Sunday, August 19, 2007

Course cuts at Madison: African languages

I often bemoan how course offerings at the University of Wisconsin have suffered with budget cuts. Today's Wisconsin State Journal provides details, showing that we're currently offering about two-thirds as many courses as we did in 1975. (Don't put too much weight on those numbers — they depend on lots of variables and interpretations of data that aren't clear in the article.) The number of distinct majors has dropped from 239 to 214. Of course, classes have gotten bigger, much bigger in lots of cases.

But what strikes you is the opening passage of the article:
If a language class about an obscure African dialect spoken by a dwindling number of people worldwide attracts only a handful of students at UW-Madison, should the university continue to offer it?
Do we offer any "African dialects", let alone ones spoken by dwindling numbers of people? Our Department of African Languages & Literatures offers Swahili, Arabic, Hausa, Yoruba, and Xhosa. Hardly obscure or endangered languages. There are plenty of topics courses that cover some unnamed language of a region, etc., but those aren't regular course offerings in the relevant sense. Ancient Egyptian is offered, but its numbers long ago stopped dwindling.

The WSJ is hardly a great paper, and the fact that the opening is never explained (or even followed up on in a significant way) maybe isn't shocking, but I'm wondering what the heck this is about.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

This pseudo-example is not real, the reporter clearly picked two words meant to conjur up notions of 'obscure' and 'unimportant' with the use of 'African dialect'. Need any proof? There are exactly two departments of African languages in the US, at UCLA and at the UW. Kind of frightening when you realize that Africa is a whole continent, important in so many ways, and chock full of languages and cultures we all need to know about.

Mr. Verb said...

OK, I'm really depressed now. Mostly because you're probably right.

The Ridger, FCD said...

Yep, almost certainly right. Can you get any more "useless" than "African dialect"? Is there a better example of how universities waste money?


Grrrrr

Mr. Verb said...

God, I wouldn't be surprised by that from knuckle-dragger Republicans in the legislature, but that's reprehensible from a journalist.

Just think about how much federal money and effort is going into "less commonly taught languages" right now, including at the Center for the Advanced Study of Language, virtually next to the "Greenbelt" your blog is presumably named after. Until fall of 2001, they would have probably used Pashto as the example.

Newsflash: We need to understand the world, including its languages and cultures. Major national security issue. Even more important that Halliburton's profits.

The Ridger, FCD said...

Amusingly (maybe I'm just easily amused?) my blog is really named after the Greenbelt trails in my home town; it's a spin off from my regular website, The Ridges (Oak Ridge)... what makes it amusing is that I'm now working in College Park, where CASL is...

zmjezhd said...

Even worse is the use of dialect for unimportant language of no possible consequence. Feh!

Mr. Verb said...

Yeah, Zmjezhd, you hear that all over ... In Mexico, it's downright normal for people to talk about 'dialects', meaning any indigenous languages. Speakers of those languages use that too. I've never gotten over a real sense of surprise at that. But again, from a professional journalist writing about a university in a major paper ... something's wrong here.

So, Ridger, I guess that's a happy coincidence ... I always figured you named it after the Maryland location, keeping the geographical thing going with a new area. Live and learn ...

The Ridger, FCD said...

Much like Chinese "dialects" ... Perhaps they take seriously the old joke "a language is a dialect with an army"?

Anonymous said...

Hate to say it, but the reporter didn't pull this out of the air. There are two UW officials quoted in the article, the "African dialect" example must have come from one of them, no doubt from the Chancellor, who has been quoted by the Dean of L & S as wondering out loud why UW needs to offer "all these languages".

Anonymous said...

Seriously? Sandefur has quoted Wiley as saying that?

Anonymous said...

Sandefur said this at the opening of the Language Institute in Van Hise, much to the dismay of the entire assembled audience. He also said "before becoming dean I didn't realize we had all these great language departments", which was equally dismaying. And guess what? Now UW DOESN'T have all those great language departments.