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.

ASU center publishing new series of translations of Shakespeare plays that use language accessible to diverse, contemporary audiences“Shakespeare’s English is 400 years old. It’s not like you can just sit down without having studied it and really get it,” said Ayanna Thompson, center director and Regents Professor of English. “And while it is very beautiful, so is contemporary poetic English. So we thought, why not try this?”Among the authors of the translations are several renowned playwrights of color, including Marcus Gardley, who has written for Amazon Prime and cites James Baldwin and the Harlem art scene as influential to his work, and Migdalia Cruz, whose characters often draw from Latino history and her personal experiences of growing up in the South Bronx.According to a representative for the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the “Play On Shakespeare” series represents a new future for the ACMRS Press — one that is “contemporary, equitable and forward-looking.”Brandi Adams, another recent hire who, along with Espinosa and three others, is part of an effort to elevate scholars of color working on issues of race in premodern studies, said the “Play On Shakespeare” series emphasizes that “there is no one way to view Shakespeare.”“The way that modern theater and modern scholarship is moving is in a much more inclusive way,” Adams said, “and this allows so many new versions of Shakespeare to appear.”

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.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.

In 2022, though, a survey found that only seven per cent of Harvard freshmen planned to major in the humanities, down from twenty per cent in 2012, and nearly thirty per cent during the nineteen-seventies. From fifteen years ago to the start of the pandemic, the number of Harvard English majors reportedly declined by about three-quarters—in 2020, there were fewer than sixty at a college of more than seven thousand—and philosophy and foreign literatures also sustained losses. (For bureaucratic reasons, Harvard doesn’t count history as a humanity, but the trend holds.) “We feel we’re on the Titanic,” a senior professor in the English department told me.