HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Yale Cancels Western Art. “Introduction to Art History,” for decades one of the most popular and famous courses at Yale, is being eliminated because its emphasis on Western art is “problematic,” according to the chair of the art history department, Tim Barringer. The Yale Daily News translates that to mean that Western art is a “product of an overwhelmingly white, straight, European and male cadre of artists.” The horror!

The course will be offered one final time during this spring semester, but it sounds as if Barringer has already managed to ruin it. He has promised students that the course will consider Western art in relation to “questions of gender, class and ‘race'” as well as its involvement with capitalism. And he has promised that a “key theme” will be the relationship between art and climate change. Yes, just what everyone wants to learn from an art history professor.