Bypassing the Traditional Leadership: Who's Minding the Store?

Bypassing the Traditional Leadership: Who's Minding the Store?Author(s): Dorothy JamesSource: Profession, (1997), pp. 41-53Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595606 .

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Bypassing the Traditional Leadership:

Who's Minding the Store?

DOROTHY JAMES

By tradition, the leading association of scholars in the field of foreign lan

guages and literatures is the Modern Language Association, and under its

umbrella, ADFL functions as an association for departments, focusing at

tention on "matters of language program administration" (Welles 1). In this

way, the MLA has built into its structure a recognition that the administra

tion of departments calls for special attention, that administrators of depart ments need their own seminars and publications in addition to the scholarly meetings and journals that otherwise provide MLA members with venues

for discussion.

We do not often address in the MLA or in ADFL the question of who is

actually leading our profession?the scholars or the administrators. It is an

uncomfortable question. In theory, we are all working together for the

greater good. Many of us are, or try to be, both scholars and administrators. We do not want in our own departments the antagonism and mistrust that often exist on an institutional level between professors and career adminis trators. In these days, however, when departments and programs are in

many places facing crises of reorganization or threats of downsizing, even

of extinction, I choose to put the uncomfortable question quite explicitly and perhaps crassly in my title: Who's minding the store?

The author is Professor of German at Hunter College and the Graduate School, City Univer

sity of New York, and Chair of the Department of German at Hunter College. A version of this article appeared in the Spring 1991 issue of the ADFL Bulletin.

41 Profession 1997



42 HI BYPASSING THE TRADITIONAL LEADERSHIP: WHO'S MINDING THE STORE?

I think it is time for us to acknowledge openly that we in the language and literature profession are in the perhaps perilous position of having two

kinds of leaders. I am not referring here to leaders of the two branches of our profession whose separation has been much discussed, the branches of

language and literature. Seeking appropriate terms for the more subtle di

vision of leadership that I am interested in, I recall the MLA convention in

Chicago in 1995 when Aldo Scaglione organized a forum and two related

workshops on the question of university governance. The forum, "Who's

in Charge, Why, and What For?," was held in an enormous room; the room

was packed, and the speakers included stars of the profession, such as Stan

ley Fish. They were urbane, witty, very good?anyone could see why they were stars, and the audience (including myself) responded with gales of

laughter and lengthy applause. Then the next day came the associated

workshops, in smaller rooms with far fewer in the audiences: one on "rela

tions between faculty and chairs" and the other on "relations between fac

ulty and central administration." The speakers of the day before did not

attend (with the honorable exception of Scaglione). Most of the speakers and chairs of the workshops were, predictably, drawn from that association

of the MLA that "concentrates on matters of language program adminis

tration," ADFL. The first speaker in the morning session, Thomas Beyer, of Middlebury College, a longtime chair and ADFL member and no mean

speaker himself, stood up at the microphone, perused the half-empty room, and commented ruefully that he had been most impressed and entertained

by the speeches at the forum the day before but that he had to admit when

he looked at what was going on in the profession as a whole, he really found

very little to laugh about. Just as I had laughed with the speakers of the day

before, so I agreed ruefully with Beyer. What was witty in the forum did

not seem to apply in the workshop, and it occurred to me then that the

quintessential MLA configuration of the forum and workshops illustrated

graphically the two branches of leadership that exist in our profession: on

the one hand, the forum leaders on the public stage, the stars, the speakers who draw the big MLA crowds, the top publishing scholars; on the other

hand, the workshop leaders, the people who chair departments, who deal

with the day-to-day business of staffing courses, of working with faculty members and administrators. Of course, a forum leader may well be or have

been a department chair, and a workshop leader may well be or have been a

publishing literary scholar. Nonetheless there are two different spheres in

which they play their roles as leaders.

I would like to reflect on what it means to have leaders in our profession

operating in two different spheres. It was not ever thus, at least in my own

experience. If I look back to my first years in the profession, more than



DOROTHY JAMES ||| 43

thirty years ago in England, it seems to me that there was then one kind of

leader in one kind of sphere. The best-known, most published scholar of

the department was usually the chair. One expected the chair to set the

scholarly tone of the department and also to run it day to day. Both these tasks seemed less onerous and less complicated than they are now in this

country, and they were much closer together. British scholars were not so

hell-bent on publishing in those days, and the main work of running the

department centered in any case on academic and curricular organization. All this has changed, of course, in England. Universities, I am told, and de

partments within universities are now ranked according to "research stand

ing," and chairs are increasingly expected to be business managers as well as teachers and scholars.

I am not simply harking back nostalgically to the good old days, though it is always pleasant to do that. I am actually doing something that is consid

erably less pleasant: I am suggesting, as my title indicates, that there is a tra

ditional leadership in our profession, that it is no longer synonymous with the working administrative leadership, and that neither is clearly subordi nate to the other. This presents us with a major organizational problem. The traditional scholarly leaders, the forum leaders of whom I have spoken, still have large academic followings and a great deal of personal prestige, but these traditional leaders, admired and applauded as they may still be, are arguably, in the real world of today's universities, being bypassed in our

field, as perhaps in no other. Those of us playing the role of workshop leader are firmly planted in that real world, and we find ourselves in many instances obliged to bypass them. We go our way, and we let them go theirs.

This modus vivendi, I would like to suggest, has been detrimental to our whole enterprise, and it is what prompts me to ask the mundane question in my title: Who is minding the store?

These are still general terms, and I should define them more precisely. Let me begin with the image of the store. I am going to invoke the privilege of being close to the end of my own professional career to make an un

ashamedly personal statement about what I think the store is and what I see happening to it, after thirty years of working in it in this country. I came

here, as many of us in the United States did, from another country, and if I look back forty years, I can see myself arriving at the University of London at the age of nineteen. The chair of the German department of Bedford

College, an indomitable professor of the old school, Edna Purdie, called the new undergraduate students entering the department together and said, "For the next three years, you will be devoting your time to German lan

guage and literature, not to the passing of examinations. By the end of the three years, you will be able to read and understand anything written in the



44 II BYPASSING THE TRADITIONAL LEADERSHIP: WHO'S MINDING THE STORE?

German language from the eighth century to the present day. That is your

goal." None of us were particularly surprised to hear this. We thought that was why we were there. We had come to college to study German language and literature. My only complaint about Professor Pur die was that her

"present day" stopped at about 1914?all literature after that she considered too modern to view objectively, and thus not suitable for us. Other than

that, I do not remember that any of us had any objection to the course of

study laid down for us, which led from Old High German to Middle High German to Early New High German to the Baroque; through eighteenth century Enlightenment and nineteenth-century Romanticism, and on to a

crashing stop in 1914. That was forty years ago. Another place, another

time. My revered professor, Edna Purdie, writer on the nineteenth-century dramatist Friedrich Hebbel, could run her particular small store quite effec

tively because she had ready-made customers who had learned German for

five to seven years before they ever fell into her hands, who had already read a number of the classics at secondary school (albeit in Later New High Ger

man), and who had come to the university with the express intention of read

ing more. Many would go back to the kinds of secondary schools from

which they had come and teach the German language and the German

classics to the next generation of students. The system, in other words, worked at that time and in that place. The United States foreign literature

major, long beloved of foreign language departments in this country, has, as we all know, been largely modeled on systems appropriate to that kind of

time and that kind of place. Our time and our place are different.

