A day after the end of winter classes, I drove for two days to New Hampshire, where roughly 40 other University of Michigan students and I spent the spring semester in unheated, unlit log cabins. Upon arriving, we sealed our phones and laptops away in plastic bags, agreeing to communicate with loved ones strictly via letters. After a while, a trip to a Dunkin’ began to feel like a special treat. For the next 45 days, all we had was each other, a journal to write in and a stack of 11 books to read. This was the New England Literature Program.
Since returning to normal society, I’ve carried a big, green Moleskine and 0.7 millimeter ballpoint Sharpie everywhere. I’ve written a poem a day — faster than I’ve ever written poetry in my life — and I’m tearing through books. From Junji Ito’s classic horror manga to Albert Camus’ absurdist philosophical novels, if it has words, I’m reading it. Every day, I peruse the English course guide the way some stalk a crush’s Instagram, considering changing my major. I feel lovesick. I already have 12 credits in English, more than I do in any other department. So why the hesitation?
To get to the bottom of my anxiety, I found myself reading Nathan Heller’s “The End of the English Major,” a recent piece in The New Yorker detailing the steep decline in students enrolled in English major programs. Over the past decade, humanities enrollment in the United States has decreased by 17%. English specifically has lost a full third of students in the same time period. When investigating students’ motivations for shifting away from English, the same basic story repeated itself.
One Arizona State University senior interviewed by Heller, Justin Kovach, consumed the entirety of “Don Quixote” on his own. Despite his longtime love for wordy classics, Kovach has never considered studying anything but STEM due to concerns regarding employability. From Arizona State to Harvard University, countless students voiced the same passions, concerns and planned trajectories as Kovach. I was sweating. I recognized myself perfectly in Heller’s descriptions.
Like Kovach, my love of art has been a lifelong journey. As a child, I put on plays with my sister, using crumbled styrofoam as fake snow. My best friend and I fantasized about being like Harold Hutchins and George Beard from “Captain Underpants,” spending our afternoons making superhero comics together that we would clumsily bind in cardboard. In middle school, I became obsessed with the bravado of French New Wave auteurs and the scrappy creativity of student films from California Institute of the Arts. I began eyeing creative writing programs across the country.
Over the course of high school, between musical rehearsals that lasted until midnight and AP coursework, I continued to draft short stories and began writing poetry. I joined the creative writing club and skipped a week of lunch to fundraise for a trip to the Mackinac Island poetry slam. Slowly, I scraped together a portfolio and began applying to summer programs across the country. In my mind, this was a trial run for Bachelor of Fine Arts applications and Master of Fine Arts applications after that.
Of course, this all means my unofficial job has been defending the merits of an education in the humanities. Growing up in a metro Detroit suburb populated with lawyers, engineers and businessmen, chasing wealth felt more like a divine commandment than a social expectation. Our local schools promoted the merits of prestige and excellence, things which life as a starving artist or academic supposedly did not have. As a minority, this pressure was doubly felt; my presence in this community was an anomaly. Many of the adults who were people of Color around me discussed how their precarious presence in the town was the result of immense personal sacrifice. As a child of immigrants, I began to assume that achieving any semblance of success in America meant giving up on a career in the arts; the cost of admission was my dreams. Since entering college, I’ve seriously considered everything from psychiatry to academia.
Students’ individual stories of economic anxiety occur against the backdrop of the commodification of higher education as a whole. In the past 40 years, Heller reports state funding has gone from contributing 79% of public university funds to 55%. As a result, he asserts that modern universities “run to the market and surf its waves” to stay afloat. This commercialization looks like fancy new science buildings and the omnipresence of consulting firms around campus — the same industries fueling America’s economic growth and therefore defining our idea of success. As a result, rather than being seen as a step towards enlightenment or self-betterment, the dominant ideology positions education as a financial investment.
At the same time, students’ attitudes towards work itself are changing. According to Tiffany Harmanian, another Arizona State senior featured in Heller’s article, students today want to “make money at a young age and retire at a young age.” Harmanian suggested this is because Gen Z is simply more progressive than previous generations. But while this view provides a path for personal liberation, it does nothing for collective liberation. For many, English may be seen as a gamble that is only safe for the uber privileged. Yet, having the ability to train for a six-figure career through a STEM degree at a top public university is also an uber-privileged position. Rather than defying the perils of capitalism, choosing a lucrative educational path enables them by accepting the commercialization of education. Even if every U-M student becomes a millionaire in medicine and tech, are we really making the world a better place?
