Another of the New Yorker pieces I grabbed before ending my subscription.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-the-english-major
The End of the English Major
The crisis, when it came, arrived so quickly that its scale was hard to recognize at first. From 2012 to the start of the pandemic, the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from nine hundred and fifty-three to five hundred and seventy-eight. Records indicate that the number of graduated language and literature majors decreased by roughly half, as did the number of history majors. Women’s studies lost eighty per cent. “It’s hard for students like me, who are pursuing an English major, to find joy in what they’re doing,” Meg Macias, a junior, said one afternoon as the edges of the sky over the campus went soft. It was late autumn, and the sunsets came in like flame on thin paper on the way to dusk. “They always know there’s someone who wishes that they were doing something else.”
A.S.U., which is centered in Tempe and has more than eighty thousand students on campus, is today regarded as a beacon for the democratic promises of public higher education. Its undergraduate admission rate is eighty-eight per cent. Nearly half its undergraduates are from minority backgrounds, and a third are the first in their families to go to college. The in-state tuition averages just four thousand dollars, yet A.S.U. has a better faculty-to-student ratio on site than U.C. Berkeley and spends more on faculty research than Princeton. For students interested in English literature, it can seem a lucky place to land. The university’s tenure-track English faculty is seventy-one strong—including eleven Shakespeare scholars, most of them of color. In 2021, A.S.U. English professors won two Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other English department in America did.
On campus, I met many students who might have been
moved by these virtues but felt pulled toward other pursuits. Luiza Monti, a
senior, had come to college as a well-rounded graduate of a charter school in
Phoenix. She had fallen in love with Italy during a summer exchange and
fantasized about Italian language and literature, but was studying
business—specifically, an interdisciplinary major called Business (Language and
Culture), which incorporated Italian coursework. “It’s a safeguard thing,”
Monti, who wore earrings from a jewelry business founded by her mother, a
Brazilian immigrant, told me. “There’s an emphasis on who is going to hire
you.”
Justin Kovach, another senior, loved to write and
always had. He’d blown through the thousand-odd pages of “Don Quixote” on his
own (“I thought, This is a really funny story”) and looked for more big books
to keep the feeling going. “I like the long, hard classics with the fancy
language,” he said. Still, he wasn’t majoring in English, or any kind of
literature. In college—he had started at the University of Pittsburgh—he’d
moved among computer science, mathematics, and astrophysics, none of which
brought him any sense of fulfillment. “Most of the time I would spend avoiding
doing work,” he confessed. But he never doubted that a field in stem—a common acronym for science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics—was the best path for him. He settled on a degree
in data science.
Kovach will graduate with some thirty thousand dollars
in debt, a burden that influenced his choice of a degree. For decades now, the
cost of education has increased over all ahead of inflation. One theory has
been that this pressure, plus the growing precariousness of the middle class,
has played a role in driving students like him toward hard-skill majors.
(English majors, on average, carry less debt than students in other fields, but
they take longer to pay it down.)
For the decline at A.S.U. is not anomalous. According
to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly but not
always identically to internal enrollment figures, from 2012 to 2020 the number
of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six
per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston
University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started
with, while suny Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar
and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of
humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at
Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including
English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils.
During the past decade, the study of English and
history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities
enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent,
Townsend found. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of
countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling
humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to
American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a
college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come
before.
If you take a moment to
conjure the university in your mind, you will probably arrive at one of two
visions. Perhaps you see the liberal-arts idyll, removed from the pressures of
the broader world and filled with tweedy creatures reading on quadrangle lawns.
This is the redoubt of the idealized figure of the English major, sensitive and
sweatered, moving from “Pale Fire” to “The Fire Next Time” and scaling the
heights of “Ulysses” for the view. The goal of such an education isn’t direct
career training but cultivation of the mind—the belief that Lionel Trilling
caricatured as “certain good things happen if we read literature.” This model
describes one of those pursuits, like acupuncture or psychoanalysis, which seem
to produce salutary effects through mechanisms that we have tried but basically
failed to explain.
Or perhaps you think of the university as the research
colony, filled with laboratories and conferences and peer-reviewed papers
written for audiences of specialists. This is a place that thumps with the
energy of a thousand gophers turning over knowledge. It’s the small-bore
university of campus comedy—of “Lucky Jim” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”—but
also the quarry of deconstruction, quantum electrodynamics, and value theory.
It produces new knowledge and ways of understanding that wouldn’t have an
opportunity to emerge anywhere else.
In 1963, Clark Kerr, the president of the University
of California system, gave a series of lectures subsequently collected in a
famous book, “The Uses of the University.” He argued that both of these
paradigms—the former largely inspired by British schools like Oxford and
Cambridge, the latter largely inspired by the great German universities of the
nineteenth century—had no actual equivalent in the U.S. Instead, he said, the
Americans created the “multiversity”: a kind of hodgepodge of both types and
more. The multiversity incorporates the tradition of land-grant universities,
established with an eye to industrial-age skill sets. And it provides something
for everyone. There is pre-professional training of all sorts—law schools,
business schools, medical schools, agricultural schools—but also the old
liberal-arts quadrangle. “The university is so many things to so many different
people that it must, of necessity, be partially at war with itself,” Kerr
wrote.
For decades, the average proportion of humanities
students in every class hovered around fifteen per cent nationally, following
the American economy up in boom times and down in bearish periods. (If you
major in a field like business for the purpose of getting rich, it doesn’t
follow—but can be mistaken to—that majoring in English will make you poor.)
Enrollment numbers of the past decade defy these trends, however. When the
economy has looked up, humanities enrollments have continued falling. When the
markets have wobbled, enrollments have tumbled even more. Today, the roller
coaster is in free fall. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the percentage of college
degrees awarded in health sciences, medical sciences, natural sciences, and
engineering has shot up. At Columbia University—one of a diminishing number of
schools with a humanities-heavy core requirement—English majors fell from ten
per cent to five per cent of graduates between 2002 and 2020, while the ranks
of computer-science majors strengthened.
