The Case for Foreign Languages as a Discipline

The study of foreign languages, literatures, and linguistics is a distinct dis cipline with a distinct humanist mission in American education. To date, however, our disciplinary role has been largely obscured by a focus on the surface issues rather than the first principles that would allow us to rectify our mission within our institutions and to rightsize our programs. The ADFL seminars of recent years, exemplified by Dorothy James's article Bypassing the Traditional Leadership: Who's Minding the Store? and the twenty-three published responses to that article in subsequent issues of the ADFL Bulletin, indicate widespread awareness of our profession's need to articulate and implement a coherent vision of the discipline as realized in foreign language departments. That we can no longer afford to ignore this issue is testified to by the resonance occasioned by James's argument. Simply stated, James illustrated that the emperor has no clothes, that foreign language departments lack visible academic and fiscal accountabil ity. By privileging scholars who teach upper-division and graduate courses in foreign languages, literatures, linguistics, and culture, departments may no longer reach the needs as well as the numbers of students essential for maintaining programs in the twenty-first century. To quote James: