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THE concept of equal opportunity has been devalued by bureaucratic overuse into a cliché. It is nonetheless an ideal for which heroes have died and many ordinary mortals have tried to live. Writing as an ordinary mortal, I use the term in my title without cynicism and with two meanings that have dictated the terms of my own professional life, lived out as it has been in New York City. The equal opportunity of my title means equal opportunity for the study of both language and literature, and this, in my own setting, means equal opportunity for students at inner-city universities to study what students at other, more privileged institutions may study.
I have been talking and writing for the last decade or so in more or less optimistic terms about the need and the real chance that we have in big urban institutions to teach language and literature in foreign language departments, affording, shall we say, underprivileged students the opportunity to progress toward high levels of literacy in a variety of foreign languages. The events in the real world in the past couple of years have, on the one hand, mightily eroded my optimism but, on the other hand, given rise to a certain last-ditch hope that impending disaster will galvanize foreign language and literature faculties as well as university administrators into the kind of concerted revolutionary change in their attitudes and efforts that more affluent times, alas, never brought forth.
The events of the real world that I am talking about are, of course, the political shifts in many of our state legislatures an in our federal government that have led to the slashing of many education budgets. In my university, the City University of New York, with its ten senior and six community colleges, its technical school, its graduate school, and its medical school, and its more than 200,000 students, a state of fiscal exigency was declared last year, and we are threatened with further budget cuts of fifteen percent this year. Fiscal exigency has again been declared, allowing more tenured faculty members to be fired across the university; early retirement plans have further decimated the faculty (serendipitously, of course, without planning), class size has gone up, the number of part-time instructors has gone up without matching the losses in full-time instructors, the teaching load has gone up, all services have been reduced, and, of course, student tuition has been raised. It is not surprising that colleagues of mine to whom I have mentioned the title of this article have said, “Equal opportunity? You've got to be kidding.”
But I am not kidding. I am more than ever convinced that the opportunities for language and literature study, at all levels, high and low, should be equal . Or, to put it less abstractly, that a student from Harlem ought to have the opportunity to learn Latin, to be offered the kind of scholar's education that points upward in society. A student from Bedford-Stuyvesant ought to be able, somewhere in the educational system, to learn to read Goethe's Faust and not be automatically, by definition, closed out of jobs with, say, German companies for which a high level of literacy in German is a big plus. A student from the South Bronx ought to have a way up the ladder to those job opportunities and lifestyles that come from being able to handle genuinely literate Spanish and do not simply accrue from growing up with street Spanish. And so one could go on. That's what I mean by equal opportunity, and that is why I see the language-literature curriculum, if it is properly organized and properly taught, as a great leveler in society, not as an elitist path to the elite world of graduate school and literary theory, though I see no particular reason why inner-city students per se should be excluded from that kind of intellectual exercise either.
Public institutions like the City University of New York have traditionally functioned as levelers in American society, opening the doors of higher education to generation after generation of immigrants. The title of this article caused several of my colleagues to say, “Be careful of using words like ‘inner-city’: it's a code word for minority , you know.” Well, I see no reason to use code words, so I will spell out what it means. My college, Hunter, is on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which, though in the heart of Manhattan, anyone who knows the city will know is not itself in the inner-city if inner city decodes, for example, into ghetto . It is an upper-class residential expensive shopping and museum area; we have an upper Park Avenue address. Our students, however, do not live on Park Avenue, and nor do we. We all come in on the Lexington Avenue subway, which disgorges its masses straight into one of the basement classroom areas of the college. About 60% of our Hunter students are officially designated as minorities, the largest group being the 21% who are black. We are one of the senior colleges of the City University system, scattered all over the five boroughs, and according to 1996 enrollment statistics, 69.4% of the total student body is “minority,” if you do not regard that as a contradiction in terms; of these, 32.3% are black, 25.2% are Hispanic, 11.7% are Asian, and 0.2% are American Indian. 1
Another way of looking at the makeup of the student body is to look at the immigration patterns of the city: During the period 1982–87, over 500,000 immigrants settled in New York City, roughly one half from Latin America and the Caribbean, and one quarter from Asia. As a result of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1986, 130,000 undocumented aliens applied for residency status, and more recently large numbers of Eastern Europeans have settled in the city. Currently New York's foreign-born population stands at two million. It is estimated that by the year 2000, at least 50% of CUNY first-time freshmen will have been born abroad or in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico ( Immigration 19). Already in 1992, 44% of freshmen and advanced-standing students admitted to CUNY reported on the application form that their native language was not English; entering freshmen reported speaking a total of eighty-eight different languages at home—“from Akan to Zulu” ( Report 1).
