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Letters...Why don’t you return to the status quo ante?
The beauty of days gone by
I was delighted when my daughter Adena applied to the University of Chicago, because I assumed the College still adhered to the same high standards it did in my day. When she told me she wanted to major in gender studies, I chuckled and said the U of C doesn’t have those trendy new majors, just tried and true character-building classes like classics, history, math, and gym.
Well, the little dickens forced me to eat my words when she showed me the gender studies major in the course catalog. So much for the University of Chicago’s much-vaunted adherence to principle in the face of the slings and arrows of elite opinion. What really galled me was the fancy language employed to bestow a patina of respectability on this politically correct piece of academic deadwood: “Gender Studies at the University of Chicago encompasses diverse disciplines, modes of inquiry, and objects of knowledge” (page 216). This is just the sort of vapid string of fashionable buzzwords that would have gotten a student a big fat goose egg from any teacher in the Common Core 20 years ago.
Well, I guess times have changed. Too bad they’ve changed for the worse.
Chuck Pollack, X’86
Hartsdale, New York
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