English majors on the decline

"Why Teach English?"

by

Adam Gopnik

August 27th, 2013

The New Yorker

Whence, and where, and why the English major? The subject is in every mouth—or, at least, is getting kicked around agitatedly in columns and reviews and Op-Ed pieces. The English major is vanishing from our colleges as the Latin prerequisite vanished before it, we’re told, a dying choice bound to a dead subject. The estimable Verlyn Klinkenborg reports in the Times that “At Pomona College (my alma mater) this spring, 16 students graduated with an English major out of a student body of 1,560, a terribly small number,” and from other, similar schools, other, similar numbers.

In response, a number of defenses have been mounted, none of them, so far, terribly persuasive even to one rooting for them to persuade. As the bromides roll by and the platitudes chase each other round the page, those in favor of ever more and better English majors feel a bit the way we Jets fans feel, every fall, when our offense trots out on the field: I’m cheering as loud as I can, but let’s be honest—this is not working well.

The defenses and apologias come in two kinds: one insisting that English majors make better people, the other that English majors (or at least humanities majors) make for better societies; that, as Christina Paxson, the president of Brown University, just put it in The New Republic, “ there are real, tangible benefits to the humanistic disciplines—to the study of history, literature, art, theater, music, and languages.” Paxson’s piece is essentially the kind of Letter To A Crazy Republican Congressman that university presidents get to write. We need the humanities, she explains patiently, because they may end up giving us other stuff we actually like: “We do not always know the future benefits of what we study and therefore should not rush to reject some forms of research as less deserving than others.”

Well, a humanities major may make an obvious contribution to everyone’s welfare. But the truth is that for every broadly humane, technological-minded guy who contributed one new gadget to our prosperity there are six narrow, on-the-spectrum techno-obsessives who contributed twenty. Even Paxson’s insistence that, after 9/11, it was valuable to have experts on Islam around is sadly dubious; it was Bernard Lewis, a leading scholar on the subject, who consulted closely with Dick Cheney before the Iraq War, with the results we know.

Nor do humanities specialists, let alone English majors, seem to be particularly humane or thoughtful or open-minded people, as the alternative better-people defense insists. No one was better read than the English upper classes who, a hundred years ago, blundered into the catastrophe of the Great War. (They wrote good poetry about it, the ones who survived anyway.) Victorian factory owners read Dickens, but it didn’t make Victorian factories nicer. (What made them nicer was people who read Dickens and Mill and then petitioned Parliament.)

So why have English majors? Well, because many people like books. Most of those like to talk about them after they’ve read them, or while they’re in the middle. Some people like to talk about them so much that they want to spend their lives talking about them to other people who like to listen. Some of us do this all summer on the beach, and others all winter in a classroom. One might call this a natural or inevitable consequence of literacy. And it’s this living, irresistible, permanent interest in reading that supports English departments, and makes sense of English majors.

Bill James dealt with this point wonderfully once, in talking about whether baseball is, as so many people within it insist, really a business, and not a sport at all. Well, James pointed out, if the sporting interest in baseball died, baseball would die; but if the business of baseball died—which, given all those empty ringside seats at Yankee Stadium, doesn’t seem impossible—but the sporting interest persisted, baseball would be altered, but it wouldn’t die. It would just reconstitute itself in a different way.

And so with English departments: if we closed down every English department in the country, loud, good, expert, or at least hyper-enthusiastic readers would still emerge. One sees this happening already, in the steady pulse of reading groups and books clubs which form, in effect, a kind of archipelago of amateur English departments. The woman with the notebook and the detailed parsing of how each love affair echoes each other in “Swann’s Way” is already an English professor manqué. (Or, rather, a comp-lit professor.)

If we abolished English majors tomorrow, Stephen Greenblatt and Stanley Fish and Helen Vendler would not suddenly be freed to use their smarts to start making quantum proton-nuclear reactor cargo transporters, or whatever; they would all migrate someplace where they could still talk Shakespeare and Proust and the rest. Indeed, before there were English professors, there were… English professors. Dr. Johnson was the greatest English professor who ever lived—the great cham of literature, to whom all turned, Harold Bloom plus-plus—and he never had a post, let alone tenure, and his “doctorate” was one of those honorary jobs they give you, after a lifetime of literary labor, for Fine Effort. The best reading and talking about books was, in the past, often done by people who had to make their living doing something else narrowly related: Hazlitt by writing miscellaneous journalism, Sydney Smith by pretending to be a clergyman.

So then, the critic Lee Siegel asks, quite pertinently, why don’t we just take books out of the academy, where they don’t belong, and put them back in the living room, where they do? The best answer is a conservative one: institutions don’t always have a good reason for existing, but there are very few institutions that do exist that didn’t get invented for a reason. The space between a practice and a profession is as wide as any social space can be. And what professions do that practices can’t is remain open to what used to be called “the talents.” To have turned the habits of reading and obsessing over books from a practice mostly for those rich enough to have the time to do it into one that welcomes, for a time anyway, anyone who can is momentous. English departments democratize the practice of reading. When they do, they make the books of the past available to all. It’s a simple but potent act.

