Did you realize that in the last generation, there has been a startling drop-off -- a near-collapse, actually -- in the number of college humanities majors? Prof. William Chace, writing in The American Scholar, takes on the problem from the English Department:
What are the causes for this decline? There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.
Chace tells a long, fascinating and depressing story of how broader social and economic changes have marginalized the humanities in colleges. But he focuses his frustration on how English departments have done so much harm to themselves, by turning the study of the beauty and the wisdom of literature and language into a bloodless, clinical dissection of this or that Theory. Chace, who is a veteran professor of literature, says there is no center or coherence to teaching English literature nowadays, and therefore a dissipated sense that its study is important. The withering and decay of the profession can no longer be hidden, he writes:
Meanwhile, undergraduates have become aware of this turmoil surrounding them in classrooms, hallways, and coffee lounges. They see what is happening to students only a few years older than themselves--the graduate students they encounter as teaching assistants, freshman instructors, or "acting assistant professors." These older students reveal to them a desolate scene of high career hopes soon withered, much study, little money, and heavy indebtedness. In English, the average number of years spent earning a doctoral degree is almost 11. After passing that milestone, only half of new Ph.D.'s find teaching jobs, the number of new positions having declined over the last year by more than 20 percent; many of those jobs are part-time or come with no possibility of tenure. News like that, moving through student networks, can be matched against, at least until recently, the reputed earning power of recent graduates of business schools, law schools, and medical schools. The comparison is akin to what young people growing up in Rust Belt cities are forced to see: the work isn't here anymore; our technology is obsolete.
Discuss.
By the way, I'm hearing that schools of journalism are thriving these days. I cannot figure out why. The job market is terrible, and is not going to get any better in the foreseeable future. Veterans are trying to leave before they're driven out by circumstances. Far more than what's happened to English departments, I think, this is an externally driven matter for journalists (though we are aware that we have made mistakes that hurt ourselves too). It is often pointed out to us journalists that the public is consuming more journalism than ever before. The problem is not a lack of interest in what we do; there is far, far more interest in that than in what English professors do. No, the problem is that because of the Internet, there is no longer a way to pay for what we do, and no longer a way to compel people who consume our products to pay us for what we do. I bring this up here not to start another discussion about the decline of journalism -- really, I'd rather hear from English students and professors, and also teachers and students in the humanities about their situations. I only bring it up to say that I would actively discourage any college student from majoring in journalism, unless he or she couldn't imagine doing anything else, and had a clear idea of how hard their professional lives were going to be for an indefinite period. If I had college-age children, unless they were on scholarship and were intensely passionate about journalism, I would throw myself in front of them to keep them out of journalism school. It's not that I don't love journalism; it's not that at all. It's what I do, it's all I've done, and it's what I love more than almost anything. Rather, my fear is that my child would rack up indebtedness and waste his college years studying something that he won't be able to support himself doing.
Anyway, the decline of English and the humanities in university. Discuss.
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Crustacean,
Naipaul may be a great writer, but from what I understand he was also a first-class @$$. (I'm Indian too, for what its worth).
I'd like to get into Soyinka one of these days, I've heard good things.
Maryland Prof: My students do not come to college, by and large, to grow as human beings. They come to get good jobs. Neither they nor I can see how what I do serves that purpose.
Well, of *course* your students come to get "good jobs" (as fleeting as those are these days), because they are paying tuitions that have doubled many times over since my own halcyon college days in the seventies. They're deeply into debt - a particularly evil and pernicious debt that can't be discharged upon bankruptcy; a debt that for some will last their whole lives, and will even take their social security payments (yes, they *can* do that with college debt.)
College debt IMO clearly meets the medieval standard of usury (read Wendell Berry's essay against usury, and apply it to what college students today experience.)
Going into slavery to the banks for your whole life in order to "grow as a person" is basically frivolous at best, disastrous at worst. When people could pay their tuition with a summer job, or part-time work during the year, that was one thing. But otherwise, college for "personal growth" is a let-them-eat-cake luxury. (And yes, I know Marie Antoinette really didn't say that, but the point still stands.)
Conservatives are always complaining about people "not having enough kids" (the "right" people, that is) - take a close look at college debt.
Appalachian Prof
If I had gotten stuck at some place where I would have been pressured to do "queer readings" (to take just one example)and not to refer to theology (I deeply appreciated Sam Keyes and Extollager on this) I think I would have left academia all together.
Oh come on, you know better than that. Researchers pursue the topics they are interested in. There are still plenty of people doing traditional historical research in traditional areas like English Constitutional or Ancient Military history.
You also know darn well that humanities majors have a very great amount of flexibility to take the courses that suit their interests. Sure, some are going to end up taking the "Queer Theory in Historical Perspective" or "Feminizing the American Novel" classes, but that's largely because it's what they want.
The best advice I ever had was to take teachers not classes. And that stood me in good stead throughout my undergraduate experience in a large state college, to the extent that I was able to go study classical languages using a rigorous, traditional, intensively grammar-based, drill-and-memorize approach and history courses that focused on careful analysis of primary sources and criticism of historical methods used in secondary sources.
And guess what? Even in a place like that, you still had people teaching Old and Middle English and reading the canon starting with Beowulf and moving forward from there, in both the English and History departments. And in those classes studying those works, it was impossible to avoid absorbing a pretty large amount of theology. Liberal medievalists know just as well as conservative ones how important theology is to a basic understanding of the period.
Are there ideologues in the liberal arts? You bet there are (and I'd be willing to bet that they're at least as present at your small Christian college; you may very well be one yourself). But good ideologues still value well-thought out and well-supported ideas and will reward students that learn to produce those accordingly. The best kind of ideologue is the one who arrived at those firmly held positions through that intellectual process.
If you find it hard to hold to your ideas because of what your colleagues believe and articulate and the arguments they make, maybe the problem is with your ideas, not with your colleagues.
As for the idea that it's only the liberals who are destroying good research and good scholarship in the humanities, I refute it thus—mediocre work endorsed by a third-rate Christian college.
As an engineering student, I was required to take an English course. I chose one on Shakespeare's plays. I pretty much lost it when the respected, tenured professor argued that "A Midsummer's Night Dream" was about bestiality.
I find it odd that people treat "humanity" as if it's not an important part of every discipline...as if it can be cut out and taught separate from things that "matter."
To be a good doctor, you have to engage with other human beings and genuinely care about their medical outcome.
To be a good engineer, you have to understand how your work affects the lives of other human beings and make every effort to make sure your work is safe.
To be a good banker, you have to care about how your decisions affect other human beings and not gamble with other people's retirement funds.
I think the artificial separation of the human element from all the other disciplines is at the root of many of the problems we've faced in the last few decades.
People who choose a profession simply because it's lucrative, without the understanding that they are paid well because their work is important to other people's LIVES, will not be competent or successful in those fields. And other people will pay the price for their incompetence.
The study of English, of literature, is the study of people. You will meet more people in more diverse situations through reading than is possible in the limited span of a human life. If you can learn about people from the books you read, you will be able to apply those experiences to the real people you encounter in your real life and be a better anything because of it.
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