The Decline of the English Department?

In the Autumn 2009 edition of The American Scholar, there is an interesting article, The Decline of the English Department? by William M. Chace. It is well worth a read.

Nicely based on some factual analysis, (from 1970 to 2003, the number of students majoring in English declined from 7.6% to 3.9%), the article discusses why this might be an issue and why it has happened. I couldn't agree more with this leading statement:

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.

Amen! If even those most affected in academia cannot set aside their divisive indulgences in order to support and cultivate a love of reading, then there should be little surprise that people turn away from those studies and that the culture of reading should itself stand in some jeopardy. I would go further than Chace and argue that an additional significant contributor to the decline has been the advancement of teaching by assertion and emotion, displacing teaching by reason and evidence. It is an incredible waste of time to attempt to argue against positions whose validity are not grounded in any measurable reality or whose theories cannot be tested.

Some of the other particularly attention grabbing passages:

Studying English taught us how to write and think better, and to make articulate many of the inchoate impulses and confusions of our post-adolescent minds. We began to see, as we had not before, how such books could shape and refine our thinking. We began to understand why generations of people coming before us had kept them in libraries and bookstores and in classes such as ours. There was, we got to know, a tradition, a historical culture, that had been assembled around these books. Shakespeare had indeed made a difference - to people before us, now to us, and forever to the language of English-speaking people.

Chace makes the point that, mundane as it might seem, English departments do have a tangible mission to fill. Having spent twenty years in management and systems consulting, I can testify that businesses in general, particularly services industries, value effective communication skills and are constantly seeking to find employees that can write well and invest in courses to improve the writing skills of their existing employees. The fact that they have to do this is testimony to the fact that English departments are not fulfilling a mission that is in demand.

The English department has one sturdy lifeline, however: it is responsible for teaching composition. While this duty is always advertised as an activity central to higher education, it is one devoid of dignity. Its instructors are among the lowest paid of any who hold forth in a classroom; most, though possessing doctoral degrees, are ineligible for tenure or promotion; their offices are often small and crowded; their scholarship is rarely considered worthy of comparison with "literary" scholarship. Their work, while crucial, is demeaned.

Ouch.

English has become less and less coherent as a discipline and, worse, has come near exhaustion as a scholarly pursuit. English departments have not responded energetically and resourcefully to the situation surrounding them. While aware of their increasing marginality, English professors do not, on the whole, accept it. Reluctant to take a clear view of their circumstances - some of which are not under their control - they react by asserting grandiose claims while pursuing self-centered ends. Amid a chaos of curricular change, requirements dropped and added, new areas of study in competition with older ones, and a variety of critical approaches jostling against each other, many faculty members, instead of reconciling their differences and finding solid ground on which to stand together, have gone their separate ways. As they have departed, they have left behind disorder in their academic discipline. Unable to change history or rewrite economic reality, they might at least have kept their own house in order. But this they have not done.

The result - myriad pursuits, each heading away from any notion of a center - has prompted many thoughtful people to question what, indeed, the profession of literature amounts to. As long ago as 1982, the iconoclastic literary critic Frederick Crews, keenly attracted to exposing the moribund in intellectual life, announced that the study of English literature couldn't decide if it was "a legitimate discipline or only a pastime." He concluded that it was not so much a profession as a "comatose field." Two decades later, in 2004, looking back over his shoulder, the intellectual historian and literary journalist Louis Menand told his fellow professors at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association something they already knew: while student enrollment in the humanities peaked around 1970, "it has been downhill" ever since. His verdict: "It may be that what has happened to the profession is not the consequence of social or philosophical changes, but simply the consequence of a tank now empty." His homely metaphor pointed to the absence of genuinely new frontiers of knowledge and understanding for English professors to explore. This is exactly the opposite, he implied, of the prospects that natural scientists face: many frontiers to cross, much knowledge to be gained, real work to do.

And this really hurts.

