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THIS paper attempts to translate some intractable curricular issues into some intractable issues of governance, with the hope that both sets of issues will become at least more comprehensible when the connection between them is revealed. The making of this connection will turn out to require a shift to a level of diffused cultural values, values within the academy not less powerful for being seldom verbalized. I may add that the impetus for this inquiry was not merely speculative but arose from certain practical frustrations. This is a local report and can perhaps best be introduced autobiographically.
In 1982 I was appointed Master of the Collegiate Division of the Humanities (a post which at Chicago carries the concomitant titles of Associate Dean of the College and Associate Dean of the Humanities) with a somewhat generally expressed mandate from the dean of the college to do (among other things) “something about language instruction.” As a step toward finding a more definite intention in this charge I created a “seminar,” a weekly meeting to which I invited, for discussion of mutual interests, all those known to be deeply involved in teaching language at Chicago. They talked to each other and I listened; there turned out to be a lot to talk about. These language teachers had been scattered through a score of departments, committees, and fields; once they met each other (in many cases for the first time) they turned out to have common intellectual interests, having to do with methods of instruction, and common material interests, having to do with facilities. Out of this group came the committee that asked for and got from the dean of the humanities our center for language instruction with its computer and its audiovisual equipment, and this is the group that will succeed, if anyone will, in upgrading our language laboratory. Something, in other words, was accomplished: I had invented a pressure group. On the other hand as I sat and listened I was recurrently impressed by how little was happening; the intellectual range of the conversation seemed to me narrow and the practical ambition confined. These are not vices, I may say, that one associates with the University of Chicago, where committee deliberation tends toward wild not to say perverse speculation and utopian grandiosity. There was something here to consider.
Much of the discussion when it was not about methods and facilities was about the language requirement, about placing students into it or excusing them from it. This conversation, it seemed to me, remained superficial because it took for granted most of the problem: there was discontent with the one-year requirement to which most students were held but no willingness to talk about the content of that requirement or its place in a wider curriculum. Everyone there (except me, it seemed) assumed that to teach a modern language meant the teaching of broad-gauged, quasi-native-speaker capacities, and everyone assumed that the value of such instruction is self-evident and generally understood.
The seminar, as such groups do, started with a relatively large and shifting attendance and then settled down to a smaller group of regulars. The teachers of dead languages disappeared; Modern Chinese continued to be represented but Classical Chinese was not. Those who teach languages as an aspect of linguistics also dropped out: this meant that we lost Modern Greek, which at Chicago is taught primarily for its ethnolinguistic interest, and Georgian, which we offer as a three-year coordinated program: introductory, intermediate, and advanced. These were of course the very people who might have been expected to widen the intellectual preconceptions of the group; instead they decided that the conversation was not for them and went away.
We were left with teachers of major modern languages. Looking at them as an associate dean I could not fail to be struck by the diversity of their appointments. There were tenured faculty members, including a full professor or two, assistant professors (all, I happened to know, with poor prospects of promotion), senior lecturers (predominantly women), and graduate-student lecturers (usually on two-year appointments but occasionally extended indefinitely). At Chicago, which has always proclaimed that its “real” faculty do its teaching, this quasi-faculty demanded explanation; no other aspect of humanistic teaching was organized this way. As I got to thinking about this point, my attention shifted from substance to procedure and to problems of governance.
Academic governance may be divided into two branches: curriculum and personnel or (more informally) What shall we do? and Who is going to do it? (Curriculum really should be curriculum-and-research, but in the humanities—with rare exceptions, such as the Assyrian Dictionary —research is left for individual faculty members to fit into their unadministered time and becomes an administrative problem only in terms of the granting of leaves.) Obviously the first conditions the second: we have jobs because there are things for us to do. Yet it is striking that most faculty members want to be included in personnel discussions, even ones remote from their own areas, while we get into curricular discussions mostly out of a sense of duty; many do not even think of the curriculum as an aspect of governance. Perhaps this is because we do not really view the academy as a purposeful agency but as a self-justified society; the right people (people like ourselves) should be admitted and then left to do what they want. Or it may be because, while personnel discussions are conducted in a tone of tough realism (“I like so-and-so as a person” is a sure sign of a negative vote coming up), curricular discussions tend to idealism in the bad sense. There is a recurrent gap between high sentence and low motives; a roomful of professors talk of The Knowledge Most Worth Having and What Every Educated Person Should Know, while all of them know that each of them is evaluating every suggestion in terms of its impact on teaching loads and the labor of the class preparations, on recruitment, on the fortunes of their own protégés, and on the prestige of their own fields.
