Who killed the English major?

I graduated from Wheaton College with an English Lit BA in 2006. More than one of my professors directly advised me NOT to go to grad school in English. They said it could wring my love of literature right out of me.

I chose to do a Master's in Library Science instead, since I really enjoy working in libraries. It's working out well so far, and there's a lot more jobs in my area doing library work than there are being an English prof.

What's surprising to me is that the supply of English Ph.D.s is still outpacing the demand for professors. I'd think that even in decline, there would still be some sort of equilibrium.

Most people go to grad school for the love of the subject. That explains the excess of PhD's to jobs.

Most kids that dream of going to grad school in the humanities aren't utilitarians, see. They don't think or judge things the way "normal" people do. Most would call them naive. They are drawn by the authority of the academy, and passion for their discipline. They aren't simply thinking about how hard it will be to justify their expenditure of time and money, economically in the future.

PhD programs should be tuition free, I say. Because it's essentially exploitation for institutions to charge their apprentices for their training, especially seeing as so many of them will never achieve tenure.

The kids who give up a decade of their lives to study something "specialized" or even "esoteric" with such intensity ought to be given the economic space to do it without wrecking themselves. Because what they do is good, good for all of us, even if it doesn't lead them directly to a career or "make any money."

The really ironic thing about how the humanities have come upon hard times is that they are the most important subjects you can study.

Not useful in the utilitarian sense, mind you, because anyone who asks an idiotic question like is "Pushkin more pleasurable than pushpins" is a spiritual retard.

Literature and history, narrative I say, are the wellsprings of our humanity.

We should be begging our youth to study them. It's the wilt of our decadence that an MBA or Law Degree is supposedly more "pragmatic" a course of "studies" than Literature, History, Philosophy or (God help us) Theology..

Started college as an English major back in '90. Came to dislike books the longer I spent with the professors. Even then, theory-based hijacking of the literature seemed designed to drain the life out of the works themselves.

In hindsight, I always remember the modern Brit Lit survey course that started with Blake, ran through Wordsworth, Coleridge and all those guys. On first past, the poems did nothing for me. Reviewing for the final, they were alive. I'd been taught how to read and what they meant -- on their own terms. And it was pretty enlightening.

That professor, though, was an old fogie of a traditionalist, teaching Wordsworth and marking papers up for their wordy prose. Most of the profs were more fun personally but taught me less.

Anyway, switched to history and dabbled in economics. If my undergrad years had lasted a little longer, I might have even ended up in accounting. Thank heaven they kicked me out.

How can you pursue a Degree in the Humanities if it is a moving target? Revisionism, Tenured Professors, and Professors that are so looney left they cease to function. Students have to be re-wired as Freshmen to comprehend the agenda. Statism was born, nurtured, and furthered in the Humanities. Kudos to those students who can sort through the fog and emerge into usefulness. No wonder we have so many wacky Lawyers and Politicians.

I'm in 20th Cent Lit class for some night courses and Humanities credits I'm taking. I joked to one of the students that everything we studied in the class was about sex. If sex isn't on the surface, then it is just underneath. How mundane! Granted this is only one class, but you'd swear sex was the greatest discovery of the 20th century.

I have an English degree from an ivy league school and I'm currently a graduate student who teaches freshman comp and creative writing at a different ivy league school.

The degree to which English at the graduate level has become conflated with "scholar-activism" for certain leftist/'68 causes can't be overstated, I think. I know that's going to make me sound like a big grump, but it's true. What "ym" above said about Jane Austen and Toni Morrison is pretty on point (though you are still allowed to like Dickens.)

At the same time, many grad students are still getting advanced degrees in English, despite the dismal job prospects, because they just love books. That's real, too. Good schools provide the PhD tuition-free, with stipends or pay for teaching, and so a student can study something he loves for five or six years without going into debt.

The particular school at which I teach, these days, is almost a parody of the tendency you are describing, in that its student body is almost completely made up of students studying the sciences, engineering, and business. Despite having over 13,000 undergraduates, it only has about 20 English majors per class. I don't think it's a coincidence that this particular school is known for having careerist, mentally incurious, and entitled students, but the school seems stuck in a rut, unable to attract students (or perhaps not even trying to attract students) who care about learning for its own sake.

