This issue considers the sustainability of English studies and of the humanities as a whole in the context of shrinking budgets and job opportunities and of shifting resources. Exploring topics from academic freedom and globalization to digitization, diversity, and the value of a humanities-based education, “To Delight and Instruct” reexamines the work of the English professor and calls for a reassessment of the priorities and means that undergird it.Contributors examine the faculty’s fundamental responsibilities to classroom teaching, the university, and the community. Attending to the relationship between changing technologies and literacy in a global environment, the issue not only argues for a reassertion and reimagining of the humanities in the contemporary university but, perhaps as important, helps articulate a way forward.

Contributors: Michael Bérubé, Martin Bickman, Marc Bousquet, Elizabeth Brockman, Sheila T. Cavanagh, Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Patricia Donahue, Gerald Graff, Donald E. Hall, Gail E. Hawisher, Jennifer L. Holberg, Colin Jager, Paul Lauter, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Julie Lindquist, Harriet Kramer Linkin, Mark C. Long, Donald G. Marshall, Richard E. Miller, James Phelan, Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori, Robert Scholes, Cynthia L. Selfe, Marcy Taylor