Well, you might remark, you already have the Tower of Babel, why do you need to teach foreign languages at all? Let me remind you that the Lord had the City and Tower of Babel built to confound the one language spoken until then by the people of the earth, to ensure that they no longer understood one another's speech and then to scatter them upon the face of the earth. The foreign language departments of New York City ought to be the City and Tower of Babel in reverse. All these people who have landed from the far-flung faces of the earth in CUNY and come pouring in to us from eight in the morning till ten at night on the New York City subway ought to be able to look to us for enhancement of skills and cultural literacy in at least some of their own languages as well as an understanding of other languages, foreign to them but useful to them in the increasingly tough fight for economic survival and advancement in the United States.
But what do these multitongued denizens of the latter-day Tower of Babel find in the City University? They find that instruction in most languages, other than English and Spanish, has already disappeared or is rapidly disappearing in our great cosmopolitan university. As of my last count, for example, since the last round of retrenchments and retirements, there is only one faculty member left in the entire 200,000-student university who teaches Arabic; there is no full-time faculty member teaching Yiddish, Polish, Swahili, Hindi, Yoruba; there are only two in Japanese and three who can teach Portuguese but rarely do. There are a massive seven in Chinese and in Hebrew and eight in Russian. We have no program with a major course of studies in Japanese, and only one in Chinese, two in Hebrew and three in Russian. In classics, there are still four upper-level programs, but only one that is holding its own in the upper levels of Latin and Greek. The so-called commonly taught languages, French, German and Italian, have only a handful of relatively strong upper-level programs across the university. Many of the faculty members in these remaining languages are approaching retirement age, enrollments are in many cases weak, and very little hiring is in the cards for the foreseeable future. We are facing now (in June 1996) a new round of retrenchments and retirements. It is very likely that the weaker full programs will be altogether gone in five years’ time, unless some dramatic moves are made to reverse the trend. Spanish is strong across the university and has all the problems of a field too big for its own resources: huge elementary classes of often more than forty students, inadequate funding for proper tracking for the various kinds of heritage speakers, and consequently limited success in taking nonheritage speakers through to the higher levels.
How has this happened? How, when the multiculturalism of the university has increased by leaps and bounds, have the options for learning foreign languages steadily decreased? Why, for example, are traditionally taught languages that used to boast large faculties and strong majors and still boast excellent library holdings shadows of their former selves? The explanation most often heard in departments of traditionally taught languages puts he onus on events that faculty members and administrators do not control and for which they cannot therefore be held responsible: “demographics,” for example, are referred to more or less as an act of God about which one can do nothing. Certainly it is true that “in 1971 with the advent of Open Admissions, the university opened its doors to large numbers of non-traditional students” ( Report 1), students very often needing remedial work in several areas; such students, it is tacitly said in declining language departments, simply aren't up to handling the materials. “Look, it's simple,” an unusually candid person once said to me. “We don't draw on the middle class, and it's the middle class who learns German and French.”
Administrators do not tend to come out with this kind of blunt assessment either in public or in private. They talk about “student choice.” Students, they say, are no longer choosing to study most European and classical languages. Then, bowing gracefully to “student preference,” they simply close down programs as enrollment drops and faculty members retire.
I do not think that we should accept the notion of “student choice” any more readily than the notion of “middle-class languages.” Of course, students' ethnicity and socioeconomic status play a part in the choices they make, but there are other factors that render our students' ability to make a free choice pretty much null and void. These factors lie in the educational system itself, of which we all, faculty members and administrators, are a part and for which we must take responsibility. This system has in many ways failed our city students. They have not been properly prepared for college work in their poorly equipped, overcrowded schools, and they are now coming into increasingly poorly equipped, overcrowded colleges. How free is their choice, for example, not to study physics? About as free as their choice not to study ancient Greek or, if it comes to that, German. They can only make such a choice if they get a lot of help and encouragement from us.
