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ON 12 SEPTEMBER 1992, CNN visited the California State University, Long Beach, campus to report on a program that sought to secure extramural funding, much of it private, for regularly scheduled courses with full enrollment that state money had previously supported; these courses were going to be cut that fall because of the dwindling state budget. Dubbed Adopt a Class, the project was launched in 1992 by the CSU, Long Beach, Office of University Relations and Development in a last-ditch effort to save at least a few courses so that students could get through their degree programs on time. 1 As the CNN video clip documents, the project drew speculation nationwide about the results, both negative and positive, that this embryonic form of good old-fashioned patronage might produce. The positive results have startled the entire CSU, Long Beach, Community. One first-semester language class and one conversation class have been covered each semester since fall 1992 through Adopt a Class. We now think differently about our programs and about how we plan for the future. So far, the negative aspects, expressed as fears that our department would have to answer to yet another level of authority, have not materialized.
While most faculty members might believe that fundraising efforts take place on campus somewhere deep within the administration, Adopt a Class had instead been formulated on the premise that a particular discipline and a particular community simply needed a pretext to come together in order to voice their needs to each other. It was hoped that these needs might be reciprocal and that the two groups could find the best solution by working together. As the first chair of the Department of Romance, German, and Russian Languages and Literatures to face a budget that could not possibly have maintained all our programs, I nonetheless felt obliged to keep my promise to the faculty that I would do everything in my power to retain all five language programs, even if in name only. 2 Within the CSU, our situation was not unique. In similar straits, most chairs of foreign language departments made the only decision they could: they closed the programs they saw as less crucial, a determination made administratively on the basis of the type of degrees the programs led to, whether MA, BA, minor, or less. Languages offered for a year only (two semesters on our campus) were usually the first to disappear, followed by minor programs and MA programs and then by BA programs with low enrollments. As a result, several Italian language programs have been eliminated or severely cut back throughout the system. 3 Since I had been hire to teach both French and Italian and knew well that students desired more, not fewer, courses, I could not accept the idea of eliminating a subject area altogether. 4 But my obligation to maintain degree programs for students who needed to graduate was going to force me to cut the Italian program, just as most foreign language chairs on other campuses had been forced to do.
The announcement about Adopt a Class came as I debated my options. Adopt a Class certainly offered me a pretext to ask for help from any person or institution we had dealt with in the past. I only had to think back to a few years before, when the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles sponsored a campus program to teach Italian to K-12 French and Spanish teachers in the Los Angeles basin, in the hope of introducing Italian into more elementary and secondary classrooms. The program had been so successful that we later received an NEH Masterwork grant for the reading of literature and a matching grant from the Italian Ministry of Education for intensive summer language training for the fifteen participants who had successfully completed the courses. Our close collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute made it possible for me to pick up the phone, call the former director, Gerlando Butti, and find the courage to say, “Italian needs your help. We need funds this semester to keep the program going.” Butti called a dinner meeting for the following week. He invited me, the director of our Italian program (Irene Marchegiani-Jones), and leaders of Italian American organizations in the Los Angeles area for a meeting on the plight of Long Beach. At first the members of this loosely formed committee from outside the university did not quite believe what they were hearing. They simply assumed that Italian held an unchallenged position in universities. They expressed concern about the elimination of the Italian program but an even greater concern over the lack of Italian language courses in middle schools and high schools. We explained that middle school and high school programs are impossible without BA programs for future teachers. We also disclosed our long-term goal of adding Italian to our department's BA programs, but we made it clear that the university, especially under the current funding strictures, would not create another tenure-track position in Italian in the foreseeable future. While many of the Italian American organizations present—NIAF (National Italian American Foundation), the Order Sons of Italy in American, and UNICO 5 —give money to scholarship programs every year, the scholarships do little to promote the study of Italian. The awards are usually made to students of Italian American descent graduating from high school, whatever their field of study. Since most members of these organizations assume that they are indirectly supporting Italian by belonging to an Italian American organization that gives money to education, the thought of contributing to an Italian program in higher education had never crossed their minds. We discovered that most people have a very rudimentary understanding of how their tax dollars are spent on public education programs. I spent an hour and a half answering questions and explaining why the intervention of these groups was the only hope for the preservation of Italian on our campus. It was a meeting I would relive several times as the program got under way.
