Your Basic Public U Language Illiteracy
Signs are growing that public universities are lowering standards in order to cut costs. Today's news brings word that the Austin campus of the University of Texas is reducing the language requirement from four semesters to three or two. The piece cites the Executive Director of the Modern Languages Association:
There are two issues here. The first is that public school Americans are being relegated to a linguistic backwater in which they can't interact or compete with their global peers. Speaking one or two foreign languages is "part of being an educated person" as one Swiss colleague recently said to me. UC's Educaton Abroad program sends 4000 of UC's 170,000 or so undergrads abroad, and maybe 8000 total go in some kind of short or long-term program. What about the other 165,000?
The second is that universities don't necessary respond to budget cuts by sparing cheap programs and cutting expensive ones. They are as likely to cut to make cheap ones even cheaper. For a possible harbinger of worse in UC to come, read this eloquent and graphic description of how this has already damaged languages and the humanities in Australia.
The privates are doing it to. USC is now enrolling more students in its on-line teaching credential program, MAT@USC, and insisting that it is "providing an education that is fully equivalent to [its] on-ground master's program."
Studying a language for only one year, she says, is "like taking one year of piano lessons or math. It's just not enough to give you all the immersion that you would need to get some lasting and significant benefit."Very very true.
There are two issues here. The first is that public school Americans are being relegated to a linguistic backwater in which they can't interact or compete with their global peers. Speaking one or two foreign languages is "part of being an educated person" as one Swiss colleague recently said to me. UC's Educaton Abroad program sends 4000 of UC's 170,000 or so undergrads abroad, and maybe 8000 total go in some kind of short or long-term program. What about the other 165,000?
The second is that universities don't necessary respond to budget cuts by sparing cheap programs and cutting expensive ones. They are as likely to cut to make cheap ones even cheaper. For a possible harbinger of worse in UC to come, read this eloquent and graphic description of how this has already damaged languages and the humanities in Australia.
The privates are doing it to. USC is now enrolling more students in its on-line teaching credential program, MAT@USC, and insisting that it is "providing an education that is fully equivalent to [its] on-ground master's program."
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