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AN INDIVIDUAL chair of a foreign language department is a very small cog in the elaborate machinery of the American academic reward structure. A search of current literature on the topic of compensation and rewards confirms one's sense of individual helplessness and at the same time uncovers an urgent need for joint, effective action. The giant wheels turn, and we turn with them, but the machinery is not working very well these days, and some of the powers that be are already trying to shift gears. As individual chairs, we need at the very least to understand where we might be going, and as a professional organization of chairs, we might at the very best go in a direction of our own choosing.
With these two ends in view, I first look at the broader picture of the reward structure of higher education, the way it is viewed and the terms in which it is discussed outside as well as inside the profession. Then I look at foreign language departments against this broad background and suggest changing some of the basic assumptions underlying our own reward structure with a view to improving the status and performance of our discipline as a whole.
The academy is facing a barrage of criticism from the outside. Popular writers have launched attack after attack on what is widely seen as a lack of concern for undergraduate teaching and an overemphasis on research. They are particularly incensed by the notion that the university pays high salaries to people who do research and low salaries to people who teach. Charles Sykes's ProfScam, perhaps the best known and most abusive book-length attack on the universities, set the sights of critics six years ago on high-paid professors who were abdicating their teaching responsibilities to low-paid teaching assistants. Since then attacks have appeared in a variety of publications and a variety of styles, ranging in the last two years from the relatively urbane Wall Street Journal piece, “What! Me Teach? I'm a Professor” (Anderson) to a thumping broadside in Rolling Stone, “The Great Tuition Scam,” which pounds out the leading question, “How did higher education get this expensive and this bad?” and calls on the young to quit going into debt “to pay the bloated salaries of Napoleonic administrators and do-nothing faculty… and start fighting back” (Mead 138).
For all the passion spent on the topic outside the university, yawns and shrugs frequently greet what Ernest Boyer has called “the tired old teaching versus research debate” (xii) inside the ivy-covered walls—and even inside the bare concrete walls of my own urban institution. Outside attacks on research and appeals for better teaching have not been matched in the press by eloquent, professorial defenses of the university's way of doing business. It is hard to find a public defense of professors who do a lot of research and little teaching. A Rolling Stone writer might suggest that they scarcely need to defend themselves: They are laughing all the way to the bank. We know better, of course: Chances are that they are not reading Rolling Stone or even the Wall Street Journal. But if the public furor is passing them by, it is not escaping the attention of legislators, nor of those who administer the foundations and the universities. There are distinct signs that while the salaries of researchers are hardly being lowered, attempts are being made to look more critically at published scholarship in “research universities,” which are the main targets of outside critics. Stanford's president has followed the example set in recent years by Harvard University's medical school and the National Science Foundation and has recommended limiting the number of publications to be submitted for promotion and tenure evaluations in order to concentrate on quality rather than quantity of research. Not everyone, it has been remarked skeptically, has the clout of Stanford's president (Leatherman), but others are enthusiastic: “If Stanford's doing it,” says the provost at the State University of New York, Binghamton, “that might help” (Mooney, “Efforts”). And so it might. Stanford, Cornell, Michigan, Syracuse, and others have recently issued reports on measures they are taking to step up recognition of university teaching and to take the evaluation of teaching more seriously in their reward systems.
The evaluation of teaching is certainly being discussed more, in print and on campus, but the tone of such discussion differs considerably from that of the strident off-campus press. Faculties in all kinds of institutions are concerned about workload issues, such as how to quantify and evaluate the various kinds of contributions that an individual professor makes to the institution, the discipline, the profession, and the community and how much value (i.e., prestige and money) to attach to each of the kinds of contribution. A former ADFL president, Howard Mancing, has addressed this university-wide topic and suggested ways in which the traditional formula for evaluation—40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% service—may, even in a research university, be applied to a department as a whole rather than rigidly to each individual. This is in tune with other creative suggestions made in recent times for viewing the work of a department as that of a team in which players do not simply duplicate their teammates' efforts (Langenberg). The model of workload distribution that Mancing suggests is flexible, practical, and very valuable to the working chair. It leaves open questions of remuneration that have to be decided on individual campuses, such as which “team player” will actually enjoy over a lifetime the greatest prestige and make the fastest progress up the salary ladder. Mancing's model includes, for example, an 80% teaching and 20% service person “who never does research” as an acceptable contributor to the departmental effort (“Teaching” 49). Many departments might well accept such a person as a team player, and they might also accept the fact that such a person in the course of a career would earn considerably less than other colleagues playing on the team with a 40-40-20 workload.
Data drawn from a massive 1987–88 federal survey of faculty members were recently assessed at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Pennsylvania State University for possible connections between teaching time and compensation, and the conclusions presented in draft form at a Department of Education seminar in 1992 seem unambiguous:
The concept of departments working and being assessed as teams makes very good sense, but it does not in itself solve individual problems of compensation nor does it answer questions of title. The 80% teaching-20% service person would in many institutions be called not a professor but an instructor, a lecturer, or a preceptor. Titles are important in the academy and are tied to salary scales. Discussion of practical workload issues can hardly avoid the seemingly abstract question of what a professor is. Are professors people who carry out original research, publish that research, and bring it to bear on their teaching? Or can professors be people who keep abreast of developments in their fields and communicate them to their students? What may a professor publish that qualifies as professorial? If a professor writes a textbook, does that count as a publication? If a person has written only textbooks, does that person count as a professor? Seemingly abstract issues of definition translate rather precisely into dollars and cents, into employment and unemployment, when they are applied, as they have to be, to the concrete workload issue. For a young professor facing tenure review, it is a crucial question whether, for example, a recent textbook belongs under “teaching” or under “research.” If it falls under “teaching” in one kind of institution, and the candidate is not otherwise a prolific researcher, then the “research” quota may be lacking enough weight; if it falls under “research” in a different kind of institution, and the candidate is not a great teacher, then the “teaching” quota may be inadequate. In either case, the 40-40-20 scales may tip the wrong way and the case for tenure may be lost. This is the kind of burning issue that professors understand and debate hotly.
Criticism of the universities has emerged in recent years from such august organizations as the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and it tends to remain within the debate as framed by the professoriat itself, seeking not to revolutionize the system but to recalibrate it. Thus in the most substantial recent set of recommendations for an actual overhaul of the reward system, Scholarship Reconsidered, Boyer examines what he rightly calls in his subtitle the “Priorities of the Professoriate.” No less than his more raucous fellow critics outside the academic and foundation world, he sets out from a position of concern for undergraduates. “It is futile,” he says on his first page, with a directness that would go down perfectly well in the Wall Street Journal, “to talk about improving the quality of teaching if, in the end, faculty are not given recognition for the time they spend with students” (xi). He does not go on, however, as more radical critics have done, to suggest turning the reward system on its head and giving teachers the high salaries and researchers the low ones (Anderson, Impostors ), giving professors released time and smaller classes not for teaching graduate seminars but for teaching introductory undergraduate courses (Douglas), or simply not allowing poor teachers to be professors (Wegner). Instead he skillfully sidesteps the “tired old teaching versus research debate” by subsuming both elements of the debate under the heading of scholarship. This strategy is in itself a return to an older and once highly respectable image of the professor as scholar-teacher, but Boyer widens and defines the concept further. The scholarship of discovery (research), he suggests, is on a par with the scholarship of teaching, the scholarship of integration, and the scholarship of application (service). Thus a scholar who keeps up with the field and teaches it well should be rewarded for the scholarship of teaching, while a scholar who keeps up with the field, or with several fields, and integrates acquired knowledge into such form as a textbook deserves recognition for the scholarship of integration. A scholar who uses a special field of knowledge to provide service to the larger community, “whether in medical diagnosis, serving clients in psychotherapy, shaping public policy, creating an architectural design or working with the public schools,” is equally meritorious in contributing to the scholarship of application (23).
Boyer's redefinitions contribute elegantly to that topic of much fascination to the professoriat: What is a professor? It is also, like Mancing's formula for a redistribution of the workload, a valuable document for the working chair in that it can actually be used in setting up new and more flexible ways of apportioning merit raises and in judging tenure and promotion cases. It provides, for example, splendid ammunition for the chair who wants to promote a teacher-scholar with few publications. With Boyer behind you, you may be able to do it even in a research institution without rocking the academic boat. Boyer does not, after all, really upset in any way cutting-edge researchers who do not teach very much or very well. His initial crystal-clear premise that faculty members must be recognized for time spent with students does somewhat lose its way in all his redefinitions. Yet it is this premise that would resound most positively among outside critics of the university. His four types of scholarship, however, seem like so much arcana in the outside world where questions such as whether a teacher should be rewarded for teaching, or a published textbook counts as a publication, fall rather into the question category of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Boyer is an inside critic and a very good one. We insiders hear what he is saying; we know where it belongs and how we can use it. We can also, if we wish, reject it with time-honored arguments. Either way, it does not take our breath away. An outside view of the academy, however, turns up other things that do not belong easily in Boyer's “celebration of the richness of faculty talent” (29) and leave us for the most part silent and uneasy. The outsider sees, for example, that in 1992 “a record 63% of high school graduates enrolled in college, up from about 50% in 1980” (Labor Letter), and that “about one half of high school students who go on to college go to community colleges” (Tucker), increasingly with the expectation of transferring to four-year colleges (Mercer, “States”). In the two-year colleges there is frequently no research expectation of the faculty and research facilities are normally meager. The university is therefore seen to be already living with the fact that at least fifty percent of the country's record numbers of entering students are being taught by people who are, by the terms of their employment, very far from the cutting edge of research. Well, we might say, these instructors are devoting themselves to the scholarship of teaching: certainly, their teaching loads are heavy. The outsider goes on to observe, however, that “part-timers” now make up about thirty-eight percent of all college teachers, according to the latest AAUP estimates, and fifty percent of all community college teachers (Mangan, “Many Colleges”). The university then is also seen to be living with the fact that hundreds and thousands of college classes are taught by people who are not only far from the cutting edge of research but also far from making a living wage. Many of them are hired days before a course begins and dropped days after it ends. They are not obliged to spend any time with students outside class: they could hardly be expected to do so when they make, if they are lucky, eighteen hundred dollars a course with little or nothing in the way of fringe benefits. What price the scholarship of teaching? asks the outsider. Have we, in our ingenious professorial way, perhaps found a formula for balancing this particular set of educational scales on a nationwide basis? Do we think we can tip the balance against these hundreds and thousands of ad hoc college classes by insisting that the other hundreds and thousands of classes be taught by people whose every contribution to the profession is weighed and measured as they inch their way up the promotion and tenure ladder on rungs of thousands of dollars? What price angels on the head of a pin? asks the outsider. Mr. Boyer in his humane and enlightened discussion of the reward system simply does not mention part-time teachers. We insiders high up on the ladder know why. It is, we often say as we lift our gaze from the lowest rungs to higher things, an intractable problem. It is also, arguably, at the heart of what is rotten in the state of the university.
It may appear here that I am writing about the university, as its outside detractors often do, as if it were one monolithic institution. We know, of course, that it is nothing of the kind. Reward structures operate very differently in the different worlds of small elite liberal arts colleges, big public research universities, two-year community colleges, large, highly selective Ivy League institutions, and so on. It is a truism of the American education system that every college and university has a right and an obligation to define its own “mission.” The routine adulation of this diversity would perhaps be more convincing if all students had an equal right and obligation to go to the kind of college and university that they really need. Close to eighty percent of the college student population is now to be found at public institutions (Jacobsen, “Academic Leaders” A36). Many public universities are massively overloaded with students, and while budgets are being cut, student enrollments are in many places rising. Anyone who teaches at my own big city college knows that most of the eighteen thousand registered students who come to school on the Lexington Avenue subway actually need and would benefit mightily from the personal attention and one-on-one tutoring that is regarded as the mission of the small liberal arts college. Nevertheless my college, which now has more than half its courses taught by part-time faculty, is free to define its mission as that of a “premier teaching and research institution,” to weight research and publications more heavily in the reward system than teaching (Green), and to make no attempt even to enforce the scheduling of one faculty office hour a week per course taught. Only a few miles away on the lovely, green-lawned suburban campus of small, private Sarah Lawrence College, teachers are told clearly that research and publication may be their private hobbies, but their jobs entail spending four full days a week in their offices working with their students. It is perfectly clear which students are most disadvantaged by these two different reward systems, namely, the eighteen thousand city college students who started out more disadvantaged in the first place.
Of course, we will all go to the barricades to defend the rights of colleagues to decide on their own reward systems. My own university certainly has a right to defend its proud reputation for research and scholarship and it has an obligation to try to preserve it in adverse circumstances. This does give rise, however, to impossible educational paradoxes. It is by no means a matter of simple arithmetic for a chair in my institution these days to figure out a workload policy based on Mancing's model with percentages of working time spent on each activity. This model is rightly based on a first assumption “that the department's goals and priorities are consistent with the institution's mission” (48). But facing the realities of an institution's life as distinct from its published mission can turn workload assignments into a complicated matter of conscience, and conscience does make cowards of us all. The individual chair who tries alone to buck the system, otherwise known as the mission, is also most bound to fail, to put his own department at a disadvantage and his own faculty at risk.