I am, let me add quickly, a living witness to this: my father is the son of a Jewish immigrant butcher and grocer, a wise man but hardly a reader. My father, who loves to read, worked his way through Penn, back when you could, to become… a professor of English, with a specialty in the eighteenth-century wits, Pope and Richardson and Swift and Fielding. Without an English department and an English major, he would never have had a chance to make that journey in so short and successful a time—and, I feel bound to say, the practice of talking about books would have been poorer for it. (Mine would, certainly.) The best way we’ve found to make sure that everyone who loves to talk about books have a place to do it is to have English departments around.

The study of English, to be sure, suffers from its own discontents: it isn’t a science, and so the “research” you do is, as my colleague Louis Menand has pointed out, archival futzing aside, not really research. But the best answer I have ever heard from a literature professor for studying literature came from a wise post-structuralist critic. Why was he a professor of literature? “Because I have an obsessive relationship with texts.” You choose a major, or a life, not because you see its purpose, which tends to shimmer out of sight like an oasis, but because you like its objects. A good doctor said to me, not long ago, “You really sort of have to like assholes and ear wax to be a good general practitioner”; you have to really like, or not mind much, intricate and dull and occasionally even dumb arguments about books to study English.

The reward is that it remains the one kind of time travel that works, where you make a wish and actually become a musketeer in Paris or a used-car salesman in Pennsylvania. That one knows, of course, that the actuality is “fictional” or artificial doesn’t change its reality. The vicarious pleasure of reading is, by the perverse principle of professions, one that is often banished from official discussion, but it remains the core activity.

So: Why should English majors exist? Well, there really are no whys to such things, anymore than there are to why we wear clothes or paint good pictures or live in more than hovels and huts or send flowers to our beloved on their birthday. No sane person proposes or has ever proposed an entirely utilitarian, production-oriented view of human purpose. We cannot merely produce goods and services as efficiently as we can, sell them to each other as cheaply as possible, and die. Some idea of symbolic purpose, of pleasure-seeking rather than rent seeking, of Doing Something Else, is essential to human existence. That’s why we pass out tax breaks to churches, zoning remissions to parks, subsidize new ballparks and point to the density of theatres and galleries as signs of urban life, to be encouraged if at all possible. When a man makes a few billion dollars, he still starts looking around for a museum to build a gallery for or a newspaper to buy. No civilization we think worth studying, or whose relics we think worth visiting, existed without what amounts to an English department—texts that mattered, people who argued about them as if they mattered, and a sense of shame among the wealthy if they couldn’t talk about them, at least a little, too. It’s what we call civilization.

Even if we read books and talk about them for four years, and then do something else more obviously remunerative, it won’t be time wasted. We need the humanities not because they will produce shrewder entrepreneurs or kinder C.E.O.s but because, as that first professor said, they help us enjoy life more and endure it better. The reason we need the humanities is because we’re human. That’s enough.

Humanities are dying

"The Decline of the English Department"

How it happened and what could be done to reverse it

by

William M. Chace

Autumn 2009

The American Scholar

During the last four decades, a well-publicized shift in what undergraduate students prefer to study has taken place in American higher education. The number of young men and women majoring in English has dropped dramatically; the same is true of philosophy, foreign languages, art history, and kindred fields, including history. As someone who has taught in four university English departments over the last 40 years, I am dismayed by this shift, as are my colleagues here and there across the land. And because it is probably irreversible, it is important to attempt to sort out the reasons—the many reasons—for what has happened.

First the facts: while the study of English has become less popular among undergraduates, the study of business has risen to become the most popular major in the nation’s colleges and universities. With more than twice the majors of any other course of study, business has become the concentration of more than one in five American undergraduates. Here is how the numbers have changed from 1970/71 to 2003/04 (the last academic year with available figures):

    English: from 7.6 percent of the majors to 3.9 percent
    Foreign languages and literatures: from 2.5 percent to 1.3 percent
    Philosophy and religious studies: from 0.9 percent to 0.7 percent
    History: from 18.5 percent to 10.7 percent
    Business: from 13.7 percent to 21.9 percent

In one generation, then, the numbers of those majoring in the humanities dropped from a total of 30 percent to a total of less than 16 percent; during that same generation, business majors climbed from 14 percent to 22 percent. Despite last year’s debacle on Wall Street, the humanities have not benefited; students are still wagering that business jobs will be there when the economy recovers.

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.

That, as I say, is the most serious cause of the decline in the number of humanities students. But it is not alone. In an educational collapse of this magnitude, other forces must also be at play. The first of these is the surging growth of public higher education and the relatively slower growth of private colleges and universities.

During the most recent period for which good figures are available (from 1972 to 2005), more young people entered the world of higher education than at any time in American history. Where did they go? Increasingly into public, not private, schools. In the space of that one generation, public colleges and universities wound up with more than 13 million students in their classrooms while private institutions enrolled about 4.5 million. Students in public schools tended toward majors in managerial, technical, and pre-professional fields while students in private schools pursued more traditional and less practical academic subjects.