Rod, Allan Bloom's book The Closing of the American Mind may be of interest to you, in that it identified this phenomenon, why it is happening, and its consequences, back in the mid-80s.

The people who have "killed" the English major (and the History major and the Philosophy major, et al) are the same people who have tried and largely succeeded in "killing" God. Secularists used to think that the humanities would "pick up the slack" left behind as religion waned. They used to think that figures like William Shakespeare would "pick up the slack" left behind by Jesus Christ as He was shown the door out of any meaningful place as a moral reference point in contemporary life. I think it's clear or ought to be clear to anyone with eyes to see that that has not worked out as Secularists planned. Secularization leads over time to a relentless and possibly terminal moral, intellectual, and aesthetic dumbing down and coarsening of culture as everything gets boiled down to politics or to economics or to some combination of the two. Those on the right devote themselves to using big business as a means to screw as much money (and power) out of other people's hands into their own as they possibly can. Those on the left devote themselves to using big government to screw as much power (and money) out of other people's hands into their own as they possibly can. Those on the right pretend to have some vestigial regard for religion, but really they don't. They've reduced it to therapy designed to keep peons quiescently serving big business's needs. Those on the left pretend to have some vestigial regard for the humanities, but really they don't. They've reduced them to agitprop designed to keep peons quiescently serving big government's needs. And, of course, the joke on us peons is that big government's needs and big business's needs, big business's needs and big government's needs, are, at the root of them, the same needs. Neither Jesus Christ nor William Shakespeare serve those needs. So they both have to go, so we can be about our business of reverting to mostly hairless apes bashing at each other with sticks over who gets the most of the bananas.

There is a difference between studying English as an undergraduate and making a career out of it. Perhaps the future of English programs is in teaching literature to students who want a richer, fuller life but also pursue a course of study that will result in employment.

By the way, I'm hearing that schools of journalism are thriving these days. I cannot figure out why.

Because professional schools in general attract more students when unemployment spikes. That's where people go when they can't find actual work. And yeah, the students by and large aren’t looking to be ink-stained wretches, they’re there to become highly paid TV anchors.

As to English departments, yes, they're a mess, and I say this based on long experience with them. This is one of the few areas where criticisms from the right -- about "tenured radicals," trendy obscurantism, etc. -- are at least partly correct. (Which is a kind of relief: We can talk about queer things that are actually happening in classrooms, instead of “queer” things that Bill O’Reilly cynically wants us to believe are happening but aren’t.) But as William Chace himself says in the article linked to here, there are causes for their current problems that have nothing to do with the rise of PC/po-mo curricula in the ‘70s and ‘80s. By his own reckoning, the trendline goes back at least 40 years, and even way back then, fewer than 8 percent of students were majoring in English while nearly twice that many were already majoring in business.

Also, this diagnosis from Chace strikes me as wrong and to some degree backwards:

“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.”

From what I've seen in actual classrooms, undergraduates generally like the English curricula they're offered these days. It's not as if they're dying to read Beowulf, or have some independent vision of “good books” with which they came to college to commune. They'd far rather be talking about the “construction of sexuality” in Madonna's music videos, or unmasking the ideologies of Western imperlism in Donald Duck cartoons, or whatever it is their PC professors are encouraging them to do. Topics like these might repel a few students, but they attract others. The trendy / fashionable stuff is deadly at the graduate level, where it becomes an arcane private language of the cognoscenti, but with undergraduates it's more like a kind of pandering.

If proportionally more students – though still quite few – majored in English in the (distant) past, that's not because it used to be intellectually absorbing and challenging and now is baffling and dull. It's because there used to be fewer alternatives, as well as less need to consider them in a world where the B.A. itself was still a significant mark of distinction regardless of what you'd majored in. But the movie image of English professors as quasi-poets extolling the greatness of beautiful expression (see, for one hysterical example, Barbra Streisand's character in The Mirror Has Two Faces) has never been accurate. As long as English has been a university discipline – a controversial development when first introduced, a hundred or so years ago – it has struggled to prove its academic bona fides by professionalizing the study of literature and attempting to reduce it to some kind of methodical system: "philogy," historicism, New Criticism, structuralism, etc. Most of those systems made for instruction that was less appealing to undergradutates than is today’s.

