Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) March 3, 2023: Because I was an English major at Saint Louis University (SLU), the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri, Nathan Heller's article "The End of the English Major" in The New Yorker (issue dated March 6, 2023) caught my attention.
In it, Heller intimates that he himself was an English major at Harvard, but he does not say exactly when that was.
Now, when I look back on my life, I recognize that I was a young and impressionable undergraduate. However, my impression is that all eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-old undergraduates tend to be young and impressionable. But this may not have been the case for the World War II veterans who flocked to higher education under the G. I. Bill.
In any event, as an undergraduate I was deeply impressed by the idealism of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the black civil rights movement at the time. I heard Dr. King speak at SLU in October 1964, and in Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1965. He was an impressive orator. However, I have to wonder if eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-old undergraduates growing up in the Trump era experience anything comparable to Dr. King and the civil rights movement of the early 1960s.
As an undergraduate, I was deeply impressed with T. S. Eliot's 1922 poem The Waste Land and James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses - and so I celebrated the centennial of each in various OEN articles. When I took the American Jesuit Father Walter J. Ong's course Practical Criticism: Poetry at SLU in the fall semester of 1964, he had us read Eliot's book Of Poetry and Poets (1957). I was also deeply impressed with it. I still have the paperback edition of it that I bought in 1964.
As for Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955), he himself majored in Latin as an undergraduate at Rockhurst College (now Rockhurst University), the Jesuit college in Kansas City, Missouri - Ong's hometown. By way of digression, we should note here that majors in the classical languages are not common today. Perhaps English majors will become as scarce in the not-too-distant future.
In any event, I was so deeply impressed with Ong at SLU that I took five English courses from him there over the years. Subsequently, I wrote the introductory-level survey of his life and eleven of his books and selected articles titled Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication, 2nd ed. (Hampton Press, 2015; 1st ed., 2000).
More recently, I have discussed Ong's thought in my somewhat lengthy OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020):
In it, I call attention to Ong's characteristic pioneering media ecology theory. As we will see momentarily, Heller quotes certain English professors who discuss changes in our contemporary media ecology that have emerged since Ong died in 2003 - indeed, rather recently. No doubt those more recent changes in our contemporary media ecology can be discussed in terms of Ong's pioneering media ecology theory.
However much I may be impressed with Ong's pioneering media ecology theory, I am not prepared to speculate here just how he would respond if he were still alive and well today, to the precipitous decline in English and history majors since 2013 - the decline that prompted Nathan Heller to write his article "The End of the English Major."
But it would be fair to Ong to say that if he were still alive and well today, he would say something about the precipitous decline in English and history majors since 2013. After all, he served as the elected president of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) in 1978 - the only Roman Catholic priest thus far elected to be MLA president. From 1968 to 1976, Ong was a trustee of the National Humanities Faculty; vice chairman, 1971-1974; president and chairman of the board, 1974-1976 (NCH was set up by an act of Congress; it was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities). In 1973, the National Humanities Faculty published a conversation with Ong about language titled Why Talk? A Conversation about Language with Walter J. Ong Conducted by Wayne Altree (Chandler and Sharp). It is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Hampton Press, 2002, pp. 363-403).
In any event, Harvard is one significant focal point in Heller's article "The End of the English Major," but Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe is most prominent in his article. According to Heller, ASU "has more than eighty thousand students on campus." "Its undergraduate admission rate is eighty-eight per cent. Nearly half its undergraduates are from minor backgrounds, and a third are the first in their families to go to college. The in-state tuition averages just four thousand dollars, yet ASU has a better faculty-to-student ratio on site than UC Berkeley and spends more on faculty research than Princeton. The university's tenure-track English faculty is seventy-one strong - including eleven Shakespeare scholars, most of them of color. In 2021, ASU English professors won two Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other English department in America." According to Heller, ASU "is today regarded as a beacon for the promises of public higher education." Consequently, he visited the ASU campus and interviewed numerous ASU students.
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