Russian enrollments at the university

[Sibelan Forrester]

Dear friends and colleagues,

Obviously, Russian enrollments during the Cold War years were
artificially inflated from both directions on the ideological
spectrum:  there were people who knew they could get a good job with
the US military or intelligence, and there were other people (whose
hair was longer and whose shoes were not so shiny) who wanted to save
the world through greater cultural understanding, or else to shock
their parents by having truck with Communists.  And then in the
middle were the people who were genuinely interested in the language
for some reason, who had read Dostoevsky in translation or had a
meaningful family connection or just loved the structures of Russian.
In my experience of teaching at that time, it was the "middle"
students who were the most fun to teach anyway.  Now, of course, it's
mostly only the middle that is left -- they're largely self-selected
into Russian, and on the whole more gifted in general than the
students who don't choose to study Russian.  So there.

I'd like to make a couple of comments on the good points earlier
posts have made.  First, to pick up something that many people have
said on SEELANGS:  if we want a healthy range of students of Russian
entering college and university, we have to support the work of
teachers of Russian in the secondary schools.  Some of my best
students lately have come from Amherst or Baltimore -- thank you,
thank you, thank you for your good work with them!  If our local
school districts don't offer Russian, there are still ways to contact
students:  encourage those of our students who are interested in
teaching to volunteer in the brief introductory programs elementary
schools sometimes offer before or after school, or schlep over with
some colorful souvenirs for the middle school festival on world
cultures, etc.  If your institution's policies allow, let a
home-schooler audit your language classes -- she might wind up takine
Russian in college, even if it's not your college.  If you have kids
in school, use some of your copious free time to attend a few PTA
meetings and let them know that a unit on Russia would be a great
benefit in the social studies curriculum.  If we just sit in our
ivory towers and do nothing to spread our own knowledge and
enthusiasm, it's clear who's to blame for that.  If you're too busy
to generate your own materials, ask colleagues in AATSEEL or ACTFL
for advice.

We can't and we shouldn't cut down on presenting grammatical rules
and structure.  Just as we don't expect students in college-level
physics classes to learn the laws from empirical observation of the
world (kettles, baseballs) the way a two-year-old does, but lead them
through guided experiences in the laboratory, we have to present the
rules that our students would we hope find out themselves if they
could go to Russia and live for five years.  They simply don't have
the time to approach it in a fully "natural" way.  What's more, many
of those students in the "middle" that I mentioned above really like
those rules:  they tend to be good at physics, math, linguistics and
music as well as language, and it's the grammar, if it's presented in
a way that's not stultifying, that keeps them coming to class.
Obviously it shouldn't be a dry presentation of the grammar (they can
get that themselves from the book), and a lively conversational and
cultural component is essential -- but (again, to crib from an
earlier post) they just don't have as much knowledge of Russian going
into it as English gives them for most of the Western European
languages, so it's just going to be more difficult, or take more of
an investment of time and effort.

Finally, solutions to our problems with Russian enrollments are not
going to be monolithic (the way the Cold War enrollment bonanza was);
they're going to depend on the character of the institutions where we
teach and on what each of us has to offer to students.  Some places
(big institutions with strong professional schools?) will benefit
from propagandizing the benefits of Russian as a tool for refining
writing and analysis and gaining, back-handedly, the kind of command
of English grammar that lets one author a complicated technical paper
in good time and with maximum clarity.  Or we'll create large and
popular courses on "sexy" topics that will bring our departments'
existence to the attention of students who wouldn't know about them
otherwise, and will cushion the smaller advanced enrollments with
lots of warm bodies at that introductory level.  At some
institutions, the very difficulty of Russian is a sort of cachet (at
least, for students in Honors programs and the like).  We need to
make sure that students aren't told by their advisors to avoid
foreign language study (because it takes too long or "spends" too
many credits), and that our own propaganda flyers and posters are
hanging alongside the history department's or included in the
enrollment packets when new students arrive on campus.

I'd like to take issue for a moment with the presentation of
Humanuties departments in some media venues:  trashing Humanist
scholars for wallowing in ethnic and gender politics sounds like a
clear example of backlash against scholarly diversity, and one that
comes from a pretty conservative agenda.  No one would chase away a
student who wanted to learn Russian in order to go there and sell
junk bonds (or whatever), and we all know that what we teach has
plenty of tangible, job-worthy benefits to our students.  But in some
places the best-drawing courses in Russian programs are in
"stigmatized" areas such as queer studies or gender studies (which
I'd say are hardly taking over Russian programs in any case, though
there's a lot more than there used to be, thank the Goddess).  In
other words -- the participation of some Slavists in current
scholarly developments is not going to be a deterrent to students,
unless the students are going to take some magazine's opinion as a
guiding factor.

We all have a lot to learn from other people's experiences and strategies.

Best regards to everyone,

Sibelan


Sibelan Forrester
Swarthmore College

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