{"id":27924,"date":"2023-08-28T09:15:25","date_gmt":"2023-08-28T07:15:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/?p=27924"},"modified":"2023-08-31T16:05:59","modified_gmt":"2023-08-31T14:05:59","slug":"the-end-of-arabic-and-the-dumbing-down-of-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/the-end-of-arabic-and-the-dumbing-down-of-america\/","title":{"rendered":"The End of Arabic and the Dumbing Down of America"},"content":{"rendered":"<h5>Between university budget cuts, the challenges of remote learning and reduced attention spans, book bans, and fear itself, education in the United States is facing a mounting crisis.<\/h5>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h4>Jordan Elgrably<\/h4>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Let me make clear at the outset that the title of this commentary is an exaggeration \u2014 Arabic is not going anywhere; it will continue to be spoken by more than 100 million native speakers and millions more who have learned the language for religious study or travel. But in the United States, the number of university programs and departments offering Arabic and Middle East studies, or \u201carea studies,\u201d are on the decline. Could it be that, more than 20 years after 9\/11, the frenzy of the State Department and academia to meet the demand has finally waned?<\/p>\n<p>No \u2014 it\u2019s all about economics, not optics.<\/p>\n<p>The other day <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2023\/08\/18\/us\/west-virginia-university-budget-cuts-deficit.html\">the New York Times<\/a> followed the story of West Virginia University shuttering its entire world languages, literature and linguistics department. I had caught wind of this cataclysm only a few days earlier, in a tweet by poet and translator Huda Fakhreddine, who was circulating a petition designed \u201cto reverse this dangerous decision.\u201d<\/p>\n<div class=\"ose-twitter ose-uid-a509f1babbf19bc0d0e1ad777807bce8 ose-embedpress-responsive\" style=\"width:600px; height:550px; max-height:550px; max-width:100%; display:inline-block;\" data-embed-type=\"Twitter\"><blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"600\" data-dnt=\"true\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">West Virginia University is eliminating its department of World Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics! Sign and circulate this petition calling on WVU administration to reverse this dangerous decision. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/UOMJUbps5B\">https:\/\/t.co\/UOMJUbps5B<\/a><\/p>&mdash; Huda Fakhreddine | \u0647\u062f\u0649 \u0641\u062e\u0631 \u0627\u0644\u062f\u064a\u0646 (@FakhreddineHuda) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/FakhreddineHuda\/status\/1690744769343881219?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">August 13, 2023<\/a><\/blockquote><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/div>\n<p>Looking into the matter further, I soon discovered that it is not only foreign languages that are on the wane; nationally, college degrees\u00a0in <a href=\"https:\/\/nces.ed.gov\/programs\/digest\/d19\/tables\/dt19_325.50.asp\">English<\/a> are down by nearly 30%, going from 63,914 graduates in 1971 to 40,002 in 2018.<\/p>\n<p>The Times story noted that, \u201cThe number of bachelor\u2019s degrees in world languages, literature and linguistics awarded annually fell by 25 percent nationally.\u201d Part of the problem is that many universities\u00a0are operating at a budget deficit in the many millions of dollars. As the Times reported, the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, faces a $63 million budget deficit in 2023.<\/p>\n<p>I reached Huda Fakhreddine, who happens to be an Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at U Penn.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAll of us in the humanities feel threatened but especially those of us on the margins of the humanities, in area studies which, as you know, is where American institutions place\u00a0<em>other<\/em>\u00a0cultures and languages. Here at Penn, the decline in enrollments is always brought up as a warning or a threat. Also, early last year our Middle East Center lost its federal funding. Various reasons were cited, but overall, it did feel like an attack on our relevance and existence at the institution.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I asked Ammiel Alcalay, who has taught courses on Middle Eastern and Mediterranean literacy and intellectual culture at the City University of New York and Queens College since the \u201890s, if he had observed a drop in interest in area studies, including foreign languages and literature over the past few years, and whether he thought intellectual discourse was as vibrant today as it had been in the late \u201890s and early 2000s.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOf course there\u2019s been a drop in interest, but there\u2019s also a drop in interest in <em>everything<\/em>,\u201d Alcalay noted. Without exaggeration, the poet, translator and author of the classic study <a href=\"https:\/\/www.upress.umn.edu\/book-division\/books\/after-jews-and-arabs\"><em>After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture<\/em><\/a> really sounded the alarm bells.