
The Decline of the English Department - jackchristopher
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-decline-of-the-english-department/print/
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kajecounterhack
This is just an honest, curious question as a CS undergrad right now: what
jobs are there for english majors?

As much as I might love reading and writing, and as much as I believe that a
lot of literature is an overall human good, even writers & scholars need to
feed and clothe themselves, right?

~~~
mechanical_fish
Pretty much the same jobs there are for anybody else.

Unless you're actually planning to become a professor, a scientist, or a
Professional Engineer (note the capital letters!) it really doesn't matter
much what you major in as an undergrad. It's only four years out of your
80-year lifespan. (And, since not every course in college is a course in your
_major_ , it isn't even that.)

You do have to be careful to take enough science courses if you want to go to
medical or dental school, but even that can be fixed after the fact. A friend
of mine graduated in English, _then_ decided to go to med school, and her
college allowed her to come back and take a couple years of intense science
courseload. No problem. (Unless you count debt, of course. Make no mistake:
Math and science courses are good investments, even if you're an English
major. You never know when chemistry or statistics will come in handy.)

I couldn't have majored in my own current profession -- web development --
even had I known to do so, because the web was invented the year after I
graduated from college. My own misspent youth was in EE and physics, but I
have colleagues -- many more talented than I -- who majored in English, worked
as professional actors, or played in symphony orchestras. They learned their
current careers like almost everyone does: A mixture of "teaching yourself in
your spare time" and "working your way up from the bottom".

~~~
brg
One's major is too understated when described as simply 4 years out of a 80
year lifespan. It is the moment in your life when you decide your career path.
It is the time when all of society give you a pass to spend your time
preparing for greatness.

After it is over you have responsibilities, bills, and work becomes a
necessity if you live with any ambition. 40 hours a week you will be working
to fulfill someone else's desires, if those are you customers or your own. But
you will almost never again be given a free pass to spend four years
ostensibly studying.

And getting a good start towards a career is extremely valuable. Most success,
in math, science, or industry come as the result of a long journey. A good
start can significantly shorten the duration between start and finish.

------
gnosis
Our society simply does not value intellectual achievement or learning as ends
in themselves.

What is valued and rewarded is making money, entertaining, acquiring power,
and being "practical", which the humanities are just not focused on.

The humanities are also constantly denigrated (especially by the right-wing,
but also by many in the sciences). This trend is fueled largely by ignorance,
but also somewhat by a reaction to the criticisms they see coming from the
humanities departments towards the status quo, "traditional institutions", and
the view of science and technology as savior (ie. scientism).

Given these attitudes, financial disincentives, and attacks, it's really no
wonder fewer young people choose to major in the humanities.

~~~
tokenadult
_Our society simply does not value intellectual achievement or learning as
ends in themselves._

Does intellectual achievement or learning happen in the typical English
department? Frederick Crews,

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Crews>

mentioned in the submitted article, is a smart man whose essays are well worth
reading, but he is very much of an exception among professors of English.

~~~
anonjon
/Does intellectual achievement or learning happen in the typical English
department?/

Huh? What type of question is that?

You seem to be at once completely proving the parent comments point (that the
humanities are consistently denigrated), and failing to provide an argument.

(Outside of a backhanded attack with the implication that English professors
whose essays are worth reading are few and far between.)

At least provide some evidence that Literature degrees are useless. (Or that
other degrees are less useless than Literature...)

~~~
tokenadult
I have a humanities degree myself (as my profile makes clear). It has been my
dismaying observation that students in various colleges (sampled through
parents I know trying out distance learning programs for their children) can't
count on English departments to teach English grammar or English literature
anymore. Perhaps it reinforces my point to mention that both of my paternal
grandparents had degrees in English, so we have a family tradition of
expecting achievement and learning to happen in English departments.

Frederick Crews is a good example of an English professor who is an
intellectual, but he is a rare example.

 _provide some evidence that Literature degrees are useless_

The submitted article already provided the example of the revealed preference
of college students. But I suppose to that the objection is that college
students are gauging usefulness along a dimension of expediency in getting a
job after college graduation. That's a good criterion of usefulness, but to
turn to "intellectual achievement or learning," I'll point out that business
majors probably write quite as many thoughtful, evidenced books about public
policy per year per 100,000 graduates as English majors do. Computer science
majors very likely write considerably more thoughtful, evidenced books about
public policy per year per 100,000 graduates than English majors do. I
consider writing a book that provides good information value to readers to be
a good criterion of intellectual achievement.

~~~
anonjon
If that is true then it is indeed dismaying.

I will mention that college level English departments should not need to teach
basic English grammar. I would expect that anyone requiring help in that area
would be directed towards remedial courses (or a different discipline).

