Dispatches From the Trenches of World War Humanities

HUMANITIES MAJORS ARE DECLINING…SOME CALL IT THE END OF THE LIBERAL ARTS. IS THE WAR ALREADY LOST? OR ARE WE FIGHTING THE WRONG BATTLES?

Every week there’s a new headline proclaiming the “death of the English major,” one of many humanities majors that has been slowly circling the drain of higher education. Some writers suggest there’s an element of social Darwinism at work, since if students decide that a course of study doesn’t prepare them for the future — a future that is increasingly inhuman and bleak — then why have students and their parents pay to support it? After all, who needs to read and discuss the masterpieces of world literature if all you’re going to do after college is work 75 hours to pay off a truckload of debt so you can dream of doing all the things (buying a house, starting a family) that previous generations did by default? Does anyone really pay their bills with the fruits of a humanities major on their transcripts? Or is it just a liberal scam to keep Marxist professors tenured and in control of the Socialist agenda? (tee-hee).

Nathan Heller’s recent New Yorker article, “The End of the English Major” offers some thought-provoking examples from the trenches of World War Humanities, profiling students and faculty alike. One such example comes from the prolific author and professor, James Shapiro, who admits the following: “Technology in the last twenty years has changed all of us,” he went on. “How has it changed me? I probably read five novels a month until the two-thousands. If I read one a month now, it’s a lot. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in fiction. It’s because I’m reading a hundred Web sites. I’m listening to podcasts.”

In other words, people no longer take in information the way we used to. We have more efficient, streamlined ways to process the world around us. No more newspapers, magazines, or books; now we scroll through our phones or half-listen to podcasts. Now more than ever, there just seems to be so much to know and experience, with more and more downloads streaming every day. Hell, there are entire podcasts dedicated to all the podcasts we should be listening to. Even James Shapiro is losing sleep over it!

Humorously, his quote reminds me of what a student once told me when they couldn’t finish the assigned reading: “After working for eight hours I had to hang out with my friends, play video games, finish my Netflix series, and then it was time for bed. I just didn’t have time to read the book!”

In one sense, Shapiro and Heller suggest the problem lies with technology’s transformation of the attention span. Even at the movies — not the theater or opera, mind you — you see people whipping out their phones and scrolling through their feed, ignoring the gorgeous cinematic experience they’ve paid good money for. If people can’t sit through a two-hour long movie which makes few demands on their intellect to begin with, how can they be asked, as students, to wade through a 200-page novel, or God forbid, something like Moby Dick or Anna Karenina? We’ve been trained to listen and read in miniature, skimming for content rather than reading for enjoyment.

And maybe that’s the real problem that Shapiro is trying to highlight: that we’ve learned to read solely for information rather than art. Reading has ceased to become an aesthetic pursuit that leads to wisdom and understanding and needs to be experience and enjoyed slowly, over time. Who has time to do that now? It’s onto the next podcast and tweet!

Of course, there’s one problem with this otherwise accurate assessment, which lies in the nature of reading itself. Haven’t we always read shallowly or, in many cases, not at all? In my own generation, teachers lamented that we were all but illiterate, since we spent our every waking moment watching MTV and playing Atari or Nintendo. Who remembers growing up in the 70’s and 80’s? Back then, few of my friends owned any books, since reading was largely abandoned at childhood, except for the odd comic book or Mad magazine. Personally, I read TONS of comics, one after another, and then re-read my favorites. But would my English teachers have called that reading? Couldn’t they make Shapiro’s argument that learning to read in bite-sized boxes would forever ruin me for appreciating the endless, static pages of full-text novels? Could I possibly survive in a world without colorful images and hyperactive cartoons? (hint: I did just fine, and I continue to read both books and comic books to this day).

To be sure, there are even more podcasts and feeds than they were network TV shows and cartoons and comics back in the day. But that’s all relative, since it felt like we had untold riches back then, too many channels, too many comics to choose from. The point being that we had every excuse to flip on the TV instead of finding a well-worn book from the shelf. The only big difference I see between now and then is much more surprising: whether or not we read shallowly or deeply, we are reading MORE than ever before. The average student in my first-year classes spends a good chunk of every day reading. Sure, they’re reading texts, and web feeds, and watching Tik Toks or Instragam videos (some more literate than our 1980’s TV habits), but still, it’s more reading than most of my generation engaged in.

Even more surprisingly, they’re writing non-stop. Again, I know, it’s just texts and comments to videos and posts, but what kind of writing were we doing willingly in 1984? I don’t remember writing anything outside of school ever. The average student has written several novels or short stories’ worth of texts by the time they enroll in college. Whether or not we would want to read these novels and stories for enjoyment — much less for wisdom — it’s still better than writing on the bathroom wall (which was the message board of choice in 1984). Seriously, could anyone in 1984 have possibly predicted that the chief source of recreation for teenagers in 2023 would be reading and writing to their friends and strangers?! My god, what kind of sci-fi utopia would that be? Certainly not Orwell’s 1984!

Unfortunately, despite this optimistic assessment, the numbers speak for themselves. Students are by and large NOT majoring in English or the humanities like they used to. Is it ironic that the more we read and write, the less inclined we are to major in fields that not only require, but celebrate these very activities? As Tanner writes in his article:

“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…“We feel we’re on the Titanic,” a senior professor in the English department told me.”

What can possibly account for this dramatic dip in humanities majors, which certainly goes beyond Harvard to encompass every school in the US? Even at my own college, I’ve watched the number of English majors bounce up and down, though each ‘up’ cycle is less lofty than the previous one, which each ‘down’ cycle dips just a bit lower. The explanations are naturally bound up in a complex web of social anxieties, political identities, and religious fundamentalism. Those who champion traditional American values (whatever those are) remain suspicious of the ‘liberal arts,’ with their emphasis on liberal education, the open exchange of ideas, and of course, subject matter that pushes against what some people consider decent and proper.

Of course, this is nothing new: parents have always wanted their kids to be lawyers and doctors rather than anything to do with the arts. And students, generally, are all-too happy to defy the older generations’ values and expectations. So it can’t be public disapproval alone, or even the media’s attempts to downplay the pay-off factor of the humanities in our ever-decreasing job market. Again, if that were the case, who would have ever majored in Art or English in the Great Depression?

One professor in his article offers the hypothesis that today’s students simply can’t read the sentence structure of old books; it reads like ancient Greek to them, so they give up, or see it as hopelessly outdated. If this is true, then how did the 1980’s generation of comic-book reading, video-game playing metal heads get through college at all? When I went to college, I only had a handful of novels under my belt, as my stomach was crammed with decades’ worth of pop-culture confections. By my waist size alone, I shouldn’t have been able to digest anything my professors offered me, from Shakespeare to Jane Austen. And yet, those authors became two of my favorites, and after a short learning curve, I learned to read, interpret, and more importantly, appreciate literature than was generations and centuries older than anyone I had ever met.

While there are always students who will be more resistant than others (and I was pretty anxious to learn, thanks in part to all my comic book training), you can’t argue that an entire generation is unable to read and appreciate stories. More likely, the problem rests with teachers who are unwilling to find new ways to reach these students, or who simply don’t want to teach (a very common ailment among elite university professors, such as Harvard).

The more pressing issue is stated clearly by a first-generation student in the article: “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.”

And there you have it: the Humanities are seen as a “hobby,” something you do in your spare time, for fun, whereas the real majors (that get you work), are the ones that are not fun, but make you really sweat. But hey, as Babbit says in Sinclair Lewis’ eponymous novel, (paraphrasing, as I don’t have the novel at hand), “I’ve never done a thing I wanted to in my entire life.” So why should college students?