“Until about four years ago, I thought it was a
reversible situation—that those who profess the humanities hadn’t been good
enough at selling them to students,” James Shapiro, an English professor at
Columbia, told me in his office one day. He had worried his graying blond hair
to a choppy peak. Photographs of Shakespeare productions he has worked on were
perched among the books on his shelves, which were close-packed. “I no longer
believe that, for two reasons.”
The other reason was money. Shapiro put down the phone
and glowered at it. “You get what you pay for!” he said, and grabbed a
departmental memo that lay on his desk. With a blunt pencil, he scribbled on
the back a graph with two axes and an upside-down parabola. “I’m talking about
the big fire hose.”
As I watched, he labelled the start of the graph
“1958”—the year after the Soviets launched Sputnik, when the National Defense
Education Act appropriated more than a billion dollars for education.
“We’re not talking about élite universities—we’re
talking about money flowing into fifty states, all the way down. That was the
beginning of the glory days of the humanities,” he continued. Near the
plummeting end of the parabola, he scribbled “2007,” the beginning of the
economic crisis. “That funding goes down,” he explained. “The financial
support for the humanities is gone on a national level, on a state level, at
the university level.”
Shapiro smoothed out his graph, regarded it for a
moment, and ran the tip of his pencil back and forth across the curve.
“This is also the decline-of-democracy chart,” he
said. He looked up and met my gaze. “You can overlay it on the money chart like
a kind of palimpsest—it’s the same.”
At the high point of
autumn—midterm season—I travelled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to spend time
among the golden kids of Harvard. Last year, the college reportedly had a
3.19-per-cent admission rate. Those who make it through the needle’s eye are
able to evade a lot of the forces thought to drag humanities enrollments down.
Harvard’s financial-aid packages are ostensibly doled out to the full extent
needed, and built without loans, giving students who receive aid the chance to
graduate debt-free. Basic employability is assured by the diploma: even a
Harvard graduate who majors in somersaults will be able to find some kind of
job to pay the bills. In theory, this should be a school where the range of
possibilities for college remains intact.
In 2022, though, a survey found that only seven per
cent of Harvard freshmen planned to major in the humanities, down from twenty
per cent in 2012, and nearly thirty per cent during the nineteen-seventies.
From fifteen years ago to the start of the pandemic, the number of Harvard
English majors reportedly declined by about three-quarters—in 2020, there were
fewer than sixty at a college of more than seven thousand—and philosophy and
foreign literatures also sustained losses. (For bureaucratic reasons, Harvard
doesn’t count history as a humanity, but the trend holds.) “We feel we’re on
the Titanic,” a senior professor in the English department told me.
Students lacked a strong sense of the department’s
vaunted standing. “I would never say this to any of my English- or my
film-major friends, but I kind of thought that those majors were a joke,” Isabel Mehta, a junior, told me. “I thought,
I’m a writer, but I’ll never be an English major.” Instead, she’d pursued
social studies—a philosophy, politics, and economics track whose popularity has
exploded in recent years. (Policy, students explained, was thought to effect
urgent change.) But the conversations bored her (students said “the same three
things,” she reported, “and I didn’t want to be around all these classmates
railing on capitalism all day”), so she landed uneasily in English after all.
“I have a warped sense of identity, where I’m studying something really far
removed from what a lot of people here view as central, but I’m not removed from
these cultural forces,” she told me.
English professors find the turn particularly baffling
now: a moment when, by most appearances, the appetite for public contemplation
of language, identity, historiography, and other longtime concerns of the
seminar table is at a peak.
“Young people are very, very concerned about the
ethics of representation, of cultural interaction—all these kinds of things
that, actually, we think about a lot!” Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of
undergraduate education and an English professor, told me last fall. She was
one of several teachers who described an orientation toward the present, to the
extent that many students lost their bearings in the past. “The last time I
taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really
struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble
identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are
different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.”
Tara K. Menon, a junior professor who joined the
English faculty in 2021, linked the shift to students arriving at college with
a sense that the unenlightened past had nothing left to teach. At Harvard, as
elsewhere, courses that can be seen to approach an idea of canon, such as
Humanities 10, an intensive, application-only survey, have been the focus of
student concerns about too few Black artists in syllabi, or Eurocentric biases.
“There’s a real misunderstanding that you can come in
and say, ‘I want to read post-colonial texts—that’s the thing I want to
study—and I have no interest in studying the work of dead white men,’ ”
Menon said. “My answer, in the big first lecture that I give, is, If you want
to understand Arundhati Roy, or Salman Rushdie, or Zadie Smith, you have to
read Dickens. Because one of the tragedies of the British Empire”—she
smiled—“is that all those writers read all those books.”
For families recently arrived in the U.S., however,
literary study is not always the most urgent priority. One evening, I met a
student who graduated from Harvard in 2021 with a degree in molecular and
cellular biology and a minor in linguistics. Like Justin Kovach, she described
herself as an avid student of literature who never considered studying it in
depth.
“My parents, who were low-income and immigrants,
instilled in me the very great importance of finding a concentration that would
get me a job—‘You don’t go to Harvard for basket weaving’ was one of the things
they would say,” she told me. She was a member of the first generation in her
family to attend college—the sort of student that élite schools are at pains to
enroll. “So, when I came, I took a course that was, like, the hardest course
you could take your freshman year. It integrated computer science, physics,
math, chemistry, and biology. That course fulfilled a lot of the requirements
to be able to do molecular and cellular biology, so I finished that, for my
parents. I can get a job. I’m educated.”
She paused, then added, “I took courses in Chinese
film and literature. I took classes in the science of cooking. My issue as a
first-gen student is I always view humanities as a passion project. You have to
be affluent in order to be able to take that on and state, ‘Oh, I can pursue
this, because I have the money to do whatever I want.’ ” Nice work if you
can get it. “I view the humanities as very hobby-based,” she said.
One misty afternoon, a
Harvard junior named Henry Haimo took me for a walk down Dunster Street, and on
past Harvard’s red-brick upperclass dorms. Haimo had assumed the style of an
ageless Ivy Leaguer: glasses, a button-down, and an annihilated pair of chinos.
