The Decline and Fall of the English Major

This is something you build up to over a long period of time, not in one or two classes or even cramming it into four years.

> It's sad that the classical education is no more, but it's also true that the humanities rotted from within

This really resonated with me. I find the concept of a classical education immensely important. I originally wanted to be a music major before diverting to CS. Even during my CS studies, I took extra liberal coursework to try and "round out" my education: history courses, literature, etc.

I found it troubling that as the liberal arts came into the modern age, I think they became more and more irrelevant to describing and enriching the world: philosophy, once a guide for humanity into the frontiers of law, ethics, science, has become a circus of irrelevant navel gazing; high-music became random and unpleasant fist slamming; literature because trite political regurgitation or stream-of-consciousness vomitus; sculpture and painting turned into talent and effort-free indecipherable and pointless enigmas that all talked about the same inconsequential nonsense; and architecture turned into collisional visages made of unlivable spaces and leaky roofs.

There seems frighteningly little of import, things that have honestly progressed and lifted up the species, that has come out of the humanities in recent decades -- at least as compared to everything post-Renaissance till the Industrial Revolution. There's highlights of course, but oh so much garbage. It's no wonder the general population is more interested in Pop Music than in what should be the modern equivalent of Bach.

There's an interesting experiment that's easy to conduct. Go to a classical art gallery and sit and watch the people, how they react to the art. Then do the same at a modern art gallery. I find that more people resonate and connect with work that's a millenia and a continent removed from them than they do with with the indecipherable "art" that was produced a month ago in the same city.

I remember touring the Vatican museum, which is setup basically as a long and winding path through Western History. There are works there dating back thousands of years and into modernity, many are the finest examples of their type. Being the Vatican there is of course a tremendous amount of devotional art through the ages. If you stop and look around, you see people from all over the planet, young and old, looking around jaws agape at some of the wonders.

Near the end of the tour you end up in a modern gallery. Most of it is devotional art, most of it looks like reassembled garbage and random tossings out of paint can. Nobody, not a person, stops and pays any attention to it. If you stop in these galleries and watch people as they move through it, the only sounds you hear are snickering and sighs as people try to escape the crushing irrelevance of it all.

Somehow high art lost its audience.

I try and visit modern galleries, hoping that something will speak to me the way other classical fine art speaks to me. On occasion I find something interesting or witty, something I can appreciate. But most of the time I end up in very tired "special showings" of 2 steel plates welded together, or an exploration of albedo, black square on black #47 or some similar nonsense.

I guess somebody gets this stuff, I don't, I find most of it vacuous and the work of borderline scam artists and flim-flam "artists". And I think most of the general public also feel that way. Sitting in a modern art installation and watching people as they view the work, there's an inevitable sadness. They've come to be enriched and to grow, to be moved and touched to the bottom of their soul, and instead they're met with the artistic equivalent of insults.

I know that there's a number of historical reasons for this, largely a reaction to the World Wars and a desire to detach from the normal vernacular of power that often gave voice to art. And I'm starting to see some new art in the last decade or so that's really interesting. But I can't help but feel that the pendulum swung too far and too fast away from relevancy for too long and we've lost generations of would be art supporters. And it'll be generations before our civilization learns a new "language" of expression that can reflect and resonate with people's spirits and capture and enrapture people en masse again.

I leave you with this: It's very hard to see something like this http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/0... (and it really looks like that in person) and then this http://i-cdn.apartmenttherapy.com/uimages/ny/3rdChurchChrist... and not feel like we've lost something in our art.

The first paragraph would be improved by the economic reality that dare not speak its name: adjunct. Most people who pursue the PhD in English will fail to join the one profession which actually needs English PhDs (training future English PhDs) and instead, if they want to continue putting to use the last 7+ years of their life dedicated to mastering the reification of privilege and construction of the other as demonstrated by 18th century American advertising, end up as later-day itinerant minstrels. The career has little to recommend it by the standards of Harvard undergrads: poor material conditions ($3,000 for teaching a course, typically no benefits), little impact, no stability, and (perhaps most cutting of all) the social slight of being a second class citizen in academia and constantly forced, in ways large and small, to acknowledge that fact.

English PhDs should come with a disclaimer: "90% of you will be unemployable. Your professor who says that you are special and such a good writer that you deserve to give this a go is lying to you. You are not a particularly good writer. You have just internalized the art of flattering English PhDs, which is unfortunate, because they expect to get that done for free and have more than enough takers. Many people who are as talented as you are unemployed or underemployed, and their only opportunity to appreciate Foucault and Kafka is when they're applying for welfare benefits."

English undergrad is almost worse. Even by the standards of the humanities, which chiefly exist to certify that certain students managed to be mostly literate by senior year of high school, it tries to beat any love of the language out of you. By twist of fate and changing departmental policy, my sister (3 years my junior and a genuinely talented writer) and I ended up in the same "freshman" composition class. I phoned it in and got As and A+s, she slaved away on every essay and squeaked out a B-. She hadn't learned the bemused sneer yet. ("The author believes that the poor would better themselves through honest labor. One imagines an elf in Santa's workshop, quite appropriate since the benevolent employer is a myth but the unwavering sweatshop labor in the service of fulfilling the bourgeoises' consumerist desires is very real." our alma mater in a position which was, frankly, secretarial work, and was told, when she attempted to move into a permanent position, that secretaries at our alma mater should have graduate degrees because it would reflect poorly on the institution if they had just graduated in English.)

I would say that those gifts aren't determined by the content (For you, CS, for others, business or whatever) as they're underlying gifts someone either has naturally and 'easily' or for others still it takes more learning and practice to acquire them. I studied design and now software engineering and I too would say I've acquired these gifts—to an extent—but also not only from university did I learn these but from my parents (We've always had a lot of books and my parents are happy readers) and situational circumstances. :) In that last sentence I was thinking that these things are hopefully taught not only at university but elsewhere and earlier too.

I disagree. Tourists in museums are generally bored by the classical/baroque/renaissance art section and entertained by the weird stuff in the contemporary section. If their jaws are agape it's because they are falling asleep, or because they weren't expecting the Mona Lisa to be so small.