|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
EDUCATIONAL reformers in foreign languages are swimming very much against the tide of reduced institutional budgets. Attempts to reform foreign language teaching are usually expensive, involving, for example, smaller classes, more time for teaching and testing, more instructors, more institutional space and equipment. Faculty members wanting such improvements find themselves urged on all sides to seek “outside funding.” This is the current magic spell, and people who never thought of themselves as financial wizards are turning, with calculators and high hopes, to a quest for the outside funding that will help them perform educational miracles for their students. It will also provide a little extra soft money for their administrators, who will then look more kindly on their departments-no small consideration in view of the low place that many foreign language departments occupy on the institutional totem pole.
It is not my intention to disparage either the quest or its motives. I am well aware of the various ways in which a department benefits when it brings in a grant to its institution. Getting a grant, however, is not quite the same thing as actually doing the grant-funded work. I have had my own positive and negative experiences with grant-funded projects directed toward educational reform, curricular and pedagogical. Several times, in more than one institution, I have been in the position of trying to carry out the plan of work that I myself had written into a proposal for an institutional grant. I have also had occasion to read numerous grant proposals written by others, and to observe the work done under grants at various institutions. There are, I have noted, many guidelines available for people who want to get grants, but grants offices and funding agencies do not usually publish guidelines for carrying out successfully, and with lasting effect, those activities that the grants are supposed to support. As a small contribution, then, toward filling this gap, my comments and suggestions will be specifically addressed to people whose primary concern is to carry out educational reform. I am not addressing people whose primary concern is to raise money. My interest is in bolstering the integrity of educational reform and in protecting the time and energy of the would-be reformer, not in advancing the financial interests of departments or of educational institutions per se.
The columnist William Safire, in a recent discussion of the expression “soft money,” quotes from a letter by James D. McCawley, professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago: “Soft money in an academic setting is money (especially from an outside source) that is available only for a limited period of time and carries no commitment of expenditures after that period is over.…” This takes us immediately to the heart of the matter. Outside funding agencies do indeed usually provide money for a limited period. Long-term commitment to the project is supposed to come from the institution receiving the grant. The guidelines proposed by the NEH's Division of Education Programs, for example, contain the specific suggestion that letters of support be written “demonstrating the kinds of planning and types of institutional commitment that stand behind a project, including an institution's commitment to providing the resources necessary to secure the long-term benefits of the project” (25).
Most proposals in fact contain some demonstration of such commitment. But there is a catch in this for you, if you happen to be a proposal writer new to the business of grant getting. When you go to your administration with a good proposal that stands a chance of being funded, you are liable to receive support. Not too often will anyone say to you, “I'm very sorry, but honestly speaking, even if you get half a million dollars now, I don't think we'll be able to support your kind of work over the long haul.” Administrators will write letters declaring their support; commitments will be made to sustain your work after the grant is over. Such commitments are no doubt made in good faith, but three years down the line these same committed administrators might already have left your institution; if they are still there, they will in any case probably be just as financially strapped then as they are now, if not more so, and they simply will not have the $50,000, or whatever it takes, to continue faculty released time, or extra adjunct funding, or student mentoring, or oral-proficiency testing, or any of a dozen things that your project will still need after its fledgling run of two or three years. Of course, they will assure you that they support very strongly what you have done, that they are absolutely committed to it. They certainly hope you will be able to continue giving your time to it, but-well-what about seeking some more outside funding?
This is a worst-case scenario, but it does touch on some of the facts of life in the world of soft money. It is entirely possible (though by no means inevitable) for individual project participants and departments ultimately to suffer rather than to benefit from a grant-funded project. The project participants, for example, will often have invested enormous amounts of time and energy in a project, far more than was paid for by the released time under the grant, very much to the detriment of their own scholarly research. If it then appears that there will be little long-term effect on the institution and that most things will in fact quickly revert to the status quo ante, then considerable bitterness may result. Individuals may withdraw from any kind of curriculum planning and pedagogical research or, in extreme cases, go into early retirement. Instead of enhancing the long-term educational development of the institution, the grant will actually have impoverished it. In financial terms, too, the last state of a department may be worse than the first. If its budget, for example, has been supplemented for some years with “soft money” and the chair has eased off in the usual fight for a piece of the institutional budgetary pie, then the department may find its budget now lower than the budgets of sister departments that had no outside funding. Furthermore students may have been attracted into newly developed programs and enjoyed the smaller classes, extra sessions, more oral work, or whatever the grant provided, only to be disappointed and quite annoyed when these disappear.
