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By axing medieval literature from its English courses, supposedly in favour of a ‘decolonised curriculum,’ Leicester University is making cynical use of progressive terminology to push through a cost-cutting agenda, argues RORY WATERMAN
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LAST week, University of Leicester managers announced that its English degrees would no longer include medieval literature.
Goodbye to the university’s long history of teaching Chaucer, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: room must be made, they said, for “modules on race, ethnicity, sexuality and diversity, a decolonised curriculum, and new employability modules.”
I am a graduate of Leicester’s English degree. Twenty years ago, humanities programmes had less of a focus on employability than they do now, but I learned some very useful transferrable skills — in addition to studying great writers from Chaucer to Sarah Kane, Salman Rushdie to Aphra Behn, and learning to navigate a broad cross-section of English literature and literary theory.
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