In college-he had started at the University of Pittsburgh-he’d moved among computer science, mathematics, and astrophysics, none of which brought him any sense of fulfillment. Still, he wasn’t majoring in English, or any kind of literature. “I like the long, hard classics with the fancy language,” he said. He’d blown through the thousand-odd pages of “Don Quixote” on his own (“I thought, This is a really funny story”) and looked for more big books to keep the feeling going. Justin Kovach, another senior, loved to write and always had. “There’s an emphasis on who is going to hire you.” “It’s a safeguard thing,” Monti, who wore earrings from a jewelry business founded by her mother, a Brazilian immigrant, told me. She had fallen in love with Italy during a summer exchange and fantasized about Italian language and literature, but was studying business-specifically, an interdisciplinary major called Business (Language and Culture), which incorporated Italian coursework. Luiza Monti, a senior, had come to college as a well-rounded graduate of a charter school in Phoenix. On campus, I met many students who might have been moved by these virtues but felt pulled toward other pursuits. English professors won two Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other English department in America did. The university’s tenure-track English faculty is seventy-one strong-including eleven Shakespeare scholars, most of them of color. For students interested in English literature, it can seem a lucky place to land. Berkeley and spends more on faculty research than Princeton. has a better faculty-to-student ratio on site than U.C. The in-state tuition averages just four thousand dollars, yet A.S.U. Nearly half its undergraduates are from minority backgrounds, and a third are the first in their families to go to college. Its undergraduate admission rate is eighty-eight per cent.
“They always know there’s someone who wishes that they were doing something else.”Ī.S.U., which is centered in Tempe and has more than eighty thousand students on campus, is today regarded as a beacon for the democratic promises of public higher education. It was late autumn, and the sunsets came in like flame on thin paper on the way to dusk. “It’s hard for students like me, who are pursuing an English major, to find joy in what they’re doing,” Meg Macias, a junior, said one afternoon as the edges of the sky over the campus went soft. Records indicate that the number of graduated language and literature majors decreased by roughly half, as did the number of history majors. From 2012 to the start of the pandemic, the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from nine hundred and fifty-three to five hundred and seventy-eight. The crisis, when it came, arrived so quickly that its scale was hard to recognize at first.
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