Monday, September 26, 2016
Baby Steps
One of the topics that interests me greatly is the sheer diversity of degree programs available at modern colleges. It somewhat baffles me how there are so many 'experts' in our colleges. In addition, as colleges grow they broaden the fields in which they provide study/degree programs in. I am curious as to how colleges got to have such a wide variety of degrees, and what constitutes a 'field'. More importantly to me, I am interested in the success of graduates from those 'newer' programs, as well as the 'older' ones.
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That's a fascinating topic idea and one no students have taken on before. Several students have discussed college majors, but you are asking about major fields from an institutional perspective, which is much more interesting. Armstrong and Hamilton definitely touch on the issue of major fields and the ways they help support institutionally validated "pathways" through college that guide student decisions about viable career goals -- sometimes to their detriment. And the way major fields have been created has not always been connected to the career prospects in those fields -- though career prospects are increasingly an important part of field development today. I think it would be interesting to look at the creation of major fields from a historical perspective and to trace out how the creation of fields has changed in just the past 50 years. I am familiar with some of the scholarship on how the field of English literature developed (which includes books like The Origin of Literary Studies in America by Warner and Graff; Professing Literature: An Institutional History by Gerald Graff; and English in America: A Radical View of the Profession by Richard Ohmann), and I imagine that there are similar institutional histories about other fields. I think you will find that the way fields got defined in centuries or decades past was very different from how they develop today, yet we are still living with the legacy of those earliest fields of study even as some become less attractive to students and less meaningful, especially as the University becomes more connected to careers and money. I'd be very interested in learning more about this topic myself and am very interested to see where it takes you.
ReplyDeleteI forgot The Origins of American Literature Studies by Elizabeth Renker. There sure are a lot of books on the creation of English as a field. And there is no question that "English major" can be a joke -- consider Garrison Keillor's running joke about the "Professional Organization of English majors":
ReplyDeletehttp://prairiehome.publicradio.org/programs/2010/05/29/scripts/english-majors.shtml
Meanwhile there is definitely research that starting salaries for English majors are not that great, so that the only students who pursue the degree tend to be affluent:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/college-major-rich-families-liberal-arts/397439/
So English as a major might indeed make an interesting "case" for your paper. Something to consider.