Director
Joyce Jenkins of Poetry Flash has stacks of books to review at the
office in Berkeley, Calif., on Thursday, September 27, 2012.
A rarity has occurred - the English major is being debated in the
press. We're all so surprised we don't really know what to do. It's a
little like meeting your favorite author: You feel both anticipation and
dread.
It all began back in October 2012 when the Wall Street Journal ran a
story in which Santosh Jayaram, a wildly successful Silicon Valley
entrepreneur, praised English majors for their ability to construct
stories about products or companies. He even uttered the words: "English
majors are exactly the people I'm looking for."
Wow.
But that just got things started.
In late June, columnist David Brooks addressed the decline in the
number of undergraduates majoring in English and the humanities in an
opinion piece in the New York Times, calling for employers and students
to rethink English as an important and valuable area of study.
Two days later, Steve Strauss wrote a piece for the Huffington Post
on why he loves to hire English majors. Shared 8,300 times and "liked"
by 34, 776, Strauss' essay was an English department chair's dream come
true.
Then, just last month, Jordan Weissman wrote an interesting piece for
the Atlantic Monthly on the favorable employment numbers for English
and humanities graduates.
These pieces make the future look bright for students of English, but
the question is, as college tuition gets more expensive and as jobs get
scarcer and more complex, is English a smart major in the long run?
I think so.
English majors possess two competencies that are difficult to
quantify but highly sought by employers. The first I often describe as
the "content/connotation/culture facility." By this I mean the ability
to acquire and make sense of structure and story while also paying
attention to how that story is told as well as the cultural and
historical values communicated in a literary text.
When someone spends four years reading, writing about and talking
about complicated, nuanced texts, a kind of interpretive stacking occurs
that enables a student (or an employee) to navigate the noise
surrounding a document and pay attention both to what it's saying and
(perhaps more important) to what it's doing.
Virtually no text is culture-free or value-free. Everything
communicates more than what it says. Students of English and literary
studies are trained to pick up on things like tone, metaphor,
implication, intentionality, hesitation, argumentation and valuation -
which can be, quite literally, a deal-maker or a deal-breaker. I see
this fluency in my wife, who was an English major at the University of
Chicago and is now a vice president of a Fortune 500 company.
English majors also tend to be good at what I call "deep decoding,"
which has less to do with plunging into an author's work and more to do
with versatility. One of the great aspects of studying literature is
learning the traits of various genres. Literary study is unique in this
regard.
Reading a novel is a lot different from reading a sonnet, which is a
lot different from reading a play, which is a lot different from reading
an autobiographical essay, which is a lot different from reading 12
essays about Wallace Stevens' poetry. Each genre has its own rules, its
own histories, its own techniques, its own codes. In short, each genre
is a system, and an English major must be proficient in all of these
systems. In essence, English majors are the original cross-platformers.
But this is my perspective. What do our alumni think? I e-mailed
several University of San Francisco English graduates and asked them if
their degrees had prepped them for their chosen careers. The response
was beyond encouraging, and I've decided to post them on our
departmental website. Two are worth including here:
Shelley Lindgren seems an unlikely English major. In 2009, she was
voted "best wine director" by San Francisco magazine and "best new
sommelier" by Wine & Spirits and made the cut for the "top 10
sommeliers" by Bloomberg Markets.
For Shelley, her training in English was about exploration and
articulation: "My incessant focus on wine and food in my papers and
class discussions must have bewildered many a professor, but I learned
so much that I'm able to use to this very day in my classes, cookbooks
and interactions with guests at the restaurants. More importantly, what I
discovered about myself through all the reading and writing exercises
gave me the confidence to pursue a hospitality career and follow my
dreams."
One of my first students at USF, Chas Lacaillade, went on to business
school at the University of Southern California and works in the
entertainment field in Los Angeles.
"Being an English major," he writes, "taught me to explore the origin
and results of thoughts and actions and not just respond to information
as it presented. I also learned the importance of context and how to
construct an argument or idea effectively." That is a good example of
the content/connotation/culture facility I mentioned above.
Of course, English isn't for everyone, and it won't guarantee you a
job upon graduation, like a major in accounting might. But, with people
switching jobs every few years now, I can think of no degree more
versatile or more interesting. I also believe that studying English
makes you a smarter reader of the world. And as the world becomes more
saturated with information, literacy (in all its forms) is the most
employable skill around.
