Commentary
A story appeared recently in The New Yorker carrying the funereal title “The End of the English Major.” It got a lot of attention, and it’s not an easy take for people who are committed to literary culture, who think that a society without a population of active literary readers is an unhealthy one. Those of us who’ve warned for two decades that the humanities were dying—and were ridiculed for saying so—derive no pleasure in being proven right.
The numbers are clear, though, the abandonment of literary majors on campus decisive. What used to be a central part of higher education in the United States is now a marginal one. Languages and literatures once drew more than 10 percent of the undergraduate majors who completed their formation. Now, they fall below 3 percent….