It was late autumn, and the sunsets came in like flame on thin paper on the way to dusk. “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.
Records indicate that the number of graduated language and literature majors decreased by roughly half, as did the number of history majors. 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. The crisis, when it came, arrived so quickly that its scale was hard to recognize at first.
