The Academic Assault on English Literature

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British exam board OCR has sworn fealty to the ‘current thing’ by removing long-dead white men, including Philip Larkin, Thomas Hardy, William Blake, Wilfred Owen, and John Keats, from its poetry exam anthology. In an effort to add “more diverse works to [their] GCSE and A Level English Literature,” these historically significant contributions to our cultural heritage have been passed over for “more poems by contemporary and established poets of colour.” Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi has decried this as “cultural vandalism.” Academics are cannibalising their own discipline in an effort to ‘decolonise’ and ‘diversify’ the space. But all they will manage to achieve is the emptying of impressionable heads.