No doubt this is all as it should be. Academics are paid to talk, and we had better find something more interesting to say than “I want this because I want it, and I'm going to get it because I've found some other powerful people who want it too.” We are professionally committed to defining our interests in terms of higher cultural values—and in this respect academic politics, for all its wordy inconsequence, perhaps sets a model for all politics (if we mean by politics something other than the test of force). Nor should we be dismayed that curricula are political documents; if the process of reasoning, even if it is little more than rationalization, requires us to state the meaning of our work, so also the process of negotiation, even if it is little more than logrolling, requires us to respect our colleagues as persons with whom we share a common institutional loyalty and fate. The two processes, taken together, keep the college in touch with the realities of power and current culture, both within the college and outside it.
The academy is self-perpetuating, self-evaluating, and self-accrediting. To a large extent it defines its own relations with the wider society—which to a large extent is ready to be told what it should value. We, in turn, know that these things (whatever they are) are valuable because we and others like us value them. Certainly these things change over time, but it is something of a mystery why, for instance, Latin declines and calculus advances. A curriculum always attempts to make concrete our current values. Certainly the shape of the faculty changes in response to curricular changes, but the reverse is also true; it is unclear whether there are now fewer Latin teachers because Latin is less taught, or vice versa. If we hire enough computer people, computer science will become an integral part of the core curriculum. Always the curriculum is an attempt at self-definition by those at that time established in academic power.
It follows that curricular discussions can never be fully “rational”—in terms of student demand, faculty interest, and available funding; all those things are subject to change and can be changed by the ways we talk about them. Neither the “useful” nor the “needed” is a sufficient criterion of what is proper to higher education. On the other hand the discussion does not helpfully proceed on an “ideal” plane either; we must be respectful of the conditions in which we find ourselves, and we must recognize that the statement of an ideal is never disinterested and often intends the seduction of the innocent.
All this is prologue to a consideration of the language requirement, which I intend to discuss in terms of the sociology of the academy and to use as a case study for inquiry into the way academic values are negotiated and legitimated. Let me begin by noting that from the ideal point of view languages are strangely unproblematic. Everyone seems to agree that it is good to learn them. One might say the same of mathematics, but in this case I would go further: everyone actually desires to know more languages—if it could be done without effort we would like to know them all. That “row that downed every hod on Babel” is one of the emblems of our Fall, and by partially repairing it we come one small step back toward some primal unity. So languages should not be a curricular problem.
Nevertheless language is a problem—because, while we seem to know what we want, we seem completely unprepared to insist on it. It is generally agreed that second-language acquisition should come early, yet foreign language is no longer required for college admission; the controversy now turns on the college language requirement. It is generally agreed that languages are retained only by those who bring them to some usable level, for either conversation or reading, that for most American students this level can be reached only in two years and only in a few languages (Romance and to some extent Germanic), yet the general liberal arts requirement is not uncommonly set at one year of any available language. It is generally agreed that language learning requires commitment and a certain level of intensity, yet we permit students to meet the requirements with Cs and Ds. It is generally agreed that languages are learned by those who have a use for them; the language requirement does not, however, require students to use the language or even to learn it but merely to study it. I have heard the language requirement debated many times, but I have never heard a faculty debate a real language requirement. Such a requirement would insist on two years' college work (or equivalent) at an A or B level in a language in which such work can be expected to bring the student to a reasonable proficiency; it would be enforced by a tough proficiency exam at the end—no proficiency, no diploma. Such a requirement would demand the kind of commitment demanded by premed chemistry; no one seems to think it proper to ask this of students in general. Instead, the debate is conducted between those who think that in the absence of a real requirement it is better to have no requirement at all and those who think something better than nothing. The debate seems to be a leading indicator of faculty attitudes toward requirements in general: when requirements are out, the language requirement is eliminated; when, as at the present time, requirements are again in fashion, the language requirement, in the tepid form that satisfies its proponents, is reintroduced. Of course if we gave languages, in the schools and on the SATs, the kind of weight we give mathematics, every American would arrive in college with some smattering of a foreign tongue, and the colleges would have a real requirement.
