ENB121 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Verlyn Klinkenborg, Christina Paxson, Pomona College
Whence, and where, and why the English major? The subject is
in every mouth—or, at least, is getting kicked around agitatedly
in columns and reviews and Op-Ed pieces. The English major is
vanishing from our colleges as the Latin prerequisite vanished
before it, we’re told, a dying choice bound to a dead subject. The
estimable Verlyn Klinkenborg reports in the Times that “At
Pomona College (my alma mater) this spring, 16 students
graduated with an English major out of a student body of 1,560,
a terribly small number,” and from other, similar schools,
other, similar numbers.
In response, a number of defenses have been mounted, none of
them, so far, terribly persuasive even to one rooting for them to
persuade. As the bromides roll by and the platitudes chase each
other round the page, those in favor of ever more and better
English majors feel a bit the way we Jets fans feel, every fall,
when our offense trots out on the field: I’m cheering as loud as I
can, but let’s be honest—this is not working well.
The defenses and apologias come in two kinds: one insisting
that English majors make better people, the other that English
majors (or at least humanities majors) make for better
societies; that, as Christina Paxson, the president of Brown
University, just put it in The New Republic, “ there are real,
tangible benefits to the humanistic disciplines—to the study of
history, literature, art, theater, music, and languages.” Paxson’s
piece is essentially the kind of Letter To A Crazy Republican
Congressman that university presidents get to write. We need
the humanities, she explains patiently, because they may end
up giving us other stuff we actually like: “We do not always
know the future benefits of what we study and therefore should
not rush to reject some forms of research as less deserving than
others.”
Well, a humanities major may make an obvious contribution to
everyone’s welfare. But the truth is that for every broadly
humane, technological-minded guy who contributed one new
gadget to our prosperity there are six narrow, on-the-spectrum
techno-obsessives who contributed twenty. Even Paxson’s
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