A few students feel that if they have literature, they need nothing else (except maybe glasses). But that kind of devotion’s not the norm, degree-enrollment data suggest. (Photo by Flickr user janetmck)
In a previous post on the white paper by the MLA/Teagle committee, I cited a phrase that indicates a powerful impetus for the project. On page 13, the paper examines “the history of bachelor’s degree awards in the fields of modern languages,” and infers “their increasingly marginal status.”
Why the pessimism?
Because of the students. The report includes several charts on degrees awarded to undergraduates since the mid-60s, and each one signifies a field in decline.
Back in the early-1970s, Bachelor’s Degrees in English shot up to more than 60,000 per year. But by the mid-1980s, though, English degrees had plummeted to the low-30,000 level. Foreign-language degrees went from 24,000 in 1969 to 9,700 in 1984.
From the mid-1980s to 2004, the amount climbed back up, but it still fell well below the mid-1970s levels. In 2004, 53,000 English degrees went out, 15,000 foreign language degrees.
Those are simple numbers. The relative measures look worse. If we calculate the number of English and foreign language degrees per 100 bachelor’s degrees awarded in all fields, in 1966 English was at 7.47, foreign languages at 2.94. In 2004, English had fallen by half, 3.74 degrees per 100, foreign language even more so, 1.05 per 100.
In part we may attribute the slide to more professional fields being open to women since the mid-1960s and to more preprofessional majors at the undergraduate level (such as the explosion in undergrad business enrollments). But keep in mind that the decline in English and foreign language has taken place at the same time that reading and writing skills, as well as general cultural awareness, have acquired ever higher value. The business world resounds with calls for better readers and writers. Globalization rewards second- and third-language fluencies. Medical schools want “well-rounded” applicants and look favorably on humanities course-taking. And 7.5 percent of English-degree recipients in the 1990s have ended up as lawyers or judges.
These factors suggest that at least part of the reason for slipping English and foreign-language majors lies not without but within. It represents the experiences students have in freshman and sophomore language and literature classes, the readings placed on syllabi, the approaches taken, and the engagement of teachers. For whatever reason, those early courses recruit ever fewer students to the major, a turn-off that contrasts sharply with the self-representation one often hears from the professors themselves. For some 30 years, language and literature teachers have hailed the advances they’ve made, affirming how much more theoretically-aware they are, more liberal, more sensitive to racial and sexual bias, less tied to narrow notions of tradition.
Maybe so, more or less and now and then, although the we’re-so-much-better-than-the-oldsters attitude can get insufferable at times. But add other measures to the self-assessment, including student commitments (and sales of monographs, adjunctization, public opinion . . .), and the triumphalism begins to pale. The bear market in language and literature is here, and the MLA/Teagle report provides a sorely needed, hardheaded facing of the facts.
