There needs to be more ruthless credentialism in the humanities I’m talking about the sort of brutal discipline in JE Williams “Stoner” where a prospective grad student is bullied to death for knowing nothing about Elizabethan poesy.

Graduating with a BA in English lit from PA & not knowing that “The Sound & the Fury” is a direct quote of Macbeth should invoke a rescission of credentials.

We need the “angry old man professor” archetype back in the humanities— it is all together too “soft,” subjectivist, & limp. There is far too much “humanity” in this saccharine sense.

The “Liberal Arts” isn’t supposed to mean “interrogating your feelings”— it’s supposed to mean running the gauntlet of the most challenging works of intellectual invention ever devised by the human race as a purgative process, to be reborn as a phoenix