As someone who grew up wanting to major in English but ended up majoring in STEM, I think I have some insights on this.
I started college in 2015. At the time, there was (and perhaps there still is) a massive push for "women in STEM". Couple that with the fact that humanities majors earned mockery from other students on my college campus, with majors such as English being derided as "easy" and for "stupid people" who "can't do STEM", to me, at 18 years old, being seen as a progressive, intelligent STEMinist was preferable to being just another "dumb" humanities major.
Aiding in the fight to crush the glass ceiling, while also being seen as one of the smart ones, despite the fact that I had zero math or science inclinations or interests, was a sure way to gain acceptance amongst my peers.
And then there's the familial pressure - as a first-generation college student from a family of immigrants, the pressure to "think big" and make a big six-figure income was incredibly overwhelming.
In the end, rather than majoring in the humanities, which would have been a more natural fit for me, I willingly bent my aspirations to fit societal and familial expectations, earning two STEM degrees - one in earth science, and the other in computer science. My family and friends, who were concerned about the possibility of my majoring in the humanities, took a sigh of relief when I switched to STEM, and I was praised for going "in the right direction".
To be sure, STEM has been rewarding. With STEM, there is less risk - the career path for a computer science major versus an English major, for instance, is far clearer, and the roadmap to a six-figure salary is a bit less bumpy. Furthermore, as a person in a STEM career, but especially as a woman in a STEM career, you tend to get a bit more respect - the humanities are just not as respected as STEM these days (which is extremely unfortunate). People are always impressed when they hear I can code but are far less interested when they hear I love to read, write, and create art.
While I don't necessarily regret going into STEM, I do sometimes wonder how things would have turned out if I had been a bit more confident and assertive, proudly studying the humanities rather than shrinking from it in fear that I'd be seen as stupid, or not feminist enough, or not thinking big enough. And I wonder if other young, malleable college students who might be more humanities-oriented have experienced the same as me - the overwhelming cultural pressure to change themselves to fit into a box that perhaps isn't the best fit.
I also started college in 2015 and had the exact same experience. I almost left English but then thought that I could either be an exceptional writer English or I could be an average programmer/lawyer/banker etc. In the long run, I figured I could actually make more money as an exceptional writer than as an average lawyer.
I decided to be a really good writer and it seems to be working to some degree! People read my stuff and take me a bit more seriously. Ironically, liberals tend to take me much more seriously when I say I’m a writer.
I hate the idea that humanities majors are stupid. Well, as I say in the article, some are. But not the real ones!
But sounds like you’ve found what works best for you!
Way to navigate that STEMinist pressure from all sides. Speaking from a decade of experience, your fam/friends weren't wrong to breathe a sigh of relief, turns out. Going STEM after 2015 saved you from insufferable English professors and grad students guilting and shaming you into a predetermined cookie-cutter racist, sexist, multi-oppressing identity box/cult/game, etc. Those humanities-oriented students you wonder about (like me after being in STEM) - yea they have suffered the "overwhelming cultural pressure to change themselves to fit into a box that perhaps isn't the best fit" precisely because they entered the humanities. Orthodoxy and dogmatism reigned supreme where the English language is equivalent to Middle Passage slave ships - vessels that colonize our minds with the Capitalist Patriarchy at every turn. So, no one studies English structure, really. STEM pressure on females is not healthy, but wow, Social Justice and DEI identity kits are not a great fit for any minority or majority. It leaves a mental and emotional scourge in its wake, wrapped in euphemisms. My 4 daughters love reading, and I'm introducing STEM-based projects at home - any fun coding app/game suggestions? I hope you read, write, create, and code something beautiful for us all here on substack.
Gutted. Genuinely thought this was going to be an essay about the demise of the standard literary character - the stuffy old, ex-military English 'Major'!
I can only answer your question from my particular experience. I earned 2 degrees in English, but with a wife and 3 children, opted for Law School since my lit degrees weren't gonna pay the bills. And upon reflection, I'm thankful for all of my education. Law School taught me how to think just as much as my literature degrees.
Glad law school taught you many 'hows' to think. Hundreds of sections of composition courses each semester prop up English departments that are anti-western, see English as a hegemonic and colonialist language, and (as one presenter at 4 Cs in Baltimore told us), studying English language and literature manifests the neoliberal patriarchal emphasis on ROI. Honestly, I thought...still? This line? English depts. are largely husks, rotted out by social justice ideologues built on postmodernist suspicions and old Marxist whims, whose revolutionary origins are now long forgotten cuz Marx is male. Seriously, my 'English' professors advocate citation justice where we no longer cite white/all males, and females too, in our 'scholarly' literature.
