从1956年全国综合性大学和师范院校恢复英语专业以来，国内大学英语教育历经起伏，最近，又迎来了新调整。
中国科学技术大学近日发布公示，拟撤销“英语”等6个本科专业。
该公示提到，据《教育部高等教育司关于开展2023年度普通高等学校本科专业设置工作的通知》，关于本科专业调整和撤销的要求，我校梳理并征求相关院系意见，依次经相关学院教学委员会及党政联席会议、校教学委员会审议通过，拟将英语（专业代码050201）、传播学（050304）、考古学（060103）、通信工程（080703）、软件工程（080902）、环境科学（082503）等6个本科专业向教育部申请撤销备案。
中科大教务处相关负责人随后解释，这几个专业之前就处于事实停招的状态，现在是学科优化设置的需要。
今年9月开学初，西安交大等高校取消了四六级与学位证挂钩的要求，以后学生不用考四六级也可获得学位证。
无独有偶，不仅我国的大学英语专业日渐西沉，甚至在英语母语国家，比如美国，英语等人文专业也越来越不受重视。
下面来看这篇Nathan Heller今年2月份发表在《纽约客》的《英语专业的终结》。
The End of the English Major
The crisis, when it came, arrived so quickly that its scale was hard to recognize at first. From 2012 to the start of the pandemic, the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from nine hundred and fifty-three to five hundred and seventy-eight. Records indicate that the number of graduated language and literature majors decreased by roughly half, as did the number of history majors. Women’s studies lost eighty per cent. “It’s hard for students like me, who are pursuing an English major, to find joy in what they’re doing,” Meg Macias, a junior, said one afternoon as the edges of the sky over the campus went soft. It was late autumn, and the sunsets came in like flame on thin paper on the way to dusk. “They always know there’s someone who wishes that they were doing something else.”
危机来来得如此之快，以至于一开始很难意识到它的影响力。从2012年到疫情开始，亚利桑那州立大学校园内英语专业的人数从953人下降到578人。记录显示，本科语言和文学专业的人数减少了大约一半，历史专业的人数也减少了一半。女性研究下降了80%。“像我这样致力于英语专业的学生很难从正在做的事情中获得快乐。”大三学生梅格·马西亚斯在某天下午说，当时校园上空天空的边缘变得柔和起来。那是深秋，日落像薄纸上的火焰一样，在黄昏来临的路上映入眼帘。“我们一直知道，别人希望我们在学其他专业。”
A.S.U., which is centered in Tempe and has more than eighty thousand students on campus, is today regarded as a beacon for the democratic(有民主精神的) promises of public higher education. Its undergraduate admission rate is eighty-eight per cent. Nearly half its undergraduates are from minority backgrounds, and a third are the first in their families to go to college. The in-state tuition averages just four thousand dollars, yet A.S.U. has a better faculty-to-student ratio on site than U.C. Berkeley and spends more on faculty research than Princeton. For students interested in English literature, it can seem a lucky place to land. The university’s tenure-track(终身职位的) English faculty is seventy-one strong—including eleven Shakespeare scholars, most of them of color. In 2021, A.S.U. English professors won two Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other English department in America did.
以坦佩为中心，校园里有超过八万名学生的亚利桑那州立大学，如今被视为公立高等教育民主前途的灯塔。其本科录取率为88%。近一半的本科生来自少数族裔背景，三分之一是家中第一个上大学的人。州内学费平均只有四千美元，但亚利桑那州立大学的师生比加州大学伯克利分校更好，在师资研究方面的支出也比普林斯顿大学更多。对于对英国文学感兴趣的学生来说，这似乎是一个幸运的落脚点。该大学的终身英语教师有71名，包括11名莎士比亚奖金获得者，其中大多数是有色人种。2021年，亚利桑那州立大学英语教授获得了两项普利策奖，超过了美国所有其他英语系。
beacon / ˈbiːkən / [GRE] n.灯塔，灯标
The Pulitzer Prizes 普利策奖，美国新闻界最高荣誉奖
On campus, I met many students who might have been moved by these virtues but felt pulled toward other pursuits. Luiza Monti, a senior, had come to college as a well-rounded graduate of a charter(特许) school in Phoenix. She had fallen in love with Italy during a summer exchange and fantasized about Italian language and literature, but was studying business—specifically, an interdisciplinary(跨学科的) major called Business (Language and Culture), which incorporated(包含) Italian coursework. “It’s a safeguard thing,” Monti, who wore earrings from a jewelry business founded by her mother, a Brazilian immigrant, told me. “There’s an emphasis on who is going to hire you.”
在校园里，我遇到了许多学生，他们可能会被这些优点打动，但会被其他追求遣吸引。大四学生路易莎·蒙蒂是凤凰城一所民营学校的多才多艺的本科生。她在一次夏季交流中爱上了意大利，并对意大利语言和文学产生了幻想，但她正在学习商科——具体来说，是一门跨学科的专业，名为商业（语言和文化），其中包括意大利语课程。“这是一种保障措施。”蒙蒂告诉我。她戴着巴西移民妈妈创立的珠宝公司的耳环。“重点是谁会雇用你。”
well-rounded adj.全面的；多才多艺的
charter school 90年代以来美国中小学教育领域出现的一种新型学校，是公办民营学校的一种类型。
Justin Kovach, another senior, loved to write and always had. He’d blown through the thousand-odd pages of “Don Quixote” on his own (“I thought, This is a really funny story”) and looked for more big books to keep the feeling going. “I like the long, hard classics with the fancy language,” he said. Still, he wasn’t majoring in English, or any kind of literature. In college—he had started at the University of Pittsburgh—he’d moved among computer science, mathematics, and astrophysics(天体物理学), none of which brought him any sense of fulfillment. “Most of the time I would spend avoiding doing work,” he confessed(承认). But he never doubted that a field in stem—a common acronym(首字母缩略词) for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—was the best path for him. He settled on a degree in data science.
