Don’t overreact to the headline, which is the internal headline the New Republic put in its <title> tags. The headline on the page itself is not much better: “In the Near Future, Only Very Wealthy Colleges Will Have English Departments.” Both versions overhype and (in my opinion) misrepresent the author’s thesis, which is actualy “Only wealthy institutions will be able to afford the luxury of faculty devoted to studying written and printed text.”

Which may be true, but “studying written and printed text” is only part of what English facutly do these days, and digital humanists of all stripes regularly study manuscript and print culture along with digital forms. I won’t link to the article itself; you can find it by Googling the click-baity title if you wish.