What colleges have well developed/overall excellent English and writing departments?

As for region, I would say no farther west than Chicago and whatever is above and below that. (I'm in Virginia right now).

The major thing here, though, is that I want an urban environment. Again, I can't believe I forgot to include that. Size doesn't matter, but urban colleges tend to be bigger anyway.

Thanks again.

Also: this runs completely counter to your preferences, but there's a buttload of schools in California that have put a lot into their writing programs -- usually by investing in MFA programs and then having serious undergrad programs build out of that.

heh

Just in VA, places to consider: UVA (of this list, the most notable nationally recognized English department, how that filters down to the undergrad education however may be up to you), William & Mary, George Mason, Mary Washington, Mary Baldwin. Also, are you interested in studying literature or in creative writing? All schools will have well developed literature departments, but if you want to focus on creative writing you may have to be more selective.

Also, there was a thread about G. Crump's daughter who was interested in writing programs in the South, they were some good suggestions there. See if you can find that, or maybe someone could link to it. I can't remember what it was called.

As for cities, do you mean large cities, or small college-town-ish cities? If you mean large cities, Columbia, NYU, New School, Penn, U of Chicago, Georgetown, etc. Good luck.

It is funny how the majority of Mary's recommendations have the word 'Mary' in them.

In terms of literary analysis, the best undergrad English programs that spring to mind are (big schools)

UC-Berkeley, UC-Davis, UCLA, Michigan, Texas, Iowa, Washington, Wisconsin, Indiana, Colorado, CUNY, SUNY-Buffalo

small schools--

Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Brown, Duke, Stanford, Swarthmore, Oberlin, Washington U, U-Chicago

A good rule of thumb, aside from exceptions listed here, is to void the South.

I'm sure I'm forgetting some. But that should get you started. There's a small liberal arts college in Iowa i'm forgetting and one in Minnesota I'm forgetting, searching for either one of which might initiate a better, more comprehensive research paradigm than asking a random message board where you should go.

In terms of creative writing, it's hard to top Iowa. The Writer's Workshop is the most prestigious and selective MFA program in the world, and their students lead undergrad seminars. Michigan's pretty good, too, and so's U-Houston and U-Pitt.

Good luck. Majoring in English is a wonderful thing to do, no matter what anti-people people will tell you.

You might also want to think about they *type* of English major you want - do you want something really heavy on the European *classics* with lots of period-based focus? Are you interested in literary theory? Do you want a place with a lot of feminist, marxist, cultural theory stuff? Rutgers had a fair amount of all of the above, incidentally. Creative writing was not great -- if you want that I'd go elsewhere.

Thing is, English isn't some esoteric subject that you will have to search out. Any accredited college will most likely have a fairly strong English program. The small colleges focus on the humanities so you will be fine there, and the large universities focus on research so you will have big names there. At large state universities a number of artist-types and pre-laws will flock to the English department. So maybe you should just decide where you would like to go to school then pick out a school.

I would seriously not get that excited about being taught by Iowa MFA students.

Hello Tulane. Also: my writing workshop teacher's poetry is snickered at all over campus and he's an Iowa MFA.

(Cal is really great for graduate English, though. Totally different ballgame.)

Oh and Bob, another thing you really want to think about is how exactly you want to study. Some places will give you a lot of modern literature and a lot of critical theory along with it (e.g. Brown), while others will just start you on a really firm grounding in the literary canon (e.g. Northwestern).

Best is a professor who is able to facilitate a discussion in such a way that it is not half-baked or awkward but rather engaging and helpful (cf. Paolo Freire's "midwife" model of teaching).

Yes.

See, the thing is, I can understand why some people hate discussion classes, because I really feel like only 10% of my college classes actually had GOOD discussions, and that was entirely incumbent upon the professor being able to facilitate them.

I had a sociology prof who was a really nice guy, and smart, but the extent of his classroom leadership was to say at the beginning of class, "So! What'd you think of the reading?" Which is a terrible question to ask of a group of students who have just slogged through Durkheim and don't really understand it.

I don't know, I am just not that interested in what myself or my peers have to say (and this includes grad school).

