It’s easy nowadays to despair about the future of American higher education, but here are some ideas from someone who knows higher education better than anyone else I know. -- I read your latest Then and Now Newsletter with interest and want to add to what you said about West Virginia University’s decision to eliminate foreign languages. You note the possible “domino effect” of this change. From my perspective there are two, separable domino effects. The first is among colleges and universities that for more than a decade have, for financial reasons, been eliminating courses and programs that do not draw many students. The humanities have been big losers in this process, but so have other fields such as physics. It is unfortunate that students at these mainly smaller, not affluent institutions will no longer be able to obtain a well-rounded general education because core subjects have been eliminated from the curriculum. This domino effect shows no sign of abating, sad to say. The second domino effect is the one you note in your discussion of West Virginia University. WVU, the leading research university in the state, has a mission to advance knowledge at the frontiers of research and to preserve knowledge for the benefit of future generations. While no university can be expected to cover all subjects, WVU’s elimination of several core fields suggests that it no longer aspires to be a true research university. Admittedly, there are among the “flagship” universities in the US, some that are clearly stronger than others. But if leading universities in additional states abandon core subjects, the domino effect you worry about will surely follow. There are possible solutions. For example, several major universities with distinctive strengths in Southeast Asian studies, when they found it extremely difficult to enroll enough students to offer the full array of language courses in Vietnamese and the other languages on each campus every year, banded together to offer intensive summer courses on a rotating basis. Another example is Harvard’s Ukrainian studies program, for generations arguably the best in the US and perhaps the world. It has never attracted large numbers of students. Yet despite threats to eliminate it because of low enrollment, it has been sustained and now serves as a key resource for American understanding of current affairs. If these less-commonly-taught languages and literatures can be sustained, surely a research university can maintain expertise in the major languages and literatures of the world. If state governments increasingly decide that they no longer need to have a true research university within the state’s borders, then the second domino effect you fear will follow. The consequences of this domino effect would go well beyond the loss of state pride.” Richard Ekman President Emeritus Council of Independent Colleges |
THEN AND NOW
A Now and Then Newsletter
Labor Day 2023
Dominoes from West Virginia:
West Virginia University, the flag ship of its state system of higher education, seems about to make radical changes. In August its President, E. Gordon Gee announced a plan to close 32 graduate and undergraduate programs. eliminate 9% of the university's majors, and terminate perhaps as many as 16% of its full-time faculty.
While other areas would also be affected, Undergraduate education in the arts and sciences is especially likely to be hurt. Chemistry, Mathematics, Philosophy and other disciplines will be damaged; the Program in World Languages, Literature and Linguistics is slated for total elimination. There will be no teaching of foreign languages, no study of world literature. no exploration of how languages shape thinking. .
Reasons for the proposed cuts? President E. Gordon Gee says that his recommendations follow a national trend of declining enrollment in the humanities and other fields in the arts and sciences, and the declining number of 18 year olds in the future. It’s also the case, as Wikipedia notes, that he needs “to address a budget crunch caused largely by the ill-fated expansion program that he previously pushed.”
Gee,79, knows the scene in higher education. He’s held more university presidencies than any other American, nimbly hopping, some would say, from one post to the next before the full effects of his leadership could be assessed.
WVU’s Board of Governors will decide on the plan at its meeting on September 15th. Their decision, no doubt, will be reported in the student newspaper, the Daily Athenaeum, and, I expect, in the national press. If you are as troubled as I am, you can contact the Board through [email protected]
The big question, however, is not whether the Board will go along with President Gee’s proposal, but whether other colleges and universities will take similar action. WVU is, no doubt, an extreme case, but demographic, budgetary and political pressures may lead other universities to adopt similar measures. Once one domino falls, others are likely to follow. An opinion essay by Leif Weatherby explores the situation and its implications; it’s worth pondering.
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What a “Classical Liberal Arts Education” Means at New College of Florida:
Following the Governor’s appointment of new trustees things have changed, big time, at Florida’s one time public liberal arts college. The driving force this time is not budget but ideology, and the results, as Inside Higher Ed reports, is chaos. But change is coming, lots of new athletes and a new twist in the rhetoric about a “classical liberal arts education” when, as Michelle Goldberg notes, New College has made a big push to fill its entering class with baseball players and other athletes and then to cater to them. New College’s interim president, Richard Corcoran, Goldberg writes.-.”sent a memo to faculty members, proposing new majors in finance, communications and sports psychology, ‘which will appeal to many of our newly admitted athletes.’ “
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Why It Matters:
Why should we care what goes on at a low ranked university in West Virginia and a tiny college in Florida? Because infection spreads. Demographic, budgetary and leadership issues are not found only on these two campuses. They are widespread and come at a time when there is hay to be made for Know Nothing politicians who know how to exploit doubts about higher education.
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The Partisan Divide:
The American public has serious doubts about what’s going on at colleges and universities, and those doubts have increasingly taken partisan form. This was already clear in a 2018 report from the Pew Research Center, “The Growing Partisan Divide in Views of Higher Education,“ and is likely to have intensified over the last five years. In a nutshell the Pew reports found “There is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction – even suspicion – among the public about the role colleges play in society, the way admissions decisions are made and the extent to which free speech is constrained on college campuses. And these views are increasingly linked to partisanship.“ . Here’s the URL for the Pew report: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/08/19/the-growing-partisan-divide-in-views-of-higher-education-2/
Make your own predictions about how this will play out in the 2024 elections, but keep your eye on state legislatures where many decisions affecting higher education are made.
