The Slow, Unpreventable Death of English Departments

I wonder if these conversations go in your departments the same way they go in mine. That is, we start talking about the problems of declining majors, having to cancel classes because of low enrollment, the lack of jobs for phd candidates, and/or the murky ethics of asking students to pay ~$20K for an MA in English. Eventually we come to the conclusion that we should bravely stand by our values, our belief in the traditions of the humanities and the work we do, and then we basically make a couple cosmetic changes and really do nothing (except blame every externality we can imagine). As a discipline we've had these conversations for 30 years, and one can point to various local successes (typically temporary successes), but nothing has spread across English departments. We're basically still in the model created in the 60s with some mission creep for diversity and rhet/comp.

Generally I have little problem with the many defenses of the humanities, English, literary studies, etc. that have become a clickbait genre unto themselves. However, asserting that the knowledge we produce and communicate has value is different from saying English departments have to be large. And I recognize the validity of an argument that says we shouldn't contort our discipline in order to give students what they want or serve the job market. Maybe the route to sustainability is to figure out what English departments look like when they are serving 1-2% of the majors nationally.

In theory this could be done well, but I have little faith in us. I've never been in a department meeting about hiring plans where people didn't mostly argue for hiring more people like themselves. What's your department going to look like at 2/3 its current size? Probably you can just look at the older third of the faculty and get a good idea. Then you'd have to ask how the rest can adapt to create a workable curriculum. You can expect to hire NTTs to massage the downsizing over the next 10-15 years. Fundamentally that's the challenge we're asking for when we say we should stick to our values. Basically it's going to be ugly, and it's hard to know what will happen when departments really screw this up (which some inevitably will). And all of this will be exacerbated by the larger neoliberal cultural changes for higher education.

Hypothetically there probably is a solution where English departments stay large. It would begin by recognizing that we grew in the mid-20th century by convincing our colleagues and students that we were at the center of cultural literacy practices, and that, as such, they needed to know what we knew. We'd need to make that argument again. It would mean recognizing the proliferation of media, discourses, and genres. It would mean recognizing that close reading is an insufficient research method to ground 90% of what we do. It would mean shifting our expertise as composers of media and committing ourselves to the churn that implies. It wouldn't necessarily mean abandoning our core values but it would mean seeing them very differently and disentangling them from texts. In short it's never going to happen.

What will happen, I think, is that there will be a need for someone, some discipline/department, to serve in a role analogous to English 50-60 years ago. Undoubtedly there are some people in English departments that could be (and probably will be) part of that future. But not the departments as a whole and not literary studies or rhet/comp as a whole either.

Basically, 20+ years ago English Studies bet that it wouldn't need to adapt to the changing economic, technological, and educational culture. And we lost that bet.  Via WPA-L