And the world that Chace seems to long for is one where professors were under a lot less pressure to cater to students than they are today. Therefore they didn’t. A curriculum based on “historical chronology” meant, in practice, professors droning on from the same yellowing notes year after year in survey and period-based courses that seemed to bore even them. There still isn’t enough support for good, enlivening teaching, but there’s much more attention to it, and much more interest in achieving it, then there was when I was an undergraduate English major. The problem is that fewer students now have the luxury of cruising through four years of increasingly expensive higher education in pursuit of what interests them. To change that, you’d have to make college a lot cheaper and/or a humanities B.A. a lot more lucrative, which is not something that English departments have the power to do.

I have taught English at a small Midwestern state university that emphasizes teaching rather than research for 20 years; tenured at the rank of associate professor for about 14. I was a grad student at the University of Illinois in the mid-Eighties. At that time I was saddened by the passion for literary theory and for the reading of relatively modern literature that was evident in a survey of the grad students. About the oldest author they seemed to want to read, in new course offerings, was Jane Austen. Their desire was for more theory. They're now the professors teaching undergrads in English.

What it comes down to, in my view, may be stated as: cleverness versus wisdom. The professor can dazzle the students with "subversive readings" of classics and the students who like this sort of thing can catch on quickly. I see two levels of mischief here. The first is an endless preoccupation with racism, colonialism, "heterosexualism," and so on. The second level is even more mischievous, the "deconstructive" ruination of logos in the campaign to separate word from meaning.

Why should a man or woman who loves reading, and thinking about and discussing, good books, waste time with such things? It may be as well to stay away, to let the present generation of faculty die and rot, or else to seek out the teachers who remain here and there, often without the glam, but caring about those books?

As the Proverbs say: Get wisdom.

What I alluded to in my previous message was not simply the fruition of a “Sixties” agendum. Here is Eugene (later the monk Seraphim) Rose, writing circa 1960 after having been a student at Cal and Pomona:

“The academic world … has become today, in large part, a source of corruption. It is corrupting to hear or read the words of men who do not believe in truth. It is yet more corrupting to receive, in place of truth, mere learning and scholarship which, if they are presented as ends in themselves, are no more than parodies of the truth they were meant to serve, no more than a façade behind which there is no substance. It is, tragically, corrupting even to be exposed to the primary virtue still left to the academic world, the integrity of the best of its representatives -- if this integrity serves, not the truth, but skeptical scholarship, and so seduces men all the more effectively to the gospel of subjectivism and unbelief this scholarship conceals. It is corrupting, finally, simply to live and work in an atmosphere totally permeated by a false conception of truth, wherein Christian Truth is seen as irrelevant to the central academic concerns, wherein even those who still believe this Truth can only sporadically make their voices heard above the skepticism promoted by the academic system,” etc. (quoted from Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, p. 118)

It’s precisely a parody of scholarship and wisdom that many English professors are now inculcating, if one can go by their published articles and books, their lectures, their reading lists, and so on. They and their students may, depending on the professor’s charisma, have a lot of fun being “clever.” “Cleverness” is the parody of wisdom that you get in when wisdom is rejected. Wisdom is rejected when logos itself is denied. Granted that human knowledge is never complete, and that the verbal expression of our partial knowledge is imperfect -- this is no justification for the kind of “literary theory” that opposes what it calls “foundationalism” and would initiate students into an amusing fall into bottomless abysses of nothing.

Colleges ceased being about formation of the whole person thirty-five years ago. The set off marketing themselves as white collar vocational training institutes, with slogans such as "Real learning for real life"

Pretty much says it all.

Without ignoring some of the trends in English departments in particular and humanities in general that have made their disciplines more tedious, I think that it's important to note the big changes in academia since the 1960s that have undermined interest in the humanities in both an absolute and relative sense.

