Apologia No More: On Strong Foundations and the Future of Hispanism

By 2060, the United States population will be nearly 30% Hispanic, making Hispanism vital to students' engagement with the full breadth of their own societal fabric (Colby and Ortman 2015: 9). To replace current "reductionist" valuations of foreign language (FL) study as the depositor of career-enhancing skills, we argue for a four-year curricular vision focusing on the development of translingual and transcultural competence, and for a clearer articulation of the value of our work as teachers and scholars of Spanish. We project a future that replaces reductionist symptoms of a broader crisis in higher education with a model that makes our work central to solving that crisis.