Much like Mr. Katz of the linguistics program I have bias because of the amount of time that I spent in the Linguistics department as well as the departments of

Much like Mr. Katz of the linguistics program I have bias because of the amount of time that I spent in the Linguistics department as well as the departments of multiple foreign languages in college. In addition to my linguistics major, I took classes in Chinese, Japanese, French, and German. It's also been quite a long time since then, and things have surely changed. So, with that bias out in the open: I think that the discussions here generally underestimate how much these language programs contribute to university life beyond just a degree: 1. Will international students be attracted to this university with no program that represents their native language? My experience was that a lot of Chinese students spent quite a lot of time in the Chinese department, even if their focus was engineering. 2. In the same vein, what meaningful partnerships will WVU have with non-English speaking institutes of higher education in the future? Seems like not very many! Even if computers will do the translating in the future, we're still talking about a global economy and relationships are important. 3. What about students of all disciplines (history especially comes to mind) that are interested in texts that weren't published in English. jUSt uSe gOoGlE? I'm rolling my eyes. There's still plenty of knowledge for English speakers in non-English texts. Provincial is the word that comes to mind, which I think of as the opposite of "Education".