Americans as a nation are not much good at foreign languages. This is one of the places where we become aware that our pedagogy is embedded in the wider culture. The Dutch and the Danes learn foreign languages; the French, who are phonologically isolated, learn to read but not to speak or understand them—except for those few who learn many, having observed that, while an accent in French is vulgar, a French accent is charming. Americans are more like the Italians; it is not unusual to meet in Italy young people who have had six or seven years of English in school and cannot form a sentence in it. Perhaps the similarity is accounted for by the fact that both nations are in their different ways linguistic melting pots; Italian is after all a second language for most Italians, a foreign language learned at school (and from television) to supplement the Piemontese or Calabrian they speak at home. By the time they arrive at formal foreign language instruction they have already suffered years of language anxiety. Similarly Americans often seem blocked off from language acquisition by their ethnic contact with languages other than English; many a college language teacher complains of the obstacle of church-basement Modern Greek or barrio Spanish. The student's previous efforts to communicate are thus academically categorized as a disadvantage; it is better to know nothing then to know something “incorrect.” However, the French Canadians of New England do seem readily to learn French. It is a puzzle.
In any event it is clear that foreign languages are one of the places where the nations reach exceeds its grasp; they are a Good Thing but Just Too Hard. We are not willing to put into them the necessary level of resources in the schools, in the colleges, or at any level. (I well remember the graduate student who said: “Oh, I took the German reading exam two years ago, I couldn't possibly read it now.”) In this contradictory condition the language requirement is our compromise; it does not insist that students learn a language, but it does transmit to them the message that we very much wish that they would. Perhaps this message is important enough to be worth a yearlong college course—even though it does mean that our teachers have to teach two kinds of students: those who are learning the language and those who are meeting the requirement.
Language teaching has been adapted to our ideology of “exposure” (as in the expression “exposure to the humanities”). For most modern European languages we now have beautifully crafted teaching programs, comprising textbooks, workbooks, tapes, and even interactive videotapes; we expose the students to the program, and in some cases it is effective, in some cases not. No doubt this is generally the case with exposure; it is only that in this case the exposed student is likely in another sense later to be exposed. The inability to see the point of a poem is a failing that in ordinary life can usually be concealed, but an inability to speak or read French becomes at certain moments painfully obvious—and is not made less painful by the mumbled admission, “I had some French in college.” Given the requirement, we then proceed to rationalize it. Much of the well-rehearsed debate about the requirement consists of the rediscovery of these rationalizations. It is said that foreign language study at any level improves the understanding of language in general—that, for instance, most Americans learn English grammar for the first time in the course of studying some other language. It is said that even a very modest command of a foreign language is some use—one can learn enough to “get around”—or to pick through technical articles in a specific field, getting the good of their formulas or footnotes. It is said that an introduction to the language is really an introduction to the culture. It is said that language study encourages good study habits, trains the memory, and encourages the habit of precision.
I call these rationalizations, not because they are untrue, but because we do not take them seriously enough to shape our instruction in accordance with them. The last rationalization applies to a great variety of intellectual fields—for instance, the mastery of baseball statistics. It does not justify language per se. The other three would imply forms of instruction very different from those now in use. A focus on language (rather than a language) would stress those aspects, structural and semantic, that most differ from English; that is the way the linguists teach, for instance, Georgian and Greenland Eskimo—not for any prospective use, but as objects of study with an intrinsic intellectual interest. A focus on culture would stress those aspects of the language most culturally specific—euphemisms and obscenities, exclamations and gestures, proverbs and low idioms, the language spoken to children, such formal subrhetorics as police reports, prayer, and patriotic speeches. A focus on particular uses would adapt itself to those uses. A teacher could offer, for instance, Broken Spanish for Travelers, with the kind of simplified structure and large vocabulary that would enable one to function effectively as a comic foreigner, to shop, to deal with the civil service, to read the weather reports. German for Chemists does exist, and my colleague James McCawley has designed a course in how to read the wall signs in Chinese restaurants, but those models have not been generalized.
