What Happened to the English Major?

Back in the day I used to teach English literature at the college level. At some point I got side-tracked into psycho analysis, which is effectively just another literary pursuit. After all, it is about storytelling. It just happens, as I noted elsewhere, to be high priced storytelling. 

Still, I have retained a decent respect for the value of literature. If you want to learn how to use language and how to tell stories, you cannot do better than to study the writings of the members of the literary canon. I would add that reading literature allows you to expose yourself to some of the great minds of Western civilization. And, as Newton once said, you see further standing on the shoulders of giants than on the backs of midgets.

I would add, though it is not relevant to today’s conversation, that literature and the arts gives you an appreciation of aesthetics, of the beauty of artistic creation. It even allows you to appreciate that the beauty of art is not the same as the beauty of nature. 

In any event today’s young people no longer bother with literature. They study subjects they consider more relevant to job opportunities. That includes statistics and various STEM subjects.

They are right, up to a point, even if they should have figured out that people who know something about literature normally have superior management skills, to say nothing of superior communications skills. If you do not know how to communicate your relationships will be dry and empty. If you don’t believe me, try it. And this does not even take account of the advantages of direct personal communication, as opposed to texting and such.

For those of us who spend some considerable time writing, it should be obvious that we hone our craft by reading great writers. If you do not read Dickens and even the bard, your writing will be poor and deprived and tedious. Your ability to tell stories will be diminished. 

As it happens, Nathan Heller wrote in a much quoted New Yorker article,  the college English major is currently on life support. It has lost its audience and it is hobbling along, a few steps from the academic graveyard.

Heller offers some examples:

The crisis, when it came, arrived so quickly that its scale was hard to recognize at first. From 2012 to the start of the pandemic, the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from nine hundred and fifty-three to five hundred and seventy-eight. Records indicate that the number of graduated language and literature majors decreased by roughly half, as did the number of history majors. Women’s studies lost eighty per cent.

One is tempted to offer the normal explanations. First, a younger generation has had its collective mind corrupted by iPhones and video games. It no longer has a real attention span or a real ability to focus and to concentrate. Second, college is expensive and students are more likely to want to major in subjects that will offer better job opportunities. In truth, English literature does not seem to fill the bill here either.

Heller does not mention it, except perhaps with a brief reference, but the Humanities have become a proving ground for diversity hiring and for ideological indoctrination. Perhaps this is the hidden secret, namely, that English departments are no longer teaching literature any more. It’s not just that students refuse to read dead white males and even dead white female authors, but their teachers would not know how to teach them if they did.

So, professors insist that they must make their subject more relevant, by extracting sociological and political truths out of literary text, generally ruining the literary qualities and the aesthetics. If they think that literature has an ideological underpinning, they have completely missed the oint.

Here the solution is the problem. The new cohort of English language teachers does not know anything but political truths and sociological facts. They would not know how to teach English if their lives depended on it. When a teacher bemoans the fact that her students cannot understand Hawthorne because they do not know the difference between subjects and predicates, we can ask ourselves what these students were studying in high school. Back in the day we diagrammed sentences in Middle School. Apparently, teachers no longer teach English grammar, perhaps because it is too white.

So, a hatred for Western civilization, especially for the Anglo-Saxon side, has produced college students who are illiterate and ignorant, who do not know how to communicate and do not know how to tell stories. Those faculty members who might know how to teach them what they do not know are mostly on the verge of retirement. Within the academy idiotocracy reigns, to the detriment of literary studies. There, the free market is killing a discipline that has worked long and hard to diminish itself.