English majors no longer required to take class focused on Chaucer, ShakespeareA year and a half after a petition circulated calling for Yale to "decolonize the English department," the first students are enrolled in a new course created by the department to increase the breadth of the curriculum and combat claims of departmental racism.
What's more, new requirements are in place to ensure a more "diversified" slate of courses.
Previous requirements for the major included two courses in "Major English Poets," including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton and Eliot, among others. But that two-course series petitioners had deemed actively harmful due to its focus on white male poets. The series is no longer a graduation requirement for Yale's English majors.The petition, a Google document which has since been made private, critiqued the perceived whiteness of the English department requirements: "A year spent around a seminar table where the literary contributions of women, people of color, and queer folk are absent actively harms all students, regardless of their identity."
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