A few weeks ago over fall break I visited a friend of mine who goes to Rice University in Houston. I’ve always found it the slightest bit pretentious that Rice is known to many as the “Harvard of the South.” As Lisa Simpson once said, “anything that’s the ‘something’ of the ‘something’ isn’t really the ‘anything of ‘anything.'” Of course if I’m going to go faulting an institution for delusions of grandeur it would be somewhat hypocritical of me to exempt SMU from my complaints.
All joking and petty rivalries aside, I do vividly recall one experience from this visit to Rice. I was meeting a few of my friend’s own acquaintances, and like the good college students we were, we began every conversation by exchanging majors. One person told me that he was studying linguistics. “Which languages are you studying?” I asked him. “No, I’m not studying any particular language, I’m just studying linguistics,” he responded. I’ll never forget my immediate thought upon his remark: “You can do that?”
Indeed, I’d never really thought about the possibility of a major in linguistics before this year mainly because it wasn’t until recently that I even realized what linguistics entailed. Generally and broadly speaking, it’s the study of human language, but there’s so much more to it than that. Linguistics is an academically rigorous science related closely to the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology and even biology. There are various levels of specialization: phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics and all sorts of other fields that might immediately frighten a layman who hasn’t had exposure to the subject. This semester, as part of my Spanish minor, I’ve been taking an introductory linguistics course, and I was surprised to find just how rich this field of study actually is. Moreover, I was disappointed to find that SMU does not offer a particularly complete linguistic study curriculum, especially when I found that other prestigious schools like Rice do.
That’s not to say that students interested in the field are completely out of luck if they hope to study it here. Gabriela Vokic and Alberto Pastor both offer a variety of interesting linguistics courses: in addition to the introductory classes that they teach, they also offer classes on linguistic variation, language structure, phonetics and phonology, and more. As you get ready to register for classes next semester, I would certainly recommend any Spanish majors or minors to consider these classes. However, all of these classes are only offered as upper-level Spanish classes (with the exception of the introductory class which does have an English-language equivalent), so anyone who doesn’t speak Spanish is put at an obvious disadvantage.
I know I shouldn’t really be surprised at the lack of a true linguistics major here at SMU. Schools across the country are facing difficult financial times and, to the dismay of many of my colleagues and me, language programs are often the first to get the axe. However, unlike many of the majors in the foreign languages department that are currently facing cuts, the linguistics major has never existed at this school in the first place.
I believe SMU and its students are missing out on an important academic opportunity here. Linguistics is a highly useful field of science, informing the work of not only anthropologists and sociologists but also philosophers, computer scientists, neuroscientists and engineers. If we’re going to offer other “soft sciences” like sociology and anthropology as major, why should linguistics get stiffed? As SMU continues to debate strategies to climb the rankings and establish itself as a nationally renowned school, I urge the administration to give linguistics a chance: it might be exactly the program they’re looking for.
Brandon Bub is a sophomore majoring in English and edits The Daily Campus opinion column. He can be reached for comment at [email protected]
