Decline of the English Department

The Mermaids Have Stopped Singing

The latest edition of The American Scholar contains an article by William M Chace on how English Departments have declined significantly in US universities and colleges.

While there are many causes, he identifies the main reason straight off:

What are the causes for this decline? There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.

He goes on to describe how studying English used to be in its halcyon days, when he was in college:

What was the appeal of English during those now long-ago days? For me, English as a way of understanding the world began at Haverford College, where I was an undergraduate in the late 1950s. The place was small, the classrooms plain, the students all intimidated boys, and the curriculum both straightforward and challenging. What we read forced us to think about the words on the page, their meaning, their ethical and psychological implications, and what we could contrive (in 500-word essays each week) to write about them. With the books in front of us, we were taught the skills of interpretation. Our tasks were difficult, the books (Emerson’s essays, David Copperfield, Shaw’s Major Barbara, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and a dozen other works) were masterly, and our teacher possessed an authority it would have been “bootless” (his word) to question.

Studying English taught us how to write and think better, and to make articulate many of the inchoate impulses and confusions of our post-adolescent minds. We began to see, as we had not before, how such books could shape and refine our thinking. We began to understand why generations of people coming before us had kept them in libraries and bookstores and in classes such as ours. There was, we got to know, a tradition, a historical culture, that had been assembled around these books. Shakespeare had indeed made a difference—to people before us, now to us, and forever to the language of English-speaking people.

Chace goes on to point the finger of fundamental blame at the "academy" of professional English teachers itself. It has propagated a post-modern fragmentation of its discipline which has left is rootless and without mooring. He cites Harvard as a leading example:

Consider the English department at Harvard University. It has now agreed to remove its survey of English literature for undergraduates, replacing it and much else with four new “affinity groups”—“Arrivals,” “Poets,” “Diffusions,” and “Shakespeares.” The first would examine outside influences on English literature; the second would look at whatever poets the given instructor would select; the third would study various writings (again, picked by the given instructor) resulting from the spread of English around the globe; and the final grouping would direct attention to Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Daniel Donoghue, the department’s director of undergraduate studies, told The Harvard Crimson last December that “our approach was to start with a completely clean slate.” And Harvard’s well-known Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt also told the Crimson that the substance of the old survey will “trickle down to students through the professors themselves who, after all, specialize in each of these areas of English literature.” But under the proposal, there would be no one book, or family of books, that every English major at Harvard would have read by the time he or she graduates. The direction to which Harvard would lead its students in this “clean slate” or “trickle down” experiment is to suspend literary history, thrusting into the hands of undergraduates the job of cobbling together intellectual coherence for themselves. Greenblatt puts it this way: students should craft their own literary “journeys.” The professors might have little idea of where those journeys might lead, or how their paths might become errant. There will be no common destination.

As Harvard goes, so often go the nation’s other colleges and universities. Those who once strove to give order to the curriculum will have learned, from Harvard, that terms like core knowledge and foundational experience only trigger acrimony, turf protection, and faculty mutinies. No one has the stomach anymore to refight the Western culture wars. Let the students find their own way to knowledge.

As the US has moved progressively to be dominated by an anti-Christian culture, the unity and coherence of knowledge, particularly historical knowledge has inevitably started decomposing. As it dismembers, ignorance rises. People, even professional educators, become imprisoned to the whim and fancy of the moment. Rootless and ignorant of their heritage, they become swept about by every changing wind of fashion and opinion. Because they no longer know where they stand, they fall for anything.

Chace, however, places more emphasis upon the deleterious effect of commercial agendas, rather than the culture wars themselves. In the end, students want to get jobs and earn and income. English (and the liberal arts generally) do not appear to offer a ready career path. A vicious circle develops: colleges get less students in such faculties and courses, so they fund them less. Teachers find it harder to get tenure because they do not attract funding and research grants (as do the hard and soft sciences). Teaching quality declines, which in turn leads to another downward cycle. He puts forward several suggestions to help arrest the declension. One of these involves focusing upon mastery of the English language (and therefore cognition) itself:

They can also convert what many of them now consider a liability and a second-rate activity into a sizable asset. They can teach their students to write well, to use rhetoric. They should place their courses in composition and rhetoric at the forefront of their activities. They should announce that the teaching of composition is a skill their instructors have mastered and that students majoring in English will be certified, upon graduation, as possessing rigorously tested competence in prose expression. Those students will thus carry with them, into employment interviews or into further educational training, a proficiency everywhere respected but too often lacking among college graduates.

But in the end, the author remains dispirited. We believe that everything which he described is paralleled in the NZ state education system. There is nothing strange or foreign here. But the study of the humanities, the classical liberal arts, is essentially a phenomenon of the Christian faith: when that faith goes, so goes the central importance of english, history, philosophy, art history and so forth to the culture and to society. It is only the Christian faith which has a fountain of belief in the brightness of the future and of inevitable progress because the future of this world has become inextricably bound to the coming of the Kingdom of Christ into human history. World history has now become redemptive history, and the Redeemer is the King of all kings, and everything is being and will be placed under His feet.

As a culture becomes progressively Christianised, once again the study of the past become important and deeply pregnant with meaning and significance. For in studying the past, we are studying Christ's redemptive work. We discover our place in that divine work in the brief time we have upon the earth--and therefore what we must do now. It was the men of Issachar of old who understood the times, and therefore knew what Israel had to do in their day. The Christian faith makes the humanities central to all learning and human action, for the humanities enable us to discover where we have come from, helping us to discover what we, then, must do in our day and generation.