Small liberal arts colleges themselves, long the envy of would-be teacher-scholars at larger institutions, are in these times of flux providing their own scenarios for crises of conscience. Reports have been emerging in the last few years of a “stronger push for research on liberal arts campuses,” bringing fears of changes in the campus climate at colleges such as Grinnell, Wellesley, Franklin and Marshall, and Macalester (Heller). Recently a professor at Colby College has described distress at seeing junior colleagues denied tenure because they had taken seriously the official ideology that teaching, advising, and spending time with students was more important than publishing only to find that their chances of advancement depended largely on their publication records (Bowen). The seemingly basic assumption that departmental goals and priorities must be consistent with the institution's mission does rather depend, in small private colleges as in large public institutions, on two even more basic assumptions: that the institution's stated mission is consistent with what it actually does and that what the institution actually does makes some sense. The latter assumption, in the current state of moral confusion and financial disarray in the profession, is particularly hard to take for granted.
It is not altogether surprising that some critics, looking at the confusion particularly on teaching versus research issues, are beginning to suggest that since the academy cannot seem to sort itself out, “massive system-wide intervention from outside the academic system is needed” (Bess 22). James Bess's own sweeping diagnosis is that current faculty members are “miscast professionals” and that a new incentive structure should be devised to bring into the universities new kinds of people who have genuine potential for being good teachers but who do not now see university teaching as a viable career (21). This suggestion is still in the realm of theory, some would say fantasy, as are a number of other recent suggestions for radical and perhaps enforced change (Barnett; Douglas; Miller; Tucker; Ulbrich; et al.).
Quite concrete pressures for change are, however, emerging from those who foot the university bills—in the case of private universities, directly or indirectly, students themselves. Administrators of some private universities are launching efforts to turn their institutions into “student-oriented research universities” because they are facing potentially large financial deficits and “steep competition for students who can afford … rising tuition.” So far, faculty members seem to be responding with skepticism. The faculty adviser to a student group at Syracuse, Undergraduates for a Better Education, has been quoted as saying: “I think they (the administrators) are making a valiant effort, but I don't think the faculty believes it will happen” (Mooney, “Syracuse” A32). If, however, the point is reached where university administrators decide firmly and generally that there is more profit in running a respectable undergraduate teaching program than in funding a prestige-enhancing research program, then faculty skepticism will probably begin to wither away and Boyer's humane plea for diversifying the definitions of scholarship will come into its own. This may not happen soon enough to meet other outside pressures, for in the meantime, those mass providers of university funds, the state legislatures, are taking a down-to-earth look not at “the richness of faculty talent” but at what they tend to call “faculty productivity.”
A number of states are questioning how much time professors spend working with undergraduate students; surveys of faculty workloads have been completed in Mississippi, New York, and Virginia, and similar efforts are afoot in Arizona and North Carolina. Such efforts are not always appreciated on the campuses by faculty or administration, and have apparently been greeted with protests from the administrators of institutions such as the State University of New York (Cage). By contrast, in a comment on the 1992 report that at least a dozen states were examining the academic work week “with an eye toward mandating that faculty members teach more,” the chair of history at Miami University of Ohio argued convincingly that protest was not enough; he suggested that we needed to do a better job explaining what we do with our time but we also needed to acknowledge some of the criticisms and “to work out new arrangements to guarantee that teaching needs are better met” (Winkler B2). This of course is easier said than done, but Allan Winkler's point that we need to show how we can put our own house in order is surely well taken. If we do not, in one way or another, it may be done for us.
Foreign language and literature departments demonstrate all too clearly some of the worst failings of the educational system, but for various reasons we are now very well placed to demonstrate how we might put our particular house in order and begin to overcome these failings ourselves. Crucial to our success will be the way we manage the reward system of our discipline, for this directs the expenditure and allotment of faculty time, and large amounts of faculty time will need to be redirected.
Individual department chairs can and do skillfully manage the way rewards are meted out in their own departments—released time, travel funds, office space and equipment, even merit increases—and make many decisions about them that affect the way a department works. They cannot, however, even with the full backing of their departments, redirect the reward systems of the individual institutions. To stand any chance of contravening and even influencing their overall institutional systems, they need to have the power of the discipline behind them. As chairs across the spectrum of foreign language and literature departments we can, if we will, support one another in shifting the priorities of the reward system as it affects our discipline as a whole. Salaries are paid and time is allotted by individual institutions but prestige comes to professors largely from their standing in their own disciplines. Disciplinary prestige translates into dollars and cents in institutional reward systems and so plays a very important part in determining the work that actually gets done in the academy.
The discipline of foreign languages and literatures is in a stronger position now than it has been for many years. Paradoxically it is in that position not through the efforts of those who enjoy the highest prestige in the discipline (namely, the literary scholars) but because of the efforts of those who enjoy the least prestige (namely, the language teachers) and who are being recognized and encouraged by powers outside the discipline. College foreign language enrollments grew thirty percent in the last decade after a ten-year period of decline. There was a six percent increase in high school foreign language enrollments between 1985 and 1990 (ACTFL). In 1990, the “widespread national recognition of the need for more US citizens to learn foreign languages” received the imprimatur of the federal government when Congress approved funding for the Special Opportunity in Foreign Language Education to be administered by the National Endowment for the Humanities (Byrnes 6). We are much more in the mainstream of what the country wants than we used to be.