Although many public institutions have had an interest in teaching the humanities, their prime role has always rested elsewhere: in engineering, research science, and the applied disciplines (agriculture, mining, viniculture, veterinary medicine, oceanography). By contrast, private schools have until now been the most secure home of the humanities. But today even some liberal arts colleges are offering fewer courses in the liberal arts and more courses that are “practical.” With their ascendancy, the presiding ethos of public institutions—fortified by the numbers of majors and faculty, and by the amounts of money involved—has come to exert a more and more powerful thrust in American higher education. The result? The humanities, losing the national numbers game, find themselves moving to the periphery of American higher education.

But were they ever at the center? The notion that the literary humanities in particular have been at the heart of American higher education is, I think, a mirage. I once thought so because of the great popularity of the study of literature during my undergraduate and graduate years. Yet the “glory years” of English and American literature turn out to have been brief. Before we regret the decline of the literary humanities, then, we must acknowledge how fleeting their place in the sun was.

In this country and in England, the study of English literature began in the latter part of the 19th century as an exercise in the scientific pursuit of philological research, and those who taught it subscribed to the notion that literature was best understood as a product of language. The discipline treated the poems and narratives of a particular place, the British Isles, as evidence of how the linguistic roots of that place—Germanic, Romance, and other—conditioned what had been set before us as “masterpieces.” The twin focus, then, was on the philological nature of the enterprise and the canon of great works to be studied in their historical evolution.

Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Gerald Graff’s impressive study of what happened next, shows that even criticism of that canon is not yet a century old: “Scholar and critic emerge as antithetical terms,” he writes, and “the gulf further widens between fact and value, investigation and appreciation, scientific specialization and general culture.” Yet neither side denied the existence of a canon or that its historical development could be studied.

The stability of these ideas in the postwar years, from the late 1940s until the early 1970s, permitted the spectacular growth in English departments. The number of English majors spurted up from 17,000 to 64,000 and the number of graduate students from 230 to 1,591. (As part of that spurt, I entered graduate school in 1961 and got my Ph.D. seven years later.) But by 1985/86, the number of undergraduate English majors had fallen back to 34,000, despite a hefty increase in total nationwide undergraduate enrollment. In the foreign languages, philosophy, and history, the story was the same: impressive growth followed by swift decline. The history of enrollments reveals, then, that the study of English and American literature enjoyed only a momentary glamour.

What was the appeal of English during those now long-ago days? For me, English as a way of understanding the world began at Haverford College, where I was an undergraduate in the late 1950s. The place was small, the classrooms plain, the students all intimidated boys, and the curriculum both straightforward and challenging. What we read forced us to think about the words on the page, their meaning, their ethical and psychological implications, and what we could contrive (in 500-word essays each week) to write about them. With the books in front of us, we were taught the skills of interpretation. Our tasks were difficult, the books (Emerson’s essays, David Copperfield, Shaw’s Major Barbara, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and a dozen other works) were masterly, and our teacher possessed an authority it would have been “bootless” (his word) to question.

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.

Finding pleasure in such reading, and indeed in majoring in English, was a declaration at the time that education was not at all about getting a job or securing one’s future. In comparison with the pre-professional ambitions that dominate the lives of American undergraduates today, the psychological condition of students of the time was defined by self-reflection, innocence, and a casual irresponsibility about what was coming next.

Also visible in the late 1940s and early 1950s were thousands of GIs returning from World War II with a desire to establish for themselves lives as similar as possible to those they imagined had been led by the college generation before their own. For these veterans, college implied security and tradition, a world unlike the one they had left behind in Europe and the Pacific. So they did what they thought one always did in college: study, reflect, and learn. They would reconnect, they thought, with the cultural traditions the war had been fought to defend. Thus a curriculum complete with “great books” and a pantheon of established authors went without question for those students, and it was reinforced for everybody else.

For those like me who immediately followed them in the 1950s and early 1960s, the centrality of the humanities to a liberal education was a settled matter. But by the end of the 1960s, everything was up for grabs and nothing was safe from negative and reductive analysis. Every form of anti-authoritarian energy—concerning sexual mores, race relations, the war in Vietnam, mind-altering drugs—was felt across the nation (I was at Berkeley, the epicenter of all such energies). Against such ferocious intensities, few elements of the cultural patterns of the preceding decades could stand. The long-term consequences of such a spilling-out of the old contents of what college meant reverberate today.

In addition to the long-term consequences, today there are stunning changes in the student population: there are more and more gifted and enterprising students coming from immigrant backgrounds, students with only slender connections to Western culture and to the assumption that the “great books” of England and the United States should enjoy a fixed centrality in the world. What was once the heart of the matter now seems provincial. Why throw yourself into a study of something not emblematic of the world but representative of a special national interest? As the campus reflects the cultural, racial, and religious complexities of the world around it, reading British and American literature looks more and more marginal. From a global perspective, the books look smaller.

