
The Decline and Fall of the English Major - jonmumm
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/opinion/sunday/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-english-major.html?_r=0
======
gruseom
It's sad that the classical education is no more, but it's also true that the
humanities rotted from within. Because carrying on the traditions of arts and
letters was no longer considered valuable, the disciplines rushed to gut
themselves in favor of far shallower and dodgier stuff, like political
ideologies ("the only things that matter are race, class, and gender") and
pseudo-technical gibberish. None of that has lasting value and none of it
touches the heart of why a student would want to devote themselves to things
like literature, philosophy, or art history. So over the same time period that
these fields have been losing social and intellectual status, they've also
been becoming less valuable.

They're not going to disappear, and maybe it's a good thing if they become de-
institutionalized for a century or two. I admit to being bothered by it,
though. By the time I went to university it was already no longer possible to
get what I would call a real education. Meanwhile there is a smugness that
goes along with purely technical training, a certainty that its way is the
only valuable way, that calls itself education but whose true name is
Philistinism, and I feel sad that that mentality is taking over our society
completely.

~~~
bane
> It's sad that the classical education is no more, but it's also true _that
> the humanities rotted from within_

This really resonated with me. I find the _concept_ of a classical education
immensely important. I originally wanted to be a music major before diverting
to CS. Even during my CS studies, I took extra liberal coursework to try and
"round out" my education: history courses, literature, etc.

I found it troubling that as the liberal arts came into the modern age, I
think they became more and more irrelevant to describing and enriching the
world: philosophy, once a guide for humanity into the frontiers of law,
ethics, science, has become a circus of irrelevant navel gazing; high-music
became random and unpleasant fist slamming; literature because trite political
regurgitation or stream-of-consciousness vomitus; sculpture and painting
turned into talent and effort-free indecipherable and pointless enigmas that
all talked about the same inconsequential nonsense; and architecture turned
into collisional visages made of unlivable spaces and leaky roofs.

There seems frighteningly little of import, things that have honestly
progressed and lifted up the species, that has come out of the humanities in
recent decades -- at least as compared to everything post-Renaissance till the
Industrial Revolution. There's highlights of course, but oh so much garbage.
It's no wonder the general population is more interested in Pop Music than in
what should be the modern equivalent of Bach.

There's an interesting experiment that's easy to conduct. Go to a classical
art gallery and sit and watch the people, how they react to the art. Then do
the same at a modern art gallery. I find that more people resonate and connect
with work that's a millenia and a continent removed from them than they do
with with the indecipherable "art" that was produced a month ago in the same
city.

I remember touring the Vatican museum, which is setup basically as a long and
winding path through Western History. There are works there dating back
thousands of years and into modernity, many are the finest examples of their
type. Being the Vatican there is of course a tremendous amount of devotional
art through the ages. If you stop and look around, you see people from all
over the planet, young and old, looking around jaws agape at some of the
wonders.

Near the end of the tour you end up in a modern gallery. Most of it is
devotional art, most of it looks like reassembled garbage and random tossings
out of paint can. Nobody, not a person, stops and pays any attention to it. If
you stop in these galleries and watch people as they move through it, the only
sounds you hear are snickering and sighs as people try to escape the crushing
irrelevance of it all.

Somehow high art lost its audience.

I try and visit modern galleries, hoping that something will speak to me the
way other classical fine art speaks to me. On occasion I find something
interesting or witty, something I can appreciate. But most of the time I end
up in very tired "special showings" of _2 steel plates welded together_ , or
_an exploration of albedo, black square on black #47_ or some similar
nonsense.

I guess somebody gets this stuff, I don't, I find most of it vacuous and the
work of borderline scam artists and flim-flam "artists". And I think most of
the general public also feel that way. Sitting in a modern art installation
and watching people as they view the work, there's an inevitable sadness.
They've come to be enriched and to grow, to be moved and touched to the bottom
of their soul, and instead they're met with the artistic equivalent of
insults.

I know that there's a number of historical reasons for this, largely a
reaction to the World Wars and a desire to detach from the normal vernacular
of power that often gave voice to art. And I'm starting to see some new art in
the last decade or so that's really interesting. But I can't help but feel
that the pendulum swung too far and too fast away from relevancy for too long
and we've lost generations of would be art supporters. And it'll be
generations before our civilization learns a new "language" of expression that
can reflect and resonate with people's spirits and capture and enrapture
people en masse again.

I leave you with this: It's very hard to see something like this
[http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-
live/photos/0...](http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-
live/photos/000/068/cache/st-peters-basilica_6809_600x450.jpg) (and it really
looks like that in person) and then this
[http://i-cdn.apartmenttherapy.com/uimages/ny/3rdChurchChrist...](http://i-cdn.apartmenttherapy.com/uimages/ny/3rdChurchChristScientist2.jpg)
and not feel like we've lost something in our art.

~~~
nooron
My first impulse at this was to slam my fists on my keyboard and howl with
rage.

Since that's totally unproductive and not an appropriate response to a
sophisticated argument such as yours, I'll abstain.

