What was the English major?

We have to move on.

This recent New Yorker article about the decline of the English major caught my attention.

Take a look at this provocative subhead:

Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened?

What happened? My thesis: A lack of making real things. I’ll explore that more, but first a quick backstory on where I’m coming from:

I have a B.A. degree in English from a semi-prestigious private university.

¹

I also have a master’s degree in English from a regional public university.

²

To save whatever face I could for this expensive college, I decided to tack on an English degree. It was already one of my minors with this American Studies/interdisciplinary thing and thought it would help in any grad school applications. 

I was a mixed-up kid with a mixed-up degree.

Across all of my random disciplines, I carved out some type of creative work: 

1. I learned about writing in a poetry class and a screenwriting class (English + Film)

2. I learned about political communication and the ways lobbyist and political strategists influenced voters (Political Science)

3. I learned about rhetoric, and modern messaging, including a class where I had to analyze The Simpsons on a regular basis (Communications)

4. But then I had things like Intro to Poetry, Dante, British Literature before 1800s, an overview of American Film and European Film, plus another 1 or 2 filmmaking classes where I actually made short films

On top of that, I was active in the University arts and culture magazine, wrote a few newspaper columns my senior year.

In my academic pursuits, in my after-class interests, what was I actually looking for? Being a writer.

Being an artist.

Being — dare we say — a creator.

The Creator Degree

I didn’t even take an art class, but now looking back on how the current digital world

³

has unfolded, I think I would have been right at home with a degree that: 

• Analyzed media, information, and mis/disinformation 

• Showed me styles for recording and editing, film and audio

• Taught me about narrative and storytelling

• Helped me understand the role of creation, media, and the digital economy

Here’s a quote from a Harvard student in The New Yorker article: 

“You write one essay better than the other from one semester to the next. That’s not the same as, you know, being able to solve this economics problem, or code this thing or do policy analysis.”

What the student is hinting at is a problem with creation. What are English majors and humanities building towards? More analysis? Great.

But what if they built towards their own book of essays, their own YouTube channel? 

It would be somewhat measurable on a regular basis. Layer on audience building and it would show engagement.

One of the Arizona State professors quoted in the article sees the trend moving toward creation:

“More and more students come to the discipline not necessarily to take courses in literature…They’re curious about creative writing or media studies…But this is a moment where we might be in a position to reimagine ourselves,” said Devoney Looser, an English professor at Arizona State. 

Lack of doing has held back English departments in the past.

Professors can’t imagine anyone else not wanting to study only literature, even if it could be applicable in many other realms. 

There’s a shift to storytelling, not just analyzing the text for more and more obscure theories and connections. 

With world-building and universes all the rage, there is value in studying these things to then create. 

The Problem of Department Politics

Once I hit grad school about 6 or 7 years after my undergrad (as I said, I was confused and I’ve had many jobs), digital media was taking hold at least in the professors’ research. 

The regional public university I went to had a focus not only on traditional English subjects, but also rhetoric and business writing was popular with a few professors. So were critical lit theory and postmodernism. 

The university also had a growing Creative Writing program, that was (you guessed it!) separate from the English Department. And it was in a town, (hello Wilmington, NC) that had a filmmaking history — where Blue Velvet, the first Iron Man, 00s shows like Dawson’s Creek and One Tree Hill, and others I can’t remember. 

The lines between departments seemed clear even when film or creative writing students sometimes took an English class. It was maddening to me why the creative writing and English departments didn’t function together. I’m sure there are *reasons* whether they are good or not? I’m not privy to that.

This surely isn’t new for anyone loosely familiar with academia, but the lack of collaboration is glaring, like an embarrassing highway billboard that everyone sees but no one sees any reason to discuss. 

Where’s the creative energy?

The lack of “creation” in English departments is probably one of the reasons why this divide exists. The study vs the creation seemed more important than it does now, especially since the means of creation were harder to come by. Now, it’s essentially zero, turning each student into their own small publishing houses.

Creative writing programs jumped on this early (by accident or purposeful?) found the resources, and therefore have taken a lot of the energy out of English departments in the last 30 years. The students can see a finished product, something they did, something they used their studying towards to make something. 