Our majors are not just choices about what we want out of our lives and education. They are choices that reflect what we believe the purpose of education should be. Through those choices, we shape educational institutions themselves.
In one version of my future, I see myself finding a stable, flexible job — maybe in advertising, maybe in law, maybe in an option I’ve yet to consider. I’d have enough security and wealth to afford my needs and to begin starting a family of my own. I would fill my house with more books than most libraries, travel the world, write poems and short stories and novels in my free time. But this image rings hollow. What ideologies do I perpetuate by fantasizing about the American dream? What society would I create through relentlessly chasing a life of upper-middle class luxury? Instead of asking ourselves if we can afford to study things we are passionate about, we must ask if we can afford to live in a world where passion, talent and drive are not enough.
No matter what happens to university humanities departments, the humanities will persist. Shakespeare’s plays were adored by illiterate commoners. Charles Dickens’ novels were read across England by poor factory workers. The same urges that drove Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel drives children to scribble on walls. When we argue about the meaning of life over a cup of coffee, we are continuing the tradition of philosophy practiced by Jean-Paul Sartre and Camus before us. Our everyday lives are built out of the humanities. They are mundane. What’s actually at stake in English departments is not society’s love of literature, but the idea that our normal, natural human lives are as valuable as studies of the Higgs boson. The idea that we can understand humanity not just through neuroscience or endocrinology but through conversations with each other. The idea that passion matters even when it’s not directly related to America’s biggest industries.
As Heller describes, many English departments see declining humanities enrollment as a marketing problem. However, universities’ attempts to increase enrollment in humanities departments by advertising them as secretly profitable are ultimately misguided. These initiatives do not address the fundamental contempt for passion that occurs when we prioritize commercialization above all else. Likewise, by centering the profitability of humanities majors, universities devalue everything that makes those fields worth studying in the first place. Everything that makes the humanities actually human. Should we study literature so we can write New York Times bestsellers and movies so we can make millions for Paramount? Or should we study the humanities because books and movies are fun and interesting and beautiful to talk and think about?
Many of the professors interviewed by Heller lamented that students no longer care about traditional notions of the Western canon or critical analysis. Tara K. Menon, an associate professor at Harvard, criticized students who “have no interest in studying the work of dead white men.” She argues that to understand Arundhati Roy or Zadie Smith, students must read Dickens. However, I would argue that insisting literary study must begin with the same set of dead white men is to confine it to the past century and restrict it to a certain group of rich, white college students. This antiquated worship of canon would not only relegate the academic world of English to the past, but ensure it remains controlled by the same demographic as always. The problem is not that students are developing an interest in postcolonial texts without caring about their colonial precedents. I think that if students continue to be interested in Edward Said and Chinua Achebe, it is a sign that English is still relevant in the modern world. In an evolving society, the evolving interests of students should be the basis of literary study.
To solve these problems facing modern English departments, we cannot return to the models of education used when English was last at its peak. We need to sprint towards inclusivity and accessibility. We need to create a space that allows people from every background to feel comfortable spending four years — or 40 — studying literature. To confront the problems of the dying English major, we must confront the problems of the whole university.
For the last trip of the New England Literature Program, we climbed Mt. Washington, infamous for being the site of the world’s highest recorded wind speed. The mountain’s tongue-in cheek tagline is “the world’s worst weather.” After struggling through hours upon hours of hiking through biting gusts and chunks of ice hitting my head, sitting in the visitor center at the highest peak in the northeast, I felt like I had achieved a newfound appreciation for warmth and a simple cup of coffee. As cold as it was, I felt like I could live there forever. The dark, bold greens of our campsite and the mist hanging over the mountain lake reminded me of the mountainous hometown of the hero Ged from my favorite fantasy novel. Near the top, we arrived at a ridge covered in a sea of stones, enclosed completely by inky white in every direction. A friend of mine, Alex Hetzler, commented that it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Every moment on the mountain, my breath was taken away. And yet, I couldn’t quite bring myself to agree with Alex. On the drive back to Michigan, I finally realized why. Everywhere I look there’s beauty. Whether I’m staring at the face of a friend or the cardinals in my backyard or the multicolored billboard in a grimy gas station on Mack Avenue. We should not be satisfied with the way that English has been taught and we should not accept its slow death. I’ve realized I can no longer accept the limited ways the humanities have been taught. Why, in any subject, should we be content with the stifling, unchanging format of the college classroom? If we are willing to revise preconceived notions of what education should look like or what thinkers should be centered, we could see so many beautiful things, all hidden in plain sight.
Statement Correspondent Awmeo Azad can be reached at awmeo@umich.edu