36, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 27-30 To the Editor Search

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OVER the past three years, I have had the privilege of serving on the MLA Executive Council, where I met and exchanged ideas with distinguished colleagues working in a range of language and literary fields. I have also had the opportunity to work with the MLA’s talented and dedicated staff and am especially grateful to former Executive Director Phyllis Franklin, to current Executive Director Rosemary Feal, and to Elizabeth Welles and David Laurence, who, over this time, listened carefully to the concerns I and other council members expressed about the distressed state of affairs that began developing in the 1990s in some foreign language fields. Stemming largely from declining enrollments in several of the foreign languages most commonly taught in American universities (including my own, French, but also German and Russian), the sense of crisis that emerged prompted serious reflection on how our once self-sufficient programs might be reconfigured in ways that would revitalize student interest and keep the study of these languages, literatures, and cultures alive and thriving well into the next century. The MLA’s responsiveness to these circumstances has taken a number of forms, but the one that has most impressed me and that I consider the most valuable expression of our organization’s power to intervene in important ways in shaping the future of our disciplines is the April 2002 conference held at New York University. The meeting gathered a dozen distinguished scholars from a variety of language and literary fields and began the work of “fostering dialogue and imagining change” in the relations between English and foreign language departments in North American universities. The NYU conference and the joint meeting of the ADE and ADFL at the 2003 Summer Seminar West have, I believe, great potential for providing new structures that will not only strengthen advanced study of the above-mentioned languages but also extend foreign language, literary, and cultural studies well beyond the traditional scope of these European languages.¹

What, one might wonder, does the current situation in some foreign language departments have to do with departments of English? In one acronym, whose importance all departmental administrators will immediately recognize, the answer for me is clear: FTEs (full-time equivalencies). In these dire fiscal times, at least in my increasingly besieged institution, FTEs are becoming an elusive object of intense competition and desire. Academic units are becoming ever more painfully aware that if they are unable to demonstrate healthy enrollments and to show they can serve a larger portion of the student body, they are at serious risk of coming up short when the annual responses to departmental requests for faculty lines are issued. Fewer FTEs means fewer course offerings, which results in weaker programs. Weaker programs in turn translate into decreased student interest and, of course, the lower enrollments that leave units vulnerable to administrative consolidation (these days, a favored cost-saving instrument) and to other debilitating forms of “resource reallocation."

In my institution, foreign language units, especially small ones, have fared poorly, of late, in the annual FTE scramble. The once viable Department of Russian now has two members and has been appended administratively to the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures. In the last ten years, the Department of French and Italian has fallen from 15 FTEs to 9.5, even though our unit has been able to offset some of the loss of enrollments that occurred in the 1990s by developing new strategies of delivering French-related instruction to both the departmental and the broader College of Liberal Arts and Science curriculum. If current trends continue and additional retirements and departures occur without replacement, one can easily imagine circumstances in which the bare-bones staffing of foreign language units leads to serious decline in the number of students enrolled in courses of study relating to the non-English-speaking world. Even Spanish (which could be considered, in the United States, not only a foreign language but also a second national language), despite its soaring enrollments on our campus, has not been able to exert the kind of influence that could conceivably lead to a general rethinking of traditional interdepartmental relations, a paradigm shift that might help it and other languages gain a greater share of the institutional resources devoted to instruction in language, literature, and cultural studies.

