What's going on with English Majors?

Rich text file version of this talk for printing.

For several decades, intensifying economic forces have pressed the discipline to rethink its working assumptions. While “temporary” instructors have taught writing courses since they first gave rise to English departments, the numbers of nontenure faculty almost doubled between 1975 and 1993, and along with graduate students they now teach most undergraduate English courses (ADE Committee on Staffing, see website). This deprofessionalization of the professoriate is converging with the increasing dependence of colleges upon undergraduate revenues.  These forces have pressed us to attend not just to teaching, but to the basic disjuncture between that work and the graduate programs and hiring systems that reproduce the profession. 

Much can be learned about how to respond to the situation by looking to formative moments in the history of our work, most notably the founding of English majors just over a century ago and the collapse of enrollments in the 1970s and early 1980s, when English majors dropped by over fifty percent despite a sixteen percent increase in overall graduations (ADE Committee on Majors 87).  This era has often been identified with the debates over the canon known as ‘the culture wars,’ but the conditions of employment were changing at a more fundamental level.  While enrollments increased 75% in the late 1980s and early 1990s, teaching was increasingly temped out, setting up the problems we now face.  To see where these trends are leading, we will need to look not up to leading organizations or research universities but down—down to the pragmatics of the work we do.  

The research paradigm defines our profession’s perspective on much of what we do.  Research institutions dominate the discipline’s articulation apparatus and its means of reproduction—the journals, organizations, and the basic credentialing process for gaining standing as a professional in the field.  The systemic disconnect of leading professional organizations, graduate programs, and scholarly journals from the undergraduate duties of most practitioners is broader than the basic dichotomy of research and teaching—a dualism that is particularly disabling in our field because English is the most broadly-based discipline in the academy.  We are rarely called to attend to the pragmatics English studies in ‘teaching’ institutions and the public schooling system because the workloads imposed there leave little time and few rewards for teachers to write about their conditions.  Becoming engaged in local educational systems and cultures is generally seen as a service duty by professionals who have looked elsewhere for advancement.  That orientation may be changing, and much can be learned by looking, not up to the professional hierarchies we often identify with, but down to take account of the basics of who teaches what to whom.  Taking account of the programs of study offered in various sorts of institutions is one way to map out how our field is represented to those who are joining us in its work.

Consider how the organizational cultures of departments differ as a result of the fact that tenure-track faculty in PhD- and BA-granting institutions teach

·         34% and 71% of undergraduate courses,

·         40% and 82% of lower-division literature courses, and

·         5% and 49% of first-year writing courses.

           Before considering how our field of work is represented in undergraduate programs of study, I want to broaden our field of vision by looking back to the first English majors, and then to more recent surveys of how English gets taught in America.  As detailed on the website, the majors at twenty “representative” institutions were described in William Morton Payne’s English in American Universities in 1895.  These reports provide a point of reference for later surveys of English studies, including my own survey of a hundred English majors, which were randomly selected from the Carnegie categories to provide a stratified sample of American colleges and universities.  These surveys provide some benchmarks and raise some questions that may be useful in reflecting upon what we we do, and how it differs by where we do it. 

Surveying the History of English Majors                                                        return to top

            English in America is, according to Gerald Graff, "the single best source" on "the ideological divisions" that came to structure the discipline, for formative issues are handled in telling detail with an "unexpectedly high degree of sophistication" (101).   These accounts document how the discipline set its professional mission above the onerous work of grading freshmen themes.  While philology was evolving from a classical discipline into a linguistic science, it was already losing its centrality in English studies.  The concentration on literature as the principal object of study is a rather curious departure from the broader history of literacy studies.  Constituting a professional vocation from a gentlemanly avocation presented considerable rhetorical challenges, as Graff has discussed.  In opposition to the prevailing utilitarianism, early professors of English invoked a humanist tradition that identified literature with a broader range of genres than those that would be taught in modern literature classes.  The demarcation of the novel from the news and politics from poetics helped limit composition courses to the formalities of academic writing, and the replacement of rhetoric by literature as the paragon for literacy left little place in English departments for journalists and rhetoricians working with public address.  The bifurcation of writing instruction into the truly creative and the merely technical is already evident in the accounts of the first creative writing workshops and in the separate rhetoric and composition departments that were already being set to work.  The reduction of the teaching of writing to a peripheral position was part of an avowed effort to raise admissions requirements and thereby reduce how much faculty had to teach.  The Universities of California and Stanford argued over who had raised admissions requirements higher, but the former was still involved in the public educational system, while the latter had already set itself up as a private enclave by requiring students to pay extra fees to be remediated, with unrefined students who had to work treated with particular disdain. 

