In response, a number of defenses have been mounted, none of them, so far,  terribly persuasive even to one rooting for them to persuade.   As the bromides  roll by and the platitudes chase each other round the page, those in favor of  ever more and better English majors feel a bit the way we Jets fans feel, every  fall, when our offense trots out on the field: I’m cheering as loud as I can,  but let’s be honest—this is not working well.

The defenses and apologias come in two kinds: one insisting that English  majors make better people, the other that English majors (or at least humanities  majors) make for better societies; that, as Christina Paxson, the president of Brown University, just put it  in The New Republic, “ there are real, tangible benefits to the  humanistic disciplines—to the study of history, literature, art, theater, music,  and languages.”  Paxson’s piece is essentially the kind of Letter To A Crazy  Republican Congressman that university presidents get to write. We need the  humanities, she explains patiently, because they may end up giving us other  stuff we actually like:  “We do not always know the future benefits of what we  study and therefore should not rush to reject some forms of research as less  deserving than others.”

Well, a humanities major may make an obvious contribution to everyone’s  welfare. But the truth is that for every broadly humane, technological-minded  guy who contributed one new gadget to our prosperity there are six narrow,  on-the-spectrum techno-obsessives who contributed twenty. Even Paxson’s  insistence that, after 9/11, it was valuable to have experts on Islam around is  sadly dubious; it was   Bernard Lewis, a leading scholar on the subject, who  consulted closely with Dick Cheney before the Iraq War, with the results we  know.

Nor do humanities specialists, let alone English majors, seem to be  particularly humane or thoughtful or open-minded people, as the alternative  better-people defense insists. No one was better read than the English upper  classes who, a hundred years ago, blundered into the catastrophe of the Great  War.  (They wrote good poetry about it, the ones who survived anyway.)    Victorian factory owners read Dickens, but it didn’t make Victorian factories  nicer.  (What made them nicer was people who read Dickens and Mill and then  petitioned Parliament.)

So why have English majors?  Well, because many people like books.  Most of  those like to talk about them after they’ve read them, or while they’re in the  middle.  Some people like to talk about them so much that they want to spend  their lives talking about them to other people who like to listen. Some of us do  this all summer on the beach, and others all winter in a classroom. One might  call this a natural or inevitable consequence of literacy.    And it’s this  living, irresistible, permanent interest in reading that supports English  departments, and makes sense of English majors.

Bill James dealt with this point wonderfully once, in talking about whether  baseball is, as so many people within it insist, really a business, and not a  sport at all.  Well, James pointed out, if the sporting interest in baseball  died, baseball would die; but if the business of baseball died—which, given all  those empty ringside seats at Yankee Stadium, doesn’t seem impossible—but the  sporting interest persisted, baseball would be altered, but it wouldn’t die.    It would just reconstitute itself in a different way.

And so with English departments: if we closed down every English department  in the country, loud, good, expert, or at least hyper-enthusiastic readers would  still emerge.   One sees this happening already, in the steady pulse of reading  groups and books clubs which form, in effect, a kind of archipelago of amateur  English departments. The woman with the notebook and the detailed parsing of how  each love affair echoes each other in “Swann’s Way” is already an English  professor manqué.  (Or, rather, a comp-lit professor.)

If we abolished English majors tomorrow, Stephen Greenblatt and Stanley Fish   and Helen Vendler would not suddenly be freed to use their smarts to start  making quantum proton-nuclear reactor cargo transporters, or whatever; they  would all migrate someplace where they could still talk Shakespeare and Proust  and the rest.   Indeed, before there were English professors, there were… English professors.  Dr. Johnson was the greatest English professor who ever  lived—the great cham of literature, to whom all turned, Harold Bloom  plus-plus—and he never had a post, let alone tenure, and his “doctorate” was one  of those honorary jobs they give you, after a lifetime of literary labor, for  Fine Effort.   The best reading and talking about books was, in the past, often  done by people who had to make their living doing something else narrowly  related: Hazlitt by writing miscellaneous journalism, Sydney Smith by pretending  to be a clergyman.

