next »

[spork]

My plan? Closer integration of corporate employers with undergraduate programs. If employers don't know what universities do and universities don't know what employers want, then they should talk to each other.

I work in a state where insurance companies are now requiring applicants to take tests on basic English writing skills. They're seeing far too many job-seekers who can't communicate. Yet the college students don't know this until they start applying for jobs as seniors, which means they've essentially wasted four years of very expensive "education." And universities don't really care to change their curricula until applications, enrollment, and retention go down the tubes.

I've made reference to this before on other threads, but I think it would be beneficial if CEOs visited a few campus auditoriums and said something like "my company pays people who can demonstrate speaking and writing proficiency in X language Z dollars more than our other employees. We think second language proficiency demonstrates an ability to learn, creativity, and hard work, and those kinds of employees are much more valuable to us for those reasons, in addition to being able to better serve our operations abroad."

We all know how things SHOULD be.

We may disagree on the specifics.

My question awhile ago was about strategies: how to make the things that SHOULD be, actually happen.

I don't see strategies here.

At my uni, we lost most of our foreign languages because people pontificated instead of making arguments that would be convincing to the board that decides what "frills" to cut.

I have a request for MERCE:

Could you use regular paragraphing and punctuation, especially commas? Your posts are very hard to read.

The Fiona

[farm_boy]

I don't believe that my specific suggestions were mere pontification.  Besides, I'm Protestant.

On the other hand, I don't see much hope.  People in charge worship money and are focused on the short term.

And while I'm at it, here's another radical proposal: teach literature (e.g. Latin American) in translation.  Not much is lost, despite the common arguments to the contrary.  It's not practical to expect students to spend several years in intense language study just so they might pick up one or two nuances in an original literary text.

[janewales]

I would target lobbying efforts on getting serious language programs into the school system. I can think of two politically-backed and quite successful examples: French (both immersion programs and early introduction into English-language programs) in Canada, and the revival of Welsh in Wales. In both cases, the languages were felt to be important to national identities or aspirations. Both countries have government-job related opportunities that are more easily accessed by people who can be classified as functionally bilingual.

The provision of serious language streams from the primary grades onwards means that many students are bilingual when they graduate; the functional/ business part of language is already taken care of (and so doesn't have to be the exclusive focus in higher education), and a pool of students who know it is possible to speak, read, and write more than one language, has already been created. Whether they'll then decide to pursue advanced study, including of literary texts, is another matter, but they do seem to me more likely to be potential recruits, than raw beginners.

I don't know what language the US could get behind in the same way, though.

[merce]

I'm afraid I fall on the side of those who do not think the battle or the war can be won. Hence my inability to conceive of a strategy to implement.
In fact, I dare say we haven't all got the same "should" of how things should be in our heads. It was, justement, in learning that other literature professors and history professors thought my field and the study of literature in general were not serving people, humanity, or society that I realized the war was without hope of being won.

I am sharply opposed to linking the doings of the university campus with the doings and desires of Corporate CEOs. It is the stranglehold of the corporation on our society that I see as the cause of innumerable ills including the erosion of the sort of university I love.

Perhaps if study and reading were respected and a love of learning were instilled in children we could again have hope. But I don't see how this could happen.  As regards language study or bilingual education, if we cannot get behind Spanish instruction in a country in which English is spoken by 80% of the population but some Spanish is spoken by 60% (without including Puerto Rico) then I think this country clearly has a stance against the learning of language (or perhaps against learning period) as a core value.


A couple of months ago there was an article in the Guardian or some UK paper. It suggested Republicans and Democrats in the US were incapable of truly communicating or debating or convincing members of one group to change sides because the reasonable arguments were not the factor that led to one's choosing to be of one party or the other: core values made one identify as Republican or Democrat.

I think this is how humans make decisions: based on values rather than individual, discrete items. If we humanists don't share the same values or focus on our values to determine whether we share them at all, then we are lost. And, as the Guardian article said, we cannot win in a  battle values. The corporate world will not be won by arguing for the importance of the humanities. We need our society to move to a new model and one that does value human beings, the human condition, humanistic enquiry, letters, thinking, compassion, and all that which defines the Humanities.

I'm a follower, not a strategist. Because of what I confess above I've yet to find a strategy I think will work.
Please post articles or book titles that do provide strategies so I can keep up my quest.

[merce]

PS- if you wonder where to get data on language practices and study in the US you can go to the Modern Language Association of America.

The MLA Language Map

is intended for use by students, teachers, and anyone interested in learning about the linguistic and cultural composition of the United States. The MLA Language Map uses data from the US Census 2000 to display the locations and numbers of speakers of thirty languages and three groups of less commonly spoken languages in the United States. The census data are based on responses to the question, "Does this person speak a language other than English at home?" The Language Map illustrates the concentration and number of speakers in zip codes and counties. The Language Map Data Center provides data from US Census 2000 about over three hundred languages spoken in the United States, including actual counts and percentages of speakers. The Data Center uses data from the 2005 American Community Survey about the thirty languages most commonly spoken in the United States to provide a snapshot of recent changes in American language communities. In addition users can add to each map the colleges and universities that teach the selected language and can display fall 2009 enrollments for the language by undergraduate and graduate levels.

[farm_boy]

Thank you, merce.  I especially enjoy the MLA map.  Hang in there and fight the good fight.  It's always a pleasure reading your posts.  Feliz navidad y próspero año.

[betterslac]

I'm afraid I fall on the side of those who do not think the battle or the war can be won. Hence my inability to conceive of a strategy to implement.
In fact, I dare say we haven't all got the same "should" of how things should be in our heads. It was, justement, in learning that other literature professors and history professors thought my field and the study of literature in general were not serving people, humanity, or society that I realized the war was without hope of being won.

I am sharply opposed to linking the doings of the university campus with the doings and desires of Corporate CEOs. It is the stranglehold of the corporation on our society that I see as the cause of innumerable ills including the erosion of the sort of university I love.

Perhaps if study and reading were respected and a love of learning were instilled in children we could again have hope. But I don't see how this could happen.  As regards language study or bilingual education, if we cannot get behind Spanish instruction in a country in which English is spoken by 80% of the population but some Spanish is spoken by 60% (without including Puerto Rico) then I think this country clearly has a stance against the learning of language (or perhaps against learning period) as a core value.


A couple of months ago there was an article in the Guardian or some UK paper. It suggested Republicans and Democrats in the US were incapable of truly communicating or debating or convincing members of one group to change sides because the reasonable arguments were not the factor that led to one's choosing to be of one party or the other: core values made one identify as Republican or Democrat.

I think this is how humans make decisions: based on values rather than individual, discrete items. If we humanists don't share the same values or focus on our values to determine whether we share them at all, then we are lost. And, as the Guardian article said, we cannot win in a  battle values. The corporate world will not be won by arguing for the importance of the humanities. We need our society to move to a new model and one that does value human beings, the human condition, humanistic enquiry, letters, thinking, compassion, and all that which defines the Humanities.

I'm a follower, not a strategist. Because of what I confess above I've yet to find a strategy I think will work.
Please post articles or book titles that do provide strategies so I can keep up my quest.

Just as an aside, there is a large literature and debate regarding whether people make political decisions based on affective factors (what their friends and families believe and their identification with a political party) or whether they do so based on rational calculations regarding interests. It has yet to be settled, in large part because the empirical evidence seems to point both ways. If one were interested in fighting this battle, the most reasonable way to proceed would be to create and use strategies based both on identity (we need to learn these languages because that is who we are as a society) and rational calculations (we need these languages in order to do business with the rest of the world, etc.)

[merce]

Perhaps relevant:

[urlhttp://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/what-is-college-for/]What is College For[/url]?

[merce]

Very few can bear to think of a university with biomedical engineering and social psychology but without shakespeare or dickinson.

It is worth noting that many universities have gotten rid of Cicero and Sophocles and are starting to think about getting rid of Kant and Hume.

Since when do universities make these decisions? In my world, it's departments who control their curricula, and/or professors who choose the texts to assign.

Cicero and Sophocles aren't usually in the same course, anyway. I've taught both, but in different courses.

I really do wish people who post would be clear about their facts and who they're blaming and who done what.

Thanks to Sporky for his comment upthread.

The Fiona

Does this article not suggest that Colleges are choosing to Stop teaching the Cicero, Hume, Nietzsche, etc?
I was confused what was meant by the idea that professors could teach what they wanted.
What if there are no professors to teach the literary or philosophical texts? This is the plan of someone on my campus with its strong liberal arts foundation, a prof with an admin position who wants a higher-up admin position.

The article begins:

In March administrators at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas announced that, because of budget cuts, the entire department of philosophy would be eliminated. Philosophers rallied, the administration flinched, and within a month the crisis was averted. So all is well, right?

Not so fast. Unless systemic changes are made within the profession of philosophy over the next several years, we can expect that within a few decades, the entire discipline may be threatened.

We've started threads urging people to join petitions to save innumerable disciplines and/or departments. So, I'm confused since it seems professors are not in power.

[fiona]

We probably need a new thread on who decides which courses are offered.

The Fiona

[spork]

[. . .]

Does this article not suggest that Colleges are choosing to Stop teaching the Cicero, Hume, Nietzsche, etc?
I was confused what was meant by the idea that professors could teach what they wanted.
What if there are no professors to teach the literary or philosophical texts? This is the plan of someone on my campus with its strong liberal arts foundation, a prof with an admin position who wants a higher-up admin position.

The article begins:

In March administrators at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas announced that, because of budget cuts, the entire department of philosophy would be eliminated. Philosophers rallied, the administration flinched, and within a month the crisis was averted. So all is well, right?

Not so fast. Unless systemic changes are made within the profession of philosophy over the next several years, we can expect that within a few decades, the entire discipline may be threatened.

We've started threads urging people to join petitions to save innumerable disciplines and/or departments. So, I'm confused since it seems professors are not in power.

Here's the problem, or at least one aspect of it: doctoral programs in the humanities and the social sciences generally do not emphasize training people to teach well, nor do they emphasize that graduates be able to bring Cicero or whatever into the formulation of public policy or public discourse. What we get every year are several dozen English PhDs who have completed their dissertations on the post-structural implications of Thomas Hardy's use of comma splices. And they compete for the one job in the whole country for which the advertisement states "expertise in Comma Splice Studies desirable." And then the data show that the undergrads of this hire, who has been granted course releases to write The Next Big Study in Comma Splice Studies, aren't learning how to read or write.

The entire system is f***ed.

[totoro]

At places I've been all course proposals must be approved by curriculum committees and departments are required to provide service courses. So, no, professors and departments can't teach whatever they want.

[merce]

Now that I think about it, a proposal by someone who did not study in a Lit/Lang department was pushed by the Prof/Admin I mentioned above. It was rejected by the curriculum committee.

The proposal was for community work to receive credit within the category of our department's literary/linguistic offerings. The community service course did not have literature or linguistics at its center. Or really, at its periphery.

The curriculum committe is composed, for the most part, of folks who share my appreciation for literary study.

[farm_boy]

Merce, your curriculum committee is an endangered species.

Who usually decides now which courses are offered?  Our deity: the Invisible Hand.

[totoro]

The committtees I'm thinking of are the faculty/college level or even university level. So all the proposals for courses from departments have to go up to higher levels to be approved. And existing courses if they don't have enough enrollment also end up having to be dropped too...