How Humanities Professors Got Marginalized

In any discussion of the state of the humanities, the first fact is a numerical one. In School Year 2021-22, while a little more than two million people earned bachelors’ degrees in the United States, only 33,429 of them majored in English. That makes for a rate of 1.6 percent of the whole, one in 60 undergraduates. In 1970-71, a high point for English, the rate was one in 13.

English used to be one of the most popular majors on campus, much more common than the now-thriving fields of biology, psychology, communications, and engineering/computer science. A half-century later, for most students, exposure to English amounts to a single requirement, freshman composition, a course that in most cases has no literary content. Instead, teachers highlight social themes, current events, and contemporary readings (op-eds, for instance). They sound more like social-science instructors than humanities profs.

For most students, exposure to English now amounts to a single requirement, freshman composition. The same abysmal numbers come up with foreign languages and linguistics, which draw fewer than one in 130 (!) undergrads to their fields, according to the NCES table cited above. The field of history shows the same sliding trend. The Humanities Indicators project counted 34,922 history grads in 2009 but only 21,572 in 2022, an astonishing collapse during a time of rising college enrollment. Philosophy and classics are in the same downward spiral. Students haven’t left English, the largest department, for the others. They’ve abandoned the humanities altogether. At this point, the fields of English, history, philosophy, and foreign languages combined draw only four percent of the majors in the United States.

At this point, English, history, philosophy, and foreign languages combined draw only four percent of the majors in the United States. People under 40 don’t realize the magnitude of the loss. They grew up and pressed through college hearing about STEM, the Digital Age, and business, hot fields where high-paying jobs would follow. They don’t know that, in 1979, the schools of theory in the humanities—deconstruction, Foucauldian historicism, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminism, etc.—were prominent topics in the academic scene. Everyone across the campus knew then that things were simmering and brewing in literature departments.

Some humanities professors became celebrities, such as Stanley Fish and Harold Bloom. The New York Times Magazine profiled Bloom, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller as if they were international designers. (One nickname for them was “The Yale Deconstruction Company.”) When the Culture Wars broke out in the mid-1980s, on campus they took the form of the “Canon Wars,” whose battlefield was the English syllabus. One of the best-selling books of the time, The Closing of the American Mind, was written by a philosophy professor skilled in the intricacies of Hegel.

When I chose an English major at UCLA in 1980, the field had energy and self-respect. You could feel the confidence in the classroom, especially when all the seats were filled. A year after I began teaching at Emory University in 1989, a team of French professors from Johns Hopkins, Yale, and schools in Paris joined the faculty in Atlanta and earned lengthy coverage in the New York Times.

Younger academics can’t imagine such attentions paid to the humanities. When so few students sign up for the courses each term, who cares what the professors say and do? For a few years, Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball attended the Modern Language Association’s annual convention and wrote reports in The New Criterion needling and satirizing the panels and participants. They were a hoot, the reading public laughed, and the professors actually enjoyed the publicity.

After a few years, though, Kramer and Kimball dropped the project, realizing that the profs were becoming stale and unimportant. They were right. The intellectual poverty of the fields today may be measured by the many conference papers that rehash the same race/sex arguments and interpretations that haven’t been surprising or cutting-edge for more than 30 years. In the 21st century, “Queer” isn’t transgressive or subversive, as its theorists boasted in the 1990s—it’s just tiresome.

In a decadent situation such as this one, the only corrective is a material one. Otherwise, people don’t listen. Student enrollments are an unavoidable rebuke. Conservative critics of the humanities—from Bill Bennett in the 1980s, Dinesh D’Souza in the ’90s, and David Horowitz in the ’00s to Christopher Rufo today—have won the debate time and again, but the professors held offices and didn’t have to budge. They still control hiring, curricula, and graduate admissions, so why worry about a Wall Street Journal commentary or a legal decision against their institution? The “Group of 88” in the Duke Lacrosse Scandal didn’t suffer at all in spite of their false allegations and the eventual triumph of the players.

English was so central and sturdy for so long that it never occurred to the professors that it might not always remain that way. I remember an event around the year 2000 when my department hosted a couple of distinguished professors with theory credentials, and five of us took them to a fancy dinner. A colleague of mine who was working on a book on gay themes in religious literature mentioned to the table a move by some old-fashioned types to stick with literary history in undergraduate courses and save the sexuality studies for graduate seminars.

He concluded by explaining their motives with quiet assurance: “They’re threatened by it.”

Humanities departments don’t bring in federal dollars, so the only tally that counts is student sign-ups. This was a friend, not a confrontational guy, and I wasn’t as openly conservative then as I became a few years afterwards, so I didn’t take his remark personally. The fact that he tendered it so casually, however—that he could frame the traditionalists’ objections so smoothly as insecurity, not principle—irritated me a bit. If he had shown a little more passion and less dismissal, I would have smiled and let it pass. Instead, I said in an amiable tenor, “But ______, maybe they just think it’s wrong.”

He smiled back and said nothing. He didn’t have to argue. The outlook that held “They don’t like us because we threaten them” saved him and his theory comrades the trouble of engagement. When you run the show, you don’t have to defend yourself, especially not if the house is packed each night.

English was so central and sturdy for so long that it never occurred to the professors that it might not always remain that way. Appeal to the kids? That was beneath them. Now, reality has set in. Diminishing enrollments can’t be ignored. The ultimate justification of the department (in the eyes of the administrators charged with the maintenance of the business) is down, way down. When class-sizes shrink, a department head can’t go to the dean at the end of the school year and say, “Two of my profs are retiring and one is leaving for another school—we need replacements.” The dean is likely to check the attendance records and reply, “No, you don’t.”

This sliding popularity erodes the prestige of the humanities among colleagues in other departments and casts them as poor relatives. In the competitive atmosphere of Tier One schools, size matters. Demand determines value. Humanities departments don’t bring in federal dollars, so the only tally that counts is student sign-ups. In the Culture Wars years, professors could accuse conservative critics of Eurocentrism, chauvinism, and anti-intellectualism and thus preserve their high self-opinion. They can’t do that with 20-year-olds. All they can do is admit that the learning they offer isn’t wanted anymore.

The numbers are decisive. If you’re a conservative and find yourself at an occasion with some liberal professors who assume the condescending tone that puts you down and lifts them up, ask them this: “Hey, how many majors did you have in 1990? And how many today?”

Mark Bauerlein is emeritus professor of English at Emory University and an editor at First Things magazine. His most recent book is The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults.