Is the English Major Dying Out?

At the Modern Language Association annual convention held over Christmas in Philadelphia in 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education published the sad story of a young adjunct college English teacher who couldn’t afford the $400 it would have taken him to attend MLA and interview for a full time job. (Chronicle 12/20/09.)

Earlier, MLA published a report on the dizzying drop in tenure track jobs at that same convention. As a Ph.D. who never even had to interview for any academic job, I feel I can talk objectively about the crisis. Especially, since I walked happily away from twenty years as a full professor with tenure.

I spent thirty years in the classroom (1952-82) teaching seventh and eighth grade (1952-53) and tenth and twelfth grade (1953-55) at East Lansing High, a year (1955-56) in New York on a Ford Foundation grant as Radio TV Editor of Scholastic Teacher when three professors from Trenton State asked me to join them as assistant professor (1956-57), after hearing me speak at the 4C’S Convention on “Liberace and the Future of Cultural Criticism”. The next year I got my Ph.D. and a Carnegie Postdoctoral Fellowship at Penn (1957-59) to create a new course on “The Mass Society” in the Department of American Civilization.

That led to an appointment 1959-60 at the new Annenberg School as assistant professor of media history. The sociologist David Riesman then recommended me as the first director and associate professor at the new Institute of American Studies at the East West Center of the University of Hawaii. Erwin Steinberg of Carnegie-Mellon then recommended my appointment as full professor and English Department chairman at Arcadia University, where I taught for twenty years with one year off to teach media as Andreini Fellow for a former Annenberg student at Santa Rosa Community College (1975-76) and the next year off to celebrate reaching 50, with a three month exploration of the art and architecture of the Mediterranean littoral.

I had been awarded a Fulbright to the University of Algiers to follow up my expansion of the English rubric to include African Literature in English. This was withdrawn at the last moment, presumably for political reasons. (My Number 2 in Hawaii had been a CIA agent for 10 years before he was appointed to watch me and the foreign students!)

In 1982, after my 86 year old mother died in Detroit, I decided to abandon Academe for a second career as a cultural reporter in California. I give this CV, not to brag, but to establish how much different it was for young Ph.D’s in that era than it it is now. What wrecked their prospects? In my opinion, the emergence of star professors pocketing $100,000 and more as the workaday assignments increasingly went to “adjunct” (a fancy professorial synonym for peon) without tenure or health benefits.

That's a disgrace that will forever shame the Humanists who let it happen, indeed planned it. I believed (as I wrote monthly for several years in The English Journal) that the English curriculum had to include the newer media of radio, film, and television to be functional in the Twentieth Century: Identify excellence in the newer media and encourage our best students to cultivate a creative career in those fields. To show what I meant, I organized media events for several years in the 50’s and 60’s at those MLA & NCTE conventions.

One year I reran a Robert Lowell play on the Vietnamese war as well as a splendid new film on Theodore Roethke by David Meyer. Both were received enthusiastically. So when David asked me to seek MLA member support for a film on Marianne Moore (she had already given him a green light), I wrote to Mike Shugrue, then Number 2 to John Fischer, editor of PMLA, he replied quickly: Our members have had a bad year on the stock market so we can’t help. Alas, Ms. Moore died the next year.

When Harvard’s “Daedalus” magazine fielded a conference in the Poconos on what humanists must do vis a vis the newer media, all but a very, very few pretended that sneering at mass culture was the way to go! Indeed the conference ended with the poet Randall Jarrell waggling his beard and index finger at me when I finished my paper and cried, “You’re the man of the future, Mr. Hazard, and I’m glad I’m not going to be there.” And he wasn’t. Sadly, he committed suicide a few months later. I say sadly because I had relished teaching his poems! To be explicit about it, the humanist have been guilty of a massive and absolutely critical trahison des clercs.

Take a historical perspective: We didn’t start teaching American Lit until the late twenties.And those mostly at the state universities where ignoring student proclivities was fiscal suicide. The preceding half century English professors had struggled for permission to teach contemporary English literature. For centuries to be humanistically educated was to know Latin and Greek. Now I went to an old fashioned high school (actually a Roman Catholic seminary!) where I loved studying both Latin and Greek.

But before I chose a second career as a cultural reporter (It too will add up to thirty years in 2012!), I had started to internationalize my contemporary literature courses. It began with my including black Americans and white Appalachians. Then I included Canadian and Caribbean Lit in English—at a splendid seminar with Michael Harper, Seamus Heaney, and the so-called Jamaican Thomas Jefferson.

When I taught summers in London I stretched it to include African Lit in English, especially after doing my homework in Senegal at the First Negro Arts Festival in 1964 and the Commonwealth Education Conference in Nigeria in 1966.

Finally we included Oceania, from which the Australian Robert Frost, A.D. Hope gave a powerful reading. Am Lit plus Commonwealth Lit, I argued, amounts to International English Literature. Post McLuhan, with media whenever possible. That rubric guides my exploratory readings to this very day.

Wake up, MLA. It’s never too late to learn! Look what happened to our literary ancestors in Greek and Latin who tried to Atlas their way in the humanities. There are only a few of them professionally extant, like Mary Beard of TLS, keeping a sharp eye on crucial sectors of the past. And they are indispensable, but only a crucial part of our strategy of humanizing the masses. Our first responsibility is identifying the best being thought in our generation, and seeing that our contemporaries have adequate access to those complex enough emerging realities.