Month: November 2018

Originally published in the Winter 2018 MLA Newsletter The process of acknowledging abuses and committing to change requires...

As I left for vacation in July, I tucked A Changing Major: The Report of the 2016–17 ADE Ad Hoc Committee on the English Major into my bag. Not exactly beach reading, I thought, but since my own department slipped from 567 majors in 2012 to 294 in 2018 and is projected to have only 184 majors by 2021, the report felt like a must-read. The Association of Departments of English, a project of the MLA, provides a network for departmental leaders, just as the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages does for chairs of language departments. Both the ADE and the ADFL have long led curricular thinking, and the ADE report on the major is no exception. ADE colleagues scanned departmental Web sites and conducted a survey of ADE-member English departments to create a detailed portrait of English majors.