<p>Hmmmm. That list looked OK to me, but I have no idea how it was generated. At least it had some schools that clearly belong on such a list, like Johns Hopkins, that high school seniors don’t always associate with great English programs. (But where is Cornell? Carnegie-Mellon?)</p>
<p>As I understand such things, Chicago has a well-regarded English department on the graduate level (as in: clearly top 10, not quite top 3-4), which means that it offers all of those resources to undergraduates, too. It has areas of strength and weakness, like almost everyone else. Surprise, surprise, it is strong in critical theory, and relatively weak in creative writing courses (especially compared to peers like Penn, Brown, Hopkins, CMU).</p>
<p>English is one of the most popular majors at Chicago, and it is fairly easy to double-major in English, because English is one of a handful of majors where writing a BA thesis is optional, not mandatory. My English-major child’s experience was that the faculty was neither unapproachable nor particularly warm or fuzzy. The ensemble of English majors was too large and too diverse in its interests to have much esprit de corps as a group, but she met some of her closest friends in English classes and shared lots with her circle within the department.</p>
<p>One of the advantages of going to Chicago as a prospective English major is that there is no question that literary study is respected there. (Heck, even Richard Posner wrote a book about it.) Partially because of this, there are options OTHER than the English Department for doing literary study. The most important is probably the Fundamentals program, where people who want to do old-fashioned close reading of Great Books to derive moral lessons can feel completely comfortable, rather than being scorned. Lots of English-like work also goes on in Law, Letters and Society and Comparative Literature, and of course in foreign literature departments, the theater department, and the Classics department, all of which are also pretty good.</p>
<p>So . . . if your dream is to be in the Hopkins writing program, and then get an MFA at Iowa, it’s not so good. If you need to have lunch with your professors every week in order to feel completely comfortable in class, it’s probably OK, but certainly not great. If you want to study gender theory, or post-colonialism, or to immerse yourself in Shakespeare’s idea of the Human, or in the narrative component of law, it’s superb.</p>