This letter from Cary Tennis’s reliably cringe-inducing advice column caught my eye. It’s from a journalism professor, wondering if he should still be teaching journalism, given the state of the industry:

I am a college journalism professor. When I got into this field a half dozen or so years ago, after 17 years as a journalist, I was excited to enlighten young minds and inspire them. And I have, and hope I still do.
The problem is this: I feel like I’m teaching them something that will be as useful as Sanskrit when they graduate. I am trying to get them involved in learning the latest technology as well as teaching them important writing and life skills, so they will be employable. But every morning I read stories about how huge, venerable newspapers will likely be shuttered by the end of the year, and it absolutely freaks me out.

As the owner of a beautiful but lamentably underutilized Sanskrit grammar (Journalism is easy, Sanskrit is hard!), I have a couple of thoughts on this. The first is the advice I always give to the students at the summer journalism seminar I help teach: Don’t major in journalism. Majoring in journalism is one of the most useless things undergraduates can do, especially if they want to understand the world well enough to work in journalism. Major in economics, history, science — anything rigorous that engages you with the world. Or get a law degree.

Second … what’s so useless about Sanskrit? Learning languages is a very useful thing indeed. Learning Indian languages, at this moment in history, ought to be extraordinarily fruitful for an aspiring journalist. True, conversational Hindi would be more immediately useful, but the two studies ought to go together reasonably well. Given a choice between two job candidates, one of whom had an undergraduate degree in journalism and the other of whom had read the Ramayana in the original, I’d be inclined to give some weight to those “useless” Sanskrit skills. (I wish I had “useless” skills like that.) A journalist needs an education that is, in the best sense of that abused word, liberal.