It would seem that if we are going to have a large number of students who will be taking one year of a language in college and no more, we would be designing courses for those students. There exists, for instance, reduced languages that, because they are no one's mother tongue, can be mastered quite quickly. Pidgin (also known as Neo-Melanesian) is one such; Esperanto is another. A different sort of example is Homeric Greek, to which one might add Old Norse. It is possible, as I know from experience, to teach students to read Homer accurately and sensitively in a year of ordinary course-work—indeed by the end of this time a good graduate student is ready to write publishable articles on the Homeric language, proof against the most exacting professional criticism. Alternatively one could teach Reading Scholarly French—although as French rhetoric becomes more baroque this reaches a narrower range of scholarship than it used to. Or we could teach not language but the history of language; we could teach Latin and its derivatives (including Sardinian and Rumanian) with attention to underlying structures and patterns of historical transformation. There are an indefinite number of opportunities in this and other directions. None of them are being pursued. We continue to offer virtually all our students broad courses intended to begin to establish the full range of native-speaker competences: phonetics, phonemics, morphology, syntax, vocabulary, idiom, and stylistics. And we then observe that it is not possible to do much in a year.
The students who really want to learn a modern language generally travel. (This poses a special problem for Russian, since few find it easy to spend much time in the Soviet Union.) Total immersion, as we know, is the one proven effective pedagogy, since it punishes refusal to function in the language by embarrassment, loneliness, and even actual hunger. We could provide artificial conditions of total immersion on our own campuses, but it is understood that the expense is too great—not only the material expense, but the expense in moral wear and tear. It is understood that precisely because these sanctions are real they are not to be imposed on those who do not specially choose them.
Conversely the language requirement, because it is for everyone, functions without real sanctions. My objection to the requirement (and I do generally object to it) is that it makes obvious to the world—and even worse, to ourselves—our failure of nerve. It is a curricular expression, not of our determination, but of our hopes and wishes. It is my impression, further, that while most requirements are defended by those who teach them—the physicists insist on physics, the English teachers on English—the language requirement is generally unpopular with those of us who teach languages. It is, rather, insisted upon by those of us who hope that someone else will teach our students what, in many cases, we wish we ourselves had learned.
I may add that the physicists, having insisted on a physics requirement, do set themselves (however ineptly) to the creation of courses tailored to the requirement; these are the well-known courses in Science for Nonscientists. We do not, however, have (as I have said) Language Courses for Those Who Will Not Learn Languages. Our language teachers go doggedly on, dragging everyone through a curriculum intended only for some.
All this suggests that the place of language teaching in the curriculum merits further investigation. This is an area that absorbs a large chunk of our resources and has benefited little from our creativity. Language instruction is a poor relation; we all know we have to find it houseroom and feed it, but we seldom ask if it is happy.
All this has to do, I think, with a confusing fact about natural language: it is a symbolic capacity that is acquired, in most cases, without study. Every natural language is someone's mother tongue, and the intellectual efforts we exert on mother's knee, while undoubtedly intense, are not of the sort we undertake in college. To put this another way: modern languages (I shall come to dead languages later) are an odd element of higher education because they are known to be known by many who are hardly educated at all. In France even the little children speak French—in certain districts with a remarkably good accent. In language study we repair a partiality in our upbringing—that we were brought up in one language community rather than another. In this sense all modern language study is remedial. The process of learning the language puts us back into a kind of childlike state: we don't know the simplest things, like the words for bread and water. Languages, further, cannot be learned by intellectual effort; the process requires drill and other forms of repetitive practice. The necessary redundancy of the process is frustrating; languages come slowly, and we feel that we should already know these things; they are so simple and yet so frustratingly difficult. To know many languages is, of course, an extraordinary thing, but each modern language is in itself ordinary, and on its own home ground taken for granted.
