Super News for Open-Source Advocates

I should be used to the complete disconnect from logic and reason that now passes for our political discourse, but this one still leaves me slack-jawed.  I started graduate training in the late 1980s in an obscure region that crosses two of the government’s supposed “critical areas.” There was absolutely no way at the time that any university, even my own Big 10 U, could have funded the necessary language study on its own.  My partner and I started dating around then, and she (a linguistics major) had never heard of the language I was studying. Since September 11 my region of interest is in theory a much higher priority for the government, so of course they cut the funding!  I recently sent a student off to a full ride at Penn, eager to study Persian; now I worry what she’s going to do.   In the past — perhaps you could confirm this, TR — the US has reacted to wars and crises by turning inward, and that’s the only way I can understand this current bout of isolationism.  But it will make the American situation worse: the fewer languages we know, the less sophisticated we are, the less we engage in ideas and movements from outside Kansas, the weaker we will become.  Then we’ll respond by withdrawing more.  Why is this so hard to convey to the politicians?

Every year I tell my students that if they can’t at least comfortably read a second language, they really shouldn’t plan to major in history. Some of them think that by shifting to North American history, that’ll let them off the hook. In my country, that’s pretty risible. I’m a complete failure at spoken French, but I read it easily. I also read German, Latin and Italian. That’s still merely passable by my standards but students these days at my university wouldn’t be able to study at least one of those language and one other is always a struggle to keep on the books. If we don’t teach languages, we’re missing a big part of the point of education, period.

Perhaps that is so, although “slackening of academic rigor” covers a lot of sins.  What is also the case is that a series of presidents, from Truman through Carter, believed in internationalism and forwarded a pragmatism that linked internationalism to national security principles.  That began to decay in the Reagan administration, and conservative policymakers turned on education funding and global cosmopolitanism.  The Cold War university that supposedly had that rigor prior to Vietnam was an invention of Cold war government funding, and when that was withdrawn, so was the teaching of languages.

It is also the case that during Vietnam men received draft deferments to study languages and do social science graduate programs in places of strategic interest to the United States, particularly the MIddle East.  So what you are describing as a lack of general rigor was coupled to recruiting and training cadres of young people to work in the national interest and specifically for the State Department and the CIA.  The government no longer pays for people to train for national service — unless that service is specifically military. 

TR asks: what languages are excluded from the MLA as being not modern?

Classical languages, TR.

Nice essay on some of these issues by Mary Pratt, here: silverdialogues.fas.nyu.edu/docs/CP/306/pratt.pdf

I wasn’t actually trying to be witty (though, hey, I’ll take the credit) — the truncated nature of my reply was just a matter of being pressed for time after going through the rigmarole of setting up an account here. (Btw, Dr. Virago’s first name is now Eve, since I needed one to register.) And also, it wasn’t *really* germane to the post, but you asked, so I kept it brief.

This comment is not so brief, alas.

Middle English is a historical form of a modern language, as is Old French, and yup, they’re both covered by the MLA.  (Here’s a list of the Divsions: http://www.mla.org/divisions.  And here are the Discussion Groups: http://www.mla.org/discussion_groups.)  But yeah, I suppose that then raises the question: isn’t ancient Greek a historical form of a modern language?  So the division is more about the status of these languages in US universities when the MLA was founded (1883), which was about the same time when “modern languages” (and their histories — i.e., philology, now historical linguistics) were first made a possible subject of study, versus the traditional liberal arts, where the “rhetoric and grammar” part of them meant “rhetoric and grammar of Latin and ancient Greek.”  In the beginning, it wasn’t about marginalization at all — Latin and Greek were where the power was and the modern languages and literature had to prove themselves against that. And the study of the history of modern languages (hence the inclusion of Middle English, Old French, etc.) was part of proving that these were “serious” subjects on par with the study of Latin and ancient Greek — that students wouldn’t just be sitting around reading poetry. (Back then, they didn’t count novels as literature.) Plus ca change…Seems like we’re always having to prove ourselves against some other model of worth/value.

Anyway, classicists have their own professional organizations, so I doubt you’ll see a change in the MLA’s name, unless, given the shrinking of the study of classical languages and lit, they come over to the bigger MLA (here in the States, anyway). In the meantime, MLA doesn’t really need to take “medieval” into account, since those of us in it know we’re there. :-) Then again, note that Cambridge now has a faculty of “modern and medieval languages” (http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/).  When I was there, IIRC, it was “modern languages.”  I wonder if this was to have a place for, say, medieval Latin, which has sometimes gotten shoved aside in classics departments.  Don’t know, though — just speculating.  But an MMLA already exists:  Midwest MLA.  Oh well.  MCLA is still possible, though.

To me, the thing that stands out as missing in the MLA’s name is *literature*.  But in my field (both in English at large and, more specifically, medieval English literature and language), we’re stuck with so many names and titles given in the 19th century that don’t really apply, I’ve stopped sweating it.

And yeah, *germane* to the post, those numbers about the increase in language study are one more bullet point to add to your list of why the de-funding and discontinuing of language programs at all levels of education is stupid, shortsighted, and utterly unmotivated by any empirical evidence.  And I’d even add classical languages (as well as historical forms of modern languages) to that, since studying *any* language makes studying any other language (including your own) all that much easier, and also provides both an opening up of worldviews and a workout for the brain.  It doesn’t matter if you can “use” it or not to communicate with other living people.

(ETA and OT: Weird, how does the Chronicle commenting program know that’s my avatar image? I mean, they’re *right*, but it’s still kind of spooky! Well, I guess it just means Dr. Virago has a consistent identity on the internet, so that’s a good thing.)