The discussion of discussions interests me, yet I dare say I can only swirl with thoughts about it, not pronounce definitively. The art of making people discuss well is a delicate one, in which a given method or approach may work well or badly from one week, even one hour, to the next, let alone from one term or year to the next. Possibly students - some students - do not realize that much in the quality of a class discussion comes down to them; that it is their responsibility - but also by that token, their opportunity.

For all their fame, I don't know whether Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates are better at organizing a group discussion than you, me or the geezer next door.

I like the UScentrism of this thread. It would be weary to be discussing Wolverhampton; it is stimulating to hear of Macalester or Carleton. Yet I am not sure whether to believe that there is really a Kalamazoo College.

As on the Morrissey thread, I like the intelligence of Mary's contributions, though I still think it is funny that they named all those colleges after her.

I can't compare with a bigger-name institution except to say that I NEVER had a GTA past sophomore-level courses, and ALWAYS had phds, which is pretty damn important. Nabisco said above that at Princeton Toni Morrison would be teaching or something--pretty false from what I've heard. The bigger the school, the more GTAs and alienated professors. If you want direct contact with lots of experienced smart teachers, ironically a big state school is probably better than IVy leagues. A big caveat- with regard to discussions, the level of the students around you- even in senior seminar, etc.- is abysmally low.

Oh but it's super cheap if you live in Virginia, which is really the reason to consider it when you get down to it. Good luck!

If my classes were filled with ILx types, I might love discussions, though of course it's easier to be make sense via writing than vocally for most of us. I agree that teaching is definitely an art and skill, I would love to have learned proper methods to do it, unfortunately as an adjunct I wasn't being paid nor taught to do so.

One problem is that people who tend to dominate the conversations, tend not to be the most articulate, interesting people--also the can tend to be really annoying. The people in the class drawing in their notebooks and saying nothing may well have the most interesting insights, or the least interesting, and their silence is hiding that fact, who knows.

I suppose this echoes something that Mark S has often said.

I dare say that teaching can be taught, but I also suspect that it is a bit like creative writing, and must also be ... learned by just doing it, I suppose. A possible problem with that is that if it takes someone time to learn to teach well, then others must suffer from their initial ineptitude in the meantime.

David Baldacci (Law ’86)
Novelist, Absolute Power, Saving Faith, The Simple Truth

Henry S. Taylor (Col ’65)
1986 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry

N. Scott Momaday (Law ’59)
Author, House Made of Dawn, The Bear; Pulitzer Prize recipient

Douglas Day III (Col ’54, Grad ’59, ’62)
Author, Malcolm Lowry: A Biography; National Book Award recipient

Louis S. Auchincloss (Law ’41)
Attorney, novelist, The Rector of Justin, The House of Five Talents, The Atonement

Karl Shapiro (attended 1932-33)
Pulitzer-prize winning poet; editor, Prairie Schooner

Paul Bowles (attended 1928-30)
Author, The Sheltering Sky; composer

Erskine Caldwell Erskine Caldwell
(attended ’23-’24, ’26-’27)
Novelist, Tobacco Road, God’s Little Acre

Julien Green
(attended 1919)
Novelist; member, Academie Francaise

Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe
(attended 1826-27)
Writer

David C Berman
Writer/Poet; Actual Air

Richard Lowry (Col ’90)
Editor, National Review

George P. Rodrigue III (Col ’78)
Journalist, Washington Post; two-time Pulitzer Prize recipient

William F. Shortz (Law ’77)
Crossword editor, New York Times; puzzlemaster, NPR Weekend Edition

Joan M. Stapleton (Col ’75)
Former publisher, New Republic

C. Shelby Coffey III (Col ’68)
President, CNN Business News and CNNfn; former editor, Los Angeles Times

Frederic W. Barnes Jr. (Col ’65)
Senior editor and White House correspondent, New Republic

J. Taylor Buckley Jr. (Col ’61)
Senior editor, USA Today

also lets nots forget: katie couric, benjamin mckenzie (ryan on the OC!), melissa stark, tiny fey and 2 or 3/5s of pavement the rock band.

is there really any other choice?

http://www.discoverkalamazoo.com/images/kzoo_store/YesButton.jpg

Agreed, but in most cases, teachers at the college level have almost no training in pedagogy: their only requirement to teach is the graduate degree. This seems a mistake to me.

