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THE so-called crisis of German in the United States and the opportunities and challenges connected with it are clearly not new. Americans' belief in learning a foreign language and in the necessity to acquire a meaningful degree of cross-cultural awareness has, as we all know, had its ups and downs. More than in most European countries, where learning a foreign language--or, more often, several foreign languages--is considered an established and unchallenged component of a well-rounded humanistic education, foreign language and literature studies in the United States have often been coupled with political events and pressures. The sputnik effect of the 1950s vividly illustrates how perceived political needs, not a general belief in humanistic education, can result in fiscal resource allocations to language and literature programs.1 I agree with Peter Uwe Hohendahl's argument that in today's political climate of d'ètente between East and West, it is less the political agenda that influences the fate of language and literature study in this country than it is the corporate world and the economic forces driving the global economy today (see also Lindenberger).
The most recent crisis of German in the United States was perceived with intensity when a short-lived enrollment increase in German language courses occurred after the fall of the Berlin wall, in 1989. This crisis of the nineties has received a tremendous amount of attention throughout our discipline and has been marked by an unparalleled sense of urgency.2 While all types of private and public institutions across the country have reported declining enrollments in German and are consequently seeing shrinking numbers of students studying German beyond the language requirement (if a language requirement exists), the possible solutions and academically responsible reforms depend significantly on individual institutional contexts. This context can be defined by any or all of the following factors: financial resources and availability of state-of-the-art information technology, the institution's mission or mission statement, the self-perception and goals of the German or foreign languages department and its faculty (specifically, faculty members' willingness to revise and reevaluate their roles in the curriculum and their ability to innovate), an emphasis on undergraduate or graduate education, student demographics (e.g., students' socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds),3 heritage versus nonheritage language learners, the academic preparation of the student population, the administration's flexibility in supporting innovative curricular and organizational approaches (e.g., consortial arrangements and horizontal coordination), and possibly even the institution's geographic location.4
The question posed at the 1996 meeting of the German Studies Association, "German language and German studies: How much and what kind?," will therefore have to be answered differently by institutions like local state universities and nationally and internationally renowned private institutions. Both are legitimate and accredited academic institutions although they have different student populations and student goals.5 It would be academically self-defeating and ill-judged to impose on the student at a local state university a curriculum that emphasizes German intellectual history and critical theory and to ignore regional educational realities such as percentages of parents with high school diplomas or college degrees, literacy questions, and exposure to multicultural and global issues.6 Correspondingly, the demographic background of the private university or Ivy League student, which usually includes an excellent high school preparation and a high rate of selectivity, allows the successful delivery of a different curriculum. The 1994 Vanderbilt conference included some of the United States' most diverse institutions, both geographically and academically. Sadly but perhaps not surprisingly the conference demonstrated an incompatibility of curricular approaches and goals in our discipline as well as a certain reluctance of disparate institutions to respect one another's educational realities, which ultimately affect the shaping of a sustainable curriculum and pragmatic curricular outcomes. While I believe we need a common denominator in the curricular agendas and educational missions of our discipline to deflect disenfranchisement, counterproductive elitism, and the increased polarization between different types of schools, I also believe that today's realities require a curriculum that is to some extent student driven and institutionally contextualized and that goes beyond facilitating the mastery of a national language and a national literature.
One model of a common denominator for German studies with flexibility for institutional variations was formulated by faculty members participating in the summer 1995 NEH Institute Language through Content, Content through Language: Teaching German across the Curriculum, at the University of Rhode Island. Germanists, historians, and political scientists represented a cross-section of American colleges and universities in terms of geographic distribution and institutional type. Their joint document defined the mission of foreign language in the curriculum of the coming decades and focused on language, culture, interdisciplinarity, multiculturalism, and liberal education.7
Language Though it may sound unnecessary to suggest that the teaching of language be the first mission of a foreign language faculty, this has not always been the case. Language faculty are trained first and foremost as literary scholars and traditionally place highest value on courses which are taught through the medium of literature. In a time when many voices from the private and public sectors outside of academia advocate bilingualism as a necessary tool in the global workplace, however, it is essential for all language faculty to take greater responsibility for language teaching itself. More attention must be placed on the quality and nature of language instruction with the goal of attracting more students, both majors and non-majors, to advanced levels of study. Students from all disciplines must be encouraged to study and/or work abroad in order to become both linguistically and culturally proficient. To this end, administrators and departments must place greater value on professional commitments to research in language education and programmatic initiatives.
