SUNY Brockport: Modern language professors at SUNY Brockport worry about department cuts

Modern language professors at SUNY Brockport are mobilizing against a possible downgrading of their department, a local manifestation of a national predicament for shrinking language departments at budget-conscious public universities.

West Virginia University's earlier this year decided to eliminate all its language programs along with many others, a resounding setback for classical liberal arts education. Academics feared it could be a harbinger for elsewhere in the country. Indeed, nearly the same thing is slated to happen at SUNY Potsdam.

Provost Martin Abraham insisted Brockport is not following the same model, but rather is thinking broadly about how best to organize its academic departments. "We have no interest in replicating what the folks in West Virginia are doing," Abraham said. "We're not looking to remove a major or remove the language requirement."

Modern language department Chair Skye Paine, though, said he fears the strategy is "boiling the frog" — continually disinvesting from small programs until they can no longer withstand the pressure, then abandoning them altogether. Student and faculty headcounts and program offerings in modern languages have decreased in the last 10 years or so.

"The reality is that American public universities, from West Virginia to Western New York, are failing their students," Paine wrote in an email. "Perhaps the stakeholders in public education believe that only those who can afford private college should have intercultural competence and any form of linguistic diversity. That is certainly how they are acting."

SUNY Brockport moves toward academic alignment

Technically speaking, the dispute stems from Brockport's recent academic affairs strategic planning process.

That process was meant to consider whether the school's various colleges, departments and majors are properly aligned. Administration asked academic departments to "look at this in their own views and their own lives," Abraham said.

He conceded that modern languages as well as two similarly small departments, philosophy and women and gender studies, were given "a little bit of a head start" on the question.

"If we have very small programs (with) proportionately very high administrative costs, then as good stewards of the public money, we have to look at that on a regular and ongoing basis," he said.

Abraham said he foresees minor administrative changes for the department of modern languages, effectively invisible to students and the general public.

And he emphasized that no changes have been finalized.

Falling enrollment threatens language programs — but why?

The conditions that Brockport is responding to are common across the country: falling student enrollment together with greater interest in degree programs that lead more directly to a job.

Undergraduate enrollment this fall is about 5,400, up slightly from last year but down 23% from five years ago. That has been driven by several factors: fewer local students applying, fewer transfer and lower rates of student retention. University President Heidi Macpherson said in the spring that the college was facing a $10 million structural budget gap.

The primary driver of that gap is employee salaries outpacing revenue. One way to close it would be to employ fewer people. That, some fear, is where the talk of academic reorganization comes in.

"Regional public institutions are deciding they’re only there for workforce preparation, and that’s what we have to fight back against," said Paula Krebs, executive director of the national Modern Language Association. "Children have a right to a full higher education and not just to be slotted into a job that may not exist in 10 years."

Paine is one of four full-time faculty members in the department of modern languages. All students on campus are required to take two semesters of a modern language — down from four semesters a decade ago, Paine notes — and there are 11 students majoring in Spanish.

Those faculty and student major numbers have been decreasing steadily. Paine attributed that to decreased institutional support. He cited as an example the fact that undergraduates are now required to take two semesters of a modern language rather than the previous four.

"Our numbers are down, but they are not down in a vacuum," he said.

Where do small college departments belong?

Barbara LeSavoy, an associate professor in the department of women's and gender studies, recalled the administration's prompt as a broad one: "Think about where you belong."

She and the other department chairs in question are humanities professors. It is in their nature to question the premise.

For example: Where does a small and shrinking liberal arts department belong within a small and shrinking public university? More broadly, where does a college education in Spanish or philosophy belong amid an economy that values job-specific academic credentials more than a broad understanding of the humanities?

"Whether you call it consolidating or reorganizing, this is really a takedown of the humanities," LeSavoy said.

Modern languages, women and gender studies and the philosophy department share the same corridor in the Fannie Barrier Williams liberal arts building and all worry they may be folded into larger programs.

"The basic attitude of the college in the last couple of years is 'grow or die,' which has been accompanied by a policy of helping thriving departments at the expense of the struggling departments," Paine wrote. "The outcome is inevitable."

A dream fulfilled at Brockport

Besides the Spanish major, there is also a certificate program. One of its recent graduates is Lucy Sebastian, the daughter of a migrant farm worker from Puerto Rico.

As happens so often, her parents said she needed to speak English, not Spanish, and so she never learned it fluently. It was only well into adulthood that she was able to enroll at Brockport and learn what she missed in her youth.

"I’m just grateful I could come here and achieve a goal and a dream I probably never would have been able to had this program not been here at Brockport," she said.

She is now auditing a course in Spanish literature.

"If we remove the language departments from our universities, how will America ever become as capable as some of the European countries where they speak three or four languages?" Sebastian said. "To remove that department from our universities I think is very sad not just for the students but for the nation."

Justin Murphy is a veteran reporter at the Democrat and Chronicle and author of "Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger: School Segregation in Rochester, New York." Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/CitizenMurphy or contact him at jmurphy7@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Shrinking language departments at NY colleges: SUNY Brockport next?