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Making the Case for What Matters:  

The Future of the English Department 

JANINE UTELL 

Widener University 

 

 

Almost a year ago, I was standing in the hallway outside the office of Congressman 

Glenn Thompson, representative for the Fifth Congressional District of Pennsylvania (the 

one that includes Penn State). I’d never been in the Cannon Building — I’d never been in 

any legislative building of any kind — and I had an odd sense of gratitude. I felt grateful 

that I could walk into that building as an informed, concerned citizen, and make an 

argument for — advocate for — something I know is important. 

I was there as part of Humanities Advocacy Day, an annual event devoted to lobbying 

members of Congress for increased (or at least maintained) support for the humanities: 

the National Endowment for the Humanities, local humanities councils, and fellowship 

programs such as the Fulbright. The National Humanities Alliance gathers 

representatives from organizations devoted to the humanities, from universities, museums 

and libraries, for its yearly meeting. It offers panels and roundtables on current issues and 

research in the humanities, and then trains participants to lobby using portfolios of data, 

up-to-the-minute status of legislation before Congress, and budget priorities. I traveled to 

this meeting as an individual, a faculty member, and as chair of the English department at 

a small-to-mid-sized regional comprehensive metropolitan university that tries to 

integrate the liberal arts with work in professional fields like nursing. I did so because I 

believe the future of the English department rests in the hands of those willing to 

advocate for its work and values, those ready to make the argument for its necessity, 

those equipped to be vocal both on campus and beyond. 

 

The writers participating in this roundtable all come from fairly traditional academic 

backgrounds and training, but all are intensely cognizant of the ways the field is 

changing. All are paying close attention — at conferences, in conversations facilitated by 

social media, on the tenure track and off — and all are thinking about how to expand and 

redefine the role of the English department and their own place in it (or outside of it). 

Academics who identify as members of the discipline of English are active in the open 

access movement, the alternative academic (or alt-ac) movement, the digital humanities 

movement. All of these are transforming how we think about doing English, and these 

currents can be felt in the rarefied air of the Modern Language Association as well as in 

community colleges, four-year schools, research libraries, centers and institutes and 

councils devoted to the study and proliferation of the humanities.  



49    Utell 

 
 

This brief capsule actually makes it sound as though the field of English studies is 

dynamic, exciting, innovative. We are, and have always been, in a sense, the original 

disruptors. The ideas to be gleaned from the texts we study and teach still have the power 

to transform. In the 1920s and 30s we made the radical case that students should have the 

opportunity to study poetry published in their lifetime, and that the study thereof was 

even worth doing in college. In the 1970s and 80s we cracked open the edifice of the 

ivory tower to let in new ideas about race, class, gender, and ideology. Even today, as 

higher education professionals appropriate language from the Harvard Business Review 

blog and talk about “innovative disruption,” “flipping” their classrooms by having 

students actually prepare material outside of class (i.e., do homework) and come in ready 

to discuss and problem-solve, we scratch our heads and say: well, we’ve been doing that. 

We create a space for the enthusiastic exchange of ideas, and we bring students into it.  

So, then why all the talk about decline? Why all the concern about relevance? A 

number of factors have been cited as causing the “decline” of the humanities, and of 

English in particular. Commentators have suggested the corporatization of the university 

is to blame; Frank Donoghue in The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the 

Fate of the Humanities (2008) describes the current academic workplace as exploitative 

and competitive, not the hothouse of ideas scholars in the humanities had been somehow 

led to believe they would find upon completing a Ph.D. Faculty are preoccupied with 

chasing publications and grants, administrators are obsessed with outcomes and 

productivity, and everyone is serving on too many committees. Donoghue also notes a 

fundamental tension between teaching and research that pulls at humanities scholars; 

more so than other fields, the humanities, especially English, is defined in large part by 

labor-intensive teaching, usually in writing. While many teacher-scholars of English 

imagined themselves reading and discussing the texts they love, writing and doing 

research, what a large number of English faculty wind up doing is teaching, and teaching 

writing — often in a perilous state of contingency, and often with great commitment to 

excellence. Those numbers are growing, and are being held increasingly accountable, 

even with no power and few resources, for data that shows students cannot read, write, or 

think (as demonstrated in Arum and Roksa’s recent Academically Adrift: Limited 

Learning on College Campuses (2011)). 