Culture The strongest advocates for language study today also call for the cultivation of cross-cultural skills. It is incumbent upon language departments, therefore, to integrate culture into their courses on all levels, with emphasis upon both high culture and the culture of everyday life. A strong literature program is an important part of this enterprise. At the same time, it is no longer appropriate to expect all students in a language program to focus on literature to the exclusion of other aspects of culture. Language majors should complete their degrees with a strong sense of the history of thought, the arts, and literature, but also of politics, society, business, and technology.
Interdisciplinarity Language departments have the opportunity to join with colleagues of other disciplines in shared projects of interpretation and become centers of interdisciplinarity for the curriculum of the future. Language programs may serve as a means to enrich the study of other fields from international perspectives and as a meeting place and conduit for the productive interaction between disciplines. Through the rich comparative nature of language and culture study, the engineer, the historian, the mathematician, the philosopher, the literary scholar, and the chemist will be able to engage one another and provide the richest possible education for tomorrow's student.
Multiculturalism The recent immigration wave has reminded us as a nation to what degree we are comprised of many cultures, languages, and ethnic groups. Though this very pluralism is the strength of our nation, it is also the point at which it is most vulnerable. If we do not teach our young people to be linguistically and interculturally sensitive, they will have little basis to understand the different behavior of their neighbors. Language faculty must work together with colleagues from other disciplines to impart the broadest possible cultural appreciation to their students. In light of the difficulties in defining and implementing the concept of multiculturalism, language faculty, with their broad expertise in this area, can play a critical role in helping their institutions move toward a truly cross-cultural education.
Liberal education The overall goals of liberal education include such elements as critical thinking, creativity, the ability to view things from multiple perspectives, and commitment to a lifetime of learning. The study of language and culture can play a critical role in this endeavor. Studying another language opens the mind to an understanding of language per se and provides clear insight into one's native tongue. Studying culture provides an understanding of the values of others and a critical perspective for judging one's own. Inasmuch as language across the curriculum models focus not only on language and culture themselves, but also on their integration with many other disciplines, this new vision of foreign language study should play a key role in any general education program.
Using these five principles and goals as a generic blueprint for German studies in the United States, individual colleges and universities would have the opportunity to shape a German studies curriculum that would be both sensible and feasible within their institutional context. Timothy R. Austin, reflecting on the elusive character of a concept such as interdisciplinarity, notes that "unfortunately, interdisciplinarity and its implied antithesis, (intra)disciplinarity, defy absolute definition as intellectual concepts; their meanings are at best provisional and institutionally dependent" (272). Austin's claim that interdisciplinarity's form is largely dictated by locally specific institutional forces can be transferred to the concept of German studies. One such institutional force that has shaped a German studies program is the international engineering program in German (IEP) at the University of Rhode Island. A discussion of this program touches on some of the institutional limitations in our endeavor to invigorate German studies in the United States.
Few doctoral candidates in the field of German literature and language, or German studies, anticipate that their future academic appointment might require teaching German language and literature in nontraditional contexts, which may include curricular linkages with other disciplines. While it has become more common for German to forge interdisciplinary programs and courses with other humanities or social science disciplines, it is still rare to find programs connecting German with science, technology, or engineering.8 The traditional notion says that disciplines have clearly defined vertical boundaries that are perceived as impermeable, especially when the disciplines are as disparate as German and engineering. The training of graduate students in German neither prepares them for nor makes them amenable to the concept of nontraditional curricular contexts for German as a discipline. Linking foreign languages and literatures with professional disciplines still carries a stigma for many in the academy. This linkage is viewed as a dilution of the disciplinary content and rigor of German and as a challenge to the disciplinary status and identity of German. The overwhelming fear is that linking German with the professions will cause German to become a mere service department to disciplines such as science and engineering. While justified, these fears can prevent an open-minded climate for addressing them. Whether we like it or not, the status of the humanities in the United States and the values associated with a humanistic education have changed in recent years. Fewer federal funds are being allocated to the humanities, and today's students define themselves as educational consumers demanding a direct correlation between educational input and professional-financial output. In short, most of today's students do not see the need to study German language and literature for its humanistic value. The answer to shrinking enrollments and the loss of programs and departments must take this new reality into account. Teaching German in nontraditional and innovative contexts is unavoidable if academic programs and positions are to be preserved. The challenge is to do so without sacrificing German's disciplinary integrity and to find innovative models for a relevant delivery of German's cultural curriculum.
