Changes
Two articles really hit home this week showing our changing world. The first, in the New Yorker describes The End of the English Major. I was one myself, enrolling in the University of Toronto’s English Language and Literature program at Trinity College. There were 14 of us starting out in 1956 – joined by others enrolled in modern languages, history and philosophy. The entire college had an enrolment of about 900 students, about half of whom lived in residence.
There were at least six full professors of English and one lecturer who was finishing her doctorate. The program was based on historical periods, though we did not study them chronologically and very few novels studied in our final year had even been written in the twentieth century. We could walk into teaching jobs at the end of our four years after 15 weeks of training, since there were 3,000 teaching vacancies in the province. Those averse to teaching could continue in graduate studies, though few did. Some turned to library science or publishing – and a few went on to more glamorous fields like publishing and journalism.
We entered those courses with reasonable preparation in public and private high schools and had to pass entrance exams set by the province. English and history were compulsory subjects every year. Most of us had two foreign languages as well, choosing among French, German, Spanish, Latin and even Greek. There were more options among mathematics and sciences, but chances were that we had encountered at least two years of them in geometry and algebra – leaving calculus and trigonometry to the experts. General science was covered in early years and specialties in chemistry and physics followed. Geography was just coming into its own as a secondary school subject and specialists were in short supply; our high school instructor also taught at the local university. Social sciences and philosophy had to come later.
Fast forward to 2023. The New Yorker article notes that majoring in English has fallen by half in most US colleges and universities. Several factors are in play. Many students are the first in their families to pursue higher education and the focus must be on jobs. Tuition rates have skyrocketed. If one has to go where the jobs are, the fields are those known as S.T.E.M – science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The universities themselves have partnered with commercial enterprises and are strong S.T.E.M advocates. There are still plenty of graduate courses in the humanities – but almost no jobs in the academy itself.
My own journey reflects these changes without my thinking of the wider implications. Teaching jobs became redundant in the 80s and many of my out-of-work colleagues and I became arts administrators – with only on-the-job training. because university based course took until the 90e to catch up. Fascinated by the PC and later the Internet, I was later a software vendor and a business trainer with no academic training in either area, but learning on the job and moving with the times to train others in these same things. But I never lost my connection with the humanities through all this – my children pursued similar academic areas. Where they have ended up in terms of employment in most cases is more radically different from their university course work. Grandchildren have even more options – and that will be a subject for the next post.