Hal---

Thanks for the link to this.  My 2 cents: there are a number of  
crosscurrents at work in this essay.  However, Chace seems to fuse the  
pressure of economics and his own dissatisfaction with how literary  
study is currently practiced as inextricable factors in the decline of  
the humanities.  His implied deduction is that if we just went back to  
good old close reading, then everything would be fine.  I don't think  
he's right in drawing this conclusion.

Rather, I would argue that only one of those factors is the real  
driver for the phenomenon he's observed.  We can come up with a clear  
picture if we, as Deep Throat instructed, follow the money.  The  
correlation between the increase in public university enrollment and  
the increase in business majors, on the one hand, and the decline of  
the humanities, on the other hand, is driven by economics--not the  
academic discipline but real money pressure.  Public schools have  
grown because privates are priced far beyond the opportunity of many  
to pay the freight.  And even private education is through the roof.

Chace's statistic about what his Berkeley education cost ($700/year in  
today's dollars) shapes his interpretation. It was far higher when I  
was a student there in the 1980s.  However, students today have an  
entirely different economy within which they make decisions.  The UC  
Berkeley student education budget (from their website http://students.berkeley.edu/finaid/undergraduates/cost.htm) 
  is around $28K for residents and $51K for non-residents--that's not  
chump change.   So faced with these economic realities, students make  
decisions about their educational choices not strictly in intellectual  
terms as they did in the days of yore.

The lure of big money also has had an impact on disciplines other than  
the humanities.  This is anecdotal not statistical, but when I was at  
Berkeley, a number of bright students were being lured from the  
Astrophysics program to the Business school.  It seems that their  
mathematical acumen with something called derivates was being touted  
as the ticket to riches.  One of these guys is a big shot with  
Goldmann Sachs today.  As he explained his decision to me back then,  
he could spend his career in astrophysics writing grant proposals that  
may or may not get funded or he could get rich on his mathematical  
talent.  And the mortgage-backed securities fiascos and banking  
collapse of recent history followed.

Now everything that Chace said about the value of intense reading,  
thinking, and writing that the study of literature entails is on the  
mark.  We need to do a better job of pointing out that this kind of  
training is not only intellectually satisfying but also valued in a  
wide number of fields that offer lucrative careers (ones that make the  
cost of their education a reasonable investment).   We can't do that,  
however, by putting Joyce and Woolf on a pedestal; rather we must meet  
students in the culture they inhabit.  That culture doesn't exclude  
Joyce (by the way, is there a way to teach Ulysses without thinking  
about sexuality and identity politics?) but it includes a lot more.   
On our campus we've begun holding an English dept. career event each  
year--not one with employers throwing offers at them, but rather with  
a panel of people who earned English degrees and can tell compelling  
stories about how their educational choices benefited them in a wide  
array of career fields.  This squares with our departmental rhetoric:  
students who are successful in their lives  think creatively about how  
their talents and skills can be applied to interesting careers.  So  
while an accounting major may be recruited by one of the big number  
crunching firms,  humanities majors have to be more resourceful.   
While this may seem to stack the deck against those in the humanities,  
they're up to the challenge.

Finally, in order to make this appropriate to the Mark Twain Forum,  
Twain's work engages with the areas of cultural studies that Chace  
criticizes.  Is it an accident that Mark Twain studies have flourished  
as concerns with race, class, gender, nationalism, economics, and  
politics have been embraced literary critics?


--Larry Howe

On Sep 9, 2009, at 8:47 AM, Harold Bush wrote:

> Great PR in the current American Scholar:  what is our response???
>
> www.theamericanscholar.org/the-decline-of-the-english-department/
>
>
>
>
>
> Harold K. Bush, Ph.D
> Professor of English
> Saint Louis University
> St. Louis, MO  63108
> 314-977-3616 (w); 314-771-6795 (h)
> <www.slu.edu/colleges/AS/ENG/faculty/hbush.html>