Language Extinction

We are at the point where if a language is eliminated from a given university, we cannot expect to see it return in our lifetime. If Classics is eliminated, then there is hardly any foreseeable future in which it will return. So much of the Liberal Arts entails the preservation of a heritage.

While we are all obliged to be modern, there is a vast range of experience that will simply be lost, if no one teaches it. This applies to Inuit languages as much well as ancient European ones.

Once it is no longer taught, it will be forgotten, at least in the here and now—at this university, for these students in this state of the union.

I have sat on fellowship committees where we read applications from remarkable American students at Berkeley or Harvard working on Hittite or Sumerian, asking to attend a German university because the last professor in North America who taught the language had retired, and now there was just this one in Heidelberg or Tübingen who still taught seminars in the subject. Such applications get everyone’s attention, for no matter whether we taught post-war film, the Holocaust or Romanticism, we all recognized the claim these students of ancient languages had on us.

And when kids in Nevada can study only Spanish as the one other foreign language, their perception of the world and its history will have shrunk down to nothing more than their immediate surroundings.