I begin with a problem: The literature curriculum as it’s currently designed is untenable.
I present this as practical problem, not an ideological one. For generations, most literature departments have employed a literary historical approach. To perform literary history, English departments have used a coverage model: one professor to cover medieval, another to cover early modern, another for the long eighteenth century, and so forth. (For the sake of focus and efficiency, I draw my examples from my own discipline of English, but most literary fields have their own versions of the problem I’m describing here. Nor is the problem confined to literature. Many of the humanistic social sciences rely on similar coverage metaphors to organize their disciplines.)
The problem is simply that most departments don’t have enough people to cover the historical range anymore, even when people wear more than one historical hat. Once, Gerald Graff observes, conflict “could be muffled by the expedient of adding another unit to an aggregate that remains unchanged” (250). Those times are long gone. The COVID-19 pandemic has severely contracted faculty ranks in recent times, but the academic job market has been squeezed for much longer than that.1
The problem does not result simply from a downturn in the number of faculty positions. There has been a corresponding rise in what may be covered. This disjunction isn’t new, of course. It received trenchant expression some years ago in a widely circulated 2009 essay by the English-professor-turned-college-president William Chace. No dispassionate observer, Chace laments what English “has done to itself.” He deplores cultural studies in particular, especially how it has “dismember[ed] the curriculum” by inviting the consideration of a wide variety of textual artifacts: “myriad pursuits, each heading away from any notion of a center.” Chace complains that “everything now is porous, hazy, and open to never-ending improvisation, cancellation, and rupture.” The resulting lack of “order to the curriculum”—especially a movement away from traditional literary texts—leads Chace to question what “the profession of literature amounts to.”
We might dismiss Chace as a curmudgeon whose rearguard action merits little attention—except for the skills-based solution he proposes to meet the incoherence he sees. But before considering his proposal, I present a few further observations concerning the problem.
Chace is surely correct that the traditional canon has been expanding. It has done so for at least fifty years, but the motivation behind the expansion is hardly malign. For good reasons related to social justice and representation of marginalized and formerly silenced groups, the list of necessary specialties—and necessary books—has grown beyond the ability of a single department to cover them all. The result has been a kind of canonical entropy: the center doesn’t hold anymore. The coverage metaphor is bankrupt.2
Most English departments haven’t done much to address this reality on an intellectual level. The main solutions amount to curricular Band-Aids. Some English departments have introduced “tracks” within the major (creative writing, rhetoric, or topic studies such as ecology, gender and sexuality, and literary-historical areas) in the hope that students might cobble together out of distributional requirements an English major that suits them. This may work in practice (and I believe it holds promise for that reason), but it does not answer the question of what the study of English is—or ought to be.
Other departments employ vitiated literary-historical approaches, also accomplished through distributional requirements: students might be required to take two courses in literature before 1800, at least two before 1900, and so on. But the result is not so much conceptual unity as an enrollment system that funnels bodies into the classrooms of professors with different specialties, historical and otherwise.
That’s the problem. Now let’s view it in relation to the history of American higher education. In the United States, the general public has long viewed higher education as an opportunity to acquire expertise that can be put to professional use. That idea asserted itself early. One of the founders of Princeton expressed it this way: “Though our great Intention was to erect a seminary for educating Ministers of the Gospel, yet we hope it will be useful in other learned professions—Ornaments of the State as well as the Church. Therefore we propose to make the plan of education as extensive as our circumstances will admit” (Pemberton 199). This emphasis on use value will be familiar to any observer of higher education today. My point is that in America this idea is so old that it emerged before the United States was even founded.
This utility-based aim became more specific when research universities came to the United States in the postbellum era. Private and public research universities were founded in great numbers during the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. During this same time the middle class was coalescing as a social identity. (That is, people started thinking of themselves as “middle class” and describing themselves that way.) In the United States, the simultaneous rise of college education and middle-class professionalization created a need for credentialed expertise to demonstrate one’s membership in this newly visible professional class. University presidents recognized the value of meeting that need, and the resulting intertwined coil of higher education, middle-classness, and professional credentials forms part of the DNA of American higher education.3
In English, the content of a graduate’s credentialed expertise was first filled by philology. Philology gradually gave way to literary history, which was interrupted by the New Criticism after World War II. Literary history then reasserted itself.4 “Literary history” was the content-based answer to “What does an English major know?” It remains the main answer to that question, even though the expanded canon—not a bad thing!—has fragmented that history from the student’s point of view, and the shrinking of department faculty ranks has made that history increasingly difficult to teach.
