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FOR those who might be misled (or seduced) by my title to expect a discussion of, say, Russian verbal morphology or the clash of aspect and tense in Contemporary Standard Slovene, I've got three words from Dante, “Lasciate ogni speranza”—Forget about it! I'm not a Slavic linguist, so I'll leave it to others better versed in these matters to discourse on them. No, the “tense” of my title derives from tensus ‘tension’ rather than from tempus ‘time,’ and what I'd like to discuss here involves the challenges and difficulties of being in a field that is notoriously cyclical; alas, currently at the bottom of one of its cycles; and yet full of hope for the future.
Slavic got going seriously in the United States in the 1940s, which is about a hundred years after it became an academic discipline in Europe and Russia. 1 The impetus here of course was World War II and its aftermath, first because we were an ally of the Russians and the Poles and the Yugoslavs and then because we were their mortal enemy. At Indiana University the military organized the first courses in Russian and East European languages, and in 1947 (we celebrated our fiftieth anniversary last September) the university founded a program in Slavic studies, now known formally as the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. From the department there developed, first, the Summer Workshop in Slavic and East European Languages (1950), which in 1997 offered instruction in twelve Slavic, East European, Central Asian, and Caucasian languages, and, second, the Russian and East European Institute (1958), a federally funded Title VI National Resource Center. After the initial novelty, however, enthusiasm and funding dried up and the realities of studying that “riddle wrapped in an enigma,” as Churchill famously called Russia, set in. My retired colleague and the former chair of the Slavic department, William B. Edgerton, who remembers the 1950s well, still speaks of the frustrations of studying a country that at the time he could never hope to visit. Then too there were the sensitivities about studying anything that sniffed of Communism. Suffice it to say that after the heady 1940s, the 1950s saw the first of the pronounced, prolonged cyclical downturns in Slavic.
In October 1957, the Soviets sent into space that little beeping grapefruit-sized thing called Sputnik , and Slavic studies in the United States skyrocketed with it. Millions were spent in the name of national defense (the first two letters of the NDEA and NDFL, which so generously funded many Slavicists' educations in the 1960s, including my own), new programs and departments blossomed, and Russian (alone among the Slavic languages) even penetrated into high schools, at least for a time. Thanks to Public Law 480, many libraries became recipients of massive amounts of Slavic and East European books, and impressive national collections were established in some unlikely places, like Champaign-Urbana. In those heady days, Slavic languages, especially Russian, were the envy of the other foreign languages. The field was on steroids. For Slavicists it seemed that the sky was the limit. And that, it turned out, was literally true: even before we landed someone on the moon and “won” the space race, once again the harsh realities set it. When I reported to my army unit in Germany in 1969, 1 discovered to my dismay (and no little panic) that Russian “linguists” (as the army styles Russian speakers) were so numerous that they were loading sacks in the mailroom (if not worse; some were using their language expertise—I speak ironically, of course—in Vietnam). Another downswing in the Slavic sine curve had set in.
In Soviet history the 1970s marked the beginning of the aptly called period of stagnation of Leonid Brezhnev and company. To some degree the same was true of Slavic studies here and abroad. It was hard for us newly minted PhDs to find a job in the 1970s (too many degrees chasing too few openings), and many a Slavicist became an academic gypsy or didn't get tenure (ask me about it) or simply abandoned the field for greener pastures. I cite some statistics from the Winter 1997 ADFL Bulletin (Brod and Huber). If Russian enrollments were negligible before 1957, by 1960 they had risen to the point where Russian, with some 30,000 students, was in fourth place in the United States after the big three—French, Spanish, and German. By the end of the decade Russian enrollments had swelled to 36,000, an 18% increase and still fourth place. But between 1970 and 1980 they fell by a full third (33.7%), to about 24,000, well below Italian and not much ahead of Hebrew, suffering about twice the loss of all foreign language study in the United States in that dreary period. I suspect Russian did not disappear altogether from the academic scene at this time not because administrators were planning ahead for better days but simply because of academic inertia and the fact that a number of Slavicists had managed to get tenure between 1960 and 1980. And there was always the “spy game,” that is, the unspectacular but steady supply of jobs for Slavicists available through the CIA, the NSA, and the foreign service.
And then what happened? The new pope in 1978 did wonders for Polish enrollments: for the first time in Indiana University's history we had two sections of elementary Polish (never to be repeated, I'm sorry to say). And then Gorbachev, glasnost, perestroika: Russian enrollments went through the roof, up 86% in the 1980s to their highest level ever, almost 45,000 by 1990. Other Slavic languages, like Czech (for good reasons) and Serbo-Croatian (for tragic ones), also saw appreciable increases as the cold war ended and the East Bloc opened up. But this upswing was different from the earlier ones: it was not fueled by fear and ignorance of the Soviet Union, nor was it undergirded by massive infusions of government money (higher education had just lived through the “Reagan revolution,” you will remember). Its cause seemed to be genuine interest in and enthusiasm for the changes going on in Russia and Eastern Europe. In my view Slavic in this country had for the first time found a natural market: students with Russian-language skills might actually aspire to a job with something other than the foreign service or the CIA. And the heritage students, that is, those with a Slavic background, who became a factor in our field after the emigrations from the Soviet Union beginning in the 1970s, added to our enrollments. (I might note that they added to our difficulties: for the first time we were confronted with significant numbers of students who could speak Slavic languages far better than they could read or write them.)