                 Such students had long taught part time to earn tuition, and it is notable that even early English programs generally ignored teacher training (for more details see the website).  Teacher preparation has been so little addressed by the profession that such omissions may not seem problematic, but the evolution of teachers colleges into research universities was a more conflicted process than has been recognized.  Normal schools were the primary conduit for women, workers, and people of color to enter educated society, and English was and is broadly implicated in access issues because it is taught to more students at more levels than any other subject, and it is seen by educated people as essential to learning how to think and communicate like them.  Our profession’s failure to attend to the institutional base of our work is perhaps the greatest shortcoming of our field of work, and the problems we now face present opportunities to rethink our discipline’s historical relations to its material base.  Our profession’s limited engagement with our work can be attributed to the basic workings of the American educational market.  As Normals evolved into land grants and then research institutions, they shed themselves of their involvements in teacher training because the competitive standing of colleges depends in large part on the social status of their graduates, and becoming a teacher only brings status to those who have none.  English departments are at the center of this dynamic because their rise from basic skills units to research departments with a higher mission provides a benchmark for an institution’s rising sense of itself, as well as a practical means to instill that higher sensibility in students.  This dynamic is documented in Ida Jewett’s English in State Teachers Colleges (1927).  Jewett reviewed several surveys of the English curricula in Normal schools in the first quarter of the century and found that aspiring Normals consistently imitated the literary curricula of universities and deemphasized courses in pedagogy, grammar, composition, and rhetoric—with the latter dropping from being offered in 88% of academies at the turn of the century to being listed only fourteen times in some 2025 course titles in catalogues in 1925.

 These conflicted dynamics can be identified with two opposing historical orientations to education: a pragmatic tradition more broadly concerned with teaching and learning, and a more literary orientation that looked to the humanities for a classicist and anti-utilitarian stance that disdained the popular, the practical, and the pedagogical.  Each of these traditions has had clear limitations.  As discussed in Cremin’s influential The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education (1961), the pragmatic tradition of Dewey and the progressive movement in American education was readily coopted by a managerial mentality concerned with testing, tracking, and job counseling, in part because of the economics of American education and the pressures on it to assimilate others, but also because the pragmatic concern for practical conditions and consequences tends to work operate within existing constraints and assumptions about what is possible.  Of course the institutional ideology of literary studies has also accommodated prevailing conditions in ways that have ill served students and teachers.  Literary studies have been positioned at a critical remove from the literate experiences and needs of the less learned, and this position has established a hierarchical progression in the teaching of literacy in which students learned that a prerequisite for professional advancements was a deference to literate modes of self-restraint.  This function has broad continuities with the purposes served by the classical tradition before the learned professions became more diversified, but the “antiprofessional professionalism” of literary studies (as Stanley Fish has termed it) also serves more precise functions today.  Humanists’ efforts to position their work above mercantile concerns provides a model for other qualified professionals to invoke higher purposes to justify distancing their enclaves of expertise from market factors, or at least it did until the open market became more broadly established as the model for all social relations, including even the relations of the medical profession to its customers.

Another Critical Juncture in the History of the Major                                                        return to top

Pragmatic and humanistic approaches to the teaching of English have been pressed to come to terms at those conflicted but highly generative moments when traditional assumptions have lost their telling force as a result of broader changes in learning and the learned.  At such junctures the discipline has been pressed to reassess its relations to its material base— in class work with teaching, writing, and studies of language and literature, and more broadly in the institutional dependence of academics on those who teach the basics of their disciplines.  The late seventies and early eighties were such a time.  The rising tide of the research university that had promised to lift all departments began to recede in some areas.  Jobs for graduates and enrollments of undergraduates in English dropped, and the discipline was pressed to rethink its assumptions, as evident in how the professional lexicon reacted by shifting to a higher register.  At the same time, some reached out to form  alliances with teachers to reorganize their shared work, establishing the English Coalition, which held a three-week conference in 1989.  An account, The English Coalition Conference: Democracy through Language (1990), was edited by two compositionists, Richard Lloyd-Jones and Andrea Lunsford, with a foreword by the leading rhetorical critic of the time, Wayne Booth.  Booth recounts how the participants came together in opposition to the planned plenaries promoting the doctrines of E.D. Hirsch.  Compositionists, critics, and school teachers were able to find common cause in a student-centered model of the “language arts.”  The MLA and NCTE jointly published a second volume edited by another compositionist, Peter Elbow, What is English?  The ADE Bulletin followed with articles that were critical of the more pragmatic aspects of the conference, but several contributors also supported some of its proposals.

