(a fairly necessary) INTRODUCTION – THE STORY OF SPANISH & PORTUGUESE AT BYU
The Department of Spanish and Portuguese first saw the light of day in June of 1967, created from the large Department of Languages in the College of Humanities. Yet foreign languages (German, Latin) had been taught since the creation of Brigham Young Academy in 1876; the first Spanish classes were taught in 1883/1884. The first Portuguese class was offered by Gerrit de Jong, in 1942.
I have used many sources to complete the story of Spanish and Portuguese at Brigham Young University. In 1972 an emeritus professor of French, Harold W. Lee, wrote a “History of the Department of Languages” at BYU. His brief account deals with foreign language teaching from 1876 to the early 1970s. A slightly abbreviated version of Lee’s history is available in Bruce B. Clark’s “The BYU College of Humanities: 1965 – 1981. The First Sixteen Years.” I have used a few bits of this fine, detailed, three- volume history which deal with the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. I have read and used the papers and history of Gerrit de Jong. The University Archives have provided curriculum vitae files of all faculty to 1989. In 1990 chair Merlin Forster asked emeritus professor L. Sid Shreeve to complete a history of the department. Sid accumulated hundreds of pages of information and interviews from retired and current faculty members but was not able to complete the anticipated history. I have used some of the documents he gathered to write the present history. Further, since the creation of the department, the secretaries have kept a very detailed annual statistical and historical report. I have read all of these 45 binders of week-by week departmental dealings. These have been invaluable in creating the present narrative. I have read the first M.A. thesis presented to the department as well as Darrel Taylor’s Ph.D. dissertation, gone through old BYU year books, spent considerable time in the picture archives of Special Collections. Most of these source documents are now available in the office of the Department, on a shelf titled “Departmental History.” Cherilee Beus Devore has kept important historical information in various files that have been extremely valuable in creating this history.
I have not wanted to place documents and letters into an appendix, fearing (knowing?) that they would likely be forgotten or at least ignored. Rather, I have placed a few such items right in the text. Further, I have used frequent charts and tables that I have created because they summarize much information in such short compass. You may say, “Too many charts.” I respond with, “Better a summary chart than a never-ending narrative.” I hope you’ll read them and not skip over them. It may take you a few minutes to look through these charts – it has taken me many hours, sometimes several days or weeks, to compile them. There are quite a few photos of faculty, some of them rather staid, yearbook-type pictures. I would have preferred more “action” shots, but this is all I could find. Lo siento.
You will note that I have concentrated on the earlier rather than the “later” years of the department. This is purposeful – I have wanted to show our roots, the patriarchs from whom we descend, the sources from which we spring, the early traditions that created who we are today. In researching and writing this history I have tried to be as objective as possible. But this will surely be an “objectively biased” story of our department. I have enjoyed teaching in the department too much to simply be coolly or coldly objective. Further, point of view is a problem; we teach about this in our classes. At first I tried to make the history read as if there were no visible narrator, but that became impossible, so I occasionally insert an “I” or a “We”, often to avoid too much passive voice.
Besides these pages of our history I have conducted and filmed oral interviews with ten of our retired faculty; these taped interviews will be part of the departmental history, available in the office.
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Early on I faced a problem of audience. For whom was I creating this history? The faculty? Our spouses? Our students? The dean or a vice president? An “implied reader”? In the process of researching and writing I soon felt the need to emphasize our unique legacy, a history that shows the present how the past has formed us. History as legacy. I hope that as you read you will see what the department has done, and ask yourself, “How are we doing now? What can we do better? What can we ‘use’ from the past?”
There are surely typos, misspellings and errors. Forgive them (“Of you it is required. . . “). I am also sure that there will be a few dates that are not one hundred percent accurate. I have really tried very hard to check and re-check dates, but there will still be a few incorrect dates. Please advise me if I have messed up one (or more) of your favorite dates. If your picture does not appear, forgive me – I have scoured departmental files and did not find exciting pictures of you and your favorite activities. If there is an error in the details in this history, there is none in the intent. Please help me correct any such errors.
Jorge Luis Borges once noted that “A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter – if not [just] a paragraph or a [single] name – in the history of philosophy.” As I have researched and written this departmental history I have kept Borges’s sad but true reductionist concept in mind – the quote above is preceded by: “There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless.” Well, I hope not.
As all of us have lived, or will live our forty or more years in the department. We have showed up morning, made assignments, corrected quizzes and tests, lived our language every day, and deeply enjoyed our students and colleagues each semester and term. But at some point, someone decides to summarize, make a lot of charts, condense, and hence delimit, those minute by minute, and day by too- fast-moving days into a single volume. Such a work obviously distorts the broad reality of each individual; I hope that the condensed result is not an insult, and at least captures the best of our humanity. I have included a few pictures, of activities, faculty, and students. But I have not tried to make this a yearbook with pictures of every faculty or staff
I hope that this story is not too lengthy or detailed to enjoy. I have attempted to capture the people and events that have made us such a unique and dynamic department. I have enjoyed the writing; I hope you will too.
Ted Lyon Oct, 2013
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INDEX
Beginnings …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 1 Founding Fathers ……………………………………………………………………………………………………… 5 James L. Barker (5) Benjamin Franklin Cummings (7) Gerrit de Jong (8) A Student-Centered Department ………………………………………………………………………………. 12 A New Generation of Founding Fathers .…………………………………………………………………… 18 H. Darrel Taylor (18) Lee B. Valentine (20) Ernest J. Wilkins (22) Growing into Our Own Department …………………………………………………………………………… 23 Our Students ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 28 Ph.D. program (28) M.A. degrees (29) Our undergraduates (32) An Amazing Faculty ……………………………………………………………………………………………………… 36 Some Church Service ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 40 Extending BYU Beyond BYU ………………………………………………………………………………………….. 41 Visiting Lecturers (41) Visiting Professors (44) Mini Courses (45) Studying Abroad …………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 48 Dramatic Presentations ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 52 Some Faculty Recognition …………………………………………………………………………………………….. 54 “Texting” ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 56 Communications …………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 58 “No problema” ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 60 Area Studies ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 63 Goodness Greatness …………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 65 Workshops, Conferences, Exhibits ………………………………………………………………………………… 69 Fun(ny) Faculty ‘Fotos’ …………………………………………………………………………………………………… 72 Some Departmental ‘Homes’………………………………………………………………………………………… 77 A Tentative Ending …………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 78
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CHARTS, LISTS, DOCUMENTS
Page number Title, description
3 sample pages, first text used at BYA, 1884 6 Spanish Phonetic Manual, 1944, James L. Barker 10 Semester Load Report, Gerrit de Jong 11 Chairmen, Department of Modern and Classical Languages 12 Early M.A. Degrees 22 Letter of calling and creation of FLI (LTM, MTC) 25 Full-time faculty, Spanish & Portuguese, 1967 26 All Department Chairs, Spanish & Portuguese, 1967 to present 27 Departmental FTEs – 1967 to present 28 All Ph.D. degrees granted, 1970 -1980 30 All M.A. degrees, by area of emphasis 30 Selected M.A. recipients 31 Faculty-nominated M.A. recipients 36 All faculty, by year of hire 37 All faculty, alphabetical order 38 Advanced degrees of current faculty 41 Mission presidents 42 Off-campus visitors, lecturers 44 Visiting professors 45 Mini-courses 49 Study abroad programs, by country 52 Dramatic presentations 55 Faculty recognition 59 Sample faculty meeting agenda, 1979 64 Coordinators, Latin American Studies
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THE STORY OF SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE AT BYU
Present-day Utah Valley was once part of Spain! Actually New Spain, but still, Spain. Really! And later it was Mexico, and not just as “our nearest neighbor,” but truly, Mexico. One valley, two Spanish- speaking countries, all before the Mormon pioneers even dreamed of a home in the valley.
With the help of Indian guides, Spanish priests Francisco Silvestre Vélez de Escalante and Francisco Atanasio Domínguez (obviously Francisco was a good name if you wanted to explore and become famous; witness Pizarro, Coronado, the current Pope, and others) departed from Albuquerque and made their way to the Valle de Nuestra Señora de la Merced de los Timpanogotzis – in short, Utah Valley. Arriving in September, 1776, they affirmed it as a newly-explored Spanish possession, and promised to return the following year to establish a full mission, similar to the California missions on the west coast. Their plans were frustrated by bureaucratic delay, but had they returned with a full-fledged mission, Utah would have been speaking Spanish when the Mormons arrived. As it turned out, a vigorous trade route was established. The 1776 “discovery” established a regular and well-trodden route, ending in Utah Valley, where knives, guns, and ammunitions were bartered with the Numic- speaking Utes, the “come pescado” people, in return for slaves, pelts and dried fish. As a frontier settlement, Utah Valley became a dual-language trading center and Spanish was the language of commerce. In the 1820s, when Mexico achieved independence from Spain, its vaguely defined northern territories continued trafficking in slaves and arms on the Yuta Trail, always in the Spanish language of the Mexican traders. After the brief Mexican-American war (1846–1848), the Treaty of Guadalupe- Hidalgo deeded all the northern Mexican lands to the United States, and Spanish ceased being dominant, although many Indians had learned enough to continue exchanging their goods with the opportunistic Mexicans who frequented the valley for several years.
Shortly after his arrival to Spanish Territory in 1847 Brigham Young recognized that there was a large population of natives in Utah Valley and instructed his faithful followers to settle elsewhere, so as to “not crowd upon the Utes” (his words) in prosperous Utah Valley, nor usurp their lands and livelihood. But a “more rebellious part” (3 Nephi 10:12) of the Saints came anyway and by 1849 had built some homes, established a fort and a lucrative fishing industry on the lake and river. Two of the new residents, Dimmick B. Huntington and George Washington Bean, rapidly learned the native language, and soon became the Church’s official interpreters, as the Saints settled Utah and other mountain valleys. Hence, very early on, Provo became known as the center for language learning and interpretation for the entire Church. Frequent conflicts resulted with the native Utes and Huntington and Bean became the recognized language experts and negotiators, with Provo as their home base.
Brigham Young, in his role as Territorial Superintendent of Indian Affairs, tried to limit the slave trade in Utah, wherein Utes raided neighboring tribes and carried off their women and children to sell to the Mexicans. This human trafficking in Utah Valley had been practiced since 1776 and was desired by both parties, Mexicans and Utes. During the 1850s Mexicans continued to visit Utah Valley, speaking their language and plying their trade. Young issued a proclamation instructing community leaders in Utah Valley to arrest “every strolling Mexican party and those associating with them.” This and other early documents often use the term “strolling Mexicans,” to indicate that all Mexicans were up to no good in the territory and should be viewed with suspicion, even arrest. Their language and culture was soon held in disdain and mistrust by the Mormon settlers.
