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YESTERDAY, or the day before, it was 1960, and my brother and I were students in a military academy in the South. The English master was intoning the “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” I was daydreaming, as I was unfortunately wont to do. The English master was, however, six-five or so, well over 250 pounds, and empowered with a stentorian voice that made the walls quiver. Suddenly, the classroom fell peculiarly silent. Then from behind me came a thundering bellow: “Tell us your vision, Jones!” Abruptly brought back to Keats, I replied meekly that I had none to offer.
I must admit at the outset of this paper that I have no clear, definitive vision of the future of language teaching and learning to offer. I have not had any pertinent revelations of late, and I would be most concerned to find that any of us worried about the future of something we hold very important did have a sure idea of what is before us in the years to come. A few years back, Columbia University mounted a fund-raising campaign that bore the engaging title “Columbia for the Year 2000.” I remember thinking how interesting it would be to stand rather like Voltaire's Micromégas in the year 2000 and to look back at our common preparations for the millennium, to see purposefully if we had in fact prepared correctly, if we had seen the real problems before us, or if we had squandered our efforts and resources in hopelessly inane ways. With a gaze borrowed from Micromégas, therefore, let us first examine some facts with which we may not quibble.
Constrictions are upon us, without exception for geographical area, type of institution, or classification of school. Higher education, the Educational Record reports, is “in perhaps the worst financial shape of the last 50 years” (Harvey 11). At the beginning of this decade, the American Council on Education's annual survey Campus Trends stated that sixty percent of all American colleges and universities had been forced to cut their budgets for the second consecutive academic year. Thirty-four percent continued the trend in the 1992–93 academic year, and thirty-eight percent in the 1993–94 academic year (El-Khawas). More than one-third of over eight hundred college and university presidents polled by US News and World Report confirmed that their budgets would not be balanced before the year 2000, and almost fifty percent of these same institutional leaders reported candidly that budget deficits would perforce have to continue (Elfin 8). Resulting from a widely divergent and complex set of issues coming to the fore simultaneously, these constrictions fall too at a time of college and university bashing unparalleled in the post-World War II educational culture in which many of us have come of age academically. Beginning primarily with Allen Bloom's best-seller The Closing of the American Mind , the trend continued apace with Tenured Radicals by Roger Kimball, Killing the Spirit by Page Smith, and several other volumes of this ilk, with the latest arrival coming in the winter of 1994 in the form of George Roche's particularly acerbic The Fall of the Ivory Tower . Those of us fortunate enough to reside within the academy “in partial beatitude,” to use Frank Lentricchia's salient turn of phrase (86), have been battered in a way inconceivable to previous generations of scholars by these attacks of vitriol, mostly from the extreme right wing, launched angrily and sometimes nastily on what we hold important. (I fear that many Americans mirror the New Yorker cartoon figure who, entering the bookstore and seeing on the counter piles upon piles of Closing of the American Mind , quips, “I haven't read it, but it is excellent.”) One must wonder if the more thoughtful commentaries on American higher education are having anything like the effect that the fire-brandishing frontal assaults apparently are now engendering. What about Bart Giamatti's A Free and Ordered Space , Wayne Booth's Vocation of a Teacher , Jaroslav Pelikan's The Idea of the University , or Alexander Astin's What Matters in College ?
Into these murky historical waters, then, falls the plight of language programs. How, pray tell, are we to plan for the year 2000, following Columbia's optimistic clarion call, if we honestly do not even know how we are to get through the present environment of constrictions, budget deficits, freezes or paltry increases in salary, library acquisition-budget slashing, and the like? As our experience with state funding demonstrates painfully, language programs often follow right behind those other “luxury” programs such as music, fine arts, and drama when legislative power brokers take budgetary cleavers in hand. What seems most peripheral and trendy, what seems most expedient to cut and costly to maintain, goes by the boards if the past record of legislative funding patterns holds valid. How then, to return to the question, are we to deal with present circumstances—untoward and discouraging as they can often appear? We may need to focus more clearly on the central question, one that harks back to that traditionally asked of a novice seeking to enter the sanctuary of the cloister: Quid petis ? What is it that you are seeking? What follows in this essay (in Montaigne's sense of the term as both a short disquisition in prose and an experiment) is an attempt to define the parameters of possible answers to the question for our common future.