My sense is English departments will keep transforming into Rhetoric/Writing departments. As a white male with a BA in English in 2010, I sadly knew my time was up and went into teaching English grammar and sentence structure to ESL students via an MA in applied linguistics (15), then an MA in composition studies (20), and now a PhD in rhetoric and writing (25). That's where the teaching gigs were then, and moreso now. But, I found increasingly sophisticated bigotry in each Progressive department, theorizing themselves into oblivion and targeting their version of my identity in their minds. They 'study' English literature to crap on it, not to praise it, if they study it at all.
And, I thankfully did just land an assistant professor position this March in teaching writing, critical thinking/reading/writing, and research methods. We'll see how long I can keep it. I have won few friends at Virginia Tech and Cal State for daring to question The Message for its limitations, flaws, and drawbacks. It is radical to believe that grammar, logic, and rhetoric improve writing and thinking, and that our younger generations (like my 4 daughters) deserve evidence-based perspectives on teaching them well in addition to studying literary and poetic beauty and mastery. The slow demise of English majors, though sad, opens new possibilities we will create.
My English degrees were both earned by 1978, so I thankfully avoided the postmodern/Marxist nonsense, and I graduated Law School in 1986, before the invasion of Critical Theory.
I remember stopping by my English department in the 1990s where I ran into one of my favorite professors, and he bemoaned the ideological militancy then prevailing.
He was glad to see me as I seemed to remind him of better days. But he was sad, and I felt sorry for him.
Literature is the battleground of all ideas and ideologies, but the wisdom of John Milton prevails:
"Let truth and falsehood grapple. Whoever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter."
That quote has been a guiding light throughout my adult life, and it should be engraved on my headstone.
I feel for your former professor experiencing the initial tightening and stricture of thought and expression...did he see its long aftermath, its long march through our discipline to cancel culture, shaming, guilt, and censorship in my departments?
Not too long after your visit, a liberal Maxine Hairston addressed the political partisanship and critical theory in a 1993 CCC article - it 'went viral' in today's terms with multiple printed responses in the same leading journal. It was ratioed hard. But, to a 2025 observer, the article and its responses inadvertently exposed how entrenched the ideological thinking became, and how their vitriolic response was theory-infused, not just a few corrupt power-hungry bad attitudes.
The history of rhet/comp shows 4 decades of ideological dominance in a critical social justice paradigm from around the 80s. Seems you just skirted around the thorough takeup of the critical theory paradigm. I wonder what your professor would say if he observed today's realities...
I haven't been in touch with that professor, Dr Stein since, so I don't know what he saw of the rise of cancel culture or the SJW movement. Those forces have infected my family and church, however. My daughter home schools her four children but hasn't the faintest idea of the difference between critical thinking and Critical Theory or the relationship between CT and CRT.
Worse for Dr Stein is that he was/is Jewish, and as infuriating as the current antisemitism is for me, it would have been more personally painful for him. I hope he didn't live to witness October 7.
Are you familiar with Alan Dershowitz and his “Dershow” podcast? He's the legal voice of balance and sanity for me.
I largely disagree with this article. I don't disagree that there is a very strong undercurrent of ideologically-based teaching in a lot of college English classes. I don't necessarily disagree that's it's gotten worse in the last decade (though I can't directly confirm). I left an English PhD program in 2011, and it was already pretty bad then. But I disagree that (1) the ideas that ideologically-based teaching necessarily leads to bad learning outcomes, and (2) the migration of students away from humanities degrees was caused by a dramatic increase in the increasing ideological nature of those departments.
On (1), English departments have been ideological havens for leftists for decades. I started undergrad in 1997, and there wasn't a single conservative faculty member in my school's English department. That was already pretty standard. But despite that strong ideological base, the faculty was still good at teaching critical thinking and close reading and good writing to the students who actually wanted to learn those things. By the time I left academia in 2011, that was as true as it had been in 1997. It is, in fact, completely possible to have strong beliefs in an ideology but still be a strong analytical thinker. Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton produced high quality work despite their commitments to Marxism. I don't agree with them on great many things, of course, but their ideology was not an impediment to rigorous analytical thinking. If you try to excise people who have strong ideological commitments, you end up with a narrower range of interlocutors who can help you sharpen your thinking. The problem is not people with ideological positions, but an environment where only certain ideological positions can even be considered. Did those environments start to grow in the 2010s in at least some departments? Probably, but that already seem to be receding somewhat due to a combination of general vibe shifts and reminder that institutions need to legally cover their ass from exposure to lawsuits, etc. Regardless, yes, there are many bad students to come out of these programs, possibly even the modal student, but talented students can come out of even pretty lefty English departments, and I don't see why that reality has changed.