He decided to major in history after flirting with philosophy. “There’s an
incredible emphasis on ‘ethics’ in every field of study now,” he explained:
A.I. plus ethics, biology plus ethics. “And effective altruism”—a practice that
calls for acquiring wealth and disseminating it according to principles of
optimization and efficiency—“is a huge trend on campus, seeping into everything.
It has probably contributed to a good number of concentrators and secondaries
in the philosophy department.”
I asked Haimo whether there seemed to be a dominant
vernacular at Harvard. (When I was a student there, people talked a lot about
things being “reified.”) Haimo told me that there was: the language of
statistics. One of the leading courses at Harvard now is introductory
statistics, enrolling some seven hundred students a semester, up from ninety in
2005. “Even if I’m in the humanities, and giving my impression of something,
somebody might point out to me, ‘Well, who was your sample? How are you
gathering your data?’ ” he said. “I mean, statistics is everywhere. It’s
part of any good critical analysis of things.”
It struck me that I knew at once what Haimo meant: on
social media, and in the press that sends data visualizations skittering across
it, statistics is now everywhere, our language for exchanging
knowledge. Today, a quantitative idea of rigor underlies even a lot of
arguments about the humanities’ special value. Last school year, Spencer
Glassman, a history major, argued in a column for the student paper that
Harvard’s humanities “need to be more rigorous,” because they set no standards
comparable to the “tangible things that any student who completes Stat 110 or
Physics 16 must know.” He told me, “One could easily walk away with an A or
A-minus and not have learned anything. All the stem concentrators have this attitude that
humanities are a joke.”
Another of my student correspondents sent me a viral
TikTok post in which a fit young woman wearing short shorts sprinkler-danced around
her dorm room while the song “Twerkulator” played and stem-tastic slogans flashed across the screen.
“Do I like studying science or does it just fuel my god complex?” one read. “Am
I smart or was I just at a high reading level in elementary school?” Equivalent
humanities TikToks had a different energy. “I want to read philosophy while
listening to classical music with my glasses on my head,” one Harvard TikTok-er
for the humanistic cause enthused.
Haimo and I turned back toward Harvard Square. “I think
the problem for the humanities is you can feel like you’re not really going
anywhere, and that’s very scary,” he said. “You write one essay better than the
other from one semester to the next. That’s not the same as, you know, being
able to solve this economics problem, or code this thing, or do policy
analysis.” This has always been true, but students now recognized less of the
long-term value of writing better or thinking more deeply than they previously
had. Last summer, Haimo worked at the HistoryMakers, an organization building
an archive of African American oral history. He said, “When I was applying, I
kept thinking, What qualifies me for this job? Sure, I can research, I can
write things.” He leaned forward to check for passing traffic. “But those skills
are very difficult to demonstrate, and it’s frankly not what the world at large
seems in demand of.”
The assistant professor
Brandi Adams’s English 206: Introduction to Literary Studies met in one of
A.S.U.’s biology buildings. “It looks like a closet door,” she told me when
giving directions to the classroom. When I slipped in one morning,
Adams—salt-and-pepper hair worn in a high bun, glasses with translucent frames
gradually drifting down her nose—was surveying her students about the course
syllabus.
“We read ‘Beowulf.’ We read ‘Tears of the Trufflepig,’
by Fernando Flores. We read ‘The Roman Actor,’ by Philip Massinger. We read
sonnets by Shakespeare, Thomas Wyatt, Terrance Hayes, and Billy Collins,” she
said.
“We read ‘Persuasion,’ we read ‘Passing,’ we read
Victoria Chang’s banger poems ‘Mr. Darcy’ and ‘Edward Hopper’s
Office at Night,’ and we read ‘Uses of Literature,’ by Rita Felski. We also
watched the ‘Persuasion’ and ‘Passing’ Netflix adaptations.” She looked at the
group: nine students in the room, two remote, appearing on an A.V. system. “It
has given me the opportunity to think about what we did and didn’t like. I
think I might remove ‘Persuasion.’ What do you think? Keep it or ditch it?”
“I say ditch,” a student said.
“Should I substitute another Jane Austen novel?” Adams
asked.
“So everyone’s just, like, You picked the wrong one?”
Adams asked. She shrugged. “ ‘Persuasion’ is gone.”
Her approach reflects a wider effort at A.S.U. to meet
students in their interests. “Instead of a teacher telling you why it might be
relevant, but there doesn’t seem to be any connection to your lived experience,
I think it’s important to have every model of learning available to every
student,” Jeffrey Cohen, a butter-voiced, bearded man who has been the dean of
the humanities at A.S.U. since 2018, told me. On taking the position, he hired
a marketing firm, Fervor, to sell the humanities better. It ran a market survey
of eight hundred and twenty-six students.
“It was eye-opening to see their responses,” Cohen
said. “In general, they loved the humanities and rated them higher than their
other courses. However, they were unclear on what the humanities were—two
hundred and twenty-two thought that biology was a humanity.”
The students also had no idea which careers humanities
study led to, so Cohen decided to teach a course called Making a Career with a
Humanities Major. “One of the things the students do is choose a famous
humanities major and write about that person,” he said. “Many students are
first-generation and bringing the weight of their family tradition with them to
the classroom. If they know that someone like John Legend studied literature
and made a really great career, they’re, like, ‘O.K.!’ ” His office keeps
a growing list of famous people and pushes it, by e-mail, during the period
when students sign up for their courses.
In a quantitative society for which
optimization—getting the most output from your input—has become a self-evident
good, universities prize actions that shift numbers, and pre-professionalism
lends itself to traceable change. In 2019, two deans at Emory, Michael A.
Elliott and Douglas A. Hicks, received a $1.25-million grant from the
Mellon Foundation to create what they called the Humanities Pathways program,
focussed on career preparedness. (“Faculty learn to integrate into their
syllabi elements to make students conscious that what they’re learning will
help them with what potential employers are looking for,” Peter Höyng, a German-studies
professor who co-directs the program, told me.) It arranges Zoom seminars with
alumni to help show the way. Almost immediately, the program’s co-creators were
plucked up into bigger roles: last year, Elliott became the president of
Amherst College, and Hicks is now the president of Davidson.
