Here's a tragedy in its way on the level of King Lear or Hamlet.

To get a bachelor's degree in English literature at the University of California at Los Angeles,

one of the most prestigious colleges in America.

You must take courses in gender race, ethnicity, disability, or sexuality studies,

in imperial transnational or post-colonial studies, and in critical theory.

But you are not required to take a single course in Shakespeare.

In other words, the UCLA English faculty is now officially indifferent

as to whether an English major has ever read a word of the greatest writer of the English language,

but is determined to expose students according to the course catalog,

to alternative rubrics of gender sexuality, race, and class.

Sadly, UCLA is not leading a movement, it is following one.

That movement seeks to infuse the humanities curriculum

with the characteristic academic traits of our time.

Narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination

to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to identity and class politics.

In so doing, the modern professoriate has repudiated

the great humanist tradition on which much of Western civilization

and the Western University has been built.

That tradition was founded on an all-consuming desire

to engage with the genius of the past.

The 14th century Florentine poet Francesco Petrarch triggered the explosion of knowledge

known today as the Renaissance, with his discovery of Livy's monumental history of Rome

...