As early as 1837 the LDS Church had sent missionaries to England; missionaries soon began preaching in several other European countries in the late 1840s and early 50s, laboring in Germany,
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Denmark, France and Italy, but none ventured to Portugal or Spain. During the 1840s Joseph Smith and Brigham Young also sent missionaries to the islands of the Pacific, to India, to Jamaica, but none went to Spanish-speaking countries. Finally, in 1851 Apostle Parley P. Pratt, his pregnant wife, and missionary companion Rufus Allen boarded a dirty freighter, spent two trying months on the ocean, devoting themselves to learning Spanish during the voyage. He wrote to his family at home, affirming that “We study Spanish every day. It is a beautiful language, and wonderfully adapted to the simplicity of the Lamanites.” (Autobiography, p. 388). They arrived in Valparaíso, Chile in November, 1851, the beginning of summer. Pratt was sure that he was now in the exact promised land where Lehi and Nephi had landed about 589 BC, and hence felt a divine and prophetic assurance that he would be preaching in a spot sacred to the descendants of Book of Mormon patriarchs. Pratt tried very hard to master Spanish but we have no record of this fiery missionary ever preaching a sermon in that language in Chile. He became discouraged by the political turmoil in Chile and other Latin American countries he was reading about. He associated mainly with British Protestants, and had very little communication with native Chileans. After three months, during which the couple’s new-born son Omner had died and been buried (in the Cementerio de Disidentes, in Valparaíso) Pratt returned to San Francisco, with a negative report about the future of missionary work among Spanish-speakers. Yet he continued to study the language once he was back in Utah territory, often passing through Provo. Perhaps his greatest legacy to the Spanish-speaking world is that a son (Helaman) and grandson (Ray Lucero) learned the language very well and became loved and respected leaders of the LDS Church in the U.S. and Mexico.
The first Spanish-speaking missionaries to Mexico began their service in 1875, but only after a surprise Spanish convert, Melitón Trejo, with assistance from Daniel W. Jones had already translated selections from the Book of Mormon into Spanish and urged the opening of Mexico. The first missionaries to serve in a Portuguese-speaking country were called to Brazil in 1927 but did not speak much Portuguese – they taught in German and sought converts among the immigrants from that country. In the 1930s a few missionaries in Brazil learned Portuguese but it wasn’t until the end of World War II that the LDS Church began sending large numbers of Portuguese-speaking missionaries to that country.
Just a year after LDS missionaries were sent to Mexico, Brigham Young called German-born Karl G. Maeser to establish the Brigham Young Academy in Provo; Young admonished Maeser to teach even the multiplication tables by the Spirit – surely the same charge applied to foreign languages. Maeser was not only the first principal, but also its foreign language teacher. Among the first classes offered in 1876, he quite logically taught German. The next year he taught a Latin course, added Greek in 1880, and French in 1882. Maeser, with his training in the Classics, taught all four languages. During the school year 1883-84 the Academy offered the first basic Spanish class, taught by Mexican convert Ferdinand (Fernando) A. Lara. Lara was from the tiny town of Atluatla (in the State of Mexico) and was among the first seven or eight converts in that country. He had accompanied Apostle Moses Thatcher to Utah in 1881 (largely on horseback) and took up residence in Provo, likely because he saw some teaching opportunity in the Academy with its emphasis on foreign languages. He taught Spanish and drawing classes, for four years. During that time he also served the LDS Church by assisting in the translation of selected sections of the Doctrine and Covenants into his native language. By 1890 he had returned to his native country, taking up residence in the State of Chihuahua.
The Academy catalogue for 1885 describes the Spanish courses: “Spanish (two year’s course). The first year’s course is according to Ahn; the second is according to the same; and Spanish conversation [text] by M. Velasques de la Cadena, connected with exercises in Spanish composition. Reference book: Ahn’s Spanish Grammar.” In 1862 Englishman Franz Thimm published a series of
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“European Grammars, after an easy and improved method,” by F. Ahn. The “easy” system is basically a translation method of language learning, designed to teach English speakers how to read and speak European languages – the Spanish of this text is decidedly the pronunciation of Spain. Two pages from this early grammar text used at BYU illustrate the method.
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The first Spanish text used at BYA, 1883
After Fernando Lara returned to Mexico, George Middleton, John Mills and Nels Lars Nelson taught Spanish grammar classes, beginning in 1889, through the 1890s and into the first decade of the new century. All were graduates of the Academy; Nelson also served as principal, from 1900 to 1904. They experimented with another basic text, by Ollendorf, and praised its results. Each year Maeser had to submit a report to the Board of Trustees and for the 1891-92 report, one of his Spanish teachers prepared a statement of objectives and teaching methods:
The [Spanish] class has completed Ollendorf’s Spanish Grammar. This system proceeds on the synthetic plan; so gradually are the intricacies of the language disentangled, and so copious are the illustrations given, that all the difficulties are passed ere the student is aware of them. Ability to read, write, and converse fluently is the object kept before the class constantly, and the students taking it have chiefly in view the use they shall be able to make of the language in a contemplated tour into Spanish America. I suggest that for missionaries to any of the Spanish countries this is an excellent preparatory course. N.L. Nelson, teacher.
The statement certainly exaggerates the ease with which the young academy students learned Spanish: “all the difficulties are passed ere the student is aware of them.” Classes were very small (eight to twelve students) and the Ollendorf method continued to emphasize translation as the way to master a language – little conversation was possible. In his Roughing It, Mark Twain had quite a different take on this early grammar text. After creating a business relationship to prospect for silver in Nevada, Twain notes that one of his partners is a “gentleman named Ollendorff (sic), not the party who has inflicted so much suffering on the world with his wretched foreign grammars, with their interminable repetitions of questions which never have occurred and are never likely to occur in any conversation among human beings” (Chap XXX).
Foreign languages in the United States were normally taught more as a way to expand thinking and mental discipline than to speak and communicate. The above-cited report, however, mentions two specific and uniquely-new reasons to study Spanish. The first is a “contemplated tour into Spanish America.” As a result of teachers who had learned Spanish in Mexico, or from Mexicans in Utah, Spain was no longer the linguistic focus, and
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possible tourism in the Americas became a reason to study Spanish. Few Utah students planned to tour Spanish America, but at least the option was now available. The second reason given for studying Spanish also pointed to a distant future use – missionary work. However, in the 1880s and 1890s most full-time missionaries were older, usually married men; those youth who “disentangled the intricacies of the language” would have to wait many years to be able to use it. And, until 1925, Mexico was the only Spanish-speaking country to which missionaries were called. In short, there was only an incipient expectation linking foreign languages and missionary work at this time. Despite these practical reasons Spanish was only taught sporadically during the 1890s (and no one even considered teaching Portuguese at that time). When a Collegiate Department was established in the Academy (1896), for the first time a foreign language was required of all high school students who pursued that academic option. But, the only three possible languages were French, German and Latin. Greek had long since been abandoned and Spanish, too, had gone by the wayside. This trend, of teaching Latin for discipline and rigorous thinking, and French and German as the two important, “useful” modern languages, was also common in high schools and colleges throughout the United States. With just one temporary hiatus (World War I) these two modern languages dominated foreign language instruction until the 1950s in American academic circles. However, a short war briefly shifted the trend, allowing Spanish to again be taught at BYU. The ten-week Spanish-American war of 1898 which “liberated” Cuba and the Philippine Islands from Spain, also sparked a new emphasis on studying Spanish and Latin America in the United States. The Academy catalogue (“Circular”) for 1899-1900 enthusiastically affirms:
In view of the new relationships established between the United States and Spanish America including the Philippine Islands, it is believed that the Spanish language will become one of the necessary branches of a liberal education. The aim of this [new] course is to prepare the student for business transactions in our newly acquired territories.
So now a third reason to study Spanish (besides tourism and missionary labors) had been established at BYA – foreign business transactions. As the Utah and American economy began the boom of the late 1890s and early 1900s, business opportunities would surely open up in Latin America, and indeed this was the period of dynamic and increased American involvement in mining, shipping and railroads throughout Mexico, Central America, Argentina and Chile. Spanish would now be useful to enterprising entrepreneurs. The above-cited BYA “Circular” unabashedly refers to Cuba and the Philippines as “our newly acquired territories” and does not mention their own national identity or freedom.
While serving as head of BY Academy (1892- 1903), Benjamin Cluff too-enthusiastically embarked on a Book of Mormon/scientific expedition through Mexico and Central America (1900-02), expecting to go all the way to South America, with the purpose of finding the “lost city” of Zarahemla. Despite en-route disapproval from the Brethren in Salt Lake City, he steadfastly persisted, journeyed into unknown parts of Mexico and Central America; one member even reached Colombia. Cluff eventually ended the unique endeavor, but not before spending a short time in jail. The expedition certainly failed but Cluff had witnessed the urgent need to be able to communicate in Spanish, if nothing more than with his fellow felons and jailers. He left the Cluff Expedition, Departure to Mexico
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university shortly after returning from his eighteen month cultural experience in Latin America, having personally witnessed the need to learn Spanish as a means of basic communication with our neighbors.
DYNAMIC FOUNDING FATHERS – A BIG THREE
James L. Barker
During the first decades of the Twentieth century the teaching of Spanish limped and sputtered, started up for a year or two, only to be abandoned again. Language teachers were all part time instructors, and German and French were the only languages regularly taught. In 1904 the Academy changed its name to Brigham Young University and began offering the bachelor degree, expecting that more students would study foreign languages. In 1907 a young teacher-scholar, James L. Barker brought his enthusiasm for languages to BYU and for the first time the university established a four-year language sequence, but in German and French only; Spanish struggled and was never regularly James L. Barker offered in these years. Yet Barker’s personal energy and language research effected a major change in teaching methodology. In the 1910-11 BYU Catalogue he confidently affirms that “In the modern language work, translation is avoided, exercises for class and home work being in one language only. Students think directly in the new tongue, and it is used as the instrument of study.” Barker also created the first foreign language clubs on campus, but only in the two standard languages; Spanish was ignored. However a Spanish Club was eventually established in 1927. Whenever possible Barker taught some basic Spanish classes but no sequential pattern of language mastery was established. Unfortunately Barker left BYU in 1914 for more verdant pastures at Weber College, and later served for many years as chair of the Foreign Language Department at the University of Utah. His career at that state university was twice interrupted when he accepted calls to serve as mission president in Argentina (1942 - 44) and France (1946). In 1944 he published a short Spanish Phonetic Manual (Ann Arbor, Michigan) and used it as a text in his pronunciation classes; the title page and an illustration appear below. He eventually returned to BYU in 1952 and taught classes in the various languages he had mastered, including Spanish, as well as publishing much of his gospel research. He died in 1958.
