Are universities, and their language departments, now promoting new forms of linguistic indifference?

As previous sections of this forum illustrate, ostensibly multilingual practices and discourses are not immune to linguistic indifference. Nor does—in any domain whatsoever—a mere affirmative pivot to multiplicity solve the problem of indifference. The very ecologies of our university departments and programs, and the affordances and constraints that shape our work within them, have been contoured by pressures that often encourage linguistic indifference. In light of the institutional imperatives that might tacitly endorse such a posture, this contribution considers how German studies programs in Canada and the United States have responded to neoliberal paradigm shifts in higher education since the 1990s, where tallying “butts in seats” has been treated as the primary form of accountability. Demands to demonstrate high enrollments have led to the practice of teaching Germanistik in translation in English-speaking post-secondary institutions (Gilman; Hohendahl). Taking my home department at the University of British Columbia as an example, I argue that this practice of prioritizing courses taught in English has not been shown to foster increased interest in German studies as a major or minor area of study, even where such an Anglophone emphasis does bolster the cumulative student credit hours spent in individual courses. Meanwhile, though, the strategy has led to an inadvertent promotion of monolingual ideologies and English-language hegemony since the translatedness and translingual nature of texts and discourses are rarely centered in courses that are heralded as broadly accessible. Modern language programs have argued for decades that the teaching and learning of additional languages add to higher education the kind of value that otherwise cannot be achieved (Byrnes; Maxim; Pfeiffer). Yet we seem to be undermining those arguments when teaching our discipline monolingually in English. A German course taught in English cannot guide socio-, inter-, cross-, and transcultural literacy—the ability to see oneself through the cultural lens of others and through the cultural lens of another language—the way it does if the texts under consideration are read in the original German. Courses taught in translation do not afford adequate insights into how the language(s) we speak, hear, breathe, and live are intimately interwoven with how we experience the world, how we make sense of it, and how those language(s), in tandem with other sociocultural, socio-cognitive, and emotional aspects acquired with and mediated through those same language(s), condition us in our perceptions, choices, values and beliefs (Modern Language Association; Kramsch, Language). These experiential dimensions of transcultural and translingual learning (Kramsch, “Translingual”) go missing when the difference is only ever positioned as an object of study and never as a practical occasion to inhabit the world otherwise. Of course, students can be instructed or informed that all humans have the necessary anatomical equipment to see the color blue, but the word and concept of blue are required to actually see it. And yet, this descriptive approach to multilingualism can never approximate the experience of seeing blue for the first or the thousandth time. A parallel case can be made that grasping new concepts for the first time, through the ways they are conveyed in a new language or other semiotic system, is a powerful experience that affords us insights into the ways that language shapes who we are. At the same time, that experience opens up not just new worlds—literature taught in English does so as well, after all— but new ways of thinking-for-speaking, speaking-for-thinking, speaking-for-being (Slobin). In tandem with studying German cinema, literature, and thought as historical and cultural avatars, these multilingual insights translate into reflection on our own values and beliefs, seeking to respect and empathize with those of others, opening our minds to the plurality of languages, to the plurality of being.

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