@JBStillFlying , I admit - if that’s the right word for it - that I am reading the words of the statement as meaning what they say. However, I have a suspicion that there could well be silent abstainers. Perhaps that is what you are hinting at. Some of these must surely be students admitted in the less woke times of a few years ago. Still, some years ago I read through lots of course descriptions, almost none of which would have fired up the young would-be scholar I once was. Nearly every one of them emphasized this or that faddish deconstructive critical perspective. The chief medievalist marked out his own interests in queer and feminist critiques, the psychological analysis of the peculiarities of belief, and a host of similar social, psychological, gender, racial, and political themes. He made no mention of the Christian world-view or Christian texts. At the conclusion of that wordy salad of interests and themes was one word: Chaucer. Was the fancy intellectual verbiage offered as justification for the reading of a classic author? Or was the author an afterthought, a mere crouton in a soup of fashionable buzzwords?
@bluebayou , I haven’t been inside the belly of this beast for a long time and have no inside information. What I do have is perspective and, I hope, a love of the subject matter. I suppose I also have the hope that these old authors will continue to be read and taught in some fashion by people who try to understand them in the way they understood themselves. Perhaps that will now happen outside English Departments.