Where Do English Departments Come From (Parker Riley)

So long as there had been a narrow, prescribed curriculum and not too many students, departments of instruction had little or no administrative significance, and although the word "department" was sometimes used earlier, it was not really until the 1890's (at Harvard, for example, not until 1891; at my own university, not until 1893) that departments became important administrative units, pigeonholes into which one dropped all the elements of a rapidly expanding curriculum...Perhaps inevitably, departments soon became competitive and ambitious, looking anxiously at any unoccupied territory between themselves and neighboring departments (p. 12, Norton Guide To Composition).

Early chairmen and early professors of English literature were willing if not eager to increase the prestige of their subject and numbers of their students and course offerings by embracing, not only linguistics (including English grammar and the history of the language and even, whenever possible, comparative philology), but also rhetoric, which normally included, of course, oratory, elocution, and all forms of written composition. How this latter coup was possible I shall explain in a moment, but first let us remind ourselves of the full scope of the aggressiveness (some would say acquisitiveness) exhibited by departments of "English." They were later to embrace, just as greedily, journalism, business writing, creative writing, writing for engineers, play-writing, drama and theater, and American literature, and eventually to be offering courses in contemporary literature, comparative literature, the Bible and world classics in translation, American civilization, the humanities, and "English for foreigners." In sum, English departments became the catchall for the work of teachers of extremely diverse interests and training, united theoretically but not actually by their common use of the mother tongue. Disintegration was therefore inevitable. Since there was no diminishing of the various forces that caused the original creation of departmental structure in colleges of arts and sciences, splintering departments eventually ensued, often with great bitterness and an unhealthy increase in competitive spirit (p. 13, Norton Guide To Composition).