Less Than Words Can Say
If you saw the 2004 Pixar hit The Incredibles, you might remember that Mr. Incredible, a.k.a. Bob, captures in one line the reason our schools are failing. Resisting his wife’s…
Posts tagged with
“English”
How English Departments Became Broken
If you really want to understand the horrors of war, don’t just read accounts written years after a battle, but instead read first-hand accounts by soldiers who were on the…
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’…
Should English Majors Pay Less?
Institutions of higher education are bracing for a crunch, if they aren’t experiencing one already. Slowing population growth, mounting skepticism of academia, and various other factors have provoked college leaders—at…
English departments are really dying
To the editor: Reading Mr. Phelps recent article, “Are English Departments Really Dying”, I was surprised by the conclusions he drew from the data he referenced at the U.S. Education…
Disadvantaging Black Students with a Demand for ‘Linguistic Justice’
On August 3, the Executive Committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication approved a position statement on “Black Linguistic Justice.” The statement was crafted as a set of…
Why Literary Scholarship Matters
A recent book by Thomas L. Martin and Duke Pesta, The Renaissance and the Postmodern: A Study in Comparative Critical Values represents something of a critical cat among the contemporary…
Three Ways Declining English Departments Can Be Relevant Again
A major in English was once a serious endeavor masquerading as a frivolous one. Despite the occasional “do you want fries with that?” condescension from business or science students, the…
Teaching Freshman English: It’s a Battlefield
So you think you might like teaching college English. You love the language and its great works. Lots of people are like that, including me. Good, but beware. Teaching college…
The English major has lost its way; here is a path back.
The English major has lost its way; here is a path back.