Source: Bigstock

To give you some perspective on how the teaching of the humanities has changed, the big debate at Vanderbilt at the time was not about declining enrollment in English, but declining enrollment in Latin and Greek. There were still a lot of us taking Latin and Greek, just not as many as in previous decades.

The recent articles about the decline of majors in English, philosophy, history, anthropology, art history, and the like—often to the point of just getting rid of entire departments—are helpful in understanding the mind of the millennial and the postmillennial, because they point out what the new popular majors are:

Homeland Security
Parks and Recreation
Health Care
Forensic Science
Marketing
Fitness Studies
Firefighting
Law Enforcement
Nursing
Business
Data Science
Accounting
Statistics

Excuse me, but I’m starting to doze off. That all sounds like really grown-up stuff. That’s why I say I’m an addict. When I was in college, I did childish things like staying up all night because I couldn’t stop reading The Sun Also Rises, going to the library day after day to battle my way through The Faerie Queene, and sneaking some whiskey into the offices of The Hustler—the campus newspaper where many of us worked—so we could all commemorate the return of graded Blue Books from the spring exam in Elizabethan Lit. It could have gone either way—drunken condolences or boisterous celebration—and I’m happy to say that we reveled.

We were addicts frittering away our lives. Thank God they don’t give that stuff to impressionable students anymore.

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