From this vantage point, our Department of English, which currently has a faculty composed of 42 FTEs, appears to enjoy an embarrassment of riches. The third-largest unit in the College of Liberal Arts and Science, serving approximately a thousand majors and functioning as the unit that administers one of the college’s major general education requirements (general education literature), the department is clearly a force to be reckoned with. It is not difficult to imagine circumstances in which serious FTE envy might set in, leading administrators and faculty members in foreign language departments to question why the study of English-language literary, cultural, and other kinds of texts (cinema comes to mind here) should command such institutional attention and resources when, with a little imagination, those resources might be spread more widely, allowing greater numbers of undergraduates to familiarize themselves with the literatures and cultures of a range of human societies, that is, non-English-speaking societies. We are talking, of course, about teaching foreign literature and cultural studies courses in English translation, an option that often presents a serious stumbling block in many language departments, where, for many good reasons, teaching in anything but the target language has not been in line with departmental priorities. My own experience designing and delivering courses in English translation has taught me, however, that studying texts in English translation, especially at the undergraduate level, may not be as linguistically authentic and rich as working in the French originals, but it does expose American students to strikingly different cultural traditions, literary paradigms, and habits of thought that allow them to begin imagining the world otherwise. A number of students I had in these classes, who did not previously have an interest in learning a foreign language, subsequently enrolled in French-language classes, traveled to French-speaking countries, and returned with impressive second-language skills. An array of such courses offered to the English-speaking student body, developed in a more systematic fashion and having sufficient curricular support to allow them to count for more than electives, could provide the enrollments that would let foreign language units continue offering courses in the target foreign language, courses that are necessary for both the foreign language major and graduate studies. Higher overall enrollments could also justify additional faculty lines, a resource that is indispensable when it comes to projecting the life of foreign language study programs into the future. Again, this is crucial for smaller language departments, which are especially vulnerable to reorganization and resource reallocation in the bleak fiscal environment in which public institutions nationwide are now operating.

Gaining access to enrollments, particularly undergraduate enrollments, is a critical aspect of the above scenario. In my institution at the moment (as I am sure in many others) the Department of English could be a powerful collaborator in enabling these new structures to develop. Indeed, several years ago, following a jointly conducted review of all language departments at Iowa, strategies were proposed for strengthening the foreign language and literature programs, and efforts were made to explore ways in which English and foreign language programs might collaborate in advancing this aim. These efforts were unproductive, and no further ones have been made to foster an exchange between the language and literature units on campus.

In preparation for the ADE-ADFL Summer Seminar, I invited the current chair of the English department to meet with me to discuss his thoughts on what the possibilities were for exchanges, experiments, and cooperation between English and the other languages and to assess, from his unit’s perspective, what the advantages and disadvantages of this sort of collaboration might be. At Iowa, we are fortunate to have Brooks Landon as this chair, a colleague I grew to admire during my recent tenure as an interim chair. I observed the leadership skills and, above all, the intellectual integrity and finesse with which he conducted himself in regular collegiate meetings that gathered chairs of units across the College of Arts and Sciences. As I reflected on our discussion afterward, it occurred to me that had I not met Brooks in these chair meetings, I might not have taken the initiative to inquire about his views. I realized that, largely because of the spatial arrangement of the buildings on campus, few opportunities arise for English and foreign language faculty members to interact with one another and to familiarize themselves in any serious way with the teaching areas and scholarly interests of colleagues in these units.

The absence of such opportunities presents a major obstacle to the kind of dialogue that needs to take place for any collaborative venture to take shape. This absence, I surmised after my meeting with Brooks, was a principal reason the earlier effort to encourage collaboration between English and the foreign languages had failed. Instead of assembling faculty members from the units in question so that a discussion could take place about the intellectual and pedagogical aims of our prospective collaboration, the problem had been broached from a largely administrative perspective, with fiscal concerns placed at the fore. The form this encounter took had failed to provide an opportunity for members of English and foreign language departments on campus to consider what they have in common: the study of language, literature, and the sociosymbolic systems and cultural codes they purvey. An exchange of this kind might have helped dispel the commonly held belief that foreign language professors primarily gain and teach mastery of the mechanics of second-language learning. What, the stereotype goes, could they possibly have in common with the serious, theoretically minded scholars of English-language literature? When I inquired about the prevalence of this notion, my colleague acknowledged that it does have currency among some English faculty members who perceive important “methodological” differences between the study of English literature and the literary studies pursued in foreign language departments. When I countered that the syllabi of theory courses I have seen offered in the Department of English include the works of Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Bourdieu, and Kristeva—all theorists who are routinely taught in French graduate courses and whose intellectual Frenchness is, I would argue, central to the theories they formulated—he agreed that the claim of difference was not altogether tenable.

