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IF THE title of my paper sounds truculent in the style of today's automobile bumper stickers, that is quite voluntary. Despite negative voices both inside and outside our profession (e.g., Charles Sykes, in Profscam ), I am happy being a professor of French even as I recognize that foreign languages and literatures are usually considered the poor relation of the university family. I declare my pride not with any hubris but rather with the intention of inspiring “professor” pride in all of us. For in the word professor I hear resonances of related terms, namely, profession, and professional, and of all they imply about quality, high standards, achievement, competence, and dignity. In short, pride in who we are and what we do.
To reach the level of bumper-sticker consciousness, however, we have far to travel. To my mind there are at least two paths to follow, and colleagues in other disciplines can guide us along both of them. From those in areas like theater and music, we must learn the value of performance, since an important part of our professional life takes place on a stage, either the classroom or the speaker's podium. From those in the sciences, where research is often collective and cooperative, we must learn teamwork, because we humanists are solitary, working in the silence of libraries and alone in front of typewriters, computer terminals, or even plain paper—“le vide papier que sa blancheur défend,” as Mallarmé, the poet of isolation, puts it. Performance and teamwork may not be the first words that come to mind when we think of the foreign languages, yet that do have something important to teach us about professionalism and our profession.
Performance speaks to the verbal communication skills that we teach in the classroom and that we ourselves demonstrate in committee activities, college meetings, and faculty senates, where our participation, whether written or oral, reflects on our discipline. Equally pertinent to the question of our campus image, teamwork focuses on how we function within the university community, our cooperation with other departments and even with the higher administration, both as executive officers and as individual faculty members.
We are professors of literature, of the word. We deal with words when we write and when we teach. We are, one would expect, experts with words. They are the very stuff of our professional life, especially for those of us in foreign languages who have developed these verbal skills in another idiom as well. Speaking out is very much a performance, one given either to our students or to our colleagues. But do we really recognize the crucial importance of our performances and behave as if we do? Consider, then, what an outsider might observe at our professional meetings, at the MLA convention, for example, where eminent representatives of the foreign languages “perform” annually. Hunched over the podium and unable to make eye contact with their audience, speakers race inaudibly through their texts in unnaturally pitched voices; others, too nervous to stand, choose to sit and speak to the floor, eyes glued to the page in front of them, their words not carrying beyond the first now of seats. Mumbling into a microphone and stumbling over the paper they have themselves written but never read, these “professionals” may be highly qualified in the matter they profess, but they are sorely deficient in their manner of professing it. Why is the oral performance we hear at such meetings so inferior to the written text we read in our journals? Why are so many teachers and communicators inept in the very skills we might expect them to exemplify? Focusing on the question of professional status and dignity, we should ask ourselves how long we can survive the kind of comic reporting that the New York Times dishes out to the MLA every time the convention comes to town. Our other professional meetings escape such treatment not because they are better but because they are neither as large nor as visible. Like John Houseman (aka Professor Kingman) pitching Smith Barney, the MLA earns its derisive coverage. Other language and literature groups are, it seems, beneath even contempt.
I have elaborated this either amusing or depressing description of foreign language professors only to frame a larger question: if we behave this way in a situation that we cite in seeking promotion and salary increases, how then do we perform on less prestigious stages like our classrooms? If we not only lack a flair for standing before an audience, but take no joy in doing so, how can we expect to succeed in the daily encounters that constitute the essence of our profession? How will we face the reviews of those students who will remember our performances long into the future? These questions are critical because our former students, happy or unhappy with how we have acted (in both senses) before them, will be assigning us real grades in the future. More and more universities are thinking of students as “clients” and measuring “customer satisfaction.”
Even as you nod and smile in agreement, you are saying to yourself, “But he exaggerates!” Of course there are brilliant speakers whose scholarly papers are also riveting dramatic performances. But let us be honest: they are the exceptions. Allow me one personal anecdote. A number of years ago I was giving a paper at a national meeting. I had eighty slides to illustrate a fifteen-minute talk. I clicked through my slides—all of which were, not accidentally, in the correct order and facing in the right direction—without interrupting my reading, since they were meant as visual parallels to complement but not to interrupt my spoken discourse. Earlier that day, at another session, I had listened to a speaker who used three slides in his presentation. Learning over the podium, he peered at each in turn, took off his glasses, squinted, returned to his text, rechecked the slide, lost his place, and had to reread before coming again to the sentence where he would gesture haltingly at the screen. His performance was accepted as normal and ordinary. When my talk was over, the session organizer, who had been more than a bit skeptical when I arrived with my already loaded carrousel tray, said simply, “That was … slick!” His pause was significant, his adjective pronounced with both disdain and surprise. Yes, I had prepared and even practiced my presentation; yes, I had worked on the coordination of slides and text so that their synchronization appeared effortless. That word slick denigrated precisely the professional performance I intended to give. That left-handed compliment speaks volumes about our attitude toward competence. We are uneasy with professionalism; we enjoy the academic version of the noble savage, the rustic genius, the crude boeotian ill at ease in the sophisticated world. Quite simply and simplemindedly we have romanticized the absent-minded professor—sincere, inept, and quite “out of it”—as an ideal preferred to all that is polished and prepared, to all that is, in one damning word, professional.
True, we all know that students enjoy any evidence of our failings. I wish I could deconstruct the professor as noble savage and demonstrate that the fumbling and stumbling, the failure to comprehend the simplest technology, and the lack of rehearsal disguise some deeper strategy, some clever attempt to disarm a skeptical public with feigned down-home naturalness. But that I fear would be hyperbole.
My point in all this is that our performances influence any assessment of our professional worthiness. We are now facing challenges that will determine the future of our profession. Stating it in the bluntest terms, I do not think that we can continue to present so sorry a spectacle and still except to enjoy any respect. More than respect: in these difficult times (this line was first written before financial havoc broke loose in January 1991, forcing many of us to make immediate and serious recisions in our current budgets, with threats of more to follow), when board and tuition in the Ivy League can be higher than the national median income, we are talking about funding from state and federal legislators, enrollments from potential students and tuition from their parents, endowments from friends and gifts from alumni—otherwise known as those students who watched us perform in their classrooms. We are talking about our status in the eyes, the hearts, and the wallets of the public that pays us. We are talking about our livelihoods, our salaries. Our professional dilemma is clear-cut. Do we want to remain absent-minded professors, that butt of sophomoric humor, or do we want to be recognized and rewarded as competent professionals? Will we perpetuate a romantic image of ourselves as comically but lovably inept, or will we accept a classical norm that expects hard work and respects a job well done? I am not calling for miracles, nor do I expect all of us to become media stars. We do, however, owe our profession a minimum level, albeit a high one, of craftsmanship and competence.
Fortunately, I have no wonder program for accomplishing reforms. I have no curriculum changes to advocate, no mandatory classes in public speaking to propose for our graduate students, no remedial lessons for those of us with tenure. We can take heart that some academics, even without a reform movement, have already traded in negative images for positive ones. Scientists are regarded as hardworking and are cited favorably in the media; colleagues in such unlikely places as colleges of education are valued enough for their professional expertise to be hired by business as consultants. But we in the humanities have by and large failed to explain to the outside world what we do as professor professionals. And to ourselves, I might add. Long considered to be at the core of the humanities, historians continue to desert us and flock to the banner of the social sciences.
I claim, however, that we as single individuals can make a difference within our own limited spheres. Change can begin with ourselves. First, we have to recognize that problems exist and not dismiss attempts to rectify abuses. Next, we have to identify real and practical solutions. How will each of us approach our next opportunity to read a scholarly paper? How much will we as chairs encourage our younger colleagues to master the skills of effective presentation? And if they do, how will we reward them? When we recognize sessions ourselves, will we take performance criteria into consideration as we accept and reject proposals? As we participate in university affairs and governance, will our verbal contributions reflect positively on the foreign languages? Most important, how much professional consciousness, how much extra preparation and effort will we bring back to our classrooms, where, in effect, we perform for an audience that is often forgotten or taken for granted? The lectures of the fathers will be visited upon the sons. Although my terms here are gender-specific, they are in no way intended to exclude women from the fate that surely awaits all of us if we fail to teach well.
On a more positive note, we in the foreign languages should recognize that we are offering the kind of education that can only become more and more valuable in these modern times, when illiteracy (I mean the raw inability to read, not inadequacy in the niceties of interpretation) is growing and communication skills are in increasing demand in the marketplace and industry. Almost inevitably, given our subject matter and the limited enrollments in our classes, we engage in intensive personal instruction. Our classes emphasize the difficulties of communication, the nuances of language, the slipperiness of meaning and understanding. We oblige our students to write and to speak out loud, to present and defend their ideas in front of others, in the give-and-take that is only negotiated by individuals talking to one another. These skills, as rudimentary as they may be, are not being taught elsewhere on our campuses. What we do cannot be done in large lecture halls or with multiple-choice, passive-recognition examinations. These skills constitute the most valuable legacy we bequeath to our students, especially those who do not go directly into a job that requires foreign language training. Is it just coincidental that now, following the vogue of the MBA that has dominated American higher education for so long, former blue-chip companies are going bankrupt or being absorbed by others, destroyed by their failure to read—I use that verb pointedly—the economy correctly?
If we do not exhibit our own skills with words to the highest degree of variety and competence, how will we justify our claim to teach them? The rehabilitation of the liberal arts major in the past few years has been directly predicated on the theory that we possess and can inculcate the fundamental skills of reading and writing, of communicating effectively, on which everything else depends. But teaching is done more by example than by precept. We will deserve our ranks as professors and professionals only to the extent that we demonstrate clearly—to students, to university colleagues, and to all our constituencies—that we actually can do what we teach.
The second path that we must follow is, in my view, teamwork. I fully realize that the sporting metaphor underlying that term is widely used on campus in a contrary sense. When colleagues say they will “no longer play the game,” they mean they are renouncing some dirty world, usually administration, and returning to a more innocent land. But I would reclaim that metaphor for its positive import. Although serious, administration is a game, playful like language itself and like much contemporary literary theory, and I am suggesting that we should play it that way. Like administration, games have arbitrary and often illogical rules that have to be observed. Games are full of surprises and unpredictable outcomes. Strategies that lead to success one day may not on another. Often a clever scheme fails and dumb luck wins out. But let us remember also that games continue from day to day; individual victories or defeats are less important than the overall record for the season. Only with a sense of humor can we free the homo ludens in us all and plays, seriously, with our professorial skills to advance our professional purposes.
The first question that teamwork may help us with is how we are perceived on campus. Perhaps our main source of discontent as professors of foreign languages is a conviction that we and the discipline we represent are of little or no value to the university. This inferiority complex is insidious because it can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we feel we are receiving little respect, our frustration may lead us—or may have already led us—to behave in ways that in fact deserve little respect. In many of our departments there is a conviction that the dean—or the provost or the academic vice president or the chancellor—personally dislikes foreign languages. Proof is easy to find: our salaries are low, our departments underfunded, our promotions difficult to come by. While problems with salaries and promotions are real, they are not all the simple product of an administration's animosity. Demonizing the dean creates an enemy who may not have had any hostility toward us. To perform their jobs satisfactorily, deans need successful and productive departments on their teams. Their self-interest is therefore similar to ours: they want us to shine for their glory just as we want to shine for our own. The unfortunate truth is that no dean has unlimited resources to distribute among the various departments asking for them. Deans are forced to choose, to be selective, to give and to withhold, just as we do inside our own departments with our limited rewards. We are wrong to attribute departmental failure in this institutionalized competition solely to personal vendettas against foreign languages.
It is here that we need to discover teamwork. That concept, of course, implies a web of ideas about winning and losing, playing the game, working together, ideas about competition and emulation, mutual respect and recognition. We must begin by treating the dean as a friend and teammate. We can no longer impute hard decisions to personal pique. We have to find those areas where the dean needs our cooperation and then provide it. As professors we are expert readers. Yet rarely if ever do we apply those skills to our institutions. Deans have likes and dislikes, types of projects they favor and those they do not. They are open to certain arguments and closed to others. They reason along some lines and not along others. We should learn to read their patterns of thought so as to find out how to make the best use of the opportunities there are. When we fail to obtain the funding we seek, we rarely admit that perhaps we could have done a better job asking. Other departments often make better cases for their needs than we do. Other departments often know how to make requests attractive and convincing. Often colleagues who are not specialists in language know how to manipulate words better than we do.
If we are to start making sense of our campus situations, I again recommend teamwork, especially for new or inexperienced department administrators. Foreign language chairs can seek out other executive officers for frank exchanges about delicate issues like budgets, soft money allocations, and the distribution of raises and other increments. In so doing on my own campus, I have found that the foreign languages were not the eternal victims of a hostile administration despite a pervasive and diehard perception of ourselves as martyrs. At times we did better, at times worse, than similar departments. Not until we cooperated and talked it over, however, did we discover the facts. Only facts can dispel the myths. A similar opportunity for teamworking exists within the Consortium for Institutional Cooperation, an umbrella group for Big Ten campuses that holds annual meetings for chairs of foreign language departments. Although other business is transacted, I always find this kind of nitty-gritty discussion the best part of the meeting. The ADFL also provides a framework for interinstitutional networking, information gathering, and teamworking. The exchange of practical information about how things get done is most worthwhile whether carried out informally over coffee and one-on-one conversation or in formal presentations followed by question-and-answer sessions.
It is human nature to suppose that the grass is greener elsewhere. Sometimes it is. But sometimes we are that elsewhere, and others look at us with envious eyes. It is always a revelation to hear colleagues from other departments or from other campuses exclaim, “You have that?!” While the information itself may be negative, the dialogue, the exchange, the teamwork that permit us to find out what is happening elsewhere can be nothing but positive. In calling for dialogue, I am not saying that we should simply share our misfortunes. We want to be treated equally, and we can only find out where we stand by comparison and contrast. Unfortunately, being treated equitably sometimes means being treated badly. Life is tough. If we want our fair share of the bounty in the fat years, we have to accept our share of the cuts in the lean. But we can rejoice in the awareness acquired only through teamwork that we do not have a monopoly on failure and that we are not the whipping boy for an administration that simply hates foreign languages.
Every university budget is a fixed-size pie, and we all compete for our slice. Disagreement is inevitable over what constitutes a “fair share”: we all have projects that deserve to be funded. Here we enter the realm of realpolitik, where, unfortunately, foreign language departments are more at home with the word than with the concept, with the signifier than with the signified. Once again I lament that we in languages fail to understand and exploit the rhetoric of our institutions: the fixed form of the memo, the prose poem requesting funds, the epic saga of departmental review, the epigram of congratulations, the novel that is promotion papers. In that novel, do we realize that the narrator plays a key role in persuading the readers to vote yes? Why do we not regard the writing chores connected with administering our departments as exercises in professional rhetoric targeted at specific readers, requiring the very skills we teach in our classrooms and discuss in our scholarly journals? Every institution produces the jargon it wants to hear. Universities publish reports and inventories, financial and departmental profiles, all phrased in the words they find most dear: cost per contact hour, cost per FTE, ratio of students to faculty members, ratio of staff to number of majors, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Do we read the administration's prose? Do we learn their terms of endearment? Such statistics, I submit, are just so many fictions. They are versions, visions, of a reality that constantly eludes us and that is eternally deferred. Can we not be at home here using our own language of literary criticism to deconstruct the system? Can we not learn to speak the administration's idiom and manipulate its words in our own self-interest? Can we not exercise our verbal skills in these administrative situations just as we might in our classrooms? Aux armes, citoyens! Administration may be nothing more than literary criticism by another name.
I pass now to a question that is most sensitive because it is so subjective and because it tears at the very fabric of teamwork: I mean the thorny problem of merit, prestige, and rewards. If foreign languages are not as favored as other departments in the humanities, might the reason lie in something called “productivity”? I do not want to engage here in any argument about teaching versus scholarship. The tension between the two is endemic to the university and present in all areas. Scientists complain even more than we do about the pressure on them not just to publish but also to secure outside funding. Nor do I wish to minimize the difficulty of choosing suitable departments for comparison. Size, discipline, and other subtle variables will all affect the outcome. The problem in defining the terms of legitimate comparison is one we are all familiar with from our literary studies. We should easily recognize that the rhetoric we use almost unconsciously to transact university business is an ideological code loaded with meanings that remain hidden at our peril. The discourse of departmental comparison and review, while appearing objective and neutral, can in fact occult its own a priori decision either that apples cannot be added to oranges or that they are all just fruit. We should be prepared to challenge any such code when it fails to recognize our accomplishments.
