27, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 47-48
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Foreign Language PhDs: Marketing the Candidate Fit the Market
Karen C. Kossuth
DAVID Maxwell, the director of the National Foreign Language Center, once articulated to me the four categories of motivations for students to study a foreign language: (1) increasing their awareness of other cultures; (2) learning a language for practical use, business, travel, or studying in another field; (3) preparing for graduate study in that language or literature; and (4) understanding their family or ethnic heritage.
Our graduate schools are best at meeting the third need: they are excellent at educating professors to prepare more students for graduate study. Through teaching assistantships, they are also fairly good at training teachers of language, which meets the second need. The first need was poorly addressed until our graduate programs branched out into interdisciplinary areas, and the fourth is generally ignored in graduate curricula. Though it has been argued that studying a national literature furthers all four goals, the study of literature is rarely a primary factor in the student's decision to study a foreign language. Thus professors who can satisfy all four needs only through the study of literature find themselves, perhaps unfairly, considered irrelevant by students who are increasingly pragmatic in planning their college education. To continue the metaphor in the title of this article, students are the consumers of our product, foreign languages. To the extent that they take our courses for more than foreign language or breadth-of-study requirements, we must be aware of their motivations. As retailers in the foreign language marketplace, we turn to the graduate schools as our wholesalers. In the 1990s the product is changing, and we need our suppliers to grow with us as we broaden our foreign language curriculum to respond to the motivations Maxwell identifies.
Pomona College is a privately funded liberal arts college with 1,400 students. It is one of the five Claremont Colleges, so its enrollment pool is really about 5,000 students. The Department of Modern Languages and Literatures offers majors in French, German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese. The other colleges offer as majors French, German, and Spanish, as well as elementary courses in Korean, Italian, and Portuguese, bringing the number of available language to nine. Three of the Claremont Colleges have foreign language requirements of three or four semesters, and most of our language faculty members teach half their load in lower-division language classes. Our upper-division courses include the traditional courses in literature, courses in literature in translation, and recently, cultural studies courses with some component in the target language. The last group of courses is the focus of considerable discussion in our department, and it is the key to our changing recruitment efforts.
The study of literature per se is not thriving in Claremont, despite an ambitious program in literary theory that was intended to transcend traditional comparative literature programs and provide intellectual challenges unavailable in normal undergraduate courses covering the canon. Students have told us for over twenty years that they are pleased to study literature as one manifestation of a national culture but that they would like courses examining other aspects as well. Apparently for this reason, our programs in Asian studies, Latin American studies, Chicano studies, and international relations are thriving. Two years ago, we instituted a concentration in German studies that is considered successful, particularly in attracting double majors. It is the model for a program in Russian studies that will be in place by the end of the 1995–96 academic year. All these cultural studies programs include courses on some aspect of the country taught in English in other departments. Our faculty members offer their own courses in the history or culture of the country, usually in English with readings in the target language.
In 1994 the Claremont Colleges took another step toward emphasizing cultural studies by instituting a German-across-the-curriculum (GAC) program, supported by an NEH grant. The courses are team taught by a German professor and a professor in a related field. Students electing the GAC option get extra course credit and meet for one additional hour a week for discussion in German. Papers are written in German and are evaluated by both professors. This spring the modern languages department at Pomona went on record in support of foreign languages across the curriculum (FLAC) and we are working on ways to use our experience with GAC to implement a parallel effort in Spanish in conjunction with the Latin American studies program.
Our department implemented cultural studies and FLAC programs for many reasons.
- Our student body is becoming more and more diverse. The new first-year students are more experienced in foreign languages and cultures than those we taught just ten years ago, and we hope to capitalize on that. Our advanced courses in cultural studies can offer these students a scholarly framework for their experiences.
- To make our curricula relevant and combat the preconception that time spent on foreign languages is wasted because it is impossible to maintain fluency, we are seeking ways of increasing student participation in foreign language beyond the first two years. By interjecting foreign language into courses outside our department, we hope to lengthen student exposure to foreign language, increasing proficiency while satisfying their interest in foreign culture, history, or social science.
- Through FLAC, we hope to increase our involvement in the mainstream of the college's intellectual life. Besides the obvious benefits of academic interaction, we hope our increased visibility will raise enrollments in our literature courses.
- The liberal arts, as they are now manifested at Pomona College, have a strong global agenda, and foreign languages play a prominent role in them.
As the college changes, so does the profile of our job candidate. When we conducted a search in Russian in 1993, all four of our top candidates were from the PhD program at Stanford, which has a strong program in Russian studies. In 1995, when we hired someone on peninsular Spanish literature, it was a candidate from Northwestern with a degree in comparative literature. Our last two hires in German have had a strong interdisciplinary focus; one has a degree in comparative literature with a minor in philosophy, and the other has a degree in German studies with a minor in comparative literature and a focus on popular culture. We have no particular allegiance to the PhD in comparative literature, but we find that those candidates are more likely to have worked in the social sciences or in other humanities fields than candidates in a single national literature are. We still expect our professors to do research and publish in the field of literature, but we are recruiting candidates with an interdisciplinary bent who will be able to work with members of other departments as we expand our programs.
We expect to intensify these efforts as time goes by. Increasing numbers of our students have spent a summer or a semester abroad in high school. Even students without foreign experience are now more likely to reach college with some background in foreign cultural studies, because of new government initiatives, including foreign language goals being developed by the Department of Education. The K-12 Standards for Foreign Language Learning, part of the Goals 2000 effort of the Department of Education, call for cultural proficiency alongside language proficiency by high school graduation. These are goals for schools, not colleges, and they are not policies. When these goals or similar ones are adopted, the effect on college programs will be fundamental and far-teaching. More than ever, we will need colleagues trained to teach literature in context. We will need professors who can talk shop with art historians, foreign relations experts, musicologists, anthropologists, and sociologists. We are looking not for generalists but for people who study literature as a part of a larger cultural whole. The new liberal arts will demand a solid foundation in one literature and its cultural, historical, and political matrix. And we need pedagogical experts, one for each language offered, especially if they can weave their knowledge of a country's culture into lower division language classes. Graduate programs, the source of candidates for our openings, have already begun broadening their offerings. Making candidates fit our markets for the next ten years means a new focus for the graduate schools, and it is as great challenge for them as finding such candidates is for us.
The author is Professor of Linguistic and German and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Pomona College. This article is based on her presentation at ADFL Seminar West, 22–24 June 1995, in Eugene, Oregon.
© 1996 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 27, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 47-48 |
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