Thoughts Occasioned (in Part) by the Closure of the French Department at SUNY-Albany

I never know what I'm supposed to be paying attention to when I go to the symphony. In general, wherever I go, I lapse all too easily into sociology, and I start thinking about the posture and the haircuts and the accents of people around me when what I'm supposed to be doing is listening to what they're saying. But at the symphony, where I know so little about what is really at stake, where I am so unskilled in making that judgment learned audiences so love to make as to whether or not the evening's interpretation is a successful one, my reversion to sundry reflexions on anything and everything but the music is almost automatic.

Most recently, I found myself watching Anne-Sophie Mutter playing a violin piece composed specially for her by Sophia Gubaidulina. It was good. I liked it. If anyone was 'off' that evening, I certainly didn't notice, but this may be because I was preoccupied with all sorts of ridiculous and improbable thought experiments, one of which is still with me days later. I tried to imagine, namely, what it would be like if, somehow, I was sent out on stage with a violin in my hands. What could I do? Absolutely nothing. The internal wiring of my body --the neurons and the nerves and the muscles-- simply has not been configured so as to enable me to even pretend for a second that I can play a violin. But look at Anne-Sophie Mutter's body. Is it so different? It is a woman's body, but it is not in respect of that difference that she is a violinist and I am not. Where is the difference, then? The difference, obviously, is in the way we were shaped and tenderized over the years. Her violinist-body and my slouching, contemplative, wholly non-musical body were shaped throughout the course of many years of handling, of dressage.

Now we're getting close to what I actually wanted to talk about: not music, but the humanities, and the state of higher education in general. There is, at this point, nothing we in the humanities can ask students to do that is analogous to what must be asked of anyone who hopes to follow in the footsteps of Anne-Sophie Mutter. We cannot say to students: "Welcome. We are here to rewire your neurons. We are here to completely transform you from the inside so that everything you do with your body (and mind, but that's an afterthought), every sensation and minute experience you have of your own capacities, will be entirely foreign from what you now know." Increasingly, in fact, universities are clamoring to assure students that no such transformation will take place. They promise that they will complement the students' already-existing strong points, fit themselves into the students' busy schedules, speak to what the students already know, and so on. Many universities have by now practically adopted as their slogan: Come join us! No transformation required.

Foreign-language instruction is the one area of the humanities where the promise of non-transformation is difficult to keep, and I believe it is in this connection that we need to understand the rapid disappearance of departments of foreign languages and literatures throughout the English-speaking world (the case of French --not to mention Russian!-- at SUNY being just the most recent of many examples). If there is an argument in defense of eliminating these programs, it is that they were at this point only vestigial anyway: it's been a long time since anyone came out of a BA degree in French who was able, as a result of the course of studies for which the degree was the reward, to actually speak French. To expect students to master a foreign language would be precisely to have a design upon the wiring of their brains, but such a design would entirely go against the trend, now fully dominant across the humanities, of creating, for every course, a parallel universe of so-called 'learning objectives', where the singular and obvious objective of a course cannot be mentioned, and instead one must speak vaguely of enhancing critical thinking skills, nurturing confidence in public speaking, learning to collaborate with others through small-group work, etc. But obviously the only legitimate learning objective of, say, a Greek course is to learn Greek. Once that basic commitment is abandoned, real education in letters is doomed.

Foreign-language programs were, I mean to say, the anchor of the humanities, but it is not only since the recent economic crisis and the massive closure of these programs that we have been adrift. The institutional changes that made these programs irrelevant and ineffective occurred during boom times, and in particular during a time when universities came to realize they could get in on the boom by catering to students as if they were customers, adapting themselves to the 'learning styles' and degrees of motivation of potential tuition-payers. Soon enough, classics departments were spinning out parallel degree programs in 'classical studies', where --following the general rule in academia according to which 'studies' implies dilution, corner-cutting, and compromise-- students could now get degrees by taking courses about daily life in ancient Rome, say, without having to learn any Latin at all.