My point about measures of productivity is that the playing field on most campuses is level within a grouping like the humanities. What is required to be a respectable department in one branch of the humanities is probably what is needed to be an equally respectable unit in another branch. We have no choice but to accept the premise that comparisons will be made and will determine the allotment of resources. We can of course disagree with the results. But then we have to reargue the comparisons and prove where they are faulty. That is to say, we have to be ready to engage in an intelligent institutional, infrastructural struggle (battle or game, choose your own metaphor) for our just share of funds based on the conditions that prevail on our campus. If we reject that premise, we in effect quit the team and sit on the sidelines. In other words, we voluntarily disqualify ourselves from exercising any meaningful influence on the outcome. Here we must be honest. Does our department teach as effectively (however that effectiveness is measured) as other, perhaps more popular departments, like political science or communications? Are we as scholars as active (again, by whatever yardstick our campus uses) as our colleagues in comparable, albeit larger, departments, like English and history? We have to ask these questions and provide real, hard answers, formulated in the terminology of our own institutions, before we can maintain that we are being treated unfairly.
The entire question of comparison with other “comparable” departments is made especially difficult by language instruction at the elementary and intermediate levels. Do we abandon such teaching to graduate assistants so that we can pursue our own scholarship? English departments relegated composition to such minor-league status many years ago. The results have been disastrous for generations of college students who have never learned how to write and for departments that have consequently lost students, faculty members, and a central place in the university curriculum. Not surprisingly, many English departments are today trying to regain those lost programs and that lost prestige. Do we in the foreign languages choose to teach more contact hours because we have small classes? Language instruction being notoriously labor-intensive, it resists those apparently efficient large lecture sections other disciplines have adopted. But cards that were losers in the past now begin to look like trumps. Today we are experiencing a newfound awareness of the importance of undergraduate instruction under labels like “writing across the curriculum” and “back to basics.” Parents and state legislatures are asking hard questions about class size and insisting that students have close contact with full-time tenured faculty members, not just with teaching assistants. Here is an opportunity for us in foreign languages to take advantage of what we do best: intense personal instruction, emphasis on the basic mechanisms of language and communication, support and involvement in small groups. We can turn what has heretofore been a liability into an advantage only if we look closely and carefully at our own strengths and pitch them to the university's changing needs.
Finally, in the name of teamwork I would suggest that foreign languages have to renounce their “attitude” of isolation. Often we elect to remain “foreign” in the worst sense—that is, alien, different, and apart. Our discipline itself explains some of this isolation. We value speakers of foreign languages because they do not speak our language. This forces students to communicate in the target language more effectively than does our own pretense of not understanding English. Sometimes, however, that attitude rubs off on other matters. We do not talk to colleagues in other disciplines (even foreigners in other departments), and we are suspicious of colleagues who do. We pride ourselves on not speaking the administration's language. Indeed, not doing so is often a badge of honor, a sign of purity and innocence. We respond angrily when the administration does not observe the protocols that are supposed to be normal in our foreign cultures. “You can't treat [fill in the blank: Russians, Poles, Germans, Frenchmen, or Spaniards] like that.” Here I think we hide behind a fiction that is both juvenile and inaccurate. Any department that demands as a condition of dialogue that the university adopt its particular discourse condemns itself to silence and marginality. We choose whether to be petulant children who refuse any rules but our own or game kids who “play it as it lies.”
Performance and teamwork, the two strategies I am proposing we emulate, share one most important characteristic: they can be directly implemented by us, both individually and as a group. We are to a greater degree than we imagine the masters of our fate. In the past, much of our thinking about foreign languages was not optimistic. Fatalistically we gave up command of our own ship. It is time to change that attitude. We are no less citizens of the university than are our colleagues in other disciplines; we are players on the same team regardless of our positions. We can decide to perform as professionals at the highest levels of competence and craftsmanship. We can choose to be a part of the team. If we do not play the game fully and skillfully, I am afraid that we will not earn the right to consider ourselves professors and professionals. We are as helpless as we want to be:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars
But in ourselves, that we are underlings. ( JC 1.2.140–41)
The author is Professor of French at the University of Illinois, Chicago. This article is based on a paper presented at ADFL Seminar East, 6–8 June1991, in New London, Connecticut.
© 1992 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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