In my small department in Hunter College we have put all our efforts in recent years into giving CUNY students a real chance seriously to learn the German language to the point where they are already to begin specializing in it for various professional purposes, and we have discovered a lot about what this takes.
Most of our students come to us having learned no German in high school. Only nine New York City high schools teach German any more, and they are the elite high schools most of whose students do not come to CUNY but go to Harvard and Yale. So our students start from scratch with us, for the most part. We have worked for some years with the ACTFL scale, and we have tested many of our students in the four skills over a period of time. We know, for example, that after four semesters of fifteen weeks, three hours a week, twenty-eight students in a class, the average student will not rate higher than Intermediate-Mid in speaking and writing. We have therefore recast our whole upper-level program on the basis that it starts at thee Intermediate-Mid level. We no longer take these students and catapult them into upper-level courses dominated by native speakers. We cannot rely on time spent in Germany to raise their language skills, so the classroom is our primary resource, an increasingly poorly equipped classroom, since in the last round of cuts at Hunter, almost all the workers in the audiovisual center were fired, so that even getting an overhead projector to all our classes is a major operation.
I have written elsewhere in some detail about what we have done with our upper-level program (88–94); suffice it to say here that while we have abandoned survey courses and introduced language courses and a sequence of business German courses, our literature courses are still a crucial part of our enterprise. In all our courses, we work with individualized learning goals, group work, graduated speaking and writing assignments, and we help our students move through a series of courses in which their cultural awareness is developed alongside their language skills. (We have, I may say , doubled our enrollment in our upper-level program, from about thirty-five to about eighty-five.)
Even after all the work we do with them and they with us, however, most of our students emerge from our program at a level rarely higher than a good Advanced in speaking and writing on the ACTFL scale (not untypical of graduating majors across the United States). Equal opportunity, then, for them as for most students in the United States who start a difficult language in college, means very simply that language instruction must continue in graduate school. Certainly it should have started in high school. It didn't. And if we want in the next couple of decades to give students from our university the opportunity to enter the German teaching profession or to use the language seriously in any other profession, then we must institute serious language teaching in graduate school, beginning at the Advanced level , not presuming “near-native fluency.” We have recently been awarded an NEH institutional grant to develop a coordinated undergraduate-graduate program across Queens College, Hunter College, Queensborough Community College, and the Graduate School, CUNY, with bridge courses on the threshold to graduate school and the incorporation of language learning into graduate courses. Whether this project will survive our own budget cuts remains to be seen, but even if it does not, I believe that it presents one usable model for stemming the tide of failure in the traditional language and literature programs, that is, failure to attract and retain students with undeveloped language skills and with very little money in the bank. At the same time, it may present a way to introduce to these same students some of the languages that are traditionally less commonly taught and hardly taught at all in high school, Asian languages, for example, where the four-year undergraduate program is simply too short.
What such a model entails, however, is a very big change in the way faculty members now teaching in advanced literature programs and in graduate programs view and conduct their professional lives. It also entails a very big change in the way our universities reward their faculty members. Teachers of literature and of literary criticism have to be prepared to see themselves as teachers of language at the higher levels, and universities have to recognize in their reward structures the investment of time that this involves. Teaching language at the Advanced Plus-Superior threshold is an intellectually fascinating as well as pedagogically satisfying enterprise. Content, be it literary or otherwise, is better taught when student skills are simultaneously enhanced, and student skills are better enhanced when they are focused on increasingly challenging intellectual content. But in order to teach skills and content successfully at a very high level, you have to learn a lot of about your students' actual skills, and you have to be prepared to work intensively with them on improving these skills. Are our professors really prepared to do this now, in sufficient numbers to give the next generations of students a real chance, and at the same time to give the next generations of potential teachers a job?
The proposition that I am making, of course, bucks the seemingly growing trend, inside and outside the language and literature departments, simply to give up on the language-literature connection. Inside the profession, some people in failing traditional programs are seeking salvation, not in teaching the language better over longer periods of time, but in expanding the content of their programs beyond the national literatures and turning their attention to cultural studies, often interdisciplinary and often in English. One hears more and more discussion of creating separate departments of literature on the one hand and departments or centers of language teaching on the other. This may work in rich institutions that can afford to run high-powered, well-staffed language centers and retain a small elite body of professors to write books and teach literature and literary criticism to a small number of students. Many people outside the academy are greeting this solution with great glee as heralding the end of the “traditional homes of foreign languages” and the beginning of newly professional language teaching in the universities. But in universities like our City University, with ever-decreasing budgets, such an apparently benign solution is hardly an option. We cannot afford the luxury of two separate faculties and two separate operations, and in our milieu, if such separation were attempted, it would probably result rather rapidly in the abandonment of the “elite” strand, the gradual loss of most senior faculty, and the teaching of largely the lower levels of a limited number of languages by low-paid part-time and non-tenure-track instructors.