I will not run through the argument here that it was not the humanization of the university, but rather the corporatization, that brought these changes about. What I want to suggest is just that it is not only cost-cutting in difficult times that has brought about such a dire situation for the humanities. Humanities programs are dying off in this desert into which we've all strolled because they were already weakened by the junk-food diet they adopted while still in their old and bountiful habitat. Faculty members, who did not share the financial incentives of the people whose interests were served by scams such as 'classical studies', nonetheless were complicit, since they held onto the inherited belief that the replacement of learning by 'learning objectives' was a part of the democratic opening up of higher education to all members of society.

I want to suggest also that it is not just language and literature programs that have been seriously damaged by the changes I've described, but indeed all of the humanities. When I say that foreign-language training is the anchor of the humanities, I mean it anchors, or ought to anchor, disciplines apparenty as independent of it as philosophy and history. There is a wonderful model of education that will be familiar to anyone who has read about the Little Russian monasteries in Gogol's stories, and that also existed in classical India and in the Islamic world. In the Byzantine version of it depicted by Gogol, schoolboys pass through four stages: first they are 'grammarians', then 'rhetoricians', then 'philosophers', and, finally, 'theologians'. This seems to me pretty much the proper order of things (leaving off, perhaps, the ultimate stage). In the Indian tradition, claiming to be a master of any of the darshanas or doctrines without first demonstrating a deep, thorough, intimate mastery of the elements of phonetics, grammar, and prosody (and I mean a real mastery, comparable to what enables Anne-Sophie Mutter to do what she does with her violin), would be simply absurd. Without mastery of language, a student trying to spin out ideas is like me trying desperately to scrape a few notes from a stringed instrument. Potentially, that mastery could simply be of English, just as the pandits gave their exclusive attention to Sanskrit. But students today are permitted to remain nearly as estranged from the inner workings of their own native tongue as they are from the foreign languages they were expected until recently to at least sample.

Again, if there is any argument in favor of the decision recently made at SUNY, it is only that foreign-language instruction is already so much decayed, and so out of step with the institutional culture of 'learning objectives', that pulling the plug was a natural conclusion to a process that began long ago. But how much more hopeful it would have been (and may still be, if not in Albany) to see the humanities re-anchor themselves, and to return, against the tide of academic corporatization that first made foreign-language instruction irrelevant, to the old expectation of real transformation. 

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Comments

[International Psychogeography]

Even since I got a very good humanities degree, I've had to struggle with being told it was a useless degree.

[Cyrus Hall]

Coming from the left-side of academia, I can report that the same trends are penetrating engineering faculties. In computer science, the beneficial trend toward greater abstraction has bled over into pedagogical thinking, leading some faculties away from the fundamentals. Combined with the trend to see students as customers instead of, well, students, along with adoption of extraneous learning objectives, pushed by administrations and self-declared gurus, departments have dropped theory courses, or made them vapid. Students get the message (I certainly did; this trend isn't that new): this isn't important, ignore it. I barely need to say that, of course, this turns out to be anything but true.

There is another dynamic, perhaps more embarrassing, at play. It's easier as a professor to ignore the fundamentals. This is likely counter-intuitive until you have tried to teach them, but here again abstraction makes things misleadingly simple.

Programming languages, like any human language, have a grammar that organizes how different operations (i.e., "words") relate. When learning basic programming, students will inevitably commit syntactical genocide several times over. Yet, the way such courses are now often taught, no one, including the lecturer, will likely be able to discuss the language at the grammatical level. Instead abstraction is brought to bear, and the details are hand-waved away, with intuition substituting for understanding. After all, grammars are hard. The excuse "we'll see this later" is rarely fulfilled.

Happily, I can report that there has been a moderately successful counter revolution at my current institution. The ordering of the material is still jumbled, with fundamentals and higher-level material somewhat randomly mixed together, but at least the fundamentals are present, taught by individuals who know them and love them.

Myself, I'm still trying to pick up what I was never directed toward during my formal studies. Turns out it's all pretty awesome.

[Praiseyou]

It goes back even further than that. Oxford and Cambridge stopped requiring Greek as an entrance requirement in the early 20th century when they were told Etonians were increasingly not going to be able to meet their requirements.

