Slavic field

[Jeff Otto]

A response to Robert Orr's question and Andrea Nelson's follow-up:
>
>>Just a wee rhetorical question .... did people stop studying German after
>>1945?
>>Russia's still a "big, imporatnt country", as Genevra Gerhart pointed out ...
>
>Yes.  You and I know that Russia is still a "big, important country" but
>enrollments have dropped EVERYWHERE in the United States in Russian.  We
>need to be able to communicate very passionately our view that it is a "big
>important country" with a rich language and culture.
>Andrea Nelson

        Robert Orr's point is well taken:  if the argument against funding
Russian and Slavic programs is justified because Russian is no longer the
"enemy language" then it follows that we should be seeing a huge increase
in Arabic and Persian language enrollments since the nightly news is
telling us that our new enemies are Iran, Iraq, and Hamas.  To my knowledge
this is not the case.  Let's take Robert Orr's question a step further:
why study French?  It is no longer the international lingua franca.  Why
study Latin?  The Roman Empire died out centuries ago.  Andrea Nelson gives
us the anwer:  we don't study a people, their culture, and their language
*just* because it's politically necessary to do so.  We study these things
because they are part of history and human achievement.  Do we no longer
study the Roman Empire because it's gone?  Of course not.  Do we no longer
study French because France is our ally and thus politically uninteresting?
No.  Leaving aside the age-old issue of "why are the Humanities
important," I think a lot of us in the field have been unconciously
entangled in this line of thinking that only the here-and-now is important.
What will we do now that the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact are gone?  We'll
do the same thing that every other language program has done since its
empire collapsed:  continue to study the people, their culture, and their
language because they are an integral part of the Humanities.
        I don't mean to make light of declining Russian enrollments, but we
should be mindful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  As Andrea
Nelson points out, we must now build an enthusiasm for studying Russia and
the E European countries and their languages for what they are:  not a
piece of political interest recently passed into oblivion, but an integral
part of our study of human culture.
        Now that I've preached to the choir, can I have an "Amen" from the
administrators?


Jeff Otto
Ohio State University

********************************
otto.10 at osu.edu
********************************