The Decline and Fall of the English Major

It&#x27;s sad that the classical education is no more, but it&#x27;s also true that the humanities rotted from within. Because carrying on the traditions of arts and letters was no longer considered valuable, the disciplines rushed to gut themselves in favor of far shallower and dodgier stuff, like political ideologies (&quot;the only things that matter are race, class, and gender&quot;) and pseudo-technical gibberish. None of that has lasting value and none of it touches the heart of why a student would want to devote themselves to things like literature, philosophy, or art history. So over the same time period that these fields have been losing social and intellectual status, they&#x27;ve also been becoming less valuable.<p>They&#x27;re not going to disappear, and maybe it&#x27;s a good thing if they become de-institutionalized for a century or two. I admit to being bothered by it, though. By the time I went to university it was already no longer possible to get what I would call a real education. Meanwhile there is a smugness that goes along with purely technical training, a certainty that its way is the only valuable way, that calls itself education but whose true name is Philistinism, and I feel sad that that mentality is taking over our society completely.

&gt; No one has found a way to put a dollar sign on this kind of literacy, and I doubt anyone ever will. But everyone who possesses it — no matter how or when it was acquired — knows that it is a rare and precious inheritance.<p>This is a widespread sentiment. This is even a chic sentiment. This is maybe even a sentiment I once sympathized with. It is also the kind of romantic bullshit that hurts people.<p>It doesn&#x27;t really matter if Johnny Middle Class believes it, his parents can probably help him muddle along somehow. Jorge, though, first in his family to get to college, might just take it seriously, and wind up somewhere ugly with too much debt, four years gone, and a piece of paper that nobody wants.<p>I personally know at least a dozen people like that. I didn&#x27;t make that mistake- but it was more by whim than anything else.<p>The worst, saddest part of all of this, is how trope heavy and unoriginal it is. This is the world&#x27;s second oldest complaint, right after &quot;the youth are lazy and disrespectful.&quot;

I wonder what current (or perhaps past?) president of the MLA, Michael Bérubé, has to say about this.<p>Or rather, I wonder if you wonder. I know. It&#x27;s this:<p>&quot;&quot;&quot; You know, I&#x27;ve been trying for many years now to get people to understand that the decline in humanities enrollments in the US happened almost entirely between 1970 and 1980. I usually work from this table from the NCES Digest of Education Statistics -- <a href="http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_286.asp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;digest&#x2F;d11&#x2F;tables&#x2F;dt11_286.asp</a> -- where you can see that English plummeted from an anomalous 7.6 percent of all bachelor&#x27;s degrees in 1970-71 to 3.4 percent in 1980-81. (It was 4 percent in 1950; it rebounded to about 4.5 percent in the mid-90s and is back down to 3.2 percent today.)<p>But today I came across this other table -- <a href="http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_289.asp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;digest&#x2F;d11&#x2F;tables&#x2F;dt11_289.asp</a> -- and lo! In 1970-71, 17.1 percent of all bachelor&#x27;s degrees were awarded in the humanities, and in 2009-10 the figure was .... 17.0 percent. For the purposes of the NCES, &quot;humanities&quot; includes &quot;degrees in Area, ethnic, cultural, and gender studies; English language and literature&#x2F;letters; Foreign languages, literatures, and linguistics; Liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities; Multi&#x2F;interdisciplinary studies; Philosophy and religious studies; Theology and religious vocations; and Visual and performing arts.&quot; That last group, btw, has more than tripled in majors since 1970, while the total number of degrees has merely doubled. And &quot;liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities&quot; has increased sixfold. This makes up a lot of ground from the relative dropoff in English and foreign languages. &quot;&quot;&quot;