In 2006, Marjorie Perloff, then president of the organization and herself a productive and learned critic, admonished her colleagues that, unlike other members of the university community, they might well have been plying their trade without proper credentials: "Whereas economists or physicists, geologists or climatologists, physicians or lawyers must master a body of knowledge before they can even think of being licensed to practice," she said, "we literary scholars, it is tacitly assumed, have no definable expertise."

The indictments keep coming, made worse by their consistency with the facts.

Perhaps the most telling sign of the near bankruptcy of the discipline is the silence from within its ranks. In the face of one skeptical and disenchanted critique after another, no one has come forward in years to assert that the study of English (or comparative literature or similar undertakings in other languages) is coherent, does have self-limiting boundaries, and can be described as this but not that.

Such silence strongly suggests a complicity of understanding, with the practitioners in agreement that to teach English today is to do, intellectually, what one pleases. No sense of duty remains toward works of English or American literature; amateur sociology or anthropology or philosophy or comic books or studies of trauma among soldiers or survivors of the Holocaust will do. You need not even believe that works of literature have intelligible meaning; you can announce that they bear no relationship at all to the world beyond the text. Nor do you need to believe that literary history is helpful in understanding the books you teach; history itself can be shucked aside as misleading, irrelevant, or even unknowable. In short, there are few, if any, fixed rules or operating principles to which those teaching English and American literature are obliged to conform. With everything on the table, and with foundational principles abandoned, everyone is free, in the classroom or in prose, to exercise intellectual laissez-faire in the largest possible way - I won't interfere with what you do and am happy to see that you will return the favor. Yet all around them a rich literature exists, extraordinary books to be taught to younger minds.

What a line: "The caravan, always moving on, travels light because of what it leaves behind."

For me, this turn of events has proven anything but happy or liberating. I have long wanted to believe that I am a member of a profession, a discipline to which I could, if fortunate, add my knowledge and skill. I have wanted to believe that this discipline had certain borders and limitations and that there were essential things to know, to preserve, and to pass on. But it turns out that everything now is porous, hazy, and open to never-ending improvisation, cancellation, and rupture; the "clean slates" are endlessly forthcoming. Fads come and go; theories appear with immense fanfare only soon to be jettisoned as bankrupt and declasse. The caravan, always moving on, travels light because of what it leaves behind.

It can't seem much more dour than this.

Fewer and fewer undergraduates are showing up in classrooms, mine and everyone else's; the pleasure of undergraduate reading is everywhere blighted by worries about money and career; university administrators are more likely to classify "literary types" as budgetary liabilities than as assets; the disciplines we teach are in a free fall, as ideology, ethnicity, theory, gender, sexuality, and old-fashioned "close reading" spin away from any center of professional consensus about joint purposes; and the youngest would-be professionals, shrinking in number, stare at diminished job prospects.

Here's the crux.

For those of us who care about literature and teaching, this is a depressing prospect, but not everyone will share the sense of loss. As the Auden poem about another failure has it, "the expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."

But we can, we must, do better. At stake are the books themselves and what they can mean to the young. Yes, it is just a literary tradition. That's all. But without such traditions, civil societies have no compass to guide them. That boy falling out of the sky is not to be neglected.

Not to argue with Chace's analysis but to offer a silver lining. There are some seventy million parents of children of a reading age who, by and large, are eager for their children to read. Passe a discussion which I recently heard, perhaps the study of children's literature might be a platform on which to resurrect the deminished credibility of the English department. Seventy million natural constituents eager to see and understand some of those yet-remaining frontiers of new knowledge and intellectual discovery:

What is the mode of effectiveness that links the act of enthusiastic reading to the demonstrated academic performance in school?

What role does children's literature play in the establishment or continuity of culture?

Does children's literature reinforce personal values and behavioral attributes and if so how?

Are there any factors in common between books that have demonstrated multi-generational longevity?

What are the attributes of particular children's books that seem to translate easily across cultures (for example, why is Anne of Green Gables so popular in Japan)?