28, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 37-39
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The Future of Spanish in Academia
Cristina González
Apply yourself to the study of the Spanish language with all the assiduity you can. It and the English covering nearly the whole face of America, they should be well known to every inhabitant, who means to look beyond the limits of his farm.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr (1788)
THE fall 1995 reports on the numbers of students and faculty members in second language departments at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, reveal an interesting pattern: the department of Spanish and Portuguese teaches forty-one percent of the undergraduate majors and forty-four percent of the graduate students in these departments but has only twenty-three percent of the faculty members. The true imbalance is even greater than these figures indicate. We have an unusually high number of undergraduate minors, since many students combine Spanish with another area of study. Our lack of resources compared with other second language departments is thus dramatic.
This imbalance is the result of the administration's failure to add faculty lines in the department during the years when Spanish was becoming the second language of choice for students in the United States. According to a Modern Language Association study of national language enrollment patterns, enrollments in Spanish surpassed those in French as early as 1970 (Huber). By 1990, enrollments in Spanish were nearly twice as high as those in French. Since then, Spanish has continued to grow rapidly, but the administration has never acknowledged this fact by funding additional faculty members. Even now, twenty-six years after Spanish became the second language of choice for American students, the department of Spanish and Portuguese is not the largest language department at the university in terms of members of faculty.
This situation is not unusual. On the contrary, Spanish departments at universities all over the country are facing the same problem. We are vastly underfunded in relation to other language departments, and we are working under extreme pressure. We must teach and advise numerous graduate and undergraduate students, direct many programs here and abroad, and conduct a variety of outreach activities, in addition to maintaining serious research programs. When Spanish faculty members meet at professional conferences, they often express frustration about this anachronistic and unproductive state of affairs. However, rather than merely commiserate about the lack of support and appreciation for our departments, I think we must raise the issue openly. Why is Spanish growing so much, and why are academic administrators so resistant to the growth of our departments?
As Thomas Jefferson pointed out over two hundred years ago, English and Spanish are the main languages of the Western hemisphere. The United States is the frontier where the two languages meet. There never has been a neat border between the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds. Unlike the political boundaries, the linguistic lines are blurred. Spanish is spoken with varying degrees of frequency from the southernmost parts of the United States to the Canadian border and beyond. With some thirty million Hispanics, the United States is now the third-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, after Mexico and Spain. In many parts of the country, one hears Spanish spoken constantly. Indeed, the presence of Spanish is growing rapidly and reaching areas that previously had no significant Hispanic populations. People from Spanish-speaking nations keep in close contact with their places of origin, some of which are close to (or, in the case of Puerto Rico, part of) the United States. Moreover, as we move toward a continental and global economy, national borders are becoming less important, and movement of people in all directions is bound to increase. Spanish, in all likelihood, then, will continue to increase its penetration into the northern parts of the continent, creating an increasingly bilingual society. Spanish is becoming the de facto second national language of the United States. The English-only movement is merely a response to this reality, and its appearance is the best proof of the enormous vitality of Spanish in this country. While some citizens react with fear, many more have decided that Spanish is a language they want to learn. Many jobs require knowledge of Spanish, and young people are aware of this fact. How can they not be if they hear their classmates speak Spanish and see Spanish on the labels of many products they buy? They do not need to read Thomas Jefferson to realize that knowing Spanish is important for their personal growth and financial well-being. This is where multiculturalism and economic development meet.
Unfortunately, most administrators are not as attuned to this situation as the students they serve are. Administrators are usually slow to respond to changes in demand for courses, and they often have preconceived notions about which departments should be large and well-funded. Thus, because of a combination of inertia and chauvinism, Spanish departments all over the country have become dangerously underfunded. We study and teach the cultures of people who, for the most part, are neither rich nor white, and our programs are regarded by many as not very important. Indeed, the resistance to the growth of Spanish in academia is enormous. Faced with a burgeoning demand for our courses, administrators often deny us resources. Frequently, they simply do not allow us to meet the demand for our courses in an appropriate fashion. Many Spanish departments are turning away large numbers of prospective students every semester, because there are not enough instructors. Many also have classes that are too large to be effective. Another unproductive approach to the rapidly expanding demand for Spanish courses is to hire part-time and temporary instructors to avoid significantly increasing the number of full-time tenure-track faculty members. However, these stopgap measures simply are not acceptable twenty-six years after Spanish became the most studied second language in this country. History, geography, and time are on the side of continued growth in Spanish, which is here to stay. Academic administrators must come to terms with this situation and make appropriate long-term investments in our programs.
