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About the Author
Stan Katz teaches public and international affairs and directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is a past president of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for Legal History. He comments frequently on policy issues relating to higher education, particularly liberal education, and on the humanities and social sciences, philanthropy, scholarly relations with Cuba, and the interplay of civil society, constitutionalism, and democracy. And on his beloved Cubs.
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The Big Test and College Admissions | Comment [1]
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Wie Gehts, USC?
A week ago (11 April), The Chronicle featured a story on the decision of the dean of the University of Southern California to close its German department. At one level, this was not surprising, since enrollments in European language and literature departments have been declining for some time. But at another level it is quite remarkable, since many of these departments have been reinventing themselves as cultural-studies programs, and in so doing have attracted considerable student interest.
Nowhere has this been more true than in the field of German, where the traditional Germanistik (language and literature) approach has been abandoned for German studies of one sort or another. In my own university, for instance, the German department offers brilliant instruction in media studies that has engaged some of our best undergraduates.
I am on the other coast, and I know little first-hand about USC, but there is something about the way that its German department was terminated that makes me uncomfortable. I note that Dean Howard Gillman (a scholar in my own field whose work I admire greatly) has spun the decision as one to close a “stand-alone” German department. In his 15 April memo to the faculty, he speaks of the need for a “global perspective,” and asks whether “we best serve this commitment by organizing every great literary and cultural tradition into separate stand-alone academic departments?” He mentions the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures as a model, and dismisses German as a stand-alone department “created before USC fully embraced its mission as a truly global university.” His conclusion is that it would be better to “integrate the field of study into a broader enterprise.”
Perhaps. And perhaps Dean Gillman has a clearer understanding of what it means to be academically “global” than I do. But his decision reminds me of the devastatingly successful attacks of the globalist-internationalists on the conception of area studies in the 1990s. Using the excuse that external funding was not available (true enough, I suppose), universities began to pull back on training students in area studies and even on hiring faculty. When was the last time your Economics department hired a Japanese or Middle Eastern specialist? Henry Rosovsky would have a hard time if he were seeking a first job in 2008. But everything that happens globally happens somewhere — and in a particular language.
It is quite possible, as I have heard, that the USC department was not up to the highest standard. If so, that is a genuine problem for any dean, and he is right to seek a solution. But the death penalty should not be the only option — even though I realize that “partial-life abortion” seems to be the solution offered at USC. Non-consultation (again, as reported) does not seem the best way to manage a university. But, to be fair, there is another more general problem embedded in this one. How many of our academic departments have adequate strategies for managing their life course? How many plan adequately for both retirements and changes in the direction of their fields? How many tools do deans have to help departments to help themselves?
There is a lot to ponder in what has happened at USC.
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As is pointed out in passing in the last part of the article, this action signals a grave crisis in unversity governance. Every discipline should take a lesson from this.
Where is true shared governance and “collegiality” at USC? Where/how had its faculty (all of its faculty) participated in the academic planning function of the university?
Indeed….
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 18, 09:18 AM · #
Unfortunately, in this time of limited and shrinking budgets, everyone must be aware of this as a potential end. I often suggest to faculty in smallish programs that they need to be working to demonstrate their value to the institution. Boards looking at the bottom line may be inclined to kill a program because it has very few majors, claiming that it does not serve enough students. Faculty/Chairs need to be aware of this tendency and need to be prepared to provide data to counter these sorts of arguments.
Faculty have a responsibility to be involved. They need to participate in shared governance. They need to be aware of their surroundings. If your program has little enrollment — ask the administration what you can do to help. Personally, I would be happy to sit with any of my faculty in small programs to brainstorm ideas to help grow the program. More commonly, I see no interest in the workings of the department and the college beyond the 4 walls of the classroom until this sort of decision is announced. Developing an interest in shared governance after the decision to cancel a program has been announced is too late.
— M · Apr 18, 01:10 PM · #
“enrollments in European language and literature departments have been declining for some time.” Surely Spanish is a European language and literature? (As is English.) Enrollments in Spanish continue to increase. Italian has also seen an increase in enrollments at many institutions.
— RDP · Apr 18, 01:19 PM · #
Enrollments in German have been rising nationally, in fact. And the decline of a German department is hardly suprising if the administration refuses to replace retiring faculty, or those who move elsewhere, with young and exciting scholars and teachers. Finally, the issue does not appear to be one of a “stand alone” department, seeing that USC discontinued German majors and minors, which can be successfully integrated into “Foreign Language” departments, as many schools have done. In other words, while I admire the even-handed tone of the column, I don’t think the piece reflects the realities of this execution.
