Humanists are accustomed to thinking of their disciplines in crisis. Indeed, crisis may be one of the profession’s most reliable bellwethers. Since I entered graduate school, in the mid-1990s, I do not recall an era in which the language of crisis — pedagogical crisis, theoretical crisis, institutional crisis — was not at the center of our shared lexicon.
The past few years have seen some interesting pushback against this crisis talk. Enrollments are not endlessly declining: According to the federal National Center for Education Statistics, the number of bachelor’s degrees in the humanities as a proportion of all degrees was 17.1 percent in 1970-71 and 17.6 percent in 2005-6; this at least suggests that the canon wars, the rise of theory, or any of the other changes in the literature fields between 1970 and 2005 have not produced much change in student interest. Similarly, employment outcomes from undergraduate majors are, while not as good as those for students in engineering or economics, nonetheless not that bad, in terms of both actual employment and lifetime income — which puts paid to the myth of the English major spending a lifetime working at McDonald’s or Starbucks. That these arguments have come into the public eye, thanks to the work of colleagues like Michael Bérubé and journalists like Nate Silver, is a good thing.
As for Ph.D. programs, any claims about a crisis in the number of teaching jobs in English and foreign-language fields must confront the fact that the number of jobs advertised in the MLA’s annual Job Information List (JIL) has fluctuated, since 1975-76, from lows of around 2,200 jobs a year to a peak of around 3,800. In the chart below, for instance, we see a drop around the dot-com bust of 2001, followed by a steady increase that peaks in 2007, when roughly 3,500 jobs were advertised in the English and foreign-language editions of the JIL. And then, of course, come the 2008 crisis and its aftermath.
The big negative shocks in the early 1980s and mid-1990s were followed by recoveries. Will the same happen this time? If so, then talk of a crisis is overblown. And yet the data also show that the overall trend in job advertisements since 1975-76 is downward. Even if hiring recovers from this recent shock, faculty members in literature and language have reason to be pessimistic about long-term trends.
The number of undergraduate majors in the humanities has been subject to similar fluctuations. As shown below, the low point of humanities degrees as a percentage of overall degrees came not in recent years but in 1985-86, when such degrees were only 13.5 percent of the whole. By 1990-91 they were back at 15.8 percent, and then they rose through 2005-6, reaching a peak at 17.6 percent. Yes, things have declined lately, but the data on bachelor’s degrees do not support the idea that the humanities have been perpetually in crisis.
What catches the eye about the chart of jobs advertised in the JIL is the remarkably rapid drop between 2007-8 and 2009-10 and the steady decline since. Every year since 2013-14 has set a successive low for the total number of jobs advertised, and the total number of tenure-track jobs advertised is less than half of what it was a decade ago. One might also be concerned by the decline in the number of humanities bachelor’s degrees awarded since 2005-6. Both declines suggest that we are at a relative low point, and that the actual situation has changed — that we may be in a real crisis, and not just a rhetorical one.
These charts offer a vision of a way out of this darkness: We can wait. Previous peaks have always come back down to valleys, and the valleys have risen back to peaks. The percentage of overall majors in the humanities has been fairly steady since the mid-1970s. If we can just hold on for a bit, things will work themselves out, as they always have. There are good reasons, political and social, for shedding the habit of melancholy and letting go of the noble fantasy that we are the survivors of the historic rear guard. Things have been more or less fine for about 40 years.
Part of the reason they have been fine, however, is because humanists have fought. Things were not just fine on their own.
This is the good news — the overall institutional position of the humanities is relatively historically stable, in no small part because of the efforts of humanists. The bad news is that things are different today. There’s good reason to believe the humanities aren’t coming back. Without action we humanists stand to lose a great deal. This crisis will define and shape us.
Consider what has happened to enrollments. While the financial factors that caused the decline in the number of jobs advertised since 2007-8 have been ameliorated — public funding for higher education is back, in many states, to its pre-2008 levels, and endowments have recovered — other factors are causing a rapid and historically unusual decline in undergraduate enrollments and majors in the humanities.
This decline will be responsible for a highly unusual double shock, in which an already shaken Ph.D. job market not only fails to recover but worsens. The results will be, I fear, devastating, for graduate students as well as for departments and programs.
At many institutions, the decline in humanities majors since 2010 is over 50 percent, a fact that I can barely bring myself not to surround with flashing lights.
This general decline in undergraduate humanities enrollments does not correspond to a decline in undergraduate enrollments overall or in the liberal arts more generally. It has taken place in a relatively short period of time — not since 2008, but since 2010 or 2011, which is what makes it hard to see, given that much of the data we have for historical enrollments are at this point a year or two (or more) behind the times. At many institutions, the decline in humanities majors since 2010 is over 50 percent, a fact that I can barely bring myself not to italicize, put in all capital letters, and surround with flashing lights.
