Richard Utz, chair of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology, recently blogged in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the history and evolution of English departments, as well as his thoughts on where the next evolution should take us.

He points out that "the teaching of composition has been all-too-willingly relegated by tenured English faculty to junior colleagues and contingent faculty, groups whose members, because of their relative youth and employment situation, are “naturally” inclusive of new technologies and experimental teaching. In several schools, first-year writing/communication nowadays even incorporates not only written, but also oral, verbal, electronic, and nonverbal communication, creating even more convergence with other areas on college campuses."

He advocates that tenured faculty in English "should embrace, accompany critically, and shape the new discourses [their] students sorely need to communicate and compete: blogs, video essays, Web comics, digital archives, data visualization, and the like. If these professors continue to hide in disciplinary dead-wall reveries, preferring not to grow with the academic culture and technological change that surround them, I predict students will vote with their feet, and parents with their pocketbooks, to usher in the end of degree programs and departments that rely exclusively on writing, print, and the allegedly carefree days of WordPerfect 6.0."