The Decline of Literature
Or Why English Departments Hate Literature
The cathedral-builders had ideas. The bureaucrats who inherited the cathedral had careers.
In 1971, English was not a boutique illness for over-verbal melancholics. It was a major civilizational organ. English language and literature accounted for roughly 7.6% of all U.S. bachelor’s degrees. By 2021, that share had fallen to about 2.8%. The humanities as a whole are bleeding too: in 2024, U.S. colleges and universities awarded 165,489 humanities bachelor’s degrees, 30% below the 2012 high-water mark; English itself was down 43% from 2012 to 2024. This is not a vibe shift. This is institutional organ failure with a dean’s signature on the chart.
The polite explanation is tuition pressure, STEM prestige, bad job markets, screen addiction, and student pragmatism. All true. All incomplete. The real story is uglier.
English departments did not die because students stopped loving literature.
They died because the institutions hired people who loved the institutional management of literature more than literature itself.
The cathedral-builders had ideas. The bureaucrats who inherited the cathedral had careers.
Liza Libes and the Catechism of Suspicion
In her Pens and Poison video, Liza Libes tells the story of arriving at Columbia expecting the humanistic tradition and discovering instead a curriculum already colonized by theory-first suspicion. She expected Athens and got HR metaphysics with a bibliography.
The perfect emblem comes early: her first English seminar assigned Edward Said on Mansfield Park before assigning Mansfield Park. Worse, according to Libes, Austen’s novel was not even on the semester reading list. The student did not meet the work. She met the approved prosecution of the work.
Pause there. That is the whole institutional disease in miniature.
Not Austen. Said-on-Austen.
Not art. Approved interpretation.
Not reading. Catechism.
The novel enters the room already shackled. The critic stands at the altar. The student is taught not to ask “What is this work doing?” but “What is this work guilty of?”
That is not pedagogy. That is ritual conditioning.
And ritual matters.
Ceremony is politics. Curriculum is ceremony. They won the ceremony.
A syllabus is not a list of readings. It is a civilization’s attention-map. It tells young minds what must be loved, what must be doubted, what must be prosecuted, what must be inherited, and what must be ritually disowned. When the first sacrament is not the book but the indictment of the book, students learn the real doctrine immediately: literature is not a living inheritance; it is evidence at the trial.
Libes describes the pattern spreading outward: Marx, Judith Butler, theory everywhere, literature increasingly treated as a delivery system for approved readings about power, gender, race, oppression, and social justice. She is careful enough to say that justice can be one part of literature’s concern. But in her account, it became the only legitimate concern. The book could speak, but only after ideology frisked it at the door.
By graduate school, she says, the disease had metastasized: no literature, just theory. Critiques of Their Eyes Were Watching God without reading Their Eyes Were Watching God. Interpretation without encounter. Scholarship without the thing itself. Autopsy without a body.
This is how literature is murdered without banning a single book.
You keep the title. You keep the department. You keep the seminar table. You keep the sacred words: critical thinking, interpretation, inquiry, justice. Then you replace the act of reading with the ritual of suspicion.
The corpse still has a nameplate.
It Is Not Just Marxism
Calling this Marxism flatters it.
Marxism, in its original cathedral-of-error form, at least had force. It had a theory of history, material conditions, class struggle, production, alienation. Wrong in catastrophic ways, yes, but seriously wrong. Built wrong. Architecturally wrong. Wrong with stone vaults and blood in the mortar.
What captured many English departments is thinner, cheaper, and more bureaucratic: resentment dressed as scholarship.
Adam Walker’s account in The Decline of the English Department is useful precisely because it avoids reducing the whole collapse to one ideological infection. He gives the autopsy, not just the wound. He points to curriculum abandonment, the replacement of systematic literary history with choose-your-own-journey structures, tuition pressure, STEM-centered funding priorities, the rise of theory, the research model’s conquest of teaching, adjunctification, and the loss of public-facing critics.
His sharpest point is that theory itself was not necessarily the villain. The original theorists were often serious people. The rot came with the epigones: the graduate students, committee climbers, tenure hunters, and disciplinary managers who turned theory from an intellectual instrument into a credentialing ritual. In Walker’s account, the dominance of theory was not mainly promoted by the great theorists themselves, but by the following generation, who established a critical orthodoxy around ideological readings of literature.
