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WHO in our profession has not heard the question "What can you do with an English major?" dozens of times? It is a question directed at departments of English from all angles--or from special groups, each with its own angle: students, parents, administrators, potential employers, groups that form the concentric circles of a contemporary public that frequently expresses uncertainty about the value of the humanities, anxiety about the cost of higher education, and concern about the demonstrable "outcomes" of literary study.
I think it is important to articulate the same question ourselves--to ask from our own entrenched (or some might say "in the trenches") perspectives what we can and should be doing with the English major--and when we do, the focus shifts from defending the discipline against outside skepticism to imagining and building a sound major from within. This building involves an ongoing effort to construct curricula and teaching practices that, in Edward Said's words, "encourage and deepen the irreconcilability between the search for knowledge and political oppression and injustice" (3)--curricula and practices that make us confront the relation of our discipline to the larger world. In doing this, we might also take some practical steps that will help that world identify with and value what we are trying to accomplish, steps that will encourage students, parents, administrators, and employers to recognize the kinds of knowledge and skills they can expect from English programs. My concrete suggestions on both public relations and curriculum development emerge from experiences with the now eight-member English department at Stonehill College, but I think my institution represents in microcosm what we are seeing in the profession at large, and it certainly reflects some of the challenges faced by the small college English department.
I know there was a time when I was turned off, even put out, by the idea that we should have to sell our field to potential majors by aggressive recruiting--that we should have to woo and win students to a course of study that seemed to me inherently valuable as well as intrinsically pleasurable. But I now think it behooves us to remember that if we believe in what Patricia Meyer Spacks in a recent ADE Bulletin [Show Article] called "the profession we serve" (1) and if we care about its survival in a recognizable form, then we must be ready to serve some kinds of outcomes--some viable and imaginative ends for our students. We must help students see that the pleasures of the text that led them into the study of language and literature can also lead them out to rewarding work contexts. At Stonehill, my colleagues and I have tried to do this in several ways.
The first was a small step--a low-budget flyer that we could hand to apprehensive would-be English majors, one that would reassure them or their parents that studying English did advance pragmatic ends. Gleaning information from the alumni affairs and career services offices and personal contacts, we ask on the cover, "What can you do with an English major?"; inside we answer, "Anything you want to," and then list the professions of recent Stonehill English graduates and the employers they work for. Our graduates, like English graduates everywhere, are working in many fields; we have Peace Corps teachers and corporate vice presidents, wine consultants and attorneys. We even claim a secret service agent and a stand-up comedian in our ranks, but I'm not sure how we gave them their training. This flyer helps students recognize that they can take pleasure in their college experience without having to regret it when they reach the job market.
On a larger scale, we established an internship program, which we continue to expand (see app. for suggestions). Students often enter internships certain of the professions they want to pursue, but they also learn about other possibilities while on the job. Or they may come to us knowing that although they love literature, they do not want to enter the teaching profession, yet they feel unclear about other options. We send English department interns to work in editorial positions with literary journals, specialized magazines, newspapers, and publishing companies; they gain valuable experience with television and radio stations; they operate in several capacities with small and large advertising firms; some choose to explore the arena of public relations with corporations, hospitals, or small businesses; others work in the marketing divisions of places like the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. If they have more than one major, we try to find ways to combine their interests, so that an English-fine arts major might work in a creative or editorial position at Art New England or an English-biology major might write and edit the newsletter for a foundation dedicated to research on a specific medical problem. But our role in all this is not only to give students practical experience; we also manage the logistical aspects of these internships, ensuring their academic integrity by providing oversight and evaluation and by determining academic credit through purposeful assignments.
We have found the experience and the satisfaction of students so rewarding that our new departmental strategic plan calls for a required practicum that students can fulfill through student teaching, an internship, or an independent research project, depending on the person's postgraduation plans. Moreover, we have designed, but not yet implemented, an interdisciplinary minor in contemporary media technologies, where students will learn nonfiction writing for the print media, techniques of editing, digital imaging, and film production. We see this minor as a way to serve English majors who want to supplement their more traditional study of literature with a specific set of skills that can give them an edge in some job markets. These kinds of internships and programs become, in turn, selling points for prospective students when we work with the admissions office; they also offer liaisons to leaders in the corporate and business worlds.
