I think the immediate response of the substantial majority of people reading this (including myself) are going to say “Yes, obviously. Why are you even bringing up the question PastTense?”
Because it turns out that West Virginia University is answering the question: No. It has a $45 million budget deficit and it has decided that the humanities would be a good place to cut.
I work in a large department that includes all of the world languages and literatures at WVU in addition to its ‘basic’ and applied linguistics programs. On August 10, 2023, the WVU provost recommended dissolving our department and all of its academic programs and faculty lines, including the only Linguistics programs in the state of West Virginia (our MA and undergrad minor). All of the tenured and untenured faculty in the department are to be laid off, including the linguistics faculty. All of the foreign language and literature programs at the university are to be discontinued; the president of the university publicly stated that foreign-language classes will be replaced with online apps or remote classes at other universities.
Should? Of course. Have to? Not really. If there’s a budget crunch and that’s the area that’s losing the university the most money, it makes sense. Certainly I would hope that they would keep the faculty around long enough to have everyone who started a program graduate there, but again, they really don’t have to if the budget situation is bad enough. People can transfer elsewhere, in theory.
If they suggested cutting all literature courses as well, that could be problematic for distribution requirements, and I certainly would hate them to do it given that I earned a lot of Humanities distribution requirements taking Latin Literature classes, but as long as they’re offering English literature and other Humanities stuff still, there’s classes available to fulfill those distribution requirements.
I had a graduate degree program cancelled by a university when I was halfway through. I was working full-time and it was the only one in my area, so no realistic way to go elsewhere. It sucked, big-time. I feel for everybody involved.
Be prepared to hear these announcements every year from now on. The humanities are dead.
Actually, I am trying to learn more about what exactly is the answer to your question. Which I assume is: do big-name college sports programs create net profits for schools? Or cost them money/raise tuition? My friends and family in WV have strong, conflicting opinions on the matter.
There seem to be a lot of factors, and it’s not easy to get information on some of them. I should stop my hijack here, and maybe open a thread on your question.
I think your post gets right to the heart of the problem.
Foreign languages will never pull in the faculty grants and alumni donations that higher-status majors will. So: should the university take this as a cost of doing business/ a loss leader, or should each department pay its own damn way?
My feeling is that the university should offer at least a few foreign languages/ literatures because that’s what being educated looks like.
Other people feel that as long as your degree gets you a job that pays well, screw well-rounded.
A huge issue is administrative bloat, as noted above, but equally significant is the decrease in public funding.
I think the inability (or unwillingness) to read US news from foreign media is a real concern.
There’s been conflict between ‘education’ and ‘job training’ almost as long as there have been institutions of learning. And the process of change is often painful. But the powers that be at WVU have really loused things up.
The article I’ve linked (post #4) spells this out conclusively.
Some contrarians may make some arguments about something, but what are their STEM students supposed to do when, at a minimum, performing research published, in, say, the German or French languages?
Use some robot machine to spit out some crap translation?
There’s no excuse for illiteracy at the college level.
Speaking as an American who moved to Europe several years ago: the stereotype of Americans who speak non-English languages by simply shouting English slowly is well founded.
In global business, English is still a useful lingua franca — if a Korean investor is meeting a Danish banker, for example, English will most likely be the language in which they initially connect. (Technical negotiations and contracts will involve translators, of course.) But this is fading a bit. In my experience, French and to a lesser extent German are slowly rising in prominence in the EU, especially with the UK’s Brexit.
Americans continuing to isolate themselves linguistically will have long-term effects on their global economic position. Not immediately, not in your lifetime or probably your children’s lifetime, but farther out, certainly.
I understand that emphasizing STEM education is all the rage now in some circles, but I think some appreciation of non-STEM education ought to occur in all universities. Whether that is literature or history or political science or a foreign language, or a just-plain humanities course of some sort, it should be there; and students should be allowed to follow their ability. If they show an aptitude at high school for studying foreign languages, let them continue to do it at a university. Don’t infer that they are not wanted at University X, because it doesn’t offer foreign languages.
I’ve long thought that a STEM education should absolutely include some basic non-STEM courses and vice versa.
I was sometimes stunned by how ignorant some of my friends who pursued hard sicences studies were of basic philosophical and social sciences concepts. Of course, we’re not going to go back to Presocratic physics theories, but ethics for instance is a whole area of philosophy that is still relevant and needed. Plus, as pointed out above, being able to at least read articles in a foreign language is very useful, not to mention the capital importance of knowing about history, or the joy of being able to appreciate art at a deeper level that like/don’t like.
And it goes both ways, of course. I couldn’t help but laugh when some of my linguistics classmates froze as the words “frequency” and “formants” were uttered by our introduction to phonology professor, or sighed when asked to name the unit of electrical resistance (“I chose to study languages in order not to hear of that stuff ever again”). About 15 years years after I graduated, my University started to offer an optional Statistics for Social Sciences course. I’d have signed up in a heartbeat. Heck, it’d even be obligatory if I was in charge.
More likely not encounter it or skip it if they do. If it’s not published in English, it’s most likely either not worth reading, or so old that someone has already summarized the important bits. On the rare occasion when that isn’t the case (only twice in my entire career), a technical dictionary sufficed. Google wasn’t an option then but likely does an even better job. Chemistry graduate programs dropped foreign language requirements because time in grad school is precious and and better spent on something other than learning German or whatever.
There may be plenty of other reasons to have these programs, but the notion that American STEM students need it isn’t going to be high on that list.
I am only familiar with ABET, which is for STEM. I would expect a university to have different accreditaions for the different fields of study.
I would extend that to all native English speakers from UK, Ireland, Australia, and maybe even Canada. I have coworkers who have resided in Switzerland for more than two decades and can barely order a beer in the local language. Being able to speak the local language gives me a big advantage.
I studied French and Japanese in high school and college. I actually use the French for menus, but the main point is by learning another language, I have a better understanding of my own language, plus some insight into another culture. For this reason, I would say it is not necessary to learn any specific language. It is more important to learn any other language to be able to better understand there are cultures besides one’s own culture.
IMHO, eliminating foreign languages at the university level is another way of keeping Americans in America and further isolating them from the rest of the world.
I have also seen the abbreviation STEMM, where the second M stands for medicine. Almost every doctor I have met here can read English and can understand it, as it is the lingua franca for many medical journals.
I chose my university for my STEM degree based on the fact that it also emphasized non-STEM requirements for the STEM students and vice versa.
Excellent points. I studied French from Grades 5 through high school graduation (I’m in Canada), and I can at least “get” the rudiments of French culture from my studies. I may not always understand them, but I can at least “get” them, and go with the flow.
And this is a shame. Americans should be embracing foreign languages and cultures, given America’s place in the world. Have there been any US Presidents who can speak anything other than English; and more importantly, used it in talks with other world leaders?
How do Americans who only speak English get by in the rest of the world? In English-speaking countries, just fine, I guess; but what about elsewhere? Do American diplomats in, say Russia or Senegal, speak Russian or French, respectively?