The Fall of the English Department
and the rise of new stewards
The mid-twentieth century was the golden age of the university English department in the U.S.1 Up until the 1990s, the average English major would have studied nearly every major work from the medieval period to modernism, from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. Today, most English majors can graduate without a sense of literary history. Many programs don’t require a course on Shakespeare.
Meanwhile, outside of the academy, readers are returning to, and expanding, the literary canon. Some of the one-year reading plans found online are more robust than the current curricula in most university English departments in the U.S. Many of the people I know who have read all of Shakespeare (or plan to) don’t study literature at college. They’re simply readers with a relish for language and with eyes and ears for beauty.
Public readers (i.e., non-academic, non-professional readers) are getting something right. For many of them, their reading plan isn’t politically or culturally motivated; it isn’t a part of some cultural effort at preserving “Western values.” They value the canon for what it is, an ever-growing list of works agreed upon by a general consensus of readers that represents what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought or said.” The public readership is also broadening the canon by placing contemporary texts in conversation with “classic” literature.
The university English department, generally speaking, is no longer the place to look for a robust study of the English-language literary history. How and when did this happen? Why did English departments lose so much ground, and how are some public readers now recovering it?
While my last article considered how American universities are facing an identity crisis and how, as a result, humanities departments have changed significantly. In this essay, I want to trace the rise and fall of the American English department as a case study of how this happened, and, most importantly, consider how public readership is regaining the ground that the universities have lost.
The Rise and Fall of the English Major | A Brief History
For most of the twentieth century, English departments were the prize of universities.
During the post-war years especially, English programs enjoyed a steady surge of interest. Many programs were being expanded and given resources. This included both undergraduate and graduate programs. In the 1940s, the University of Pittsburgh Department of English began to grow markedly, awarding 21 PhDs in 1940.2
The “golden years” were somewhere around the 1960s, with the high-water mark being in the early 1970s. According to Louis Menand, U.S. English departments awarded 64,342 bachelor degrees between 1970-1971.3 That means that 7.6% of all bachelor degrees were in English in 1970.
Let that sink in for a moment. 7.6% of all bachelor degrees were in English.
The English degree clearly had a broad appeal and institutional respect. To students it offered broadly applicable skills in analysis and communication, not to mention the familiarity with great literature that it demanded. In many departments, students were expected to read the complete works of both Shakespeare and Chaucer during their four years.
A comparative analysis of mid-20th-century university bulletins reveals a consistent model of a rigorous English curriculum. At Columbia University in 1918, courses were offered on all the major English authors including a course on Old English prose, “Shakespeare as Playwright,” “Johnson and His Circle,” and “Modern Drama.”
The Harvard University catalog of 1950-1951 reveals that all majors were required to complete a full-year historical survey of English literature titled “English 1. History and Development of English Literature from the Beginning to Present.” So that’s two semesters of literature from the Anglo-Saxons to Modernism. The first elective chosen after the foundational “English 1” survey had to be selected from a specific list that was heavily weighted toward author-specific courses, all of which required several hours of reading each week.
Harvard’s 1950-51 course on Chaucer taught by Prof. Whiting lasted two semesters and required students to read all of Chaucer’s writings. “English 123 Shakespeare” by Professor Farnham was also a two-semester course that required students to read all of Shakespeare (including the lyric poetry) with a special emphasis on the major plays.4 If today there is an English major course that requires students to read all of Shakespeare or Chaucer, I haven’t found it. At least not in the U.S.
You also had more focused survey courses like “English Literature from 1500-1603, English Literature from 1603 to the Restoration [1660]” and “English Literature from the Restoration to 1700.”
Similar requirements were standard across the U.S. According to the University of Michigan’s 1963-1964 bulletin, students were required to complete two out of three possible full-year surveys in English, American, or World Literature alongside an intensive writing requirement and a senior seminar.
