One of my best friends from high school is a tractor guy.

If you grew up outside the city limits signs, you know the type: John Deere hat, pack of Beechnut side chew or can of Skoal in his back pocket, his steel-toes or cowboy boots clomping down the high school hallways.

He spent all his time in the machine shop -- when he wasn't with me in the remedial typing section -- and I thought he might quit school all together when he had to write a research paper.

The epitome of the non-academic. He proudly states he doesn't read real good. But he's smart enough to make me think he says it that way on purpose.

Kurtis has been on tractors since before it was probably legal.

His first job off his family's farm was fixing them. Now, he mainly delivers them all over the Northeast.

I was bored one winter break a few years ago, so I decided to tag along on a long-haul to eastern Long Island to deliver a skid loader to a tree nursery. And as if having 40 feet of truck and trailer on the George Washington Bridge wasn't an experience enough, I heard something on that trip that I will never forget.

"If there was one thing I could do over again in high school," my friend muttered in his thick Dutch/redneck accent, "I would have learned Spanish."

I was taken aback by the irony. Foreign languages and cultures, and Kurtis, don't go together.

But then I realized that the language -- and the culture -- aren't foreign. They are everywhere, including all over my friend's delivery route, where many of his company's customers have employees who are first or second-generation American, originating south of the border.

That fact was apparent as we pulled in the long driveway of the farm and were met first by a middle-aged Hispanic man, to whom we needed to repeat our requests to speak to the owner a few times -- because proper English was a second language to all of us involved. The moral: Latino culture is everywhere, even permeating the lives of farm boys who grew up in Nowhere, USA.

For me, as a journalist, I've come to the same conclusion as my friend. I should have forgone the German and taken Spanish, too.

The last job opening I saw at my home region's paper, The Patriot-News, was for a reporting position in its Lebanon bureau. The city is considered by many to be the ugly, forgotten fourth child of the Capital Region, but there was still one so-called "big-city" skill needed to scribble notes there: You needed Spanish language skills.

Latino culture is all over there, too. And this little journey has barely left rural America. Even greater is its influence in major cities, and all over the south and southwestern United States.

So great is the influx of Latino culture on the United States today that one can't go anywhere without finding it. Every academic discipline that studies our country needs to take it into consideration - economics, literature, political science, sociology, family studies, etc. Hispanics also recently overtook African Americans as the largest minority group in the country.

All of this, and Penn State has no department devoted to studying it. Such a large university should be expected to stay ahead of developments in our world, to offer the best programs to study what goes on around us. Currently, the best the university can do is an English major with emphasis on Latino culture. That's not good enough.

If we have an African and African American studies department, we should have a Latino studies department too.

Because if a tractor delivery man wishes he knew more about it, it's obvious that a major university should do a thorough job at teaching it.