I&#x27;ll say this: more so than any other department or discipline (yes, including computer science), I think a person would benefit most from a few properly taught college English classes.<p>Well-taught classes (and I took enough good and bad English classes to recognize the distinction) are completely irreplaceable by Google or MOOCs. They focus overwhelmingly on the art of discourse: sure, there are papers and exams but the soul of the class is in the daily lecture; everyone comes in with X, Y, and Z read and you discuss it, growing and pruning theories and interpretations of literature as one would an oddly looking tree. A good professor wants to teach you that Frankenstein is an allegory for the Industrial Revolution, or the creation of Man; a great professor knows the conversation that Shelley had with Chaucer and Milton and everyone in between -- and knows how to help their students figure out everything themselves, with just enough help along the way.<p>A good English course only needs a semester to teach you how to make a point, argue it, research it, defend it against a multitude of competing and contradicting points, and ultimately handle the reality that the point has been made many times before by people much smarter than you.<p>(This experience is magical, and something that really can&#x27;t happen in a room with more than forty people, let alone a web app with hundreds.)<p>You develop along the way a finely honed level of communication (I had a fellow CS grad once suggest to me that 100-level English classes were about punctuation and grammar, and it made me inappropriately angry); you learn how to approach questions with no answer and conversations with no real goal, how to talk with peers, mentors, and people who died hundreds of years ago. You learn a tremendous amount about yourself and others through the lens of literature, honed tightly by a great professor and a greater book, because the way you approach any experience is of course colored by everything about you.<p>I switched out of the English department my sophomore year to pursue Computer Science, but British Literature II was the most valuable class I&#x27;ve ever taken.

I agree. But it&#x27;s ironic that the author never argues her case with clear writing.<p>She asserts that &quot;clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature&quot; is extremely extremely valuable. She asserts this as a fundamental &quot;truth.&quot;<p>She probably doesn&#x27;t even realize she needs to explain why because it actually is considered a &quot;truth&quot; among English majors.<p>That&#x27;s too bad. Obviously it&#x27;s not considered a &quot;truth&quot; by the people she wants to convince. And they&#x27;ll think it&#x27;s just some stereotypical English major bullshit.

Education is what has declined.<p>The humanities merely show it more, because they aren&#x27;t particularly useful for the <i>non-education</i> function of university, namely, serving as a hoop which when jumped permits your resume to survive the first and most impersonal culling.

<i>&quot;What many undergraduates do not know — and what so many of their professors have been unable to tell them — is how valuable the most fundamental gift of the humanities will turn out to be. That gift is clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature.&quot;</i><p>I seem to have acquired all three of these gifts, and I majored in computer science.<p>Also, if English dies as an academic discipline, it may very well be due to the lack of people who are able to teach it. As tenured professors retire and are replaced with poorly paid adjunct faculty who need to work part-time at multiple colleges to scrape together a meager living, the number of people who enroll in graduate programs in the humanities will probably decline.

I did an English minor while doing my undergraduate physics degree. It&#x27;s a good thing I took the &quot;heavy&quot; course on literary theory last, because it utterly demoralized me. The sheer volume of books in the library devoted to literary criticism is astounding. It outweighs the entire canon of classics by at least two orders of magnitude, and it&#x27;s almost all self-aggrandizing gibberish. If you could somehow distill all the original and clear ideas in these books down there wouldn&#x27;t be enough material to fill a pamphlet! Perhaps I was just unlucky in my choice of books and perhaps I had a bad prof, but after that course I couldn&#x27;t look at someone doing graduate studies in English and not marvel at their tolerance for bullshit.<p>The most important lesson in writing is that &quot;nobody wants to waste one second more than they have to reading your drivel, so get to the point&quot;. I learned this writing physics papers. I had several English profs who probably still haven&#x27;t learned this lesson.

As long as the people making the case for studying the humanities make it as unconvincing as the author, there will continue to be pressure towards STEM education. &quot;I can&#x27;t explain it or give a quantifiable reason, but I know that it is important&quot; is simply unacceptable as a defense of the humanities (I majored in Political Science, and all of the standard critiques of humanities education were true of my experience).

I&#x27;m picking up mixed messages from this article. On the one hand, the author describes the (theoretical) value of an excellent humanities education, and regrets the decline in the number of English majors. So far so okay. But on the other hand, she says that today&#x27;s English majors are confused thinkers and pompous writers, and are being poorly taught. Well, in that case, what&#x27;s the big loss? Let them major in a STEM field, so they <i>might</i> learn to think, and might also one day repay their loans.<p>Solzhenitsyn was a mathematician.

