Dunno... an english professor where I went to college listed his primary research on his faculty website as “determining from the writings of Mark Twain whether he was gay”. I often wonder how much of my tax dollars went toward that. On the whole I have a low opinion of the “english” department, since they get to study a blend of communication, philosophy, psychology, history and so on without ever contributing concrete advancements to any of those fields. For instance, it took all of one month of my first job before I realized that the essay format was a completely ineffective way to communicate (tl;dr) and learned a completely new bullet-point-driven style that would actually deliver ideas to the intended recipient. I taught myself; it would have been nice if the people who study communication for a living actually knew the best way to communicate ideas to others and could have taught me that. Instead they basically taught me the most artistically pleasing way to communicate with other english majors. I’m also generally irked by the english major attitude that there are no wrong answers and every interpretation is equally valid. This attitude prevents them from ever making useful advances at anything.