At the Crossroads: Learning to Speak the (Foreign) Language of Higher Education Leadership

MORE than ten years have passed since the 2007 MLA Ad Hoc Committee of Foreign Languages report recommended structural and curricular change initiatives to counteract the growing crisis in postsecondary world language education. Almost a decade earlier, Heidi Byrnes had already expounded on the need to replace persistent bifurcated curricular legacy systems in world language education with clearly articulated programs across the entire undergraduate spectrum. To do so, she argued, faculty members at all levels needed to abandon unrealistic and nativist expectations of student proficiency, stop pitting teaching against research, and replace the dictates of a textbook or chosen methodology with wellthoughtout curricula. She also urged practitioners to engage in “deep reflection on the value of foreign language study in a collegiate context” to help “learners perform the humanist act of discovering themselves” through the acquisition of multiple literacies (278). If we consider John Kotter’s change theory (1993), world language practitioners have been aware of a sense of urgency to devise and enact change since the 1990s; however, attempts at building a guiding coalition or forming a strategic vision and initiatives have—with few notable exceptions—rarely been enacted or yielded many tangible results at the department level. Resistance to muchneeded changes in our discipline is certainly not baseless given the pronounced vulnerabilities language programs face in the light of dwindling resources and declining enrollments, reductions or elimination of language admission or graduation requirements, and the scarcity of employment opportunities for world language practitioners in higher education, compounded by a heavy reliance on contingent faculty. Further, shifting demographics and evergreater diversity in higher education frequently result in traditional world language programs having little appeal to a linguistically and culturally diverse student body because few “departmental offerings match [students’] language learning profile and are relevant to their interests” (Byrnes 282). On the contrary, it appears that most practices in place today lend further support to the critics of world language education who maintain that language learning is nothing but an arduous and elitist undertaking that yields little return for either the language learner or the world languages department in terms of investment of time, energy, and money. While the authors of this paper understand that many factors contribute to student enrollment in world languages, we view the fact that enrollments continue to decline nationwide as at least partial evidence that most world language units have maintained bifurcated instructional and curricular systems, have failed to engage faculty in muchneeded change initiatives, At the Crossroads: Learning to Speak the (Foreign) Language of Higher Education Leadership