I'd also like to acknowledge that at the end of my remarks, we're unlikely to
agree fully. But I'm hoping I can demonstrate my perception of these
phenomenon that you specify, my perception of your perception, and in that,
why I think you're mistaken on a few fronts.

1\. Your classical education failed you if you can't identify one of the most
important reasons visual art has changed so much.

>I remember touring the Vatican museum... If you stop and look around, you see
people from all over the planet, young and old, looking around jaws agape at
some of the wonders. Near the end of the tour you end up in a modern gallery.
Most of it is devotional art, most of it looks like reassembled garbage and
random tossings out of paint can. Nobody, not a person, stops and pays any
attention to it. If you stop in these galleries and watch people as they move
through it, the only sounds you hear are snickering and sighs as people try to
escape the crushing irrelevance of it all.

I'll start by pointing out that I happily do stop at these galleries. Western
visual culture was essentially devoted to cultivating photo-realism for
centuries. Then the camera (and its derivatives) came into prominence and set
off a powerful debate, primarily academic, about what the goal of visual art
and its means should be. I think this controversy is a very interesting one
and I enjoy watching it-- but you have to be aware of the controversy for a
lot of it to make sense. I posit that we should teach it because it's part of
our culture and has been for decades.

On a more personal note, a lot of modern art is trash in the way that a lot of
pre-modern art was too. But a lot of it also speaks to me, and I don't
appreciate what I interpret as your weirdly simultaneously faux-populist and
faux-elitist suggestion that I'm being insulted.

2\. I dispute your implicit claim that high art ever had that tremendous an
audience. In raw terms, it's actually larger today than it was a hundred years
ago-- think about the number of people we educate today versus then.

3\. I'll quote you again: >I found it troubling that as the liberal arts came
into the modern age, I think they became more and more irrelevant to
describing and enriching the world: philosophy, once a guide for humanity into
the frontiers of law, ethics, science, has become a circus of irrelevant navel
gazing; high-music became random and unpleasant fist slamming; literature
because trite political regurgitation or stream-of-consciousness vomitus...

Which philosophers are you accusing of navel gazing? Perhaps we'll agree,
perhaps not.

And who do you consider high-music? Again, perhaps we'll agree, perhaps not.

I perceive you as lamenting the decline of high art culture while
simultaneously lashing out at people who do try to improve it with a vaguely
populist criticism not well grounded in any historical-empirical data about
popular art appreciation.

Post script, you can like pop and Bach at the same time and there's precisely
nothing wrong with that.

~~~
raverbashing
> Post script, you can like pop and Bach at the same time and there's
> precisely nothing wrong with that.

THIS. And let me add Bach is (was) the dance music of yesteryears (follow the
3/4). (Mozart was probably rock)

The thing with "modern music is crap" has one factor helping it, we never got
to hear Bach's time crap music.

(Note: the above is my opinion based on my shallow knowledge of music)

~~~
artimaeis
> "Bach is (was) the dance music of yesteryears (follow the 3/4). (Mozart was
> probably rock)"

Not so much. Bach and Mozart were employed by quite wealthy individuals to
compose and perform pieces for nobility and aristocracy. The only way the
proletariat population would have heard their work would have been in a
church-setting of some sort, probably performed by someone with very little
skill or training.

>"we never got to hear Bach's time crap music"

More than you might imagine, actually. While folk songs were rarely written
down in any sort of musical-notation there were (and doubtlessly still are)
scholars who worked tirelessly at uncovering these old works as best they
could and those were the real 'dance music' of the era. Songs written on the
same 4-chord pattern we use this very day and age. Songs about love, loss,
friends, family, etc. Typically upbeat and always set to a beat that you could
sway your hips to. Instrumentation would have been based on either a piano,
flute, or that century's particular flavor of stringed instrument.

It's been a good while since I studied this subject, I'll see if I can dig up
a source for this info tonight.

~~~
bane
Mostly right, actually Bach was a church music director for most of his career
(though he did the Royal court thing also). The great majority of his body of
work is vocal liturgical church music.

------
krakensden
> No one has found a way to put a dollar sign on this kind of literacy, and I
> doubt anyone ever will. But everyone who possesses it — no matter how or
> when it was acquired — knows that it is a rare and precious inheritance.

This is a widespread sentiment. This is even a chic sentiment. This is maybe
even a sentiment I once sympathized with. It is also the kind of romantic
bullshit that hurts people.

It doesn't really matter if Johnny Middle Class believes it, his parents can
probably help him muddle along somehow. Jorge, though, first in his family to
get to college, might just take it seriously, and wind up somewhere ugly with
too much debt, four years gone, and a piece of paper that nobody wants.

I personally know at least a dozen people like that. I didn't make that
mistake- but it was more by whim than anything else.

The worst, saddest part of all of this, is how trope heavy and unoriginal it
is. This is the world's second oldest complaint, right after "the youth are
lazy and disrespectful."

~~~
sk5t
Are you arguing that there exists a class of people smart enough to gain
admission into and pay for college, yet too simpleminded to assess the hazy
job prospects based around a degree in English, psychology, art history, and
the like?

