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THE modern university started about the same time in the United States and in France. In 1794, in France, Lakanal and his ideologue friends Cabanis, Daunou, Volney, and Destutt de Tracy, were eager to put the Reign of Terror behind them and to rebuild the intellectual elite of France, which had been decimated by the guillotine at the hands of the fanatical revolutionary zealots, the sansculottes. Lakanal conceived of a twin-track systems. The practical track would be characterized by the teaching of skills applied to practical goals; this type of teaching would be carried out in institutions of higher learning called Schools. On the other track would be Universities, devoted to purely speculative endeavors without the responsibility of producing a concrete output. Thus in 1794 Lakanal created institutions of the first type: l'Ecole Normale Supérieure, whose function would be to prepare teachers for the new schools, and l'Ecole Polytechnique for the technological elite. In the same year, in the United States, the first land-grant university, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, was founded.
Because of the Napoleonic wars, Lakanal's effort was not immediately followed by a massive educational project. But in 1808 Napoleon affirmed Lakanal's proposals through a set of education laws. He introduced concrete academic disciplines including economics, political science, and geography and created new, mostly technical schools—Ecole des Mines, Ecole Centrale, Ecole des Arts et Métiers, and so on—to train engineers to support his military expansionism. The Sorbonne, which had been closed during the revolution, was reopened, its status as the premier university of France confirmed and its liberal arts orientation solidified. In Germany, at the same time, Hegel proposed a model of the German university that would confirm philosophically the divisions between the universities devoted to research and idealistic pursuits, and the institutes devoted to concrete applications and materialistic projects. (The long text on the organization of the German university in Hegel's Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences [1817] was recently used by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida to defend the teaching of philosophy in high school, which in France has come to be seen as dilettante's luxury that should be replaced by more concrete disciplines.)
Finally, at the end of the nineteenth century, the beginning of the industrial era triggered a division in the universities between general studies and specialized studies. In the United States, Charles W. Eliot, the president of Harvard, proposed the creation of a graduate division for all doctoral candidates, and Johns Hopkins, during the discussions regarding the incorporation of the university that would bear his name, insisted that the institution should be patterned after a European university and should emphasize graduate research over collegiate instruction. When the university opened in 1876 it quickly became a model for other institutions and attracted scholars happy to be able to do only research. One of these researchers was Charles S. Peirce, the inventor of the American semiotics, a body of knowledge still considered useless by many today. In France, at the seam time (1879–83), Jules Ferry reinforced the status of doctoral studies by establishing the national guidelines of the Thése d'Etat. This final product of graduate study, which allows a scholar to become a professor and to have one of the few national chairs in a discipline, was defined as the intellectual demonstration of the validity of an hypothesis; a masterpiece of speculative reasoning and superb writing.
To understand what is happening to our graduate programs in foreign languages, one must acknowledge that graduate programs have been created for a specific purpose and according to certain clear principles. Today graduate programs in the humanities are often considered the worst manifestation of the ivory-tower mentality when one understands the “ivory tower” as a place of isolation where a privileged scholar can pursue in total economic freedom his self-involvement with books, with the life of the mind, often with contempt for the mere trivial everyday worries of his contemporaries. There is nothing innocent about this negative view of graduate programs as ivory towers; it is the product of an underlying fear of freethinkers and a sly valorization of crass utilitarianism, and it forgets that a tower can also symbolize, for example, strength, principles, and durability. The negative value attached to the phrase ivory tower is part of a general attack against intellectualism, against everyone who thinks, everyone who neither seeks fraternal recognition through conformism nor believes that to be one's contemporary one has to be in the street every second and follow whatever wind blows. Fascistic and totalitarian regimes have always attempted to close universities and graduate programs devoted to speculative research; historically, they have emphasized so-called research that has concrete and immediate results. So one benefit of the ivory tower may be that it offers the security to isolate one's self from immediate concerns or political and social tyranny and provides the elevation one needs to produce a distanced assessment of our time. As a colleague of mine who grew up in the South in the fifties and sixties said to me, ”I am glad that I went to graduate school and that I studied French. Otherwise, I would have become a racist.” At the other end of the United States, Alice Kaplan, in French Lessons , shows how graduate school and the study of French emancipated her from her environment in Minnesota and helped her shape her intellectual personality. So I believe the ivory tower, the graduate programs, should remain intellectual barricades against the here-and-now zealots, the slaves of university fashion, the worshipers of ephemeral utility in all its forms.
