Here’s a post from a blog by Ron Rosenbaum on the disappearance of Shakespeare issue. Rosenbaum is clear in his take:

In the post I lamented the disappearance of the study of Shakespeare from the teaching of literature in American universities (due largely, I believe, to the repellant force of the addled, jargon-ridden rhetoric of antiquated postmodernists of The Relic’s ilk).

He also includes, however, a response from Frank Tipler, a physicist at Temple, who finds the same decay of curriculum in the sciences. It begins:

Ron Rosenbaum recently wrote, commenting on the fact that Shakespeare was no longer a required course for English majors at the overwhelming majority of American elite universities: “It’s like studying physics while denying the existence, or at least the importance, of gravity.”
Actually, the situation is just as bad in physics departments.