Claire Kramsch
Emerita Prof. of German and
Affiliate Prof. of Education
Founding past director of the BLC
As we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Berkeley Language Center in 1994, it is good to remember the geopolitical conditions that made a BLC possible, even desirable, at the time. While the big financial freeze of the early ‘90s prevented the Administration to give it a budget of its own and instead funded it by hitching it to the budget of the Language Lab, the BLC was right from the start heavily supported by the powerful International and Area Studies (IAS) Program and its eight Area Studies centers and institutes on campus. (1) Indeed when I arrived on campus, Albert Fishlow, the then Director of IAS at UC Berkeley, and his Executive director David Szanton, invited me to give professional development workshops to all language teachers on campus, which I did for a number of years. In turn, these language pedagogy workshops helped IAS secure funding from the International Foreign Language Education (IFLE) Title VI-Fulbright-Hays program of the U.S. Department of Education for its research in various areas of the globe. Why was the Department of Education so interested in the teaching of foreign languages?
Twenty years after the Sputnik scare of 1957 (2) and four years after the signing of the Helsinki Accords at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1975 (3), the United States’ position in the world had changed radically. Nuclear monopoly had given way to nuclear proliferation, and the United States were no longer the only major center of scientific and technological progress. It confronted a potent combination of social ideologies and national aspirations that had extensive consequences for America’s domestic well-being. At the end of the 1970’s, then President Carter ordered a thorough review of American education and of Foreign Language and International Studies education in particular. The Report of the President’s Commission “Strength through Wisdom” published in 1979 in the middle of the Cold War, was a bombshell.
“Nothing less is at issue than the nation’s security. At a time when the resurgent forces of nationalism and of ethnic and linguistic consciousness so directly affect global realities, the United States requires far more reliable capacities to communicate with its allies, analyze the behavior of potential adversaries, and earn the trust and the sympathies of the uncommitted. Yet, there is a widening gap between these needs and the American competence to understand and deal successfully with other peoples in a world of flux… .
In our schools and colleges as well as in our public media of communications, and in the everyday dialogue with our communities, the situation cries out for a better comprehension of our place and potential in a world that, though it still expects much from America, no longer takes American supremacy for granted. Nor, the Commission believes, do this country’s children and youths, and it is for them, and their understanding of their own society, that an international perspective is indispensable. Such a perspective is lacking in most educational programs now.” (Perkins 1979:457)
The Report ended with a detailed list of recommendations for all sectors of American education, in particular foreign language education. I remember well the shock of that report. It was quoted again and again in the press, at conferences, at faculty meetings. When I arrived on the UC Berkeley campus in 1990, the Berlin Wall had just fallen, the Cold War had ended, but American universities were still actively acting on the recommendations of the President’s Commission report. The American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) was launching what would be called “The proficiency movement” with its Oral Proficiency Interview tests, its National Standards of Foreign Language Proficiency, and its efforts to teach not for grammatical competence, but for communicative proficiency. The US Department of Education was funding undergraduate international studies and foreign language education programs, especially in languages of strategic interest to the United States like Japanese, Korean and Chinese. It was supporting National Resource Centers and Language Resource Centers at various universities such as U. of Maryland, U of Michigan, and Penn State University. It was granting fellowships for faculty to take seminars or do research abroad, and for students to pursue advanced language training in less commonly taught languages or to do doctoral research abroad.
In 1986, the eight Ivy League universities (including Stanford and M.I.T) with the support of the Andrew Mellon Foundation created a Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning to “enhance the quality of language study by attending to the professional development of their foreign language teaching faculty.” In the early ‘00s, the University of California would follow suit with its own Consortium for Language Learning and Teaching founded by Robert Blake for the 10 UC campuses, and of which the BLC would become a member. In 1992, the new president of Stanford, Gerhard Casper, a German political scientist, invited Timothy Light (Prof. of Chinese at Kalamazoo College), John Rassias (Prof. of French at Dartmouth College) and me (Prof. of German at UC Berkeley) to review all foreign language teaching at Stanford, including study abroad. After four days on and around campus, we recommended that Stanford create a Language Center to heighten the morale of its language teachers and to provide for their professional development. Back in Berkeley, the Dean of Letters and Science, Anthony Newcomb, a musicologist, proposed having one such center at UC Berkeley. After some discussion, the project got the approval of the foreign language departments, that saw an opportunity to professionalize their GSIs and help them get a job; and it was enthusiastically endorsed by the International and Area Studies Centers who were keen on securing their research grants from Washington. Thus was born a Language Center that had all the hallmarks of individual creativity, political engagement and youthful idealism that characterized many such initiatives at a public university like Berkeley.
