English Department Limits Graduate Admission to Pre-1900's Focus

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
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All 60-70 of them? That’s how many English majors graduate from U Chicago each year nowadays.

In any case, a quick perusal through the enrollment of classes at UChicago which deal with “classic” White Male authors, and few of them were fully enrolled. That is exactly what you would expect when a major has that few students, and they are the only ones taking these classes.

The courses about Shakespeare, Milton, and others are not any fuller than any other classes, and are generally smaller classrooms, not huge 50+. The only White dude who can fill a classroom is not even a native English speaker - a class on Nabokov’s Pale Fire pulled in 87 students.

Actually, the only reason that some of the old White dudes have as many students as they do is because there are requirements for a course on literature composed before 1650. So it’s Chaucer or Shakespeare. The requirement for a course on literature composed between 1650 and 1830 will get another Old White Dude, or Jane Austin, or somebody else that the student already knows.

So no, students are not thronging to classes, clamoring to learn literature written by White Christian Men.

Moreover, English Departments have been losing enrollment for decades. After a peak in 1970-1971, when there were almost 64,000 graduating English majors, which was around 7.6% of all degrees given those years, it dropped by 50% in the early 1980s, recovered to around 4.7% of all graduates in the early 1990s, and since, the proportion of English majors of graduating undergraduates has dropped steadily, to around 3.7% in the early 2000s, to 3.0 in the early 2010s, to less than 2% in 2018-2019.

So fewer and fewer students are actually becoming English majors. It is dying field, and teaching the Wisdom Of Old White Men is doing nothing to keep it alive.

Revised to add: U Chicago has some really cool and interesting coursing in their English department, and many of them seem to be drawing a good number of students. So they are not relying on the same old set of Old White Dudes to keep up interest in a changing world.

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I agree with the poster above that at least they are telling the applicants up front what they are looking for and what their current professors can support academically.

How many students do they accept every year?

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“. . . because he was a noted and influential writer who fits the theme or time period in discussion” is pretty much the epitome of subjectivity.

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@MWolf , you say that English is dying as a subject matter because of its former emphasis on dead white European males (and you add Christian ones to boot), but that’s just your dismissive way of describing what once attracted serious students to this study - the desire to read and reflect on “the best that has been thought and said” in our language. That’s where you find it. Shakespeare and Chaucer are not read because they belong to your categories but simply because they’re the best, the most expressive, the most profound our language can offer. Study lesser writers, by all means, but don’t delude yourself as to the ones most worth the effort. Jewish scholars and Jewish novelists and poets have of course been among the most eminent.

None of this tribal stuff matters to a serious person - it is quality that matters. I myself take it wherever I find it, whether among the living or the dead, the male or the female, the white, the black or the brown, the Christian or the pagan. Writers in all categories - indeed in all languages - have the power to stir and enlighten. All who have that power are in my canon of greatness.

What you read and the courses you take in college say a lot about what you’re made of or at least aspire to be. Why would a serious person waste precious time on anything but the study of the very best? That the English curriculum has deviated from that standard tells me all I need to know about why the subject matter itself is failing as a discipline, why it no longer attracts the best minds, why it has ceased even to attract kids who want to major in it. Profs who taught those old white guys never had that problem. Maclean, Tave, Rosenheim, Booth, Bevington were seen simply as the best there was teaching the best works to the best and most serious kids. There was a crackle of energy in their classes when they taught those old dudes - and kids of both sexes and many years younger than any of them were drawn to the flame. That they had white hairs (or none) and are now dead is true. More’s the pity, as a quintessential DWEM once ruefully said. The Chicago English Department may have died with them.

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The problem is that you keep on insisting that subjective measures of beauty are objective.

The argument that you are making is that, essentially: “These authors are great because these professors taught that they were great”. What you are ignoring is that every single one of those professors went into the field because they agreed with their own professors that these authors were great.

Any undergraduate student who thought, say, that Shakespeare was a mediocre writer (I’m not saying that he was), or that Milton was garbage, did not go on to do their PhD in English, and never taught in a prestigious university (or in any university at all). Only undergraduates who found these writers to be great went on to do a PhD, spent years in teasing out even more greatness in these authors, and further solidified this as unassailable dogma.

These people were also in charge of teaching the gen ed courses to all students, teaching undergraduates across the country, and the ones who were able to do best at perpetuating the perceived greatness of these authors were the ones who taught in the most prestigious departments.

Moreover, for generations, the people in charge of the curricula of elementary and secondary schools were educated in colleges where these professors taught.

