A year ago, The American Scholar published yet another statement of the obvious subtitled “The demise of the English department” by William M. Chace, who waxes nostalgic for the good ole daze at Haverford when getting a degree meant searching for meaning in life. Of course in the Elysian fields of a mainline Philly campus, the affluent, anglophilic white boys who attended when Chace was an undergrad had the money and time to play cricket and contemplate their collective navels while the working class took advantage of those state universities to earn a degree to get a job.

Chace cobbled together an article that is the same old collection of cliches about why English departments self-destructed. No need to repeat them here, but we agree with Chace that English departments no longer serve any useful function. Study of language is now done by linguists in linguistics departments. Writing is taught in journalism departments. Rhetoric is taught in speech and drama departments. And so on.

What’s left is a scramble to find yet another critical fad to use for reading—sorry, for deconstructing a text. Books are no longer read in English departments, which reminds us that the name for the department has been wrong from the beginning. Not just incorrect. The department has nothing to do with the study of the English. The English department was invented by a bunch of disgruntled Harvard composition instructors who had to put up with the likes of “C” students like Thoreau; the faculty wanted to do more than grade papers. They invented, therefore, philology, the study of language, which, as mentioned has long since been usurped by the upstart and ungrateful linguists. So you can’t even find a grammar course in a university English department.

Digression: The word “composition” is somehow still in use in English departments for writing courses, although no English professor can explain the difference between “composition” and “writing.” However, continued use of the word “composition” as in compose something such as a symphony, calls into question the hard hat metaphor used by reading professors to describe what they do. They “deconstruct” a text, as if deconstruction is the antipode and equivalent of creativity, as if the whole of a work of art can be reduced to its constituent parts. Which begs this question: If writing is composition, why is not reading decomposition. Reading professors, therefore, are decomposing. But we digress.

Fact is, the English department tenured reading faculty have been fighting a rear-guard action for decades now (a fight that coincides with the alleged “demise”) to avoid going back to teaching composition. At Oregon State University, for instance, the desperate tenured English faculty invented an oxymoronic degree called the master of interdisciplinary studies, and then went on to introduce programs that were already taught at the University of Oregon in spite of the legislated dictum not to have redundant programs at two state universities existing only 45 miles apart.

But having to teach bogus grad students, of course, meant literature faculty no longer had the time to teach undergrad composition, which would, of course, be taught by grad students, who would provide even cheaper labor than the full-time, professional writing instructors who were fired to make room for the MAIS program, but for instructors married to tenured reading faculty.

So we had to LOL long and hard when we read this passage from the learned Professor Chace’s disquisition on demise, the passage presented as a solution (or part of one) for reviving the dead patient. “The English department has one sturdy lifeline, however: it is responsible for teaching composition.” To which we responded, after the laughter died, “What has he been smoking?” Has he not heard of writing across the curriculum, which means learning to write in any department but the English department? Where was he when mandatory first-year writing courses were scattered across the requirements-for-graduation list to be taken at any time before commencement? Has he ignored the reality that but for elite schools where the students arrive literate and articulate, most college and university mandatory writing courses are a joke? Some of the students improve slightly by the end of the semester, but then regress to a state of semi-literacy the moment they leave the course, unless they’re journalism majors—with the exception of Sarah “Refudiate” Palin.

And, once again, as with any stupid suggestion like this, Chace, even though he’s exploited writing instructors all his years as a college president, sez, out of the other side of his mouth that teaching writing (aka composition), though “central to higher education . . . is devoid of dignity. Its instructors are among the lowest paid” and have crowded classes, lousy office space (if any), no tenure, no recognition for publication, and so on. We’ve heard the litany before, and we know that writing will always be denigrated in education—in this country. Presidents and other politicians speak of the importance of science and math and reading in schools. None mention writing. Besides, as long as universities crank out English grad students with MA, MFA, MAIS, and PhD degrees, the pool of cheap, easily exploited itinerant paper graders will remain large.

So here we are in the 21st Century and Chace is still proposing a rescue using a lifeline that doesn’t exist, that tenured English reading faculty—the philologists—don’t want, that political leaders don’t want, that no longer has any relevance offline. But the biggest reason the Chace solution is well within the pale of the absurd happens to be the English department reading faculty itself.

Here’s a sample of prose written by an Arizona State PhD in English now teaching something called “cultural studies,” not to be confused with the legitimate cultural studies of anthropologists. No, we’re talking about good old fashion art appreciation, now morphed into the study of “texts” both visual and written and wherever you want to find one (look out your window). “The privileging of image as an eminent textuality of human subjectivity is one problem, and the absence of attention to how race and gender function in the valence that images carry in the social order is another.” Chace wants this guy to teach undergrads how to write clear, concise English prose?

Don’t worry, only a few (and “few” is an overstatement) attendees at the annual Modern Language Association jargonaut understand such gibberish spouted by the allegedly learned professors of cultural studies who hide out, according to one deep background faculty source at a top Catholic university, in small liberal arts colleges and talk to each other and no one else in their insular, monastic communities. A very deep background academic from a Big Ivy school who writes readable prose and has the publications to prove it, said: “What can we say about cultural studies? It’s a sham field and attracts lazy fakers. Perhaps I’m being too generous?”

Yes, far too generous. Kill the English departments. Outlaw their doctoral programs. Outlaw creative writing programs. If people want to learn to write well, they’ll learn on their own just as Thoreau did. If people in the 21st Century want to learn to write well, they get a blog. If people want to learn to read well, they buy a Kindle. They don’t need a canonical priesthood to tell them what to read any longer or how to read it. And critical theory will never usurp creativity.

No small wonder, then, that the main title of the Chace lament was a mocking echo of the 60s: “Where Have All the Students Gone?” Online laughing, Professor Chace. On the Internet, you anachronistic fossil.

The English department is dead.

—the editors