Like a consumptive protagonist in a Victorian novel, the humanities have been dying for a long, long time. Earlier this week, James Pulizzi declared that English departments would soon be “extinct,” and that there was “no reversing” this decline. Although his topic was the newly emergent “digital humanities,” his sentiments could have been plucked more or less verbatim from The New Republic in 1970: “English,” wrote poet, professor, and editor Reed Whittemore, “is going down the drain.”

In fact, the humanities have been going down that drain since at least 1621, when Robert Burton blamed their decline for the rampant disease of melancholia attacking scholars of his generation: “In former times, kings, princes, emperors, were the only scholars, excellent in all faculties … but those heroical times are past: the Muses now are banished, in this bastard age.” Lately, the prime culprits in this deathbed scene are either out-of-touch traditionalists, who refuse to adapt to a changing world and “instruct students in contemporary media platforms,” or digital humanists chasing new trends and succumbing to “the language of salesmanship” instead of defending the tradition.

I am probably doubly culpable: I published a scholarly tome at the world’s oldest press, and I currently lead a team that is data mining over 487,000 book records and building a website reconstructing and visualizing the social networks of Shakespeare, John Locke, Benjamin Franklin, and their peers. I really do wear tweed, but I also tweet at my pajama-wearing students when I’m not harping on them to turn off their damn phones and bring their books to class. Mea culpa.

295,221 students per year graduate with humanities degrees—more than any field except business.

In my defense, though, anyone following the humanities death watch for the last 600 years would be struck both by its recurring characters and its disconnect from objective fact. Burton wrote in the age of Shakespeare, when the remarkable growth of literacy drove the first golden age of vernacular literature. Whittemore wrote while English as an academic discipline was in the midst of a meteoric rise, climbing from 17,240 BA degrees granted in 1950 to 64,342 in 1971. After a steep drop in the 1980s, English is now back to a robust 53,767 degrees granted per year, and 295,221 students per year graduate with humanities degrees—more than any field except business.

Defying all conventional wisdom and their parents’ warnings, most English majors also secure jobs, and not just at Starbucks. Last week, at the gathering of the Associated Departments of English, it was reported that English majors had 2 percent lower unemployment than the national rate, with an average starting salary of $40,800 and average mid-career salaries of $71,400. According to a 2013–14 study by PayScale.com, English ranks just above business administration as a “major that pays you back.”