D.W. Fenza: Why the Department of English Needs a Drastic Renovation

The English department had fashioned itself

after the kind of revelation the English Department

could no longer provide.

—from the poem “Berkley Hills Living” by Jessica Laser

~

The English Major has become an endangered species on most college campuses. This is a worrisome development for those of us who wish to see literary audiences grow and become more eager for the next publishing season of novels and poetry. Since the Great Recession, enrollments in English have declined by 25.5%.^[1] Although the student population of undergrads has grown by 1.2 million since the 1970s, departments of English now produce 25,000 fewer majors annually.^[2] To put it crassly, the English Major has suffered a catastrophic loss of market share. The Netflix series, The Chair, satirizes how poorly an English department navigates generational change, with young professors fighting the complacency of senior faculty, while students subject their teachers to the courts of social media, while administrators support whichever trend seems likely to protect future enrollments and revenues. The Department of English has become its own terrible advertisement. With declining enrollments, many departments now face budget cuts and restructuring plans, and a few colleges have sought to eliminate their English departments all together.^[3]

Since the 1800s, there have been at least four major upheavals in the teaching of literature at the college level, and a fifth change—a major demolition and renovation—is needed if the study of literature is to continue to enrich our college graduates. What worked for the Boomers who were English majors, like me, often fails to work for today’s students. Revisiting the upheavals in academe’s teaching of literature is worthwhile to remind the tradition-bound among us that the academic study of literature has sometimes changed profoundly to overcome its shortcomings. It must do so again.

In 1857, Matthew Arnold was an innovative Professor of Poetry because he lectured in English, rather than in Latin. This was the first of the four upheavals in the teaching of literature at the university level. In Arnold’s time, the study of literature was mostly inseparable from Latin and Greek models of oratory and rhetoric to serve the next generation of clergymen, barristers, and doctors. Arnold’s innovation, the study of literature in English as works of art, was something slow to evolve—and slower to adapt to the democratization of the arts and the dynamic demographics of America. It’s amusing to note that, in the years before the Civil War, our just barely United States had fewer than a dozen graduate students in all academic disciplines. 

Until 1918, even English departments in the United States were reluctant to study poetry and fiction by American authors, although they did focus on canonical works of British literature. A surge of patriotism due to U.S. involvement in World War I finally made American literature a popular addition to literary studies—a second major change in the department of literature and writing. Was it a WASP-driven mythology of Britain as the cradle of civilization that made the Department of English so condescending to literature from other lands, including the homegrown works of America? Perhaps this was partly so, but it’s more likely due to the status-fears of the arts and humanities, which have long suffered from insecurity among the sciences and empirical research. As a result, the arts and humanities often struck serious poses of rigor, and they became conservators of antiquities. Philology and linguistics were safer areas of research in the English language because those inquiries could be deemed more empirical. The Department of English was, at first, uncomfortable with the study and appreciation of storytelling and poetry as arts. Departments of English often performed like dancers ashamed of their own bodies. 

Manic Episodes in the Study of English Literature

The incursion of literary theory and the acceptance of creative writing as an academic discipline were the third and fourth major upheavals in the university’s teaching of literature. These changes were well underway by 1967. That was the year Jacques Derrida published Of Grammatology in France, and that was the year creative writing programs banded together to form the Associated Writing Programs (now called the Association of Writers and Writing Programs), a nonprofit organization for the support of literary writers teaching in higher education. The Department of English began to develop multiple personalities, and these personalities seldom played well with one another. The literary theorists trivialized the work of traditional scholars; the scholars ridiculed the work of theorists; and both groups denigrated the creative writers.

If the study of literature was no longer simply providing models of rhetoric and oratory, what was it? If the study of literature was about studying the human condition and eternal verities, then why was it that works with English origins only that merited study? Why were male authors studied almost exclusively? Roughly a half of the world’s population speaks 23 different languages, and more than 7,000 languages are spoken worldwide—so why the narrow focus on works in English if we are to study the human condition and universal truths in literature? A narrow focus only on works originally written in English fails to make students better citizens adept at navigating a diverse world. 

To the detriment of readers, creative writing programs, and young writers, a peculiar chauvinism and conservation had shaped the Department of English. In the Department of Physics, professors don’t exclude the study of works originally written in German, Japanese, French, and other languages; but the Department of English does. How is this exclusion good for the formation of a young mind’s sensibility? How does that exclusion serve a citizen in a global economy? Is this way of teaching literature the best way to promulgate peace, love, and understanding? 

