At the beginning of Avenue Q, the Broadway Musical notorious for its puppets who say and do dirty things, the fresh-out-of-college Princeton glides onto the stage (as well as puppets can glide), assumes a singing position, and earnestly asks the audience: “What do I dooo with a B.A. in Engleeeeehsh?”
In his article for The American Scholar, “The Decline of the English Major,” William M. Chace observes how many students are wondering the very same thing. A professor of English who has taught at Berkeley, Stanford, Wesleyan, and Emory, Chace is concerned about the dramatic drop in students who chose to study English during the last couple of decades. Just as Princeton has no idea how to proceed after arriving in New York City with nothing but a degree in English, thousands of students are feeling unsure about entering a major that presents them with very few ideas on how to carry on after college ends.
One reason is our society’s shift in values. According to the research of Alexander W. Astin, in the mid-1960’s, 80 percent of incoming freshman were intent on “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” in college over anything else, whereas in 2001, over 70 percent were primarily worried about developing skills that would lead to financial stability. Somewhere in between there, probably the 1970’s and 80’s, the need to earn surpassed the need to cultivate a meaningful outlook. And while the study of literature may be important philosophically and spiritually, perhaps, it’s not exactly known to bring in the Benjamins.
The lack of practicality in the post-college world is not the only factor that has caused English departments to recede from the spotlight. Chace also cites the relative inability of English Faculty to bring in money to the university as one of the prime reason that English departments have shrunk over the years. Whereas medical students and physicists win government grants, faculty of the humanities rarely draw in money to the institutions that pay them.
Besides economic turbulence and society’s changing views on what constitutes a valuable education, “the deeper explanation resides not in something that has happened to it, but in what it has done to itself” says Chace of the reason for the English department’s decline. Chace blames professors for failing to establish rules and boundaries for what defines good literature, for refusing to create a cohesive study of literature, and for being complacent about their department’s own stagnation.
So what now? The fact that there aren’t many jobs to be had in any field actually gives a twisted hope to the more neglected fields of study such as literature. Chace believes that books should be studied “in terms of the intrinsic value of the works…as appealing artifacts of human wisdom.” The art for art’s sake mentality. What’s more, continues Chace, tenure should be based more on classroom time than on research. Teachers may be able to do a better job of imparting their passion for literature when not weighed down by the need to prove it to various scholarly boards and journals.
Chace ends his article by inviting students to join their teachers in discovering and defining what makes literature so important to education and history. He sees the project as a grand sweeping challenge that will both reenergize the discipline as well as sharpen students’ ability to argue and defend their points. In short, anyone interested in maintaining the study of English as a revered and useful discipline must take a stand and use their well-honed writing skills to argue it back into its place of influence.