The next day Butti called to tell me that the committee members would participate in Adopt a Class; they were also willing to consider more long-range involvement in cooperation with our department to support Italian courses.
Two departments succeeded in raising funds through Adopt a Class: ours and engineering technology. The Office of University Relations and Development was surprised to discover an Italian American community in Los Angeles. Once the gift had been made, the vice president for development, Jerry Mandel, told me that he had never expected to have success with Adopt a Class in Italian. He then pledged resources from the Office of University Relations and Development to our program so that we could build a long-term fund-raising strategy that would lead to an endowed chair in Italian.
True to his word, Mandel had we working with a development officer the very next week. Over the course of a month the officer and I met several times to discuss the short-, mid-, and long-term goals of the program. I was given a series of questions to answer so that we could develop a case statement for Italian. While I had initially resented the time these activities took from my other professorial and administrative duties, I immediately began to see the benefits of such detailed planning and assessment for the department as a whole. Before these meetings, I had no definitive vision for the program. The development officer was simultaneously polling other faculty members, students, and community members about the program and their hopes for it. Combining their views and mine, the development officer and I structured an overall plan. After two months of such work we finally had a solid, one-page document that we could leave with the people we were calling on for help. With document in hand and me in tow, the development officer scheduled twice-weekly presentations about the program, usually off campus. As interest grew, we scheduled our first fund-raising event, a reception in spring 1993 at the home of the president of the university. The following excerpt from an article appearing in the CSU, Long Beach, Review , an alumni publication, summarizes the event:
A recent reception at the Miller House brought together members of the Southern California Italian community concentrating their efforts in support of Italian Language Studies at CSULB. The goal of the Committee for the Advancement of Italian Language and Culture, formed in March, is two-fold—to raise $500,000 toward an endowment and to create an Italian major at CSULB. If successful, it would be the only major of its kind at a CSU campus in Southern California.…
“The Italian-American community wants to help the university develop and maintain programs to teach Italian language and culture to preserve Italian heritage at Cal State Long Beach,” says [Frank] De Santis. 6 “The community is demonstrating commitment through its involvement and its gifts.”
(“Italian Community”)
In the months following our first fund-raiser, we tried to visit as many of the people who had attended the event as we could and took advantage of every means to make our cause known in the Italian American community. Various committee members have had a steady flow of articles about the project published in California's Italian American paper L'Italo-Americano ; others, who represent local, regional, national Italian American organizations, have sought to make the CSU, Long Beach, Italian Program endowment the recipient of annual donations. For example, the Italian American women's club of Los Angeles made a contribution in 1994; in 1995 the club will decide to make the program the object of an annual donation and will set the amount of the donation. Robert Barbera, a member of the San Gabriel chapter of UNICO National and the current chair of the committee Friends of the California State University, Long Beach, Italian Program, invited me to his home to meet with the presidents of twelve of the local chapters of UNICO to discuss the project. Each of the presidents agreed to propose to their respective boards and memberships that they make the endowed chair in Italian at CSU, Long Beach, a fundraising project over the next few years. Once the groups has agreed, the local chapter presidents together made a proposal for funds from the regional organization; in recent months the incoming national president, Frank Cannata, has also begun work to publicize our project to the national organization; his efforts culminated in the national convention in Kansas City on 6–7 August 1994, where several chapters made pledges to the program. The main reason for our success with UNICO is their understanding of what we are trying to do; the organization has already helped raise funds for two chairs of Italian on the East Coast. 7
Our conversations with UNICO have given us a glimpse of how other organizations and individuals will respond one day when they understand why it is so crucial to give to such programs. During a visit to CSU, Long Beach, on 13 June 1994, Cannata told our committee that he would like to see UNICO National spend the bulk of its fund-raising dollars on higher education. He feels that such programs offer organizations like his the best way not only to preserve and promote their cultural heritage but also to target educational dollars directly toward programs they believe in. 8 One reason Cannata is such a strong advocate for university foreign language programs is that he recognizes the utility of foreign language study in international business, since that is the world he works in. Before launching our campaign with UNICO National, Cannata came to Long Beach to meet the university president, Robert Maxson, and to visit the campus. During his stay he told the president and other administrators that no one would be competitive in tomorrow's marketplace without knowing a foreign language. He cited personal examples from his experience as a businessman, adding that his son had been studying Russian for seven years, had been to Russia twice, and would pursue the language at college. It is exactly this kind of advocacy that foreign language departments need community members to bring to the administration. Donors often have the opportunity to associate with deans, vice presidents, and presidents; they will tell the administration repeatedly how important the programs they support are to the mission of the university. Since they have heard the programs explained several times, these community members usually master the most important aspects with no trouble. Indeed, members of our Italian committee often present the issue more compellingly than I do.
