Thursday, December 06, 2007

Restructuring Linguistics

We noted a while back here that the University of Illinois, though unable to rid itself of its racist mascot, has been able to create a School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics. Now this release indicates that their Senate has …
approved a proposal to merge the Division of English as an International Language and the department of linguistics into a newly configured department of linguistics. All curricular programs will be transferred in their current forms to the new department. When the merger has received all necessary approvals, an internal committee will be established in the new department to help resolve any issues that emerge during the transition.
I've argued before that one of the things linguistics needs to more bridge-building to allied fields. This sounds like a good move to me.

2 comments:

Chris said...

I agree. Several years ago, SUNY Buffalo merged most of their foreign language departments into the linguistics department and it has largely been a happy marriage. This has allowed the linguistics department to hire more faculty, and brought more linguists (grad students particularly) into the teaching of languages.

I'd also like to see the responsibility of teaching writing, typical the duty of English departments, spread out across other departments, particularly social sciences.

Mr. Verb said...

Oh, thanks! I hadn't even thought about Buffalo as an example of this, but it's a very good one.