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ONE OF the most pressing questions during my six years as chair of an all-inclusive modern language department in a large, comprehensive, public university has been, How do we respond to the enrollment-driven formulas that have been forced on us? Until this past year, funding has depended on our contributions in generating student credit hours to meet targeted enrollment corridors at the undergraduate level. For the most part, our department has done fairly well in spite of what at times appeared to be unrealistic targets. To address the rapid growth in the state of Florida--whose population from 1990 to 2010 is projected to grow by nearly five million, with the numbers of high school graduates projected to grow by nearly fifty thousand--our new chancellor has proposed a three-tiered plan for Florida's ten public universities. According to the plan, which groups similar universities according to their current missions, geography, and distinct history, institutions identified as Research I universities, Florida State University being one, have been asked to maintain the number of undergraduates at a steady rate and to increase the number of graduate students to meet the state-mandated corridor at the graduate level. While I welcome the change and see many benefits in the decision, a certain skepticism cannot be denied. When Elizabeth Welles invited me to speak at an ADFL summer seminar session entitled "The Ethos of Chairing: Good Practices, Good Enrollments," I was somewhat surprised, given my intimate and not always satisfying encounters with the dreaded student credit hour; nevertheless, I found the invitation to be quite timely. "Good enrollments" are indeed often a question of perspective. That said, I would like to share with you some strategies that our department has employed, or is planning to implement, to address the question of enrollments and, at the same time, to strengthen its presence at Florida State University.
A recurrent motif in the literature on higher education and departmental governance is the strong recommendation for foreign language departments to demonstrate how their missions fit into the college and university mission. Tony Becher in his book Academic Tribes and Territories has written that "scholars in modern languages are less inclined to form allegiances outside their broad subject area" (37). Others, recognizing the inclination of foreign languages and literatures departments to be "notoriously insular" (Foster 21), have strongly argued against a "siege mentality" (Anderson 23), have warned departments not to build bunkers around themselves, not to isolate themselves from the rest of the university, and to make themselves indispensable to the university community. Such is the point Peter Uwe Hohendahl makes in his assessment of German studies programs. His comments and suggestions could easily be applied to foreign language departments in general. Hohendahl's first recommendation to the incoming chair is the following: "Do not isolate your department from the rest of the college or university. Do not encourage the perception, on the part of the dean or the chairs of the English and the history departments, that the German department is simply pursuing its separate agenda, an agenda that is of no relevance to other units. It is vital to the survival of the German program that the administration as well as neighboring departments perceive the program as part of a larger educational mission" (21). Frank Rhodes, president emeritus of Cornell University, in a 1998 address to Florida State University's Commission on the Future, noted that universities came into existence in the tenth and eleventh centuries because scholars were persuaded that knowledge could be more effectively pursued in community--in a learning community--than in the isolation of a monastic cell. Rhodes observed that universities "now have a cellular campus. [. . .] We have gone back to our monastic cells and they are called departments and sub-departmental units and institutes and centers and colleges" (12). Two questions raised by Rhodes strike me as fundamental to the "ethos" of an outstanding institution: "How do we reinvent the community?" and "In what way can we contribute to the intellectual life of the community?" (Florida State 13).
