All right then, it’s official. People like me have gone out of fashion, grown superannuated, way past their sell-by date. According to no less an authority than The New Yorker, that most bookish of large-circulation magazines, the academic study of imaginative literature is in the process of vanishing from American college campuses. The humanities, we’re told, are all but finished.
“During the past decade,” writes Nathan Heller, “the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third.” It gets worse: From 2012 to 2020, “the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. 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.”
