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IF A dean were asked to write down the first thing that came to mind at the mention of foreign languages, what would it be? Spanish, perhaps? Maybe staffing problems? What about the second and third things? Would there he any second or third things, or would the dean's imagination fail to go beyond the causes of the most immediate and pressing problems? Would a more relaxed conversation invoke only the issues of departmental configurations, the use of non-tenure-track faculty members in university-level courses, and the plunging enrollments in certain languages that have resulted in overstaffed programs? Or would the subject shift to seemingly intractable faculty strife in a multilanguage department? Unfortunately, when deans examine a particular academic area of the college, the issues that cause the most grief usually get the most attention. The most telling moment, however, comes when deans need to think beyond those problems to focus on what else those departments are doing.
Assume (as we must) that we could in some way affect what the dean thinks about the foreign languages. 1 How should we describe some of the most critical and exciting developments taking place in our discipline as they are being played out in our departments? Would we explain what the various methods of assessment are telling us about the success of proficiency-based methodologies in our classrooms? Could we describe clearly and convincingly how the teaching of language skills in the first couple of years of our curricula relate to the humanities and to the university's academic goals? What about foreign languages across the curriculum (FLAC) programs that take foreign language study into other disciplines? How do we explain to someone outside our field what we mean when we say that we teach “culture” in our first- and second-year curricula, and how do we know how effectively we are doing that teaching? How proficient do our students really become through completing the foreign language requirement and over the course of a major? Since most of us are in departments of languages and literatures, what can we say about how well we teach students to read critically all kinds of texts and to express in the target language complicated ideas and insights about the texts in correct and reasonably sophisticated speech and writing?
Clearly, we cannot at all times influence what the dean sees when he or she looks at foreign language programs, and the heavy demands that foreign languages exert on divisional staffing budgets will always attract administrative scrutiny. Department chairs tell deans that the small class is the only format in which foreign language learning can take place effectively. Yet as we all know, much of the teaching in first- and second-year courses has become highly coordinated at each level, with a single textbook, a uniform syllabus, and common examinations across many sections. The latest material used to teach these courses is also highly programmed and structured around the central textbook; batteries of quizzes and tests, supplementary workbooks, video- and audiotapes, CD-ROMs, and more all determine to a high degree the courses' methods and their structures. Under this labor,intensive model such courses in medium-to-large programs can be and are taught by graduate students who receive some initial preparation and continuing supervision and by teachers who have MA-level training and perhaps some experience in the schools or elsewhere. The university cannot be expected to make what is potentially a thirty-year investment in tenure-track faculty members whose responsibilities will be limited to first- and second-year teaching. And it would not be accurate or useful to argue that we will want to sustain the kinds of staffing patterns we rely on today for the next twenty-five to thirty years. It is impractical to use tenure-track positions to meet the kinds of staffing pressures that so many language departments are experiencing lately.
Because the teaching demands in our field are disparate, we appear to have—whether we wish to call it that or not—a two-tiered curriculum, with language instruction at one level and literature at another, and we have largely two-tiered staffing patterns to match. In many of our programs, graduate students and temporary faculty members teach almost exclusively in the language sector, and tenure-track professors for the most part do not teach there at all. 2 The result is a departmental profile that the dean's office may not easily appreciate in comparison with those in other disciplines. In fact, it can be easy for those outside the department to see little more than the “service” functions of foreign language departments, especially given the recent national attention to the burgeoning use of part-time faculty members.
Beyond the structure of teaching and of the curriculum, how well does the administration understand the pros and cons of foreign language department organization? More important, what do we as faculty members and as a profession think about various kinds of configurations? Are we best organized at our institutions as single departments encompassing various modern (and sometimes classical) foreign languages and their literatures, or would we be better off as several separate but discipline-related departments? Whatever the departmental organization may be on paper and no matter how distinct the foreign language units may be one from the other, administrators will almost inevitably think of them all together and compare them using the criteria of student demand and of their over- and understaffing relative to one another. In these times of static budgets and shifting student demand for courses and even for majors, it may be particularly tempting to seek to balance the needs of one foreign language department or section against those of another. But deans are just as likely to compare our departments' needs with non-foreign-language departments'. So instead of Italian or Russian versus Spanish, for example, the comparison may be mass communications versus Russian, or biology versus upper-division French literature. We need to ask ourselves how foreign language departments would fare in such comparisons if the decisions were based not only on staffing and enrollment numbers (whether high or low) but also on an assessment of the centrality and the overall contribution of the foreign language departments in question to the college or university mission.
Since many or all of these factors will enter into dean's-level decisions about the distribution of resources, we in foreign languages must also be aware of the particular aspects of our complex missions that we normally privilege when we communicate with the dean. Are we careful to represent consistently and strongly our contribution to the overall college or university curriculum and mission? Can we talk about areas of university-wide academic leadership that are consistently associated with our departments? Can we argue effectively that it would be potentially disastrous for an administration to eliminate the teaching of, say, Russian or German solely on the basis of low or declining enrollments in the departments' language courses? Are we taking leadership roles with our administration and our fellow faculty members in the internationalization of curriculum? We need to be able to demonstrate how these departments, besides teaching the language to a small number of self-selected students, enrich the educational mission of the institution in ways that would be impossible to replicate if they were eliminated.
