Learning and literature at Union are not restricted to the classroom. English majors often participate in Mountebanks, the College dramatic society, contribute to Idol, the College arts and literary magazine, and write for Concordiensis, the student newspaper. In addition, those students interested in literature sometimes edit, and frequently publish in, The Minerva Review, an undergraduate scholarly journal for students from Union, Hamilton, Skidmore, Wellesley, and Siena.

Moreover, in the last ten years, students have had the opportunity to hear and meet visiting writers as prominent as Margaret Atwood, Gwendolyn Brooks, Carlos Fuentes, Allen Ginsberg, Seamus Heaney, Denise Levertov, Czeslaw Milosz, Toni Morrison, and Robert Pinsky. The department has also helped to sponsor recent visits by such literary and cultural critics as Kathryn Pollett and Barbara Ehrenreich.

An English major is not a preprofessional program in the narrow sense (that is, a vocational course of study leading to a single profession), but it does prepare one for a life that is profitable, in all those forms of work in which analytical skills, judgment, and the capacity to write with accuracy and speak with power are valued. In fact, skills of this kind are especially resistant to the effects of economic change: they fit one to hold not one but many posts with credit, and thus to adapt to many situations.

The English faculty is very proud of what its majors have achieved after graduation from Union. Some have received prestigious awards, including Watson and Fulbright scholarships, and graduate fellowships from Washington University and Rutgers. Some of our graduates went on to attend law school at Cornell, Harvard, and George Washington. Others still have studied creative writing and journalism at Columbia, NYU, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, and Washington University, or completed degrees in business at the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford. Some have gone to medical school. Others are working for the U.S. Information Agency, or are in the Foreign Service, and a number are working for TV or radio stations, or in business, sales, advertising, management, publishing, or editing. But whatever their specific professional objectives, all graduates have profited from the faculty's commitment to rigorous critical analysis, clear thought and speech, and precise, graceful writing--the cornerstones, we feel, of a genuine humanistic education.