"What do you do with a BA in English?  What is my life going to
be?  Four years of college and plenty of knowledge  Have earned
me this useless degree.  I can't pay the bills yet  'Cause I
have no skills yet  The world is a big scary place  But somehow
I can't shake  The feeling I might make  A difference to the
human race."  This verse from "Avenue Q" does a better job
summing up the case for the humanities than a full 92 pages from
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  The humanities, they
say, are up a creek. The percentage of people who study them is
down. Their funding is drooping. Dolorous pieces are popping up
at every which outlet lamenting the demise of the English major.
So the academy came out with a dramatic report, titled "The
Heart of the Matter," to make a case for their continued study.
As someone with a bachelor's degree in English, I hated the
thought that my kind was going extinct. But if you read the
argument for them, you begin to suspect things actually are
dire. Chug through the