The College Fix

Sadly, that’s not always the case

Disappointing news out of academia recently: The English major is rapidly declining in popularity. There are a number of reasons for that, but prominent among them is the English faculty’s frequent focus on “issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and identity,” as The College Fix reported this week.

That’s no joke: There are a great many English classes college campuses today that are neurotically fixated on these issues, to the point that you can forget you’re in a program that’s supposed to be about literature. Professors with chips on their shoulders, combined with students who are monomaniacal about the latest queer undocumented trans-asexual activist crusade, can often make for some bizarre—yet at the same time boring—courses: You’d be surprised how many gender-reassignment surgery themes the average college student can tease out from The Twelfth Night, and you’d be positively shocked at how long a class can spend grumbling about the alleged ethno-centric white nationalist biphobic undertones of East of Eden.

That is a disappointment, because literature, particularly English literature, is one of the jewels of human civilization. The joys of reading, discussing and analyzing the canon are among the greatest that the academy has to offer. Real analysis—a good, thorough dive into a rich work of art—is a treasure, far more pertinent and fulfilling than the shallow hermeneutics of so much of identity-driven academia. A thorough analysis of Coleridge’s deployment of expressive emotion in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” is eminently preferable to yet another dreary deconstructive interpretation of the class-based capitalist motifs of some poorly-written postmodern dirge.

Students who are seriously considering an English degree should try and figure out which universities are offering which kinds of educations. A good English program gives a student great tools and skills which he can use for the rest of his life—the benefits of writing well, an ability already in short supply, cannot be overstated—and it also allows students to tap directly into the rich and invaluable library of great works that have uplifted and inspired generations before them. That’s worth something.

MORE: Yale ‘decolonizes’ English dept. after complaints studying white authors ‘actively harms’ students

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