The Forgotten Value of a Literary Education

Why English departments have lost their way—and how rediscovering Arnold, Trilling, and Frye can save them.

The following essay is a guest post by

Joshua Fagan

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It is clichéd to observe that the humanities in American universities are in crisis, but that does not make it any less true. The number of people graduating with humanities degrees has fallen precipitously, and just as importantly, humanities departments have become emblematic of a higher education system that has increasingly lost the trust of the American public. A Gallup poll from 2024 revealed that only 36 percent of Americans had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, down from 57 percent only nine years before, in 2015. When conservatives opine about the indoctrination in American universities, they are usually not discussing engineering or natural-science departments. The value of studying the humanities, particularly literature, is significantly in doubt.

This time of great instability could have prompted a degree of introspection in English departments: what is the value of a literary education? what is the point of having kids read books from generations ago? Sadly, these departments have not undertaken such introspection. The answers they muster for why English departments have fallen in stature are varied, but what they have in common is a remarkable lack of self-criticism. Some of what they say is true: for instance, an over-emphasis on STEM, on reducing education to mere skills training for the workforce, is indeed a mechanistic and reductive ideology. As far back as 2014, an op-ed from Verlyn Klinkenborg lamented a “new and narrowing vocational emphasis in the way students and their parents think about what to study in college.” A rather extensive 2023 expose in the New Yorker laments “a quantitative society for which optimization—getting the most output from your input—has become a self-evident good.” These are in fact problems, but reductive materialism and an obsession with productivity are not new fads; the difference is that English departments now lack a clear counter-vision. They welcome the passing away of the old canon but have little to replace it with aside from sentimental platitudes.

As an undergrad, I remember asking several professors why studying literature was important, and even the professors I greatly admired could not give me a solid answer beyond vague responses about how it developed skills for the workforce or how it cultivated empathy. Others could not do better. The New Yorker article is detailed, piercing, and surprisingly nuanced, but it is also meandering, and it is the kind of piece that makes statements like, “Everyone agrees that the long arc of higher education must bend toward openness and democratization,” without qualification. It quotes a wide variety of professors, many of whom seem helpless and befuddled. One professor praises how college students are “very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction—all these kinds of things that, actually, we think about a lot,” before admitting that many of her students have difficulty reading The Scarlet Letter. Even Stephen Greenblatt, one of the greatest English scholars of the last fifty years, venerates modern long-form television for creating “a contemporary form of very deep absorption of the kind comparable to literary study.” What these answers have in common is their lack of specificity or insistence that it matters which books students read. The answers could apply to reading The Brothers Karamazov and Middlemarch, or they could apply to reading Harry Potter or Sally Rooney, or even watching television, as Greenblatt suggests.

Stuck in such a mire, intellectuals prefer to deflect blame to the Republican Party, which is cast as a homogenous cadre of anti-intellectual hyper-religious bigots who are deeply terrified of students reading about slavery. Certainly, education polarization is a major and growing influence in the United States. Among voters in 2024 who did not attend college, Trump won 59-39 over Harris; among voters with postgraduate degrees, Harris won by an astounding 65-33. Republican politicians looking for a populist target thus find one in universities. Certain professors argue this is nothing new. A mentor of mine at the University of Washington confidently assured me that the right-wing attack on higher education is simply a constant of life, referring to the likes of Willam F. Buckley and Allan Bloom, both of whom lambasted the post-1960s American university as a hotbed of narrow left-wing radicalism. My mentor’s view is not entirely baseless. Richard Nixon once declared, “The professors are the enemy,” and J.D. Vance repeated that quote, with the Nixon attribution, at the conclusion of a speech given in 2021 at the National Conservatism Conference.

For those who (like me) are in the camp of highly educated Democrats, there is a certain satisfaction in positioning ourselves in a timeless war against the forces of anti-intellectual bigotry. Still, the facts differ. Until the mid-2010s, support for higher education largely remained high throughout the political spectrum. According to the Gallup poll cited earlier, in 2015, 56 percent of Republicans had significant confidence in higher education, greater than independents and not much lower than Democrats. Now, only 20 percent do. And importantly, the same trends are visible, albeit to a lesser extent, among independents and even Democrats. Only 35 percent of independents have significant confidence in universities, down from 48 percent in 2015, and among Democrats, the percentage has declined moderately from 68 percent to 56 percent. Attacking English departments as a den of radicalism is no longer simply the province of shadowy extremists—it is now a legitimately winning position.