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYounger people are desperate, suicidal, see very few options for themselves, so the idea of getting excited about studying a language or another culture is really far afield. I would attribute this to the complete corporate woke culture of US academia and the effect of the lockdowns. Universities may have been some of the worst perpetrators of utterly insane policies that treated students (and everyone else) like cattle, in order to transform them into sheep. The stats for the rise in administrative positions versus enrollment is enormous, and most of those positions are in the \u2018DEI\u2019 realm (diversity, equity, inclusion).<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAt the same time, the rest of the world is truly shut out airtight. In the US, no mainstream media outlets report anything outside the US unless it\u2019s directly part of US policy (i.e. support for the war in Ukraine, but is there any actual journalism on it? analysis? nyet). There aren\u2019t even images, or anything to pique the imagination. So, for all intents and purposes, the rest of the world doesn\u2019t exist, other languages don\u2019t exist. It\u2019s all being flattened to the small digital screen and the very limited feeds that most people have become accustomed to.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Alcalay argues that the bottom has dropped out. \u201cThe decimation of the curriculum goes across the board, starting in kindergarten, so things are <em>not<\/em> going to improve,&#8221; he declared. &#8220;Sorry to be so dire, but I\u2019m feeling it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Mehnaz Afridi, a professor of religious studies at Manhattan college, concurred. Replying to an email query, she wrote: \u201cI think humanities are in trouble around the nation. There are new laws in certain states that are not allowing educators to discuss race, sex, and colonial history. Budget cuts are due to mismanagement but the first programs that are being cut are in the Liberal Arts.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Echoing these concerns, Huda Fakhreddine added, \u201cIt seems as if we, in area studies, regardless of our expertise and disciplines, exist to serve other agendas and interests. We are easily dispensable when these interests shift.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>By the way, WVA isn\u2019t only killing foreign languages, notably its Arabic and Mandarin studies \u2014 it\u2019s also ending creative writing courses.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Post-Pandemic World<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Some of the people you talk to about this crisis say we\u2019re in the \u201cpost-pandemic world,\u201d as if that conveniently explains the continuous decline of knowledge, when capitalism in the time of the internet and the smart phone has been leading us down this path for decades. Earlier this month, writing in their Substack, in \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/steady.substack.com\/p\/the-battle-to-save-public-education\">The Battle to Save Public Education<\/a>,\u201d Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner argued:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">\u00a0The pandemic wreaked havoc with the emotional, intellectual, and social development of America\u2019s youth. Dismal test scores provide depressing data of yawning learning deficits. Talk to anyone in or around schools and you hear stories of setbacks and struggle \u2014 heaps of qualitative data suggesting a staggering scale of generational loss.<\/p>\n<p>Not to come across as shrill, but we may truly be talking about a \u201clost generation\u201d across the spectrum, from elementary school kids to college students. With attention spans shrinking, with fewer young people talking to each other (they prefer WhatsApp texts and the online chat option <a href=\"https:\/\/www.internetmatters.org\/hub\/esafety-news\/parents-guide-to-discord-on-how-your-kids-can-use-it-safely\/\">Discord<\/a> to real conversation), the opportunity for face to face debate is greatly diminished.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe digital business is a huge problem, [as we see] the flattening out of everything and the destruction of a real attention span,\u201d Alcalay commented. \u201cI don\u2019t have a smart phone and am not on any social media, yet I still have had to really discipline myself to get back to reading [books] for hours on end,\u201d he added. \u201cThe problem is not just academia but big tech [and] government censorship, as exposed in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lemonde.fr\/en\/les-decodeurs\/article\/2022\/12\/06\/all-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-the-twitter-files_6006703_8.html\">Twitter Files<\/a> and by Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger and other actual journalists, as well as in congressional hearings.