Where does that leave us? At the key word of my title: skills.
When we talk about what students learn from an English major—or any humanities major, for that matter—we don’t stop at literary history. Instead, we may expect to hear phrases like, “We teach critical thinking,” “We teach clear and concise expository writing,” and other such true statements. Critical thinking and clear writing are skills, not historical “content.” Accordingly, gatekeepers allow them into the forum, but only if they stand at the back. Those writing and thinking skills—along with the important skill of close reading—have always been part of what English instructors teach students. And those skills increasingly define what we teach our students, in part because of the breakdown of the literary historical curriculum that I have described.
Let’s now return to Chace, who says that he is eager to “map a way out of this academic dead end.” His advice to English departments: teach writing, and double down on the value of doing so. English departments, recommends Chace,
should place their courses in composition and rhetoric at the forefront of their activities. They should announce that the teaching of composition is a skill their instructors have mastered and that students majoring in English will be certified, upon graduation, as possessing rigorously tested competence in prose expression. Those students will thus carry with them, into employment interviews or into further educational training, a proficiency everywhere respected but too often lacking among college graduates.
To do so, Chace says, will turn a recognized “liability and a second-rate activity into a sizable asset.” As all graduate students and faculty members in English know, teaching composition is a low-caste activity. Chace notes that college writing teachers “are among the lowest paid of any who hold forth in a classroom; most, though possessing doctoral degrees, are ineligible for tenure or promotion; their offices are often small and crowded; their scholarship is rarely considered worthy of comparison with ‘literary’ scholarship.”
If this solution is so simple, why aren’t English departments considering it? That’s the rub. The answer lies in the vexed reputation of skills.
When we talk about what students learn from an English major—or any humanities major, for that matter—we don’t stop at literary history. Instead, we may expect to hear phrases like, “We teach critical thinking,” “We teach clear and concise expository writing,” and other such true statements. Critical thinking and clear writing are skills, not historical “content.”
During a visit to a Midwestern university in 2022 I got into an informal conversation about skills with an advanced graduate student, a dean, and a visiting former foundation president (who started as a faculty member at a different Midwestern university). We were talking about whether skills should drive the liberal arts curriculum.
All of them objected to the word skills.
The graduate student said that skills sounds like what you do when you capitulate to the capitalist system. The dean said that skills sounds like “something that a robot would do.” The former foundation president said that “skills sounds like it’s not even college.” To him, the word suggests manual labor.
Why the many-sided opposition? What makes skills a dirty word in so many academic hallways?
First of all, there’s the idea that skills is a stalking horse for service. The fear is that if departments embrace a skill-centered mission, English and other humanistic disciplines will wind up as service departments. Everyone in English will teach freshman composition all the time, and research will be just a memory. (Other departments have their own version of this fear.) I’m not going to deny that this is a risk.
A second, related, concern is that a focus on skills will weaken professors’ professional identity as researchers. That identity actually evolved fairly recently—it’s a Cold War development. Only when the federal government started investing in universities as a source of innovation (to compete with the USSR in the space race, the arms race, and elsewhere) did many professors gain the resources to allow them to think of themselves as researchers first and teachers second.5
The professional identity of humanists as researchers is surely under threat right now. The threat is decades old, and it’s growing more dire. The opposition comes from students, parents, and sometimes state legislators who take a narrow view of what academics do—and who often focus on our role as teachers of skills.
But that doesn’t mean that teaching skills is the problem—or that we should be viewing it only as a Trojan horse. As I suggested, the pursuit of skills has been a goal of American academia since its beginnings. We deny that fact at our peril.
Laurence R. Veysey argues that the American research university is driven by three imperatives: research, utility, and “liberal culture” (an idealized, individual freedom of thought, informed by education in the liberal arts). These three interests don’t work in harmony in Veysey’s model; they compete for resources. One and then another has gained the edge at different historical moments at different institutions, but the tension among them endures. Imagine a triangle in which each corner pulls against the other two. That tension, Veysey argued, has shaped the culture of American higher education.
