So, this is odd. If you happen to receive the University of Chicago Magazine, you might have noticed that my journey as a literary translator of Hindi and Urdu texts is featured in the current issue. The magazine proudly trumpets my training at the University as an essential ingredient in my success as a translator. But this, as it happens, turns out to be false advertising.
The very same month the current issue was published, the University administration suddenly announced plans to dramatically shrink the humanities. In particular, they target my home department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations (SALC)—which, with fewer than a purely arbitrary 15 tenure or tenure-track faculty members, has been deemed “too small”— I fear they may excise all the language classes from their home departments, grouping them together with the language lab, perhaps to get rid of as many languages as possible at a later date. A few days after the announcement of the reorganization campaign, the University also declared that graduate admissions would be paused for the majority of humanities programs.
The reason? A massive deficit, incurred by an administrative mismanagement of funds and a relentless drive to acquire property and build shiny new facilities. It is an open secret that the quality that made me choose UChicago over the Ivies and their ilk—a commitment to intellectual and scholarly rigor rather than to facilities and empty prestige—has long been considered problematic by the administration. In a bid to chase that Ivy-style prestige and downplay the University’s informal mottos (“where fun goes to die” and “hell does freeze over”), they have slowly whittled away at the very heart of what makes the University a unique powerhouse for academic scholarship. In tandem with their attempts to compete with the Ivies prestige and capital projects, they have gradually been defunding the humanities. Now, the latter has been set to warp speed.
In 1987, when I set out from Massachusetts to attend the University of Chicago, it was considered a weird choice by my family and peers. East Coasters did not attend college in “flyover country” in those days. I had toured many fine colleges the previous year and was annoyed at how the tour guides at prestigious East Coast universities only spoke about the buildings and land and the history of their campuses (George Washington slept here!). The University of Chicago was the only place where the tour and publicity focused on the intellectual life of the campus. I was dazzled by the wide array of languages offered. Already a linguaphile, I wanted to continue studying Latin, French and German, to start learning Greek or Hindi or Chinese or Arabic—the choices were endless!
I stayed on through graduate school, earning a Ph.D. in 1998 in the world-renowned Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations (SALC). Throughout my time at Chicago, I studied the following languages: Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Malayalam, Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, French and German. I wish I had studied more. I regret not learning Arabic or Persian or Bangla or Turkish. Early on in my studies in SALC, professor Colin Masica encouraged me to try my hand at literary translation. Masica was an influential area linguist whose office was lined with dictionaries and grammars of every conceivable language: Hindi, Telugu, Magyar, Russian, Chechen, Vietnamese. The list was never-ending. He gave me the opening page of a Hindi novel to try my hand at—Andhere Band Kamre, by Mohan Rakesh—and the process of translating that one page awakened in me a desire to translate more. It was a marvelous marriage of linguistics and creative writing and it felt natural to me. Later, I had the honor of taking a course on literary translation with the legendary professor A. K. Ramanujan, a translator, poet, folklorist, storyteller and linguist extraordinaire. I owe my career in literary translation to my mentors in SALC, distinguished scholars and thinkers all.
Unfortunately, such remarkable opportunities for intellectual discovery are now at risk. The current political environment provides a unique opportunity for the dumbing down of the American university. Anti-intellectual authoritarian forces hold sway over the nation, with the Trump administration taking a wrecking ball to many of our most prestigious institutions. The University of Chicago administration, always the stepchild in the higher education hierarchy, refuses to be outdone by the likes of Harvard, Columbia, and Brown. It has decided to drop its wrecking ball on itself since the Trump administration has not yet gotten around to it.
But why single out the humanities, precisely? And why languages? Surely these programs represent a tiny percentage of operational costs when compared to the sciences, the professional schools, and the bloated administrative budget. Clearly, these areas of study are considered worthless by the consultants and administrators looking to cut costs, but why? Do they think (or perhaps hope) all language study and translation will be replaced by AI? Do they wish to replace human intelligence with artificial intelligence, as our technocrat overlords would have us do? Do they value buildings over brains? Property over knowledge? Are they annoyed that instructors in the humanities faculty were instrumental in unionizing the non-tenure and tenure-track faculty? Hmm. So many questions.
As I write these lines, I struggle to explain why humanistic study and language learning are not only important to the University of Chicago, but to our society at large. I struggle, because the importance of such things are truths that I, and many of my peers, hold to be self-evident. Why is there a sudden race to embrace a future where robots replace us all? Why is there an ardent hope that it will no longer be necessary to learn how to speak new languages or translate literature? Why is there a longing to see human knowledge production fail in the face of machine learning? What makes a future ruled by Dr. Who–style Daleks so attractive to, well, just about everyone in charge?
University administrators are not alone. The current government administration wants it; Silicon Valley wants it; business owners want it. The motivation to embrace the robot future is simple: it means fewer workers to pay (or ideally none!). It means no unionizing or workers’ rights. It means no conversations about ethics and values (Funding genocide is fine! Racism is fine! No need to worry about human rights!). Above all, it means consolidation of power and resources in the hands of the few.
This battle is asymmetrical. The Daleks have the upper hand. But, because they care so little for all that is human, they are incapable of complex acts of thinking, and of the wordsmithing of linguaphiles. We are smarter than them and capable of logical human thoughts. With their AI brains they hallucinate facts, like the humanities are too expensive, or language learning is useless. Buildings good, humans bad. Capital good, labor bad. They want to reduce world class universities to extremely expensive trade schools with immense property holdings. But we won’t let them. So here is my call to arms: let us take up our quills, dip them in ink, and show the Daleks that our pens are mightier than their chatbots.
Daisy Rockwell (A.B. ’91; A.M., Ph.D. ’98) is an artist, writer, and Hindi-Urdu translator living in Vermont. Her translations have been awarded the International Booker Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the Scaglione Prize, and the Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation. Her memoir Our Friend, Art is forthcoming from Pushkin Press in 2027.
Editor’s Note: Regarding the role of humanities faculty in unionizing the non-tenure and tenure track faculty, Rockwell has spoken to several union members on the matter; according to Jason Grunebaum, instructional professor in Hindi, the humanities faculty led the union organizing charge 10 years ago and have historically made up a very large part of the bargaining unit—60 percent at last count.
