Feal
believes teaching is "a privilege"
UB faculty
member recognized by students, national colleagues from MLA
By DONNA
LONGENECKER
Reporter Assistant Editor
Rosemary
Feal is the quintessential erudite scholar, who still calls teaching
an "honor and a privilege." And after talking with her, it's unlikely
anyone would question the importance of studying modern languages and
obtaining a liberal arts education.
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FEAL |
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Professor
of Spanish and chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures,
Feal has earned the admiration of her students at UB and the respect
of her peers on a national level. She recently was selected to receive
the Student Association's Milton Plesur Excellence in Teaching Award.
Moreover,
she will take a leave of absence from UB this summer to assume the position
of executive director of the Modern Language Association, one of the
most eminent scholarly societies in the world.
Feal
will succeed long-time MLA executive director Phyllis Franklin, who
will retire after heading the organization for 27 years. While replacing
Franklin may seem daunting, Feal believes that pressure only generates
opportunity. "My first job is to appreciate and learn how the organization
runs and to find my role therethe senior staff is outstanding"
she says.
Feal's
active involvement with the MLA began in 1988 when she was appointed
to the association's delegate assembly. She later was elected to several
other positions, most recently to chair the association's Committee
on the Status of Women in the Profession. She was selected executive
director after a nationwide search.
The
MLA's membership is comprised of professors and graduate students in
the fields of modern languages and literatures, and is unique in its
comprehensive approach to providing scholars with extensive resources
to address and support nearly every aspect and stage of their careers.
The
MLA's bread and butter, says Feal, is the scholarly preservation of
texts; publication of the bibliography, which is the most essential
research tool in the field of modern languages, and production of the
MLA handbookconsidered to be the key guide for scholars and professional
writers, as well as for writers of term and research papers.
Equally
important, she adds, are the organization's numerous book publications,
publication of a wide variety of pedagogic materials, surveys of the
state of the profession, efforts to find ways to preserve cultural and
literary material, the translation of texts, organizing sessions at
the annual convention and running a job information service that connects
employers and job seekers.
Because
the MLA is the largest organization of scholars in the humanitieswith
about 33,000 members in 100 nationsit is a natural place, Feal
says, for issues of scholarship to be discussed and for progress to
be made on a variety of professional matters. One of her goals is to
see more of the knowledge and experiences of MLA members brought into
the public arena.
"I'm
very interested in the role of MLA members as public humanists, public
intellectuals, and as scholars and teachers who find ways to bring their
specialized knowledge to groups that don't necessarily have the same
specialized knowledge," says Feal. While scholars often are good at
communicating with one another, she says, they haven't always been as
effective at communicating in more general terms with the public at
large, which may be due, in part, to the increased specialization within
disciplines.
Feal
also echoes an ongoing concern in academia about the trend towards employing
adjunct professors and having fewer available tenure-track positions
on many college campuses.
"A
major concern (of MLA members) is the state of the job structure or
employment system, wherein new Ph.Ds seek primarily tenure-track positions
so they may carry on a research and teaching career in the way that
many of them have trained for and aspire to," she says.
"More
Ph.Ds are trained and get their degree than there are tenure-track jobs
available," she notes. "It's most acute in English and in some of the
foreign languages, such as German, which have diminished enrollments."
The MLA already has taken a proactive approach to the problem by developing
guidelines for the evaluation of doctoral programs, as well as getting
those in charge of graduate programs to take the initiative to tackle
the issue, she says.
Feal
believes strongly in the importance of a liberal arts education and
the significance of knowing a second language.
"Some
of the reasons for studying foreign languages include national security,
the preparedness of the nation to interact globally, but the other aspect
would be the study of the language," she says. "It's just a basic part
of a liberal arts educationa liberally educated person should
know about the history and the uses of his or her own language, and
the history and uses of at least one other language, the history of
the nation one lives in, the history of the nations with which one's
nation interact. A liberally educated person should know those thingsthey
should have exposure to the great cultural, historical traditions."
But
that argument, she notes, doesn't hold the same kind of weight that
it did in previous generations. In the United States, she says, it is
due in part to a positive change: the availability of higher education
to a larger sector of society. "It's no longer considered the finishing
school for the elite," Feal says. "It's now considered the right of
every person in the U.S. to aspire to as much higher education as they're
capable of and desire.
"So
what happens is that some of the cornerstones of the liberal arts education
have not stood up in the same wayit's kind of like a trade-off,"
she adds. Those cornerstones remain in many liberal arts institutionsincluding
UBbut a student might have to seek them out, she notes.
Another
issue that may be contributing to declining enrollments in foreign language
programs is that American students, and much of the rest of the world
due to the push towards globalization, recognize English as the "Lingua
Franca"the language of diplomacy and the language of the Internetand
the second language for most international students.
"What
they don't see or don't fully appreciate until they study a language
is the degree to which knowing another language will give them an advantage
in the communicative process, in national security issues they deal
with that they couldn't possibly have without it," says Feal.
Students
enrolled in UB's foreign language programs are taught to read and explicate
the linguistic and literary signs that they encounter and to understand
meaning in context and how that context variesan essential element
in the work of translation, says Feal.
For
example, students of Spanish will come to understand that "the context
of the word 'privacy' as a hallmark of the way we construct ourselves
in the U.S., both legally and socially, doesn't exist in Spanishwhich
is a more social culture in general," says Feal.