As far as I know, every major world culture produces writers, poets,
sculptors, and musicians, and in no case is an education in those fields a
guaranteed ticket to economic prosperity.

~~~
scarmig
Yes. Simple-minded is an obnoxious word; brainwashed gets closer to it but
implies too much a malevolent force at work.

Cold statistics are one thing, but everyone has trouble actually chewing them
over when every part of your environment is telling you "all you need to do is
go to college, and everything will work out fine." If you know the ins and
outs of how post-college employment works, you're working from a position of
stark informational privilege compared to someone who doesn't. The people who
succeed as English majors are much louder than the large majority who don't,
and the people selling the English majors certainly aren't telling them they
have a decent chance of ending up immiserated.

If you genuinely enjoy English literature and writing, it's easy to fall into
that trap. Many people here majored in CS, and that's awesome and has worked
out well for them. But I would also take a gander that, going into college,
those people weren't blank slates who had no love of CS and just did a
mechanical calculation as to what would generate the most time-discounted
income years. They had worked with computers in the past and loved it. It's
very easy to overlook how much emotional or arational factors plays into your
own choices while condemning those whose arational choices end up tossing them
into another bin.

Obviously the choices people make aren't totally ignorant of economic factors,
but they also aren't determined by them.

------
kenko
I wonder what current (or perhaps past?) president of the MLA, Michael Bérubé,
has to say about this.

Or rather, I wonder if you wonder. I know. It's this:

""" You know, I've been trying for many years now to get people to understand
that the decline in humanities enrollments in the US happened almost entirely
between 1970 and 1980. I usually work from this table from the NCES Digest of
Education Statistics --
[http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_286.asp](http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_286.asp)
\-- where you can see that English plummeted from an anomalous 7.6 percent of
all bachelor's degrees in 1970-71 to 3.4 percent in 1980-81. (It was 4 percent
in 1950; it rebounded to about 4.5 percent in the mid-90s and is back down to
3.2 percent today.)

But today I came across this other table --
[http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_289.asp](http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_289.asp)
\-- and lo! In 1970-71, 17.1 percent of all bachelor's degrees were awarded in
the humanities, and in 2009-10 the figure was .... 17.0 percent. For the
purposes of the NCES, "humanities" includes "degrees in Area, ethnic,
cultural, and gender studies; English language and literature/letters; Foreign
languages, literatures, and linguistics; Liberal arts and sciences, general
studies, and humanities; Multi/interdisciplinary studies; Philosophy and
religious studies; Theology and religious vocations; and Visual and performing
arts." That last group, btw, has more than tripled in majors since 1970, while
the total number of degrees has merely doubled. And "liberal arts and
sciences, general studies, and humanities" has increased sixfold. This makes
up a lot of ground from the relative dropoff in English and foreign languages.
"""

------
jmduke
I'll say this: more so than any other department or discipline (yes, including
computer science), I think a person would benefit most from a few properly
taught college English classes.

Well-taught classes (and I took enough good and bad English classes to
recognize the distinction) are completely irreplaceable by Google or MOOCs.
They focus overwhelmingly on the art of discourse: sure, there are papers and
exams but the soul of the class is in the daily lecture; everyone comes in
with X, Y, and Z read and you discuss it, growing and pruning theories and
interpretations of literature as one would an oddly looking tree. A good
professor wants to teach you that Frankenstein is an allegory for the
Industrial Revolution, or the creation of Man; a great professor knows the
conversation that Shelley had with Chaucer and Milton and everyone in between
-- and knows how to help their students figure out everything themselves, with
just enough help along the way.

A good English course only needs a semester to teach you how to make a point,
argue it, research it, defend it against a multitude of competing and
contradicting points, and ultimately handle the reality that the point has
been made many times before by people much smarter than you.

(This experience is magical, and something that really can't happen in a room
with more than forty people, let alone a web app with hundreds.)

You develop along the way a finely honed level of communication (I had a
fellow CS grad once suggest to me that 100-level English classes were about
punctuation and grammar, and it made me inappropriately angry); you learn how
to approach questions with no answer and conversations with no real goal, how
to talk with peers, mentors, and people who died hundreds of years ago. You
learn a tremendous amount about yourself and others through the lens of
literature, honed tightly by a great professor and a greater book, because the
way you approach any experience is of course colored by everything about you.

I switched out of the English department my sophomore year to pursue Computer
Science, but British Literature II was the most valuable class I've ever
taken.

~~~
casual_slacker
A big problem lies in secondary school. There's very little exposure to formal
argument, and heavy emphasis fitting ideas into a rigid paragraph structure.

~~~
saraid216
IME, I was pushed into the 5-paragraph form more during primary education; in
secondary school, there were no such requirements. (That might be a
consequence of having been moved into AP classes; I never looked into what
regular English did.) I think this was a good thing, since I was forced to
learn to support my claims and look at them structurally.

The issue is that "English" is a non-subject. In early education, it's about
literacy: being able to read and write at all. As you advance, it becomes
about logic: being able to coherently express your substantiated view. And
then, at the end, it becomes about literature: using deeper historical
contexts to analyze a work deeply and interestingly.

These are each _vastly_ different subjects, but we call them all "English".
Which is silly. We have other words. People with English degrees should know
that.

