It's the End of the English Major as We Know It, And I Feel Fine
On the decline of the humanities, uselessness, and long cons
Earlier this month, Nathan Heller wrote on a long feature in The New Yorker called “The End of the English Major,” a broad report on the decline in humanities majors across US universities. After a brief stir among academic types, all the attention on the article was eventually diverted to a different New Yorker article on academia, Rachel Aviv’s pulp-novel-of-ideas on philosopher Agnes Callard’s marriages. So in case you heard more “my philosopher wife’s boyfriend” jokes than despair about the state of the humanities, I can fill you in on what you missed. In a tone not unlike the scientist in a bad disaster movie looking at a screen and gravely saying, ‘um, Sir… you’re going to want to take a look at this,’ Heller laid out the stats: a fifty percent drop in English majors at Arizona State from 2012 to 2020 and a spreading contagion across the country.
“[T]he decline at A.S.U. is not anomalous.” (Is anyone else thinking of that scene in The Thing where the computer shows how well the virus copies its host?)
“[F]rom 2012 to 2020, the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent.” (Jesus Christ, Sir… Ohio State has fallen.)
“Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two.” (We’ve lost contact with Tufts, Sir.)
“Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while SUNY Albany lost almost three-quarters.” (Somebody call SUNY Albany’s family, goddamnit! At least tell me we’ve still got Vassar and Bates – standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges!)
“Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half.” (PG-13 saving cut away from the general saying, ‘Holy shi-’.)
“In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils.” (Alarm goes off, everyone leaves the room, computer ominously reads ‘ALL HUMANITIES DEPARTMENTS ELIMINATED WITHIN 27,000 HOURS.’)
From that dire prognosis, Heller teases out the various academic reckonings with “what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before” and how the humanities – particularly English departments – might adapt to lure back more students. There’s a sort of sweaty insistence among the many quoted professors and administrators that the degree is ‘useful’ after graduation and makes for employable graduates, and that if they just find the right texts – “banger poems” or Better Call Saul or whatever1 – and remind people that, uh, John Legend was a literature student and still made a career for himself,2 programs across the country will roar back to their midcentury prominence, or at least not dwindle away into nothingness. They’ll bundle themselves into STEM programs before they go the way of the once-mighty Classics department.
Though the economy is mentioned in the article – department enrollment usually mirrored economic performance, but humanities enrollment had begun to decline even during boom times – there’s a curious lack of consideration for the ways in which the economy has changed in the last 75 years or so, and on for whom a ‘good economy’ is good now. Hint: it ain’t English majors! The most direct career paths for English majors are within academia, publishing, and the media, which, if you haven’t paid attention lately, are among the most precarious and poorly-paid jobs that require college degrees in the country. (The other clear option is becoming a tutor, helping uninterested kids raise their English grade and test scores so they can scam a college into accepting them, where they’ll proceed to not take humanities courses.) And if you still believe that the point of a university is to produce ‘well-rounded individuals,’ well, the hiring software used to sift through the deluge of applications for entry-level jobs across the rest of the economy is weeding out all those well-rounded individuals without ‘practical’ degrees.3 Whereas 70 years ago or so, your deadbeat kid with an English degree could get a decent job through an informal network of family, friends, or the fact that they simply went to a certain school, things have changed, for better or worse. Better that the hiring market is not entirely (or at least not as much) based on nepotism / collegiate affiliation, worse in that meaningful entry level jobs have basically vanished except on the specialized high-end.
There’s plenty of discussion in the article about whether English departments, in focusing on professionalizing their students and doing whatever they can to get some of that sweet, sweet STEM money from corporations and their administrations, have “ceded the terms” to the research heavy, labor producing, capitalist dream of the modern university. At this point, that’s like an AM radio announcer worrying about losing ground to television, or a frog fretting at the rolling boil that’s begun in the pot. You’re too late! Capital’s already won this one in a rout! Instead of complaining about students majoring in English or History or ‘basket weaving’ instead of going to a vocational school, the market has changed to force every student to treat every college like a vocational school. Until there’s student loan forgiveness or free public college, that isn’t changing.
In the case of the English major, though, there’s another undercurrent to the contemporary ‘crisis’; instead of framing this as some precipitous fall from grace, you could see the major’s current state as the end stages of a long, successful con. That is to say, the English major has always been ridiculous, literature and its study has never been good for anything besides an intellectual pleasure shared among certain devotees, and it’s just taken this long for everyone else to realize it. You could get accredited by a college for thinking about books? We really had ‘em going there for a bit! Sure, reading and analyzing texts can make you a more discerning person, and can help you synthesize information quickly, and the humanities administrators in Heller’s piece hold on to the fact that humanities students are “better leaders” (however that’s quantified) and might be able to do things A.I. programs can’t,4 but I have a hard time ascribing those qualities all to education rather than an intrinsic inclination. If you wanted to read books, crack them open and see how they were made and how they work, I’d argue that’s an urge developed by a humanities degree rather than created by it, though I’m sure there are some rule-proving exceptions. And I seriously doubt anyone went into it thinking it would land them a plum job, rather than just giving them the time to read some interesting stuff, a fancy piece of paper, and a set of tools to sell themselves with.