In response to these questions and to Florida State University's commitment to "internationalize" the campus, our department has attempted to build on the university's strong liberal arts tradition while integrating it with professional training and developing technology and implementing more interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary courses. The Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University is a very large administrative unit that provides instruction in eleven languages (Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish). Bachelor of arts degrees are offered in French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. A major in a language with a concentration in business can also be selected. In addition, the department participates in majors and minors with the following area studies programs: Latin American and Caribbean studies, Asian studies, East European studies, Middle Eastern studies, and international affairs. Graduate programs leading to the master of arts are offered in French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. PhD degrees are offered in French and Spanish. Notwithstanding its complexities and the disparity of sizes of the various language sections, a large inclusive department such as ours has afforded us an excellent opportunity to interact with one another on a day-to-day basis and design courses and programs that have become, and are becoming, an integral part of today's undergraduate and graduate education and that the university has deemed essential to its mission. Not unlike departments in many other universities and colleges, our department has focused a great deal of its attention on improving the quality of the basic language programs and, as part of this effort, has attempted to make the study of foreign languages more relevant to students' lives and career interests. Among the more significant achievements in the area of basic language instruction is the implementation of an intensive, six-week, preservice training program for the department's newly appointed teaching assistants before the fall semester each year. These teaching assistants teach a large portion of the beginning language courses to a vast majority of students who are primarily fulfilling the exit requirements for the bachelor of arts degree but who also represent, let us not forget, a large potential audience for our more advanced courses. This training program provides the department with a formal and systematic approach to teaching the latest methodology, including computer-assisted instruction, to carefully reviewing course content, and to planning and preparing quizzes and tests. In addition the latest state and federal regulations are presented by the department during these orientation weeks. In our department's most recent program review, the outside consultant noted, "Such a time period devoted entirely to what and how to teach before the semester begins, relieves the graduate students of undue worry and increases self-confidence as they begin their own graduate careers in their dual role as students and teachers" (Foreign Languages 51). The training program also provides us with an excellent forum to begin our dialogue with our new teaching assistants about important issues of the profession.
As a result of the strong emphasis our department places on graduate training, our faculty members and PhD students have participated in the program Preparing Future Faculty, sponsored by the Pew trusts and the Association of Graduate Students, in which doctoral candidates at the research university do supervised teaching in liberal arts colleges and community colleges and have the opportunity not only to develop their skills but also to absorb and perhaps appreciate the norms in different kinds of settings. We have also developed a course (Tutorial in Professional Issues) that addresses the issues and expectations of new faculty members in the discipline of modern languages. The course treats such topics as second language acquisition, the use of technology in teaching literature and language, and languages across the curriculum. The graduate students' increased knowledge and awareness of issues in the profession have directly benefited the department. For example, our teaching assistants in German, aware of the enrollment decline nationwide in the language, began to look at strategies that might address this problem and, in coordination with the faculty in German, instituted two projects to help bolster enrollments, particularly in the third year: an open house and the Grammar Center. In brief, the open house was a week-long effort before open enrollments for the spring session. Students completing their third semester were invited to visit upper-level courses in which they had an interest, to see just what happened during a class period. The goal was to demystify the upper-division courses and thus increase enrollment. Students could visit on any day in that week. In some cases an entire third-semester class visited an upper-level course, and students from both classes worked on a special project that day. The Grammar Center, a modified version of a program at the Monterrey Defense Language Institute, is a fully equipped room for language learning in which German teaching assistants provide language services to students. Each teaching assistant spends his or her office hours there instead of in the general TA office and assists students from any of the first-year German classes. A chart outside the room shows what hours the center is open and which TA will be available. This center has been highly successful and makes a more productive use of our TAs' office hours. There is also a grammar center on the Internet where students who cannot meet with the TAs may post their questions. In 1998-99 there was a 19% increase in German enrollments from the previous year.
The Spanish enrollment has risen dramatically throughout the nation and particularly in Florida, as Spanish-speaking immigrants have increasingly taken up residence within the state. Because of Florida's advantageous geographic position as a gateway to Latin America, the state is increasingly involved in commercial and trading interests with Latin American countries, and there is a strong interest in Spanish for professional reasons. Since 1990, for instance, the department has experienced great growth in undergraduate enrollments in Spanish, from 2,668 (1990-91) to 4,750 (1998-99), an increase of over 45%. We have responded to the growth and needs in Spanish by implementing Spanish for Careers courses such as Spanish for Health Professionals, Spanish for the Legal Profession, Spanish for Teachers, and Spanish for Law Enforcement. The department has expanded its offerings in business Spanish and is currently in the planning stages of a distance learning course in this area along with one for medical personnel. Florida State University enjoys the special status of being located in the capital city of our state. Consequently, we have made efforts to maintain and strengthen our relationship with the state government through the implementation of internships with several of the state agencies and departments. These internships also lend themselves most effectively to the strong public service commitment of Florida State University. For example, many students have received credit by assisting in the mentoring and tutoring of Hispanic migrant workers in nearby counties.
