Gone Forever?

The Brothers Karamazov, 1879

A blockbuster article appeared last week in The New Yorker with disturbing news about “The End Of The English Major.” I was an English professor. So is my son Mark. This article surprised neither of us. Mark has been giving me fresh reports from the trenches for some years now: “But, Dad, they’re just not reading good books anymore.” The article confirms that a whole generation of students has fundamentally tuned out the value of reading great literature. And universities have failed to make the case. Each one of us must pause to ask if this is a good thing, for students or for our civilization.     

The article focuses on two prominent, very-different universities, Harvard, a great institution out of the past, and Arizona State University, a university positioning itself as a model for the future. The story is the same: “Records indicate that [from 2012 forward] the number of graduated language and literature majors decreased by roughly half, as did the number of history majors.”

The usual, not-surprising reasons were given for this dramatic decline: You can’t make a good living with an English major; everything these days is about statistics, the “dominant vernacular” for any major;  reading literature, or anything out of the past is . . . well . . . the present is all that matters anymore. The humanities, said one seasoned professor, “are going to be the little bird on the hippo.”

But we’ve got to ask again if this is a good thing? I kept coming back to the suspicion that the author, Nathan Heller, focused almost exclusively, perhaps obsessively, on the practical, economic, material reasons for the decline, what students desire these days and how their wishes shape everything, or the impact of phones and the internet on reading. I get all of that.

But I ended up feeling the author perhaps had never been stirred, as I was early in college, by reading such things as Middlemarch, The Brothers Karamazov, “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” Catcher in the Rye, The Gift Of Asher Lev, the poetry of George Herbert, Shakespeare’s Macbeth or the Sonnets, William Butler Yeats, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, and so many more. I was listening to hear that he too had been stopped in his tracks as he encountered breathtakingly beautiful language, the likes of which is found only in great literature, and almost nowhere else, except in the Bible.

Also missing, it seemed to me, was any sense of wrestling with the big questions: How we might find meaning for our lives when meaning is so self-defined; or how we might find guidance on pain and suffering and death; or how is it possible to encounter the divine in the midst of ordinary life. Where else but great literature do we engage such matters?   

From the day my father asked me “what is Shakespeare for?” or “why should Christians read this stuff?” I’ve crafted my reasons that great literature challenges, engages, and enhances my faith and my reading of the Bible. We need them both.

I am not naïve here. Not everyone was ever an English major. Of course. But as recent as two decades ago, we could still count on universities to require some form of classical core curriculum. That has all vanished now with notions of canceling and revising culture to fit current, often ideological preoccupations. The consequences have not been pretty. We’ve grown more shallow. We have a hard time grappling with big issues. Our language grows thin. Among some of the young, writing can be a struggle. We’ve lost so much! Are we educating a generation that will never again experience the things that literature and history and philosophy and theology have to offer?

There is no easy solution here. I suspect the damage has been done and there’s no going back. The repair will reside, if ever it happens, in the culture that determines how we educate. But we know that culture is in great disarray. My solution for now can only be personal, I’m afraid. Along with my Bible I will continue to reread and relish the great literature of the ages. To be sure I can continue write and teach literature whenever I get the chance. I will still follow my lifelong commitment to engage the culture.

In the meantime, I’m left with finding great joy, seated in my study or lounging in bed before sleep, reading and reflecting on the best of what has been written throughout the ages. That has to be enough for me now, though not nearly enough for our world.