When I entered graduate school in English in the mid-1980s, I didn’t understand the importance of undergraduate enrollments in the field. I was so caught up in scholarship and research and theory that the junior and senior classrooms didn’t much count. The freshman and sophomore classes were even more remote. They registered to me only when I had to teach a survey course and my freshman composition course, assignments valuable only so far as they supported my career. I had a dissertation to write and books of High Theory to read. Helping undergrads with grammar and explaining where a Shakespearean sonnet diverged from a Petrarchan sonnet was an interruption.
In my second year at Emory University, though, I became the Director of Undergraduate Studies. My duties included staffing freshman comp courses and discussion sections in sophomore survey courses and evaluating the instructors. I did that for six years and realized that those courses are the foundation of everything that goes on at the higher levels from upper-division courses in the major to readings courses and seminars in Ph.D. programs to the books professors wrote. If a department didn’t take introductory teaching seriously, corruption would set in everywhere else.
And there was something else. If basic courses didn’t create a steady stream of sophomores into the major, a department would suffer. English didn’t bring in Federal research dollars; it didn’t often get foundation grants or alumni donations. Its material support came from the dean’s office, and the dean needed proof of productivity. The best evidence for that was lots of courses with full enrollment. A department with courses half-full told the dean to pull back. Low student interest meant fewer professors were needed. If freshman and sophomore experiences didn’t inspire very many kids to stick around, the department was in trouble.
[Colleges Give Up on Western Civilization]
The crucial pipeline role struck many undergraduate directors across the country, starting about a dozen years ago when the number of students majoring in English began to slide. A few of us noticed signs of decline much earlier, when the relative portion of students declaring an English major fell significantly, a drop disguised by the fact that while absolute numbers of majors didn’t change, the overall undergraduate population swelled quite a bit. Why didn’t English grow correspondingly?
It was clear that something was wrong when, for example, the number of total graduates jumped by 76,000 from 2006-07 to 2008-09, but the number of English graduates climbed only 340.
Let’s review the numbers, taking data from the latest version of the Digest of Education Statistics (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_322.10.asp).
The high point for English came in 1970-71 when the field tallied 63,914 bachelor’s degrees out of 839,730 degrees in any field awarded nationally. That amounted to a 7.6 percent share of the whole, more than one in 13 students majoring in English.
English majors outnumbered engineering/engineering technology (50K), biology/biomedical sciences (36K), psychology (38K), mathematics (25K), and visual/performing arts (30K). Only the professional fields of education (176K) and business (115K) exceeded English. That tells you how high English once stood in post-secondary American education.
[The Slow and Tortuous Death of the GRE]
English fell to 41,000 five years later, and 32,000 five years after that, but recovered through the 1980s and stuck at 50-55,000 students through the 90s and 00s and 2013. The stability, though, was misleading. From 1990 to 2013, the overall baccalaureate population leaped from 1,094,538 to 1,870,150, a 70 percent increase. If English grew proportionately, it should have reached 80-85,000 majors, not remained stuck in the low 50s.
Moreover, after 2013, things got much worse. While the overall number of graduates continued to rise, English began a steep descent. From 2013-14 to 2014-15, the number of graduates fell by nearly 5,000. In the following year, it lost another 3,000 (while the number of four-year students rose 25,000). The following year, the last one in the Digest, English lost another 1,500 students (while the overall number of undergrads rose 35,000).
Compare that performance to “Communications, journalism, and related programs.” In 1971, the portion was tiny, only 10,000 of the more than 800,000 kids in four-year institutions. In 2006-07, it had skyrocketed to 74,800, and the 2008 recession did[n’t hurt it one bit. In 2010 it surpassed 83,000, and since then, it has grown steadily every year, reaching 93,778 in 2017.
[How Diversity Hijacked History 101 and All the Humanities]
The same consistent growth has held for computer science, engineering, and biomedical fields. The US Department of Education counts “Health professions” as separate from biology and biomedical, and it has exploded, going from 25,000 in 1970 to 238,000 in 2017. What must it be like to be in one of those high-growth fields? I wouldn’t know.
And what must it be like to be in one of the European languages? In 1970, foreign languages and linguistics grabbed 21,000 bachelor’s degrees. Its share was 0.25 percent of the whole. Twenty years later, while the undergraduate population had swelled, foreign languages and linguistics were still stuck in the low 20,000s. In 2017, the category had dropped to 17,642. That put foreign languages at not even one percent (0.9)! One wonders how those French, Italian, and German professors feel now about joining the march to eliminate Western Civilization from the curriculum.