“When I was a graduate student, in the nineties, the
New York Times ran a series of magazine stories about
major literary theorists, because they were seen as being central,” Elliott
told me from his new office. “Now they would be about people working in
artificial intelligence or natural-language processing.” Students have noticed
the change of focus. “They like being part of vibrant debate and
discussion—it’s one reason we continue to see strong enrollments around Black
studies,” Elliott said.
At A.S.U., the English department has been wondering
whether even to keep calling itself the English department. “More and more
students come to the discipline not necessarily to take courses in literature,”
Devoney Looser, a professor and an Austen scholar, told me. They’re curious
about creative writing, or media studies, or they follow other beacons. A few
hundred yards from the department’s building, which has only two classrooms of
its own, looms the business complex—two wings with terrazzo floors, sky
bridges, fountains, and wall placards that say things such as “vision: we transform the world”—and comparisons
are hard to avoid. “ ‘Branding’ makes a lot of people uncomfortable, and
English professors are not typically a group that embraces the marketplace,”
Looser said. “But this is a moment where we might be in a position to reimagine
ourselves.”
Some humanities departments at A.S.U. have gathered
into schools of loose affiliation, following a fashion for “unbundling,” or
breaking departmental barriers to let students mold study to their needs. “The
idealistic part is: Can we reach people who might otherwise not get any higher
education? The vulgar part is: Can we monetize the bits and pieces?” Catherine
O’Donnell, a history professor, said. “Everyone is going to be hoisted on this
petard, because, as we instrumentalize higher education, students question the
whole bundling of a B.A.: Is a college education ‘worth’ it? Is a humanities
degree ‘worth’ it? The humanities are going to be the little bird on the
hippo”—an afterthought trying to balance on other educational goals.
For many students, the humanities already are the
little bird. Tiffany Harmanian, a senior at A.S.U., is premed, with a
neuroscience major (“I come from a family of doctors—I’m Middle Eastern!” she
told me), but minors in English and founded a student organization called the
Medical Humanities Society. Growing up, she lived in novels and poetry. But it
hadn’t occurred to her to go all in as an English major while being premed.
“People involved in the humanities may not even need to go to school for what
they’re wanting to do,” she said; she didn’t see what studying “The Waste Land”
had to do with making it as a poet. “Also, because of the world we’re living
in, there’s this desperation for being able to make money at a young age and
retire at a young age,” she added.
I asked her what she meant.
“A lot of it has to do with us seeing—they call them
‘influencers’ online,” Harmanian said, pronouncing the word slowly for my
benefit. “I’m twenty-one. People my age have crypto. People have agents working
on their banking and trading. Instead of working nine to five for your
fifteen-dollar minimum wage, you can value your time.” She and her peers had
grown up in an age that saw the lie in working for the Man, so they were
charging out on their own terms. “It’s because our generation is a lot more
progressive in our thinking,” she told me.
For years in the United
States, high culture—or, more precisely, the idea of high culture—was kept
aloft with help from Cold War coffers. During the fifties and sixties, the
Congress for Cultural Freedom, a C.I.A.-backed anti-Communist organization,
notoriously funded literary and ideas magazines with sympathetic allegiances.
Other ventures were less direct. Beginning in the forties, the U.S. government
mounted exhibitions of American art, and the State Department later bankrolled
jazz tours overseas. The idea was: they don’t swing in Sovetsk.
It is hard to separate the effects of support for
cultural endeavors from the effects of increasingly widespread college
education. But, for years, there was little reason to. Through the second half
of the twentieth century, the opening up of the university to the outside world
and the work valued in that world aligned. Being able to appreciate a
Thelonious Monk record or a Miller play or the wild sprawl of a Pynchon novel
was a widely held objective. The concept of “the canon” is a mirage—there’s no
single list handed down from the mountain—but the idea of shared knowledge of
challenging art is powerful, and by mid-century it had been framed as a route to
upward mobility. The French sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude
Passeron coined the term “cultural capital” to define the inherited or acquired
cultural knowledge that makes movement and advancement easier in a field of
society, and by the sixties, in America, that kind of wealth was newly open for
the claiming. In 1962, Nichols and May, the aspirational university-humor act,
performed for President Kennedy alongside Marilyn Monroe. In 1964, “My Fair
Lady”—a verbally dense musical of transformation through upward
acculturation—grossed several times as much in cinemas as “A Hard Day’s Night.”
In other contexts, though, the government’s
investments could be seen as having backfired. Most institutional-opposition
movements of the past sixty years, from Vietnam protest to today’s
defund-the-police efforts, have been amplified on campuses. That’s partly
because fields like literature and history teach close, fact-based study and
critical analysis with the goal of pulling up the rug to understand what’s going
on beneath. When students graduate and seek changes in broader society, they
carry those practices with them. If they’re young, their language is still the
current language of the university, so the causes bounce back to professors and
students at a convivial angle. That feedback loop is partly how youth movements
grow.
Some scholars observe that, in classrooms today, the
initial gesture of criticism can seem to carry more prestige than the long
pursuit of understanding. One literature professor and critic at Harvard—not
old or white or male—noticed that it had become more publicly rewarding for
students to critique something as “problematic” than to grapple with what the
problems might be; they seemed to have found that merely naming concerns had more
value, in today’s cultural marketplace, than curiosity about what underlay
them. This clay-pigeon approach to inquiry struck her as a devaluation of all
that criticism—and art—can do.
Others, though, suggest that the humanities’ loss of
cultural capital has been hastened by the path of humanities scholarship
itself. One theory is that the critical practices have become too specialized.
