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AS I write in late June the dust from this year's ADFL Summer Seminars has just settled. The mix of familiar faces and new acquaintances attested to continuity along with renewal in our seminar populations; both elements confirm the program's vigorous good health. Though participants attend voluntarily, many are new chairs or chairs elect, so that fate—acting through campus colleague—has chosen who will he present.
In any given year each seminar has its own distinctive character, despite the regularizing effect of a common structure, theme, and set of topics. The Seminar West meeting in Omaha produced a sense of close-knit community well before the end of our group's three days together, in part created by the impression of having all to ourselves the small, elegant hotel that we nearly filled and by the warmth, attention, and easygoing friendliness of our midwestern hosts. Seminar East in Montreal was destined, by reason of the group's greater dispersion throughout a larger hotel, city, and host-campus environment, to produce a string of somewhat discrete occurrences, cohesive primarily within themselves. The bilingual and bicultural nature of life in Montreal and the bipolarities manifest in the identities of our two host universities lent an extraordinary quality of enriching illumination to Seminar East.
Every year the aftermath of the seminars turns out to be a natural occasion for stocktaking. Although the outline of their content is predetermined first by designation of an annual theme and topics, then by the serendipity of availability and willingness of individuals to present and otherwise participate, the meetings nonetheless amount to a weather vane, the summing-up of a moment in the profession's state of mind.
This summation deserves to be captured, and indeed the sense of a collective wisdom defining the seminars' slice of time forms naturally, unbidden, in people's minds as the program unfolds. Heady moments occur in which the exuberance of forward motion, the drive to achieve, to overcome adversity, shine through in our colleagues' reports of their successes large and small. In that sense the summer seminars constitute a welcome antidote to the poisonous daily impact of outrageous fortune's missiles: the seminars remind us that good things can be accomplished in our profession, and on our own individual campuses, even in the worst of bad times.
The good news emerging from the 1993 seminars had often to do with using aggressive outreach efforts to advance the study of languages, literatures, and associated cultures against formidable odds. Oregon State University's concurrent international degree has brought several of the institution's technical and professional programs into close cooperation with the language programs, leading to growing language budgets in an environment of shrinking overall appropriations. Interdisciplinary alliances at Clemson University have produced a high level of interaction between the language programs and business and engineering studies.
Outreach, we were reminded, can have dimensions that touch on the programmatic both directly and indirectly. Redrawing departmental curricula based on an assessment of student interests and needs in the local context led to dramatic growth in the number of language majors at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. At Colorado State University, responding to requests by students and local industry has led to an expansion in the instruction of less commonly taught languages—supported by the department but organized by student—and to the more sophisticated use of computers and acquisition of hardware for the language faculty.
FLES immersion programs for elementary school students in the Kansas City School District have proved successful as a means to integrate an increasingly diverse population of native-born and immigrant children; at the same time the programs are on their way to producing numerous potential future clients for our postsecondary language and literature departments. Expert testimony delivered to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing and the Educational Testing Service by a group of California State University faculty representatives not only has affected the state's certification procedures for secondary school language teaching but also has had a direct influence on the form and content of the National Teachers Examination, administered to prospective language teachers around the country.
An example from Arizona State University demonstrated that reaching out from the departmental fold to inform and to be informed by colleagues in other disciplines changes attitudes and behaviors both outside and inside the department. From Tarrant County Junior College came the message that coordination across the boundaries of secondary, two-year college, and four-year college and university language programs can make possible the sort of articulated long sequences of study that will produce advanced students for our upper-level undergraduate, graduate, and professional degree programs. Experiences from New Mexico State University, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley, suggest the enlightening and liberating effect of teachers' willingness to identify and teach a range of language varieties distinct from the pedagogical norm to a set of language learners whose skills and needs are distinct from the standard classroom profile.
The word outreach is no obvious or inevitable translation of the phrase carpe diem , yet the terms and their associated notions surfaced repeatedly throughout the seminars in ways that engraved them in our minds as two logically linked expressions communicating one fundamental insight. As our banquet speakers asserted and as other presenters underscored, there is a moment of opportunity at hand for collegiate programs in the modern languages other than English. That opportunity can be seized, however, only by an immediate and active—even vigorous—reaching out. Those who define our reason to exist—students, parents, teaching colleagues and academic administrators, legislators and governmental agencies, private benefactors, the voting public—all want something from us. Though we may prefer to be self-defining, our enlightened self-interest, as well as our public-service role as educators, should in fact lead us to find out what that something is and to attempt to respond to it.
The kind of response I have in mind—the kind we heard exemplified in Nebraska and Quebec—is not one of passive acceptance, capitulation, or resignation to the loss of control over what we investigate and what we profess. Rather, the desired model is an active one that controls and shapes as it conforms, that carefully applies professional insight and expertise as it reaches out to the various constituencies we serve.