We must first seek to make our sense of our discipline pivotal to the national educational interests. Adlai Stevenson used the metaphor “this spaceship Earth” in 1965 in the last speech of his distinguished career as a statesman. As we near the end of the twentieth century, we must press to see that education is theoretically multidimensional and international. We cannot educate our students to be citizens of any narrow geographical entity, be it city, state, or nation. We must educate them to be citizens of the world. And there is no way to accomplish fully such a vitally necessary goal other than by teaching them foreign languages. First-tier universities and colleges will be those who recognize that undergraduate education must be of international scope. Those who are blind to this reality will do their students a decided disservice. Such institutions will follow along too late. American business schools not requiring fluency in a foreign language will soon come to the brutal realization that they cannot prepare future business leaders unless they require language training as uniformly as they do finance and accounting.
Joseph Johnston and Richard Edelstein have recently underscored this point in their cogent and timely Beyond Borders: Profiles in International Education . The 1990 report of the National Task Force on Undergraduate Education Abroad carries as its subtitle “Getting On with the Task.” We are not getting on with the task quickly enough because we have undertaken our efforts amid wholesale budgetary constrictions and widespread university bashing. When the City University of New York, San Diego State University, and other institutions of higher learning cut back on what should be essential at this particular moment in the evolution of American higher education, we all lose, to be sure, but our respective students lose mightily, for they lose the ability to deal in today's multilingual, multidimensional global environment. In congressional testimony, Davydd Greenwood, director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell, sobered the Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education with a harsh statistic: over 86% of the business leaders surveyed by the Coalition for the Advancement of Foreign Languages and International Studies said that their firms “would place a greater emphasis on international competence among management and employees in this decade” (United States, Cong., Senate, Reauthorization 15). Our country is, of course, not responding to the situation at hand: until greater awareness of the critical importance of foreign language education is placed squarely before the boards of trustees, state legislators, deans of faculties, provosts, presidents, and all the rest, we will not be getting on with the task at all. Greenwood's final statement merits citation in full.
At the very time the United States faces unprecedented and unpredicted changes in the world order, our nation's infrastructure for generating international expertise is losing ground rapidly. Further delay in reversing this trend will only compound our economic, foreign policy, and other international problems. Our recommendations are designed to encourage Congress to refocus attention on the urgent federal responsibility to work with the higher education community in preparing the nation for our new global challenges. (18)
Senators Paul Simon, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, David Boren, Robert Stafford, and a few of their peers have been stalwart in their support for foreign education initiatives, and in this regard, these individuals should ideally serve as models for the rest of Congress to emulate. But the major issue all too often gets obscured by the rhetoric. The rest of the world will not blithely come to us. We must reach out “beyond borders,” as the abovementioned report stipulates. One example among many may demonstrate my point. Non-Japanese Asia—the newest of our cultural and economic frontiers—has recently shown that it can do quite well without the West. While throughout 1992, Europe, the United States, and Japan were suffering a painful recession, Asia (again, excluding Japan), witnessed an average growth rate of 5.2% in its ten main economies. In 1994, by some estimates, the figure may have grown to 7% (Brauchli 1). 1 For nor reason other than economic vitality (to avoid the more shocking “survival”), we must turn our educational perspectives truly beyond borders. Consider the following statement to Congress by Charles MacCormack, president of the Experiment in International Living:
There are between 12 and 14 million American university students at one level or another, and of these 12 to 14 million, fewer than 5,000 participate in any kind of study abroad program to a nonwestern country. So 5,000 out of 12 to 14 million describes a real problem in terms of these future oriented areas.
(United States, Cong., Senate, Competence 131)
Our past posture must shift, for the future has already moved elsewhere, and we now have no choice but to play catch-up as best and as fast as we can to redress the situation at hand.
