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THERE are many ways to conceive the dramatic changes that foreign language departments have undergone in the last twenty years, but the tidal metaphor of my title seems particularly appropriate--and suitably ominous. On the one hand, the rising tide refers to the good fortunes of Spanish, which might serve--if the proverb is true--to float the boats of its sister languages. But the metaphor also suggests the possible ephemerality of this success. For the moon that rules the languages' tide--the humanities--is clearly waning. The figures are eloquent: in 1966, 21% of BA degrees in the United States were in humanities; in 1993, that had dropped to 13% (Kernan 248). In 1960, 16 of every 100 college and university students took a foreign language; in 1995, only 7.6 students of every 100 did so (Brod and Huber).
Looked at from this larger perspective, the thoughts outlined in these pages may seem a version of rearranging the deck chairs on a certain ill-fated ship. But we cannot predict the future, and nothing is to be gained by assuming the worst will happen. It seems more useful for us to work together in a proactive attempt to shape the short- and medium-term future of our languages. To be effective and realistic, such planning must take Spanish into account, searching for ways to capitalize on its strength for the benefit of other languages.
This essay begins with a brief consideration of the historical role of Spanish in the North American university system, since that past continues to influence present attitudes. This discussion is followed by an account of several initiatives undertaken in the Romance Languages and Literatures Department at the University of Florida during the first four years I was chair, 1994-95 to 1997-98. All were devised on the bedrock of Spanish enrollments and vitality. Over these four years, the department has had 22-23 ranked faculty members and 11 full-time lecturers. Undergraduate majors have grown from 120 to 160, and graduate teaching assistants from 42 to 60. The university has grown 8% at the undergraduate level since 1994. I assumed the chairship with two firm convictions: that Spanish had to be allowed to grow to accommodate demand and that Spanish could be mined to bolster the strength of the department's programs in French and Portuguese (we offer Italian through the third year, but no major, and Haitian Creole through the intermediate level). That my field is Spanish made it easier for me to follow up on both of these convictions, particularly the second, since a non-Spanish chair might be regarded as a claim jumper rather than a miner.
The unequivocal primacy of Spanish in United States colleges and universities discomfits many who are not in the field, but it is a fact that must be faced. The irony of this rise to preeminence--in a time of general decline in support for the humanities--does not escape Spanish scholars of my generation, who endured decades of indifferent or disparaging treatment from colleagues in other languages and from equally biased administrators. Spanish has lived what might be termed a rags-to-riches story, except that it is still frequently dressed in rags, and its only apparent riches are unspendable student credit hours. In fact, there have not been increases in funding and tenure-line positions in Spanish commensurate with the spectacular growth in the language, as Cristina González makes clear in a trenchant essay published recently in these pages.
Administrators are usually slow to respond to changes in demand for courses, and they often have preconceived notions about which departments should be large and well-funded. Thus, because of a combination of inertia and chauvinism, Spanish departments all over the country have become dangerously underfunded. We study and teach the cultures of people who, for the most part, are neither rich nor white, and our programs are regarded by many as not very important. Indeed, the resistance to the growth of Spanish in academia is enormous. (38)
González effectively rebuts administrators' common excuse for the continued understaffing in Spanish: that they have been unable to keep up with the sudden spurt of growth in the language. She does so by marshaling widely available MLA data showing that Spanish had become the most commonly taught second language as early as 1970. Her conclusion, as cutting as her essay, is that administrators have systematically neglected the growth in Spanish for the better part of three decades.
Proverbial wisdom offers some consolation for this state of affairs, noting that only a very ill wind blows no good. The history of Spanish in North American universities seems to bear this out, for administrative neglect of the language has taught Spanish faculty members to deal with scarcity. Years of training in how to get by with less (staff, money, prestige, respect) has equipped this group to deal ingeniously with the mean budgets and staffing dilemmas that all the languages may reasonably expect to experience through at least the next decade. This aspect of Spanish institutional history should benefit multilingual units, which will increasingly be chaired by professors in Spanish, canny from years of making do.
