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I SPEAK to you here as an administrator, and I do so without shame. I will not begin with a joke that deprecates department chairs or deans, because I believe that good administrators improve the quality of institutions and of institutional life. In addition, I am sufficiently shameless to make a prediction about the future. I hope to convince you that devoting time in the next two years to a special kind of departmental planning will determine whether your department has strong language programs at the turn of the century, particularly if you're at a public college or university. Now, I'll understand if you want to take a moment and check my credentials as a fortune-teller. Who am I to ask you to spend valuable time on a special kind of planning, when you've already completed routine projections of departmental needs and now have a stack of journals to read and an article that needs just a little more work before it can go to an editor. In fact, you will surely say, you're already overcommitted and overworked, and so are most of the other members of your department. Besides, you've seen more than your fair share of useless academic planning.
I don't blame you for being cautious. I too am uneasy when anyone, especially anyone in higher education, projects that this or that is going to happen. I've been around long enough to remember the forecasts of faculty shortages in the 1970s.
Even though predictions are perilous, few administrators are effective without them. In fact, making them comes with the territory. Whenever I try to think about the future, I find myself torn between two common wisdoms that appear to contradict each other. How are we to reconcile the belief that “it is not possible to step twice into the same river” with the conviction that “the more things change, the more they remain the same”?
Well, I have concluded that, in the context of academic administration, both statements are true. The particulars of situations vary, and so we never can step twice into the same river. But other things do not change in quite the same way; for example, the realities of academic bureaucracy are amazingly stable. In part, therefore, I predict the need for special planning that is aimed directly at deans and provosts and that underscores their obligations to
As you can see, I do not rely on a crystal ball. I base my prediction on decision-making practices in colleges and universities. Furthermore, I am betting on the continuing influence of national associations of higher education, which are frequented by deans, provosts, and presidents. With some regularity, these associations-the Association of American Universities, the Association of American Colleges, the American Council on Education, and others-identify current issues of importance to higher education and point to particular ways of resolving them. Along with the public and private foundations, the associations establish a set of national priorities, a kind of meta-agenda, against which a fair number of deans, provosts, and presidents measure developments on their campuses. Being aware of this agenda is useful in judging the issues that are likely to seem important to your dean.
Not surprisingly, funding has emerged as a major problem in the 1990s. Universities wonder how they can sustain widely recognized achievements in research, which, in the sciences, are increasingly difficult to continue, as laboratory equipment wears out and the cost of replacing it increases. And they are concerned about projected shortages of PhDs and the need to replace faculty members later in the decade, in a totally different kind of market. I believe academic departments will be competing for resources in the 1990s in what is likely to be, not only a harsher fiscal climate, but one that, in many institutions, is less respectful of humanities disciplines and even of the need for academic departments. Having a good liberal arts program may not be good enough when a university tries to maintain productivity in the sciences and to attract new, scarce faculty members in many, if not most, fields. If, in four or five years, your department will have a fair number of tenured faculty members nearing retirement, how tempting it will be for a dean or provost, pressed by internal conflicts over resources, to think of phasing out or combining your unit with another retirement-weakened department rather than rebuilding two departments.
My purpose here is to help you save your dean from confronting this unpleasant temptation. I propose that you convene your department as soon as possible to organize a special kind of planning venture that will allow you to identify for your dean the valuable modern language and literature programs your institution now has and to outline the faculty positions that must be replaced, if these programs are to continue. With diligence and luck, within six months, your department will have completed its study and written a persuasive staffing plan that proposes phasing in some number of faculty appointments as early in the decade as possible, before the market changes. (I understand that many institutions have already begun this kind of planning.)
Now, I can't guarantee that any particular dean will be impressed by any particular staffing plan. But I believe that certain kinds of plans, like certain kinds of offers, are hard to refuse. That's what I'd like to turn my attention to now-the character of a persuasive staffing plan that will be hard for deans to refuse in the next two years, a plan, incidentally, that may be easy to ignore later in the decade, because the national agenda will have changed.
This brings me back to the meta-agenda for higher education I mentioned before. Because money is not the only nationally recognized issue, modern language departments are in an unusually good position to compete for scarce resources just now. The need for encouraging the study of foreign languages is widely recognized and has been endorsed as a priority by the influential American Council on Education. Their 1989 statement, What We Can't Say Can Hurt Us: A Call for Foreign Language Competence by the Year 2000 , begins:
This new call to action on foreign language competence is addressed to the leaders of American higher education-the presidents and chancellors, academic vice presidents, provosts and deans who are responsible for giving academic direction to our colleges and universities. It calls for action by all who are shocked and dismayed by reports of the level of ignorance of Americans regarding the rest of the world and those who are concerned by our continued inability to communicate with other people using their native language. (1)
The policy statement makes three general recommendations. It calls for “continuity in language learning throughout the educational process”; it stresses “language competence as a vital education outcome”; and it urges “institutional initiatives that will facilitate the process of language learning for students and faculty” (4–7).
Also indicative of the national support for foreign language study is the new initiative at the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is titled Special Opportunity for Foreign Language Study and is being administered by the education division. I am pleased to say that the MLA played a small part in bringing some of the needs of the field to the attention of the NEH. Over a year ago at the MLA office, six MLA representatives (Richard I. Brod, MLA staff; Andrew P. Debicki, Univ. of Kansas; Judith Ginsberg, MLA staff; Claire J. Kramsch, Univ. of California, Berkeley; Jean A. Perkins, Swarthmore Coll.; and Judith Ryan, Harvard Univ.) met with Lynne V. Cheney, head of the NEH; Celeste Colgan, the NEH deputy chair; and Jerry Martin, another NEH staff member, to discuss grant programs in foreign languages.