For a department supposedly devoted to literature, it’s amazing how much of it the English department has excluded.

By the 1980s, the Department of English showed the signs of its ill-considered specializations. Its brand of literature was not big enough to represent the human condition. Deconstruction, structuralism, and other literary theories were a means of making English literature a better player in the global society of ideas, and these new modes of studying literature showed how badly the English literary canon had represented the peoples of the world, especially women, colonial subjects, people of color, and the LGBTQ community. With literary theory, the Department of English sought to make itself an enlightened agent of cultural equity and change while at the same time it continued to value the same old content—British and American literature in English—above all. In seeking cultural pluralism, the Department of English would have been smarter if it had diversified its content rather than its critical theories about that old content.

With a default preference for studying the victors and Great Men rather than the oppressed, the old departments of the liberal arts failed to change quickly enough to embrace the intellectual needs of new generations of scholars and students. To compensate for deficiencies in the sclerotic departments of history and English literature, academe created new departments or ancillary programs. Women Studies, African-American Studies, Gender Studies, Hispanic Studies, Diaspora Studies, and Asian-American Studies were among the new academic units created in apostasy. Dissatisfactions among writers of color also led to the establishment of new nonprofit organizations to build support they found lacking in creative writing programs. The Hurston/Wright Foundation, Cave Canem, the Macondo Writers Workshop, Canto Mundo, Kundiman, the Voices of our Nations Arts Foundation, Asian-American Writers’ Workshop, Lambda Literary, and Indigenous Nations Poets were among the new literary organizations. 

Bizarrely, under the spell of literary theory, the Department of English began to specialize in what literary works failed to say, rather than what their authors had intended them to say. The theorists were not much interested in literary authors and efforts to create beautiful forms with language—or how a work’s meanings might have been highly innovative or progressive in an author’s own time. With their new postmodern sensibilities, literary theorists passed judgement on the authors of previous epochs, and the theorists found the authors guilty of crimes against humanity. By the 1980s, with the ascendancy of deconstruction and other literary theories, many departments of English began to dance as if they despised their own bodies. 

Although the goals of literary theory were extremely progressive, its methods were absurdly elitist. Literary theory dressed its visions of social equity in some of the most sadomasochistic prose ever endured by humankind. The new critiques had a rhetoric festooned with ponderous nominalizations and allusions to difficult works of psychology, linguistics, anthropology, economics, and philosophy.^[4]  Just as the richest 1% of all Americans have access to special financial services that remain obscure to most of us, the Department of English promoted a style of highly specialized prose that was accessible to only the most over-educated 1% of all readers. This was a self-defeating way to help future generations become avid lovers of poetry and fiction, but if you were to say so to any theory-glazed apparatchik, you would be accused of anti-intellectualism, racism, misogyny, or homophobia—as if arguments for the common good could only be couched in the latest lugubrious theoretical style. “There are many forms of stupidity,” Thomas Mann said, “and cleverness is the worst.” Departments of English, by the 1980s, had grown very clever. No wonder the Department of English was losing its share of new undergraduates.

Creative writing programs were a countervailing force to the Brainiac trends that made the seminar room a chamber of horrors for the inquisition of poems and stories. The installation of storytellers and poets in the Department of English made other seminar rooms friendlier to poems, stories, and their authors’ intentions. A creative writing seminar on long poems, for instance, would acknowledge Wordsworth’s erasure of women in his big poem, The Prelude, but the seminar would also study the poem for its fine meditative use of blank verse, and for its grappling with the role of nature in the Industrial Age—and for how nature could inform the spirituality of any soul who might not subscribe to the dominant religions of one’s time. 

In the 1980s, almost all creative writing programs were units within departments of English, and their establishment within the departments was often hard-won, and it required some very combative advocacy from the association that represented creative writers in higher education. Because there are now so many classes in creative writing at the undergraduate and graduate levels, it’s easy to take such programs for granted, even though the scholars and theorists often did their best to thwart the development of BFA and MFA programs in creative writing. Nonetheless, the number of creative writing programs grew from 13 programs in 1967 to more than 1,000 today.^[5] In the academic year 2018 to 2019, America produced 8,217 master’s degrees in English language, literature, and letters^[6], and most of these degrees were for the study and practice of creative writing. 