Things began to change by the mid-1980s. The number of English degrees dwindled over 50% at each level of degree.5 After that, English degrees increased in number but not in proportion. As degrees rose across all fields, the share of the English degree fell to record lows by 2014 (the same year I enrolled in English at the University of Florida).6
By 2018, bachelor’s degrees conferred to English majors were down 20 percent since 2012.7 By 2021, the number of English majors since 2012 had dropped by a third.8
Harvard’s requirements for English majors (called “concentrators” at Harvard) in 1950-1 are very different from the foundational (or “Common Course”) requirements for Harvard’s English majors today. One required course, English 10, focuses exclusively on poetry written after the year 2000. The other three Common Courses are classes on “Literary Forms,” “Literary Methods,” and a tutorial on a specialized topic taught by a grad student. And while most English majors will gain a breadth of literary history in these courses, there’s no longer the guarantee that an English major will graduate with a clear sense of literary history.
The point of this history is not to suggest that English departments have lowered their standards. In many cases, their standards have shifted as the department adapts to the challenges of money-centric university culture. Neither do I want to lament a rejection of the literary canon. Expanding the canon is necessary as more literature is produced in conversation with the time-honored works. Equally important is reading outside the canon. Students should have the freedom to do that. But the valuable approach that many English departments have lost is a systematic study of English-language literature and literary history. Both are necessary for any informed reading both within and outside of the canon. This is the vision that informs the work outside the academy and on Versed Community
Why English Departments Changed
Some on the political right will argue that departments “went woke.” They will point to the fact that the decline of the English department directly corresponds to the rise of critical theory in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Others on the political left will point to the rise of tuition costs (largely the result of conservative legislation), which directly correspond to the decline of the English department. As you’ve probably guessed, the picture is much more complex than either one of these accounts.
Here is my take, which includes a wider sampling of contributing factors:
Many English departments abandoned a strong curriculum. For much of the 20th century, English departments had a recognizable core of (1) The English tradition (800-1950); (2) Shakespeare; (3) American literature; and (4) literary history. As the idea of the canon began to be challenged and abandoned, the English department curriculum became increasingly unstructured. Departments traded a set of strong required courses for more of a “choose-your-own-journey” model.
There arose a preference for public universities over private or religious colleges. Between the 1970s and 2010s, students began attending public universities, primarily because they were cheaper (I, as a community-college transfer student, was one of them). But public universities are increasingly interested in the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). Many humanities programs at public universities are not well funded for reasons described in my previous article.
Tuition costs rose significantly between the 1970s and now. Tuition has surged well over the rate of inflation for several decades. In the 1950s, tuition at Harvard was around $600 per academic year, which, by the way, was way cheaper than Yale or Princeton at the time. $600 averages out to about $7,000 per year in today’s money. That’s a significant amount, sure, but it’s nothing like the $50k+/yr of today’s colleges.
The rise of theory did not help, it’s true. As John Guillory wrote in his Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993):
The ultimate social horizon of the latter development is the hegemony of that technobureaucratic organization of intellectual life which has rendered the literary curriculum socially marginal by transforming the university into the institution designed to produce a new class of technical/managerial specialists possessed of purely technical/managerial knowledge. It is in this context that we shall have to understand the ambivalent position of literary theory with respect to literature, since theory is both indissolubly bound to that curriculum and yet opposed to reproducing it as the vehicle of universal “humanist values” constituting a knowledge of a nonspecialist nature. The project of literary theory in its premier deconstructive form was therefore to discard one ideological rationale for the literary curriculum, and then immediately to install another in its place.” (261-2)
As I’ve said before, theory is great. I admire the work of many theorists. The dominance of theory wasn’t promoted by the major theorists themselves.
It was their graduate students, the following generation of tenured professors, who established the critical orthodoxy of ideological readings of literature at the expense of other more affective, formalist, or aesthetic appreciations. The theorists were all well versed in classic literature from Homer and the Hebrew Bible to Hilda Doolittle. And many of them were excellent close-readers.
The research model took over English departments. After the 1970s, the American university model shifted to a research-driven faculty culture. Professors were evaluated and tenured based on their publications. As a result, literature became a specialized academic field. This change meant that educating undergraduate students became no longer a serious metric for job-placement and tenure.
Teaching was deprioritized. This reason is directly related to #5, the rise of research and scholarship. The study of English literature had begun as a teaching discipline. Over the past 60 years, it transformed slowly into a research discipline which produces highly-specialized scholarship read mostly by other specialists.9 Intro-level teaching shifted to underpaid adjuncts and graduate students. Hiring prioritized research agendas. Whether a professor could teach well was less of a priority.
