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Thursday
A month ago a friend (Bruce Baird) alerted me to a New Yorker article about “The End of the English Major.” Actually, Nathan Heller’s essay is about the arts and humanities generally, with English serving as a metonym for all those majors that aren’t social science, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math), or degrees connected with vocations. According to Heller, collegiate study of English and history has fallen by a third over the past decade while humanities enrollment overall has declined by 17%.
With the ruthless thoroughness of a New Yorker writer, Nathan Heller shares all the explanations for this state of affairs that he has encountered. To share you any suspense, I can tell you he arrives at no clear answer. Among the reasons given are the following, some of them related:
1. Skyrocketing tuition costs
With college growing increasingly expensive, students are more vocationally minded and want degrees that are clearly linked with specific jobs and careers. The article notes that, while English majors on average “carry less debt than students in other fields,” they also take longer to pay off their debt. As a result, even students drawn toward the humanities sometimes choose others majors just to be safe. As one student put it, the humanities are often seen as “hobby-based” for those who can afford it.
2. Relatedly, a precipitous drop in state funding
This means that universities have to choose where to invest their resources. Often, they are more interested in shinier fields of studies than the traditional humanities.
3. The rise of social media
Many are worried that books can’t compete with the texts, videos, and podcasts available on the internet. As one English professor, who himself admits he reads less fiction now than formerly, observed to Heller, “Go to a play now, and watch the flashing screens an hour in, as people who like to think of themselves as cultured cannot! Stop! Themselves!” To which Heller adds, “Assigning Middlemarch in that climate [is] like trying to land a 747 on a small rural airstrip.”
4. The seeming lack of clear performance metrics in the humanities
One student interviewed by Heller put it this way:
“I think the problem for the humanities is you can feel like you’re not really going anywhere, and that’s very scary,” he said. “You write one essay better than the other from one semester to the next. That’s not the same as, you know, being able to solve this economics problem, or code this thing, or do policy analysis.” This has always been true, but students now recognized less of the long-term value of writing better or thinking more deeply than they previously had. Last summer, Haimo worked at the HistoryMakers, an organization building an archive of African American oral history. He said, “When I was applying, I kept thinking, What qualifies me for this job? Sure, I can research, I can write things.” He leaned forward to check for passing traffic. “But those skills are very difficult to demonstrate, and it’s frankly not what the world at large seems in demand of.”
–Failure of English departments to link literature to students’ life experiences
Needless to say, this is a major concern of mine, although it’s probably not the reason for the precipitous drop in humanities enrollments. I’ll have more to say on this in a future post.
–Overspecialization
This has long been a complaint but, again, it wouldn’t account for why other humanities majors are also seeing enrollment declines.
–Too much focus on “disenchantment”
Some are accusing English professors of taking the enchantment out of literature. I suppose the critics here are referring to deconstruction or historical criticism although the idea that scholars are ruining literature by systematically dissecting it goes back at least to the early part of the 20th century, when German philology invaded British literary studies. To quote Terry Eagleton in “The Rise of English,” the discipline was irrevocably changed when it ceased to be regarded as “idle gossip about literary taste.” Eagleton writes that colleges faced the difficulty of knowing “how to make [English] unpleasant enough to qualify as a proper academic pursuit” but adds, “This, it might be said, is one of the few problems associated with the study of English which have since been effectively resolved.”
–The Obamas
By focusing so much on STEM and the arts with nothing in-between, Barack and Michelle (so the complaint goes) weighted the scales against the humanities. This criticism isn’t really fair, however, since the former president constantly sang the praises of Toni Morrison. And in any event, the arts are suffering from the general decline along with literature.
–The humanities actually aren’t doing that poorly, only their successes are hidden
As Heller explains,
One idea about the national enrollment problem is that it’s actually a counting problem: students haven’t so much left the building as come in through another door. Adjacent fields aren’t included in humanities tallies, and some of them are booming. Harvard’s history-of-science department has seen a fifty-per-cent increase in its majors in the past five years. The humanities creature who recites Cavafy at parties might fade away, but students are still getting their vitamins. There’s a lot of ethics in bioethics, after all.
–Traditional literary study has become stale
Heller:
Some have resigned themselves. “The age of Anglophilia is over,” one late-career English professor told me. “It’s like thinking back to when Latin was the center of the world—the memorization of lines and competing with your friends at Oxford and Eton in quips.” The great age of the novel had served a cloistered, highly regionalized readership, but that, too, had changed. “I don’t think reading novels is now the only way to have a broad experience of the varieties of human nature or the ethical problems that people face,” he said.
–Relatedly, literary studies departments can’t imagine alternatives
There has been some imaginative rethinking here, however. Heller reports that some in the humanities are recommending that their departments
match majors to topics that resonate in the current moment, like climate change and racial justice[.] I wondered aloud whether that was a moving target—the concerns in our headlines today are different from those fifteen years ago—but Kelsey insisted that some causes were here to stay. “I would like to see us come out with better platforms for studying the environmental humanities, migration and ethnicity, and the medical humanities,” he said.
–Changing student demographics, with more students from working class backgrounds
Such students understandably want clear paths to jobs. And in fact, my English Department at a state college (St. Mary’s College of Maryland), with its high percentage of first-generation college students, addresses this issues by emphasizing internships, externships (where students shadow former majors in their jobs), and colloquia where alumni visit campus to tell their experiences in the job world. Nevertheless, as Heller notes,
It is only slightly awkward, then, that this opening of the field has nudged educational incentives away from humanities study. The students whom universities most seek are the ones likeliest to require immediate conversion of their degrees into life change. They need the socioeconomic elevator that college promised them. And they need it the instant they lose institutional support.
–Advanced Placement courses
As Heller explains,
Smart humanities-oriented kids are taking the A.P.s, or studying English or history at community college, so, by the time they make it to four-year colleges, they’ve placed out of humanities requirements: classes in which students often fall in love with the field. In that way, too, students whom the universities are keenest to recruit are pre-sorted away from the humanities.
Fortunately, Heller notes, there is some good news for the humanities. “Career studies,” he points out,
have shown that humanities majors, with their communication and analytical skills, often end up in leadership jobs. To that extent, the value of the educated human touch is likely to hold in a storm of technological and cultural change.
He also notes that those with humanities backgrounds are less likely to be replaced by Artificial Intelligence:
There has been much hand-wringing about ChatGPT and its ability to replicate some composition tasks. But ChatGPT can no more conceive Mrs. Dalloway than it can guide and people-manage an organization. Instead, A.I. can gather and order information, design experiments and processes, produce descriptive writing and mediocre craftwork, and compose basic code, and those are the careers likeliest to go into slow eclipse.
Because I taught at Maryland’s liberal arts college, I have long been aware of the difficulties of convincing students to major in literature. My own efforts to relate literature to my students’ lives led to this blog, where I now try to spread the word more generally. As I see it, this will always be an uphill battle.
But since, as Heller too believes, it is imperative that students have some acquaintance with the humanities, I agree with those who believe we need to reimagine the discipline and to join with other disciplines to get the word out. Rather than despair, humanities teachers just need to be creative.