The Hoya! The Hoya!
JUDGE, MARK GAUVREAU
The Hoya! the Hoya! by Mark Gauvreau Judge FOR A SHORT TIME LAST YEAR, I was sure I was going to become an English professor. I had landed a job in the English department at Georgetown University,...
...As a believer in the intellectual tradition of Catholic education, I find all of this heartbreaking...
...He taught a course on Milton and considered Paradise Lost the greatest verse ever committed to paper...
...Simpson"-is a patriarchal way of "feminizing" the object, thus making Nicole Simpson guilty of the crime of being murdered...
...Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band...
...and Studies in Culture and Performance will, as one professor told a campus newspaper, "include the study of anything that aids in the construction or representation of cultural values like race, gender, and sexuality...
...The master's tools cannot dismantle the master's house," goes one leftist quotation that a class of freshmen was asked to absorb...
...The intellectual collapse at Georgetown has been well documented in the media...
...Studies in Culture and Performance...
...and Studies in Writing: Rhetoric, Genre, and Form...
...it's another actually to see students demeaned for their conservative ethical views and to be forced to spend hours a day copying tripe...
...But starting this fall, they will have a triad of categories to choose from: Literature and Literary Theory...
...It will work as follows: Literature and Literary Theory will be the last bastion of the Dead White Males...
...Eventually, I decided to leave my job at the university to take up journalism again...
...Mark Gauvreau Judge is a journalist whose last contribution to THE WEEKLY STANDARD was "No Alternative" (Jan...
...His colleagues thought it a fine idea until he broke it to them that he had been joking...
...With the financial barriers to a Ph.D...
...But no account could capture the demoralizing feeling of witnessing the effects of political correctness firsthand...
...I had landed a job in the English department at Georgetown University, a job that offered free tuition...
...They've just killed Milton," he would moan...
...Dummies...
...eliminated, I was free to fulfill a lifelong dream...
...Professor Christy incurred the wrath of the department when he offered to teach a course on Sgt...
...They're taking away Shakespeare...
...Not much dumber than the teaching they receive...
...These kids are dummies," he hissed, getting close so no one could hear him...
...You have to reject the "patriarchal paradigms" and settle into your own little cocoon of victimization, whatever it may be...
...One day before I left, Professor Christy wandered into the department, clutching student papers and appearing more flustered and despondent than usual...
...But he was actually a different kind of rebel...
...I saw course descriptions requiring students to read comic books and watch the feminist film Thelma and Louise, and academic papers proclaiming that all courses not named "Women's Studies" or "African-American (or other) Studies" are "men's studies . . . white-defined, ethnocentric, and implicitly racist...
...This does not mean that we were trained to be rubber stamps...
...I spent my high-school years at Georgetown Prep, the Jesuit school that is considered a baby brother to Georgetown...
...I was once scolded by a professor when I refused to agree that using the passive voice-as in, "I think Nicole Brown Simpson was killed by O.J...
...We simply acknowledge that some people have revealed the mysteries of science or written the English language with a genius unsurpassed, and it makes logical sense, if students strive to become learned and thoughtful, to demand that they study the best...
...They" are the radicals who have conquered the Georgetown English department...
...Until the late 19th century, when the Catholic church separated its secondary schools from its colleges, Georgetown Prep and Georgetown University were a single institution...
...At Georgetown University, exploring Newton or reading Tacitus in the original is considered not merely quaint but an exercise in oppression...
...Bohemia Manor, Georgetown Prep, and the university endured in large part because of the Ratio Studiorum, the Jesuits' formal plan of study, which emphasized literature, Latin, Greek, grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, science, and mathematics...
...Then I met Professor Christy (not his real name...
...of the post-60s campus radical...
...Both the New York Times and the Washington Post covered the curriculum change, and Maureen Dowd and Coleman McCarthy wrote columns about it...
...He was an English professor whose ponytail, round spectacles, and jeans-and-blazer outfit made him appear a walking clich...
...Both had grown out of Bohemia Manor, founded in Maryland by Jesuits in the 1740s and, according to Catholic Schools and the Common Good, "the first Catholic school to take root and endure within the original English colonies...
...At Georgetown, English majors were once required to study Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer, works from Old Middle English, the Renaissance, and the Restoration, and American literature...
...On campuses across the country, the story is a common one: Holdovers from the 60s reach positions of power in the university and begin to jettison the classics in favor of deconstructionism, theory, and literature lacking merit but boasting political cachet...
...Such topics still form the core of a Georgetown Prep education, and they account for why a Prep graduate continues to enter college and the adult world with the kind of knowledge that places him miles ahead of other students...
...I would act on 20 years of Catholic schooling and become a teacher, dedicating my life to turning mush-heads into thinkers...
...It's one thing to hear that radicals have destroyed the study of classic literature...
...Nor do we deny that authors and artists are products of their times and cultures-a favorite charge against conservatives...
...Studies in Writing will explore deconstructionism and other academic fads...
...In other words, don't immerse yourself in the best of what has been thought and said, even if doing so-as in the case of Frederick Douglass, who studied Augustan rhetoric in order to argue for the abolition of slavery-can bring eloquent voice to your personal concerns...
...Often, I would see him shuffle into the department like a man headed for the gallows, his face a mask of despair...
...Christy was at war, not with the Dead White European Males of the patriarchy, but with the tyrannical claptrap that is political correctness...
Vol. 1 • May 1996 • No. 33
