The Guardian view on humanities in universities: closing English Literature courses signals a crisis | Humanities

The announcement that Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent is ceasing to offer Degrees in English Literature let several rabbits run, most of them in the wrong direction. The university actually said that hardly anyone wanted to study English literature at degree level any more and therefore the course was no longer viable. If you can’t do English in Chaucer and Marlowe’s town, where can you do it?

The history of Canterbury is familiar. EngLit is wholesale retreat at A level, down from 83,000 in 2013. to 54,000 in 2023, with university enrollment also declining over the past decade, although statistics are challenged as the subject is studied at degree level in many forms, including creative writing and linguistics. In general, humanities subjects seem to be losing their edge appealwith only 38% of students taking a course in 2021/22, a drop of almost 60% between 2003/4 and 2015/16.

Tuition fees and the need to study a subject chosen to recoup the student’s significant investment are likely to remain behind the decline. The dangerous The state of university finances is also leading to deep cuts – leading to the loss of respected ones chemistry course in Hull last week. But most worrying is the widespread closure of arts and humanities departments – art, music, drama, dance – with institutions such as Goldsmiths, Oxford Brookes and Surrey shedding hundreds of academics.

EngLit might seem like an easy target. The study of Beowulf is no longer as attractive as it was when the state paid. Meanwhile, those on the liberal side of the argument blame 2013. of Michael Gove curriculum reforms that ushered in an era of content-heavy courses assessed by final exams. Successive Tory education ministers have also praised science and technology while deriding the career prospects of arts graduates.

Studying literature is inherently a good thing. Virginia Woolf, who was humiliated by her father’s reluctance to let her go to university, saw books as a way to transcend herself. The university should be concerned with the promotion of rational inquiry and the free play of the intellect; it’s not about creating useful drones, and it’s a shame that the training fees have made the experience somewhat transactional. Courses should challenge students by emphasizing decoding of texts rather than cursory skimming.

The closure of the Canterbury Christ Church University course coincided with the National Literacy Trust report revealing that only 35% of 8- to 18-year-olds like to read for pleasure – a drop of nearly 9 percentage points in a year. Reading rates are declining, the gender gap is widening, and the reasons range from the dominance of social media to library closures and shrinking attention spans. (Should we read anything into this year’s brevity Booker Prize Winner? (How would our mutual friend fare?) Some school teachers suggest replacing Dickens with social media studies, but, as Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop might argue: “To an extent, Lord Copper.”

We should be concerned about the closure of the EngLit course at Canterbury. The universities are in a shocking state, and the new government has only just begun the Herculean task of stabilizing the sector. This is more than an institutional failure. It signals a cultural shift that risks leaving future generations without the critical, empathic, and intellectual tools provided by literature. “There is no friend so faithful as a book,” said Hemingway. Relying on Instagram influencers can only take you so far. We still need it Our mutual friend.