1977. Brent Henze

Wagner’s book as “a politically and educationally conservative polemic” (529) that promoted the university as “a place where knowledge is pursued objectively for its own sake, an institution concerned with higher things, free of mundane pressures” (Lane 529).

      Similar concerns were evident in controversies over increasing disciplinary specialization. An editorial in the Educational Record for Winter 1977 attacked the “divisiveness” of academic specialization and called for an end of “fractionization” that was harming the holistic benefits of a “total system” of liberal arts education (Heyns 4). Summing up the panic over the place of liberal arts in 1970s higher education, Stephen Bailey, Vice President of the American Council on Education, lamented, “How can liberal learning accommodate the twin necessities of educating specialists and educating generalists, of turning out experts who are not merely technicians?” (250). In the struggle to accommodate the new students brought in by expanding admissions and to respond to growing public concern about the ultimate goals of higher education, the 1970s generated much curricular reform. Attempts to establish core curricula and programs in “basic skills” which might equalize and unite the increasingly diverse student population grew in popularity. Bailey, for example, advocated a “liberal core” of courses and attention to “basic skills” (which, for him, meant “spelling and grammar” [251]). Support for such centralized “essential” curricula received a boost when Harvard shifted from general education requirements to a core curriculum, even though that curriculum promised to exclude many of the “new students.” In the February 7, 1977 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the team of curriculum evaluators from Harvard defended their move to a core curriculum by identifying six “basic” characteristics of the educated person, including “the ability to think and write clearly”; “an awareness of other cultures”; “good manners and high aesthetic and moral standards”; and “depth in some field of knowledge” (10). The ideal student, then, would be both a specialist and a generalist—and maintain the manners and aesthetic values associated with the Ivy elite.

      From faculty pens and mouths across the country came nostalgic laments about the “State of the Humanities” (Reager 148). In the February 1977 Harper’s, English professor Reed Whittemore sounded a gloomy death knell for the humanities, which he predicted would all too soon “go the way of the classics” (qtd. in Gregg 13). Penn State liberal arts faculty, in the spirit of the national mood, clearly felt these pressures and responded in the spring of 1977 by convening a faculty conference at University Park to ponder the future of “The College of Liberal Arts in the 1980’s.” The published proceedings of the conference, which involved over 600 faculty from 20 campuses, reflected the concerns plaguing humanities scholars across the nation. Penn State Liberal Arts faculty concerns were heightened by 1977 figures that showed a 32 percent relative decline in College of Liberal Arts enrollments over the course of the 1970s (Coelen 40). Liberal Arts Dean Stanley Paulson’s “Introduction” to the published proceedings set the tone for the papers and discussions to follow and clearly linked the concerns fronted at the conference to larger issues in higher education:

      The readers of this volume will no doubt be struck with the way questions and problems outnumber the answers and solutions. For it to have been otherwise would have been to evade or oversimplify the complex changes underway in the larger society as well as in a university of 50,000 students. [. . .] Though the Conference participants looked unblinkingly at the problems liberal education now confronts, the ability of the liberal arts to deal with the developing educational needs was affirmed again and again. While they recognized the current pressures toward vocationalism and technological specialization, the long range importance of preparation for life rather than simply to make a living was stressed. (2)

      Mirroring the concerns expressed by Provost-elect Eddy and the Vice President of the American Council on Education, Stephen Bailey, Paulson stressed the conference’s importance in maintaining the unity of the liberal arts in the face of increasing demands for job-related education. Bailey, in fact, delivered the keynote of the Penn State Conference. Defending the need for liberal education, Bailey described the tenuous human condition to the conference participants in a way that speaks to the unhappy temper of the time and situation:

      Perched on a whirling planet, blind to our origins, blind to our reasons for being, we wander between a desolate sense that we are bits of transient nothingness, and a strange sense of presence of ineffable innuendoes that mock our despair. Whatever the long-range fate of the universe, we have a continuing commitment in education to discover and transmit truths that are in fact fertile hypotheses about the reality, and the latent possibilities, of the existence we know and of the existence we can anticipate for our children. (11)

      3 Background II: English Studies in 1977

      Given the sense of crisis and malaise in the university and in the humanities, it is not surprising that a similar atmosphere was evident in English studies. The discipline was still perceived to be a key component of all university training, yet the field was nevertheless experiencing economic and intellectual challenges that prompted heated debate.

      Most obviously, English was experiencing a severe budgetary crunch at a time when the humanities (like every other discipline) were being more and more gauged in quantitative terms. Enrollments in English in the 1970s plummeted almost everywhere. Nationally the number of English undergraduate degrees awarded plunged from an all time high of 63,976 in academic year 1971–1972 to 35,328 in 1977–78—the lowest figure in many years (National Center, tables 229 and 230). Of all bachelors’ degrees granted in 1978, fewer than four percent were now in English (Neel and Nelson 51–53) as compared to 7.59 percent in 1968 (Franklin 6). In most cases the drop-off from the heady days of the 1960s was unexpected and calamitous as English faculty without much preparation or data or prior experience debated what to do in the face of alarmingly diminishing enrollments in introductory and upper-division courses.

      At the same time, despite the sharp decline in English undergraduate degrees granted during the late 1970s, English graduate programs resolutely continued to confer an increasing number of PhDs for a job market that had recently and precipitously collapsed. During the 1960s, the number of English graduate programs had increased over 50 percent, from 81 to 124 (Geckle 43), and new PhD programs continued to appear on campuses during the 1970s. At the same time, job opportunities were suddenly decreasing so that by 1977 a significant glut of doctorate holders existed in relation to the number of vacant tenure-track positions in English. Appointments in literary studies decreased by over 65 percent between 1972 and 1978; in the class of 1978, 40 percent of all English doctorates were unable to obtain any appointment, and another 20 percent were forced to accept temporary, often part-time, teaching jobs (Neel and Nelson 51–53).10 Time magazine, describing the 1977 MLA convention in its January 9, 1978 issue, noted that “Of the 1094 PhDs created last year in English and 753 in foreign languages, we learn that only 42 percent and 46 percent respectively have landed steady teaching positions” of any kind. And the future seemed just as bleak: Ernest R. May, chair of the history department at Harvard, estimated that “whereas now [1977] the humanities can expect 16,000 new jobs annually, by the 1980s there will be only 4,000 (600–700 of those in English)” (qtd. in Geckle 43). Jasper Neel, then director of MLA’s English programs, and Jeanne C. Nelson wrote that “there is absolutely no reason to believe that more than 35 percent of recent doctorates will be able to make a lifelong career of college English teaching. [. . .] There won’t be an upturn in PhD hiring in this century” (51).

      Reluctantly recognizing the end of the baby boom and the resulting decrease in students, the MLA and other academic organizations arranged conferences to encourage and foster professional employment for English professionals outside of academia (one at Emory University in 1978; another at the University of Maryland in 1979), but the sense of crisis in the job market continued as the media publicized the disappearance of college teaching opportunities in English and related disciplines. By the late 1970s, the growth spurt in graduate English studies of the 1960s had therefore evaporated. After a 6.5 percent increase in graduate students between 1974 and 1975, a notable decline in graduate student applications soon followed, and many departments were hard pressed to fill assistantships with capable applicants. Dual-degree programs, combining English with a second major such as Business Administration or Library