But there are additional reasons for the drop in numbers of students concentrating in English and other subjects in the literary humanities. History, geography, and demography do not explain it all. Other forces, both external and internal, have been at work. The literary humanities and, in particular, English are in trouble for reasons beyond their control and for reasons of their own making. First, an obvious external cause: money. With the cost of a college degree surging upward during the last quarter century—tuition itself increasing far beyond any measure of inflation—and with consequent growth in loan debt after graduation, parents have become anxious about the relative earning power of a humanities degree. Their college-age children doubtless share such anxiety. When college costs were lower, anxiety could be kept at bay. (Berkeley in the early ’60s cost me about $100 a year, about $700 in today’s dollars.) Alexander W. Astin’s research tells us that in the mid-1960s, more than 80 percent of entering college freshmen reported that nothing was more important than “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.” Astin, director of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, reports that “being very well off financially” was only an afterthought, one that fewer than 45 percent of those freshmen thought to be an essential goal. As the years went on, however, and as tuition shot up, the two traded places; by 1977, financial goals had surged past philosophical ones, and by the year 2001 more than 70 percent of undergraduate students had their eyes trained on financial realities, while only 40 percent were still wrestling with meaningful philosophies.

Off-campus, the consumer’s point of view about future earnings and economic security was a mirror image of on-campus thinking in the offices of deans, provosts, and presidents. I was in those offices, day in and day out, for 20 years, and can report that such officials are forever considering how to exploit available resources against ever-growing operating costs. As those costs grow, they create a paradox: the only way to bring in more money, over and above tuition income, is to employ more and more people to attract philanthropic donors and to assure the continuing flow of research dollars from governmental and other sources. Every administrator is complicit in the expanding number of necessary non-faculty employees—development officers, technical support staff, research assistants, lawyers attuned to federal regulations—and human resource personnel to handle the ever-growing numbers of just such new employees. I agree with historian Lynn Hunt’s description of the situation: “The university staff as a whole is getting bigger, but the relative presence of faculty, secretaries, and janitors is actually declining.” The faculty decline is, in particular, in the humanities, which bring in almost no outside income. Economists, chemists, biologists, psychologists, computer scientists, and almost everyone in the medical sciences win sponsored research, grants, and federal dollars. By and large, humanists don’t, and so they find themselves as direct employees of the institution, consuming money in salaries, pensions, and operating needs—not external money but institutional money.

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.

Despite sheltering this central educational service, English departments are regarded by those who manage the university treasury as more liability than asset. The presence of endowed “centers for the humanities,” the availability of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the MacArthur Foundation or the National Endowment for the Humanities, and others, ease in only small ways the financial crunch universities now endure. As John H. D’Arms, formerly the head of the ACLS, reported more than a decade ago, even the meager outside support conveyed to humanists is slowly drying up and the responsibility for their well-being is “being increasingly shifted to the colleges and universities and . . . they cannot, or will not, make up the losses from other sources.”

These, then, are some of the external causes of the decline of English: the rise of public education; the relative youth and instability (despite its apparent mature solidity) of English as a discipline; the impact of money; and the pressures upon departments within the modern university to attract financial resources rather than simply use them up. On all these scores, English has suffered. But the deeper explanation resides not in something that has happened to it, but in what it has done to itself.

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.

Indeed, inquests abound. The annual meetings of the Modern Language Association have become somber opportunities for scholars to engage in painful rituals of self-diagnosis and confessions of despair. 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.”

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.

Consider the English department at Harvard University. It has now agreed to remove its survey of English literature for undergraduates, replacing it and much else with four new “affinity groups”—“Arrivals,” “Poets,” “Diffusions,” and “Shakespeares.” The first would examine outside influences on English literature; the second would look at whatever poets the given instructor would select; the third would study various writings (again, picked by the given instructor) resulting from the spread of English around the globe; and the final grouping would direct attention to Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Daniel Donoghue, the department’s director of undergraduate studies, told The Harvard Crimson last December that “our approach was to start with a completely clean slate.” And Harvard’s well-known Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt also told the Crimson that the substance of the old survey will “trickle down to students through the professors themselves who, after all, specialize in each of these areas of English literature.” But under the proposal, there would be no one book, or family of books, that every English major at Harvard would have read by the time he or she graduates. The direction to which Harvard would lead its students in this “clean slate” or “trickle down” experiment is to suspend literary history, thrusting into the hands of undergraduates the job of cobbling together intellectual coherence for themselves. Greenblatt puts it this way: students should craft their own literary “journeys.” The professors might have little idea of where those journeys might lead, or how their paths might become errant. There will be no common destination.

As Harvard goes, so often go the nation’s other colleges and universities. Those who once strove to give order to the curriculum will have learned, from Harvard, that terms like core knowledge and foundational experience only trigger acrimony, turf protection, and faculty mutinies. No one has the stomach anymore to refight the Western culture wars. Let the students find their own way to knowledge.

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 déclassé. The caravan, always moving on, travels light because of what it leaves behind.

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.

I still teach, and do so with a veteran’s pride in what I know and what I hope I can give. My classrooms are, I hope, bright and sunny places where we can spend good time with Joyce’s Ulysses or Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. But I know what some of my students sense, that what we do now faces an array of problems, any one of which might prove surmountable, but which together amount to an enervating spectacle. 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.

