The announcement that Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent is to stop offering English literature degrees has set several hares running, most of them in the wrong direction. The university said in effect that hardly anyone wanted to study English literature at degree level any more and the course was therefore no longer viable. If you can’t do EngLit in the city of Chaucer and Marlowe, where can you do it?
Canterbury’s tale is a familiar one. EngLit is in wholesale retreat at A level, with numbers down from 83,000 in 2013 to 54,000 in 2023, and there has been a decline at university, too, over the past decade, though statistics are disputed because the subject gets studied at degree level in many guises, including creative writing and linguistics. Overall, humanities subjects seem to be losing their appeal, with only 38% of students taking a course in 2021/22, down from nearly 60% between 2003/4 and 2015/16.
Tuition fees and the need to study a subject chosen to recoup a student’s substantial investment are likely to be behind the fall. The perilous state of university finances is also leading to deep cuts – resulting in the loss of the well-regarded chemistry course at Hull last week. But most concerning is the widespread closure of arts and humanities departments – art, music, drama, dance – with institutions such as Goldsmiths, Oxford Brookes and Surrey shedding hundreds of academics.
EngLit might seem an easy target. Studying Beowulf is no longer quite as attractive as it was when the state paid. Meanwhile, those on the liberal side of the argument blame Michael Gove’s 2013 curriculum reforms, which ushered in an era of content-heavy courses assessed by final exams. Successive Tory education ministers also extolled science and technology while deriding the career prospects of arts graduates.
Studying literature is inherently a good thing. Virginia Woolf, who was mortified by her father’s unwillingness to let her go to university, saw books as a way of transcending the self. University should be concerned with encouraging rational inquiry and the free play of the intellect; it is not about the creation of useful drones and it’s unfortunate that tuition fees have made the experience to some degree transactional. Courses should challenge students, emphasising the decoding of texts over superficial skimming.
The closure of Canterbury Christ Church University’s course coincided with a National Literacy Trust report revealing that only 35% of 8 to 18-year-olds enjoy reading for pleasure — a drop of nearly 9 percentage points in a year. Reading rates are falling, the gender gap is widening and causes range from social media’s dominance to library closures and shrinking attention spans. (Should we read anything into the brevity of this year’s Booker Prize winner? How would Our Mutual Friend have fared?) Some school teachers suggest replacing Dickens with social media studies, but, as Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop might counter: “Up to a point, Lord Copper”.
We should be concerned about the closure of the EngLit course at Canterbury. Universities are in a shocking state, and the new government has barely begun the herculean task of stabilising the sector. This is more than an institutional failure. It signals a cultural shift that risks leaving future generations without the critical, empathetic and intellectual tools provided by literature. “There is no friend as loyal as a book,” Hemingway said. Reliance on Instagram influencers can only get you so far. We still need Our Mutual Friend.
• This leading article was not filed on the days on which NUJ members in the UK were on strike.
