University English departments once were considered “the crown jewels of the humanities.” Now? Not so much.
Jay Schalin documents the disturbing change in the new Pope Center report titled The Decline of the English Department.
In a commentary tied to the new report, Schalin tells us “the decline is far from hype.”
By almost any measure, English departments are diminishing numerically, dropping standards, or calcifying into a hard-left intellectual status quo.
That is not to say that there are not pockets of excellence in the discipline. Nor does it mean that English departments are going to be closing up shop anytime soon. But they are besieged by negative trends on almost every front, from politicized course content to ebbing enrollment.
Outside pressures, such as increasing emphasis on vocational training at the university level and a generational reduction of students’ interest in contemplative pursuits such as the study of literature, are depressing enrollment. At most UNC schools, there has not yet been a wholesale retreat from the English major, as there has been elsewhere. At the University of Maryland, for example, the number of English majors fell by 40 percent from 2012 to 2014.
Many English departments have taken proactive approaches to fend off the decline in enrollment, mostly by making drastic changes to the English curriculum to make it more appealing to students. This means more emphasis on writing and technology courses that will help prepare students for employment, and it also means more courses that are entertaining. An example of the latter phenomenon include such courses as UNC-Chapel Hill’s “CMPL 55: First Year Seminar: Comics as Literature.”
Much of the decline is self-inflicted. As the English discipline moves farther away from its core of the greatest works of English, American, and European literature, either to attract students or for political reasons, its very reason for existing is reduced. As New York Times columnist David Brooks put it, the humanities “are committing suicide because they have lost faith in their own enterprise.” And English may be leading the pack over the cliff.
