[PerkinWarwick]

>I think you'll find if you spend time on universities today, they are essentially apolitical.

An interesting experiment would be to compare English Department reading lists in the 1970's vs. now.

My bet is that you'd see quite a difference.

It's not that the College Marxist Club had it's meetings in the basement at any particular time, but that politicization and social movements of the day have been normalized into daily life.

I will stick to my guns in saying that there were 0 (zero) demonstrations of a political nature during my stay. For all I know, it was a low point in such activities (which likely gives me a short temper on the modern world). Frank Zappa played there every year though.

...hah, now that's an interesting angle I hadn't thought of. I went hunting for reading lists for the graduate students. A course on the '19th century English novel' has, wait for it, 7 female authors and 2 male. And one of the two men wrote 'Portrait of a Lady'. That's a pretty interesting way to shift the conversation.

[UncleMeat]

> ...hah, now that's an interesting angle I hadn't thought of. I went hunting for reading lists for the graduate students. A course on the '19th century English novel' has, wait for it, 7 female authors and 2 male. And one of the two men wrote 'Portrait of a Lady'. That's a pretty interesting way to shift the conversation.

Do you find yourself being just as concerned when the reading list is 7 male authors and 2 female authors? Or only in this direction?

If this counts as political, then boy howdy were curricula in the humanities political in the 1970s when there was basically zero time spent on the voices of women.

[PerkinWarwick]

>Do you find yourself being just as concerned when the reading list is 7 male authors and 2 female authors? Or only in this direction?

Not at all, it just stuck out at me while I was browsing through their program. Women represent barely a blip in the world of the 19th C. novel, you might as well teach military history as a series of female leaders. Novels of that era represent a core teaching (or should) in English departments, not an opportunity to boost underserved demographics. Save that for a specialty class.

I don't give a damn about fairness so much as teaching the truth, and the truth includes relative values of things.

[UncleMeat]

It is a graduate class, well past any level where you'd expect reading lists to be a representative slice of anything. I'd generally expect a graduate class on "the 19th century novel" to be roughly built around whatever books the PhD student or professor teaching the class personally loves and knows very deeply.

And military history should involve the voices of women. There is more to the subject than just who marched where and who gave orders when.