Boy, that date of June 2011 — when the university’s federal stimulus funding runs out — just gets closer and closer, doesn’t it? And it’s not looking good.
UT faces a $54 million budget reduction then, including a $37 million reduction for instruction. That’s a lot of money.
But when simply reading them, those numbers are abstract and meaningless. It’s like watching the money climb on “Jeopardy!” with every right answer. The figure does not mean anything until someone puts a face on it.
Here’s your face: The Knoxville News Sentinel reported on May 3 that the majors Italian and Russian may be on the chopping block, as one of the options to cut costs.
Though classes would still be offered in Italian and Russian for non-majors (for those pesky intermediate foreign-language credits). Those interested in more than just a few semesters of Italian or Russian would still be able to minor in either language, as well. Heck, majors in language and world business — a sort-of foreign language and business hybrid — could still pursue further concentration in Italian or Russian.
But throw out the idea that all these provisions and compromises would be made, should the university lose Italian and Russian. Forget the notion of what university does or does not have which foreign language, and how typical foreign language instruction beyond the old standbys is.
If the university were to lose Italian and Russian, it would lose apart of itself. UT would lose a fraction of what it offers as a comprehensive university. It loses that ability to honestly tell the wide-eyed, fresh-from-high-school student that he or she can do literally anything here. The university loses that ability for students to just mess around for at the very least a year (a reasonable time period, even for a responsible student) and see what they want to do for the rest of their lives. It’s sort of a big deal.
Losing the majors would also go against university administration’s ideals. At the inaugural Honors Symposium, UT Interim President Jan Simek said he’d rather UT be like the University of North Carolina, not North Carolina State University.
“North Carolina is the broad-based professional school, liberal arts, business, that comprehensive institution that I think is so critical to the cultural and economic well-being of a state,” he said. “We don’t have North Carolina State in Tennessee. We don’t have Georgia Tech. We’re all of that.”
I agree. Becoming a specialized university has a two-fold damage. It, one, destroys the ideal college setting, one of experimentation and coming-of-age for late teenagers and early adults. And two, it diminishes the overall quality of the university. It’s the equivalent of UT coming up with a body part lame.
Furthermore, eliminating the majors goes against the university’s much-ballyhooed Ready for the World Initiative. It runs counter to the ability of a student to fully commit to the study of either foreign language. It could force those who would want to teach a foreign language as a profession — a not-unheard of idea — away from the university by limiting further study to the language and world business major.
Even with all that, sometimes one has to be reasonable. One has to embody that icky phrase — fiscal responsibility. And truth be told, the compromises that the university has hypothetically laid out, should Italian and Russian be removed, are, indeed, reasonable.
UT’s proposed compromises take into account how tunnel-visioned that sticky notion of having a “low-producing” program really is. These foreign-language majors, as well as a slew of others, keep popping up as “low-producing” for a reason.
I wrote an article for the March 5, 2009 issue of The Daily Beacon, entitled “Faculty responds to potential program cuts,” (yes, as you can see by the date, this “problem” of “low-producing” is not new). And when researching the story, I found out that “low-producing” programs mean ones that produce less than 10 bachelor’s degrees per year over the last five years.
So when the Tennessee Higher Education Commission puts out these reports, it identifies programs as “low-producing,” which invariably is misinterpreted as either “low quality” or “low popularity.”
As Simek asked rhetorically at the symposium, “Who majors in Italian?” (Italian majors: Do not send hate mail to Simek. It was part of a larger point he was making, defending the programs and critiquing the reports. It’s admittedly out of context, but I am trying to make a point.)
Individual students in a university with nearly 26,000 may not know an Italian major. It does not make the major any less significant. Thank God for those proposed compromises about still offering Italian and Russian courses. Otherwise countless students who need to gain those aforementioned intermediate foreign-language credits would lose major options at doing so by losing the majors. A proposed change perceived at first glance as hurting a handful would handicap thousands.
The albatross label of being a “low-producing” program does not include the effect that these foreign-language programs have on freshmen who major in any myriad of subjects but enjoy Italian or at least prefer Italian to other foreign languages.
Admittedly the university is in a tough situation, and cuts have to be made somewhere. With the level of cutting that must take place, this simply cannot be the same university. My next column will tap at the surface of just how different this university could get.

— Robby O’Daniel is a graduate student in communication and information. He can be reached at rodaniel@utk.edu.