Is that really the meaning of life? Enjoyment be damned, I need a job in something I hate? (hyperbole here, since I know many people love the STEM fields as well). Are the humanities simply fun but not feasible? Luxuries for loveable loafers, but otherwise, irrelevant to those who need to hustle for a piece of the ever-vanishing pie? This is a fair criticism, since no student takes a class in, say, Shakespeare’s Tragedies and thinks, “okay, I know exactly how I can use this on the job market.” The humanities, and English in particular, get such a bad rap because they’re not tied to an immediate job or career in a 1:1 ratio. Rather, we should think of English more like 1:1,001, meaning that the skills, ideas, and experiences you learn in English and humanities courses are relatable to hundreds if not thousands of jobs, trades, and lifestyles beyond the leafy quad.

Let’s consider another perspective on the humanities, this time from David Denby, a famous writer and film critic, who also wondered if the Humanities’ time had passed. In comfortable middle age, he decided to take a ‘Great Books’ course at Columbia University since they were one of the few colleges still requiring them in their general education curriculum (this was in 1996). Most universities had already moved on and were making the Great Books, and indeed, the entire survey of Western literature and art optional, one of many possible dishes offered up on a grand buffet (but which those who professed literary veganism could avoid). Denby’s goal was to see how the university presented these works for a then-modern, and largely indifferent audience, and if these time-worn works still held value at the dawn of the 21st century.

One of the first things he noticed through his reading and discussions is how uniquely tailored these classes are for the eighteen and nineteen year-olds who enroll in them. This is a pretty bold claim, especially when the 1996 curriculum focused on the pillars of Western civilization such as Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Hume, Neitzsche, Conrad, and Woolf. As he writes,

“Lit Hum was a training in sensibility, which meant, inevitably, that some of the books called out to aspects of the students’ temperament that had not yet been developed…They had been stranded by a culture that marginalized art, splitting it off from entertainment and consigning it to a small, lonely corner. But if they were lucky, their “errors,” corrected, or at least challenged, would serve as the ground of understanding and even as an opening to a larger life. If they were lucky, they would get a liberal education.”

This quote is almost a direct response to the first-generation student in Heller’s article. In 1996, and in 2023, literature has been “[split] off from entertainment and [consigned]…to a small, lonely corner.” On the one hand, it’s seen as a hobby, something you do when you’re not going to work; but on the other, it’s not seen as entertainment at all, since it’s, well, hard work. It takes skill and discipline to read works of literature, which is why most people don’t head to the beach with a copy of The Iliad in tow.

So which is it? Are the humanities fun and frivolous, or difficult and depressing? At the end of the day, books are books. One person’s beach read is another person’s required reading. Indeed, what makes English departments so relevant today is how they can incorporate all manner of texts and media into a curriculum that is less about what you read, than how you read it. For that reason, the typical English major is just as likely to survive on a diet of Shakespeare, Austen, Stanley Kubrick, Art Spiegelman, Twilight and Taylor Swift. Whether or not we see all of these works as equal or rigorous is beside the point; what IS important is that we can approach them all with the same rigor and critical thought. Art isn’t a genre, nor is literature, when ANYTHING can high or low, art or pop, and everything in-between.

To return to Denby’s quote, English is a “training in sensibility,” that old eighteenth-century term which means to invoke the deeper, finer emotions, those which shape morals and character, as well as personality. In Austen’s Mansfield Park (1816), Henry Crawford, a frivolous lady’s man, learns to value the rather homely heroine, Fanny Price, because she possesses more than beauty, sensibility. As Austen writes,

“It was a picture which Henry Crawford had moral taste enough to value. Fanny’s attractions increased — increased twofold — for the sensibility which beautified her complexion and illumined her countenance, was an attraction in itself. He was no longer in doubt of the capabilities of her heart. She had feeling, genuine feeling. It would be something to be loved by such a girl, to excite the first ardours of her young, unsophisticated mind! She interested him more than he had foreseen.”