On (2), the flight from the humanities started happening basically at the onset of the Great Financial Crisis, and has been a pretty consistent line down ever since. I think the economic scarcity mindset of the GFC, combined with increasing student loan debt and the free fall of standard humanities job fields of the past like journalism, has led a lot of people to reconsider the financial value of a humanities degree. Even if I think they're wrong about the value of a humanities degree, the general belief is that they aren't worth much, and that's a hard thing to change culture wide. People want economic security before they're willing to spend their financial capital to attain cultural capital. Maslow's hierarchy, etc. The increase in ideological stridency within humanities departments seems to have mostly happened later, maybe starting in earnest around 2014-2016. In fact, there's a story we could tell that's the reverse of the one you're telling: less ideological students who previously might have been humanities majors have migrated to other fields, leaving only those who were there for the ideology and activism. It's something of a self-reinforcing trend: the less ideological students leave more and more, so later non-ideological students see these departments (correctly) as more ideologically-dominated over time. But the key in this version of the narrative, which seems to be backed by the data trends, is that the cause isn't primarily the ideology. The cause is the economic and job market realities of the early 2010s, which has had a cascading effect of less toleration of ideological diversity in a lot of humanities departments.
I’m glad someone voiced these ideas. Liza’s claim that people being fed up with the rampant Marxist ideology in English departments is the cause for a mass exodus seemed to miss the point. All in all, your financial crisis theory makes a lot more sense and even accounts for the perceived idealogical concentration in the humanities. As far as I can tell, I suspect that Liza just really has it out for Commies. Which, when you think about it, is nearly a pot-calling-the-kettle-black situation.
" Only then can we show both the ideologues and the concerned parents that, when done correctly, literature is the noblest pursuit of them all."
At the moment this is a kamikaze mission in the existing academy.
The way to fix it is to start new schools focused on the humanities, rhetoric, writing, the arts, and turn out great, humanistically trained graduates. Let them do some computer science in their final two years. There would real demand for them. But the current academy is the worst of all worlds for these subjects, in far too many cases.
That's an excellent idea. And a national nonprofit Humanities University Fund could be set to match nonprofit contributions to an academy that fulfilled a Humanities curriculum checklist of fundamental requirement. They would be like University Humanities charter schools to help students gain a rigorous and proper Humanities education that they have been prevented from obtaining by deeply embedded Marxist faculty and their student rock star retinues.
I've been a member of the school board in my community for the past seven years, and every spring, at graduation, I sit next to my fellow board-member/fellow writer/fellow former English major, and we watch the procession of graduates step up, receive their diplomas, and have their future plans read out loud. In the six ceremonies I've attended, I think we've heard about one graduate who was planning to major in English. One. And maybe a handful of others who had plans for anything else in the Humanities.
It makes me very sad. I wrote recently about my own college experience in the Humanities, and why it mattered (https://brokenhand.substack.com/p/they-gave-me-the-world?r=105e3). I wish college weren't so ludicrously expensive that families felt forced to think only about their children's future employment. And I wish that, even WITH that concern, they'd realize how much an English major can matter.
Speaking as an English major from a small US college decades ago, I'd like to see the English curriculum be more than just a long series of discussion-heavy literature classes with one primary assignment, the ten page term paper at the end. There should also be a requirement to sprinkle in some combo of linguistics, rhetoric, public speaking / debate, and PR/journalism classes as part of the major. Participation should be required and tracked. Students should be penalized if they skip more than 'x' number of classes. There should be some 'objective' exams, e.g. quiz to make sure you did the reading. Yup, it's old fashioned, but I think English majors would be better educated and more respected if the major was set up this way. Instead, it seems that English departments are doubling down on trendy lit classes.
Yes! I thoroughly agree with this. I just wrapped up an associate’s, so I don’t have as much experience as you, but I would have appreciated a little wider exploration of the power of language in all of its manifestations.
I have a M.A. in English Literature. I would not recommend majoring in English to any young person I know, simply because the knowledge, skills, and abilities it gives you are not valued by our culture.
Fundamentally, I think the issue is that English professors just find literature "boring" and would rather analyze some esoteric identitarian angle than just read/enjoy the work. Even the viral "smell lady" from Twitter --- does she actually enjoy reading literature for the sake of literature? Hard to tell, but if I were in a class where every single aspect of a literary work was filtered through her hobbyhorse, I think I would lose my mind.
I’ve long thought the problem is that good English lit instruction is “merely” about teaching students to understand the meaning and appreciate the aesthetic choices of great literature. From there, a book-club style discussion of themes and characters etc is enough to get at the meat of things. But that feels so high school, and it’s hard to write new books about eg Shakespeare that way, so university profs indeed get bored of it and here we are.
I’d also love to see English classes that tell me more about the material history of the book and the publication process and history, which could also add real meaning to the final book we’re reading.