The numbers are an indictment of the language and literature professors. The arrival of the Millennials into college should have been a windfall in the fields. They shared the progressive politics of the professors, and the professors were willing to adapt their courses to the media/contemporary landscape favored by the kids. But the kids didn’t come. The star professors in charge of the field wrote edgy books and concocted out-there theories; they floated from campus to campus, enjoyed hefty salaries, and cultivated graduate students. But they didn’t often teach freshman and sophomore courses, and when they did, few of them had the charisma to draw the half-interested student into the field. These were theorists, not entrepreneurs. They scorned the professor who geared his thought to first- and second-year students.
Besides, why worry? The collapse happened on their watch, but it didn’t hurt them personally. The discipline is marginal now, and the people who took the helm have not expressed any regrets, but why should they regret something they notice only as a trend far beyond their own actions? They were in control then, and they are in control now. It’s nice to be in charge, even if the enterprise you lead is failing. You still get your paycheck. We will see where things stand in another ten years.
I received my A.B. in English in 1972 having studied with the remnants of the New Critics at Kenyon. It was wonderful and I wouldn’t have traded it for any other degree. By the time I received my M.A. in English in 1975, the barbarians (Derrida, deMan, Foucault, Fish, et al.) were at the gates. Reading jargon-filled theory that was dry as dirt in those few moments when it was comprehensible. Reading authors based on their racial or ethnic origin rather than because they were any good. It wasn’t hard to see where this discipline was going. I did what any self-respecting English major would do, I went to law school. Regrettably, I wouldn’t go near the English Department today, and it is the professors who are to blame. Suicide by PC.
As a retired Mechanical Engineering professor, I am less than impressed with Prof. Bauerlein’s thesis. I grew up being force-fed works like The Greek Way by Greek fangirl Edith Hamilton, and I am less than impressed with Western Civ courses. As far as I am concerned, English courses, except for English comp, can be safely disposed of. At my college, we actually developed a writing course for our engineers because the English Dept. was not up to the task.
The moral rot in the Humanities started long before the current crisis. Does anyone remember the vociferous racism that permeated Humanities and social ‘sciences’ a century ago? The glorification of slave societies (ancient Greek and Roman societies)? Fortunately, academics control the teaching of history, so their performance was quickly erased from modern history books. They can always blame it on someone else (usually evangelical Christians).
The good old days are gone. Reforming humanities, if such a thing were possible, means more than just back to the past.
I also teach in an engineering program. Could not agree more. We had the english department here put together a technical writing class for us. Two years later we told them to forget it and created our own course.
The english major is a joke. It’s nothing but SJW indoctrination.
There is some good news here. The campus snowflakes and all the rest are illiterate to the point that they can no longer communicate. The dumbest cannot write a simple sentence; the smarter are so intoxicated with jargon that nobody knows what they are saying. The Left has become a Tower of Babel and this is to our advantage. More generally, and thanks as well to identity politics, long gone are days when those on the Left could organize anything. They are, admittedly, a royal pain but they are not serious revolutionary threat.
“The high point for English came in 1970-71 when the field tallied 63,914 bachelor’s degrees out of 839,730 degrees in any field awarded nationally. That amounted to a 7.6 percent share of the whole, more than one in 13 students majoring in English.
1970-71 was also the height of women graduating with the so-called “Mrs. Degree” — Women seeking to find & marry a husband who would be able to provide for them. They weren’t dropping out of college like Barbara Bush did, but they would graduate with something like a BA in English which would enable them to carry on conversations at social events and charity functions. To uphold their half of what was a partnership, to entertain the boss’ wife and the rest.
Degrees lag about six years behind decisions, in that college majors are largely chosen in the summer between the Junior & Senior years of High School. Hence those graduating in 1971 had made the decision to major in English back in the Summer of 1966 and those were prosperous times. College was cheap, and as the baby boomers were overwhelming capacity, the hardest thing was getting in — there was no thought of having to repay student loans back then.
Conversely, _Griggs v. Duke Power Co_ was decided that year — management aptitude tests were thrown out as racially discriminatory and hence corporations increasingly relied on “a college degree” (in anything, from anywhere) as the prerequisite to any management position. And as college degrees were still relatively scarce, one in anything was prestigious in a way it isn’t today.
Yes, a lot of other things happened, and I’d even go so far as to say that the tenured radicals destroyed their own departments. But “the working girl must eat” (the title of a pragmatic WW-II era cookbook) and all students today (not just the women) have to look at employment in a way that their parents (and now grandparents) didn’t.
Reality is that never-married childless women are earning *more* than their similarly situated male peers. They have become the careerists that men always were, and the liberal arts — even if they are taught well — have become expensive extravagances which young adults can’t afford.
While I don’t think that the Millennials (collectively) are anywhere near as Progressive as many think, I agree with Professor Bauerlein’s thesis — it’s only that the economic reality is in the background. And with three Vermont State Colleges proposed to be closed this very fall, I don’t think it will take 10 years for the whole carousel comes crashing to the ground.
Never-married childless women <B<under age 35.