The lights in the basement of the humanities building don’t flicker; they simply go out. It happens department by department, a slow-motion blackout that starts with a memo and ends with a locked door.
At a major university this week, the decision was finalized. Film studies and modern languages are being scrubbed from the curriculum. On paper, it is a clinical exercise in "resource reallocation." In reality, it is a lobotomy of the cultural imagination. We are watching the systematic removal of the tools we use to understand anyone who doesn't look or sound exactly like us.
Consider a student named Elena. She isn’t real, but she represents thousands who are currently packing their bags. Elena spent three years learning to deconstruct the visual language of cinema and the grammatical nuances of Italian. She wasn’t just watching movies or memorizing verbs. She was learning how to see through eyes that weren't her own. When she watched a neorealist film from 1940s Rome, she wasn't just fulfilling a credit. She was inhabiting a moment of human desperation and rebirth.
Now, the university has decided that Elena’s pursuit is a luxury the market can no longer afford.
The logic used by administrators is deceptively simple. They point to spreadsheets. They highlight "low enrollment" and "employability metrics." They speak in the flat, gray language of ROI—Return on Investment. If a degree doesn’t lead directly to a cubicle in a fintech firm or a lab bench in a biotech startup, it is deemed a failure. This is the great lie of modern education: that the only thing worth learning is the thing that can be sold.
But look closer at what is actually being lost.
Languages are not just sets of alternative labels for objects. A language is a worldview. When you lose a German department or a French program, you aren't just losing "Bonjour" and "Guten Tag." You are losing access to centuries of philosophy, legal thought, and social structures that are baked into the very syntax of those tongues. You are closing a door to a room where the rest of the world is talking.
Film is no different. We live in a world governed by moving images. From the propaganda of political campaigns to the algorithmic manipulation of social media feeds, we are constantly being "spoken" to through a camera lens. To cut film studies is to decide that students no longer need to be literate in the primary language of the twenty-first century. It is like teaching someone to read but telling them they have no business understanding how the sentences are constructed to make them feel afraid or angry.
It’s a hollow victory for the balance sheet.
The university argues that by cutting these "niche" subjects, they can bolster "core" disciplines. They want more engineers. They want more data scientists. They want more people who can build the machine.
But who is going to tell the machine what to say?
If we produce a generation of brilliant coders who have never engaged with the moral complexities of a foreign narrative, or who cannot recognize the visual tropes of an autocrat, we haven't built a better workforce. We’ve built a high-functioning vacuum.
The sting of these cuts is felt most sharply by the faculty—the people who have spent decades tethering these threads of human knowledge to the present day. These are scholars who move through the world with a specialized kind of empathy. They are now being told that their life's work is an "inefficiency." There is a specific kind of grief in watching a library of expertise be dismantled because it didn't generate enough "impact points" in a fiscal quarter.
This isn't an isolated incident. It’s a contagion.
From small liberal arts colleges to massive state institutions, the humanities are being treated as the "appendix" of the academic body—a vestigial organ that can be snipped away without consequence. But the humanities are the connective tissue. They are the nervous system that allows the body to feel the world around it.
We are moving toward a terrifyingly narrow definition of "utility." We act as if the only things that matter are the things that can be quantified by a computer. Yet, every major crisis we face—from global conflict to the ethical minefield of artificial intelligence—requires the exact skills these "obsolete" courses provide. We need people who can translate nuance. We need people who can interpret subtext. We need people who understand that "the other" is just a story we haven't learned to read yet.
The university claims these changes are "student-centered." They argue they are following the "demand." But the role of a university is not merely to react to the whims of the job market like a weather vane in a storm. Its role is to be the anchor. It is supposed to protect the knowledge that isn't profitable but is, nonetheless, essential.
When the film department closes, the local cinema culture withers. When the language department vanishes, the international exchange programs dry up. The campus becomes a smaller, quieter, more insular place. The "Global Citizen" we were promised in the glossy brochures turns out to be a product that was discontinued due to high overhead.
The tragedy isn't just that these courses are gone. The tragedy is that we have been convinced their absence doesn't matter. We are being taught to value the "how" and ignore the "why."
Somewhere in a darkened lecture hall, a professor is turning off the projector for the last time. The screen goes white, then black. A student walks out into a world that is becoming increasingly complex, yet she has been stripped of the very tools she needs to navigate its shadows.
We are trading our windows for mirrors.
Eventually, all we will see is ourselves.