At the same time, into every life a little rain must fall, and certain problems are bound to arise when any one language becomes hegemonic in a multilingual department. This is the case because each language, as represented by the professors who impart the intricacies of its structure, literature, and culture, has a distinctive intellectual tradition. Professors in each language group have been socialized to prefer, or find natural, a particular type of governance, and each group feels comfortable with its own classic pedagogical practices. One could also argue that aesthetic and cultural values tend to vary by group, but there are so many exceptions to this generalization that it seems less credible. No one will deny, however, that several traditional groupings of languages on American campuses produce chronic dissension: between faculty members in German and Russian, or French and Italian, for example. Most common, perhaps, is the conflict that arises in Romance units between Spanish and French. Tension is inevitable between colleagues who are used to centralist traditions and those who find diversity as normal as breathing.1 Beyond this, Hispanists find it difficult to smile at forms of Eurocentrism that consign Hispanism to second-class status. Given that Spanish and French are the two Western languages that seem best placed to survive the decline in foreign language enrollments in the United States, they will have to learn to live with divergence and to profit from it.
Multilingual departments in which one language has far more students than any other also present chairs and administrators with practical problems. Balancing workloads and access to rewards across the languages is vexatious. Faculty members in Spanish have borne and will continue to bear a much heavier teaching, advising, and service load than their colleagues. They have concomitantly less time for research, with all that generally implies in the university's reward system. If we add to this the historical and continuing understaffing of Spanish units, the disparities may seem insuperable.
One way I have redressed this imbalance is by drafting new "discretionary" raise guidelines that take quantitative measures into account alongside qualitative.2 For example, an article may earn three points, but three points may also be won for exceeding the department's mean student credit hour production by fifty percent (90 student credit hours in 1997-98).3 In the same vein, I lobbied intensively to ensure that new "merit" raise guidelines reward volume and variety of pedagogical activities in addition to publications and good teaching. Workload inequities can also be mitigated by assigning committee chairships and other departmental tasks to those with lighter teaching and advising loads. This tactic can have unintended consequences, however, insofar as it grants power to those least involved in the central task of teaching and to those whose pedagogical or governance tendencies may not represent the majority.
Cavils and qualifications aside, Spanish is now in a position of such frank superiority over the other languages that it is all but obliged to buoy them up. There are many reasons for Spanish to undertake this task, not the least being Hispanists' traditional belief in the virtues of plurality, evident in any elementary or intermediate Spanish text one cares to read, obvious in Spanish curricula and even in the authors who constitute the Spanish advanced placement canon. If even one of the languages now taught on our campuses were to founder, it would impoverish us all. Indeed, the entire academic community would be diminished by the loss of the richness of human experience represented in that single language. Even from the strictly Hispanist perspective, it is clear that faculty members in Spanish have much to learn from their colleagues in other languages, including teaching methods, research orientations, and ways to be in the world. Finally, maintaining the vibrancy and productivity of all the languages in multilingual departments represents an irresistible managerial challenge for chairs.
Disciplines are healthy when they maintain the critical mass of faculty members necessary to offer sufficient courses in each of their degree programs and when their graduates can, if they so desire, find employment that will utilize their training. Maintaining faculty numbers is not always easy, in the face of accelerating retirements and in the presence of deans who are loath to replace lines in fields with poor enrollments. In such situations one can attempt to use the burgeoning numbers in Spanish to derive benefits for the other languages. One must marshal the data most likely to impress one's particular dean. At the University of Florida, where a productivity-based model called the UF Bank is firmly in place, the student credit hour is the gold standard and provides this data. The university's one-year language requirement amounts to ten hours. From the languages' point of view, ten hours are too few, but the proverbial winds keep blowing some good: ten credit hours is a handsome multiplier for generating student credit hours. If your university has data comparing departments' student credit hour production per person-year, you will probably find that your unit--even with its constitutionally small classes--is one of the very top performers. Moreover, if your multilingual unit is typically chockablock with lecturers and graduate student teaching assistants then its cost per student credit hour will almost certainly be among the lowest. This is a language most deans speak fluently, even when fielding irksome requests for lines.
Once Spanish staffing is adequate to cover most of the necessary courses, every third or fourth line earned by a department's numbers could go into the less "productive" but culturally indispensable languages. This pace of replenishment may please no one fully, but it is the chair--the only person who thinks for the group as a whole--who must convince the factions that such a compromise is in the department's best interest. But lines cannot reasonably be requested for language sections that are unable or unwilling to adapt to the changed environment for foreign language study and graduate student training. It is only reasonable for chairs to negotiate concessions from the recalcitrant in exchange for support, that is, curricular revisions that will benefit them in the long run and impress the dean. The chair may have to be the agent of change for languages that dig in their heels in an understandable attempt to protect the status quo ante.