To call the English major a con is not to say that nobody’s found out till now; just that there was momentum from so many eons ago that has now started to slow down. The English major has been the butt of ‘and what are you going to do with that?’ jokes for far longer than the dire statistical trends quoted in Heller’s article. If you go back 60 years or so, you can observe William Stoner’s parents reacting with utter dismay at his decision to pursue an English major instead of agricultural school in John Williams’ Stoner:
‘If you think you ought to stay here and study your books, then that’s what you ought to do. Your ma and me can manage.’
His mother was facing him, but did not see him. Her eyes were squeezed shut; she was breathing heavily, her face twisted as if in pain, and her closed fists were pressed against her cheeks. With wonder Stoner realized that she was crying, deeply and silently, with the shame and awkwardness of one who seldom weeps.
Or you can go back even further to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, where, to Caleb Garth’s disappointment, his son Christy has “taken to books instead of that sacred calling ‘business.’” The younger Garth unfortunately “[holds] it the most desirable thing in the world to be a tutor, to study all literatures and be a regenerate Porson…” and, well, if you don’t know who Porson is, he was a famous Classicist of the 18th century, which might give you a clue where the study of English literature is headed. The decline of the English departments will probably just look something like what’s happened to Classics departments, a place for true devotees (and future academics) only, but with the distinct advantage of having a constant stream of new texts to subsume into the scholarship. At least Porson got a typeface out of the deal! We could only hope to be so lucky.
As long as the major still exists, there will be graduates forced to make their way in the world, most likely with an acute, novelistic sense of just how screwed they are. (It never goes well for bookish, starry-eyed idealists!) In case any English departments want to put me on a poster, or hire me for a speaking engagement, I did once get a job because of my English degree: hosting at a restaurant, because the manager thought my degree might make me an interesting person to talk to. Your mileage may vary on that charge, but God bless you, Audrey, for not immediately lighting my resume on fire in the boutique smoker. They even let me read at the host stand when it was slow!5 I suppose my degree helped me find work at a bookstore, but it's hardly a requirement – lifting heavy boxes and the ability to help a customer find a gift for someone who "doesn't read" are a little higher up on the priority list than knowing all the Romantic-era poetry that's gathering dust on the shelves. Speaking of which, could you dust those shelves real quick?
The only person I've personally seen use the tools of literary analysis to become a Huge Business Success was a guest professor in my graduate program.6 He taught a course called "Principles of Observation" where we read philosophers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and the fiction of Nicholson Baker and Georges Perec. The point of the course was to learn how to drill down into the essences of reality, and how that reality might be conveyed in writing. The professor was a Scandinavian man with the strongest Bond-villain vibes I've ever encountered – white hair, cool accent, extremely well dressed, rich as all hell, and prone to casually dispensing ominous phrases: "When people are in deep trouble, they call me." "I know a fair amount of politicians." "I was in the building the first day Coca Cola sold less than the day before." Then he'd grin and get back to the Heidegger.
Over the course of many weeks, we learned that the ludicrously successful company he had founded was basically a phenomenological consulting firm; they would tell brands about the thinginess of their things and then tell them how they could better position their brands in the world of their brands. If it sounds like nonsense, just brush up on your sein and dasein. When we got to talking about Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine – a precious 80s novel that takes place in the internal monologue of a man going up an escalator – I noted, using the skills honed to a knife’s edge by my English degree, that beyond all the whizbang observations made about all the funny little things in the world, the narrator of the book was essentially miserable, and that that was the secret point of the book. A life this closely observed was no life at all, actually; was it worth knowing all about shoelace eyelets and plastic straws and milk cartons if you went back home to a dingy apartment to cook yourself a box of shitty pasta? I sat back in my crappy plastic chair, thinking that I had just shown off my true observational prowess, before Ernst Blowhard himself let me know that, actually, the narrator’s sad life didn’t matter at all: the quality of his observation was all that counted. That crystallized it for me: Ernst Blowhard was full of shit! He had found a way to spin your average business and marketing consulting – study a company, and then offer suggestions – into something more intellectual than it was, and had found enough suckers to buy that line using the language of semiotics and phenomenology, and that a lot of business was just faking it till you made it. But hey, credit to him: he figured out (quite remuneratively) how to use his humanities degree in the real world, or, more crucially, he figured out how to bend the real world around the humanities. He conned them! You can’t tell anyone to follow that path, but it might suggest how little a major matters compared to the chance, luck, and circumstance of employment.
Let’s finish with a little something more from Stoner, a book written by an English professor about how a life studying English is spiritually worth it all despite its many earthly miseries. Why would you want to make yourself so useful to a world like ours anyway? From one ardent devotee of the useless to another: “Like the church in the Middle Ages, which didn’t give a damn about the laity or even about God, we have our pretenses in order to survive. And we shall survive – because we have to.”
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I’m all for critically analyzing this kind of stuff, but if you can’t get students into the canon, that’s a teaching issue, not a canon issue.
I don’t think you could come up with a funnier example. He has a very identifiable non-literary talent!
And to add insult to injury, the people with STEM degrees are getting laid off from tech companies. Ain’t that a stinker.
ChatGPT only got a 2 on the AP English Lit test. What a dummy!
Or they at least tolerated it. I think my coworkers thought I was an intense Christian when they caught me reading Joy Williams’ 99 Stories of God.
In case you had any doubt in my expertise in impractical degrees, I also got an MFA.
Pure genius, Evan.
Love it. Not to steer you off-Substack (and perhaps off-brand), but you should consider sending this to BuzzFeed, Aeon or other for publication. BTW bonus points for working in 2 references to Stoner - a work known only to the most bona fide of English majors.