The English major of a decade or two ago or today is very different. Within a fairly short span of time the traditional way of studying and analyzing texts has mostly been sidelined at universities in favor of identity politics readings. Look at the UCLA English courses and you’ll see a once respected department where half the courses are about race, sexuality, and assorted wokeness ‘lenses’ filtering out the actual books.
This has become commonplace and it’s anathema to anyone who actually loves words and books.
In The End of Literature, I wrote that, “This is the sort of thing that matters if you believe that books are a state of communion, rather than a holographic palimpsest that can be infinitely reinvented as generations of literary theory has taught. If a grad student’s interpretation of Frankenstein has as much validity as what Mary Shelley actually meant, then why not go a step further and rewrite not just movie adaptations, but the book itself? Or argue that Shakespeare was really a black woman? Literary theory has devalued the author and the endless efforts to find new things to say about old works gave way to wokeness by applying leftist lenses that updated them in line with the new politics.”
When English courses go woke, do you stick around or do you go do something else? We have our answer.
From 2012 to the start of the pandemic, the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from nine hundred and fifty-three to five hundred and seventy-eight. Records indicate that the number of graduated language and literature majors decreased by roughly half, as did the number of history majors.
That’s the same period when wokeness took over traditional learning and universities rushed to revamp their offerings around identity politics.
The university’s tenure-track English faculty is seventy-one strong—including eleven Shakespeare scholars, most of them of color.
The most prominent Shakespeare figure at ASU is Ayanna Thompson, the Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, responsible for anti-intellectual identity politics garbage like ‘Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America’, the editor of ‘The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race’ and ‘Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance.’
She “was appointed to the board of trustees of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and in 2020 she became a Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at The Public Theater in New York” and “she served as the President of the Shakespeare Association of America.”
If you actually care about Shakespeare, do you stick around for this sort of thing, knowing you’ll be expected to churn out an analysis of Hamlet as being about racism? Or do you go elsewhere or do something else?
For the decline at A.S.U. is not anomalous. According to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly but not always identically to internal enrollment figures, from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while suny Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils.
During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before.
When your education consists of repeating back woke pieties and discovering race and sexuality in classic works, or, worse still, studying Audre Lorde and Amiri Baraka, there’s no education anyway.
Nobody becomes an English major because they enjoy the lucrative prospects of being an adjunct. They love words, ideas and stories. And there’s not a whole lot of that in the woke university system which has come to consist of Soviet exercises in explaining how literature upholds party dogma.