We must also seek an awareness as an intellectual community that “salvation cometh not from afar.” It is counterproductive to seek scapegoats. Far too often we argued from positions of weakness rather than from positions of strength, and just as often the fault has lain squarely with ourselves. The most flagrant example of this point is the unattended curriculum. Language departments cannot try to do everything equally well. We must make choices rationally and logically, depending on what one would hope would be a common sense of mission and purpose. The department that tries to teach language and literature while trying to field area studies, literature in translation, general culture, theory, business, and other courses without any established priorities will inevitably find that, by trying to do everything, it tends up doing everything with an equal degree of mediocrity. And again, it is our students who lose the most. One certain way of arguing from a position of strength would be to refocus our energies on the language program as the cornerstone to our departments' missions. Doomed by their own misguided decisions will be those departments that, reacting to the various pedagogical ebbs and flows of the past thirty years, annually propose a vast smorgasbord of equally indigestible offerings from which our students are forced to choose. No curriculum should be left untended for longer than three years. And we should never accept the status quo, no matter how finely polished we believe the pedagogical model to be.
We must seek additionally to be creative in our understanding of just what a future language curriculum might possibly look like. While we certainly need to focus our attention carefully on language training as the pivotal piece of an overall departmental curriculum, we must think broadly about curricular concerns. One of the most important of such concerns will necessarily deal with expanding the traditional venues of language learning. In a recent paper on the curricular crisis in American foreign language teaching, Dale Lange cites an example that may be as edifying as it is original. From the passage of the Title IV resource center grant, the University of Minnesota's international studies program appended a Spanish language course as a “trailer” to a course on Latin American government and politics housed in the department of political science. The two classes were orchestrated in tandem.
In the trailer course, students were asked to study a Latin American country and to apply the theory of a political scientist whose work is available only in Spanish. The trailer course was conducted entirely in Spanish by the professor who teaches the political science course. The students worked with the professor in a group setting where the comprehension of political theory and its application were the ultimate goal. At the end of the course, the students made oral presentations in Spanish of written papers in which they not only completed the task assigned to them but also included their own assessments of the political theory and its application to Latin American. (15)
Here is the logical extension of the theory of writing across the curriculum moved over into the domain of foreign language pedagogy. In this example we find two salient characteristics. First, the students are applying the target language to real-world uses. This approach is far removed from an inane requirement that they make up vapid sentences about what Raoul is doing in Mexico on summer vacation. The connection between the academic (the acquisition of Spanish) and the real (issues in political science) is thus given the very concrete frame that proves language's immediacy and relevance. Second, students can experience the interrelatedness of all knowledge themselves. Tackling the theoretical issues of Latin American government and politics in the primary language of Latin America undergirds the actual link between the real world and the academy and serves as an example of a creative use of the classroom for more than one pedagogical purpose. We might indeed posit that such will be the true interdisciplinary nature of advanced language learning in the future: learning pushed to extremes unacknowledged until recently. The immediacy is present, the actuality concrete. According to Lange, the student “evaluations for this course were superlative” (15). Little wonder, since students always recognize quality when they see it and respond accordingly.
We must also seek, in like measure, to expand our vistas, moving away from our almost totally Eurocentric perspective to a more global outlook that takes into account the growing importance of the Pacific Rim. In January 1994 at Southern Methodist University, we began an experimental program abroad that attempts to address the global changes before us. Ten SMU undergraduates from a variety of disciplines traveled to Australia under the auspices of Curtin University in Perth. They spent a month participating in a closely supervised service project, completed five months of intensive course work, including instruction in Indonesian, and then embarked on a study tour of a six major capitals of the East. Our students earn twenty-four semester hours for their efforts in the program. Student interest has been overwhelmingly positive thus far. This program is of course but a small beginning of what will have to become far more common if American universities are to rise to the challenges of the end of this century and the start of the next. The association between SMU and Curtin has been as fruitful as it was unexpected. Our students are living an experience inconceivable but the blink of an eye ago, yet this vast amalgamation of ideologies, languages and perspectives will define their world in ways their parents and teachers could never foresee. But as we seek to ponder the future, we cannot be blind to today's realities. We can no longer follow the traditions of the past any more than a modern university curriculum could today be based on Attic Greek and world geography, as was Oxford's before the curricular reforms at the end of the nineteenth century. Our educational structures must adapt to the realities of the present. We must look to the South as we must look to the East and to Africa. The North American Free Trade Agreement will alter the way Americans see the world around us, as will the economic and cultural revolutions occurring all over the globe.
We must seek associations not only with kindred institutions abroad but also with institutions in our own “intellectual neighborhood,” 2 our immediate academic environment. And here too we must learn to think in creative, innovative ways. No university or college can conceivably offer all the necessary courses in all the necessary languages (the traditional ones such as Latin, French, German, and the burgeoning Spanish); those with fewer students, such as Russian, Greek, and Italian; and the less commonly taught languages, such as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Serbo-Croatian, Hindi, Indonesian, Portuguese, and so on (see McGinnis). Our present financial plight proves an additional detriment. Unless we are hopeless, and hapless, dreamers, we must accept that no one institution alone can possibly find the resources to fund adequate levels of all the necessary languages mentioned above. So what then might we do? One plausible solution is suggested by the Five Colleges in western Massachusetts.
The history of this particular collaboration is telling, for the visionaries responsible for the consortium responded to difficult problems in the 1950s with a willingness to deal from respective strengths and a concomitant willingness to share faculty members, resources, libraries, physical plants, and the like for the mutual benefit of all. 3 Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, the University of Massachusetts of Amherst, and, after its founding in 1970, Hampshire College work together through a carefully thought-out mechanism whereby joint faculty appointments, faculty seminars, two departments shared by the five component schools, and a wide-ranging variety of programs (including the very successful Five College Library Automation Project) are the cooperative order of the day. Of particular importance for our purposes here is the Five College Language Resource Center established in the 1980s to bring the most recent technological advances in to the language classroom environment. The Five College consortium may well be the finest example of interinstitutional cooperation in American higher education.
Hampshire College until recently offered no language instruction in its curriculum, yet its students have access to classroom instruction in twelve different foreign languages, including Latin and Greek, at the four other schools. Amherst does not offer Italian in its curriculum, yet each year a number of Amherst students take Italian at another of the consortium campuses. Smith is the only one of the institutions of offer Korean in a regular classroom setting, but this less commonly taught—though increasingly important—language is available to any student at the other four schools. Mount Holyoke offers only two years of Chinese and Japanese, but its students may enroll in third- and fourth-year Chinese and Japanese at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Smaller language departments like Russian and Italian often have few majors of their own registering for advanced courses. Rather than duplicate offerings, only one of the three Italian departments, for example, offers advanced grammar and composition courses and literature courses taught in Italian, therefore freeing the faculties of the other two departments to offer electives; none of their advanced electives are offered at more than one campus. Arabic, a requirement for the consortium's new certificate program in Near Eastern studies, is covered by one or more joint appointees who deal with four levels of the language.
Many of us have much to learn from the Five College example. If none of the colleges has a faculty opening in a particular area of need, then the deans of faculty of the five institutions discuss how the need can be met. This procedure has over the years resulted in a number of joint appointments—appointments made in one school and released elsewhere, freeing faculty positions—thereby benefiting the faculties and student bodies of the five institutions immeasurably. This sharing of resources, writ large, enables the otherwise impossible to be realized. Granted, institutions located by themselves in rural environments would face difficult logistical problems in attempting to follow the Five College model. Perhaps advances in technological support of instruction, particularly developments in telecommunications, will be helpful in these situations. But surely institutions relatively close to others could look to this model as a way of expanding offerings in a time of fiscal constraint. For those of us most concerned about foreign language programs, the model is ideal. We can offer more levels of more languages if we share our resources of money, effort, technological availability, and library holdings. Bridges between institutions must be in place, however, if people, books, and ideas are going to be able to travel from one location to another. According to Jackie Pritzen, associate Five College coordinator, building bridges takes a great deal of planning and negotiation, and much depends on the right combination of participants at an auspicious moment. And of course, objections will be made to these efforts by those who wish always to protect the status quo. I am certain there will be institutional bureaucracy to overcome, as well as those defending their proverbial against the onslaught of a radical new idea. I am equally certain that the Five College cooperation is not without its own internal difficulties. But the brilliantly conceived model does provide a crucial way to confront some of the most pressing problems before language departments today.
We must seek, as well, to join hands with our colleagues on the secondary and elementary levels. I fear that all too often we in higher education forget that our colleagues on other levels of the educational system are in the trenches more than we are on a daily basis, and they endure staggering student loads. Here too, models of cooperative efforts exist. One particularly successful example of cross-level cooperation can be found in the Clayton Public System in Clayton, Missouri, just outside Saint Louis. In the mid-1980s, a group of concerned parents began to lobby the school board and system administrators for elementary language instruction. The school system had experimented with such a program a few years before, but like not a few such experiments, this one failed because of a lack of trained teachers and because of all-too-common bureaucratic obstacles to progress. No one really wanted to foster before-school language classes; the classes would have to “compete” with other “extracurricular” activities; the school system was not completely convinced that the necessary effort could be expended. So a group of parents decided to deal with the issue themselves. Working jointly with the faculty of the department of Romance languages and literatures at Washington University, these parents hired graduate students who were interested in expanding their own pedagogical expertise to young children. The initial program, housed in only one elementary school, offered early-morning courses in Spanish and French, with German following not long after because of increasing demand. The students were enthusiastic and quick to learn. Parents were delighted. The graduate students were pleased not only because they had chanced upon another possibility of earning needed funds but also because their efforts were so well received in their intellectual neighborhood. Soon, parents in the system's other elementary schools began to lobby excitedly for similar programs, and the school system authorities found themselves under considerable pressure to respond. Those responsible for the secondary school curricula in foreign languages in that district had no choice but to become intimately involved with the activities on the elementary level, and the university community, the elementary school parents, and the secondary school teachers were soon working toward shared goals: a “consortium” of sorts harking back to the model set in western Massachusetts but on a different plane.
Finally, as we seek answers to the question Quid petis ? we must realize that technology has changed, is changing, and will continue to change everything we believe we know about language learning. In a very real sense our advanced technological age offers possibilities impossible to conceive just a few years ago. My favorite example of the new vistas before us is the availability of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Only a minute number of scholars had access to this treasure of Western civilization until many of the scrolls themselves were placed on exhibition at the Library of Congress, where considerably more scholars could see them. Now, through Mosaic, the Dead Sea Scrolls are available to anyone who has an Internet connection. We are moving to universal access at lightning speed. Realities can, with the push of the proverbial button, now become “virtual.” Would any of our intellectual forebears have understood this neologistic turn of phrase?
These technological advances can best be understood contextually. In the great universities of Europe in the nineteenth century, language acquisition consisted of developing a reading knowledge of the literature in question. For decades modern languages were taught as precisely as were Latin and Greek. Now, however, we stress competence in the language itself as a communicative device requiring not only proficiency in writing and reading but also expertise in speaking, listening, and multicultural sensitivity. Replacing the textbooks of old, accordingly, are the computer laboratories of today, and we are still in virgin territory indeed as technology advances at a staggering pace, daily opening up horizons we never knew existed or thought possible. Language learning centers allow students to assimilate language in utterly fascinating ways. At SMU we opened our Foreign Language Learning Center in the fall of 1991, after the university president had established this project as one of his highest priorities and after we had identified donors who had special interest in such a crucially needed addition. We now have a wide variety of variously configured computer workstations that support interactive software supplied by a central file server. Two systems are dedicated to the support of interactive laser disc programs, providing TV-quality images in conjunction with oral exercises. Students can check out video- and audio-cassettes, while other viewing stations support video programming. Each station contains a color monitor, a VCR, and multiple headphones so that two or three students may simultaneously watch the same video. Students can watch programming coming directly from foreign countries, and we can tape virtually any broadcast one of our professors wishes to use for class or for individual learning situations. The center is connected by satellite to thirty-five countries. Faculty members, even those originally unsure about the value of the enterprise, have embraced the center's practically unlimited capabilities and have become involved themselves in the production of software programs. Here too we have an example of how students respond to worthy curricular and programmatic innovations: in 1993–94 student demand for these offerings increased so dramatically that the center experienced in two days the same volume it received during a six-day week in 1992–93.