As disparate student demand affects enrollments, language areas that are suffering declines can develop their own unique strategies for contributing to the mission of the division or the university. If certain programs are not teaching as many language students as they used to, a dean is likely to want to know what they are doing instead. Are faculty members teaching courses on literature from their areas of specialization in English translation, perhaps in the general liberal arts curriculum? Are chairs encouraging cross-departmental work for their faculty members, making connections with colleagues in linguistics, English, and other foreign literatures? Are foreign language departments teaching courses in national folklore, women's studies, area studies, or film studies, for instance, that attract students even if not necessarily increasing language majors? And perhaps more important, are chairs finding ways to make these contributions possible? Departments that contemplate these or other new directions will face real challenges in faculty development. Chairs will need to be particularly creative in providing incentives and resources for faculty members not only to develop new courses but also to attend conferences and summer seminars that will take their expertise in teaching and even in scholarly work in new directions. Chairs need to inform their deans about these initiatives and lobby for material as well as moral support as they make necessary adjustments to new circumstances.
And what about the fast-emerging areas of applied linguistics and second language acquisition studies within the discipline of foreign languages? Until fairly recently, only the large research universities found places on their faculties for these specialists, and even these faculty members often did not have the full understanding and respect of a primarily literature-oriented faculty. They were hired to do the jobs that no one else on the faculty knew how to do well and that few, if any, wanted to be involved in at all. Often these new faculty members ran into problems getting tenure when their teaching and research were evaluated at the departmental level by committees of literature scholars. These apparent schisms within departments were and are difficult to understand for those at levels beyond the foreign language departments who must act on personnel decisions and pass them on to university-wide committees.
Today the landscape looks increasingly different for applied linguists and second language acquisition specialists. Almost every medium to large department wants at least one, and this trend also challenges the traditional thinking about what kinds of teaching and especially research are appropriate in the foreign languages. Applied linguistics faculty members provide mid-sized and larger universities with links to the foreign language teacher training programs, and they teach and conduct research in areas that are in great demand among practical-minded undergraduate majors, such as second language acquisition theory and the study of discourse. The chair must ensure that both the department faculty and those outside the discipline and the department also respect and credit the unique professional contributions of applied linguists. We must also be aware that the hiring of these specialists again contributes to the impression of the foreign languages as a disciplinary field whose practitioners are unusually disparate in their specializations.
I think that one way we can meet the challenges of the future in our discipline is by systematically and dispassionately looking at how our foreign language and literature areas are organized. What sense can we make of the various groupings of departments by language or language “family” (Romance, Slavic) or by entirely bureaucratic criteria (say, combining some less taught with more taught languages)? Even single departments of foreign languages and literature are most likely subdivided by national language.
What are our alternatives? Is there a place, for instance, in the university of the future for academic divisions or centers, perhaps with their own core faculties, devoted exclusively to the scholarship of applied linguistics and language acquisition and to the teaching of all the foreign languages offered? Aside from concentrating these activities in a single unit, perhaps foreign language learning centers could organize better the intermediate-level study of foreign languages to meet the specific and growing needs of students in business, diplomacy and foreign affairs, the health professions, and social service fields. Such multidisciplinary endeavors as FLAC programs might also be organized out of such centers along with the coordination of teacher training programs, the pursuit of outside funding, and the supervision of language research and learning facilities.
In the social sciences the traditional structures of geographic area studies are being challenged by new problem- and issue-based foci that cut across national and regional groupings. Foreign language departments are in an ideal position to take the lead in proposing institutionalized opportunities in the humanities for faculty members and students to work across these traditional boundaries—for example, closely affiliated divisions or centers for the study of literature and culture, in which faculty members would offer courses both in foreign languages and in English translation. Such restructuring may be particularly important as various academic disciplines continue to examine the phenomenon of the linguistic and cultural construction of ethnic, cultural, and national identity. Wouldn't it better allow scholars, teachers, and students of languages and literary and cultural studies to work together in programs that would more easily cross and recross the frontiers now separating national literatures and cultures? Shouldn't our curricula follow the direction of our scholarship and challenge the traditional segregation of our work in literature and culture by language, geography, and nationality?
Since deans are often greatly concerned about how central departments and programs are to their institutions' educational missions, I want to return to that familiar issue. In our discipline we say that we teach the skills necessary to understand, speak, write, and read the target language at reasonable levels of competence after a certain period of time in the classroom, and we are learning how to gauge our success in these areas quite convincingly. But what else can we say about the learning that goes on in our programs beyond the acquisition of skills?
