"Outsourcing Language Learning"="dramatically dismantling..language departments and firing faculty en masse"?

Foreign Language Depts Cut..Still a trend? What happened to globalization?

• "..the last two years have seen many language departments threatened or eliminated" - "News: Disappearing Languages at Albany ", Scott Jaschik - Inside Higher Ed October 4, 2010
• “Facility with a language other than English is a general education goal that every institution should have,” but " students not planning to pursue academic or literary careers would be served well by conversational knowledge of a language." - quotation from Richard H. Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges in "News: Outsourcing Language Learning" — Jennifer Epstein, Inside Higher Ed Jan 22, 2010.
• ca. 2009, The Drake Univ Language Acquisition Program (DULAP): "stirred up controversy by eliminating its foreign language departments and thereby the jobs of faculty in French, German and Italian, even those with tenure.

More re: DULAP controversy
"Traditional lecture and language lab instruction was replaced with the small discussion groups led by on-campus native speakers, a weekly session with a scholar of the language, a one-semester course on language acquisition and the use of several Web-based learning technologies.
"Critics feared the evisceration of language departments, the elimination of countless tenure-track and adjunct jobs, and the prospect of students not actually learning the languages they’d signed up to study.
"But not everything that could go wrong, in critics’ eyes, did go wrong. Other institutions haven’t followed suit by dramatically dismantling their language departments and firing faculty en masse, though some departments have shrunk under budget pressures and waning student interest. For them, and for institutions that hope to expand their language offerings but can’t hire new traditional instructors, the Drake model may offer a way for students to learn foreign languages."
"The argument, Cadd said, “isn’t that this is a better model than anything else,” just that it works for many students who are interested in using a language for business, travel or family interactions, rather than to become scholars of French or Japanese literature. " http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/22/languages

IMAGE

Photo of "picture generated from a crystal structure reported by James Fraser Stoddart et al. Science 2004, 304, 1308-1312. It shows a molecular Borromean ring with the grey spheres representing zinc(II) ions. It was made by myself and is free to be used by all others." 2007-01-20 (first version); 2007-02-10 (last version)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0e/Molecular_Borromean_Rings_Atwood_Stoddart_commons.jpg/500px-Molecular_Borromean_Rings_Atwood_Stoddart_commons.jpg

//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Molecular_Borromean_Rings_Atwood_Stoddart_commons.jpg

M stone at the English language Wikipedia [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], from Wikimedia Commons

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