The three vertices of Veysey’s triangle can maintain distance from one another when there’s enough rain to water the gardens of all three camps. But we’re in a time of literal and figurative climate change. The drought in higher education is forcing everyone closer together, jostling to irrigate their gardens from the same limited source. That’s creating conflict.
The professional identity of humanists as researchers is surely under threat right now. The threat is decades old, and it’s growing more dire. The opposition comes from students, parents, and sometimes state legislators who take a narrow view of what academics do—and who often focus on our role as teachers of skills. . . . But that doesn’t mean that teaching skills is the problem—or that we should be viewing it only as a Trojan horse.
It’s safe to say that the utility vertex of the Veysey triangle is winning the three-way tug-of-war. Preprofessional majors like business threaten the traditional liberal arts curriculum. Everyone, including state lawmakers and tuition-paying parents, seems to be questioning the “usefulness” of majors that don’t provide explicit training for specific jobs.
Even in 1965, when American academia was flush with government money and growing at a rate seen neither before nor since, Veysey was a disappointed utopian. He saw these enduring oppositions, and he saw the way that universities sublimated the debates between them.6 Maybe, nearly sixty years after Veysey wrote about them in The Emergence of the American University, we should look more closely at the meaning of those oppositions. Why do these three elements have to oppose one another?
John Guillory argues in his magisterial 2022 book Professing Criticism that “Literary study became a profession before it became a discipline” (vii). He means that literary study behaved like a profession (including behaviors like founding the MLA) before the members of that profession fully understood or agreed upon what their profession entailed. That is, the shifting definition of the expertise that we’re supposed to be teaching dates from an original instability in that definition. Our expertise was never fully clear even to us—and Marjorie Perloff’s 2006 complaint that “we literary scholars, it is tacitly assumed, have no definable expertise” is really a recycling of very old news (qtd. in Chace).7
With that history in mind, as well as the current exigencies that beset the humanities from all sides, we ought to be more generous to new, more pragmatic formulations of our mission. Resistance arises, explains Eric Hayot, because faculty members are “loss-averse, so much that they won’t make changes even in the face of death” (Interview). Simply put, we’re not succeeding with what we’ve got, so we must chart a sustainable path forward.
Hayot is one of a very few humanists who has tried to develop a new rationale for humanistic study. He starts from first principles—most important, that students should want to take the classes. “What if,” Hayot asks, “we reorganized the undergraduate curriculum around a set of concepts that instead of foregrounding training in the graduate disciplines, foregrounded topics, skills, and ideas central to humanistic work and central to the interests of students?” (“Humanities”). To structure this reorganization, Hayot proposes a series of curricular “modules.”
Not surprisingly—because students care about acquiring them—some of these modules center on skills. These would include “language learning, writing and speaking, historical, cultural, and social analysis.” “Theme modules” would focus on “topics,” including contemporary and historical subjects (“Humanities”).8
Humanists, says Hayot, should “lean into writing and making in a way that we don’t now” (Interview). That’s good advice in both concept and practice. After all, faculty members rely on their own skills—as opposed to the facts that they know—more than they want to let on. David Porter, a professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, reconsidered the meaning of his expertise when he taught a professional development seminar to graduate students a few years ago: “I thought about the use of my dissertation in my career, and I realized that for me, too, it was about the methods, about learning how” (qtd. in Cassuto). As Robert Frost says, “It’s knowing what to do with things that counts” (my emphasis).
With these ideas in mind, I will conclude with an example devised by the English department at Marquette University. It’s a proposed blueprint for a reformed graduate program in English. The graduate-level focus gives force to the argument, because the fear of emphasizing skills is even more pronounced in graduate education than at the undergraduate level. Here is how Marquette English faculty members have reconceived their mission:
The English graduate program values the broad diversity of our students’ objectives and strives to help them to fulfill their unique goals for their futures. In recent years, the program has moved away from a model that privileged narrow coverage of literary time periods and traditions as its primary organizing principle and has focused instead on the following goals:
- Training students in the methodologies of literary, cultural, and writing studies.
- Helping students cultivate high-order critical and creative thinking skills that prepare them for a wide range of futures.
