American Campuses: Decline of the French Language

You thought this expression was a creation of George Orwell’s, but you are wrong. It is the message, written in the administrative “newspeak” language, that the seven professors of the French department at SUNY-Albany (the State University of New York at Albany) just received from the president of the university with a laconic brutality. And yet, they were all what is called in the U.S. “tenured professors.” They thought they had absolute job security. The senior faculty was advised to take early retirement, and the rest of them to “pursue [their] careers elsewhere.” They were not charged with professional misconduct. They were only treated as the mechanism of a machine that was unplugged because it is not making profits anymore. No “deactivation” was possible without prior dehumanization — now we are in Orwell’s story.

Beyond the human consequences to which no one can remain insensitive, what just happened in Albany shows the extremely worrisome general tendencies that are now deeply affecting higher education in the U.S.

There are persistent delusions in this respect in France: Only overexposed universities of excellence that appear in the Shanghai rankings are acknowledged, whereas the unfamiliar sides of unknown universities are ignored — even though they account for the greatest majority of the student population.

Two Historical Anomalies

This sector is now seriously threatened by money-saving and intellectual reforms. The “deactivations” carried out by SUNY are the proof of the severe budget cuts that put an end to the courses considered less profitable; in addition to the French program, the Italian, Russian, Theater and Classics programs were simultaneously eradicated, while many jobs are increasingly insecure.

In American universities, only 35 percent of professors are tenured or on their way to becoming so, while the number of adjunct professors — whose positions are insecure and require a lot of traveling — is growing. They spend their lives on the road going from one university to another in order to teach to new classes. This is how the piece of advice given by the SUNY-Albany committee is to be literally understood: “pursue (their) careers elsewhere” — that is to say, behind the wheel.

In the wake of World War II, the university system was reformed in accordance with the American business model, but two historical “anomalies” inherited from the European university tradition — but unrelated to the business culture — have remained: job security (with the tenure system) and the fact that it is an important intellectual sector that is not directly oriented toward making profits (with Classical studies). These two “anomalies” are on the way to being “corrected” before our eyes.

Job security is slowly but certainly disappearing from the American university system, along with the erosion of all individual protections as required by neoliberalism. As for the fate of Classical studies, the brutality of the measures adopted by the SUNY-Albany presidency has, paradoxically, some merit. It has the merit of showing what could be become a banal reality for every university where teaching Classical studies will suddenly come to an end. And with their disappearance, the stories created by Orwell will sink into oblivion. …