Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore stopped offering Russian as a major to its students. Students will still be able to choose Russian as their minor for now. The news as to the cancellation were announced in early October 2017. Johns Hopkins’ Russian programs in literature and culture were small to begin with and they were conducted by professors from the nearby Goucher College. The head of Russian programs at the university Professor Olya Samilenko said that she was struck by the cancellation of the Russian programs, especially when the influence of Russia grows in the world and even inside the U.S. “This mad decision is based not on the quality of the program, but on something else that we can’t understand,” she reportedly said. Johns Hopkins administrators explained their decision by faulting incompatible instruction methodologies that Goucher College staff uses; however, Professor Samilenko claims that she was earlier told that the programs are cancelled due to low attendance. She was told that the programs were too advanced and were taught in Russian, such that it did not correspond to the purpose of the University’s language training programs.

The development is especially strange in that there is a strong increase in the number of students signing up for Russian courses in the Baltimore-Washington area, including at George Washington University, the University of Maryland, and the United States Naval Academy. The executive director of the Association of Modern Languages Paulа Krebs said it was regrettable that the university decided to reduce its Russian offerings, having apparently planned the program closure prior to the surge of interest in U.S.-Russian relations.

The vice dean for undergraduate education at Johns Hopkins Professor Joel Schildbach said that it was necessary to make a choice between offering a language and a literary course or providing a wider selection in Russian that would bring benefits to a far bigger number of students, including hundreds of students in the sphere of international research and political sciences. According to the report of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, all linguistic courses have suffered after the Senate in 2016 reduced by 35 percent language program financing under Title IV. The exceptions include the Harriman’s Institute in Columbia University and the Davis Center at Harvard, where the schools use their own funds for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian subjects.

According to various reports, college courses on the former Soviet Union today are pursued by anywhere from two to four times fewer individuals than in 1990. Quite often, the subjects offered are far removed from what would actually enhance the students’ knowledge of the language, as the curriculums are often structured in line with fashionable racial- or gender-based, as well as post-colonial themes, for ease of receiving grant funding.

Among examples, there are such subjects as “Africa in the Soviet agitprop of Stalin times” and “Gender roles in the Ukrainian serf village.” A doctoral candidate of one of the prestigious universities on the East coast has complained that all semester long, the students of one of the national languages of the former U.S.S.R. were required to read tiresome electric engineering texts only because those books happened to be written by a woman. Other researchers, however, express careful optimism. A professor of one of the universities in the northeast has joked that Cold War is good for business.

Everyone unanimously agrees that the reduction in interest to Russia-related subjects for the last 25 years has led to the loss of expertise in Russian, Ukrainian, and other post-Soviet subjects that undermines the U.S. interests. One educator observed that this lack of preparedness was vividly noticeable during the Ukrainian crisis, for which the American establishment was “woefully unprepared.”