The inequities I describe are particularly unsettling in the light of the increasingly prominent role Spanish departments are being called on to play in society. As the presence and centrality of Spanish language and culture in the United States grow, more and more constituencies look to us as primary repositories of Hispanic cultural expertise. For example, the need for schoolteachers who understand the language and circumstances of Hispanic pupils and who can impart that understanding to non-Hispanics has mushroomed, and it is largely our responsibility to train such teachers. Businesses, government, and social service agencies also need college graduates who not only speak Spanish but also truly understand Hispanic culture. Within our own institutions, we must provide cultural resources for and establish academic dialogues with a variety of other disciplines. Last but not least, we must provide an academic home for students from the country's largest and fastest-growing ethnic minority.
As a result of these changes, Spanish departments must alter their traditional approaches, and most are doing so quickly. Until relatively recently, many Spanish departments, like the universities that housed them, were Eurocentric, emphasizing the literature of Spain over that of Spanish America. This situation has changed in most institutions. Spanish American literature is now receiving much more attention than it did in the past. However, additional investments in this area are still necessary, particularly United States Latino and Latina literature and its ties to the literatures of Mexico, the Caribbean, and the rest of the Hispanic world. Spanish departments need to pay special attention to these needs when they hire faculty members and develop curricula. Linguistics is another area of growth. Because of the intellectual traditions of the Hispanic world, Spanish departments typically have had more linguists than other second language departments have. In fact, a good number of Spanish departments offer PhDs in linguistics, which are rarely offered in second language departments. This trend should continue. Whether or not Spanish departments offer PhDs in Hispanic linguistics, however, they need to have specialists in second language acquisition and in applied linguistics, as well as in educational technology. It is essential that Spanish departments have cutting-edge language programs that are customized and flexible and that use technology to enhance communication and to expand learning opportunities. Given that computer literacy and Spanish literacy are both essential skills today, it makes sense to combine them. An electronic conversation course, for example, can introduce students to the Internet and put them in contact with the Hispanic world.
Another area of increasing importance is translation and interpretation. Spanish departments need to hire specialists in this area and to develop courses and programs to meet the growing demand for professional translators and interpreters. We also need to increase cooperation with related departments, such as linguistics, English, and comparative literature. Most particularly, we need to teach some graduate, as well as undergraduate, courses in English that are cross-listed with other departments, in order to expose students from other disciplines to Hispanic culture and to establish an intellectual dialogue between Spanish and other fields. Finally, Spanish departments need to expand their relationships with professional schools, which are in great need of our services. Specialized Spanish courses for business, law, nursing, and other professions, from elementary through advanced levels, need to be developed. Interdisciplinary majors, double majors, and minors should be facilitated and encouraged. We need to offer future businesspeople, lawyers, medical professionals, engineers, hotel managers, teachers, and so on a background that will broaden their education, help them better understand their own increasingly Hispanic country, and help them deal with the rest of the Hispanic world.
In the area of outreach, Spanish departments need to enhance ties with the Hispanic community. We should strive to serve this community, as well as to take advantage of its tremendous human potential, by creating service courses that give students credit for working for and in the community. Spanish departments must continue to enhance relationships with the Hispanic world through study-abroad and exchange programs. We should act as intermediaries between the Hispanic community and the university and between the university and the Hispanic world. We should help connect the Hispanic community with the community at large and with the rest of the Hispanic world. Spanish departments must offer courses for external constituencies, such as school systems, social service agencies, businesses, and health organizations, and many of these courses should be taught on location. Representatives of these constituencies are now coming to us for help, and we must be responsive to their needs. Spanish departments also need to offer special courses for university employees, many of whom are interested in learning Spanish but have difficulty fitting into traditional classes. It is crucial that we make our institutions more sensitive to Hispanic culture. The successful Spanish department of the future will be the one that offers a full range of services to a broad group of constituencies in addition to providing a first-rate education to traditional students.
Finally, Spanish departments must protect and enhance research enterprises and move to center stage in scholarship. We should not be afraid to exert academic leadership in the national modern language arena or at our institutions. We should make sure to be well represented and to have our voices heard within professional organizations and in our universities' governance systems. We must have a strong intellectual presence in academia. The old-fashioned dichotomies between language and literature and between research and service, which are still prevalent in many areas of academia, need to be overcome, and Spanish departments can lead the change. We have a tradition of combining language with literature and service with research. We must build on that tradition. Under a cultural studies rubric, Spanish departments should be centers of Hispanic culture in all its manifestations. We should teach language, which is the most important element of culture, at all levels and for all audiences. We should study language through linguistics. We should study and teach literature and all the other manifestations of culture, such as art, film, and music. We should be a major cultural resource to a broad range of constituencies. We must confidently build large, diverse, integrated, engaged departments of Spanish and not be afraid to demand the resources we need and the attention we deserve. If not for ourselves, we must do so for love of the culture that we study, teach, and represent and for love of this country, which, though perhaps not yet fully aware of it, desperately needs what we have to offer.
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Work Cited
Huber, Bettina J. “Variation in Foreign Language Enrollments through Time (1970–90).” ADFL Bulletin 27.2 (1996): 57–84. [Show Article]
© 1997 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 28, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 37-39 |
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