Thanks to Barbara McKenna at FACE Talk for pointing out an article in The New York Sun about a hiring spree at The City University of New York. The university recently hired 40 tenure-track professors at its College of Technology as part of a push to up the ranks of full-time faculty members on the university’s 23 campuses from 50 percent to 70 percent, the Sun reports.
McKenna contacted Dorothee Benz — communications director at the Professional Staff Congress/American Federation of Teachers, which represents faculty and staff at CUNY — for comment. McKenna writes that Benz applauds CUNY’s efforts but notes that …
the gain is a far cry from where the system was in 1975 when it served considerably fewer students but employed 11,300 full-time faculty.
“The City University of New York has hired about 1,000 full-time faculty since 1999,” reports the Sun. That is solid progress, notes Benz, “but at that rate it would take 32 years to restore the full-time faculty level to what we had in ‘75.”
Addendum:
Jay Hershenson, CUNY’s senior vice chancellor for university relations, says he was delighted to see this mention of the university’s plans to hire more full-time faculty members.
He points out, however, that while the system employed 11,300 full-time faculty in 1975, it did not have fewer students then, as McKenna quoted Benz as saying. CUNY actually served slightly more students in 1975 — 250,784 — than it did in 2006 — 225,962 — when enrollment reached its highest level in 30 years.
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19 Responses to CUNY Plans to Boost Its Full-Time Faculty Ranks
marcleavitt - September 6, 2011 at 9:48 am
“The moving hand has writ, And having writ, moves on.” Personally, I like the second personal singular, but my likes do not a difference make. Possibly, in the best of all possible worlds, we could have retained the distinctions, but we didn’t. Sic transit lingua.
mason243 - September 6, 2011 at 9:57 am
Interesting bit of linguistic history for “us guys.”
jffoster - September 6, 2011 at 10:05 am
‘Thou’ isn’t quite gone. It is still used by a fair number of Americans in one extremely formal address — to God. What is interesting here is that the originally intimate / familiar old 2nd person singular has become treated as very formal, and many Americans regard it as presumptious to address God ‘in the same way you would a plumber, or your neighbor, or a “good convoy buddy” — as one informant put it to me one time. This very formal meaning of ‘Thou’ shows up even in some modernist churches, as for instance the Episcopal Church, where their “Rite II” in which God is called “you” is used in a service but the Lord’s Prayer is said by the congregation in the older “Hallowed be Thy name…” form. And some congretion member refues to use the _you_ forms at any time in a prayer to God.
I suggest it is no accident that this 180 degree semantic shift from Thou to very formal came during the reformation period in England and the Enlightenment when God became viewed as distant and “Lord of the Universe”.
Interestingly, the same thing has happened in Afrikaans, where most Boers / Afrikaners are in the Dutch Reformed tradition. Afrikaans has two sets of 2nd person personal pronouns —
jy / jou informal, intimat, singular
julle informal plural
u formal singular and plural
So: .
1. Goeiemôre, Sari! Hoe gaan dit met jou?
‘Good Morning, Sally! How goes it with you?
2. Goed, dankie baas. Hoe gaan dit met u?
‘Fine, thanks, Boss. And how goes it with you?
Note the shift in informal from employer to employee but formal from employee to employer. If Sally wanted to be really formal, she’d have not used ‘Baas’ bur rather ‘Mnr. Terreblanche’ ., as in the continuing conversation:
3. Uitstekend. En wie is dies juffrou? ‘Very well. And who is this young lady?’ 4. Mnr. Terreblanche, laat ek u my dogter Marie voorstel. ‘Mr. Terreblanche, let me introduce you my daughter Mary.’ Marie, dies is nou mnr. Terreblanche.
3. Uitstekend. En wie is dies juffrou?
‘Very well. And who is this young lady?’
4. Mnr. Terreblanche, laat ek u my dogter Marie voorstel.
‘Mr. Terreblanche, let me introduce you my daughter Mary.’
Marie, dies is nou mnr. Terreblanche.
Now, in Scripture when humans talk to each other, the jy forms show up:
Markus 12, 13 Jy moet jou naaste liefhê soos jouself. ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’ ‘You must neighbor love so as yourself.’
Spreuke van Salomo 27. 1 (Proverbs) Beroem jou nie op die dag van môre nie, want jy weet nie wat die dag sal bring nie.
‘Boast not thyself of tomorrow, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.’
But when addressing God, the very formal ‘u’ form is used, and written with a capital letter ‘U’.
Psalm 119, 9 Waarmee sal die jongeling sy pad suiwer hou? Deur dit te hou na U Woord.
‘Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed thereto according to thy word.’
And…
In die kerk het u dit gebid of het u dit bid hoor: Ons Vader in hemel, word(e) U name geheiligte. of …………………, U Name sal heilig word. ‘In the church you prayed thus: ‘Our Father [who art] in heaven, hallowèd be Thy name. or ‘………, Thy name shall be holy.’
In die kerk het u dit gebid of het u dit bid hoor:
Ons Vader in hemel, word(e) U name geheiligte. of …………………, U Name sal heilig word.
‘In the church you prayed thus:
‘Our Father [who art] in heaven, hallowèd be Thy name.
or ‘………, Thy name shall be holy.’
jabberwocky12 - September 6, 2011 at 12:59 pm
German also distinguishes between an informal “you” (“du”) and a formal “you” (“Sie”, written with an upper-case “S”). The differences are replicated in the Nominative, Accusative and Dative case. An extra complication is that the form of the verb that follows is also affected.
