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The literature of humanities in crisis could not be clearer: our not-for-profit institutional capital as humanists has been seriously depleted in the last few decades by the growth of market culture. The cyclical upturn in university employment, necessitated by today’s booming enrollments at colleges, will help with new hiring in absolute numbers, but the place the humanities occupies will not be as prominent or as assured as it traditionally has been, suffering as part of “the long-term decline in the cultural capital of literature” (Guillory x). Our goals as humanists must be realistically aligned with a sober assessment of our capitalization in the university today. Janet Swaffar nicely calls this reassessment of our programs “rightsizing” rather than “downsizing” (155). As Swaffar’s upbeat phrase indicates, the general professional weariness with the now passé rhetoric of crisis has given way in the last few years to a literature of pragmatics and administrative optimism. This new objectivity can be documented amply in the past year’s ADFL Bulletin, as well as in several practically oriented anthologies that have recently been on our bookstores’ shelves (e.g., Denham, Kacandes, and Petropoulos). In the new administrative view, drawing on renowned success stories like those of Silicon Valley and Multimedia Gulch and on successful fund-raising campaigns like Harvard’s recently completed $2.32 billion effort (Pulley, “Harvard") and Ohio State University’s record $1 billion for a state university (Pulley, “Campaigns”), departments agree that they must be the engineers and entrepreneurs of their own can-do future. Those who find themselves teaching and administering a department must now start from the department itself—ground zero—not with explorations into the foundations of the university in the global economy. The gauntlet has been laid down for the humanities by the culture of IPOs, and this new situation demands that we forgo luxurious deconstructions of the bottom line.
In our flawed but richly abundant times, the age-old rhetoric of sacrifice, utopia, tragedy, crisis, and, most of all, ideology sounds dangerously antimodern. Richard Rorty, for one, argues for comedy as the preferred post-cold war genre for reflecting on our public activity. Thus the new tactical language of the humanities needs to avoid speaking a hermetic vocabulary as though culture and humanism were under siege, holed up in a medieval monastery or languishing in a provincial burg. Academic humanists instead must go public: our language needs to guide us toward a new set of goals that are adequate to the realities of a globally competitive, commercially savvy learning environment, where our course innovations are as valuable for our students as they are for Daimler-Chrysler. The Stanford Learning Lab, for example, has sought to share not-for-profit obligations to the former with commercial obligations to the latter. Our curriculum should be multimedia, interactive, user-friendly, and cutting edge. Modern language departments can reposition themselves in this new public, over-the-counter environment if they can devise and implement the right mixture of pedagogical and institutional elements. As a paid column appearing on the op-ed page of the New York Times argues, “The days of the ivory tower academy and academician are fading fast. Tomorrow’s teachers and universities must be fully attuned to the changing needs of the business world. They must work closely with one another and with the corporate sector to develop curricula that keep up with the swift pace of technological evolution” (New York Institute of Technology). Our mission as tactical humanists, then, is plain: we need to work together to find the killer-app, if you will, of humanist salesmanship, when mere excellence—oversold in the last decade (see Bill Readings’s critique)—is no longer enough for the new millennium of market share.
As in Silicon Valley, the competition around the next big thing will naturally remain fierce. The rational consensus cherished by democrats as the basis of practical action (Habermas 134–35) must yield to the campus buzz cherished by adventurous entrepreneurs, since only departmental practice can decide the true killer-app. Enrollment numbers, not lofty discourses, matter here. Although we do not need consensus, we perhaps might agree on some fundamental institutional goals. I see three basic desiderata for reimagineering our departments.
First, whether or not it fits their traditional highbrow self-image, foreign language departments need to be practical service departments. The core service they must sell to administrators and potential students is their unmatched ability to teach the foreign languages that are necessary for international business, for cross-community or international public service, and for research and developmental exchange. Kurt Müller argues on the basis of German-American export-import statistics that the “enrollment situation in German is a national disgrace” (19) because it does not reflect the real extent of economic exchange in United States-German commercial relations. As one solution, he calls for German departments to seek corporate sponsorship from firms involved in United States-German trade. As one learns from ads for instructional tapes and videos, in an increasingly competitive commercial world, language barriers are becoming de facto trade barriers, as pernicious to personal and domestic growth as patchwork regional tariffs. A language department, with its diverse knowledge bases and developed technological resources, can far more effectively help launch students across language and cultural barriers than a Berlitz course. As long as we keep this service mandate foremost on our agendas, we need not fear the competition of narrowly focused, dedicated language-teaching firms any more than a healthy computer service department need fear Hewlett Packard or IBM’s in-house training and accreditation programs.
