The College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin has dropped a plan to reduce foreign-language requirements in the face of faculty outrage. After a packed faculty meeting on Monday at which no attendees spoke in favor of proposals to reduce the requirement from 16 credits to 12 credits, a dean sent an e-mail message to the faculty saying that changing the language requirement was off the table. Department heads have been told to find other ways to cope with budget cuts, said Peter Hess, chair of the Germanic-studies department.
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17 Responses to U. of Texas at Austin Drops Contentious Foreign-Language Proposal
conahec4u - October 22, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Good for the faculty members of UT-Austin. Instead of reducing number of hours, UT and other institutions should seriously considering a) a stronger articulation with previous levels of education, and b) being more serious in fostering a second language competency level in all students. A combination of both efforts will result in more students with full command in a second language.If U.S. higher education, intends to remain competitive, higher foreign language standards should be implemented.
seejay - October 22, 2009 at 8:19 pm
This is welcome news for UT-Austin as well as for American undergraduate education in general, in view of the signal it sends to persons who do not value the broadest possible general education for our future leaders.
jffoster - October 23, 2009 at 6:33 am
I agree that it’s probably better they keep the two year requirement until they’ve thought it through. But they probably won’t think it through. The language departments have too much at stake although and don’t want it thought through. Actually many of the reasons usually given for a college foreign language requirement turn out upon close examination to not hold much water.
drj50 - October 23, 2009 at 9:35 am
Funny, at my public university, faculty are busy converting BA majors to BS programs because they are convinced that the two years of language required for a BA is the reason they don’t have more majors. Like so many things, I’d like to see empirical data that demonstrates the long-term effect of one, two, or three years of language study. Perhaps one is enough; perhaps three are needed. Until we are clear on what our goal is and how best to achieve it, we’re really just recounting prejudices here.
chguk - October 23, 2009 at 9:41 am
Could someone explain the point of a foreign language requirement? I’m not being facetious, I am genuinely curious – I was at university in the UK and so had a much tighter academic focus, certainly with no requirements outside my discipline.I suppose this goes towards asking what the point of the “broad liberal arts degree” is, although the language requirement stands out a bit (is there a 16-hour Math requirement?)
jdecrist - October 23, 2009 at 12:29 pm
This note is for “chguk” who asked what was the point of a foreign language requirement, and here’s my response – I have a degree in English, a liberal arts degree, from the Univ of Florida, and we had a foreign language requirement. I ended up taking two years of French and one year of Swahili, just to do something different. When you study a foreign language, you are studying more than the language itself – you are learning about the culture of those that speak that particular language. When you study a language different from your own, you better begin to understand your own language and its nuances. The world is shrinking,and the better we can understand others that speak languages different from our own, the more we will better understand our neighbors on this planet. It’s not easy learning a language, especially for me, but I am glad that I made the effort.
procrustes - October 23, 2009 at 12:52 pm
for chguk (#5): in the UK people traditionally got their gen ed before college (although this seems to be eroding). I’m not sure what the average American high school graduate learns these days; certainly not his own language much less another. Nor much in the way of literature or history. My colleagues in the sciences don’t seem all that thrilled with the math and science prep either. Here college seems to have become the last chance to learn anything.
jffoster - October 23, 2009 at 1:38 pm
No 6, the University of Florida has a very good Anthropology Department. If you wanted to learn in depth about the culture of an area, you would have been much more likely to have learned more with a good ethnography course on Western Europe or East Africe, &c, than in a 1st or 2nd year language course in French or Swahili. The faculty in the language departments may and often are very good at teaching the language but their notion of “culture” generally is “the arts” and they tend to have very light and shallow understanding of holistic patterns of cultural parts and processes.
