The Nature and Purpose of the University*
The humanities slip from favor...
The New Yorker just published an excellent long-form investigation by Nathan Heller headlined “The End of the English Major” that examines literature’s fall from academic grace in undergraduate education. Enrollment is down, budgets have been slashed, opportunities for tenure are laughably low and the pay an insult — these are all common gripes and all legitimate.
Heller’s reporting aggregates all of the causes into a single, well-rendered narrative. None of them are surprising and none are new. Capitalist economies find plenty of roles for English majors but many of the most rewarding vocations require technical or vocational expertise that you won’t find in Beowulf (but please let The Middlebrow know if KillGrendel Inc. is hiring). One professor that Heller interviewed admitted to their own reading pac dropping from five novels a months to one because there are also now articles to read online and podcasts to listen to. It’s true. Books have to compete with everything, not just other books, in the attention economy. Others point out, rightly, that our political leaders, and public funding, now flows heavily towards Science, Technology, Engineering and Math departments, leaving the arts and humanities an afterthought.
Heller also addresses the complaint that the study of literature has itself become too specialized or has veered off course so that students who might choose an English major because they want to read Ulysses deeply under the guidance of a skilled instructor are now instead receiving instruction in post-colonialism, post-structuralism, power dynamics, anti-racism and the like. In this complaint, the student showed up to study the attentions and achievements of the author but was delivered a contextual examination of the work that isn’t exactly art-forward.
That last one seems the culprit most often cited by The Middlebrow’s friends. I’m not convinced, though I sympathize. For one thing, undergraduates love to veer from the text during heated discussions with smart and hip professors who let them have class outside in the spring. They are almost constantly trying to relate the works to their lives, to politics and to society.
There’s nothing wrong with that, either. The romantic notion is that these students are working in a kind of vacuum thrall, picking apart The Wasteland line-by-line, but the reality is they are relating the words to their lives and notions of social justice, politics, sociology and economy are bound to play into that.
There’s also the question of how conversations move forward. Say that we all want to get together to discuss a straight-forward but very deep text like The Old Man and The Sea. We can start with Ernest Hemingway’s intentions, use of language and, of course, the themes of nature’s indifference and how the community of people can soften its blows but never truly protect us from them. But then what? How does the conversation move forward? It might not be wrong to talk about poverty in Cuba, about how that affected its history, about Cuba's origin as a country or about how, even then, American popular culture seemed to hang over everything. We might relate the story to contemporary American working poverty, or conditions elsewhere in the world where people are exposed to the hardships of nature. We might ask why conditions that Hemingway described so vividly in 1952 persist in 2023. Undergraduates love to explore these ideas.
There is also a fantasy, and it is very comforting but very wrong, that if undergraduate education would just focus on the appreciate of novels and novelists that this would disseminate through society and restore the novel and its authors to positions of moral and intellectual authority that have been seemingly lost over the years.
It won’t happen. Recall the professor whose monthly book reading volume has collapsed by 80% because of websites and podcasts. Undergraduate professors are not going to turn the tide of the Attention Economy. As for the public intellectual power of authors — we may live in a more honest age now where our public intellectuals are Elon Musk, not Salman Rushdie. It’s dollars, not backlist, that matters in American society. This is also not new.
Hopefully, the value of a humanities education will become clearer as our society and economy careen into an era of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Somebody will have to keep the soul and nuance of life alive, after all. But for those interested in restoring literature to a vaunted societal spot, the university is not the answer.
The answer is better literature. The New Yorker could even help with that!
*Non sequitur: One of my favorite literary trivia is that playwright Chris Durang once misread the name of a book he saw on a professor’s desk and this became the title of his play “The Nature and Purpose of the Universe.”