But the main reason why English departments are in decline is because they have lost public voices. The academy used to be more porous. Earlier professors, such as Lionel Trilling, Helen Vendler, Cleanth Brooks, Northrop Frye, C.S. Lewis, Helen Gardner, Harold Bloom, spoke to, and wrote for, an educated public. When you read these critics’ work, the value of the humanities is abundantly clear. There’s no need to defend why the humanities mattered. No one questioned it. Readers knew why they mattered, and felt it. But now many professors have stopped publicly professing. I once proposed that a certain English department start a public-facing initiative—a podcast or series of public lectures. The proposal was met with confusion and disdain. Although there are many professors who still write for the public, the majority seem uninterested in public engagement. Meanwhile outside the tower, technological acceleration, short-form entertainment, technocratic-market logic continues to dull the faculties of the imagination and disintegrate shared meaning. It’s no wonder anti-intellectualism is on the rise.
If the American English department is indicative of the whole, the humanities have lost cultural influence precisely when society most needed them.
The New Stewards of Literature
A decline in public interest in reading literature corresponds to the decline of the English department. By all accounts, the state of public literacy has only gotten worse with reading for pleasure in the U.S. adult population having plummeted over the past 40 years. Fewer than half of all adults read at least one work of literature in 2015, a concerning statistic that was described as “the lowest percentage . . . since NEA surveys began in 1982.”10 In 2022, less than half of adults reported having read at least one book in the past year.11
And yet… Even as university English departments pared back structured canonical curricula and major enrollments fell, there remain signs of renewed public appetite for serious reading and study of literature.
Looking out on the state of things in 2025, it is clear there are major changes afoot. A major cultural reorientation is underway. The 2020s promise to be a big decade for the revival of reading the classics. Online initiatives such as The Catherine Project and my Versed Community (now with 600 members) demonstrate a renewed desire for encountering works of literature in conversation and with rigor.
Where the universities have failed, some non-academic readers and self-learners are committing themselves to the life of the mind. Readers, writers, “autodidacts,” and communities of learners outside the university are preserving tradition, sharing knowledge and wisdom, improving language, experimenting creatively, and cultivating new fields of the imagination. The public commitment to literature is increasingly counter-cultural. Readers are turning to the canon out of a desire for meaning and beauty.
The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called these readers the “clerisy,” a class of readers that included those outside the academy (teachers, students, skilled and frontline workers, etc.) whose continued education and interest in the arts preserve and support the cultural life of a nation. The health of a nation depends upon this class, which is not a class of academics or scholars or theologians but of average readers capable of advancing learning in all branches of knowledge. He believed that some members of this clerisy would reside inside the academy but most of them would be living lives outside of the universities. In their hands was the “strongest security and the surest provision, both for the permanence and the progressive advance of whatever (laws, institutions, tenures, rights, privileges, freedoms, obligations, etc.) constitute the public weal.”12
On platforms like Substack, YouTube, and public reading groups, many are studying and writing about great works of world literature more for soul-formation and cultural belonging than for credentialization.
The custodianship of literary culture has passed from institutions to the public reader, those seeking wisdom, meaning, beauty, and intellectual depth in an age of distraction. Without the promise of credentials or any external obligation, they have become the new stewards of the tradition. They’re buying classics, reading and expanding the canon, writing and reading close-reading essays and lectures online, and joining grassroots salons. Among them, the idea of “required reading” seems foreign. Reading has become instead voluntary devotion.
This isn’t optimistic guff. This is my firsthand experience, something that very few, if any, academics have. My students and friends on my Versed Community have convinced me that the relevance and vitality of literature do not depend upon the academy. It really rests on all of us. My experience teaching on Versed is actively shaping the way I think of my vocation in the world as a “professor” without an institution and the future of literature and the arts.
Communal learning, even though not “in-person,” is proving that the past works of literature are being enlarged by the present. This renewed stewardship is less bureaucratic and more intimate, less obligatory and more communal, and it may prove the stronger for it. I used to think that the decline of the English department signaled the death of literary study. I have learned that it signals a return of literature to common life and personal encounter. Reading is returning again to the way it was before it was professionalized by the academic study of it. It’s becoming the public commons.