Through the Internet, students can now correspond directly with their peers in the target language and culture. Through SCOLA (Satellite Communication of Learning, Associated) broadcasts they can access incredible new sources of information. They can participate in online discussion groups with native speakers through vehicles such as Frenchtalk or Francopolis. And for the scholar, databases and search mechanisms such as ARTFL (American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language) allow research projects impossible before the distributive-computing age in which we live and in which our students are coming of age. 4 In the years to come we shall undoubtedly see even more mind-boggling expansions. As we ponder what the future of foreign language education will look like, it is certain that the technological advances now upon us will continue to alter in ever more significant ways how we may proceed with our mission.
In closing I now ask you my readers for a final measure of patience and forbearance. I am going to do the unthinkable and conclude a formal academic paper, as I began it, on a subjective, indeed quite personal, note. My doing so may be excused and dismissed as the privilege of age, for I find that in my own professional life I tend, now more than ever, to think about education in autobiographical frames. Whatever else happens to our profession and to foreign language education in American colleges and universities in the years before us, there is one critically important aspect that each of us can and must control personally: our classrooms. Above all else, I would urge a rededication to our most elemental—and crucial—task: to teach those students who are our charges to the best of our abilities.
In the same military school to which I referred at the outset of this essay was a teacher of legendary prowess, Major Ferguson, an admixture of the R.F.Q. Delderfield characters and Mr. Chips. Coming to campus with a BA from a small, relatively nondescript college, this Latin and French master had been at the school since the middle of the Second World War and had always been assigned the most derelict of classrooms, “decorated” only by a yellowing, tattered poster of the paternoster that was scripted sometime past in a young boy's careful hand and that hung at a peculiar tangent on the wall. The master sat to the right of an old wooden desk, in a straight chair the back legs of which had been cut an inch or so shorter than the front by the head carpenter years before. He rocked back and forth constantly. He had no realia, no attractive visual aids, no teacher's manuals, no technological equipment except an old Philco 78 record player that occasionally appeared. He chain-smoked Camels right there in class when he was not holding forth on the subject at hand. Only once in our five years of upper school did we witness him rise from his wooden chair during class, in November 1963 (when, while we were studying Ovid's Metamorphoses , a colleague came in to tell him in hushed tones that President Kennedy had been assassinated). He broke every rule known to education-course doctrine. He looked elfish and could be seen walking briskly to and from the main classroom building draped in an old black raincoat, whether winter or summer stormy or halcyon the day.
Yet in his classroom, known to generations of boys as “the sanctuary,” extraordinary language learning took place every day of the week. Whether we were crossing the Alps with Caesar, conjugating the irregular semideponent verbs that govern the ablative case in advanced Latin grammar, singing the “Marseillaise” to a scratchy prewar recording by Lily Pons (an indescribable cacophony indeed), or quietly discussing Alphonse Daudet's “La dernière classe,” we did so entranced. Time meant nothing in the master's classroom. Class began before the bell rang and went on while we were dragging ourselves, open books in hand, out the door so that we would not be given demerits for tardiness in the next class. The voluntary tutorials in the afternoon found all the seats in “the sanctuary” filled (less punctual students had to sit on the floor) not because we were required to be there but because we yearned to be there. The answer to the Quid petis question asked to gain entrance to this “sanctuary” was knowledge, knowledge of tongues other than our own that somehow miraculously left the domain of the foreign and became valued and indeed treasured. Something quite magical took place in that classroom of yesteryear, in an external environment far from any ideal.