It follows that language instruction is, within the academy, a relatively low-status operation. Good language teachers are hard to find, and we might expect them to be valued—but it is a fundamental sociological rule of the academy that prestige attaches, not to the ability to teach, but to the thing taught. All remedial instruction is low-status. Modern language teaching lacks that initiatory quality, that sense of being admitted to a circle of the instructed elect, which confers on the teacher a magic aura. We are grateful to good language teachers, as we are grateful to those who cook our meals and cut our hair, but we do not, except in a few cases of rare virtuosity, find them impressive. Language teaching is a service occupation within the academy.
This diagnosis is confirmed by the fact that the situation is completely different with the dead languages. In Greek and Latin, not to speak of Hittite and Akkadian, tenured faculty members routinely teach at the elementary level; indeed there is a not unfounded belief that few assistant professors know these languages well enough to teach them. These languages can be acquired only by study and are thus quite differently evaluated in relation to college work; the mass of unsystematic detail that must be mastered is not seen as a banality, as in a modern language, but admired as a philology, a secret code known only to the few. In the dead languages the language is the field, and prestige attaches primarily to philological competence itself rather than any use to which it is put.
A somewhat paradoxical corollary of this situation is that in the dead languages there is little language teaching as such. At Chicago we teach Greek grammar for three or four months—a quick trot through some standard textbook—and then settle down with the students to sentence-by-sentence review of texts. For most of them, this is all the language teaching they will ever get, even if they go on to the PhD. In the review-of-text format students work out a translation of the assigned passage, looking up words in the dictionary and puzzling out their construction; they then present this in class for correction. There is little or no attention to the language as a system, except as some particular example may lead the teacher to remind the student of a general rule or to impart some bit of syntactic lore. Students use commentaries, but these seldom distinguish between unique uses of words—in freshly coined metaphors, for example—and specialized but generally used meanings; neither do they distinguish between interpretations of particular phrases and the identification of idioms or between the interpretation of a particular construction and the discernment of a syntactic pattern. Students thus do not study the Greek language; if they are clever they pick it up while studying texts—which they in turn go on to teach in the same unsystematic fashion. Few, of course, reach this level. They do, however, have the satisfaction, if they major in classics, of having read in the original some ancient works. They are unlikely, unless they enter the profession, to retain much knowledge of the language in later life—except that, for reasons stated earlier, they may retain the ability to read Homer.
The classical languages are conceived not as productive, usable systems but as a body of texts available for study. Classical philology is the detailed knowledge of these texts, and the philologist is admired not so much for the ability to state a rule as to cite a parallel. For the same reason that the beautifully designed teaching programs of the modern languages have had so little influence on the teaching of classics, the teaching of classical language does not provide a useful intellectual model for the teaching of modern languages. Neither does classics provide a useful sociological model. The ancient texts have themselves a high prestige, and study of them confers prestige on the scholar. The languages of Racine and Goethe cannot confer the same prestige, since they are basically the same as the languages of Le Figaro and Der Stern .
The relatively low status of modern language teaching is structural, and we are stuck with it. No use to say it is difficult, important work; so is nursing, so is high school teaching, but this does not make nurses the equals of doctors or high school teachers the equals of college teachers. No doubt things should be otherwise, but they're not going to be. In all these cases there is a correlation between prestige and length of training—although it is hard to be sure that the difference in training is a cause of the difference in status rather than its consequence. The primary qualification for modern language teaching is knowledge of the language, and the preferred teachers are native speakers—who of course get no credit for knowing their own language. There is something to learn about how to teach a language but evidently not much; two years' supervised practice is more than most receive. Otherwise language teaching is assumed to be a gift—which we are delighted to come upon but unwilling to reward. The administration of modern language teaching within the university thus poses problems of equity, problems that are likely to be insoluble in the sense that each solution will generate specific dissatisfactions.