rhadmanthys - October 23, 2009 at 2:30 pm
No 8, I have a few questions for you. Take Brazil, for example–who do you think knows the most about that country? Who has the most experience with it? What language do they speak? What language do they write books about their own culture in? What language do they sing their music in and make their television, film and news media in? The answer is not English. And if you think that all Brazilian Portuguese texts and recordings are translated into English, or that all Brazilians speak English, I can tell you from my own extensive research in Brazil that you’re very wrong. The point is that the vast majority of the world does not speak or write English. And if you honestly think that the way to communicate with and understand these billions of people is to take an Anthropology course in English at an American university, then your vision of all those people is, and will to continue to be, seriously limited. A strong language requirement should be partnered with study abroad if you really want to get to know another country or civilization.
larmstrong - October 23, 2009 at 2:37 pm
I agree with chguk. What value is two years of foreign language in college when most courses don’t go beyond grammar, vocabulary, and some reading and writing? Foreign language needs to be part of primary education to create bilingual speakers. I suspect that faculty were more concerned about losing their jobs more than anything else.
rhadmanthys - October 23, 2009 at 5:22 pm
larmstrong, the point is that out of every 10 students who take the language for 2 years, you will get something like 2 or 3 that continue on to study it further and even go live and study abroad. That is the value–giving students the opportunity to expand their horizons to include the rest of the non-Anglophone world (or whatever part of it a particular university has language course offerings in). University language courses should by no means be thought of as a replacement for language instruction at the primary or secondary level–they are continuing education, and students can be placed into an undergraduate course at the appropriate level based on how much they learned through high school (the more the better as far as I’m concerned).Language instruction at the university level is simply part of a range of courses one can and should take to understand and communicate with the rest of the world better, no matter what discipline is your focus. By the way, you don’t need to learn a language in elementary school to be a fluent speaker. I learned Portuguese in graduate school and am now fluent (and I had no language instruction at all at the primary level). But I would say that it was key that I had taken university language courses in other languages already to help me understand how to most efficiently learn a foreign language.
jffoster - October 23, 2009 at 6:08 pm
Rhradmanthys, The opening paragraph in 11 of your reply to 10 is an argument for making available the study of foreign languages. It is not an argument for requiring it. Your post of 8 are some questions for me? I will naively pretend they were not rhetorical and will answer some, though not all, of them. First, You ask what language “they” speak in Brazil. Who’s “they”. They speak Tapirape, Piraha, Yanomamo, Guarani, Bororo, Caribe, Portuguese, Hixkaryana….. “Who do I think knows mose about the country?” Well, that depends on what “knows about” means. I suspect that from your “own extensive research in Brazil” you may know more about what ever your research was about — you didn’t tell us — than the average Brazilian native does, just as Helio Castraneves’ automotive engineering analyst probably knows a good deal more about how to adjust his car than Castroneves does, though the latter is probably the more accomplished driver. You ask about “communicating with and understanding”… Actually I never mentioned either of those things in my post. I referred to “learn[ing] in depth about”. So you’ve actually introduced a straw man. And again it depends on what you take “communicate with” and “understand” to mean. We are talking in this series about a two year, i.e. 4 semesters or six quarter, language requirement. Depending on a number of variables: teacher, student, learning situation, and particular language…, two years will lead to some communication ability though the amount will vary. “Understand” can mean eveything from how to order a cup of coffee to the complex relationships among rainfall, tropical forests, indigenous swidden farming and hunting, ranching, introduction of iron tools, and the nature of endemic warfare in tribal societies. Or of pentacostalist revitalization movements in Sao Paulo. Yes, you can learn a good deal more about Brizilian cultures in a good ethnography course on Brazil given in English than you can in a Beginning or Intermediate course on Brazilian Portuguese. For that matter, you can learn a lot more about how Brizilian Portuguese works from a linguistics course on B P than you can from the average beginning or intermediate language course. This is no “put down” of the language courses. If you want to learn how airplanes work, take courses in aeronautical engineering and flight dynamics. If you want to learn to fly a plane, go to flight school. Ideally one would do both. But languages arts faculty don’t seem to be able to keep these kinds of things analytically distinct. But then someone once said that it is very difficult to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on their [and others'] not understanding it.
