Responses to the NYer’s Doomcast

[in which I can’t resist the discourse, after my visit to Tempe synchronized with the latest skyfalling in the national press. With a bonus proposed solution to the butter-beard dilemma, including toast!]

1. The doomstory shows the shape of a slowing river, but we all swim in distinctive little eddies. In the early parts of the decade of decline, enrollments in English at my academic home, St John’s U in New York City, a large Catholic metropolitan uni that doesn’t closely match any of the places described in the article, stayed reasonably solid. Then we ebbed slowly, and only in the past 3 or so years have our numbers taken a dive – which, basically, means we’ve caught up with the flow of the national river, after having resisted for a bit.
2. We need better numbers! I’m not confident in my figures or the precise timing of my local story, and I don’t have an easy way to get better information. I also wonder, both locally and farther away. about two things the NYer glosses over. If the past decade and more has seen a significant rise in “adjacent majors,” new-ish programs like Gender Studies or African-American studies, New Media Studies, Environmental Studies, &c, into which some potential humanities students have been funneling, then a slump in the house of English might not necessarily indicate the decline of the humanities. Have students left for the sciences, or for pre-professional programs, like Business, Education, Pharmacy, or Nursing? The article is slippery in its movement back and forth between “English” and “the Humanities,” and it seems to think that English means only “the study of canonical literature.” Neither of those things is true.
3. The surge in online enrollments that Covid accelerated, also, may be shifting the numbers – ASU’s recent rebound in enrollments appears to include many online students, including non-traditional age students. The Starbucks barista whose tuition is being paid by her corporate overlords makes an appearance! To be clear, I think that’s a very good thing, though I wonder how many universities have the capacity, and the willingness, to expand this way. Maybe we should figure out how to do it! My very rough sense is that both new programs within the humanities and new students supported by online learning may well be significant in shaping the visible decline in old-timey majors like English. Since at most individual institutions we’re really not talking about huge numbers of students overall, we might be misdiagnosing or miscounting, in some cases. Obviously “The End of the English Major” is a prewritten (and oft-repeated) doomstory designed for clicks – but better numbers might lead to a more subtle narrative. (But I am the sort who would want a subtle narrative – I’m an English professor!)
4. Arizona State University, the happiest example of an English department in the NYer, during my short visit felt even happier than the story seems willing to admit. One thing I noticed is that ASU commissioned a marketing firm to help sell its humanities majors. It has used the results of that survey. Those are two good things to do!
5. I don’t believe that students no longer “love” books or stories or made-up things. A love of imaginary objects forms a baseline in human culture, and always has. That love can be a resource for us English profs, but we neither own it nor always know how best to use it. In some ways, a love of books, esp the books we read at an impressionable age, sometimes in the company of charismatic teachers, might be a distraction. (I say this as a Shakespearean, perhaps overly secure in the belief that Big Will will do fine even if he must shed some cultural authority and adapt to new media forms.)
6. The real barriers to the major – leaving aside the question of whether majors and minors are always the best ways to think about college experiences – are fear and money. Those programs are larger than the English department! Some local problems also flow from too much nostalgia, which may not be scary but can certainly feel dull.
7. The folkways through which our profession appears to be responding to this moment, whether critical and diagnostic, as voiced by Columbia’s James Shapiro, or speculative and plaintive, as per Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt, aren’t going to get the car out of the ditch. I admire the work of both those distinguished figures, but they don’t look good here.
8. Like many of my academic friends, I’ve been mulling the compound adjective “butter-voiced” since I first read the article, which describes ASU’s Dean of Humanities as “butter-voiced, [and] bearded.” What exactly is a buttery voice? Does my old friend Jeffrey Cohen really have a butter voice? What might that succulent and symbolic reference mean? Can we spread his voice on toast? During my visit to Tempe, I did, in fact, eat a deliciously buttered piece of toast at Casa Cohen. Surely all these things can’t be coincidences?
9. Everybody loves to dog-pile the English major, including onetime English majors who now have bylines in The New Yorker. But English is not the humanities, and English is not just great books either. I enjoy great books, old ones and new ones. But books are not the only things we share with our students and communities.
10. The NYer’s tripartite idea of what colleges are – Oxbridge quads or research-focused institutions or glittering multiversities – matches poorly onto the majority of colleges in America, and the world. It’s probably true, though, that most NYer subscribers (including me) went to colleges that fit those models. Much public confusion about higher ed in the US comes from a failure to understand the diversity of institutions we collectively call “college.”
11. Money is always the subtext, whether we’re talking about why students, administrative advisers, and parents worry about English or what the latest fancy building for STEM or the business school looks like. I wonder if we should speak more honestly about money. Plenty of humanities majors do well financially, though as in other areas of the American economy, its helps to start with social and financial capital. The connection between college majors and money might be more oblique that some assume.
12. I admit I’m not sure what to do with our old friends Truth and Beauty, who make an appearance in passing. I like them well enough, but do they really need to hog the limelight?
13. The latest interdisciplinary major at ASU is called “Culture, Technology, and the Environment” – a nice list of terms that could also describe the content of the English courses I’m teaching this semester! What is the value of re-naming? I like culture, I like technology, I like the environment, I like (new and old) media, I like performance…
14. Marketing to new majors can be fraught, since I imagine that many if not most prospective new English majors would come at the expense of our friends down the hall in History and Philosophy, or of bigger majors across campus like Psych or Bio. (The ASU English major who gets the last word in the NYer had started as a Psych major.) At St. John’s, the requirements of the School of Education mean that a significant number of my Shakespeare students who want to be teachers are told they can neither major nor minor in English. Does squabbling over majors really seem like the best thing for profs to do?
15. The best thing about the NYer’s description of ASU was its celebration of the people who comprise English and the Humanities. The students rightly occupied the center of attention, and the long article’s last words were from a newly declared English major at ASU. She “hasn’t told anyone yet” (except the NYer) that she wants to be a novelist. “You never know,” she closes out the final page. “You never know what’s a possibility.” I like “possibility” as the last word on the future of the humanities!
16. I also loved the rich portraits of ASU faculty, including my Shakespearean friends Brandi Adams, whose lively class got portrayed in generous detail, and Ayanna Thompson, who has remade ASU’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies as a thriving national hub for #Raceb4Race scholarship and for supporting scholars of color. There’s no livelier or more influential place in early modern studies in America today. One advantage of being big, like ASU, is having space for lots of people, including the ability to hire even in current conditions. Back in Queens, alas, that’s not the way our little world seems to be going. But we are a much smaller place.
17. What’s the moral of the story? Some simple imperatives: Celebrate your people! Market your courses! Invent (or rename) courses, majors, minors! Get help from Deans, or at least figure out ways to smooth out university bureaucracies! Get better numbers, and pay attention to them! Investing in faculty helps too, though perhaps faculty who say so risk seeming self-interested.
18. Those straightforward-sounding things are easier said than done.
19. If butter-voiced means alluring, as I guess it does, maybe the NYer writer was worried that Dean Cohen’s smooth delivery of ASU’s happy story would, if the reporter wasn’t careful, smear up the prewritten story of catastrophe he and his editors have been counting on? Maybe our future can be well-buttered despite it all? Or maybe I just enjoyed visiting friends in the lovely desert last week?