How it happened and what could be done to reverse it.
In one generation … the numbers of those majoring in thehumanities dropped from a total of 30 percent to a total of less than16 percent; during that same generation, business majors climbed from14 percent to 22 percent. Despite last year’s debacle on Wall Street,the humanities have not benefited; students are still wagering thatbusiness jobs will be there when the economy recovers.
What are the causes for this decline? There are several, but at theroot is the failure of departments of English across the country tochampion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong caseto undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the traditionin which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departmentshave done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from thenotion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for thebooks themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations(identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popularculture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the youngpeople interested in good books.
Studying English taught us how to write and think better, and tomake articulate many of the inchoate impulses and confusions of ourpost-adolescent minds. We began to see, as we had not before, how suchbooks could shape and refine our thinking. We began to understand whygenerations of people coming before us had kept them in libraries andbookstores and in classes such as ours. There was, we got to know, atradition, a historical culture, that had been assembled around thesebooks. Shakespeare had indeed made a difference—to people before us,now to us, and forever to the language of English-speaking people.
Finding pleasure in such reading, and indeed in majoring in English,was a declaration at the time that education was not at all aboutgetting a job or securing one’s future. In comparison with thepre-professional ambitions that dominate the lives of Americanundergraduates today, the psychological condition of students of thetime was defined by self-reflection, innocence, and a casualirresponsibility about what was coming next.