Dubya was pretty comfortable in Spanish, at a frequent-tourist kind of level. Delivered some campaign speeches in the language, as I recall.
Too late to edit …
How many Americans could answer this question: “Как вас зовут?” without needing an interpreter/translator? It is a simple question and just asks “What is your name?” An American who learned Russian at university would know this, no problem. Take away the Russian language option, and they’d be stuck. Seems to me that international relations, where this kind of thing can come in handy, is a lot more better than solving x=2 in some math class.
STEM has its place. But I’d suggest that its place is no more important than anything else. Learning a foreign language is only ever a good thing. Let those who are good at it shine. Taking away a chance for them to do so, is doing America a disservice.
Verifying my Dubya note above, I find this:
Definitely some interesting trivia in there. (“Which president learned English as a second language?”)
As did I, but not because reading foreign language journals was important for performing research.
Van Buren’s first language was Dutch. Hoover spoke Chinese (which he used to speak secretly with his wife, who spoke something like five languages). FDR spoke German and French. So did Teddy Roosevelt. Woodrow Wilson could read and write German. Carter gave speeches in Spanish (that were better received than Bush, who tried the same).
Earlier, Adams (the First one), Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams (the Second one) were all broadly learned in various languages, including French (which they used in diplomatic capacities).
Many of the others were proficient in Latin and Greek, as part of a classical education (which, I suppose, goes more directly to the point of the thread).
Clinton and Obama claimed limited proficiency in German and Indonesian, respectively.
Are you implying that a STEM students only need something related to STEM and that any other subject is not relevant?
Or that anything that is not directly related to STEM research is trivial or irrelevant? Good to be used as a hobby horse, but not for serious matters in real life?
If so I want to state that I completely disagree with your opinion. You are missing so much that the objective STEM knowledge you believe you have is warped, clouded and distorted beyond being useful.
But perhaps I am misunderstanding your position and we are both expressing our respective POVs too strongly.
Anyway: Closing a language department is shortsighted and dumb.
I went to Italy last year. I didn’t need any Italian to get by. Speaking it enriched my experience immeasurably, but in ways that would be hard to convey to a monolingual, who may have had a great time on a similar trip.
Education as a whole is like that: it’s very difficult to convey the ways in which a STEM or humanities education improves your life experience, but it does. When those things don’t directly lead to dollars, the ill-educated often can’t be bothered to see the point.
Yes, American diplomats will be trained in the languages of the countries they are serving in at the level of “general professional proficieny” in both speaking and reading.
There was actually a thread started up recently on that subject:
As you surmised, there’s no clear answer. My initial thought is “if portions of the athletic department weren’t serving as a net gain to the university, they’d be cut in this sort of circumstance”.
But these answers are never easy, or black and white. There are short- and long-term ramifications for all of these decisions, and I’ve never served in a university’s financial department.
The vast majority of research in STEM fields (and much of the research in non-STEM fields) these days is published in English. Obviously you’re better off knowing German and French and Russian so you can cover all the bases, but a scientific researcher with a knowledge of nothing but English is really not held back by an unfamiliarity with other languages.
Which is not to say that there are no benefits to learning languages; I think there are many, most of them detailed in the thread already so I won’t belabor the point. I think it’s a sad day when language classes are cut. It’s just that access to STEM articles in other languages isn’t an especially important reason for it being a sad day.
This was half the reason I never followed a foreign service path since I am crap with any languages. Ah well. I say cut 'em all!
But seriously, I have to think there are better targets for trimming than languages. Call in an outside consultant at least to give an appearance of impartiality.
Why would any courses need to be trimmed? The only reasons I can think of are:
- Enrollment has dropped to the point that they can’t fill classes (this seems rare)
- Administrative bloat means it’s hard to pay for instructors without raising tuition again
- Nobody ever enrolls in these classes (lack of student interest)
It seems a common mindset to presume that people are incompentent slackers and constantly work to ferret out and get rid of the worst. But what if we just presume that everybody is a competent professional doing their job, and let them get on with it? We would save a lot of money if we just stopped tracking everything so damn hard.
I wouldn’t think that WVU is a school known for its language program or that students seek out that school for a language-based degree. My guess it that students take these classes more as filler, to meet general studies requirements, or because they find them interesting. If the language classes aren’t available, then students will take classes in other programs and it will essentially be the same to them. Certainly a language class is different than a literature class, but to the students at WVU, it might not really make a difference. Students who are really interested in a language-based degree will likely be at a school which is more focused on that area of study rather than at WVU. An opposite example might be a liberal arts school cutting their electronics engineering department. It doesn’t mean that EE is not valuable or useful to liberal arts students, but rather that the students at that school aren’t interested enough in EE for it to be economically viable to offer courses in it.
The WVU College of Arts and Sciences (which includes majors like math, physics, chemistry, biology, history, English, political science, and psychology) requires students in these majors to complete four semesters of a foreign language.
It’s not clear to me whether WVU’s plans will ‘merely’ result in students’ no longer being able to major in foreign languages, or eliminate all foreign language instruction at WVU. If it’s the latter, it will have a huge impact on the school’s academic reputation.
The bit quoted in the OP (“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”) makes me think it’s the latter, but I don’t know for sure.
Here’s the letter detailing the proposed eliminations:
Right, I forgot that i also had to take the equivalent of 4 classes in a foreign language (5 if you chose Chinese or Japanese) that was offered by the school, or otherwise demonstrate proficiency in a foreign language at the same level. So I would assume that something similar is the case for other schools, and closing the entire foreign language department would mean that students would have to somehow take classes elsewhere. I guess then I should rethink my initial response - especially in light of the fact that apparently some of the programs weren’t losing money.
It really sucks.
I expect you’re probably right that these are not incredibly popular majors, and that students who are truly interested in studying a language are perhaps likely to go to a school other than WVU. But it gets a little tricky when we’re talking about in-state students. For a kid growing up in West Virginia, the lower cost & greater convenience of attending THE public university in their state may be compelling. They might in some ways be better off at a different institution if they’re really interested in language study, but going elsewhere might not be feasible. So while I agree with you in general, I wonder about West Virginia kids with limited resources who really want to learn Spanish, or Russian, or whatever.
No.
Ah, OK, got carried away. Sorry.
I could not have named any other public schools but here’s the sortable list in Wikipedia. I can’t tell you that it covers all the bases though without digging at each school: