You know, no one says you have to take the wishy-washy multicultural classes if you don’t want to. At my state school a few years back, I could (and did) choose to take math, science, formal logic, history, economics, accounting, etc. If your school requires 40 hours of women’s studies or whatever, go somewhere else.
If you want to take good literature classes, take a class on Shakespeare or Chaucer or Milton or the Greek or Roman classics. They still exist! And in my experience, they’re still popular. They do have substantially more men then other literature classes, for whatever that’s worth.
The reality is that students can choose what to take. I don’t blame academia for offering this crap so much as I blame lazy students for taking the easy way out. Students aren’t idiots: They know they can take Shakespeare’s Tragedies, read a lot, write a lot, and risk a B or C (though even that would be hard these days), or take Women’s Lit and get a guaranteed A if your politics are right. It’s a marketplace of ideas, all right, and the supply side is just answering the customer’s demand for an easy A. Does the school care how little its customers learn or how little their degrees are worth? Nah – more customers = more cash. End of story.
