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Ah, Professional Day. Every semester, the introductory French courses spend a day dedicated to the lucrative advantages of bilingualism. Higher pay! Career advancement! Business abroad! An entire class session where you're graciously reminded that your language skills have value—monetary value, of course. What else could possibly justify the existence of a language course other than its ability to raise your salary?
If you're still not convinced, The School of Literatures, Cultural Studies, and Linguistics (LCSL) website offers further rationalization. A page titled "Why Study Language?" assures us that learning a language is a worthwhile investment. Some benefits include higher test scores (because everything must be quantified), lower chances of Alzheimer's (because we love the looming threat of physical illness), and, chief among them, the fact that language learning exercises the same logical, formulaic thinking used in STEM (because god forbid a subject be considered valuable unless it aligns with the sanctified sciences).
Of course, these are perfectly fine reasons to learn a language. Who wouldn’t want to be smarter and healthier? But notice what’s missing from the equation: the possibility that learning a language might have inherent value. That communicating with people in another language might be an end in itself. By comparison, nowhere on the UIC College of Engineering website is there any mention of how data science may improve a student's ability to learn Spanish.
I can't blame the LCSL. These marketing tactics aren’t completely coincidental. They reveal something more insidious about the educational and cultural landscape we find ourselves in: the steady erosion of the humanities. The LCSL, like so many others, has been forced into the contradictory task of proving its worth by distancing itself from the very field it belongs to. It must be more scientific, more profitable, more useful.
As Nathan Snaza writes in Animate Literacies:
“To put this most schematically, one side sees the humanities as a waste of energy (intellectual, instructional, and especially institutional) while the other side expends enormous amounts of energy legitimating their existence in terms that are almost always entirely friendly to neoliberal capitalism.”
And yet, despite these desperate attempts to remain relevant, the department (and the humanities at large) are still losing ground. On Valentine’s Day, a Chicago Tribune article revealed that the university is allegedly planning the closure of the School of Literatures, Cultural Studies, and Linguistics. This would mean the loss of five majors, four minors, and non-tenure-track faculty. UIC is recognized as a Hispanic-Serving Institution, an Asian-American and Native American Pacific-Islander Serving Institution and an R1 research institution—the only public research university in Chicago. To defund the LCSL would be a disservice to all of these titles.
Here we are. Forced to argue that literature, philosophy, and language are “useful” in a world that only values what is immediately profitable. Yes, there is value in utility. Yes, there is value in money. But these are not the only measures of value. It is a matter of squares and rectangles.
I can’t help but wonder: if the LCSL is on the chopping block today, what will it be tomorrow? It seems all too plausible that disciplines like English, philosophy, and history may soon face similar existential threats. We need to take action before humanity gets lost in translation.
what we can do
Participate in the rally tomorrow, March 13th, 11:30 am on the Quad.
Email Chancellor Marie Lynn Miranda, Dean Lisa Freeman, Provost Karen Colley, and Jose Camacho, head of the school of LCSL.
chancellor@uic.edu, provost@uic.edu, las_dean@uic.edu, jcamach@uic.edu
Add on a language minor/major if you can!
– sputnik sweetheart ⋆˙⟡♡
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