Why Study English?
Nathan Heller documents what may be the demise of the traditional English major as it once thrived in the wood-panelled seminar rooms of élite universities (“The End of the English Major,” March 6th). But schools of that kind make up less than five per cent of the country’s institutions of higher learning. At the other ninety-five per cent, the humanities are already combining traditional pedagogy with newer approaches. At my private, midsize university in lower Manhattan, enrollment in our English department has grown by forty-seven per cent in the past two years, to about a hundred and fifty majors. Our courses incorporate archival research and community collaboration. This academic year, one section of our introductory literature course worked with the Bowery Residents’ Committee to organize a book drive for our unhoused neighbors. Several classes are researching lower Manhattan’s nineteenth-century Black and Spanish-language presses.
If what draws the next generation of students to English and other humanities majors is innovation and pedagogical experimentation, then the top research institutions, which dominate discussions of higher education, are unlikely to lead the way.
Kelley Kreitz
Associate Professor of English
Pace University
New York City
In the classroom, in publications, and at professional meetings, my colleagues are boundlessly optimistic about the potential for literary studies to effect all sorts of social and political change. Why is it, then, that, when confronted with the corporate-administrative ethos that sees universities only as job-training facilities, they are willing to give so much ground?
I am, of course, aware that the English department that nurtured my love of literature and my delight in talking to students about it may soon be a thing of the past (if it isn’t already). But I also have no illusions that speaking the language of administrators, corporations, and Big Tech—that reimagining the value of literature and literary studies in utilitarian terms—will cause deans to be more generous to my department, or bring more students to the English major. What I remain optimistic about is that the intensive study of literature can enlarge the mind of any student who has the patience and the will to pursue it. Such enlargement, even if it cannot be proved to be an economic good, is a psychic, even a spiritual, necessity. And, until they turn the lights off, I will continue to labor for this necessity, no matter what the university and its corporate sponsors tell students they ought to want.
Jeremy Lopez
Professor of English
Montclair State University
Montclair, N.J.
As an undergraduate English major at a large public research university, I found Heller’s article dismaying. It gives the impression that the survival of English departments depends entirely on the irrationality of their remaining students. Much of the discussion surrounding the state of literary studies portrays the rest of the undergraduate body as incapable of seeing the real value of literature. Yet, within academia, self-professed lovers of literature read books with the sole purpose of tearing them apart, a practice that has all but killed the magic of the written word, the thing that makes us study English in the first place. If English departments spent less time lamenting the end of an era and more time engaging their students in a serious conversation about the state of the profession, they’d find a wealth of fresh perspectives.
Alex Ramirez-Amaya
Atlanta, Ga.
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