It was a fine day in February, and we were spending it in Advanced German. Verbs were declined, nouns were capitalized, and a fun time was had by all. I believe we were studying art and literature from the era of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the context of media history when we were first told by our instructor that these happy days could not continue. Rensselaer would soon cease to offer German courses. It emerged that our instructor was being forced to leave Rensselaer, and that the German language courses would be discontinued from the ground up—first-year courses are not being offered next semester, and the second-year courses have but a year to live.

To put this in perspective, consider that German is the second most prevalent language used in science, engineering, and technology, and, in fact, in research overall. It is the second most common language found on the Internet. Our school maintains the opportunity for exchange programs with 13 universities in German-speaking countries. Every single career fair in recent memory has included offers to travel to a German-speaking country and work there. Almost every one of our “Market Basket” competitor schools finds it necessary to offer a major in German.

A group of interested students met with Professor Geisler, chair of Language, Literature & Communication, to find out why such a decision was made. She informed us that the decision was made by her and the Promotion & Tenure Committee, who she freely admitted were “not competent” to make that kind of decision, because the department does not maintain any tenure-track language professors to oversee the process. The professors making curricular decisions regarding the languages taught at RPI are not even involved in the instruction of the languages. In addition, they had not considered any of the aforementioned facts. Nor had they considered student enrollment in the language or the cost of offering the courses, according to the chair.

So why did they decide to cut it? As we were told, that’s confidential information.

Changing the world requires more than just developing technology in a vacuum. We need the language skills and cultural competence to successfully interact with technical leaders worldwide. Let’s not allow the current administration to silently weaken and eliminate programs. After German, what program will be next? How far do our educational options need to be diminished before we ask ourselves what Rensselaer is really giving us for our money? Even “mere” technical schools ranked well below Rensselaer offer programs far more extensive than our own to improve intercultural experience, putting them in a much better position to both understand and change the world.

Tolga Goren, MATL ’08