It is only 2 p.m. on a mild afternoon in February, but the hallways are quiet and dim. Dozens of students stroll and chatter and text on the quad outside, but here in the Humanities Building at UCLA, the air is still. It’s a pleasing brick structure in the Romanesque Revival style, four stories high at the center of campus. Passages are wide and ceilings low, benches and administrative rooms on one side, faculty offices on the other, all in soft Mediterranean tones. It has a small library and fourteen classrooms outfitted with the latest audio and video tools, but few teachers and students are in sight. The English department spreads over three floors, and by my count only one out of eight office doors is open. The department has 1,400 majors, and barely a half-dozen of them wait for a chance to speak with a professor. In my slow circuit up and down the corridors, I hear just three lively exchanges between student and teacher.
It didn’t used to be so. When I started the English major in Westwood in 1980, it seemed that half the office doors were open each afternoon in Rolfe Hall where the department was then located. Here and there you had to step over the outstretched legs of undergraduates on the floor waiting for consultations. Some of the professors were off-putting, a few downright mean, but even so they were a presence in the hallways. Classrooms were nearby in the other wing, the English Reading Room beneath them on the ground floor, the department office on the bridge between, and an auditorium where the required English 10 A-B-C series met (Beowulf to Joyce) but a few yards away. It made for a coherent experience.
