My ASL lecturer, on the other hand, is a dream employee. He wants to start a Deaf Studies program at my department. He told me from the start, “I understand that you are technically my boss. Do you need me to report to you about the steps I take to make Deaf Studies happen?”
I said, absolutely not. Go for it, do whatever you need, I’ll sign everything, just tell me how I can help.
Since then, I keep hearing that he’s constantly in meetings with the Dean, the Provost, the Vice-Chancellor, even the library services. I don’t need to manage the process, hand-hold, or even know about this. In short, the dude is me. He knows what he wants and goes for it. We’ll have our Deaf Studies program in no time.
The ASL lecturer is promising me a course on deaf culture. I’m going to take it as a student because how fascinating?
On my end, I’m bringing Swahili to campus in the Fall. This will be the third new language I’m adding to our department. We hadn’t added any languages for 15 years previously for reasons I don’t understand. My goal is to bring in Hebrew in 2025 so we can offer Hebrew and Arabic in alternate years, and then I’ll happily retire as department Chair.
Clarissa's Blog 
That’s fantastic about your ASL lecturer and the deaf studies minor. I read a book about deaf culture a few years back and there is some really interesting stuff going on there.
As far as adding and not adding new languages is concerned, have you had changes in your administration? My university successfully added Arabic and Korean in the past two decades, but attempts to get several other languages going failed due to low enrollments and lack of administrative support. We’ve had four deans over that period of time and one of them was just very blunt about saying that we offered too many languages, the others have been mixed in their support. The current dean only seems interested in funding things that are already large and growing, so I think adding a new language right now would be incredibly difficult for us. We have a decent range of languages with 14 currently taught, but I worry it could be a struggle to keep them all going in the coming years.
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We bring Fulbrighters to teach languages. This means that the university pays nothing and the administration has no say in what I do. You have to set this up once with the Fulbright program, and then it’s done forever. Yearly paperwork is minimal, and I say it as somebody who believes all paperwork is excessive.
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We had some Fulbright language teaching assistants in the past, but it’s hard for us to use them to launch a new language because their courses can’t be counted towards the general education requirement. To be eligible to count for general education, we have to be able to offer a full four semester sequence in the language and we have to commit to offering that sequence indefinitely. It’s hard to get more than six or seven students for a language when the course can’t be counted for the gen ed requirement and committing to offer it indefinitely means that we have to hire at least one person on a renewable lecturer line to teach it.
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Why do you need more than 6 students, though? We never get large enrollments in these courses but nobody says anything because the university isn’t paying for any of it. My Yoruba course this semester is running with 3 students but the person teaching it is so amazing and does a lot of important work for us otherwise.
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I was not directly involved with the Fulbright language TAs when we had them, but I heard that the dean at that time really didn’t like them. The dean supposedly told the people who were organizing the Fulbright language courses that even assigning an office and a classroom to someone teaching so few students was a waste of resources. I think we were also paying for them to have the grad student health insurance that wasn’t very much money, but it was an expense for the dean to criticize. That dean HATED everything that was small. She forced a bunch of small departments to merge and axed a whole bunch of smaller majors and graduate programs. And she would have happily merged and axed far more than she did if she had been able to do so. I think the two people who were organizing the Fulbright TAs just got tired of being targeted because of it and they saw no hope in growing interest in those new languages to the point that we could hire someone to teach them full time which had been a goal when they started.
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The obsession with size is definitely there and it’s so intense that it’s unhealthy. Our administration tells us that we need to offer more dual-credit courses even though we lose money on them.
Why do it in the midst of a severe budget crisis?
Because it will increase headcounts.
Why do we need to increase headcounts if it loses us money?
Because it’s evidence of growth.
But why do we need the kind of growth that’s on paper only and it loses us money?
Because growth is the whole point.
This is a literal transcription of a conversation I personally had with an administrator. To me, it sounds downright deranged. But that’s the ruling manner of thought.
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Yep. The “logic” and priorities of administrators is frequently baffling.
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“You have to set this up once with the Fulbright program, and then it’s done forever”
We had fulbright people for several years (one per year) and it was pretty great. Whatever they lacked in expertise they made up for in enthusiasm.
And then in May or so they claimed they were out of money and wanted the university to make an offer of what it could do…. at an institution of this size and the bureaucratic obstacles in place we might have managed something if they had given us more warning but there was no way to organize anything in two weeks.
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Wow, that’s terrible. I so don’t want it to happen here. I’m planning to introduce Hebrew and alternate it with Arabic. This will be so cool.
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“Wow, that’s terrible”
We were able to get some extra stuff on short notice but not nearly as much as Fulbright expected…
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