A Crisis of Confidence, Vol. 6

Work begins in earnest this week, as Number One Son goes back to school, as we settle into the Fall routine, and as I get ready for my slate of classes for the term.

Before that, though, comes the annual department "retreat" (the word "retreat" is misleading because it's only an all-day meeting...apparently you can use department funds for food at a department "retreat" but not for food at a mere "meeting."), in which we will discuss yet again how to increase the visibility and appeal of the major for the sake of numbers.  We will discuss how to communicate the benefits of the degree, how to attract more students to the major, whether nor not to purchase marketing materials, and so on.

This all puts me at a real disadvantage because I am torn between the institutional demands of the department and the demand of truthfulness.  More specifically, I can tell people that the English major is important--but I can't truthfully say it's important for the reasons I am "supposed" to say it's important.  Especially nowadays.  I can no longer tell students that graduate study is a good option.  I cannot tell students, given the employment climate they are likely to experience for the foreseeable future, that a humanities degree will be useful for getting them a job.  I've taken to hedging, saying that English is a good degree because it meshes well with just about anything else and allows you to heighten and broaden the strengths you already possess.  The problem is, to really benefit from a degree in the traditional humanities (English, History, Philosophy), a student has to invest more time reading than everyone else, has to figure out how to join the various disciplines into a unified whole, and has to love learning for its own sake.  Put bluntly, almost none of my students have that ability--or even that desire.

In a climate where everyone wants to know how their education dollars are contributing to measurable results, it's hard to be a cheerleader for my discipline--at least the way it is currently practiced.