Where in the World Are Languages?

Throughout my career as an educator, I have observed that the advanced study of languages is not universally valued in the American educational system. Even so, I was stunned by several announcements this fall. The University at Albany, State University of New York, has decided to eliminate major, minor, and graduate programs in French, Italian, Russian, and the classics (the German program was already reduced), along with theater. Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge has cut all offerings in Portuguese, Japanese, and Russian effective this spring semester. Plans to phase out foreign language programs are being contemplated at several institutions, such as the University of Nevada at Reno and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. The option to major in German has been deactivated at the University of Maine, Orono, Loyola University at Chicago, and the University of Southern California, among others. When financial exigencies hit, decisions to cut services and programs must be made, but cutting languages is shortsighted. The Albany plan is especially draconian for a research university: No European languages except Spanish will be taught beyond the language acquisition stage.

Many universities, like Albany, seek to justify these cuts based on student interest as reflected in the number of language majors. That misguided metric is more complicated than it looks. Research by the Modern Language Association shows that language majors are often identified as second concentrations, but a many colleges and universities do not report such majors. Quite a few international studies and business majors declare a second major in a language. Many students choose to minor in a language, especially after a period of study abroad, and courses show up as transfer credits.

The flawed "number of majors" metric distracts us from the real question: What is the purpose of a university if not to cultivate the core disciplines of a liberal arts education for its students? If we value the advanced study of languages as central to the mission of a liberal arts curriculum, then we must ensure that programs have adequate resources, connect well to other elements of the curriculum, and provide students with the essential experiences to develop translingual and transnational competence. It is absurd to give students access to introductory and intermediate sequences in French (available in virtually all the high schools that send students to universities) but not to advanced courses on linguistics, literature, culture, and media taught in French. Students who peek into the door of language yet cannot go further are being denied a key component of a university education. In all of this, we are terribly out of sync with the rest of the world, where the study of one or more languages is undertaken seriously in the pre-university years.

Restricting and eliminating language offerings is a move that makes the university equivalent to a high school. It also deprives other humanities programs of the expertise that specialists in literature, linguistics, and culture bring. Community college students who transfer into four-year institutions like Louisiana State University may find that when it comes to languages, there is no progression from the two-year schools. College students returning from study abroad may find no opportunities to apply their high-level language skills in fourth-year courses. High schools teachers seeking to further their graduate education in the languages they teach may find no programs in the entire state, and when high school students ask what state universities they can attend to continue studying the languages they've started, the answer may very well be "none."

The consequences of failing to embrace language study early and promote it throughout the educational system are readily apparent. We are a "language rich" country in terms of the numbers of speakers of languages other than English who live here, but a "language poor" country when it comes to advanced expertise. Rather than encourage bilingual and multilingual speakers to pursue higher learning in the languages they know and want to know, some colleges and universities seem willing to jettison advanced study. While we must resist this country's creeping devaluation of humanistic study, from an economic or strategic vantage point, a diversity of language, cultural, and literary study is critical to how well the United States functions in a global context.

It is the responsibility of the larger community, academic and social, to make the case for the advanced study of languages and humanities. We must call out university administrators who, by failing to explain the value of the advanced study of languages and literatures to legislators and the public, are derelict in their duty. Until Americans see learning languages as an indispensable enterprise, we must argue, continuously and vigorously, for the centrality and indisputable relevance of this area of study.

The University at Albany proudly proclaims on its Web site that it "puts 'The World Within Reach.'" Yet if its restructuring plans go forward, one of the four flagship research universities of New York State and those schools across the country that follow its lead will put a good part of the world beyond the reach of their students. Let us hold all universities to Albany's statement of values. If the academic community and those who support it do not stand up in support of advanced study and research in languages other than English, then the humanities truly are incomplete -- and the mission of higher education is seriously compromised.

 

Comments

[HazMat5]

02:08 AM on 11/28/2010

lots of good points above, very nice analysis

globalization has brought domination by a handful of languages, the information age has put everything needed at one's fingertips - out of the library, out of the academy

the natural progression is diminishing the number of languages in use, as cultures homogenize - and history is lost

but we still will utilize information, represented symbolically... learn to talk to the machines, learn to code

[Deep77]

06:00 PM on 11/27/2010

To understand the importance of a humanities education, one needs to talk to a professor at the American University of Cairo. In Egyptian society there is a huge emphasis on math and science. There is an immense prestige that comes with being an engineer. High schools in Egypt groom their brightest-and often wealthiest- students to be engineers. This means tons of calculus, physics, chemistry, etc. All at the expense of literature and social science classes. As a result, professors have found these students unable to express their own ideas nor be analytical about readings. Plagerism is quite common, because students do not see ideas in a book but rather just words as if it was a mathematical formula. The professors have to basically change their mind set, change they way they think. Or as the Times article that I read about this from, "unthink". What makes this article so interesting, is that with all the emphasis Egyptian society has on engineering, Egypt is not a technologically innovative country. In this respect it is quite backwards.

[Rachael Crawley]

08:24 PM on 11/24/2010

As a Russian language/lit major, thank you! It's horrid to see a language I love so much cut along with all the others.

[Microfante]

11:45 AM on 11/24/2010

When I was a PhD student, I always said that the associations of university professors should establish the fundamental goal of making plans for the future of their disciplines. I kept asking: "What do you want to do with your programs in French, Italian, German, etc?" It was not a disinterested question: my PhD program was in Italian and French. No one gave me an answer. In the 1990s, the mantra was: do your theory, write at least one chapter of your dissertation on gender studies, and then crank out as many fashionable buzzwords as you can in your articles and research proposals. Once you have tenure, they told me, no one can remove you.

I got no tenure, and no more offers from any other universities. My choice of an alternative career (at 45) was not totally free and adventurous, nor was it painless. Recently, I read Edward W. Said's "Humanism and Democratic Criticism": it says so many things by which academia should have stood in the past, and many that, in all modesty, I suggested. They were totally ignored in favor of academic fashions. Now you reap what you sowed.

Good luck, kids.

[AxelDC]

03:44 PM on 11/23/2010

I minored in French in college and it took me from the ability to communicate to the ability to read and write at a college level.  I wish I'd had more time to study languages.

The US needs more emphasis on language acquisition, not less.  This is deadly to US competitiveness in the world, and Americans cannot forever count on the world catering to their monolingualism.

[Kurt Muller]

01:52 PM on 11/23/2010

Even when simultaneously advocating global awareness, some educators do not perceive the barriers they place before American students. Because I have had multiple careers, I have several perspectives, but all have required foreign travel, and, although I’m sure it’s possible to get around without additional languages, that option is fraught with danger, both physical and professional. On the physical, consider the xenophobic fear some Americans have here at home when in Miami surrounded by Spanish speakers. For some reason, the fear is that “they’re talking about me.” Probably not, but abroad, the inability to understand what’s going on around the traveler may indeed leave that person vulnerable to targeting. Professionally, it’s easy to use English at professional conferences, but if the language of the conference is English, and the participant doesn’t use another “high-value language” (one used commonly by persons of various nationalities), that person misses much of the information shared off the speaker’s podium. Some 20 yrs ago, the American Psychological Assn published an article that noted that American practitioners’ professional reading restricted to English put them 20 yrs behind their European colleagues. My experience in multilateral environments dealing with diplomacy and security convinces me I could not have accomplished a number of tasks using only English. Advanced levels of cultural knowledge have allowed me to achieve consensus or collaboration by using my counterparts’ language, and even less-fluent use has led to invitations I would not have received otherwise.

