We are, said a recent New Yorker article, living through the “end of the English major”. The statistics are stark. The number of undergraduates taking English literature at leading American universities is down a third in the past decade. Wider humanities degrees (history, philosophy, classics and other arts courses) are down 17 per cent. One Harvard professor said: “We feel we’re on the Titanic.”
Something similar is going on in Britain, where the proportion studying humanities has fallen from 28 per cent in the early 1960s to just 8 per cent today. Since the turn of the millennium the number of English undergraduates halved, even as total university student numbers rose by a third.