~~~
bane
The 5-paragraph essay gets a lot of hate, much of it deserved as it gets
overused, but I've found it a _very_ helpful tool to get students to organize
their thoughts. I used to help tutor East Asian ESL students and getting them
to understand how to make an argument and then support it with evidence was
difficult, but once they grokked how it worked, vastly improved their
communications.

Were I a regular English teacher, I don't think I'd let a student coast in
5-paragraph beyond a semester.

> The issue is that "English" is a non-subject. In early education, it's about
> literacy: being able to read and write at all. As you advance, it becomes
> about logic: being able to coherently express your substantiated view. And
> then, at the end, it becomes about literature: using deeper historical
> contexts to analyze a work deeply and interestingly.

A very good point. We used to call "English" education by the subject you were
learning "reading" "writing" "grammar" "spelling" "punctuation" "letters",
"creative writing", "technical writing", "literary analysis" etc. But in some
grand scheme to simplify things I guess we just use "English" now, which is
frankly lame.

~~~
dnautics
the 5-paragraph structure is wonderful. I used (a 4-paragraph version of) it
for my MCATs in one essay and used the french equivalent (these - antithese -
synthese) in another - mind you you have 30 minutes to organize and write each
essay. It forces you to do exactly that, think about what your point is and
put in a place where your reader will actually see it, and not drown it in a
sea of words.

A scientific paper is basically that, except expanded into bigger sections.
When authors take liberties with the structure it really results in
incomprehensible gibberish. Even for general expository writing - I found that
reading through internship essays, for example, when the essay was a ramble, I
would chuck the whole application, but when the essay had clear topics and
supporting information structure, I kept it.

~~~
saraid216
Well, make no mistake: the 5-paragraph structure is a crutch. It's like a
coloring book: all the lines are drawn for you and you fill it in. That's not
a bad thing, though, because you're learning about muscle control and
coloration and texture... but it's completely different from drawing your own
picture.

At the point you've learned how to construct an argument and substantiate it
with supporting claims, you're ready to leave it behind for longer (or
shorter!), less structured forms... or to pull it back out when you feel it's
appropriate.

------
kvee
I agree. But it's ironic that the author never argues her case with clear
writing.

She asserts that "clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with
literature" is extremely extremely valuable. She asserts this as a fundamental
"truth."

She probably doesn't even realize she needs to explain why because it actually
is considered a "truth" among English majors.

That's too bad. Obviously it's not considered a "truth" by the people she
wants to convince. And they'll think it's just some stereotypical English
major bullshit.

~~~
bbxiao1
I think the decision to focus on writing was very specific. She is trying to
convince people that studying the humanities can/does create a very real
skill, an argument that drives a lot of STEM advocates.

Personally, I see the value of humanities as how we (a society) got here and
why. I think it's important, but I don't think I will have the opportunity to
use this knowledge. I do not know all the author's thoughts, but I would guess
that she was writing to what would generate the most appeal, not necessarily
her exact thoughts.

~~~
kvee
She never makes a clear, logical case for writing.

But forget about writing in particular. She never makes a clear case for the
humanities at all. She just says they're really really important.

~~~
abraininavat
There should be a comma there: "really, really"

------
JulianMorrison
Education is what has declined.

The humanities merely show it more, because they aren't particularly useful
for the _non-education_ function of university, namely, serving as a hoop
which when jumped permits your resume to survive the first and most impersonal
culling.

~~~
gruseom
I agree. Education means bringing out that which is within. Training means to
pull something along. The one has no particular end state in view, the other
is about ensuring specific behaviors or, if you want to be cynical, producing
followers. What we call education is really training. The question people
typically ask a student about what he/she is studying: "What are you going to
_do_ with that?" is more meaningful than it seems.

------
greenyoda
_" What many undergraduates do not know — and what so many of their professors
have been unable to tell them — is how valuable the most fundamental gift of
the humanities will turn out to be. That gift is clear thinking, clear writing
and a lifelong engagement with literature."_

I seem to have acquired all three of these gifts, and I majored in computer
science.

Also, if English dies as an academic discipline, it may very well be due to
the lack of people who are able to teach it. As tenured professors retire and
are replaced with poorly paid adjunct faculty who need to work part-time at
multiple colleges to scrape together a meager living, the number of people who
enroll in graduate programs in the humanities will probably decline.

~~~
gammarator
_I seem to have acquired all three of these gifts, and I majored in computer
science._

We all think that; it's a cognitive bias.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_wobegon_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_wobegon_effect)

One of the benefits of writing classes is the chance to improve in response to
third-party feedback. Our arguments are rarely as tight nor our prose as clear
as they seem to us.

~~~
Crake
The difference between compsci and english is that if your prose is not clear
in the latter, you'll still get an A (or even get an A _because_ of the lack
of clarity), whereas your code will not work in the former if it's muddled to
the point of obscurity and non-functionality.

~~~
simias
There is a difference between writing code and writing prose though. I've met
many, many, many programmers who might have been good at their jobs but suck
terribly at expressing their ideas during meeting or even in emails. It makes
team work very tedious and time consuming.

------
beloch
I did an English minor while doing my undergraduate physics degree. It's a
good thing I took the "heavy" course on literary theory last, because it
utterly demoralized me. The sheer volume of books in the library devoted to
literary criticism is astounding. It outweighs the entire canon of classics by
at least two orders of magnitude, and it's almost all self-aggrandizing
gibberish. If you could somehow distill all the original and clear ideas in
these books down there wouldn't be enough material to fill a pamphlet! Perhaps
I was just unlucky in my choice of books and perhaps I had a bad prof, but
after that course I couldn't look at someone doing graduate studies in English
and not marvel at their tolerance for bullshit.

The most important lesson in writing is that "nobody wants to waste one second
more than they have to reading your drivel, so get to the point". I learned
this writing physics papers. I had several English profs who probably still
haven't learned this lesson.

~~~
Crake
The problem is that if they didn't fill it with self-aggrandizing gibberish,
people would easily understand what they mean, and then go: wait, didn't so-
and-so write about this already?

Science still has legitimate frontiers. English, in many instances, does not.

------
the_watcher
As long as the people making the case for studying the humanities make it as
unconvincing as the author, there will continue to be pressure towards STEM
education. "I can't explain it or give a quantifiable reason, but I know that
it is important" is simply unacceptable as a defense of the humanities (I
majored in Political Science, and all of the standard critiques of humanities
education were true of my experience).

------
auctiontheory
I'm picking up mixed messages from this article. On the one hand, the author
describes the (theoretical) value of an excellent humanities education, and
regrets the decline in the number of English majors. So far so okay. But on
the other hand, she says that today's English majors are confused thinkers and
pompous writers, and are being poorly taught. Well, in that case, what's the
big loss? Let them major in a STEM field, so they _might_ learn to think, and
might also one day repay their loans.

Solzhenitsyn was a mathematician.

------
patio11
The first paragraph would be improved by the economic reality that dare not
speak its name: _adjunct_. Most people who pursue the PhD in English will fail
to join the one profession which actually needs English PhDs (training future
English PhDs) and instead, if they want to continue putting to use the last 7+
years of their life dedicated to mastering the reification of privilege and
construction of the other as demonstrated by 18th century American
advertising, end up as later-day itinerant minstrels. The career has little to
recommend it by the standards of Harvard undergrads: poor material conditions
($3,000 for teaching a course, typically no benefits), little impact, no
stability, and (perhaps most cutting of all) the social slight of being a
second class citizen in academia and constantly forced, in ways large and
small, to acknowledge that fact.

English PhDs should come with a disclaimer: "90% of you will be unemployable.
Your professor who says that you are special and such a good writer that you
deserve to give this a go _is lying to you_. You are not a particularly good
writer. You have just internalized the art of flattering English PhDs, which
is unfortunate, because they expect to get that done for free and have more
than enough takers. Many people who are as talented as you are unemployed or
underemployed, and their only opportunity to appreciate Foucault and Kafka is
when they're applying for welfare benefits."

English undergrad is almost worse. Even by the standards of the humanities,
which chiefly exist to certify that certain students managed to be mostly
literate by senior year of high school, it tries to beat any love of the
language out of you. By twist of fate and changing departmental policy, my
sister (3 years my junior and a genuinely talented writer) and I ended up in
the same "freshman" composition class. I phoned it in and got As and A+s, she
slaved away on every essay and squeaked out a B-. She hadn't learned the
bemused sneer yet. ("The author believes that the poor would better themselves
through honest labor. One imagines an elf in Santa's workshop, quite
appropriate since the benevolent employer is a myth but the unwavering
sweatshop labor in the service of fulfilling the bourgeoises' consumerist
desires is very real." <\-- "OMG so nails it!!") After you've mastered the
pseudointellectual bemused sneer, English class is your oyster. My sister
refused to be cynical, grappled with the texts and worked out some genuinely
beautiful prose, and barely passed. She figured it out in later years,
graduated, and is currently deeply in debt after receiving a master's in an
unrelated field after finding out, unsurprisingly, that a major in English
makes you virtually unemployable. (One of many deep cuts along the way: she
ended up working for _our alma mater_ in a position which was, frankly,
secretarial work, and was told, when she attempted to move into a permanent
position, that secretaries at our alma mater should have graduate degrees
because it would reflect poorly on the institution if they had just graduated
in English.)

~~~
gruseom
But your comment already takes for granted that there's no purpose in studying
literature other than a career in academia (presumably because education is
only about careers to begin with). I'd say the battle for the things worth
caring about here was lost long before that assumption became not-even-worth-
bothering-to-make-explicit. And sure, the economics are pathetic and the
profession is rife with horseshit.

The reason I studied literature for a while was that I wanted to learn what
literature could teach me, because I wanted to connect with a noble tradition,
and things like that. At the time, if anyone had asked me "what are you going
to 'do' with that? what about the economics?" (and I know this, because they
did), I would have said that economics aren't everything. Are they?

Edit: come to think of it, that battle was probably already lost when people
tried to pretend that there was a viable middle-class career path in any of it
to begin with. Traditionally, this stuff was produced by the leisure classes,
entertainment professionals, and poor bohemians. I'm not sure the marriage
with academia turned out to be a very good or a very long-lasting thing. I'm
quite sure that tying this cultural tradition to any short-term notion of
economic utility is pointless; might as well shoot it in the head.