Once, in college, you might have studied “Mansfield Park” by looking closely at
its form, references, style, and special marks of authorial genius—the way
Vladimir Nabokov famously taught the novel, and an intensification of the way a
reader on the subway experiences the book. Now you might write a paper about
how the text enacts a tension by both constructing and subtly undermining the
imperial patriarchy through its descriptions of landscape. What does this have
to do with how most humans read? Rita Felski, whose book “Uses of Literature”
is studied in Adams’s A.S.U. class, has argued that the professional practice
of scholarship has become self-defeatingly disdainful of moving literary
encounters. “In retrospect, much of the grand theory of the last three decades
now looks like the last gasp of an Enlightenment tradition of rois philosophes persuaded that the realm of
speculative thought would absolve them of the shameful ordinariness of a messy,
mundane, error-prone existence,” she wrote. “Contemporary critics pride
themselves on their power to disenchant.” The disenchantment, at least, has
reached students. When I was in college—not terribly long ago—a life in letters
seemed one of the lower ridges of Olympus. Speaking from a sample size of one,
I can report that a shift in perception is noticeable. At Harvard and A.S.U.,
several students inquired with furrowed brow about my prospects, whether I was
going to be O.K. Especially after years of grim stories about publishing, the
shine has come off.
Bring back the awe, some say, and students will
follow. “In my department, the author is very much alive!” Robert Faggen, a
Robert Frost scholar and a longtime literature professor at Claremont McKenna,
told me, to account for the still healthy enrollment he sees there. (There are
institutional outliers to the recent trend of enrollment decline; the most
prominent is U.C. Berkeley.) “We are very concerned with the beauty of things,
with aesthetics, and ultimately with judgment about the value of works of art.
I think there is a hunger among students for the thrill that
comes from truth and beauty.”
If this is so, the trail to studying truth and beauty
must still be blazed; it can’t come from walking backward. That’s challenging,
many scholars worry, without the national mandate that the humanities had fifty
years ago. “My big beef with the Obamas was that every sentence out of their mouth
was stem, stem, stem, stem—and then the arts, nothing in between,”
Ayanna Thompson, a Shakespeare scholar who directs A.S.U.’s Arizona Center for
Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the RaceB4Race conference series, told me.
“We never heard anything from Trump, and we’re not hearing anything from Biden,
either.”
One afternoon, I walked
across the Charles River, past the Harvard Business School, to Western Avenue,
where, two years ago, the university opened a
five-hundred-and-forty-four-thousand-square-foot Science and Engineering
Complex, which reportedly cost a billion dollars. Just inside the entrance, an
enormous painted wall display read “our research: tackling societal challenges.”
Placards noted that the complex, in the spirit of the Ark, could “maintain
critical research activities” during the grid loss and floods of a hundred-year
storm. I tapped a jumbo touch screen on a wall, and a keyboard appeared,
offering directions. I passed a digital triptych by the art collective breakfast, and hundreds of magnetic disks traced
my profile in a sequinlike cascade of mirrored light.
The new complex houses Harvard’s engineering,
bioengineering, computer-science, and data-science departments. In the basic
sense, it was conceived in 1997, when the university announced the acquisition
of fifty-two acres of land in the Boston neighborhood of Allston. But it wasn’t
until after Larry Summers became president, in 2001, that a vision for that
land was made public.
Summers imagined “the next Silicon Valley, with all
that it means and all that it brings,” with an emphasis on industrial
opportunities for biomedical research. In “Beyond the Ivory Tower” (1982),
Derek Bok, Harvard’s president through the seventies and eighties, had warned
about “commercial ventures” posing “dangers for the quality of research and
even for the intellectual integrity of the university itself.” At the time,
such doubts prevailed. When, in 1980, the gene-transcription pioneer Mark
Ptashne was induced to launch a bioengineering company from his professorship,
storm clouds rose around him. Summers’s appointment—like A.S.U.’s presidential
appointment, the following year, of the tech-policy specialist Michael
Crow—signalled an openness to business with the new global private sector. In
2004, Harvard hired a “chief technology development officer” to aid in the
commercialization of research. In 2010, Xi Jinping withdrew his only child from
college in China and enrolled her at Harvard—a gesture that affirmed the
university’s arrival as a hub of Swiss disinterest on the byways of industrial
diplomacy. In 2012, Harvard and M.I.T. founded edX, which markets branded
courses online. The university promotes its Science and Engineering Complex as
the “most significant new building constructed by Harvard in a generation.”
That was certainly the impression I got as I walked
through the complex’s eight floors and open hallways, arranged around a central
vault. The materials and the color palette suggested the space station in
“2001.” The ground floor, flecked with vivid-red Fritz Hansen swan chairs,
comprised classrooms, a state-of-the-art auditorium, and a workshop of
whizbangs and doodads called the Makerspace. Up some floating staircases, a
landing was arrayed with Ping-Pong and foosball tables and a snuggery of orange
Knoll womb chairs. One floor up from that, half a dozen Peloton bikes faced a
giant window overlooking a bioscience mural by the artist Sophy Tuttle. I
didn’t climb aboard and pedal in my jeans, as must have been the hope, in part
because I felt quite exercised already. Wandering the building’s hallways, a
proud dean told Harvard Magazine, is a six-mile walk.
On the top floor, I passed a student and a professor
in a hoodie talking about job placement at Toyota. I visited the complex’s
library, filled with volumes such as “The Metaverse: And How It Will
Revolutionize Everything.” Nearby, a row of large booths containing desks were
hung with yellow curtains ready to be whisked across for privacy, like the
partitions in a massage parlor. Sleek glass whiteboards lined the common
spaces, and the labs were glass-walled, too, affording passersby like me a
glimpse of dummy torsos draped in bionic garments, and prototypes for “a colony
of robotic bees.” I followed a gaggle of stem students to the ample gardens. As a
soft drizzle began to fall, I got on a zero-emissions shuttle blaring the
Talking Heads song “Wild Wild Life” and took a rollicking ride back to Harvard
Square. In school, I had been friendly to the sciences, but I had majored in
the humanities, and since then I’d never had a moment’s real regret. After half
an hour in this new complex, I was prepared to do it all again and choose the
interesting, vivifying life path of an engineer.
