I wrote today about Yale English students petitioning to be free of a requirement that they read great English poets:

The petition whines that “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.”
This is a variation on the widespread belief on campus that unwelcome speech is tantamount to a physical threat. In this case, the speech happens to be some of the most eloquent words written in the English language. One can only pity the exceedingly fragile sensibility it takes to feel assaulted by, say, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.”
It takes a deeply impoverished imagination to regard Shakespeare simply as an agent of the patriarchy. The petition’s implicit contention is that the major poets are too circumscribed by their race and gender to speak to today’s socially aware students, when, in point of fact, it is the students who are too blinkered by race and gender to marvel at great works of art.