You told me if I loved literature, I shouldn’t go to grad school,” wrote a former student. The biochemistry-turned-English major, who went on to medical school and is now a thoracic oncologist, was thanking me for a conversation we had over fifteen years ago, which I had entirely forgotten. “I’m grateful,” she added, “that literature can remain a personal love rather than an obligation.”
When I received this note recently, I was relieved to find out that a talented student had been spared five to ten years in academic servitude, with job prospects ranging from infinitesimal to none. I was also reminded of a simple truth too often ignored in all the soul-searching about the fate of the humanities in a time of budget cuts, declining enrollments, and AI. There’s no easy solution to the crisis, but there is something we can do about it. Instead of perpetuating our narrow interests, faculty should focus on inspiring students to read and write, regardless of what they end up doing for work.
Many English majors have drifted into my office over the years to say that they love literature and want to apply to graduate school. As good jobs have dried up, I’ve tried to break the news that they’re looking at up to a decade of hard, often lonely work with very slim job prospects at the end of their quest. I then assure them that they can enjoy books without devoting their professional life to them.
In fact, they might even enjoy these things more if they don’t make a job of it. A retired colleague once said to me, “I suspect that some English professors don’t really like literature all that much.” The humanities may seem to be named for their universal reach, but they produce a great deal of dark matter that’s often impossible for the public to grasp or appreciate.
Meanwhile, the prospects for aspiring scholars keep getting worse. The Chronicle of Higher Education stated in 2019 that at the time of their reporting, not a single graduate from Columbia University’s prestigious doctoral program in English and Comparative Literature, where I taught from 1987 to 1996, had managed to snag a tenure-track job that year. The most recent job numbers reported by the Modern Language Association show an uptick since the pandemic, from around 500 jobs each in English and foreign languages for the pandemic year of 2020-21 to around 900 each in 2022-23.
But even those more plentiful jobs, some presumably re-posted after pandemic hiring freezes, won’t be close to enough to absorb the many PhDs unable to attain employment during the lean years. Moreover, the numbers are still down precipitously from the more than 1,800 jobs reported for English (plus about 1,700 for foreign languages) just before the financial crisis of 2007-08, or the previous high of nearly 4,000 jobs total for both sectors in the late 1980s.
In his book Professing Criticism, an institutional study of literary scholarship published in the wake of the pandemic, John Guillory lamented the precarious careers of adjuncts and postdocs subsisting in a gig economy of short-term teaching jobs and side hustles. The following year, The New Yorker’s Nathan Heller declared “The End of the English Major,” reporting on the open mockery of humanities majors by STEM students at elite colleges. Since then, the second Trump administration has declared war on “woke” college curricula while taking an ax to federal arts and humanities grants, compounding the situation. Trump’s cuts to federal science funding have also had a spillover effect as universities have further slashed humanities budgets so as to reallocate funds to STEM programs.
“You can be the best fish in the pond but, if the pond dries up, you’re dead,” the late Stephen Jay Gould once said. Viewed in that light, the successive fads that have gripped humanities departments in recent years—not just all manner of identity obsessions but ecocriticism, digital humanities, and more—look like the desperate, last-gasp mutations of a species doomed to extinction.
“The extinction event facing the humanities has many causes.”
The extinction event facing the humanities has many causes, from students crowding into more “practical” majors and administrators addicted to soulless metrics to, more recently, the rise of generative AI. At the same time, some younger academic humanists also have denounced the humanities as rife with misogyny, racism, and colonialism. In 2019, a rising star in anthropology called for “letting anthropology burn.” Radical academics in other fields have issued similar denunciations against their own fields.
The radicals should be careful what they wish for. The Trump administration may hate the humanities for the opposite reason, but it has embraced the recommended solution: wholesale destruction.
Maybe nothing can save a profession under attack from so many quarters and so full of self-inflicted wounds. But it might help stanch the bleeding if faculty stopped treating the very few students bound for humanities doctoral programs as a superior species. Professors should also stop treating the humanities as something confined to the campus. The humanities flourish in every public library, publishing firm, playhouse, concert hall, art gallery, museum, book group poetry reading, and magazine rack.
Are the humanities doomed? It isn’t clear that most of the public thinks so. To reverse that trend, we might take our cue from colleagues who venture beyond the ivory tower to engage a larger public by teaching in prisons, working with veterans in community writing programs, speaking to local clubs or civic organizations. From my own experience, I know that public talks and interviews are good ways to take our work to a broader constituency, one that includes taxpayers, the parents and grandparents of our students, as well as dedicated readers and aspiring writers everywhere.
“Why not do more to share the cultural commonwealth with a larger public.”
Academic humanists claim expertise in some of the best stuff ever written in the history of the world. Rather than narrowly trying to reproduce ourselves, why not do more to share the cultural commonwealth with a larger public and to inspire in our students, no matter what their career paths, a lifelong appreciation of books?