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University officials experimented with various structures to more efficiently administer language teaching, by creating two departments - Ancient Languages and Modern Languages (1910), but later re- joined them (1917). And, once again, a war brought Spanish to the fore. After World War I (1918) great national and world prejudice against Germany caused most American universities to abandon and even ban the teaching of German; Spanish, at BYU, and many other universities, became the replacement language. The early 1920s mark the firm and continuous teaching of Spanish at BYU. From that time it became a regular offering in every catalogue.
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Benjamin F. Cummings
After ten years of teaching at LDS High School and the University of Utah, another dynamic young professor joined the BYU faculty. Benjamin Franklin Cummings III was appointed head of Modern Languages and Latin in 1920, and served in that capacity for 31 years. At the beginning he served as the only full-time faculty member of the department, and he occasionally taught a basic Spanish class. To make himself more serviceable to the university, in 1923, he requested and received an eighteen-month professional development leave (with half pay) to study at Stanford University. Not only did he refine his skills in French and Spanish, but purposefully opened an important conduit with that university for various other young BYU professors to follow, in the 1940s, 50s and even into the 1960s. Under Cummings’ dynamic leadership courses in Italian, Hebrew, Portuguese, B. F. Cummings, 1923 Aramaic, Syriac, and various Slavic languages were added to the rapidly growing department. Cummings actively recruited new faculty, often his own best students, including Lee Valentine (1940), Carl Gibson (1949) and Darrel Taylor (1949).
In April, 1945 Cummings penned a thought-filled, sea-change memo to new president Howard S. McDonald, correctly noting that:
My period [as department chair] has been one of pioneering, and some of the results have been gratifying. But it is only honest to say that progress from now on calls for modifications. From the point of view of intensive specialized excellence it is probably better for me to confess than to boast of having taught six languages here. Other staff members have been “utility men” in lesser degree. I regard this type of set-up as highly undesirable, and by now only partly remediable in view of the fact that so many [of the professors] have similar major interests. I should like to re-shape the assignments . . . . My idea is to give each teacher a limited area in which he can attain to specialized excellence. The chief condition is stabilization of personnel. I should like to get the process under way in time to meet the increased demand incident to an expected increase in enrollment [due to the ending of World War II].
Cummings also observed that most full-time faculty were teaching as many as twenty hours each week, and suggested stabilizing assignments at thirteen hours of foreign language instruction, and two hours of religion courses, for a total of fifteen teaching hours. This would be necessary to permit faculty to specialize in academic research areas rather than merely teach miscellaneous, basic language courses. So, for the first time, foreign language professors would have an expectation of specialization and associated research, teaching and publication in that specific area. This was a novel concept and carried the implication that specialized professors could better serve the needs and interests of individual students. An indication of this need is that in 1940 the Department of Modern and Classical Languages awarded its first Master’s degree, to Robert P. Cooper. His thesis, “A Comparative Study of French and Spanish Paronymous Verbs Followed Directly by an infinitive or by a Preposition Plus an Infinitive” is uniquely original. I have examined this thesis (BYU, Special Collections) and find it surprisingly sophisticated, creative, and very well Robert Cooper, 1937 written, including innovative charts, and comparisons. The bibliography is small but not unexpected, given the limited linguistic research extant in 1940. Cummings himself directed the thesis; Gerrit de Jong, Jr. and Bertha Roberts also served on the thesis committee, obviously demanding a high standard of excellence. Such a specialized linguistic study as this required knowledgeable faculty members to guide the original research. Faculty specialization was necessary to give the growing
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graduate program a legitimate base. As an undergraduate Cooper majored in French but was also active in the Spanish Club. Indeed his thesis is a departmental first.
In 1945 the seven full-time members of Modern and Classical Languages enjoyed their fine offices in the Joseph Smith Building (“the best office space on campus,” in Cumming’s opinion). In the same lengthy memo cited above, Cummings recognizes that due to growing pressures the department may soon be dispossessed of those offices and affirms the need for even more and better space because the department now has a “library of books, phonograph records (Linguaphone Foreign Language Series), files for realia, maps, charts, etc.” In short, the department had acquired considerable equipment to supplement and strengthen language teaching; it had become an entity, a group of unified, united, cooperating faculty who knew their disciplines and kept up with what other universities were doing. Cummings also affirms the high quality of the faculty: “Staff members are persons carefully selected for personality, allegiance to the Church, its teachings and ideas, and most excellent training by study, travel, missions. They are not fanatical language zealots, but [are] sincerely convinced of the value of work in foreign languages, literatures and cultures. They are popular with students for they are fine human beings.” By this time almost all faculty members had had considerable experience studying abroad; LDS missionaries were serving in Mexico, and Argentina; Barker had opened a branch in Uruguay in 1944, and Brazil was receiving a few missionaries. The number of missionaries called to foreign-speaking missions mushroomed after World War II, and foreign language teaching followed suit at BYU.
Gerrit de Jong
During the same exciting decade that Cummings began innovating and stimulating a deeper study of foreign languages – the 1920s – the university undertook organizational changes to make administration more efficient. In 1925, for the first time at BYU, academic disciplines were split into colleges, administered by a dean. That year BYU lured Gerrit de Jong, Jr. from the LDS University (high school) in Salt Lake City. He became the founding dean of the College of Fine Arts, serving in that calling for a record 34 years. English and foreign languages became part of this college, and besides his broad administrative duties, de Jong enjoyed an academic teaching position in the Department of Modern Languages. Born in the Netherlands in 1892, he immigrated to Utah with his family at age 14, already proficient in music and foreign languages. He received both a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Utah, where he majored in Spanish and education. He also spent a summer (1921) at the Universidad Nacional in Mexico City, a rare fete among North American academics during that period, when study in Europe was the prevailing norm. While serving as dean he took a leave and completed his Ph.D. at Stanford, in 1933, with an emphasis in German but he also took many courses in Romance Languages. He became the first “doctor” in BYU’s language department. His teaching of Spanish in the 1920s and 1930s was only occasional, but his great leadership, example of mastery of many languages, and innovative ideas touched thousands of students and colleagues at BYU.
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In the summer of 1942, during the first full year of World War II, the United States Council of Learned Societies invited de Jong to join with 25 other scholars to discuss and indeed set up the teaching of Portuguese in U.S. universities. This honor likely came because de Jong was already known and respected at national levels, and also because BYU was beginning to be seen as an important player in language teaching. This government-sponsored intensive summer language institute came about because generals in Washington recognized an urgent and unmet need in the teaching of foreign languages in this country. De Jong recalled, in the preface to one of his Portuguese texts, “De novo, como no ano de 1942, o Governo indica a grande necessidade dos americanos aprenderem portugues.” The classes in the summer institute were taught by teachers “imported” from Brazil, since Portuguese simply wasn’t a part of academic life in the United States before that time. Upon returning from this seminar, held on the campus of the University of Vermont, in Burlington, he Gerrit de Jong immediately began to teach a basic class in Portuguese, during the fall quarter, 1942. In an oral interview with librarian/historian Mark Grover, Elmo Turner, an early missionary to Brasil and later mission president in that country, recounts the history of this first-ever Portuguese class taught at BYU.
I went to BYU [as a freshman, in 1942] and I wanted to take a language. I thought, if I ever get to a foreign land, it’ll probably be Mexico, so I’ll take Spanish. And so I went to BYU and registered . . . and at that time you must receive permission from the Dean of the College of Fine Arts, Gerrit de Jong. And so I said, okay. So I talked to Dr. de Jong and I told him my desires and I expected that he would sign me up for Spanish. He said “No, you don’t want to study Spanish, you need to study Portuguese.” I said, “No, I would like to take Spanish.” I could hardly pronounce Portuguese. But he said, “No, there are more people in Brazil who speak Portuguese than there are Spanish-speaking people in all of South America and Brazil is rich in natural resources.” And went on and on and he was determined I was not going to take Spanish, so I finally said “Well, I want to take a language so I’ll take Portuguese.” So I registered and when I went to the class the first day, who should I behold in the front of the classroom but Dr. Gerrit de Jong. He had been back in Boston [actually, Vermont] that very summer and had learned Portuguese and was introducing it at the BYU campus and he wanted some students I guess, but in addition to me there were Dr. Franklin Harris, the president of the university, Lee Valentine, a Spanish instructor . . . and maybe one or two other freshman like myself. . . . He was very good [as a teacher]. He had good pronunciation and a good grasp of the vocabulary. I was amazed that he learned it as well as he did in just one summer. But of course he was a linguist and had a lot of interest in languages (Elmo Turner interview, page 4, BYU Special Collections).
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Semester Load Report – Gerrit de Jong De Jong carried great personal prestige which enabled him to attract the busy president of the university to his innovative classroom; and the Portuguese language received a gigantic boost as well. From the above quote it is clear that de Jong passionately recruited to get students into this first course. Portuguese now had its beginning at BYU. In an interview with John B. Harris in 1971 de Jong admitted that “I’ve never had one lesson in Portuguese in my whole life!” (No. 1, College of Humanities Profiles, November 1971). In short, he did not learn much Portuguese while in New England, but obviously prepared himself and found sufficient materials to begin a class.
The push for Portuguese-teaching began with war-time hysteria. The Allies feared that German armies would advance through North Africa, cross the Atlantic and continue into Brazil, and there unite with the many foreign nationals from that country. Indeed early LDS missionaries to Brazil had preached almost exclusively in German. Hence, learning Portuguese now became necessary as a defensive war measure. When the war ended, and there had been no invasion of Brazil, many colleges dropped Portuguese from their offerings. Not so at BYU. De Jong fought for and singularly maintained the emphasis. In 1947, at the invitation of the U.S. State Department, he spent an entire academic year in Santos, Brazil, as founder and director of the Brazil/United States Cultural Center. He continued for many years at BYU (a total of 47 years) as the dynamic force for the study of Portuguese language and literature, publishing Four Hundred Years of Brazilian Literature: Outline and Anthology (1969) A sample of de Jong’s semester load sheet from 1964 demonstrates his amazing dedication and commitment to nurturing students in Portuguese. De Jong lists a total of 90 hours per week spent on “university functions.” Throughout the college and university he became known as “Mr. Portuguese.” Gerrit de Jong retired from BYU in 1972, at age 80, a
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pleasant and necessary exception at a time when sixty-five was a mandatory and fixed retirement age at the university. Gerrit de Jong was apparently considered too valuable to retire. He received several awards and recognitions, including an early version of the Karl G. Maeser Distinguished Teaching award (1960) and the David O. McKay Humanities Award (1972). In 1972 de Jong and his wife were invited to UCLA where he was properly honored as a “pioneer in the development of Luso-Brazilian Studies in the United States.” He died in 1978.