— smw · Apr 20, 09:17 AM · #
Perhaps, if one digs a little more deeply, one will find yet another story of personality conflict and “prima donna” behavior among the USC German faculty as was reportedly the case at SUNY-Albany which performed a similar “execution” years ago. Or not.
Gradually rising enrollments after a dramatic decline do not necessarily a resurrection make — especially at the level of the general education program which is, as the world knows, a “once more with feeling” of America’s failing high school education.
The moral of the story is the tale of the rise and fall of the university department qua department. How it is established (as opposed to a program, especially an interdisciplinary one, which may or may not ever achieve “departmental” status), how it is governed, how it is budgeted, how it “sustains” itself in the local academic universe….
How “departments” rise and fall, how they increasingly represent the failure of the university qua university to rethink the “boundaries” of departments and of discipline in the information age of the increasing specialization yet the increasing integration of knowledge….
Indeed, there is a lesson here for all departments, all disciplines. And it’s the lesson of “the tub on its own bottom”, of the failure of the contemporary “idea of the university” to structure itself in a manner which reflects the inter-connectedness of all knowledge and the search for truth — rather than the pursuit of physical and economic expansion.
The ironies of “the bottom line” uber alles, nicht wahr?
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 20, 12:21 PM · #
We all know, very well, that Americans have a probloem respecting the rest of the world. American exceptionalism it has not been called (indirectly). Germany, as a token for “rest of the world”, suffers from this respect deficiency.
I remember opting to take my MIT freshman year humanities courses in German, instead of English, and finding, to my amazement, that Germans really respected Germany and German things (the horror!). Since no one around me in the US respected German things similarly, I concluded that something was wrong with all the people I had known in the US thus far in life and I made a decisive break, to never, after that year, 1966, depend on one nation as “me” and “mine” and “my identity”. As a result, I could come to US organizations with great personal power, moving in several cases from peon to vice president in one year, merely by not partaking of the cultural assumptions that American management had spread over so much of the business world. My German friends with their manias for excellence and world best versions of particular technologies and product classes—had inspired me to alternative ways, often useful in US competitive contexts. In but not of is a good way to put it—business competitiveness by being in a nation but not of it, in a market but not of it, in an organization but not of it, in a marriage but not of it. When we restrict student chances for exposure to this alternative way to live, the world suffers, the students suffer, and the particulars of whole lives and organizations go astray, with no one inside them outside them enough to guide them.
— Richard Tabor Greene · Apr 21, 05:34 AM · #
“Gegen Dummheit streben auch die Goetter umsonst.”
—Schiller
— Dan · Apr 21, 08:28 AM · #
One of the issues dogging foreign language departments could be the lack of recruitment of declared majors. Next month my son will graduate with honors from a highly-lauded college preparatory school. In four years he has taken four units of English; two units of Latin; two units of French; and three units of German — one of them a college course. Add to that four units each of college-prep science, math, history and religion. He did not take one study hall in his four years of high school. When he enters college this fall in the honors/scholars program he will major in German, and at my suggestion, minor in international business. I should also point out that one of his classmates intends to pursue German as a major. What my son does with his calling to German is hard to predict, but you can see that at least two well-educated students (while anecdotal) are drawn to the languages at the next level. If you were to ask him, I would suspect my son would tell you his attraction to the languages has been nurtured by an excellent faculty member (a multilingual Belgian) who has complete command and control of her classroom. While not the complete solution to the USC issue, a student’s (and future scholar’s perhaps) success at the high school level plays an important role.
— Douglas · Apr 21, 09:54 AM · #
Further re. post #2
I know nothing about the USC program beyond what I have read. However . . .
My own university is under instructions from our state authorities to reduce the number of programs graduating fewer than a dozen students per year. I have offered a workshop and made repeated offers to meet with faculty in these areas to help them “market” their programs to prospective students and prospective majors — all to no avail. Some have web sites that look like they were designed by a beginning middle school student. They would be helped a great deal by a professional appearance, professional-looking faculty photos and bios, and a “why major in . . .” page.
Too many faculty seem to regard it as the job only of the admissions office to recruit students to their programs, and to do so without faculty assistance (e.g., appearing at admissions open houses or new student orientation). Education is a relational business. What students are “buying” with their tuition dollars is (in part) time with our faculty. Who’s wants to buy without seeing what they’ll be getting for their money?
I wish I knew how to help faculty develop a sense of personal efficacy, a belief that they can shape the future of their program and university, instead of so often seeing themselves only as victims of heartless and irrational decisions made by others.
— drj50 · Apr 21, 11:06 AM · #
It should be “Wie Geht’s, USC?” which is from Wie Geht es?
— Jack · Apr 21, 11:47 AM · #