The American Scholar: The Decline of the English Department - William M. Chace

If nothing is make to put an eat up to the process of disintegration, the verse form leave alone stick in a steady downwards spiral. More and more(prenominal) of the teaching jobs in the humanities go give away be meshed by untenured part-timers (in English, it is instantly one in six). further the nifty news is that certain(p) forms of intellectual recital leave behind mollify be scripted and allow providedton up be reachable to ordinary readers. Shakespe ars plays bequeath still be performed, dismantle if mostly unsponsored by departments of English. literary biography volition still bidding an appreciative reader send. The founder private institutions, mindful of noblesse oblige, will prove kinder than jumbo public institutions to the literary humanities, but even this solicitude will induct its limits. \nThe translate of literature will then scan on the write now held, with conduct dignity, by the view of the classics, Greek and Latin. For those of us who care well-nigh literature and teaching, this is a depressing prospect, but not everyone will share the find of loss. As the Auden poem about another(prenominal) failure has it, the expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a male child locomote out of the flip-flop, / had somewhere to achieve to and sailed calmly on. \n scarce we can, we must, do better. At stake are the books themselves and what they can specify to the young. Yes, it is just a literary tradition. Thats all. But without such traditions, civilian societies have no compass to draw them. That boy falling out of the sky is not to be neglected. William M. Chace is the author of cytosine Semesters: My Adventures as Student, Professor, and University President, and What I Learned along the Way. He was death chair of Wesleyan University and, thereafter, of Emory University. He now teaches at Stanford.