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WITH this issue, which opens a new volume for the ADFL Bulletin , my first editorial year comes full circle. Though I write in June for September publication, the cycle of office business is already largely complete: correspondence, committee meetings, publication activities, summer seminar gatherings. In retrospect, 1991–92 was a year of mingled hope and adversity for languages in the United States, with successes balanced against new obstacles to be overcome. The message is familiar to advocates of multiple-language use, especially language teachers. It reminds us of the complexity and unpredictability of forces in the world, whether in the educational establishment, human society, or the natural environment. Some of the forces at play are visible in the pages of recent Bulletin issues.
Last August, for example, an MLA news release announced record totals in foreign language enrollments at American colleges and universities in fall 1990. These increases were not simply a result of greater numbers of postsecondary students but true gains, as total language registrations per hundred college and university enrollments went from 7.8 in 1986 to 8.5 in 1990. Richard Brod and Bettina Huber provided a full report and analysis of these data in the Spring 1992 Bulletin.
A news note in that same issue outlined passage of the National Security Education Act of 1991 (the Boren Bill). Hailed by some as a new National Defense Education Act—the sputnik-inspired measure that gave special impetus to language studies a generation ago—the NSEA promises to sustain future students of critical languages and area studies who agree to enter government service or teaching for a time. So far, many in the higher education community are ambivalent, their enthusiasm tempered by uncertainty about the final makeup of the National Security Education Board and its eventual determination of what constitutes study of critical languages and areas.
In the present issue, Bettina Huber reminds us of results reported by Richard Brod and Monique Lapointe in a 1989 Bulletin article: foreign language requirements for graduation at colleges and universities are once again becoming more prevalent across the nation. Stabilizing in the early l980s after declining in the late l960s and much of the 1970s, these requirements were generally enduring, reappearing, or being newly created at a significant rate as recently as 1989.
Alongside Huber's report, we reproduce Heidi Byrnes's testimony before a House of Representatives appropriations subcommittee in April. This hopeful message of positive interaction between national bodies concerned with the advancement of language studies, among them the MLA, and federal legislative and administrative agencies, most notably the NEH, ought to have a cheering and sustaining effect. Byrnes's reflective glance over the last several decades identifies a long-term forward trend to counter the perceived accumulation of short-term setbacks that often emerges from our day-to-day professional lives.
Sources other than our own pages suggest a view of waxing fortunes in the language professions and a heightened perception of the value of those fields. I offer some representative, if randomly chosen, indicators. The self-identified “international 50 liberal arts colleges” have published a promotional text detailing their “contributions [to the nation] in advancing interests in world affairs” (Engerman and Marden I). They tout the high rates at which their students enroll in foreign language courses, select majors in languages, and study abroad as evidence of this contribution. In its 1991 report, the National Education Goals Panel includes among indicators of progress toward its third goal, student achievement and citizenship, a five percent increase in the number of eleventh and twelfth graders taking the advanced placement foreign language exams from 1981 to 1991 (49).
Last year the Office of Educational Research and Improvement of the Department of Education funded the National Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language Learning. The University of California, Santa Cruz, coordinates operations of this center, which is designed to address the needs of minority-language students and to develop an appreciation of America's multicultural population and our linguistic diversity (Short).
In February 1992 the American Association of Community and Junior Colleges (AACJC) convened a two-day foreign language education roundtable, under funding received from the NEH. The outcome was a draft statement on foreign language education policy, Improving Foreign Language Education at Community, Technical, and Junior Colleges. That statement identifies foreign language education as a national priority and proposes recommendations to guide association members in addressing it.
This partial list is imposing, and it suggests an overwhelming momentum in favor of American multilingualism. Resisting a palpable forward motion, however, are other forces that take their immediate source in the strains of a depressed national economy. Unemployment, rising costs, and a diminished tax base mean fewer resources for education in most public institutions, from primary schooling to postgraduate study. These general, almost universal, pressures have the effect of testing resolve in our schools and on our campuses, with the result that deep-rooted convictions—prejudices, one might call them—are brought into play, becoming determinants where enlightened reason might otherwise have guided decisions in a thriving economy.
Set against the evidence supporting a new national awareness of, and concern for, foreign language education are examples of a forced reversion to old bases of judgment: some decision makers in academic institutions still look toward foreign language and literature programs when curriculum and staff reductions must be made. In the present climate of severe budgetary pressures affecting colleges and universities nationwide, some institutions are restructuring, regrouping, or even eliminating foreign language offerings, and others are contemplating such steps.
The irony of fiscal logic running counter to policy logic or, alternatively, of visceral behavior denying reasoned conclusions—the fear that studying other languages and cultures is superfluous if not subversive—is brought home nicely through a single example. Two years ago, San Diego State University's Language Acquisition Resource Center became one of three centers in the country to be funded through US Department of Education Title VI moneys and designated as a National Foreign Language Resource Center (the other two are the Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Center at the University of Hawaii and a center jointly operated by Georgetown University's School of Languages and Linguistics and the Center for Applied Linguistics) (Bley-Vroman and Robinson). In May of this year, the Los Angeles Times printed an account of San Diego State's “unprecedented plans to eliminate several core departments,” an attempt by the university to meet a major budget shortfall (Abrahamson A3). Of the six departments mentioned in the article as likely targets, three were foreign language departments. In approximately twenty-four months, university administrators there seem to have arrived at two diametrically opposed sets of conclusions about the role of foreign languages in their curriculum. Thus are the convictions of intellect easily overturned by the imperatives of emotion, fairweather good intentions subverted by foul-weather reversion to form.
