Dartblog

No, no, not the College’s English department. The Decline of the English Department is the title of an engaging piece in The American Scholar by William Chace, the former president of both Wesleyan and Emory. It received a David Brooks’ Sydney Award as one of 2009’s best pieces of commentary.

Chace laments the decline of the humanities in general in the academy, and more specifically, of English:

First the facts: while the study of English has become less popular among undergraduates, the study of business has risen to become the most popular major in the nation’s colleges and universities. With more than twice the majors of any other course of study, business has become the concentration of more than one in five American undergraduates. Here is how the numbers have changed from 1970/71 to 2003/04 (the last academic year with available figures):

English: from 7.6 percent of the majors to 3.9 percent
Foreign languages and literatures: from 2.5 percent to 1.3 percent
Philosophy and religious studies: from 0.9 percent to 0.7 percent
History: from 18.5 percent to 10.7 percent
Business: from 13.7 percent to 21.9 percent

In one generation, then, the numbers of those majoring in the humanities dropped from a total of 30 percent to a total of less than 16 percent; during that same generation, business majors climbed from 14 percent to 22 percent. Despite last year’s debacle on Wall Street, the humanities have not benefited; students are still wagering that business jobs will be there when the economy recovers.

I’ll refrain from summarizing Chace’s thoughts, which bear close study, but I do want to add the observation that the admissions departments of our institutions of higher learning seem to have played some role in this development.

Perhaps this is a chicken and egg problem, but we should not be surprised if nationally only 16% of students graduate in the humanities when only approximately that percentage of matriculating students express a primary academic interest in the division before setting foot on campus. Foolish consistency is either the hobgoblin of little minds, or it could point to the existence of numerical quotas of some kind. From the ever helpful Dartmouth Fact Book’s profile of incoming freshmen’s academic preference:

Perhaps one of Dartblog’s faithful readers in the Admissions Department can enlighted us — on a confidencial basis if so desired. We can’t go on together with suspicious minds: does the Admissions Department seek to reach such consistent percentage figures, or is this just how things happen to turn out?

All that said, reality once again proves more interesting than expected. It seems that though many students arrive in Hanover with low expectations about the humanities, the multiple charms of the faculty in that division do exert a certain pull:

Double majors are counted twice here, but still.

Addendum: It is interesting to see the accretion of students in the above tables to the Humanities and the Social Sciences, and their marked attrition from the Sciences. It seems that only half of Freshman Week scientists end up majoring in the sciences. I wonder why?