Are English Departments Killing the Humanities?

That's the question being asked by Dissent Magazine.

From the piece...

At my home institution, the University of Illinois, English is larger than departments of philosophy, religion, classics, and art history combined. That relationship is quite typical. And its disproportionate size has come at the expense of other disciplines. In its youth it promised an education in literature without the hard work of learning languages, much to the dismay of classicists. In its middle age it offered a stripped-down version of philosophy under the banner of critical theory, an intrusion that philosophers bore with Stoic calm. Now in its senescence, the English department is being beaten by communications at its own game of watering down curriculum and reducing humanist traditions to what today’s adolescent will find—to use the favorite malapropism of the text-messaging generation—“relatable.”

At this point many of my colleagues in the discipline will wonder if they have a Judas in their midst or, worse yet, an Allan Bloom. The typical maneuver of conservative movements in the humanities is to offer in such moments a paean to ancient Greeks and Romans. I have no such intention. In an age more forthright in its bigotries, Irving Babbitt advocated a New Humanism that readily embraced a meritocracy of learning. The humanitarian, in Babbitt’s phrase, “has sympathy for mankind in the lump,” where a humanist “is interested in the perfecting of the individual.” The return to the classics, or to great texts traditionally conceived, never seems in my mind fully to dispense with such patrician sensibilities.

The humanities programs of the next century might rather be structured around “world humanisms.” In such programs the phrase “great texts” would evoke the Bhagavad Gita every bit as much as it does The Iliad. The learning of at least one world language would be required, be it Arabic, French, or Mandarin. At its center would be neither the vernacular nor an artificially constructed “Western tradition.” Instead it would explore on their own terms, and in their rich cross-fertilization, millenia of world traditions offering insight on the relationships between individual and society; on our ethical obligations to our fellow beings, human and non-human; and on flourishing and justice. The study of English and other literatures would still play a prominent role—unlike philosophy, literature gives us insight on the blood-and-guts world of cultural production, where the desire for pure idea and beauty strains against the fetters of material contexts and the smallness of mind they breed; that’s what keeps me coming back to it, and especially back to Milton, where those agons are writ large. There is no humanities department, English included, that needs to shrink, but there certainly are some in desperate need of growth, and English is far from the top of the list.