Prior to the first wave of boomers hitting college-age in the mid 60s, good universities mainly acted (for undergraduates at least) as finishing schools for a WASP-ish male elite. Their students were drawn largely from wealthy and well-connected families who weren't likely to be struggling for money after graduation. Unconstrained by career considerations, there was little reason to focus on "practical" education.

For better or for worse (and I do believe that there's a mix of both in here) college is now seen as an instrument of social mobility for middle class families. Therefore, there's a much greater focus on majors that promise good jobs at the end.

Also, greater demand for university education leads to higher tuition, especially at prestigious schools. Higher tuition leads to more indebted students. More indebted students leads to a greater focus on careers that will pay the debt off.

Sometimes I think a good reform to the higher education system would be to create a greater distinction between traditional universities focused on training intellectuals and polytechnic-type schools focused on training skilled workers. Some European countries do this, and it seems to work reasonably well. Actually, I kind of expect that something like this might happen without an explicit policy should university tuition rates continue to soar.

It would be fun to lay this one at the feet of deconstructing academics, but I think our Rapificated culture is a more likely culprit. Which is not to say that I blame Rap, but the culture that buys it (mostly young, affluent and white) which also sees crass materialism ("he who dies with the most toys wins") as the goal of the "good" life.

That, and the fact that our educators have spent decades helping us know about things without actually having to do the hard work of knowing them. We teach kids about everything from The Illiad to Shakespeare, but actually reading them? That's for elite effete academic snobs! We used to make movies from books like To Kill a Mockingbird this summer's biggest movie was the second edition of Transformers a movie about a line of toys from the 1980s.

I think I'll go read a book.

I agree, Gerard Nadal.

I attended grad school in the 80s, working on, and eventually completing, a PhD in Comp Lit. I gave myself migraines trying to decipher literary theory. I now regret losing hours of life I will never recover to watching the endless naked emperor parade.

I had visions of being formed by a tradition, and finding my place within it. What I learned was to avoid most of the younger faculty members and create an old-fogy dissertation committee who wouldn't have cutting edginess as an assessment value.

I wrote a stodgy, but respectable, dissertation.

I teach at a small, religious school, where the students and I talk about the meaning of the works we read. We believe in meaning and recognize works that have very little of it, when they sometimes do pop up in classes where the text is an anthology. We have a great time interrogating each work as the unique creation of the genius of an individual human being who lived in a particular time and place. The author is never dead in my class, and the text is not a product of colonialist/racist/sexist/imperialist hegemony. The thing is, my students all recognize that sort of condescension in the text. My female students are especially offended by the sexism of older works, but the difference is that they're more likely to rebuke a text's sexism with John Paul II's theology of the body as they are with "The Second Sex" or "The Feminine Mystique."

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. Let's be honest: It's not that you can't find evidence of suppressed homosexuality in older works, but the onus should be on the critic to marshal arguments and present evidence for such novel interpretations. What I witnessed too often was the underlying assumption that a queer (insert any other fashionably "oppressed" group) reading was always possible.

While the academic powers-that-be bleat much about being "educated" and "thinking critically" (see the sorts of comments that pop up on Ross Douthat's columns in the NYT), they won't often stoop to question their own foundational "truths" and assumptions. They hold their "truths" to be self-evident. Sounds sorta unedumacated ta mee.

Keep on fricking the po-leece, Appalachian Prof. Keep on fricking the po-leece.

Make that "happy just to live OUT your days....."

Count me as another of those incoming English majors who turned to history upon finding out what the scholarship of lit crit, as opposed to the literary content itself, was all about. And that was in the '70s, before structuralism turned into poststructuralism (or before it did so in the USA anyway).

In grad school in the '80s my history department suffered from a mild case of the French Flu, particularly among the Europeanists, but as a dumb Americanist I didn't have to deal with it much. And anyway, history has a stubborn empirical streak and notwithstanding the "cultural turn" (code in the history biz for pomo-influenced scholarship) most historians, even the ones who have dutifully pounded through all that reality-is-a-social-construct stuff, still want to know what really happened. So though history turned away from its most empirical quant wing in the '80s (most of those folks migrated to economics departments), it never went pomo at the core.

