On the morning of tuesday, 11 September 2001, not far from my classroom, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan were hit by two jet airliners hijacked by terrorists from the Middle East. The towers subsequently collapsed, killing almost three thousand people. Those who originated the attack were apparently of the Islamic faith and spoke Arabic. Those who died were not just Americans but working people from around the globe.

The relation of english to other language-oriented departments, though dense with complexity, is rarely talked about in the open. One explanation for the lack of discussion may be the difficulty of framing a relation that is moving in two directions at once: while over the last generation or so English and the so-called foreign languages have come to resemble each other in substance, they have grown apart in material resources and institutional prestige. Many departments of English are more or less thriving, while departments of other languages and literatures in the same places are depleted and struggling. And yet, in the view of many of the people who determine our condition—administrators, legislators, and students—we are largely all of a piece; my problems will soon be yours, yours will be mine, and scholars and teachers of literature will find that they have far more joining than dividing them. To revive one of the rubrics of our New York University conference, we literary scholars are much better at collating the many ways we are different than identifying and leveraging the ways we are the same. How much does our declining influence in academy and society owe to an incapacity to come together and announce our identity when it matters? I take the position that we now have an ethical obligation to do what inclination and training have so badly prepared us for: to measure our sameness and difference on one scale and talk about what we can do together. How can people in English departments address this condition? What might those in other literature departments do? Having spent a career moving between these settings, I offer some reflections.

I was asked to address thequestions “why major in literature?” and “What do we tell our students?” I make this assignment explicit because my initial reflections left me bewildered. Is not the study of literature part of the humanistic mission of the liberal arts? Or has the major changed in some way that would prompt these questions? To be certain that I had not missed any reconceptualizations of the discipline, I decided to investigate the rationales for the study of literature over the past century.

The changing demographics of higher education are bringing the teaching of English and the teaching of foreign languages closer together. For an increasing number of students, English is a foreign, a second, an international, or a global language, not the language of a unitary mother tongue and culture. Increasingly, students of French, German, or Spanish are learning a foreign language on the background of experiences of migrations, displacements, and expatriations but also on the background of multilingual and multicultural experiences. The typical language learner is, for example, a Nigerian with a Canadian passport learning German at the University of Texas, or a Czech citizen with a knowledge of English, German, and French enrolled in a Japanese class at the University of California, Berkeley. The common denominator among language learners is their interest in language in all its manifestations: literary and nonliterary, academic and nonacademic, as a mode of thought, as a mode of action, and as a symbol of identity. At UC Berkeley, the current success of courses with titles like Language, Mind, and Society; Language in Discourse; Language and Power; and Language and Identity—as they are offered by English programs, foreign language programs, linguistics departments, or schools of education—is a sign of a renewed interest in the way language expresses, creates, and manipulates “alien wisdoms” through discourse.

One of my favorite sayings——SITUated on the tenuous interface between humor and seriousness—is “Money isn't everything, but it's way ahead of whatever is in second place,” which is cynical and materialistic but impossible to completely reject. In our profession, one could plug in the word Spanish and derive the same results. At colleges and universities across the country, enrollments in Spanish language courses are growing out of proportion, while programs in other languages often struggle to attract students; some small language offerings have in fact become endangered species, and comparisons to the laws of natural selection permeate the discourse. To the many acronyms that pepper the jargon of our profession has been added LOTS—that is, languages other than Spanish—a disclaimer used whenever language programs and language enrollments are being discussed. This acronym is troubling, since it categorically removes Spanish from the discussion of language programs as being too big to handle or—even more sinister—as somehow constituting an obstacle to the teaching and appreciation of the remaining languages, that is, of the LOTS. Even more troubling are the constant references to the “Spanish problem,” heard among university administrators and language program directors, and the downright offensive comparisons between Spanish enrollments and gorillas of varying dimensions and body weight, depending on who is offering the simile. Why should one facet of the disciplines we hold most dear become a problem akin to a threatening beast escaped from the menagerie? I am aware of no global demonization of other trends found in the humanities (sarcastic and often politically incorrect backroom comments notwithstanding); we had no structuralist, deconstruction, feminist, Marxist, or postmodern problem, and the current attractiveness of such areas as applied linguistics, gender studies, and cultural studies is not seen as problematic except by a small group of professors whose own courses are perceived as losing enrollment to these upstart newcomer fields. Across universities no one speaks of the math problem, the science problem, the physical education problem, or even the English problem, despite the fact that all students are required to take courses in these areas and that staffing and resource issues often cause the shoe to pinch in many places simultaneously. To face these issues squarely, we need to examine facts and fantasies, pride and prejudice, public virtues and private vices, and reject the fratricidal vivisection of our profession in favor of a stance that is both ethically defensible and logistically realistic.

What better time could there be to major in literature than now? The corpus of texts available, thanks to translation, is that of the world. The boundaries of the literary are allinclusive, embracing high and low culture. Reading lists are always a surprise. You can be a literature major and work with film, with computer-generated texts and hypertexts. You can cross over into creative writing and communications. The skills you will learn are easily transferable and will enable you to be a candidate in a variety of areas when you enter the job market, especially if you have had an internship. Humanities majors are more likely to attain leadership positions during their careers than are students in narrow technical fields. A literature major can even be combined with premed and prelaw if you are thinking about graduate school.