In a 1990 article entitled "Reflections of an Emeritus (To-Be)" published in Profession, Peter Demetz, of Yale University, looks back on his thirty year career in the United States and argues the case for the kind of teach

ing he has done in German literature classes over the years. He does not, be it said, argue the case for teaching literature rather than other things; he

defends his having given priority to "textual, structural, and generic con

cerns" rather than to questions of "social background or relevance, psycho

logical analysis, and ultimate significance" (4). He describes how, in

teaching Lessing's eighteenth-century comedy Minna von Barnhelm, he

tries to transmit his interest in the rhythm of dramatic events, the configu rations of characters, the organizational features of the play; essentially he

wants his students to see how the play works, how it is constructed by a

particular playwright in a particular time, and he wants his students to de

rive pleasure from it. He is, given the climate of critical opinion in 1990,

gracefully and ironically apologetic about this. I am not concerned here in

the least with agreeing or disagreeing with his position, which of course

would be shared by many of those who have polemicized much more vio



DOROTHY JAMES III 45

lently against Demetz's "friends the deconstructionists" (5), but with draw

ing attention to the nature of his concerns and to a telling aside in which

he makes the obligatory apology for his position and explains that some of

his priorities "are defined by the American classroom situation: many of

[his] students have to read a German eighteenth-century text with the occa

sional use of a dictionary, and not all of them have seen a German play per formed by professionals" (4). His concern in 1990, that the students should

read, understand, and enjoy the text, is not so different from Purdie's in

1954; his concessions to the American classroom seem, as a matter of fact, more meager than hers to the English one: she would certainly have ex

pected us to make a good deal more than occasional use of the dictionary, and she would not have expected any of us to have seen professional Ger

man theater. The really dramatic difference, however, is that whereas Pro

fessor Purdie had a ready-made student audience, Demetz and I and all our

contemporary professors of European literature in the 1980s and 1990s in

the United States have not had such an audience. While a couple of gener ations of professors of literature, therefore, have been battling out, some

with rapiers and some with bludgeons, the wars of literary theory and the

partially related wars of political correctness, recognizing of course the need for "occasional use of the dictionary" in the American classroom, their undergraduate audience has dwindled away. Unless things change,

many of these professors will retire leaving very few students in their un

dergraduate classrooms, altogether too many in their graduate classrooms, and consequently a brutal competition for the few positions still opening up for teachers in undergraduate foreign literature programs. Those of us

who will soon retire have earned our salaries. We will receive our pensions. But our store is going bankrupt, and we leave our successors only with debts and with part-time jobs or unemployment. This is one of the ugly truths that makes it hard to be amusing or even charitable about our profes sion today.

I hope it is clear that I feel no joy in witnessing the demise of the tradi tional foreign language and literature program, though I realize full well that many people do feel joy, not to say schadenfreude. At the Foreign Lan

guages across the Curriculum (FLAC) conference last fall I heard David Maxwell of the Language Research Center in Washington proclaim with

great glee the devolution of language-teaching programs out of their tradi tional homes in the universities and the establishment of what he called

"freestanding language programs," which needed, in his terms, to be "out side the traditional language and literature departments." Of course, I un

derstand as well as Maxwell does why this change is indeed happening in some places, but I feel anger rather than joy at this turn of events?anger



46 HI BYPASSING THE TRADITIONAL LEADERSHIP: WHO'S MINDING THE STORE?

not at some outside forces that have brought this upon us but at ourselves

that we have allowed it to happen, perhaps even made it necessary. I have worked for the last fifteen years or so, as have others, quite con

sciously against such devolution, not for the status quo but for a genuine coordination over a period of years of language and literature teaching

within the humanistic framework of a liberal arts curriculum and rooted in a clear awareness of undergraduate students' needs, their needs to be seri

ously educated, to reach a high level of literacy, and ultimately to make their

way in a tough real world?needs that are, in my book, not so very differ

ent from one another. This can work. In the City University of New York, where German has steadily dwindled in recent years across the eighteen campuses, Hunter College had in 1996 eighty-eight students registered in

our upper-level courses in German, doing a variety of things: reading the

classics, learning business German, taking advanced level composition and

conversation. Only about five of them were native or "seminative" speakers. Most of the nonnatives who go through the whole upper-level program will come out of it at least at the middle of the Advanced level on the ACTFL

scale without spending time in Germany. These results can be achieved

within the framework of a traditional language and literature department.1 After I pointed this out in the context of Maxwell's comments at the

FLAC conference, one of the organizers wrote to me:

