24, no. 2 (Winter 1993): 1-2
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From the Editor
John W. Cross
WHEN I was a student it seemed to me that knowledge of facts marked the educated person, particularly detailed facts in enough abundance to completely cover the expanse of any given subject area. As a beginning teacher I thought the same thing and strove above all to transmit hard facts to my own students. Only during my mature years in the classroom did I come to understand that access to sources of information is an even more powerful possession: knowing where to find the facts (and ideas, theories, and interpretations) puts many more of them at one's disposal than can ever be recalled on demand.
Some part of that mature satisfaction of the classroom is mine in the ADFL office as I receive calls from around North America and beyond—requests for information, be it in the form of facts, names, interpretations, or conjectures—and am led more often than not to confirm ADFL's ability either to supply what is needed or to identify appropriate sources for locating it. Calls for statistical data strikingly illustrate this point. As queries have come in, I've been gratified to realize that the production of statistical reports here has essentially kept pace with the evolving interests and needs of the profession. This timeliness is a tribute to the hard work of our staff, the informed assistance of association members, and what appears to be the remarkable foresight of leaders in the association and the profession.
Lest I be thought to sing unduly the praises of numerical data, let me emphasize that I understand their limitations and, indeed, their inherent dangers. In a time when the technological, the computational, and the electronic are ascendant—often as it seems to the detriment of the intuitive, the sensorial, and the tangible—the tendency of managers to rely on statistics as the necessary and sufficient evidence for decision making is debilitating to the humanist enterprise, frequently restrictive of definitional scope, and sometimes fatal to the case for liberal arts disciplines at academic institutions. Arguments for the preservation and enhancement of the study of our subject matters must be founded on broad principles of personal and societal affirmation and actualization, not on the play of numbers. For the numbers can be used and abused, they can tell many stories, and they frequently fail to tell the whole story.
Still, the numbers exist, and the foreign language program administrator who does not know them and has not analyzed them will be unable to defend against their misuse. Statistical texts, like verbal texts, are open to multiple readings, and interpretation is best done by an informed reader. Confirming numbers, whether large or small, lend authority to a compelling case drawn first on pedagogical and scholarly principles.
This year the Bulletin considerably expands the available statistical material on postsecondary foreign language study by reporting selected results from the MLA's 1987–89 survey of foreign language programs. The Fall Bulletin (24.1) carried news about institutional requirements for language study, this issue (24.2) describes the context within which instruction is carried out, and the Spring issue (24.3) will report on curricular patterns, including intensive courses and programs abroad.
Credit for this truly monumental project, requiring four years to administer and prepare and several ADFL Bulletin issues to report, goes in the first place to the MLAs director of research, Bettina Huber, who supervised the survey and analyzed the results. The MLA's Ad Hoc Advisory Committee on Foreign Language Programs, its successor the Advisory Committee on Foreign Languages and Literatures, and ADFLs 1989, 1990, and 1991 Executive Committees helped develop the survey questionnaire and provided feedback on the preliminary survey report. A range of MLA and ADFL staff members supplied key advisory and technical support. The conscientious work of David Goldberg and Denise Bourassa Knight significantly enhanced the quality of the final data set. No less fundamental was the participation of department chairs and other respondents, who took time to complete the lengthy questionnaires indispensable to this project.
Enormous variety exists among programs, as among their contexts, and the survey data will have to be interpreted on each campus for each program. Huber not only distinguishes programs by institutional type but also establishes and defines four separate categories of language programs. Other distinctions farther reduce the possibilities for global commonalities: such distinctions as those between widely taught and less widely taught languages and those across the range of features that make individual languages what they are—human communication systems independent of one another.
Clearly, then, these survey data provide few predictors that are applicable to all programs at all institutions. Only administrators and faculty members for whom the survey results lend a statistical weight to understandings already reached through the lived practice of their programs will be able to say why, for example, the dynamics—partially reflected in statistics—of foreign language instruction at State College differ from those at Small Ivy, Metropolis University, and County Community or what separates instruction in German from courses in Japanese.
Prepared as we are to expect a fragmented image of the profession, given the range and variety of instructional contexts, one incontrovertible fact of universal application does emerge from the complete survey: a critical mass of full-time, tenure-track faculty members is fundamental to success in foreign language programs of every size and type in every sort of institution. Huber concludes her article in this issue with the speculation that “perhaps tenure-track faculty members are essential to creating and maintaining a strong program because their long-term commitment to an institution provides the curricular structure and coherence that serve as vital underpinnings for a rich and robust program.” Here is a model use of statistics to confirm what foreign language professionals already know through experience. Beyond enrollments and numbers of majors, the vitality, effectiveness, appeal, and dynamism of foreign language programs—their very continuation, in fact—are largely determined by a sufficiency of full-time, tenure-track teachers.
At a time when student demand for foreign language study is unprecedented and Americans' need for language skills is increasing, a lack of appropriate instructional staff can nonetheless undermine program development. The survey numbers support the profession's intuition of this truth. One careful student of human mental processes observes that “logic is the science of the justification of conclusions we have reached by natural reasoning” (Jaynes 41). 1 Having confirmed that statistics can justify our professional insights, we have a message to send about foreign language program staffing that is both clear and strong. That message deserves our best efforts to make it heard and respected.
Note
1 Jaynes defines logic and natural reasoning as the products of, respectively, conscious left brain activity and subconscious right brain activity.
Work Cited
Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral. Mind. 1979. Boston: Houghton, 1990.
© 1993 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 24, no. 2 (Winter 1993): 1-2 |
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