My (small) experience with the English department , was that it did indeed
teach English literature... (although really you should be getting an
education in not just English literature, but literature in general). Of the
few classes that I took, I found it to be very multidisciplinary. It bridges
philosophy, sociology, history and art (at the very least).

In reality, very few people who graduate from college actually end up
publishing a book, let alone a one that is really worth reading.

I think it will be very hard for you to pull together specific data about what
major will write a well evidenced book in some subject, but it seems to be
begging the question to say that a computer science major is more likely to
write a book on public policy than English or Business majors. It is kind of a
speculative claim.

I personally consider college education to be a process of learning how to
learn.

Yes you are forced to focus in a specific discipline, but the end result of an
English undergraduate degree is not to be an expert able to discuss the
western literary cannon (that is the point of a PHD). I would expect an
English undergraduate to spend his or her time reading books mindfully and
learning how to recognize the themes, ideas and relevant social commentary
from the book.

That sort of meta-cognition is what makes you good at learning in general.
Being good at generalized learning is much more useful that having abstruse
knowledge of Chaucer...

~~~
tokenadult
So is there evidence that English majors are better at that kind of
metacognition than, say, engineering majors? (I certainly don't credit MOST
business majors with a high level of metacognition, but maybe all we have
going on now is yesterday's former marginal English majors becoming today's
marginal business majors. Maybe neither major program adds value to the
students enrolled in it.) I strongly suspect that engineering majors have more
experience reading harder material more closely than most humanities majors,
but I'm basing that mostly on my close acquaintance with my contemporaries.
There may well be published research on this subject--what does that research
say?

~~~
anonjon
I wouldn't be surprised if it was the case that the best English majors and
the best Engineering majors (or business majors) have similar (high) levels of
meta cognitive ability. I also wouldn't be surprised if the mediocre students
all had similar (low) levels of meta-cognitive ability.

Having fought my way through a number of Greek and German philosophers, I can
tell you that there is no shortage of dense and difficult material to read in
the humanities. (There is plenty of English lit that isn't a cakewalk either).
In my current line of work I often find myself reading technical papers
involved in computer science and engineering. I can tell you that while there
is sometimes math that I have trouble with and have to learn, the level of of
writing is certainly not more difficult than Nietzsche, Wittgenstein or Joyce.

What I intended to convey was that in general the particular major probably
doesn't make as much difference as we would think. I think it is misguided to
believe that you can learn any career in four years at college, I would argue
that it is more important that you learn how to learn, so that you can keep
learning for the next 60 years of your life/career. A good student will use
his or her time at college to develop meta-cognition.

As a matter of fact, a quick Google turns up a plethora of information about
reading comprehension and meta-cognition (in both the sciences and liberal
arts). There seems to be much less information about specific majors and meta-
cognition.

------
philwelch
"Despite last year’s debacle on Wall Street, the humanities have not
benefited; students are still wagering that business jobs will be there when
the economy recovers."

Business jobs come and go--humanities jobs never are, never were, and never
will be there.

------
loja_ecuador
I am a native English speaker and an American. I would never major in English
because the grades are too subjective. I would not want to put my future
outside of my own hands.

I prefer my grades to be based on quantifiable data, not subjective gobbledy-
gook.

~~~
_delirium
I dunno, the grades are pretty subjective in a lot of majors. I'm TAing for a
machine-learning / data-mining class right now, and the assignments aren't
mostly ones with objectively correct answers (it'd be easier to grade if they
were). Instead, I have to read their writeups and determine if they picked
interesting problems and formulated coherent hypotheses; if they used
algorithms suited to those problems and explained why; if they demonstrated
knowledge of how choices in algorithms or parameters would affect their
results; and if they knew how to interpret the results properly and use a
mixture of graphs and prose to effectively convey them.

It's possible it's less fuzzy, but there's still a good deal of fuzziness...

------
julius_geezer
Well, yes, but... Anyone wishing to assess the point reached by the English
Departments in the days he mourns should also have a look at what a generation
of poets and critics said of the Modern Language Association (Randall Jarrell
and Edmund Wilson come to mind) or Ivor Winters's essay "What Are We to Think
of Professor X".

What jobs are there? Well, there's law school--a number of English majors I
knew took that route. One can try for a job in publishing, though that looks
unpromising now. Or you can end up in the tech world

------
rogermugs
its true. the thing thats funny about this though is the understanding that if
you go into English you're going to want to teach others. but apparently we
English majors have failed.

i have an English degree... but I LOVE complex problem solving... hence the
love for programming...

its difficult to pitch the old man and the sea to anyone with 1/2 a brain.

------
araneae
tl;dr

