Cornell voted to stop calling its English Department the "English Department" in order to fight "structural forms of racism"

Image for article: Cornell voted to stop calling its English Department the "English Department" in order to fight "structural forms of racism"

Doc Holliday

Oct 16, 2020

When it came time to choose a category for this story "Can't Make It Up" was the natural frontrunner.

Yeah super-woke Cornell University has voted to stop calling its English Department the "English Department" because that is extremely racist. They want to separate "the conflation of English as a language and English as a nationality."

So they're renaming the department "the department of literatures in English."

I mean what can you say about this? I'll just leave you with some amazing quotes from faculty, courtesy of the Cornell Daily Sun:

  • "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."
  • "What surprised us was the fact that so many of the white faculty of the English department signed on — we were amazed. By the time we were ready to officially take it to the department as a whole, we had over 75 percent of the faculty signed on."
  • "This isn't just us doing a symbolic gesture, this is in keeping with the University's call to have us really rethink our everyday practices around racism."