Calls for data, for evidence-based assessment, stem from a need, whether perceived or 

actual, to make claims for the value of higher education, particularly in the face of ever-

rising tuition. This leads directly into asking explicitly whether a degree in English is 

“worth” what a student might pay in tuition, and whether such a degree might lead to 

gainful employment that will offset student loan debt sufficiently to allow a graduate to 

survive. Media outlets ranging from NPR to the Wall Street Journal to the New York 

Daily News interrogate the worth of a liberal arts degree on an almost weekly basis, and 

members of English departments everywhere have wrung their hands in desperation at 

having to answer for it as they watch the numbers of majors and the size of enrollments 



Making the Case for What Matters  50 

dwindle. In an article for The American Scholar, William M. Chace outlines the issues 

raised above, and then turns on the discipline itself with a withering critique: we have 

destroyed ourselves by neglecting the tradition we have been charged with sustaining. He 

writes: 

 

I have long wanted to believe that I am a member of a profession, a discipline to 

which I could, if fortunate, add my knowledge and skill. I have wanted to believe 

that this discipline had certain borders and limitations and that there were essential 

things to know, to preserve, and to pass on. But it turns out that everything now is 

porous, hazy, and open to never-ending improvisation, cancellation, and rupture. 

 

While it is true that the discipline has been fractured — the culture wars are a favorite 

scapegoat for this, but Louis Menand in The Marketplace of Ideas (2010) has a more 

reasoned exploration of the role of the move towards interdisciplinarity as well — it does 

not necessarily follow that the preserving of tradition is all an English department in the 

twenty-first century is good for.  

I read much of what I’ve outlined here as a resistance to making a case for our own 

relevance and for what we can and should do in the twenty-first century. Much of the 

discourse around “the crisis in the humanities” hearkens back to a time when the 

relevance, even necessity, of the English department was taken for granted as 

foundational to the liberal arts education. We must be in decline, these voices say, if we 

have to convince people we matter, especially as the numbers of majors appear to be 

falling and English courses are being cut from general education curricula. I do not 

consider having to make a case for the importance of what I do a “crisis”; I consider it an 

opportunity to share what I do and the value it brings to my students, my school, and my 

society. When I attend the annual meeting of the National Humanities Alliance and hear 

what is being done in archives, in digital humanities, in public history, I cannot fathom 

why anyone would say the humanities are moribund. Some of the most exciting work — 

and some of the best investments in public monies — are happening in the humanities. 

When I walk into the office of an elected representative and am given the opportunity to 

speak on behalf of my discipline, and on behalf of my students who are investing time 

and money in the study of that discipline, I am doing my job as a member of that 

discipline. And when I present data to my colleagues and administrators that show our 

students have made gains in writing and critical thinking as a result of their study of 

literature, I am doing my job as a faculty member and a department chair. I may believe 

that the study of literature provides, as Kenneth Burke wrote, “equipment for living,” and 

I communicate that position to my students in my teaching, but as an advocate for my 

students, my faculty, and my discipline, I work to provide hard evidence for that idea as 

well.   



51    Utell 

 
 

The future of the English department does not have to involve online courses and for-

profit universities; such things may very well lead to the “death of the humanities,” as 

was suggested by Aurelien Mondon and Gerhard Hoffstaedter in a recent piece for the 

Guardian. But we should not be considering this gloomy prediction from a position of 

fear for our own status. Rather we should be mindful of how trends in higher education 

compromise the very things we believe the humanities, and study of English should do: 

engage the mind, demand the asking of big questions, foster the ability to craft an 

argument with nuance and complexity, sharpen the eye for details and their significance. 

And if we believe in these things, then they are worth our attempts to argue for them, and 

we should. The nimbleness of mind we seek in our own interpretive work, and that we 

encourage in our students, might be brought to bear on these shifts in our professional 

lives. In order to convince students to join our departments, colleagues to save a place 

(preferably the cornerstone) for us in general education curricula, and administrators to 

see that we bring value to our campus, we must model that nimbleness, and cultivate an 

investment so deep in what we do that we are willing to take to the hustings to defend it 

— in a way that makes sense to multiple constituencies and takes into account their 

multiple perspectives. Because it matters. 

 

 

Works Cited 

 
Arum, Richard, and Josipa Roksa. 2011. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on 

College Campuses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Burke, Kenneth. 1938. “Literature as Equipment for Living.” Direction 1: 10-13. 

Chace, William M. 2013. “The Decline of the English Department.” The American 

Scholar. Web. Accessed 14 January 2013. 

Donoghue, Frank. 2008. The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate 

of the Humanities. New York: Fordham University Press. 

Menand, Louis. 2010. The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the 

American University. New York: Norton. 

Mondon, Aurelien, and Gerhard Hoffstaedter. 2012. “Could Online Courses Be the 

Death of the Humanities?” The Guardian 7 December. Web. Accessed 14 January 

2013. 

 

 

 