You and your colleagues at Hunter have been able to keep language and literature working together by coordinating the teaching of language and literature. But most institutions simply don't want to do that, and won't

do it. More fool they, but it doesn't do the students any good in those cases where language learning and literary study are out of sync and out

of sympathy with each other to keep the two together. If Mom and Dad want a divorce, they had better get one. Departments like yours can be a

reproach to us all by remaining two-parent families.2 (Shoenberg)

This proposed solution, of simply giving up on the language-literature connection, is apparently being embraced in various institutions, not only in the obvious way that Maxwell was thinking of, namely through separate

language programs and centers, but also, less obviously, by expanding the

content of programs beyond the literary into cultural studies or interdisci

plinary studies of various kinds and increasingly doing the teaching in En

glish, thus quietly eliminating any attempt at language teaching beyond the

elementary and intermediate levels. One hears more and more talk about

creating separate departments of literature or of literature and culture and

departments and centers of language. I think that many of us who have been

active in language teaching in recent years may well have arrived at my cor




respondent's position that a divorce is better than a bad marriage. But one

might remember that divorce is usually easier for the rich than for the poor. Affluent institutions can perhaps afford to run high-powered, well-staffed

language centers and to retain a small elite body of professors to write

books and teach literature and literary criticism to a small number of stu

dents. But as I have argued elsewhere, in universities like my own, with

ever-decreasing budgets, such an apparently benign solution is hardly an

option. We cannot afford the luxury of two separate faculties and two sepa rate operations, and in our milieu, if such separation were attempted, it

would probably result in the rapid abandonment of the elite strand, the

gradual loss of most senior faculty members, and the teaching primarily of

the lower levels of languages by low-paid part-time and non-tenure-track

faculty members (James 27). The best hope of a genuinely high-level, multiple-option education in

foreign languages surely lies for many of us in having one faculty that will

work with language in a cultural-literary context and open the doors to the

highest levels of literacy for our students. What such a model entails, how

ever, is a big change in the way professors now teaching in advanced under

graduate literature programs and in graduate programs view and conduct

their professional lives. I have in the past decade visited several large universities considered to

be research institutions, and I have described the kind of language work we

do with our students at all levels of the curriculum; the professors of litera ture have been conspicuous by their absence from such meetings, and the few who have attended have said such things as "I think what you do is won

derful, but we couldn't do it here. It would cut into our research agenda." Of course they are right. It would. And universities have traditionally re

warded people for carrying out their research agendas. But in the meantime, while the research agenda, largely literary, of our

departments of language and literature has certainly been maintained and while by maintaining it those fortunate enough to be hired in different times are still making their way up the tenure and promotion ladder, many doors seem to be closing in the faces of those who would now like to be come teachers, to pursue similar literary research agendas, and also to make their way into the security of the professorial ranks. Why is this happen ing now?

The traditional leaders of our profession are trying to answer this ques tion, shocked as they undoubtedly are by the loud cries of distress coming from the area of the job market. As Sandra Gilbert, the 1996 president of the

MLA, pointed out in her first column in the MLA Newsletter, while contro

versies over the literary canon and interpretive style, disputes over literary



48 III BYPASSING THE TRADITIONAL LEADERSHIP: WHO'S MINDING THE STORE?

theory inside the academy, and defenses of it against outside attacks

marked the columns of her presidential predecessors during the previous decade, there was a new focus of attention in 1994 and 1995, when Patricia

Meyer Spacks and Sander Gilman "inevitably devoted considerable atten

tion to the interlocking issues of the job market, the changing character of

our profession, and the future of the humanities" ("Columnar Selves" 3). Here is a very definite sign that the forum leaders are directly addressing the major practical problems facing the workshop leaders. Gilman, a bona

fide MLA star, showed recently in his year as president real concern for the

plight of graduate students. In his Winter 1995 President's Column, he dis

cussed what we, the members of the MLA, can do about it:

The problem is not that there is no need for teachers of foreign languages and English?virtually everyone believes in internationalization (at least for reasons of market competition) and in cultural literacy, language en rollments are up ..., and English

courses are filled. .. . There is even a

nascent languages-across-the-curriculum movement. . . . The major is

sues today are economic?and not just in higher education. Yet the num

ber of students in higher education continues to exceed the capacity to teach them. Students want to study what we want to teach. ("Jobs" 4)