From the Association of Writing Programs website:

Oddly, English departments once included few living practitioners of the art of making literature, although they included many practitioners of criticism and scholarship. The founders of AWP argued that the understanding and appreciation of literature could be enhanced by having practitioners of that art teach that art. It was a radical notion at some institutions, and positions for writers in many departments were hard-won.

It’s not a far jump to extend that to podcasts, short films, TV, newsletters, TikTok, whatever while still having some grounding in analytical and dare we say close reading. 

The New Yorker article has this observation from Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt:

“It happens that we do have a contemporary form of very deep absorption of the kind comparable to literary study…And that is longform television….It’s a fantastic invention!”

This isn’t a new observation.

“The Wire” and perhaps even “Hill Street Blues” before it were always thought of as “Dickensian,” meaning a more heightened way of saying that they seemed to be more literary than other TV forms.

Just as the literary canon was shaped and is evolving, the filmed one is changing and evolving too. It makes sense for many of the top practitioners in studying literature could move into this form as well, to maybe not discuss technique but storytelling along with technique as they also learn and grow into the language of film. 

Many English professors are familiar with these, they’ve become at least conversant in them. 

A broadening does have to occur. But as the AWP notes, maybe it’s too late for the English department.

How to move on

Thankfully there are several paths for the English department. Or at least I see a few, if anyone is asking me, which they aren’t. But here we go:

1. Traditional. Put another log on the fire for Dante and Tristam Shandy. Keep studying and analyzing. There’s still a place for this! We need thoughtful teachers and researchers who may not be interested in making something, but still love to read. And want to teach others about their favorite books. Book sales and reading are growing!

2. Media Studies and Analysis. This is more Communication Studies, but pair it with a rich understanding of greater literature and you have a firebrand of a class, that’s for sure. Help students sort through fact from fiction. You analyze news, current events, modern rhetoric, and rhetoric of old. You throw in marketing and psychology. This is more Communications, but if a school doesn’t have a Communications Department, it seems like someone in English could put together a syllabus.  

3. Contemporary Stories: You have to take a certain number of classes on historical novels, modern novels, films and TV shows. You also dive deep into current social media and trends. All about th medium and the message. 

4. + Creation. This is one of the 3 above + you make something. Like a lab for biology. In creation, you have to choose a medium, and focus on creating a body of work within it — a set of short stories, essays, investigative journalism, a YouTube series, tweet threads, a graphic novel, a podcast series.

   It’s like taking the newspaper or the campus magazine as a class and getting credit for it. A focused theme or series is important here to build a body of work. Random posts won’t do — again, let’s build towards something and then that something can be shown off. This is something tangible that can be shared with future employers — rather they be in marketing, media, branding agencies, or something else.

The reporter for The New Yorker notes that at Harvard, “There are plentiful offerings in creative writing —in the age of the ‘maker economy,’ the idea goes, students want to send material in the world.” 

That’s it exactly. Make something. 

Academics should not cede all of their studies to their well-meaning students, I was a victim of that. Yet, there is a way for English departments and students to meet in the middle, to find that common area where students can find their interests and professors meet. 

One more note: 

I didn’t even mention video games. TBH, I’m not as invested in games and don’t really play the more narrative ones, I usually stick to sports.

But they are of course way more popular than film, but not in the cultural discourse and should be talked about in much the same way I described film and television above — professors would need to become conversant in how they work and how their storytelling expands with user choices.

My lit theory is a little rusty right now, but the reader response seems primed and ready to be applied to this, there are probably hundreds of academic papers out there about it. 

If anything the popularity of the HBO show “Last of Us” makes this clear — it’s a video game adapted into a well-respected television show. 

Point is: the overlap in mediums won’t stop and the English departments need to find a way to take them in.

The traditional purview of English departments is starting to show up everywhere else besides the English department. 

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• “Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that.” — Kurt Vonnegut

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  -Josh Spilker

1. Depends on who you ask! But it’s Vanderbilt University.

2. UNC-Wilmington. Go Seahawks!

3. I was in school in the early 2000s. The study of internet culture wasn’t yet a thing.