Ivy League doesn’t teach Russian language in Russian courses on the grad level
I had never heard of Russophobia back in the 70s, but I had a personal encounter with it. Our Nazi government is REALLY serious about cancelling Russia, even its language. And this goes back decades.
Filed under: Russophobia
Don Hank, date unknown (around 2014?)
I had my first personal exposure to Russophobia in the 70s
I took a few undergrad courses in Russian (not my major) and when I felt I was fluent enough to go to a higher level, I decided to take a Master’s degree in Russian language. with the sole purpose not of enhancing my earning power but simply to build up my fluency and learn as much as I could about a beautiful people and their beautiful language and culture. Will they raid my house now?
Along my journey I enrolled in a Russian study tour in Leningrad with the CIEE (Council on International Educational Exchange), where I had a strange brush with Russophobia in academe.
I was sitting in a break room at the student dorm with a group including 2 tour guides from Inturist and a young American gentleman, whom I had taken for a student. We were speaking Russian as expected. Somehow the conversation drifted toward academe and it came out that the young man was one of the chaperones and had a doctorate in Russian (whatever that means in America). At this point, since I was vaguely interested in perhaps pursuing a doctorate as well, I said “you have a doctorate in Russian?”
I guess I must have sounded surprised that the guy would have such a high degree in Russian, but that was not my intent at all. He scowled and snapped defensively something like “yes, I do for your information!”
I had not paid any attention to the quality of his Russian but I guess he was full of complexes due to a sense of linguistic inadequacy. But was that my fault?
After that I began to suspect that some American profs who teach Russian are not that good. As for those who are native Russians, they are kept from revealing their inadequacy by the American majority on staff. Which would have been an easy task for the Americans because a certain percentage of these native-Russian profs were escapees from the Soviet Union and were already intimidated by the general Russophobia endemic to America.
Later, it eventually dawned on me that this Russophobia to which I was exposed – and didn’t know its name yet -- was only part of a bigger phenomenon that I call Westernness, which is in fact an infectious psycho-social disease, ie, primarily a way of thinking and functioning, one of whose symptoms is a general recalcitrant mediocrity and incompetence that in America has spread throughout academe, the professions, politics (in particular), the military, the think tanks, intelligence agencies, the media, organized religion and the general populace. But it is also a sociopathy, making it invisible to the wide public. This stands in contrast to what I call Easternness, a way of thinking that not only is not a psychosocial disease but is in fact the remedy for the infectious epidemic of Westernness. Easternness is prevalent in Russia, China and countries allied with them. It is responsible for the economic prosperity of China and the military and diplomatic superiority of Russia – which in turn have given rise to enormous (but ineffectual) blowback from the incompetent Western political class.
I believe that once the West begins to understand Easternness, or Eastern thought, it will realize that it is beginning to be healed. I suppose that if I could bottle it, I could become a millionaire. I could of course also wind up in jail, sharing a cell with Julian Assange.
**
Later, I started looking for a university to further my knowledge of Russian. I didn’t realize it yet, but academe was exactly the wrong place to look for knowledge.
Around that time a friend of mine who had a Bachelor’s degree in Russian from Franklin and Marshall in Lancaster, PA, and was fluent in Russian, was accepted to Yale to work on his Master’s in Russian. After he returned on a break from his first semester, he told me that the profs in all his classes taught only in English. He lamented that, as a graduate student of Russian, he was forgetting his Russian.
Now let me back up and reassure you that the undergraduate courses in all colleges that offer Russian are taught in Russian and the profs I knew of then were first rate. It was on the graduate level where it all fell apart.
My friend’s story did not surprise me. While I was studying Russian at a summer school in Colby College in Maine, one of my profs, Dr. Yury Grinberg, told me that my Russian was better than that of the head of the Russian Department of Harvard.
At first I refused to believe it, but he pressed me until I realized he was telling the truth. And to be sure, I did spend a lot of my free time reading Russian short stories and I imagined I was not half bad.
My Lancaster friend confirmed what Yury Grinberg had told me, namely, that none of the US big name universities, including Ivy League ones, taught the Master’s level courses in Russian.
Dr. Grinberg also told me that in his Midwest home, people had looked at him with suspicion when he received packages, mostly books, from the Soviet Union. Even the postman treated him like a leper. I didn’t know the word “Russophobia” then but I could feel myself in its icy grip.
During my search for a suitable Master’s course, just as an experiment, I called Harvard and spoke with the head of the Russian Department. I told him I might be interested in doing my Master’s course work there and acted a little hesitant to make him think I was afraid I would not know enough Russian. He told me not to worry, that all the course work was done with English translations of Russian literature.
So this was how it was then.
I had explored the Master’s level course offerings of various colleges in other languages like German, French and Spanish and learned that these were taught in the languages in question. The students read works of literature in the languages in question, wrote papers in the language, heard lectures in the language, etc. These were real language courses.
Only the Russian course was taught in English.
I was getting apprehensive. Was this a conspiracy?
During my search for a college, a friend of a friend told me that she was taking a Master’s level course in Russian at Bryn Mawr on a scholarship and the head of the Russian department was desperate to find more students, offering scholarships to warm bodies. Apparently there was not much demand for Russian courses. I drove down there for an interview.
Knowing what I had learned about big name colleges teaching Russian Master’s level courses only in English, I approached her with feigned apprehension, asking if there was a chance I would not understand her lectures or the course work.
“Oh, there’s nothing to worry about,” she reassured me smiling. “It’s all in English!”
“What about the reading material?”
“It’s all English translations of Russian literature.” Still smiling.
“Why do you call it a Russian course if we aren’t able to hear and read the language?”
With her Smile wiped off, she stammered out: “Some of the students wouldn’t understand if it were in Russian. I’m very jealous of my degrees.”
“So you’re afraid you might accidentally confer a Master’s degree in Russian on someone who knows Russian,” I thought, but didn’t say it.
Needless to say I gave that course a miss.
At any rate, I placed a few more calls and located a no-name college, Kutztown State, where I came across an eccentric by the name of Dr. Richard Fortune, who became my Russian prof for the next 3 years or so. He was a lovely person but a stickler for the Russian language, never once lapsing into English in class.
Dr. Fortune had taken his doctorate at Columbia University — where his “Russian” profs also only taught in English in our Kafkaesque America where mediocrity is not only tolerated but is enforced with rigid rules to prevent students from getting too familiar with the language of a hated enemy of the state. Apparently there was a real fear that Russian students might start thinking like Russians and start joining terrorist gangs or sympathizing with communism.
On one occasion, Dr. Fortune was not available for a course for a semester, and I was obliged to take another prof. This prof was a Russian native. I only went to one class because this man turned out to be a fanatical anti-Soviet with a chip on his shoulder. He spent the whole class hour talking about the evils of the Soviet Union. In English. I dropped the class.
I often think about Franz Kafka and try to imagine his life as a youngster and what it must have been like.
I passed his family home the one time I visited Prague. It was closed to tourists that day but as I contemplated the exterior I imagined Franz sitting at his typewriter in a dingy attic room batting out those strange dreamlike stories of his, and I wondered what his life must have been like.
Surreal I supposed, something like life in Amerika.
Scholastic Integrity is what you've got, my friend!
Institutionalized incompetence has become ubiquitous at all level here where I live. Universities have huge budgets devoted to DEI staffers (that do what exactly?). Even medical schools are talking about priorizing DEI over medical competence. In the clinical psychology field, it is more important to know how to write papers than do real research or become a skilled therapist. Those are just two examples. But I am curious to hear more about your view of the difference between east and west.