My understanding of this interplay of forces was shaped by activities here in New York from September till June: over the year, the ADFL and MLA foreign language programs staff received several inquiries from individual foreign language professionals on the one hand and from college and university administrators on the other hand, asking for help in addressing program restructuring issues. In June participants at the ADFL Summer Seminars helped clarify that understanding by reporting their experiences at their institutions.
In Berkeley and Atlanta the mood of our meetings was serious: amid the fine weather, good fellowship, relaxing moments, and stimulating presentations that graced both events, interactions were lively and discussions focused. California came first, and the shock of the 1991–92 budget cuts in that state was fresh and intense, expressed in plenary audience responses and small-group meetings, during meals, and at nightcaps. It supplied a thread and gave a passionate edge to exchanges, as colleagues working in the public sector in California, whether on state or federal payrolls, communicated their concern and distress; for example, our hosts at the University of California, Berkeley, shared stories of teaching-staff reductions with their near neighbors, participants from the faculty at the Defense Language Institute.
Georgia was next, and again the attractive setting, pleasant circumstances, and even the delight of an unprecedented event—the first ADFL seminar hosted by historically black institutions—did not overturn our sober mood. This is not to say that we suffered: the Atlanta University Center campuses kept safe for us the legend of southern hospitality. There was also an extraordinary camaraderie within the group, something I sensed and others confirmed. But we were purposeful, and our purpose seemed to coalesce with each new plenary paper, each new small-group meeting, each banquet speech, until a comment from the floor after the last formal presentations set those presentations—Richard Jurasek's outline of foreign languages across the curriculum and Alfred Guillaume's program for minority participation in foreign languages—in context with each other and with all the preceding events.
That comment, by John Grandin, suggested a logical link between what appeared in the printed program to be two disparate topics: both Guillaume and Jurasek argued that foreign language professionals need to rethink their undertaking, to synthesize past practice and new approaches, traditional constructions of subject matter and emerging strategies for mapping intellectual territory. The comment hit home with me, and very hard. Our entire seminar program could well be seen as a plea for, or as evidence for, rethinking and synthesizing. The challenge of a transformed academy, so vivid as to be painful in California, is no less real though perhaps a bit less new on the Eastern Seaboard. The shock of change, whether willing or forced, motivated from within or without, is with all of us who deal with the teaching of foreign languages and literatures. Our perhaps unwelcome task is to embrace this reality, putting aside expectations the past might have given us about the future.
By embracing reality, I mean to suggest an assessment of our circumstances, done with all the objectivity we can muster. We are currently being assessed and judged by others, perhaps not objectively, sometimes with disastrous results. We need to know ourselves and our moment, if only to understand how and why to maintain the status quo. Taken seriously and done without prejudice, self-assessment may lead to positive change. Just as important, it can afford the chance we need to confirm for others and for ourselves the meaningfulness and value of our enterprise.
In such work ADFL can lend a hand. This office can make available to departments information at our disposal, such as statistical data produced by MLA surveys, articles published in the ADFL Bulletin or Profession , and statements of policy and guidelines for informed practice. For instance, in 1984 the ADFL Executive Committee developed a document entitled “A Checklist for Self-Study for Departments of Languages and Literatures,” and in 1987 it issued a set of guidelines, “Policy Statements on the Administration of Foreign Language Departments.”
In the same spirit, it may be time for the ADFL membership, acting through the Executive Committee, to outline a statement of guiding principles for foreign language program review and restructuring. Such a statement might aim to influence practice on both sides of any program modification. It might, for example, show administrators how to assess the value and importance of foreign language study to their students and describe methods for carrying out an informed administrative review of foreign language programs. For faculty members, it might suggest ways to effect positive outcomes of program review and restructuring and offer advice on establishing supportive behaviors among colleagues within and across programs and departments during review and restructuring.
We hope that readers of the Bulletin will be able to see and evaluate for themselves the testaments of our 1992 ADFL Summer Seminars as written versions of the presentations appear in future issues. Please do let us know your ideas about what a statement on program review might look like. What specific issues would such a statement need to address? Can you identify examples of good practice it should cite as models? Your guidance will be important to the ADFL Executive Committee and the ADFL programs office in the coming months.
Abrahamson, Alan. “San Diego Stare Plans Sweeping Cuts and Layoffs.” Los Angeles Times 15 May 1992: A3+.
American Association of Community and Junior Colleges. Improving Foreign Language Education at Community, Technical, and Junior Colleges . Washington: AACJC, 1992.
Bley-Vroman, Robert, and Gail Robinson. “Foreign Language Resource Centers.” ERIC/CLL News Bulletin 15.1 (1991): 5–8.
Brod, Richard, and Bettina J. Huber. “Foreign Language Enrollments in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 1990.” ADFL Bulletin 23.3 (1992): 6–10. [Show Article]
Engerman, David C., and Parker G. Marden. In the International Interest. The Contributions and Needs of America's International Liberal Arts Colleges . Beloit: International 50, 1992.
National Education Goals Panel. The National Education Goals Report, 1991. Building a Nation of Learners . Washington: GPO, 1991.
Short, Deborah. “Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language Learning: A National Center for Educators.” ERIC/CLL News Bulletin 15.1 (1991): 1+.
© 1992 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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