Here we have someone who sees precisely what is going on, describes it ac

curately, but then, in drawing a positive conclusion in his last sentence, illus

trates equally precisely the seemingly willful blindness that has brought our

profession to the verge of bankruptcy. "Students want to study what we

want to teach"? This statement, as Edward Knox suggests politely in a let

ter responding to the column, is "simply not an accurate statement on re

cent history in language education." Knox points to the past failure of MLA

members and leaders to understand and support the long-standing calls for

"communicative competence and proficiency" as part of the picture that

Gilman, in his positive conclusion, ignores. Gilman, who himself believes

strongly in the teaching of languages in the liberal arts curricula of colleges and universities, as he has shown in his other columns, is surely deluding himself if he believes that his colleagues in the upper reaches of the profes sion really want to teach what the students who certainly enroll en masse

for language courses seem to want to study. If his colleagues en masse really wanted to teach what the students want to study, we would not be suffering in our language and literature programs from the small enrollments in

upper-level courses that are literally the death of us in bad economic times.

Gilman is right when he says the major issues are economic; this fact,

however, does not absolve us of all responsibility for what has happened. We (the professoriat) have contributed to our own economic vulnerability.




In largely confining language teaching to the lowest levels of the curriculum

and in assigning it to a category of teachers different from those who teach literature or other content, we have undermined the rationale for having a

paid, tenured, full-time professoriat in foreign languages. We ourselves fos

tered this separation long before anyone ever thought of language centers.

In large segments of our profession, we handed over language teaching at

the lower levels wholesale to graduate students or to part-time teachers

who did not have the research commitment that justifies professorial rank; we refused in many cases to give professorial rank to language program co

ordinators, who often have a research commitment in language acquisition or in pedagogy; and, to cap it all, we disdained the activity of language teaching at the higher levels and in graduate school, pretending that Amer ican students could learn European languages in two years. Can we really be surprised if our upper-level classes are small? Can we really be surprised if it dawns on administrators under severe budgetary constraints that they can save a lot of money by doing away with the small upper-level foreign literature programs altogether and sustain the lower-level language courses

without the benefit (and expense) of properly paid senior faculty members? All over the country, institutions are looking at their programs, their de

partments, and their budgets, and they are counting heads. They see the lower levels (large) taught by cheap labor and the upper levels (small) taught by expensive labor. In the best cases, they wait for retirements and do not

rehire. In the worst cases, they declare fiscal emergency and retrench. Ei

ther way, the future closes down for our discipline, for our future under

graduates, and for our present graduate students. Small wonder that shouts of dismay from graduate students are begin

ning to sound loudly in the ears of the normally insulated traditional lead

ership. These shouts are finally bringing the potential bankruptcy of the

profession to the forefront of MLA concerns. Until now, most senior schol ars have seen only the convenience of having graduate students teach ele

mentary language courses while swelling the ranks of graduate seminars. We have in many cases continued to take in graduate students without re

gard for their professional future; we have even recruited students from the countries whose languages we were teaching when the supply of American students seemed to be drying up. Students come here from other countries not always, I regret to say, as Gilman optimistically suggests, because "we

provide a . .. better perspective on the study of literature and culture" than their home countries do ("Jobs" 4) but because they think that their

prospects of academic employment may be better here than there. We have continued for the most part to train graduate students for a career in the

university teaching of literature, yet as the number of major programs in




the traditionally taught literatures other than Spanish diminishes, the dis

crepancy between supply and demand seems to be on the increase.

A graduate student in English quoted by Gilbert in a recent President's

Column sees the problem more clearly than many professional leaders do.

"Discussion about limiting the number of grad students," the student writes, "is a good start, but I don't think it gets at the root of the problems.

... If, for example, there were no students for us to teach, no real need for literacy

training or literary instruction beyond high school, I would feel strongly that the number of PhDs needed to be limited" ("Business Week" 4-5).