Second, language departments need to think big in our expanded world. They must position themselves as the most knowledgeable adjudicators of cross-cultural difference in the context of a global, cross-border world (von Hoene). Here they need not fear competition from English departments’ privileged access to the colonial experience, so long as they understand the postcolonial moment of free trade as an era in which the values of future exchange matter as much as the record of past exploitation. If English departments might rightly claim best to be able to communicate the important desideratum of intramural multicultural representation and tolerance within North America, foreign language departments can best address the distinct desideratum of fostering an ethics of international cultural, linguistic, and territorial difference. As long as embassies and trade and cultural delegations abroad continue to exist, language departments can confidently assert their institutional primacy in educating students to the distinct goal of cross-nation-state ethical sensitivity. The rules of linguistically, regionally, and geopolitically based ethnic difference are dramatically different from (and equally important as) those of the domestic multicultural franchise. We are where one goes to learn those rules.
Third, language departments need to be the methodological generalists of the public sphere, offering their various interpretative and communicative skills as the analytical approaches required by the various social elites to engage effectively in public discourse and decision making. Whether a student seeks to be a leader in not-for-profit public service or in money-moving international banking, whether a student wants to influence opinion in the sphere of SoHo galleries or in that of low-income medical care, whether she wants to be a union negotiator or a junk-bond queen, the rules of participation in each public sphere separately and aggregately in our media, PACs, and halls of representation are ideally the same. The humanities teach us and them the ideal rules and virtues of republican, democratic civic virtue (Nussbaum). Our students might come to us with the natural aptitude to be great innovators or artists or athletes, but if they want to participate with others in public opinion or policy, then they must look to us as the entry gate to their collective future—our role as humanists is that simple and that grand.
This tripartite strategic vision requires only that we move on from any perverse—and quaintly passé—insistence that we teach our charges to be critics and pariahs: for then they willy-nilly become the wards rather than the warders of the commonwealth.
The specific tactical mix of these three strategic elements will be different in each institution and will reflect the administrative differentiation among the language and culture departments as well as within the student body. Where they exist, distinct national language departments should continue energetically to assert their relevance. Galya Diment, for example, has reminded us how important departmental self-assertion was in saving the Slavic department at the University of Washington. While overlap between some competencies of the several foreign language departments is inevitable, aggregation of humanities departments in most cases leads to (and is motivated by) net budget-cutting rather than strength in institutional unity. Although accounts of successful aggregation exist (Cárdenas), the explicit impetus is financial savings rather than disciplinary reconceptualization. Given the strategic goal of creating the buzz that foreign language departments are indispensable for our global future, what pedagogical program might we offer that can speak in plain English to the tactical conjuncture facing foreign language departments today? After all, today’s conjuncture seems to put us in a paradoxical position of needing to sell both our unique difference (from other humanities departments) and our basic methodological generality (as underlying the greater public sphere). How then do we set about properly designing a curriculum that distinguishes us as a unique and valuable administrative unit and that also integrates us into the broad, consensual mandates of humanities education?
My tactical suggestion is embodied by a hybrid course combining first-year language with a first-year introduction to the humanities core. This type of course would articulate both the particularity and the generality of our disciplines. The proposal of such a freshman integrated language and culture seminar is based on two crucial experiences that I have had as an educator: one, helping to teach a cultural unit for a first-year German-language course (German Studies 003) and, two, teaching in the new core curriculum program at Stanford, Introduction to the Humanities (I-Hum). Before describing the proposed course, I want to briefly indicate how my experiences made apparent to me that such a course could be intellectually effective, appealing to students, and administratively practical.
The German department at Stanford sponsors a track in I-Hum called Myth and Modernity: Culture in Germany. Although the course is administered by the I-Hum program, which also manages the postdoctoral teaching fellows, the professors are from German studies. Its success—both for I-Hum and German studies—is clearly reflected by numbers and evaluations. It is highly regarded in freshman surveys, it is usually overenrolled, and its enrollments have grown steadily since I-Hum was introduced three years ago. More students (in 1999-2000 enrollment was over 150) regularly come into contact with German cultural themes through Myth and Modernity than they do through any other course affiliated with the German department. Although the evidence that the course leads to more German majors is anecdotal, I know that some of my best students have gone on to major or minor in German studies. In terms of building the strength of the German studies department, however, there is one area for tactical improvement in the course. Taught in translation, it is already administered by another program and could in principle be detached from any implications for learning German language.
