There’s more information about Gordon Gee in his Wikipedia entry:
A link to that has already been posted once in this thread, but it wasn’t made clear that the problem with Gee isn’t just one incident.
Gee was president of WVU when I went there in the early 1980s, but left to take a better-paying job as president of Ohio State. Someone wrote a parody of the Madonna song: “…:we are living in the material world, and I am a material Gee”. I guess they’d forgotten about it when they hired him back 10 years later.
WVU’s problems are rooted in the demographics trends noted upthread, primarily declining target population nationally. But Gee was spectacularly lousy at planning, forging ahead with his plans to grow the enrollment from 30,000 to 40,000 (it’s now around 24,000). When asked about the declining enrollment, he misled and outright lied.
In the proposed budget-cutting plan, they are considering ending the program I graduated from (Bachelor’s of Science Electrical Engineering), but interestingly, are not planning on ending the Associate’s degree in EE program (which didn’t exist when I went there). If these kinds of cuts continue (e.g., ending the graduate math program) they may seriously damage the school’s research mission and turn it into a glorified, overpriced votech school.
There was one US president whose mother tongue was not English. Van Buren’s was Dutch. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Kennedys spoke French.
George Romney, who sought but didn’t win the 1968 Republican Presidential nomination, was born in Mexico (of American parents). He didn’t visit the U.S. until he was 6 (I think). I would guess he grew up speaking both English and Spanish. Many American Presidents were fluent in other languages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multilingual_presidents_of_the_United_States#Table
That’s an interesting chart. I’m not sure I believe the claims of fluency in Greek and Latin—reading fluently, sure, and perhaps writing, but spoken? The table distinguishes Jefferson’s reading of Greek from Madison’s.
It’s also interesting to note that no president since Roosevelt was fluent in a second language.
If you can read it, you should be able to speak it. I have read that people from past centuries who had an advanced Catholic education could speak Latin to one another if that was their only common language.
Speaking Latin? Absolutely it was part of the “classical” education of the period. It would be expected of them, as it would for any well educated landowning man of that period. Greek to a lesser degree but also not surprising.
That is not true. I read Latin just fine, but I don’t speak it with anything like fluency. I just put on https://www.vaticannews.va/en/podcast/vatican-radio-news-in-latin.html to see how much I understood, and I get most of the words, but can’t really understand it, but the equivalent in Italian would be clear to me.
In times past, there was more of an emphasis on being able to speak the language; some Latinists do also speak it, but most don’t. I assume it’s the same for Greek. (Edit—if you go a little farther back, to the 16th century or earlier when education itself was conducted in Latin, of course they could speak it and communicate with strangers in it.)
By the sixteenth century, Latin (and even more so, Greek) had begun to cease to be the languages that academic works were conducted in. In the eighteenth century, it appeared that French would become the language of academia. But in the nineteenth century, it became clear that German was the language of academia. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, Germany was what the largest group of academic studies were written in. Then in the mid-twentieth century, English became the top language for academic studies, and that remains true today. This is mostly why it’s become less common to study other languages at colleges in the U.S…
In my father’s time most PhDs required proficiency in a language regardless of the field. Most engineers took German so they’d be able to read more of the research. My Dad took German because he already spoke Yiddish so it was the easiest
Aaaaahhhhh!
German was
Would it be possible to gift this article?
Which is how some of our current “leaders” look upon postsec education in general. They believe that what they need is just specialized technicians to do necessary work. As in, don’t need to appreciate literature or understand philosophy to code, to design bridges or fix a broken limb. The occasional “visionary genius” will just be able to arise on his own, uncontaminated by alien experiences unrelated to “real world issues”.
Thank you.
Thank you for gifting the article. I enjoyed reading it, although it gave me great pause as my state land grant R1 university is beginning to experience that same parsimony from our short-sighted politicians.
Smaller universities should offer major languages. Large universities some less common ones that enough people wish to study. I don’t have a problem with smaller universities not exploring every sub specialty. But students should certainly be encouraged to take a second language and enough other humanities course to give them some appreciation of history, social sciences, etc. Sone of these things can be learned well outside the university setting, and my previous points still generally apply.
I could see a situation where there is little demand from students to study (say) Old Norse. I don’t think every language also requires being able to major in that if demand is non-existent. But graduate math? Environmental science? No wonder the faculty was unhappy. Universities still have a public mission.
The best place to study Flavoovian is in Flavoovia, not Weat Virginia. To study Old Norse, better travel as well as to go back in time a millennium. It sounds like West Virginia is also trying to go back in time, but I am not sure how far.