How many students today are taught to have “feeling, genuine feeling” for anything? Sure, some do, as they pursue passions in athletics, or music, or art. Yet when I look out into a first-year classroom, a majority of the students appear to be sleepwalking through life, unable to muster much enthusiasm for anything of the mind or spirit. And yet, true passion — for ourselves, and for others — comes through cultivating a deeper part of ourselves, most often discovered when we respond to the world around us, contemplate the beauties and horrors of existence, and feel profoundly alive. It’s the reason we love thrill rides, horror movies, storm chasing, and falling in love. That’s what life’s all about, right?

So why aren’t students majoring in English? After all, English, in particular, confronts you with endless opportunities to encounter the sublime (the fear and love and beauty) through art, and through it, to find your own sensibility in response to an ancient poem or pop song. Isn’t the purpose of art to walk in step with a total stranger, feeling their joys and sorrows as your own? Isn’t that the great wonder of books, to make you live a dozen lives in the space of an afternoon?

This is what makes it so difficult to ‘sell’ English to prospective students and to society in general. Being educated is more than just answers and trivia, data and dates. Education, at its core, is self-knowledge; how you identify yourself in relation to the world and ideas around you. Or to use another definition, education is a conversation since it requires more than one person to make it ‘speak.’ We find ourselves through talking to others, listening to their words, and forming our own responses (which are as much theirs as ours). Everything we are is the sum total of what we’ve heard, read, and spoken. In this sense, English (in particular) is a discipline that makes us who we are. It’s a degree in sensibility, in shaping the individual consciousness, in learning how we know who we are…and inevitably, if we’re really sure we are that person. And if not, who else can we be?

This is another beautiful point Denby makes in his book — which is called Great Books, by the way. As he explains it,

“That was the beauty of such survey courses…You read a persuasive argument and it filled your mind; you becamean adherent of that text, swelling with it, enlarged by that implacably correct way of looking at the world — for a week. You were a rationalist, an empiricist, a skeptic, a Hegelian, a Marxist. Taking one identity after another, you were, for a while, blissfully irresponsible. No one would burn you at the stake for the wrong opinion or for false enthusiasms…Out of this early promiscuity, if you were smart and disciplined, would come something like intellectual experience and readiness for more.”

Clearly, this affirms everything certain groups fear when they send their children to college. What, they’ll become a Marxist? A Hegelian?? One identity after the other? What’s wrong with the one they have? It seems insufferably naïve to expect students to go into college (or a job, or into life itself) the same person they went in as. How would that even be possible? Experience changes us, conversations change us, people change us, books change us, and the sum total of all of these, life changes us. College just takes this assumption and runs with it. Why not give students the chance to encounter these important, transformative ideas in society and give them a trial run? What would it be like to think like Marx and Hegel? Or Shakespeare? Or Virginia Woolf? As he says, “Out of this early promiscuity, if you were smart and disciplined, would come something like intellectual experience and readiness for more.”

In other words, the goal of so many of the liberal arts is to prepare you for a lifetime of gradual transformation. This isn’t to say that you have to abandon your faith, divorce your parents, or move to a foreign land. It merely suggests that you are still in a process of growing, and the more people you read, the more you experience intellectually, the more of yourself you can find and know. That’s why (most) English courses keep the old books alive, since they have proved invaluable for the process of self-knowledge and transformation (it worked for James Joyce and Tony Morrison, after all). At the same time, English departments are expanding their definitions of cultural identity through works of other ethnicities, cultures, lands, and forms/genres. After all, even though Shakespeare said a lot, he can’t tell the entire story by himself (and he wasn’t trying to). That’s why an ‘English’ education is in multiple languages, in print and non-print media, and includes forms that were once consigned to the low-culture dustbin (I knew reading all those comics would come in handy one day!).

In short, few students know who they are by the time they reach college, nor should they. And as high school becomes more and more dominated by standardized tests and other forms of assessment, there is less opportunity to have the transformative experiences that cultivate a student’s sensibility. Increasingly that burden is falling on college. In my experience, at least, college was the first time I was trusted to read a book on my own (as opposed to just reading aloud in the classroom) and returning with my own ideas and perspectives. It was the first time I was actually listened to (as opposed to just being guided to the right answer), and the first time I was taught to listen to others. I began to have strong ideas about books, culture, and history, not merely because I dreamed them up, but because I was actively debating with other students who were encountering these books at the same time as I was. In essence, we were building ourselves piece by piece in real time, collaboratively, even though we had the illusion of working alone.