That endangered link to the German studies department, however, brings me to my second experience, namely, helping to teach a cultural unit in the first-year German-language sequence (German Studies 003). This new sequence, whose genesis is described by Elizabeth Bernhardt and Russell Berman, mandates that ninety percent of instructional time be devoted to language and ten percent to culture. My experience teaching a cultural unit—to students who, under Kathryn Strachota’s formidable language instruction and cultural preparation, were speaking for the first time in extended discursive fashion about German cultural topics—was eye-opening. Not only was it clear to me what a year of expert instruction could accomplish in terms of speaking facility, but I also realized the potential symbiosis between German-language cultural analysis, on the one hand, and the analysis and discussion I was simultaneously undertaking in Myth and Modernity, on the other. It was a short step to imagine that the two courses could be regularly linked in an intensive freshman honors seminar. While such a seminar might address only a small subset of the 150 freshman who enroll in Myth and Modernity each year, it would establish a solid bridge between humanities general education (with its appealingly broad relevance to a college student’s experience) and foreign language learning (with its more often indirect, though potentially intense, relevance to a student’s life). I want to be clear that each course was popular and effective on its own terms. Linking the two would create a third space that could be both an administrative boon to the German department and a demonstration to the university constituency at large of the particular contribution of foreign language study to college general education.
Let me fill in the picture. In German Studies 003, Strachota and I were working with an intensive set of resources (a Web site, an online discussion forum, QuickTime film clips, and classroom film screenings) to introduce first-year language learners to a set of basic issues in contemporary German culture. The film was Michael Verhoeven’s The Nasty Girl (1989), about a student researching the Nazi past of her small Bavarian town. The students watched the film in class over two weeks. Every other evening they commented on a Web-based film clip using the electronic discussion forum to which they posted German-language commentaries that served as the basis of German classroom discussion on the following day. On the alternate evenings, groups of students prepared English-language presentations on five discussion topics, each supported by Web links. The topics were the Holocaust, the cold war, coming to terms with the past, antifascist resistance, and collective memory and memorials. Each topic was closely related to the relevant film segment and, although the fifteen-minute presentation was in English, the following discussion was in German. After screening and discussing the entire film, the students chose one of their online commentaries, which they developed into a 300-word minimum German essay. The results of such a demanding curriculum were astonishing: Strachota’s first-year students met the challenge of German-language cultural discussion with enthusiasm and skill. At the same time, the five German Studies 003 topics were also central to Myth and Modernity. The few students who happened to be in both classes were struck by the congruencies and were inspired to elaborate themes and connections.
A freshman integrated language and culture seminar would be an administratively practical way of sparking intellectual fires in foreign cultural studies and solidifying the administrative standing of language departments. What would such a seminar look like? It would not aim to boost culture to more than ten percent of a first-year language’s class time. Rather it would take a section of precisely such a course as German Studies 003 and rigorously tie its themes into those of a linked section of Myth and Modernity. It would be a two-semester (or three-quarter) course that would satisfy both core curriculum and language requirements. It would be team taught by two instructors or professors. Instructor A would teach the language seminar first semester and the culture seminar second semester. Instructor B would teach the culture seminar first semester and the language seminar second semester. These intensive linked seminars would be an honors subsection of the two larger courses, German Studies 003 and Myth and Modernity, which would continue as independent offerings. This seminar would be advertised to students in the core curriculum catalog material as an intensive way for them to satisfy language requirements, general education requirements, humanities honors requirements, study abroad prerequisites and otherwise to put themselves at the top of their game.
The heart of my curricular proposal, then, is to design and enable an integrated language and culture seminar in which the faculty team rotates language and culture responsibilities over the two semesters (or three quarters). The chief idea is to link the methodological and ethical components of the general education course—approaches to the humanities and cross-cultural difference—with the German department’s core distinguishing feature: language instruction. This tactically powerful linkage would serve several key aims of German departments. It would increase language enrollments. It would increase majors, insofar as it made German cultural specificity relevant to humanities generally. And it would help overcome the hierarchy of researchers and language instructors within the department by forging the two facets into one core humanities mandate. As Bernhardt and Berman have contended, “The path to success [. . .] entails pursuing the consequences of ‘German studies’ as ‘cultural studies’ and recognizing the inseparability of language and culture. First-year language courses must become the gateway to a fundamental cultural literacy [. . .]” (24). Tactics and Principles in the Humanities
Before I leave this modest curricular proposal to its fortunes in public debate, I want to pull back my focus briefly to reflect on the position of the tactical humanist, this enterprising new hybrid of academic and fiscal planner, not only in the twenty-first-century school but beyond its gates as well. Pragmatic concessions and strategic alliances are a necessary part of institutional existence and should not be shunned as compromises of the spirit. Surely every new curricular and administrative proposals are necessary fuel for the discussions that modernize and rethink our discipline for changing generations. At the same time, each proposal to be useful must address actors who live in a wider world in which a proposal’s values must also be tested. These actors include students, staff, and faculty members of the university with their overlapping network of identities as people with families, careers, public and private obligations, jobs, and recreations. The values relevant here are not simply those of enrollments and grants and billets, however seriously the coin of the realm must nevertheless be regarded. Proposals affect labor and management, apprenticeship and learning, self-worth and openness to others—and aren’t these concerns also those of the humanities’ philosophers and filmmakers, editors, speakers, and writers?
