Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Decline and Fall of the English Major

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 160 posts

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#11

Post by lkrubner »

Paul Krugman recently had a blog post that touched upon a somewhat more general trend: the decline of "human capital" as it was, for some decades, associated with a broadly liberal education:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/devaluing-human-...

"Nancy Folbre suggests that the golden age of human capital – roughly speaking, the era in which the economy strongly demanded the kinds of skills we teach in liberal-arts colleges and universities – is already behind us. She may well be right: after a long stretch when both technology and trade seemed to be undermining only manual labor, it does look as if many skilled occupations are now under threat by Big Data, Bangalore, or both."

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#12

Post by greenyoda »

"What many undergraduates do not know — and what so many of their professors have been unable to tell them — is how valuable the most fundamental gift of the humanities will turn out to be. That gift is clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature."

I seem to have acquired all three of these gifts, and I majored in computer science.

Also, if English dies as an academic discipline, it may very well be due to the lack of people who are able to teach it. As tenured professors retire and are replaced with poorly paid adjunct faculty who need to work part-time at multiple colleges to scrape together a meager living, the number of people who enroll in graduate programs in the humanities will probably decline.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#13

Post by gruseom »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #8

Education is what has declined. The humanities merely show it more, because they aren't particularly useful for the non-education function of university, namely, serving as a hoop which when jumped permits your resume to survive the first and most impersonal culling.

I agree. Education means bringing out that which is within. Training means to pull something along. The one has no particular end state in view, the other is about ensuring specific behaviors or, if you want to be cynical, producing followers. What we call education is really training. The question people typically ask a student about what he/she is studying: "What are you going to do with that?" is more meaningful than it seems.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#14

Post by kenko »

I wonder what current (or perhaps past?) president of the MLA, Michael Bérubé, has to say about this.

Or rather, I wonder if you wonder. I know. It's this:

""" You know, I've been trying for many years now to get people to understand that the decline in humanities enrollments in the US happened almost entirely between 1970 and 1980. I usually work from this table from the NCES Digest of Education Statistics -- http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_286.asp -- where you can see that English plummeted from an anomalous 7.6 percent of all bachelor's degrees in 1970-71 to 3.4 percent in 1980-81. (It was 4 percent in 1950; it rebounded to about 4.5 percent in the mid-90s and is back down to 3.2 percent today.)

But today I came across this other table -- http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_289.asp -- and lo! In 1970-71, 17.1 percent of all bachelor's degrees were awarded in the humanities, and in 2009-10 the figure was .... 17.0 percent. For the purposes of the NCES, "humanities" includes "degrees in Area, ethnic, cultural, and gender studies; English language and literature/letters; Foreign languages, literatures, and linguistics; Liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities; Multi/interdisciplinary studies; Philosophy and religious studies; Theology and religious vocations; and Visual and performing arts." That last group, btw, has more than tripled in majors since 1970, while the total number of degrees has merely doubled. And "liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities" has increased sixfold. This makes up a lot of ground from the relative dropoff in English and foreign languages. """

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#15

Post by foobarbazqux »

fibbery wrote: post #10
foobarbazqux wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you really need to study a full English major to learn to write properly? It's not clear to me that majors are things that are studied, especially English ones.

I don't follow you. To complete a major you take a certain number of courses in a subject. Or are you suggesting that English majors don't learn anything?

If a major is a program of study, then to study a major is to study a program of study. It's possible, of course, but I don't think that's what most majors do. And English ones especially would see the subtle language implications here. (As you can see we're both already abusing the term: majors are also those that enroll in a particular program of study, but I'm quite sure he didn't mean to study them.)

It just seemed ironic that a question about the validity of an English major was perhaps incorrect in its use of English, that's all. Not a big deal. Not even sure if I'm right, I've just never heard "to study a major" before.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#16

Post by krakensden »

> No one has found a way to put a dollar sign on this kind of literacy, and I doubt anyone ever will. But everyone who possesses it — no matter how or when it was acquired — knows that it is a rare and precious inheritance.

This is a widespread sentiment. This is even a chic sentiment. This is maybe even a sentiment I once sympathized with. It is also the kind of romantic bullshit that hurts people.

It doesn't really matter if Johnny Middle Class believes it, his parents can probably help him muddle along somehow. Jorge, though, first in his family to get to college, might just take it seriously, and wind up somewhere ugly with too much debt, four years gone, and a piece of paper that nobody wants.

I personally know at least a dozen people like that. I didn't make that mistake- but it was more by whim than anything else.

The worst, saddest part of all of this, is how trope heavy and unoriginal it is. This is the world's second oldest complaint, right after "the youth are lazy and disrespectful."

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#18

Post by jlgreco »

Kylekramer wrote: post #4
gms wrote: post #2

Do you really need to study a full English major to learn to write properly? Seems like one or two classes would do.

I like to imagine a bizarro literature based Hacker News where a person is saying "Do you really need a full Comp Sci major to write code? Seems like one or two classes would do." Of course you don't need to take an English major to write properly. But that is rarely the goal of taking an English major. Very few majors are actually about the mastery of one skill.

> bizarro literature based Hacker News where a person is saying "Do you really need a full Comp Sci major to write code? Seems like one or two classes would do."

I didn't know this Hacker News was literature based. Interesting. Where is the non-bizarro one?

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#19

Post by abraininavat »

gruseom wrote: post #3

It's sad that the classical education is no more, but it's also true that the humanities rotted from within. Because carrying on the traditions of arts and letters was no longer considered valuable, the disciplines rushed to gut themselves in favor of far shallower and dodgier stuff, like political ideologies ("the only things that matter are race, class, and gender") and pseudo-technical gibberish. None of that has…

Meanwhile there is a smugness that goes along with purely technical training, a certainty that its way is the only valuable way, that calls itself education but whose true name is Philistinism

It's funny that you use the term 'smugness', as that's exactly the feeling I got while reading your post. There's just something telling about a person who calls others Philistines.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#20

Post by kvee »

I agree. But it's ironic that the author never argues her case with clear writing.

She asserts that "clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature" is extremely extremely valuable. She asserts this as a fundamental "truth."

She probably doesn't even realize she needs to explain why because it actually is considered a "truth" among English majors.

That's too bad. Obviously it's not considered a "truth" by the people she wants to convince. And they'll think it's just some stereotypical English major bullshit.

Post reply on HN