I’m sure most second-language students of German would love for one of those forms to disappear. Although it is a great language, its grammar is really, really complex, so much so that even Mark Twain, on getting to grips with it, wrote his (rather unfair) essay entitled “The awful German language.”
keithsawyer - September 6, 2011 at 1:13 pm
My sources tell a different story: “thou” most likely dropped out of English because of a backlash against the Quakers. George Fox, the church’s founder, insisted that all Quakers use a type of speech that he called Plain Speech, and this required saying “thee” to everyone. Thus, as a matter of religious principle, Quakers refused to use the formal “you” with anyone in a superior position, as was expected at the time.
The English settled on the formal pronoun because of a popular backlash against the Quakers; they were perceived to be extreme radicals, and most of the English just thought they sounded rude. It got to the point where a non-Quaker couldn’t use the informal pronoun without people thinking he might be a Quaker, too. Gradually, the informal pronouns died out in England, and remained in use only among Quakers.
Sources:
Sawyer (2001), Creating Conversations. Hampton Press.
Pages 265-266 of Brown, R., & Gilman, A. (1960). The pronouns of power and solidarity. In T. A. Sebeok (Ed.), Style in language (pp. 253-276). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Pages 105-106 of Knowles, G. (1997). A cultural history of the English language. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
denadavis - September 6, 2011 at 3:25 pm
That’s fascinating. I am an American Quaker and of course it would be ridiculously affected to use thee and thou today, even among Friends. But…I recently returned from francophone Switzerland, and I understand that French-speaking Quakers adhere to the basic principle, addressing everyone as “tu.” Problem is, without a bonnet, and with my iffy French, I just sound dumb or rude when I do that!
unusedusername - September 6, 2011 at 4:39 pm
A few languages have two words for “we”. One word includes the person being spoken to, and another excludes the person being spoken to. I think this would be a useful distinction.
davidcomposer - September 7, 2011 at 1:36 am
Here in Oklahoma we have solved the formal/informal problem with “y’all.” Y’all is informal singular. Oklahoman being a very precise language, there are different forms for the plural. While “y’all” is sometimes used in talking to a group of people, if you are specifically addressing two people, you would say “both y’all;” if there are three, then it’s “all three y’all.” If there are more than three, the proper form is “all y’all.” We hardly ever use the formal “you,” since we want all y’all to feel like part of the family. When I returned to my native Oklahoma after many years in other states and countries, I noticed that it had become much more culturally diverse. But when I went to a Chinese restaurant, the waiter (whose accent indicated he was a fairly recent arrival) came up to the table and said “now what would y’all like to drink.”
jffoster - September 7, 2011 at 8:35 am
It ;seems entirely meet, right, fitting and proper and to expect that reasonable changes in American English would sort themselves out in Oklahoma Sooner rather than later.
Y’all write agin now.
mollycooke - September 7, 2011 at 3:24 pm
I grew up outside Philadelphia and knew several Quaker families who used thou/thee/thine within the family, especially to children. “You” was used outside the family so George Fox’s political point had been lost.
I remember thinking that the informal thou sounded pretty.
jffoster - September 7, 2011 at 4:16 pm
One note– if the Friends you knew used the form _thou_, it was a back-formation, a ressurected form from literary and KJV / RSV English that had become absent from Quaker English long before. The general Quaker usage had _thee_ for both nominative and objective, i.e. subjects and all objects. So if thee heard Quakers using it, they acquired it from literary sources and not from ordinary spoken Quakerese.
Jamus - September 7, 2011 at 5:12 pm
Mason243 – what about the middle-Pennsylvanian “weuns?”
benyagoda - September 8, 2011 at 10:55 am
Thou swell! (Thanks to Lorenz Hart)
ellenhunt - September 8, 2011 at 4:45 pm
Russian has its Вы (you) and Tы (thee). But popular Russian seems to be sliding more toward Tы rather than Вы these days. If Russian loses one it seems likely to be its “you” rather than its “thee”.
Could make a thesis out of that question, comparing it to the deprivation of English… :-)
butteredtoastcat - September 11, 2011 at 7:29 pm
You forgot “all y’all” which is the true plural in some Southern states (when “y’all” is singular.)
sahara - September 12, 2011 at 2:56 pm
So now we know you can cut and paste in Afrikaans…(yawn).
And don’t speak for members of the Episcopal church, since you aren’t one! (“their Rite II…”).
jffoster - September 12, 2011 at 9:51 pm
Sahara,
What exactly is it that bothers you about my posting on Afrikaans showing that it, like Modern English, has come to use a very formal pronoun to address God? And why are you bothered about my reporting facts about liturgical practice common in Episcopal Churches?
The trick on cutting and pasting, Mnr. Sahara, is knowing what to cut and paste and knowing enough about languages of the world to know where you can find pertinent examples to adduce. Actually, the cutting and pasting was from my own work, except of course for that from the Bible, and I do apologize for the double pasting and skewing of some of the interlinear translations.
22113683 - September 14, 2011 at 9:43 am
Or the southwestern-Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh regional) “yinz”?
22113683 - September 14, 2011 at 9:52 am
Related bunny-trail: One of the Scots who translated the New Testament into Scots (Braid Scots) used the usual Scots language for everything except the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. When the Devil speaks, he speaks in King James English. (I believe the translator’s son persuaded him not to do that in the published edition, but it’s in an appendix.)