This development is not solely because of changes in English departments, but it is worth noting that the decline in confidence parallels the turn of those departments from detached, cynical postmodernism to overt activism. An ideology has emerged that is distinct from the department’s long-standing and often admirable progressive leanings. It is an ideology that views neutrality and objectivity as lies that protect a patriarchal and white-supremacist status quo. It is an ideology that is explicitly anti-universalist and identitarian, viewing citizens of this country as colonists living on stolen land. This ideology really started to overtake universities with the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests in 2014, a wave that brought ardent concerns about microaggressions and cultural appropriation. If there is a symbolic tipping point, it is probably the infamous Yale Halloween costume controversy of 2015, where a professor very politely critiqued an insipid email lecturing students about wearing ‘offensive’ Halloween costumes and received in response immense student protests demanding that she be fired.

The effects of this change should be extremely obvious to anyone who has stepped inside a humanities classroom. For instance, the Modern Language Association’s 2024 conference page disdains how religious celebrations are “shaped by the historical experiences and preoccupations of settler colonialists from the global north and colonial metropole” while also including a land acknowledgement venerating Native American tribes “whose governments now reside in different states as a result of colonial-settler violence and dispossession.” As an undergrad at Columbia, I was subjected to no end of dreary panegyrics by professors and administrators and fellow students about how the curriculum was too white and male and needed to be diversified. The quality of books was not particularly relevant to them, since they viewed canon-building as a barely disguised exercise of heterosexist imperialist authority. Everything was about power to them, and they sought to accrue power to reshape the curriculum to their whims. This kind of thinking did not stop after I left Columbia. I completed my Masters in the United Kingdom, which is happily less affected by overt politicization in its universities, but when I returned to America for my doctorate, the same kind of thinking was still present. Literature existed in the service of activism. The social-justice training they had us undertake ranged from the tedious to the frankly bizarre, such as an anti-racist transcendental meditation session where we had to consider our internalized biases. We were told to reverently consider an anti-racist pedagogy statement containing this remarkable sentence:

We acknowledge that literacy education and language policies in the U.S. are built on a foundation of racial capitalism, White supremacy, and settler colonialism that persists and has delegitimized and often penalized the language practices, experiences, and knowledges of minoritized and historically underrepresented peoples.

The Republican charge that literature departments are extremely leftist and obsessed with activism and social justice is often made carelessly and recklessly, but dismissing it is difficult because, well, they are clearly leftist and obsessed with activism. Scholarship is largely tied to a specific cause, whether that be racial justice or transgender rights or climate change. I admit I personally care very deeply about fighting climate change and other such injustices. Still, the fact that millions of Americans who are not particularly right-wing or anti-intellectual could oppose this intense and undeniable politicization seems rather understandable. Hence the flurry of recent edicts and laws and funding freezes targeting colleges and universities.

Professors lament what they view as the loss of their ‘academic freedom’ and find the idea that they indoctrinate their students absurd. (There is a certain irony in people so conversant in Foucault and microaggressions, so learned in the subtleties of power, stating that no coercion occurs because they do not literally force students to reiterate their ideas.) Certainly, an environment in which professors are told what they can or cannot teach by the government is not ideal. Still, English professors would greatly benefit from considering why their discipline has become unpopular and how they can respond. What is the point of offering an education in literature?

Whatever the merits or demerits of the recent flood of anti-DEI laws, they are insufficient as a foundation for an alternative vision of a literary education. A more literate segment of the right and center has discussed the importance of a ‘classical education,’ but whether those ideas can fully evolve from simple reaction into a coherent philosophical movement is uncertain at best. The techno-corporate Silicon Valley ethos of ‘university as career training’ is certainly insufficient: yes, writing essays about F. Scott Fitzgerald can provide reading comprehension, communication skills, and the like, but so can writing essays about Charlotte’s Web or a TikTok video. Just as insufficient is the idea of research as a kind of activism, as popular as this is among academics themselves.

The question of why studying literature matters was not a difficult one for the writers and critics of the past. Matthew Arnold, one of the great literary critics of Victorian Britain, asserts that the broad study of culture makes “a fresh stream of thought play freely about our stock notions and habits,” thus encouraging “a fuller harmonious development of our humanity, a free play of thought upon our routine notions, spontaneity of consciousness, sweetness and light.”

His point is not that certain books have a mystical, talismanic power and should be unthinkingly revered; rather, he makes the robust, rational case that stories convey sensations and ideas that have had relevance throughout the ages, while also revealing the insights and ideas peculiar to a particular time and place. He praises the curiosity to “try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind; and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best.” Hence, The Great Gatsby is both a sharp-tongued tragedy about the vacuous materialism and modern alienation of Jazz Age New York and a work that brings remarkable acuteness to timeless ideas of heartbreak, regret, and disillusionment. And so on: great French writers like Balzac and Hugo deliver special insight into the desperate yearnings of individuals sprawled across an intricately realized historical stage; brilliant Russians like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy illuminate the existential melancholy of an uncertain modernity. No one writer elucidates every specific aspect of human existence, but each great writer exposes particular components of it extraordinarily well.

What is evident to people like Arnold is that the trends and routines of the present do not contain all that is necessary to be a fully educated and developed human being. This does not mean that the present is uniquely terrible—it only means that what is currently popular and fashionable does not encompass all the wisdom and understanding an individual needs to intellectually and philosophically thrive in the world. Certainly, there is value in easily readable, loosely autobiographical first-person narratives about life as a messy commitment-averse thirty-something in a creative industry living in present-day New York City, and those who want such narratives are served well by the contemporary fiction market. But it is self-evident that there are aspects of human experience that are not covered by contemporary tendencies and were best encapsulated in the literature of different countries and time periods.

Arnold was not a conservative advocate of adherence to a rigid list of classics—he expressed interest in a wide variety of literature, espousing the idea that literature provides a wider sense of perspective, a capacity to reconsider what seems obvious from within the mores and standards of one’s own time and place. Though he hails from Victorian Britain, his ideals are no less valuable in twenty-first-century America. Lionel Trilling, arguably Arnold’s greatest American defender, makes a similar argument regarding the study of literature. He praises J.S. Mill for venerating the conservative S.T. Coleridge “although [Mill’s] political and metaphysical disagreement with Coleridge was extreme,” and he asserts that reading broadly—especially talented writers with whom the reader disagrees—demonstrates that “the world is a complex and unexpected” place that is “not always to be understood by the mind as we use it in our everyday tasks.” Northrop Frye, who along with Trilling was the other towering North American literary critic of the twentieth century, arrives at a similar conclusion. In the “Polemical Introduction” to his Anatomy of Criticism, he says that his approach to literature is based on “Matthew Arnold’s precept of letting the mind play freely around a subject in which there has been much endeavor and little attempt at perspective.”

For such critics, this is the value of seeking out great works of literature. The desire is not to tell the reader what they already know but to tell them what they do not know—what they might not want to hear—and to broaden their perspective. This is not particularly glamorous work. It has none of the visceral thrill of ardent activism, and it has none of the comforting practicality of teaching useful skills for the workplace. But it is the work of eternity, work done with the conviction that yes, there is in fact a human condition, one known differently through different cultures and time periods. Learning what brilliant writers have thought and said about our commonly held hopes and fears and longings is beneficial to how we live and act in the world.

Literature professors will continue to lean progressive, as they always have in America, and that is not necessarily a problem. Frye was an ardent leftist, while both Arnold and Trilling were significantly left of center. The problem is not that literature professors are too far left but that they have, in general, lost an intellectually compelling conception of why the study of literature matters, a conception that their predecessors of even a few generations prior knew well. Rediscovering such a conception might not satisfy contemporary critics of the humanities, but it would provide a sense of what studying literature actually means, and why this study matters not simply as a fun, enjoyable pastime but as a fundamental human good. Above all, a literary education needs to mean something more than professional training, or instruction in how to be a reliable progressive activist. Otherwise, it will one day cease to exist.