Otto W. Johnston points simply and effectively to the dangers of raising expectations even with small-scale grants such as the $6,000 Exxon grants awarded to institutions for the introduction of the Rassias, or Dartmouth, model of foreign language teaching. The model requires at least $3,750 annually on an ongoing basis simply to train and pay the undergraduates needed to conduct drill sessions. Johnston comments:
Bietet nach Ablauf der Stipendiumsfrist die Schulverwaltung dem Exxon-Stipendiaten infolge finanzieller Schwierigkeiten keine weitere Unterstützung, so wird dieser seine Anfänger für Fremdsprache und Lehrtechnik begeistert haben, um sie nur desto tiefer enttäuschen zu müssen, da er dann zur Einstellung des intensiven Sprachmodells gezwungen ist. (43)
If the administration, because of financial difficulties, does not support the recipient of the Exxon grant after the grant runs out, then this recipient will have aroused in beginning students an enthusiasm for the foreign language and the teaching system, only to disappoint them more deeply since h e will be forced to abandon the intensive language model. (My trans.)
Rassias himself, Johnston points out, avoids this problem by applying his genius for publicity and propaganda to such things as the mobilization of parent support. You, however, while you might have been awarded one grant, do not necessarily regard yourself as a public relations genius on the order of Rassias, any more than you see yourself as a financial wizard. Yet rather than face such unpleasant consequences as disappointed colleagues and disappointed students, you may find yourself on a fund-raising treadmill, obliged to keep on drumming up support and money to keep your department in the sunlight of administrative favor and to sustain activities that your institution ought to be sustaining. If you follow this path, you might even end up as a full-time administrator!
There are still many of us, even among chairs of departments, who do not regard administration as the pinnacle of life's activities. Even so, as scholars and teachers, we can do some very fine things for our students and set in motion some very useful long-term changes with the aid of outside funding. I would like therefore to offer a short list of practical suggestions, not for people who want to build their careers on “grantsmanship” but for scholars and teachers who want to make one particular grant-funded curricular project work and give it at least a fighting chance of making a lasting impact on the life of an institution.
1. Look to the end of the project before you start. Look farther than that happy moment when the large check arrives, farther even than the years while it is being spent, and into the great beyond when there is no money left. Be honest with yourself. Will the project still need major financial support? Are there ways of setting it up so that it can be supported by normal institutional budgets? If not, think twice about doing it.
2. If you are absolutely convinced that there is something you really want to do, remember that to make a major curricular project work, you need, first and foremost, genuine support from a number of your colleagues, including at least some senior people who carry weight and are not dependent on the goodwill of others for such things as promotion and tenure. These must be people who can and will risk the ire of other established people who do not want to make changes.
3. Your colleagues in the project, including the senior ones, must be prepared to put in real time. No matter how good the “plan of work” is, it will not succeed if, for example, the faculty members who commit themselves in advance to the project are more committed to the idea of getting released time than to doing the work that you want them to do in that released time. People often find themselves doing much more work on grant-funded projects than they would be doing on a normal schedule. They have to want to do this if the project is to succeed.
4. If you are going to rely heavily on the work of junior faculty members, you, as project director, have to be in a position to assure them that their curricular work will actually be recognized in the reward structure of your particular institution. If junior colleagues are spending hundreds of hours, for example, training student mentors, working with part-time teachers, learning to be oral-proficiency testers, testing students, developing experimental writing assignments, or doing whatever your project requires, they cannot at the same time be writing scholarly articles based on purely literary research. If your institution is not likely to reward intensive pedagogical work, then it is essentially unprincipled, and in any case unrealistic, to design a project that requires such work from untenured people. It is up to you to recognize this, because your administrators will not necessarily admit it when they see the chance of a big grant. Later, however, when the money has gone, they may well demand independent publications in a literary field from those young people who have put in three years of work on your project and who may now be faced with negative evaluations by faculty committees. Committees on tenure and promotion are not always concerned about outside grants and administrative commitments, but they are almost always concerned about publications lists.
5. If you are the chair of a department, as well as project director, you may be well placed to involve members of your own department in projects of curricular reform and even to protect them in the reward structure. If, however, your project is an interdepartmental one, then you have to be very sure that the chairs of the other named departments seriously support it, and will really put their backs into getting their colleagues' support instead of being quietly unenthusiastic about it behind your back. You have to remember that other chairs, being only human, may not be totally ecstatic at your success in getting a grant and involving members of their departments in the work. After all, they need their people to teach their regular courses. Your fine plans for reform may begin to look more like an intrusion on their turf, and in a sense they probably are. While it is nice, therefore, to have a grant in your name only, you might find it worthwhile to have those other chairs involved as codirectors. Sharing the glory when the money arrives means ultimately sharing the responsibility of getting the work done, and there may come a time when you will be very glad of some division of labor.
6. Avoid, however, that division of labor which makes you project director while someone else retains the title of principal investigator, someone higher up in the administrative hierarchy, such as a dean or provost who might not even be in the field of foreign language study. It is advisable to establish your position and title before the proposal is ever submitted. You have some real power at this point-namely, the power not to write and submit the proposal. Once the money is there, it is too late to negotiate a position. All power is then in the hands of the named principal investigator who holds the purse strings. You may be named project director and find yourself in the unenviable position of having very little power and all the responsibility.
7. From the first stage of drafting the grant proposal, think about the budget. Do not leave this to grants officers or deans. They may know more about grant budgeting, but they are not going to be doing the work. One line of reasoning from them might be, for example: “This foundation won't give you that amount of money, so ask for less.” This is the reasoning of someone who wants a grant. You, on the other hand, want to get the work done, so your answer has to be: “If I can't ask for the money I need, I don't want the grant.” If you find yourself with an underfunded project on your hands, you and a few dedicated colleagues will end up subsidizing it with your own time. This is essentially a short-term solution and does not set the right framework for long-term changes. As is sometimes said in the business world, a small business subsidized by its owner's time is essentially bankrupt.
8. Before you submit a proposal, find out precisely how grants work in your institution. For example, you might apply for a grant for curricular reform in foreign languages and ask for one-sixth released time for one associate professor with an annual six-course load and a salary of $40,000. This means that the professor will have one course off in a year to work on the grant-funded project. The granting agency may then give the institution approximately one-sixth of that person's salary ($6,666). The institution will hire one adjunct at a salary of, let us say, $1,800 to teach a section of elementary language in the professor's place. Now, you do not have to be a financial wizard to see that the difference between 6,666 and 1,800 is 4,866. Before you agree to run a project, it is very important to find out what will happen to that figure of 4,866 and all the other 4,866 figures provided under the released-time section of the budget. Will at least some of this revert back to you as project director, or perhaps to a dean who will guarantee to put it back into the project? If so, it will help you immeasurably. If not, perhaps you should “just say no” to the privilege of submitting the grant proposal. University administrators know that the money in the released-time budget is by no means all at your disposal. The foundations also know it. It is the new and unsuspecting project director who does not always know it. You need to find out such things in advance and to count very carefully the number of released-time courses you can actually offer your faculty. Time is going to be the crucial factor in getting the work done, and you should not be deluded about how much time will actually be fundable.
9. Make sure before you apply, or at the latest in the first moments of administrative euphoria after the grant is announced, that you have a room in which to conduct the project. Most projects involve an administrative assistant. Where is this person going to work? Where are you going to keep the masses of paper, the cassettes, and everything else that accumulates during the project? A grant-funded project takes on a physical life of its own. Think ahead to the end of the funding. Where is all this material going to end up? Is the space contingent on continued grant funding? Will your project group fall apart if there is no central place to house meetings and materials?
