Has the discipline of English finally reached its fatal tipping point, the point of no return? We English professors have never been sanguine about our discipline’s future. A sense of struggling against remorseless institutional tides has defined the ethos of the English department since the 19th century. But the rhetoric of impending doom has ratcheted up of late. Even before the financial crash in 2008, the literary-critic-turned-public-intellectual William Deresiewicz declared in The Nation that English was “dying” as a profession, suffering from a “steep, prolonged, and apparently irreversible decline” of enrollments.
Since then the entire higher-education sector has been caught in a squeeze between skyrocketing public debt and plummeting household wealth. The only fix currently on offer seems to be contraction and curtailment. Surely, in such an environment, the quintessential discipline-in-crisis cannot hope to last very long.
Without denying the scale of the challenges our colleges are facing, I want to propose a different view. We in English studies have become so habituated to visions of decline that we fail to appreciate our discipline’s resilience, which has kept it relatively stable here in the United States—even as it expands rapidly across many other parts of the world.
English is one of the larger and more durable disciplines in a growing global system. Let’s stop writing its obituary and start charting its future.
That future is going to be an increasingly international one. But even in regard to the United States, decline-of-English narratives have been vastly overblown. They invariably seize on 1971 as the key point of comparison for gauging current enrollment levels. It’s true that in the America of 40 years ago, there were more English majors, and far more as a percentage of all bachelor’s-degree students, than there are today. But 1971 was the apex of a sharp and anomalous late-1960s spike. That was mainly the result of the influx of women into universities and their heavy concentration in just a few, traditionally “feminine” disciplines—in particular those which, like English, served as preparation for careers in teaching.
Enrollments fell back toward historic norms as soon as women began to gain access to a wider range of fields and professions—a drop that should scarcely be cause for regret. To adopt 1971 as a benchmark is to load the statistical deck by ignoring the broader historical record.
Once we stop obsessing about the post-1971 decline, we can observe that English enrollments in the United States have been holding their own for more than a quarter-century, even against some of the disciplines that we probably imagine to be stronger sellers in the “curriculum marketplace.” In the early 1980s, after its fall from the heights of a decade before (when it granted about 64,000 bachelor’s degrees per year), English was granting about 32,000 bachelor’s degrees per year. Between 2005 and 2010, that figure was about 55,000. That’s a 72-percent increase, meaning that the discipline roughly kept pace with the 74-percent overall growth of the nation’s bachelor’s-degree programs, maintaining a 3.4-percent share of all college graduates.
To be sure, there are disciplines that have done better. They are not, however, the ones that crisis narratives lead us to expect. Degrees in foreign languages and literatures have increased about 100 percent over that same time span—as have degrees in philosophy and religious studies. Generalist degrees in “liberal arts and humanities” have increased 115 percent. Psychology has grown nearly 150 percent. The big losers? Physical sciences, computer sciences, engineering, mathematics, and (wait for it) economics, all of which have shrunk significantly relative to the system as a whole. Even business has shrunk slightly.
Of the six broad curricular categories tracked by the National Center for Education Statistics, the humanities easily grew the most between 1985 and 2010, increasing its share of total degree students by 26 percent. The social and behavioral sciences have increased their share by 20 percent. All other sectors have shrunk. English has yielded some ground in the most recent decade, losing students mainly to history. But despite that recent (and far from irreversible) migration from one humanities major to another, English remains the largest discipline in the fastest-growing sector.
Of course, total course enrollments in a subject may fall even when the number of majors holds constant. Like other core liberal-arts disciplines, English now claims a smaller share of students’ elective courses than in the past. Freshman writing and other composition classes, once a staple of the English department, are increasingly handled by separate programs with their own instructional staffs, depriving English of a sizable enrollment block.
Then, too, national enrollment data do not necessarily reflect local experiences. The best-established and most-selective undergraduate colleges, concentrated in the Northeast and the Midwest, have traditionally granted far more than the average share of bachelor’s degrees in English, but those enrollments are gradually coming down toward the national mean. An English professor at one of those colleges sees a very different picture than does someone at a new institution or new branch campus in the Sunbelt, where most of the growth in American higher education (hence in the English major) has occurred.
There may be, as well, a tendency to conflate downsizing of other kinds—of tenure-track faculty positions, departmental budgets, medical benefits, and so on—with enrollment declines. The miserable state of the academic job market, in particular, might instill a generalized sense of disciplinary contraction. But such misapprehensions can be dangerously self-fulfilling. To insist, against the statistical data, that English has ceased to appeal to students is to provide a false rationale for financial cuts.