Another benefit of working with community members is that it allow us to expose them to the university and to what we do. Many committee members have spent time shadowing me on campus. They are always surprised at the number of hours we work and the number of tasks we perform besides teaching. Through their contact with the program they also see areas of the curriculum that from a layperson's point of view could stand improvement. They tend to favor “practical” courses such as business language courses or translation courses. They also like to think of language acquisition as outcome-based, meaning that we can be very specific about a student's speaking, listening, reading, and writing capabilities, or “outcome,” on a semester-to-semester basis. Most of them had a foreign language experience in high school or college that was anything but positive—they “didn't learn anything” and “didn't like the instructor.” They are impressed by the use of technology in language teaching and by the possibilities it offers for Students. They now understand why language acquisition is not an overnight process and realize that students need to be nurtured during their college years and encouraged to spend a portion of those years abroad.
The discussions about curricula that we have had with community members have been important both for our rethinking of the program and for the community's understanding of how a series of course offerings fits into a plan of study for the BA degree or the minor in Italian. As mentioned above, the community members I have worked with are most often focused on language acquisition, since many of them have attempted to learn Italian in a community college or adult education program. They often have no concept of what a detailed course of study in a language program might be. In my interaction with various community groups, I am invariably called on to address curricular issues. Community members are always fascinated by the breadth of courses we are trying to offer and the range of the field of Italian studies. This reaction belies confusion about the relation between language and literature, language and history, language and business, and so on and about why one needs to learn and practice different vocabularies and modes of expression in order to become a competent practitioner of the language.
Most of our committee members are in business, and therefore they see the necessity of courses that cover the language of business and world news. We have been concerned with this need for a long time and have been selecting news segments for our first- and second-year classes in French and German with the help of a Department of Education grant. 9 In hope of finding a donor who will assist us in adding Italian to this project, we have shown our committee the type of research and the level of technological expertise and equipment needed to make this sort of programming possible. Exposure to educational technology has also made a great difference in what the committee members think about what academe is and where it is going. Businesspeople feel very comfortable with high technology, and they feel closer to academe when they see computers and video applied in the classroom. They react very favorably to interactive video programming such as A la rencontre de Philippe , which gives the learner the opportunity to explore real-life situations in the language, and self-paced computer software or interactive videos such as Exito , the CIA-developed Spanish immersion program that imparts a semester of language study in ten days of intensive work.
Our committee is always surprised by the limitations and obsolescence of our equipment. They usually remark that children in elementary schools have access to better equipment than we do. The lack of machinery and technical personnel for language teaching demonstrates to the public how holes in the budget affect education. Extramural funding sources will finance the development of software but not expenditures for hardware. The difficulty of being included in the university's technology budget in the first place and the length of the funding cycles in which there is money available mean that few campus language media laboratories can call themselves state of the art. For this very reason language media laboratories provide perfect opportunities for businesses to donate to language programs. It is easy to ask for dollars to fund technology because it is easy to demonstrate the need for and potential of the resources to people and businesses whose economic viability often depends on technical equipment and skilled personnel.