Benjamin Franklin Cummings ended his far-sighted and long-lasting chairmanship of the Language Department in 1951. Early in his administration BYU President Ernest L. Wilkinson began encouraging a more frequent rotation of department chairs and Cummings gladly stepped aside. The following individuals served as chairmen of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages:
Chairmen – Department of Modern and Classical Languages Name Years of service Language emphasis Benjamin F. Cummings 1920 – 1951 French, Spanish Harold W. Lee 1951 – 1953 (called as mission pres.) French Arthur R. Watkins 1953 – 1958 German Harold W. Lee 1958 – 1960 French H. Darrel Taylor 1960 – 1963 Spanish R. Max Rogers 1963 – 1967 German Creation of four languages June 1, 1967 departments
When Cummings retired in 1955 he observed that too many language classes were being taught by teaching assistants and encouraged the hiring of more permanent faculty members. Since the end of World War II students in language classes had increased so rapidly that supply (faculty) could not keep up with demand (students), the first time this nearly-constant dilemma surfaced in foreign languages. In 1951 there were only three exclusively-Spanish teachers, and one sometime Portuguese (de Jong). Lee Valentine (hired in 1940), Carl Gibson and Darrel Taylor (both hired in 1949) made up the entire Spanish faculty, within the Department of Modern and Classical Languages. To help fill the growing need, the department contracted Ernest J. Wilkins in 1953 and C. Dixon Anderson in 1956. All taught heavy loads and large classes. This small number, of just five, dropped to four when Lee Valentine accepted an LDS Church call to serve as mission president in Argentina in 1952. His mission call established a pattern that frequently repeated itself – the LDS Church found many department members with Spanish and Portuguese backgrounds to be trustworthy and effective mission presidents. Twelve full-time faculty members have been called to interrupt their academic work to serve in this spiritually and physically demanding assignment. It is likely that no other department in the university has contributed an equal number of faculty members to LDS missionary service. A listing of these presidents and their country assignments appears later in this history.
The postwar period, when many students were able to benefit from the generous GI bill, saw an immense increase in both undergraduates and graduate students at BYU. We have already mentioned the first M.A. degree with its comparative (Spanish and French) linguistic emphasis, granted in 1940. After an eight-year lapse, the graduate program, with emphasis in both Spanish and Portuguese swelled rapidly – one M.A. completed in 1948, five in 1949, two in 1950, and continued to grow steadily through the decade. Among many outstanding graduate students who wrote innovative theses and completed the Master’s Degree were:
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Early MA Degrees
Name Year Topic Lee Valentine 1948 Popul Vuh; preliminary study and translation Carl Gibson 1949 Deceptive cognates in Spanish and Portuguese Harold Dowdle 1949 Religious concepts in drama of Benito Pérez Sid Shreeve 1950 Gaucho life, gaucho poets Merlin Compton 1954 “Pundonor” in works of Lope de Vega Kay Moon 1959 Fantasy and Dreams in works of Alejandro Casona Hal Rosen 1959 Emotional conflict in works of Eduardo Barrios Jack Brown 1960 Indianistic novels from Peru Jim Taylor 1960 Oral/aural testing and placement
This partial listing of the many high quality master’s degrees conferred by the Department from 1948 through 1960 demonstrates the early development of future faculty members. All nine men listed above soon became the full-time Spanish faculty. Most used their master’s degree as springboard to Ph.D. studies at other universities, eventually returning as full-time faculty at BYU. Indeed, the post-war boom of the 1940s and 50s is the cradle for what later became the Department when Spanish and Portuguese were separated from the other modern languages. And Carl Gibson, first and long-serving chair of the new department (1967) deserves the honor of completing the first degree with a Portuguese emphasis, albeit a comparative one. Most of the theses show a traditional emphasis in literature, with a rather even split between Spanish peninsular and Latin American literature. Gibson’s topic, like the already-noted 1940 thesis, points to an interest in linguistic comparisons. Jim Taylor deserves credit for the first thesis to emphasize pedagogy, language placement and entrance examinations.
A STUDENT-CENTERED DEPARTMENT
As mentioned in the introduction to this history, the faculty story is not the only one. The faculty does not exist merely to effect research, publish books or attend academic conferences. Students are the first, and final raison d’etre of the university. This was especially true during the early years of the Modern Language and later the Spanish and Portuguese Department. The rapid increases in students during the 1950 and 60s was a delight to the busy professors, but it also caused rising pressures and more expanded roles for them. Faculty members were needed to plan and structure student learning activities. So, in meetings and hallways, in offices and over postum, the professors began to talk, brainstorm (even before the word existed), and eventually develop programs and activities beyond the daily classroom, to enhance and promote better language learning for the students. The beginnings of these student-centered activities and experiences will be chronicled here but may be revisited later in their more-current structure. Among the early attempts to deepen and intensify student learning were:
1. Foreign language films on campus 1938 2. Language Laboratory 1954 3. Foreign language clubs various years 4. National honor society membership 1959 5. Foreign residence programs 1958 (Mexico); 1961 (Spain) 6. Public school outreach 1956 7. New and better textbooks various
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(1) The first foreign-language films on campus were shown in 1938. Lee Valentine, a student at the time, ordered and presented early films in Spanish. In conjunction with professors and students in French and German he selected films that American students might understand. Each film had to pay for itself, so there was a small admission fee; and to save money the language teachers often collected the admission fee, operated the 16mm projects, and even spliced the occasional break. These films were initially shown on the lower campus, located where the Provo City Library now stands, on Fifth North and University Avenue. From this modest beginning the films moved to the upper campus when the Joseph Smith Building was completed. Professor J. Reuben Clark III oversaw the department’s first Foreign Language Film Committee, set up in 1942, often struggling with the appropriateness of this art form on BYU campus. The films became popular not only with students studying foreign languages, but the campus in general. For this reason the films often came under criticism in these early years when a student or faculty member questioned the content or propriety of the presentation. Through this student-learning activity the Modern Language Department had opened itself to the entire campus and to the occasional censorship struggles that continue to the present. From its unpretentious beginning BYU’s International Cinema program grew into one of the best foreign film programs in the country.
(2) Language laboratory. Beginning in the 1930s individuals in the language department began acquiring tapes and “Linguaphone” records, and a few portable machines for use in the classroom, but the benefit to students was minor and rarely measured. In 1953 Harold Lee proposed a modest, fixed lab, with twenty booths or stations. The following year the department received permission and the first language “lab” was established. In his 1956 report, Chair Arthur R. Watkins hailed the 1954 “acquisition of the new, modern, electronic language laboratory [as] undoubtedly the finest this side of the Mississippi River.” In 1958, an entire classroom was modified in the David O. McKay Building and the “lab” space greatly expanded. By 1962 walls were removed and space created in that building for 96 student stations; two years later this space was doubled to accommodate high demand among all the foreign languages. Chairman Darrel Taylor noted the continual expansion of services in 1962, touting that “the department employs laboratory Jim Taylor, 1960, with modern technology technicians, native informants and readers. The language laboratory functions 14 hours a day, Monday through Saturday.”
(3) Foreign language clubs. As noted earlier, a Spanish Club was formed on campus in 1927. It continued, with some irregularity during the 1940s and 50s. Here students could mingle socially and create activities designed to further the learning of culture and literature. By 1963 Darrel Taylor included the Spanish Club as one of the laudable activities of the college. “Spanish Club activities [include] one-act plays, contests in oratory and poetry with prizes given to the top winners, and their regularly scheduled Tertulias (hours of culture in Spanish).” In 1937 the thirty one members posed with their sponsors B.J. Cummings and instructor Edmund Richardson, as pictured on the previous page. In quite typical manner, there are more women than men; among the group is senior Robert P. Cooper, who three years later would complete the master’s degree in Spanish and French. The noble purpose of the club “is to strengthen ties among American and Spanish-speaking peoples.”
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(4) National honor societies. The five faculty members who taught Spanish classes during the 1950s determined that students would benefit in their lives and careers if BYU were to establish a relationship with important national organizations. The chair of the language department contacted Sigma Delta Pi, the recognized Spanish honorary society which had been founded at the University of California, Berkeley in 1919. After considerable paperwork and statistical information BYU was approved to begin a chapter of the society. On May 27, 1959 Dr. Ned Davison and his wife came from the Gamma Chapter at the University of Oregon and inaugurated the new chapter at BYU. Darrel Taylor served as the first faculty adviser and each of the founding faculty later served in that same capacity. Twenty-five students and faculty were initiated, becoming the charter members of this organization that continues to function with amazing “ánimo” in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at BYU. [See photo next page] Three future faculty members, then students, were part of this original charter – Jack Brown, Hal Rosen and Jim Taylor. Since its original creation at BYU, Sigma Delta Pi has grown into one of the most outstanding chapters in the country. It inducts from 50 to 80 new students every year, engages in local and international service activities, sponsors and hosts visiting lecturers and diplomats, and publishes a respected academic journal. In its 53 years at BYU approximately 3,000 students have merited an invitation and joined the society. This was the first such language honorary society at BYU. The German faculty also made application to their national honorary society; it was accepted in 1962. French followed suit in 1963. This brief paragraph does not do justice to the greatness of the BYU chapter. Under the leadership of various professors it has surely become the most outstanding, recognized and respected chapter in the country.
(5) Foreign residence programs. By the 1950s many of the graduate and undergraduate students in the department had served thirty-month foreign missions, but many of the majors and minors had never left the United States. In an effort to provide in-country cultural and linguistic experiences for all its students, the Department of Modern Languages initiated travel and study programs in Europe and eventually in Latin America. Max Rogers and Arthur Watkins recruited and commenced the first for-credit tour, lasting 102 days, during the summer of 1952. They traveled with 36 students through France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Holland, Belgium and England. However, as with early Mormon missionaries, Spain and Portugal simply did not find place in their extensive itinerary. Spanish faculty members observed the success and excitement among the returning students
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Charter Members of Delta Pi Chapter of Sigma Delta Pi Brigham Young University, Provo Utah May 27, 1959
First Row: Harold Earl Rosen, Bartell W. Cardon Jr., Acel Lowe Jr., Gary Luis Haws, (President), Carol Ann Bell (Secretary- Treasurer), Joseph Layton Bishop, Jack Vernal Brown. Second Row: James Scott Taylor, Mrs. Ned Davison (Visitor from Gamma Chapter), Dr. Ned Davison (Official Representative of the National—Gamma Chapter), Prof. M. Carl Gibson, Paul Lloyd, Patricia Crane, O. Blair Williams, Paul Rodriguez. Third Row: Dr. Ernest J. Wilkins, Dr. H. Darrel Taylor (Sponsor, Delta Pi Chapter), Dr. Lee B. Valentine, Elliott C. Howe, Gordon Kent Thomas. Not Present When the Picture was Taken: Alma P. Burton, J. Reuben Clark III, Vernon L. Anderson, Reginal Ray Dorff, Gordon Delbert Smith, Gerald A. Hale, and Glenna Deana Jennings. and almost immediately created similar cultural tours to Mexico in the mid-1950s, directed by Carl Gibson, Ernest Wilkins and Darrel Taylor. Then, during the summer of 1958, Darrel Taylor and Dixon Anderson structured the first Spanish-language residence study abroad program, in Mexico City. Students were housed with Mexican families, for six intensive weeks of classes in the United States/Mexico Institute, in the Zona Rosa; they also visited the main cultural sites of central Mexico. It was the energy and excitement of the students and faculty that assured the program’s continuation each summer, and the faculty took turns directing it.
