Ubi Justin

Judging by my email over the weekend, it appears that every foreign language department in the SUNY system is in the same boat as my own. I'm receiving numerous emails advertising courses that can be taken online, and asking me to tell the students here at UB about them. The SUNY system has begun to push online education in a major way, largely through OpenSUNY and #sunyonline . My understanding of the effort is relatively vague, but it appears SUNY wishes to centralize online offerings and has set up new protocols through which a student at one SUNY campus can enroll in an online course at another with relative ease.  I don't think I'm off-base when I suggest that everyone on this Same Boat is under the same gun. From the very top of SUNY Central administration in Albany, down to the smallest of its 64 universities, colleges, and community colleges, everyone seeks to boost enrollments (and hence budget allocations) by expanding online education. No duh. There are only...

My perspective on this blog is shaped entirely by my current professional experience. As Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), my mission is clear: I am charged with spreading democracy throughout the world by educating global citizens who are not only fluent in multiple languages (French, Italian, Spanish, and sometimes Portuguese and Catalan, in the case of RLL), but also culturally conversant in the history, art, literature, and civic life of societies that speak these languages. No really, that's what I do for a living! My primary way to achieve my mission, however, is anything but idealistic: Butts in seats. Our viability as a department depends on generating revenue for the College, which of course is determined by the number student butts land in our classroom seats. Accordingly, we have to adapt programs and curricula in order to attract more students paying the highest tuition rates: namely, paying MA students ...

A recent study conducted by the Modern Language Association found that institutions of higher education across the United States eliminated a whopping total of 651 foreign language programs between 2013-16. One might imagine that these closures arrived in the wake of the 2008 financial market collapse, although for myself I do not necessarily see a direct correlation between the Great Recession and the "Great Extinction of Foreign Language Programs." The very same MLA study, for instance, reports that between 2009-2013 there was only one program closure. That is, in the years of greatest budgetary crisis among states and localities, foreign  language programs appear to have continued much as they had in years prior: Most likely starved of resources just like every other department on campus, but certainly not under threat of extinction due solely to diminished tax revenues. This brings me to the foundational premise of this blog. Higher education is not in crisis, it is in...