Students pick up on the emphasis. At the point when,
in 1996, the university opened a refurbished humanities building, humanities
enrollment was rising; now a new mandate is clear. “Harvard is spending a huge
amount of money on the engineering school,” a sophomore mechanical-engineering
major said at dinner in the dorms one evening. It was curry night in
Pforzheimer House, and a dozen students were chatting at a long table,
finishing their meals. “Mark Zuckerberg just gave another half billion dollars
for an A.I. and natural-intelligence research institute, and they added new professorships.
The money at Harvard—and a lot of other universities, too—is disproportionately
going into stem.” According to the Harvard Crimson, which conducts an annual survey,
more than sixty per cent of the members of the class of 2020 planning to enter
the workforce were going into tech, finance, or consulting.
“I think that the presence of big tech and consulting
firms on campus is a big part of people’s perception that you can’t get a job
in the humanities,” Hana, a senior in integrative biology, chimed in at the
table. “Google, Facebook, Deloitte, B.C.G. . . .” She shrugged
in exasperation. “They just have access to our campus in a really pervasive
way!” The first time she was buttonholed by a consulting firm was freshman
year.
For some, the idea that if
the prevailing interests can’t be beaten they can be joined is the natural next
step in opening up the university. In a bank-gray administrative building
called University Hall one morning, Harvard’s dean of arts and humanities,
Robin Kelsey, an art historian with a tidy tam of silvery hair, told me that
his hope was to “disaggregate what departments do” to match students’ interests
in the world beyond the gates. “Our departmental structure formed between 1890
and 1968,” he said. Since then, nothing had changed in departments, even as big
changes were under way in life. Outside the window, twin lampposts carried
banner portraits of alumnae in the sciences. “impact,” one said. “innovation,” said the other.
One idea about the national enrollment problem is that
it’s actually a counting problem: students haven’t so much left the building as
come in through another door. Adjacent fields aren’t included in humanities
tallies, and some of them are booming. Harvard’s history-of-science department
has seen a fifty-per-cent increase in its majors in the past five years. The
humanities creature who recites Cavafy at parties might fade away, but students
are still getting their vitamins. There’s a lot of ethics in bioethics, after
all.
Echoing the work at A.S.U., Kelsey regards the
drifting of humanities skills into other fields as the way of the future. (This
mixing has a pecuniary benefit, too: humanities deans like Kelsey and Cohen
rarely have first crack at big donations, so nesting their divisions’ doings in
the sciences and the social sciences can help with funding.) Instead of
determining majors by how professors organize themselves, why not also match
majors to topics that resonate in the current moment, like climate change and
racial justice? I wondered aloud whether that was a moving target—the concerns
in our headlines today are different from those fifteen years ago—but Kelsey
insisted that some causes were here to stay. “I would like to see us come out
with better platforms for studying the environmental humanities, migration and
ethnicity, and the medical humanities,” he said.
And the techie-fuzzy collaborations have good models.
One afternoon, I visited the chair of Harvard’s comparative-literature
department, Jeffrey Schnapp, who is involved in Kelsey’s disaggregation.
Schnapp, a shaved-headed man with a trim gray Vandyke and two small rings in
his left ear, sat me at a round table in an office filled with
industrial-design artifacts. “I always thought that the models of the
humanities that we inherited were open for expansion and innovation,” he said.
Behind him, in a corner, lay several trophies from his years racing motorcycles
on the West Coast.
Schnapp was a Dante scholar and, as a young professor,
had helped lead the Dartmouth Dante Project, a vast textual database that was
an early triumph of the so-called digital humanities. At Stanford, where he
taught from 1985 to 2009, he founded the Stanford Humanities Lab, in part to
apply computational techniques to literary and historical study. When Harvard
brought him East, he founded a version of it called metaLAB—a project that he
saw as true to his scholarly origins. “Medieval literary culture was not
‘literary’ in the way that we understood it in the nineteenth century, when
printing became an industry. It was polychrome,” Schnapp said.
To show what he meant, he picked up a brightly colored
paperback, which he co-wrote, called “The Electric Information Age Book.” “This
is a book on the history of experimental paperbacks, like Marshall McLuhan’s
‘The Medium Is the Massage,’ ” he said, and leafed through, revealing
pages of wild typefaces and pictures. Another volume he had co-written used
“little microessays connected to the future of libraries and library furnishings,”
and was published with a deck of playing cards. “ ‘Making’ can mean
writing books, but it can also involve other forms, such as building software
platforms infused with values from the humanities,” he said, and flipped over
the bottom card.
To fund metaLAB, Schnapp has had to be strategic about
adapting projects to what he called “research incentives”—though the techie
cast of his work helped. “There’s no commensurability of scale between the
National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities,” he
said. They weren’t even close. “A friend of mine likes to point out that the
total budget of the N.E.H. is the same budget as just the Vienna State Opera.”
In 1980, on average, state
funding accounted for seventy-nine per cent of public universities’ revenue. By
2019, that figure was fifty-five per cent, and governors such as Ron DeSantis,
in Florida, are applying new pressure for funding cuts. Confronted with those
shortfalls, public universities have two options. They can strip down
academics, and face what that diminishment leads to. Or they can run to the
market and surf its waves.
Because the state of Arizona cut higher-education
funding by more than half between 2008 and 2019, A.S.U. has gone the market
route. It invested in its online education, which gained prestige when the
school figured out how to give remote students credited laboratory time. (The
solution was a system of intensive camps designed by Ara Austin, an assistant
professor who took college courses online after a traffic accident and later
chafed at such programs’ second-tier, cash-cow status.) Diplomas are the same
whether earned online or on site, and the extra tuition, plus donor funds,
fills A.S.U.’s sails. In 2007, the university received twenty-eight per cent of
its operating budget from the state; last year, it was only nine per cent, for
a budget of $4.6 billion. “We are operating in full enterprise modality,” the
president, Michael Crow, announced. To put it differently: many of the greatest
American public universities increasingly run as private businesses.
A side effect of A.S.U.’s remote-learning boom has
been improvement in its humanities numbers. On paper, the number of English
majors at A.S.U. has grown, even as the number of students in English classrooms
has dropped. Several professors insisted to me that they really, truly felt no
preference for online or on-site students—but that they did notice a difference
in the demographics of who showed up onscreen.
