During a break from searching for annotations in philosophy/religion/hermeneutics books, I browsed the filing cabinets and came across a short piece titled "English A.D. 2000." It was published in The Saint Louis University Magazine 44.2 (1971): 11. The magazine contacted professors in some 40 departments and asked them to write a short statement what they believed their field would be like in the year 2000. Fr. Ong concluded with:

"I suspect that at its best English in the future will continue to develop by reaching out and pulling in around itself as many as possible of the other always burgeoning humanistic subjects (including the sciences in their manifold humanistic dimensions). Many of the other humanistic disciplines will also be engaged in similar fraternization. Born sanguine, I look less for interdisciplinary conflict than for interdisciplinary cooperation.

"Perhaps the end result will be the emergence of a multidisciplinary field of study, which we can hop will not be invincibly chaotic and which we might be styled anthropology in the deepest sense of this term, with various foci, these for English being around the verbally produced artifact. How this will be managed in terms of academic organization, we shall have to see."