The Name of Love
Far Right Nutjob
You've seen this story again and again.
This follows the trend of Humanities Courses being cancelled at another college for similar reasons.
At this rate, I think the far right is going to lay claim to all of the classics of the Western Canon. Yay?
Yale Plans to Ditch an Art-History Class Because It’s Too Straight, White, and Male | National Review
This is nothing more than a close-minded, limiting outlook parading as the opposite.
www.nationalreview.com
Yale University is set to cancel a popular introductory art history class after this spring’s session, citing department concerns that its focus was too Western, straight, white, and male.
According to an article in the Yale Daily News, “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present” was once “touted to be one of Yale College’s quintessential classes.” Now, the college is canceling it over what it calls “student uneasiness over an idealized Western ‘canon’ — a product of an overwhelmingly white, straight European and male cadre of artists.”
(Note: The claim that there had been “student uneasiness” about the class is not further detailed anywhere else in the article, nor could I find any other material regarding it. The article does, however, report that demand for the course “skyrocketed” in its final semester — with 400 students vying for one of its only 300 seats. Although I can’t be sure, this leads me to suspect that, if there had been any complaints, it seems more likely that “uneasiness” represented the views of a small group of students rather than a campus-wide, or even majority, attitude.)
Tim Berringer, the chair of the art-history department and the course’s instructor, explained the decision to discontinue the course this way:
“I want all Yale students (and all residents of New Haven who can enter our museums freely) to have access to and to feel confident analyzing and enjoying the core works of the western tradition,” he wrote in an email to the Daily News. “But I don’t mistake a history of European painting for the history of all art in all places.”
Unlike previous versions of the course, the Daily News explains, its final installation “will seek to question the idea of Western art itself.” According to the syllabus, it will also examine art as related to “questions of gender class and ‘race’” as well as Western capitalism. Its relationship to climate change will also be a “key theme.”
Instead of one single survey class, the art-history department reportedly plans to offer various others, including “Art and Politics,” “The Silk Road,” and “Global Craft,” and plans to offer a replacement “Introduction to Art History” class within a few years. The new class, however, as Barringer puts it, “will be a course equal in status to the other 100-level courses, not the introduction to our discipline claiming to be the mainstream with everything else pushed to the margins.”
This follows the trend of Humanities Courses being cancelled at another college for similar reasons.
At this rate, I think the far right is going to lay claim to all of the classics of the Western Canon. Yay?