That is the mechanism.
The cathedral-builders had ideas. The bureaucrats who inherited the cathedral had careers.
The institution did not reward love of literature. It rewarded publishable novelty, ideological legibility, committee fluency, and the ability to produce specialized scholarship read mostly by other specialists. Walker describes the post-1970s shift toward a research-driven faculty culture in which professors were evaluated far more by publication than by teaching, while undergraduate survey courses were pushed down to adjuncts and graduate students.
This matters because the English department began as a teaching discipline. It became a research bureaucracy.
And bureaucracy has different appetites.
A teacher asks: What must the student read to become more fully human?
A bureaucratic scholar asks: What can I publish that the profession will recognize as sufficiently novel, sufficiently coded, sufficiently aligned with the prestige grammar of the field?
That is how you get essays no one outside a hiring committee wants to read. That is how you get interventions instead of interpretations. That is how you get prose that moves like a corpse dragged through wet cement.
Why Bureaucracies Hate Literature
Bureaucracies do not hate literature because they are full of cartoon villains twirling mustaches over a dead copy of Keats.
They hate literature because literature resists management.
A real poem cannot be reduced to outcomes. A real novel cannot be audited into compliance. A real canon creates hierarchy. A real tradition makes demands on the living. A real encounter with beauty humbles the credentialed.
Bureaucracy cannot tolerate uncredentialed authority. And great literature is exactly that: authority without permission.
Shakespeare does not need your department chair. Dostoevsky does not need your diversity rubric. Austen does not need an assistant dean of narrative accountability. Homer does not care about your learning outcomes.
The bureaucratic mind wants literature to justify itself in administrative language. Relevance. Inclusion. Resistance. Outcomes. Impact. Professionalization. Student success. The usual beige toxins.
But literature’s deepest value is not administrative. It is formative. It builds perception. It disciplines attention. It initiates the reader into memory, ambiguity, tragedy, beauty, judgment, and the terrifying fact that the dead may know more than the living.
That is intolerable to the career-manager.
So literature must be processed. It must be made safe by being made guilty. It must be mediated by theory, supervised by ideology, translated into grievance, flattened into discourse, and finally filed under content.
That is why the bureaucratic department prefers criticism-before-text. The raw book is dangerous. The interpreted book is manageable.
The Lost Core
Walker reminds us that mid-century English curricula had a recognizable spine. Harvard’s older model included a full-year survey from Anglo-Saxon literature to modernism, major work in Chaucer, and extensive Shakespeare; not a decorative sonnet or two, but plays and poems as a serious body of work. This kind of systematic core was once common: English tradition, American literature, Shakespeare, literary history, and often world literature.
This does not mean the old canon was perfect. No canon is. Every canon is an argument, a battlefield, a weather system. It should be expanded, challenged, corrected, and deepened.
But a civilization that cannot transmit a spine will not grow new limbs. It will become curricular jelly.
The answer to a narrow canon was not no canon. The answer to inherited hierarchy was not amnesia. The answer to exclusion was not replacing literary judgment with demographic bookkeeping.
A living canon is not a museum. It is a training ground. You enter it to fight, kneel, steal fire, sharpen your ear, find your ancestors, betray them properly, and build something that can survive your own death.
But choose your own adventure curricula are easier to administer. Less conflict. Fewer fights over what matters. More menu, less meal. More consumer preference, less formation.
That is the soft death of the university: not tyranny, but options.
The Public Reader Returns
Here is the good news, and it is almost too good for the institutions to understand.
Literature does not need the English department to survive.
Walker sees this clearly. As university departments have retreated, a new movement has begun outside the academy: online reading communities, autodidacts, salons, Substacks, public lectures, classics groups, voluntary readers returning to literature for beauty, meaning, rigor, and soul-formation. He invokes Coleridge’s clerisy: not a caste of professors, but the dispersed readers, teachers, workers, and self-educators who preserve the cultural life of a people.