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Alcalay added that today\u2019s screen culture is a huge problem, not only because it challenges our attention spans, but because it augurs \u201cthe destruction of journalism, investigative reporting, and actual debate.\u201d (If you\u2019re reading this online in The Markaz Review, thank you for indulging the irony.)<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, an August 16<sup>th<\/sup> story in the Nation, on \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.thenation.com\/article\/society\/wvu-cuts-higher-education\/\">The Evisceration of a Public University<\/a>,\u201d found that, \u201cThe\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.insidehighered.com\/news\/2022\/02\/10\/how-k-12-book-bans-affect-higher-education\">book bans<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/opinions\/2023\/04\/29\/university-campus-free-speech-censorship-fight\/\">censorship<\/a>, purges of area studies programs, and targeting of academics at public institutions (particularly in the South) are all calculated to decrease the public\u2019s confidence in public education so that it can be dismantled and replaced with private corporations, which lack regulation and oversight.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">The future of higher education looks bleak. Money will flow to elites in private schools, who will benefit from comprehensive language instruction, liberal arts, inclusive critical thinking skills, and a global curriculum, and thus have access to global careers in the arts, finance, diplomacy, national security, international business, international law, AI, and other fields. Students at state schools will receive the education that the oligarchs want them to, based on their largesse.<\/p>\n<p>And we haven\u2019t begun to scratch the surface of the damage being done by recent book bans and other forms of censorship. A PEN America report dated August 23<sup>rd<\/sup> on \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/pen.org\/report\/educational-intimidation\/\">Educational Intimidation<\/a>\u201d found that, \u201c<em>Fear<\/em>\u00a0is the new watchword in public education. Across the country, teachers, librarians, and school administrators are attesting to a chilled climate, in which they are more concerned with running afoul of new censorious laws than with educating their students.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Thus, in the United States, intellectuals and academics are fighting battles on multiple fronts, from shrinking budgets for area studies and educational intimidation, to shrinking attention spans. Lest you think this is only a North American problem, foreign language study is on the decline in the UK as well. A <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/education\/2013\/oct\/09\/university-language-departments-10-things-to-know\">Guardian<\/a> story 10 years ago sounded the alarm and a 2020 report by the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.britishcouncil.org\/sites\/default\/files\/language-trends-2019.pdf\">British Council<\/a> found that Brexit had spurred a negative trend in language learning in UK schools. It quoted the British Academy statement, \u201cMonolingualism is the illiteracy of the 21<sup>st<\/sup> century.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s worth noting that the decline of Arabic and Middle East Studies in the United States parallels the waning of US influence in the region, as Chas Freeman recently pointed out in \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/the-middle-east-is-once-again-west-asia\/\">The Middle East is Once Again West Asia<\/a>.\u201d Arab countries, Iran, and Turkey among others, Freeman wrote, \u201care in active pursuit of strategic autonomy through diversification away from political and economic overdependence on the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Even though whole foreign language departments are threatened with extinction, US employers are still looking for people who can speak a language other than English. Demand for bilingual staff is on the rise, according to a report from the <a href=\"https:\/\/research.newamericaneconomy.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/NAE_Bilingual_V9.pdf\">New American Economy<\/a>. In fact, demand for bilingual talent rose by 14% between 2016 and 2019 alone, and in the UK in 2020, according to the same <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.gitnux.com\/bilingual-employment-statistics\/\">source<\/a>, 75% of employers valued foreign language skills.<\/p>\n<p>So don\u2019t delete your Babel or Duolingo app just yet. Hang on to your hope that you can acquire a second or third language, because you may need it. Besides, reading literature in another language takes you to a whole new level of human understanding. They say it even increases your emotional IQ and makes you more of an empath.<\/p>\n<p>How\u2019s your Arabic?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What happens when public universities begin shutting down entire area studies departments, and learning foreign languages becomes a 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