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FEW developments in higher education have received as much broad-based attention as have the recent attempts to expand the traditional curriculum by incorporating issues of race, class, and gender in an effort to sensitize students to the unique historical realities that have shaped United States culture. Multiculturalism and multicultural education , as these endeavors are most often labeled, are “among the most emotional topics faced by teachers and scholars today” (Verhovek). The heated debate over the long-term implications of this enterprise has ranged from the pages of the New York Times to those of PMLA. While much has been written about multiculturalism, particularly as it refers to the teaching of the social sciences and English, surprisingly little has been directed specifically at foreign language professionals. My purpose here is to contextualize the subject within the more specific frame of the teaching of foreign languages and literatures.
In the fall of 1990, a group of students at the University of Missouri, on their own initiative, proposed that a multicultural course requirement be incorporated into the general-education requirement. In response, the College of Arts and Science instituted a series of discussion groups to serve as forums for the exchange of ideas about the proposed requirement. It was pointed out that twenty universities across the nation have similar requirements.
Both the students' and many faculty members' definitions of multicultural , however, omitted any mention of the central role of foreign languages and literatures in expanding notions of cultural diversity. I thus discovered that the term refers not, as one would expect, to the study of different cultures but rather to a curriculum-reform movement linked by and large to integrating issues of race and gender into the college curriculum and expanding diversity in United States culture. On some campuses, in fact, it has been labeled a “human diversity” requirement and is primarily concerned with relating aspects of racial and ethnic diversity to the contemporary experiences of American students. By extension, what has come to be called multicultural scholarship is “research that has added the study of women, members of minority groups, and the working class to the analysis of culture” (Winkler A5).
Multiculturalism and multicultural research grew out of the social and political movements of the 1960s and, as the media are quick to point out, have been traditionally associated with the Left in academia. Just as the 1987 publication of Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind and E. D. Hirsch, Jr.'s Cultural Literacy gave rise to much discussion of the canon, two recent titles seem to have served as a crucible for intellectual debate and controversy surrounding the notion of democratizing the curriculum: Paula Rothenberg's Racism and Sexism: An Integrated Study and Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. While Rothenberg's book is more a textbook anthology and D'Souza's an exposé of what it claims are the detrimental effects of the liberal wing of the academy, both deal with the roots of the multicultural movement. The media's attention to this movement has ranged from thoughtful essays to angry letters to the editor, with considerable posturing on both sides. Just as Hirsch's and Bloom's books led to a lively response in the profession at large, the debates over multicultural education have similar resonance. What is especially significant for foreign language professionals, however, is that the issue has often led to a review of the undergraduate curriculum. Their disciplines have an important role to play at this juncture, and the time is appropriate to explore the potential curricular ramifications of the current controversy.
Some specific examples give us an idea of what is contained in the new set of multicultural requirements that are becoming part of the general-education curriculum at a number of universities. All students who entered the State University of New York, Albany, in fall 1990 or thereafter must complete an approved course in human diversity to qualify for the baccalaureate degree. One of the fundamental criteria of such a course is that it relate directly to contemporary experiences of students in this country or contain components that compare, on a fairly regular basis, aspects of other cultures to those experiences. Among the approved human-diversity courses, only one class, Hispanic Cultures in the United States, would appear to have anything to do, even vaguely, with the traditional curriculum in foreign languages and literatures. Along similar lines, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has proposed that all undergraduates be required to fulfill three of their general college or arts and science “perspectives” with non-European courses. As Deepthiman Gowda, the cochair of the network for minority issues, notes, “The U.S. is not homogeneous, but multicultural, and students need to reflect that. Such a flagship institution as UNC would be at a disadvantage having students graduate without a broad perspective” (Fogle 5). The notion that a college curriculum should be sensitive to the needs, interests, and experiences of its student population is, in itself, not very controversial. We should bear in mind that by the year 2000, a third of all elementary and high school students are expected to come from minority groups, making this pool of students even more important for the future of postsecondary education (DePalma).