The ascendancy of creative writing programs fixed one defect in the department of English. While some English professors preferred their authors to be long dead and entombed in libraries and anthologies, the new creative writing professors studied literature in a prospective way; they studied literature as a living art. It was an antidote for the department’s poses of retrospective, pseudo-empirical rigor. The new professor-writers and their students also looked to the literature of other countries for their literary models. At George Mason University, the novelist and radio commentator Alan Cheuse taught the works of Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Puig, Gogol, Flaubert, Calvino, and Borges in his seminars on the forms of fiction. Poets, among the field’s other teachers, translated works of Vietnamese poets, Chinese poets, Dante, Rilke, Akhmatova, Neruda, Tranströmer, Szymborska, Milosz, and many other authors writing in languages other than English. Professors of creative writing made the English department bigger—more like a department of world literature; professors of creative writing enriched their classes with a broader sampling of aesthetic possibilities and the human experience.

As many older professors of creative writing would tell you: many literary scholars and theorists believed that there would be more traditional English majors—more student-scholars and more student-theorists—if only creative writing did not contribute to the intellectual dissipation of their students. They saw creative writing as a threat to the prosperity of their realms, but it was not creative writing that made the English Major less appealing to new generations of students. If anything, enrollments in creative writing classes were propping up the numbers of students in otherwise moribund departments. The passage of time has proven how wrong-headed the detractors were. The English Major had deeper problems in its many maladapted personalities—its preference for only those works written in English, its zeal for theoretical sophistries, and its retrograde obsessions. These problems partly explain why students walked away from the Department of English. The students’ vocational desires, family histories, and economic worries also drove them away, of course. Arizona State University, for instance, saw its numbers of English major decline from 953 to 78, from 2012 to the start of the pandemic.^[7]

Generational Strife, Race, & the Fall of the English Major

For a few decades, the popularity of creative writing helped to slow down the declining enrollments in departments of English, but then the numbers of English Majors continued to decline. The decline is bad for the development of future audiences for serious literature, and this, in turn, is also bad for the careers and future economic prospects of writers. The declining numbers of English majors is bad news for creative writing programs, which formerly could rely on a good number of newly graduated English majors from which to select new cohorts of grad students in creative writing. At some schools, the Department of English has become a financial liability, as it no longer attracts enough students to match the cost of retaining all of its tenured professors. For creative writing programs, most of which continue to be units within the departments of English, the traditional study of English literature is also an artistic problem as it offers a narrow a range of literary models for a far more diverse population of readers and writers. The demographics of today’s students are very different than those of the 1950s, when John Updike was an English major at Harvard. The majority of today’s freshmen are people of color.

Many contemporary writers have written about the unbearable whiteness of departments of English and the creative writing programs within them. The novelist Junot Díaz put it in The New Yorker, “That shit is too white.”^[8]

A dynamic that exacerbates generational strife in academe is tenure, although tenure must always remain a necessary part of academic professionalism. Tenure slows down changes in the demographics of the professorial class. If the majority of Boomers who earned literary and creative writing degrees in the 1970s and 1980s were mostly white, that means, four or five decades later, the majority of professors still continue to be mostly white, in spite of the fact that the Millennials include far many more people of color and now Gen Z freshmen are mostly people of color. Academe creates a problematic time-warp where old generational values persist, over-ripen, and malinger; and in the arts, which thrive on new sensibilities and new visions, this can often be a huge frustration to young practitioners. If literature is to present the human condition, literature would improve if its makers and teachers resembled the world’s peoples. The Boomers have been retiring from their academic posts. This will create many opportunities for literary scholars and writers of color. Tenure has impeded the change,^[9] but it cannot stop the demographic shift.

Creative writing programs have changed with the changing demographics of its students, although that change, of course, cannot be rapid enough for many young writers. Even as the programs evolve, however, departments of English are holding the programs back due to the department’s specialized focus only on works that have their original provenance in the English language. The silo of the department of English requires demolition and a replacement to improve the teaching of literature and the delivery of the better angels of the arts and humanities.