As a discipline we are with other humanists still at the low end of the overall faculty compensation scale. In a fighting speech at the ADFL seminar in Athens, Georgia, three years ago, Howard Mancing urged us all to rebel against “disciplinary discrimination” and to speak up forcefully against the caving in of administrators to “market pressures” by paying much bigger salaries to engineers and accountants, among others, than they do to us (“Full Equal Partners” 8). Although his speech caused quite a stir among seminar participants and was subsequently published in the ADFL Bulletin, no reverberations have yet affected our place in the listings of average faculty salaries by rank in selected fields that are published every year in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Indeed the sponsor of the 1992–93 College and University Personnel Association survey was reported as saying, unrepentantly: “The academic marketplace is working its will of supply and demand” (Magner A14).
Most of us would surely support Mancing's opposition to salary differential by discipline and we usually balk ourselves at the idea of pandering to the marketplace. But the fact is that we, as a discipline, do at the moment have something to supply that society is demanding, and I do not simply mean foreign languages for business purposes, though that certainly fulfills a specific societal need. We could in a much bigger and more important way put society very much in our debt if only we could unify ourselves as a discipline and work together with mutual respect toward some common educational goals instead of vying with each other for position and prestige across the language and literature divide. What has happened in the foreign language teaching field in the last decade has actually put us in a stronger position than most disciplines to seize the initiative in answering one of the most urgent questions facing the entire United States educational system, namely, how to guide students smoothly, successfully, and efficiently through the various stages of their educational careers.
Many aspects of this question are under discussion in meetings of the Education Commission of the States and in boards of regents and higher education coordinating boards across the country. With or without the knowledge and approval of college faculties, legislative action on some of them is already being dictated in one way or another by “tight budgets” (Layzell). Characteristic pieces of the problem as stated in recent published accounts of nationwide actions are the “lack of progression from high school to college” (Mercer, “Commission”), the millions spent annually by higher education institutions “to bring students up to speed to do college work” (Lively), and the difficulties that students have in “breaking through the barriers of transfer” from two-year to four-year colleges (Mellow). A recent, typical report on the last-mentioned problem suggests what lies in store for the universities: “The Ohio legislature, frustrated by students' problems in transferring from state-assisted technical and community colleges to public universities, passed a bill in 1992 directing public institutions to develop and carry out a statewide articulation and transfer policy” (Cicarelli B1).
In the universities articulation is unfortunately another of those words that tend to make professors yawn. They see it as someone else's problem. And yet a massive professionwide effort at solving our articulation problems in foreign languages would not only please legislators, to say nothing of the marketplace, but also offer college professors themselves what they should surely most want: the chance to teach foreign languages and literatures in college at the college level.
Nowhere is it clearer and easier to admit than in foreign languages that a good deal of what goes on in college, i.e., the teaching and learning in elementary and intermediate courses, could and should go on in high schools. The “millions spent annually by higher education institutions” on foreign languages are indeed spent “bringing students up to speed to do college work,” which most of them then never actually do. According to a 1987–89 MLA survey of 607 representative foreign language departments, twenty-two percent of the programs in the sample had no enrollments at all in advanced courses; most of these were two-year college programs. Of the four-year programs offering advanced courses, eighteen percent of total enrollments on average were in advanced courses (Huber, Report ch. 8, p. 6). By anything resembling, let us say, European standards, less than one-fifth of the four-year college students in that sample in that semester were doing college-level work, and practically none in the two-year colleges.
This makes neither educational nor economic sense. Armies of TAs and adjunct teachers are being paid low wages to help us teach at college introductory and elementary foreign languages that could be better and more efficiently taught by full-time, properly paid, properly trained teachers at the secondary level of education. At the same time, armies of foreign language professors are being paid high salaries to teach the same introductory and elementary courses when they are well qualified to teach much higher levels of the language and could readily do so if only students could be made ready to work at these higher levels by the time they reach college. A very small number of college professors are actually being paid to teach college-level work. The foreign language field thus illustrates all too clearly what some candid critics of the educational system have been pointing out in recent times—that “many U.S. colleges are really inefficient, high-priced secondary schools” (Tucker).
