Critical Mass Is Indeed Combustible

Readers, if you like even some of what you find here, you are doing yourselves a great disservice if you don’t regularly check Critical Mass, a blog by Erin O’Connor, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

A terrific example of Erin at her best is this post about the decline of literature courses into group therapy. As teachers “turn English into an artsy form of sensitivity training,” she writes, it makes a kind of perverted sense that now students “want teachers to undergo sensitivity training.”

She’s not making this up, for she provides a link to an American lit professor making this argument. At first I thought this article was a parody, but alas it’s an unintentional self-parody.

UPDATEDustbury has a nice, which is to say un-nice, response to the multicult requirement of sensitivity training for literature professors.

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  1. dustbury.com November 6, 2002 at 10:20 pm | | Reply

    UnTwained masses

    Okay, you’ve got an English class to teach, more literary than grammatical this semester, and one of the books you

  2. CGHill November 6, 2002 at 10:26 pm | | Reply

    I hope that the forcible retirement of some of our sillier politicians may reduce the amount of this Thou Shalt Be Sensitive nonsense, but I fear it may take a long time to root out completely — a generation, maybe?

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