Donald Trump’s aggressive isolationism is likely to have chaotic effects on modern languages departments in the US. It is tempting to presume that student numbers will fall, but the Trump era is just as likely to draw undergraduate students into the study of foreign languages and cultures. Either way, U.S. modern language departments in 2017 are in stronger health than popular media narratives would have you believe.
It is often insinuated that modern languages are a drag on the solvency and adaptability of the public university. But this is simply not true. At some U.S. institutions, modern languages programmes may rank in the top 20 per cent of revenue-generating units campus-wide. Nationwide, there was a 6.7 per cent dip in foreign languages enrolment between 2009 and 2013 – a decline that outstripped the overall fall in student numbers in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Yet ambitious recruitment efforts at first-year student orientation events and large general education “feeder” courses have enabled us to buck the trend and continue to coax upwards enrolment of majors in French, German, Russian, Italian, Chinese and Japanese. And this is without the large private-sector subventions often required in other disciplines.
Those disciplines across campus – medicine, business, manufacturing, agriculture – may address language and culture instrumentally, as a necessary component of “getting to yes” or “closing the deal”, but they rarely have space in their curricula to enquire about the complexity of multilingualism and translation in any sustained fashion. Modern languages curricula by some, in contrast, offer courses grounded in the lived complexity of societal multilingualism. They apply linguistic, cultural, historical and literary approaches to questions relevant to engineering, business or even arid lands management. A course on “German culture, science and technology”, for instance, shows how the specific traditions housed in the German language offer a meaningfully different set of operational principles and assumptions about things such as “security”, “risk”, “progress”, “growth” and “the economy”. Students come away with a much stronger sense of how non-governmental organizations can better acknowledge the belief systems of their beneficiaries in their home languages; how physicians and nurses can engage in nuanced conversations with seriously ill people that truly relieve suffering; and how focus-group-tested political rhetoric is often designed to hide structural inequalities in society.
These 'outside-the-box' modern languages curricula are often best suited for dual-degree courses, and most professors urge undergraduates to concentrate on a language alongside another major. But instead of just training them in how to “get ahead”, recent modern languages programmes show students how to notice when powerful interests are aiming to manipulate them with coercive language, imagery and marketing, and how to transform that moment of noticing into resources for creativity, justice and collaboration.
The major challenge of the next 10 years will be continuing to build this critically engaged, applied and outward-facing momentum in modern languages curricula. Threats continue to hack away at our resources, and the Trump-occupied White House has removed all multilingual content from its website, reminding us that English-only is a powerfully resurgent delusion.
©️Times Higher Education
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There is much to discuss, I think.
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There is much to discuss, I think.
