suggestion for Vision 2020 - Dec. '96

[Benjamin Rifkin]

Dear Colleagues,

Genevra Gerhart asked what is Vision 2020.  I responded to her directly,
rather than to the list, but she suggested that I share this with the
entire list as there may be some who members of the list who don't know.

Vision 2020 is a panel at the National AATSEEL Convention (annually since
about 1991) sponsored by ACTR and AATSEEL that's dedicated to issues of
national professional (or professional/national) significance.  In its
first year it had a call for papers on a number of topics and papers were
selected in a refereed process with some invited speakers from other fields
(including Heidi Byrnes, for example) who commented on the papers in their
topic sections.  After that year the format changed somewhat, but
presentations still focused on issues of national significance for the
entire Slavic field.  In the last two years the Vision 2020 panel has been
dedicated to the problem of enrollments, with more focus on "problem" than
"solution".  I remember that in Dec. '94, Dick Brecht asked people to raise
their hands if their institutions had seen significant decreases in
enrollments in Russian and virtually everyone in the room (200-300 people)
raised their hands.  Then he asked people to raise their hands if their
department had made any changes to fight the enrollment declines and not a
single person raised her/his hand.  There was a gasp as we all realized
that we had to get cracking. I suggested to the list, in a previous
message, that it would be productive if this year's panel were to focus on
solutions.

I hope that this information is helpful.

Ben Rifkin


**********************************
Benjamin Rifkin
Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1432 Van Hise Hall, 1220 Linden Drive, Madison, WI  53706
(608) 262-1623; fax (608) 265-2814
e-mail:  brifkin at facstaff.wisc.edu