“These are people in their thirties and forties who
have been stay-at-home parents, or they work. And they are committed to the humanities—they have an idea
about the value of liberal-arts education,” Ayanna Thompson, the A.S.U. English
professor, told me. Partly, it was a cohort thing, given that the older
students represent the views of older generations. But it was also a matter of
life experience. The university has a partnership with Starbucks, which pays
for its baristas to earn bachelor’s degrees online (a recruitment tool for the
coffee company and a revenue source for the school), and what someone who has
been in the grind of life wants to learn most isn’t necessarily linear algebra.
“Personally, I love my English major, and it really
bums me out when ninety per cent of the people I talk to have input that’s
negative!” McKenna Nelson, who enrolled remotely at A.S.U. while working at a
Starbucks in Southern California, said. “I don’t think life should revolve
around money—I’d rather go to work happy.” (She wants to teach.)
Surprisingly, many in the future biz concur. A funny
thing about the market mentality, they note, is that it knows only what’s
judged to have future value right now. Career studies have shown that
humanities majors, with their communication and analytical skills, often end up
in leadership jobs. To that extent, the value of the educated human touch is
likely to hold in a storm of technological and cultural change.
“Imagine if you had a voice assistant that could write
code for you, and you said, ‘Hey, Alexa, build me a Web site to sell
shoes,’ ” Sanjay Sarma, a professor of mechanical engineering at M.I.T.,
told me on the phone. (Immediately, he pulled the receiver away to rebuff a
device in the room: “Shut up, Alexa! No! No!”) “That’s already happening. It’s
called ‘low-code.’ ” There has been much hand-wringing about ChatGPT and
its ability to replicate some composition tasks. But ChatGPT can no more
conceive “Mrs. Dalloway” than it can guide and people-manage an organization.
Instead, A.I. can gather and order information, design experiments and
processes, produce descriptive writing and mediocre craftwork, and compose
basic code, and those are the careers likeliest to go into slow eclipse.
“I think the future belongs to the humanities,” Sarma
said.
In a fit of inspiration or desperation,
the Harvard English department has started handing out tote bags with slogans
such as “currently reading” printed on them. (“They’re
trying,” a senior told me.) The department has set up alumni panels, and
embraced change. As of this year, it is possible to receive a degree in English
from Harvard without taking a course dedicated to poetry. There are plentiful
offerings in creative writing—in the age of the “maker economy,” the idea goes,
students want to send material into the world—and forays into new media.
Stephen Greenblatt, one of the highest-ranking humanities professors by the
stripes and badges of the trade, told me that he’d come to think that literary
students had a future somewhere other than the page.
“It happens that we do have a contemporary form of
very deep absorption of the kind comparable to literary study,” he said. We
were sitting in his paper-piled office. “And that is long-form television. ‘The
Wire,’ ‘Breaking Bad,’ ‘Chernobyl’—there are dozens of these now!” He rocked back
to rest his feet on the edge of his desk. “It’s a fantastic invention.”
Greenblatt popped open a green egg of Silly Putty and
began to knead it vigorously. For a moment, he seemed lost in thought.
“ ‘Better Call Saul,’ ” he added.
He liked to think of Shakespeare reading “Don
Quixote,” in 1612, and marvelling at this new narrative form: the novel! So it
was today, with “Better Call Saul.” He wondered whether literature departments
should do more with TV.
And yet the blissful English students whom I talked
to—there were many—surprised me with their indifference to the things that
grownups higher in the food chain said they wanted. Ashley Kim, a junior, had
been an intended economics major with a falling-asleep-in-class problem. When
she kept emerging happy and alert from Tara Menon’s 9 a.m. City Fictions course, she switched to
English. “It isn’t just people trying to learn something to get a job,” she
explained.
Jeffrey Kwan, a physics and mathematics major down the
hall from Kim, takes one English class a semester. “I get so much out of
English because it’s the professor telling you what they thought about the
work, as opposed to skills you have to learn,” he said. But he would never
major in it, he told me, because he felt underqualified. “I try to figure out
when to insert myself into the discussion.”
Kim concurred. “When I first joined the English
department, I felt seen, but I also felt, Maybe I don’t belong,” she said.
She’d gone to a magnet public school in New Jersey and felt a step behind the
sanguine private-school kids in knowing how to perform her interest in the
classroom.
That kind of sorting is often invisible at first. “It
definitely is a very specific community in the humanities,” Rebecca Cadenhead,
an upperclassman from Westchester County, told me. “People in this group are
usually from the Northeast, are usually upper middle class, are usually white,
honestly, and are a certain way.” That way had a fashion element: chunky
statement shoes (Doc Martens, Blundstones), baggy trousers (mostly Carhartt),
and vintage sweaters. “There are many people of color and many low-income
people in the humanities, but in general it’s people with that vibe, and we all
know each other.”
Cadenhead started out in applied mathematics—she’d
been urged toward science in high school—but ended up a philosophy major,
adding African American studies for fear that “the philosophy department would
not have as many nonwhite thinkers.” Yet she worried that her path remained
illegible outside the Blundstone circle. And, for students of color, it seemed
to her, the weight of being judged less academic for studying the humanities
was multiplied. “Sometimes I have a concern that when people are encountering
me they might assume that I’m here because of affirmative action,” she said. “A
lot of people of color here at least initially gravitate towards the sciences,
because they think they’ll be perceived as more intelligent if they do.”
It is only slightly awkward, then, that this opening
of the field has nudged educational incentives away from humanities study. The
students whom universities most seek are the ones likeliest to require
immediate conversion of their degrees into life change. They need the socioeconomic elevator that college
promised them. And they need it the instant they lose institutional support.
