One thing nobody seems to notice, in hifalutin discussion of hispanism, is that the whole enterprise is based on the popularity of Spanish. In comparison, just about every other language is "lesser taught." I'm sure French as a field also depends on enrollments in French classes at the lower level, but Spanish it the most robust.
For example, the existence of a PhD program can only be justified if people are getting jobs. There are more jobs in Spanish than in other languages because there are more students studying Spanish.
We could just have programs to train language teachers, and then send them to other colleges to teach language, but instead we have PhD's in literature and culture. I suppose it's because the Spanish major still exists, so someone who is only a language teacher cannot teach all the rest of it. But students are mostly interested in language for its own sake. They are interested in the culture, but often in a vaguely defined way.
One reason why this isn't discussed in discussions of hispanism is that it is less evident from the Ivy league perspective, where there are smaller departments than in large flagship public university like mine.
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This is actally discussed, if not enough, and fancy people discuss it, and there are PhD programs at IN and IL that address it
Also: here at least, lower division enrollment in Spanish funds advanced programs in more fields than just Spanish
That's another wrinkle. Department with more than one language. Our Spanish subsidizes our very small Portuguese program.
At LSU, the other languages are said to support the only graduate program in the department, Spanish. (French and Italian are their own department -- it's French and Italian, with money, and Foreign Languages, without much.) I wonder if it's true, though -- Spanish has so many sections.
Here, Spanish probably supports programs beyond just French and other languages. All the money goes to the college, so who knows who gets it. But we *definitely* have designated dollars from Spanish to cover the salary of one tenured faculty member in French: the 2d language acquisition person. We, in Spanish, need such a person but are not allowed to have one.
...but I am still reeling from having read A. Castro's explanation of why the now much maligned philological model for the curriculum needed to be implemented in 1920. It has put me at peace with everything somehow.
...re the language teaching: I think some people, including Sarah Lawrence, MIT, and U of Denver have revamped curricula to get rid of the onerousness of this phil. model but I am amazed at how much resistance there is to doing something else. And you know, there is still huge resistance to any kind of communicative language teaching--I have a section of Spanish 3 right now and it is the first time most of them have ever been asked to speak, or to write an original sentence, or to retell a short reading in their own words. Now it's all grammar-translation and multiple choice, you "read" and then "recognize" a correct answer. Until they get to me and your KU online program for Spanish 4, of course, but I have bad evaluations and don't get raises, etc., because I make students do "crazy" things, so.
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