What has unleashed a torrent of discord and acrimony, however, is the somewhat hard-line stance taken by both the proponents of multiculturalism and those opposed to the concept. Subsumed under the label of multiculturalism as an intellectual issue are a host of other related matters involving free speech and what is considered “politically correct,” as well as important disagreements about what ought to constitute the canon of books from which students form a sense of self and society. In her 1990 presidential address to the Modern Language Association, Catharine R. Stimpson offered a thoughtful summary of the issues that have emerged as by-products of the rise in multicultural studies:
Given the conflicts and passions of our moment, multiculturalism has inevitably provoked a spectrum of responses. For some, it connotes an effort to substitute emotion for reason, a thin many-other-worldism for a deep grasp of Western history, philosophy, literature, and art. Others, although they find the concept of multiculturalism important, fear that its practitioners will satisfy themselves with academic reform and not take on the harder task of social change. For still others, with whom I am in much sympathy, multiculturalism promises to bring dignity to the dispossessed and self-empowerment to the disempowered, to recuperate the texts and traditions of ignored groups, to broaden cultural history. (404)
One way of graphing the contemporary desire for curricular change is to borrow some of the language and theory of canon formation—itself probably among the more interesting avenues of recent critical inquiry. There seems to be a consensus that although there is no fixed sequence in canon formation, certain general principles—(1) preservation, (2) nationalism and historicizing, (3) the belief in transhistorical excellence, and (4) revisionism as a response to the established canon—chart more or less accurately the stages through which anthologists have traditionally moved (Golding 279–84). The process is most clearly seen at the opposite ends of the spectrum: preservation symbolized in the great books curriculum, which views selected texts from earlier periods as the cornerstones of Western civilization, in contrast to revisionists, who view the voices rarely heard as the most authentic expressions of contemporary culture. Alan C. Golding notes the logical tensions that emerge from the process:
Continued revision is the logical and ongoing final stage, but any revisionist editor who invokes universal standards in his defense walks on shaky ground. That editor will use the principle of transhistorical excellence to propose a new canon: the established poetry, in his view, does not meet universal standards. A more conservative editor, however, can use the same principle to justify the established canon.… A good poem or poet, once recognized, will always be, and always be considered, good. (238)
If we conceive of the curriculum as a sort of ideological anthology, we can see the same stages taking place in periods of curricular change. Thus, the special-interest anthologies that proliferated in the 1970s, reprinting the works of women, African American, Latino, and Chicano writers, have an affinity with the recent multicultural movement in their explicit desire to radicalize the traditional canon. The resistance to their inclusion, the claims that literature is somehow being devalued by this process, is manifest as well in the strong opposition to the proponents of multiculturalism.
The analogy between canon formation and curricular reform is an intriguing one that deserves further investigation. It is quite clear, for instance, that certain historical periods produced a collective self-reflexivity that resulted in curricular changes within the universities. The early twentieth century provides a good example: a period when modern science became enshrined in the national character was paralleled by basic reforms in medical education, spurred by the 1910 publication of Abraham Flexner's Medical Education in the United States and Canada. Thus debate foments change, whether positive or negative. The 1950s, with their mixture of fear and paranoia toward the Soviet Union, saw a reexamination of public education embodied in the National Defense Education Act Institutes; the political turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s spawned a plethora of special-interest anthologies and a concomitant reshaping of the offerings in higher education; and the recent public debates over what is important resonate in the decision-making process on college campuses. Moreover, at the same time that many universities are rethinking the notion of multiculturalism and altering to some extent both what is taught and how it is taught, American medical education is undergoing a similar radicalization, introducing a problem-solving curriculum that, in some schools, will completely eliminate the first two years of formal teaching. The span between periods of curricular reform seems to be shortening as society in general becomes more reflective about its goals and aspirations.
Perhaps the publication in 1990 of the Heath Anthology of American Literature , whose 5,500 pages include, along-side the classics, selections from throughout American history by women, blacks, Chicanos, Hispanics, and Indians, is but a metaphor for the whole process of this rethinking. The multicultural movement is linked to this process of ongoing change in yet another way: its implicit and explicit relation to the current blurring of the traditional generic boundaries between literary texts and the theoretical modes used to analyze them—a topic that has been discussed extensively and is treated quite profoundly in Profession 89.
Let's put the discussion on a more practical footing and suppose, in the light of several multicultural programs—for example, the proposal at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the human-diversity requirement at the State University of New York, Albany—that an academic dean asks a department of foreign languages and literatures to state its position vis-à-vis a campus call for curricular reform. What would the issues be? What questions would be raised, and what might be some probable responses?
It could be convincingly argued that university foreign language programs are uniquely positioned, given their academic structure, to play a significant role in the multicultural studies phenomenon. As Bettina Huber demonstrates, foreign language study differs from other humanities subjects in the way it is organized and administered, and these differences have consequences not only for numerical generalizations but for potential cooperative efforts. Thus, the MLA database indicates that in 26% of the institutions surveyed, instruction in both English and foreign language is under the auspices of a single division. Furthermore, 20% of the institutions have joint language programs, with foreign language and English courses offered by the same administration (“Characteristics” 40). Such administrative arrangements allow for unique cooperative efforts between the English and foreign language faculties and might permit the incorporation into the curriculum of writers who do not fit neatly into established academic pigeonholes—for example, Oscar Hijuelos, the author of Our House in the Last World and, more recently, of the Pulitzer Prize—winning Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love , or Martín Espada, winner of the PEN-Revson Foundation Fellowship (for poetry) and author of Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover's Hands. Both Hijuelos, a Cuban-born American, and Espada, the son of Puerto Rican parents, write in English from a unique ethnic and cultural perspective. Multilingual programs, which also host various languages under one umbrella, account for 45% of the institutions with foreign language programs (Huber, “Characteristics” 40).
