...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...
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.