Alas, today the pressure against speculative and intellectual graduate programs is enormous. In the last ten years, I am sure, everyone has witnessed an evolution toward more interaction with the everyday world. These changes are unavoidable because of the double nature of a graduate program. On the one hand, a graduate program is where future researchers are trained—and trained on a one-on-one basis, which goes against the current principles of mass production—and, on the other hand, it is very much a preprofessional program whose function is to prepare teachers for collegiate instruction, which is increasingly subject to the rules of mass production.
The importance and the nature of the preprofessional component of our graduate programs has changed dramatically since the dark period of the early eighties, when jobs became harder to find. In letters of recommendation we still use (or at least I still use) the term promising scholar to describe a few of my graduate students seeking positions. Thus we still assume that the best candidate for an undergraduate teaching job is the one whose graduate scholarship is the most outstanding. Prospective employers still request writing samples or theses and ask candidates to give twenty-minute lectures on their research projects during the campus visit. But some institutions have become less attached to the traditional pomp and etiquette of academic searches and are more blunt in saying so. For example, in a recent job listing, a major department at an Ivy League institution asked for candidates with “native or near native proficiency,” “proven excellence in language teaching at all levels,” and “an active interest in a curriculum that integrates literature, culture and language.” This ad strikes a nerve in me, because I taught at that institution in the seventies. Then, only a few graduate students chose to teach undergraduates: the prevalent belief among graduate students was “Why waste your time teaching when you can devote all your time to writing your thesis?” There was no formal training for undergraduate teaching until a group of young faculty members created a course entitled Phonetics and Teaching Methods. Since I taught the graduate courses in formal linguistics, it seemed a natural extension of my teaching for me to teach this course. I considered it my duty to expand my graduate students' knowledge of linguistics to include corrective linguistics and linguistic methodology. But it was an uphill battle to get the department council to approve the course, and we had many tense discussions. In the end, however, my literary colleagues decided that a course like that could be considered a graduate course faithful to the program's speculative mission.
Now, because we have to find jobs for our graduate students, the methodological aspect of collegiate teaching has become an overwhelming concern, to the detriment of most of the methodological scholar training that had been at the core of a distinguished graduate program. The proliferation of teaching-methods courses and the rise of the utilitarian methodological notion of proficiency have transformed graduate programs into hybrids, many of which have lost their souls. I doubt that any graduate foreign language program in the United States offers a graduate course in literary research methodology or research bibliography. The workshops our libraries conduct for our students are geared more toward the applications of technology for teaching than toward the study of, for instance, watermarks in early manuscripts or fifteenth-century paleography. Our graduate students who go abroad are not acquainted with the work modalities in foreign libraries; often they do not even know the resources available in the countries whose literatures they are studying. Graduate programs no longer offer courses on research writing, and graduate students are more likely to ask a secretary in the department office than a faculty member about the formal aspects of writing a thesis; at best, they might consult the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. The intellectual training and the one-on-one mentoring that accompanied the writing of a thesis is disappearing as a cornerstone of graduate education. Today, graduate students are mostly sought to perform activities related to undergraduate foreign language teaching and to proficiency testing. Rare or absent is the type of scholarly activity related to the research nature of a graduate program. National organizations such as ACTFL and movements such as foreign languages across the curriculum have created numerous local, regional, and national clinics and workshops on teaching or assessing collegiate foreign language programs, and most campuses have centers for teaching excellence, each with its own team of pedagogical specialists who, often with the blessing of the dean's office, do not hesitate to ask graduate students to submit videotapes of their teaching for regular pedagogical checkups.
