The End of the English Major
A long-form piece by Harvard alum Nathan Heller (AB ‘06) on the decline in the humanities with a focus on Harvard. The piece has sparked debate in the NYT and online. “During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent…. What’s going on? …[And] what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before?”
Heller describes the reasons for the decline as multifold, including: 1) Time/focus due to technology, 2) Careerism/Pre-professionalism and 3) Financial focus/support, noting that “The loss of humanities numbers isn’t happening in the collegiate pipeline, in other words. It is happening when these students walk through the university gates.”
Heller visits his alma mater, Harvard, citing that “In 2022…a survey found that only 7% of Harvard freshmen planned to major in the humanities, down from 20% in 2012, and nearly 30% during the nineteen-seventies.” He then cites a senior professor in the English department who told Heller, “We feel we’re on the Titanic.”
Heller spoke with several professors. “Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor… was one of several teachers who described an orientation toward the present, to the extent that many students lost their bearings in the past,” he writes, quoting Claybaugh : “The last time I taught The Scarlet Letter… my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb’… Their capacities are different.”
Heller also speaks to Tara K. Menon, a junior professor of English at Harvard, who “linked the shift to students arriving at college with a sense that the unenlightened past had nothing left to teach…[plus] concerns about too few Black artists in syllabi, or Eurocentric biases.” In a powerful quote cited in the WSJ, NYT and social media, Menon told Heller, “There’s a real misunderstanding that you can come in and say, ‘I want to read post-colonial texts—that’s the thing I want to study—and I have no interest in studying the work of dead white men’… My answer…is, ‘If you want to understand Arundhati Roy, or Salman Rushdie, or Zadie Smith, you have to read Dickens. Because one of the tragedies of the British Empire…is that all those writers read all those books.’ ”
According to Heller, another Harvard literature professor “noticed that it had become more publicly rewarding for students to critique something as ‘problematic’ than to grapple with what the problems might be…merely naming concerns had more value… than curiosity about what underlay them.”
Yet others noted, according to Heller, that humanities studies have become “too specialized,” moving, for example, from studying “form, references, style, and special marks of authorial genius” in literature to looking at “how the text enacts a tension by both constructing and subtly undermining the imperial patriarchy through its descriptions of landscape.”
Heller then details one of the influential impacts on the humanities— financial focus, outlining what happened from Harvard President Bok to Summers.
“In Beyond the Ivory Tower (1982), Derek Bok…warned about ‘commercial ventures’ posing ‘dangers for the quality of research and even for the intellectual integrity of the university itself.’ “ Then, with Summers’ appointment, there was “an openness to business with the new global private sector.”
Heller explains that, “In 2004, Harvard hired a ‘chief technology development officer’ to aid in the commercialization of research… In 2010, Xi Jinping withdrew his only child from college in China and enrolled her at Harvard—a gesture that affirmed the university’s arrival as a hub of Swiss disinterest on the byways of industrial diplomacy.”
“Students pick up on the emphasis,” Heller writes. “The money at Harvard—and a lot of other universities, too—is disproportionately going into stem.” Within the piece, Heller cites Harvard students who describe the humanities as “hobby-based” and a “passion project,” with some parents saying “you don’t go to Harvard for basket weaving” and many questioning, “is a humanities degree worth it?”
Yet, the reality of humanities majors isn’t what it seems. “Career studies have shown that humanities majors, with their communication and analytical skills, often end up in leadership jobs,” writes Heller, with one MIT professor describing how “the future belongs to the humanities.”
And what about democracy? “Everyone agrees that the long arc of higher education must bend toward openness and democratization,” writes Heller. “The way in which diversity of experience is understood to enrich study, and in which diverse study is understood to enrich society, is a product of work done in the humanities.”
Related:
I’m What’s Wrong with the Humanities (NYT, 3/8/23)
Oh, the Humanities (WSJ, 3/8/23)