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.
Perhaps, not too much, but between the lines I see something interesting.
ReplyDeleteThe author talks about departments of modern languages concentrating on the following languages; Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Russian. Immediately, I noticed the absence of Spanish and Arabic, especially as it was written in the U.S. in 2017. Probably, the Spanish language would be an afterthought due to it being the second mother tongue of the U.S. … but Arabic?
Someone may also mention the absence of English but, of course, English as the mother tongue would be studied within a liberal arts curriculum, rather than in a department of ancient (or modern) languages, should such a department even exist. If we focus on the English language, studies of Latin and ancient Greek would be important, not to mention early French and German.
But, where do we study Arabic? Is that an ancient and/or a modern language?
Is this absence a coincidence, or the result of today’s cultural phobia regarding Islam which is limited to Islamic schools (madrasas) … and how is this decision managed (assuming that there is a conscious decision)?
If the subject under discussion were, for example, global warming, could it be discussed without political intrusion. Therefore, is it not surprising that the study of a foreign language may also include political comment, and is that harmful?
I eagerly pass comment back to you.
A learned discourse and almost a plea for help in this pivotal period of history. The world may be at the beginning of a revolt by the plebes against the elites. Language is the tool of both camps. Trump uses the language of the plebes and speaks their tongue as do the Brexit leaders, La Pen, Wilders and leaders like them in Germany and elsewhere. I suspect the language used by Putin would be anything but the language of the elites in Russia assuming there are some remaining. Let's hope that pockets of learning will remain as happened in the Dark Ages in monasteries.
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ReplyDeleteThankfully, you focus on just one part of a huge subject, and it gave me pause. Language can communicate historic detail to us, and with or without a digital memory we are bound to repeat the proverbial mistakes.
There is an argument that the origins of the English language go back, with global influences, for about 5,000 years. Therefore, it is not surprising that serious communication, between different groups, can be problematical.
Today, as you say, the world is experiencing various forms of revolt by the common people against the elites (Meaning, those with power, but not necessarily intellectual superiority), and the lack of communication is playing an important part. There are those who may not understand their own history because it is banned, as in China. The terrible loss of historic academic books over hundreds of years of tumult in the Middle East makes it difficult, for example, when one section of the population speaks Arabic and the other speaks Hebrew. The lack of understanding of someone’s point of view can not be fully explained without a logical and identically intelligent form of communication.
Thus, today, we see another obvious example of lack of understanding by political parties in the U.S. One party was unable to communicate to the electorate, and the other party used a language of the majority common people which could not even be affected by so-called ‘false news’.
Educators have a huge responsibility in this regard. Notwithstanding, in my view, the increasing apathy towards good language skills. One thing that I have often tried to highlight is an increase in high school debating societies (A university without a debating society should be ashamed of itself).