Why I'm relaxed about the decline of English at university

There’s an interesting article in the Guardian about the study of English at university. It’s in decline, says Susannah Rustin, which is a shame. Bright youngsters who might once have signed up to a few years of sonnets and Chaucer are feeling pressured to study something more useful like engineering. Let them, and those influencing their choices, not suppose that English is self-indulgent thumb-twiddling; let them not forget that it sharpens the critical faculties, and ‘has a humanistic role… in advancing a more expansive and democratic version of Englishness than the nativist one.’

It happens that Susannah Rustin and I studied English together at York University in a previous century, so I’d like to resume an argument that I think I had with her back then, in the pages of a precocious little campus magazine. Yes, English is fun to study. But it’s a discipline that lacks discipline. And so I am more sanguine about its decline since the days of our teenage enthusiasm for it.