How Humanities Professors Got Marginalized

In any discussion of the state of the humanities, the first fact is a numerical one. In School Year 2021-22, while a little more than two million people earned bachelors’ degrees in the United States, only 33,429 of them majored in English. That makes for a rate of 1.6 percent of the whole, one in 60 undergraduates. In 1970-71, a high point for English, the rate was one in 13. English used to be one of the most popular majors on campus, much more common than the now-thriving fields of biology, psychology, communications, and engineering/computer science. A half-century later, for...