Broken English Departments: The Repair Manual
A fed-up professor exposes how propaganda has replaced instruction in many college English courses. He offers a solution.
Review by George Leef, James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
Order Broken English Departments: The Repair Manual $15.95 plus shipping at www.localbooknook.com
Preface: Here, from the front lines, is an English professor’s unsparing analysis of an academic discipline that has lost its way, followed by his blueprint for reevaluating and overhauling English departments in which indoctrinating students about politics has replaced the former responsibilities of instructing young people in the skills of effective writing and the achievements of English and American literature.
PART ONE: The Breakdown
“People tend to forget how effectively the anti-Vietnam War campaign swept students into radical politics unconnected with the effort to bring American soldiers back from Asia . . . . The crowd energy behind the Free Speech Movement of 1964 had shifted gears with hardly any pause . . . Noontime speakers holding forth on the Sproul Hall steps . . . denounced the university administrators, Republican governors and presidents, institutional racism, and private enterprise, advocating instead state Socialism, Che Guevara, and Cuban revolutionaries, ‘street action,’ race and gender quotas, Democratic governors and presidents (unless they supported the Vietnam War), and draft resisters” (Chapter 3).
PART TWO: A Case Study in Harassment
“I now recognized that the Leftwing political combine in my department was manufacturing a target to ostracize. In the freest nation in the world, in the most racially tolerant, gender-neutral, and ideology-accepting institution within that republic—a university—the academic Left, knowing that it lacked any actual foes, was finding it necessary to invent a straw man, someone to bear the label, however undeservedly, of an oppressor. . . . I realized that one must stop looking for rationality in this generation of politically-crazed academic intellectuals within the humanities” (Chapter 9).
PART THREE: The Repair Manual: A Disruptive Handbook
“Only an overhaul of administrative leadership in the universities can make it possible within the humanities for future professors to teach historical facts and aesthetic achievements rather than radical Leftist propaganda to students . . . Truly committed individuals need to be tapped for these posts instead of feckless opportunists with little interest in academic freedom or the integrity of the disciplines. . . . Either vigilant students, alumni, and taxpayers take a stand against this abuse of required English courses, or [there will be] worse results to our culture, government, and freedoms. . . . The first step toward removing this indoctrination is as simple as it is feasible” (Chapter 21).
ABOUT Reynolds Cotter, PhD
Reynolds Cotter, PhD, taught literature and writing courses for forty-five years as an English Professor. He served on countless committees and held various campus offices. He wrote BROKEN ENGLISH DEPARTMENTS: THE REPAIR MANUAL for alumni, parents, students, and taxpayers. “Reynolds Cotter” is the pseudonym of an actual professor.
MORE EXCERPTS FROM BROKEN ENGLISH DEPARTMENTS
Chapter 18, Hidden Reasons Why College is so Expensive
“The reason it costs more and more to attend college . . . is the multiplication of bureaucratic offices overseeing every conceivable aspect of faculty conduct and student life. Issues of race, class, and gender have been translated into minute areas of record-keeping, each overseen by a separate dean, associate dean, assistant dean, associate provost, associate provost, assistant chancellor, associate chancellor, assistant president, or associate president.”
Chapter 20, Gross Imbalance of Faculty Viewpoints
“An examination of political loyalties conducted in 2020 by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture among the faculty in thirty-two elite colleges and universities found. . . . [that] Democrats outnumbered Republicans ten to one, 1,397 Democrats to 137 Republicans.” A 2022 survey by The College Fix, an online forum for young journalists, “looked at sixty-five departments, primarily within the humanities, in seven universities . . . ; half of them . . . had no members who identified as Republicans.”
Chapter 17, Denying Students Their Cultural Heritage
“The Vietnam generation of English Professors successfully recruited enough students with a distaste for literature written in English (and the art of writing English itself) to the extent that the majority of professors and instructors currently at the most elite colleges and universities consider it beneath them to teach the traditional subjects of their discipline or conduct true research into the background of books and the times of the authors. . . . It is far too common for English professors to treat their students either like terrible bigots or people of color who need to recognize their oppression and embrace the salvation of Socialism.”
REASONS to read Broken English Departments: The Repair Manual
Anyone with a connection to a university—parent, alumni, student, or donor–can benefit from this book, which reviews the intellectual history of universities and reveals how the humanities fields, especially English Departments, have been broken by Leftist professors.
QR Code
Broken English Departments: The Repair Manual
Broken English Departments: The Repair Manual 