![]() ![]() My best friend and I fantasized about being like Harold Hutchins and George Beard from “Captain Underpants,” spending our afternoons making superhero comics together that we would clumsily bind in cardboard. As a child, I put on plays with my sister, using crumbled styrofoam as fake snow. Like Kovach, my love of art has been a lifelong journey. I recognized myself perfectly in Heller’s descriptions. From Arizona State to Harvard University, countless students voiced the same passions, concerns and planned trajectories as Kovach. Despite his longtime love for wordy classics, Kovach has never considered studying anything but STEM due to concerns regarding employability. One Arizona State University senior interviewed by Heller, Justin Kovach, consumed the entirety of “Don Quixote” on his own. When investigating students’ motivations for shifting away from English, the same basic story repeated itself. English specifically has lost a full third of students in the same time period. Over the past decade, humanities enrollment in the United States has decreased by 17%. To get to the bottom of my anxiety, I found myself reading Nathan Heller’s “ The End of the English Major,” a recent piece in The New Yorker detailing the steep decline in students enrolled in English major programs. I already have 12 credits in English, more than I do in any other department. Every day, I peruse the English course guide the way some stalk a crush’s Instagram, considering changing my major. From Junji Ito’s classic horror manga to Albert Camus’ absurdist philosophical novels, if it has words, I’m reading it. ![]() I’ve written a poem a day - faster than I’ve ever written poetry in my life - and I’m tearing through books. Since returning to normal society, I’ve carried a big, green Moleskine and 0.7 millimeter ballpoint Sharpie everywhere. This was the New England Literature Program. For the next 45 days, all we had was each other, a journal to write in and a stack of 11 books to read. ![]() After a while, a trip to a Dunkin’ began to feel like a special treat. Upon arriving, we sealed our phones and laptops away in plastic bags, agreeing to communicate with loved ones strictly via letters. A day after the end of winter classes, I drove for two days to New Hampshire, where roughly 40 other University of Michigan students and I spent the spring semester in unheated, unlit log cabins. ![]()
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