Identity politics and the university

This project examines politicization of the university. Critics have long charged that politics, and specifically identity politics, has infiltrated the classroom via radical professors. Scholars who lament the decline of the western canon claim that a massive wave of new untested works - largely written by women and people of color - have replaced the works of dead white men leaving our students ill-prepared. While most of the scholarship in this area has been written in the area of English literature departments, this project focuses on the field of Hispanic Literature. If identity politics has challenged the canon in the university, it is expected that within identity-based disciplines the infiltration of politics should be substantial. To test the politicization of the university, I examined 38 Hispanic Literature survey courses from a variety of American universities. I found a high degree of consistency among these syllabi and concluded that critics of the university have in many cases overstated their case. However, the results to suggest that changes are taking place in regards to the inclusion of more diverse authors in the curriculum, though not a complete take over as suggest numerous critics.