"Decline and Fall of the English Major" and Other Thoughts on the State of the Humanities

"Decline and Fall of the English Major" and Other Thoughts on the State of the Humanities

It seems as though an entire cottage industry has emerged to promote, prevent, or simply observe the imminent demise of the humanities.  One of the latest contributions is a Sunday Observer column in the New York Times entitled " The Decline and Fall of the English Major " by Verlyn Klinkenborg.  The author is a college teacher who offers the familiar professorial laments about the skill level of his students.  (One wonders, has any generation of professors ever not believed that students were becoming less diligent, more sloppy, and harder to reach than when they first started teaching?  If so, they don't write nearly as much about the subject as do those who believe in the inexorable slide of academic standards.)  The most recent evidence of the decay of the humanities in academia is the rapidly falling percentage of college graduates with majors in these fields.  "In 1991," he notes, "165 students graduated from Yale with a B.A. in English literature. By 2012, that number was 62. In 1991, the top two majors at Yale were history and English. In 2013, they were economics and political science."  The desire for the more immediate "applicability" (and thus, economic reward) of students' degrees is often cited as one of the key motivators of this change, especially in our current financial climate.

Despite his pessimism, Klinkenborg does offer a persuasive argument for the benefits of an education in the humanities.

"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. 

"... Whenever I teach older students, whether they’re undergraduates, graduate students or junior faculty, I find a vivid, pressing sense of how much they need the skill they didn’t acquire earlier in life. They don’t call that skill the humanities. They don’t call it literature. They call it writing — the ability to distribute their thinking in the kinds of sentences that have a merit, even a literary merit, of their own.  

"Writing well ... is about developing a rational grace and energy in your conversation with the world around you.  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."

 Also worth reading along these lines are the report of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on the state of the humanities in higher ed, and recent NYT articles by David Brooks and Stanley Fish.