Poet, translator, and teacher John Ciardi said, “The university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in the students.” If the Department of English really cared about undergraduates, it would refashion its curriculum to better prepare them to be citizens of the world, managers in the global markets, and contributors ready to collaborate in diverse workplaces. The English department’s fixation on covering every century of British and American literature is failing to attract undergraduates, and it fails to help them to develop a more global understanding of the world’s peoples. The typical English major must study English works from at least three different centuries. For example, the English major must take at least two courses chosen from at least these three different time periods: early English literatures up to the 17^th Century; 18^th century and 19^th century British or American Literature; and 20^th century and 21^st century British or American literature. For undergrads, the experience of studying literature would be richer if the department required, instead, the study of literary works from three or more continents, including works in translation. What’s more important to the good education of an undergraduate?—investigations of past episodes of the evolution of the English language and its literature, or the investigations of the cultures and peoples from other regions of the world?

Many of the largest departments of English have added new topics of study in attempts to satisfy an increasingly diverse body of students who are committed to social justice or who wish to address their curiosity about their families’ origins. Race and ethnicity studies, African-American literature, postcolonial literature, Asian-American literature, and Latinx literature are among the new areas of concentration. But these developments are insufficient, and small liberal arts colleges remain likely to follow the old model of an English department that teaches works originally written in English only, grouped chronologically by their British or American origins. Departments of English are not delivering the kind of cultural pluralism that students value, especially in a tough economy. 

Economic Pluralism & Literary Supply & Demand

Creative writing programs in the U.S. had created one of the largest systems of literary patronage that the world has ever seen. The growth of creative writing programs created thousands of good paying jobs for novelists and poets, as well as the small literary presses, reading venues, conferences, and marketing platforms that support writers. Some special care should be exercised in protecting that system, in making it more equitable, and in helping young writers navigate their way through it. As corporate leviathans have swallowed our trade publishing houses, and as good literary advances became smaller and harder to secure, academe’s system of literary patronage has become more important to emerging literary talents. 

One of the most monstrous hypocrisies in academe was produced in the Department of English, where many professors espoused the virtues of socialism, multiculturalism, and the need for social justice, even while the department exploited an underclass of barely paid teaching assistants, lecturers, and adjunct professors. The department, for decades, has been full of multiculturalists who were narrowly focused on culture. As Russell Jacoby has explained, cultural pluralism without economic pluralism is a recipe for failure.^[10] Cultural pluralism without economic pluralism is simply a mollification from those who benefit from the status quo, and the Department of English has practiced a cruel kind of cultural pluralism for decades now. 

In one of my previous incarnations, I worked as the executive director of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).  From that perch, I often pondered a literary supply-and-demand problem. The supply of literary works was robust, but how could AWP and its programs help increase the demand for those works? This inquiry was an important preoccupation, especially as I worked in the midst of many detractors of MFA programs in creative writing. Some of the more prominent critics included Joseph Epstein (“Who Killed Poetry?”), Dana Gioia (“Can Poetry Matter?”), Marjorie Perloff (“Poetry on the Brink”), and John Barr (“American Poetry in the New Century”). As I watched the success of many programs and their graduates, it became clear that, if you expand and diversify the supply, you can greatly increase the demand. Sandra Cisneros’s novel The House on Mango Street (1984) and Rita Dove’s book of poetry Thomas and Beulah (1987) were harbingers of things to come in the creation of new works for bigger and more diverse audiences of literature in North America.

The increasing numbers and diversity of creative writing graduates increased the numbers of new literary works, and all this expansion and diversification of the supply improved demand by attracting new readers to literature. New voices catered to new audiences whom our publishers had previously neglected. More people can now enjoy the shock of recognition in new stories and poems by and about more kinds of peoples. Many of these books are by graduates of creative writing programs.^[11]

The first writers of color who studied in creative writing programs—like Cisneros and Dove—had a difficult time. Nonetheless, they found the time to write, even while their white peers and professors misunderstood their intentions and needs. Sandra Cisneros has written and spoken candidly about the travails she endured as a writer at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Nonetheless, it was higher education’s commitment to pluralism that helped her secure a seat at the seminar table and her first major publication, The House on Mango Street, which was first published by a university-affiliated press, Arte Público Press. In his book The Program Era, Mark McGurl explains just how much the multicultural or pluralistic values of higher education were helping America to develop a literature that better represented its citizens:

…the institutional position of Arte Público Press makes clear—housed by the University of Houston since shortly after its founding in 1970—it was above all the U.S. university that would sustain the symbolic connection of minority writers to a global pluralist space. To look at the contributors to important early anthologies of minority writing—from Ishmael Reed’s 19 Necromancers from Now (1971) to Aiiieeeee! An Anthology Asian-American Writers (1974) to A Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981)—is to be struck by how many of the figures included in these volumes claimed an academic affiliation…^[12]

Creative writing programs could improve upon its successes in developing bigger audiences for literature, if only the departments of English would dedicate themselves more completely to the “globalist pluralist space” that McGurl extols. The stakes are very high, especially now that social media has made our cultural thinking prone to staccato outbursts of tribalism—distracted from distraction by distraction and by pet hatreds and lies. We desire, more ardently, that academe will cultivate a reverence for literary works that embody empathy, self-awareness, continuity, and wisdom. 

Sadly, the Department of English has too many old habits that make it an ineffectual advocate for the wisdom, empathy, and diversity of literary works. The old specializations of English literature remain impediments in the audience-development for literature, in building economic equity for writers, and in fostering a more authentic multiculturalism. The students of Gen Z are not so enamored by the literary heritages afforded by the empires of Britannia and the U.S. Many of their families have origins outside of the U.S. and U.K. More than 22% of college students speak a language other than English at home.^[13] A very successful literary novel today would be one that sells more than 100,000 copies in hard cover; a highly successful book of poetry would be one that sells 10,000 copies. In a nation of 334 million souls, these successes should be far greater. Our culture can do better. Academe must do better.

The Department of English is obsolete, and students have voted with their feet. They have moved on to courses of study that support their aspirations or that reflect upon their families’ origin-stories. It once was that seven out of every one hundred bachelor’s degrees were conferred in English literature, but now less than two out of every hundred BAs conferred are in English literature.^[14] In a challenging economy, many students choose majors that promise to be more financially rewarding, of course. They know that cultural equity without economic equity is a threshold to dim prospects. A steadier economy, more affordable tuition and fees, and a stronger middle class would help restore only a small portion of the lost enrollments to English departments. A coexisting problem is the maladapted nature of the Department of English itself. 

Fever-Dreams

In my fever-dreams, every Department of English would be restructured under the appellation of “Department of International Storytelling, Poetry, Writing, and the Sublime,” although I would settle for “Department of Writing and Literature.” This new department would include poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in translations from all nations and languages; and the new department would embrace screen writing, playwriting, criticism, translation, comparative mythology, business writing, composition, technical writing, policy writing, speech writing, public speaking, and public narrative. The department of literature should stop striking pseudo-empirical poses, and it should embrace the highly subjective arts of storytelling and poetry as major forces that animate the world. “Public narrative” is now taught as a leadership skill in schools of business and government. Corporate storytelling is now a hugely important marketing tool; public relations firms and ad agencies reap millions of dollars every year by helping corporations craft their stories. All this shaping of public storytelling is far from benign, of course, as the latest dictators and demagogues remind us. Social media and cable news outlets have made it possible for lying to be a lucrative business model and a malignant force. Yet, in academe, the study of storytelling is narrowly defined by the examination of novels and short stories originally written in English. The narrow specializations of English lit are bad for the values of a liberal arts education. It’s bad for business, bad for the U.S.A., and bad for the global cultivation of peace, love, and understanding. Departments of Literature and Writing would have bigger hearts and a more expansive curriculum than an appreciation of the greatest hits written only in English for monoglots. 

Shortfalls in university revenues and declining enrollments are causing pell-mell, ad hoc, willy-nilly changes to the Department of English, but these changes seem more a mainly financial matter of balancing the college’s budget rather than a spiritual matter of revising the college’s values and usefulness to our students. The restructuring seems unlikely to address the general needs of our culture, our economy, and our civics.  It would be a good thing if higher education would do a little soul-searching and revise its pedagogical goals to dispel some of the hyper-specialization in the arts and humanities at the undergraduate level. Academe should reaffirm high-minded and age-old pedagogical goal of what Kant called schöne wissenschaft, the study of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Or, at the very least, academe should establish new ABCs as pedagogical goals for all departments: Analytical skills, Behavioral skills, Cross-Cultural skills, Communication skills, and Civics. 