Meanwhile the folks in the comp lit department would take a Shakespeare sonnet, a Dutch apothecary's list of the items in his cabinet, and a Bavarian theologian's sermon, tie it all together with some elaborate metaphor, ignore the distance and the half-century span of time separating them all, and publish a peer-reviewed riff in the name of "historicism"--and this, mind you, represents the earthy, grounded wing of the discipline, much despised by the purer Theory types.

I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, since as this comment stream shows there are people who passionately love literature and language and have kept the faith. But really, in my time lit crit has seemed like a field with a really huge dose of self-loathing, a remarkable tendency to reward naked careerists, and an overwhelming aversion to clear thought and clear expression. The great disciplinary reflex is to "problematize" everything, ie, to apply a variety of hermeneutical tricks in order to demonstrate the artificiality (better yet, the "self-subversion") of any claims about beauty, meaning, or authority. Internalize that kind of thinking long enough and people will look for beauty, meaning, and authority anywhere but in your intellectual Cloud Cuckooland.

These problems exist to some degree in all the humanities fields, but lit crit is where a lot of the foundational ideas sprang from, and where they became most dominant. Except for the math department, I don't know of any other department on campus so determined to stamp out the naive enthusiasm of incoming freshmen.

I'm sure larger cultural forces are playing a big role in the decline you mention; the old gentlemanly literary world is gone forever, the culture is increasingly coarse and anti-intellectual, and the economic pressures on students are immense. But inspirational scholarship could be a force in the other direction. You can only go on preaching so long when the thing you're preaching is a crisis of faith, and an awful lot of lit crit is devoted to unmasking inspiration (the author's and the reader's) as a tool of oppression, or a philosophically unsophisticated con. A few students find that inspiring in itself--and anyone who has taught in a humanities department knows the type of cultish, jargon-spouting 20-year-old who does (you hope they'll grow out of it)--but not many do.

"If we're ashamed of the fact that we're "all" culturally-aliterate Moral-Therapeutic-Deistic U. of Phoenix grads now, then instead of going on pretending we are otherwise, perhaps we should actually *change* in ways that would allow us not to be so ashamed anymore."

You want us to CHANGE?

Fuggedabadit. We like keggers.

Grumpy Old Man,

Maybe Harvard's and State U.'s new motto should be:

"White-Color Polytechnic Training. Plus Keggers. And Diversity."

I was an English major a generation ago at a small, church-related liberal arts college. On our campus the English department was the most powerful and influential, and English majors were considered the intellectual elite, almost all going on to graduate or professional school. We studied the texts historically without falling into historicism, and we were unafraid and unashamed to find human and religious truth and meaning in the books, truth and meaning for ourselves and our lives. Our professors were politically liberal--in a largely conservative, pro-Reagan school--but they were old-fashioned when it came to the study of literature. I loved being an English major; it taught me to think and write, and some of the favorite authors I discovered, like G.M. Hopkins and Walker Percy, still help me find truth, beauty, light and life.

I'm sorry if that world doesn't exist for English majors today in most places. I'm sure it does in some, especially schools with a strong, Christian identity. God bless them.

"they're more likely to rebuke a text's sexism with John Paul II's theology of the body as they are with "The Second Sex" or "The Feminine Mystique."

How is 'rebuking' an 18th century text with a 20th century pope's writings any better than 'rebuking' it with any other 20th century theory? It sounds to me as if your students just have a different favorite modern lens through which to view (distort?) works that were written from a completely different worldview.

sorry for double-posting. Blame captcha.

"The great disciplinary reflex is to "problematize" everything, ie, to apply a variety of hermeneutical tricks in order to demonstrate the artificiality (better yet, the "self-subversion") of any claims about beauty, meaning, or authority...an awful lot of lit crit is devoted to unmasking inspiration (the author's and the reader's) as a tool of oppression, or a philosophically unsophisticated con."

