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Which degree was that?

I'd say that one degree program being less difficult than another doesn't make it fake or unserious though. It's just natural that some topics are harder than others. There's a qualitative difference between "unserious" and "easier" I would say.

Princeton, which had been previously known for grade deflation, removed the requirement to study a classical language (Latin and Ancient Greek) as part of their classics major in able to make the field more accessible to people of color.

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/12/1005833496/critics-concerned-...

Sorry, I was specifically asking about fake or unserious degrees, so its not really in line with what I was discussing. However, I would question whether removing Latin or Ancient Greek as a requirement meaningfully lowers the quality of education. I'm not privy to all criteria considered when making that decision, but it seems reasonable on the face of it to me -- removing unneeded requirements that may be a barrier to learning.

Removing requirements on the basis that they don't increase the quality of education does indeed sound reasonable, but doing it due to the color of skin would be the wrong reason to enact a policy. Racism is what we're fighting against, not trying to make policies enabling it.

In what world is being able to read the material unneeded?

Latin may not be a requirement for whatever Grievance Studies, but it certainly is necessary if you want to study Virgil.

All this hemming and hawing is still irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

If you're studying history, you should be reading primary sources. Translations are a useful tool, but everyone makes mistakes and has their own biases, so your scholarship is compromised of you rely on them. The only jobs relevant to a classics major are Latin teachers and college professors. Obviously, you can't do the former without learning Latin. Professorships are already incredibly competitive in classics, so you'd be a lot less competitive without language proficiency. I don't think the degree is quite "fake" yet, but it's definitely getting close.

Moreover, familiarity with Greek and Latin is very helpful even when reading English-language texts, in part due to the influence of those languages on English, and in part (I admit this is a bit circular) because English-language authors—especially the more academic-leaning ones—up until quite recently assumed they could toss in some Greek or Latin and their readers would understand it, especially if it was just a quote from some familiar text the reader surely encountered in school.

I could see loosening the requirement, but if the loosening isn't simply to permit French and German (also hugely important in academics, some fields more than others, very influential on English, and also often untranslated in otherwise English texts, so, justifiable for similar reasons) as substitutes, yeah, I'd regard it as likely a step backwards.

> However, I would question whether removing Latin or Ancient Greek as a requirement meaningfully lowers the quality of education

In Classics, where Ancient Greek and Latin are principal topics of study

I understand why we might relent on not teaching them as a part of general studies, but in Classics, Theology and Ancient History at the graduate level there's no way to escape the need to read the original, and anyone who must rely on translation will remain crippled in the field as long as they do so.

Man, McWhorter jumps straight to the point. It's remarkable that NPR still has him on:

> JOHN MCWHORTER: Thanks for having me.

> SIMON: Josh Billings - I don't have to tell you, a classics professor who's the department's head of undergraduate studies - says, quote, "having new perspectives in the field will make the field better." What would be wrong with that?

> MCWHORTER: Nothing at all, but I don't want to hear it until I know that it's not a way of saying through the back door that we want to have more Black students, and it's racist to expect them to learn Latin and Greek.

It's especially odd to have him on since he's not a classics professor.

It’s a cross-cutting issue. If academics have been seized by the belief that white subjects must be watered down to be accessible to “people of color,” it doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking about computer science or the classics specifically.

My surprise is that NPR—which thinks that minorities can’t be expected to adhere to white people’s rules like not burning down cities—would have on a heretic like McWhorter.

That is not why princeton removed it. It was because there were classics in other regions that you could study as well. The requirement of knowing a set of “classics” isnt gone. You could study ancient china for example.

Ancient China is in a different department. It would make sense to allow students to choose ancient Aramaic instead of Latin, but that's not the change. You can now graduate specializing in Ancient Greek without reading a single line in Ancient Greek.

> You can now graduate specializing in Ancient Greek without reading a single line in Ancient Greek.

Is that true? It sounds more like classical Greek literature was just removed from the core curriculum.

Aramaic wouldn't make any sense either as aramaic isn't part of european civilization. It should be latin and greek. A degree in "classics" ( the works of greco-roman civilization ) should require both latin and greek.

Heck all students in american education ( K-12 ) should be taught latin at the very least. Why we stopped...

Looking at the degree requirements at the moment, the option to study another language isn't in place of Greek or Latin, but rather in place of other courses.

> One course must deal substantially with classical reception or comparative approaches to the ancient world; this requirement may also be fulfilled by study of another language relevant to the student’s interests (Akkadian, Modern Greek, etc., at any course level).

Since this is semi-anonymous, I'll dare to say gender studies.

That tends to be the common answer I hear, but I usually don't hear why its fake. What makes gender studies fake or unserious?

They're ideologically driven. Not so much a field of study as an agenda. Sometimes, when going through academic records of people from certain countries, I see their grades in courses like "Theory and Practice of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" or "Islamic Faith", gender students looks to me like a Western equivalent of those.

My (admittedly uninformed) impression of gender studies is that so long as you reach them conclusion that X gender is a victim (where X isn't cis men), it matters very little what path you take to get there. This is how an obviously joke study [1] got accepted in a relatively prestigious gender studies journal.

[1] http://norskk.is/bytta/menn/dog_park.pdf

It demonstrates a grave lack of faith in humanity writ large to imagine that such a description can be representative of any distinguished academic tradition.

I'm not saying that gender studies is useless. It has obviously produced many valuable insights in the past, and I'm sure plenty of academics produce high quality scholarship in this field to this day. My point is that it makes little effort to distinguish this high quality scholarship and complete nonsense.

Stating this as some kind of obvious fact on a public forum usually requires some level of personal familiarity on the subject. Otherwise, what you are saying is literally, definitionally, "bullshit".

I made that qualification to acknowledge that I'm not an expert, but I've read enough on my own to make an informed judgement. Feel free to offer an alternative explanation to how such a comically absurd paper got into a prestigious journal instead of hastily declaring that I'm wrong.

> My point is that it makes little effort to distinguish this high quality scholarship and complete nonsense.

You make such sweeping claims based on a sample size of one. You neglect to account for survivorship bias -- you cannot see all the bullshit papers that were rejected from journals. This all feels obvious to me as issues with your analysis. Where is your intellectual rigor?

Not a sample size of one. Out of 20 papers they published, 7 got accepted, 6 were rejected, and 7 were still undergoing review. Also, I don't think that paper is that different from the postmodernist literature that I've read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair

People have this weird perception of humanities students that they dick around all day. Some of the hardest-working people I met in school where humanities students. It might be the case that they were working hard on weird esoteric bullshit, but it was hard work nonetheless.

Most of the humanities :-P