We have learned that we make great strides in achieving positive visibility for our department when we make every effort to establish linkages with secondary schools at the local, regional, and state levels. As a result of our wish to remain active in facilitating these connections with high schools, department faculty members have participated in the High School to College project sponsored by the Modern Language Association and the Coalition of Foreign Language Organizations. The purpose of this project is to promote articulation between high school and college foreign language programs beginning at the local level while at the same time providing a national forum for discussion. Participation in this project has enabled our department to establish a closer working relationship with local high schools, to identify discrepancies between the high school curriculum and the placement instrument now being used at Florida State University, to gather data to determine the feasibility of developing a placement instrument that reflects the Florida curriculum and competency-based placement, and to create a Web site to discuss articulation issues and to post information about projects. The department is keenly aware of the important work done by high school teachers throughout the state and their value to those of us working in higher education. In an effort to provide high school teachers with an additional resource and as a means to promote foreign language study, our department, thanks to a generous bequest to our French program, has created a summer scholarship program for Florida high school French teachers who would like to spend a month studying in Paris. In addition, in the summer of 2001, the department plans to inaugurate a Florida State University summer institute for French language studies, located at the Tallahassee campus, that will be directed toward high school teachers. The institute will provide courses that will permit teachers to renew their teaching certificates in French or to pursue a master's degree in French.
One can perhaps gather that a several-million-dollar endowment to our French program may have had some effect in keeping our enrollments in French fairly steady during a period of general national decline in the language. Along with the initiatives mentioned above, the bequest has enabled us to offer a number of scholarships for students majoring in French and for those who choose to study in France or another francophone country. At the same time, the endowment has presented our French program with a splendid opportunity to substantially enhance its strength, its cohesiveness, and its stature. The driving philosophy behind our planning has been to build a French program that contributes to the university's mission, not as a service limited to its own internal community, but more ecumenically, by its technological contributions, drawing from our university's strong commitment and support of technology, and by offering courses in English on the French intellectual tradition, French literature in translation, the history of French civilization, and modern France. The cornerstone of this program will be the Center for Contemporary French Studies. The center will be interdisciplinary in character, representing literatures, cultural studies, history, anthropology, political science, philosophy, sociology, music, and so on. It is important that our plan remain consistent with the direction our French program has taken and as our soon-to-be French major in French cultural studies indicates. This decision on our part reflects what is in fact a national trend: students are interested in pursuing studies in a foreign language as a means of enhancing their intellectual horizons and deepening their knowledge of a language with the aim of using it for careers in business, government service, and law, to name a few areas. Consequently, the French section has undertaken a restructuring of its offerings to permit students to study French for a variety of different reasons and from a variety of different perspectives. While we have retained the strong commitment to language teaching, we want to provide students with the opportunity to investigate French culture both through the study of literature and through work in other intellectual disciplines. To that end, in consultation with our colleagues in the departments of history and art history, we have developed a degree that combines work in language and literature with a study of the French presence in history and the visual arts. Our plan is to include other academic disciplines in our major. In an article entitled "French Studies: Back to the Future," Nelly Furman articulates most effectively many of the ideas that have served as a springboard to our own program. According to Furman, a French studies program "could provide an environment for those studying any aspect of the many francophone communities throughout the world. In the academic marketplace of knowledge, French studies could serve as an interconnecting link to the plethora of transnational courses across disciplines within and between colleges" (70).
There is much value for language programs in having an active series of literature and culture courses in translation. These courses serve several important functions, as Ann Bugliani has argued. There is the obvious advantage of increasing enrollments by appealing to students interested in, say, French or German or Italian literature and culture but who do not have a sufficient mastery of the language to follow courses in the original language. Good translation courses can sometimes encourage students either to learn the language or to develop their knowledge of it. However, it is also important to demonstrate to the university community, by means of excellent courses, that the foreign languages department does work that goes beyond the teaching of skills. What we represent as scholars of Italian, French, German, or Spanish, for example, has relevance to anyone whose intellectual interest involves Europe, Latin America, or the Caribbean, and we have an obligation to bring our potential contribution to the attention of the university community. It is in this spirit that our department has developed courses that introduce advanced undergraduates and graduates in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice to the possible relevance of contemporary critical theory and literary texts to their professional work. Most recently, we have offered a course entitled The Prison in Criminology and the Humanities, team-taught by three faculty members from modern languages. Works by Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, and Gabriel García Márquez were used to show how various issues pertaining to criminal justice are treated within the context of humanistic disciplines.
