Enrolment in my university is up. I feel this most when I’m looking for a parking spot, when I join the line of a dozen other cars nudging around the lot looking for a space like little silver balls in plastic travel maze. But with enough persistence I can still find a spot. How’s that for a metaphor for life? Yet with the increased enrolment of all these non-carpooling, non-public transporting students (which I am neither, so I suppose I’m now just a hypocrite) I can’t find any of these new students in my department! Enrolment in the Humanities is down, and if I have to be honest it doesn’t really surprise me.
When I tell people that I’m doing an English degree I have the same conversation almost every time.
“What are you doing in school?”
“I’m doing an English degree.”
“Oh, you want to be a teacher.”
“No, not really.”
“Oh, so what do you want to do?”
“I want to do an English degree.”
“Yes, but for a job.”
“Oh, well ideally I’d like to write, and hopefully be a professor. But mostly I want to do an English degree.”
“Ahh...hmm...oh.”
At which point I inwardly roll my eyes and tell them I have no problem being a well-read waitress. Then, they usually change the subject or think of an excuse to walk away. Evidently people don’t understand the point of an English degree.
I can sympathize with these questioners, especially parents. There is no how-to manual for getting a job with an English degree. It’s not like going into tourism or hospitality or business. You go to school and take accounting to become an accountant. You go to school to take dental hygiene then chances are you’re going to be working with a dentist (and wearing those comfy scrubs!) But with an English degree you’re not going into career training, you’re going into mind training. So why do an English degree?
First I think that over the last fifty years we have seen a drastic change in the way people find and secure their careers. You can see from the change in media, technology and priorities in our everyday lives, that in order to succeed you need to be able to adapt. What is important throughout all these changes and choices is the ability to communicate. With an English degree you study rhetoric and persuasion. The ability to develop and defend an argument sets any English student up to sell themselves.
Secondly, writers are needed everywhere. Public relations, government, publishing, fundraising and charity organizations, global conferencing, advertising, the list goes on. Restaurants need menus written, hotels need brochures and website content, museums and theatres need to communicate with the community, minorities and special interest groups need to be heard, again the list goes on. Anyone who does anything needs to tell someone else they’re doing it – and an English degree prepares the student to convey this message intelligently, clearly, and with persuasion.
Finally, my medieval professor said it best, I think. She asked my second year Chaucer class why we thought this 600 year old literature should still be studied. Half the class sat in silent contemplation, or maybe on their laptops checking Facebook, as these things go. The rest of us discussed how medieval literature plays an important role in the evolution of the literature we see today. Literature of the past can also serve as a bridge between the literature that came even before it, and the contemporary literature of today. You’d be amazed how much literature is a reinterpretation or recreation of a classic myth. But my professor said simply, if we don’t study it, it will be lost, and don’t you think that is a shame?
Authors, like other artists, record a contemplative history of the world around them. Books have changed the world. Books are not elitist. The same book can be read by those who make the rules and those who break them. When Mary Wollstonecraft wrote Vindication of the Rights of Women she breathed into the growing breeze that started to move the marble that etched out the path of feminism. As a literary student, you can join into the debate on how much influence she really had. Victorian authors such as Thomas Hardy and Elizabeth Gaskell painted a picture of the exhausting and suffocating conditions of the working class in nineteenth century England. Is it fair to the people who lived through those conditions that they are forgotten, even though there is a permanent record in print of their lives? Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart in a response to his colonizers who believed that they were the masters of literature and the most powerful voice. With an English degree one can contribute to the ongoing debate of humanity, the speculation of truth, and what in the world is important. To me, there will always be people to crunch numbers and clean teeth. But someone will always want to say something, and someone else should listen.
