I predict that academics in the 25th century will be having this same debate about the tradition of Buffy Studies sinking over the horizon and the growing disconnect between students and the immortal prose of Joss Whedon.

I think knowledge of African history is useful, important, and in certain key areas, close to essential for a sophisticated understanding of how the modern world came to be what it is. (The Atlantic slave trade, in particular.) Would I require it of all undergraduates or even of history majors? No. Because requirements and “essential” are not synonymous for me, for many of the reasons I’ve outlined on this blog, and especially in the discussion in this thread. If nothing else, because I think an emphasis on thinking historically will eventually lead any well-educated student to that topic. But also because of a kind of pragmatism that leads me to think that expert-driven or authority-driven institutional practices are going to have to bend in many ways if they’re not going to break, not just in English or History majors, but in libraries, in public policy, and much else besides.

As I said, this could be the basis for an interesting discussion: do you need requirements? Are requirements the same thing as standards? Is a requirement necessary to make a statement that something is “important”? If everyone continues to acknowledge Shakespeare’s importance, then what’s the evidence that requirements are necessary? Why do you and Withywindle believe that the disappearance of requirements leads to the disappearance of literary standards, actually? What’s the evidence for that? Didn’t Shakespeare become important over the course of three centuries without the benefit of curricular requirements in mass public education? What makes Milton or Chaucer or Shakespeare or any other author important: is it the history of literature (that they are precedent to later work), is it the qualities of their work, or other elements? Is college really the proper place for the work of requirements, or should that come earlier? And so on. I hope you seriously do not believe that ACTA’s latest report actually is a discussion along any of these lines. It’s a polemic that doesn’t even bother to argue on behalf of its central premises, but merely declares them as obvious truths.

There is much I could say about your response to the ACTA report. For the moment, I will just stick with two observations.

The first is that your reading of the report does not seem to be as careful as it could be, and that your criticisms suffer as a result.

You say, for instance, that “One of many problems with the ACTA report on Shakespeare is that it assumes that the lack of a requirement for Shakespeare or core literary surveys is somehow specific to the humanities, done with specific intellectual and philosophical intent. But what they’re describing is more general to the humanities and some social sciences, that the structure of majors and of general education requirements has become less prescriptive in general.” You go on to elaborate, via Graff, on the problems created by broad curricular shifts away from requirements, with the suggestion that ACTA has simply overlooked this issue. But ACTA hasn’t. It’s mentioned in the conclusion to the Shakespeare report, with reference to ACTA’s recent full-length study on precisely this topic, The Hollow Core. So, perhaps, your thinking on this issue is closer to ACTA’s than you had supposed. Dialogue appears to be genuinely possible here — but it depends on you giving the report a fairer reading than you have.

The second point has to do with your idea that major requirements need not reflect a cohesive picture of disciplinary knowledge if it can be shown (or simply presupposed) that some essential areas of study, such as Shakespeare, usually take care of themselves. I have to disagree with you on this point, not least because, even though Shakespeare is the test case for it, it’s not a typical test case. A couple of years ago the National Association of Scholars issued a study of changing English major requirements that compared today’s requirements to those of 1964. Their sample was, unfortunately, quite small (they focussed on 25 top colleges). But what they found was revealing. Shakespeare requirements were disappearing (Swarthmore’s among them), but Shakespeare courses were still popular. They did note, though, that Shakespeare was probably the one author who could survive the gutting of the English major, and that less popular but equally important authors such as Milton and Chaucer had not fared so well.

I do agree with Withywindle that “the disappearance of requirements leads to drift and disappearance.” Such a recognition is not incompatible with routinely reviewing and revising requirements to ensure that they reflect current understanding of what content is and is not important.

To my knowledge, no one has responded to the ACTA report by saying that Shakespeare is not important. There does not seem to be any controversy on that point. So, if it is important, that importance should be reflected in English major requirements–as it is at Harvard, Berkeley, UCLA, Wellesley, and a host of other schools. Schools that don’t require Shakespeare stand in contrast to schools that do, and are implicitly saying that Shakespeare is not essential to literary study. And that strikes me as interesting and worthy of further inquiry.

1) My idea of tradition is to be a superlative topic for invention. The richness of tradition allows for richness of invention by each student; lose tradition, and you invent on a paucity of material.

2) I believe I intersected with neither Western Dave (not knowing who he is) or Tim. I took and enjoyed Harry Wright’s course on South Africa. Where Harry Wright one day handed out a bag of Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies to us, then, when we’d started eating them, said, “You know, they’re a year old.” Everyone stops eating. “Or more. Does it matter? They taste the same, don’t they?” We ponder. Yes, they do. Continue eating. Pity he retired when he did; I’d planned on taking his Modern Africa seminar. And of course I graduated before his replacement arrived.

3) Disappearance of requirements leads to drift and disappearance: see Latin.

4) I confess that when you say that Burke isn’t your Bible, it does make me much more skeptical of your citation of him. As I say, cherry-picking.

There’s no doubt that there’s a demand for environmental history–I think it was your offering that really suggested that to me forcefully, even though I don’t have your facility with the historiography.

A lot of this is, “What are the things we think students must do that we think they’re inclined not to do?” I think Shakespeare is actually low on that list: there is way more inclination out there to study Shakespeare without any extra urging than there is many other important topics. I think it’s more important to make students in the humanities seriously engage the sciences, for example.

The skills vs. exposure thing is also crucial. It’s probably clear to readers here that I tip more towards the skills side, that this is what the liberal arts mean to me. Which means that I tend to think that whether you’re teaching a course on Zoroastrianism or Homer, Latin American economics or cognitive science, if you’re not teaching students how to think through and with the topic of the course, to look at it from a lot of angles, to use the course as a springboard to more than just competence with the material, you’re not doing the liberal arts.

Again, that’s a place where I think institutional pluralism works pretty well: we can have institutions that heavily emphasize exposure and institutions that heavily emphasize skills. Aren’t we enriched when we have both choices in our educational ecosystem?