As I have grown older, if not wiser, I have come to understand that in the end of each of us can be truly responsible for but one thing: what transpires daily in our respective classrooms. Major Ferguson took to heart Wordsworth's admonition to “teach others to love what we have loved” every single day of his nearly half-century career in the foreign language classroom. And his love for learning spread like fire to us all.
Not by chance do the French call this rare and precious gift accorded one's students le feu sacré , “the sacred fire.” The sacred fires of the ancients were, after all, kept carefully guarded in sanctuaries to avoid their ever being extinguished. Each of us who are called to teach might do well to remember anew—whatever the external circumstances influencing our efforts—whence we came academically and the gift of le feu sacré we might share with our students. Nothing less should be the single cornerstone of our common vision for our common future.
The author is Dean of Dedman College and Vice Provost of Southern Methodist University.
I should like to thank Elizabeth Holecamp of the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages; Jan Marston, director, Foreign Language Learning Center, SMU; Jackie Pritzen, associate Five College coordinator; and Kathleen Hugley-Cook and J. Randall Phillips, assistant deans at SMU, for their unstinting efforts toward the realization of this essay.
1 See especially Brauchli; the Wall Street Journal has been featuring of late decidedly more articles advancing such a posture for the American business community.
2 The phrase is Toni Morrison's description of Princeton, from an article devoted to her former colleague Cornel West (45).
3 The initial impetus came in the mid-1950s from the pressures to accommodate a mass of students, including returning GIs, and the Cold War demands on higher education in science. Noteworthy is the fact that the first department shared by the member schools was astronomy. Joint work in area studies followed, as did Hampshire College, which exists today as an outgrowth of the original four-college cooperation.
4 The bibliography is so vast that even an overview is unthinkable at this point. See, for example, Morrissey's well-wrought essay on the use of ARTFL.
Brauchli, Marcus W. “Asia on the Ascent Is Learning to Say No to ‘Arrogant’ West.” Wall Street Journal 13 Apr. 1994, eastern ed.: 1.
Elfin, Mel. “What Must Be Done: Cutting Costs while Improving Educational Quality Is the Main Aim of the New College Reform Movement.” America's Best Colleges . Spec. issue of US News and World Report 28 Sept. 1992: 100.
El-Khawas, Elaine. Campus Trends 1991; 1992; 1993 . Washington: Amer. Council on Educ., 1991, 1992, 1993.
Harvey, James. “Footing the Bill: Financial Prospects for Higher Education.” Educational Record 73 (1992): 11–17.
Johnston, Joseph, and Edelstein, Richard. Beyond Borders: Profiles in International Education . Washington: Assn. of Amer. Colls. and Amer. Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business, 1993.
Lange, Dale L. “The Curricular Crisis in Foreign Language Learning.” ADFL Bulletin 25.2 (1994): 12–16. [Show Article]
Lentricchia, Frank. The Edge of Night: A Confession . New York: Random, 1994.
McGinnis, Scott. “The Less Common Alternative: A Report from the Task Force for Teacher Training in the Less Commonly Taught Languages.” ADFL Bulletin 25.2 (1994): 17–22. [Show Article]
Morrison, Toni. “Life and Letters.” New Yorker 17 Jan. 1994: 39–48.
Morrissey, Robert. “Texts and Contexts: The ARTFL Database in French Studies.” Profession 93 . New York: MLA, 1993. 27–33.
United States. Cong. Senate. Hearing on the Reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965 . 102nd Cong., 1st sess. Serial 102–55. Washington: GPO, 1991.
———. ———. ———. Hearing on Foreign Language Competence for the Future Act of 1989 . 101st Cong., 1st sess. S 1690 and S 1540. Washington: GPO, 1990.
© 1995 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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