Her point of view thus far coincides with Gilman's. Both Gilman and she

recognize the need for teachers of English and foreign languages, but the

graduate student is herself doing the sort of teaching that is sorely

needed?teaching composition and sometimes an introduction to literature

while getting a PhD?and her conclusion is very different from Gilman's.

She sees that the future for her and for many of her contemporaries lies in

going on doing such needed teaching part-time, with low pay and no bene

fits or job security. "There is a great need for people trained in language and literature," she concludes succinctly, "and we must continue to train

people to fill this need. ... So the question is not really how to limit PhDs

but how to compensate them for the work they are doing" (5). Quite so.

I recently talked myself with a roomful of graduate students in the many

foreign language programs at Columbia University, languages from A to Z?

well, A to Y, anyway: Arabic to Yiddish. It was a meeting organized on a Fri

day afternoon by the language program coordinators at Columbia, and my

topic was "Teaching Language and Literature: A Joint Enterprise or a Lost

Cause?" I talked about teaching literature in the undergraduate curriculum,

ways of teaching language in the literature curriculum. It was, of course, a

workshop?hands on and with lots of discussion?but in the context, inevi

tably, of what is going on in the profession as a whole. I pointed out to them

that while Columbia sits up there on its heights with graduate students spe

cializing in many foreign literatures, the colleges of the eighteen-campus,

200,000-student City University of New York are losing languages whole

sale from their undergraduate offerings: the last round of retrenchments

and retirements left only one faculty member in the entire 200,000-student

university who teaches Arabic. There is no one left in Yiddish, Polish, Swa

hili, Hindi, or Yoruba; there are only two in Japanese. There are three who

can teach Portuguese, but they rarely do. There are only a handful of rela

tively strong programs left in German, French, and Italian; many of the fac

ulty members in these remaining programs are approaching retirement age, and very little hiring is in the cards for the foreseeable future. The weaker

full programs will therefore be altogether gone in five years unless some




dramatic moves are made. Spanish is strong across the university and has

all the problems of a field too big for its own resources. The resources cut

from the other languages are not being put into Spanish: huge elementary classes of more than forty students are being taught more often than not by part-time teachers. I told the graduate students all this, because the rum

blings at CUNY do not usually make it through the ivy-covered walls of

Columbia. Many of the faculty members at CUNY, however, have PhDs

from Columbia. It became painfully clear to these young people that Co

lumbia PhDs in most foreign languages will not be finding jobs at CUNY

in the future, except possibly part-time positions in Spanish, unless we can

turn things around, not just at CUNY but in the profession as a whole. At one point in the discussion, a young woman stood up, looked around the

room, and said, "We're talking about literature teaching, but they are not

here." And they weren't. The people present were practically all teaching lower-level language courses part-time, and hardly anyone with an estab

lished professorial position was there. (Most language program coordi nators at Columbia do not have professorial rank.) The absence of the

literature professors suddenly hit these graduate students like a ton of bricks,

perhaps along with the thought that they might never themselves become

literature professors, able on Friday afternoons to work in their libraries

with a clear conscience while someone else attended workshops on lan

guage teaching. I think it is a good sign, though one born of desperation, that graduate

students are finally doing what many of us workshop leaders have failed to

do for years, namely, really gaining the ear of the traditional leaders, the

scholarly leaders, those whom I have called the forum leaders. Graduate students are an important link between the two working parts of the pro fession, language teaching and literature teaching, and their present plight shows the terrible folly of having allowed these two parts to be separated.