[ellander]

10:04 AM on 11/23/2010

Thank you for writing in defense of advanced language education. I am particularly concerned about language education in public institutions: with the exception of Loyola University at Chicago, all of the programs mentioned in this article were at public universities. Languages have long been a component of elite education at private institutions and I suspect that those programs are relatively less threatened (even in today's economic climate) than ones at state schools, where they arguably are even more critical. Public institutions educate larger numbers of students than private ones: these are the very places where language programs need to be plentiful and rigorous in order to assure that more Americans achieve advanced competencies in languages other than English.

[frogprof12]

01:04 PM on 11/23/2010

Rice University, in Houston, has completely done away with its graduate French program, and has watered down its undergraduate program to a "French Studies" department, which "integrates several disciplinary perspectives in the study of contemporary France and the broader French-speaking world. Accordingly, the faculty includes literary theorists, philosophers, historians, linguists, cultural critics, as well as language instructors." (You see where language instruction comes in that line-up -- and one wonders whether the literary "classics" are even glanced at. Probably not -- they wouldn't fall under "queer studies" or the like.)
I can't even find a job teaching French in Texas [I'm an ABD, which doesn't help], because I don't have a teaching certificate to teach high-school French. The public schools here would rather have some recent college graduate with 18 hours of undergrad French and a certificate, rather than someone with a master's in French Lit and most of a PhD in the same, as well as a year of living and teaching in a French high school. That's where our priorities lie now -- not with education but with bureaucracy.

[Russell A Berman]

11:36 PM on 11/22/2010

Not that long ago, it was commonplace to criticize US policies for 'unilateralism' and for an insufficient ability to understand the perspectives of other countries and cultures. Yet how can we avoid unilateralism if students have no opportunities to learn about other cultures in depth--in the depth that requires some familiarity with a foreign language? The attacks on language learning opportunities are attacks on student access to knowledge. The shameful decisions at Albany are just one example, but perhaps the most egregious.

What is particularly sad in this destructive dismantling of higher education is the role of the leaders--so few of whom are speaking up in defense of education. We need college and university presidents who can articulate to the public the importance of learning, including language learning. Instead, so far, lots of silence.

[Eric Englert]

06:54 PM on 11/22/2010

I am a 19-year-old community college student. I am a Japanese Foreign Language major and I speak French in addition to English and the aforementioned. My main concern with the massive campaigning for math and science education was that it would lead to a defunding of programs because of a lack of interest and a lack of value appropriated to Foreign Language courses. This was already present but has been amplified by the xenophobic sentiments that seem to be blanketing mainstream news organizations in the country. This past saturday, I started taking a Vietnamese class and I am planning on teaching myself Basque, Hindi, Farsi. I want to learn Cherokee as well if I can find a suitable number of resources for the last one. A fundamental understanding of outside cultures comes from a knowledge of how language shapes culture and vise-versa. If we cannot break ourselves from the inherent fear of out-groups found throughout all socioeconomic levels and cultures in this country and realize that expecting the world to learn English is incredibly and almost laughably arrogant, I believe we as a country will never again be a major competitor on the in the technological and economic stage, and certainly not an effective political mediator. It takes a mix of humanities and sciences and affording preference to one over the other inevitably creates an educational imbalance which hurts our status as a world power. Thank you, Ms. Feal. This has been neglected far too long.

[Tim303]

06:42 PM on 11/22/2010

Did you read that biochemistry professor's ringing defense of the Albany departments that were cut?

[Eric Englert]

10:42 AM on 11/23/2010

Do you happen to have a link to that or know where I could find it? I would love to read it.

[Ruthie O]

01:52 PM on 11/23/2010

Yes! It's magnificent.

http://genomebiology.com/2010/11/10/138

[kfitz47]

04:37 PM on 11/22/2010

Eliminating the advanced study of certain languages (and the study of other languages tout-court) will not just affect the students who want to major in those languages, but will also hurt the options for students who major in fields like anthropology or international relations; it's just not possible to fully understand another culture without a sophisticated understanding of its language.