In response to the Commission on the Future's recommendation that Florida State University students enhance their international awareness, our department has created a minor in world literature and world film, enabling interested students to pursue the topic in a coherent manner that fits into the department's curriculum. Another recent department initiative that responds to the growing emphasis on professional education has been the creation of a translation practices certificate program. The purpose of this program, which includes a required course in technology (Technology for Translation), is to prepare students for graduate training at, among other institutions, the University of Texas, Austin (National Translation Center), and the University of Iowa (Translation Laboratory).
We are fortunate to be at a university that is enormously well-served in international linkages and continues to enhance and expand its study-abroad programs (both during the regular year and in the summer). As Florida State University vows to make international study a part of our students' educational program, the foreign language department must become an advocate for developing these international linkages and must work with the university administrators in designing programs that effectively integrate language and culture courses into the curriculum. Adopting a proactive stance, several faculty members from our department have assumed leadership roles in many of the university's foreign centers, including those in Costa Rica, Paris, Florence, Spain, and Russia. Our study-abroad programs continue to experience strong enrollments. These programs are not geared exclusively to majors but offer courses based in the liberal arts, as well as foreign language study at all levels. Our popular study center in Florence, which averages well over two hundred students each year, has been instrumental in maintaining our department's strong numbers in Italian (in the last five years approximately seven hundred students each year enrolled in Italian courses). In fact, the popularity of Italian at Florida State has led to the recent approval by the Board of Regents of an MA in Italian studies. In addition, faculty members from our department have collaborated with the College of Law and the College of Business in establishing specialty or exchange programs with the University of the West Indies and with the University of Dauphin in France. Given our expertise and interests in the area of international study, it is the responsibility of modern languages to participate actively in an area of growing prominence at our university and, consequently, to make ourselves indispensable to the university community.
I would like to close with a practical suggestion. Student advising needs to be a high priority in your department. I am told that it is a big area of neglect on many of our campuses throughout the country. In their exit interviews, students highlight advising as a key area that often makes or breaks their decision to choose languages as a program of study. Language departments should also work closely with their respective university's orientation programs. No one knows your department better than you do, and no one knows the possibilities language study offers better than you; therefore I would strongly suggest that your department have personal, informative, and enthusiastic input in the orientation programs for your university's new or transfer students.
An important part of the equation in making enrollment increases possible is administrative support. Fortunately, our department has had this support. We would like to believe that the administrative support has been forthcoming because we have tried to demonstrate that our perspective and the activities we are engaged in are relevant and crucial to the university community and its mission.
The author is Professor of Italian and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University. This article is based on his presentation at ADFL Summer Seminar East, 24-26 June 1999, in Nashville, Tennessee.
Anderson, Reed. "Educating the Dean: Who Are We and What Do We Do?" ADFL Bulletin 29.1 (1997): 20-23. [Show Article]
Becher, Tony. Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Cultures of Disciplines. Levittown: Open UP, 1989.
Bugliani, Ann. "Why Foreign Language Faculty Members Should Teach Literature in Translation." ADFL Bulletin 29.2 (1998): 32-35. [Show Article]
Florida State University. Commission on the Future. A Future We
Would Welcome for Florida State University. Report to the President. May 1998.
Foreign Languages and Linguistics Program Review. State University System of Florida. June 1998.
Foster, David W. "Making the Languages Department Indispensable to the University Community." ADFL Bulletin 30.2 (1999): 19-21. [Show Article]
Furman, Nelly. "French Studies: Back to the Future." Profession 1998. New York: MLA, 1998. 68-80.
Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. "The Fate of German Studies after the End of the Cold War." ADFL Bulletin 29.2 (1998): 18-21. [Show Article]
© 2000 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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