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ON MY campus, not a week goes by without someone mentioning and discussing such issues as globalization, the world village, internationalization, and the new international campus. Ironically, lofty debate about internationalizing the campus appears on the same page of the newspaper that reports new efforts to enforce “English only” and a growing interest in local history, local folklore, and local cultural studies—local to Athens, Georgia. With each new class of undergraduates, we find more-sophisticated young people who have traveled extensively, if only through the Internet, but who also seem to want to know more about the world around them. Those of us who have been in the profession for two decades or more can attest to the new student who frequents our classes and the new cultures emerging on college campuses. For the first time since I've been in the profession, the study of what is foreign (languages, cultures, literatures) is fashionable. This is our opportunity to have a strong voice in our institutions and carve for ourselves a central position both in the curriculum and on campus. I would like to address a few issues that department chairs will need to consider to ensure that our departments and faculty members do not miss this opportunity to come in from the margins.
First let us consider who faculty members are. How do they see themselves? Do they want to change, or are they comfortable enough maintaining the status quo? In the fall of 1997, while preparing a presentation for the American Association of Applied Linguistics conference, I conducted a survey of a random sample of departments who advertised in the MLA Job Information List for tenure-track literature lines with the proviso that the candidates demonstrate near-native ability. My objective was not only to ascertain what departments mean by the term near-native but also to get some information about pedagogical practices in courses taught and whether departments are generally aware of the many changes in our views of language and literature curricula. What I found was both surprising and frustrating. The surprising part was that the majority of respondents ranked being at ease in the language and being able to discuss literary theory in the language as more important than grammatical knowledge or pronunciation. The frustrating part was that a vast majority of the respondents report that most of their literature classes are taught in English, and 13% of the respondents report that even beginning classes should be taught in English.
You may be wondering what these findings have to do with internationalizing the curriculum and carving a central place for our departments in the new university order. The relevance here is that many of our colleagues are still clinging to traditional methodology and traditional cultural divisions of language versus literature. Dorothy James's article “Bypassing the Traditional Leadership: Who's Minding the Store?” and the debate that followed it are also telling of the pulse of the profession. As department chair, part of your strategy in taking charge of a central position on campus will have to be to engage in some introspection—a fashionable and very appropriate activity for the end of the century. What does your department want? And how willing are the faculty members to work toward the necessary changes in routine and habits to achieve what they say they want?
Add another issue to be pondered as you engage in introspection: what is the perception of others in your academic community toward your department? More important, has your position of potential leadership in internationalizing the campus been acknowledged, or are you still considered the service department known for its failure to provide the world (or at least your colleagues) with fully bi- or trilingual students? This perception, unfortunately, is more common than not. Moreover, it is a perception that language departments have fostered by allowing colleagues and students to have unrealistic expectations of what those departments can do.
On our campus, we in the Department of Romance Languages have experienced a certain amount of pressure from other departments within arts and sciences and from other colleges and schools. From the colleagues in the College of Education we often hear that the “content area” we teach is irrelevant and old-fashioned for today's foreign language teacher. In some cases they blame us, in arts and sciences, for poor teaching in the local schools. The College of Business has demonstrated hostility and frustration at the fact that its students are not able to conduct business in the target language after completing the required courses—a full two hundred hours of instruction spread over four quarters beyond the basic language sequence. Colleagues in ecology complain that we do not have a course on the dangers of deforestation in a “culturally authentic” environment. Colleagues in criminal justice would like us to teach their students the cultural lessons needed to deal with lawbreakers from the different cultures that we represent. Colleagues from the sciences ask us why our courses are so inefficient in giving students fluency in the languages when some of these same scientists, within the context of their own disciplines, know about physiological development and the genetic components involved in acquiring different skills. All of these are examples of requests, suggestions, and complaints that we have received in the past few years. These perceptions are real, and they may even be constructed, as mentioned above, by what we have claimed to have been able to do in the past.
What has changed in the last few years is the persistence with which colleagues demand that we meet their needs. Rather than moving toward abolishing language requirements, at least on my campus, colleagues are, in my opinion, offering us a way to take charge by their demands. It is up to us to educate them in what we can and cannot do, what we will and will not do, and finally, what is best for students from our professional point of view.
I pondered on what literary texts might best illustrate my point— Dr. Faustus immediately came to mind, as did Cervantes's Don Quixote and Moratin's El sí de las niñas. All are examples of tradition versus reality and offer ways in which to manipulate people and situations. My husband, a social psychologist, pointed me in the direction of current research by Robert B. Cialdini, also a social psychologist, who has studied social influence, self-presentation, and altruism—the latter topic only tangentially related to our purposes here. In a recent article, “Principles and Techniques of Social Influence,” Cialdini outlines a set of guidelines that appear to influence decision making. In short, Cialdini has studied how the true professionals (politicians, salespeople, fund-raisers, advertisers, cult recruiters, con artists, and lawyers) achieve the desired goal of getting someone to “get with the program,” as our students would say.