Admissions work didn't used to be part of my job. I simply knew there were people in the central administration of the college who did that, and of course there still are, but my department has discovered that nobody in the admissions office is inclined to pursue potential English majors as enthusiastically as we are. We worked with admissions this year by completing a telephone campaign and sending out an informative letter to all accepted majors, welcoming them and outlining the kinds of commitment we make to our students. Our yield of committed majors from the group of accepted majors is significantly higher than in previous years. Hoping to attract even more students to our curriculum, we plan to start earlier next year and to design an evening program--perhaps a speaker, a play, or a performance of Renaissance music and dance--that will allow the prospective students to experience a cocurricular aspect of the English program in the company of majors, minors, and faculty members.
These are some of the steps we have taken to reach out to and through the various concentric circles I mentioned at the outset. But I don't want to give the impression--either to others in the field or to our perceived public--that our department is merely utilitarian, that we are merely (or even mainly) outcome-driven. In fact, what I would like to emphasize is the most basic and important work we do each day to develop students who can read texts carefully and critically, who have enough respect for the written word to struggle for clarity of thought and expression, and who will mature into independent thinkers. This work is done through the curricular choices we make and the teaching practices we enact. What can we do with the English major? I have several thoughts, particularly on curricular issues and the ways those of us at small colleges make decisions about what to cover and what to leave out in a discipline that has expanded in so many valuable directions.
Two years ago, our then-seven-member department (six tenure lines, one visitor) determined that we would advertise broadly for a tenure-track position. The field was open, but we sought a candidate whose scholarly and teaching interests were in postcolonial or cultural studies. We must have written the most open advertisement published in the entire Job Information List, for our hard-working secretary was soon buried under 580 applications. Obviously, we made a mistake, but our good intentions had been to hire someone who represented a field or a theoretical position currently underrepresented in our department. We could adequately cover basic British and American offerings, critical theory, creative writing, and a wide range of film studies, but we were coming up short in many other areas of the discipline. We tended to immerse students most thoroughly in theories involving gender, psychoanalysis, and new historicism, and we had a strong commitment to interdisciplinary programs such as American studies and Irish studies. But we wanted to do more and be more for our students.
As we made our way through the applications, we were, more than anything else, overwhelmed by the choices we had to make. We felt, among other pressures, the disciplinary pressure to shape a department more fully representative of the burgeoning field of English studies. We certainly didn't look like a microcosm of the discipline because we had no one teaching courses in the literatures of the Caribbean, Africa, India, Chicanas and Chicanos, Asia or Asian Americans, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and Arab countries, literature and religion, literature and science (the list could go on). We recognized enormous gaps--many areas even represented by their own division in the MLA--and we had to choose one as our first attempt to widen the exposure students had to fields other than British and American. Our four campus interviewees were specialists in African American literature, Chicana and Chicano literature, Indian and South African literature, and American literature and Jewish cultural studies. We would have been happy to hire any of them, but we ultimately made a decision that our most important underdeveloped areas were in ethnic American literatures and non-Western anglophone literatures. Some institutions have attempted to add cultural diversity and global perspectives to the English department by inviting members of the foreign language department to teach courses in translation--courses cross-listed in the English department. There is, of course, nothing wrong with such courses, and we regularly suggest that our students take literature in translation when such classes are offered. But we took pains to explain to our administration our own sense of educational purpose--our conviction that the areas we wanted to cover would expand our students' knowledge of themselves, of other less-familiar English-speaking countries, and of colonial experience both in their own country and in other nations. We ultimately prevailed and actually received permission to hire two people from our search--the American literature and Jewish cultural studies expert and the specialist in Indian and South African literature. Now we have more difficult work ahead because we must collaborate with our new colleagues to interrogate the value of a curriculum that has a strong emphasis on period structure and historical reach.
We learned a great deal as a department through this process--not least, we learned never to write such an open advertisement again. But we were also forced to face our own personal, departmental, and institutional biases. Why had we, for so long, emphasized only British and American literature? What valid rationale was left for teaching only those two very distinct traditions in one major--those two versions of English, as if they (and they alone) belonged together. After all, literary traditions developed very differently in England and America, and some of the work that most distinctly revealed those differences--work in ethnic literatures--was rarely available to our students. So why not, we had to ask, add other Englishes to our course of study so that students might learn, among other things, how one language, whether inherited, adopted, or imposed, adapted itself in various ways to the cultures it grew in: cultures such as American immigrant enclaves, India, and South Africa. There's no way to say these areas are more important than any of the others still underrepresented at Stonehill, but with one search we have taken two important steps. In addition, we discovered how to use trends in the discipline to influence administrative decisions and how to ensure that our department determined the role it would take in institutional agendas for internationalizing the curriculum.