David Laurence, of the MLA’s office of research, summarized some of what is happening in a 2017 MLA-convention presentation. Laurence’s work, shown below, depicts the number of bachelor’s-degree completions in English, history, languages other than English, and philosophy and religious studies from 1987 to 2015. This long-term view may mitigate some anxiety — we are, after all, still above where we were in 1987 in absolute terms.
But local stories give a clearer picture of what Laurence described as “alarmingly steep” declines. Where I teach, at Penn State, the number of humanities majors fell between the autumn of 2010 and the autumn of 2015 by about 40 percent across all disciplines. Laurence’s research shows shockingly large declines at hundreds of institutions. To speak of English alone, if we compare the number of bachelor’s degrees conferred in 2015 with the average number of degrees conferred from 2000 to 2010, we see the following changes:
- Out of 258 doctorate-granting institutions, 190 (nearly 75 percent) saw declines in the number of bachelor’s degrees granted. Of those, 125 had declines of 20 percent or more, and 54 had declines of 40 percent or more. At 66 institutions, the number of bachelor’s degrees granted increased. The number of 2015 English graduates across all doctorate-granting institutions was 79 percent of the 2000-10 average.
- Of 438 master’s-degree-granting institutions, 264 (60 percent) saw declines. Of those, 178 had declines of 20 percent or more, and 95 had declines of 40 percent or more. At 172 institutions, the number of bachelor’s degrees granted increased. The number of 2015 English graduates across all master’s institutions was 87 percent of the 2000-10 average.
- Of 258 bachelor’s-degree-granting institutions, 180 (70 percent) saw declines. Of those, 129 had declines of 20 percent or more, and 64 had declines of 40 percent or more. At 77 institutions, the number of bachelor’s degrees granted increased. The number of 2015 English graduates across all bachelor’s-degree-granting institutions was 80 percent of the 2000-10 average.
Let me put it more plainly: At many, many of the colleges where we work, the number of humanities degrees awarded has dropped precipitously. In 2015 about 9,300 fewer English majors graduated from the colleges in the MLA study than in an average year from 2000 to 2010. The recent and rapid decline in the number of majors suggests that the humanities have become disconnected from the general ups and downs of university funding, resulting in a second shock, in which the enrollment drops are extending and solidifying the effects of the 2008-15 period. (Preliminary data recently released from the NCES suggest the situation continues to deteriorate. According to analysis by Northeastern’s Benjamin Schmidt, the number of English B.A.s awarded fell by 10 percent from 2015 to 2017.)
When an English department goes from 414 majors in 2005 to 155 in 2015 (as did the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s), or from 126 to 55 (as did Harvard’s), what department head can justify increasing the size of the tenure-line faculty? On what grounds can we even argue for hiring replacements for our retiring colleagues? And if departments reduce their hiring, instead of bringing it back to previously normal levels (which were already not enough to employ all the graduating Ph.D.s on the tenure track), what will happen to our graduate students?
To make things worse: In this new situation we will not have the same allies we had before (during the financial crises of 2001 and 2008). Enrollments in business, in science, and in some of the social sciences seem to be increasing. (At Penn State, the department of economics graduated twice as many students in 2015 as it did in 2009.) The humanities are institutionally more alone and more vulnerable than they have ever been, more at the mercy of a university’s financial decisions or a new dean’s desire to prove his or her toughness by consolidating departments or reducing faculty size.
To my colleagues involved in Ph.D. programs, I say something simple and hard: Unless you are placing most of your students in the professorial jobs for which you are training them, you need to rethink what you are doing. We cannot go on allowing ourselves to accept students who believe that they will be the ones to make it, when we see so clearly that the job market is a matter not of individual talent but of structural violence, of a system whose primary ideological function is to absolve the individuals who participate in it from any moral responsibility for its effects.
A couple of years ago, I was talking with someone who was chair of a large English department. “I feel so worried about the profession,” she told me, “that sometimes I just think to myself, ‘Oh, well, at least I only have five years to retirement, so I won’t have to watch it all fall apart.’”
Sometimes I feel that way myself. Many of us, having invested much of our lives in these fields, look at what’s going on and feel scared or sad. Part of the problem is that the sheer scale of the collapse makes it feel impossible to combat, and so despair leads to a kind of learned helplessness: There’s nothing I can do. At least I’ll be dead before it’s all over.
But it doesn’t have to end, even if it does have to change. No one ever said you would get to do the job in the same way for all 40 years of your career. No one ever said that large-scale social changes wouldn’t change your working conditions. And now they have. It is time to be creative, time to look for new ways to connect with our students, and help them love what the humanities can do for them. There’s still time to fight.
This essay is adapted from an article in the MLA’s journal Profession.