~~~
rsingel
My undergrad degree in literature might not have gotten me a high-paying job
out of college, but it helped me live a life that I wanted.

I had the privilege of doing my final two years of college at a school where
grades weren't given out for papers in the English department.

You'd write a one-page response paper to a Shakespeare play, where you'd have
to make a cogent argument/close reading and in response, you'd get 300 words
from the professor engaging with your argument.

My classes wandered across Irish literature, non-fiction writing seminars,
18th century literature, modern and post-modern theory, and hyper-text
literature.

I learned to engage with the classics, learned to hear the poetry in James
Joyce's initially inscrutable Ulysses, and was forced to confront the problems
of loving Pound's words while abhorring his politics.

I learned tech later, as I went. I probably would have made more money
studying computer science or cognitive science (which was fascinating mix of
technology and theory), but I don't regret at all being a liberal arts major.

The world is big, fascinating and hard to think through -- and that's not
getting any easier. I owe to my liberal arts education the limited skills I
have for finding beauty in a true sentence or the mismatched typography of a
local business's sign.

That education has driven me to understand why I need to live in the world an
open heart, to understand things that I naturally want to dismiss and to forge
a life built on an ethically-driven approach to politics, literature and art.

I've got lots of arguments about how our education system works - starting way
before college.

But if the new reality is that college is only good for pushing out
technicians and a liberal arts education is only for suckers, then we've just
added one more depressing symptom pointing to a diagnosis that there's
something deeply awry in our nation's economic system and social priorities.

~~~
chc
> _But if the new reality is that college is only good for pushing out
> technicians and a liberal arts education is only for suckers, then we 've
> just added one more depressing symptom pointing to a diagnosis that there's
> something deeply awry in our nation's economic system and social
> priorities._

I think the problem is more that people expect to be employable after going to
college. If you are independently wealthy and are just going for laughs, sure,
the lack of concrete utility in an English degree is not a problem. But I
don't think that's the position of most college students. They want all those
intangible benefits you discussed (live with an open heart, understand things,
etc.), but they also intend to put themselves on the path to a comfortable
life, and they don't find out until after graduating with an English degree
and a ton of debt that they only get the intangible benefits and are on
roughly the same career trajectory as they were before they went to college.

------
Tichy
Apparently an English Major enables you to fill an entire page without
providing any arguments at all. That's definitely a useful skill.

~~~
Crake
Haha, this. Exactly what I was thinking when reading the article.

------
lkrubner
Paul Krugman recently had a blog post that touched upon a somewhat more
general trend: the decline of "human capital" as it was, for some decades,
associated with a broadly liberal education:

[http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/devaluing-
human-...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/devaluing-human-
capital/?_r=0)

"Nancy Folbre suggests that the golden age of human capital – roughly
speaking, the era in which the economy strongly demanded the kinds of skills
we teach in liberal-arts colleges and universities – is already behind us. She
may well be right: after a long stretch when both technology and trade seemed
to be undermining only manual labor, it does look as if many skilled
occupations are now under threat by Big Data, Bangalore, or both."

------
gms
Do you really need to study a full English major to learn to write properly?
Seems like one or two classes would do.

~~~
Kylekramer
I like to imagine a bizarro literature based Hacker News where a person is
saying "Do you really need a full Comp Sci major to write code? Seems like one
or two classes would do."

Of course you don't need to take an English major to write properly. But that
is rarely the goal of taking an English major. Very few majors are actually
about the mastery of one skill.

~~~
jlgreco
> _bizarro literature based Hacker News where a person is saying "Do you
> really need a full Comp Sci major to write code? Seems like one or two
> classes would do."_

I didn't know this Hacker News was literature based. Interesting. Where is the
non-bizarro one?

~~~
sk5t
No, it's the alternate universe HN that would be literature-based.

This one is loosely oriented around topics such as general interest, startup-
financing, and social/political dealings, with the fans of each occasionally
arguing that the others don't belong.

~~~
jlgreco
You appear to have missed my joke. This clearly is a HN that largely believes
that CS degrees are unnecessary.

