Thursday, July 23, 2020

Let's Cancel the Rutgers English Department

It should not come as a surprise. The elite pedagogues of America’s greatest academic institutions have long since given up on correct grammar. We are no longer allowed to use gendered pronouns, but are required to use the illiterate “they” to refer to one person, two persons or a multitude of persons. 

First, they came for the pronouns. Then they started out after your mind. They will do so by making literature courses into anti-racist propaganda mills. And they will cease teaching good grammar, because, you know, good grammar is white.

In the first place, this means that the graduates of these programs will be functionally illiterate. In the second place, it means that these programs will no longer attract even the most semi-intelligent students. They will become adjuncts of ethnic studies programs, the kind that were instituted when colleges and universities started admitting students who had grossly inferior test scores… and who thus could not do the work.

The problem with this stupidity is simple: will these courses still teach the great writers, writers who knew English grammar? And, by the way, when the graduates of these programs go out in the world they are going to have a rather rude awakening when they discover that they will be excluded from dinner parties, job opportunities and social activities because they speak like lumpen proles. No one can advance in our world if he cannot speak correct English.

The College Fix has the story from Rutgers University (via Maggie’s Farm):

The English Department at Rutgers University recently announced a list of “anti-racist” directives and initiatives for the upcoming fall and spring semesters, including an effort to deemphasize traditional grammar rules.

The initiatives were spelled out by Rebecca Walkowitz, the English Department chair at Rutgers University, and sent to faculty, staff and students in an email, a copy of which was obtained by The College Fix.

So, if you can’t speak English and can’t write English, the Rutgers English Department is going to let you wallow in ignorance. We recall wistfully the story about a charter school in New York’s Harlem where minority children are taught Latin. That is, correct conjugations, correct declensions, correct grammar. Guess what, they love it. And they are thrilled to learn how a language functions. They are even more thrilled to learn how to use correct English.

Under a so-called critical grammar pedagogy, “This approach challenges the familiar dogma that writing instruction should limit emphasis on grammar/sentence-level issues so as to not put students from multilingual, non-standard ‘academic’ English backgrounds at a disadvantage,” the email states.

“Instead, it encourages students to develop a critical awareness of the variety of choices available to them w/ regard to micro-level issues in order to empower them and equip them to push against biases based on ‘written’ accents.”

Of course, this is barely literate. In truth, it means that students who cannot speak English will still be able to receive good grades in English courses. Evidently, this will devalue their degrees and make the Rutgers English Department a laughing stock. 

Naturally, this will require the department to stop teaching the great English language writers. Students will be indoctrinated in black English, black sensibility, black culture and white police brutality:

In 2020-2021, we are running 14 courses in the fields of African-American literature, on subjects ranging from W.E.B. Dubois and His Afterlives to Afro-Futurism and Black Speculative Fiction.

Building on this commitment to African American Literature as a standalone requirement for the major, we are also implementing a new Global South requirement, the fruit of two years of curricular study and revision by the faculty. This will create more space in the curriculum for courses in the areas of post-colonial, ethnic American, and global Anglophone literatures and support future hiring in these fields.

Now, you are thinking that children in China are subjected to indoctrination and propaganda in their schoolwork. Yet, American children are indoctrinated, not with the great writers in the English language, but by being forced to read the lesser lights, the ones who can barely write or think:

We are developing modular [creative writing] assignments on a) identity issues and b) social change issues that all of our [creative writing] instructors will be invited to use; they will be expected to use one, or to craft their own. This curricular innovation will be part of the entire [creative writing] curriculum for next year – in every [creative writing] class.

We will design the reading for Rutgers Day 2021 to specifically address issues of anti-black racism and social justice. This is our annual reading-under-the-tent, which attracts students, faculty, administrators, and community members to the Rutgers campus.

So, the Rutgers English department has become an indoctrination mill to train social justice warriors. Isn’t it about time that it be canceled?

5 comments:

  1. I had to retire earlier than I expected due to some medical problems. There is a good university near by. I looked into finishing a degree in English. The requirements now include a semester of black writers and one of feminist writers. I got a sample of one the required writers, struggled through it, still had no idea of the writer's point, and decided not to bother. I would have laughed out loud at some point in a class and been shown the door, forever.

    I wonder just how literate Ms. Walkowitz is. Would she recognize " shuffled off this mortal coil " ?

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  2. https://twitter.com/pegobry/status/1285916484838006784?s=20

    Shot Chaser.

    The Republic as we knew it is dead. If will have to be reconstructed.

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  3. I disagree with your use of the future tense in para 3.

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  4. This philosophy of poor language will soon filter out to the professional world and language skills will be looked upon negatively.

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  5. Wonder how many are so easily swayed that, without thinking, they switched from "PC" to "woke" and now do not even put quotes around it....which, yes, has us all going around sounding illiterate. (It's akin to the common spelling of "whore," which even educated people now spell with an h and an O.) onder how many know that "woke" is wrong in two ways, as anyone who's taught Engish to those who speak "ebonics" as a first language knows.

    First, it's the wrong verb tense. "Woke" is past. "I woke up early this morning." But they say "I am woke." Current tense. Wrong.

    You can say (as I'm sure you know) "I am awake now" or "I woke up this morning," but you cannot say "I am woke now" or "I am a woke person," because it's not an adjective.

    The second reason (besides wrong tense), is it's the wrong part of speech. "Woke," is a verb, past tense, when what they want is an adjective described how "I am." "I am happy." "I am sleepy." "I am awake." So they mean "awake," but instead, they not only use a verb instead of an adjective describing state of being (what they mean is "I am an awakened being,") but they substitute a verb, of all things, and a past tense one. "I am woke."

    Pedantic,I know, but it's just one of the cringy things -- like hearing someone say "google it" instead of "look it up" or "research it" when google is NOT our friend, is censoring us, and is (to the best of its ability) rigging elections against us.

    This is involving politics, too, as it is forcing us all (who use the expression without quotes or orally) to speak ebonics -- it's more of the destruction of American tradition and culture in order to substitute the Third World version, which is happening in a lot of societal areas these days.

    Sigh.

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