The first paragraph would be improved by the economic reality that dare not speak its name: <i>adjunct</i>. Most people who pursue the PhD in English will fail to join the one profession which actually needs English PhDs (training future English PhDs) and instead, if they want to continue putting to use the last 7+ years of their life dedicated to mastering the reification of privilege and construction of the other as demonstrated by 18th century American advertising, end up as later-day itinerant minstrels. The career has little to recommend it by the standards of Harvard undergrads: poor material conditions ($3,000 for teaching a course, typically no benefits), little impact, no stability, and (perhaps most cutting of all) the social slight of being a second class citizen in academia and constantly forced, in ways large and small, to acknowledge that fact.<p>English PhDs should come with a disclaimer: &quot;90% of you will be unemployable. Your professor who says that you are special and such a good writer that you deserve to give this a go <i>is lying to you</i>. You are not a particularly good writer. You have just internalized the art of flattering English PhDs, which is unfortunate, because they expect to get that done for free and have more than enough takers. Many people who are as talented as you are unemployed or underemployed, and their only opportunity to appreciate Foucault and Kafka is when they&#x27;re applying for welfare benefits.&quot;<p>English undergrad is almost worse. Even by the standards of the humanities, which chiefly exist to certify that certain students managed to be mostly literate by senior year of high school, it tries to beat any love of the language out of you. By twist of fate and changing departmental policy, my sister (3 years my junior and a genuinely talented writer) and I ended up in the same &quot;freshman&quot; composition class. I phoned it in and got As and A+s, she slaved away on every essay and squeaked out a B-. She hadn&#x27;t learned the bemused sneer yet. (&quot;The author believes that the poor would better themselves through honest labor. One imagines an elf in Santa&#x27;s workshop, quite appropriate since the benevolent employer is a myth but the unwavering sweatshop labor in the service of fulfilling the bourgeoises&#x27; consumerist desires is very real.&quot; &lt;-- &quot;OMG so nails it!!&quot;) After you&#x27;ve mastered the pseudointellectual bemused sneer, English class is your oyster. My sister refused to be cynical, grappled with the texts and worked out some genuinely beautiful prose, and barely passed. She figured it out in later years, graduated, and is currently deeply in debt after receiving a master&#x27;s in an unrelated field after finding out, unsurprisingly, that a major in English makes you virtually unemployable. (One of many deep cuts along the way: she ended up working for <i>our alma mater</i> in a position which was, frankly, secretarial work, and was told, when she attempted to move into a permanent position, that secretaries at our alma mater should have graduate degrees because it would reflect poorly on the institution if they had just graduated in English.)

Apparently an English Major enables you to fill an entire page without providing any arguments at all. That&#x27;s definitely a useful skill.

Paul Krugman recently had a blog post that touched upon a somewhat more general trend: the decline of &quot;human capital&quot; as it was, for some decades, associated with a broadly liberal education:<p><a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/devaluing-human-capital/?_r=0" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;krugman.blogs.nytimes.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;10&#x2F;devaluing-human-...</a><p>&quot;Nancy Folbre suggests that the golden age of human capital – roughly speaking, the era in which the economy strongly demanded the kinds of skills we teach in liberal-arts colleges and universities – is already behind us. She may well be right: after a long stretch when both technology and trade seemed to be undermining only manual labor, it does look as if many skilled occupations are now under threat by Big Data, Bangalore, or both.&quot;

Do you really need to study a full English major to learn to write properly? Seems like one or two classes would do.

To my eye there is a major problem with the piece. Studying English Literature is not just learning how to write. Not is it the only way to learn how to write. One might, for example, argue that philosophy is a superior training in how to construct a coherent argument. It is supposedly also learning how to read. And IMHO this has been profoundly corrupted by the poisonous influence of a series of &#x27;schools&#x27; informed by half digested Continental philosophers. Such philosophers are muddy enough for other philosophers and associated wannabes, but such obscurantism has been a horrific influence on the humanities. Reading through the filter of one or other of these corrupting lenses diminishes pleasure in the the text. No wonder people don&#x27;t enjoy reading any more.

