Marymount University Faces Protests Over Eliminating at Least Nine Majors
“Respect our choices, hear our voices!!”
Mike blogged about Marymount University eliminating ten majors. Teachers and students are not happy.
Students and teachers are outraged about the decision on February 24 to eliminate numerous liberal arts majors at Marymount University.
On March 1, protestors chanted, “Respect our choices, hear our voices!!”
They also held up signs that read, “Not fair and not inclusive” and “Students deserve to be heard.”
The action comes after the Board of Trustees voted to eliminate several majors including art, English, history, philosophy, mathematics, sociology, secondary education, and theology and religious studies.
The plan to cut those majors was proposed by Marymount President Dr. Irma Becerra.
“I’m opposed to the choices that are being pushed through by the president and the teachers’ response has really like enforced my understanding of everything,” Marymount student Jonas Gleiner told 7News.
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“has really like enforced my understanding of everything”
Case Closed – no need for an English major
Or a philosophy department.
“I’m woke, therefore I am stupid.”
Totally, dude….
What’s left if you take those away? No math major? Wow.
They are the Devine Nine.
There aren’t many math majors these days. Math is important but it mostly supports other STEM majors.
No math, that hit me too
Art, philosophy, sociology and secondary education – ok
English, economics, history, mathematics and theology and religious studies (it is a Catholic school) – why?
The original article mentions “low interest”… in math, econ, English and history? What the heck are the popular majors?
Had to look it up. They have a pretty solid list of majors in the sciences, computer science and nursing. No grievance studies majors which is a good sign though there is a Gender and Society minor.
I am ok with trusting the judgement of the trustees on this one.
Drop History, Economics and Philosophy but keep “Politics”?
That’s a recipe for the kind of politicians who are the bane of our society.
Economics is low in majors like math and mostly because of the math.
English is also not a very viable major unless you do some kind of writing, which most people don’t want to do. We have more than enough pompous dbags that want to read the work of others and offer their enlightened pearls of wisdom on it.
English, economics, history, mathematics and theology and religious studies – all the underpinnings of western civilization.
Gender studies 101,102, and 103!
I thought the left has bene screaming STEM now you cut STEM.
philosophy
Gee, and just yesterday I bought Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” by Jean Hyppolite, arrives tomorrow.
Good old “Catholic College” why have courses that teach you about you faith?
They will still have the courses – but are no longer offering it as a major.
(That was the original announcement.)
To be clear, they are cutting majors, not courses.
The courses will still exist but the upper level majors in that stuff, which aren’t popular, would not.
The economists probably understand (but hate) why their major is being cancelled.
If I recall correctly from the original article, the university is simply going to discontinue offering degrees in those fields. Students currently in those programs can complete them and receive their degrees, but no new students will be accepted into them. Classes in, for example mathematics, will still be available, just not the major or a mathematics degree.
As I see it, these students have no complaint coming. If they want to get a degree in a major that isn’t offered, they need to go to a different school.
I can’t believe they don’t have a major in basket weaving. How will the thumb twittlers be able to show what they worked so hard for?
With the exception of sociology and secondary education, the subjects to be cut were once well-worth studying. However, the woke, progressive faculty have ruined them by turning them into boring Maoist re-education sessions. If you doubt it, check out this course offered by the once great Kenyon English Department. (Keep a barf bag handy.). Then imagine sitting through this garbage.
“How do you read gender? How do you read sexuality? How and in what ways have gender and sexuality been written and rewritten? This course serves as an introduction to queer and transfeminist theories and practices in gender and sexuality studies. Conceptualized through its intersections with race, ethnicity, coloniality, class, and ability, the sex/gender system of oppression has long served as a taxonomizing apparatus. And yet, the literary, in league with anticolonial, civil rights, and LGBTQ social movements, not only sheds sharp light on how gender and sexuality are regulated and troubled, but also animates the liberatory potential of imagining embodied relations otherwise. At once world-building and world-shattering, representations of gender and sexuality can leverage critiques against normativity in the same gesture as they bow to reproducing it. Taking our transnational cue from subjugated knowledges and intersectional epistemologies, we’ll constellate the diverging genealogies and methodologies that have shaped the politics and aesthetics as well as the ethics and affects (sic) of gender and sexuality. Against the traffic of binary opposition, we’ll index the possibilities of intimacy and performativity that determine desiring subjects and their objects. As a class collective, our aim will be to read and reread as well as write and rewrite texts that interrogate and complicate how gender and sexuality, as contested sites of pleasure and pain, are embodied and experienced. The geographic and generic focus of this course may vary; for more information, students should contact the instructor. This counts toward the methods requirement for the major and an elective for the women’s and gender studies major. Open only to first-year and sophomore students. Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104.”
I think that description clarifies why they want to eliminate English. Imagine if they had to actually explain what that drivel means in plain English.
