Friends & Good Ol' Times

I recently visited my German host family from high school. As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, I spent my last semester of high school in Germany with some of the fabulous people below. (Not everyone could make it over the weekend, so watch out for the second edition of this photo at some later date!)

The weekend was full of biking and canoeing along a nearby river, later looking at vacation photos from Portugal, and catching up over good food, including the typical German afternoon cake and coffee.

As we told stories, I thought about how much that final semester of high school influenced where I am today. Without a doubt, spending it in Germany played a huge role in me double-majoring in German, later traveling and studying in German-speaking countries, and setting the stage for future endeavors, such as my post-doc.

This week, the higher education publication The Chronicle printed an article on the current state of German departments at U.S. colleges and universities. (Hint: it's not good.) The article, entitled "Don't Ditch Deutsch", laments the diminishing number of German departments offering traditional literature courses, as well as the diminishing number of German departments overall. Those departments offering fewer literature courses are instead opting for more "practical" business and other professional German courses. (Why can't we offer both?) I, for one, cannot imagine my college experience without our German department, and studying literature was a huge part of that experience. Writing for those German lit classes even improved my scientific writing, much to the surprise of my purely technically-minded engineering peers.

Given the current state of affairs, the author argues for the integration of German topics into related courses: Marx in Political Science, Jelinek in Women's Studies, and so on. Whether this approach works (or is even needed) depends on the institution, but I think we can all agree that losing our German departments and our German teachers would be a substantial loss indeed -- not only at the universities, but at every level of education. Offering fewer opportunities to learn German means offering fewer opportunities to make a difference in the German-sepaking world. And after all, you never know where one single course may lead.

Read the article while it's still paywall-free here.