Yes, I totally agree that this can become paint-by-numbers for the English prof who is teaching Shakespeare for the 130th time, which may explain why they proceed down increasingly esoteric and pointless paths of inquiry. As you note, good English lit instruction is something that a competent high school teacher can easily achieve - a high school lit teacher is probably less equipped to do a post-colonial critique of Mrs. Dalloway (although these days who knows!).
Your idea of adding more "history" is a good one. My own humble advice to a bored English professor would be ... to just branch out and read/perhaps teach other literatures. Personally, two years ago, I felt like reading English and European literature had become kind of stale for me, and so I made a point of reading works from non-Europeans. Exploring works from Heian Japan, China, Turkey, etc. has really helped rekindle my love of literature, and perhaps could allow a bored Shakespeare professor to "get back to basics" by teaching a class on "Tale of Genji" or "Leg over Leg." There's so much great literature out there - instead of distilling every last drop from Hamlet people should just explore other literary cultures!
Had one professor who insisted that literature could be learned perfectly well by only working within the horror genre…she certainly did know perfectly how to write the perfectly (lol) researched paper and breathed fire on those who were deficient. It certainly was an experience I won’t forget.
I had the good fortune, if not wisdom, to take a degree in journalism from the University of Oregon back in the old days, when all the professors had had successful careers in their field, putting ink in their veins, before they entered t the academy. The degree required to full years of English literature and it was the best training I could have had for my career in business. It trained me to step back, critically assess and think things through, then formulate a coherent plan and influence others to follow it. What has happened to the academy since my graduation is nothing short of catastrophe.
I got history degree from UVA and I don’t regret it! It was a gift and a made me a better person even if I don’t “usel it. Most people change careers 3 times and most jobs don’t require any kind of special skills.
As an 82 year old former English Major, I can say that my early training served me well throughout my work years in the military, business and construction. The ability to organize thoughts and express them well is highly valued in all settings. It usually sets one apart from their contemporaries, but in a positive sense. In those college years we were buried with assigned reading and writing, preparation for classroom discussion and memorization of memorable passages in great literature. I do not recall having free time that could have been devoted to any type of campus demonstration. We were immersed in our studies.
Now, in my retirement years, I have the luxury of going over the works of Milton, Shakespeare and others as old friends. This return to those beginnings has shaped my views of this life, it's meaning, and the richness available at our fingertips if we have the mind to do it. We need this balance to stand up to the challenges we all face as technologies converge requiring moral choices to govern how far we go and to protect our humaness.
Thank you so much for this. At 60 I believe I got my English Major in the twilight of those years. I’ve recall asking one of the professors in my smaller town what he felt was the purpose of learning English because I was impressed that he had formerly taught at Oxford. His answer: ‘To learn how to think.’ I have never forgotten that and it has stayed with me until today, as has my love of literature. Despite the fact my career has always struggled, I felt I had gained clear thinking as a result, for which I am still profoundly grateful.
Thank you Liza, this takes me back over 50 years. I was lucky enough to study English Language and Literature at Oxford, from Anglo-Saxon times to 1900. After that "it is too soon to tell". Half-way through, I asked our tutor what work could I do with a B.A. Hons (Oxon). His response:
"We are not an employment agency, Mr. Freedman. We are here to teach you how to think... hopefully."
What a wonderful experience! I did not see your post until after I wrote mine above about having been taught by a former Oxford teacher who somehow was working in the Seattle area where I was attending in the early eighties. And his answer was similar, I had asked what he thought the purpose of an English Major was and answered similarly: “To learn how to think.” It made a profound impression on me, for which I am everlastingly grateful.
Majoring in the Humanities is what gives our society its - for lack of a better word - humanity. Those who write books well, who create plays, who teach and develop music, who share in the various languages (even Latin!), etc... these are the people who help develop our collective heart. STEM is important, but as everyone rails against AI,it is obvious the difference between AI and a person is heart. STEM created AI. We need more heart, not more AI.
Absolutely. But AI symbolizes the victory of the mind over the heart. The victory of "what has been observed" over "ever having to train oneself to observe anything."
A tragic victory that was more tragedy than victory. A mind without a heart is a bot without a soul. Science fiction is filled with stories about how heart disappeared from humans and somehow showed up in machines who desperately wanted what humans were given at birth that Science withheld and like a villian, always prevented them from receiving.
My Millennial/Gen Y niece secured an entry level job straight out of college, with an international NGO, based solely on her writing skills. She majored and minored in humanities. 13 years on, she is now assistant director of governmental liaison. All because she read the classics, and was able to communicate in clear, concise, and grammatically correct English.
As a former English major who ended up working in the legal field, my writing was my greatest asset to my team.
As someone who grew up wanting to major in English but ended up majoring in STEM, I think I have some insights on this.
