Yale Students Petition to Abolish All-White-Male 'Major English Poets' Course

At the U.K.'s Daily Mail, Anneta Konstantinides reports on Yale undergrads petitioning to change the "Major English Poets" course, which focuses on all white men. "An anonymous petition has demanded the department not only change the English 125/126 course, which has existed since 1920, but abolish it entirely. It also asks that the major's pre-1800/1900 requirements be changed to include literature relating to 'gender, race and sexuality.'"

'A year spent around a seminar table where the literary contributions of women, people of color and queer folk are absent actively harms all students, regardless of their identity,' it reads.

'The Major English Poets sequences creates a culture that is especially hostile to students of color.'

'When students are made to feel so alienated that they get up and leave the room, or get up and leave the major, something is wrong.'

The Major English Poets course requires that students spend two semesters studying the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, as well as Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Alexander Pope and William Wordsworth.

The second semester seminar instructor, in addition, is also allowed to teach either the work of T.S. Eliot or 'another modern poet'.

The course, which regards itself as 'perhaps the most distinctive element of English at Yale', is described as an introduction to the 'English literary tradition' for freshmen.

But students and professors alike are now arguing that both the course - and major itself - are leaving out the work of women, people of color, and those who identify with the LGBTQ community.

Adriana Miele, who graduated this year, described her experience as an English major at the Ivy League to be a 'horrifying' experience.

'In my four years as an English major, I primarily was lectured by old, white men about rape, about violence, about death, about colonialism, about genocide,' she told the Yale Daily News.

'And I was repeatedly told by many of my professors that these evils were necessary or even related to spiritual enrichment. This was horrifying.'

Read more here. Yale's department chair, Langdon Hammer, says, "We’ll be in conversation with our students, who have a range of views. And we’ll make decisions about what we teach and what we ask of students that seem appropriate to us."

At top: Center panel of "Education" (1890), a stained glass window by Tiffany Studios, Linsley-Chittenden Hall, Yale.