The question of what English is had arisen because the discipline was being pressed to account for its basic work to those whom it could no longer count on to defer to its expertise.  To make their account broadly persuasive, pragmatists enlisted the support of teachers by defining their work as a shared vocation, while some humanists reacted to the pressure to attend to the basics as a populist threat to the rigor of the humanities.  Both responses were attempts to consolidate the respective positions’ power bases, beyond and within the discipline.  I believe that the former response was and is more viable as well as valuable because the virtues of professionalism do not hold the power they once did, and that power was never equitably distributed.  In any case, at this turning point in the profession, as at its origins, the pragmatics of the discipline were called into question against changes that could not be accounted for in traditional ways.  The pragmatists at the conference reported that after teachers and professors had come together in a shared repudiation of “cultural literacy,” participants mapped out the language arts along traditional lines in the triad of literature, language and writing.  They then realized that the fourth corner of the field, teaching, could not be tacitly assumed but had to be addressed more explicitly.  It is that need to provide an account of what had been tacitly assumed that makes the Coalition Conference of historical value, for at such pragmatic junctures, the learning capacities of a discipline expand as it attempts to articulate the values of its methods to those who have not internalized them as givens.  The dynamics of this process are evident in how the contributors to the volumes turn away from traditional accounts of their subject of expertise to claim common cause for the “vocation” of teaching writing, language, and literature.  Elbow concludes his contribution by waivering between the discipline’s “strongest center,” “the traditional one,” “the profession of grammar and literature, correctness and good taste” and a more ill-defined but “cohesive focus on the productive dimensions of language,” with the waivering a transparently rhetorical attempt to make the latter more broadly engaging to traditionalists (117).

Surveying the Current Field of Study                                                        return to top           

For the present analysis, one of the most important points that Huber makes is that requirements and majors varied by the size and types of institutions.  Many large institutions (more than 15,000) had more wide-ranging requirements, but such departments were less likely than either mid-sized public institutions or departments with joint programs to require linguistics, the history of language, rhetoric, and general or advanced writing courses.  Huber speculates that this pattern may be due to the fact that these courses were required in English education majors, and there clearly was a broad concern for raising the disciplinary base of education majors. The following statistics are based on a sample of over 300 departments:

	Percentages of majors requiring writing and language courses
	by type of departments	Joint Programs Depts.	Separate English Depts.
			Midsized Public	Small Private	Very Large
	Writing	45.3	33.8	23.3	26.9
	Lang, ling, and rhetoric	32.8	30.8	10.0	17.9
	Adv. Comp or writing	58.3	57.4	29.6	34.2
	History of English or comparative grammar	62.5	48.5	23.2	35.4

While most departments (56%) offered concentrations in more than just literature, the percentages increase markedly with the size of the institution, with 71.1% of institutions of more than 15,000 offering alternative majors, 58.6 of institutions with 2,000 to 15,000, and 38.9% of those with fewer than 2,000 students. 

 

Percentages of concentrations in 4 year departments offering concentrations
Area of Concentration	1991-­92	1884-­85
Literature (general)	72.2	­
Creative writing	54.6	56.9
Writing (e.g., professional, technical)	45.9	29.2
English education	42.8	57.4
American literature	31.4	­
Communications (e.g., journalism, speech, drama)	20.1	25.2
Linguistics	13.4	19.3

(Huber 76)

Percentages of depts. requiring selected courses
Characteristic	Shake- speare	Advanced Composition	History of English or Comparative  Grammar	No. of Depts.
Entire sample	60.8	42.2	39.2	344
Public	69.2	51.5	49.7	169
Private	51.4	32.4	28.5	179
Doctoral		24.0	27.1	96
Comprehensive		49.4	45.2	166
Baccalaureate		45.9	40.0	85
Northeast	51.7	28.1	19.1	89
South	59.6	40.4	42.1	114
Midwest	59.6	59.6	49.5	99
Pacific & Rocky Mtn	78.3	32.6	45.7	46

(Huber 74)        

My own survey of a hundred English majors is not large enough to make claims about different types of institutions, but I do believe that foregrounding such differences is vital to enable us to intervene more effectively into the educational systems in which we work and challenge the professional dominance of the discipline by research institutions.  As one moves down the list from colleges that offer more associates degrees than baccalaureates through comprehensive to doctoral institutions, one sees that English studies change from an interdisciplinary nexus to isolated departments. Almost half of English majors in baccalaureate institutions are in departments that are not labeled simply “English” but foreground other interdisciplinary or intradisciplinary fields of study such as humanities and communications or professional writing, languages, and literatures.  While types of majors differ across institutions, there does seem to be a consistent correlation among English education, writing, and language classes, as Huber concluded from the much larger survey of the major a decade ago.