29, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 64-68
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Reply from Dorothy James
THE editors of the ADFL Bulletin have graciously offered me the last word in this Forum. Although when I wrote my keynote address for the ADFL Summer Seminar West in 1996 I fully intended it to be my own last word on the subject, I am glad now of the opportunity to thank all colleagues who responded so seriously to my remarks on leadership in our profession, and I cannot resist the temptation to utter just a few more “last words.” I wrote the keynote address as my own small swan song. I was strongly aware of the fact that I was approaching the end of my career as a professor. I know the ADFL seminars very well, and it seemed to me that this was the right place to make one last personal statement on the situation in foreign language and literature teaching. Twelve years had gone by since I first, with high hopes, addressed an ADFL seminar on the topic “Toward Realistic Objectives in Foreign Language Teaching.” I was not less hopeful in 1996 about the prospects for foreign language teaching and learning as such: these prospects are quite bright in all sorts of ways and places in the Unites States. But I was beginning to lose hope, as many others have done over the last ten to twenty years, in the possibility that large-scale successful language teaching could really be carried on in the universities by the national language and literature department. That loss of hope gave rise to the fear that while language teaching of various kinds would go on, foreign literature teaching would dwindle into an elite activity, conducted by the few for the few. I was writing with sadness and with some anger, not so much, as one respondent assumes, from the perspective of the language teacher (Peck, in the Winter Bulletin ) as from the perspective of a lifelong literature teacher who weeps to see the resources of that magical storehouse known as literature slowly withdrawn from the masses of our student because the most powerful keepers of the storehouse have not known or cared enough about passing onto the masses the key to the door. They possess that key themselves, often by birthright, and the key is, of course, language. These powerful keepers I called, in a somewhat inflammatory way, the stars of the profession; and the organization that has provided them with strong support for their aspirations and self-image, with a forum in which their stardom is exhibited at its best and modeled for the rising generations, was, I suggested, our own MLA.
This was provocative and polemical talk on my part, and I am grateful to all respondents not only for their willingness to be provoked but also for their wisdom in not, for the most part, being provoked themselves into polemical, posturing. As Joan DeJean (Winter Bulletin ) rightly says, “Infighting is something we can ill afford at present.” Most of the writers are not intent on defending their absolute rectitude but are looking, often with some pain, at the problems we all face, at “the disarray of a complex and changing field” (Patrikis), and are trying to describe and analyze the problems as they see them, in many cases offering creative solutions (e.g., Harper; Henning; Mignolo).
There is no need for me to reiterate these solutions here, though they do, individually and as a group, rekindle the hope that language, literature, and culture departments and programs have still the wherewithall to survive and prosper, if they wake up in time, in the way that numbers of these respondents have woken up. The solutions may also, if chairs pass the ADFL Bulletin on to their faculty members, rekindle the hopes of many colleagues across the country who have felt helpless to “do anything about” their department and perhaps about their chairs. The suggestions of Patricia Chaput, for example, for ways department members can take steps toward strengthening the field “even if our stars are slow to react” should help galvanize the profession from the bottom up. People should also take heart from the well-argued position of several respondents that a grassroots renewal of the profession is more important and more potentially productive than a change in leadership (Patrikis).
The audience for whom I originally wrote “Bypassing the Traditional Leadership” consisted of the currently on-the-job chairs and program heads of ADFL, hence my stressing of leadership issues. I was urging them, as leaders, to engage the efforts of all members of their departments, including their top-ranking publishing scholars, in the day-to-day work of creating and teaching a language-literature-culture program that would appeal to a wide spectrum of students. I was also urging the ADFL, an association of chairs, to raise its voice more loudly than in the past within the MLA hierarchy, so that the ADFL's concerns would be put more forcefully and less deferentially to the Executive Council, traditionally heavily representative of the literary establishment.
Some respondents objected politely to a certain “punitive” note in my remarks concerning literary scholars. I was pointing the finger at the stars and blaming them for the ills of the profession (Schor). No one likes to be caught out in such teacherly behavior, but I cannot really deny it. Of course there are many more factors at play in the current situation than the attitudes of the stars. Nonetheless, I think it is true to say that many of us trying to teach language and literature to undergraduates for a life-time have felt deserted by leading literary scholars, who have not seemed to care very much about whether we, or indeed they, have students in undergraduate classes or not. In their preoccupation with the battles of literary theory, they seemed to be fiddling while Rome burned. And yet they continued to produce graduate students who would badly need jobs teaching in language and literature programs at all kinds of institutions. It is this sense of having been deserted by the very people from whom we might have hoped to receive serious support that fed my anger about the current situation, and hence the punitive note referred to—a note that regrettably antagonizes the people whose help I would like to enlist.
