From dlupher@ups.edu Sun Mar 11 14:41:28 2001 Received: from mxu4.u.washington.edu (mxu4.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.02) with ESMTP id f2BMfRL17980 for ; Sun, 11 Mar 2001 14:41:27 -0800 Received: from mail.ups.edu (main.ups.edu [192.124.98.219]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.02) with ESMTP id f2BMfQB23084 for ; Sun, 11 Mar 2001 14:41:26 -0800 Received: from [207.207.116.53] (wyatt1dhcp53.ups.edu [207.207.116.53]) by mail.ups.edu (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id f2BMfNZ14084 for ; Sun, 11 Mar 2001 14:41:23 -0800 (PST) X-Sender: dlupher@mail.ups.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <000c01c0aa78$d97b2e60$b4cb64a8@jfgannon> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/enriched; charset="us-ascii" Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2001 14:29:52 -0800 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: David Lupher Subject: Re: No foreign languages in Iowa! J.F. Gannon writes: The president of Drake was quoted as saying that he has no prejudice against the study of foreign languages, since he himself has taught Russian, but that the way to learn, say, French, was to go to France not to a school in Iowa.  The article did not mention how many languages were involved--there are fifteen members of the faculty-- There's an article by Alison Schneider about this in the Chronicle of Higher Ed., March 9, pp. A14-15. Drake has offered only three modern languages: French, German and Spanish. The Chronicle says that "by the end of 2002, formal classroom language instruction and faculty members trained to provide it will be as dead at Drake as Latin." That is ambiguously phrased. I gather that it is a would-be witty way of saying that at Drake *all* languages will soon be "dead," but it could be taken to imply that Latin, too, is a dead duck at Drake. (Perhaps it has not been around to be killed off.) This article gave hints of there being more to the story than an eccentric president's hare-brained notion. For one thing, there's the recurrent reference to the fact that the only way you can legally get rid of tenured faculty, barring charges of moral turpitude etc., is by getting rid of a whole department or program. This seems to imply that Maxwell may have been trying to get rid of some particular *people* and that the elimination of the program was just a means to that end. Also, there is the fact that the foreign language department as currently operational seems to have been struggling. The article notes that beginnng German has only five students at the moment---though only four showed up for the CHE photo. Since Drake has 5,000 undergrads and is located in a region where I should think that there are several students of ethnic German heritage, this seems like a surprisingly small number. The Chronicle article seems torn between regarding this as a bizarre case and offering it as the invevitable result of a supposed nose-dive in foreign language enrollments nationally. Any thoughts about this? Is David Maxwell of Drake an isolated nut, or the pioneer of a coming trend? David Lupher Classics Dept. Univ. of Puget Sound .