It would be a pleasure to map a way out of this academic dead end. First, several of my colleagues around the country have called for a return to the aesthetic wellsprings of literature, the rock-solid fact, often neglected, that it can indeed amuse, delight, and educate. They urge the teaching of English, or French, or Russian literature, and the like, in terms of the intrinsic value of the works themselves, in all their range and multiplicity, as well-crafted and appealing artifacts of human wisdom. Second, we should redefine our own standards for granting tenure, placing more emphasis on the classroom and less on published research, and we should prepare to contest our decisions with administrators whose science-based model is not an appropriate means of evaluation. Released from the obligation to deliver research results in the form of little-read monographs and articles, humanists could then resolve to spend their time teaching what they love to students glad to learn. If they wanted to publish, they could do so—at almost no cost—on the Internet, and like-minded colleagues could rapidly share the results of such research and speculation. Most important, the luxury of reading could be welcomed back. I want to believe in what they say.

I have also wanted to believe that English and American literature constitutes a subject of study that is historically coherent and shaped by the intrinsic design of its own making. The causes giving it that shape can be analyzed, as can the merit and integrity of each of the achievements within it. And students, without whose energetic presence the study will wither, can be attracted to an activity—partly aesthetic and partly detective-like—in which they can participate along with teachers who bring enthusiasm to the work at hand. Like young scientists teaming together with older scientists at the same workbench, they can be made to feel that what they are doing makes sense, is shared by others, and will result in knowledge worth having. Perhaps they, the youngest generation, can labor with their teachers in putting together the house that has forfeited its sense of order. If they do, they can graduate with the knowledge that they possess something: a fundamental awareness of how a certain powerful literature was created over time, how its parts fit together, and how the process of creation has been renewed and changed through the centuries.

Some of their detective work could involve topics of great current interest—the role of race or gender or sexuality in the making of a work. But the focus would or should be on the books, not on the theories they can be made to support. English departments need not refight the Western culture wars. But they need to fight their own book wars. They must agree on which texts to teach and argue out the choices and the principles of making them if they are to claim the respect due a department of study.

They can also convert what many of them now consider a liability and a second-rate activity into a sizable asset. They can teach their students to write well, to use rhetoric. They should place their courses in composition and rhetoric at the forefront of their activities. They should announce that the teaching of composition is a skill their instructors have mastered and that students majoring in English will be certified, upon graduation, as possessing rigorously tested competence in prose expression. Those students will thus carry with them, into employment interviews or into further educational training, a proficiency everywhere respected but too often lacking among college graduates.

If nothing is done to put an end to the process of disintegration, the numbers will continue in a steady downward spiral. More and more of the teaching jobs in the humanities will be occupied by untenured part-timers (in English, it is now one in six). But the good news is that certain forms of intellectual history will still be written and will still be accessible to ordinary readers. Shakespeare’s plays will still be performed, even if largely unsponsored by departments of English. Literary biography will still command an appreciative readership. The better private institutions, aware of noblesse oblige, will prove kinder than large public institutions to the literary humanities, but even this solicitude will have its limits.

The study of literature will then take on the profile now held, with moderate dignity, by the study of the classics, Greek and Latin. 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.

Liberal arts...going?

It did not used to be this way. A liberal arts school was just that...liberal arts where there was a blend of the sciences and humanities. Now it appears that emphasis is placed solely on the sciences. That's not a well-rounded education; it's more vocational oriented.

"Poor patronage for 13 PG courses in Madras"

by

D Suresh Kumar

January 19th, 2009

The Times of India

CHENNAI: At least 13 academic departments of the University of Madras have not been able to attract enough students for postgraduate courses over the past several years. Patronage for these courses has been only between 8 % and 49% of the sanctioned strength over a five-year period beginning 2003-04.

The university offers 80 postgraduate courses in humanities, science and commerce streams through its 68 departments. Statistics compiled on the basis of admission figures provided by 59 departments revealed that the average students' enrolment has been poor or average in 13 departments. Some departments have also recorded zero student intakes in some years, a performance audit report prepared by the Principal Accountant General (Civil Audit) has said.

The courses which have attracted fewer students are: M.Sc Nuclear Physics, M.Sc Electronic Science, MA Political Science / Public Management, Ancient History and Archeology, Anthropology, Saivasidhandha, Jainology, Sanskrit, Philosophy, Kannada, Defence and Strategic Studies, Econometrics and French.

"Some of the courses are religious oriented courses and only selected students who have personal interest in these courses take them up," the university officials said in response to the audit findings.

Interestingly, not a single student joined MA in Saivasidhandha in the academic years 2003-04 to 2006-07, whereas the department has a sanctioned student intake of 10 every year. Likewise, last year no student enrolled for the MA in Philosophy although the sanctioned strength is 20. Just 21 students joined the philosophy department in five years, whereas the sanctioned intake for one year itself is 20.

University officials pointed out that the humanities stream has always been less attractive that the sciences stream and therefore, not many joined postgraduate courses.

Professor P Govinda Reddy of the anthropology department explained that not many students and parents were familiar with the availability of the MA in Anthropology in the university. "In the entire Tamil Nadu, the University of Madras is the only higher education institutions to offer a course in anthropology. No college or university in the state has instituted a course in anthropology even at the undergraduate level. Therefore, naturally joining MA Anthropology is not a popular option," Reddy told The Times of India.

