Aberdeen University considers dropping degrees in modern languages

The university certainly plans devastating cuts to its French, Spanish, German and Gaelic courses.

As things stand, a default option is for full-scale degrees to be replaced by diddy electives.

Yes, a supposedly comprehensive ancient university is very likely about to dump languages and cultures it has been helping students understand for at least a century.

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I think we should pause for a moment and reflect on just what a remarkable – even tragic – development this is for our entire country.

We could be in a position where there are no serious full academic courses in key, basic European languages and cultures north of the Tay.

The entire region will lose a huge chunk of its capacity to engage beyond its borders, including with key markets for its tourism, oil and whisky industries. That might sound like an exaggeration. It is not.

True, we are only talking about a small core of lecturers and researchers. But these are the people who prepare many of the teachers, translators and outward-thinkers across an entire region.

Yeah, sure, some wannabe linguists will head south to one of the remaining three comprehensive universities offering proper international studies in Scotland: Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews. But not everybody can leave home. And not everybody who does so comes back.

In other words, the north of Scotland is having its own little intellectual Brexit.

This is so serious that – in a frankly astounding intervention – diplomats from four of the biggest countries in the EU have written to the university to express concern at the cuts.

You read that correctly: Scotland is now so bloody bad at languages, at communicating with the rest of the world, that foreign governments are worried.

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As The Herald revealed last month, the German ambassador raised falling study of his country’s language in schools north of the border with Humza Yousaf.

This is not the first time Germans have moaned about Scotland’s neglect of Deutsch for years.

Scotland has been sleep-walking in to a languages crisis for a generation.

Hey, every now and again there is some hand-wringing in the serious press or questions in parliament about declining study in schools or some of our more vocational higher education institutions.

But by and large the dramatic loss in our collective capacity to understand other cultures – including our nearest neighbours – has happened without much fuss.

Like many of the worst crises, most of us did not even notice – or care – that it was taking place. I am not sure we have even begun, collectively, to think through what this means for our culture, our economy, our politics, our intellectual life, even our security.

But how did we get here? Well, the Aberdeen decision is just the latest in a generation’s worth of terrible calls.

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It is easy to blame politicians. Scotland has not had a real champion for languages in power since Tory Michael Forsyth in the years before devolution.

The last two and a half decades – the odd good news story aside – have been a disaster. First, Labour and the Liberal Democrats decided kids could drop a foreign language before 16.

This policy – also carried out south of the border – has stripped learning and teaching capacity out of our system. Talk about vandalism! This was a wrecking ball.

What was worse, there were no political consequences for the demolition job these guys did on language study at schools. Nobody cared.

The SNP, despite all its patter about Scotland being a European and internationalist nation, did not reverse Labour’s serious error of judgement.

Instead, they came up with grand-sounding schemes to introduce more languages study at primaries.

It has not all been bad. Despite suggestions to the contrary, after school the number of students who want to do proper language and culture study is actually holding up.

I suspect this has made some of our leaders complacent. They might see language study decline at secondaries but take heart from the fact that at least our elite academic institutions are producing some linguists.

But for how much longer? Aberdeen should be a wake-up call. The university cites lower enrolments in recent years (though insiders accuse managers of cherry-picking numbers) and an operating deficit for language teaching.

It is true that lingos bring specific challenges for universities. Teaching them is relatively expensive. Students are typically Scottish and therefore bring a modest subsidy rather than the hefty fees of foreigners.

But our crisis of international and cross-cultural understanding is not just the fault of politicians, national or local, or higher education bean-counters.

We all share blame. With English widely if badly spoken as a lingua franca it is very easy to be lazy. You might not be able to ‘get’ France without speaking French, but you almost certainly can get a croissant, even if this provokes a “bof”. So, sure, we share wider anglophone hurdles to second language acquisition. And this remains a permanent drag on our economy, costing 3.5% of GDP a year, according to recent from the British Academy. Maybe that does not sound a lot? Well, that would be more than twice the value of North Sea oil lost every year because we lack the skills to sell to foreigners.

At this point please let me say a special hello to Scotland’s so often deeply unimpressive business leaders. A lot of you, ladies and gents, are failing on languages. You just don’t pay enough for them. And, sorry, this is one of the many reasons why you are suffering from low productivity, moribund innovation and disappointing exports.

There was an old retort from Scottish nationalists that critics of independence thought this country was "too small, too poor and too stupid". Well, on languages this is turning out to be spot on.