I think the “English Department” is a dumb name, and many schools don’t even have one. Departments update their names all the time, so there is nothing especially newsworthy here. Every department I’ve ever been a part of since graduate school has a different name now then it did 20 years ago. Naming a department doesn’t usually impact the names of majors and degrees, as that is usually a separate process, and that is what even the students and graduates will talk about. Nobody asks a graduate “what department did you get your major from”, they ask “What was your major”, which still might be English, or literature, or whatever Cornell offers.
The name change is branding and marketing, probably with an audience of academic peers, graduate students, and members of the department, and they probably have good reasons for doing this for their intended audience. It certainly won’t do anything to impact the long decline of humanities degrees in comparison to STEM, or help their PhD graduates on the academic job market, but they should be able to call themselves whatever they want if they follow the university rules. All that being said, this is exactly the type of thing the right are talking about when they mock political correctness and lampoon 'SJW’s.
