At 10:18 PM +0100 11/26/06, Daniel Wolf wrote:
John Howell wrote:
At 5:21 AM -0600 11/26/06, Henry E. Howey wrote:
My Friends,
As one who has been in the college teaching business for too long, I would
like to offer a reason for the lack of foreign language excperience these
days. Simply, during the Vietnam War, the language requirement was for
many a ticket to the rice paddies. Thus, it was dropped universally.
Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, the requirement seemed silly
to people who have never fulfilled it.
May I suggest that dropping language requirements at research
institutions came about largely through the increased influence of
science and engineering faculties? Since the second world war,
international publication in these fields has been essentially
anglified, while the humanities have continued to offer significant
opportunities for research and publication in foreign languages. As
to draft issues, it seems like every University had one or two
courses or requirements specifically designed to weed out potential
draftee, here a language req., there a math req., and over there a
tough Western Civ. course.
Actually, nothing I wrote is quoted above, Daniel.
So, let me get this straight. You believe that "every"
university--and don't forget, these are the same universities that
others have complained care about absolutely nothing but recruiting
students and collecting their money and don't have any quality
control over their graduates--had an established policy of having
flunkout courses for the SPECIFIC PURPOSE of causing students to
flunk out of school (after which the school would collect NO tuition
from them!), for the SPECIFIC PURPOSE of making sure they would be
drafted (which means the school would NEVER collect any tuition from
them!!)?
How paranoid can you get?!! I suspect that you folks got burned by
some very SPECIFIC problems at some very SPECIFIC schools, but
generalizing from one situation at one school to ALL SCHOOLS
certainly makes up in paranoia what it lacks in logic. You are not,
in any case, describing anything I have ever seen, heard about, or
experienced, naive thing that I am.
Not that individual departments don't have what are widely seen as
flunkout courses. In music, it's usually first year theory and ear
training. In engineering, when I first came to this school, it was a
5-hour calculus course, which caused students to call engineering a
pre-business course! Now it's a first year Engineering Fundamentals
course, and it would not be unusual for any field to have
introductory courses that accomplish the same thing. But the purpose
of such courses is--I hope this is sufficiently obvious--to identify
and discourage those students who lack the fundamental abilities
required to succeed in a given field, not to hand them over to the
government as canon fodder!
I agree, by the way, that engineering and, to a lesser extent,
science faculties are likely to be against ANYTHING that takes time
away from major classes, including foreign language study. When we
were in a College of Arts & Sciences that was painfully obvious, and
when the university reorganized its Colleges a new College of Science
was formed so they could keep all their nice overhead money from
outside contracts. But that's why we have a liberal arts Core
Curriculum.
So, let me suggest that you can't have it both ways. Either all
universities are money-grubbing capitalists engaged in sucked the
blood out of innocent students without giving anything in return, or
all universities are run by the C.I.A. and see to it that students
are flunked out so they can be drafted.
Oh, that's right, we don't have a draft any more, and we have a
professional military, which requires intelligence and skills in
handling complex electronic equipment and not just the ability to
peel potatoes without cutting your own throat. You know: jobs that
even WOMEN can be good at!!
So how about a third alternative (as Tevye would no doubt have
discussed with God): all universities do what they do because they
care about their reputations, want to attract the best students, want
to keep and graduate those students, and want those grads to go out
and send them other students. That doesn't happen if your graduates
aren't well enough prepared to get jobs, and it doesn't happen if
there's even a hint of feeding students to the military outside
normal channels. (We have ROTC here because we have a Corps of
Cadets with a long and proud history, but only the best of the best
actually make it into the military. I took ROTC for two years
because it was required under Universal Military Training. So????
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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