I Agree with Your Minor but not with Your Major

Albertus, the conspicuously silent blogger for A&D, sent me a recent article from the Chronicle of Higher Education. It's another piece explaining why a Ph.D. in the humanities is a dead-end.

Of course, it's not a dead-end if you can get a teaching gig...but those have become extremely scarce.

For the majority of humanities Ph.D.s who will either never defend their dissertation or never land a tenure-track job, you really have to seriously question whether it was time well spent.

This makes me think about conversations I have sat through where colleagues were discussing how to draw more majors into the program, and a rather startling thought occurred to me.

Perhaps the success of a humanities program should not be defined by the number of students in its department or even the work the students are doing (there is a recent push to "professionalize" undergrads).

Rather, it seems a better scale for success of a humanities department is how many minors it can boast. The English minor suggests that someone from outside the field of English perceives value to what your program is doing. That says a lot about what is happening in the class.

Very few English majors, from my perspective, prove to be students who actually want to study English in a professional way. I have, in the past, described the English major as a kind of Chinese pinball major. It's kind of a default major for students who aren't good at anything else. They aren't necessarily good at English, either...they can just hide their lack of talent more successfully.

This isn't me being jaded...this is honest-to-goodness based on what students have told me when I survey the class...and it doesn't inspire me with great hope for the future of the major. It might also help explain why so few English graduates students don't complete their work. What happens in the undergraduate English classroom barely resembles what happens in graduate school, which is one of the reasons why so many English grad students are so self-loathing. Take someone who is doing English because they aren't good at anything else...send them to grad school so they can avoid confronting their self-perceived lack of talent...and they quickly discover that their old tricks don't work anymore, and class isn't even as fun as it used to be. Personal reflections no longer matter; sweeping assumptions of history will not be tolerated; teachers are no longer easily impressed; and literature papers can no longer just deal with literature. The skills they learned in an undergraduate English major have very little bearing on a future as a literary scholar.

Yet, transforming undergraduate classes into pre-grad programs seems like a bad idea as well. First, grad programs are already accepting too many students and graduating a glut of Ph.D.'s into a world with no room for them. Second, if undergrad classes were more like graduate work, I highly suspect that very few people would want to take them...certainly not the large population of "default majors."

Thus, it seems wiser to keep the spirit of the undergraduate course alive while simultaneously discouraging students from pursuing literature in graduate school. In other words, cater to non-majors.

The future of English departments might not be training English majors how not to be grad students, but in training science majors how to become Shakespeare snobs.

Comments

[John]

That, sir, is a great observation. In the Classics department at UMD, where I once thought my Comp Sci/Classics double major was strange, I have found that the majority of Classics majors have another major which they intend to pursue after their undergrad degree is completed. As you said, they will be software developers, surgeons, etc. who are also Classics snobs.

[Peter Terp]

I guess the next question for you, John, would be to ask why you chose to double major in Classics.

[John]

A love for the material and the languages. Discovering puns and double entendres in Petronius and Catullus, reading epics like the Aeneid, and figuring out the questioning and argumentation of Socrates are all just so much better in Latin or Greek.

[John]

Plus, we don't have to write nearly as much as English majors and we get to read the true Classics which have survived for thousands of years.