I&#x27;m one of those English majors who pops up in interesting places (in this case, software engineering).<p>After more than a decade in the field, I continue feeling that my degree was excellent preparation for writing code. Allow me some bullet points:<p>* The typical English major is drilled in taking an impenetrable text and constructing an interpretive narrative (an essay). Much of the major involves writing essay after essay and having it critiqued by professors. The progression of the English major is that typically you go from thinking you&#x27;re a hotshot writer to understanding that you are a bag of presuppositions and ill considered narratives. With that understanding can come depression or the knowledge that there is never a single interpretation, and that you are looking at one facet of an ineffable infinite. If you are not overcome by dread, this skill comes in handy when it comes to interpreting business requirements.<p>* A well trained English major is the first to point out that their precious interpretation is probably not correct -- that it is but one of several paradigmatic interpretations, and is, furthermore, culturally situated. Once again, this either brings nihilistic paralysis or a &#x27;skillful means&#x27;-type approach where you tend to respect and incorporate other peoples&#x27; viewpoints. A piece of programming is ultimately the synthesis of many viewpoints, and the skillful developer must understand that they are channeling the viewpoints of all the project stakeholders when they put pen to paper.<p>* The close reading of poetry, especially poetry across multiple cultures and viewpoints, is excellent preparation for reading and appreciating other peoples&#x27; code--the most lacking skill in the industry today. You adopt the same mindset as a reader of poetry--first and foremost, trying to understand the situation of the author. Secondly, examining and critiquing your own visceral response -- are you irritated because the code is stupid, or is it perhaps written in a way that is consistent with an approach you do not yet understand? Thirdly, understanding that you are reading highly structured text -- what is the discipline behind the programming language you&#x27;re encountering? How do its keywords and cadences lend themselves towards certain modes of expression and functionality?<p>* In a more theoretically oriented English degree, there is much focus on language as a construct -- as the lens through which you view the world. This is incredibly true in software development, where the narrative of the code can be so oblique to the narrative on the server (for example, the way in which most modern languages behave implicitly through inheritence, and the way in which structural code can only begin to point at the interaction between threads, processes, and servers).<p>* As an English major, I understand that I am coming from my own experiences, and I believe that the understandings I mentioned above can be gotten in any field of study. I do feel that my English major was valuable in particular because of the emphasis on the critique of the student&#x27;s writing. Over the course of several years, my fundamental assumptions about anything and everything were repeatedly and effectively critiqued by my professors.

Is it possible that the decline also has to do with the decline in quality of humanities teaching? My undergrad writing &quot;teacher&quot; was a terrible grad student, intent on pushing a social agenda on the class. I certainly wasn&#x27;t going to take any more than I had to. My &quot;intensive writing&quot; teacher has a very extreme political agenda attached to a geography class. I sucked it up, but vowed never to venture into his department either.<p>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s pure practicality that&#x27;s holding English back. Many CEOs are English and History majors. It&#x27;s the quality of the teaching.

The necessity of studying one&#x27;s own language is the problem. Most of what is read in English should have been read before college begins. And what&#x27;s left? There is no language to master as there is with a French or Classics major, save some specialty work in old&#x2F;middle English. The interesting linguistics are covered by that field. Education majors cover the pedagogical aspects just fine. So, the only thing that can be left is remedial reading or inventing new fields of study, and the invented fields aren&#x27;t rewarding ends or means financially or intellectually.

Besides a decline in overall literacy, which from personal impression is not a requirement for a English degree, I wonder if we can say this trend reflects an the accessibility of a college education.<p>Perhaps, 30 years ago Yale boys could afford to get an English degree because they were guaranteed cushy jobs at Goldman-Sachs where their dad and granddad were partners. Now some kid programming in what once was an Indonesian island took their job.

