Don’t Kill ‘Frankenstein’ With Real Frankensteins at Large
by Maureen Dowd
By the time I took off my mortarboard two weeks ago, my degree in English literature was de trop. Instead of a Master of Arts, I should have gotten a Master of Algorithms.
As I was pushing the rock up a hill, mastering Donne, Milton, Shakespeare, Dickens, Joyce and Mary Shelley, I failed to notice that the humanities had fallen off the cliff.
t was as if the bottle of great wine I saved to celebrate my degree was bouchonné.
The New Yorker ran an obit declaring “The End of the English Major.” One English professor flatly told Nathan Heller, the writer of the 10,000-plus-word magazine piece, that “the Age of Anglophilia is over.”
The Harvard English department handed out tote bags with slogans like “Currently reading” and dropped its poetry requirement for an English degree. But it was too late for such pandering. Students were fleeing to the hotter fields of tech and science.
“Assigning ‘Middlemarch’ in that climate was like trying to land a 747 on a small rural airstrip,” Heller wrote.
Trustees at Marymount University in Virginia voted unanimously in February to phase out majors such as English, history, art, philosophy and sociology.