On the Borders and Bridges of Portuguese Programs (Including those with Spanish Programs)

. . . stony limits cannot hold love out . . .

—Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.67

The title of this feature is not at all accidental. It is my goal to share these thoughts not only with colleagues in my field, but also with colleagues in Spanish—the field closest to Portuguese and that other side of our linguistic, geographic, and political borders.

I do want to make a caveat, for the sake of honesty. Here, I will be expressing my viewpoints since most of my research agenda is focused on literary and cultural production, and not so much on program coordination and development. However, this caveat is neither feigned modesty nor a preliminary excuse for the plausible shortcomings of my message. Indeed, I chose this topic since a very large proportion of Portuguese instructors—often the “token” Portuguese instructor in our departments—juggle our research and teaching with all the efforts of program coordination, so as to make sure that a program is there to begin with. In the words of Margo Milleret (2016), “all Portuguese instruction in higher education in the United States, no matter where one teaches or how many classes one teaches, has at its core the important task of program development.” Indeed, Milleret notes, “there is no final point to the job of program development. There are landmarks along the way, but those who teach Portuguese in the US are always program developers” (11).

With this in mind, my points of view stem from that very condition that is typical to most of us, Portuguese teachers and professors, which is the fact that we accumulate our teaching and research with program development. They also reflect my experiences both as a teacher of Portuguese for over twenty years now and as a professor of Portuguese as a foreign language in the United States for the last fifteen years, as well as a Portuguese program coordinator in two different institutions over the course of the last decade (University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee [UW–Milwaukee] and San Diego State University [SDSU]).

Before I go much further, though, I would like to address some of the data and conclusions that were released in June 2019 in the Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Summer 2016 and Fall 2016: Final Report, written by Dennis Looney and Natalia Lusin, and published by the Modern Language Association (MLA). The reason I am starting here is not to make us all feel disheartened, but rather to emphasize the point that we need to reinvent ourselves within the worlds of languages other than English and in Spanish and Portuguese. We should consider some of the excellent possibilities ahead of us—through creativity and innovation. According to the report, “Total enrollments (undergraduate and graduate) in languages other than English dropped by 9.2% between fall 2013 and fall 2016.” On the other hand, “The total number of language programs offered in fall 2016 was down by [a staggering] 651, or 5.3%, since 2013, whereas between 2009 and 2013 the number of offered programs declined by one” (Looney and Lusin 2019, Summary page). Furthermore, “The 2013 MLA census showed overall enrollments falling by 6.7% . . . and . . . The 9.2% decline for fall 2016 clarifies” that the tendency of falling numbers continued (21).

The report highlights that Portuguese is part of the group of “languages [that] had close to half their programs reporting stable or increased enrollments: Portuguese (40.5%)” (Looney and Lusin 2019, Summary page). Not quite a case of a half-full or half-empty glass, undeniably this means that a considerable majority of our programs (59.5%) indeed reported a decrease in enrollments. And, as a matter of fact, in proportion, Portuguese sustained the blow better than Spanish, since 63.7% of Spanish programs actually reported a reduction in numbers (86).

According to the report, Fall 2016 marked the first time in decades that Portuguese enrollments lowered, taking us back to the numbers in the early 2000s. At the graduate level, between 2013 and 2016, 49% of Portuguese programs reported a...