04, no. 3 (March 1973): 34-36
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LANGUAGES IN COMMUNICATION: EXPANDED OPPORTUNITIES FOR LANGUAGE MAJORS IN
BUSINESS AND INDUSTRY
Loyal Gould
AFTER receiving the invitation to be with you this afternoon, I accepted it with alacrity. After accepting it, I had second thoughts in so far as I am now a stranger to your ranks. It was not always that way. I started out as a member of a college language department before I became a working journalist. I was a member of the MLA then, and it happens also that I practically grew up, as it were, in the MLA. My father spent over thirty years in philology at the University of Chicago. Once a year—if I remember it correctly, it was always at Christmas—we made the annual trek to the MLA convention. So in one respect, I do consider myself this afternoon once again in the family of those whose ranks I joined back in the 1950's as a college teacher of German and French.
The substance of this paper focuses on a new perspective regarding foreign language opportunities, based on the premise that with an evermore contracting world, a world made progressively smaller by modern communications techniques, there is an ever greater need for Americans to speak at least one other language in addition to their native English and to understand or at least to have an interest in understanding the culture and civilization in which that foreign language flourishes. Personally, I know of no better way to gain an understanding of a foreign people and all their various and unique institutions than through the study of their language, which in turn leads to a study of their literature. Now here is the rub. I am convinced that the study of the foreign literature merely for its own sake is not going to attract large numbers of students today, for the simple reason that the ideal of the Renaissance man cannot be realized by a significant percentage of our students in this day and age. Also that old argument, the one about producing—in the old sense of the phrase—“the educated man,” will no longer suffice as a defense for the large share of the curriculum you now have in your respective colleges, particularly in the colleges where there are still foreign language requirements. Whether we like it or not, we are now truly in the age of mass education and very few of us, I believe, in this room will ever have the privilege of devoting our teaching lives exclusively to Ph.D. candidates whose sole interest is our own particular area of expertise. However, if the study of foreign language, and especially the study of foreign literature, is regarded by the teacher, and thus presumably by the students, as a reflection of the social, economic, political and esthetic conditions prevalent at the time of its writing, then the students, I am sure, are going to find it exciting. They might even, to use that overworked term, find it relevant. In other words, I believe that more attention should be paid to the concept that mastery of a foreign language is the best tool available for understanding a foreign people. And if we Americans ever needed a better understanding of the nations with which we now share this earth, it is certainly right now. Aside from all the humanistic reasons one can muster to support the proposition that in an ever contracting world, people must, if not particularly like one another, then surely try to understand each other's needs, there are also very pragmatic reasons for language study in the United States today.
There is one example in my own field, journalism. American journalism is in desperate need of journalists who have an understanding and perhaps even a sympathy for foreign nations and people. The information dissemination business of which journalism is a part is today the fastest growth-rate industry or the fastest growth-rate business in America. We are on the threshold of what I think can truly be described as the golden age of American journalism, and we are sorely lacking the sophisticated people who are going to make it function. Right now this country has about 300 foreign correspondents, and in that number I am not including the glorified sports reporters who provide the daily, but terribly misleading body counts from Viet Nam. By foreign correspondents I mean skilled diplomatic reporters. The reason there are not more is that the command of a foreign language by American journalists is so woefully lacking. And this is the case just at the time when the larger American news organizations would like to double if not triple their foreign news staffs.
I conducted a study a few years ago, and its results, by the way, were similar to those obtained by the MLA and others. I contacted the foreign news editors of the major American news organizations and asked them what type of person they sent abroad as a foreign correspondent. About 97% of the editors who answered indicated that they in essence were looking for men and women who had backgrounds similar to their own. They were looking basically, they claimed, for first-class police reporters, and concluded that these assuredly would make first-class foreign correspondents. Then I contacted the men and women whom they had sent abroad in the previous five year period. These men and women did not meet the guidelines that these foreign news editors had in their own heads. The people that they had sent abroad did, however, have very good academic backgrounds in the traditional humanities with a heavy emphasis on foreign languages. I found it interesting that the foreign news editors of the major news organizations of this country were convinced, when they talked among themselves, that they were sending a certain type abroad, but in actual fact they were not.
The Wall Street Journal for example, at present would like to establish an Asian edition in Hong Kong, edited, written, and reported in English, but designed for Asian subscribers. However, the Wall Street Journal is experiencing the greatest difficulties in finding staff members with the requisite skills in interpreting Asian cultures. Even though President Nixon is apparently well on his way to opening up China, how much news is going to be reported from that giant and ever more important country by the six American journalists we have who speak Chinese, especially when three of them are the last of the old pre-World War II China hands? What I am saying is that for any number of reasons, many of them political, we simply do not have a sufficient number of American journalists who can speak Chinese and thus begin to comprehend what is transpiring in that country. The same thing generally holds true for nearly every other area of the world.
