英专生：我们没有明天 | 纽约客

1

The End of the English Major

英语专业日暮途穷

Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened?

全美人文学科入学人数骤减。发生了什么？

The crisis, when it came, arrived so quickly that its scale was hard to recognize at first. 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. Records indicate that the number of graduated language and literature majors decreased by roughly half, as did the number of history majors. Women’s studies lost eighty per cent. “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. It was late autumn, and the sunsets came in like flame on thin paper on the way to dusk. “They always know there’s someone who wishes that they were doing something else.”

这场危机来得如此迅猛，以至于很多人一开始都没有意识到其规模之大。从2012年到疫情爆发之初，亚利桑那州立大学（A.S.U.）在校英专生数量已从953人下降至578人。根据记录，无论是语言和文学专业毕业生，还是历史专业毕业生，其数量都已“腰斩”。女性研究专业毕业生甚至骤减八成。大三学生梅格·马西亚斯（Meg Macias）说道：“对于像我这样的英专生来说，看到这样糟糕的招生情况简直糟心透了。永远都有人悔不当初，心想要是没选这个专业就好了。”她说话时正值晚秋，日暮将至，校园的天际线正逐渐隐去，残阳宛如薄纸上跳跃的火焰。

A.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. Its undergraduate admission rate is eighty-eight per cent. Nearly half its undergraduates are from minority backgrounds, and a third are the first in their families to go to college. The in-state tuition averages just four thousand dollars, yet A.S.U. has a better faculty-to-student ratio on site than U.C. Berkeley and spends more on faculty research than Princeton. For students interested in English literature, it can seem a lucky place to land. The university’s tenure-track English faculty is seventy-one strong—including eleven Shakespeare scholars, most of them of color. In 2021, A.S.U. English professors won two Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other English department in America did.

位于坦佩的亚利桑那州立大学拥有八千多名学生，如今被视为普及公立高等教育的标志。其本科生录取率为88%，本科生中近半数有少数族裔背景，三分之一是家中第一代大学生。亚利桑那州内学费平均只有4000美元，然而和加州大学伯克利分校相比，其师生数比例更高；和普林斯顿大学相比，其学术研究投入更多。因此，对那些对英语文学感兴趣的学生来说，亚利桑那州立大学似是再理想不过的福地。该校有71位位于终生教职轨道的英语学科教师，包括11位莎士比亚学者，大多为有色人种。2021年，该校的英语教授斩获两项普利策奖，在美国所有英语系里都首屈一指。

On campus, I met many students who might have been moved by these virtues but felt pulled toward other pursuits. Luiza Monti, a senior, had come to college as a well-rounded graduate of a charter school in Phoenix. 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. “It’s a safeguard thing,” Monti, who wore earrings from a jewelry business founded by her mother, a Brazilian immigrant, told me. “There’s an emphasis on who is going to hire you.”

在亚利桑那州立大学里，我遇到许多学生，他们虽被该校的这些优势所打动，但却最终屈从于其他人生选择的诱惑。路易斯·蒙蒂（Luiza Monti）当时是一名大四学生，她多才多艺，高中就读于凤凰城一所契约学校。在一次暑期交换生项目中，她爱上了意大利，并对意大利语言文学充满憧憬，然而她选择了主修商科，更确切地说，这个专业名为商务（语言和文化），是一个融合了意大利语课程的跨学科专业。蒙蒂戴着母亲（一位巴西移民）所创办的珠宝商店的耳环，对我说：“这是一种保障，重要的是谁会雇佣你。”

注释：

charter school: (in North America) a public funded independent school established by teachers, parents, or community groups under the terms of a charter with a local or national authority （北美）契约学校（根据地方或国家当局特许状由教师、家长或社区组织建立的公助私立学校）——《新牛津英汉双解大词典》

Justin Kovach, another senior, loved to write and always had. 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. “I like the long, hard classics with the fancy language,” he said. Still, he wasn’t majoring in English, or any kind of literature. 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. “Most of the time I would spend avoiding doing work,” he confessed. But he never doubted that a field in STEM—a common acronym for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—was the best path for him. He settled on a degree in data science.

另一位当时的大四学生贾斯汀·科瓦奇（Justin Kovach）一直以来都热爱写作。他自己读完了一千多页的《堂吉诃德》（“我觉得，这真是一个有趣的故事”），并寻找更多的鸿篇巨作来保持这种兴趣。他说：“我喜欢那些语言华丽、颇费思量的长篇经典作品。”尽管如此，他并没有主修英语或任何文学专业。他此前曾在匹兹堡大学上学，大学生涯都在计算机科学、数学和天体物理学之间游走，然而这些学科的学习没有给他带来任何成就感。他承认：“大部分时间我都在逃避功课。”但他从未怀疑过科学、技术、工程和数学领域（STEM）是他的最佳求学选择。他最终选定了数据科学这个专业。

Kovach will graduate with some thirty thousand dollars in debt, a burden that influenced his choice of a degree. For decades now, the cost of education has increased over all ahead of inflation. One theory has been that this pressure, plus the growing precariousness of the middle class, has played a role in driving students like him toward hard-skill majors. (English majors, on average, carry less debt than students in other fields, but they take longer to pay it down.)

到毕业时，科瓦奇将背负三万美元的贷款，这一经济负担影响了他的专业选择。数十年来，教育成本普遍上涨，增速甚于通货膨胀。有理论认为，学费压力大，加上中产阶级摇摇欲坠，促使像科瓦奇这样的学生选择硬技能学科。（英语专业学生背负的助学贷款通常低于其他学科的学生，但他们需要更长的时间来偿还债务。）

注：

1.美国大学生多数背负助学贷款，见 搜狐-美国多数大学生背债务毕业 平均需还3.3万美元

2.precariousness: the condition of being likely to fail or get worse. Cambridge Dictionary

For the decline at A.S.U. is not anomalous. According to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly but not always identically to internal enrollment figures, from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while SUNY Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils.

亚利桑那州立大学文科生减少的情况并非孤例。美国艺术与科学院（American Academy of Arts and Sciences）人文指标项目所收集的数据，虽偶与内部招生数字略有出入，但大体非常一致。项目的联合主任罗伯特·汤森德（Robert Townsend）表示，从2012年到2020年俄亥俄州立大学（The Ohio State University）主校区的人文学科毕业生人数下降了46%。塔夫茨大学（Tufts University）少了近一半的文科生；波士顿大学（Boston University）减少了42%；圣母学院（Notre Dame College）降到2012年学生数量的一半水平；纽约州立大学奥尔巴尼分校（University at Albany, State University of New York）少了将近四分之三；瓦萨学院（Vassar College）和贝茨学院（Bates College）这两所顶级文理学院人文学科学生人数则近乎腰斩。威斯康星大学史蒂文分校（University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point）在2018年曾一度考虑取消包括英语、历史、哲学在内的13个专业，原因是生源不足。

During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before.

过去十年间，在英语和历史领域的研究规模减少了整整三分之一。汤森德还发现，美国人文学科的入学规模总体上下降了17%。到底是怎么回事？这一趋势其实具有全球性——80%的经济合作与发展组织（The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development）国家的文科专业入学率在过去十年都在下降。但这并不能给美国学者带来什么安慰，他们已经开始思考，这一代大学生人文教育的空前不足可能意味着什么。

翻译组：

Eva，寻路中，偶尔怀念，时常向前

Mai，男，经济学博士，世界那么大，我想活得久一点

Rex，男，集书狂魔，经学钢粉，总觉得24小时不够用

4