I have been mystified by what has happened to English departments since I was an English major half a century ago, but I’m beginning to get the drift.

For one thing, English has split into two parts. “Composition” has emerged. As R.V. Young noted in a 2010 essay, composition is “a new research field requiring theorization and publication, requiring numerous and mutable theories, since everyone in higher education is now expected to have an ongoing research project. … Reading and writing are completely different skills not to be learned together, and literature must, therefore, be banished from the composition classroom.”

But even the treatment of literature has totally changed in English departments, several times in fact.

In a new Pope Center essay, Troy Camplin charts the history of the trends in studying literature. They have culminated in analysis based on warmed-over remnants of outmoded ideologies from other disciplines—Freudianism, Marxism, feminism, etc. (Marxists are rare in economics departments, and Freud is no longer very popular in psychology departments; feminism does not seem to have a disciplinary base.) Camplin contrasts that superficial eclecticism with the solid grounding required for a major such as biology, where knowledge of chemistry, physics, and math is a must.

He has some ideas for getting English back on track (making it more like biology).