I'd like to stray momentarily from the pressures exerted on English programs to mention one other, but more troublesome, learning experience from the hiring process. A department like mine had to confront numerous differences between the goals of baccalaureate and graduate programs, most important, differences in curriculum priorities and in expectations about professional life. The curriculum issues involve the amazing level of specialization in recent doctoral graduates; for example, we read transcripts for recent English department PhDs who had no recognizable "English" courses in their graduate years, though they did have a fascinating array of educational experiences, from Chinese and African literature to Hindi and Urdu. At Stonehill, where every full-time faculty member teaches in a general studies program that still emphasizes Western traditions, we need to have some sense that people can teach a range of traditional English texts. These curricular issues were surprising, but not ultimately problematic, because we also hope that our new colleagues will help us rethink general education goals at the college and reimagine the parameters of the English major.
Slightly more disconcerting was my own emerging understanding of the expectations today's graduate students have for the job market. On one very real level the expectation is, "I will never get a job." Thus the advertising institution appears to offer the candidate that obscure object of desire. But when the terms of the position are reviewed, candidates cannot help being shocked that the small college--unless it has some historical prestige or the foresight to establish a faculty development endowment--does not generally offer the kinds of benefits that seemed like essential parts of the job at the research institution they just left. Often trained by superstars in their fields, newly minted PhDs have also been subtly (and unintentionally) nurtured into expecting high salaries, pretenure sabbaticals, low course loads, and research leaves (I mention only benefits that are not offered at my own institution, though some may be quite common elsewhere). The golden apple of a tenure-track job must look slightly tarnished by the time the negotiations are over, and the small college is left to handle the bewilderment--even the potential resentment--of new colleagues who expected better than what they got and to experience the embarrassment of being unable to provide what the candidates are sure amounts to customary practice.
But that is tangential to my focus here. I was considering the disciplinary pressure, largely internalized, that we experience in making our curricular choices and thus our hiring choices. These disciplinary expectations are essentially a positive force because they remind us of our obligation to the larger profession, to what Spacks calls the "ideal profession, a profession in the mind," and also a profession of "immense variety" (1). Yet a different sort of demand is exerting itself in many states today, including my own state of Massachusetts: the judgment of programs and majors based on graduates' performance on a statewide teacher test for employment in secondary and primary schools.
I think that some forms of testing might be useful in assessing the abilities and the work of public school teachers. And I agree wholeheartedly with Phyllis Franklin's recent MLA Newsletter column urging that we "rethink teacher preparation" in order to "give students who wish to become teachers and teachers who wish to continue their education the opportunity to gain confident command of the knowledge base that defines the field as an area of academic study" (4). But the priorities, at least in Massachusetts, of the State Department of Education and of the teacher test seem somewhat askew. Again, there is a significant impact on small colleges, especially colleges with education departments.
At Stonehill, students interested in pursuing careers in secondary education are certified to teach through the minor in secondary education, which is combined with a major area of study. While some English programs hire a department member specifically trained to teach English education, the difficulties I have already outlined with coverage of the widening field make that hiring priority prohibitive for us at this time. (Moreover, we have only an average of two to four majors pursuing secondary education minors each year, though more do enter the field at some point after graduation.) State requirements for certification create a minor that amounts to the equivalent (when the student teaching hours are included) of thirteen courses--and the English major requires only a minimum of twelve. Add to this the general education program, and the Stonehill English education majors simply cannot take more than the basic number of required courses in English unless they are willing to take an overload. The result, as I see it, is that we send students out who are superficially professionalized but unconfident of their subject areas.
I was alarmed last year to discover that departments and institutions were being judged on the overall effectiveness of their programs on the basis of the very first round of teacher tests. Most of this judgment was media driven, because the results were posted in local newspapers and education programs were threatened with loss of accreditation if their students failed. My dean informed me that in English, one of Stonehill's most respected programs of study, only forty percent of majors had passed. I was shocked and asked how many had taken the test. The answer: five. Given the size of this sample, I pointed out, the law of small numbers would suggest that these percentages were arbitrary. And, indeed, as more graduates and seniors took the test in the next several months, our so-called percentages, still based on a relatively small sample, rose dramatically. Now I must resist pointing out our one hundred percent pass rate!