This has really hindered my generation in practical ways. It led to a hesitancy to be seen as fully committed to anything. I've been pulling out some old cds lately and reevaluating them. It led me to think about this, because music is where generations first flower, this was the music of my cohorts & the fear of fully identifying with anything is evident in so much of it. I noticed that old lackadaisical pose, all of the ways we had of signaling that, "hey, we aren't taking this too seriously", and it actually left me feeling profoundly sad. Sad at potential not quite realized, because a lot of this music is really quite clever and beautiful and so often the artists couldn't just go for it- they had to hide behind irony, jokyness and a half-assed posture.

As always Dreher and commenters ignore the more important, the most basic fact of life in the US today, the demographic and accompanying dispossession of the historical European-descended majority.

The humanities, of all subjects were devoted to preserving and passing on cultural heritage. But it is very hard to actually care about the heritage of other, obviously physically different people. Yes, there are exceptions to the rule, but your average Chinese kid can't really related to Shakespeare in the way that someone who could plausibly be descended from, say, a solider in Henry V's army can. The "band of brothers" only extends so far. Coupled with affirmative action -- who can forget Jesse Jackson leading the 'hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go" chants at Stanford. Asian students are indifferent to Western Cultural heritage -- with the possible exception of music -- while Africans and mestizos from Latin America are actively hostile.

So, for example, in California, where white students have literary been pushed out of the UC by mass immigration of Asian middle class folks (Northeast Asians are on the average also about 1/5 of a standard deviation more intelligent that whites, and were getting high caste hindus for a while, though that immigration is reverting to the mean now) you simply have displaced a good proportion of your population which would have an interest in humanities topics, whether history or literature.

Stari Momak, the admission of literature created by African-Americans and other "minorities" to the academic literary canon militates against your argument. The dirty little secret of what happened to the English major is economics. At roughly the same time that we decided everybody had to go to college to get any kind of job, we discovered that the only kind of college education most employers were looking for was a business degree. Forty years ago, undergrad business majors were almost unheard-of. Now, sifted in with IT, they are the majority of college students. English is not the only major that has been abandoned--there's also philosophy (despite the current availability of a career path in biomedical ethics), art, and music. Then there are the fields that have been abandoned DESPITE THEIR POTENTIAL FOR HIGH EARNINGS, because they are simply too much work for American students to think they should have to do, like foreign languages, science, math, and engineering.

Not much "new" in the death of the humanities. Nearly twenty years ago, when I started graduate school, it was hardly much better; but the slide has continued.

Many factors have contributed, but above all has been the self-destruction, mostly along PC lines, of the humanities themselves. Enrollments are down in large part because professors are teaching things no normal student would ever care about.

I'm a historian and a "success" (ie I'm a tenured full professor at a 'name' institution) but most of my colleagues are hopelessly mired in trivia, writing articles and books read by essentially no one, even in the history field. Why should students care?

Despite my own happiness with my choices - the product of hard work, luck, and a lot of hard-nosed career advice from "old school" mentors when I was a graduate student - I've not been able to recommend PhD programs to promising students for years. I tell them the job outlook is bad, it's going to get worse, and they need to pursue something more likely to put roof over head and food at table. They can read - and even write - all the history they want in their free time.

Ditto for English departments, but much more so ... IMHO

"most of the best literature being written today is being written by writers of non-European ethnicity in the nations of the former British Empire and/or by immigrant writers of non-European ethnicity in Anglophone countries."

and

"It's not about truth or beauty anymore. It's about politics and economics. It's about which group of semi-hairless apes have big enough sticks to smack which other groups of semi-hairless apes upside their heads, in order to steal their bananas."

How can one create anything when one believes that power is the only reality and every statement and every act is a self-serving fraud (whether unconscious or by design) fabricated to further these power interests?

There is a line in an old punk song attacking the fetishization of material poverty in the UK scene that applies to spiritual and material poverty as well: Having nothing isn't much of a pose.

http://www.nikkisudden.com/lyrics/a_trip_to_marineville.htm#spitfireparade

Writers like Ha Jin, Rohinton Mistry, V. S. Naipaul, Wole Soyinka, and Derek Walcott, to name just a few, have done infinitely more in our lifetime to keep English-language literature alive and well than their contemporaries of European descent in either the U.S. or in the U.K.