The best hope of a genuinely high-level, multioptioned education in foreign languages in our kind of university surely lies in having one faculty who will work with language in a cultural-literary context and open the doors to the highest levels of literacy for our students. When I mentioned earlier the students who had a right to read Goethe's Faust , I was advocating a return to the bad old ways of making students run before they could walk. I was proposing, however, that there should not be two curricula in this country, one for the socially advantaged, who will go on having the option of studying “traditional,” “difficult,” “elite” subjects, and one for the others, who will receive a diminished education that does not lead to high levels of literacy in any traditional or in fact practical sense.
And this brings me finally to my “last-ditch hope” that impending economic disaster will galvanize professors of foreign language and literature into the kind of concerted revolutionary change in their attitudes and efforts that more affluent times never brought forth. At my own university in recent months a faculty task force on foreign languages, set in motion with good intentions by an enlightened central CUNY administrator, Vice Chancellor Richard Freeland, has been working on ways of organizing language teaching across the colleges of the university. Such concerted action would have been unthinkable in “better times,” when we were busily digging our own graves in isolation from one another. It will not work now if we continue to be beaten into the ground by new and bigger budget cuts. It will not work either if faculty and administration cannot suspend their ingrained suspicions of each other's motives and cannot cooperate to save the overall enterprise. But at least we have a plan, and we shall be able to report in these pages in the years ahead on its success or failure.
We are hoping that colleagues will help colleagues to sustain upper-level programs by cross-college consortial arrangements, organized in areas of the city. Our central, long-term teaching goal is to be able to offer our students serious, coordinated sequences of language learning in many languages, literatures, and cultures, sequences that will allow native speakers of some languages to develop their literate command of the language out of what is often a very limited functional ability and also sequences that will hold out real possibilities for nonnative speakers to reach high levels of functional literacy.
We want to get away from the notion that the higher reaches of the educational system, the major in some cases and graduate study in most, should be largely the domain of the native speaker—the native speaker, very frequently, educated somewhere else than on these shores. We want to work with New York City high schools at one end of the learning continuum and with our own Graduate School at the other to offer longer sequences of language instruction in a variety of languages with clearly defined performance standards and multiple entry and exit points so that the system is flexible enough to accommodate the huge variety of language learners in our university and at the same time organized and serious enough to open up the difficult way to the top for many more of them than find it now—that difficult way into the heart of a language, literature, and culture. 2
If administrators and faculty members can be persuaded to throw their joint weight behind such serious attempts to rethink teaching efforts and to recognize such efforts clearly and unambiguously in the reward structure of the institution, then we may still, against all odds, set a new scene where young faculty members will again be hired to teach foreign languages and literatures in full-time jobs and where it will not sound like heavy irony when we talk about equal opportunity for the students of our beleaguered inner-city university.
The author is Professor of German at Hunter College and the Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York, and Chair of the Department of German at Hunter College. This article is based on her presentation at the 1995 MLA convention in Chicago.
1 The statistics were provided by the City University of New York office of University Relations.
2 Interested readers can obtain a copy of the final report of the task force, World Languages at CUNY: Meeting the Needs of the Twenty-First Century: A Blueprint for Short-Term Survival and Long-Term Growth , by writing to Robert A. Picken, Office of Academic Affairs, City Univ. of New York, 535 East 80th St., New York, NY 10021.
Immigration/Migration and the CUNY Student of the Future . New York: City U of New York, 1994.
James, Dorothy. “Re-shaping the ‘College-Level’ Curriculum: Problems and Possibilities.” Northeast Conference Reports . Ed. Helen. S. Lepke. Middlebury; Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Langs., 1989. 79–110.
Report of the CUNY ESL Task Force . New York: City U of New York, 1994.
© 1996 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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