Whether or not students can pass the subject area test, though, I feel they would be better served by a fuller English major--or a double academic major in, say, English and history--combined with a postgraduate MAT degree, especially now that Massachusetts, like several other states, requires that all teachers earn a master's degree within five years of being employed in the state. Our college, among many others, systematically pushes its best students toward what it (perhaps selfishly?) values as higher goals--postgraduate grants or graduate, law, and medical schools--when these students might make very fine teachers. Given the state of our PhD job market, we should work with our strongest English majors to help them recognize the rewards they can reap from strengthening the secondary--and even the primary--education system in this country. An effective undergraduate major in English, augmented by a degree like the MAT (which combines both graduate English and graduate education courses) could satisfy those students who want to widen and deepen their knowledge and to share their belief in the value of the humanities with others. I am aware that to recommend this course of action is to endanger the livelihoods of our colleagues in undergraduate secondary education programs, but not to rethink teacher preparation is to endanger the quality of education for another generation of American students and to threaten, in Franklin's words, "public understanding of how the humanities and especially the study of language and literature contribute to society, prepare students for careers, and enrich people's lives" (5).
There may always be some perceived tension between academic programs in the humanities and the wider public, some suspicion of or question about the value of what we do. These days, the halls of the academy ring with a resounding chorus, "Thou shalt assess." From the largest institutional level to the department and course level, academics are being encouraged to document outcomes (or frightened into doing so), that is, desired outcomes in specific classes, skill outcomes for majors in every discipline, placement records for graduates. Outcomes for teaching, outcomes for research, and so on--like never before, colleges and universities are being held accountable for the citizens they produce. Voices from the age of downsizing and billable hours in business and health care now clamor around academic institutions, assaulting faculty productivity and loudly debating the merits of tenure. But, as we all know, there are dangers in looking at the academy as an assembly line and at students as products. The most important work we do--building students' knowledge and understanding of material in a specific discipline and sharpening students' critical skills in analyzing that material--is very hard to measure. But if we keep in mind issues from the personal to the institutional--that is, from the very real concerns students have about finding meaningful work (not to mention repaying loans) to the indisputable impact we can have on every level of the education system in America--then what we do with the English major will transform the available range of answers we give to the next student who asks, "What can you do with an English major?"
The author is Professor of English and Chair, Department of English, at Stonehill College. This paper was presented at the 1999 ADE Summer Seminar East, hosted by Purchase College, State University of New York, in Rye, New York.
Franklin, Phyllis. "An Urgent Request to Rethink Teacher Preparation." MLA Newsletter 31.2 (1999): 4.
Said, Edward. "An Unresolved Paradox." MLA Newsletter 31.2 (1999): 3.
Spacks, Patricia Meyer. "The Profession We Serve." ADE Bulletin 118 (1997): 1-4. [Show Article]
Creating an Internship Program
The internship should be considered a course for both students and professor. Give the course a name and number that indicates its role--Internship: Working Models, for instance, or English Practicum. Limit the enrollment to fifteen students. Students should try to determine and then emphasize the learning that is involved with internship--not just what tasks they perform, but what and how they learn. Academic assignments should reflect this learning.
Create a database of employers interested in English interns, but leave other internship possibilities open to the student. Keep the files updated and maintain a space for notes on students' past experiences with that employer or permanent jobs that evolved from internships. Work with your alumni office to find alumni who might want to hire English interns.
Decide how to determine credit hours--a rule of thumb might be that eight work hours per week over the course of the semester equal three credit hours. Determine how many credit hours of internship can be counted toward the English major [at Stonehill, it's a maximum of six credit hours].
Create an evaluation form to be used by the employer but also decide in advance what role that form will take in the academic evaluation of students.
Meet the internship class at a regularly scheduled time--once a week or once every two weeks. Students get a lot out of sharing their experience with others.
Decide on the nature of the assignments. I usually give the following requirements:
Reading: New York Times daily. Additional reading in some specialized internships.
Reflection: Students are required to clip any articles that appear in the Times related to the field in which they are working. They should be aware that if they are working in publishing, for example, that articles might appear in any part of the paper--from Business to Living to Arts. They should think of themselves as professionals and acquaint themselves with issues in their field.
Presentations: Students are required to give two presentations to the internship class: (1) a presentation on the state of the field, based on trends they find in the articles they read. They can supplement this reading with professional journals and magazines recommended by their employers; (2) a presentation on a project they are working on or have completed (an advertising campaign, articles for newspapers or magazines, an editing project, etc.).
Writing: Students should keep an internship journal. The final paper is an introduction to the internship, which is kept on file for future students who want to know about the internship before applying. Because we treat the internship as a kind of practicum, we also work with students individually on résumés and sample letters of application for jobs.
Assign grades in the course so that students take seriously the academic requirements for the class.
© 2000 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
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