Reading Kafka makes you smarter, says a headline at Science Daily. Does this mean English departments matter again?

This month's "Theory killed English" article is stranger than most, as it begins with a recognition that drops in English departments are commensurate with drops in foreign languages, history, and "philosophy and religious studies" (which I had no idea was a single discipline). It therefore concludes that these disciplines must all be part of something called "the literary humanities," whose decline can still be pinned (of course) on politicized disputes within English itself. Now, it's true that I have long thought History was ripe for academic colonization, but I think my friends in that department might resist the idea that their discipline is a mere appendix to mine.

English: from 7.6 percent of the majors to 3.9 percent
Foreign languages and literatures: from 2.5 percent to 1.3 percent
Philosophy and religious studies: from 0.9 percent to 0.7 percent
History: from 18.5 percent to 10.7 percent
Business: from 13.7 percent to 21.9 percent

It takes real work to look at numbers showing a roughly 50% decline across the board in the humanities since 1970/1971 and conclude that intra-English shifts must be the primary culprit. I look at these same numbers, note the nearly identical drops in History and elsewhere, and conclude the decline must have been caused by external pressures, having nothing to do with theory or the canon at all.

Also from my Facebook newsfeed: Somebody told Harvard the canon's dead.

See how many of the 100 most common English words you can name in five minutes. Spoiler alert: My, your, his, her, and their all make the list, but our is conspicuously absent—and that's what's wrong with society today.

In stark contrast to publishing throughout the rest of the globe, translated fiction accounts for only a tiny fraction of the books published in the English-speaking world. In Germany 13% of books are translations. In France it's 27%, in Spain 28%, in Turkey 40% and in Slovenia 70%, but in Britain and America the best estimates suggest that the fraction of books on the shelves which started off in another language is somewhere around two per cent.