That is the buried coal under the institutional ash.
The National Endowment for the Arts has reported grim numbers: in 2022, only 48.5% of U.S. adults read at least one book in the past year, and only 37.6% read a novel or short story. So yes, the reading public has been damaged. The screen has eaten attention. The feed has colonized the nervous system. The algorithm has built a casino inside the skull.
And yet the counter-movement is real.
People are buying classics. Reading in groups. Writing essays for no credential. Gathering on Discord, Substack, YouTube, podcasts, living rooms, private schools, homeschool networks, small presses, and private libraries. Walker calls this renewed stewardship less bureaucratic, more intimate, less obligatory, more communal, and perhaps stronger for it.
Exactly.
The transmission is routing around the damage.
The American university mistook itself for the source of humanistic culture. It was never the source. It was one vessel. One monastery. One bridge. One machine for transmission.
And when a bridge collapses, sane people do not worship the wreckage.
They build another crossing.
Fork the Humanities
So no, the mission is not to save the English department.
That is the sentimental trap. Libes still wants restoration. Walker still wants, in his gentler formulation, both the tower and the garden. I understand the impulse. It is noble. It is also too slow for the hour.
The tower is captured, indebted, credentialized, committee-poisoned, administratively swollen, and spiritually exhausted. Some good people remain inside. Of course they do. Every dying institution has saints in the basement and cowards in the boardroom.
But the center of gravity has moved.
The doctrine is simple:
Fork the humanities. Build the parallel transmission.
Private libraries. Reading orders. Small presses. Substack salons. Public lectures. Annotated editions. YouTube seminars. Poetry circles. Sovereign archives. Homeschool curricula. Book clubs with teeth. Peer teaching without permission. Patronage for scholars who still love the thing itself.
Do not ask the corpse to dance.
Build the school.
This is not anti-intellectual. It is anti-bureaucratic. The distinction matters. The bureaucrats will blur it because bureaucracy always identifies itself with the thing it parasitizes. Criticize the university, and they say you hate learning. Criticize the department, and they say you hate literature. Criticize the credential factory, and they say you are anti-education.
No.
We love literature too much to leave it with people who treat it as a corpse for professional dissection.
The Final Choice
Walker ends with a beautiful question: will the new stewards of literature go underground like the last readers in a technocratic dark age, or will they become Renaissance figures bringing forgotten literature back into the light?
The answer is yes.
Some must be monks. Some must be Petrarchs. Some must preserve. Some must resurrect. Some must teach children Homer before the feed gets them. Some must build archives. Some must write essays like thrown bricks. Some must host the salon. Some must fund the scholar. Some must read the damn book.
The department may continue. It may even reform in places. Fine. Let every honest professor do what can be done inside the walls.
But the future of literature will not be decided by curriculum committees.
It will be decided by the clerisy: the public readers, private teachers, obsessive annotators, dissident scholars, mothers with bookshelves, fathers reading aloud, half-mad Substackers, small-press cranks, and midnight autodidacts who still believe sentences can save pieces of the soul the institutions forgot they had.
Let the department burn. Preserve the library. Rebuild the school.
The book does not need their permission.
Sources & Notes
- Liza Libes, “Why English Departments Hate Literature,” Pens and Poison, YouTube. Source transcript used for the Columbia/Said/Mansfield Park account and theory-first curriculum claims. (YouTube)
- Adam Walker, “The Decline of the English Department,” Close Reading Poetry, YouTube; related Substack essay “The Fall of the English Department.” Used for the historical curriculum account, structural causes, research-model critique, public-reader argument, and Coleridge “clerisy” frame. (YouTube, Substack)
- Humanities degree data from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Humanities Indicators: 2024 humanities B.A. totals, decline from 2012, and English decline of 43% from 2012 to 2024. (amacad.org)
- English major share data from the James G. Martin Center summary of IPEDS/NCES figures: English bachelor’s degree completion declined from about 7.6% of all degrees in 1971 to about 2.8% in 2021. (jamesgmartin.center)
- Reading participation data from the National Endowment for the Arts: 2022 adult book-reading and fiction-reading rates. (National Endowment for the Arts)