The reality, though, is that there is a demand for students of anthropology in the job market. "We are unable to cater to the manpower requirement from non-governmental organisations, rural development department and social welfare department at the national level. Interestingly, social scientists and even medical doctors have evinced keen interest in pursuing doctoral studies (PhD) in Anthropology," he said.

To popularise the subject, the department is toying with the idea of introducing a five-year integrated MA Anthropology course in the university from the next academic year.

University officials also attributed vacancies in some departments to the communal reservation system that is followed while admitting students. "The vacancies exist (in some departments) because they cannot be filled up for want of eligible candidates under certain categories of community due to adoption of roster system," the officials said.

While this is the scene with the students' intake, the university is simultaneously grappling with infrastructure inadequacies in hosting students of some other departments that have attracted lots of students.

For instance, in respect of research oriented science subjects, the classrooms available are adequate for conducting theory classes for one batch of students alone, while the other batch is accommodated in the laboratory.

However, now the university is initiating steps to construct more classrooms in multi-storied buildings to meet future requirements of all its four campuses in Chepauk, Marina, Guindy and Taramani.

"The lasting value of the humanities"

by

David Tebaldi

January 19th, 2009

boston.com

HISTORY, literature, philosophy, and the other humanities disciplines - of what use are they? Stanley Fish, the erudite blogger for The New York Times, has argued recently that they are of no use at all. Paradoxically, that is precisely why they are important, according to Fish.

I beg to differ, and so too would former Rhode Island senator Claiborne Pell, who died on New Year's Day and is best remembered for the student financial aid program that bears his name - Pell Grants. Less appreciated was Pell's seminal role in the founding of the National Endowment for the Humanities and its sister agency, the National Endowment for the Arts.

The legislation sponsored by Pell in 1965 established the humanities endowment with a mandate to foster "national progress" in the humanities. In some of the loftiest language ever to appear in federal legislation, the act declared that "a high civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone but must give full value and support to the other great branches of man's scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present and a better view of the future."

Through its grant making and other activities, the endowment preserves and provides access to cultural and intellectual resources that help to define us as a people; strengthens teaching and learning in the humanities in schools and colleges across the nation; facilitates basic research and original scholarship in the humanities; and provides opportunities for Americans to use the humanities both for personal enrichment and to improve civic life.

Over the past 40 years, nearly 100,000 high school and college teachers have deepened their knowledge of the humanities and honed their classroom skills through intensive summer study supported by the endowment, tens of thousands of scholars have received funding for research and writing projects, and tens of millions of Americans have been enlightened and entertained by endowment-funded documentaries such as Ken Burns's "The Civil War."

In keeping with Pell's vision, local affiliates of the endowment exist in every state. Ours is called Mass Humanities. With funds provided by the national endowment, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and private donors, Mass Humanities supports and conducts humanities programs that strengthen civic life across the Commonwealth.

The benefits of the Pell Grants are easily comprehended. The benefits of humanities programs are less readily identifiable. Certainly we all understand that a teacher who attends an NEH seminar will become a more knowledgeable and enthusiastic teacher, and a youngster who watches "Eyes on the Prize" will come away with a greater awareness that civic freedoms and rights are matters for which all of us bear responsibility.

But what is generally not considered is the capacity of the humanities to ennoble and enrich the lives of average citizens, and to make them more complete human beings and more capable of sustaining themselves and their communities. Here in Massachusetts, for example, the Clemente Course in the Humanities offers college-level humanities courses free to adults living in or near poverty in Boston, Holyoke, and New Bedford. Graduates of the program receive six college credits and, more important, they acquire resources that enable them to take fuller control of their lives, enhance the well-being of their families, and become more effective participants in civic life.

In difficult economic times, humanities programs may seem a luxury, something we can do without. Like Pell Grants, however, humanities programs are even more important in hard times. Indeed, this is a time to consider a dramatic increase in the NEH appropriation, which is, and always has been, woefully inadequate.

History teaches us how those who came before us have confronted the challenges of the past; literature provides insights into human needs, desires, and motivations; philosophy helps to clarify and illuminate what, in the end, is truly of value. Taken together, the humanities give us a fuller sense of what is possible, desirable, and right.

Pell understood the usefulness of the humanities. We should be grateful for the legacy he has left us.

C. P. Snow...science and the humanities

Few have heard of C. P. Snow but he did stir up some controversy [The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution] many years ago and I think his basic complaint is still relevant today...that scientists of today, with few exceptions, are lacking knowledge of the humanities; that those in the humanities are lacking knowledge of the sciences.

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the law of entropy. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: 'Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?'

I would even stretch it further and allow that those individuals have little knowledge of their own areas of expertise--that scientists lack a history of science.


An address by Phillip A. Griffiths at the annual Distinguished Chairs Dinner at Rice University on September 13th, 1995:

It is a great pleasure to be with you at the second annual gathering for Distinguished Professors, and an honour to be asked to speak after a dinner as fine as the one we have just enjoyed.

