Finnegan Schick explains at the New Criterion.

Faculty have “dismembered” their curricula, Stanford English Professor William Chace argued in The American Scholar, supplementing traditional classes with a smattering of “themed” courses. These new courses raise questions of gender and racial identity, sexuality and popular culture, at the expense of a foundational syllabus already equipped to answer these very questions. The English canon is a wellspring of wisdom, yet many academics dismiss the classics in favor of more contemporary or marginal literatures.

Incidentally, now that the university professors have left English for ideology, Christian colleges and universities have a platinum opportunity to salvage the best of the discipline. It may well be that Christian institutions can preserve learning through the next dark age, much as the monasteries did through the last one.