The place of English departments has already changed to a large degree, with many faculty simply not aware of it. Undergraduate enrollments are down across the country, perhaps due in part to what has happened here in Louisiana with the outsourcing of freshman composition to high schools. There is yet to be a complete assessment of the enrollment drop, but the rise in focus on STEM education and on “bank-able” careers has certainly not helped. So far, the humanities in general and English departments in particular have not done well in making an argument for pursuing degrees, or at least significant coursework, in their disciplines. The argument that we offer critical thinking skills or advanced writing skills has not lessened the drop in enrollment. (It does not help that we largely leave “critical thinking” and “advanced writing” largely undefined such that neither faculty nor students understand what it is students will take away.)
Few students I have ever known, especially in a place like south Louisiana (where I myself grew up and went to university), entered college planning to major in English. Rather, we were lucky, usually post-composition, to take a general elective early in our college career where we were amazed at the opportunity to think about compelling, complex documents in ways that made us feel our own thinking made a contribution. This, I would argue, is significantly different than many of the lower-level STEM courses where the focus is often on entrainment. One immediate response to the enrollment crunch is to get those faculty who want to attract students into the field into the courses which fulfill general education requirements.
That’s an initial response, but it doesn’t address the larger question of what an English department does in general and what in particular a degree in English is good for? There seems to be a certain bankability in the human, especially the adolescent human, need to express oneself. Socially and culturally, college is often imagined as the last stage in the process of formalized individuation that seems to be one of the missions of educational institutions. It’s where students go to “discover who they are” and to “choose who they are going to be” or “what they are going to do.” (The American cultural machine has slowly ground down the higher ideals of universities to provide generalized intelligence and abilities to specialized ones — no wonder we fear AI; we fear something will take over now that we’ve crippled ourselves.)
Given this socio-cultural focus on individuation, creative writing has risen over the past few decades to have a significant place in English departments. But refining students’ abilities to write poems, short stories, novels, or plays doesn’t prepare them any more for the workplace than does studying or writing about them. Both engage in a lot of hand waving, like an illusionist getting us to pay attention to her left hand while she palms an object in her right hand.
To address this gap between a classical education, which is what an English major remains to a large degree, and a professional education, departments like the one I am in have introduced things like technical writing and/or professional writing, which we sadly promptly ghettoize, much like we do freshman composition and lower-level gen ed courses. We are literally out of touch: we are not in the classrooms where the majority of non-English majors are. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing in as much as there is no argument being made here that the English major should survive, though it is not clear that any department could survive purely as a service department to other disciplines. What I have seen is that it doesn’t take much for business schools to hire business writing faculty or their own business ethics faculty. The same is probably true for the sciences and social sciences.
So we come back to the question of what could an English degree be good for. (Hat tip to Wendell Berry for his inestimable What Are People For?) Like much of the rest of the humanities at all levels of university and advanced courses in the human sciences and sciences, it is good for thinking. Like the rest of the humanities, it’s good for thinking about complex topics that do not arrive with a manifest structure, unlike a chemical compound or economic formations. Rather, the humanities in general, and English in particular, seem to be at their best when they attempt to tackle complex objects whose underlying structure must be teased out. This is what I do when I tackle a collection of conspiracy theories in particular or the idea of conspiracy theories in general. It’s what my colleagues do when they examine a novel or a cluster of novels—or poems or plays or sentences (oh, linguists!).We examine writing in and through more writing. Other disciplines face similar conundrums or limitless halls of mirrors—look no further than mathematics—but they don’t do it with, in, and through writing.
And the ability to write, especially to write on complex subjects, remains a gold standard for advanced democracies. And that’s why English departments, and degrees, remain important to me.