The French section in my department lost a theoretical linguist two years ago, and they wished to replace him. Two arguments were presented: first, this line has been vacated and it should be filled as it was five years before, with no modifications in the job description; and second, our enrollments are stable, not declining as they are elsewhere in the country, and this fact merits a line. On their face, such arguments are logical, but the UF Bank has a logic of its own; it rewards productivity growth, not stability. And the dean must apportion lines in consonance with UF Bank dictates or lose funding to other colleges. Another strategy would be required to shake this line free.
A major effort went into having the French group develop other reasons, redefine the position, and begin to modify their major to make the new person's field indispensable. It seemed evident to me that the line would be of greater utility to the department, and of equal use to French, if it were in applied rather than theoretical linguistics.4 The department is working to develop a track in applied linguistics, in part to respond to market demands for specialists in the field but principally to provide all our graduate students with the training they will need to obtain good jobs and to excel in them. The demographics of the department also made it desirable for the person to have professional competence in Spanish, as 60%-70% of the students in applied linguistics courses will be graduate students of Spanish.
The request to the dean began by presenting the Romance Languages and Literatures Department's excellent productivity and low cost of delivery, the contributions the new faculty member would make to the department's mission, and finally the argument that the section needed to maintain its critical mass in the face of several impending retirements. Despite all this preparatory work, the dean was not sufficiently impressed to grant the line. It took a surprise resignation in another of our languages for him to give a line to the department. The department had to make the Solomonic decision: replace the only ranked faculty member in one of our languages or shore up a unit that was in danger of losing its critical mass. We opted for the latter, and the search for a French applied linguist commenced.
Using the newfound credibility of Spanish to fortify requests for lines is one way to buoy other languages. Enrollment management is another; it is a time-consuming but effective way to ensure greater overall health to the various languages in the unit. In the Romance Languages and Literatures Department this has included the deployment of Spanish's excess students into other languages and the encouragement of cross-training for majors, minors, and graduate students. At the elementary level, Spanish was providing too much remedial work and too many A's to too many sandbaggers. This was expensive for the graduate student teaching assistant budget, for the students' parents, and for the state. Still, my moral outrage and the budget's groans might not have sufficed to exclude students from courses they wanted if I had not found Board of Regents language forbidding remedial education at the state's universities. Seizing on that and mounting a noisy public relations campaign around campus, the department was able to impose a new "exclusionary" placement policy based on high school seat time. For example, students with three years of high school Spanish may not enroll in the five-credit first-semester course; they must take a three-credit refresher or go directly to the second-semester course. Students with four years of high school Spanish may not take the five-credit second-semester course; they must take a three-credit refresher or go directly to the intermediate level. Two years after we inaugurated this policy, incoming students were required to present SAT II scores for their high school language if they wished to continue its study at the University of Florida. To discourage students from purposely underachieving on the SAT II (as they commonly had on our placement test), we state that no matter the SAT II score, a student may never enroll below the level required by years of high school study of the language. In other words, the SAT II is an advisory score, not a placement ticket.
This policy has been roundly successful, decreasing elementary Spanish enrollments by 16% over the past four years, even as the university itself grew by 8%. It has benefited Spanish by freeing up graduate assistants to teach at the intermediate level, where the availability of new sections has fostered rapid growth (up 81% in four years); by improving student morale in first-year classes; and by causing some students, terrified of starting in second-semester Spanish, to choose another language to fulfill the requirement.
Portuguese was the first to benefit from the last group, as it always had seats open and it offered, twice a year, a five-credit Intensive Introduction to Portuguese for Spanish-Speakers that fulfilled the language requirement. We have since broadened this course's title to Intensive Portuguese for Students of Other Romance Languages, teach it three times yearly, and hawk it unabashedly in third-year Spanish courses and in meetings with Hispanic student groups. Thanks to this use of the rising tide in Spanish, Portuguese enrollments at the third- and fourth-year level grew from 22 to 88 students between 1993-94 and 1997-98.
We have recently designed similar courses in French and in Spanish to encourage cross-training among our students. Many Hispanics adore the idea of French--indeed, about 25% of the French majors at the University of Florida are Hispanics--but some may not have had the chance to study it and cannot easily spare ten credits to do so. The new intensive course will be attractive to them and to others who know Spanish. If only a few continue beyond the five-credit introduction, that will still be a gain for French. The intensive Spanish course is a public service for those who studied another language but realize they'll need Spanish in the real world of central and south Florida. It has also been designed with an eye on the market: graduate students in French need Spanish to increase their marketability. Spanish graduates can also enhance their job prospects by knowing French or Portuguese.