The pressure against proper scholarly graduate training is both internal and external. Internally, departments that retain responsibility for language teaching often have directors or coordinators of language programs who have been trained not in foreign language graduate program but in a school of education's foreign language teaching program; these professionals employ methods and institute goals that place almost no emphasis on literature. As a result, our graduate students teach language without teaching what is at the core of their own graduate training: literature. And our undergraduate students are not encouraged to continue learning the language in upper-level courses, which are generally devoted to literature and therefore present too great a gap to overcome, requiring too much effort. Finally, current textbooks that emphasize oral communication and proficiency place little emphasis on reading, a skill that is essential for graduate students. The old format of the course supérieur –type textbook had the advantage for graduate students that it reinforced their knowledge of the field; many of the texts they studied with their undergraduate students were literary texts that their graduate work required them to become familiar with. I do not know what substantive intellectual advantage, what reinforcement, today's textbooks offer the graduate student who must spend a semester with the characters of Philippe or Nicole and their gang of friends as they go through a mythical teenagehood in the French fantasyland equivalent of Mayberry.
The external pressure against scholarly training in graduate programs is also considerable. In this age of financial realism, foreign language programs have to prove their value to the academic community. Faculty members in sciences and social sciences can easily point to tangible achievements. It is more difficult for our graduate programs; often, our students' research topics receive the local Golden Fleece award. One can imagine that sarcasm comes easily to a biology professor who discovers a thesis entitled “Dissecting Desire: Gender and Eroticism of the Absent Body in Decadent French Literature”—produced, furthermore, by the Romance studies department. So, the pressure is on. Through grant-driven programs in such fields as comparative area studies, Latin American studies, and European studies, language departments are made to concentrate on providing social science students with basic language skills to function in their discipline. Administrators encourage content-based courses like Spanish for Business and French for Forestry. Social science administrators create language centers so that literature departments cannot impose a scholarly philosophy on the foreign language curriculum. And there are other pressures still. In all these instances graduate programs are asked to provide the necessary undergraduate teachers, sometimes even under threat: Organize these useful courses for the rest of the university if you want to keep your pet specialized literature sections.
All these pressures significantly transform our graduate programs. Often the changes manifest themselves indirectly: our students complain that teaching leaves them too little time to study; they take fewer courses a year, or they take courses with the least amount of reading and read the texts during the summer, away from their graduate classroom. There is therefore no doubt that the increased emphasis on training graduate students for collegiate undergraduate teaching is progressively ruining the training of future researchers and scholars.
Far be it from me to deny that our graduate students should be trained to teach undergraduate courses. They must, but their training is ill-conceived. There is too great a gap between what they learn in graduate programs and what they learn in this training and in randomly chosen clinics and workshops. Hybrid programs should be based in an institute or a school (not a “career”), should be collaboratively organized by foreign language and education departments, and should provide training in linguistics, psychopedagogy, and so forth.
Although several universities have such programs, they are not yet the norm: our graduate students spend more and more time in pedagogical activities sponsored by a myriad of centers that often compete to impose their educational agendas. This competition for time reduces the mentoring interaction between faculty member and student; our graduate students become autodidacts who read mostly outside formal courses. This evolution is quite evident in graduate literary exams. Yes, our students have read the texts, yes, they are familiar with the content, but, deprived of a graduate teacher's guidance, they cannot distinguish between what is significant and what is not or discern why a text is considered important. A graduate program, unlike an undergraduate program, derives its distinction from the distinction of its faculty, and an excellent faculty is a mobile faculty. As soon as graduate faculty members sense that their function is no longer essential to their program's vitality, once they discover that their students do not have enough time to work seriously with them on theses or courses, they leave. I could therefore propose this basic rule of academic physics: in distinguished graduate programs, the greater the emphasis on training graduate students for foreign language teaching at the collegiate level, the greater the problems with faculty retention.
