(Ayanna Thompson, the Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies)
The English major of a decade or two ago or today is very different. Within a fairly short span of time the traditional way of studying and analyzing texts has mostly been sidelined at universities in favor of identity politics readings. Look at the UCLA English courses and you’ll see a once respected department where half the courses are about race, sexuality, and assorted wokeness ‘lenses’ filtering out the actual books.
This has become commonplace and it’s anathema to anyone who actually loves words and books.
In The End of Literature, I wrote that, “This is the sort of thing that matters if you believe that books are a state of communion, rather than a holographic palimpsest that can be infinitely reinvented as generations of literary theory has taught. If a grad student’s interpretation of Frankenstein has as much validity as what Mary Shelley actually meant, then why not go a step further and rewrite not just movie adaptations, but the book itself? Or argue that Shakespeare was really a black woman? Literary theory has devalued the author and the endless efforts to find new things to say about old works gave way to wokeness by applying leftist lenses that updated them in line with the new politics.”
When English courses go woke, do you stick around or do you go do something else? We have our answer.
From 2012 to the start of the pandemic, the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from nine hundred and fifty-three to five hundred and seventy-eight. Records indicate that the number of graduated language and literature majors decreased by roughly half, as did the number of history majors.
That’s the same period when wokeness took over traditional learning and universities rushed to revamp their offerings around identity politics.
Where have all the English majors gone? Maybe rewriting Shakespeare for diverse audiences will help.
ASU center publishing new series of translations of Shakespeare plays that use language accessible to diverse, contemporary audiences
“Shakespeare’s English is 400 years old. It’s not like you can just sit down without having studied it and really get it,” said Ayanna Thompson, center director and Regents Professor of English. “And while it is very beautiful, so is contemporary poetic English. So we thought, why not try this?”
Among the authors of the translations are several renowned playwrights of color, including Marcus Gardley, who has written for Amazon Prime and cites James Baldwin and the Harlem art scene as influential to his work, and Migdalia Cruz, whose characters often draw from Latino history and her personal experiences of growing up in the South Bronx.
According to a representative for the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the “Play On Shakespeare” series represents a new future for the ACMRS Press — one that is “contemporary, equitable and forward-looking.”
Brandi Adams, another recent hire who, along with Espinosa and three others, is part of an effort to elevate scholars of color working on issues of race in premodern studies, said the “Play On Shakespeare” series emphasizes that “there is no one way to view Shakespeare.”
“The way that modern theater and modern scholarship is moving is in a much more inclusive way,” Adams said, “and this allows so many new versions of Shakespeare to appear.”
Students who actually appreciate literature want nothing to do with this despite, “the university’s tenure-track English faculty is seventy-one strong—including eleven Shakespeare scholars, most of them of color.”
The most prominent Shakespeare figure at ASU is Ayanna Thompson, the Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, responsible for anti-intellectual identity politics garbage like ‘Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America’, the editor of ‘The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race’ and ‘Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance.’
She “was appointed to the board of trustees of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and in 2020 she became a Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at The Public Theater in New York” and “she served as the President of the Shakespeare Association of America.”
If you actually care about Shakespeare, do you stick around for this sort of thing, knowing you’ll be expected to churn out an analysis of Hamlet as being about racism? Or do you go elsewhere or do something else?
For the decline at A.S.U. is not anomalous. According to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly but not always identically to internal enrollment figures, from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while suny Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils.
During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before.
When your education consists of repeating back woke pieties and discovering race and sexuality in classic works, or, worse still, studying Audre Lorde and Amiri Baraka, there’s no education anyway.
Nobody becomes an English major because they enjoy the lucrative prospects of being an adjunct. They love words, ideas and stories. And there’s not a whole lot of that in the woke university system which has come to consist of Soviet exercises in explaining how literature upholds party dogma.
In 2022, though, a survey found that only seven per cent of Harvard freshmen planned to major in the humanities, down from twenty per cent in 2012, and nearly thirty per cent during the nineteen-seventies. From fifteen years ago to the start of the pandemic, the number of Harvard English majors reportedly declined by about three-quarters—in 2020, there were fewer than sixty at a college of more than seven thousand—and philosophy and foreign literatures also sustained losses. (For bureaucratic reasons, Harvard doesn’t count history as a humanity, but the trend holds.) “We feel we’re on the Titanic,” a senior professor in the English department told me.
Good thing Harvard offers both “English 280ql. Queer and Trans Literature and Criticism” and “English 189vg. Video Game Storytelling” covering “the white-saviour narrative in the Far Cry franchise”.
When you drill a hole in your own hull, it shouldn’t be too confusing why you’re sinking.
What’s your point here? It is a fact that the numbers of English majors has decreased since 2012, as has the number of history majors, and humanities majors in general. But where is the evidence that the cause of this decline is “wokeness”? Did wokeness start in 2012?
You know very well, because you quote yourself mentioning it, that the literary theory you detest has been around for sixty years. What happened in 2012?
