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FIFTY years ago—that is to say, two years after World War II—modern language professors gathered for the first time at the University of Kentucky, to examine the major task that lay ahead of them—namely, to restore the intellectual contacts with colleagues in this country and abroad, to rethink the goals of foreign language programs after the turmoil of a global war, and, in the German case, to reconsider the values and possible use of German culture after the experience of National Socialism. For the United States it was certainly a moment of historical optimism: after the defeat of Germany and Japan, the country was ready to accept the challenge of global leadership that was bestowed on it when the European powers were clearly no longer in a position to resume traditional roles of domination. The organizers of the first Kentucky conference, whether they fully understood the global historical shift of those years or not, must have grasped the unexpected opportunities for foreign language departments that came with the new global mission of the United States, opportunities that were soon channeled into the rigid mold of the cold war, in which every phenomenon, whether political or cultural, was looked at and defined in terms of its function in the struggle between democracy and totalitarianism.
Clearly, language and literature programs had to be strengthened so that they could participate in the larger rebuilding and expansion of the American university, which for the first time made a serious attempt to open its doors to those who had not been born into a social class in which college training was taken for granted. That the Kentucky conference has been successful for the last five decades, that it embraced the challenges of the 1970s, when all of a sudden the traditional structure of foreign language departments was seriously jeopardized by the abolition of the language requirement, and that the conference accepted and participated in the changes of the 1980s, when, once more, familiar definitions of our roles were undercut by new theoretical outlooks—these accomplishments speak for the strength of the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference.
It is in this spirit of innovation and questioning that I want to raise a number of issues that most of us are aware of, although we do not always like to be reminded of them. Today's mood is much more somber than the atmosphere of the immediate postwar years. American universities and colleges find themselves in a state of siege that has left its traces in our professional lives. Its most obvious symptom is the spirit of cost cutting, an unprecedented tendency among university administrators to reduce expenditures and to streamline structures—and therefore to look critically at programs that have relatively high infrastructure costs, such as small language departments. The more the business corporation becomes the model for the American university, the less we can take the preservation of traditional institutions and programs for granted. Another symptom is the significant decline in language enrollment since 1991 that the staff of the MLA has recently documented. While French departments have lost almost 25% of their previous enrollments, in the case of German the loss is even higher: we have 27.8% fewer students enrolled in German language classes today than six years ago. The consequences for faculty development are more than obvious. By traditional standards, universities and colleges need fewer German and French teachers, or at least fewer regular tenured faculty. As we know all too well, universities have responded increasingly to this crisis by hiring part-time teachers, thereby maintaining maximum financial flexibility.
The present situation in the job market seems to bear this assumption out. In the last three years we have reached a low that reminds us of the 1970s, when, for the first time after a decade of expansion, the academic labor market seemed to collapse. Of course, we have to remind ourselves that the trend toward downsizing is not limited to language and literature departments; it has reached physics and chemistry as well, disciplines that have prospered for decades because they could count on external funding. Scientists are told to think small, an order they find much harder to swallow than the humanities do, where there never was a lot of money.
This reminder is important because it will help us to read the larger picture before we draw hasty conclusions and embark on a course of action that might do more harm than good. But how does it all hang together? Is there a connection between the decline in language enrollment in French, German, and Russian (but not in Spanish), on the one hand, and the budget crisis at American universities, on the other? Is there a link between the fate of the German program and the physics department? I suspect that there is a tie, but not a direct one or a connection that can be explained in immediate causal terms. I believe that the end of the cold war, which some fifty years ago began to shape foreign language departments, has had a greater impact on American postsecondary education than we realize.
This is fairly obvious in the case of the sciences. The model of fundamental political confrontation, in which at any moment each side had to be ready for global warfare, encouraged large government expenditures. Universities received money for basic research that could be translated into defense technology. To a much smaller extent, even language departments took part in this boost. Older faculty members, now mostly retired, will remember the so-called Sputnik effect of the late 1950s, when languages were suddenly seen as a critical tool in the ongoing confrontation. The end of the cold war has made these expenditures superfluous. Moreover, the end of the cold war, it seems to me, has directly and indirectly affected the mission and function of American postsecondary education. It is possible, I believe, that the American research university (state or private), which for forty years was the engine of technological and economic progress and therefore crucial for social change, is losing its pivotal role. If there is indeed a process of marginalization at work (which conservatives would certainly welcome, because they do not trust the university), the smaller liberal arts college would also be affected, since it has served as a kind of Zubringer , or feeder, for the large research university.
Clearly today, American universities and colleges are on their own; neither the federal government nor the states feel strongly committed to provide the funding necessary for the ambitious teaching and research programs that were developed during the 1970s and 1980s. From the point of view of the political and economic leaders of this country, there is no longer an urgent need to support these programs, since they have no apparent function in the post-cold war economy. Furthermore, the publicly acclaimed drive toward privatization of public tasks leaves the university and the college in the cold.
This is our situation: we are faced with a rapid metamorphosis of higher education, as part of a larger structural transformation in the political and social sphere, that begins to touch our professional lives, mostly in negative terms. Under these circumstances we may lose our confidence to do what we do best—to teach our students the intricacies of a foreign language and the use and value of a foreign culture. What is to be done?