After years of observation and empirical research on the behavior of the professionals, Cialdini has identified six principles that he labels and defines as follows:
Where do you, as chairs, fit into the equation? Your role, in carving out a central place for your department within the structure of the changing and more international university, has to make use of Cialdini's six principles in two different directions. You must influence your faculty members as well as those outside your department. Let me elaborate here by giving your some specific examples pertaining to my own department.
As we began making plans for the transition from quarters to the semester system some three years ago, a few of us were interested in a more integrative curriculum. Our new department chair was also interested in an innovative approach to the curriculum, but at issue was the age-old dictum, To change a curriculum, you must first change the faculty. Moreover, we were faced with the basic question of how to change the faculty's view on courses that most of us had taught for almost two decades. The chair sought extramural funds for faculty seminars. The funds provided generous summer and fall support for everyone in the department; however, to obtain the funds, we each had to agree to attend a month long daily seminar in the summer and a ten-week, weekly seminar in the fall for which we agreed to read “out of field” and engage in dialogue with one another about our research and teaching interests. As you will see, although we were not aware of it at the time, most of Cialdini's principles were at work.
The chair led the faculty members through some much needed dialogue by providing a good incentive—summer salary and released time (reciprocation). Since we were all participating, we decided to commit to the activity (social validation). After we agreed to participate and were committed to the idea of the seminar, the chair was able to demand an incredible amount of reading and reflection on our part (consistency). Since we were all involved in the activity, real and perceived factions in the department were represented; therefore, no matter where we were in the process, we had friends and allies in the same room, going through the same process (friendship/liking). Finally, each of us chose a text from our own area of expertise to be included in everyone's reading list. When the time came, each of us taught that specialty to colleagues (authority). Part of the funding went toward inviting experts to our campus to bring us up to date on what was going on nationally in foreign language and literature departments—from very specialized literary theory to more practical hands-on ideas and strategies concerning implementing the standards in our own courses. Many faculty members became acquainted with the standards movement for the first time and had a chance to explore its implications.
As other departments in the university struggled to make their quarter courses comply with the semester calendar, our department threw out all courses and started the new curriculum from a fresh perspective, taking care to articulate sequences and content materials that made sense from practical and theoretical points of view.
During the entire process, we continued to hear from well-meaning colleagues (as I described before) who tried to tell us how to teach our courses and what content to include. One group that demanded our attention was the faculty and administration of the College of Business and their students in international business. To fulfill the language requirements according to accreditation demands, students must complete the equivalent of a minor in the foreign language—four courses beyond the basic language sequence. Since the number of students in our classes, particularly in Spanish courses, far exceeds the availability of faculty members to teach these courses, either our majors or the business majors were being shut out of the sections.
As our faculty members debated the new curriculum, we had the time and energy to brainstorm and figure out some innovative ways of resolving the conflict. We approached the dean of the College of Business through the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and proposed the creation of a permanent, although not tenure-track, faculty line in our department. This position is funded jointly by the two colleges. Unlike the positions of adjuncts or instructors, this line is fully funded at a competitive salary and carries reasonable teaching loads.
In creating this line, the two deans no doubt engaged in negotiation that included all six of Cialdini's principles. What made it a boon for us was that we were able to offer business Spanish courses at a higher level and incorporate those courses into our integrative curriculum. Moreover, our department acquired a new faculty line, and we were able to have a national search for a person with a PhD in our field and considerable experience or training in business. The success of this endeavor has prompted faculty members to consider approaching other deans (social work, law, and agriculture) for similar arrangements.
For the past four or five years our department has worked to revise its curriculum and its image on campus. I mention the time that it has taken because I want to underscore the developmental nature of this type of move from the margins to the center. For the first time in the recent history of annual university-wide, five-year strategic plans, the Department of Romance Languages was given a voice in the committee. We are represented by a faculty member and the chair. This is a small victory, but for the first time we are being heard as an equal partner in the university-wide international studies policy-making group. Whereas before our latest strategic carving of a more central place, the university might have had such a committee without any representation from the foreign languages, now we are included in decision making. Our role in the future will very likely depend on how we use the present opportunity and the outcomes of our active involvement. Although what I have described applies to my department within the specific context of a transition to a different academic calendar, I believe the principles can be adapted to other situations.