The impressionistic and mostly anecdote-driven commentary about the flight of students away from English and the humanities can be even more misleading in relation to the broader global picture. The trends in Britain have been running counter to the crisis narrative since at least the mid-1990s. English and the humanities as a whole have gained ground while the physical and computer sciences and, to a lesser extent, economics, has fallen behind the overall rate of expansion.
Nor is this simply a phenomenon of Anglophone countries. With the rise of English as the undisputed language of the world economy and the dominant language of global cinema, literature, and the Internet, the discipline has claimed a significant place in practically every university system in the world.
Those systems have been growing far more rapidly than our own. Most governments today accept the view promulgated by Unesco, the World Bank, and other international agencies that higher-education enrollment needs to be at least 50 percent of the college-age population for a country to achieve sustained economic and technological advancement. The United States has long been above that level, but many European countries did not begin moving toward mass enrollment until the 1980s and 90s, and are still expanding aggressively. In Poland, for example, the undergraduate population has doubled in each of the past two decades and is now as large as Britain’s.
Major developing countries like Brazil, China, and India are at earlier moments on the expansionary curve, with enrollment percentages in the teens or low 20s, not nearly sufficient to meet demand from all the families pursuing middle-class status for their children. As recently as 1998, China had only about one million students enrolled in postsecondary education. Today it has perhaps 30 million, and it graduates more students with bachelor’s degrees in English than the United States does.
Americans tend to assume that English majors in Poland or China are really just learning English as a foreign language and aren’t interested in fiction or poetry, and that their curriculum involves no real engagement with works of literature. Such is not the case.
Yes, these programs do require substantial coursework in language, linguistics, and translation. In China’s national curriculum, for example, such language courses constitute two-thirds of English B.A. requirements, with literature classes contributing only one-third. But most students of English outside the United States also fulfill far more of their total degree requirements within their major than American students do, while they take fewer courses in cinema, creative writing, and cultural studies for an English major. Thus English majors in the various national systems complete about the same amount of coursework in literary study: 400 classroom hours, or the equivalent of about eight typical semester-long classes at an American college.
The specific works being studied do not vary greatly, either. Some countries favor British over American literature more than others do; some tend to include more drama on their syllabi. But assigned texts everywhere are drawn from a pretty narrow repertoire of well-established classics and contemporary masterpieces. Austen, Conrad, Twain, and Morrison are widely represented. Shakespeare is a more ubiquitous requirement outside the Anglophone countries than within them.
Moreover, with exposure to Anglophone digital media, students in many countries are arriving at college with far greater proficiency in English than even just a decade ago. As a result, programs are reducing compulsory coursework in language skills and focusing on literary study at earlier stages of the curriculum.
At the same time, in other countries as here in the United States, English departments are offering ever more open and flexible tracks or options. The increasingly widespread orthodoxy of student-as-consumer means that students can claim more power of choice over the timing and curricula of their degree programs. That is forcing a big expansion of multiple, modular, part-time, and individuated degree programs—especially in the humanities, where surging demand for coursework in the creative and performing arts can be accommodated.
We in English see this demand reflected most clearly in the boom of creative writing. While some faculty may regard the rise of creative writing as a threat to the literary curriculum, it is a distinct advantage for English to be able to offer a strong and relatively well-integrated “creative” track within a traditional academic discipline.
Considered globally, the challenge for English studies is not how to manage contraction but how to accommodate a student population that is becoming larger, more dispersed, and more diverse in its demands and expectations. The old pattern, in which “peripheral” locations strive to keep up with the latest theoretical and curricular innovations of metropolitan ones, is fast approaching anachronism as foreign variants become larger and statistically more central to the discipline than the domestic model itself.
We need to foster the kinds of intellectual traffic that are emerging around the study of Asian-Anglophone literatures. It is a major new field being developed by scholars and teachers in Australia, China, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, and elsewhere, and not simply spreading outward from the American-based fountainhead of Asian-American studies.
The dire economic situation of American colleges and the continuing degradation of academic instructional labor can make it more difficult to abandon the rhetoric of crisis. Nor should we underestimate the damage being done to our higher-education system by the decimation of the middle class and the purposeful bankrupting of government.
But if the question is whether the discipline of English has ceased to matter within this troubled system, whether it is a dinosaur already at the edge of extinction, the answer is clearly no. English will continue to provide the main focus of the higher-education experience for something approaching a quarter-million college graduates a year. We owe them a more thoughtful and serene engagement with our disciplinary future than what the crisis narrative affords.
James F. English is a professor of English and director of the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his recent books is The Global Future of English Studies (John Wiley & Sons, 2012).
Correction (9/17/12): The original version of this article mistakenly referred to the English major as the main focus of the higher-education experience for almost a quarter-million American college graduates a year. That estimate actually applies to college graduates worldwide.