Modern Greek: A Small, Agile Team Player?

Modern Greek has evolved as a small, agile player in American colleges and universities since its emergence as a field of university study in the 1970s. It continues to do well in the seismically shifting landscape of a budget crisis in higher education that is forcing language and literature programs to cut "advanced offerings in the most commonly taught languages after Spanish, such as French, German, Italian, or Russian" (Feal 2011:5) or even to shut down despite growth in enrollment numbers ("MLA Language Enrollment Database, 1958–2009"). Bucking the trend of cuts, Modern Greek is a growing presence, with student enrollments in language classes remaining more or less steady in existing programs while new language programs (University of Wisconsin–Madison this year) and even tenure track positions (Portland State University will advertise a new position next year) keep coming into being.¹ Modern Greek has not suffered major blows, in large part because it is so small and agile.

In the United States, at least, Modern Greek never aspired to be anything but small. First, there was no good argument for big. Why Modern Greek should be taught at all has never been obvious to administrators. Teaching jobs in secondary education, job opportunities in Greece or the United States for students with undergraduate or graduate degrees, large numbers of speakers in the United States, strategic language—these practical arguments never fit Modern Greek. And while the emotional argument highlighting Greek's long written record and strong literary presence in the post–World War II era (two Nobel Prizes, one Lenin Prize) moved a few deans in the 1990s to hear out the request for Modern Greek instruction, it was the two-year language sequence taught by an adjunct professor or lecturer and overseen by a faculty specialist in another field that prevailed, in large part because administrators came to recognize this as a self-sustaining model.² Thus the justifying force was student demand adequate to sustain language instruction, in some cases with an added sense of the fundraising potential of this formula in the Greek American community. And so from the field's beginnings instructors in Modern Greek programs have been highly attentive to student interest while also aware of their links to a broader public.

The agility of American Modern Greek undergraduate programs derives from a keen awareness of institutional structures, with their conditional support for Modern Greek instruction. There was a time when departments such as Romance languages, History Mathematics and Statistics, and Chemistry, for example, which have dropped thirteen percent, ten percent, nine percent, and seven point three per cent respectively since 1971 in the percentage of colleges offering these programs, did not have to think defensively about institutional support, since they would never have anticipated their loss. Modern Greek did not share this sense of security. At every turn, it has had instructors of Modern Greek needing to anticipate the potential elimination of institutional support. Survival has for this reason required understanding institutional structures and working within them to create flexible academic units situated within evolving trends.

The strategic placement of Modern Greek has become a way of thinking and being. It happens on multiple levels, from language education to event planning to graduate supervision to course design. Undergraduate curriculum development is perhaps the most exemplary. Greek instructors in the United States know that a liberal arts education is the framework for undergraduate teaching outside professional and technical instruction. The liberal arts develop broad-based skills (foreign language, critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, writing), appreciation of diversity, and intellectual breadth (humanities, social sciences, natural science) while giving students the opportunity to pursue one or two subjects in greater depth. This structure has important ramifications for the development of Modern Greek programs in the United States. On the one hand, it does not support the creation of programs in Medieval and Modern Greek Philology following the European model, in which students are required to achieve a high level of competence—in too specialized a field—in the linguistic and literary study of Greek from the twelfth century to the present. On the other hand...