We could get Sir Humphrey to explain it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIto5mwDLxo&t=3s start at 50 sec mark
Well, for $80,000 a year — second most expensive college in the United States — they can’t exactly call the class “How To Write Gay Porn For Elementary School Students,” can they? That’ll have to wait for 5 or 10 years. Meantime, more prestige. LOL
Kenyon tried hard to make it difficult to find more information about that class, but I am an intrepid retired old-school journalist who, when he plied that trade, regarded information as my absolute right. Anyone who tried to withhold it learned how doggedly successful I could be in getting it. Anyway, with that bit of ego …
ENGL 214 Gender Benders: The (de)Construction of Gender in North American Literature. Believe it or not, the prior description was more (cough) straightforward than the one that Henry P found. Ha! See how clear it was?
Gender Benders
ENGL 214 CREDITS: 0.5
In the planetary analogy through which pop psychologists have articulated gender difference, men are from Mars and women from Venus. Presumably, this suggests an irreducible difference that always separates males and females. Critical gender, feminist and queer theorizations have, however, enabled us to look beyond such simplistic binaries. How can fiction reenvision categories of sexual difference? What newer figurations of gender, sexuality and the seeming immutability of such signifiers do writers play with and complicate? In this course, we will examine some of these gendered imaginings and pay particular attention to the fluidity of gender boundaries, in-betweenness, third space and exclusion by exploring global fiction. In so doing, we will look beyond the heterosexual and heteronormative to identify multiple axes of desire, identity and identification. This counts toward the post-1900 or approaches to literary study requirement for the major. Open only to first-year and sophomore students. Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104. Offered every two years.
English 214 is “taught” by one Brianna Thompson, a visiting assistant professor who is too scared to stick her email out there. Maybe she figures she’d better keep her head down until she gets tenure?
https://www.kenyon.edu/directory/brianna-thompson/
That blurb doesn’t list her as teaching English 214, but this one does:
https://www.kenyon.edu/academics/departments-and-majors/english/english-faculty/
coloniality.. this is a real word?
What does “dropping a major” mean? Does it mean dropping all courses in the subject? I doubt that very much.
Does it mean dropping some of the most advanced classes? (reasonable if hardly anyone is taking them)
Does it mean firing some of the faculty because they are no longer needed? (hopefuilly)
If there is no major in a subject, can students still have it as a minor? (probably)
Do the students have the faintest clue what it means or are they just protesting for the sake of protesting? (I would almost put money on it)
You answered most of your own questions correctly.
Sociology was always good but not as taught. Erving Goffman is well worth reading for pleasure. He worked by irony.
He’s a great example of how powerful, novel insights can be profoundly hijacked, even so.
Similarly don’t get me started on the trajectory of Family Systems Therapy.
Some of those classes had very, very few students
“Marymount University Faces Protests Over Eliminating at Least Nine Major”
Me: Okay, maybe someone’s realizing you don’t need 15 different demographic group studies maj-
“The action comes after the Board of Trustees voted to eliminate several majors including art, English, history, philosophy, mathematics, sociology, secondary education, and theology and religious studies.”
Wait what? Math, Art, English, History, and Philosophy?! Those are like a core part of most university programs.
Secondary education seems to be…odd. That’s a straight major? When I got mine, you didn’t get a “secondary education” degree, you got a degree in a subject (e.g. my undergraduate is Mathematics Education). Maybe they structure theirs as “Secondary Education, emphasis in X”. Though, reality is most schools would do better to more emphasis on the subject matter, and lesson on the education program, as I had 3 good education classes and student teaching and the rest were straight worthless and beyond redemption.
You can eliminate the Major’s in a subject like English but still teach and require it for undergraduates. My degree is in Biology but I took numerous English, Philosophy etc while not Majoring in the subjects. My University had numerous classes required for Graduation to make a well rounded student without offering a Major in the subject.
Today’s theme seems to be “About those implicit contracts.”
Undertaking a major drags in a bunch of implicit contracts with the institution. For one, you are also associated with that program, as branding — they want you to believe it’ll be there, without decline forever after.
Like govt programs and for-profit companies, education operations reserve the right to change the deal unilaterally when it suits them. These students are noticing that the contract they thought they had isn’t worth the paper it’s not printed on.
That’s why the school will let current students get degrees in those majors. The change applies only to new students, not existing ones.
Worth mentioning that Marymount has a $45 million endowment, which is next to nothing for a liberal arts college. They are ranked in the bottom one-third of liberal arts colleges. Looks like a not-glorified community college, churning out nurses and physical therapists.
Only 58% graduate in SIX years. Folks, this is a women’s trade school with its back to the wall, financially speaking. There are dozens of schools like this, circling the drain. Think they’ll be around in another 10 or 15 years? I don’t.
No Math major? Are y’all insane? (Not an English major, I.) I don’t see math as a liberal art but as a hard science, like physics & Chemistry. (Biology used to be a hard science but now it’s fluid.)