10. And finally, although it is not a good idea to accept the position of project director while a higher-level administrator is principal investigator, you do nevertheless need real support from above. You need at least one high-level administrator with courage, integrity and conviction who will stand up for you and run interference at all political levels of the institution, supporting, for example, your curriculum in faculty committees and your people in the reward system. If you have no such person in your administration, then probably you might as well put your time into the seventeenth-century lyric and not try to go it alone in educational reform.
Turning then, on the topic of administrative support, to a few of the broader questions, I would like, on the positive side, to say that there are some high-level university administrators who genuinely want to bring about educational reform and who seek outside funding for that purpose, not just to balance their budgets or to increase their own “slush funds.” Such administrators are absolutely crucial in educational reform, given the unfortunately top-heavy power structure of today's universities. The worst-case scenario described earlier can be turned around by enlightened administrators who look at the work done under a grant and take seriously their institutional responsibilities to that grant. I might quote Rhonda Kekke from Kirkwood Community College in Iowa, who has been involved in the Advancing the Humanities Project undertaken by the American Association of Community and Junior Colleges and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. She remarked at the National Humanities Conference in March 1989, “We tend to begin by thinking we will simply improve a humanities course, then discover that we must first strengthen our faculty, and in the end what has been accomplished is the building of an institution.” This is the kind of impetus that grant-funded curriculum development ought to be giving to our institutions. We are facing a major educational crisis in the United States. Overcrowded classes and often transient adjunct and graduate-student teachers pose enormous financial and logistic problems in our foreign language departments. Such problems defy easy solution and can hardly be touched by short-term measures. And yet there are some marvelous opportunities at hand for the reform of our curriculum. At my own college, under a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, we have conducted some very interesting research and pedagogical experiments, from the elementary level of language teaching to the end of the literature major, using the ACTFL proficiency-rating scale. We could not have done this without outside funding. The grant not only provided us with some released time but gave a form of professional legitimacy to the fact of our spending time on pedagogy and curricular reform instead of on literary research. In providing such legitimacy alone, outside funding agencies perform a very great service to the academy, which, to its shame, has not yet really found an internal way of legitimizing the expenditure of significant amounts of extra time on teaching.
Most grant-funded educational projects in fact do give some faculty members the opportunity to do certain kinds of thinking that they would not otherwise have done. Sometimes, as in our own recent project, this experience changes their whole mind-set in regard to teaching. It might be argued that this is enough. If some individuals learn, and change, what more can one ultimately expect? One can, I think, in these times of crisis, expect more. In times of famine, it is not good enough to say that some are fed.
And so I end with a suggestion for the grant-funding agencies themselves. They give money for a limited period of time. That is understood. But they could help committed educational reformers at the receiver institutions if they were to put a lot more concrete effort into ensuring that the commitments made by those institutions were actually met. The so-called hands-off policy of some foundations may look like generosity. It is in fact generous to those who organize the financial affairs of an institution. It puts into the hands of administrators extra money that they may legitimately use as they see fit. This enhances the already considerable ability of university administrations to function in the manner of imperial courts where faculty members play the roles of fawning courtiers, vying with each other and petitioning for favors. Project participants who simply want to do what they said they would do in their grant proposal often experience the free hand of the foundation less as generosity and more as desertion. Agencies would be doing a great favor to genuine educational reformers if they made it standard practice to conduct full-scale evaluations of projects, not only at the end of funding but five and ten years later. Such practical demonstration of concern for the long view might cause institutions to be more wary of making commitments and more serious about the commitments they make. The desperately needed funds might be more likely to go to faculty members and administrators who see that the real commitment in accepting outside funding for curricular reform is a commitment to the long-term rebuilding of their own institutions and of the educational system of this country.
The author is Professor of German at Hunter College and the Graduate School, City University of New York. This article is based on her presentation at ADFL Seminar West, 15–17 June 1989, in Northridge, California.
Johnston, Otto W. “Lehrdynamik und Verwaltungsproblematik der Dartmouth Methode.” Die Unterrichtspraxis 15 (I982): 36–45.
National Endowment for the Humanities. Division of Education Programs. Guidelines and Application Instructions. Washington: NEH, 1987.
Safire, William. “On Language.” New York Times Magazine 16 Apr. 1989: 13–14.
© 1990 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
|
|---|
|
|
|
