Phyllis Schlafly: I Love Your Hair, But Hate Your Thinking

 

Dear Phyllis Schlafly,

I love your style with your classy pantsuits and golden brooches.  No one could call you unrefined in your conservative ways.  But I came across your 2007 article entitled “Advice to College Students: Don’t Major in English,” and I think you might be a little crazy.  I take that back. Misinformed.  What, were you an English major or something?

You know how they say that Hitler had a funny mustache because he was maladjusted (if we’re just being polite)? Well you have a funny hair-do and I think it probably relates to the fact that you think English majors are killers. 

I mean, regardless of the fact that “Weapons of Mass Destruction 101″ and “How to Be Like Osama” classes are required for all incoming Freshman English majors, we’re pretty book savvy.  Not psychopath savvy.

But I forget, your biggest concern for such a liberally based major was the lack of Shakespeare:

ACTA says “a degree in English without Shakespeare is like an M.D. without a course in anatomy. It is tantamount to fraud.” College students: don’t waste your scarce college dollars on a major in English.

Yes, Shakespeare is a classic, but does that mean that an entire department is going to be walking around smacking their heads into walls because they don’t have a balding man with a thin moustache and impeccable speech to guide them?

No.  And furthermore, I would gladly take a class entitled “Of Nags, Bitches, and Shrews: Women and Animals in Western Literature.” So thank you for so blatantly advertising these liberal classes in your attempt to condemn them. 

In fact, as my apparently worthless analytic English skills read on in your article saying that America does not have a race or discrimination problem,  my petite brain began to wonder why you were fighting so hard for an extremely pasty white man to be kept in English classrooms and not Langston Hughes or Sherman Alexie?

In the decades before “progressive” education became the vogue, English majors were required to study Shakespeare, the preeminent author of English literature. The premise was that students should be introduced to the best that has been thought and said.

What happened? To borrow words from Hamlet: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.” Universities deliberately replaced courses in the great authors of English literature with what professors openly call “fresh concerns,” “under-represented cultures,” and “ethnic or non-Western literature.”

Perhaps what happened was that we learned a white man’s mouth wasn’t necessarily “the best that has been thought and said.”  But what would I know?  I’m just a scary, liberal literary person.  Maybe we should just go back to a time when all of history and literature was made by white, oppressive males. 

Anyway, no hard feelings, right? Bridge next Thursday?  I’ll bring the crab dip.

Regards,

The Boxcar Children