Adam Ellwanger teaches English at University of Houston-Downtown.
He writes at Quillette:
The Real Reasons Why the English Department DiedI’ve worked as a professor in an English department for the last 15 years, and I spent the 10 years prior to that as a student in English. Over the course of that time there was never a period when the English major wasn’t in decline. For the first half of the 20th century, English departments occupied a critical and celebrated position in the American university. But by the time of Sputnik and the beginning of the space race, the field had begun a long slide into obscurity.Today, most people who take English departments seriously are English professors and the handful of students who still choose the major. Current university administrators see the English department as serving a gatekeeping role: the required freshman-level courses generate massive enrollment, mostly from students who are not prepared for the demands of college writing. Thus, in the eyes of the administration, the job of the English department is remedial—getting those students “up to speed” so that they can do the writing required by their majors (which are overwhelmingly housed in other departments). Liberally educated professors in other disciplines often have a nostalgic reverence for the humanities and humanistic knowledge, but they know that English professors no longer serve as guardians of that tradition. In fact, it’s common knowledge that the vast majority of English faculty are resolutely opposed to traditional notions of humanistic inquiry. For that reason, they have become a parody of the erudition that used to be synonymous with literary study.But why are students rejecting what English departments have to offer? This is a topic that is little discussed by English professors. It’s not unlike visiting an old friend who is in a losing battle against cancer: to the extent that you even address the gravity of the situation, you do so briefly and obliquely. Recently though, there’s been some semi-serious discussion of the causes of the English department’s poor health. The title of an article in the New Yorker (“The End of the English Major”) acknowledged that the case might be terminal. This piece was followed by a somewhat sunnier Substack post by journalist Andrew Boryga called “The English Department Has a Marketing Problem.”
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