Craig Warmke, a WVU business professor, criticizes Princeton’s English major course offerings on Twitter, arguing that while individual courses like those on socialism or dolls can be valid, the overall curriculum lacks emphasis on traditional canonical works such as Shakespeare. He contends that students should proactively seek out and study these classics, challenging colleges to prioritize them in their syllabi. Warmke encourages current and prospective English majors to demand more rigorous reading lists from universities.
Written locally by qwen2.5:14b on 2026-09-17,
using this article's own text rather than the other coverage of the
same event (that is the story summary below).
It’s been a decade or more since Jordan Peterson became famous telling the world that most papers don’t get cited and that professors will turn your children into mindless Marxists.
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professors → become → Marxists
This accusation won’t die.
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accusation → die → ?
Most recently on Twitter, WVU business professor Craig Warmke got some attention by calling out the Princeton English major course offerings.
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Warmke → get → offerings
It’s all the sort of thing we have come to expect.
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we → ’ → thing
You get the idea.
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You → get → idea
These courses are all held in equal regard.
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courses → hold → regard
Of the twelve courses you take as an English major, none is obliged to be on Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth—authors our grandmothers might have read as school-leavers.
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grandmothers → take → leavers
This debate is often conducted in the abstract, about what colleges ought to do, or among academics about their own (often legitimate) concerns.
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colleges → conduct → concerns
In all the talk about how the curriculum ought to be changed to make it more relevant or accessible for students, opinion pieces are not written to them.
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pieces → change → them
In all this debate about what should be on the syllabus for an English degree, no one ever seems to address the students.
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one → seem → students
You can still write about gender if you study Elizabethan poetry, as Camille Paglia did.
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Paglia → write → poetry
You can still write cultural commentary if you read the old works, as Susan Sontag did.
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Sontag → write → works
You can still be a modern if you read the classics, as Merve Emre is.
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Emre → read → classics
The question is not what you think of the debate about woke colleges and canons—the question is whether you are up for the challenge.
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you → think → challenge
If you are an undergraduate or high-school student studying or thinking of studying English, you should demand more from the colleges you apply to or attend.
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you → study → colleges
Demand to study the works that the greats before you have studied.
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you → demand → that
Be like the intern who worked with me this summer who changed colleges because he was sick of being taught extracts not books, sick of not being taught Shakespeare.
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he → work → Shakespeare
(And, needless to say, there is room also for college professors to get back to the classics in their syllabi.)
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professors → say → syllabi
You are only young once, and you should make sure by hook or by crook that you spend your youth on the best books, the best writing, the work that is going to be most strongly felt in the blood and the heart.
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that → make → blood
You should not meekly accept the patronizing and ideological manner in which a vast and ancient tradition has been condensed into a series of courses about gender, race, and Theory with no requirement for you to do battle with many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.
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you → accept → lore
You should not accept the professor’s experience or expertise as any reason to study only one single course in literature before 1700, as the requirements of Princeton’s English department allow.
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requirements → accept → department
You should not accept their stature (however well-earned and well-deserved) if it means you study Sondheim without studying the great poets.
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you → accept → poets
Don’t be fooled by the grand buildings or the long traditions: if a college tells you that you do not need to read Milton and Chaucer as part of knowing what “English” is then they have lost their way.
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they → fool → way
You should want to struggle with the difficult language, the historical confusion, and the head-spinning level of erudition that marks off the great poets unreally from the rest.
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that → want → rest
There was a time when this was so obvious it didn’t need saying.
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it → be → ?
There was a time when everyone who read Virginia Woolf’s extraordinary essays (she was the best critic of the twentieth century, bar none: you can keep your Empsons, your Trillings, your Vendlers—Woolf is the one) knew that the access she so rightfully demanded was access to the tradition.
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she → be → tradition
The author of A Room of One’s Own was a great reader of the tradition: as a teenager she was knocking on her father’s study to borrow Gibbon and Cowpers.
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she → knock → Gibbon
She wrote for the future, but she read from the past.
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she → write → past
It would have been unthinkable to her not to have read Chaucer and Browne and Defoe and Keats.
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It → read → Chaucer
To follow her example would be to read with abandon in the old ways.
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follow → follow → ways
This is what I want to tell young people now—don’t listen to the discourse, don’t pay attention to the think pieces and the debates.
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I → want → pieces
That will all be gone with the wind tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
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That → go → wind
If you really want to read English, read the way Virginia Woolf read.
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Woolf → want → way
Read, for that matter, the way Derrida read—as deeply as possible in the great works of the past from Plato to Rousseau to Conrad.
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Derrida → read → Conrad
Don’t accept courses in literary criticism that begin—begin!—with Hegel and pass through Marx and Judith Butler.
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that → accept → Marx
To accept that is to accept an affront to your dignity.
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accept → accept → dignity
Who are these professors not to insist upon your reading Hazlitt, Johnson, Dryden or Aristotle, Horace, Longinus?
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your → insist → Dryden
Who are the colleges to tell you the tradition begins a mere two hundred years ago?
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tradition → tell → you
Go to the colleges that still prioritize the canon.
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that → go → canon
Some of you won’t be convinced by this.
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Some → convince → this
…and 36 more, not listed.
The Aporia