Scholars who have long experience working with French intellectual history and culture and whose knowledge is enhanced by expertise in the French language could bring to a classroom discussion greater understanding of what in the writings of the above-mentioned theorists is specifically French. I have found that this aspect often gets lost in the translation of their writings to Anglophone academic contexts. Think also of the expertise that could be brought to bear by foreign literature scholars in the world literature programs and in courses on postcoloniality that are routinely delivered in English departments. However, opportunities for conversation with such scholars, which might lay the groundwork for future exchanges, collaborative teaching projects, and interdepartmental course cross-listing, have never been formally or even informally initiated. Thus any possibility for imagining new forms in which cross-departmental collaboration could take place is effectively closed off. Finding creative ways to launch such discussions—exchanges in which the benefits of exposing students to a broader range of national, international, and transnational literary cultures could also be considered—would help enormously in breaking down the barriers that so far have kept dialogue of this sort from taking place.

In the close of my discussion with Brooks, I floated the idea of an “internal foreign exchange” program in which English majors would be required to take at least one course in another national literature. Students with a keen interest in British modernism might, for instance, take a course in the Latin American Boom writers or the modern French novel. In turn, students majoring in a foreign language would be required to take one course in the English department. This exchange would heighten the demand for courses based in the foreign language departments, and enrollments would be credited to them. More important, students majoring in English, most of them no doubt monolingual, would be encouraged to extend their cultural horizon to consider how different societies responded in distinctive literary and cultural fashion to, for instance, the stresses and sense of loss that modernization engendered.

It became clear to me that the first hurdle to be overcome in putting this model into practice would be not intellectual but rather logistic. How to ensure that a sufficient number of courses would be available in translation in any given semester to meet the needs of the hundreds of students involved? What mechanisms would have to be in place for the advising process to function smoothly? What kind of procedures would allow departments to approve exchange courses in advance? If the curricular and advising details of implementing such a program could be successfully managed, I am confident that both English and the foreign languages would gain in the exchange and would welcome the collaboration. English would be getting assistance in meeting the curricular needs of its thousand majors, students who would take upper-division courses offered in foreign language departments. Other sorts of collaboration could develop from this exchange, perhaps even the joint participation of multiple academic units in the administration of the general education literature requirement, now run solely by the Department of English.

Ventures of this sort may not make it past the proposal stage, but I was heartened by the discussion of these issues that Brooks so generously took the time to have with me. That the MLA has been proactive in supporting this kind of dialogue made it much easier for me to initiate my conversation with Brooks and to imagine our finding creative ways to continue it on our campus. If we are successful, we will expose many more students on one American campus to experiences of literary and cultural otherness. At a time when American society appears to be performing, in very worrisome ways, a repli sur soi, or an isolationist folding in on the national self, this modest change in the ways in which departments of English and foreign languages engage with one another might help keep a small part of our national culture open to the outside world and able to the hear the voices of difference it holds.

Note

¹The MLA’s twentieth foreign language enrollment survey (Welles) shows a 17% increase since 1998 in the number of students studying foreign languages in North American colleges and universities. After a period of decline, enrollments in French, German, and Russian have stabilized. The survey offers strong evidence of heightened student interest in an expanding range of foreign languages. This trend stirs hope that administrators grappling with sharp budgetary shortfalls, particularly in public institutions, will be inclined to halt and, ideally, to reverse the erosion of funding that many foreign language programs have suffered in recent years.

Works Cited

Welles, Elizabeth B. “Foreign Language Enrollments in United States Institutions of Higher Education.” ADFL Bulletin 35.2-3 (2004): 7–26. [Show Article]

© 2004 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.

ADFL Bulletin 36, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 27-30

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