If Congress approves the President's budget, $2.5 million will be available for the support of foreign language projects in the education division of the NEH. This is a dramatic increase over the $250,000 previously available. I hope that departments throughout the country will take advantage of this extraordinary opportunity to strengthen existing programs and develop new efforts.
Well, you might wish to object at this point: If foreign language study is so high on the national agenda, why do we have to worry about planning? If national associations are as influential as you say they are and we're doing a good job, won't the dean look out for us? My answer is: “Maybe, but I wouldn't count on it.” In my view, waiting for others to fend for us in a period of limited institutional resources is risky. It might only result in benign neglect, but it's not likely to bring support from a dean who is pressured by other departments that know exactly what they want. Your deans may be inclined to support modern language departments now, but you will have to tell them what you need and why your college or university should continue to invest in the department.
And so I urge you and the members of your department to take the initiative and develop a staffing plan for the 1990s that makes clear your department's strengths, outlines faculty retirements and other likely staffing changes, and proposes phasing in needed replacements gradually during the decade. Your staffing plan should aim not only at describing your department's contributions to the institution but also at making your dean look good. If the plan succeeds, the dean will gladly forward it to the provost or president and will include sections of it in his or her annual report.
Well, what makes a staffing plan persuasive? First, a few points about the process you adopt. It should be as inclusive as possible. The plan should not be a surprise to the person who will receive it. If your department initiates its own planning activity, you should tell the dean what you're doing and seek advice as you proceed. Try to meet with the dean at least once along the way to discuss a draft of the plan. Ideally, the dean will make suggestions that you can incorporate in the draft and will comment on the timing of the new appointments. As you can see, the dean's involvement on this point is critical, and support of the effort is a lot more likely if you keep your requests reasonable and realistic in terms of the institution's fiscal situation. This is not the time to be shy, but it is also not the time to ask for everything the department would like to have.
Obviously, the department must also be involved in the study and in development of the plan. Even good plans that are read by sympathetic deans are likely to fail if key members of the department object to them. Ultimately, the department's support is necessary if the plan is to gain credibility within the institution. This means that you have to give considerable thought to faculty participation. The quality of the process employed is critical.
What should the plan focus on? I conceive of this kind of planning effort and the document that emerges as different from traditional departmental reviews in its audience and its functions. At the heart of this staffing plan is a description of what the department does. Although the major purpose of the plan is to ensure the replacement of needed faculty lines in a timely way, another strong reason for developing a plan at this time is to remind the dean of the department's importance. The message you want to convey is this: In the light of a national call for foreign language competence, our college or university regularly enrolls X hundreds or thousands of students in Y number of courses and Z number of language programs. The department's methods reflect the latest or best thinking in the field-and you should name the methods so the dean can brag about them; the faculty is productive and professionally active; and the extracurricular activities the department sponsors and administers enhance the quality of campus life for many undergraduate students.
The description should identify what your department's strengths are in relation to those of other geographically relevant or competing institutions. To produce these comparisons, which I believe are likely to provide the best arguments for sustaining and developing your programs, you and your colleagues will have to investigate other language programs in your city, state, and region. You will also want to make use of the MLA's databases and surveys for information about modern language departments across the nation. You will then be able to make comparative statements something like the following. We have a distinguished graduate program in French or German and fine undergraduate courses in Spanish or French or German or Russian that are not matched by any college or university in the city, state, or region. Or, we have the only study-abroad program in Spanish in the state. Or, we are unique in maintaining a range of language programs; other departments that look like us in size and structure are unable to do so. Statements that focus on the unique contributions of your department underscore the underlying message or theme of the document: The department's modern language and literature programs are important institutional assets. They deserve ongoing institutional encouragement, recognition, and support.
The staffing plan should also show how the department's language programs help the institution carry out its mission. Is yours an urban university with a commitment to respond to the needs of the local student population and to the needs of local, state, or regional business and industry? How do the department's programs help the institution meet its mission? Further-more, the plan should make clear how various language courses and programs support majors in other departments within the college or university. Collecting this kind of information will bring you and your colleagues into contact with faculty members in other departments and schools. Set up friendly lunch meetings to explore relations and connections-and continue the lunches after you've completed your report.
Finally, you should describe the department's goals for the future, its projections of new activities-perhaps its program for preparing schoolteachers should be expanded to meet growing enrollments in the state's schools that result from new language requirements; perhaps a less commonly taught language should be added to the department's offerings so that the institution can respond to new regional and national needs; perhaps the department's graduate program should be modified to meet the demand for more PhDs who are prepared for both scholarship and introductory language teaching. Your plan might also refer to the NEH special opportunity and the possibilities you envision for external support of departmental initiatives and improvements in conjunction with other departments within the university or with local or state school language programs.
I'm sorry to add to your work load, but I think deans need reassurance occasionally, and the planning document I propose should be reassuring. Moreover, it can encourage the members of your department to have a better understanding of the department's strengths and to take pride in what they have accomplished; it can also reveal areas that might be improved. As a sign of good faith, I offer myself as a general reader of draft staffing plans. If you think the idea worth-while, ADFL might serve as a clearinghouse, and you can share drafts and experiences with one another. I do think the moment is ours. I propose we make good use of it.
The author is Executive Director of the Modern Language Association. This article is based on a paper presented at the 1990 ADFL Seminar East at Penn State University, University Park.
© 1991 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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