Globalizing World Threatens to Change Language School

There has been a long-standing myth at the college: in halcyon summer days on an idyllic campus, chatter in Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, Spanish twirl in the open air like dandelion seeds dance across campus. Students fill the campus with passion and curiosity for a language, entering a new world but still remembering an old-aged rumor. In the corner of their eyes, they are on the lookout for tall men in black shades, trailing behind their combat boots, suspicious that they might disappear into revolving bookshelves in Axinn—yes, they are on the staking out the mythical FBI and CIA recruiters.

“It is true that the CIA and FBI have recruited at Middlebury,” Associate Director of Career Services Tim Mosehauer said. “They are interested in students for their language skills, including Arabic, Russian and Chinese — what you would call critical languages.”

“There is no cloak-and-dagger story here,” Vice President for Language Schools Michael Geisler said. “No special opportunity courses,” where agents are stowed away secretly in dark underground classrooms.

Dispelling the myth takes away the James Bond dramatizations. Yet mystery and intrigue remain in the question this debunked rumor left behind: what is it about learning a second language that makes a student so worthy?

“It is important for anyone working in a global society to acquire intensive-immersion linguistic and area studies skills,” Geisler said. “We don’t teach language. We teach culture broadly with classes on linguistics, media studies, art, history, the social system, the political system.

“The real connections you need to make as a journalist, government employee or business [partner] are connections that can’t be made in English or university classroom,” Geisler said. “It’s in the pubs.”

The Middlebury Summer Language schools has a long history of attracting students who come to learn a language having caught a fever for a culture from a song or historic event. But there has been a quiet but noticeable shift in the kind of students that enroll in the Middlebury Language Schools.

“Traditionally, language school has served students who are curious about a culture—we still have those students and they may be the majority,” Geisler said. “But a growing and strong minority of people come to language school with a more utilitarian approach, interested in adding business and journalism skills. People realize they need cultural and language skills in an economic global society.”

Applications surged in recent years, namely in the critical languages. The increased demand comes as the Language Schools are adjusting to predict how many more spaces they should add to the language schools of high interest and determine the faculty they will hire to teach additional courses to accommodate increased enrollment, while keeping the student-teacher ratio low.

Just in the past five years, the Hebrew School doubled its size of enrollment, according to School of Hebrew Coordinator Tania Bolduc. In 2013, the language school broke the record for most students ever enrolled with 1,533 students.

“For schools like Portuguese that enrolled beyond projections, we managed our yield by particular demands, and supplemented our offerings with additional faculty and courses,” Assistant Dean of Middlebury College Language Schools Elizabeth Karnes Keefe said. “The director of the school would in such a case expand the scope and offerings of the school to accommodate particular levels and academic interests.”

The changing marketplace and diversifying economy hastens the demand for spaces at foreign language education institutions.

“I see linguistics, language and ESL not in the field of teaching, but in the world of business,” Chinese School Coordinator Anna Sun said. “I guess it’s a good trend. I have two kids who graduated from the liberal arts colleges and knowing a second language gives them grounding and real life application. My son stepped into the job market as a religion major but was able to get a career as a union organizer (because of a second language).”

It used to be the case that multi-lingual competency wasn’t all about material payoff. It wasn’t even about speaking. It was about transporting yourself into the mind of a nation. It is a mosaic of history and culture on a language that, the more you build your vocabulary and idioms, forms a running, constantly expanding world.

But the passion-over-payoff trope is dying. Students, like it or not, will enter a marketplace, forced to compete against other graduates emerging out of the talent pool, or they fail to get a job.

But for some language school officials, there is no division between the students who come to learn a language for professional reasons and those who come for personal reasons. Their reaction: so what if you do turn to a language because of its emerging economy or political conflicts?

“Their professional reasons are resultants of personal reasons,” Sun said. “They are one in the same, if not just more practical.”

“When talking about why students come to the Language Schools, you can’t necessarily separate personal and professional goals,” Keefe added. Even if you are a student who wants to learn Chinese in order to gain entry into the financial community in Beijing, for example, “you also want to develop personal relationships and cultivate language skills along with cultural understanding.”

Of course, the Language School depends on students who come for professional reasons. The very fact that the job market is shifting in favor of graduates with language skills is what prompted the steady rise in applicants.

While the federal government and other universities funnel money to launch programs for the day’s critical languages, in the past, it was Japanese; now Arabic and Chinese, language schools at Middlebury, according to Geisler, have long established these programs before it became a popular language. When created, “these languages are here to stay,” he said.

But the fact that language school officials are jumping in with talk of expanding the studies to include Korean, Farsi and Swahili indicates that the Language Schools is itself changing. The brand of the school is changing with the pace of its students toward marketable languages: Swahili—a language with growing popularity in the west, Farsi—a language in high demand by federal agencies, and Korean—a language with South Korea’s economy on the rise and culture breaking into Western markets.

The growing trend of students coming to the Middlebury Language Schools to become marketable, in turn, leave that spirit with the administration, now interested in expanding its languages to ones that appeal to students with professional purpose.

Whether good or bad, the trend exists and carries with it the drastic potential to change the philosophy of education not just in language schools but educational institutions across the board: With the emphasis on professional outcomes, might we run the risk of teaching students to put a premium on money over pursuing their ideals? Or can passion and profession really be inseparable?

Perhaps, it is not enough anymore to do something simply for the love of it. Most would like to think that in an increasingly specializing setting, there is still be a place in the world where learning something gave one a fever, where learning is not a means to something but an end to itself. But maybe, for a student in a globalizing age, the follow-your-passions orthodoxy, is now something of the past.