As with music, you can't teach someone fluent French in 3-4 years unless the person is in a French speaking environment. Mutter's neurons were already totally different at 10 probably. I think the idea of the university as transformative is still pretty strong, though, but maybe in way analagous to the way military service used to function.

[Ed Bernal]

Before I started my secondary ed. program (I'm a grades 6-12 math teacher) I innocculated myself against some idiocies in education by reading lots and lots of Richard Mitchell (http://www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/), and later on took a booster with Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath (http://www.amazon.com/Who-Killed-Homer-Classical-Education/dp/1893554260/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_10). Both of the above talk about the attenuation of Latin and Classical Greek, but French? I can scarcely believe it. If you're concerned with K-12 education in the United States, the alpha and omega is the colleges and universities; we need to fix them first.

[Kai Matthews]

As a student, albeit only part-time, of the Hindustani musical tradition, I note with pleasure your reference, alongside your analogy to Ms. Mutter's skill, to the Indian emphasis on the thorough mastery of the elements of language, before one can claim to contribute anything worthwhile. The comparison goes both ways, of course: my teacher, like many in the tradition, frequently uses linguistic metaphors (as well as theatrical ones: the notes of a raga as a cast of characters whose relationships in various combinations are to be carefully illuminated in the course of the exposition of the alaap portion of the performance) to illustrate points about what is universally called the grammar of ragas. One learns this grammar incrementally and indirectly in a kind of triangulation of many, many examples. Whatever explicit theory exists is touched upon almost incidentally, unlike my Western compositional training, where it was the centrepiece. The theory itself is considered woefully inadequate as a guide to one's improvisation; it's merely the starting point, the barest of outlines. Improvisational practise, arising from one's osmotic absorption of the character of a raga via this triangulation, is the thing. It is much more like learning an actual language, in the need for constant immersion in it and constant practise of it in real-world contexts. In one's improvisation with its elements in response to the contingencies of the moment, it recalls the observation that language is a finite but flexible set of elements with which one can make an infinite number of statements.

[shale]

The humanities taught me to think. Science won't teach you that---synthetic truth is driven by repetition, not thought. The best scientists do much more than science.

I'm a scientist now, but I'd be an automaton without my philosophy degree.

Best,

[Solin gold]

Do you think there is a utilitarian element to what you're seeing in the decay of the humanities? It seems to me that there is a sort of unchallenged idea that the big picture of society is already taken care of. All that is left for us humans to do is chose where we fit into the scheme of that society. If this is true then universities are simply a place where consumers go to become certified for a specific function.

[WG]

The reduction of foreign language instruction in the universities is a terrible loss to students, whether they appreciate it or not (and apparently they don't).

It is also one more way in which job opportunities for those holding a graduate degree in the humanities are being curtailed. There are fewer and fewer reasons for anyone to go to graduate school these days:

http://100rsns.blogspot.com/2010/09/14-adjuncthood-awaits.html

[Josh Mitteldorf]

It's not just the humanities. Study of the sciences is being diluted as well, as students learn about science, rather than learning to think like a scientist. Statistics is a particularly poignant example: competence in statistics is essential for work in every science from sociology to astrophysics. But learning to think like a statistician is difficult, so almost all stat courses are designed to teach students by rote to plug numbers into formulas and report the results.

[Ray Davis]

I agree for the most part, but would like to add:

1. In college in the late 1970s, after a year of introductory French I decided not to pursue it, not because I didn't enjoy my studies and not because I felt I'd learned enough, but solely because it was too difficult. I cared nothing about grades but my scholarship cared a great deal, and with the loss of my scholarship all would be lost. Such financial pressures only intensified after 1980.

2. At the time, and through the 1980s, the most significant dumbing-down of liberal higher education seemed to me not to involve "classical studies" or the usual multicultural hobgoblins but the rise of "computer science" (AKA vocational ed) as a department. Many places began to accept programming courses as fulfillment of foreign language requirements, apparently misled by the use of "language" to brand clearly documented brands of pidgin English.

3. When I saw Anne-Sophie Mutter play, she was pretty dreadful.