另一位大四学生贾斯汀·科瓦奇喜欢写作，并且一直写作。他自己翻阅了一千多页的《堂吉诃德》（“我想，这是一个非常有趣的故事”），并寻找更多的大部头的书来持续这种感觉。“我喜欢长篇、严肃的经典作品和华丽的语言，”他说。尽管如此，他并没有主修英语或任何文学。在大学里——他从匹兹堡大学开始——他在计算机科学、数学和天体物理学之间切换，这些都没有给他带来任何成就感。“大部分时间我会花时间逃避工作。”他承认。但他从未怀疑过stem领域——科学、技术、工程和数学的首字母常见缩写——是他最好的选择。他最终选择了数据科学学位。
fulfillment n.满足（感）(fulfill + -ment)
Kovach will graduate with some thirty thousand dollars in debt, a burden that influenced his choice of a degree. For decades now, the cost of education has increased over all ahead of inflation(通货膨胀). One theory has been that this pressure, plus the growing precariousness(不安全) of the middle class, has played a role in driving students like him toward hard-skill majors. (English majors, on average, carry less debt than students in other fields, but they take longer to pay it down.)
科瓦奇毕业时将背负约三万美元的债务，这一负担影响了他对学位的选择。几十年来，教育成本总体上超过了通货膨胀。有一种理论认为，这种压力，加上中产阶级日益不稳定，在促使像他这样的学生选择硬技能专业方面发挥了作用。（平均而言，英语专业的学生背负的债务比其他领域的学生少，但他们需要更长的时间来偿还债务。）
For the decline at A.S.U. is not anomalous(异常的). According to Robert Townsend, the co-director(主任) of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly(一致地) but not always identically to internal enrollment(登记) figures, from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while suny Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly(短暂地) considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils.
亚利桑那州立大学的数据下降并不反常。美国艺术与科学学院人文指标项目的联合主任罗伯特·汤森德表示，据统一收集的数据，或不都与内部注册数据相同，从2012年到2020年，俄亥俄州立大学主校区人文专业毕业生数量下降了46%。塔夫茨大学失去了近50%的人文专业毕业生，波士顿大学失去了42%。圣母大学最终失去了一半的人文专业毕业生，而纽约州立大学奥尔巴尼分校失去了近四分之三。瓦萨和贝茨这两所标准文理学院的人文专业毕业生数量下降了近一半。2018年，威斯康星大学史蒂文斯角分校曾短暂考虑取消13个专业，包括英语、历史和哲学，因为学生短缺。
indicator n. 指标(indicate + -or)
identically adv.同一地；相等地 (identity + -cally)
humanity n.（历史、哲学、文学等）人文学科
During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before.
在过去的十年中，大学的英语和历史教学下降了整整三分之一。汤森发现，美国人文学科的入学人数总体下降了17%。发生了什么？这一趋势反映了全球趋势；经济合作组织中五分之四的国家报告称，过去十年人文学科的入学人数下降。但这并没有给美国学者带来多少安慰，他们开始想知道，大学毕业的这一代，在人类历史上受的人文教育比以往任何一代人都少，这可能意味着什么。
collegiate / kəˈliːdʒiət / adj.大学的(college + -iate)
Or perhaps you think of the university as the research colony, filled with laboratories and conferences and peer-reviewed(经同行评审的) papers written for audiences of specialists. It’s the small-bore university of campus comedy—of “Lucky Jim” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”—but also the quarry(来源) of deconstruction(解构), quantum electrodynamics, and value theory. It produces new knowledge and ways of understanding that wouldn’t have an opportunity to emerge anywhere else.
或许你认为这所大学是一个研究群体，到处都是实验室、组会和同行评审专门为专家而写的论文。它是校园喜剧的根源——《幸运的吉姆》和《谁害怕弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫？》——但也是解构理论、量子电动力学和价值理论的来源。它产生了新的知识和理解方式，这在其他任何地方都没有机会出现。
electrodynamics / ɪˌlektrəʊdaɪˈnæmɪks / n.电动力学 (electro- + dynamics)
In 1963, Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California system, gave a series of lectures subsequently(后来) collected in a famous book, “The Uses of the University.” He argued that both of these paradigms(典范)—the former largely inspired by British schools like Oxford and Cambridge, the latter largely inspired by the great German universities of the nineteenth century—had no actual equivalent in the U.S. Instead, he said, the Americans created the “multiversity”: a kind of hodgepodge(大杂烩) of both types and more. The multiversity incorporates the tradition of land-grant universities, established with an eye toindustrial-age skill sets. And it provides something for everyone. There is pre-professional training of all sorts—law schools, business schools, medical schools, agricultural schools—but also the old liberal-arts quadrangle(方院). “The university is so many things to so many different people that it must, of necessity, be partiallyat war with itself,” Kerr wrote.
1963年，加州大学系统校长克拉克·克尔发表了一系列演讲，随后被收录在一本著名的书《大学的用途》中。他认为，这两种范式——前者主要受到牛津和剑桥等英国学校的启发，后者主要受到19世纪伟大的德国大学的启发——在美国没有实际等效的大小。相反，他说，美国人创造了“多元大学”：一种两种类型的大杂烩，甚至更多。多元大学融合了土地授予大学的传统，着眼于工业时代的技能。它为每个人提供了一些东西。有各种各样的职前培训——法学院、商学院、医学院、农学院——但也有旧式的文科广场。“对于不同的人来说，大学意味着太多东西，以至于它必然在一定程度上与自己交战。”克尔写道。
许多学校取消了英语专业，
但在有些专业中，
包括工科课程，
却开始采用全英文教学。
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