The enormous potential for cultural cross-pollination and cooperative efforts is obvious. Here excellent opportunities exist for comparing the culture of the United States to a broad spectrum of both European and non-European cultures and for deploying the talents of “cultural holists,” Betty Jean Craige's term for “humanists who view the whole of society as an evolving system of interacting cultures, none of which enjoys any absolute superiority to any other …” (“Literature” 397).
It is not only the organization of departments of foreign languages that is unique but their inherent cultural diversity. What other academic unit in a typical American university brings together so large an assortment of native speakers of a foreign language, ethnic speakers of that language born in the United States but differing from the majority population in their parentage and linguistic formation, and native speakers of English who have spent long periods abroad in the environment of the target language they teach? Discussing this last group, Heidi Byrnes reminds us that many such speakers, “through language study and personal experience in the second culture,… have developed unusual cross-cultural sensitivity and gained a wealth of information about the target-language region and culture” (13).
Also contributing to the diversity of foreign language departments is the growing role of women in higher education, an issue that has itself been a basic element in the call for multiculturalism and gender studies. Data reported by Bettina Huber indicate that the status of women in modern languages has undergone significant changes since the late 1960s. The MLA's study of PhDs granted annually indicates that by the mid-1980s women were receiving close to 60% of the doctorates in modern languages (“Women” 71). Hence, there is an enormous potential for both recently hired and yet to be hired women faculty members to interact on the curricular and personal level to foreground the importance of gender-bound issues.
I have emphasized (1) that foreign language departments are uniquely positioned administratively within most universities to permit the creative cross-listing of courses and programs and (2) that they are microcosms of cultural diversity. Accordingly, given the long-term influence of curricular reform on programs of study (one only has to think of the introduction of culture and civilization courses in the 1970s), foreign language professionals should be able to respond to the new awareness of multiculturalism and to make appropriate curricular changes that will give their discipline its legitimate voice on this important issue, one that is likely to have a lasting effect on the shape of undergraduate education.
There already exists a substantial body of published research that touches, albeit tangentially, on some of the issues raised here. For example, in “Foreign Language and General Education,” an important chapter in the MLA's Strategies for Development of Foreign Languages and Literature Programs , David Graham Burnett justifies an expanded role for departments of foreign language in relation to the increasingly pluralistic student body of the 1980s, and Clifford Adelman considers language study in relation to the new reform in general education (Gaudiani, with Herron et al. 101–08, 109–20).
It could also be convincingly argued that departments of foreign language and literature already offer a wide umbrella for course offerings that would satisfy legitimate student and faculty desires to diversify the curriculum. Glancing at my own department's offerings for one year, I see Modern French Feminism, African Francophone Literature, Afro-Hispanic Literature, Studies in Puerto Rican and Chicano Literature, and Latin American Women Writers in Translation. These, I might add, are but a sample of courses that would, in a very specific sense, seem to address issues of gender, race, and class. What makes them distinctive, I would argue, is that they are taught from a doubly enriching perspective; subject is interwoven with language in this way of looking at the world, which can sometimes be appreciated only when viewed through the prism of a different language system, which structures ideas and feelings.
In addition to offering these specific courses, foreign language departments have the option of mainstreaming into their intermediate sequence a large number of authors not normally taught. At my own institution, for example, we have given our intermediate French and Spanish courses special-emphasis sections dealing with women writers and with Chicano and Latino writers. Another interesting strategy, one suggested by Marlies Mueller, is to teach the canonical texts by initiating a dialogue between the work and its author, by grounding the canon in “an aesthetics of reception which helps to reconstruct the historical process by which readers received and interpreted texts at different times” (23).
The important role played by area studies, academic programs in which foreign language teachers have traditionally been heavily represented, should also not be ignored. Betty Jean Craige, among others, calls for a reconnection of literature with its social context. In “Studying the Tangled Bank” in particular, she underscores the unique advantages of interdisciplinary study. The cross-disciplinary cooperation that emerges from area studies programs can only be buttressed and enhanced by the special academic qualifications and organizational frameworks of foreign language programs.
