A View from the United States: The Crisis in the Humanities; the Liberal Arts; and English in the Military Academy

Summary

This short essay offers a few frames of reference from my current perspective within the US. I am a professor at New York University, but worked in UK universities for over fifteen years before that, and while the essay will raise more questions than answers I hope it might offer new perspectives for thinking about the future of English within the UK.

The most pressing context for English in the US right now is the ‘crisis in the humanities’. That anything of the sort exists has been disputed by Peter Mandler, but it remains the case that many major English departments in the US have suffered forty to fifty percent losses in English majors over the space of a few recent years. Whether it's fifty percent over five years or forty percent over three years, the story is much the same in many places: recruitment of majors has fallen off a cliff. This has been reported and analyzed in a number of articles in New York Times and Inside Higher Ed. Many are wondering what the future of English in the US might look like.

Numbers are falling in the UK, I believe, but at present nothing like they are in US. When we think of a crisis in the humanities in the UK we might think of the lack of government support in a STEM-driven vision of the future, but students are still opting to study English in relatively large numbers. So, what is going on in the US, and might the trend spread to the UK? It is worth pointing out that in the US English does not seem to be losing out to the sciences as much as to disciplines that are perceived to lead more directly to sectors in which the number of jobs is growing. The 2008 financial crisis – and a resultant sense of income instability and a fast-changing economic landscape – contribute (as the commentaries already cited point out): the steady rise of computer science and business studies suggest students are opting for disciplines that they expect (rightly or wrongly) will deliver them to sectors in which jobs are perceived to be plentiful and in which wages are relatively high.