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Carl Gibson organized and recruited for the first study abroad program in Spain, in 1961; it was advertised as the “BYU Summer School in Madrid.” The students spent two months, living in hotels as well as university dorms, and attended classes at the University of Madrid. At the conclusion of coursework they traveled through much of Europe. These departmental programs in Spain and Mexico were overseen by the office of Travel Study on the BYU campus and hence far-reaching travel and sightseeing became an integral part of each program. Tensions between the Department of Modern Languages and the Travel Study office regarding financing and program control began almost as early as the programs themselves.
These two Spanish language programs established the pattern, and both students and faculty began to expect foreign residence experiences every summer. While the privilege of study in a foreign country enhanced the students’ language and culture experience, it soon became obvious that the small number of Spanish professors in the department had created a beautiful, but two-headed beast. In 1961 there were only six members of the Spanish section. Finding directors and assistant directors who could leave family obligations and Church assignments for extended periods was difficult and became one of the most frequently discussed topics in departmental meetings. Nevertheless the programs grew to the point that BYU soon became one of the U.S. universities with the largest number of students participating in foreign study programs. This high number continues to the present where BYU consistently ranks among the topic fifteen universities in the country with respect to number of students participating in programs outside the United States.
(6) Public School Outreach. Even though the term (“outreach”) was not used at the time, the foreign language faculty responded to the needs of language students in public schools, by planning a “Festival of Foreign Languages.” Once again, Darrel Taylor carried the ball, and burden, of organizing the first such event, in 1956. High school students who were studying foreign languages came to campus on a Saturday, took oral and written proficiency tests, ate foods from around the world, witnessed cultural exhibits, and demonstrated their skills. Ribbons and recognitions were awarded to each of the nearly 800 participants that first year. Other Spanish professors, Ernest Wilkins, Jim Taylor, and Dixon Anderson willingly took their turn coordinating this large and popular language departmental activity. By 1963 it was so well-attended that the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters became a co-sponsor and soon Ernest L. Wilkins opening Festival of Foreign divided the state into regions, to better accommodate the thousands of Languages, 1959. participants. The University of Utah and Utah State University acted as hosts for students living closer to their campuses. Yet BYU had been the leader in creating this annual student-recognition event. The activity has changed title and focus over the years, and has returned to the BYU campus (on a school day), but it continues as the single-most important recognition for foreign language students in Utah, essentially the state championship in foreign languages. Current faculty members Nieves Knapp and Blair Bateman have published a detailed article on this highly-anticipated and heavily-attended event which takes place each spring on our campus. Their article gives an account of the origins of one of the most popular activities, “Españolandia.” When young students from the elementary, middle and high schools are not directly involved in competition, they participate in a
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simulated Spanish-speaking country, purchasing food, going through Customs checks, and they may even end up in jail (in honor of a past BYA president), as evidenced by the photo.
(7) New and better textbooks. As foreign language enrolments increased rapidly after World War II, BYU professors began to see the need for more and better basic texts with which to teach languages. Language pedagogy began to emerge as a relatively new academic discipline, breaking language-learning from its near-exclusive emphasis on mastering a foreign language in order to read its literature. The 1958 National Defense Education Act helped create a new emphasis on language study in the United States, as well as funding for students and faculty. As mentioned earlier, Jim Taylor Españolandia, 2012 completed the first M.A. degree, in 1960, with an emphasis on foreign language pedagogy and student placement. Several professors in the Department of Modern Languages began to experiment and test materials for new textbooks to better serve their students. Among these, Ernest Wilkins and newly-hired Terrence L. Hansen collaborated and field-tested various approaches and in 1964 Ginn-Blaisdell Publishing Company brought out their Español a lo vivo I, a text which used an innovative, direct method. The following year they published Español a lo vivo II. They also co-authored Español para misioneros and Español para jóvenes, in 1964. They seemed to be on publishing fire that year. Gerrit de Jong’s pioneer anthology of Brazilian literature has already been noted as an innovative, landmark text for the advanced student of Portuguese.
In 1959 just six professors taught the hundreds of students who took classes in Portuguese and Spanish – de Jong as the lone Portuguese teacher and Lee Valentine, Carl Gibson, Darrel Taylor, Ernest Wilkins and Dixon Anderson in Spanish. In just ten years the faculty would swell to eighteen – three in Portuguese and fifteen professors teaching Spanish literature and language classes. Reasons for this never-seen-before-nor-since increase in faculty are multiple, but basic is the 1958 National Defense Education Act, which was largely a reaction to the Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik, in 1957. Feeling and fearing that the United States was behind in science, math and foreign languages, the Act encouraged and supported millions of U.S. students to attend college and develop language and science skills. Among the many academic subjects considered vital for defense was the mastery of foreign languages. Both Spanish and Portuguese fell into the funding guidelines. Even though BYU did not accept federal monies at this time, the dramatic increases in student enrollment directed many to these languages. Total enrollments in Spanish had already exceeded French at BYU since the mid-1950s and continued to shoot up during the 1960s. The NDEA stimulus benefitted BYU, albeit indirectly.
A more direct and dramatic cause for the increase in Spanish and Portuguese classes was the expansion of LDS missions in Latin America. Missionaries had been serving in Mexico since the late 1800s; the first mission in Argentina commenced in 1925. Brazil opened for work among Portuguese- speakers shortly before World War II. Gradually missionaries ventured from Mexico into Guatemala and eventually into other Central American countries. But even in 1955, the majority of Spanish American countries could not “boast” of their own mission, located within national borders. The years from 1955 to 1970 witnessed the rapid expansion of more than a dozen new missions in Latin America. North
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Americans missionaries serving in Argentina began to proselyte in Chile in 1956, and by late 1959 had experienced so much success that the Church created a new mission, comprising Chile and Peru. This mission, the Andes Mission, was soon divided into two (1961) large and successful missions. Missionaries journeyed from Peru to Bolivia in 1964 and two years later a mission was established in that Andean country. The LDS Church soon created missions in Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela in the mid and late 1960s. The Central American Mission split into various missions, during this period. New missions were created in Brazil, to handle the rapidly exploding numbers in that giant country. And even Spain, which had long been considered a no-Mormon-mission land, as long as Francisco (there’s that name again) Franco remained in power, passed a Religious Liberty Law in 1967 and by 1969 missionaries began preaching in that ancient country. No other period in LDS Church history, until 2013, has witnessed the creation of so many new missions in such a short period. And many of the returning missionaries desired to continue language and culture studies in Portuguese and Spanish classes.
A third factor in the speedy growth of students in Spanish and Portuguese classes during this time is simply BYU’s dramatic growth under the direction of President Ernest L. Wilkinson. Approximately 11,000 students enrolled in classes at the beginning of the 1960s; by the end of the decade the number had jumped to 24,000. This increase in total students obviously impacted directly on the teaching of foreign languages in the university. Anticipating missions, many young men and women took classes in Portuguese and Spanish. Some young women certainly enrolled in Spanish classes because their “novios” were serving in Latin America.
A NEW GENERATION OF FOUNDING FATHERS
Yet not only government programs, the doubling of Spanish and Portuguese-speaking missions, nor the huge increase in total students during the 1960s explains the rapid increase in number of students and the popularity of classes in the department. Students from the 1950s and 60s recall the dynamism, the excitement, the powerful “ánimo” of their professors as key reasons for beginning and then continuing language study. We have already talked of Gerrit de Jong and his spunk and spark for Portuguese. Among the Spanish professors Darrel Taylor stands very tall. He was the son of distinguished Church educator and administrator, Dr. Harvey L. Taylor, who was serving as vice president of BYU during this rapidly-expanding time of the 1950s and 60s. His son, Darrel had responded to a mission call to Argentina and served there from 1937 to 1940; while in Argentina one of his most exciting companions was Ernest Wilkins, also an “Arizona boy,” who later became a vital member of the BYU Language Department. After his mission Darrel joined the FBI for six years, filling assignments in Puerto Rico and his beloved Argentina. Darrel completed an M.A. degree at the University of Arizona in 1948 and Darrel Taylor accepted a teaching slot at BYU the following year. In 1954 he took a two-year leave of absence to study at the University of Illinois, completing his Ph.D. in 1956 with a dissertation entitled “Joaquín V. González and Justo Sierra: “Maestros de América.” I have examined this 348-page document and find it to be insightful and innovative, a comparison of a Mexican prose writer (Sierra) with an Argentine professor-writer. Taylor concerned himself with the history of ideas and nationalistic concepts in the prose of these two authors; he seemed especially interested in the role of religion in their works and their nations. Taylor is one of the first language faculty members who had never attended BYU previously and whose academic degrees all came from other universities. While at the University of
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Illinois Darrel engaged in another first – he submitted a paper which was accepted and read at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in Chicago, in 1956. Taylor obviously recognized that professors must profess, and be active in their academic fields. The paper dealt with “God and Time in the Novels of Érico Veríssimo,” once again linking religion and literature. It also attests to Taylor’s interest in the Portuguese language and emerging Brazilian literature.
