In a study entitled “Vanishing Shakespeare,” the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that 55 out of 70 “English departments at the U.S. News & World Report‘s top 25 national universities and top liberal arts colleges, as well as the Big Ten schools and select public universities in New York and California” don’t require English majors to take a course in Shakespeare. Instead, we’re replacing the Bard with Madonna:
Increasingly, colleges and universities envision a major in English not as a body of important writers, genres, and works that all should know, but as a hodgepodge of courses reflecting diverse interests and approaches. See Appendix B.) After redesigning the English major at the University of Pennsylvania, for example, the department’s undergraduate hairman told The Daily Pennsylvanian student newspaper that We might not agree on what we think English is, but we could all agree that our curriculum should reflect the makeup of our faculty. Such a philosophy results in course offerings being driven not by the intellectual needs of students, but often by the varied interests and agendas of the faculty. As a consequence, it is possible for students to graduate with a degree in English without thoughtful or extended study of central works and figures who have shaped our literary and cultural heritage.
It’s difficult for me to imagine not studying Shakespeare as an English major. Shortly after I graduated, the professor who taught the Shakespeare course at my small liberal arts college introduced a second Shakespeare course in which students spent a whole semester studying a single play, with the ultimate aim of performing it. It was offered every other year, with a more traditional, 12-play Shakespeare course offered on off years. I wish I’d had the opportunity to take both.
But not to study his work at all? “A degree in English without Shakespeare is like an M.D. without a course in anatomy. It is tantamount to fraud.”