New "Why Study Russian" website

[Frank Poulin]

    It's good to see this website-- and I've already referred it to one
person.  However, as someone who works in the business world (high-tech),
I'd like to add that, too often these days, professors of Russian appear to
be trying to "sell" the study of Russian to college students by emphasizing
that a knowledge of Russian is a "marketable skill".  This is unfortunate
because emphasizing Russian as a "skill" directly associates a knowledge of
Russian to some form of future monetary payoff.  By selling the study of
Russian as a marketable skill, Russian language and literature teachers are
placing their students and their students' parents in the position of
comparing the monetary payoff of studying Russian for 4 years to the
monetary payoff of studying more lucrative skills such as accounting,
business administration, or computer science.  In the U.S. economy, the
monetary payoff for studying accounting, business, or computers far exceeds
the monetary payoff for studying Russian (in D.C., I've seen 40,000 a year
as a common starting salary for someone with the first 3 skills and as low
as 15,000 to 22,000 a year as a frequent starting salary for someone with a
Russian-only skill).  Moreover, since many students accumulate educational
loans exceeding 10,000 to 15,000 dollars that must be paid back, and since
most of the NGO jobs that are advertised on Russian-Studies web sites are
temporary or pay relatively low wages (and sometime none at all, calling
their positions "internships"), it can become evident quickly to a student
or parent that the study of Russian as a marketable skill is not a good
investment.  I'd hate to see students or parents become as cautious of
language-study promotions as many are toward used car dealerships.
    I'd like to suggest a different approach, an approach that may seem
intuitive to many, but that does not seem to appear on Slavic Studies web
sites.  This approach would not emphasize the study of Russian as a
marketable "skill", but would emphasize the study of Russian (or any other
language) as one way in which a student can prepare himself or herself for
the fast track (or for long-term success if you will) in business, law,
engineering, or government.   If one looks at today's business leaders and
government leaders, I believe that one will discover that many of these
people are bilingual or multilingual (I believe that I heard that the
current or possibly former CEO of Procter & Gamble, for instance, knows 5 or
6 languages).  Though I'm not aware of any study that has looked at the
language and culture-learning backgrounds of today's corporate and
government leaders, I believe that the common consensus today is that many
of our corporate and government leaders possess a wide range of experience
and interests.  This leads me to suggest that a collection of testimonials
by business and government leaders on the value they've placed on their own
language and cultural studies in the past might be useful for the promotion
of language learning.  Such a collection of testimonials would, of course,
take some work, but I think that it might be more proper, in the long term,
than the emphasis on Russian knowledge as a marketable skill.
    Please don't take this as criticism of the website.  As I mentioned
above, it's a good site since a good database of job opportunities is a
terrific tool.

Regards,
Frank Poulin


-----Original Message-----
From: Irina VanDusen <vandusen at actr.org>
To: SEELANGS at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU <SEELANGS at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>
Date: Thursday, November 11, 1999 2:13 PM
Subject: New "Why Study Russian" website


For a narrative presenting reasons for studying Russian, links to get
started, and some general information on the Russian language and the
history of its study in the US, go to Why Study Russian? a web site jointly
produced by ACTR and AATSEEL.
You can get there by going to:
http://www.russnet.org/home.html
and then clicking on "Discover" menu button (maybe check out what else you
might discover there) or through direct url, which is:
http://www.russnet.org/why/index.html

Irina Van Dusen,
Publications Manager, ACTR