Even though I am a mathematician, I hope to convince you that my topic is worthwhile, for two reasons. First, my topic is not mathematics. Second, although I shall speak to you mostly about science, the consequences of what I have to say reach into every corner of academic life. I want to talk about why the scientists' traditional "search for the truth" may be in jeopardy and suggest some steps that might be taken to ameliorate this.

Let me move toward this topic along a path skilfully laid down by the great writer and thinker C P Snow. It has been three and a half decades since he delivered his famous lecture, "Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," which seems as wise today as it did in 1959. In that speech, as most of you know, Snow described what he called a "gulf of mutual incomprehension" between scientists on one shore and literary intellectuals on the other. He saw the literary culture as, in his words, "behaving like a state whose power is rapidly declining - standing on its precarious dignity ... too much on the defensive to show any generous imagination to the forces which must inevitably reshape it." He saw the scientific culture as, again in his words, "expansive ... confident at the roots ... certain that history is on its side, impatient, intolerant, creative rather than critical, good-natured and brash." The scientists, he said, regarded the humanists (when they regarded them at all) as lacking in foresight, unconcerned with their fellow humans, and even anti-intellectual. The humanists regarded the scientists as shallowly optimistic and unaware of man's true condition.

Snow warned that the continued widening of this gulf could lead to grave consequences. For one thing, he said, the "clashing point," as he called it, between the two cultures of science and humanities, was not producing enough "creative chances" - opportunities for new breakthroughs, new ways of looking at the world. "The chances are there now," he said, "but they are there, as it were, in a vacuum, because those in the two cultures can't talk to each other."

Perhaps more serious was his warning that we have lost even the pretence of a common culture. "This loss," he wrote, "is leading us to interpret the past wrongly, to misjudge the present, and to deny our hopes of the future."

Over the years, Snow's warning has been repeated by many of us. It has been accompanied by much wise nodding of heads, but little action. Gerald Holton of Harvard is one of those who believes that the gulf between cultures is wider than ever. Science, he writes, is now separated from not only the humanities, but also from the whole of society.

Indeed, C P Snow would not be surprised by the recent attacks on Western science by people a group known as social constructivists. (And I thought it was mathematics that was full of jargon). Gerald Holton says that social constructivists seek to define science not as a search for the truth - which is the definition most scientists would prefer - but as a collection of ideas constructed by a single social groups - namely, natural scientists. By this definition, Western science has no greater claim to objectivity than any other collection of ideas.

Consider a recent conference sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences. It was called "The Flight from Science and Reason." The conference was organized both to alert scientists to these attacks, and to arouse them to action, and some of the descriptions were chilling. Here is how Gerald Holton, one of the speakers, described what social constructivists believe about science: that "science is a thinly disguised plot to maintain a largely patriarchal elite in power over minorities, women, and experimental animals," and that the so-called objectivity of science is no more than one way of searching of the truth, and no more legitimate than any individual's subjective opinion or the will of the people at large. In other words, science is merely one way of looking at the world. Furthermore, it is a particular destructive way which has contributed to countless social and environmental abuses.

Let's go back a step. What does Western science say that it is? Holton, a physicist and science historian who has thought a great deal about these matters, sees, perhaps over-confidently, three pillars on which the edifice of science is based: first, to all genuine questions there is one true answer; second, the answers to questions are knowable; and third, these true answers cannot clash with one another.

But if the subjective will has as much validity as objective reason in the search for truth, these three pillars of the Western tradition have little strength. If there are no "objective rules," we have to recognize any new rules, whether formulated by the social constructivists or anyone else. We have to admit that scientific truth is not discovered but made, and its results depend on the beliefs from which you began.

This is not, of course, the first time science has been challenged in this way. We remember that Galileo was not only challenged but imprisoned for believing in the laws of physics. Even more chilling was the rise of Aryan science in Germany in the 1930s. This science was the province largely of those of Aryan blood. It shunned formalistic or abstract concepts, which were seen as the hallmarks of so-called "Jewish physics." In making even the most technical decisions, scientists were expected to welcome the opinions of the "volk," or common people.

In our time, the Czech playwright and statesman Vaclev Havel has attacked science for, in his words: "... the proud belief that man ... was capable of objectively describing, explaining and controlling everything that exists, and of possessing the one and only truth about the world." He also said: "Man needs individual spirituality, first-hand personal insight into things, ... and above all trust in his own subjectivity as his principal link with the subjectivity of the world ...."

Here at home, Congressman George Brown of California, a physicist and a former chair of the House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology, has been strongly influenced by Havel and now sees little evidence that "objective scientific knowledge leads to subjective benefits for humanity." Congressman Brown has written that he wants to "make strong attempts to involve ordinary citizens in processes of discussion and decision-making, including citizens who have not previously demonstrated expertise about such matters at all." To some, this recalls the tone of Germany's "volkische" solution, and even of Mao Tse Tung's cultural revolution.

Thus we are seeing a historic trend that has risen and fallen and risen again. Today's anti-science view is held by a minority, but it is an intelligent minority capable of shaping opinion.

