I was pondering the other day what would be required to make an English major as rigorous as possible (i.e. comparable to a hard science degree).

A few tentative thoughts.

1. The major in English should be first and foremost a major in English philology. Every student takes the basic linguistics core courses (phonology, semantics, morphology, syntax). A semester survey on English grammar caps that section off.

Every student takes 2 courses on old english, 1 on middle English, 1 one Early modern English, and then something on modern English varieties or modern English socio-linguistics.

You probably also want to include 3 years of Latin or French, or a passing test grade in either.

This is probably sufficient to give the student foundational knowledge in English *as a language.*

2. You would want a core set of courses that require technical mastery in interpreting texts. This means a poetry class that requires you to memorize poetic forms and scan hundreds of poems. It means memorizing and reciting poetry and other passages for credit. It means a prose class where people are taking big blocks of Faulkner or Conrad and diagramming the sentences and passages. It means diagramming famous essays and the structures of novels.

I am not sure how many courses this would require, but maybe two, one focused on prosody in poetry, the other on structure in prose.

3. Something like the following progression of foundational surveys:

a) Classical antecedents: Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Metamorphosis. Even better if the class also assigns poems or short stories that allude to this material so that students can see the connections over time.
b) King James Bible. (Same thing as before--but perhaps even more critical to include the poems/short stories). Make students memorize key Bible passages.
c) Shakespeare survey. At least 8 plays across genres. Make students memorize key passages.
d) English poetry to Milton + Paradise Lost. Make students memorize.
e) English poetry after Milton survey. Make students memorize.
f) 18th and 19th century novels (assign 12, unless you have a really big novel like Moby Dick, in which case you can shorten a bit; at least half of the novels should have been written in English).
g) Development of the essay to 1900 (Start with Montaigne and Bacon and move forward in time. Include several book length works)
g) The modern essay and narrative nonfiction (include several book length works--Didion, Wolf, McPherson, that sort of thing).

There also should be at least one research based class, but I suppose they can choose can between different topics/authors there.

4. I would have previously said a series of courses on composition but given ChatGPT and the inevitability of cheating I do not really know if there is a point to this anymore. The curriculum would need to be focused on things that can be tested, things that can be recited, and class discussions and debates. Students will have to learn how to write well through reading good models.
Unfortunately, the inability to assign essays makes it difficult to reach out rigor goal but I do not have any good solutions to this. On a semester by semester basis this might look like:

SEMESTER I
-Linguistics: Intro to Linguistics and English Language
-Lit Survey: Classical Literature
-Eng Lang: Old English I
-GE credit
-GE Credit

SEMESTER II

-Linguistics: Phonology and Phoentics
-Eng Lang: Old English II
-Text Interpretation: Prosody and Form
-Lit Survey: King James Bible
-GE Credit

SEMESTER III
-Linguistics: Morphology
-Latin 101
-Eng Lang: Middle English
-Lit Survey: Poetry through Milton
-GE Credit

SEMESTER IV
-Linguistics: Syntax
-Latin 202
-Eng Lang: Early Modern English
-Lit Survey: Shakespeare
-GE Credit

SEMESTER V

-Latin 301
-Linguistics: Semantics
-Textual Interpretation: Prose and Structure
-Lit Survey: Development of the Essay
-Elective

Semester VI

-Latin 302
-Lit Survey: 17th and 19th Century Novel
-Lit Survey: English poetry after Milton
-Elective (research intensive)
-Elective

Semester VII

-Lit Survey: Narrative Nonfiction
-Eng Lang: Sociolinguistics/Modern dialects
-Elective
-Elective
-Elective

Semester VIII:

-Elective (x5)

So my basic theory for why this happened goes something like this:

https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1940844949379207179

1. There are intellectual reasons for the shift, but they were less important than the practical reasons.

The practical reason: a large portion of the western elite ended up with fairly good Latin right up to the 20th century, but did not have corresponding skill in Greek.

I can think of a few actually.

Here is what I can say in defense of Scheidel: there are a certain class of interesting questions that classics is not well made to handle.

[1/x

https://twitter.com/HammillRyan/status/1939760009241665886

"Why did the Roman empire fall?" is one of these.

"Was the Roman empire similar or different from Han China, and in what ways?" is another. (Scheidel of course has written a book on the latter).

Where I think I differ from Sullivan is on how much I think this matters. He’s a bit like Dai Zhen poking at the Neoconfucian understanding of Confucius: for a thousand years we have been testing our Confucian officials on a false Confucius—the horror!

https://twitter.com/JohnF_Sullivan/status/1939748992222732417

IMHO whether the Neoconfucian Confucius really matched the real Confucius does not really matter—obviously the Neoconfucian Confucius was a coherent construct that upheld a thousand years of Chinese empire, and so that version of Confucius had some value.

Yarvin can always outlast and out-insult others, very hard to summon the energy to debate him.

The piece is good. I'll just note four things about Yarvin and that will all I have to say on him.

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1931888568206835758

1. Yarvin is a real intellectual and a very smart one at that. Everyone who pretends otherwise is coping. There are a reason so many of his ideas have stuck around two decades when so many other people from the NrX blogger days are forgotten.

A few notes.

1. Last year I wrote an essay on the different structures of the Democratic Party and the GOP. With the Democrats, power flows from the bottom up; with the GOP, from the top down.