During the postwar swell of public funding for
education, conveyances picked up humanities students right where their B.A.
diplomas left them: they could go to graduate school, and on to a stable,
rewarding career in teaching and writing; or they could leave the academy for
arts-and-letters careers plainly valued by society and at least remunerative
enough to sustain a modest middle-class life. Today, the academic profession of
the humanities is a notoriously haywire career track, with Ph.D. programs
enrolling more students than there are jobs, using them for teaching, and then,
years later, sending them off with doctoral gowns and no future in the
discipline. (In 2020, the Survey of Earned Doctorates found that less than half
of new arts and humanities Ph.D.s graduated with a job—any job—and the odds are
vanishing even with élite credentials: of fifteen people who began Princeton’s
English Ph.D. program in 2012, only two have landed on a tenure track.)
Although the public-funding arc and the university-opening arc once grew in
happy parallel, intensifying the value of humanistic cultural capital while
expanding access to it, those curves have now crossed.
It also happens that low-access or first-generation
college students are likeliest to be underrepresented in, and nudged toward, stem fields. If they do wander into a
humanities course when they arrive, they can feel—like Kim—that the milieu is
red-shifted away from them. A telling data point here is one of the most
seemingly promising. Humanities enrollment is down among bachelor’s, master’s,
and doctoral students, but it is increasing among students seeking two-year
associate’s degrees. And it is increasing among high-school students taking
A.P. courses. High schoolers, in fact, now take over twenty per cent more
humanities A.P. tests than tests in stem every year. The loss of humanities
numbers isn’t happening in the collegiate pipeline, in other words. It is
happening when these students walk through the university gates.
Robert Townsend, the co-director of the Humanities
Indicators, attributed the drop-off to acceleration tracks themselves—another
tool designed to help low-access students. Smart humanities-oriented kids are
taking the A.P.s, or studying English or history at community college, so, by
the time they make it to four-year colleges, they’ve placed out of humanities
requirements: classes in which students often fall in love with the field. In
that way, too, students whom the universities are keenest to recruit are
pre-sorted away from the humanities. And, for global students, the incentives
are more acute.
Sazi Bongwe, a Harvard freshman from Johannesburg,
collaborated with three friends in high school during the pandemic on a
magazine called Ukuzibuza. On arriving in Cambridge, he had to
consider that the F1 visa, for international students, allows for a stay of a
year in the U.S. after graduation—except for majors in a stem field, in which case one year of grace
becomes three. Bongwe had come to Harvard with thoughts of a humanities major.
But, like several international students with whom I spoke, he worried that the
choice would be naïve.
“Am I just putting myself in a position where, in four
years’ time, I’m going to be earning significantly less money than people I
went to school with?” he asked. For students maintaining ties to countries with
struggling economies—where the dollar goes far, and where their arrival at
places like Harvard or A.S.U. carries the hopes of their communities—the moral
and financial calculi are more than personal.
In previous eras, these pressures were counterbalanced
by investment in the culture of the humanities. Now universities increasingly
depend on the markets and their short-term goals. In Harvard Square one
afternoon, I met Saul Glist, a tall history-and-literature major. Glist had
been drawn toward his field, he said, because in his humanities classes he felt
less like a student absorbing information and more like a young thinker. If he
didn’t keep seeing statistics about the humanities crisis, he’d never have
known it existed, he told me.
“I think it’s really a question of what the university
is investing in,” Glist said. “When you’re telling touring students, ‘This is
our shiny new building that is the jewel of our expanding campus,’ and are
making no visible investments in the humanities, that creates a narrative.” He
believed that universities were all too happy to accept plummeting humanities
enrollments, because the story of decline created its own vortex—one that drew
away duties that the university, in its present pursuit of growth and revenue,
might prefer not to deal with.
Some have resigned themselves. “The age of Anglophilia
is over,” one late-career English professor told me. “It’s like thinking back
to when Latin was the center of the world—the memorization of lines and
competing with your friends at Oxford and Eton in quips.” The great age of
the novel had served a cloistered, highly regionalized readership, but that,
too, had changed. “I don’t think reading novels is now the only way to have a
broad experience of the varieties of human nature or the ethical problems that
people face,” he said.
But Glist resisted the narrative of diminishment. “The
question we should be asking is not whether the humanities have any role in our
society or the university in fifty or a hundred years!” he exclaimed. “It’s
what do investments in the humanities look like—and what kind of ideal future
can we imagine?”
Not long ago, Justin
Kovach, the A.S.U. senior studying data science, decided to apply to graduate
school in literature. “It would be really cool to study English literature really
specifically,” he told me one afternoon. “I thought about creative writing, but
I think I’d rather do literature.”
At A.S.U., in the humanities division, there have been
some early signs of real improvement. The number of majors on campus was slightly
increasing after almost a decade of near-constant decline. Jeffrey Cohen had
the pleasure of seeing his marketing campaign begin to bear fruit. “I do wonder
if it’s because students got more involved in humanities during covid,” he told me. But, just to be sure, a new
interdisciplinary major would start in the fall: Culture, Technology, and
Environment. “Those are the three things that young people always have on their
minds,” he explained.
Suzzanne Bigelow, one of Brandi Adams’s students in
English 206, met me at a café after class one day to report on her work. She
had started college as a psychology major on a volleyball scholarship, but felt
lost. “I was doing an application for a Hispanic scholarship, and one of the
questions was ‘Where do you see yourself in ten years?’ ” she said. “And I
was, like, I don’t know.”
Last year, she started fresh, as an English major. “My
future dream career would be to be a novelist,” she said, then added, “I
haven’t told that to anyone yet.” Her favorite novel is “Things Fall Apart,” by
Chinua Achebe, but recently she was reading “The Human Stain,” by Philip Roth,
and it inspired her to try something of her own.
“He’s an amazing writer, and I feel like, How am I
going to be in comparison to that?” Bigelow told me. “Which is obviously
unfair, because he’s one of the greatest American novelists, and who am I? Just
some English major at A.S.U.” She looked at me slyly, then glanced away. “But
I’ve been practicing more by myself. And I don’t know. You never know what’s a
possibility,” she said. ♦
Published in the print edition of the March 6, 2023, issue.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2402.21 - 10:10
- Days ago = 3155 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
No comments:
Post a Comment