From the other side, however, we hear little from the scientists, who tend to avoid political debate in favour of the work they prefer to immerse themselves in. They find it more congenial to focus on a specific task rather than on the place of that task in the broader culture. They rarely ask, "What does science do for society to justify the public's generous support?" I'm reminded of Tom Lehrer's famous song from the '60s about Wernher von Braun and his rockets. The job of the rocket scientist, sang Lehrer, is simply to get the rockets in the air: "Who cares where zey come down?" We know this is a caricature, but it still makes us just as uncomfortable today as it did three decades ago. Many scientists are too narrow and self-satisfied about what they do, and show too little concern about the role of science in society.

So let me suggest that both scientists and intellectuals have some work to do. Let's start with the latter. As modern as some of their views may seem to them, it has deep roots in the English Industrial Revolution of the late 18th century and the anti-industrial fervour of the Luddites. C P Snow said that Western intellectuals have never tried to understand the industrial revolution, much less accept it. And he accused intellectuals of being natural Luddites who were unable to see the irony of their position. That is, the industrial revolution created the wealth and made possible the leisure to support a larger population of intellectuals than the world had ever known. Snow was especially angered by the implications of the intellectuals' attacks on technology. Without it, he said, most of society would be condemned to the drudgery of manual farm labour and to its partners of poverty, illiteracy, and poor health.

But Snow was even-handed: He assigned an equal portion of blame to the scientists-especially those who scorn practical work, even if it leads to better education, health, and personal wealth. Such scientists, he said, seldom see that many problems of application and engineering are as intellectually exacting as so-called "pure" problems, and that many of the solutions are as satisfying and beautiful. More to the point, applied science is necessary to support the lifestyle enjoyed by the scientists.

Nor does Snow spare himself, recalling his own past as a research physicist at Cambridge University: In his words, "We prided ourselves that the science we were doing could not, in any conceivable circumstances, have any practical use. The more firmly one could make that claim, the more superior one felt."

The word pride sticks out here; it reminds one of the biting description, in the debate over funding, by a prominent scientist of his colleagues as "welfare queens in white coats." This pride is more and more a luxury in an era when time and resources for pure science or pure art are more and more constricted. The scientist's sense of entitlement is being questioned today by those who are paying for the white coats.

Let me suggest the beginning toward some resolution of this problem of two cultures by turning to the thoughts of Robert Oppenheimer, one of my most distinguished predecessors as director of the Institute for Advanced Study. Four years before C P Snow's lecture, Oppenheimer gave a lecture about two cultures; he used the categories of scientist and artist. He concluded that both scientists and artists had become highly specialized, isolated, and to some extent irrelevant to society. And he, like Snow, suggested that both groups expose themselves to other people - both to teach and to learn from those around them. The purpose of this exposure is not to dilute their own efforts, or to take orders from those who do not understand what they are doing. The proper role of scientists and artists, he said, is to "not merely find new truth and communicate it to his fellows, but that he teach, that he try to bring the most honest and intelligible account of new knowledge to all who will try to learn." This teaching, when successful, is the first set of girders across the gulf between the two cultures.

Does a scientist make a good teacher? I think it depends on the scientist. A narrow specialist may teach effectively in a very restricted group of those who share the same specialty. But to be broadly effective, a scientist must understand something about the context of that specialty, and about science as a whole, and about other people.

Unfortunately, few of our scientists are oriented toward this kind of teaching. Recently, I was a chair of a committee at the National Academy of Sciences which recently produced a report called "Reshaping the Graduate Education of Scientists and Engineers." In preparing this report, we examined the graduate programs in American universities and we found that most of them have for several decades built up the importance of research at the expense of teaching and communicating. To me, one of the committee's most important suggestions is that we adjust this balance in favour of better education and communication, and to remind the scientists of Oppenheimer's invitation to share what they know with others. If our colleagues have some understanding of what scientists are doing, they will be less inclined to attack them.

Let me go one step further. Over the last half century, it has become the goal of the ambitious university to be known as a "research university." The more people in white coats, the better. I would like to suggest a new concept as we prepare for the 21st century - the concept of the research and service university. Clearly, we do not want to diminish the importance of research, which must continue to bring us new technologies, products, and ways of looking at the world. But we need to balance the emphasis on research with an equally strong emphasis on service - on ways to relate what is discovered and accomplished in the university to what is unknown and lacking in society. This involves more teaching, more communicating, and a greater sense of responsibility to the community at large. I think that a conceptual change in the direction of a research and service university can help us place a few more girders across that wide and stubborn gulf between the two cultures.

If this case seems too difficult, let me conclude with a word of hope from Oppenheimer. He said that both scientists and artists have a special gift for us, if they can only bring themselves to share it. Both groups live always at what he called the "edge of mystery" - the boundary of the unknown. But they also live here on Earth among the rest of us. These visionaries must struggle constantly to integrate what they see "out there" with what they see "down here"; to integrate what is new with what is familiar; to find partial order amid the chaos of experience. Thus they are well prepared to help the rest of us, if they will, find our balance in a world which confronts us daily with new challenges and new invitations.

Thank you very much.