First of all, we have to understand that the traditional structure of the college and the university could survive after World War II because of an unspoken special agreement with society at large. Colleges and universities were considered exempt from the law of the market. The corporate model of the business world was not rigorously applied to higher education, which was seen as part of the public sphere. This policy gave us in the humanities space to produce and transmit knowledge that was not judged in terms of immediate social applicability. The standard of technological applicability was enforced mainly in the natural sciences and to some extent in the social sciences. But the primary enforcer was the state, not private business. The knowledge produced in the humanities, and especially in literature departments, had a unique function: it served as a kind of counterweight to the dominance of instrumental reason in the scientific community. In the public eye, learning languages and reading literature for their own sake balanced the utility of education in the sciences. The postwar triumph of the New Criticism articulated precisely this understanding of the humanities as a sheltered form of autonomy. As long as this balance of knowledge worked, the relative autonomy of the university was not radically questioned. The university was allowed to preserve its older structure as a community of teachers, scholars, and students. In a certain way, it was the cold war, the feeling of a permanent threat to our political and economic system, that preserved the university.
I fear that with the end of the cold war, this arrangement has come to an end. The strong state as a protector of the relative independence of the university is being dismantled. The lines between the public and the private sphere are being redrawn, with an increasing emphasis on the private. For the university this means that now the corporate model of the business sector is offered as the new standard to measure performance. This is the climate in which we will have to work in the near future, whether we are at a state or a private institution.
I believe that the application of the corporate model to the university is a fundamental mistake, because it assumes a market orientation that is ultimately counterproductive. We will have to persuade our administrations that they should not automatically cave in to the demands of their boards and regents, who frequently ask for accountability primarily in financial terms. But I realize that, at most places, the input of the faculty and the students is not strong enough to resist the present trend. In addition, in the long run mere resistance and maintenance of familiar structures cannot be successful, since these structures were historically determined and the historical parameters have definitely changed. New and fresh responses are needed, but workable patterns have not yet emerged. This makes it very difficult for us to get our bearings right.
Still, we have to make decisions about our professional future. Therefore we have to think about our discipline in a rapidly changing context. Can the corporate model be our friend? The concept of friendship would probably be misplaced, but we can ask the more pragmatic question: Can we use this model to our advantage? Although there are risks involved, the model has its own rewards. On the positive side, it favors competition, mobility, diversity, and, within the limits of cost efficiency, innovation. On the negative side, it disregards tradition (and with it continuity) and loyalty of the institution to the faculty (and vice versa). There is no place for strong and lasting attachments to the academic institution and its educational mission. (In this model, by the way, tenure is not a necessity, perhaps not even a desirable feature.) The corporate model of the 1990s, unlike that of the 1950s, tends to be decentralized; emphasis is placed on the mobility and efficiency of the individual unit.
Here lie the opportunities for the enterprising department that wants to experiment by trying out new curricula and different forms of organization, preferably, of course, without asking the dean for additional funds. This orientation applies both to language instruction and to literature and cultural programs. By and large, today's colleges and universities feel less threatened by new and potentially radical ideas than a generation ago, because—in the world of the global market—ideas are products like any other consumer good and have to be tried and tested before they can be sold to the general public. For this reason, ideological interference is less likely than fifty years ago, when the state in its role as protector also expected the political loyalty of the faculty in the war against communism. Ideological interference has become more a local matter. (A Baptist college, for instance, defines its mission in terms of specific religious ideas and norms and expects its faculty to accept these ideas and norms as a frame of reference.)
Of course, the call for innovation and experiments does not come unexpectedly or strike us as out of the ordinary. During the late 1980s, for example, Germanists in this country began to ask questions about the fate of the discipline. Their project started as a movement to bring the study of German literature and culture closer to the American home ground by redefining the parameters of the field. The so-called Americanization of Germanics challenged the assumed leadership role of German Germanistik and called for a specifically American agenda. The recent intensive debate about cultural studies has clearly helped us revitalize the discipline, precisely because the participants in the exchange did not simply call for a new methodology but suggested, rather, the possibility of multiple interdisciplinary approaches that would redesign the field and provide connections with other disciplines in the humanities and in the social sciences. At this point there is no need to rehash this comprehensive debate, which is still fresh in our minds. Instead, I want to draw some conclusions that were not yet available when we began to question the traditional mission of the German department a decade ago.
When we started to examine the status of Germanics in the 1980s, we were motivated primarily by internal problems: first, a perceived isolation of Germanics vis-à-vis the rest of the humanities and, second, a growing sense that our theoretical and methodological framework was less suited to deal with contemporary cultural problems. The traditional emphasis on the German literary canon seemed especially inadequate. Out search for a new theoretical model, aided by a series of conferences and symposia (the so-called Wüstenkonferenzen , organized by the German Academic Exchange), initially proceeded without our being much aware of the structural transformation that occurred in the American university more or less at the same time. Looking back at the recent developments from the present vantage point, we can recognize the structural link. The cultural studies movement anticipated and responded to the emerging dominance of the corporate model.
The notion of a response is, of course, ambiguous. It can mean a form of adaptation that ensures survival; it can also encompass a critical reaction that calls into question the undeniably affirmative character of the new university. Much of the recent work (in teaching as well as research)—for example, feminism, colonial and postcolonial studies, and scholarship in minority literatures—has offered a critical perspective that cannot be harmonized with the notion of academic efficiency. For the most part, though, universities and colleges have tolerated, if not even actively supported, these innovative programs, sometimes to the dismay of conservative intellectuals who had the ear of the public and therefore could stir up controversial debates in the public sphere. I am talking about the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. It seems, however, that ultimately universities are actually less interested in and threatened by these debates than one might expect, as long as these controversial academic programs attract student interest. In the entrepreneurial climate of the 1990s, innovation seems more important than a dogmatic defense of older paradigms in the humanities that conservative intellectuals have embraced as the supposed expression of the national welfare.
There is a curious irony at work: it used to be the intellectual outside the university whose critical interventions questioned the status quo, whereas academic teachers typically functioned as agents of the reproduction of knowledge. Today, the critical stance has moved inside the university, while public intellectuals have taken up the defense of tradition. Hence the moment of critique has attached itself to the teacher in the classroom.
It is the double aspect of teacher and intellectual that makes our work more interesting and more significant. But what does it mean to be an intellectual in the classroom? In the 1990s, this role implies flexible strength rather than dogmatic opposition—for instance, the willingness to accept and make use of the opportunities given by the corporate model. This cannot be done without a moment of Umfunktionierung (“refunctioning”), to quote an old Brechtian term. While the conservative critics of the university want the faculty to return to the traditional role of reproducing and disseminating accepted forms of knowledge through familiar disciplinary channels, we have to recognize that the new decentralized university, with its increasing breakdown of established organizational structures and boundaries, encourages different modes of producing and disseminating knowledge. To give an example: our language programs will have to respond to the needs of the business school and the engineering division, whose faculty members are increasingly aware of the multilingual, international environment of their agendas. Yet this does not mean that we have to define courses that serve these needs in strictly functional terms. As Claire Kramsch has repeatedly argued in recent publications, the process of learning a language consists of more than acquiring competence. The cultural experience that is part of the process can well correct the one-dimensional understanding of specialized language acquisition. To put it differently, the transfer of specialized knowledge and the conception of a critical perspective do not logically exclude each other. In the same way, the typical introductory course in German literature, the traditional workhorse of most German departments, is not a priori doomed because of its old-fashioned content. Everything depends on the arrangement and the presentation of the literary texts. If the instructor acts as an intellectual rather than as a mere mouthpiece of conventional wisdom, the old intro course could effectively reorganize the ideas of the students of the class.
Please do not understand the last example as a dogmatic defense of a pure literature program on my part. I do not believe that such an orientation would provide a successful strategy for the next century. Instead, we will have to examine the institutional context in which we operate. Therefore I would like to make a few suggestions. If I were asked by an incoming chair of a German department what to do to strengthen the German program, I would make three recommendations. First, do not isolate your department from the rest of the college or university. Do not encourage the perception, on the part of the dean or the chairs of the English and the history departments, that the German department is simply pursuing its separate agenda, an agenda that is of no relevance to other units. It is vital to the survival of the German program that the administration as well as neighboring departments perceive the program as part of a larger educational mission. Only through continued contacts with other programs and a clear articulation of a readiness to conceive of itself as part of the larger mission can the German faculty preserve its place in the new university. At the same time, it is important for the German program to demonstrate its special contributions to the larger mission. A mere duplication of trends and approaches from other fields is inadequate. In my opinion, it would be almost suicidal for a German program, for example, to ignore the great philosophical tradition from Kant to the Frankfurt school and hand it over to other programs.
The second point I would make when talking to an incoming chair is closely related to the first: the department always has to be prepared for change. It would be dangerous to rely on a specific curriculum as the solution to our problems. We all know that curriculum reform is a difficult and time-consuming process. Since we have many obligations in our professional lives, we do not want to go through such a difficult process all the time. But it is essential, I feel, to be vigilant at every moment. Solutions that were successful five years ago may not suffice in the future. The shift to cultural studies, for instance—which has rightly preoccupied many departments in the recent past—will have to be reviewed as well. Given the swiftness of the changes in postsecondary education, it would be imprudent to rely on a notion of programmatic stability.
My third point is more specific. It concerns the language program. As much as I would emphasize the teaching of the German language as a vital part of the German department, my advice would be not to rely exclusively on the traditional structure in which language instruction serves as the basis for all other departmental activities. I believe that we have to reconceptualize the relation between language instruction and the teaching of culture. In view of the recent enrollment losses that I mentioned, it might be judicious to develop a program that does not depend entirely on the use of the German language as a medium.
As I pointed out, I do not believe that the corporate model is ultimately well suited for the college and the university, and I hope that administrators will come to a similar conclusion in the near future. But for the time being, we have to live with it and have to be prepared for its demands and expectations.
The author is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Cornell University.
© 1998 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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