University writing programs multiplied even as humanities majors collapsed

Evidence

Forced austerity has vanished tenure-track positions while deskilling academic labor; “falling out” of disciplines evokes the adjunct expelled from professional forums like conferences and journals while cobbling together poverty wages in multiple departments at multiple schools. “Writing” as academic formation disperses itself “across the disciplines” and covers courses and concentrations in professional and technical writing, business writing, science writing, media writing, publishing, rhetoric and composition, and creative writing. As indices of the multiplication of writing, more than seventy US universities have established PhDs programs in composition since the 1970s; there are eighty-two BAs in professional writing that have almost all opened in the twenty-first century. According to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), there are now 728 BA programs in creative writing nationwide, which reflects a large increase during the same thirty-year period in which humanities majors overall and English majors in particular have declined. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 140

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s analysis of how literary production itself was reshaped by circulation capitalism — writing programs as one more site of the creative economy.