rhadmanthys - October 23, 2009 at 10:34 pm
jffoster, Firstly, I certainly don’t think it makes sense to say (as several posters did) that professors in language departments at a public university are really motivated by their own paychecks in this case. Generally, these profs are getting far more students per professor than the ideal, and a drop in lower-level language students would at most very indirectly affect the ability of their department to push for more professorial positions (this has no effect on existing professors). Furthermore, the people who would really be affected by a drop in the required credits would be TAs and graduate students who teach the beginning and intermediate-level language courses that are taken for the requirement. This would mean that less of them would be able to get tuition waivers or salaries to help them through graduate school, however it would have no effect on professors’ paychecks. I did not really want to get into a disciplinary dispute with you, although that seems to be the way you’re taking it. I think rather than recommending people take anthropology courses INSTEAD OF language courses, you should encourage–even require–them to do both. I was required to study language as well as choose from a range of international studies courses as an undergraduate at a major public university (from which I chose a course taught by a cultural anthropologist). Both language (and linguistics) and anthropology are important fields and should be required to some degree as part of a general undergraduate course of study (especially in colleges that include both of these fields in their departmental structure; perhaps an engineer would have an argument against this requirement, although I’d say he or she would benefit from it just as much, choosing the language of a country where he/she might pursue engineering work at some point). Finally, to help you figure out what I mean by “understand,” let’s consider again your hypothetical ethnography course on East Africa (which was supposed to allow the student to “learn in depth about” the culture of Swahili speakers more effectively than learning Swahili). That sounds like a fascinating course–however, if I had a choice I would much rather take the course with a professor who has learned Swahili and actually spoken to Swahili-speakers, lived within a community of Swahili speakers and read Swahili-language scholarship. I firmly believe that this professor will have “learned in depth” to a far greater degree than an Anglophone scholar who only has English-speaking interlocutors and only the ability to comprehend English translations of some (necessarily a fraction) of the texts, videos, monographs, lyrics etc. produced in that language. For a working definition of the word “understand,” let’s say that the former professor truly understands the culture of Swahili speakers, while the latter does not.
jffoster - October 24, 2009 at 7:16 am
Good Morning, rhadmanthys, Let me point out something about the economics and logistics of Language Arts departments, especialy Romance Languages, that you in fact probaboy realize because you actually alluded to it. If you abolish or greatly curtail the foreign language requirement in American colleges, enrollment in beginning and intermediate classes, especially Spanish and maybe French, will drop precipitously. Consequently, as you point out, fewer TAs and Adjuncts will be needed and can be justified. Consequently two things will happen: first, graduate enrollment will suffer and a number of doctoral programs will probably close, and second: the regular faculty will have to teach beginning and intermediate courses rather than the, now fewer, advanced courses, the graduate enrollment to justify them not being present. That can mean less [time for] “research”, which can reduce the chances for merit raises. In any event, it certainly affects their working conditions, prestige, &c. Now as to “disciplinary disputes, how did you think you could avoid it? You are promoting a requirement of two or more years of courses offered by particular disciplines, or in this case, a cetegory of disciplines — language arts departments. You are giving justifications for imposing such a requirement. You can then hardly avoid the questions of whether a) the requirement should be imposed or removed, b) the reasons for the requirement, and c) whether those reasons are best served by the requirement whose imposition you promote or whose relaxation or removal you seek to prevent. A student who has to take, say 16 semester hours of Beginning and Intermediate Spanish, or Portuguese, or Hixkaryana, or Swahili and who is going to graduate in 4 years is going to forego taking something else. Now to your “If I had a choice…”. Ah, but you are not talking about a choice. You are talking about a requirement. And again you introduce a dichotomy which normally will not exist. It is a language course, taught by a speaker of [one or more of] the languages of the area, or an ethnography course on the peoples and cultures of the area taught “by an Anglophone [only?] scholar”… This straw many may not be deliberate. You may be unfamiliar with the way anthropological research and training is usually done. In fact, it