The foreign language field also illustrates, however, what few outside critics seem to have noticed, namely, that it is possible for the universities to begin to dig themselves out of this hole. Large numbers of people across the country have put in very solid work in the last decade on establishing standards of performance in the four language skills and guiding students through the crucial beginning levels on which all subsequent study in foreign languages is based. Some states have recently mandated more years of foreign language study in public schools and this move has been matched at some state universities, such as Minnesota and Wisconsin, by increased admission requirements. Thus can the foreign language enterprises at public school and university support each other. In Minnesota, where college credit for introductory courses in the commonly taught languages is now denied, the groundwork is being laid in a serious way for raising the level of college teaching (Barnes, Klee, and Wakefield). At the same time steady work is improving the quality of high school offerings and the training of high school teachers (Lange). In Wisconsin more incoming students are already placing directly into second-year language classes, and attention is being paid to the training of TAs to teach at a level higher than the elementary (Magnan).
If we are to seize the national initiative that lies within our grasp in the profession as a whole, many such related efforts must be carried on simultaneously—establishing standards of performance; introducing entrance requirements; reapportioning college credit; changing the level of college requirements; rethinking the entire curriculum for high schools, two- and four-year colleges, and graduate schools; training future college teachers as well as new high school teachers; and cooperating with present high school teachers.
We are beginning to control that much discussed “progress from high school to college.” We are poised on the edge of being able to offer American students an organized six- or eight-year continuous curriculum—what it takes, in other words, really to learn a foreign language. In order to go over this edge, to offer such a continuum, and thus increase hugely the number of students in our courses doing college-level work, those who teach the upper levels of the university curriculum and those who teach at the graduate level of the university curriculum must stop thinking that this all concerns somebody else, see it as their problem, and become involved in the over-all effort. And here, lest it appear that I am straying from my topic, is where we run fair and square into the reward system of the university and the tired old teaching and research debate. In our field, the latter is very much tied up with another tired old debate, the language and literature one.
In the teaching enterprise of our discipline, prestige, for obvious reasons, attaches to teaching courses that involve a high degree of literacy: by tradition, literature courses. We are, however, marching on the path to extinction when we persist in teaching such courses in classrooms where a high degree of literacy is enjoyed only by us. Commenting at a 1991 ADFL seminar on the small percentage of enrollment in upper-level courses in the 1987–89 MLA survey, Richard Brod, long an astute analyst of our profession, asked politely, “What does this say about the attractiveness of our elective courses and of our majors?” His topic was the reward structure of our profession and he pointed out that although the teaching of introductory language was regarded as “low-level” and its contribution to higher education was poorly recognized, the vast majority of our colleagues, given the quoted percentage, must be teaching introductory language at least some of the time. It might seem surprising to an outsider that, in a profession where so many people are involved throughout their careers in actually doing this “low-level” work, so little serious attention has been paid to carrying students beyond it and into the “high-level” work to which many professors, often the selfsame people, aspire in their upper-level literature courses. The insider, however, is conditioned by the profession to equate language teaching with low-level teaching and blindly to seek the higher prestige of teaching literature in upper-level and graduate courses, untarnished by the “remedial work” of instruction in the language. One can hardly blame the foreign language professoriat for wanting its students to operate at the college level, but one must regret its short-sightedness in offering courses intended for very advanced students to students who badly need help in reaching that very advanced stage. This self-deluding myopia has hardly increased the attractiveness of elective courses and majors. On the contrary, it has closed them to the vast majority of students who cannot study abroad and cannot make the leap from language to literature by themselves.
The inability of many foreign language departments to “attract” students at the upper levels is, because of the present budgetary climate at many institutions, causing a rethinking of priorities that years of exhortation by would-be educational reformers have failed to bring about. College administrators in many kinds of institutions have not been inclined in recent decades to urge professors to spend time with students who need help in language. On the contrary, they have been intent on rewarding professors for time spent on literary research and publications. The professorial desire for prestige-teaching has combined with the institutional desire for prestige-publishing to empty many classrooms in upper-level foreign literature courses, but small literature majors have until recently managed to survive on the backs of large introductory language programs. Administrators under financial pressure are now ceasing to collude in this dubious enterprise and in many cases are threatening the termination of upper-level and graduate programs.
My own university in the great cosmopolitan city of New York is coming dangerously close to ringing down the curtain on many full programs of foreign languages and literatures, modern and classical. The plan before the university at the moment is to “consolidate” its operations by eliminating upper-level or major programs of study wherever enrollments are currently small. Where students have voted with their feet, university administrators are following with their hatchets. If the plan goes through, in this 200,000-student, twenty-two-campus university, there will be, for example, only one upper-level program in classics, one in German, one in Italian, one in Russian, two in French, and four in Spanish. Outrage has broken out in the faculty, with good reason. Nonetheless, enrollments in upper-level courses in many colleges in many languages are undeniably small despite large enrollments in required elementary and intermediate courses. Administrators have a right to say so. They have less right to exonerate themselves from all blame in the face of this manifest breakdown in the educational system. They abdicate responsibility when they assert blandly that student priorities have changed. It is of course easier for them to do this than to say honestly to the faculty: “We have for years promoted and tenured you for something other than language teaching. Now we are going to punish you for not doing well enough what we would never have rewarded you for if you had spent real time on it.” It is easier for them simply and suddenly to apply the criterion of keeping students, and while it is unfair, it ought to focus the mind of the faculty on retention through the levels.