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Brendenheim’s Law:
“When a culture renews itself it will turn to its classics – in our case to Greek and Roman texts--not for models or injunctions but for their sheer energy and exuberance. After a while, though, fatigue will set in and barbarians will be hired as gate keepers. They will quickly expel those classics, knowing that once those are gone, the rest will follow: other languages, the study of language itself, art, music, mathematics, the sciences, and soon, philosophy, that is all the sources and expressions of cultural vitality. One by one they will all be expelled.”
Maurice Brendeneim Confessions I p. 323
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Going to Greece? Check Out the Dipylon Project:
Thanks to Andy Szegedy-Maszak for linking me to
Nick Romero’s article “The Hidden Archaeologists of Athens,” .in the on-line New Yorker for August 22. . Here’s a quote I especially liked, “Beneath the seductive surface of the present, there is always something older—the cool of a vanished stream, the clay of a potter’s workshop, the stones of a country villa, the grave of a young man buried with a flute and a lyre. Even archeology itself has a past, which can flicker back to life.”
Here’s the homepage of the Dipylon Society: https://dipylon.org/en/
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Word of the Month:
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Liminality
I thought the word was jargon until I read Jerome Roos’s essay in the New York Times. You can find the whole text it here. But here’s an excerpt:
“To truly grasp the complex nature of our current time, we need first of all to embrace its ... radical uncertainty — not knowing where we are and what lies ahead ... Anthropologists have a name for this disturbing type of experience: liminality. It ... captures an essential aspect of the human condition. Derived from the Latin word for threshold, liminality originally referred to the sense of disorientation that arises during a rite of passage. In a traditional coming-of-age ritual, for instance, it marks the point at which the adolescent is no longer considered a child but is not yet recognized as an adult — betwixt and between, neither here nor there. .. ... We are ourselves in the midst of a painful transition, a sort of interregnum, .... between an old world that is dying and a new one that is struggling to be born. “
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Etymology of the Month:
Soul
It’s a bold word in its fusion of two ideas, the capacity to feel emotions, and whatever animates a living person. The word goes back to Old English sawol and is echoed in German Seele. Beyond that it is hard to go with any confidence but, “It has been suspected to have meant originally "coming from or belonging to the sea," the supposed stopping place of the soul before birth or after death ” (Etymonline s.v.).
I like that conjecture since it lets me see my favorite seafarers -- Odysseus, Aeneas, Robinson Crusoe, Prospero in the Tempest, Darwin on the Beagle, and all those sailing with Captain Ahab on the Pequod -- in a new light, as soul-farers, people who experienced the unpredictability of the deep. Is that why Hemingway says that his hero in The Old Man and the Sea had eyes the color of the sea?
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Dig Deeper in the Blog:
I’ve probed into some of these topics, and others, in my blog at https://www.wrobertconnor.com/blog
Playing Offense for a Change
Entertainment
Gardener’s World.
You can also scroll back on the blog to earlier issues of this Then and Now Newsletter.
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A Sumerian Riddle?
“There is a house in which one enters blind but leaves seeing. What is it?”
Answer: go here for this and other good old riddles
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“Stolen” and “Looted”
Officers from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office arrived at 6:00 a.m. at the Sutton Place apartment of Shelby White, a major collector of ancient art and one of the most generous philanthropists supporting scholarly studies and public understanding of the ancient Greek world. They wanted her to return parts of her collection of ancient art to the countries from which the objects had come, the New York Times reports.
More recently the same office, the Manhattan D.A, has seized eleven ancient artifacts from the Princeton University Art Museum’s collection, alleging they were illegally excavated or acquired. For the Princeton story click here.
These stories are a small part of a much larger story: The number of possibly illegal antiquities acquired by American collectors is huge: the federal Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement reports that “Since 2007, HSI has repatriated more than 20,000 objects to over 40 countries and institutions.“ The Manhattan D.A.’s office has also pushed hard on the issue. Perhaps its most famous case in this area resulted in the hedge-fund pioneer Michael Steinhardt, returning $70 million worth of antiquities and agreeing not to collect any antiquities in the future.
But what exactly is a “stolen” or “looted” antiquity?. These terms can include any art object exported after the 1970 U.N. convention on the illegal import and export of cultural property. This was a watershed moment, reflecting a broad but still incomplete shift in attitude toward the removal of such material from its country of origin. What was acceptable before 1970 became “stealing” or “looting” antiquities. The issue now, I suppose, is whether recent purchasers have done due diligence when they acquire works that once perfectly legal but now run afoul of the law and produce sensational headlines..
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Begin Latin in the Middle School?
Some schools see the rationale for getting students to study Latin in the fifth and sixth grades. Does your school system see it that way?
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Is Art All Politics Now?
In many settings contemporary art has turned into a weapon for social or political causes. Fine, but that can eclipse a quite different understanding of art, one well articulated by Claude Cernuschi,: who wrote in response to David Brooks’ essay on “ The Power of Art in a Political Age”:
“I have always thought of art as a gift. Whenever one is alive one can help people: physically, emotionally, and financially, etc. But unless we are immensely wealthy, and can establish a foundation that outlives us, that help is restricted to our literal lifetimes. But I can hear a
Beethoven symphony, read a book by Dostoyevsky, or look at a Rembrandt, and be completely uplifted, although these artists are dead hundreds of years. They have left us a gift, something that extends beyond the confines of their physical lifetimes. How many things can make such an impact?”
Claude is right, I think. Art is a gift and we should not hesitate to say thank you in any we can.
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Thanks!
Bob Connor