I started college in 2015. At the time, there was (and perhaps there still is) a massive push for "women in STEM". Couple that with the fact that humanities majors earned mockery from other students on my college campus, with majors such as English being derided as "easy" and for "stupid people" who "can't do STEM", to me, at 18 years old, being seen as a progressive, intelligent STEMinist was preferable to being just another "dumb" humanities major.
Aiding in the fight to crush the glass ceiling, while also being seen as one of the smart ones, despite the fact that I had zero math or science inclinations or interests, was a sure way to gain acceptance amongst my peers.
And then there's the familial pressure - as a first-generation college student from a family of immigrants, the pressure to "think big" and make a big six-figure income was incredibly overwhelming.
In the end, rather than majoring in the humanities, which would have been a more natural fit for me, I willingly bent my aspirations to fit societal and familial expectations, earning two STEM degrees - one in earth science, and the other in computer science. My family and friends, who were concerned about the possibility of my majoring in the humanities, took a sigh of relief when I switched to STEM, and I was praised for going "in the right direction".
To be sure, STEM has been rewarding. With STEM, there is less risk - the career path for a computer science major versus an English major, for instance, is far clearer, and the roadmap to a six-figure salary is a bit less bumpy. Furthermore, as a person in a STEM career, but especially as a woman in a STEM career, you tend to get a bit more respect - the humanities are just not as respected as STEM these days (which is extremely unfortunate). People are always impressed when they hear I can code but are far less interested when they hear I love to read, write, and create art.
While I don't necessarily regret going into STEM, I do sometimes wonder how things would have turned out if I had been a bit more confident and assertive, proudly studying the humanities rather than shrinking from it in fear that I'd be seen as stupid, or not feminist enough, or not thinking big enough. And I wonder if other young, malleable college students who might be more humanities-oriented have experienced the same as me - the overwhelming cultural pressure to change themselves to fit into a box that perhaps isn't the best fit.
I also started college in 2015 and had the exact same experience. I almost left English but then thought that I could either be an exceptional writer English or I could be an average programmer/lawyer/banker etc. In the long run, I figured I could actually make more money as an exceptional writer than as an average lawyer.
I decided to be a really good writer and it seems to be working to some degree! People read my stuff and take me a bit more seriously. Ironically, liberals tend to take me much more seriously when I say I’m a writer.
I hate the idea that humanities majors are stupid. Well, as I say in the article, some are. But not the real ones!
But sounds like you’ve found what works best for you!
I hope you will continue to find time to "read, write and create art". You can do it !!
Thanks for the kind words!
Way to navigate that STEMinist pressure from all sides. Speaking from a decade of experience, your fam/friends weren't wrong to breathe a sigh of relief, turns out. Going STEM after 2015 saved you from insufferable English professors and grad students guilting and shaming you into a predetermined cookie-cutter racist, sexist, multi-oppressing identity box/cult/game, etc. Those humanities-oriented students you wonder about (like me after being in STEM) - yea they have suffered the "overwhelming cultural pressure to change themselves to fit into a box that perhaps isn't the best fit" precisely because they entered the humanities. Orthodoxy and dogmatism reigned supreme where the English language is equivalent to Middle Passage slave ships - vessels that colonize our minds with the Capitalist Patriarchy at every turn. So, no one studies English structure, really. STEM pressure on females is not healthy, but wow, Social Justice and DEI identity kits are not a great fit for any minority or majority. It leaves a mental and emotional scourge in its wake, wrapped in euphemisms. My 4 daughters love reading, and I'm introducing STEM-based projects at home - any fun coding app/game suggestions? I hope you read, write, create, and code something beautiful for us all here on substack.
Gutted. Genuinely thought this was going to be an essay about the demise of the standard literary character - the stuffy old, ex-military English 'Major'!
I can only answer your question from my particular experience. I earned 2 degrees in English, but with a wife and 3 children, opted for Law School since my lit degrees weren't gonna pay the bills. And upon reflection, I'm thankful for all of my education. Law School taught me how to think just as much as my literature degrees.
Glad law school taught you many 'hows' to think. Hundreds of sections of composition courses each semester prop up English departments that are anti-western, see English as a hegemonic and colonialist language, and (as one presenter at 4 Cs in Baltimore told us), studying English language and literature manifests the neoliberal patriarchal emphasis on ROI. Honestly, I thought...still? This line? English depts. are largely husks, rotted out by social justice ideologues built on postmodernist suspicions and old Marxist whims, whose revolutionary origins are now long forgotten cuz Marx is male. Seriously, my 'English' professors advocate citation justice where we no longer cite white/all males, and females too, in our 'scholarly' literature.