“Work with us before it is too late!” was, on my part, an honest cri de coeur. The leading literary scholars, from whom one has desperately needed help, have seemed to think it is enough simply to urge the primacy of literature as a field. They have not seen that it is through better language teaching at all levels that literature will survive as a teaching field in our undergraduate programs. As Chaput puts it, much better than I, “The field needs ‘stars’ to return to leadership that can support the preservation of endangered programs and foster the development of curricula that encourage more students to study language and literature, the sustenance of the field. Unfortunately, the very people who could do the most good are too often in relatively secure departments and programs, insulated by distance from experiencing the erosion of their field in threateningly concrete terms.” It is true that times are changing even for institutions that one thinks of as insulated by wealth and reputation. Herbert Lindenberger tells with delightful frankness of the way in which the present financial climate has caused a rethinking of priorities at Stanford, and the other Forum responses from Stanford bear out his point that major changes in attitudes to language, literature, and culture teaching have already taken place there (Bernhardt; Berman; Pratt). Stanford is a “star institution,” and the hearts of many colleagues from many kinds of institutions were warmed last year by Stanford's willingness to open up its processes of change in a session at ACTFL. This is the kind of “working with us” that makes a real difference to everyone in the field.
My own view of what is going on in the field, as well as my occasionally punitive tone, arises from having labored all my United States life in noninsulated departments in nonprivileged institutions. Those of us who so labor, no matter how rewarding our work is (and it is), no doubt feel occasionally punitive toward the more privileged, and our voices tend to grow ignobly shrill when we contemplate them, just as the more privileged probably feel occasionally guilty about the quality of their lives compared with ours, which quilt leads them sometimes, to protest their righteousness just a little too much. But the fact is that as far as the future of the profession is concerned, we are all laboring in the same vineyard, and the plight of our present graduate students testifies to this. Graduate students from the most elite graduate schools will not get serious jobs in the academy if full-scale undergraduate programs cannot be sustained in all kinds of institutions, elite and nonelite, public and private, two-year and four-year. Graduate students in foreign literatures will not get jobs in sufficient quantities if undergraduate language programs with full-time faculty members fold. The vineyard is one, and the most heartening aspect of the responses in this Forum has been that many voices said so, in a variety of ways.
Striking by its relative absence from this group of respondents was the voice that in fact dominates in whole segments of our profession, the voice that disagrees entirely with the effort to maintain the national language, literature, and culture program. One writer who objects to my efforts to cast our current problems as “a crisis of leadership” nonetheless expresses agreement with my “basic points and concerns” and asks in passing, “And who would disagree?” (Schor). This question is perhaps kindly meant, but my basic points and concerns have to do with building integrated language, literature, and culture programs in foreign language departments of United States universities, and the question situates our exchange of opinion in the heart of the traditional foreign language department or, put another way, inside the fold of the MLA as we know it. Only there could the question be asked with a straight face. Many university people in the language-teaching field outside that particular fold see no reason to give any priority at all to the teaching of foreign literatures in high schools or in colleges. To such people, I am something of a dinosaur, because while I do not think by any means that literature should be the sole source of content in the foreign language curriculum, I do think literature has an important role to play. Who would disagree? Plenty of people, many of whom have long since tired of the MLA and its constant (as they see it, tedious and irrelevant) emphasis on literature with a capital L and theory with a capital T. PMLA has nothing to offer them that they really need, and the MLA Annual Convention not much more.
Most of the responses to my paper were inside responses. Even the ones who were obviously irritated by the terms in which I couched my argument (Ziolkowski; Ozzello and Marks) want what I want, namely programs in which language and literature are taught as one. Only one of the twenty-one respondents explicitly opposes the position that I with guarded optimism espouse, namely, that if language were seriously taught throughout the undergraduate and graduate programs in literature and culture, a considerable expansion in the student population of those programs might be expected. That one person, Sara Castro-Klarén, expresses the view that not much would change if literature people spent less time doing research and more time teaching the language at all levels. On the contrary, she argues persuasively, “a significant decoupling of language learning from literature would result in the return of student populations to upper-level programs—to a newly designed upper-level curriculum for majors and nonmajors alike.” That only one of twenty-one respondents should straightforwardly espouse such a decoupling of language learning from literature may lull the more insulated literature people into a sense of security. This would be a delusion. Castro-Klarén is alone here only because of the company she is keeping, well within the ambience of the MLA in which we all, I and my respondents in this Forum, are moving. Outside that ambience, thousands of voices are cheerfully advocating the decoupling of language learning from literature as the only hope of saving language learning in the universities, rescuing language learning, as they see it, from the clutches of the literature professors.
