Candace: I’m certainly no defender of today’s English departments, but I want to offer a limited defense of Virginia Tech’s. Yes, Phyllis Schlafly points to all kinds of weird reading material. In this respect, VT is merely typical. The campus massacre, however, is an exceedingly poor lens through which to judge the curriculum–and it leads her to all kinds of overstatements that betray a basic ignorance. Is she suggesting that H.P. Lovecraft is not worthy of academic study? That’s absurd. And she cites The Female of the Species without noting its author: Joyce Carol Oates. I don’t have a strong opinion about Oates, but she’s a highly regarded writer and putting her on a college reading list is wholly appropriate. We also need to know more about a course called “The Self-Justifying Criminal in Literature” before condemning it. I could imagine a very good syllabus, featuring everything from Macbeth to Crime and Punishment. Her column would have been better left unwritten.