Just as both ASU and Harvard are important focal points in Heller's article, so too there are other important focal points in it - not just the decline in English majors, but also the decline in history majors and the overall decline in humanities majors; not just more recent shifts in our contemporary media ecology, but also shifts in our contemporary cultural emphases (such as the cultural emphasis on STEM courses). STEM majors are soaring, while English and history majors have been in steep decline since 2013. (The acronym STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.)
Perhaps because Heller is primarily concerned with the precipitous decline in English and history majors since 2013, he does not discuss the philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum's 2010 book Not For Sale: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton University Press).
I discuss her 2010 book in two of my 2010 OEN articles: "Not For Profit, Eh? Hold on There, Martha Nussbaum!" (dated April 3, 2010):
"Martha Nussbaum on Why Democracy Needs the Humanities" (dated May 4, 2010):
As a matter of fact, Heller offers no theory connecting the humanities in general with democracy - despite the current crisis in American democracy brought on by Trump and his pretending that he did not lose the 2020 election.
According to Heller, what exactly are the dimensions of the problem of the precipitous decline in English and history majors in American colleges and universities since 2013? Heller says, "According to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly but not always indentically to internal enrollment figures, from 2012 to 2020, the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State's main campus fell by forty-six percent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while SUNY Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates - standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges - saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. . . . During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What's going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade."
Heller reports that a 2022 "survey found that only seven per cent of Harvard freshmen planned to major in the humanities, down from twenty per cent in 2012, and nearly thirty per cent during the nineteen-seventies. From fifteen years ago to the start of the pandemic, the number of Harvard English majors reportedly declined by about three-quarters - in 2020, there were fewer than sixty at a college of more than seven thousand - and philosophy and foreign languages also sustained losses."
Heller also says, "For decades, the average proportion of humanities students in every class hovered around fifteen per cent nationally, following the American economy up in boom times and down in bearish periods. . . . Enrollment numbers of the past decade defy these trends, however. When the economy has looked up, humanities enrollments have continued falling. When the markets have wobbled, enrollments have tumbled even more. Today, the roller coaster is in free fall."
In addition, Heller quotes the Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro as saying "'Until four years ago, I thought it was a reversible situation - that those who profess the humanities hadn't been good enough at selling them to students,' James Shapiro, an English professor at Columbia, told me in his office one day. . . . "'I no longer believe that, for two reasons. One reason was the way of the world. . . . "'Technology in the last twenty years has changed all of us,' he went on. 'How has it changed me? I probably read five novels a month until the two-thousands. If I read one a month now, it's a lot. It's not because I've lost interest in fiction. It's because I'm reading a hundred Web sites. I'm listening to podcasts.'"
As to Shapiro's second reason, Heller says, "The other reason was money" - funding for higher education. Elsewhere in his article, Heller says, "Between 1940 and 1970 [I myself was an English major in the SLU class of '66], the percentage of the American public that received at least four years of university education nearly tripled, sharpening the university's democratic imperative." In connection with Shapiro's discussion of funding, Heller also quotes him as referring to "the decline-of-democracy chart." Either of these sentences could have served as a springboard for Heller to discuss Nussbaum's argument about the humanities and democracy.
Now, Ong famously emphasizes technology. For example, his pioneering study of the print culture that emerged in Western culture after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s is Ong's massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press). But also see Ong's 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Methuen).
The modern novel emerged in print culture in Western culture. See Richard D. Altick's pioneering study of print culture titled The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (University of Chicago Press, 1957). But also see Joseph Bottum's article "The Novel as Protestant Art: A great metaphysical drama played out on the world's stage" online at Books and Culture: A Christian Review (dated March 19, 2015):
Now, Heller says, "One afternoon, I visited the chair of Harvard's comparative-literature department, Jeffrey Schnapp, [a Dante scholar]. . . . "'I always thought that the models of the humanities that we inherited were open for expansion and innovation,' he said. . . . Schnapp was a Dante scholar and, as a young professor, had helped lead the Dartmouth Dante Project, a vast textual database that was an early triumph of the so-called digital humanities. . . . "'Medieval literary culture was not "literary" in the way that we understood it in the nineteenth century, when printing became an industry. It was polychrome,' Schnapp said."
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