To ask the question with a tired literary trope, have rumors of the English major’s death been exaggerated? A couple of years ago, the academic world found themselves deliberating over this matter after an article in The New Yorker went viral investigating English literature departments across the country. The picture it painted was pretty bleak: professors complaining about students who couldn’t identify subjects and verbs, kids who wanted to write poetry but didn’t see the point of taking classes on the great poems, instructors wondering whether they should assign TV shows like Better Call Saul because they thought no student would ever read a long Victorian novel.
Two years into my own English education, the disposition in academia doesn’t seem much sunnier. Classes that could hold 30 people host only six or seven; professors indulge in gallows humor about the things they won’t be able to teach when the next round of humanities budget cuts kicks in; my teacher asks the class on the first day who here has read at least ten novels in their life and nobody raises their hand. A sense of dread builds up. You scroll Instagram and see posts sardonically asking, “real talk what are we all doing with our English degrees?” Your acquaintances in international relations and finance are finalizing plans to intern at Capitol Hill or Goldman Sachs. Your essays are inevitably all graded on the most subjective of scales, impossible to predict. You cruise Brookline Booksmith with your friends and balk at the prices of the unused copies. Your LinkedIn page, if it exists, is certainly not very fancy.
There are certainly things to feel good about in the literature hub of Boston College. Students can take classes ranging from every topic from Medieval Alliterative Poetry, to Unrequited Love, to Contemporary Theory. The small class sizes lead to lively and fascinating discussions. And when people complain about grade inflation, they’re usually talking about us. But at its base level, one cannot escape the fact that enrollment in the English major everywhere has declined precipitously in the last couple of decades in general and has declined by hundreds at BC. In 2003 there were 758 undergraduates enrolled in the major; in 2023 that number was only 287.
Professor Marjorie Howes, a scholar here on Irish literature and poet W.B. Yeats, blames this in part on practicality and parental pressure. “I think parents are part of the equation, because students tell me all the time, like, ‘I’m a finance major, because that’s what my parents want me to do.’ And if they had picked up an English major, that’s the major they love, right?” She says that “if it weren’t so expensive to go to college, I think parents would be more comfortable saying, follow your passion, follow your bliss. But if they’re paying 60, 70-thousand a year, they’re conscious that they want their child to have a well-paying, stable job afterwards.”
It’s a sad but fair point that in this world of spiking costs and declining economic opportunities, an English major might be too much of a risk for many. Mercedes Babka, MCAS ‘27, a lifelong reader who told me that her favorite book was Vanity Fair, an 1847 British novel, says that “I’ve always been more partial to the more subjective classes in school like art, history, and English. Whenever I shared a book I had enjoyed or showed my parents a completed art piece, I was inevitably met with the response, ‘Just make sure to keep it a hobby.’ Compared to my brothers who were always interested in STEM subjects, I felt my interests were always inferior since the results couldn’t be easily measured or quantified for their usefulness in the same way. While I am still very interested in what I am studying, the main reason I landed on economics as my major was because I felt it was the closest I would be able to get to being able to study something in liberal arts without disappointing my parents and their perceptions of a stable future career.”
Such a story speaks to the devastating shadow of the job market on the educational experience, the inescapable and intractable reality stalking our desires to learn for learning’s sake. The ideas many of us have of college as an isolated island of ideas, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to read and write and talk and think, suddenly seem naive at best and dangerous at worst. I remember how euphoric it felt in high school to get deeply into literature, to immerse myself in the wisdom on human nature that the novels of Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, or Jhumpa Lahiri carried. If a voice had told me then that going too far down this path could jeopardize my chances at a stable career, I would have been jolted. Now that that voice is quietly speaking, I’m swatting it away, putting on my earbuds, pretending to ignore it.
Other fields have responded to fill this void. Howes mentions “the rise of Communications as a popular major” as a contributor to an English decline, because it has this “technical, up-to-date aspect that appeals to people and that I think also strikes them as more job readying than the English major, in which you’re going to read some Shakespeare and you’re going to read some poetry.” Perhaps there is truth to this, that yesterday’s novelists, professors, and speechwriters are today’s social media managers and public relations specialists. I find this idea depressing. I would also still like brand managers to know about Macbeth. “I have a hard time picking up reasons for optimism,” Howes agrees.
Where does this leave actual literature? Mostly unread, apparently. An article for The Atlantic explores the declining literacy of college students and features a professor saying that a few years ago when he’d ask incoming students their favorite books, they’d say something by the Bronte sisters, for example. Now they say Percy Jackson. A National Education Association poll showed that only 37.6% of adults reported reading any fiction at all in 2022. In almost all surveys, girls read for fun more than boys do, and both girls and boys much less than they used to. At BC, there doesn’t seem to be much independent reading even among English majors. When there is, it seems to usually be either Normal People by Sally Rooney or The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Both fantastic novels but among hundreds of others that are just as good.
We are probably meant to conclude by reckoning with uncomfortable questions. Is English literature meant for college study? It doesn’t save the world or directly cure social justice problems. It certainly does not enrich our families or have this easily accessible deep well of knowledge that a few short classes in any other subject gives us. English Department Chair Min Song told me that the program aims for “the ability to write clearly with personality, to pay close attention to literary texts, to have a sense of the history that informs the development of that text. Nothing about those goals per se lend themselves to a kind of linear form of study.”
But another objective of an education in literature that is underrated is the capacity for empathy that it elicits. In no other field can an outsider truly come close to understanding what it’s like to be a depressed, nostalgic housewife; to be a child growing up amid India’s independence movement; to be a journalist navigating interpersonal relationships in a small town, but if you read Virginia Woolf, Salman Rushdie, and Sherwood Anderson, you can. That knowledge feels just as important as learning about stocks or cell membranes, if not more. And in a deeply unempathetic world, where we scream at our politics and our people for not being as kind and thoughtful as we think they should be, there’s an important opening for this kind of study.
Really into tacky boba shops, pretentious novels, and long talks with friends that are a mix of both
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