Area studies programs are usually linked to study-abroad programs, another sphere of influence in which foreign language departments often play a crucial role. The study-abroad experience, I would argue, offers one of the most rewarding opportunities for comparing cultural systems. As Heidi Byrnes convincingly argues, “language learning involves not only acquiring a skill but becoming a different person.” Thus, she continues, “achieving a high level of competence in French engages one's whole person and necessitates realizing that a value and belief system significantly different from American standards is operative throughout French society …” (13). Whether the experience takes place in Mexico, with its close cultural ties with the United States; in francophone Africa; in Brazil; or in industrialized Europe, one could argue that no other experience can so successfully deconstruct the notion of monoculturalism, allowing a student to compare his or her own customs against those encountered abroad. A good example of the kind of flexible cross-cultural study component is that currently being developed at Antioch College. The curriculum there will require all undergraduates to become proficient in a foreign language and to study another culture firsthand, either in a foreign country or in the United States. John Sims, associate dean, has for the past year led an innovative hands-on approach to the study of African American cultures in the United States. He was, in fact, inspired to create the program when he was an undergraduate studying in Europe (“Antioch”).
An index of the level of interest in the topic I have touched on is reflected in the 29 May 1991 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education , which has no fewer than four articles dealing, at least peripherally, with the issue of multiculturalism. It contains stinging reviews of D'Souza's Illiberal Education , an article on the continuing debate over political correctness, a reference to a proposed cultural studies approach, and an editorial entitled “New Politically Correct Metaphors Insult History on Our Campuses.”
To conclude, I would hope that foreign language professionals would be in the forefront of the discussion of curricular reform, that their programs would be inclusive rather than exclusive, that the faculty members and teaching these courses would be especially well qualified to do so, and that universities ultimately would be enriched and not polarized by the innovations.
The author is Professor of Spanish and Chair of the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Missouri, Columbia. This article is based on his presentation at ADFL Seminar East, 6–8 June 1991, in New London, Connecticut.
“Antioch: A Hands-On Cross-Cultural Study.” New York Times 3 June 1991, natl. ed.: B4.
Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students. New York: Simon, 1987.
Byrnes, Heidi. “Foreign Language Departments and the Cultural Component of an International-Studies Program.” ADFL Bulletin 22.1 (1990): 10–15. [Show Article]
Craige, Betty Jean. “Literature in a Global Society.” PMLA 106 (1991): 395–401.
———. “Studying the Tangled Bank.” ADFL Bulletin 22.2 (1991): 25–28. [Show Article]
DePalma, Anthony. “Higher Education Feels the Heat.” New York Times 2 June 1991: E1.
D'Souza, Dinesh. Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. New York: Free, 1991.
Espada, Martín. Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover's Hands. Rebelión es el giro de manos del amante. Trans. Camilo Pérez-Bustillo and Espada. Willimantic: Curbstone, 1990.
Flexner, Abraham. Medical Education in the United States and Canada. New York: Carnegie Foundation, 1910.
Fogle, Ashley. “Multicultural Requirement Presented.” Daily Tar Heel 12 Feb. 1991: 1+.
Gaudiani, Claire, with Carol A. Herron et al. Strategies for Development of Foreign Language and Literature Programs. New York: MLA, 1984.
Golding, Alan C. “A History of American Poetry Anthologies.” Canons. Ed. Robert von Hallberg. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. 279–307.
Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter et al. 2 vols. Lexington: Heath, 1990.
Hijuelos, Oscar. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. New York: Farrar, 1989.
———. Our House in the Last World. New York: Peresa, 1985.
Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Boston: Houghton, 1987.
Huber, Bettina J. “Characteristics of College and University Foreign Language Programs.” Profession 89. New York: MLA, 1989. 39–48.
———. “Women in the Modern Languages, 1970–90.” Profession 90. New York: MLA, 1990. 58–73.
Mueller, Marlies. “Cultural Literacy and Foreign Language Pedagogy.” ADFL Bulletin 22.2 (1991): 19–24. [Show Article]
Rothenberg, Paula. Racism and Sexism: An Integrated Study. New York: St. Martin's, 1988.
Stimpson, Catharine R. “Presidential Address 1990: On Differences.” PMLA 106 (1991): 402–11.
Verhovek, Sam Howe. “A New York Panel Urges Emphasizing Minority Cultures.” New York Times 30 June 1991, natl. ed.: 1.
Winkler, J. Karen. “Proponents of ‘Multicultural’ Humanities Research Call for a Critical Look at Its Achievements.” Chronicle of Higher Education 28 Nov. 1990: A5+.
© 1992 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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