Another large project the department has undertaken to keep our languages afloat and to enhance our visibility on campus is FLAC at FLA, a foreign-languages-across-the-curriculum program that provides one-hour discussion sections in Spanish, French, or Portuguese to complement a three-hour content course on a Latin American topic. The university's Center for Latin American Studies was eager to cooperate with the department in this venture, and we in turn wanted to strengthen our connection with them. We presented a successful joint application for a two-year Department of Education Title VI-A grant to underwrite this project. To date, Spanish has been the language of sixteen of the twenty-one FLAC sections, but we have also offered four in Portuguese and one in French. Of the students in our FLAC sections--which require third-year skills--53% had never taken a foreign language course in college! That is a huge, underserved market for us to cultivate. There can be no doubt that we were awarded this grant because of the prominence of Spanish in our proposal and because of the cooperation of the Center for Latin American Studies, a perennial Title VI awardee. Here again one appreciates the special role that Spanish, highly visible even in Washington, can play vis-à-vis the other languages.
Still, FLAC programs are not a panacea for language ills. Our program is continuing after the grant because the Center for Latin American Studies and the Romance Languages and Literatures Department are willing to subsidize it and have incorporated it into other successful grant applications. FLAC elicits great enthusiasm from administrators, professors, and students, but it has yet to fulfill its promise of generating respectable student credit hours. FLAC programs are most effective in internationalizing the curriculum, but they do nothing for the bottom line that administrators have made the be-all and end-all of higher education.
Sextant in hand, we can only wonder what the future holds for our multilingual units. It is likely that there will be more consolidation of language departments as Spanish continues to grow and other languages continue to shrink. What is clear is that those of us in languages must form coalitions with area study centers and with other humanities departments; if your campus has no humanities council, I urge you to found one. No matter how intense the pressure on us to become Berlitz, offering little but career-oriented language courses, we must resist. It is but a step from that to having our courses outsourced, whether to Berlitz or to a campus language center. We are trained as humanists, and our mission is to teach ways of thinking and different traditions of expression, not the bare bones of another language. Pocket translators can do bare bones. We look elsewhere, in time and space, for truths distilled from humankind's achievements, dreams, and values, truths to share with our students. Budgets, enrollments, and markets are elements we must reckon with, but we must not lose sight of what transcends them, the very texts and languages and communities about which we are privileged to teach.
Finally, I think we must lavish all the care we can muster on the preparation of our graduate students. As the twig is bent, so shall it grow: they are our future and our discipline's horizon. Our behavior toward the leakier skiffs in our fleet will help determine the type of foreign language department our disciples will construct--or find--in the next century.
The author is Professor of Spanish and Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Florida, Gainesville.
1Peter Hoff and Mary Pinkerton describe similar cross-disciplinary dissonance that arose at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, when the departments of English and foreign languages were merged in 1993: "Very quickly, it became clear that the cultures of the two departments varied significantly. Foreign languages was quite hierarchical, with much power vested in the chair; English was egalitarian, committee-oriented, and accustomed to operating by consensus" (53).
2Raise monies in Florida's state university system may come under different guises, depending on legislative mandate that varies from year to year. As its name implies, "discretionary raise" money can be distributed as the chair sees fit; I have drawn up specific guidelines rewarding quantitative as well as standard qualitative factors. "Merit raise" supplements must be allocated in accordance with guidelines voted on by each unit.
3Student credit hours are derived by multiplying the number of students in a class by the number of credit hours for the class. A three-credit class with 25 students yields seventy-five student credit hours. The average number of student credit hours per ranked faculty member in my department in 1997-98 was 180 (or 4 three-credit classes of 15 students each). Professors with 50% more student credit hours (i.e., 270 SCH) earned three points.
4We began working on this new description in academic year 1997-98. In the October 1997 MLA Job Information List, there were approximately fifteen tenure-track assistant professor positions for applied linguistics in French and one for theoretical linguistics.
Brod, Richard, and Bettina J. Huber. "Foreign Language Enrollments in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 1995." ADFL Bulletin 27.2 (1996): 57-84. [Show Article]
González, Cristina. "The Future of Spanish in Academia." ADFL Bulletin 28.3 (1997): 37-39. [Show Article]
Hoff, Peter, and Mary Pinkerton. "Reconfiguring Language Departments: Friendly or Hostile Takeover?" ADFL Bulletin 30.2 (1999): 52-54. [Show Article]
Kernan, Alvin, ed. What's Happened to the Humanities? Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997.
© 2000 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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