An English department reversed its enrollment slide and reinvigorated graduate training, too.
When he was president of the Modern Language Association, Michael Bérubé described the myriad challenges facing doctoral education as “a seamless garment of crisis.” That was 2013. I’m reluctant to use the word “crisis” to describe problems we’ve faced for more than 50 years, but the seamless-garment metaphor remains spot on in 2025.
Shrinking financial support for the humanities has affected the size and scope of graduate study in those fields. That issue is unavoidably linked to undergraduate education, because it hardly makes sense to admit graduate students into humanities programs — or hire new faculty members in those fields — if there are no undergraduates to teach. So if graduate education in the humanities is going to survive and thrive, we have to fix the problem of declining undergraduate enrollments in our courses and majors.
Everyone is looking for success stories to emulate, and that’s why I’m devoting this month’s column to Washington University at St. Louis. A healthy and wealthy university by any measure, Wash U. hasn’t escaped the general malaise gripping the humanities across higher ed. The number of English majors, according to the department, had been steadily declining at the university but reached an alarming low in 2018 when it dipped below 100, out of more than 7,000 undergraduates.
It “freaked us out,” recalled William J. Maxwell, a professor of English and then the department’s director of undergraduate studies. Realization dawned: “We weren’t paying enough attention to this.”
The department embarked upon “a conscious project to turn this around.” Faculty members had to go “above the treetops,” said Vincent Sherry, who was chair at the time. “Then we could see the department as something that belongs to all of us.” Their strategy is working and just waiting to be adapted across the humanities and beyond. The number of English majors at Wash U. has risen steadily for seven years and nearly doubled since that 2018 low. I visited the campus, interviewed faculty members and students, and found that English is now thriving there at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
How are they doing it? Via the following four interwoven themes.
Build on your strengths. The department started with the twin observations that (a) its creative-writing offerings were popular; and (b) the creative-writing professors were well-regarded and supported a successful M.F.A. program. “We wanted to emphasize the importance of our writing program in the context of traditional English education,” said Maxwell, so the department added an undergraduate concentration in creative writing, and another in publishing.
The change didn’t simply amount to lashing a creative-writing life raft to a sinking literary boat. Instead, said Maxwell, the department “reconceived what the boat is.” The new concentrations weren’t just add-ons; they were woven into the department’s curriculum and helped change its teaching culture.
Some English departments keep creative writing and literary study separate, but “there isn’t a divide between scholars and creative writers” here, said David Schuman, director of creative writing. Both groups know that they strengthen the department together, he said, and they are part of a “common cause.” The fact that writing “is so present in the major now,” added Maxwell, “makes me do different things as a teacher. I’ve developed new assignments, like asking students to write in the style of a writer they read.”
The faculty also updated the traditional literature-based English major. Students still take required historical surveys, but the department redesigned the courses to globalize them and also added a minority and global-literature requirement (which can be fulfilled by different courses). These changes helped to attract a more-diverse population of interested students to the major.
Actively recruit top students. The changed curriculum didn’t attract students by itself. Sherry, the former chair, helped develop a strategy of direct outreach to strong students. “Talented kids are used to being recruited,” said Maxwell, so the department developed a plan to invite them to be English majors.
The first step involved contacting faculty members who teach first-year seminars and writing courses in a department other than English. They were asked for the names of their top five students along with, crucially, a few details of work they did in class. Each first-year student then received a personalized email, a practice that continues today. “We ask them: Have you considered majoring in English?” said the current chair, Abram Van Engen.
Most have not. “We suggest that there’s a door that they can walk through” to consider a major or minor, said Melanie Micir, the department’s director of graduate studies. And many choose to walk through it.
Talk about the employment outlook. But most students don’t cross that threshold without checking with their families. The decision to major in English has to clear “the hurdle of parental perception,” said Van Engen. Parents have seen the flood of articles arguing that a humanities major is a ticket to the unemployment line. Easily available data from the Humanities Indicators project (for example, data on the employment status and earnings of humanities majors with a bachelor’s degree) show that to be a canard. But that fact doesn’t matter if parents believe their negative impression to be true. Van Engen recalled “a student whose parents wouldn’t pay for her college education if she majored in English.”
“Giving those students an answer is important,” said Van Engen. The department therefore created fact sheets for prospective majors to show to their parents. “Students have an appetite to write,” said Van Engen. “They want to create stories, read stories, know stories.” The statistics show that strong story skills lead to good jobs. By better communicating that fact, the department shows those skills to be worth paying for.
The department backs up the statistics it collects with its own career-liaison work. Professors invite the department’s alumni to share how they shape a career with a humanities degree. Such close-to-home stories, along with articles from national media outlets, Van Engen said, help students and their families to see the value of the humanities in the world.