The second phase of our fund-raising project will focus heavily on the media laboratory and will involve the other language programs in our department; it will also build on our current efforts to show news broadcasts in our language classrooms. Project Headlines Interactive, a program funded through a Department of Education grant, constitutes one initial foray in this sector.
Ultimately, our interaction with the community has led to changes in the curriculum we have outlined for our Italian BA. The proposal we presented to the university before the budget cuts reflected a traditional Italian literature course of study; the most interdisciplinary aspect of the program employed borrowings from comparative literature. As we prepare to make another BA proposal to the university and move toward completion of the endowed-chair campaign, we have opted for an Italian studies format that will allow students to comajor in Italian and another discipline (e.g., business or radio, TV, and film) by taking courses such as Consumer Behavior in France, Italy, and Spain or Italian Cinema, which will count toward a combined degree. 10
Just as UNICO National has entered our fundraising campaign for Italian as a major player, so too have the various levels of the Order Sons of Italy in America. The organization's regional board for the State of California has embraced Adopt a Class on our campus and other campuses. Indeed, the Sacramento Valley chapters of the Sons of Italy “adopted” a beginning Italian course that was in danger at Sacramento State University after hearing about our program at a regional meeting. Adopt a Class has now become a regular part of their fundraising activities. For the past two years the Orange County Renaissance Lodge of the Sons of Italy has raised money to cover one of our classes each semester. The lodge has taken even greater steps to benefit our students by turning over an endowed scholarship fund to our department. 11 Last year we were able to award two students scholarships, allowing them to visit Italy and improve their knowledge of the language and culture. In addition, the Italian Cultural Institute has awarded our scholarship recipients tuition vouchers for language schools in Italy. This year our scholarship recipients are attending the Istituto Michelangelo in Florence and the Università di Urbino.
Our own ideas and goals for the endowed chair have begun to evolve as we have worked with the community on the project. The community would like to remain involved with our Italian language program after the chair is established and will, I believe, continue to be a source of encouragement and support. Our committee has grown to include fifteen community members, a representative of the Italian Cultural Institute in Los Angeles, a student representative, and our full-time faculty members in Italian. The consul general of Italy in Los Angeles, Gabriella Meneghello Battistello, is the honorary chair of the committee. We meet once a month to review the monthly statement from the CSU Long Beach Foundation, to plan fund-raising events, to set goals, to report on work accomplished, and, most important, to come together as a body of friends with mutual interests. We are also considering what goals to pursue after we have established the endowed chair; we are contemplating the establishment of a cultural center on campus that could be a venue for additional campus-community interaction, providing even greater advantages for our students. In the future we would like to establish a music series, a film series, and a program of internships abroad for our students. Our Italian project has sparked so much interest that other language areas are eager to launch similar projects. Certainly, the first steps in creating this kind of project pose the greatest difficulties. Establishing a network of relations in the community and juggling added responsibilities is a challenge for any chair. But the rewards are too great to pass up. When chairs raise funds for their departments, it tangibly shows the administration that the chairs will not be daunted by bad budgets. My colleagues in other departments have begun to take a closer look at what our department is doing and how we are doing it. By reaching out the community, we have inadvertently reached out to our own university as well, an outcome that I could never have foreseen when the project began.
The author is Professor of French and Italian and Chair of the Department of Romance, German, and Russian Languages and Literatures at California StateUniversity, Long Beach. This article is based on her presentation at ADFL Seminar West, 2–4 June 1994, in Monterey, California.
1 The courses in question were required for general education or for the major in a specific discipline. The sheer number of required courses canceled during the most recent years of budgetary shortfalls has given rise to the infamous five- and six-year BA programs in California that have become anathema to parents and self-supporting students. While the situation appears to be improving slightly (a budget cut to the CSU system of only $1.9 million has been hailed by our president, Robert Maxson, as “the best budget in years” in a recent letter to faculty members), the number of students attending state universities in California continues to drop, while more expensive, private, small liberal arts campuses such as the University of San Diego and Santa Clara University are thriving.
2 Many CSU language programs have been forced to prune their offerings considerably since the budget cuts began. Indeed, some campus presidents have specifically focused on language departments as particularly appropriate areas for cuts. San Diego State University's recent attempt to close the department of German and Russian is a case in point.