Meanwhile the literature professors, who do not really hear many of these voices, are still discussing with some passion what language teaching they should do and at what level. It is significant that a number of our respondents read my call to professors of all ranks to work on a coordinated language, literature, and culture program as a call to “faculty specialists in literature and cultural history to go and teach language” (Mignolo; my italics), and some read it further, and protest against it, as a call to all faculty members to teach the first and second years. I think it is a fine idea for all faculty members to teach from time to time courses throughout the levels of the curriculum, as, it was pointed out, our colleagues in the classics have always done (Lindenberger). But in the present crisis a more urgent need than having “stars” regularly going and teaching 101 is to have all faculty members recognize the need to go on teaching language throughout the higher and highest levels of the curriculum, no matter what the content. This does not mean that every class has to have a grammar component! It does mean that every teacher of literature, culture, business, or whatever has to have a sense of the linguistic level from which students come to them and the linguistic level to which they hope to proceed and has to be able and willing to help them move from one level to the next. Cooperation and discussion with teachers at all levels need to occur (Chaput). Reading, writing, speaking skills need to be systematically developed over a long period of time in all content courses. This would seem to be intuitively obvious, and yet in our profession, as Peter Patrikis points out, “the very phrase ‘language learning’ … remains bound to lower-level skills, to basic training, and to linguistic performance. Few people seem to understand that language learning, even in one's first language, is a lifelong task.” It is not insignificant that the respondent who takes up most urgently the question of how necessary a continuum of language learning is over a period of years is someone who has spent much of his adult life trying to master Japanese (Wood).
I do not expect everyone to accept my view that it is the failure of senior faculty members to undertake seriously the task of teaching language in a coordinated way through the levels up to and including graduate school that has led directly to the threatened demise of national language and literature departments. I would, however, like to make it clear that I do not consider, as one respondent suggested I did, that this demise has been precipitated “because our institutions, especially the affluent ones, have tended to ‘run high-powered, well-staffed language centers and to retain a small elite body of professors to write books and teach literature and literary criticism to a small number of students’” (Ziolkowski, quoting me). This is a misreading of cause and effect as I presented it. The growth of language centers has been, in some cases, a direct response by institutions to the poor record of the language and literature departments in language teaching. If a department teaches languages for two years and then offers its students a choice between literature courses taught in the target language at too high a level or literature courses taught in English, it is not likely to build up a strong record in language teaching. Most universities nowadays do want foreign languages to be taught, and language centers seem to present a better and more efficient way of organizing the entire operation, as in many cases they may be. There are many different kinds of language centers, and I am not going to attempt to discuss them here. Mary Louise Pratt gives us a very useful description of the way the language center came into being at Stanford, where it exists in parallel with, and not in place of, the language departments and where it appears to have strengthened the entire language, literature, and culture area. My point was that this kind of dual administrative structure is not likely to be supported in poorer institutions, where financially pressed administrators are likely to seize on the financial advantages of running a center with part-time teachers of language and very minimal numbers of full-time faculty members in literature or culture. We need, I think, to be vigilant and to have solid, well-attended, coordinated programs to offer. They are the best argument against the cheaper variety of language center, and against the even cheaper alternative now being touted, namely, the outsourcing of language instruction to adjacent colleges or to commercial centers beyond the university gates. The proof is not in on any of this, however. Language centers are, relatively, in their infancy, and we are all still conjecturing about the future and the impact they will have.
I was wrong, in my original paper, to run together the very complex question of separate language programs and centers with what I described as “expanding the content of programs beyond the literary into cultural studies or interdisciplinary studies of various kinds and increasingly doing the teaching in English, thus quietly eliminating any attempt at language teaching beyond the elementary and intermediate levels” (7). This was too far much to include in one sentence, and far too serious a point to throw out one-dimensionally, almost as an aside. Several of the respondents quite rightly pick me up on this and point out that cultural studies do not necessarily involve an elimination of language teaching (Peck), that teaching courses in English can attract students into foreign language programs (Peck), and that reaching out to other disciplines has to be a key factor in our survival and development in today's universities (Henning; Vieira). These and similar comments are well argued by respondents, and their points are well taken. Russell Berman is right to question my apprehension about the spread of cultural studies and other interdisciplinary approaches. I would like very briefly to explain the nature of my apprehension. I would not argue “that a focus on literature alone” should be “the core goal of the department,” and I would agree with Berman that “a pedagogy oriented toward bringing language students to a concentration on traditional literature would drive students away; many of them have other, quite legitimate interests.” A high degree of literacy, to which any successful university program in a foreign language should aim to bring its students, includes the cultural literacy to which Berman refers. It is also fostered, I believe, by working with literary texts of all kinds in ways that take into account the linguistic levels of the students. When I express apprehension about the expansion of cultural studies at the undergraduate level, it is the same apprehension that I have about literary studies at the undergraduate level, when literary studies (theory, criticism, etc.) involves such a high degree of abstraction that it drives students away if it is taught in the target language and can succeed only if it is taught in English. If this kind of teaching, cultural or literary, dominates in the undergraduate program, it undermines and ultimately defeats the undergraduate program. Where do students go who want to learn the language on a higher than intermediate level? To separate language-teaching entity. And there we come full circle to the problems raised in the previous paragraph. Cultural studies in Berman's or Jeffrey Peck's terms does not necessarily throw us into that circle. I am simply urging vigilance. If cultural studies taught in English is just another way for foreign language faculty members to teach topics that are more intellectually satisfying to them than the topics they can teach if they stick to the target language, then cultural studies is no more likely to build up language departments than the literary studies that has so resoundingly failed in many instances. At this time, programs of cultural studies are more likely to succeed in themselves than programs of literary studies, but they do not in themselves provide us with a properly structured language curriculum, any more than the traditional literature programs have done. A properly structured language curriculum has to be built into any and every content sequence in our departments if we are to continue to be supported in our universities as the primary purveyors of foreign language teaching. (The parallels here to the work of our colleagues in English are strikingly conveyed by Paul Hunter in this Forum.)
