So, we’ve been having a battle royale in the feminist blogosphere this week. If you read the blogs, you know about it. Heck, I’ve had over 100 190 comments on a post for the first time since last fall, before my readership dropped during my January hiatus.
But other things matter, like Russell Arben Fox’s outstanding post about “treating cultists right”. It’s about the Fundamentalist LDS church in Texas and the government’s raid thereupon; Russell is a first-rate Mormon intellectual, and his piece is most welcome.
I was very unhappy to read this in the Los Angeles Times this morning: USC Will Disband German Department. Apparently demand has fallen for German language and literature courses, and a university that aspires to be one of the premier research institutions in the country has decided to axe the program. Current majors will be allowed to finish their degrees, but questions remain about how doctoral students in other departments who need German as one of their languages will complete that requirement.
I minored in German as an undergraduate. Indeed, I am but two courses short of a bachelor’s degree in German, even though I never achieved complete fluency in the language that was my father’s native tongue. (I visit my German-speaking relatives every few years, but otherwise, I hardly ever speak it anymore). I took plenty of literature courses, particularly on 19th century novels and short plays. I developed a particular fascination with Heinrich von Kleist, and wrote — on my old manual typewriter — one of the best papers I ever produced in college about his masterful Die Marquise von O. And yeah, the fact that he killed himself and his girlfriend in a suicide pact made him especially compelling to me.
My background in German language enriched my work as a graduate student in church history immensely. So many of the secondary sources I read were in German only. Much of my dissertation was influenced by Friedrich Prinz’s wonderful Klerus und Krieg im früheren Mittelalter.
I think lots of folks should do minors in a language. Though I sometimes wish now, two decades later, that I had majored in women’s studies instead of history, I have never regretted minoring in German. It enhanced and enriched my undergraduate experience immensely, and even now, I sometimes surprise people by being able to drop a line or two from Schnitzler or Goethe in the original. I’ve forgotten so much of what I learned, as I never use it anymore in this new life — but honestly, I am a better man today for having known it once.
Modern universities began in German-speaking lands. For a university like USC, richly endowed and increasingly academically respectable, to drop such a vital program is appalling. It represents a rejection of one of the foundation stones of Western heritage, and I fervently hope that the decision is soon reversed.
I’ll be speaking with my Trojan wife, a proud ‘SC alumna, and ask her to enclose a little note with her next check. Vielleicht auf Deutsch.
Sie tun mir leid. Jetzt beantrage ich bei USCs Jurafakultät studieren. Vielleicht solle ich ihnen vergessen.
Das ist nicht notwendig; nur schreib’ einen Brief, bitte!
Ich habe Witze gemacht.
Sie haben bei Berkeley Deutsch studiert, ja? Soweit ich mich entsinne, Berkeley ein sehr gute Deutsch-abteilung hat. Ich habe Chinesich studiert.
For the sake of everyone else who might read this, yes, I studied at Cal, and it was a great program. I really got close to the other students, as it was a very small group of us doing German lit.
Modern universities began in German-speaking lands. For a university like USC, richly endowed and increasingly academically respectable, to drop such a vital program is appalling. It represents a rejection of one of the foundation stones of Western heritage, and I fervently hope that the decision is soon reversed.
DWEM. “Hey, hey, ho, ho; Western Culture’s got to go!”
Isn’t that how it went?
That’s a shame. I’ve been thinking for a while that I ought to learn German, because a lot of research in my field seems to be done in German (though I think I’ll stick to puzzling out Habermas in translation). Then again, perhaps I should wait until I’ve got my Spanish up to speed before I try to take on something else.
Hugo, You don’t know me but I knew your father (also your mother) years before you were born. That’s so sad about USC’s German department! What’s this crazy world coming to?
Lester, thanks for visiting! I’ll let my mother know.
It is a sad thing. I’m excited to see so many new departments created in the modern university, but not happy when institutions rolling in dough turn it into a zero-sum game.
The department clearly doesn’t get the Zeitgeist… German is becoming particularly popular among US teens these days…
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/arts/music/20toki.html
Is it possible that USC will continue to offer some instruction in German without maintaining a stand-alone department? The inability to major in German literature by itself doesn’t seem like such an enormous loss to me (and the job market for German PhDs is horrendous even by humanities standards), but it seems bizarre that a university could maintain programs in history or comp lit, for example, without providing any options for German training.
How sad that one of America’s better universities has seen fit to further the notion that higher learning is now strictly high-end job training. It will not bode well for this world if I must take my five-year-old daughter to a museum to see people who went to college strictly for the sake of what it would do for their minds. I am further resolved to enjoy and abet this period of my child’s life. Never again will learning for the fun of it be as natural for her. Shame on USC.
The article does indeed say that basic German language courses will still be offered.
Even at UW-Madison, there are fewer sections of each level of German language being offered than just two years ago (used to be around 7 or 8 a semester, now around 4 to 5). And we have one of the top 10 German departments in the country, not to mention that a number of high schools in WI still offer it, instead of just French and Spanish.
Well, I may be biased (and German by birth and my beautiful red passport), but could this have anything to do with what has seemed to me an increasing autonomy of the American postsecondary educational system? It seems to me that second-language requirements are being dropped all over the academic place and that, with ongoing cultural colonization (in the past 14 years, we’ve added a lot of new–American-English–words to the German language), such studies are no longer needed? In other words, will the study of European languages and cultures turn into a study of “dead” (as in “irrelevant”) languages and cultures?
Well, this German certainly hopes that won’t be the case. Abwarten!
I am stricken by this news. I had to write immediately to my former German prof. who got earned her PhD. at USC years before she taught me. She was one of the most awesome teachers I’ve ever known.
I was a transfer student at USC and when I arrived I didn’t NEED to take any more German classes, but I participated in a wonderful program called “The German Semester.” Authors and poets who wrote in German–H.C. Artmann, Peter Turini, Friedrich Duerrenmatt, Jurek Becker–stayed at the university for weeks teaching, giving readings, hanging out with the students. A mini film festival of German expressionist cinema was running at the same time. These experiences were really the highlight of my undergraduate education! I’ve got to write a letter. USC in their current issue is bragging about how many foreign students they have (7115 this year) a goodly number of whom are from Germany. Ach du liebe. . .
I’d second charlotte’s observation, adding that almost every German I’ve ever known under the age of 30 speaks excellent English (come to think of it, the only people I’ve ever known of that age who speak German and not English were Czech).
My current favorite new loanword from English is in Germany’s version of “America’s Next Top Model”: “Germany’s Next Topmodel” - two English loanwords glommed into a Zusammensetzung.
German’s in danger up here, too, which is pretty ironic for a university named after Humboldt.