March 03, 2023 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian
The New Yorker is a magazine that I have barely noticed for decades. It is the epitome of the “New York groupthink” that I mention on my “About” page.
But the current issue has a long (10,000+ words) piece by a guy named Nathan Heller, titled “The End of the English Major,” that I thought might be worth a look. Perhaps here we might find some liberal introspection about how infesting everything you control with racialist and gender obsessions and Critical Race Theory might not be such a great idea.
Who was I trying to kid? What this article actually shows is that a fancy New Yorker writer can produce 10,000 words about the demise of the English major, and more generally about the demise of essentially all humanities departments at universities, without ever mentioning the takeover of those departments by the racialist radical left.
Heller begins reasonably by providing some data as to the declining numbers of students majoring in English at various schools. The piece focuses on two schools in particular, Arizona State University and Harvard. Here are some numbers for ASU:
From 2012 to the start of the pandemic, the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from nine hundred and fifty-three to five hundred and seventy-eight. Records indicate that the number of graduated language and literature majors decreased by roughly half, as did the number of history majors. Women’s studies lost eighty per cent.
(If you’ve never read The New Yorker, you may be unfamiliar with its odd style of writing out in words all numbers except years.). And here are some numbers for Harvard:
From fifteen years ago to the start of the pandemic, the number of Harvard English majors reportedly declined by about three-quarters—in 2020, there were fewer than sixty at a college of more than seven thousand—and philosophy and foreign literatures also sustained losses.
And here are some sample figures from other universities:
[T]he decline at A.S.U. is not anomalous. According to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly but not always identically to internal enrollment figures, from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while SUNY Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half.
Clearly, the declines have been rapid and drastic. Heller now has about 9000+ words left to give us the explanation for what has gone wrong. The reason that is first up will not surprise you: stingy governments refuse to provide the needed funding. Heller interviews Columbia University English Professor James Shapiro, who has this to say:
“You get what you pay for!” [Shapiro] said. . . . [In 1958] the year after the Soviets launched Sputnik, . . . the National Defense Education Act appropriated more than a billion dollars for education. . . . “That was the beginning of the glory days of the humanities,” he continued. . . . [But in more recent years:] “That funding goes down,” he explained. “The financial support for the humanities is gone on a national level, on a state level, at the university level.”
All the money is moving to STEM:
“Harvard is spending a huge amount of money on the engineering school,” a sophomore mechanical-engineering major said at dinner in the dorms one evening. . . . “Mark Zuckerberg just gave another half billion dollars for an A.I. and natural-intelligence research institute, and they added new professorships. The money at Harvard—and a lot of other universities, too—is disproportionately going into STEM.”
But even Heller will admit that it’s not just the decline in government funding at work. Factor number two in the Heller analysis is what he calls “pre-professionalism” among the students. They’re looking for majors that translate immediately into high paying careers. Example:
According to the Harvard Crimson, which conducts an annual survey, more than sixty per cent of the members of the class of 2020 planning to enter the workforce were going into tech, finance, or consulting. “I think that the presence of big tech and consulting firms on campus is a big part of people’s perception that you can’t get a job in the humanities,” [said] Hana, a senior in integrative biology. . . .
OK, I’ll be the first to admit that events can have many causes, and the causes discussed by Heller may well have something to do with the decline of the humanities at major universities. But it’s also obvious that the humanities departments are the center of the obsessions with Critical Race Theory, diversity/equity/inclusion, and the like.
Can anybody blame the students for staying away?
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