The reasons for the decline in English majors are complex, spanning both culture and economics. I agree with you that the decline is bad. It is bad because a strong humanities education is the best protection against the lies promoted by unscrupulous “journalists” like you. Who do you think college graduates vote for? Who do you think English majors vote for by overwhelming majorities? Here’s a hint, it starts with “D”. Are you under the impression this started in 2012?
Literary theory has been around for a long time. The comprehensive takeover of English literature by identity politics, what people refer to as wokeness, the insistence on identity politics readings of texts, and career and grade sanctions for those who don’t go along is a recent phenomenon of the past decade.
Ayanna’s career is a perfectly good window on the sudden dominance of racialism in fields where they are completely inappropriate and how that happened in that short period of time.
Rewriting Shakespeare. That takes some Hubris.
I am amazed at the statistics. On one hand, its good fewer young people are having woke racialism and other woke BS shoved down their throats at school (where you cannot disagree with a woke professor without failing).
On the other hand, all of the beauty of language, history, thoughts of men and women who lived before us…..gone from formal education. They’ve stolen it. And how long before they knock down our doors to find the forbidden contraband…..My “Works of Shakespeare?”
This is what the Left does. It destroys what it touches and leaves behind a cultural wasteland.
It will hijack the canon and leave people with a choice of abandoning it or accepting its ideology.
This is what it does across every arena of life including across the entire United States of America.
Take heart Cat, most of the people no longer taking these majors because of the bs nature of them, can and do educate themselves in the humanities. That’s never been easier, I’m just worried about how long that will still be possible.
Maybe the English majors became colonels.
Next they rewrite Chaucer.
Too much effort for lazy commies, they can’t get through the Old English.
Oh what tangled web we weave. when we practice to deceive
Why don’t Europeans and European Americans all start to rewrite the great works of Art and Books that came out of Africa and the Negro populations of the world… Oh yeah right… there aint any…
Such diversity of thought means… STOP thinking freely…
How come the Negroes in America, and the UK, all want to change white Heroes into black Heroes… answer… Because they have none of their own.
I finished my schooling at 14 years and six months old however I never let my lack of schooling get in the way of my education.
Outstanding distinction between schooling and education and my admiration for continuing your education. I like to think my own ‘schooling’ prepared me for a lifetime of learning.
1. perhaps cellphone and the like have diminished the attention span and immersion true reading requires.
2. I have read most of what my kids have been assigned in middle school. ages 11,12, and 13, and it is boring; mind-numbingly dull. The assigned texts are dull enough to extinguish a love of reading and culture in infancy. Perhaps these dull-as-paste writings are responsible for the lack of interest in fiction.
3. I have suggested that a PHD requires ‘original work’ and that is challenging. Not everyone has the ability to bring insight to a subject. In the post WW II period there was a massive shortage of university professors. And so the PHD itself was watered down to enable the institutions to fill the emergent need for ‘more’. (Much as pitching was diluted when major league baseball expanded in the same period.) The tool used to dilute the PHD was (and is) the ‘critical studies’ movement wherein real analysis is replaced by reframing a subject in the latest fad.
The problem is that while baseball pitching has recovered and is now possibly the best it has ever been, scholarship has not experienced similar rennaissance.
What light through yonder woke lens breaks? It is the red spectrum from the east, And none but fools do wear it, It speaks yet says nothing.
I took a professional writing course as an option, thought it would be useful. By the time we were writing essays about why logos are slavery and transmutilated people are stunning and brave, it played a major role in wanting to drop out and just work, where I’m an executive already.
History of war did it though. Sounds cool right, tanks and the phalanx. Instead we learned about why feminist post-modernists believe that saying male words makes war.
The other statistic relevant here is how many are dropping out after a semester or two? In the 1 hour researching online at home, I would gain more than a day at university. You could eliminate 90% of the arts and only provide benefit to students, as critical as they are to know who you are. It’s basically the Romans eliminating people with knowledge of the past on steroids.
When Post-structuralism emerged in the 1970’s there was some hope that it would offer new insights into humanistic texts. Students were excited about literature, for a short time. But then the limits of post-structuralism became apparent. Deconstruction of a literary text, or any cultural artifact, always came to the same conclusion, that it was “undecidable.” Then it soon became apparent that the real agenda of post-structuralists was Marxist, anti-capitalist, and, essentially, anti-civilization. A few minority students were able to parley a humanist education into a career in the “diversity” industry. The rest are working as waiters, waitresses, or whatever. There’s really no reason to major in the humanities anymore, especially since big business has now gone “woke,” so that the critical thinking skills that come from the serious study of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton (not to mention insights into human psychology, culture, and history) are not useful, but actually counter-functional.
Just looked Ayanna 2.0 up on wiki: she was mentored for her degree by Edward Said (…) then her PhD thesis was titled, “Depicting Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage“ No wonder the U.K. wokes at the Royal Shakespeare co. love her 🤮