One solution is to have a separate language teaching staff. This solution was in effect tried at Chicago during the period of the independent college; the college French and Russian staffs taught language, while the graduate departments taught literature. The relationship (often one of hostility) between the two was then entangled in the generally difficult relations between college and divisions—which to some extent brought into the university the tensions, centering on prestige differential, that exist nationally between the high schools and the colleges. (Indeed the college of that period, which admitted students at sixteen or even fifteen, was partly a high school and recruited some of its faculty members, including some of its most gifted language teachers, directly from the laboratory school.) The faculty members in modern language areas at Chicago who remember those times generally refer to them as the Bad Old Days and look on it as an achievement that the college staffs were brought into the departments. Yet the university continues to be under pressure to hire specialized language teachers—mostly, now, in the form of senior lecturers. Senior lecturer, significantly enough, is not a faculty position (it has no voting powers in the senate), although senior lecturers have de facto tenure. (Two years' notice is required to terminate a senior lecturer, and since the post was invented there has not been one termination, at least not in the humanities.) Senior lecturers enjoy full faculty benefits, but there is an informal salary cap on the position, equivalent to a good assistant professorial salary. Senior lecturers currently teach or have recently taught French, German, Swedish, Russian, and Japanese at Chicago.
Senior lecturers are explicitly, that is, by statute, second-class citizens. Their relations with departments are unclear; generally they are invited to meetings but expected to stay out of questions of policy and recruitment except those related to their own language area. Nor are they the least advantaged language teachers. One of our professional schools had for many years on its staff as a lecturer a man, by all reports a gifted language teacher, who was ABD and made no progress toward a degree and whose work was unrecognized by the relevant department. He eventually died at his post, virtually unnoticed except by his students. Elsewhere we find a teacher of an oriental language: his teaching load is fifty percent higher than that of faculty members, his salary is low—and is funded on soft money—so that his year-by-year renewal is uncertain. He stays in this job because his only realistic alternative is to go back to Cairo. He is, in fact, a kind of “guest worker.”
Since language teaching is relatively low-status, language teachers tend to become an underclass. It is not clear why we find this troubling. We easily tolerate such status differentials in other areas—for instance, physical education. (Staff members at Chicago hold faculty titles and belong to the college faculty but are supervised not by the dean of the college but by the dean of students of the university.) Perhaps it is because language teachers, for all their marginal status, are centrally involved in the academic program of the humanities. Further, the courses that they teach become part of the major concentration of students who become majors in the language area—and good language teaching is the primary recruiter to the major, which is to say, the work of the department. All this suggests that they should somehow be full members of the faculty and of the department. Certainly the issues here, constitutional and sociological, deserve further exploration. But for my present purposes it is enough to observe that most faculty members consider the second-class status of language teachers as generally unsatisfactory. Each such appointment is somewhat apologetically proposed as an ad hoc solution to a special case. Yet since there are many special cases these appointments tend to accumulate, even when resisted as a matter of policy.
The alternative is a language staff that is an integral part of the faculty. One subsolution here is to make language teaching an intellectual career in its own right: it is after all a research area; there are professional organizations, journals, meetings, and so on; and one can acquire a solid professional reputation in the field. (Such a reputation outside the university is the only reliable foundation for full academic citizenship, at least at a university like ours.) For some individuals this has been an effective solution. If it is not generally effective it is only partly because the intellectual field is relatively low-status, like the activity it studies; language instruction is a problem in applied linguistics and suffers all the disabilities of the “applied” as against the “pure,” as well as the special disabilities abilities proper to all those applications known as education. More important, most of those qualified to teach languages do not want to make a career of language teaching and its theory; they are literary and historical scholars and want to develop their careers in those directions. The utopian solution proposes that all qualified persons take their turn at language teaching as a contribution to the community. This would spread the work around, so that it would not be a major distraction to anyone. I call this solution “utopian” because it involves the unreasonable expectation that the more powerful will cooperate on equal terms with the less powerful. We had for ten years a dean of the humanities at Chicago who believed in this solution; he is a master of the art of exhortation, but ten years of exhortation had in this sphere only marginal effect upon faculty behavior. And in any case there does seem to be something irrational about taking professors earning over fifty thousand a year away from work only they can do and assigning them tasks that could be equally competently performed by adjunct personnel making less than twenty.
