The New Yorker Notices the Collapse of the Humanities on Campus

Having recently noted for myself the surge in STEM majors as enrollment in the humanities collapses, and wondered why we were not hearing more about either phenomenon, Nathan Heller's "The End of the English Major" caught my eye.

Alas, Heller's piece reminded me of much that I had to say about the quality of the coverage rendered by the mainstream media a while back. Here as elsewhere the journalist offers a few factoids, and comment culled from others presumed to have an understanding of the matter, with some interesting bits possibly to be found in the mass, but the whole less than the sum of its parts, many of which were not impressive to begin with. Too much of it consists of the writer recounting his wandering about the Harvard campus getting quotes from students and faculty of whom we are supposed to be in awe because "HARVARD, HARVARD, HARVARD!" ("[G]olden kids from Harvard," he calls the students. "Basic employability is assured by the diploma: even a Harvard graduate who majors in somersaults will be able to find some kind of job to pay the bills," Heller writes. Alas, not how it works, but that he says so is very telling about the level of thought to be found here.) Then after this he dutifully endeavors to force the bits all into the "brisk, forward-looking, optimistic" view to which our journalism, as so much else, is so unfortunately addicted. The result is that instead of a better sense of "What it all means" there was a rain of details of uncertain meaning and often no meaning at all, a good deal of obnoxious, shamelessly name-dropping elitism in its particularly grating "Cult of the Good School" form (HARVARDHARVARDHARVARDHARVARD!), and ultimate complacency, that left me persuaded that I wasted my time bothering with the thing.