Haha, probably more famous as being the dude behind the Silver Jews, but if it makes UVA happier to mention his poetry book, okay.

i had similar doubts about his statement. ive found the more "famous" the teacher is, the harder it can be to have a close relationship with them. the only celebrity professor i had during college was camille paglia and since my college didnt have GTA's [i went to art school], it was about as close as one could get, provided you could make her insane office hours.

anyway...

one of the things lacking from this conversation is what kind of writing the person who asked this question wants to do. to me, "studying english" is just as vague of a term as "studying visual art". are you more interested in creative non-fiction? journalism? poetry? screenwriting? what? that might help you find the right school.

And that's all just speaking of writing courses, not literature ones, which is probably a difference worth pointing out: they work in incredibly different ways. Writers actually tend to not be the people I'd want teaching a lit course -- but for fiction workshops, a good writer/teacher (and often a run-of-mill working writer as opposed to a "star" with other things to worry about) can do wonders.

As far as discussions go, I always felt like professors gravitated toward one of two awful extremes: either they imposed their thinking on the class to an extent that it seemed pointless to be having a discussion rather than a lecture, or they were far too interested in what students had to say, and let some stupid point someone raised dominate a giant span of class time. And yeah, the ability to strike a good path between there, to lead people to talk through important things in an interesting way -- it has nothing to do with a person's academic qualifications, and people like that could end up anywhere. Still, I remember taking English courses at the local college during my last year of high school, with a professor who was really bright and really great at teaching -- I knew him already through my family, and he's largely responsible for my wanting to study lit in college -- and, well ... this is an extreme example, since the school itself was not a "good" one by any stretch, and mostly kinda pre-professional, but it was a good demonstration of how the level of the people around you winds up dictating what a professor can even try to teach.

So it's kind of on that logic that I'm recommending certain things: a school challenging enough that you know your fellow students are going to be bright; a school with a serious enough department that a lot of your fellow students are going to be lit students, and not people from other fields dropping in for electives; and a good enough humanities program that you'll have choice and quality in your own electives. (Liberal-artsy as it sounds, I feel like a good study of literature almost has to include things like history or philosophy or religion on the side.) (And weirdly enough, a lot of the best writers I've had in workshops have been undergrad philosophy majors.)

Oh and Bob, another thing to think about is comparative literature! If you want to read a lot of work in translation, outside of the English-in-English canon, you should look for a place with a well-developed comp lit program -- preferably one that's well-integrated with the English department, so you can move back and forth easily when you want to. (This is something you can ask the schools about directly.) Same goes for the amount of theory you'll be learning -- places that put focus on their comp lit departments (or their departments of romance languages and literature, actually) will tend to give you a lot more of that stuff. This was the one thing that I wound up feeling was missed out on at my school, which offered a great foundation in the English canon, but sometimes made it difficult to slip over into comp lit classes, and did practically no theory at all. Once you've narrowed down your list, this is the kind of stuff you can start asking the departments.

GNB linked to this board, and here are some threads with similar questions that might give you things to think about. (He is probably writing the Great American Novel right now and has decided that he does not need college, or this thread.

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=104748

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=118420

Nabisco's point brings me to something else: if there is someone you admire and respect and think you would really like to work with, see if they teach at some school and then apply there, talk about it your admission letter and that will score you points. But, at the undergraduate level, I would be really surprised if there was one person you could pinpoint like that, or that it wouldn't change in the future.

I also agree with NB about taking a wide variety of liberal arts courses. This is what people told me to do when I thought, as a high school student, that I wanted to study journalism. They said to major in English, history, politics, languages, etc, but not to major in journalism. I would suggest the same for creative writing. It would be the rare student, I think, who could really benefit from a strict writing program as an undergradute.

Let me also warn you off of pursuing a degree in English. If you're as ill-motivated as me, then you'll want to earn a degree from a department that will actively prepare you to find a job. You can always bolster your liberal arts education on your own/as a minor.

that's a whole other story. college isn't trade school. If you want to go the pre-professional route, some options: teaching, the aforementioned journalism, nursing, etc.

Truly that sounds like a lazy student's paradise.

I dare say that a counter-argument is possible.