- Preparing students to teach thoughtful, high-impact courses in a number of different settings. In recent years, we have also developed a framework for students to be trained in antiracist pedagogy and issues related to equity and justice in relation to teaching reading and writing, assessment, and class design.
- Preparing students to perform independent, original research and write up this research in a compelling way that is responsive to the demands of academic and various public audiences.
- Fostering a sense of curiosity and awareness in students that is interdisciplinary and in tune with the realities of our world, and helping students become self-aware of what they are learning in graduate school and how that learning prepares them for a diverse set of future pathways.
- Offering students at least one significant professional development experience in their training. This might be achieved by working in the Ott Memorial Writing Center or the Center for Advancement of the Humanities or, more recently, in campus offices such as the Office of Mission and Ministry.
- Preparing students to be able to translate their skills to a multitude of settings and to demonstrate the distinctive preparation that they have gotten in their English graduate education. (“Envisioning”)
This version of English study places skills at the center of the enterprise. I’ve italicized some of the language that spotlights the pedagogical aim of developing expertise not in disciplinary content but methods. This version of “skills” doesn’t look like robotics, neoliberalism, or manual labor. Instead, it’s an example of student-centered education—which is something colleges and universities need more of.
These curricular changes at Marquette are, not surprisingly, motivated by necessity, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad. And they make more sense than a historical approach that we can no longer support or sustain. It’s past time that we gave ideas like these a try.
Notes
1 The diminishing professoriat is not a status quo that we must take as an immutable given. But amid efforts to change it, colleges and universities must still teach. I aim at that latter need here.
2 I draw the idea of the coverage metaphor from my reading of Graff’s Professing Literature, esp. 101–02.
3 This broad account owes much to Bledstein.
4 I am necessarily being schematic here. Graff questions the widely held view that the New Criticism was ahistorical: “It would be more accurate to say that the New Critics accepted and worked within the view of history held by most literary historians of their time” (183).
5 I refer here to the prestige pyramid that governs the academic profession. Of course, professors with higher teaching loads may think of themselves as teachers first and researchers second, but the research universities that train everyone throughout the pyramid communicate the research-first values that shape professorial ambition across the arts and sciences. The influence of the research university has created an ethos that privileges research over teaching.
6 Graff has a witty and salient aphorism that describes this tendency: “A university is a curious accretion of historical conflicts that it has systematically forgotten” (257).
7 Like Chace, Guillory is suspicious of cultural studies, which he sees as diluting the authority of literary scholars: “If literature is the basis of our entitlement to enter the public sphere, what does this imply for our public-facing representation of what we do?” (80). In short, Guillory suggests that literary scholars should stay in their lane.
8 Hayot elaborates his curricular plan further in Humanist Reason.
Works Cited
Bledstein, Burton R. The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America. W. W. Norton, 1978.
Cassuto, Leonard. “Can You Train Your Ph.D.s for Diverse Careers When You Don’t Have One?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 Aug. 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/can-you-train-your-ph-d-s-for-diverse-careers-when-you-dont-have-one/.
Chace, William. “The Decline of the English Department.” The American Scholar, autumn 2009, theamericanscholar.org/the-decline-of-the-english-department/.
“Envisioning the Future of the Marquette English Ph.D.” Unpublished document prepared by members of the Marquette University Department of English, 2022.
Frost, Robert. “At Woodward’s Gardens.” 1936. The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged, edited by Edward Connery Lathem, Henry Holt, 1969, pp. 293–94.
Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. U of Chicago P, 1986.
Guillory, John. Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. U of Chicago P, 2022.
Hayot, Eric. Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan. Columbia UP, 2021.
———. “The Humanities Have a Marketing Problem.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 Mar. 2021, www.chronicle.com/article/the-humanities-have-a-marketing-problem.
———. Interview. Conducted by Leonard Cassuto, 20 June 2023.
Pemberton, Ebenezer. Letter. Ca. 1748–50. A Princeton Companion, edited by Alexander Leitch, Princeton UP, 1978, p. 199.
Veysey, Laurence R. The Emergence of the American University. U of Chicago P, 1965.
Leonard Cassuto is professor of English at Fordham University. In addition to writing and editing books on American literature and culture, Cassuto authors The Graduate Adviser column for the Chronicle of Higher Education. His most recent book is Academic Writing as if Readers Matter.