Looking back, it is clear that the explicit mission of the BLC went beyond just improving language teaching methodology on campus. Funded in large part by the IFLE Title VI Office of the US Department of Education, the BLC shared the overall purpose of that Office which was to “prepare US students, teachers, and citizens to address global challenges by fostering a deeper understanding of languages, cultures, places, and peoples” (IFLE website). The BLC thus had an intellectual mandate to acquaint foreign language teachers and students with those global challenges and with research done in Applied Language Studies around the world (called alternately Applied Linguistics in the English-speaking world, didactique des langues et des cultures in the French-speaking and Sprachlehrforschung in the German-speaking world). Over the last thirty years, the BLC lecture series, its fellowship programs for lecturers and GSIs, its undergraduate research opportunities have been an attempt to raise the awareness on campus of the role that language plays in global real-world issues such as: immigration and heritage language use, intercultural, multilingual and multimodal communication, bi- and multilingual identities, and the use of language learning technologies.
Today, the current dismantlement of the Department of Education under the Trump administration is in sad contrast with those earlier times. Rather than bolster American universities efforts to give young people an “international perspective” (Perkins 1979), it is turning them inward to “put America first”. As O’Rourke writes in the New York Times: “The Trump administration’s orders arrive at a precarious moment in America – a moment of transformative technologies, escalating climate crises and global instability. It’s a moment that demands more from universities, not less” (March16, 2025). Indeed, the “Sputnik moment” of October 1957 is being matched by “the GPT moment” of November 2022, in which U.S. youngsters need to understand not only A.I technology but also the global political context in which this technology is being used. As in the sixties, universities today need support not just for engineering and military projects, but also for projects in the social sciences, humanities and the arts that support global diplomacy. Under the wise leadership of Kimberly Vinall and Emily Hellmich, the Berkeley Language Center must continue to play its role in meeting this global challenge.
Happy birthday!
Notes
1) In a speech to the Academic Senate inaugurating the creation of the Institute for International Studies in December of 1955, then-Chancellor Clark Kerr said:
“The establishment of the Institute of International Studies (IIS) marks a step forward in the University's program of research and advancement of human knowledge in a field which has become increasingly important as the United States has assumed a position of world leadership. The Institute of International Studies provides a focal point essential to the University's proper discharge of its share of the national responsibility in this area.”
At its founding, IIS became the umbrella for a number of existing campus programs, and it shared organizational and financial resources with faculty members from a wide array of departments to build robust area studies programs, many of which then blossomed into institutes of their own. Here are the eight institutes that were founded between 1956 and 1964 and that supported the BLC in its first two decades: Center for Latin American Studies. Center for South Asian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies, Center for Slavic and European Studies, Committee for African Studies, Center for Southeast Asia Studies, Committee for Middle Eastern Studies, Center for Japanese and Korean Studies.
2) Sputnik was the name of the first artificial Earth satellite launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957 as part of the Soviet space program. This technological feat spread a wave of consternation across the U.S. and a fear that America was losing the arms race to the Soviet Union.
3) The Helsinki Final Act, also known as Helsinki Accords, was the document signed at the closing meeting of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in Helsinki, Finland, between 30 July and 1 August 1975, following two years of negotiations. All then-existing European countries as well as the United States and Canada (altogether 35 participating states), signed the Final Act in an attempt to improve the détente between the East and the West.
References
O’Rourke, Meghan. (2025). We’ll miss universities when they’re gone. New York Times, March 16 SR6
Perkins, James A. (1979) Report of the President’s Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies. Foreign Language Annals 12:6, 457-464.