The universities did not respond to this upsurge in Slavic interest as they had before, with tenure lines and new or expanded departments. In many places graduate students, ABDs, adjuncts, and untenured PhDs carried the burdens of the new courses for as long as they lasted (administrators may not be good at predicting the future, but they are adept at learning from the past). When the enthusiasm faded, as it had to when it became apparent just how long and difficult a process democratizing and marketizing Eastern Europe and Russia was going to be, the field shrank rapidly: 1995 enrollments were again 24,000, precisely what they had been at the end of the 1970s. But the news is not all bad, in my opinion.
To make a simple-minded summation of all this history, the even-numbered decades—the 1940s, 1960s, 1980s—have been very good to Slavic: the odd-numbered ones—the 1950s, 1970s, 1990s—have been less kind. So where do we stand as we enter the last quarter of the 1990s and wait with eager longing the coming of the next even-numbered decade, the 20-aught-aughts? Let me tell you my hope.
At the moment we are in stasis, bottomed out, poised for rebound (pick the one you like best).
What I am suggesting is that things in Slavic are not as bad as they seem at first glance. I suspect our current malaise is more an understandable queasiness about the rollercoaster ride Slavic has been on from 1980 (way down) to 1990 (way up) to 1995 (back down again); I don't think the field is suffering from anything fatal. If nothing else, I hope this opinion serves as an encouragement for colleagues in languages that have not experienced such wild fluctuations. We are living through a phase at the moment and not standing at the end of time.
And lest we lose sight of the fact, in at least one area we in Slavic have seen an absolute and terribly important improvement in the early 1990s. I think back to my colleague Bill Edgerton, who in the 1950s could not even dream of visiting the Soviet Union. Now, like our colleagues in virtually every other language, we can freely visit the countries that we study, work in their libraries and archives, talk openly with their citizens, collaborate on projects with those citizens (all without the assistance of the KGB or, for that matter, the FBI), sell them our books and tapes and disks and enthusiastically buy theirs. We can prepare students for careers in Slavic that are neither exclusively academic (though we should not stop doing that) nor exclusively cold-war oriented. In a word, I believe we are rapidly becoming a normal field. The transformation is painful, but in the long run it is healthy.
Slavic as part of the national academic scene in this country is about fifty years old. That is not very old. Our early years were marred somewhat by feast and famine, but lately, as the wretched excesses of adolescence fade into the background, I would like to think we have become full-fledged, responsible, actively engaged members of the foreign language family. Just as Russia has transformed the G-7 into the Summit of the Eight, so we hope to convert the “big three” into the “frequently taught four.” And I firmly believe that the future, indeed even current, importance of Russia and the Slavic world fully justifies our efforts and will enable us to reach our goal some time in the next millennium (but please don't press me for a precise year).
The author is Professor of Slavic Literature and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Indiana University, Bloomington. This essay is based on his presentation at ADFL Seminar West, 26–28 June 1997, in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
1 For a detailed history of Slavic studies in the United States that focuses on literature but that also has information on linguistics, see Edgerton. For an addendum to Edgerton on linguistics and administration, see Lunt. And for a survey that focuses on Slavic area studies, see Byrnes. As a scholarly discipline, before it became a university subject, Slavic is about two hundred years old, having been inaugurated by Enlightenment figures in the Austrian and Russian empires. The first teaching of Russian in the United States took place in 1896, by Leo Wiener, at Harvard.
2 In August-September 1997 I conducted an informal telephone poll of some of the thirty-six (possibly thirty-seven) Slavic PhD-granting programs in the United States and Canada that were listed in the AAASS Guide to Slavic Programs, 1993–95 , whose information was collected in 1992. Since then, at least eight have either been closed or in some way curtailed (e.g., several have put a moratorium on admitting new graduate students). It is possible that programs I was not able to reach are also in this Situation.
3 Also from my survey I learned that the programs that are still up and running report a slight overall increase in Russian enrollments for the 1997–98 academic year, often (oddly enough) at the upper levels. And where they are being offered, Polish and Czech in particular are enrolling better, sometimes much better, than in the past.
Brod, Richard, and Bettina J. Huber. “Foreign Language Enrollments in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 1995.” ADFL Bulletin 28.2 (1997): 55–61. [Show Article]
Byrnes, Robert F. A History of Russian and East European Studies in the United States: Selected Essays . Lanham: UP of America, 1994.
Edgerton, William B. “The History of Slavistic Scholarship in the United States.” Beiträge zur Geschichte der Slawistik in nichtslawischen Ländern . Ed. Josef Hamm and Günther Wytrzens. Schriften der Balkankommission, Linguistische Abteilung, 30. Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1985. 491–528.
Lunt, Horace G. “On the History of Slavic Studies in the United States.” Slavic Review 46 (1987): 294–301.
© 1998 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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