As I was walking through the building that houses the English Department at the liberal arts college where I teach, I noticed what looked from a distance to be a large photo board.

“Hmmm,” I thought, “I don’t remember seeing that in previous walks through this building.” So I went over to get a closer look at what I guessed would be the current faculty lineup in the department. But instead of seeing pictures of the faculty, as I got closer, I was taken aback.

There were no photos of human beings but, instead, pictures of dogs and cats.

I read the caption at the top: “Pets in the Department of English.” Each dog and cat was named, with the last name of its faculty member companion (is that the politically correct term?) included. 

Apparently, this intriguing practice is not limited to the collection of English professors on the campus where I teach. The literary scholars at Grand Valley State University have gone so far as to provide descriptions of the hobbies and interests of their pets. At that webpage, one learns that one professor’s dog is a Green Bay Packers fan, while another faculty member’s cat has a name that means “perseverance in the face of adversity,” and still another scholar’s cat enjoys eating house plants.

At Wichita State, the English department lists department pets individually on their blog. There, you may find “Professor Ernie Bubbles,” a Jack Russell Terrier/Shih Tzu mix, who is described as “an assistant professor of Dog Studies,” and Wee Wee, another departmental dog who “speaks fluent squirrel.”

For those unfamiliar with the world of academia, there is some relevant background that sheds light on this practice: These are departments in a discipline that cannot recruit majors at pretty much any institution of higher education and, in fact, has been facing declining enrollments for years.

A glance at the course schedule for the Spring 2025 semester here at my place of employment shows a number of their courses with plenty of open slots, among which are the following: “Intro to LGBTQ+ Lit & Media,” “Gender & Sexuality in America,” “Masculinity in Modern US Drama,” and “Queer Filipino/x American Lit.”

It would be difficult, one must acknowledge, for professors of English to recognize the self-evident reasons for the steep decline in English majors. It is indisputable that chief among those reasons is the stage-4 wokeism that afflicts their discipline as well as much of the humanities, and the failure of those majors to produce meaningful employment for too many of their graduates.

English departments have moved radically away from their traditional mission—familiarizing students with the canonical great works in their civilizational tradition and working to make the writing of all students better—and now gravitate around the moralizing project of connecting everything in the literary experience to the pathetic politics of victims and victimizers. Students are rightfully fleeing such a shift, and those who remain are unsurprisingly finding that they have few skills that interest employers.

Such a sad truth is difficult to look at squarely. And so, instead of facing that hard reality, members of university faculties in these departments are deflecting from the obvious. Charged with educating our young people, they are instead going gangbusters on a different sort of effort to resolve the crisis in their field. The facts are unfriendly to them, so they are appealing to emotion: “Hey, look how cuddly and empathetic we are! We love our dogs and cats, just like people who are not obsessed with wacky cultural leftist politics do! Please, love us as we love all sentient beings—well, except for the members of the human classes we describe as “privileged”—and take our under-enrolled and intolerably hyper-politicized courses!”

I have written elsewhere on the phenomenon of the woke left substituting of pets for children. The fact that the English departments are producing posters of their pets instead of, say, evidence of their caring demeanor as parents of human children is noteworthy. There are no discussions of parenting or photo boards with family themes. May I suggest there might well be reasons for this?

I admit that seeing presentations like this, rather than evidence of scholarly acumen and the seriousness of their discipline, makes me shed a tear over the embarrassing meltdown of a once eminently respectable academic enterprise.