------
petegrif
To my eye there is a major problem with the piece. Studying English Literature
is not just learning how to write. Not is it the only way to learn how to
write. One might, for example, argue that philosophy is a superior training in
how to construct a coherent argument. It is supposedly also learning how to
read. And IMHO this has been profoundly corrupted by the poisonous influence
of a series of 'schools' informed by half digested Continental philosophers.
Such philosophers are muddy enough for other philosophers and associated
wannabes, but such obscurantism has been a horrific influence on the
humanities. Reading through the filter of one or other of these corrupting
lenses diminishes pleasure in the the text. No wonder people don't enjoy
reading any more.

------
lemmsjid
I'm one of those English majors who pops up in interesting places (in this
case, software engineering).

After more than a decade in the field, I continue feeling that my degree was
excellent preparation for writing code. Allow me some bullet points:

* The typical English major is drilled in taking an impenetrable text and constructing an interpretive narrative (an essay). Much of the major involves writing essay after essay and having it critiqued by professors. The progression of the English major is that typically you go from thinking you're a hotshot writer to understanding that you are a bag of presuppositions and ill considered narratives. With that understanding can come depression or the knowledge that there is never a single interpretation, and that you are looking at one facet of an ineffable infinite. If you are not overcome by dread, this skill comes in handy when it comes to interpreting business requirements.

* A well trained English major is the first to point out that their precious interpretation is probably not correct -- that it is but one of several paradigmatic interpretations, and is, furthermore, culturally situated. Once again, this either brings nihilistic paralysis or a 'skillful means'-type approach where you tend to respect and incorporate other peoples' viewpoints. A piece of programming is ultimately the synthesis of many viewpoints, and the skillful developer must understand that they are channeling the viewpoints of all the project stakeholders when they put pen to paper.

* The close reading of poetry, especially poetry across multiple cultures and viewpoints, is excellent preparation for reading and appreciating other peoples' code--the most lacking skill in the industry today. You adopt the same mindset as a reader of poetry--first and foremost, trying to understand the situation of the author. Secondly, examining and critiquing your own visceral response -- are you irritated because the code is stupid, or is it perhaps written in a way that is consistent with an approach you do not yet understand? Thirdly, understanding that you are reading highly structured text -- what is the discipline behind the programming language you're encountering? How do its keywords and cadences lend themselves towards certain modes of expression and functionality?

* In a more theoretically oriented English degree, there is much focus on language as a construct -- as the lens through which you view the world. This is incredibly true in software development, where the narrative of the code can be so oblique to the narrative on the server (for example, the way in which most modern languages behave implicitly through inheritence, and the way in which structural code can only begin to point at the interaction between threads, processes, and servers).

* As an English major, I understand that I am coming from my own experiences, and I believe that the understandings I mentioned above can be gotten in any field of study. I do feel that my English major was valuable in particular because of the emphasis on the critique of the student's writing. Over the course of several years, my fundamental assumptions about anything and everything were repeatedly and effectively critiqued by my professors.

~~~
mtdewcmu
"The progression of the English major is that typically you go from thinking
you're a hotshot writer to understanding that you are a bag of presuppositions
and ill considered narratives... A well trained English major is the first to
point out that their precious interpretation is probably not correct"

In other words, humility. You learn it in science and engineering, too. It's
hard to get through rigorous training in those fields without grappling with
your own limits. You can't fake it. In computer science, the computer lets you
know when you've failed. In science, the data tells you when you're wrong,
and, failing that, there's peer review. In math, you have proofs. Any endeavor
that is empirical and data-driven exposes nonsense efficiently and ruthlessly.

~~~
lemmsjid
I agree that certain axioms can be verified or disproven, but larger questions
remain arguable in both science and the humanities (if those can be truly
separated). For example, you can verify that a linked list works, or that an
operation is associative... but when you zoom out and look at whether or not a
codebase with millions of lines of code is successfully doing what it sets out
to do... The act of assessing that is similar to assessing Milton's motivation
for his depiction of limbo. The interpretations defy a single right or wrong
answer.

------
mathattack
Is it possible that the decline also has to do with the decline in quality of
humanities teaching? My undergrad writing "teacher" was a terrible grad
student, intent on pushing a social agenda on the class. I certainly wasn't
going to take any more than I had to. My "intensive writing" teacher has a
very extreme political agenda attached to a geography class. I sucked it up,
but vowed never to venture into his department either.

I don't think it's pure practicality that's holding English back. Many CEOs
are English and History majors. It's the quality of the teaching.

------
1123581321
The necessity of studying one's own language is the problem. Most of what is
read in English should have been read before college begins. And what's left?
There is no language to master as there is with a French or Classics major,
save some specialty work in old/middle English. The interesting linguistics
are covered by that field. Education majors cover the pedagogical aspects just
fine. So, the only thing that can be left is remedial reading or inventing new
fields of study, and the invented fields aren't rewarding ends or means
financially or intellectually.

~~~
Crake
I read more books before I started college than most of my liberal arts
college graduated friends have read in their entire lives.

Some of them still haven't read Orwell.

~~~
walshemj
Though even though I am a dyslexic I recall in my classical studies class I
was the only one who read all of Thucydides as well as several extra plays by
Euripides and Xenophon "the march up country"

------
frozenport
Besides a decline in overall literacy, which from personal impression is not a
requirement for a English degree, I wonder if we can say this trend reflects
an the accessibility of a college education.

