At Cornell between 2006 and 2011, the number of history majors dropped 49 percent, the number of English majors, 37 percent. At Yale — an extreme case, since its humanities programs were historically so popular and since its administration has worked hard to build up its science programs — the number of English majors plummeted more than 60 percent between 1991 and 2012. At Stanford, where the magnetism of Silicon Valley has helped draw a quarter of undergraduates to the engineering school, it’s not unknown for a humanities course to have five students or fewer; a course with as few as 20-odd students is termed a “lecture.” Humanities professors at these schools see the empty chairs in their classrooms and naturally wonder what the shift in their campus atmosphere bodes for the country as a whole.

Yet outside of this elite set of private schools, the humanities are holding their own, and at institutions with a far wider demographic of students. At schools nationwide, the number of students majoring in the “softest” humanities — English, foreign languages and literatures, the arts — has been remarkably steady over the last two decades, hovering between 9.8 percent and 10.6 percent of total bachelor’s degrees awarded. At the University of California, Berkeley — a school that enrolls roughly the same number of Pell grant students as the entire Ivy League combined — the English department this year graduated 375 majors, or 5 percent of the class. We should be wary of declaring “the end of the English major” when what has really happened is that, in terms of humanities enrollments, schools like Yale have gone from exceptional to merely above average.

Given the multitude of pressures on today’s undergrads, the real story is this persistent statistic: for the last two decades, roughly one out of eight college students majored in the humanities. (By comparison, business now attracts almost one in four; engineering, one in 13.) The real question is why, at a school like Berkeley — where a quarter of the undergraduates are the first generation in their family to attend college — do they still do it?

The answer, simply, is the resilience of the humanities canon. Students remain grabbed by the questions we pose in humanities classrooms — about style and character, politics and perception, love and ethics — and by how we follow these lines of inquiry into the pages of a novel, or the composition of a painting, or the prose of a philosophical treatise.

Here we must straighten out one of the great misconceptions that has circulated around humanities professors: that we are a trendy lot, “tenured radicals” wrenching the curriculum into irrelevance as we impose the latest theoretical paradigm upon it. Yet 30 years from the culture wars of the 1980s, what is remarkable is the continuity with the curriculum of old.