Is there reason to conform, reason to relinquish what may seem a part of our scholarly independence and academic freedom? Two sorts of answers apply, one positive, the other negative. First, our contemporary society has begun to perceive a vast need for instructed non-English linguistic skills and cultural sophistication cutting across academic disciplines and lines of work. Second, few universities care—or can afford—to underwrite our pursuit of what is itself a conformist ideal of rugged scholarly individualism. Since we do inevitably conform to some model, let our conformity be, as much as we can manage, on the side of public values—that is, in promotion of our students' language attainment and cultural insight (including the study of literature).
We may identify this as the point at which the lessons of the 1993 Summer Seminars intersect with those of the rest of the year at the ADFL office. One story that grabbed headlines in New York City and whose echoes reverberated in other parts of North America perhaps deserves exemplary status. A Report to the Chancellor , a commissioned report to the chancellor of the City University of New York (CUNY) system, announced in the news media last December, proposed to conserve scarce fiscal resources by consolidating the university's academic programs. on the basis of analysis of current enrollment levels, a number of campuses in the system stood to lose graduate and advanced-undergraduate programs, particularly in the humanities and most particularly in foreign languages and literatures.
The commission's report provoked reactions among several constituencies. From outside the university came opinion pieces in public news sources by notables such as Toni Morrison and Tony Kushner. Inside the university, one special collective voice heard was that of the CUNY Council on Foreign Language Study. This body of faculty members from across the discipline moved to convene a series of meetings where representatives from the senior and community colleges exchanged information, developed strategies, and drafted a formal document, the Response to the Report to the Chancellor. 1
While it is too early by far to assess the import of the Response for the future of either language and literature studies or academic planning in CUNY, it seems that some immediate larger lessons may be drawn. They have to do with the value of exchange among colleagues within and across disciplines and with the need to define our professional work while keeping a broad set of purposes and objectives in mind. For the existence of the Council on Foreign Language Study made possible a rapid and coordinated reaction from within the discipline to an event of concern; at the same time the council's attribution of numerous and substantial factual errors and misunderstandings to the commissioned report speaks to an absence of necessary dialogue about foreign language study in the wider arena of the university.
If the Report to the Chancellor posited a diminished place in the university curriculum for foreign language and literature study on a presumption of diminished need and importance, in its Response the CUNY Council did not simply argue to maintain the status quo; it rebutted the case for shrinkage with a case for growth. The argument in support of that case opened with an apology (“The Role of Foreign Languages in a Comprehensive Institution of Higher Learning”) and then asked, “Given the increasing importance of foreign languages in our boroughs, our City, and our world, would it not be wiser to concentrate upon strengthening the language curriculum CUNY-wide rather than reducing it, as recommended in the Report, to a handful of token programs?” In a section titled “Strengthening the CUNY Foreign Language Curriculum,” the authors offered a program of what they called “positive, alternative initiatives to improve foreign language and literature instruction in the City University of New York,” gathered under the headings “Curricular Review and Reform,” “Faculty Renewal and Development,” and “Articulation within the City University.”
Assessments of the CUNY Council's action plan will surely vary on the basis of comparison with the state of affairs in each person's own backyard (further advanced; on a par; well behind), but there can perhaps be agreement about the advantage, indeed the necessity, of the plan's existence, of an active coming to terms with circumstances as they presently are, of the spirit of carpe diem, of outreach. For most language and literature professionals at most colleges and universities, there can no longer be any question of expecting increased, or even level, support in funds and staff to do exclusively what we please in our teaching and scholarship. There may be some chance of level, or even increased, support to do what the consensus, our voices included, deems of value for our students and for the community.
In a letter composed since the meeting in Montreal a seminar participant writes,
One of the encouraging aspects about the plenary sessions this year was the increased recognition on the part of department chairs for the need to broaden our thinking about the role of foreign language study. I can remember [not only] the enthusiasm with which I returned from my first ADFL conference in 1990 but [also] the frustration I felt with what I perceived as a stubborn resistance from some of the participants to the changes that are taking place in our field.
With Timothy Light, who spoke the phrase carpe diem itself on opening night in Omaha, and with all the other participants in the 1993 ADFL Summer Seminars who invoked its message, I propose that we seize the present moment for such opportunities as it presents.
With the message of carpe diem I must also say ave atque vale , friends and colleagues in ADFL. To the many who've assisted and encouraged, comforted and advised, I send appreciation and all good wishes. A la prochaine , and may that next time come sooner rather than later.
1 Copies may be obtained from Carolyn Richmond, President, CUNY Council on Foreign Language Study, Dept. of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Brooklyn Coll., City Univ. of New York, 2900 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11210.
The Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Academic Planning. A Report to the Chancellor. New York: City U of New York, 1992.
City University of New York Council on Foreign Language Study. Response to the Report to the Chancellor. New York: City U of New York, Council on Foreign Language Study. 1993.
© 1993 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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