Last Feb. 27, the “New Yorker” published a long article – as is
its style – about the vertical drop in enrollments in humanities
courses in the United States of America, The end of the English
major.
Nathan Heller, a byline of the emblazoned U.S. weekly, collected
within his report – which we point out to our readers – the voices
of faculty and students who tried to give an explanation of this
crisis.
“During the past decade, the study of English and history at the
collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollments
in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent
[…]. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths
of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported
falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings
little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what
it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education
in the human past than any that has come before”.