Granted, our graduate students share many of these new constraints with their colleagues in English. But there is one external pressure aimed at the heart of our particular enterprises. We are proud that almost all our graduate students have achieved native or near-native fluency in the foreign language. Our graduate courses are taught in the foreign language. In my institution and at similar institutions undergraduate teaching, at all levels, is also conducted in the foreign language. This practice makes courses more difficult for the undergraduate students, and a growing number of administrators who see the university as a corporation consider it an unnecessary complication. Therefore, they are pressuring departments to teach foreign languages in English. Colleagues with the same corporate mind-set, often eager to please the administration, are lobbying departmental administrators to go along with this change. My institution is not immune to this debate. The arguments for the all-English teaching of foreign languages are that it will help attract undergraduate students and that more students bring more clout to the department. The problem again is that our graduate students teach these language courses. I fail to see how six hours a week of teaching in English would improve their language skills or familiarity with the language. And what message would we give them: that it is OK also to teach a foreign literature in English? that a monocultural approach to issues through a totalized set of national critical clichés is acceptable? that in the end the various language departments will be replaced by a department called English and the World? We used to be “the World”! Along with the many arguments for teaching foreign language courses in the target language, let us not forget the need for our graduate students to learn and use an analytical vocabulary for language and literature in the classroom.
If we believe in what we are doing, we must constantly return to the fundamentals—the fundamentals of our institutions and the fundamentals of what makes a distinguished graduate program in foreign languages. Universities are not schools. Universities were established not to be preprofessional institutions of learning but to foster speculative thinking. They were conceived to escape the tyranny of the here and now, not to foster nationalist or regionalist concerns. As the name implies, they are universalist. To attain universality, a university should have a graduate program in foreign languages, because it is only through the training of researcher in this domain that a critical discourse informed by different modes of intelligibility can emerge on campus. This natural, consubstantial gain comes to a university with a graduate program in any foreign language. Universities were not conceived to concern themselves only with the fashions of the historical moment. To base a university's teaching on commercial, political, or methodological fads can only lead to disaster. Witness the results of Martin Heidegger's overwhelming passion for National Socialism.
American universities should have graduate programs in foreign languages not simply because the programs may be populated, as Lawrence Kritzman has said, of highly intellectual, histrionic people that can be observed with some voyeuristic amusement but should never be emulated. Certainly the multiculturalism of foreign language departments may seem picturesque and exotic to a faculty member of a gray math department; but foreign language departments share one characteristic that potentially poses a great threat to all other departments: no academic discipline is off-limits to the study of literature. Michelet calls for a discourse on history; Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Machiaville entail discussion on political science; and Sartre and existentialism duplicate teaching in the department of philosophy. We in graduate programs in foreign languages make up a microcosmic university: we are not specialists in, say, history or political science, but we train our graduate students to fulfill in their literature courses the very ideals of a so-called liberal arts education. Our knowledge does not come from these specialized fields, and we are thus constantly in a position to offer necessary distance and to introduce a critical moment of doubt in the minds of students who otherwise would accept local knowledge as the unquestioned truth. A lively, industrious, and distinguished graduate program in foreign languages is a formidable educational asset for the whole community, especially for the undergraduate population, and it should be respected as such. As a privilege place of foreignness it provides, through its faculty and its graduate students who teach undergraduates, the necessary counterweight to any propensity toward nationalistic intellectual complacency. But conversely, as many efficiency-seeking, corporate-minded administrators have discovered, foreign language departments can be eliminated without too much pain: Deleuze can be taught in English in the philosophy department; French cultural studies can be replaced by Three Months in Provence, a nice course in the department of cultural anthropology; and the department of comparative literature or English can offer a course on Simone de Beauvoir and another one on realism, which would include Madame Bovary, L'éducation sentimentalle , and Illusions perdues (in translation, of course).
It is, then, not too difficult to see what the fundamentals of maintaining a strong graduate program in foreign languages are: it should be free to pursue intellectual matters, to preserve its foreign-speaking identity in its teaching, and to train students in the critique of texts and documents. A department that maintains this type of graduate program will play a critical function in the life of any American university.
The author is Professor of Literature and Linguistic in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University. This article is based on his presentation at ADFL Seminar East, 15–17 June 1995, in Charleston, South Carolina.
© 1996 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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