The evolvement of the international engineering program at the University of Rhode Island over the last ten years has to be seen against the background outlined above. This program is an example of an institutionally specific model for invigorating and redefining the teaching and--to a lesser extent--the research agenda for German. In this five-year program leading to a BA in German studies and a BS in engineering, students enroll in German and engineering courses simultaneously throughout the five years. Most students enter the program without previous knowledge of German and thus start learning the language at the introductory level. During the first two or three years, the German majors enrolled in the program are taught separately from the traditional German majors. This separation not only helps the program's students to establish a bond and an identity as a group but also serves the practical purpose of teaching engineering students specific language and content, particularly during the second and third years of study. While the program allows some flexibility in timing, students typically spend their fourth year of study in Germany. The year abroad entails a six-month, compensated internship with either a German company or an American subsidiary. The internship is an integral and mandatory part of the program. A partnership and exchange program with the technical university in Braunschweig, Germany, was established in 1995 and allows IEP students to matriculate for one semester, either before or after their internship.9 After they return, students complete their fifth-year curriculum, which includes a capstone seminar in engineering taught entirely in German by a German-speaking engineering faculty member. At this level, IEP German majors are also enrolled in German studies courses with traditional German majors. The challenges connected with joining different disciplines, such as German and engineering, are often mirrored in the German studies courses at this fifth-year level. During the first few weeks of fifth-year courses, traditional and IEP German majors view one another suspiciously; it is not uncommon to find IEP majors on one side of the classroom and traditional majors on the other side. Stereotypical notions--"I am an engineer and not good at analyzing literature" or "I can tell you how a diesel engine functions in German but don't have the vocabulary for literary analysis" or "Engineers have tunnel vision and can only think in binary terms"--must be addressed to create a successful course. In the end, the two discourses complement and enrich each other. Students graduating from this program are not only able to function as engineers in German but also have acquired a great deal of cultural literacy and cross-cultural awareness. The students' engineering degree, international work experience, high degree of fluency in German (typically on the advanced or superior level of the ACTFL-ETS oral proficiency scale), and significant knowledge of German culture puts them in high demand in today's global economy. International engineering program students enjoy a one hundred percent job placement rate. This high demand is not entirely explained by the fact that speaking German allows IEP graduates to work as engineers in Germany. After all, almost everyone in Germany speaks English, and pertinent German engineering research will almost always have been translated into English. The demand can more convincingly be explained by the fact that linguistic and cultural knowledge allows graduates to operate in a global professional context where national boundaries are increasingly more permeable for multinational companies.
The creation of the international engineering program made sense for the University of Rhode Island's institutionally specific context. Because the university had a strong and active College of Engineering interested in internationalizing its curriculum and a literature-oriented German program that suffered declining enrollments, this disciplinary marriage was of mutual interest and benefit. With approximately sixty German majors and, since 1998, its own IEP house, German has asserted itself as a significant presence at the University of Rhode Island. While today the university promotes itself by using the international engineering program as an example of innovative, interdisciplinary collaboration and internationalization, the road leading to this program was circuitous and often blocked by obstacles. The program was the brainchild of two faculty members, the dean of engineering and a German professor, who turned their vision into a successful program with at first virtually no assistance from the university. Funding for the initial nine years of the program came almost exclusively from external sources and has largely been procured by the director of the program, a Germanist, who received grants from the Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Secondary Education and from the American Council on Education. Additional funding has been provided by the German Academic Exchange Service and increasingly by the private sector. Several companies from Germany and the United States have allocated monies to the program, and the German government has recently funded a visiting professorship. Given the undeniable success of this program, the university's administration no longer found the program a risky investment. As a result, a new tenure line in German was granted, a position jointly funded by the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Engineering.
