Oxford University has indicated that it is considering dropping classic works like Homer’s Illiad from the curriculum. The change was proposed to lessen the “gender achievement gap” in the classical languages department.
According to a report by the College Fix, Oxford University is considering dropping historical texts such as Homer’s Illiad and Virgil’s Aeneid from the curriculum. Scholars within the classical languages department believe that removing the texts from the department’s introductory course would lessen the “attainment gap” between male and female students.
Jan Preiss, a second-year Classicist at Oxford University, started a petition to prevent the faculty proposal from being adopted. Preiss claims that if the change were implemented, students in the classics department at Oxford wouldn’t encounter Homer or Virgil unless they elected to study them on their own.
One of the big issues is that these reforms are marketed as ones that will increase access, but the proposal {to remove Homer and Virgil} would go completely against this because it will effectively mean that there will be people coming to Oxford with previous knowledge of Homer and Virgil… but no one else will be taught Homer or Virgil until Greats (the second part of the course) and that is only if they choose it as a paper. It would put the latter group at a disadvantage in trying to understand the literary canon and this disadvantage would carry through Mods and possibly beyond.
Conservative scholar Victor Davis Hanson told the College Fix that Americans should be concerned about the takeover of classics departments by leftist academics.
As an American, I have no idea, only a vague notion that race/class/gender political correctness had infected the Anglo-American campus and the effects, as John Heath and I wrote about in Who Killed Homer? (The title was apparently prescient) over 20 years ago. Neither Homer nor Virgil, in the pantheon of classical literature, is considered especially difficult to read in the original, especially in comparison to challenging authors such as Aeschylus and Thucydides, or Latin writers such as Propertius, Juvenal and Tacitus. Is it as if by decapitating the fonts of classical learning, thereby classical learning is relegated to an inferior academic status?
Breitbart News reported this week that Wake Forest University created a program called “Beyond Whiteness” that was designed to introduce to “diverse” perspectives on the study of Classical languages.
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