To unite these parts, however, we need to eliminate that other dichotomy in our profession, between the two branches of leadership that have tried po

litely for decades to coexist without stepping on each other's toes. The time has come for more than polite coexistence. We need together to go back to

the curricular drawing board and create coordinated language, literature, and culture programs, enmeshed with vocational training where it exists, programs that will attract and retain the many students who want to learn

languages, programs that connect with high school programs where possi ble and, where not, connect with graduate schools, so that language learning and teaching can take place on a continuum across a five-to-eight-year pe riod. We need to re-create continuous language sequences taught at all lev els (if not in all sections) by full-time professors, sequences that can stand




scrutiny from year one as serious contributions to the content of the liberal arts curriculum and that also teach language skills up to and through the

graduate level. Is all this so difficult? Will it cut into our research agenda? Certainly, or in any event it will change that agenda somewhat, but it will at

the lowest level of rationale save our own jobs, and, at a slightly higher level,

preserve the profession for future generations of teachers and scholars. And there is a higher level of rationale still. Gilman provides words for it

when he writes, "In thinking about our role as language teachers in univer

sity and college settings, we should and must stress the centrality of our un

dertaking not just to the internationalization of the university but also to one

of the central goals of the humanities and social sciences, the study of cul ture at the end of the millennium" ("Language" 4). It is, however, not enough for the forum leaders of our profession to assert the centrality of language learning and teaching in the humanities and social science curriculum. They have to roll up their sleeves alongside the workshop leaders and do some

thing about it, throw their individual and collective weight, for example, behind a serious integrated undergraduate curriculum in all the kinds of

colleges that exist in this country and simply refuse to accept a curriculum

and a faculty split, separated, weakened, divided, and ultimately conquered. To return in conclusion to my original image, we in the foreign language

and literature programs of this country have a very important store to mind. Whatever some of us may think of what the recent generations of lit

erary scholars have made of this task, it is not good enough simply to allow them to be bypassed, to allow their territory to dissolve bit by bit like a

melting iceberg, to allow them to retire and not be replaced. The territory

occupied by the literary scholar is precious to us, and we have to save it for our students, to open it to the many, not to protect it only for the few. The

workshop leaders of this profession have to find a way of holding on to a

territory that is rapidly being lost by the people to whom they have tradi

tionally entrusted it. We, as well as the graduate students, must coura

geously gain the ear of those we have always tacitly allowed to go their own

way, the scholarly establishment of this profession. How often have I heard

chairs say, "Well, I can't ask Professor So-and-So to do such-and-such." You

can't? Well, perhaps the time has come when you must. Perhaps the time

has come for your individual voice to be stronger and less deferential in

your own setting and for the collective voice of ADFL to be stronger and

less deferential in the wide setting of the MLA. Perhaps the time has come

when the workshop leaders must say loudly and clearly to the forum lead

ers, "Work with us before it is too late." Perhaps together we can after all save the store from bankruptcy and pass on to future generations of Ameri




can students and teachers a thriving foreign language and literature cur

riculum at the humanistic core of the American university.

NOTES ?

*I cite the Hunter example only because I know from personal experience that it

works. Of course, there are others at very different kinds of institutions, such as the in

tegrated approach to teaching and learning language and culture running through the

four years of the undergraduate curriculum in French at Saint Olaf College. Wendy Allen described this program at the ADFL Summer Seminar West in 1996.

2 Quoted with permission.

WORKS CITED

Allen, Wendy. "Plus ga change ..." ADFL Summer Seminar West. U of San Diego. 6 June 1996.

Demetz, Peter. "Reflections of an Emeritus (To-Be)." Profession 90. New York: MLA, 1990. 3-7.

Gilbert, Sandra M. "Business Week." MLA Newsletter 28.2 (1996): 3-5. -. "Columnar Selves." MLA Newsletter 28.1 (1996): 3-4.

Gilman, Sander. "Jobs: What We (Not They) Can Do." MLA Newsletter 27.4 (1995): 4-5. -. "Thinking about Language?Thinking in Language." MLA Newsletter 27.1

(1995): 3-4.

James, Dorothy. "Teaching Language and Literature: Equal Opportunity in the Inner

City University.MDFL Bulletin 28.1 (1996): 24-28. Knox, Edward C. Letter. MLA Newsletter 28.2 (1996): 18.

Shoenberg, Robert R. Letter to the author. 13 Dec. 1995.

Welles, Elizabeth B. "From the Editor." ADFL Bulletin 28.1 (1996): 1-4.



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Bypassing the Traditional Leadership: Who's Minding the Store?