Stomping on Shakespeare's Grave
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| Memorial Statue of William Shakespeare at Westminster Abbey |
NOTE: A version of this post appeared in Yale Alumni Magazine (July/August 2023)
When driving me to Yale for my freshman year forty-three years ago this month, Dad sensed it was time for an academic course correction. After I excelled in English, history, languages, and drama during high school, he implored me to take up something practical.
His hopes were dashed the very next afternoon when the university’s president, both a Renaissance scholar and a Renaissance man who later became America’s major league baseball commissioner, blocked this paternal advice.
A. Bartlett Giamatti gave a rousing freshman address that championed the humanities and dismissed mere pragmatism. He lectured that it would be a waste of Yale’s prodigious resources to be there for purely practical reasons and urged us to partake freely in the banquet of knowledge. Yale's official motto celebrated Lux et
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| My Yale ID card doubled as my library card and gave me access to all the "light and truth" of the university's collections |
Dad was impressed. And crushed. In that tug-of-war between a well-intentioned physician father and Mother Yale in all her intellectual prowess, Dad, for once, lost.
I majored in English and never looked back until last February, when a New Yorker headline made my heart sink. It declared “The End of the English Major."
The attendant article reported that “enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country.” The magazine quoted one cretinous parent: “You don’t go to Harvard for basket weaving.”
We should all be alarmed by this crass mindset and the potential sunsetting of the humanities. Instead of pursuing "light and truth," today's undergraduates want to farm out their intellects to AI and feed their souls on a detrimental diet of brain-dead TikTok videos. As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd put it in a piece on her late-in-life MA in English: “It is not only the humanities that are passé. It’s humanity itself.”
Today's academe is more beset with the exigencies of getting ahead than when I studied undergraduate English and later pursued an MA, also in English, at Harvard. Parents and students alike view education as a transactional proposition. I just read that traditional college syllabi are dead and being replaced by "courseware," a kind of project management software that obscures pedagogical goals and delineates terms of service as in a vendor/customer relationship.
In this brave new world (a phrase that originated in Shakespeare's The Tempest), so-called pragmatists do not see that English majors can go on to become prosperous business executives, hard-hitting journalists, distinguished attorneys, and the sharpest-tongued badasses out there. Having honed their humanity on Shakespeare, English majors go on to tackle some of the world’s most vexing problems and do so with elan and acuity lacking from the myopic herds who pursued chemistry and finance alone.
If today’s culture has any hopes of recovering from its polarization and divisiveness, its abrasions and unbridled self-centeredness, it will be this endangered species -- tomorrow’s humanities majors -- who come to the rescue. They will learn nuance, persuasion, empathy, and intellectual rigor from studying Milton, not math.
The English and History majors will save us if we are to be saved.
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| A section of Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey (London, 2022) |
Bravo, Peter! I enjoyed the post AND having the opportunity to discuss it with you this week. From one English major to another, well done.
ReplyDeleteForget accounting and finance! It's the English and History majors who will swoop in to save us. With their intellect, empathy, and Shakespearean badassery, they're our real-life superheroes. Humanities for the win!
ReplyDeleteThis made me smile. I, too, was an English major at a liberal arts university. Actually, I am an Honors English dropout….hence my creative sales career!
ReplyDeleteAnother English major here. I do worry about this college-aged generation and if they are learning TO think; too often I see that they easily believe whatever they see on Tik Tok and otherwise, without passing it through any kind of critical thinking filter. Ah, for the good old days. That makes me sound old.
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