At the risk of raising somewhat heretical notions, let me pose some further questions that are central to the way we communicate what we do in our discipline to administrators and colleagues alike. What can we say about the level of the critical reading, critical thinking, and expression that take place in the target language in our advanced literature and culture classes? Is it true that, because of the challenges of target-language reading comprehension and of communicating increasingly sophisticated and complex ideas and insights orally and in writing, our levels of expectations for even our advanced literature classes are markedly different from those for comparable humanities courses conducted in English? I am certain that our best students in advanced literature and culture courses do admirably well with subject matter in the target languages. Yet even in these courses we must continue to teach the grammar, syntax, and vocabulary necessary to perceptive reading and clear expression of ideas. In doing so, are we trying to reconcile conflicting pedagogical demands and needs and consequently diminishing the effectiveness of our advanced-level teaching? While I would never argue that we should stop teaching writing skills, I would ask whether we compromise our intellectual expectations of our students in exchange for continuous work on the mechanics of writing in the target language. We constantly discuss the goals and assessment of our foreign language courses, but shouldn't we pay equal attention to the goals in our advanced-level literature and culture courses taught in the target language?
The discussion of these issues is vital to our mission as humanities departments. What do we know about how our colleagues teaching such courses nationwide are successfully addressing the potential conflicts and tensions that I mention above? 3 We also need to answer these questions when we develop (as we certainly must) ways to assess learning at the advanced levels of our programs. And we must be ready to answer them more publicly when we talk about the overall place of foreign languages and literature in the university curriculum. Maybe our advanced students would achieve deeper understandings of texts and cultural issues if they read in the target language but discussed and wrote in English and even interrogated the original texts through the difficult and revealing task of working back and forth between the two languages. They could easily do so in the organizational context of a department or program of literary and cultural studies while developing ever more sophisticated linguistic skills in closely related but distinct foreign language courses.
As academic institutions define their missions and their foci more sharply than ever, they increasingly expect their departments and the faculty members they hire and award tenure to work in support of their educational goals. The ways in which the various disciplines can continuously respond to these institutional goals will be a measure of the vitality of those disciplines and of their centrality in their institutions' overall educational landscapes. This is no time for those of us in foreign languages and literature to be reactive or conservative. We must not adopt a siege mentality that allows us to concentrate on only the month-to-month practicalities of staffing and enrollment problems. We may have opportunities right before us to lead in such areas as the redefinition and reconfiguration of literary and cultural studies: we might, for instance, teach texts both in the original languages and in English translation, enabling students to share with one another the insights they gain through the two approaches. Foreign language faculty members can also take leading roles in areas such as women's studies, area studies, translation, and comparative literature. Foreign language faculty members can advance the internationalization of university curricula across the traditional disciplines by exploring such options as the adoption of some form of a foreign-languages-across-the-curriculum program. 4
In Profession 1996 Richard Searle writes, “Our universities are in trouble, inside and out, at the very moment when there is no clear picture of what they are and no consensus about what they are for” (17). Are foreign language programs exempt from the implications of this sweeping statement? Isn't now the time when, above all, we need carefully to redefine our own academic and intellectual position in the university and to argue convincingly for the centrality of our programs to the overall mission of higher education? And shouldn't we demonstrate that centrality by formulating exciting and much-needed new thinking about reconfiguring traditional curricular and disciplinary boundaries that no longer serve us well? Though the shifting realities of language study in the United States require our programs to make adjustments, they also provide a unique opportunity for department chairs and their faculty members to lead in the rethinking of a significant part of the traditional university humanities curriculum.
The author is Professor of Spanish and Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Science at Miami University, Oxford. This article is based on his Presentation at the 1996 MLA convention in Washington, DC.
1 Although I have worked “on the other side” as an associate dean of a college of arts and science for the past three years, I use the pronoun we to signal my continuing connection to my home discipline of foreign languages and literature. If the point of view in this essay seems at times to be a bit schizophrenic, that appearance is due precisely to the difficulties of separating those roles and concerns.
2 Even (perhaps especially) when tenure-track professors do teach language courses, their work in the classes is not viewed with the same understanding and respect as, for instance, a tenure-track philosophy professor's teaching an introductory freshman course on ethics or a senior colleague's teaching an entry-level chemistry or macroeconomics course.
3 For interesting discussions of these issues, see the Winter 1995 ADFL Bulletin (26.2), in which a section is devoted to articles on literature, culture, and theory. Michael Holquist also has a challenging article in the section of the Fall 1995 ADFL Bulletin on foreign languages, international studies, and interdisciplinarity.
4 See Wieshofer on a successful FLAC program at Agnes Scott College.
Holquist, Michael. “A New Tour of Babel: Recent Trends Linking Comparative Literature Departments, Foreign Language Departments, and Area Studies Programs.” ADFL Bulletin 27.1 (1995): 6–12. [Show Article]
Searle, Leroy F. “Institutions and Intellectuals: A Modest Proposal.” Profession 1996. New York: MLA, 1996. 15–25.
Weishofer, Ingrid. “The Humanities Come Alive: Linking Languages to Other Disciplines.” ADFL Bulletin 27.1 (1995): 16–19.
© 1997 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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