Everyone knows the storyline since the Great Recession: college students began to flee humanities majors in droves and jumped onto the STEM ship. Most English departments have seen about a 40-50% drop in majors since 2008. The skyrocketing of Big Tech companies in the meantime, all of them promising large salaries and open offices with ping pong tables, has further swung the pendulum toward Computer Science degrees. Where does this leave us now?
It might surprise you to hear, then, that English majors, minors, and certificates in our department are rising—and rising fast, across the board—and are now back to their 2006 levels, on pace to return to the all-time highs they saw just before the recession. It might also surprise you to hear that a common refrain from tech executives is that they want to hire more English majors. Google’s own self-studies, Project Oxygen and Project Aristotle, aimed to understand what has made their company successful—and what would propel Google into the future. STEM skills consistently ranked at or near the bottom, while the kinds of communicative, empathetic, meaning-based qualities developed in humanities courses were seen as vital.
There are several ways that our department has adapted to these realities. Perhaps the newest and most visible is by launching, in 2019, a joint major with the School of Computing and Information called Digital Narrative and Interactive Design (DNID). This new major brings together the creativity in long-standing platforms of English such as short stories, essays, digital filmmaking, and interactive compositions, and the CS-driven world of coding, big data, and information technologies. It has proven very popular among undergraduates in its first few years, and we’re excited about its future.
But DNID is only one piece of the puzzle as we think through the ways in which English and the digital technologies subset of STEM have been and will be entwined. There are hosts of issues currently aflame in the world of what is now called Big Tech, since it has increasingly been in the cultural and political spotlights for its biases in search algorithms, for questions about its ethics, for its use of our data, and for much more. It’s clear that having more humanistic voices at the table, more writers who can communicate, more expressive voices of those who have been marginalized and who understand how marginalization works—all of this and more is as critical to the future of Big Tech as the next frontier in AI or voice recognition.
As our students, professors, and alums know, much of this begins in our classrooms. We have courses that dive into these topics directly and indirectly, or that study them historically all the way up to the present. These courses are in all of our programs—Literature, Film, Writing, and Composition—and at every level, first-year to senior. Our courses are small and often intensively focused on writing so that we can develop exactly what a narrower focus on job skills alone sometimes misses: person-to-person communication skills, the ability to express fresh ideas and to think forward in words. Students come to our department for that holistic approach—because they want to complement what they are learning in their STEM courses and to pursue a genuine liberal arts education. As we strive to elevate the role of English in that curriculum, we can therefore remain mindful that what has sometimes been an uneasy marriage between English and STEM—or even more specifically, English and Big Tech—is a necessary one, and one for which English provides a guiding vision.
—Gayle Rogers