The danger of any proposal, in this case I put mine foremost, is that abstract policy be substituted for the intricate give-and-take of policy making. The first resource of any department is its committed, competent, and collegial instructors, staff members, and students—they come in all shapes, some of them streamlined, some prickly. A policy must not rush to be an early adopter of technological or management fads but instead should address, esteem, and transform both the foreign and the local strengths and knowledges of the department. If we foreign language instructors aim only to become the shiny new Apples and Yahoos of our respective faculties, then the scrappy departments in our future will adapt all too easily to a modern political landscape in which our best and brightest values are reduced to choices between Mac or PC, shopping mom-and-pop or Walmart. Our pragmatic task will all too soon reveal itself as translating the tragic virtues and disciplines of Aristotle, Hans and Sophie Scholl, and Che Guevara into the less severe and more useful ones of Steve Jobs and Dale Carnegie. Indeed, peering beyond the current departmental flirting with the new economy, I suspect that the grudging forces banished at the outset of this essay—utopia, sacrifice, tragedy, and ideology—are still lurking around. Students and committees might regard those forces with due suspicion, but they are the essence of human life. If IPOs and Unext.com have thrown down the gauntlet to tactical humanists, the forces that beset writers as disparate as Burke and Paine, Fanon and Conrad remain to challenge a principled humanities.
I am not suggesting that tactical humanists are so ruthless and reckless of compassion: a tactical humanist is just one mode for a humanist who in another mode might be a salt-of-the-earth humanist. But let’s briefly think about the difference between the features of a tactical versus principled future for foreign language and cultural studies (for a longer discussion of this issue, see Robinson). What looks different when we who propose policy consider the social content of not just our texts but our institutional mandates as well? How do the values we esteem in less administrative contexts—values like solidarity with the underdog, equality of opportunity, individual freedom, social renewal, and creative self-identification—take on new form when we subject them to the institutional conditions of our discipline? Are there any curricular and administrative lessons that we could learn from our study of the familiar and foreign experiences of revolution and exile, feudalism and reformation, technology and colonialism, principled resistance and seductive compromise? Or would such a political discussion of the key values of our field disturb the new laissez-faire? Must our politics become a matter of our private syllabus, not our departmental—let alone disciplinary—curriculum? It might be that the greater good of our profession demands that we all affirm our proceduralist instincts and relegate discussion of values to more elective affiliations than our departmental ones. An answer to that question of the priority of procedural right (the most effective administrative and pedagogic arrangements) versus disciplinary good (the key values of our scholarship and pedagogy) goes beyond my personal experience in our field. I hope, however, that institutional survival is not such a strict regimen of matching our enrollments to import-export statistics that it leaves no room for discussing what makes the language and humanities good.
Bernhardt, Elizabeth B., and Russell A. Berman. “From German 1 to German Studies 001: A Chronicle of Curricular Reform.” Die Unterrichtspraxis 32.1 (1999): 22–31.
Cárdenas, Karen Hardy. “Saving Small Foreign Language Programs: Is Cooperation the Answer?” ADFL Bulletin 29.3 (1998): 11–19. [Show Article]
Denham, Scott, Irene Kacandes, and Jonathan Petropoulos, eds. A User’s Guide to German Cultural Studies. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997.
Diment, Gayla. “Trying to Stay Alive in the Age of Eliminations and Reductions.” ADFL Bulletin 29.2 (1998): 28–31. [Show Article]
Guillory, John. Cultural Capital. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
Habermas, Jürgen. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Cambridge: MIT P, 1990.
Müller, Kurt. “Of Language Utility, Status, and Enrollments.” Die Unterrichtspraxis 32.1 (1999): 11–21.
New York Institute of Technology. “Education 2001.” Advertisement. New York Times 19 Apr. 1999: op-ed page.
Nussbaum, Martha. Cultivating Humanity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.
Pulley, John. “At More Than $1-Million a Day, Harvard U. Raises a Record $2.32-Billion.” Chronicle of Higher Education 15 Oct. 1999: A43.
———. “Public Universities’ Ambitious Campaigns Vex Many Small Private Institutions.” Chronicle of Higher Education 3 Dec. 1999: A39–40.
Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996.
Robinson, Benjamin. “What Comes First in German Studies, German or Studies?” Germanic Review 75.3 (2000): 226–43.
Rorty, Richard. “The End of Leninism and History as Comic Frame.” History and the Idea of Progress. Ed. Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. 211–26.
Swaffar, Janet. “The Case for Foreign Languages as a Discipline.” Profession 1999. New York: MLA, 1999. 155-67.
von Hoene, Linda M. “Imagining Otherwise: Rethinking Departments of Foreign Languages and Literatures as Departments of Cross-Cultural Difference.” ADFL Bulletin 30.2 (1999): 26–29. [Show Article]
© 2001 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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