Non-journalists and especially teachers of modern languages in my own institution ask me whether young college graduates with substantive knowledge acquired in a non-linguistic discipline, coupled with a mastery of a foreign language, really can find employment using both sets of skills. My favorite response is to tell them about something I was personally involved in, the start of this country's first academic program for the training of foreign correspondents. I did it in establishing a master's program at Ohio State University in the school of journalism, but with the help of some of your own colleagues. I took into that program young men and women with and without academic or professional journalistic backgrounds. But the one thing I insisted on was fluency in at least one foreign language. Once in the program, they did 75% of their graduate work in disciplines other than journalism. In addition, they spent a six-month internship in that area of the world where they hoped to specialize as foreign correspondents. Please remember that only 25% of their entire graduate work was in the school of journalism. I insisted on that small percent with a purpose. I knew from my own experience as a foreign correspondent that the basic journalistic skills can be learned quickly by any bright person. But the substantive knowledge necessary for a foreign correspondent worthy of the name, comes largely from an academic experience, from an academic experience enriched by the study of cultures through their languages. The success of that program is attested by the fact that my former students are now scattered throughout the world, in East and West Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia. One young woman from Shawnee Mission, Kansas, for example, has recently been named the chief diplomatic correspondent for the Associated Press at United Nations Headquarters. In other words, American journalism was eager for these young people because they had something to offer that traditionally was lacking among newspaper people.
The need is desperate, especially when one considers that this country counts only one journalist with an absolute fluency in Arabic, John Kent Cooley of the Christian Science Monitor. In the whole Middle East, only one American journalist who speaks fluent Arabic. There are only a handful who speak Hebrew. One of the major networks, namely NBC, when looking for a replacement for an aging correspondent who wanted to leave Italy, considered itself fortunate in discovering, within its own corporate structure, a young newsman who still had an English-Italian, Italian-English dictionary which he had purchased in his freshman year at Cornell University while taking a one-semester beginning Italian course. He got the assignment to Rome. The same holds true in practically every major segment of American business and industry. Just two weeks ago, I was visited by the representative of the world's largest manufacturer of electronic computerized newspaper reproduction equipment. He came to my office and asked me if I could guide him to young men and women with language skills who would want to work with his concern abroad. He explained that every year since 1960, when his firm was organized, his company had doubled its sales over the previous year, but they now fear a certain degree of stagnation if they are unable to meet the market demands in both western and eastern Europe. And they are unable to do this because of the shortage of people in their firm who have the requisite linguistic skills. By the way, the products of his firm are on the top half of the shopping list which the Soviet foreign trade ministry is about ready to present to our State Department in the wake of President Nixon's negotiations over trade with the Soviets. And consider the needs of American business within the Common Market area, the regional grouping that will soon equal the economic might of the United States or the Soviet Union. With the entry of Denmark, Ireland, and Britain the Common Market will have about 240 million highly skilled, fairly affluent Europeans. As my French colleague Servan-Schreiber pointed out in his book, Le défi americain , the second biggest economic power in western Europe after West Germany was not France, but rather U.S. industry located within the six nations of the Common Market. These American firms in Europe, representing practically every major U.S. industry, must have American personnel with linguistic and cultural understanding. I think that they would willingly absorb hundreds of such people, if they could find them. Just a few years ago when the Ford Motor Company out of Detroit was searching for public relations people with a knowledge of German and/or French for their plant in Cologne, they specified that they would like young people who had some academic background in this broad channel area of communications and who knew German and/or French. Finally, after searching the country for people who had these skills in the public relations field, they ultimately found five.
One could go on and on listing such diverse groups as the State Department and even American poultry producers, who want personnel capable of functioning abroad. But of equal importance are domestic agencies formed only recently to meet the needs of an ever more urbanized society right here in the United States. I refer, for instance, to the Model Cities Program, and to police training programs that are being taken over more and more by universities and colleges, as well as the innumerable agencies organized to combat the results of urban blight. Nearly all of these agencies have indicated the need for people who speak some European language that is spoken in the ethnic slums of America. It is my belief that what we must have are more foreign language teachers who will willingly undertake to teach today's college youth foreign languages not only for the student's cultural enrichment, but also for his vocational use in professional areas other than the lifelong study of philology. Some of you, I am sure, will object to the mere mention of vocational uses for foreign language study, insisting that this leads inevitably to increased homogeneity, but this need not frighten anybody. Homogeneity may not be a good in itself, for there is wonder and vitality in differences and variations. But remember that homogeneity is not an evil in itself. When heterogeneity means that some segments of American society are distinctly more malnourished than others, distinctly more uneducated, distinctly less comfortable, we have the right to hope for less heterogeneity, and greater homogeneity towards the favorable sides of these questions.
On the way to this meeting I spent last night at a friend's home in Kansas City. He is the head bank examiner for the Midwest. He told me that at present his federal agency is policing all U.S. banks abroad in Latin America, western Europe, the Middle East and in Asia in the same way that it polices U.S. banks. His agency, he told me, is searching desperately for bank examiners who know one or two foreign languages. Because of the lack of these people within their own ranks, they are unable to fulfill the task which Congress has given them. In short, this is a valuable government service that is being crippled because of a lack of personnel with appropriate language backgrounds.
I hope in future that whatever gap may now exist between the academic world and the world of business, government, and the media can be successfully bridged. Let me encourage the members of the foreign language teaching profession in their efforts to build such a bridge.
A paper given at the ADFL session at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 26 October 1972 in St. Louis, Missouri. Professor Gould is Chairman of the Department of Journalism at Wichita State University.
© 1973 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 04, no. 3 (March 1973): 34-36 |
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