So you want to learn a foreign language.
OK, just go to a country where that language is spoken, and within a couple of days you will pick up enough to get you started. The rest you can do in [Foreign Language] 101. Who needs a graduate program?
That's the gist of William Monroe's take on how to study a foreign language.
Sounds silly? It is. But that's not the point.
The point is that this kind of thinking seems to be widespread. That's nothing new. What's new about it is that the article seems to reflect the attitude of a significant group of administrators and faculty at Brown. Otherwise the decision to suspend admission, that is, to close the graduate programs in German studies, Italian studies and Slavic studies wouldn't have been made.
What does this say about Brown?
Brown University is an institution of higher learning that prides itself on having found a unique way to transmit knowledge, foster intellectual development and encourage personal growth. Many of the faculty, at least, and not a few of the students who come to Brown are here or want to be here because Brown has long maintained that it is a "University-College." This allegedly means that Brown makes only a slight distinction as far as faculty are concerned between undergraduate and graduate communities, recognizing their separate uniqueness while presenting its undergraduates, even in the most basic classes, with faculty members who, in the same semester, teach advanced graduate seminars and publish work relating to both. This has been the most attractive aspect of Brown for many members of the community. The suspension of graduate programs in selected areas means within such a community the automatic degradation of that uniqueness into the more usual pattern of separate and very unequal efforts, the graduate programs always the illustrious element and the undergraduate programs the necessary labor.
As ominous as this sounds, there is even more at stake. The very role of Brown University in higher education seems to be changing. Brown is redistributing more and more resources from the humanities to the social sciences, the life sciences and the sciences. This is a result of a variety of factors that cannot be discussed here. But even if we accept this as a necessary development (a suggestion which most of my colleagues in the humanities would probably dispute), how does the easy dismissal of graduate studies in German, Italian, and Slavic languages reflect on Brown as an institution?
First and foremost, one gets the impression that Brown no longer puts an emphasis on serving its traditional student clientele - those who come to Brown to study at a liberal arts college, in other words, an institution where the humanities take center stage. Can Brown afford to weaken its institutional commitments to the humanities to such a degree?
Graduate studies in German, Italian, and Slavic languages and cultures at Brown are important not only because they transmit an enormous amount of historical knowledge that is worth knowing, but because the ongoing process of globalization increasingly requires our students, even those who pursue careers in economics, computer sciences, engineering or the life sciences, to become global players. These students need an intellectual environment that offers them the chance to discover for themselves the fascination of an encounter with other cultures and to deepen their understanding of these cultures - for their professional as well as their personal growth. Graduate programs in foreign languages and cultures form an integral part of such an environment.
These graduate programs are important because they contribute to an intellectual climate and provide an institutional framework that Brown cannot do without. Anyone who harbors the illusion that the closing of these graduate programs won't have negative effects on the way foreign languages and cultures are studied at Brown should think again.
And, by the way, I sincerely hope that this is not the last word.