In Praise of Language Learning
It is easy to be depressed by recent news from the College, especially as I have been associated with Dartmouth for 50 years. Perhaps it is time to celebrate one of Dartmouth’s great achievements: the language requirement and the unparalleled quality of language instruction. Knowing other languages, like knowing music, enables one to think differently about the world and human experience. How shameful it is that neither Trump, Clinton nor Sanders speak a second language, although it rumored that Sanders knows some Yiddish. During my years on the faculty, I took Spanish and Russian introductory courses along with the undergraduates. It made my life richer.
-Jon Appleton, Arthur R. Virgin Professor of Music, Emeritus
Less Primacy, More Creativity
I want to express my admiration for Carter Brace’s fair and thorough reporting on the controversy over professor Aimee Bahng’s tenure denial in his May 19 article, “Students and faculty react to Bahng’s denial of tenure.” However, I also want to correct one of my quoted statements in the piece. In our discussion, I referred to Bahng’s involvement in an anonymously authored book, calling her one of the “primary authors” of that text. While I did not identify the publication by its title, Brace, doing his job as an investigative reporter, did name it as “Speculate This!” I wanted to correct the impression my poor choice of words gave and note that Bahng does not claim to be the primary author of this book, but rather stands behind the ethical stakes of the project by insisting on the collectivity of its authorship by uncertain commons.
One of the many troubling outcomes of Bahng’s denial is that those of us who wish to defend her against claims that she was “not productive enough” have found ourselves capitulating to the very logics this book attempts to unsettle. Upon reflection, I realize that I resorted to the language of primacy in an attempt to assert the value of her uncredited labor. In a system that prizes primacy over creativity, risk and experimentation, one can lose sight of those very values. In part, Speculate This! argues against the pressures we all feel to quantify our value, to game the systems by which that value is calculated and to place that calculation ahead of scholarly integrity. We need a system of evaluation that takes a more qualitative approach to the value of our work, our teaching and our contributions to the Dartmouth community.
We should not be put in a situation in which we are forced to trade our ethical commitment to critiquing the values of speculative capitalism for tenure. Sadly, not only has Bahng’s anonymity been breached in our efforts to rally her cause, but perhaps just as upsetting, I succumbed to the very terms of quantification that her work decries. This is but one of the many insights I have gleaned from her work, both on the page and in the classroom — and it is why I stand so firmly in my defense of her value and the merits of her case. Just as the collective of uncertain commons challenges us to embrace uncertainty, change and meaningful diversity, I too am embracing “creative speculation” in fighting for an alternative future at Dartmouth.
-Mary K. Coffey, Art History professor and art history department chair