Who? Who? Yeah -- I like him. Who? Who?

I've not read any of these guys (??? -- oh yes, looked em up, all males, no gender diverstiy here) with the exception of Naipaul. But seriously, are they on the level of -- off the top of my head -- Cormac MacCarthy, Kurt Vonnegut, John Updike, Graham Greene?

I am a big fan on Maxine Hong Kingston, but what white man doesn't have an Asian female fetish?

People interested in evaluating programs for English majors might find it useful to compare the current curriculum with this reconstruction of the Rutgers curriculum, circa 1960. These would be the literary works that seniors would be expected to have read with some comprehension. I would think that if a college required knowledge of these works (and not so much the trendy stuff), that would be a good sign. I definitely think you should feel bold to ask what the prospective English student WOULD read.

http://rci.rutgers.edu/~wcd/complist.pdf

It's a nice list too just for those who feel the urge to read classic British and American literature, but who might like a little handlist for things they have or haven't read. Of course with works such as these, to have read them ONCE is hardly the point.

Here is a twofold suggestion for consideration, and I hope some readers will correct me if it is not a good idea.

1.Given the ruinous state of much that passes for English studies today, it might be worthwhile for the young person inclined towards English to consider majoring in a language instead, particularly one other than French, Italian, etc. (Consider Russian.) The idea would be to acquire strong reading/translating skills that would enable one to read well the literature of another language – and, thus, also to read English with a perspective unavailable to the person who reads no other language well.

2.Such a student may wish to read and discuss major English literary works in the context of community reading groups open to interested readers of all ages. I don’t know if the burgeoning of reading groups has been much noticed in the press. Many, of course, are largely social, and focus on the most perishable of popular books. My own experience, however, is that there are people who will come faithfully to weekly sessions to discuss Dickens, Dostoevsky, Charlotte Brontë, Manzoni, Dante, Tolstoy, Gaskell, Scott, Austen, Conrad, Turgenev, and others; I know because I have hosted such a group for ten years, in a small Midwestern town of only about a thousand residents. The social element helps the individual to persevere with the reading of large books, almost like a Weight Watchers group I suppose. You stick with something like this and in a few years you will have read more first-rate literature than passes under the eyes of most undergrads in English. If you are interested in starting such a group, I recommend seeing if you can meet outside of someone’s home. Your public library may well have a room that can be reserved for an hour a week for such discussions. The host should start the discussion on time, keep the conversation focused though not formal, etc.

At this rate, then, in four or five years one could have both a worthwhile degree and a pretty solid literary background. The reading group, of course, does not issue certification, but one may list it (and append the reading list) in application for certain jobs. If one decided to get a degree in English, one would have a pretty strong preparation for such study; I think a personal love for those great authors could be something of a protection when encountering the cultural studies/literary theory milieu. One would be able constantly to recall one’s own literary experience as a touchstone against the rubbishy “discourse” of the classroom.

One reason journalism programs are thriving is that public relations is taught in journalism programs, at most universities.

I've taught in two different departments of "journalism and mass communication." At both, we had the largest enrollments (# of majors) within the college of arts and sciences.

The vast majority of majors were in the PR or PR/Advertising track.

Oh, yes, also: Graham Greene is surely one of the greats, and having helped secure publication for R. K. Narayan -- the first great Indian writer in English -- I'm sure he would be tickled pink to welcome Mistry and Jin into the club.

The dominance of English departments by identity politics etc. may have something to do with the decline of English. But history and philosophy are much less affected by these trends. I teach philosophy at a good, mid-range, public university. I believe in Truth and God and everything else. I teach primary texts, books that I love and know well. Many students are simply not interested. Others are interested but do not want to work hard to understand difficult books, and do not understand why they should have to work for good grades in a non-science subject. It comes to a pretty small minority that are either interested enough not to care about grades or smart enough that they don't have to. 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.

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.

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.

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.