When David Vásquez-Hurtado arrived at Fort Lewis College in August 2016, he was raring to start teaching Spanish.
But he quickly noticed problems. The 3,300-student public college in southwestern Colorado was bleeding students and money. Its language programs had been eviscerated over the last 10-odd years: First Navajo was cut, with its single adjunct instructor. Then Japanese and German, then French.
Vásquez-Hurtado and Carolina Alonso, another assistant professor, joined what was initially a team of four faculty members in the modern-languages department. But after an adjunct who taught Italian was cut and the department chair left academe, only they, and Spanish, remained.
Janine Fitzgerald, a professor in the sociology and human-services department, had watched the language programs disappear from afar. She’d heard rumors that the Spanish major, with its two “vulnerable” new hires, might be the next to go. “I got very alarmed,” she said, “because once you get rid of the major, it’s very, very hard to bring it back.”
She worked out a plan with the two newly hired professors. To keep Spanish alive as the modern-languages department closed, they’d shake up the program’s curriculum and move it under the shelter of the sociology department where, in a quirk of timing, two retiring professors had just left vacancies. Now the Spanish program had a new, academically aligned home, and a new name: Borders and Languages.
“Instead of saying, ‘Don’t cut, don’t cut,’” Fitzgerald said, they told the administration that “we’re going to completely re-envision this.”
Where the old Spanish program’s structure offered language first, analysis later, Fitzgerald said, the new model introduces critical rigor and cultural context earlier. As soon as their first or second year, students can study Latin American horror movies, punk rock and metal as protest art, and Mexican narco culture in between Gloria E. Anzaldúa, the Chicana cultural theorist, and Michel Foucault, the literary critic. That means basic bilingual instruction, with a lot of scholarly texts in English.
Such a change isn’t wholly unique. Plenty of colleges have redesigned their language programs, especially after the Modern Language Association called for more culturally integrated approaches in 2007. And more are reconfiguring departments and including intercultural analyses in their curricula, said Dennis Looney, the MLA’s director of programs.
Georgetown University’s German department, for example, has for decades shuffled curricula to emphasize analytical skills, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s French program has followed suit. Other institutions, like Connecticut College and Iowa State University, use add-on courses and programs to embed language study across students’ disciplines. At Connecticut, which features a strict full-year language requirement, any faculty member can add a discussion session in another language to his or her course. Students with some proficiency, for instance, can expand their sociology course on Brazilian favelas with a one-credit session using Portuguese texts.
And still other colleges, like the University of North Georgia at Dahlonega, have stemmed losses by enlisting federal support for “strategic” language programs the government deems important for security and defense.
But Fort Lewis’s location makes its curricular approach particularly fitting, faculty members there say. As a college in the southwestern Four Corners region, and one that teaches more Native American and Alaska Native students as a share of its student body than any other nontribal liberal-arts college in the country — 38 percent, according to the provost — a focus on borders and languages is salient, the professors say. And they say they’re seeing early interest in the program in their conversations with administrators, faculty members, and students alike.
A ‘Stunning’ Decline
Fort Lewis’s language programs weren’t the only ones to close in recent years. The total number of colleges’ programs in languages other than English dropped by a “stunning” 651 from 2013 to 2016, according to the MLA.
Enrollments in foreign-language programs have fallen, too, by 9.2 percent in that same period.
The professors at Fort Lewis faced especially tall odds against saving much of anything. Colorado is among the lowest per-capita spenders on higher education. Tuition increases at Colorado’s public four-year colleges were among the most severe in the country, jumping 68 percent on average since the recession, according to data compiled by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Budget cuts just after the financial crisis tanked Fort Lewis’s agriculture, computer science, and Southwest-studies programs, said Mitchel Davis, the college’s public-affairs officer. “Students vote with their feet,” he said. “And we put our limited resources toward the areas students were demanding.” The language programs started vanishing.
The college shed funds, and, over the last five years, students, a shift its leaders pin on tightened admissions standards and out-of-state four-year universities vacuuming up local prospects. Last year Fort Lewis announced a 5-percent tuition increase and $4.16 million in new cuts, including layoffs of eight staff members and three lecturers. (Fort Lewis says its tuition is still low for the state.)
But Davis, and the professors offering the new borders and languages courses, are optimistic about the futures of both the college and the new program, early as the steps may be. Plunging collegewide enrollments at Fort Lewis appeared to steady in the fall of 2018, and the new administration is charged with keeping it that way. And though Colorado’s higher-education spending is still low, it’s starting to climb.
Curricular Overhaul
The full borders-and-languages major officially kicks off this fall, though Vásquez-Hurtado and Alonso have already started teaching some of the classes. The idea, they say, is to examine borders of all kinds: geographical, of course, but also cultural, linguistic, and psychological.
In the second week of the old Spanish program’s introductory course, for instance, students dealt squarely with the present tense of ser, “to be,” and telling time. In Week 2 of BL 101, on the other hand, students weave basic pronunciation lessons with the history of the U.S.-Mexico border, Anzaldúa, and norteño music.
“Our focus is vocabulary and successful communication (speaking, listening), and sociocultural sensibility to understand Hispanic music in depth,” writes Vásquez-Hurtado in his syllabus for the class, “Music and Borderlands.” “Even when Spanish is the target language, Spanglish might be accepted in some of the assignments … since this is an accepted variety of Spanish in a border situation.”
The major still features a course on Spanish for professions like business and law, and complementary two-credit classes for conversational and “survival” Spanish.
Still, some critics have feared that overhauls of the classic, two-tier model of language and then analysis could sacrifice students’ language acquisition. Well, Vásquez-Hurtado retorts, how much was the old model teaching Spanish anyway?
“You’ll be learning book Spanish, unless you really travel,” he said (and study-abroad trips are in the works). And when you do, you’ll still need the sorts of communicative skills and contextual knowledge gained by seriously studying a culture — not just paella and sombreros.
“I don’t want to claim that no one’s ever cared about the social-historical concepts before,” Fitzgerald said. But the professors are optimistic. The new administration supports the borders-and-languages program, and there’s “a ton of excitement” among faculty members and some students, Fitzgerald said.
One of those students is Amelia Stecher, a senior Spanish major. As unfortunate as the dissolution of the modern-languages department was, “I think it really was a positive for the Spanish-speaking community on campus,” Stecher said. The sociology department is bigger and better resourced, she said, and has several professors who speak the language. If there is some cost in initial language acquisition, she said, the “cultural context” that borders and languages provides may outweigh it.
Stecher has done much herself to revive interest in languages at Fort Lewis. She co-founded the Club de Español, and is working on a senior-seminar project to map speakers of different languages around campus, to help students find the resources they need. Though she hasn’t taken borders-and-languages classes, she’s excited about the change, and says other students are too.
The college itself says things are sunnier too: New hires and investment in admissions and marketing have helped slow losses to student enrollments, Davis said.
Neither effort, in enrollments or languages, is mature enough to call a turnaround. But where the old Spanish program saw a dwindling number of majors, some students have expressed interest in majoring and double-majoring in borders and languages, Alonso said. For now, the “circle” of dropping enrollments and dropping instructors, she said, seems to have stopped.
If all goes as planned, the professors say, they can eventually bring the Spanish program back out from its home in sociology and reintroduce it as a freestanding borders-and-languages department. Instead of a unit within modern languages, like Spanish used to be, that department could apply its curricular model to new courses, they say.
Then — if students keep voting with their feet — they can bring more languages back to life.
Follow Steven Johnson on Twitter at @stetyjohn, or email him at steve.johnson@chronicle.com.