While theoretical possibilities for invigorating and redefining German programs exist at every institution, a major limitation is that program creations like this one and others with different emphases are not encouraged within the current promotion and reward system in our discipline. If we want to reinvigorate and change German programs or create new ones, it makes little sense for institutions to continue to reward and promote faculty members on the basis of their teaching and research alone, with diverse service items often just tipping the scale in favor of or against tenure and promotion. I do not believe that eliminating tenure is the answer, but given today's political climate of anti-intellectualism and severe cuts in education spending, the present tenure system will most likely see significant changes. I believe that our present system can work against change and for maintaining the status quo. A recent Internet discussion on the American Association of Teachers of German list made it clear that the programs (mainly in secondary schools) reporting no enrollment declines were the ones where faculty members expended great effort and displayed overwhelming individual enthusiasm. Only faculty members who are in secure tenured positions can afford to invest their energies in the area of program development. Under the current system, not only is it unwise for most untenured faculty members to invest energies in areas other than teaching and research, but it is also possible for tenured faculty members to resist change and in extreme cases to stall the progress of a whole program. The tenure and rewards system requires accountability but also flexibility. The key is to allow faculty members the freedom to refocus but at the same time to continue having high expectations. A twenty-eight percent enrollment decline in German between 1990 and 1995, as reported by the MLA, poses a tough challenge for our discipline. The challenge can only be met with a new level of flexibility by faculty members and administrators.
The author is Assistant Professor of German in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures at the University of Rhode Island.
1One of the most discussed and influential tools in assessing foreign language proficiency--the ACTFL-ETS proficiency guidelines--was originated and financed not by the academy but by the United States government, namely, the Foreign Service and the Central Intelligence Agency.
2For an overview of the crisis, see Byrnes; "Conference Report"; McCarthy and Schneider; Van Cleve and Wilson.
3A tremendous influx of Spanish-heritage learners has led the City University of New York to rethink its approach to foreign language teaching. For a complete account of the university's attempt to reform its language programs, see CUNY.
4The geographic location and its resources can influence language studies in terms of perceived language opportunities; for instance, Pacific Rim schools might see fewer opportunities for German but more for Japanese, and the recent opening of German car manufacturing plants in the southeastern United States might help revitalize German in that region's schools.
5For an excellent and eye-opening discussion of varying students' needs, see Jedan.
6Jedan notes that "educational attainment in persons in our service region who are older than twenty-five years shows that 20% have an eighth-grade education or less, 35% have high school diplomas, and less than 20% have some kind of college background. [. . .] Many of the adults have basic literary problems."
7The five mission statements are direct quotes from an unpublished text available from the Department of Languages at the University of Rhode Island.
8Programs in languages across the disciplines are important in this context. For an overview, see Schoenberg and Turlington.
9On the graduate level there is an agreement between the two institutions that allows American and German students to receive a degree from each university: an MA from the University of Rhode Island and the degree of Diplomingenieur from the technical university in Braunschweig. Other positive outcomes from this alliance include faculty exchange between the schools and the availability of German graduate students as tutors and teaching assistants in German courses at the University of Rhode Island.
Austin, Timothy R. "Defining Interdisciplinarity." PMLA 111 (1996): 271-73.
Byrnes, Heidi. "An American Action Agenda for German Studies for the Twenty-First Century." McCarthy and Schneider 162-64.
"Conference Report." Monatshefte 86.3 (1994): 331-99.
CUNY Task Force on Languages Other Than English. World Languages at the City University of New York: Meeting the Needs of the Twenty-First Century (A Blueprint for Short-Term Survival and Long-Term Growth). New York: City U of New York, 1996.
Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. "The Fate of German Studies after the End of the Cold War." ADFL Bulletin 29.2 (1998): 18-21. [Show Article]
Jedan, Dieter. "Reshaping the Undergraduate Experience." McCarthy and Schneider 65-90.
Lindenberger, Herbert. "Must We Always Be in Crisis?" ADFL Bulletin 29.2 (1998): 5-9. [Show Article]
McCarthy, John A., and Katrin Schneider, eds. The Future of Germanistik in the USA: Changing Our Prospects. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1996.
Schoenberg, Robert E., and Barbara Turlington. Next Steps for Languages across the Curriculum: Prospects, Problems, and Promise. Washington: ACE, 1998.
Van Cleve, John, and A. Leslie Wilson. Remarks on the Needed Reform of German Studies in the United States. Columbia: Camden House, 1993.
© 1999 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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