Heidi Byrnes in her response asks a question that goes to the heart of the difficulties of many a divided department: “Is curricular discussion limited to the language component, or does it encompass the entire undergraduate program, perhaps even the graduate program?” She sees that “having one faculty that will work with language in a cultural-literary context” (James 8), which was what I was suggesting as ideal, can come about only in the individual department through a curriculum discussion that includes components now often seen as separate. She takes up not only the problems of internal departmental separation but also the separation that exists in the profession as a whole, citing for example the ACTFL-MLA separation and the separation that exists within the MLA through the separate but not independent organizations of ADFL and ADE.
Only a few of the respondents commented on my call to ADFL to assert itself more strongly within the hierarchy of the MLA, though indirectly the publishing of this Forum might itself be seen as a response to that call. Frank Trommler raises a matter that has been of long-standing concern to ADFL members when he suggests that, as far as the professional representation of foreign languages is concerned, “the MLA … has internally not always generated sufficient support and know-how.” Byrnes discusses, at greater length, whether the “current governance of the [MLA] organization most advantageously reflects our deepest professional needs.” That it strikes one as quite bold of Trommler and Byrnes to make such comments, openly and from the inside, is an indication of how deeply the MLA holds us all in its thrall. I think we should be daring to ask the questions that they ask, and these are questions not just of hierarchy and position—for example, whether foreign languages are as important to the MLA as English is. They are also questions pertaining to our whole professional culture: Edward Kaplan is right when he says that the kinds of suggestions I am making will require significant changes in that professional culture, in the value system of the MLA itself. (I am in sympathy with his position that “the emergency is spiritual”—or ethical or moral—as much as it is economic.) Castro-Klarén, whose own suggestions for change are vibrant with new hope, sees the current pace of transformation as uneven, painfully slow, and, for individuals, risky. “There has yet to be developed a consensus, in organizations like the MLA, regarding the value placed on, and the professional recognition awarded to, those individuals working for positive change.” She looks to the MLA articulation project as a good start for “establishing a network for coordinated reform,” and one hopes that it is, but consensus seems to be a fairly distant goal. In the meantime some of the concrete governance issues raised by Byrnes could be tackled head-on. We, the members, are the MLA, and although a number of the respondents in this Forum objected to the notion that in our profession scholars and administrators play their roles as leaders in different spheres, we have helped institutionalize that separation in our own professional organization through the ADFL and ADE organizations and their separate publications. Separate but not quite equal. In recent years, many voices at ADFL seminars have asked why MLA members other than chairs cannot receive the ADFL Bulletin for the MLA membership fee and pay an optional fee for PMLA . And why not indeed, if the content areas of the two publications are to be kept so utterly distinct? Or should we be questioning these lines of demarcation in the organization as a whole and considering, for example, at another level, “governance issues, as they arise in ADE and ADFL discussions,…[being] afforded a distinct, permanent place in Executive Council deliberations” (Byrnes)? At this time, when so many of the MLA's members are themselves undergoing institutional crises and contemplating restructuring possibilities, it does seem that a “comprehensive assessment of its organizational structure, in preparation for long-range strategic planning and restructuring” would be, as Byrnes suggests, a particularly appropriate activity for the MLA.
“No contributor to these pages,” writes DeJean, “will be able to speak to the situations faced by all foreign language professionals today.” I have by no means spoken even to the situations faced by all the respondents in this Forum or to all the important issues that they raised. We do not all agree with one another, but most of us would at least be able, on the evidence of these pieces, to sit in one room and discuss profitably the issues raised. I wish we could do that; but, lacking such opportunity, we can hope that this Forum has presented others with talking papers. I hope that mine is by no means the last word but that people will sit down in many rooms in many places and be provoked by our comments into speaking their minds.
© 1998 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 29, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 64-68 |
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