This relates to one more idea from Danby’s book: that reading, whether alone or in a classroom, is an active, physical experience. This is certainly how it felt to him, as a forty-something working his way through the undergraduate literary curriculum, book by book, class by class. As he explains,

“Sitting alone and reading Boccaccio or Rousseau is a physical act. I’m reading something besides journalism, and I feel better, so my pulse rate drops; I feel relaxed and at the same time tensed, but tensed in a different way, struggling to understand, to take it all in. I respond physically. Physical and mental activity are never separate. There is not such thing as being “too cerebral” or “too physical” but only different degrees of courage, grace, intelligence, and wit.”

This is an important and oft-overlooked point: that “physical and mental activity are never separate.” This goes back to the idea that the humanities are a “hobby” whereas the STEM fields are a “job.” Mental activity may actually be more strenuous than physical work, even though our culture likes to scoff at the idea. And yet, look how readily we play sports and exercise vs. how desperately people avoid books and all forms of education. Despite all the media coverage on fat, unhealthy Americans, I think they’re slightly overstating the point. On an average day, I see people jogging, riding their bikes, going to the gym, powerwalking, skating, etc. I never see anyone outside reading a book. Or on their porch. Or in a library (indeed, the libraries have most people sitting at computers nowadays). So if intellectual work is so easy and passive, just a walk in the park, why are people so unwilling to do it?

The easy answer is that they’re lazy and undisciplined, which I don’t entirely agree with. Everyone is undisciplined before they learn how to do something correctly, and laziness is relative to your health and mood. The larger problem is that we simply don’t realize that education is an activity that is constant, and doesn’t end with a graduation ceremony or a diploma. We often hear people tout ‘life-long learning,’ but it’s usually just lip-service, something to say at a graduation to students who are no longer paying attention. Yet this is what the humanities and English really prepares you for: learning as a skill and a vocation. As silly as this might sound to some, all students are majoring in the same field; the distinctions are just gravy.

This really pisses a lot of students off, since they tell you that they’re paying good money and going into debt to become a nurse or a lawyer or an engineer. In a sense they’re right, college is the first step to becoming one or all of those professions. Of course, the skills required to become a successful nurse or lawyer or engineer usually have to be learned on the job, in a very specific context and environment. But how can you do that if you’ve never learned to read a book like you’re reading yourself? Education has to be more than a handful of equations you scrawled on your arm to pass an exam, or the way you arrange desks in a classroom, or what kind of learner you are. Education is an act of humility and self-reflection, discovered in conversation with hundreds and thousands of fellow scholars, not just in your college but throughout the world, in 2023 and in the decades and centuries before you ever existed.

So while it’s true that English departments are declining all across the country, and humanities programs are being mothballed for a future utopia, it’s not for the reasons we think. It’s not because the humanities are less relevant or less crucial to our 21st century experience. Technology doesn’t change our humanity, it just changes the tools and the interface. Take our current media darling, Chat GPT: for all its sophistication, the AI can’t invent new stories or plotlines. It’s the same old stories, cobbled together from the old classics, mimicking their trademark tone and mannerisms. Even if we go on to colonize another planet, we’ll bring the Earth and our homespun humanity with us, transplanting Romeo and Juliet on Mars, or The Tempest on Titan.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the same society which is arguing for the irrelevance of the humanities curriculum, is the same one that is facing an unprecedented climate crisis, and is largely choosing to ignore it. And a hundred years from now, when society is in shambles and so many great cities are uninhabitable, people will ask, “how could we have known? Who was there to warn us?” I’m sure many of them will also be college graduates; none of them, I feel certain, will be English or Humanities majors.