It helps, of course, to have an external force that drives you to look at what you are doing. In our case, the change of calendars was imminent. Whether or not we wanted to make changes, they were being imposed. What made our transition more successful was the recognition that we could take control of the transition. It is not enough for you, as chairs, to want to change your department because you know that it is the right thing to do. Most of us faculty members will continue to do what we want until we feet a compelling reason to take a closer look at it. Currently we have several external forces working to help us see beyond our own departmental boundaries: enrollment shifts, downsizing, and the corporate model currently followed by many administrations. Add to these the fact that international , foreign , and global are no longer taboo words, and students, parents, administrators, and legislators are clamoring for us to do “more”—usually with less.
Our campuses are becoming more open to interdisciplinary conversations. I say “are becoming” because the idea of interdisciplinary studies until very recently was just that—an idea. What we have had was a conglomerate of separate units protecting their territory at all costs. Our departments must lead the way toward interdisciplinary management conversations such as the one my department had with the College of Business. More important, our departments must admit their own interdisciplinarity and find ways to bolster one another's fields of study and teaching. Whether we represent a single language department or a multilingual one, few of us represent the same line of inquiry. If we are in literature, we find particular chronological periods, “isms,” and national identities represented. If we are more interested in language and linguistics, we find different fields of study. In multilingual departments, we have the interdisciplinarity of the many languages, fields of inquiry, and ideological stances.
I see several areas that may be explored as we take charge of our own destinies in the new international university:
1. Alliances with units on campus (other than teacher-training units). At the University of Georgia, we were concerned that other units would try to separate language study from culture and literature, so we created an alliance that gave the business college what it wanted—enough seats in classes for its students. While accomplishing the goals of the other, we also maintained control of the position and of the recruitment for it. Departments are limited only by their imagination on the kinds of alliances that may be addressed. Administrators seem happy to listen to well-thought-through plans that provide some solutions to pressing problems.
2. Alliances with the College of Education. Most departments are fully engaged in teacher preparation—whether we like to admit it or not. It is no longer feasible to ignore each other. The cultures of these two units—ours and theirs—are very different; however, we must continue (or start) the conversation so that our voices can also be heard. Whether or not we agree with the language-specific standards, they will affect us in the future. We can no longer ignore the standards movement in the hopes that it will go away.
3. Training of graduate students. If you are the chair of a graduate department, take a look at the models you are offering to our future colleagues in the profession. Are they aware of the newest developments in literary theory as well as in language-acquisition theory? Do you engage them in serious supervision and development as teaching assistants both in language courses and in literature and culture courses? Do you allow them time to experiment with teaching as well as with new areas of research?
4. Opportunity for exchange of ideas. The most positive outcome of our seminar, as evidenced by our own evaluations, was the opportunity to hear colleagues describing (and teaching us) their particular field of expertise. No faculty member or departmental chair enjoys faculty meetings; however, if one sees a goal to the meetings, they may become the best source of information for you, as chairs, and for us as colleagues.
5. Excellence in teaching. All campuses are expounding on the ideals of teaching excellence. On my campus, the president, deans, and department chairs are all discussing ways to ensure good teaching during financial crisis. The rhetoric is there, and I believe that it is up to department chairs to convince their faculty members of the “interdisciplinarity” of good teaching and good scholarship. These two positions are not mutually exclusive. In his MLA presidential address in 1997, Herbert Lindenberger makes a strong case for us to see “our teaching and our writing as continuous, each motivating and shaping the other […]” (377).
If we return to Cialdini's principles briefly, we can “read” them more simply. To influence people (whether faculty members or other campus colleagues), you need to follow these steps: provide something in return, demonstrate that this problem or opportunity is a nationwide phenomenon, make sure that both groups are committed to the enterprise, and take advantage of and foster already established connections among people. These are the positive principles. You may also wish to point out the other two principles: resources are now scarce, and finally, you have the authority to act.
I leave you with some advice given to me by a colleague in agriculture several years ago. As I bemoaned the time that it took to realize change in an academic setting and wondered whether only fascist dictators brought about real change, he retorted, “You can't get much honey from a beehive by beating it to death. The honey that you do get will not be worth the pain you will experience.”
The author is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Georgia, Athens. This article is based on her presentation at ADFL Summer Seminar West, 25–27 June 1998, in Victoria, British Columbia.
Cialdini, Robert B. “Principles and Techniques of Social Influence.” Advanced Social Psychology. Ed. Abraham Tesser. New York: McGraw, 1995. 257–81.
James, Dorothy. “Bypassing the Traditional Leadership: Who's Minding the Store?” ADFL Bulletin 28.3 (1997): 5–11. [Show Article]
Lindenberger, Herbert. “Teaching and the Making of Knowledge.” PMLA 113 (1998): 370–78.
© 1999 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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