The egalitarian solution to low-status activities is to assign them to the young, as the Mormons assigned stoop work to their children. Thus the work gets done, but its status does not characterize anybody; it is something everybody survives. This has been the most popular solution for language teaching. Actually this is two different solutions, since it involves two different groups of young people: assistant professors and graduate students.
Assistant professors are of course far more administrable than tenured faculty members; they can be assigned language teaching. They are unlikely, however, to receive much credit for it at tenure-review time—if only because it will be assumed that they will not do much of it after getting tenure. So the usual tension between teaching and research is exacerbated in the case of the language staff; their teaching is not even much connected with the research areas in which they will be reviewed. At institutions that do not normally promote their assistant professors this may seem less of a problem—the problem is felt by the individual candidate, who must find time while teaching to produce the kind of publications that will impress the next employer—but the professors may feel quite comfortable hiring young people, getting six years or so of language teaching out of them, and then replacing them with a new crop. At the University of Chicago, which as a matter of policy prefers to promote its assistant professors, there has been constant tension over this issue between the deans, who feel a responsibility for the career development of the young faculty members, and the professors, whose power is obviously increased by a policy of hiring new young people rather than promoting those we now have.
Graduate students, especially ABDs, may seem the ideal language instructors, and in fact Chicago now relies on them heavily in Romance, and to some extent also in German and Russian. They are after all being trained as teachers as well as being supported in their studies, and they can be paid the low rate typical of apprentices. And if they are properly selected and supervised, the quality of instruction can be good. On the other hand, there are tensions: it is not the best situation for students to be the employees of their teachers, and faculty members, pleased to have found low-priced, deferential subordinates, may be tempted to stretch out the years of service well beyond anything justifiable as an apprenticeship. Furthermore if students are to be trained as teachers, they will have to be supervised, which means finding a supervisor; this person will usually be either a senior lecturer or an assistant professor, who will then find no time for research.
In any case graduate students have the same problem as assistant professors; they are sent a double message by senior faculty members. They are assigned to teach languages and at the same time warned not to let this work distract them from the one thing that is of any importance: their research. Probably graduate students can tolerate this situation somewhat better than assistant professors, since they are not under the same up-or-out time constraints, and their expectations of happiness are in any event relatively low. Probably the best solution is to have a staff of ABDs supervised by a tenured member of the faculty—either by one of those rare professors with a professional interest in language teaching or else through some kind of rotation among competent members of the department. But such a solution can only be kept going by deans who are exceptionally tough in confronting requests and demands that the burden of language teaching be taken away from the senior faculty members. At the same time the deans will have the next-to-impossible task of seeing to it that appointments to the language staffs are made on merit and not as a matter of patronage. The senior faculty's policy on language teaching will, most of the time, reduce to a quite understandable quest for power without responsibility—“the privilege of the harlot throughout the ages,” as Stanley Baldwin once said.
All this is quite familiar. My only original proposition in this paper—at least I think it is original—is this: our curricular problem with modern languages has a political source, namely, that these languages are taught by the powerless. In the academy power follows prestige (rather than the other way around, as elsewhere), and where prestige is denied, thought is inhibited. To consign an academic task to the powerless is to ensure that its practitioners will be as intellectually limited as practically unambitious.
If I were a cultural dictator, I would get the universities out of the language teaching business. I would like a tough proficiency requirement as a condition of entrance and a tougher one as a condition of graduation, and I would leave it to the students to figure out how to meet it. The result, I predict, would be a rapid expansion and transformation of the existing private-sector language teaching business to meet the needs of those who must satisfy the university requirements. Our graduate students could work for these independent language teaching agencies instead of us, and our students could prepare for our exams without course credit. Instructor and students alike could be focused on linguistic competence and nothing else. This solution at the very least would solve some of the problems of associate deans—and the problems of associate deans, after all, are, one way or another, the problems of us all.
The author is Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Classics at the University of Chicago. This article is reprinted with the permission of the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning. It first appeared in The Governance of Foreign Language Teaching and Learning: Proceedings of a Symposium, Princeton, New Jersey, 9–11 October 1987, ed. Peter C. Patrikis (New Haven: Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning, 1988).
© 1989 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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