Cornell English Department Changes Name to Distinguish the English Language from English Nationality

Cornell University’s English department has voted to change its name to avoid the “conflation of English as a language and English as a nationality,” according to university student newspaper The Cornell Daily Sun.

The Ivy League institution located in Ithaca, New York, will now boast an English department named “the department of literatures in English.” Although this change has yet to be approved by university administrators, the English department itself voted “overwhelmingly” in favor of it.

The Cornell Daily Sun also pointed out that the proposal was introduced by “faculty members of color” and in response to the death of woke ideology patron saint George Floyd.

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“Faculty around the country — not just faculty of color, but faculty in general — began to look at the institution to see how we can help advance a discourse that challenges structural forms of racism which get reproduced in students and in teaching over and over again,” [Prof. Carole] Boyce-Davies said.

Other faculty simply recognized that it was time that the department’s title represented what it was really focused on: literature written in English.

“In part, it was also a result of an ongoing shift in literary study in this department — and others across the country — to focus on a broader reach of literature,” [Director of Undergraduate Studies Prof. Kate] McCullough explained.

As an acquaintance of mine pointed out, what person out there has ever thought that English departments only teach the conventions and culture of the ethnically English? Everyone knows they teach the English language and literature written in the English language. (Or at least they should—too many of them now teach tangentials like deconstructionism and critical race theory.) Cornell’s switch to “department of literatures in English” is nothing more than silly symbolism to show off how progressive they are.

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