William Chace, former university president and English professor, has written a very interesting essay on the decline of the English Department at American colleges. I’m inclined to agree with him, especially when he makes this point:
What are the causes for this decline? There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.
For me, the most important reason for the decline is the politicization of literary discussion and over-emphasis on literary criticism. Rather than teach graduate students how to effectively communicate their own love of books to students, they are pigeonholed into critical perspectives and told to stay there. And the older the critical theory you adopt, the less chance you will have of getting a tenured position. Should it really be all about getting a job? (yes). Or should we focus on understanding how reading seriously can inform and deepen our understanding of the world? As Chace puts it:
Studying English taught us how to write and think better, and to make articulate many of the inchoate impulses and confusions of our post-adolescent minds. We began to see, as we had not before, how such books could shape and refine our thinking. We began to understand why generations of people coming before us had kept them in libraries and bookstores and in classes such as ours. There was, we got to know, a tradition, a historical culture, that had been assembled around these books. Shakespeare had indeed made a difference—to people before us, now to us, and forever to the language of English-speaking people.
Finding pleasure in such reading, and indeed in majoring in English, was a declaration at the time that education was not at all about getting a job or securing one’s future. In comparison with the pre-professional ambitions that dominate the lives of American undergraduates today, the psychological condition of students of the time was defined by self-reflection, innocence, and a casual irresponsibility about what was coming next.
Yes
yes
yes.
However, there are a multitude of opinions on this issue, many of which are discussed well in this Metafilter thread. It ain’t as simple as I wish it all was.