It will not necessarily do this, however, unless we as a profession become fully aware of the degree to which our success and indeed survival as a discipline is bound up with the retention of all kinds of students through all the levels. So far in the budget slashes across the country, while tenure-track professors are being cut, tenured positions have largely been protected, and the danger is that those in tenured positions will continue business as usual, tacitly counting the years to their own retirement. The threat of cutting in general will by no means have the salutary effect of improving teaching efforts if, as in the case of the University of Massachusetts, the cutting committee “focuses on departments in which low undergraduate enrollment is not offset by research” (Mooney, “Financial Stresses” A 12). Language departments, such as the German department, have been targeted there too, even though their research requirements are already high. Often, by “research,” such committees mean funded research, which, as we all know, is hard to come by in languages. This kind of threat is more likely to result in stepping up literary and linguistic research and individual grant getting than in putting more time into undergraduate teaching. Personal prestige will then be further enhanced at the expense of the overall foreign language teaching enterprise.
Individual research grants will only ever benefit a minority of language departments. When university administrators talk about offsetting enrollments with research, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the kind of research most of us do as literary scholars, which brings in no cash at all to the university, is really going to save our programs when the big financial crunch comes. Success in what are bad financial times for many of us can only be achieved on a professionwide, not an individual, basis, and that means doing such a good job of teaching American students foreign languages through the levels that they will have a real chance to enjoy with us the higher reaches of literacy in these languages. Our classrooms will be full at all levels, our students will be getting what they have a right to expect, and our existence as units of the new pared-down universities will be better justified.
As chairs in all kinds of institutions we will need to support one another across the discipline in opening up the reward system to include all the kinds of work that are needed for such an effort. If teaching itself and projects involving the reform of teaching remain at the bottom of the heap in terms of real remuneration, we will simply not get enough people to do the job. We can turn to Boyer's four kinds of scholarship—research, teaching, integration and application—if we need vocabulary for promotion and tenure committees. More important than finding vocabulary is knowing where we are going and finding enough people to put their time, their prestige, their careers on the line. “Enough people” means in fact the majority of the faculty in each of our departments, no matter what their specialties are. We will have to give up pitting teaching against research and language against literature and stop being manipulated by stereo-typical views of what carries the most prestige. A hierarchy in which literature is higher than language, research into literature higher than research into language acquisition, research into language acquisition higher than research into pedagogy, and everything higher than plain old teaching—this is a manifest absurdity. By allowing such hierarchical distinctions among ourselves to be used by institutional tenure and promotion committees, we are destroying our own discipline. We need to speak with a unified voice and support the kinds of work that all our colleagues do. We need most obviously to use language teaching to reinforce the teaching of literature, and literature teaching to reinforce the teaching of language, not to set up opposing camps from which to snipe at each other.
A good example of self-destructive internal confusion in the profession is provided by one of the most obviously underrated and underrewarded positions in foreign language departments, that of the language program coordinator (LPC) and TA supervisor. While in many departments the LPC is very highly regarded and holds faculty rank, the position still hangs in the balance in many others. Very little has ever appeared in the ADFL Bulletin on the topic of the reward system (Brod) but three articles have recently appeared dealing directly with one crucial hierarchical question: the place in the foreign language profession of the LPC (Harris-Schenz; LaLande; Shumway). Coming to these three papers after a steady diet of real-world reading on the problems of the university is quite a shock. The writers are all language program coordinators themselves, and they are all doing exactly what the outside world is begging the universities to do—namely, organizing our teaching and teaching our teachers—yet they are having to defend their positions and appeal for recognition within our own discipline.
Recent reports of national professional organizations urge specifically that graduate students in all fields be seriously introduced to the complexities of teaching undergraduates through coursework and mentoring (Association of American Colleges; Council of Graduate Schools, Policy Statement; Slevin). Graduate schools are in many places responding in a minimal way by introducing one course on pedagogy into their PhD programs. In foreign language departments all over the country, however, we are way ahead of this particular game, with many highly professional LPCs mentoring graduate students on a day-by-day basis. Instead of publicizing their commitment to teacher training and ours, we are still debating whether they should be called professors and given tenure or be called instructors, lecturers, preceptors, or some other such lesser title and given three-year or in some cases one-year contracts. This is surely the kind of debate that makes us a laughingstock in the real world, where it is the PhD degree itself that is under attack, and in certain extreme views may even face a legal challenge, as being “at best superfluous and perhaps inappropriate for training. teachers for America's colleges” (Lewis and Altbach 13).