My sense is English departments will keep transforming into Rhetoric/Writing departments. As a white male with a BA in English in 2010, I sadly knew my time was up and went into teaching English grammar and sentence structure to ESL students via an MA in applied linguistics (15), then an MA in composition studies (20), and now a PhD in rhetoric and writing (25). That's where the teaching gigs were then, and moreso now. But, I found increasingly sophisticated bigotry in each Progressive department, theorizing themselves into oblivion and targeting their version of my identity in their minds. They 'study' English literature to crap on it, not to praise it, if they study it at all.
And, I thankfully did just land an assistant professor position this March in teaching writing, critical thinking/reading/writing, and research methods. We'll see how long I can keep it. I have won few friends at Virginia Tech and Cal State for daring to question The Message for its limitations, flaws, and drawbacks. It is radical to believe that grammar, logic, and rhetoric improve writing and thinking, and that our younger generations (like my 4 daughters) deserve evidence-based perspectives on teaching them well in addition to studying literary and poetic beauty and mastery. The slow demise of English majors, though sad, opens new possibilities we will create.
My English degrees were both earned by 1978, so I thankfully avoided the postmodern/Marxist nonsense, and I graduated Law School in 1986, before the invasion of Critical Theory.
I remember stopping by my English department in the 1990s where I ran into one of my favorite professors, and he bemoaned the ideological militancy then prevailing.
He was glad to see me as I seemed to remind him of better days. But he was sad, and I felt sorry for him.
Literature is the battleground of all ideas and ideologies, but the wisdom of John Milton prevails:
"Let truth and falsehood grapple. Whoever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter."
That quote has been a guiding light throughout my adult life, and it should be engraved on my headstone.
I feel for your former professor experiencing the initial tightening and stricture of thought and expression...did he see its long aftermath, its long march through our discipline to cancel culture, shaming, guilt, and censorship in my departments?
Not too long after your visit, a liberal Maxine Hairston addressed the political partisanship and critical theory in a 1993 CCC article - it 'went viral' in today's terms with multiple printed responses in the same leading journal. It was ratioed hard. But, to a 2025 observer, the article and its responses inadvertently exposed how entrenched the ideological thinking became, and how their vitriolic response was theory-infused, not just a few corrupt power-hungry bad attitudes.
The history of rhet/comp shows 4 decades of ideological dominance in a critical social justice paradigm from around the 80s. Seems you just skirted around the thorough takeup of the critical theory paradigm. I wonder what your professor would say if he observed today's realities...
I haven't been in touch with that professor, Dr Stein since, so I don't know what he saw of the rise of cancel culture or the SJW movement. Those forces have infected my family and church, however. My daughter home schools her four children but hasn't the faintest idea of the difference between critical thinking and Critical Theory or the relationship between CT and CRT.
Worse for Dr Stein is that he was/is Jewish, and as infuriating as the current antisemitism is for me, it would have been more personally painful for him. I hope he didn't live to witness October 7.
Are you familiar with Alan Dershowitz and his “Dershow” podcast? He's the legal voice of balance and sanity for me.
Sorry for meandering.
I largely disagree with this article. I don't disagree that there is a very strong undercurrent of ideologically-based teaching in a lot of college English classes. I don't necessarily disagree that's it's gotten worse in the last decade (though I can't directly confirm). I left an English PhD program in 2011, and it was already pretty bad then. But I disagree that (1) the ideas that ideologically-based teaching necessarily leads to bad learning outcomes, and (2) the migration of students away from humanities degrees was caused by a dramatic increase in the increasing ideological nature of those departments.
On (1), English departments have been ideological havens for leftists for decades. I started undergrad in 1997, and there wasn't a single conservative faculty member in my school's English department. That was already pretty standard. But despite that strong ideological base, the faculty was still good at teaching critical thinking and close reading and good writing to the students who actually wanted to learn those things. By the time I left academia in 2011, that was as true as it had been in 1997. It is, in fact, completely possible to have strong beliefs in an ideology but still be a strong analytical thinker. Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton produced high quality work despite their commitments to Marxism. I don't agree with them on great many things, of course, but their ideology was not an impediment to rigorous analytical thinking. If you try to excise people who have strong ideological commitments, you end up with a narrower range of interlocutors who can help you sharpen your thinking. The problem is not people with ideological positions, but an environment where only certain ideological positions can even be considered. Did those environments start to grow in the 2010s in at least some departments? Probably, but that already seem to be receding somewhat due to a combination of general vibe shifts and reminder that institutions need to legally cover their ass from exposure to lawsuits, etc. Regardless, yes, there are many bad students to come out of these programs, possibly even the modal student, but talented students can come out of even pretty lefty English departments, and I don't see why that reality has changed.