When it comes to English literature, the people who decide what is “Great Literature” are a small set of people who have the ability to replace themselves with people who have the exact same opinions, and were able to determine which writers were considered “great” by school boards across the country.

What we have is a self-perpetuating system in which people with a specific set of preferences are the ones responsible for training people who are self selected because they have the same preferences. To claim that these preferences are objective measures of quality is a fallacy.

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@MWolf , you are making a species of the argument I first heard from a fellow student on the first day of my first HUM class at the U of C: “Since how I feel about a work of art is no more than my opinion and what you feel is no more than your opinion there is no way art can have an independent value.” That’s a fallacy that’s been around a long time, tricked up with Marxist and postmodernist analysis holding that everything we think and know is relative to our individualized times, experiences, social class, race, gender and so on and so on. It’s seductive and superficially plausible, at least on the plane of theory. However, that’s not a plane most of us function on, especially those of us who have at any point been serious readers. To me it’s not that difficult. I recognize the good stuff when I see it. A Supreme Court Justice famously said that about pornography, but it’s also true of the other kind of good stuff. Someone once put it this way, describing a rather unlikely show of intelligence on a page he had encountered:

I have a mind myself and recognize
Mind when I meet with it in any guise;
No one can know how glad I am to find
On any page the least display of mind.
(Frost, “A Considerable Speck”)

Something like that shock of recognition is what the good stuff of a page gives you and you don’t get from the mediocre or bad stuff. To dismiss those illuminations as nothing more than dead sentiments foisted on you by your tribe or time or place may be consistent with a certain contemporary attitude of cultural malaise. But it should be resisted; it devitalizes and deprives the actual human mind of its agency and denies it the joys to be had on its journey toward discovery. There is something bloodless and inhuman about it. Fight it!

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To expand:

The way it’s “supposed” to work is that PhD’s from T-10’s populate the departments of the T-100’s, and the T-100 students graduate and go on to everybody else, and if you get a PhD from a place lower-ranked than that, you go hungry, Numbers are approximate:

That is, if you got your PhD from Yale, you might get a job at Michigan State, and your student might get a job at Southern Illinois University, but her students (if she even has any) are out of luck.

The academic environment is changing. There is a lot more reliance on part-timers and adjuncts. I was joking about Henry IV and trans-exclusionary lesbians, but a dissertation like this (only based on actual scholarship) could be used to cobble together a position that’s half English and half gender studies. This might have a lot of appeal to a small college in the middle of nowhere.

There was also more of a sense of upward mobility - one would take a job at Wayne State, get noticed, and move up to maybe Augustana. I don’t know how much mobility there actually was, but today there is a sense at Augustana “if he left Wayne State for us, maybe he’ll leave us for Pitt”.

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More like 48 as of last spring.

Not quite. First of all, UChicago doesn’t do large lecture for their English courses so you won’t be able to assess “popularity” that way (NB: 2020/21 may have been an exception due to the remote modality). Second, I listed up above for Fall 2021 the more-popular vs. less-popular English courses and the more popular ones tend to concern White Dudes - whether that’s to fulfill a major requirement or for other reasons is really up to the interests of the student. It’s not unusual at all for the English major to require a review of texts composed before 1900, nor is it too shocking to imagine that someone interested in doing so might major in English. At any rate, you actually need to examine the English section enrollment, since that usually represents undergraduates wishing to enroll in English (many courses are cross-listed with other majors, grad programs, etc). Third, one doesn’t need to declare their primary major as English to enjoy an English course. Many choose English as a secondary or even tertiary major. As of last spring, there were 154 total declared majors in English - more than in Chem or Molecular Engineering - and almost as many as in Physics and Stats. It doesn’t begin to compare to CS or Econ, but that shouldn’t be too surprising. English was also the 2nd most popular minor - behind Stats. Still others will take English as an interesting elective. So lots of options there.

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There are facts and there are opinions. Gravity, photosynthesis, the requirement for oxygen to survive, etc, are facts. “Shakespeare is the greatest English Writer” is an opinion. I am sorry, but the humanities deal with opinions. That is the entire reason that we call them “humanities”, since they deal with how humans perceive the world.

How a person is affected by what they read is not biologically predetermined, but the result of their upbringing, education, personal experience, and mood of the moment. Perception of “beauty” is the result of that effect.

You are basically claiming that how a person reacts to a specific piece of writing is biologically predetermined, and is the same for every human being who has the education which allows them to read that piece of text.

