The Decline of the English Department

What is the English department for? For most of the 20th century, the answer seemed pretty obvious. It was, you know, the place you went to study the great works of literature, to trace a conversation with beauty and meaning across time from Beaowolf to Virginia Wolf. Uh to to grapple with the complete works of Shakespeare and of Chaucer many times.

uh it was the place where you studied in the words of Matthew Arnold the best that has been thought or said and uh in many places it still is but things have changed something very significant has changed because uh the English degree used to be very popular in 1971 almost 8% of college degrees in America were in English 8% of all degrees all bachelor degrees awarded were in English that's huge um English departments by the way are relatively new additions to the university model. Many of them uh started being added to the universities in the late 19th century and you know uh a lot of people don't know this but think about it everybody was reading Shakespeare, George Elliot, Charles Dickens. So in the 19th century when when people thought well let's add an English department some objected to it because everybody was reading Shakespeare, Elliot, Chaucer and and many other Dickens. Uh it would be like asking today universities to adopt a uh Tik Tok department or a YouTube department or a TV department.

It's like well everybody's watching TV. Why do we need a department about that? Well, um that's sort of the way it was back then many of the great works that are studied academically today. So when the English departments came on, they were very popular and they uh are very useful degrees as they always have been.

But today that number of English majors has dropped significantly. Uh since 2012 to now the number of English majors has fallen by a third. And the story has so much more to do with than uh than just declining enrollments. It's about a fundamental shift in the mission and purpose of the department.

Many English majors today can graduate without ever having read uh Shakespeare. There are many reasons that contributed to this, but the historical survey across uh English literature has been replaced by more of a choose your own adventure model. Uh so what happened? Um did ...