Having completed the Ph.D. allowed Taylor to advance rapidly in the department. We have already noted the founding of Sigma Delta Pi under his direction; he also supervised the Foreign Language Fair for the state of Utah and performed many other collaborative tasks. With his colleagues he worked on a “teaching machine,” as well as “culture capsules” for Latin American countries, advocated how to improve foreign language proficiency for future missionaries, and more. His students regarded him as a brilliant, fun-loving teacher. And the fact that he was a publishing scholar who attended national meetings also put some pressure on other faculty members to follow his professional path. He served as chairman of the large language department from 1960 to 1963. His wife recalls that:
Darrel’s mind was always at work – learning, planning, teaching, creating. At one time he was working on a simple machine to be used in teaching foreign languages. It was an excellent concept but he didn’t have the money to develop it to completion. . . . It was in the winter of 1950 when he spoke to me of another of his ideas – that of instituting special classes at the BYU for those who had been called on foreign missions. These classes would give the missionaries special preparation in the language, the culture, the customs, the history, etc., of the countries to which they had been called, before their departure. This advance preparation would lessen the shock which some missionaries experienced. He also thought it would serve as a test to see if a foreign language was too great a barrier for a missionary, in which case he could be reassigned to an English-speaking mission. He had a file set up in his office to further his ideas on this. When the church instituted the Missionary Training Center a decade later, he was asked whom he would recommend as its first director. He was Chairman of the Language Department at that time and recommended two people, Ernest Wilkins and Terry Hansen. Ernest became the first president of the LTM, as it was then called, and Terry Hansen became the second one (“Harvey Darrel Taylor: The Story of his Life, 1917 -1963,” pp. 103-104).
A departmental colleague, Terry Hansen thanked and praised Taylor:
9 November, 1962. Dear Darrel: Just a note to express deep appreciation for the new typewriter. . . . While the ribbon is still new let me also express to you my personal appreciation for the excellent way in which you lead our department. I am always amazed at the number of things you are able to accomplish which are making our department one of the strong ones in the country. . . . It makes me humbly grateful to have the opportunity to teach [with you] at BYU (ibid, 130).
The quote indicates that some faculty members were beginning to tout the status of languages at BYU with respect to national ranking and evaluation. Darrel Taylor was largely responsible for this early national recognition. In 1963 he requested release as chair (of the Language Department), to devote more time to publishing, a move which shocked his colleagues, including Paul Hyer who lamented, “I am still concerned lest the change be premature from the standpoint of institutionalizing the things you have begun. I have [always] felt that someone was ‘tending the store,’ that there was a steady hand on the helm” (ibid, 131).
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In June of 1963 the youthful forty-six year old professor joined with other adult leaders and took his Explorer Scout group on an expedition to the deserts of southern Utah. In a terribly tragic accident their large stake-bed truck stalled, rolled backward on a hill, overturned, and tumbled 30 feet down a steep incline on a remote dirt road southeast of Escalante, Utah. Darrel and the others were thrown from the bed of the truck; some were crushed. Taylor was among thirteen who died; thirty-five were injured. His too-sudden death left a great hole in the department.
In the late 1950s a national committee on university education had recommended that U.S. institutions develop new interdepartmental and area studies programs, to better serve national needs. BYU responded by turning to an area where it already had demonstrated strength, and in 1958 created a major in Hispanic American Studies. The logical choice to direct this new interdisciplinary program was energetic faculty member Lee B. Valentine. Like most of the early members of the department, Lee had served a mission to Argentina (1935 - 1938), and thrilled to the language and culture of that country. In its early birth at BYU, the accent of Spain would have dominated Spanish teaching; later many part-time teachers with experience in Mexican Spanish instructed the students. But in the 1940s and 50s, most of the professors brought their Argentine accents to class. Valentine, Shreeve, and Taylor all appear in their mission picture (names underlined). Their mission president, Frederick S. Williams, is the father of Frederick G. Williams, current member of the Spanish and Portuguese Department.
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Valentine completed his BA degree in 1939 at BYU, and was soon hired as a full-time instructor. He taught heavy teaching loads but completed his MA in 1948 (“The Popol Buj, a Preliminary Study and Translation”). As mentioned, Robert Cooper had written a Master’s thesis, in 1940; Valentine’s is the second granted in the broad language department, and really the first with a single emphasis in Latin American literature and culture. After some years at BYU he applied for a leave of absence, and spent several years at Stanford, where he was a popular teacher and even received an offer to stay as permanent faculty, working on research with Ronald Hilton. But a phone call to J. Reuben Clark (of the Frist Presidency) convinced him that he had a “mission” to fill at BYU. Indeed, he was called in 1952 to serve as mission president in Argentina, for a period of nearly four years. When he and his family returned to Provo in 1956, he had been gone from the department for nearly eight years. The call as mission president had delayed the completion of his Ph.D. dissertation which he eventually received from Stanford in 1958.
Valentine’s academic life is similar to many other early professors of Spanish – he completed his MA at BYU, was hired full- time, then found it necessary to take extended leaves of absence to complete his Ph.D. Darrel, Taylor, Ernest J. Wilkins and others followed the same pattern. Valentine also took time off (in the 1960s) to return to Argentina once again to serve the U.S. Information Agency as director of Bi-National Centers in Buenos Aires and Tucumán. It was his many years of experience in Latin America that made him the wisest choice to function as coordinator of the newly-formed interdisciplinary Hispanic American Studies, from 1958 – 1964. Professor Dixon Anderson directed the interdisciplinary program for a year and aided in changing the name to Latin American Studies, to better accommodate the emphasis of both Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries. This Lee Valentine program, which continues to the present, has usually been directed by a professor from the department. It will be discussed later in this history
Lee B. Valentine also met a tragic and early death. While driving with his daughter Angela to their home one evening in 1967, he was injured in a car accident, and died the next day. He was only fifty-five years of age. Valentine was married to the daughter of W. Ernest Young, his mission president. His wife, Amy Y. Valentine, was hired as a full-time member of the faculty the following year (1968), and served for many years, teaching basic Spanish classes. She is the first woman to be hired in the department, an action which recognized her excellent teaching abilities as well an act of compassion and honor to her deceased husband.
The vibrant young Spanish faculty of the 1950s and 60s observed the needs for better and more intensive language training for their students who would soon fill missions, and for years they had talked of special classes for these students. They surely felt the tradition of Provo as the place where foreign languages had been studied since early pioneer days. In the late 1950s many missionaries who had been called to serve in Mexico were delayed for three or four months, awaiting a visa. The professors of the language department tried to fit the visa-waiters into their regular classes; this did not work well since visas came through at unanticipated times and the missionary/students often had to depart before the end of the semester. It is important to note that both the BYU faculty and the Church looked to Provo to assist, with the visa-waiters as well as with a plan to teach foreign languages to future missionaries. The Church might have chosen to solve the concerns in Salt Lake City, but the BYU
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language department was the obvious and best solution. We do not know of all the conversations that might have gone on before official Church action created the program, but we do know that the enthusiastic young Spanish professors talked of and experimented with classes and techniques to better serve the missionary needs of the LDS Church. In October of 1961 Elder Marion G. Romney proposed a language training program to the First Presidency, to be called the Missionary Language Institute – it would be set up on the BYU campus. In December of that year, thirty new missionaries reported to the BYU Alumni Building for training; sixteen were to serve in Mexico and fourteen in Argentina. This is the beginning of the formal language training for all LDS future missionaries. Besides his departmental duties, Professor Ernest J. Wilkins received an additional assignment to supervise the MLI. At first the MLI simply used space on campus but soon “graduated” to other campus buildings. In 1963 the name was changed to the Language Training Mission (LTM); Portuguese and German were added that same year. The official letter, dated April 30, 1963, calls Wilkins as the “president” of this new “mission” in the Church. Quite logically he gave up his teaching in the department for a period of years.
First Presidency Letter – Missionary Language Institute
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As previously indicated, Ernest J. Wilkins had served a mission in Argentina and been a companion with Darrel Taylor. He, like most of the faculty of that period, served the United States in World War II after his mission. He then came to BYU where he met his future wife, Maureen Lee (daughter of Elder Harold B. Lee). Wilkins became a full-time Ernest J. Wilkins instructor in 1953. He, like others, took a leave of absence and
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completed his advanced degree at Stanford, where he was a close friend with another ex-Argentine missionary, Lee Valentine; both collaborated and published with well-known professor Ronald Hilton. His 1954 Ph.D. was in Hispanic American Civilization and Wilkins always emphasized that interdisciplinary approach. He took a sabbatical leave in 1960 and cultivated a specialty in the essay in Latin America. He seemed to be restless, always looking for the creative corners of the university and the profession. His chair (and former missionary companion), Darrel Taylor noted in 1961 that “Dr. Wilkins is highly imaginative, creative, forceful and deeply interested in the best professional sense in a broad field of Latin-American civilizations.” He attended frequent professional conferences, perhaps the first Spanish faculty member to regularly take BYU’s experience to regional and national organizations; in the late 1950s he served as secretary, then vice president of the Rocky Mountain Council of Latin American Studies, and brought the annual meeting to the BYU campus for the first time. And even while serving as president of the Language Training Mission he continued pedagogical research, and began publishing textbooks to aid students. After his release from the MTC he was instrumental in establishing a Language Research Center at BYU and served as its director.
All the men mentioned above were dedicated, innovative, creative, energetic individuals who seemed to sense that their field, Spanish and Portuguese, was emerging rapidly in the United States and that they were playing a vital role in projecting the discipline into national recognition. Their pictures may look a little staid, sober and serious, but they were fun-loving, exciting teachers and colleagues. The word “dynamic” may be trite, but it truly captures their personalities and contributions. And their students thought of them as terrific teachers as well. University President Wilkinson wrote a letter to the department chair in 1955, noting that “I have just had in my office Miss Susan Emmett, whose father is a distinguished surgeon at Mayo Clinic. Susan spent last year at the University of Utah and the first quarter of this year at Northwestern University, and has now transferred to the Y. Susan is thrilled with being at the Y; says she already knows more people in three weeks than she became acquainted with all quarter at Northwestern. She is particularly delighted with her teachers, among who is Ernest Wilkins. She says our Department of Modern Languages is vastly superior to anything they have at Northwestern. Congratulations, Ernest L. Wilkinson.” Indeed the specialized study of Spanish and Portuguese was ready to be a separate department.
GROWING INTO OUR OWN DEPARTMENT
We have already mentioned that a department is made up of individuals who translate their unique preparation, their ideas and energies into programs and classes which benefit students. Gerrit de Jong, Ernest Wilkins, Lee Valentine, Carl Gibson and Darrel Taylor were among the early group of innovative teachers who helped create an exceptional and energetic department during the 1950s and 1960s. They oversaw the hiring of new faculty, who then stimulated the existing faculty with new concepts, thoughts and programs. Dixon Anderson, first hired in 1956, later completed a Ph.D. at Texas and returned to the department where he specialized in phonetics and pedagogy and always sought ways to improve classes and course materials. He felt that language learning was too sterile, often
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memorizing word lists with no cultural context. He carried out serious research which he turned into textbooks, for beginning students, Spanish in Context and Háblame for beginning students, and Patterns of Spanish for our 321 classes. The next full time hire, Terry Hansen, actually spent little time teaching in the department. He had attended the University of Utah as an undergraduate and received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford (1950), and taught at various other institutions before joining the staff here. His short tenure in the department was broken up while he served as mission president in Central America and later, in Provo, as MTC president. We have already mentioned his collaboration on Español a lo vivo, published in 1964; a year later he and Wilkins published a second-year text with the same title. He died much too young, in 1974, at age 54. James S. Taylor was an outstanding graduate student, accepting full-time employment in 1962, completing his Ph.D. in pedagogy at Ohio State University. He directed many theses relating to language pedagogy, supervised student teachers, innovated and created “Españolandia” for our Foreign Language Field Day, and always seemed to be finding new ways to improve teaching and teachers. He retired in 2001 but continued experimenting with dynamic teaching methods for older learners.
