By Professor
Doom
One of the many strange decays in higher
education today concerns language skills. In times past, every college graduate
had to take at least a year’s worth of some foreign language.
Now, I grant that Latin (a common option,
decades ago) wasn’t particularly useful all by itself, but studying another
language is incredibly helpful for mastering one’s native language. Even my very
crude understanding of other languages has from time to time given me some
insights into English. I mean, Spanish has such easy pronunciation, French has
an interesting adherence to aesthetics, Mandarin has a very streamlined
structure (those are just the languages I can at least barely speak). All of
them, overall, are so much easier than English.. . I have a real appreciation
for people who have learned English as a second language.
Unfortunately, in administrative eyes,
foreign languages were a real problem: there’s just no way to fake your way through
a foreign language. You study, and learn the vocabulary and grammar…or you do
not study, and fail. There’s nothing in between. You can’t load up a campus
with fake students if you have real courses.
So many courses we offer on campus now
require practically no studying; a student can casually fake his way through
wide swaths of courses offered on today’s campuses. Foreign languages just
can’t compete with fake classes, and so admin just got rid of these courses, in
favor of feel-good courses where it’s easy to pass without study.
Today our students learn nothing of other
languages and, looking at e-mails and such from students, it’s clear they know
little enough of English.
It seems administrators just can’t stop
debasing education, however. The latest is to attack students even learning
English. I’m serious:
Hey, I’m willing to admit English is a brutal language to learn, the worst is the vocabulary. English is the Pimp Mac Daddy of all languages, we’ve stolen so many words from other languages that we don’t notice when a word “isn’t from around here.” For example, some of my Chinese friends didn’t understand why everyone was freaking out that a “hurricane” was coming. I told them that a hurricane was a “typhoon” (i.e., “tai phun”)…and they understood that word, and the concern for the approach of such a storm. Most people don’t know that “typhoon” is really not a native English word, and English is loaded down with words whose origins are far, far from English.
On the other hand, when you listen to a
speaker from, say Japan, talk about modern, Western concepts, you can clearly
pick out the words that, quite obviously, are not Japanese—a sararii man
(“salary man”), gasorine (gasoline), and quite a few others are just slight
adaptations with modified pronunciation. When English takes a word, it often as
not doesn’t even try to make the pronunciation fit within the usual English
pronunciation…anyone learning English de facto must learn words and
pronunciation from many other languages.
English accepts words wholesale, and
doesn’t try to change them. How is this racist? Why does the University of
Washington writing center, which is supposed to be about teaching students how
to write, have a statement on antiracist, and social justice work in the
writing center? Why not
have a statement regarding teaching students to write well?
Instead of being about writing, the
writing center is…off the rails:
The writing center works
from several important beliefs that
are crucial to helping writers write and succeed in a racist society. The
racist conditions of our society are not simply a matter of bias or prejudice
that some people hold. In fact, most racism, for instance, is not accomplished
through intent. Racism is the normal condition of things…
---from the Writing Center
statement, it goes on and on like this, I lost interest and so can’t even tell
you if it eventually ever talks about writing being important to the Writing
Center.
I can’t emphasize
strongly enough how misguided this foolishness is. The whole point of writing
is to be able to express concepts clearly (with a secondary standard of
eloquence). Instead, the writing center is a train wreck:
“We promise to emphasize the importance of rhetorical
situations over grammatical ‘correctness’ in the production of texts,”
announces the poster. “We promise to challenge conventional word choices
and writing explanations.”
--seriously, what does this even mean?
Honest, standard
English is a good idea: it gives people a basis from which to formulate and
express thoughts. Having standard conventions for how this language works helps
with that. If “anything goes,” why does this university need a writing center?
One question
comes to mind: why isn’t education on the table here? The answer is the
administrative takeover of higher education. Instead of scholars making
decisions about scholarly activities like writing, we have administrators with
no interest or respect for education. Instead, they just want to expand their
fiefdom. Let’s hear an admin justify the lunacy regarding that social justice
statement:
“[The
statement] is a great example of how we are striving to act against
racism,” said Dr. Jill Purdy, Tacoma’s vice chancellor of undergraduate
affairs. “Language is the bridge between ideas and action, so how we use words
has a lot of influence on what we think and do.”
One of the things
we need to do is thin out the administrative caste. The quick rule of thumb is
to eliminate all positions whose titles are twice as long as the position
holder’s name. In this case (and, in fact, nearly every case I’ve found in this
blog), the title “vice chancellor of undergraduate affairs” is clearly long
enough to be eliminated with no risk of harming any student’s education in any
way.
Considering
education is supposed to be a primary mission of higher education, why can’t we
start helping out students?
