Has ‘Wokeness’ Killed the English Literature Degree?

Flora Maxwell is in her second year at Cambridge University studying English literature. She is loving the course, particularly the way it tracks the subject chronologically from the early medieval period, “which means you get to see how English literature progresses, in terms of what it takes forward and what it leaves behind”.

Yet Maxwell is a member of a vanishing species: the English literature student. The study of Britain’s greatest cultural export is in the middle of a crisis. The number of students taking English literature at A-level dropped from 83,000 in 2013 to 54,000 in 2023. The number applying to study it at university dropped by a third over a similar period. Partly as a result, many universities are rethinking their provision. In 2022 Sheffield Hallam modified its English degree course in 2022 to offer instead a “broad-based degree that features language, literature and creative writing”. In 2021, Cumbria University scrapped its English course. A couple of weeks ago, Canterbury Christ Church University said it would no longer offer English literature degrees from 2025.

The collapse of English literature degrees reflects the broader financial emergency afflicting universities buffeted by rising costs, inadequate tuition fees and a drop in lucrative overseas students following the Tory imposition of visa caps earlier this year. This followed George Osborne’s decision to remove the cap on student numbers in 2015, which, coupled with universities lowering their entry requirements to humanities subjects since they were cheaper to teach, led to a decline in those subjects’ academic quality.

“Less prestigious universities are struggling to get the numbers to cover their overheads, with formerly regionally important universities such as Bangor and Aberystwyth now in a parlous state struggling to recruit students,” says Tim Fulford, Professor of English at Leicester’s De Montfort University. “But even some of the 1960s universities are making lecturers redundant or cutting budgets because they, too, can no longer recruit the way they should.”

Yet the crisis affecting English literature goes far deeper than a sustained political failure to properly fund higher education – the perceived value of the subject itself is in free fall. The era presided over by literary figures such as FR Leavis, who taught at Cambridge, has finally gone. English literature, which has done so much to shape Britain’s sense of itself, through the writings of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Dickens, is no longer a respected intellectual discipline.

“English looks like a dead dog that’s about to be put down,” says one junior academic who has become so despairing he is leaving the profession. “Following the introduction of tuition fees in 1998, it has failed to articulate what it’s for in the modern world.”

Tuition fees have reshaped the relationship between academia and those studying it. The days when a student might opt to spend three years pouring over the Greeks for the sheer pleasure of debating tragedy are over. “At a recent A-level open evening an awful lot of students were asking questions about future job prospects rather than what subjects they enjoyed,” says the head of English at a leading London private school.

Some argue that the institutions teaching English literature are themselves partly to blame. A solipsistic academic obsession with subjectivity, personal identity and decolonisation has taken root over the last decade, which has affected how the subject is both taught and regarded. One academic describes it as “English literature’s self-immolation”. It has become so bad, she says, that those who don’t subscribe have become too scared to teach Joseph Conrad and parts of The Canterbury Tales to students because of a fear of causing offence.

“The issue is not woke itself, but rather why English literature should have become vulnerable to American identitarian extremism in a way other subjects have not,” she says. “In the past, some of the brighter students might read English and then do a law conversion that also gave them serious professional, analytical and critical skills. English is now regarded as a gap year that allows students to explore themselves for three years. The subject has been intellectually evacuated.”

Some, however, argue that the impact of today’s so-called culture wars is overstated. “Literature has always been viewed through an ideological lens according to a set of shared, unspoken assumptions about what was right or important or true,” says Fulford. “Leavis, for instance, fought a battle to have Jane Austen and George Eliot considered worthy of serious study.”

Others argue that it is recent government rhetoric around the issue that has badly devalued English literature as a subject worthy of study at all. “There’s been a very successful push towards STEM subjects, but you rarely hear much support for literature and arts from the Conservatives,” says one teacher. “When Rishi Sunak announced he wanted everyone to study maths to the age of 18, even our maths department said that was ridiculous.”

Arguably the biggest contributory factor shaping how we regard and teach English literature has been the catastrophic decline in reading and the commensurate increase in illiteracy rates. A recent survey by the National Literacy Trust Survey found that reading for pleasure among the under 18s is at its lowest since the survey began in 2005, with only 20.5 per cent saying they read daily in their free time, down from 28 per cent in 2023. One academic I spoke to said they have abandoned asking students to read entire novels because they know they won’t bother.

“Literature depends on nuance,” says one teacher at a private school. “But students now struggle the most with tonal variation: the ability to detect irony and humour. And the only way you learn to do that is by reading enough books.” Our addiction to social media is an overwhelming factor. “Gone are the days of kids sitting down with a book because they would rather be scrolling on their phones,” says Zainab Kar, head of English at Riverside School, a leading state school in Barking, east London. “Nor do I see parents leading by example.”

Some educationalists say that GCSE English reforms introduced in 2017 by Michael Gove, which placed a much greater emphasis on 19th-century British works, are partly to blame. GCSE English now makes for “deadly dull exams” said David Duff, chair of the English Association in 2022.

“The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is one of the set texts – it’s an awful novel: most adults haven’t even read it. Why require that teenagers should?” says Maxwell, who tutors GCSE English in her spare time. “The way the subject is taught is so formulaic: you are actively encouraged not to express your own opinion. There are certain buzz phrases you are virtually required to use. The Tories have placed so much emphasis on STEM subjects, it’s as though they applied that mindset to the arts as well.”

The impact of this disproportionately affects white British boys. “White British working-class boys perform worse than any other demographic at GCSE,” points out Kar. “I’d be surprised to find a white British boy studying English at A-level at our school: the majority tend to be Black Caribbean, whose parents tend to be more engaged in their education.”

That gender bias cuts across class and ethnicity: Maxwell, who attended Dame Alice Owen’s School, an academy in Potters Bar, says that in her A-level class of 25 students, only four were boys, and of her English tutor group at Pembroke College Cambridge, each of the eight students is female. “Girls tend to mature a bit faster, they perhaps have a better understanding of ambiguity, which is essential for English,” she wonders. “It feels very male, somehow, in this day and age, to want to have the right answer.”

It’s clear that we are heading towards an existential crisis. As one academic told me: “Unless English literature starts to make a case for itself, English literature degrees might not even exist in 10 years time.”