Erik Scott de Bie

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-decline-of-the-english-department/

Interesting article, indeed.

As I was reading, I strongly, STRONGLY disagreed with the author's assertions--finding them hopelessly high-academic (i.e., oh woe is English, which is so maligned by schools!)--until he got to the bit about the cost of education, where I was totally on the same page.

That, in my view, is the main reason fewer and fewer people study the humanities: financial reasons.

These days, people go to college to help themselves make money. And sort of rightly so: if college costs so much (you're very likely going to be $20-$40k in debt afterward), you're going to want to make sure you can get a lucrative job to help you, and--as the author rightly points out--English is not the field to get that. The only people who can afford to study in the humanities as a major are the independently wealthy (or at least well enough off) and the extremely lucky (like myself) who manage to land a lucrative job despite lacking business qualifications.

And that's just undergrad. Which of you really wants to spend 10-12 years of your post high school life getting a PhD, only to find yourself with no family (because your program consumes you), no job prospects (teaching positions are vanishingly rare), and $50-100k in debt? It's especially bad for women in academia--it's nigh-impossible to raise a child during your PhD program, and you're unlikely to get into a job until your mid-30s, and then most schools won't put you on the tenure track if you're going to have a child and take time off.

There is a lot to be said about this article, but that's the thing that jumped out at me. Yes, people are studying the right-brained humanities far, far less commonly, focusing instead on those careers that are likely to make them into the left-brained workers of the future. And, as a friend observed to me recently, and not to deprecate the intelligence of so many business, science, etc., graduates . . . we all know what happens when we put all the window washers and middle-management onto one big ship--they go and found the human race elsewhere. :) (Credit due to Douglas Adams on that one.)

Humanity needs a balance of people skilled in the humanities and in the sciences. Artistic expression and analytic exploration go hand-in-hand.

I think if the government subsidized higher education more (you know, actually gave a damn), then students would feel far less pressure/anxiety to get money, and could rather study whatever appealed to them. But America has increasingly cultured its youth over the last thirty years to be money-earning, hard-working machines.

Cheers from Marxist Seattle,

Erik