Perhaps, 30 years ago Yale boys could afford to get an English degree because
they were guaranteed cushy jobs at Goldman-Sachs where their dad and granddad
were partners. Now some kid programming in what once was an Indonesian island
took their job.

------
philco
Deep down, I just knew I'd be blown away by both the thoughtfulness and prose
in this thread. I was right. Thank you fellow HN'ers!

------
Tycho
Any attempt to justify time spent in pursuit of an English Lit degree
inevitably sounds smug/condescending. You have to say general things like it
teaches you how to write and think and appreciate the breadth of human
experience - but then you are implying that everybody else must be lacking in
those areas, which sounds terrible.

------
tzs
The English major has been declining for at least a decade, due to the
offshoring of coveted jobs for English majors such as writing poetry. [1]

[1]
[http://watleyreview.com/2003/111103-2.html](http://watleyreview.com/2003/111103-2.html)

------
littlemerman
Don't overestimate the importance of your undergrad major. The value of your
degree is based on the caliber of the institution from which you received it.

As a history major myself I can tell you firsthand that a humanities degree
does not make one unemployable.

------
virtualwhys
English major to a master's in psychology to self-trained programmer, see the
pattern?

I was interested in all three, but programming was the only one that grabbed
me in a wow, I really want to dive into this world, kind of way.

------
HockeyPlayer
Writing well is one of the only ways to scale your impact beyond face-to-face,
but you don't have to be writing about literature. Pomona taught me to write,
even though I was a computer science major.

------
nickthemagicman
Steinbeck, Wells, Shaw,Twain

College dropouts.

------
tmsh
The article gets it completely wrong. One studies writing as an English major
the way one studies programming as a computer science major. That is, the best
way to do it is to inspire via other subjects that will enliven the entire
career.

I'm a highly skilled software engineer who was an English and Classics major
at at top liberal arts college. The author of the article seems to be an
authority, but he is not. Most professors of literature that I respect would
look down on his attempt to generalize about the whole field based on a narrow
non-fiction / writing practioner-esque approach.

The reason you study English is to study literature which is the most
important concentration of knowledge, distilled, evolved and selected as to
what is important in the past several centuries. There is figuratively nothing
actually more important (if there were, someone would've written a f-ing
story). Science, by comparison, is young.

The study of literature is a celebration of what is important in life. And how
to live life. And how to find what is important to you in terms of each second
that you live on this planet, Steve Jobs / death at your back philosophically-
speaking (those are all English majory ideas -- Marvell in that case).

But back to my original point. One studies computer science to understand the
philosophy of how computers might be designed and used (see the Abelson SICP
lectures or whatever), not to learn how to implement some Java standard
interface. Though that is a little part of the practice that one has to do.
Same thing with writing.

I took zero writing courses, but wrote over a hundred essays on other writers
and it was one of the best preparations for any field -- law, science,
software engineering (in my case).

Also the proper way to study literature -- ignoring all the postmodernist and
cultural theory baggage -- is to study words closely and this has a long,
rigorous history that again rivals any other analytical tradition. Has English
studies lost its way? Sure, it always does because it's such a ridiculously
large undertaking. Are more targeted philologies and close readings
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_reading](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_reading)
) important? Sure.

But just because the typical English major isn't as employable without other
skills, doesn't mean the field itself is a bad one. But I think people get
upset about it because it is such a tricky field to make a career in and can
burn you if you think it is.

But one doesn't set out to become an astronaut by taking astronaut classes.
You have to have another broader drive. Among those who value intelligence,
however, the study of literature (f- writing -- great writing has no place in
the university except as a place to study it, if you ask me -- it's not
primarily designed to teach writing in the world because academia does not
exist primarily in the world -- it's designed to teach understanding of past
writing which is precisely 'what we know', as Eliot would say, etc.).

Anyway, as much as it pains me to give any credence to the idiots there:

[http://www.socfell.fas.harvard.edu/senior%20and%20junior%20f...](http://www.socfell.fas.harvard.edu/senior%20and%20junior%20fellows.html)

They know enough to know that English is equal to many other pursuits of
knowledge. Will it evolve to a more targeted literary analysis? Maybe. But
there is nothing more important than the study of great literature. If this
upon me proved I never writ nor no man ever loved, basically.

~~~
bloaf
>Science, by comparison, is young.

The age of literature makes it static; there is no hurry to participate. I can
pursue literature leisurely (and with very little financial investment) over
the course of my lifetime. Science, on the other hand, is more dynamic; if you
want to contribute to the cutting edge you will likely need credentials to
access the resources to do so. A degree in the sciences opens doors in ways
that the humanities do not: the great works of literature are available to
anyone at my local library, but only a very small group of experts gets to
test their theories on the Large Hadron Collider. Studying the humanities in
college therefore has a significant opportunity cost, to say nothing of the
cost of tuition.

Computer science is a prominent exception, though. There is much more
acceptance in that discipline for self-taught experts.