In departments of foreign languages and literatures, we need to take the initiative in the real-world debate on the academic profession, or if it is already too late for that, to follow a suggestion recently made that we “reclaim the conversation about teaching and learning and construct the terms of public debate based on grounded, specific examples of teaching at institutions” (Schilling and Schilling). All too often, public and indeed administrative calls for “improvement” in teaching simply amount to the suggestion that professors should teach more courses. In our field, where students' progress is heavily dependent on teachers spending time with them and their work in a variety of activities from oral testing to setting, reading, and evaluating extensive written work, more courses and more students usually mean poorer, not better teaching. This is just as true in community colleges as in liberal arts colleges. There is a tendency to think in terms of reducing teaching loads only in order to do research. Foreign language teachers who are teaching four courses of elementary or intermediate Spanish to classes of thirty or forty students in a community college or teaching German to small groups of students at all levels through the major in a one- or two-person program in a small liberal arts college—these heroic figures (and there are plenty of them) need to have their teaching loads reduced in order to teach.
Good foreign language and literature teaching is time-consuming and it is expensive; witness the experience of universities that have actually instituted proficiency-based foreign language course sequences and requirements, such as the University of Pennsylvania (Allen). Present budgets are by no means adequate in most institutions, and many of them are being cut. In order for us to have any hope of sustaining good programs that function well through the levels, we have to set about it in an organized way and make very public the fact that we are doing so. As chairs we cannot individually reduce course loads, but we need to support one another across the profession in public explanations of the demanding and time-consuming nature of teaching foreign languages properly in every kind of institution. We have to be prepared to say with one voice that running large multi-section language programs with huge classes and unsupervised part-time faculty members is educational fraud. And to back this up we have to provide evidence that we ourselves know how to teach foreign languages well at all levels and are doing it successfully.
Surveys of the university teaching profession indicate that most professors actually like to teach. The 1989 faculty study conducted by the Carnegie Foundation found that the primary interest of seventy percent of the professors surveyed was in teaching (Boyer 44) but that seventy-seven percent of professors at four-year colleges felt compelled to conduct research to get tenure (Boyer 85). The prevalent accusation that high-paid professors are abdicating teaching responsibilities to low-paid teaching assistants is a caricature that we can easily refute in our discipline: Bettina Huber's findings in the 1987–89 MLA survey indicate that “most language programs hire part-time faculty members, not as a means of relieving full-time faculty members of the ‘burden’ of teaching introductory language sections, but as a means of coping with enrollments too large for faculty to handle” ( Report ch. 9, p. 4). Universities hire graduate assistants and adjunct lecturers to save themselves money for language teaching, not to save us work.
Nevertheless, we have, as professors of foreign languages, earned our salaries and quietly acquiesced in the exploitation of vast numbers of part-timers hired at low wages to work beside us in our discipline. Those of us who teach for high wages in graduate school have accepted with benign neglect the offering of large numbers of elementary classes at the university not because we think for a minute that those classes will send students through to graduate school but because they provide jobs and financing for the graduate students, many of them native speakers, who fill our graduate classes. Many of us throughout the ranks have failed to take any responsibility for instigating and supporting efforts to improve the high school teaching that should be the bedrock of our own efforts to raise the real level of American college teaching. Outside critics often shoot wide of the mark in attacking us. This does not mean that we have no moral and social obligation to try to correct the massive failings in the educational system that, after all, gives us our bread and butter. If we can summon up the combined professional will to tackle these failings head-on, we shall not only be supplying, in a self-serving way, what the marketplace demands; we shall finally be providing what society desperately needs.
In this time of confusion and change, if we little cogs in the big machine—the chairs of foreign language departments—can only join forces with each other across a variety of institutions, we can perhaps escape being spun around individually and passively toward an uncertain future. We probably will not turn the wheels of the whole academic reward machine in a new direction but we can at least try to set our own enterprise on a road that makes sense.
My list of works cited contains not only titles that I was able to cite in this short paper but also recently published materials that have helped to shape my thinking on the topic. My thanks go to colleagues who read this paper at various stages of its development, in particular to Ernst Hoffmann and to Beverly Harris-Schenz for their close reading and comment.
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© 1994 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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