The one major exception to this pattern is... you guessed it, Elon Musk. You can find that essay here scholars-stage.org/patronage-vs-c…

Let’s take that question seriously. If you were to design the education of the future FSO, CIA officer, NSC staffer, etc from scratch, what would it look like? What experiences do they need to have? What competencies most critical to gain?

https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1929970877753393623

I am having fun imagining a college that sort of combines the Thucydides course from Naval War College with required language immersion housing /dining with forced summers in developing countries with practicums in nat/sec law

There should be more universities like St. John's. I do not mean their specific great books curriculum so much as their commitment to a completely distinct curriculum that bares no resemblance to the standard American university model. The program is taught in a unique way. There are no "professors." Instead, there are "tutors." And so on. St. John's does not give the students a lot of choice in what or how they study--everybody goes through the same program.

There are lessons for Taiwan here. Be like the Houthis.

https://twitter.com/lrozen/status/1922068124150464991

No, but the problem isn’t just American “commitment” to the campaign. You cannot read that NYT article and not have a half dozen operational lessons jump out at you, come on guys…

https://x.com/Mo_Porkburger/status/1922349272218882427

I tend to think of the current American liberal/left policy world as a triangle with three points:

1) The the centrist liberals, recently "abundance"

2) The socialisty far left, think Bernie Bros

3) The "woke" left or social justice warriors

Why this division is useful: There is a lot of talk about the left vs the libs recently, with each side blaming the other for their coalition's recent defeats.

But there is conceptual confusion here. The common understanding acknowledges group 1) and group 2) but not group 3). Or more accurately--

I have a theory for why this happened, and it goes something like this:

https://twitter.com/jaycaspiankang/status/1921221352964472920

Once upon a time there was a cohort of young politicos who wanted to do good in the world. By both disposition and ideology they were inclined to view political problems through the lens of incentive structures, statistics, and wonkish dives into regulation and law.

I recently finished this book. It describes the lifeways of the men and women who lived in Utah and Nevada between 13,000 years ago to about 1600 AD.

A few notes of interest. 1. The paleoindian pioneers who settled the North American continent were extraordinary people--a daring culture like the Polynesian wayfinders or the 19th century American pioneers, intent on driving forward into great unknowns.

1. This is insane

2. Adolescence was easily the best filmed piece of media I have consumed since Oppenheimer. The plotting, acting, and blocking were incredible.

https://twitter.com/addicted2newz/status/1910281285798396237

I am no film critic but I suspect doing entire episodes in one shot really forces everyone involved to perform at a higher level. I was really blown away.

lol. What was an incipient bipartisan pro-tariff, pro-industrial party movement is being turned into an full fledged bipartisan anti-tariff, anti-industrial policy movement. You had a democrat sponsored bill in congress legislating an across the board 10% tariff.

Halfway through Cormac McCarthy’s BLOOD MERIDIAN.

I think it is very good, but have difficulty articulating why. I disagree with its philosophy. (Or at least I think I do—I am only halfway through).

I think its depiction of the old west, manifest destiny, etc is somewhat dishonest.

What he says about video games are true for many things: social media, television, even, to an extent, sex and food.

In all cases you have things that provide a level of hedonic enjoyment that in moderation give more pizzazz to life but in larger amounts sap you of strength, skill, and meaning.

For my part I can say this: my personal accomplishment is almost always inversely correlated with the amount of time playing video games.

The exception are social video games like Super Smash Brothers which are physically played in the presence of other people. I do not play video games right now. The last time I did was during a depressing and stressful family crisis that somewhat shot my productivity in any case.

Does it seem like there are conflicting explanations for these tariffs?

What if I told you that there were multiple economic schools of thought in the Trump administration, all with different goals--including for tariffs?

Would you want to know more? See my latest report for @FPRI for my breakdown of the different tribes of Trump economic policy, and the competing priorities each endorses: fpri.org/article/2025/0…

I think “abundance” is something like the new right (or even the integralist policy platform), but for liberals: it appeals primarily to educated millennial urbanites—and in this case, educated millennial urbanites who do not own homes!

3 points:

https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1905745553977483479

1. It is always hard to build an electoral coalition around a set of policies where the gains are widely distributed, relatively modest, and cumulative over the long term while the costs are highly concentrated both in time and place.

But one of the things that distinguishes the 1950s-60s films from the 1980s-2010s version (exemplified IMHO by Pixar) is the moral urgency of the message.

https://twitter.com/Arbitrary_user/status/1895363688221286877

And perhaps that suggests a shift in the substance of the thing.

The 1950s narratives lionize man the THINKER. They express great faith in the potential of man as an abstract ideal; the focus is not “be yourself” but “learn to think. Take your stand.”

What do presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump have in common?

Each began their term in office -- and for Trump, both terms -- convinced that America needed some sort of reset with Russia, and if they played their cards right, they would get it.

https://twitter.com/Glenn_Diesen/status/1891183505729536479

So many folks talk about the power of nat/sec groupthink and DC 'NPC's who thoughtlessly shuffle down paths tread ten thousand times before, but nobody talks about Russia in this context.

If you want a measure by which to judge which tech right leaders are sincere and which are selfish—that is, in it to maximize their financial returns regardless of the cost to the rest of us—you only need to do one thing: read what they said when Silicon Valley bank went under. Some of these individuals tried to save their investments by attempting to cause a general banking panic—to ensure that the government would bail out the bank.

I have never looked at them the same again.