I see the volcanic Stanley Fish is rumbling over the dim fate of the humanities. He sees SUNY Albany’s dismantling of its French, Italian, classics, Russian, and theater programs as the beginning of the end.
It’s not news, of course. Foreign language departments across the land have been eviscerated or killed: at Drake and Louisiana State (which also terminated all of its English instructors), with a death warrant in the works at the University of Maine. Arizona State, my beloved former employer, eliminated the foreign language requirement for the bachelor’s degree years ago, and bumbling semiliteracy in a second language is no longer required for many graduate programs. In any event, ASU will accept American Sign Language to fill what few requirements remain.
And what do we expect? When everything but business and engineering is devalued and we convert education to an assembly line, what are the humanities other than a pothole in the road to voc-ed?
So it goes. Elite schools no doubt will continue to educate the elite, an exercise that involves furnishing the mind, not just inculcating skills. But as for true public education? Expect your tax dollars to support institutions modeled on proprietary schools, whose mission is to churn out lots and lots of worker bees, future technicians and paper-shufflers with bachelor’s degrees that give them no clue to what the world is about or how it got to be that way.
And if a kid in the middle or working classes has a hunger for insight, a mind for deep thinking, or a taste for art?
Oh well.
To receive my MA I had a choice: take a statistics class or take a foreign language proficiency exam. This was due to a number of students railing against having to learn a foreign language.
My advisor, however, received her PhD from Columbia and would have none of this nonsense. She not only required that I take the foreign language exam, but she also required that I hire a tutor, take part in a language exchange with a native speaker, and take practice exams that were far advanced of anything the university required.
And this may be the key to higher education: find a way to push beyond the bare requirements, which are surprisingly low. As a graduate of Arizona State University, I can attest to its mediocrity, but that didn’t stop me from getting a decent education. I got an undergraduate research grant that paired me with a senior faculty member. So, in my early 20s I learned to write grants, do graduate level research, and then present my finding to colleagues (mind you I was some 40 years their junior). Then in graduate school I found a certificate program that gave me practical skills that keep me employed currently and an academic advisor that didn’t just want me to finish my MA; she wanted me to be challenged.
And maybe that’s the real question: is it more important to print worthless degrees or for students to actually excel?
I am not, and never have been, much of a conspiracy theorist. But if I were trying to maintain an American caste system, welfare programs that allow people to survive in poverty, but never actually rise above it and educational programs that allows the middle class to have useful skills, but not think too much, would be pretty effective, I think.
I keep starting comments…and then erasing. Scary times. Vocational studies–like computer languages–can become obsolete.
BUT–language is taught so abysmally in this country that it’s no wonder there are no majors. Many kids with several years of high school language place into Whatever 101 when they get to college.
Thankfully, I learned my language in New York with their regents program. I can STILL read French, better than my children, in fact (at least till my son spent a year in France).
@ frugal scholar: Yes. When, for the purposes of marriage, I came up from the UofA, where I was hugely funded in a Ph.D. program in French, I enrolled in ASU’s French program. ASU did not offer the Ph.D., but it did have a master’s program.
I hadn’t taken a course in French that was taught in English since my freshman year. On my first day at ASU I walked into a seminar (! no joke!!!) in Middle French literature to find it was taught in English. I was horrified! All the rest of the program’s coursework was in English.
What was the point? None of their students could speak or understand French fluently enough to sit through a graduate-level course in French. As it develops, they were all Education majors. Yes. ASU was churning out people with master’s degrees in French education to go into the public schools and teach…well…what? They sure couldn’t teach French. I don’t know what they were supposed to do.
But on a slightly more positive note, @ Tina, it undoubtedly is true that a student comes away from a program with as much as she or he put into it. Probably even at a mediocre school an ambitious, smart person will learn as much as or even more than she might have at an allegedly elite school. The disadvantage, then, is only that she will not have the professional contacts that she would have developed through the elite school: classmates and professors at Harvard will open a whole different set of doors from those that alumni and faculty at ASU can open.