On (2), the flight from the humanities started happening basically at the onset of the Great Financial Crisis, and has been a pretty consistent line down ever since. I think the economic scarcity mindset of the GFC, combined with increasing student loan debt and the free fall of standard humanities job fields of the past like journalism, has led a lot of people to reconsider the financial value of a humanities degree. Even if I think they're wrong about the value of a humanities degree, the general belief is that they aren't worth much, and that's a hard thing to change culture wide. People want economic security before they're willing to spend their financial capital to attain cultural capital. Maslow's hierarchy, etc. The increase in ideological stridency within humanities departments seems to have mostly happened later, maybe starting in earnest around 2014-2016. In fact, there's a story we could tell that's the reverse of the one you're telling: less ideological students who previously might have been humanities majors have migrated to other fields, leaving only those who were there for the ideology and activism. It's something of a self-reinforcing trend: the less ideological students leave more and more, so later non-ideological students see these departments (correctly) as more ideologically-dominated over time. But the key in this version of the narrative, which seems to be backed by the data trends, is that the cause isn't primarily the ideology. The cause is the economic and job market realities of the early 2010s, which has had a cascading effect of less toleration of ideological diversity in a lot of humanities departments.
I’m glad someone voiced these ideas. Liza’s claim that people being fed up with the rampant Marxist ideology in English departments is the cause for a mass exodus seemed to miss the point. All in all, your financial crisis theory makes a lot more sense and even accounts for the perceived idealogical concentration in the humanities. As far as I can tell, I suspect that Liza just really has it out for Commies. Which, when you think about it, is nearly a pot-calling-the-kettle-black situation.
" Only then can we show both the ideologues and the concerned parents that, when done correctly, literature is the noblest pursuit of them all."
At the moment this is a kamikaze mission in the existing academy.
The way to fix it is to start new schools focused on the humanities, rhetoric, writing, the arts, and turn out great, humanistically trained graduates. Let them do some computer science in their final two years. There would real demand for them. But the current academy is the worst of all worlds for these subjects, in far too many cases.
That's an excellent idea. And a national nonprofit Humanities University Fund could be set to match nonprofit contributions to an academy that fulfilled a Humanities curriculum checklist of fundamental requirement. They would be like University Humanities charter schools to help students gain a rigorous and proper Humanities education that they have been prevented from obtaining by deeply embedded Marxist faculty and their student rock star retinues.
We think alike, Larry.
I’m on board with that.
I've been a member of the school board in my community for the past seven years, and every spring, at graduation, I sit next to my fellow board-member/fellow writer/fellow former English major, and we watch the procession of graduates step up, receive their diplomas, and have their future plans read out loud. In the six ceremonies I've attended, I think we've heard about one graduate who was planning to major in English. One. And maybe a handful of others who had plans for anything else in the Humanities.
It makes me very sad. I wrote recently about my own college experience in the Humanities, and why it mattered (https://brokenhand.substack.com/p/they-gave-me-the-world?r=105e3). I wish college weren't so ludicrously expensive that families felt forced to think only about their children's future employment. And I wish that, even WITH that concern, they'd realize how much an English major can matter.
Speaking as an English major from a small US college decades ago, I'd like to see the English curriculum be more than just a long series of discussion-heavy literature classes with one primary assignment, the ten page term paper at the end. There should also be a requirement to sprinkle in some combo of linguistics, rhetoric, public speaking / debate, and PR/journalism classes as part of the major. Participation should be required and tracked. Students should be penalized if they skip more than 'x' number of classes. There should be some 'objective' exams, e.g. quiz to make sure you did the reading. Yup, it's old fashioned, but I think English majors would be better educated and more respected if the major was set up this way. Instead, it seems that English departments are doubling down on trendy lit classes.
Yes! I thoroughly agree with this. I just wrapped up an associate’s, so I don’t have as much experience as you, but I would have appreciated a little wider exploration of the power of language in all of its manifestations.
I have a M.A. in English Literature. I would not recommend majoring in English to any young person I know, simply because the knowledge, skills, and abilities it gives you are not valued by our culture.
I appreciate my degree. But I regret it.
Fundamentally, I think the issue is that English professors just find literature "boring" and would rather analyze some esoteric identitarian angle than just read/enjoy the work. Even the viral "smell lady" from Twitter --- does she actually enjoy reading literature for the sake of literature? Hard to tell, but if I were in a class where every single aspect of a literary work was filtered through her hobbyhorse, I think I would lose my mind.
I’ve long thought the problem is that good English lit instruction is “merely” about teaching students to understand the meaning and appreciate the aesthetic choices of great literature. From there, a book-club style discussion of themes and characters etc is enough to get at the meat of things. But that feels so high school, and it’s hard to write new books about eg Shakespeare that way, so university profs indeed get bored of it and here we are.
I’d also love to see English classes that tell me more about the material history of the book and the publication process and history, which could also add real meaning to the final book we’re reading.
