I’m curious to see what Miami is going to do with these programs, because they are all important to professional development in addition to being inherently interesting or worth knowing about. In addition, the college needs to make skills developed clearer if neither students nor employers could see them well.
For instance, any sort of international business major that doesn’t require a foreign language at major-level cultural&linguistic fluency is useless.
Supply Chain would benefit from cultural fluency&linguistic basics in a variety of Asian and African languages. Some specific businesses benefit from specific languages (ie., if your employers or competitors are Audi&BMW, or Airbus, etc.)
African languages, Russian, Chinese, and Arabic are strategically important but incredibly difficult for an English speaker. As a result, they’re good in their role as general education, broadening of the mind, abstract thinking, but the level reached by undergrads is not very usable, except for students in special programs like Middlebury’s, the Critical language flagships, or the Service Academies.
Strong Foreign Language Depts have already operated a pivot to cultural fluency and away from the typical “literature century by century” from the 20th century. Those that haven’t will have to. They’ll have to incorporate culture-specific classes in English like they added Film&History classes in English (Foreign Language faculty actually often work accross departments).
Spanish is so common in the US that it seems having a pathway to fluency in relation to another major would make a lot of sense for people working domestically. In the hospitality industry and in medicine, it seems almost mandatory unless one has other linguistic skills.
French remains an “elite” marker (in that the vitality of that dept correlates pretty well with the college’s ranking) and otherwise will struggle reconciling different goals: students who take it romanticize France, want to travel to Paris, live abroad; but working in France is less common than dealing with Canadian companies, which require everything to be in French as well as English, and when necessary tailored to the French speaking population (and not just “translated”) and there’s a need at different levels for complementary mastery of languages spoken on the African continent (military academies have a high-level French program combined with Arabic, Lingala, Wolof, Jola…) Finally, an influx of Haitians requires French learners to pivot to Creole, especially in the medical field and in education. Obviously these last 3 are less attractive to students than the idea of being a famous artist in Paris and/not as obvious. To a lesser extent, the demand for bilingual immersion programs/charter schools is such, especially in NYC, that CUNYs can’t keep up despite setting up a special 1year Master’s program.
Cutting Gender Studies is strange to me: it is actually very relevant, a useful minor if you’re majoring in business (especially HR), economics, plan to go to law school, or pretty much plan to work in any field that in the 20th century was dominated by men (or still is, even in the 21st), or on its own with a minor from another field.
In particular, hard to see how one can major in HR and not have a minor in Gender Studies, African American Studies, or Hispanic Studies (or American Studies, which used to wrap these as well as History&sociology into one “shortcut” major) in the US nowadays, in the same way Marketing majors better have a statistics minor or equivalent. So perhaps a solution is to require a “corrrelate” minor.
Perhaps they’ll create new majors: UCD in Ireland “consolidated” and created new Humanities majors that pick from what used to be several different “courses” (majors) across colleges&departments, for instance. This was quite revolutionary since the Irish tradition has been the single-subject degree or at the most a “joint degree” combining 2 subjects from a pre-approved list. Creating multidisciplinary degrees broke with hundreds of years of tradition.
In short, I’m curious to see what Miami is going to do, how it’s going to roll these into new majors and whether they’ll be able to market them.