Deep down, I just knew I&#x27;d be blown away by both the thoughtfulness and prose in this thread. I was right. Thank you fellow HN&#x27;ers!

Any attempt to justify time spent in pursuit of an English Lit degree inevitably sounds smug&#x2F;condescending. You have to say general things like it teaches you how to write and think and appreciate the breadth of human experience - but then you are implying that everybody else must be lacking in those areas, which sounds terrible.

The English major has been declining for at least a decade, due to the offshoring of coveted jobs for English majors such as writing poetry. [1]<p>[1] <a href="http://watleyreview.com/2003/111103-2.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;watleyreview.com&#x2F;2003&#x2F;111103-2.html</a>

Don&#x27;t overestimate the importance of your undergrad major. The value of your degree is based on the caliber of the institution from which you received it.<p>As a history major myself I can tell you firsthand that a humanities degree does not make one unemployable.

English major to a master&#x27;s in psychology to self-trained programmer, see the pattern?<p>I was interested in all three, but programming was the only one that grabbed me in a wow, I really want to dive into this world, kind of way.

Writing well is one of the only ways to scale your impact beyond face-to-face, but you don&#x27;t have to be writing about literature. Pomona taught me to write, even though I was a computer science major.

Steinbeck, Wells, Shaw,Twain<p>College dropouts.

The article gets it completely wrong. One studies writing as an English major the way one studies programming as a computer science major. That is, the best way to do it is to inspire via other subjects that will enliven the entire career.<p>I&#x27;m a highly skilled software engineer who was an English and Classics major at at top liberal arts college. The author of the article seems to be an authority, but he is not. Most professors of literature that I respect would look down on his attempt to generalize about the whole field based on a narrow non-fiction &#x2F; writing practioner-esque approach.<p>The reason you study English is to study literature which is the most important concentration of knowledge, distilled, evolved and selected as to what is important in the past several centuries. There is figuratively nothing actually more important (if there were, someone would&#x27;ve written a f-ing story). Science, by comparison, is young.<p>The study of literature is a celebration of what is important in life. And how to live life. And how to find what is important to you in terms of each second that you live on this planet, Steve Jobs &#x2F; death at your back philosophically-speaking (those are all English majory ideas -- Marvell in that case).<p>But back to my original point. One studies computer science to understand the philosophy of how computers might be designed and used (see the Abelson SICP lectures or whatever), not to learn how to implement some Java standard interface. Though that is a little part of the practice that one has to do. Same thing with writing.<p>I took zero writing courses, but wrote over a hundred essays on other writers and it was one of the best preparations for any field -- law, science, software engineering (in my case).<p>Also the proper way to study literature -- ignoring all the postmodernist and cultural theory baggage -- is to study words closely and this has a long, rigorous history that again rivals any other analytical tradition. Has English studies lost its way? Sure, it always does because it&#x27;s such a ridiculously large undertaking. Are more targeted philologies and close readings (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_reading" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Close_reading</a> ) important? Sure.<p>But just because the typical English major isn&#x27;t as employable without other skills, doesn&#x27;t mean the field itself is a bad one. But I think people get upset about it because it is such a tricky field to make a career in and can burn you if you think it is.<p>But one doesn&#x27;t set out to become an astronaut by taking astronaut classes. You have to have another broader drive. Among those who value intelligence, however, the study of literature (f- writing -- great writing has no place in the university except as a place to study it, if you ask me -- it&#x27;s not primarily designed to teach writing in the world because academia does not exist primarily in the world -- it&#x27;s designed to teach understanding of past writing which is precisely &#x27;what we know&#x27;, as Eliot would say, etc.).<p>Anyway, as much as it pains me to give any credence to the idiots there:<p><a href="http://www.socfell.fas.harvard.edu/senior%20and%20junior%20fellows.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.socfell.fas.harvard.edu&#x2F;senior%20and%20junior%20f...</a><p>They know enough to know that English is equal to many other pursuits of knowledge. Will it evolve to a more targeted literary analysis? Maybe. But there is nothing more important than the study of great literature. If this upon me proved I never writ nor no man ever loved, basically.