Save Linguistics at Sussex
April 2, 2009 by Steven Pinker
I hope it is not inappropriate to share my concern about the plans for shutting down the Linguistics programme at Sussex. As someone who has written and spoken extensively about language for a wide audience, and who has visited the University of Sussex on several occasions, I hope my observations may give the University reason to reconsider this decision.
Linguistics is a vital subject in the world today. Our information and communication industries-telephones, the internet, computers, blogs, publishing, the press-are basically industries that buy, sell, and transmit language. Technological breakthroughs involving language could have enormous economic consequences. They include automatic speech recognition, computer translation, smart searching and tagging, natural language understanding, more effective reading education, and instruction foreign-languages. Clinical applications include the diagnosis and treatment of language impairment, dyslexia, aphasia, speech impediments, and autism.
Linguistics has also assumed a central place in the sciences. Psychology, artificial intelligence, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, archeology, anthropology, mathematics, and even evolutionary biology are all avid consumers of basic research in linguistics.
These connections to other fields were the fruits of a revolution in linguistics in the 1960s. It used to be a small, sleepy, and largely historical field in humanities, which fit comfortably in departments of English and other languages. Those days are long gone. As a technical and highly interdisciplinary field, with strong connections to science, math, and engineering, linguistics has to be taught in a coherent program of its own. Every major university in the United States has an autonomous department of linguistics. Aside from being an intellectual resource to so many other fields, linguistics programs are perennially popular with undergraduate and graduate students, and introductory classes often have enrollments in the hundreds.
For these reasons, I believe that folding a healthy linguistics programme is a big step backwards, which will ultimately reduce the productivity and status of the University. I hope the University will reconsider the decision.
[...] the letter, repeated later in a guest blog for The Badger Online, he explains the importance of linguistics in the world today, the enormous economic consequences [...]
“[Linguistics] used to be a small, sleepy, and largely historical field in humanities, which fit comfortably in departments of English and other languages. Those days are long gone.” – I like the irony here, given that a year ago Linguistics and English Language was folded into the English department, supposedly to make preserving it more feasible. Seemingly the real reason was to prevent its cancellation being a more high-profile “department closure”.
[...] Usually UD doesn’t blog about such things, not having the time to explore in depth particular – and perhaps complicated – decisions of this sort at any given university. But in this case she makes an exception, since this seems an uncontroversially strong program in a crucial academic field. [...]