What’s happening is a true renaissance of reading. And it’s important that this revival grows into a place of creativity. We don’t need to recover the golden age of the English department, as much as I admire a systematic approach to literature and its history. We need to create something new, a new relation to the canon. We need a revival of literature that feeds both intellect and spirit and one that is willing to encourage a productive and creative relationship to the ever-growing canon. That’s what our present circumstances offer.
What will the future look like? Will the new stewards of literature go “underground” in an oppressive technocratic bureaucracy like the last remnant of readers in Jules Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century? Or like the Petrarchs and Poggio Bracciolinis of the Renaissance, will they bring to light forgotten literature and usher in a new movement of humanism?
Say what you want about the decline of reading. But something is happening now. While the flames of literacy are dying, the buried coals are heating.
English departments are, admittedly, fairly new additions to the university. The first were established in the 19th century.
“In retrospect, however, the most important and decisive thing to note about the English department in the 1960s was the striking growth of the graduate program. In the 1940s, the English department granted 21 PhDs; in the 1950s, 26; and in the 1960s, 89. This growth was planned and supported by new faculty lines, including Mellon Professorships, and by new Mellon fellowships for graduate students. It was part of a push to raise the research profile of the department (and the institution). Since the 1920s, the department had defined itself in terms of teaching and service. Now it had to begin to think differently.” See https://www.english.pitt.edu/history-english-department-1960s
Apart from major author courses, there were other courses to choose from, such as an entire course on John Milton, taught by Douglas Bush (of course) and “English 182: English Critics,” which surveyed the English critics from the Renaissance to the present day, taught by Walter Jackson Bate, who had just joined the faculty around this time, and was teaching. There was also a poetry course taught by Archibald MacLeish. There were also electives like “The Study of Fine Books,” a course about collecting books and taught the history and methods of book collecting.
“After the mid-1980s, the number of English degrees rose substantially, but so did the number of degrees conferred in all fields. Consequently, the discipline’s share of all degrees fell at all three degree levels. At the baccalaureate level, the share of degrees conferred in English fell to 2.8% in 2014—the lowest point on record. The share of master’s degrees awarded in the discipline also hit a new low in 2014 (1.1%). Only at the doctoral level was the share in 2014 slightly above the previous low (2.1% as compared to a nadir of 2.0% in 2007).” See https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education/english-language-and-literature-degree-completions
This is not to say that scholarship is unimportant, but the institutional incentives and cultural ethos around research has changed the discipline’s relationship with its students and the public.
https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2024/federal-data-reading-pleasure-all-signs-show-slump. In the past, public learners have sought a structured, canon-based education often outside traditional universities. Hutchins & Adler’s “Great Books” initiative at UChicago has done much since the 1920s and ‘30s. There were several book series as well, such as J.M. Dent’s Everyman’s Library, which published 1000 cheap editions of classics from 1906-1956, the fifty Harvard Classics (1909-1910), the Penguin Classics (1946-present), the Britannica’s Great Books Set (1952), etc. What began with Hutchins and Adler’s Great Books program in the early 20th century has re-emerged through modern classical education movements and independent learning communities. Today, programs like the University of Chicago’s Great Books Core offer open enrollment courses in “Great Books” for non-academic readers. St. John’s College’s “Program of the Great Books” offers a reading list and curriculum online.
See Coleridge’s On the Constitution of the Church and State, ed. John Colmer, Princeton University Press, 1976, p. 53.
Other factors:
-The rise of the Customer is Always Right mode of college education. Reading takes time. It takes thought. This is not compatible with students who demand a degree with limited effort. Professors and teachers who demand participation via actually having done the work are given negative reviews (like a restaurant with undercooked pasta!) and then administrators step in.
-The societal shift from the value of critical thinking to the ease of ideology and dogma.
Great article, thanks.
My mother got her PhD in English. She began in the English department as a faculty member at Idaho State University in 1971. She taught and did original research (Wallace Stegner plagiarized Mary Hallock Foote when he wrote Angle if Repose), and taught for two years at the National University of Rwanda in the late 80’s. When she returned to ISU the student body had changed. They’d become hostile and weren’t interested in learning. Mom left teaching and became a resource for other faculty members to help them write grant proposals. I noticed that the people I encountered in Pocatello (96% white) were more rude, and weren’t interested in things like making life easier for the disabled (I am one). The rise of Trump hasn’t surprised me, though I’m deeply disappointed.