While the anemic enrollments in Departments of English have fallen, enrollments in Departments of Business have enjoyed robust growth. Many professors of English might be dismayed to know that, in some ways, business courses surpass English courses in cultivating the cross-cultural skills and the other ABCs I just mentioned. Most business schools teach “cultural competencies” or methods by which a managers can improve their “Cultural Intelligence (CQ)” in working with many different races, socioeconomic classes, and the other affinity groups of a global economy. Many business schools require teamwork in assignments among students with diverse backgrounds. The pedagogy itself requires cross-cultural collaboration; the method is part of the value of the lesson—not just an understanding of marketing, budgeting, or the overt content of the lesson. Classes in literature could greatly help in the development of CQ, of course—far more effectively than many classes do now, but to do so these lit classes would need to dispense with the narrow focus on British and American works. The world’s literature and its peoples are beckoning.

An Exemplary Literary Ambassador

When I wrote the first draft of this essay, Russia began its war against Ukraine. As I wrote, the specializations and strife in the study of English literature seemed like a silly side show—inane, inept, arcane—sadly divorced from the currents of our world. I had my first doubts about the value of the Department of English when I was an English major, decades ago. The Russian poet and exile Joseph Brodsky visited my college. Even though English was not his mother tongue, he could recite an astonishing number of poems by Robert Frost and W.H. Auden. Brodsky had taught himself Polish so he could read Czeslaw Milosz; he had learned English so he could translate John Donne, along with Frost and Auden. Despite Brodsky’s reverence for American and English poets, his example made me feel uneasy about my own limited knowledge of the cultures of other nations. A descendant of Polish and Italian immigrants, I found myself wanting to study Italian and Polish writers; but this was not something I could easily do while fulfilling my requirements as an English major.

One of my classmates teased Brodsky about his receding hairline, and Brodsky said he first lost a lot of his hair when the Soviet state subjected him to his second and third electroshock treatments—his Soviet “rehabilitation.” Literature, and not just literature in English, had made Brodsky a hero, a great citizen of the world. His polyglot erudition and his international knowledge of humanity made him dangerous to the closed minds of the Soviet Union. American departments of literature could be and should be places where students can attain similar powers as agents for the good.

~~~

D.W. Fenza worked for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) for thirty years, first as publications manager and then as executive director. His essays and poems have appeared in many magazines. 

Endnotes

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^[1] Long, Heather, “The World’s Top Economists Just Made the Case for Why We Still Need English Majors,” The Washington Post, 19 October 2019. Long refers to data provided by the National Center for Education Statistics.

^[2] National Center for Education Statistics, “Bachelor’s degrees conferred by postsecondary institutions, by field of study: Selected years, 1970-71 through 2019-20.”

^[3] The essay, “The End of the English Major” by Nathan Heller, in The New Yorker (6 March 2023) is an excellent account of our students’ various perceptions of the English major and its declining stature as a rewarding course of study.

^[4] For an example, ponder this statement by Judith Butler, writing in the journal Diacritics (1997)  “The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.” 

^[5] The website of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) provides listings of the current programs in creative writing. “Guide to Writing Programs,” www.awpwriter.org.

^[6] U.S. Department of Education data cited by The Chronicle of Higher Education, “2021–2022 Almanac,” 43.

^[7] Heller, Nathan, “The End of the English Major,” The New Yorker (6 March 2023), 28.

^[8] Diaz, Junot, “MFA vs. POC,” The New Yorker (30 April 2014).

^[9] The Great Recession also slowed down generational change in the professoriate. In 2008 and 2009, massive losses in the financial markets damaged retirement investments, including those of Boomer-professors, many of whom chose to work longer than they might have originally planned. Meanwhile, university endowments also suffered, and this diminished the resources by which universities could offer packages to promote the early retirement of campus elders. 

^[10] Jacoby, Russell, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (New York, New York: Basic Books, 1999).

 

^[11] Mark McGurl’s book, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing is the most comprehensive and thoughtful account of how public universities and creative writing programs have helped to democratize the literary arts.

^[12] McGurl, Mark, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2009), 331-332.

^[13] “States,” a section of “The Almanac Issue 2021-2022,” Chronicle of Higher Education (20 August 2021), 81.

^[14] Percentages calculated from the data of the National Center for Education Statistics, “Bachelor’s degrees conferred by postsecondary institutions, by field of study: Selected years, 1970-71 through 2019-20.”