An Argument for the English Major

Many people who know me would agree that I am a walking billboard for the Barnard English department - I am willing to argue with anyone and everyone about why English should be a more popular major, the benefits that being an English major has in real-world jobs, and just how hard, yet rewarding, it is to digest some of the most challenging literature in the world and come out with a coherent understanding of it. Of course, I feel that I am both willing and able to have these arguments for one reason - majoring in English has taught me how to argue. 

The reason I am such a big proponent of the English major is because I almost missed out; I, like many others, had concerns about the employability of someone who studied English. According to an October 2019 article in the Washington Post, English majors are down 25.5% since the Great Recession (1); in favor of greater job security and higher salaries, many students have chosen majors in STEM-related fields - and, to be honest, I cannot necessarily blame them for this decision. At a school focused on empowering gender minorities, it is important that we are represented in historically closed-off career fields and take advantage of every opportunity presented to us. From a logistical perspective, it may seem that a major in Economics or Computer Science would be the smartest way to push our way to the top. However, I have found that rather than closing doors off to me, being an English major has opened them up. 

I will be the first to admit that I was rather intimidated on the first day of my summer internship in financial services when we all had to go around and share our majors - there were, of course, many summer interns majoring in Finance, a handful in Economics, a few engineers, but I was the first and only one to announce that my major was English. Though there were more than a few people in the room who poorly hid their surprise, I quickly learned that this was not a disadvantage at all; in my first week of training, when I leaned over to the Finance major sitting next to me to confess that I had no idea what we were talking about, he laughed and said, “Oh, I have no idea, either.” Later in the summer when a few other interns and I were working on a big presentation, I was the go-to group member for figuring out eloquent ways to phrase our ideas and proofreading our slides for spelling and grammar. I also learned that as a Barnard student, no matter what you major in, you will go into the workforce ready to, well, work - though I may not have had an immediate understanding of everything that I worked on that summer, I was willing to do anything I had to to master my work, and I knew that I could do anything I set my mind to. 

Outside of the workforce, the academic work itself has been hugely rewarding. My major advisor, Professor James Basker, was the main driver behind my decision to pursue the major, and he has continued to convince me that this decision was the right one since that day. In his class on Samuel Johnson last semester, Professor Basker quoted Percy Shelley, saying, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world;” English does not just help you in career fields, it helps you gain an understanding of events in history, politics, and ethical world issues. Aside from all of the payoffs of the English major, it is also likely that there will be no other time in your life when your only job is to read and absorb literature. As someone who has always been moved by beautiful words and relaxed by a good book, I can come out of my four years at Barnard and say that I really took advantage of this academic experience to do something that was not just beneficial but enjoyable to me.  

Like most things, the English major at Barnard has room for improvement; several students have come forward in recent years to criticize the English department’s lack of diversity in its  curriculum and encourage the department to alter its requirements. Unfortunately, no concrete structural changes have been made, but in my four years I have seen a lot of change in individual professors’ attitude towards fostering a diverse curriculum in the classroom. While encouraging students to read the classics, I have had many professors incorporate less represented voices into their syllabi in an effort to move, slowly but surely, toward a more inclusive canon. I am hopeful that these changes will continue into the future, and that the next generation of English majors will have a hand in making structural change - because of everything the English major has given us, we will be leaders, fighters, and legislators of the world.

- Emma Cunningham ‘20

(1.) Heather Long, The world’s top economists just made the case for why we still need English majors (Washington Post, 2019)