The Humanities

Harvard Professor Accidentally Illustrates How His Kind Has Destroyed The Humanities. Harvard’s James Simpson and likeminded scholars have selectively wielded their theoretical chainsaws to disfigure the humanities into hideous totems of ideology and politics.

http://thefederalist.com/2017/04/27/harvard-professor-accidentally-illustrates-kind-destroyed-humanities/?utm_source=The+Federalist+List&utm_campaign=b76e9267f2-RSS_The_Federalist_Daily_Updates_w_Transom&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_cfcb868ceb-b76e9267f2-83813741

Excerpt: Anybody wondering how the study of the humanities arrived at its current, depressing state need only read the words of its practitioners. In a recent letter to The Wall Street Journal, James Simpson, the chair of Harvard’s Department of English, unveils the supreme and lamentable logic that now governs the field. Simpson writes in response to a March 31 op-ed from Heather Mac Donald, wherein Mac Donald discussed the new “marginalization requirement” in Harvard’s English department. All English majors must now take a course covering authors “marginalized for historical reasons.” Mac Donald posed the question (the title of her piece), “Does Harvard consider Oscar Wilde ‘marginalized’?”