Brian Kirkley’s Elmwood Village apartment is littered with dozens of well-worn paperback novels leftover from various lit classes and sojourns to used book stores. They range from modernist classics such as Joyce’s Portrait of An Artist of a Young Man to an almost embarrassingly contemporary and well-kept copy of Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. Kirkley takes the last pull on his cigarette and stubs it out on a small saucer on his coffee table.
“I don’t know what I’m doing with my life, to be honest. I always thought I was going to write novels growing up, but now, I realize it’s just not that easy. I mean, what do you do with an English degree anyway? All I have done so far in college is read some Twain and talk about my feelings in McCormack’s poetry class.” Kirkley fears that those accomplishments might not get him far professionally.
Sound familiar? This conversation has taken place with millions of students in hundreds of thousands of universities all over the United States. Kirkley is a junior English major with major doubts about his future.
“I mean, I guess I could always become a high school teacher,” he said. “But who really wants to do that?”
Teaching has become the favored fallback career of many an English student who feel it’s their only option. “I have only taken one math class; it was ULC 148. Where will that get me?”
Despite the uncertainty for the future that he shares with many of his peers, he’s not really sweating it. “Eh, I’m just becoming disillusioned with the whole literary thing. It’s not like I have to do a lot of work or anything,” said Kirkley. “Sometimes I go an entire semester without taking a test, and still get a B+.” Many teachers only assign papers in English classes, and with enough procrastination, students cram all of a semester’s work into two sleepless nights. “I drink. I smoke. I read the occasional course reading. It’s no biggie,” he said.
Kirkley is not alone in his thoughts. A wave of English student apathy is plaguing campuses across the country. Students are realizing that working hard in a major with such an uncertain future is almost pointless. “I mean, am I going to write my novel faster if I get an A compared to if I get a B?” Kirkley asked.
“I got really into misogyny for awhile like all the great writers. But all the bitches in the UB English department are too easy of a target; they all tear up when criticized. So, I felt bad about writing about their vapidity because it seemed like I was shooting fish in a barrel,” said an anonymous bespectacled English major who wanted to be known simply as Michael. “I banged my Feminist Theory professor though. That shit was hot.”
Michael also explained how he goes about selecting courses. “I don’t stress out on my window day for registration. It’s not like I sleep too late or anything; I’m usually totally tweaked out from all the meth. I just don’t give a shit, and then, it’s like, ‘Awesome. I’ll take Intro to Linguistics.’”
Undergraduates aren’t alone in carefree attitude towards the department. Amy Gia is a second year grad student who noted a similar lack of pressure in her English studies. “I went to grad school at UB because I wanted to put off real life for a little while longer, you know? I mean, I do my work—don’t get me wrong—but it’s not that big of a deal. I deconstruct some shit, reconstruct some shit, and call it a night with enough spare time to do some close reading of Kremmel’s Spatial Renderings of the Other.”
As for Gia’s outlook on the future, the prospect of having her Master’s doesn’t change much. “I don’t know. I always wanted to be a journalist but the media is so ridiculous right now. I could always become a professor, I guess. But who the fuck really wants to do that?”
Howard Wolf has been a professor of English at UB for over three full years now and has actively witnessed this apathetic trend develop over time. “At UB there are over 38,000 students enrolled in the English department alone; however only about 37,000 of those students are officially accepted into the major,” he said. “The students aren’t really putting forth their best effort, but can you blame them? If you hand in the assignments, you’ll get a B. I don’t want to have to bother with these sniveling grade grubbers demanding a better grade because they have aspirations to write for National Geographic or some bullshit.”
So, what’s to blame for this general sense of apathy surrounding the English department? Could it be that Bachelor’s degrees have less significance in the workplace each day? Or could it be that UB is seeing less and less real professors and an increase in creepy, 23-year-old grad students who’d rather shoot the shit and hit on you at some dive bar than give you feedback on your last assignment? Or even the fact that the Internet is quickly killing the concept of the English language as we know it? Regardless, one thing remains certain: no one seems to be too upset. “I mean, I’m not completely lost. I could be much worse off,” Kirkley said. “I could be a communication major.”