Yes, I totally agree that this can become paint-by-numbers for the English prof who is teaching Shakespeare for the 130th time, which may explain why they proceed down increasingly esoteric and pointless paths of inquiry. As you note, good English lit instruction is something that a competent high school teacher can easily achieve - a high school lit teacher is probably less equipped to do a post-colonial critique of Mrs. Dalloway (although these days who knows!).
Your idea of adding more "history" is a good one. My own humble advice to a bored English professor would be ... to just branch out and read/perhaps teach other literatures. Personally, two years ago, I felt like reading English and European literature had become kind of stale for me, and so I made a point of reading works from non-Europeans. Exploring works from Heian Japan, China, Turkey, etc. has really helped rekindle my love of literature, and perhaps could allow a bored Shakespeare professor to "get back to basics" by teaching a class on "Tale of Genji" or "Leg over Leg." There's so much great literature out there - instead of distilling every last drop from Hamlet people should just explore other literary cultures!
Had one professor who insisted that literature could be learned perfectly well by only working within the horror genre…she certainly did know perfectly how to write the perfectly (lol) researched paper and breathed fire on those who were deficient. It certainly was an experience I won’t forget.
I had the good fortune, if not wisdom, to take a degree in journalism from the University of Oregon back in the old days, when all the professors had had successful careers in their field, putting ink in their veins, before they entered t the academy. The degree required to full years of English literature and it was the best training I could have had for my career in business. It trained me to step back, critically assess and think things through, then formulate a coherent plan and influence others to follow it. What has happened to the academy since my graduation is nothing short of catastrophe.
I got history degree from UVA and I don’t regret it! It was a gift and a made me a better person even if I don’t “usel it. Most people change careers 3 times and most jobs don’t require any kind of special skills.
Same is true of the study of history - a tool of ideology that makes the lover of historical understanding weep.
Took as many history classes as I could and still keep my English Major. Certainly appreciate what you are saying.
As an 82 year old former English Major, I can say that my early training served me well throughout my work years in the military, business and construction. The ability to organize thoughts and express them well is highly valued in all settings. It usually sets one apart from their contemporaries, but in a positive sense. In those college years we were buried with assigned reading and writing, preparation for classroom discussion and memorization of memorable passages in great literature. I do not recall having free time that could have been devoted to any type of campus demonstration. We were immersed in our studies.
Now, in my retirement years, I have the luxury of going over the works of Milton, Shakespeare and others as old friends. This return to those beginnings has shaped my views of this life, it's meaning, and the richness available at our fingertips if we have the mind to do it. We need this balance to stand up to the challenges we all face as technologies converge requiring moral choices to govern how far we go and to protect our humaness.
Thank you so much for this. At 60 I believe I got my English Major in the twilight of those years. I’ve recall asking one of the professors in my smaller town what he felt was the purpose of learning English because I was impressed that he had formerly taught at Oxford. His answer: ‘To learn how to think.’ I have never forgotten that and it has stayed with me until today, as has my love of literature. Despite the fact my career has always struggled, I felt I had gained clear thinking as a result, for which I am still profoundly grateful.
Thank you Liza, this takes me back over 50 years. I was lucky enough to study English Language and Literature at Oxford, from Anglo-Saxon times to 1900. After that "it is too soon to tell". Half-way through, I asked our tutor what work could I do with a B.A. Hons (Oxon). His response:
"We are not an employment agency, Mr. Freedman. We are here to teach you how to think... hopefully."
And that was my best lesson.
What a wonderful experience! I did not see your post until after I wrote mine above about having been taught by a former Oxford teacher who somehow was working in the Seattle area where I was attending in the early eighties. And his answer was similar, I had asked what he thought the purpose of an English Major was and answered similarly: “To learn how to think.” It made a profound impression on me, for which I am everlastingly grateful.
Majoring in the Humanities is what gives our society its - for lack of a better word - humanity. Those who write books well, who create plays, who teach and develop music, who share in the various languages (even Latin!), etc... these are the people who help develop our collective heart. STEM is important, but as everyone rails against AI,it is obvious the difference between AI and a person is heart. STEM created AI. We need more heart, not more AI.
Absolutely. But AI symbolizes the victory of the mind over the heart. The victory of "what has been observed" over "ever having to train oneself to observe anything."
Not sure that is exactly a "victory," but I take your meaning.
A tragic victory that was more tragedy than victory. A mind without a heart is a bot without a soul. Science fiction is filled with stories about how heart disappeared from humans and somehow showed up in machines who desperately wanted what humans were given at birth that Science withheld and like a villian, always prevented them from receiving.
My Millennial/Gen Y niece secured an entry level job straight out of college, with an international NGO, based solely on her writing skills. She majored and minored in humanities. 13 years on, she is now assistant director of governmental liaison. All because she read the classics, and was able to communicate in clear, concise, and grammatically correct English.
As a former English major who ended up working in the legal field, my writing was my greatest asset to my team.