You are, essentially, saying that every person who can read English will read those writers that you consider to be “great” and immediately will be struck by their greatness.

I’ll quote something by an English language writer that I like, Terry Pratchett “It doesn’t stop being magic just because you know how it works.” I can enjoy something even though I am fully aware that the reason I enjoy it are my background and upbringing.

Your fallacy is believing that, just because YOU enjoy something, that means that everybody MUST enjoy it, and their inability to enjoy it points to some deficiency on their part. Your fallacy is in believing that your enjoyment of things that you read are the result of something inborn and biological, rather than cultural and learned.

If I don’t enjoy reading Pound, you seem to conclude that something must inherently be wrong with my ability to be able to perceive “beauty”.

PS. Our ability to enjoy things like reading or music is biological. What we enjoy reading and listening to is cultural.

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Would you say that the Mona Lisa is no better than Dogs Playing Poker?

Or in terms of literature, would you say Shakepeare is no better than Harlequin Romances? Certainly the Harlequin series is more popular. But would you say that makes it better?

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Depends on how one defines “better.”

Certainly Shakespeare is more popular among those who think they are the arbiters of what constitutes “better.”

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You sincerely aren’t sure which is better?

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The views of @MWolf and @mtmind represent the received wisdom of English Departments everywhere. Once all sense of value is removed from the study of any field the finer spirits will no longer see any reason to enter it. So it has been with this field. However, we have been through dark ages before this present one. The light will shine again some day. In the meantime the great books will remain on the shelves of private individuals, where they will continue to find their proper readers. Outside the academy.

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Now we can get deeply philosophical, and admit that “good” and “bad” are 100% human constructs, as are “beautiful” and “ugly”.

The universe doesn’t care, nor do the physical laws by which it works. All beauty is a human construct, though some constructs are more robust than others. A basketball in a refrigerator as art lasts for a shot period only. On the other hand, violently flinging paint against a canvas as art seems to have more staying power.

Moreover, “good” for what? For a play? For 45 minutes of mindless entertainment? For adding a touch of comedy to a room?

Why is one more important than the other?

Shakespeare was writing for the masses. His work is full of bad puns, dirty jokes, and pandering to the masses and to people in charge. His work was the mass entertainment of his day. It was, and is, EXTREMELY popular.

Compare his plays to the scripts of TV shows that are extremely popular today, when script writers have a lot of control over the finished product. He wasn’t Beckett or somebody like that, writing for a cultural and often economic elite.

So yes, “popular” is important. The idea that only literature and works of art for which a person needs an education to appreciate can be considered “good” is the essence of elitism. Worse, it is an elitism based on income, ethnicity, and race.

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“… and a river runs through it.”

The focus of Norman Maclean during his tenure in the English department at Chicago. He’s probably rolling over right now. :wink:

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Mr. Plato would of course vehemently disagree. I don’t, but who am I to dispute the Theory of Forms? I think this guy really was the first Christian, as some suggest.

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Can’t keep quiet. I just have to say that reading this thread is very entertaining. Very.

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Sincerely, what do you mean when you ask “which is better?”

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That depends on what the meaning of “is” is.

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Could be incorrect here, but my impression is that UChicago’s English department pretty much has something for everyone who loves the literary arts. Not sure that anyone has to argue whether Shakespeare is worthy of study or whether Ezra Pound is not - although no doubt such debates go on at UChicago as much as they do here on CC. But there is room for those who enjoy William, Ezra, and perhaps even the more contemporary stuff of our culture. (Not sure about bodice-rippers; however, ribaldry is a time-honored subject in English lit - see Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, for example).

If you declare the major, you are expected to be reasonably competent in both the history and forms of English literature as well as at least one method of analysis. After that you can kind of design your major how you choose to - and most likely there will be a preceptor and faculty advisor qualified to oversee your senior project. I don’t believe that flexibility is a proof of lack of rigor if the courses are well taught, interesting to the participant and provide plenty of feedback and critique on their writing assignments. One is expected to graduate in the major being able to articulate their ideas as scholars of English literature (defined a tad more broadly than it was 50 years ago, perhaps). Is one taken more seriously on the job market if their BA project was on Shakespeare as opposed to video games? Who knows? It’ll totally depend on how one answers that question when asked. But my guess is that either subject could be equally rigorous and difficult, being that the BA project is a full three-quarters-long endeavor (my D did one of those for history and worked pretty hard. I also noticed that more history majors graduated cum laude or higher than graduated with honors in the history major having undertaken a BA project. It sucks up a lot of one’s time).

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