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[Gil Rappaport]

The recent communications about Russian enrollments have been very
interesting. It seems to emerge that while there has been a substantial
decline over the past few years (ours at Texas started precisely from 90 to
91, aft er a steady and sustained upward trend from 1979 to 1990), this
decline has essentially been arrested as of 94 to 95. But there is no way of
telling how local this flattening out is.

I would like to raise a different question. Say that there is a national
trend of decline, for whatever reason (disenchantment with post-communist
Russia, backlash against foreign languages in general, competition from
other languages (including Slavic), ...). What are people DOING to combat
the trend and what if anything WORKS? Or DOESN'T work. It is hard to assign
cause-and-effect, but is there the feeling that putting effort into, say,
publicity or changes in program content has the effect of attracting more
students? For the purposes of my question, could we consider just getting
students in first-year classrooms? Retention is a separate question, with
its own strategies.

Gil Rappaport
Univ. of Texas at Austin