Message from the Director
Hey you, don’t help them to bury the light
Don’t give in without a fight
—Roger Waters, Pink Floyd, 1979
Dear SLCR faculty members, staff, students, alumni, and broader WSU community:
As the new Interim Director of the School of Languages, Cultures, and Race, I would like to welcome you all to the 2024-2025 academic year. I would like to warmly welcome our school’s newest faculty members, who will be conducting research and teaching in the fields of German, Spanish, and Comparative Ethnic Studies: Dr. Lisa Hoeller, Dr. Etna Ávalos, and Dr. Héctor Rendón at the Pullman campus, and Amy Hernández Matsumoto, M.A., at the Vancouver campus.
This academic year begins with a series of changes in the administration of WSU, in the College of Arts and Sciences, and in our academic unit. While these transformations entail great challenges, they also offer us a moment to meditate and confirm our commitment to the intellectual and human values in which we believe and on which our academic and educational work is based. These values are the bastions of our identity as a school. However, strong as they are, these principles are being threatened by the concerted devaluation that the Humanities must face today, just when they are more indispensable than ever.
This morning, as I sipped my coffee at breakfast, Pink Floyd’s The Wall kept stubbornly making its way into my memory. Being old enough to have seen it in the cinema when it was released, the film still seems tremendously relevant to me. And although the song “Hey You” was ultimately not included in the final cut, it deeply reflects the feelings of isolation and loss of all hope that Pink, the central character, embodies; a feeling of loneliness and lack of communication so present in our society today: “Hey you, out there on your own, sitting naked by the phone, would you touch me?”
In my 37 years as a university professor –first in Chile and then in the United States— I have always thought that one of our greatest goals as educators in the Humanities continues to be to tear down the wall of existential isolation to which we are systematically and systemically induced. Human beings –cultural, political, and social by nature– have been made to believe that all effort and all merit is individual and, consequently, human life becomes a competition where others hinder or are obstacles that we must overcome. This is particularly true in societies where neoliberalism, along with compulsive and ostentatious consumerism, have been uncritically embraced as the “natural” and unquestionable economic correlate of democracy in politics. As an ideology, neoliberalism has permeated all spheres of our individual and social life, including the way we conceive and shape our universities.
In such a context, the Humanities have a huge role to play as academic disciplines that continue to raise the fundamental questions that we humans ask ourselves, questions that inquire into the human condition, considering that everything we humans do is always linguistically, culturally, and ethnically situated. We will continue to be “the gadfly of the Athenians,” as Socrates called himself, a metaphor to describe his mission, perceived as annoying and, perhaps, impertinent, but necessary when a society in its heydays rests on its laurels and does not perceive –or does not want to perceive— its own decadence while insisting on imposing its way of life on the whole world. Borrowing Roger Waters’s words, let us not allow anybody “to bury the light” without upholding and advocating for what we believe should be the very core of any institution of higher education.
I wish you all a great AY 2024-2025!
Vilma Navarro-Daniels, Ph.D.
Interim Director, School of Languages, Cultures, and Race
Professor, Spanish and Film Studies
Marianna Merritt Matteson and Donald S. Matteson Distinguished Professor of Spanish
Honors Faculty Fellow