Hm... Department of L.I.E.
English Faculty Vote to Change Name to ‘Department of Literatures in English’
During the English department’s first faculty meeting of the fall semester, faculty members of color introduced a proposal — to change the department’s name.
The new proposed name — “the department of literatures in English” — would mark a distinct change in the department’s branding, helping to eliminate what Director of Undergraduate Studies Prof. Kate McCullough, English, said was the “conflation of English as a language and English as a nationality.”
Earlier this month, a significant majority of the department approved the change, and is now awaiting approval from college administration.
The decision to demand such a change was spurred by this summer’s resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement following George Floyd’s death, according to Prof. Carole Boyce-Davies, English, one of the original proposal writers. As a result, the faculty felt a sense of obligation to react in their own department.
“Faculty around the country — not just faculty of color, but faculty in general — began to look at the institution to see how we can help advance a discourse that challenges structural forms of racism which get reproduced in students and in teaching over and over again,” Boyce-Davies said.
Other faculty simply recognized that it was time that the department’s title represented what it was really focused on: literature written in English.
https://cornellsun.com/2020/10/14/english-faculty-vote-to-change-name-to-department-of-literatures-in-english/