So then, the critic Lee Siegel asks, quite pertinently, why don’t we  just take books out of the academy, where they don’t belong, and put them back  in the living room, where they do?  The best answer is a conservative one:   institutions don’t always have a good reason for existing, but there are very  few institutions that do exist that didn’t get invented for a reason. The space  between a practice and a profession is as wide as any social space can be.   And  what professions do that practices can’t is remain open to what used to be  called “the talents.”   To have turned the habits of reading and obsessing over  books from a practice mostly for those rich enough to have the time to do it  into one that welcomes, for a time anyway, anyone who can is momentous. English  departments   democratize the practice of reading. When they do, they make the  books of the past available to all. It’s a simple but potent act.

I am, let me add quickly, a living witness to this: my father is the son of a  Jewish immigrant butcher and grocer, a wise man but hardly a reader.   My  father, who loves to read, worked his way through Penn, back when you could, to  become… a professor of English, with a specialty in the eighteenth-century wits,  Pope and Richardson and Swift and Fielding. Without an English department and an  English major, he would never have had a chance to make that journey in so short  and successful a time—and, I feel bound to say, the practice of talking about  books would have been poorer for it.    (Mine would, certainly.) The best way  we’ve found to make sure that everyone who loves to talk about books have a  place to do it is to have English departments around.

The study of English, to be sure, suffers from its own discontents: it isn’t  a science, and so the “research” you do is, as my colleague Louis Menand has pointed  out, archival futzing aside, not really research.    But the best answer I  have ever heard from a literature professor for studying literature came from a  wise post-structuralist critic. Why was he a professor of literature?  “Because  I have an obsessive relationship with texts.”      You choose a major, or a  life, not because you see its purpose, which tends to shimmer out of sight like  an oasis, but because you like its objects. A  good doctor said to me, not long  ago, “You really sort of have to like assholes and ear wax to be a good general  practitioner”; you have to really like, or not mind much, intricate and dull and  occasionally even dumb arguments about books to study English.

The reward is that it remains the one kind of time travel that works, where  you make a wish and actually become a musketeer in Paris or a used-car salesman  in Pennsylvania. That one knows, of course, that the actuality is “fictional” or  artificial doesn’t change its reality.  The vicarious pleasure of reading is, by  the perverse principle of professions, one that is often banished from official  discussion, but it remains the core activity.

So: Why should English majors exist? Well, there really are no whys to such  things, anymore than there are to why we wear clothes or paint good pictures or  live in more than hovels and huts or send flowers to our beloved on their  birthday.   No sane person proposes   or has ever proposed an entirely  utilitarian, production-oriented view of human purpose.  We cannot merely  produce goods and services as efficiently as we can, sell them to each other as  cheaply as possible, and die. Some idea of symbolic purpose, of pleasure-seeking  rather than rent seeking, of Doing Something Else, is essential to human  existence.   That’s why we pass out tax breaks to churches, zoning remissions to  parks, subsidize new ballparks and point to the density of theatres and  galleries as signs of urban life, to be encouraged if at all possible.  When a  man makes a few billion dollars, he still starts looking around for a museum to  build a gallery for or a newspaper to buy. No civilization we think worth  studying, or whose relics we think worth visiting, existed without what amounts  to an English department—texts that mattered, people who   argued about them as  if they mattered, and a sense of shame among the wealthy if they couldn’t talk  about them, at least a little, too.      It’s what we call civilization.

Even if we read books and talk about them for four years, and then do  something else more obviously remunerative, it won’t be time wasted. We need the  humanities not because they   will produce shrewder entrepreneurs or kinder  C.E.O.s but because, as that first professor said, they help us enjoy life more  and endure it better.  The reason we need the humanities is because we’re human.  That’s enough.

Photograph by Riccardo  Venturi/Contrasto/Redux