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Zhao !/Creative Commons

In the Near Future, Only Very Wealthy Colleges

Will Have English Departments
Adapt (not publish) or perish

BY JAMES PULIZZI
June 9, 2014

Within a few decades, contemporary literature departments (e.g., English) will be largely extinct
theyll be as large and vibrant as Classics departments are today, which is to say, not very active
at all. Only wealthy institutions will be able to aord the luxury of faculty devoted to studying
written and printed text. Communications, rhetoric/composition, and media studies will take
Englishs place. The change isnt necessarily an evil to be decried but simply reects how most
people now generate and read narratives and textthey do it on digitally based multimedia
platforms.

Why should college students read narrative prose when they get their ll of stories from
television, cinema, and interactive video games? Narratives currently live in many dierent
media, and there should be nothing wrong with academics considering them alongside print
narratives. Defenders of the traditional curriculum mostly believe studentsneedto read these
printed texts if they are to be truly educated, cultured members of our society. Thats the gist of
Allan BloomsThe Closing of the American Mind(1987) and many an essay from right- and left-
leaning critics alike, including Adam Kirschs recent essay Technology Is Taking Over English
Departments.

The so-called culture war that raged around Blooms book through the 1990s amid concern that
including the disenfranchiseds voices would dilute (white, European) culture has largely passed,
and yet the anxiety about English and the humanities in general lingers. The trouble was never

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the danger to culture but to print culture. As long as literature departments remain beholden to
print culture, to the study and transmission of printed texts, they will continue to fade in
relevance and prestige. Period-based (print) literature courses will continue to vanish in favor of
disciplines that study and instruct students in contemporary media platforms. We need only to
look at how successfully lm and television migrated out of literature departments and into
departments and schools of their own. If the present trend continues, the same will happen with
digital media. This erosion of literature and its associated print culture is really what concerns
Kirsch.

Unfortunately the digital humanities (DH) scholars who responded to Kirsch evaded this fairly
obvious point in favor of detailing the importance of their research and accompanying (ironically
print) book,Digital_Humanities, which Kirsch judged a jargon-laden manifesto and handbook.
The fact that these scholars choose to explain their digital inquiry sub-eld with a print book just
underscores the inability of many literature and other humanities Ph.D.s to move beyond the
printed book. An open-access PDF exists of that book, but that le is a digital replica of the
printed page, and the essays it contains are easily recognizable asthe scholarly essays that you'd
nd in any scholarly collection published in the last 50 or so years.

The Modern Language Associations (MLA) recent report on the future of doctoral education
exhibits a similar tension between the status quo and need for reform. Doctoral students are the
future of the academic humanities, and the changes the MLA recommends for their training show
how they think the profession at large will (or needs to) evolve. Among the suggestions was a plea
for graduate students to learn more technical skills, such as text mining, data visualization, and
other very non-humanistic sounding software tools. They recommend this course so that the
legions of un- or underemployed Ph.D.s will be more competitive for vestigial tenure-track jobs
and, more importantly, for alternative academic careers in archives, libraries, and other domains.
But even while recommending that shift, they left in place the dissertation, or the production of a
large research-based, book-length monograph. Alternative projects, especially collaborative ones,
will likely never pass muster in the humanities as qualifying a graduate student for a Ph.D. And
so, the legacy of print is questioned but remains largely untouched.

If the humanities are to survive, if they are not to become as marginal and small as classics
departments, they will have to pay more attention to the variety of media narrative now lives in.
The overview inDigital_Humanitiesof the books history and development as a tool is an example
of that. Another recent essay collection edited by Kate Hayles and Jessica Pressman,Comparative
Textual Media, implores humanities scholars to regard print as one of many media they can study.
Fortunately its a print book, so maybe some of the intended audience will go to the library, check

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it out, and read it. Such a shift, however, would raise uncomfortable problems for the extant
faculty: Why should students then study literature and not media more broadly? Why not pursue
communications or design classes instead of composition?

These are all uncomfortable questions that the authors ofDigital_Humanitiesevade in their
response to Kirsch, and that evasion no doubt makes people like Kirsch all the more suspicious of
them. The assertion that the humanities have always been technological because books are a
technology (albeit an old, familiar one) is a bit like claiming industrial era steel factories are just
as technological as a blacksmiths anvil and hammer. Certainly, but the analogy ignores how the
automation and massive scale alter workers conditions (and employment prospects) and how the
economics of mass production aect quality of life. Scholars performing data mining or other
computational analyses of massive data sets have a very dierent relationship to text and cannot
perform a hermeneutical study of narratives with those new tools. Indeed, distant reading was
meant to get away from such the hermeneutic methods the humanities have used until now. The
authors ofDigital_Humanitiesadmit this (to a degree) but downplay how shocking the change it
brings to the humanities disciplines may be.

Whatever the consequences for morals, Western civilization, or humanity itself, theres no
reversing this trend. Kirschs vision of the humanities is on the decline, and even if traditionally
oriented scholars in the humanities maintain their levees against the digital inux, theyll
eventually fail as the funds ow to these new areas of study.

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