3 Even on campuses where Italian enrollments match or exceed the enrollment figures of other language programs, resources have often been reallocated to Asian language programs whose enrollments have been growing. In a time when so much lip service is paid to the importance of global education and international programs, it is regrettable that campuses are making cuts in the most globally and internationally promising courses of all. Discovery of the international dimension of life is inevitable in language study; moreover, language study forces the student to face the complexities of this international dimension rather than experience them through the filter of English. Different languages attract different students. Heritage languages draw students to language study initially, often serving as catalysts to the study of other languages and cultures as well. In this light, the elimination of any language program necessarily discourages, albeit unconsciously, a certain percentage of students from voluntary language study and is thus diametrically opposed to the international goals mist institutions of higher learning have set for their campuses and students. By eliminating language programs, we discourage students from language study.
4 As of fall 1994 the voice-registration system used to enroll students in courses on our campus has a feature that continues to track demand after courses are filled. One week before classes began this fall, the demand for Italian courses exceeded the number of available spaces by twenty-seven percent.
5 This Italian American organization originally chose the name UNICO because the word means “unique” in Italian; the name is now an acronym whose letters stand for “Unity, Neighborliness, Integrity, Charity, and Opportunity.” The organization was founded in 1922 in Waterbury, Connecticut, by Anthony Bastola when he was denied admission to a well-known philanthropic organization because he was Italian. UNICO was established to promote Italian culture and language and to support the cause of mental health. Through its recent engagement in endowed-chair projects it has strengthened the commitment to fostering Italian culture and language that was stipulated in its original mission statement.
6 De Santis, from Order Sons of Italy in American, cochaired the committee with Peter Tubiolo in its first year. Robert Barbera currently chairs the committee, which now carries the name Friends of the California State University, Long Beach, Italian Program. I am extremely grateful to these men and the organizations they represent for their unflagging and enthusiastic support.
7 Three years ago UNICO helped establish the Emiliana Pasca Noether Chair in Modern Italian History at the University of Connecticut, Storrs; the organization is currently completing a commitment to Seton Hall for a similar chair and at the August 1994 convention it launched a drive for the CSU Long Beach chair. Ours will be the first to be housed in a department of languages and literature.
8 The more I talk to people outside education, the more I discover that the same public that votes against increased taxes for higher education is actually quite willing to contribute to programs it believes in.
9 Project Headlines Interactive has been funded for two years by the Department of Education to develop video news materials for first- and second-year students in language courses who are training for international careers in business, engineering, or any field requiring excellent comprehension of the target language and culture. Thanks to an internal grant from the academic computing department, we are adding Spanish to the project this year.
10 Consumer Behavior in France, Italy, and Spain will be taught for the fist time in fall 1995. Terence Witkowski, chair of marketing, and I have received two internal awards—for internationalizing the curriculum and for innovation in teaching—to develop this course. Our Italian cinema course has already been accepted as part of the curriculum for film majors in the department of Radio, TV, and Film. When the budget cuts forced that department to eliminate courses on national cinema traditions such as French and Italian cinema, it began sending its students to our courses. As of fall 1994 our courses in French and Italian cinema are cross-listed in the film program; they carry a film program course number, but the enrollment is counted for our department. Because of interest from film students, our cinema classes enjoyed high enrollment even when they operated as “special topics” courses that had not yet been incorporated into the permanent university curriculum. Such courses could only be used for the degree in film studies with written consent of the adviser. The success of this course with students from another program has helped us justify the interdisciplinary mission of our programs.
11 The Vincent Licata scholarship endowment commemorates and is named for the founder of the Orange County Renaissance Lodge, Order Sons of Italy. Licata, a former Long Beach resident, was instrumental in establishing an Italian program at CSU Long Beach in 1971.
Maxson, Robert. Letter to the author. 4 Aug. 1994.
Schroeder, Shayne. “Italian Community Rallies Support.” Review [California SU, Long Beach] 21.2 (Summer 1993): 3.
© 1995 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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