The Shrinking Number of Shakespeare Requirements

ANNE NEAL: The American Council of Trustees and Alumni first looked at the question of Shakespeare requirements within English departments when the action by Georgetown to drop Shakespeare as a requirement was brought to our attention. In fact, as we understand it, there were many within the Georgetown English department that were deeply disturbed by the push to eliminate this requirement, and in fact it was some of those disaffected professors—who were in the minority, but nevertheless a significant minority, as we understand it, within that faculty—who came to us and said, "Georgetown is going to drop Shakespeare, this is tragic. Is there something you can do to help us let the public know, let parents know, let students know?"

And that's when we decided that we wanted to take a look—not only to see what Georgetown was doing, but to see what was happening elsewhere. In the course of dropping the Shakespeare requirement, one of the excuses Georgetown made was that everyone was doing it. And that's why we thought, can we see if this is true? And regrettably, it was very, very much true.

And we took a look at the top 50 colleges according to U.S. News and World Report, the Ivy League, Seven Sisters, also the two largest public university systems—the University of California, State University of New York—to see, was this in fact a trend, was this actually happening? And we were absolutely amazed. The report that we put out in terms of Shakespeare studies, called The Shakespeare File: What English Majors are Really Studying, found that only 23 of the 70 top institutions that we examined still required Shakespeare of their English concentrators. And I think that's an important point to make. We're not talking about whether or not students going to college were being exposed to Shakespeare. We're talking about those who were majoring in English.

And for those who are likely to become teachers, likely to go out and become journalists, and have other public roles where this kind of knowledge is important—they were no longer being required to study Shakespeare. And we found this utterly flabbergasting.