Harold Rosen, like so many of our faculty hired in this era, was drafted into military service, where he served for more than three years in the Air Force and became a Russian Language expert. He too was a founding member of Sigma Delta Pi, completed his Ph.D. at the University of Oregon and accepted full-time employment in the department in 1963. He made the Quijote and Golden Age literature his specialty. Kay Moon came to BYU the same year, completing his Ph.D. at Syracuse University. He became a specialist in literary criticism and contemporary drama. Kay also wrote his own creative literature and has published at least ten novels. Merlin Compton was the first full-time faculty to receive his Ph.D. at UCLA and came to BYU in 1964 where he became a specialist in the “Tradiciones” of Ricardo Palma and did so much creative and quantitative research that he was honored by the government of Peru for his frequent publications in and on that country. Sid Shreeve is a most unique faculty member. He was only here full time, from 1965 to 1980 but made a huge impact during those fifteen years. He had completed an MA degree at BYU in 1950, and served as a mission president in Uruguay and Paraguay, then spent years of service in public education as well as for the U.S. Information Agency in Latin America. While at BYU he took a leave of absence and completed a doctorate in Mexico. He was the moving force behind scores of programs relating the community to BYU as well as a major push for Latin American Studies.
In 1969 Ronald Dennis and Gordon Jensen were both hired directly from their Ph.D. work at the University of Wisconsin, probably the finest Portuguese graduate program in the country. Carl Gibson and other faculty members had been teaching Portuguese classes, along with dedicated work of Gerrit de Jong, but the hiring of two young Portuguese teachers indicated a much deeper, serious commitment to the Portuguese part of the department. Dennis and Jensen added their love of the language, culture and literature and increased Portuguese enrollments rapidly. Other faculty have been added and we have grown into one of the strongest and largest Portuguese programs in the United States. Following his paternal ancestry, Ron Dennis developed a deep interest in Welsh. He mastered the language, by his own efforts, and later through a leave of absence to Wales, and became BYU’s resident Welsh professor. The College of Humanities encouraged this “new” language into its expanding list of offerings. Ron became so proficient that he translated many early LDS writings and documents from Welsh to English and was often featured at the annual conferences of the Mormon History Association, as the resident expert in Welsh Church history.
Dramatic growth and frequent administrative changes are the hallmark of the 1960s at BYU. In June, 1965 the Wilkinson administration divided the large College of Humanities and Social Sciences into
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two quite-logical groupings, the College of Humanities, and, the College Social Sciences. English professor and chair of that department, Bruce B. Clark, humbly accepted the appointment as dean of this new College of Humanities. As noted, enrollments throughout the college continued to expand rapidly, but none faster than Spanish. During the Fall Semester, 1966, the Department of Foreign Languages counted 4,542 students enrolled in its classes. Portuguese could boast of 108 student enrollments that semester, and Spanish 1,858. The total of these two languages, 1966 students (in 1966) represented 44% of the total student enrollment in the broad Language Department. The graduation program at year’s end (May, 1967) lists 46 graduates in Spanish and seven in Portuguese, by far the largest numbers in foreign languages. Six graduate students completed their master’s degree in 1967.
After deliberations at several levels, administrative permission was granted and the large Department of Languages divided itself into four new departments: (1) French and Italian, (2) Classical and Oriental (3) German and Slavic, and (4) Spanish and Portuguese. A small interdepartmental Linguistics program was also created at this time. This new structure aligned BYU with most major large academic institutions in the United States at the time. However, neighboring University of Utah continued (and still maintains) its single Department of Languages and Literature. A few faculty members at BYU opposed dividing the department, despite its cumbersome nature and numbers – 49 full-time faculty, 12 part-time and more than 80 student instructors. The dissidents were quickly pacified, as usually happens at BYU. The Department of Spanish and Portuguese was officially approved by the administration in February, and came into full being on June 1, 1967, with M. Carl Gibson named as chair. Gibson was the logical and experienced choice – he had previously served as acting chair of the Department of Languages, in 1966. He now presided over seventeen full-time faculty, the next round of “founding fathers” (yes, they were all males):
Full-time Faculty 1967 – Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese
Dixon Anderson Assoc. Prof. Kartchner, John Instructor Peter Ashworth Instructor Moon, Kay Asst. Prof. Brown, Jack Asst. Prof. Rosen, Hal Asst. Prof. Chidester, Leon Instructor Shreeve, Sid Asst. Prof. Compton, Merlin Assoc. Prof. Taylor, James Asst. Prof. Dennis, Ron Instructor Valentine, Lee Professor Gibson, Carl Professor Wilkins, Ernest Professor Hall, Wendell Asst. Prof. de Jong, Gerrit Prof., Portuguese Hansen, Terrence Professor
With minor exception, the faculty was both young and balanced among academic ranks – five full professors, two associate professors, six assistant professors, and five instructors. All but the instructors and two assistant professors had completed their Ph.D. and were active in their academic fields. Years later former dean Bruce B. Clark observed that from its founding:
The department [of Spanish and Portuguese] has been characterized . . . by internal congeniality and harmony, and by a basic steadiness of programs too, partly because degree programs at all levels were already well-established by 1967 – BA, MA, and PhD programs in Spanish and BA and MA in Portuguese. The Portuguese programs have always been small . . . but even to have a Portuguese program is unusual for a U.S. university. And the Spanish programs were large, by far the largest language programs in the college.
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As Clark states, the department has enjoyed a particularly congenial, friendly, cooperative nature. There was little if any squabbling among faculty at the time of its creation, and that tenor has continued to the present, different from many other large language departments in the United States. Some of this congeniality may be attributed to the selection and character of those who have been named to serve as department chairs, from 1967 to the present. They are:
Chairs – Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese
Name Years of service M. Carl Gibson 1967 – 1979 C. Dixon Anderson 1979 – 1982 Thomas E. (Ted) Lyon 1982 – 1989 Merlin H. Forster 1990 – 1993 John R. Rosenberg 1993 – 1997 Christopher C. (Kit) Lund 1997 – 2000 J. Halvor Clegg 2000 – 2004 Alvin F. (Lin) Sherman 2005 – 2011 David P. Laraway 2011 – present
Nine (nice) men have accepted this usually-pleasant duty. Despite that fact that BYU President Wilkinson encouraged frequent change in department administration, Carl Gibson served as chair for twelve years. Indeed he became the department image in the eyes of his former colleagues in the old Department of Languages. He was highly esteemed as an efficient, kind administrator. Gibson served a mission in Brazil, from 1941 – 1943; he had previously taken Spanish in high school (in the Las Vegas, Nevada area) and at BYU. While in Brazil he quickly transitioned into Portuguese and became a mission leader. After the mission and military service in World War II, he completed his B.A. in music at BYU in 1947, and continued graduate studies in music, Spanish and Portuguese. His M.A. thesis is “A Preliminary Study of Spanish – Portuguese Deceptive Cognates,” approved in 1949, the same year he became a full-time member of the Language Department. He taught classes in four languages - Spanish, Portuguese, Latin and Italian. In 1956 he Carl Gibson took a two-year leave for Ph.D. studies at the University of Oregon; his degree in Romance Languages was awarded in 1960. Dean Bruce Clark recalls the formation of the department in 1967: “At that time Dr. M. Carl Gibson was called to be the first chairman, and he was so steady, efficient, thorough, and well-liked that we continued him in that position for twelve and a half years” (College of Humanities History, p. 37). Gibson had followed the path of most of his BYU predecessors – complete the M.A. degree, begin full-time teaching, then take a leave of absence to complete the Ph.D. He was the first departmental member to complete a Ph.D. at the University of Oregon.
Yet despite an efficient chair and the identity as our “own” department, many concerns continued. One of the most frequently mentioned is the high number of enrolments and the limited faculty who were expected to teach them. Solutions included hiring more graduate assistants, as well as requesting an increase in number of permanent faculty. A history of departmental FTE (full-time equivalent) numbers indicates the constant pressure to increase faculty. In 1967 seventeen faculty formed the new department, but departmental records show that only sixteen were tenured FTE slots
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(in short, one was temporary). The following chart, in five-year increments, shows the growth to the present: FTE – 5-Year increments
Year Total FTE in the Department 1967 16 1972 21 1977 22 1982 21 1987 24 1992 27 1997 27 2002 30 2007 29 2012 29
To request an increase in departmental FTE during the mid-1980s the chair made a case by informing the administration that a student majoring in Spanish would likely never see a permanent faculty member until the end of his or her third, or even into the fourth year, since nearly all 100, 200 and many 300 level courses were taught by teaching assistants and part-time faculty. The administration hastily found two new FTEs that year.
A frequent concern in departmental minutes and many personal letters is that of faculty compensation. Salaries at BYU seemed low, in comparison to what colleagues were receiving at other institutions, and minor complaints fill several personnel files. Returning mission presidents often urge the dean or chair to increase their yearly compensation. Surely colleagues at other universities felt similarly frustrated over salary, but BYU professors, during the 1950s and 60s frequently remind their dean that they have large families, teach many hours, and simply need higher salaries. During the administration of Pres. Dallin H. Oaks a Church-commissioned study established “comparable institutions” and pegged BYU salaries to those norms, calming and quieting much of the dissonance.
Some professors complained of high teaching load, which often included the expectation of teaching a religion class as well as one’s specialty, The “normal” expectations for professors, both those hired during the 1950s and 1960s, as well as those long-tenured faculty, was four classes in the department (at least 12 hours) plus a two-hour religion course. During these years, BYU language professors began to feel a professional desire to participate in academic research, (or were “urged” to do so), to attend professional meetings, to publish original research. The hope of reducing teaching loads, limiting seemingly endless committee work, and faculty specialization had been talked about since the already-cited B.F. Cumming’s 1945 memo. Darrel Taylor, Gerrit de Jong and others had set a standard and now all departmental members were expected to publish and participate, as well as to teach many classes each semester. In 1956 Arthur Watkins, chair of the Language Department, prepared a progress report for the university president, and noted the need to reduce
teaching load and other university work to permit greater emphasis on research. As we grow into a larger program our teachers’ interests will be shifted from teaching undergraduate classes to the teaching of graduate classes. Our professional growth will come from this intensive study of problems of literature and culture, etc. that must be prepared and interpreted for mature graduate students. Since we do not have free week-ends (Church work and substantial
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families) we must have a teaching load at least comparable to that of the average professor at Stanford and Harvard, i.e. about 10 to 12 hours, with few committee assignments (Lee, 30).