is overwhelming a field discipline and generally a cultural anthopologist who teaches ethnography of a culture area has lived among and learned at least one language of the people9s) of that area. it is not for instance uncommon to have an anthropologist teaching a course on Balkan peoples who knows two or three Balkan languages. Anthropologists teaching courses on Japan generally have studied and/or otherwise learned Japanese. Some have also learned Ainu. But even if your student does get an anthropologist for East African Ethnography who knows throroughly the anthropological work on those cultures but who doesnt speak an East African language, they are apt to learn more about the nature and workings of East African sociocultural systems in that course than they are in a course on Swahili, Kikuyu, Masai, or the like. You keep referring to “texts, videos, monographs, lyrics, et c.” produced in a given language. Well, the Yanomamo or the Hixkaryana dont produce any of those things. — Well, lyrics they do. Would you allow only languages with a literary tradition to satisfy the language requirement? You might be interested in knowing that about 35 years ago when Swahili was being taught in my university’s AfroAmerican Studies department, that department proposed to the liberal arts and sciences faculty that it satisfy the foreign language requirement (two years or equivalent demonstrated facility). The strongest opposition came from the German and Romance Languages and Classics departments. The Anthropology department supported it. It won. We would have also supported allowing Siksika (Blackfoot) to satisfy the language requirement. The question is what the purpose(s) of a two year or less foreign language requirement in college is/are, and whether those purposes are sensible and justify the lan guage requirement. Constance Bennett did a far better translation of War and Peace than a student with two years of Russian is going to do, although a student with two years of French can probably handle Tolstoj’s opening passages.
laoshi - October 24, 2009 at 8:18 am
Though my two years of university Mandaring turned out to be a strong foundation for actually acquiring the language later in life, I’m skeptical of the “foreign language” model of teaching. Teaching any other language as a “second language” would be more effective in creating a multilingual academe.
michael_g - October 24, 2009 at 2:36 pm
I maybe shouldn’t participate in this discussion, but In Europe, where I come from, we always have had the need to learn each others languages. Some of the others, – like me – German speaking students and later lecturers and teachers in the educational system, may have had huge problems to become good at French and Italian or Spanish or Dutch too, as we were kept in internal, national and instutional threads of discussions. From the middle of the 90′s it got normal for most educators to become capable of at least one more language apart from German, wich is the mothertongue and English/American, wich is the most hip and expanded language in educational syestems. In the century present we see our most ambitious young students learning Chinese, Japanese, Spanish or Arabian languages supplementing their knowledge of English and maybe at least one more European language, in order to become capable to participate and carry out working and scientific relationsships, often on higher positions as key account managers for regions or even continents.We also could turn around the question and ask, which reason we should have, not to expect of all of us to have good cultural insight and oral and written language competencies to be able to stand in inspiring contact with huge others parts of the world. Is their anything more relevant as to higher our levels of intercultural understanding and to ensure elementary but prospective communication between people from so divers circumstances, as our time in the periode of globalisation holds for us?
12116354 - October 28, 2009 at 9:33 am
The unspoken disagreement here is over prestige versus reputation, as presented so ably in Brewer, et.al. “In Pursuit of Prestige.” Having a research-based foreign language program is part of a strategy to pursue prestige, rather than providing a needed service to students. If it were really the latter, tenure-stream language professors would gladly teach 4-4 loads. Instead, these same professors claim the centrality of learning a foreign language to civilization as we know it, but leave the vast bulk of that teaching to adjuncts. In short: no one has responded to an assertion made earlier in these posts–where is the evidence that EXACTLY two years of foreign language is the magic amount for the future of humankind? Wouldn’t you be on more solid ground, if your argument is the centrality of learning a foreign language, by saying that EVERY student MUST take FOUR YEARS of language courses? More to the point, would one not have to argue that no student could/should graduate without demonstrating fluency in a foreign language? Short of this requirement, it is hard to see how two years of language instruction, as opposed to one year or none, is the proper amount short of which we have failed to produce an educated citzenry.