The Rise of the English Department
English departments as we know them are relatively recent additions to the university. Most were added in the late 19th century, when people were already reading Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Dickens on their own. Adding an academic department felt like asking today: why create a TikTok department when everyone already watches TikTok?
Yet the department took hold. By 1971, nearly 8% of all bachelor's degrees awarded in America were in English — an enormous share. At places like Harvard, the requirements were rigorous. Students took a full-year survey of English literature from the Anglo-Saxons to modernism. They completed two semesters reading everything Chaucer wrote and another two semesters consuming every Shakespeare play, poem, and lyric. The University of Michigan, similarly demanding.
The curriculum had a recognizable core: the English tradition, American literature, Shakespeare, literary history, world literature. These programs promised a broad humanistic education. They were systematic. They were demanding.
What Changed
That core has now collapsed. Since 2012, the number of English majors has fallen by roughly a third — and the story is far more complex than declining enrollments alone.
Several pressures converged. First, many departments abandoned their strong curriculum when the literary canon began being challenged. The solution was simple: let students choose what they wanted to study. This created a "choose your own adventure" model that solved nothing and eroded standards.
Second, tuition costs surged far beyond inflation. In the 1950s, Harvard cost roughly $600 annually — about $7,000 in today's money. Today, university tuitions often reach five or six figures per year, pushing students toward so-called practical degrees.
Third, the rise of theory shifted focus away from literature as affective experience toward ideological applications of literature. The dominance wasn't created by great theorists themselves but by their graduate students who became tenured professors establishing critical orthodoxy.
Fourth, the research model took over English departments. After the 1970s, universities evaluated professors based on publications rather than teaching ability. Literature became a specialized academic field read mostly by other specialists. Intro-level survey courses — those great surveys from the 1950s and 1960s — got shifted to underpaid adjuncts. Whether a professor could teach became less important than whether they published.
Fifth, English departments lost their public voices. Earlier professors like Lionel Trining, Helen Vendler, Harold Bloom, and Northrup Fry wrote for an educated public. Today, most professors seem uninterested in public engagement. Outside the academy, technological acceleration, short-form entertainment, and market logic continue dulling the faculties of readers.
The New Stewards
Yet something unexpected is happening. Even as university English departments retreated from systematic approaches to literature, a renewed public appetite for serious reading has emerged.
In 2022, less than half of all American adults read even one book in an entire year — a stark decline over forty years. But simultaneously, new movements outside the academy are reclaiming literary study. Online communities, lifelong learners, and readers returning to classic texts are forming book clubs, writing close reading essays voluntarily, and treating reading as a public commons rather than credentialing hurdle.
These new stewards of literacy — autodidacts, teachers, frontline workers — are reading everything from Job to contemporary poetry. They're buying the classics, studying them in groups, encountering literature with rigor and conversation. This communal learning proves that classic works are being enlarged by present readerships.
This shift may signal a return to literature as personal encounter rather than professionalized academic study. The decline of the English department doesn't signal death — it signals recovery: returning to literature as common life, reading before it was professionalized.
"We need both the tower and the garden. A healthy academy and a healthy reading public."
Bottom Line
The strongest thread running through this argument is that meaning-seeking readers outside institutions are doing what universities stopped doing — making literary study communal, intimate, and alive. The vulnerability is historical: the author conflates some causes (theory, research culture) with others (wokeness, tuition costs), muddling which factors actually deserve blame. But the core insight stands: literacy belongs to everyone, not just academics, and it's returning to them.