OUR STUDENTS
The Ph.D.
When the College of Humanities was created (1965) the Language Department had just recently received approval to offer a Ph.D. in Spanish (and French and German, of course). Dean Bruce Clark was enthusiastic about these new advanced degrees, because they indicated that BYU was “coming of age,” creating programs similar to the major institutions mentioned in the previous quote. But he also had to defend the existence of the Ph.D. programs to President Wilkinson. “As a university we cannot be superior in all areas, but we have an opportunity to lead the nation in foreign language study and teaching. . . our doctorate in languages will do the following.” He then lists six reasons to approve the Ph.D. degree: 1. Train teachers in foreign languages who will spread the influence and prestige of BYU and the Church throughout the world. 2. As the reputation of BYU grows as a center of language study, students from other universities will increasingly turn to BYU for advanced study. 3. A strong graduate program in languages will provide the means whereby we can develop knowledge and skill in many languages that will permit increased missionary work throughout the world. 4. By training students with advanced degrees in languages we can provide personnel to staff government and business offices throughout the world. 5. One of the values of a doctoral program is that it draws and holds high quality teachers who might otherwise be lost to other universities. 6. In summary, we need to take advantage of our great missionary program by making BYU what it already is on the road to becoming – an internationally recognized center of language study (Clark 264).
Yet despite this enthusiasm, and generally correct analysis, only five students actually completed the Ph.D. degree in Spanish, during its short existence.
All Ph.D. Degrees - Spanish
Name Year Title of Dissertation Carlton Q. Anderson 1970 Evolution of the Ines de Castro Story in Drama John Marlan Walker 1971 Satyricon, Golden Ass and the Span. Golden Age Picaresque Novel Anabel Piñero 1977 Intercultural Communication in Utah Schools: The Mexican Americans Donald C. Milne 1978 Mysticism in the Poetry of Enrique González Martínez Gloria S. Meléndez 1980 La prosa fantástica y rara de Amado Nervo
The students who studied and completed the Ph.D. from 1970 through 1980 indeed used their degrees to great personal and professional advantage. Yet the impact was hardly national or international, rather local and regional. Carlton Anderson had previously taught at Adams State University in Colorado, and upon completion of his degree returned to that campus. He became an authority on early Mormon settlement of the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado, and published extensive reports and books on the topic. J. Malan Walker had taught Spanish in the public schools of Henderson, Nevada for many years. He took a leave of absence, and after completing his Ph.D. at BYU,
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returned to teaching, administration and community service in that same town. Among his many outstanding students is current Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid (2013). Reid was bused to Henderson from a tiny town and first learned of Mormonism from Walker and a few LDS students, and soon became an involved member of the Church. In 1971 Walker was called by the LDS Church to preside over a mission in Mexico. The governor of Nevada, also Walker’s former student, and his Lieutenant governor Harry Reid, both spoke at the Walker farewell.
After completing her Ph.D in the department, Argentine-born Anabel Piñero, like the other four degree recipients, returned to her previous job and used her dissertation research to form a basis for workshops and seminars throughout the state of Utah. She accepted the job as bilingual coordinator for the Davis School District, innovating and making use of the confidence she gained in the Ph.D. program. She continues, at the time of this writing, as a regular adjunct faculty at the BYU Salt Lake Center. Don Milne interrupted his long teaching (1965 – 1993) at Colorado State University, Pueblo, completed the degree and advanced rapidly at the same institution because of his Ph.D. Gloria Melendez, who had been a part-time teacher in the department for many years, became a full-time faculty member and truly excelled as a spirited, loving, and very dedicated colleague in the department. Her teaching evaluations were almost “off the chart” of excellence.
Under some pressure from the university administration, and recognizing our own weaknesses, the department willingly put the Ph.D. program on hold in 1977. Bruce Clark, in a memo to the academic vice president used the term “quiet moratorium,” not wanting to make a public announcement of a university “failure” (Clark, 268). The department ceased further Ph.D. studies in 1980 when those “in the pipeline” completed the degree or left the university. Despite Clark’s noble ambition that BYU become a world-leading language center, it would not be in the granting of Ph. D. degrees. The department never sought permission for a Ph.D. in Portuguese.
A Master-ful Degree
If the Ph.D. degree never truly “got off the ground,” the Master’s degree at BYU has achieved a justified reputation as a top-rate, first-class degree. Since the first “shared” degree (French and Spanish, in 1940), we have granted 462 master’s degrees, and they have usually been very strong degrees. The year 1948, when Lee Valentine completed the first exclusively-Spanish M.A., must be considered the starting point of the graduate program in Spanish. Since that time the department has averaged 7.3 master’s degrees each year, with greater numbers in the early 1970s when the Ph.D. program enlivened the whole graduate experience, as well as an upsurge beginning in 1995 and continuing to the present. The earliest Portuguese theses were comparative in nature – Carl Gibson’s study of Spanish-Portuguese deceptive cognates (1949) and James V. Graves’ similar study on Brazilian Portuguese-English deceptive cognates (1962). Pedro S. Bester received the first Portuguese master’s degree in literature in 1971, with a thesis on “Social and Economic Theories in the Novelistic Works of Jorge Amado.” Gerrit de Jong directed all of these early theses. Graduate students in Portuguese have earned 42 degrees in the department, approximately nine percent of all degrees granted.
The following chart shows the emphasis of these 462 M.A. degrees, and indicates a surprising balance among the areas of specialization.
Master’s Degrees – by emphasis Years Language & Literature Pedagogy Portuguese Totals Linguistics
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1940 – 50 3 6 0 0 9 1951 – 60 0 13 1 0 14 1961 – 70 3 35 7 5 50 1971 – 80 14 27 21 6 68 1981 – 90 22 16 15 0 53 1991 – 2000 31 38 24 8 101 2001 – 10 33 68 29 21 151 2011 – 12 5 6 3 2 16 TOTAL 111 209 100 42 462
We experienced some confusion as to where to place a few of the degrees which overlapped areas of specialization, nevertheless, the chart indicates an amazing positive balance among the Spanish degrees – 111 in language and linguistics, 209 in literature (almost evenly split between Peninsular and Hispanic American literatures), and 100 in Pedagogy. Few departments in the country could boast of such balance among interest sections within the department. Translation-emphasis degrees were placed in the area of emphasis to which the content most properly belonged.
Yet the graduate program is not merely composed of numbers (of degrees granted), nor the balance of specializations, rather of students, their excitement and success, their frustrations and joys, and their work after completing the degree. We have already listed several early recipients of the M.A. degree from the 1940s to 1960. A chronological listing of some of the prominent women and men who have completed the M.A degree shows how many have “gone on to fame,” in education, administration, business, public and Church service.
Selected MA. Recipients 1962 Eldon Lytle, Berkeley Spencer 1987 Tim Richardson, Lin Sherman 1963 Robert Gabbitas 1989 Kathy Davis, Ana Olson 1966 Glen Probst, Leroy Walser 1991 Dale Jarman, Oriana Reyes 1967 John Kartchner, Howard Quackenbush 1992 Mara García 1968 Jim Jewell 1993 Greg Stallings 1969 Eugene Hill, Clark Hall, Bob Valentine 1994 Barbara Bonyata, David Laraway 1973 John Thomas, Roy Tanner 1995 Blair Bateman, Vanessa Fitzgibbon, Nieves 1974 Russell Cluff, Jerry Larson, Alan Meredith Knapp 1975 Quina Hoskisson, Marian M. Labrum 1996 Daryl Hague, Bruce Lee 1976 Carmen Vigo 1997 Ana María Hawkins 1977 Willis Fails 1999 Baldomero Lago, Warren N. Williams 1979 Tomoe Witherspoon 2000 Kathryn Ashworth, Ana María Chaparro 1981 John Rosenberg 2001 Greg Thompson 1982 Mario Blanc, John Chaston, Thomas Porter 2002 Lilia Blackwell, Rubia Fagundes 1983 Ann Mella, Rob Smead 2003 Sónia Melo 1984 Chad Luke, Kirk Skyles, Jeff Turley 2005 James Krause, Alejandra Regnet-Larson, 2008 Ivelisse Grover, Cody Hanson Gloria Stallings, Jonathan Wade 2009 Patrícia Valente, Ellen Thompson 2006 Eduardo Viana da Silva 2011 Desiree Oliveira 2007 Todd Mack
This incomplete list shows some important patterns. Our graduate program, now limited to the master’s degree, trains most of our own teachers. Nearly all of the current adjunct faculty received their
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graduate (M.A.) degree in our department. In short, we are training our own part-time faculty. Most universities in the country would view this as too-inbred and hence too limited a point of view. Yet we can, and do counter, that such a system gives us a chance to know and evaluate our future part-timers. Further, given the reality that we hire almost exclusively active LDS members, it’s almost inevitable that we follow this pattern. We observe which of our undergraduate students are very well prepared, most energetic and willing, and encourage them to complete an excellent M.A. degree; then we hire those few who best qualify. We have turned the LDS member restriction into a plus, very similar to what the early Spanish teachers did in the 1940s and 50s.
A second observation from the above list is that almost all current full-time faculty also received their M.A. with us. But, since we don’t offer a Ph.D. each has had to go away to complete a degree at other universities. Again, this might seem to be too much in-breeding among the faculty of the department. But for the same reasons listed above, the department usually hires committed LDS faculty, and the vast majority of those have received their masters’ degree at this university. A “plus” in this limiting situation is that since the M.A. is our terminal degree (wow, “terminal” sounds so fatally final) the departmental professors really pack a lot of punch into the M.A. degree. We feel that it is one of the strongest M.A. degrees offered in the country. And the experience of our graduates who go elsewhere for their Ph.D. studies confirms that belief or bias. Most of these students indicate to us that their M.A. at BYU set them far ahead of their peers from other graduate schools. The fact that most Spanish and Portuguese M.A. students write a complete thesis at BYU, when many major universities grant the M.A. degree based on a paper or on examinations, causes our students to be well prepared for research and writing at the Ph.D. level.
In the process of preparing this history we polled current and retired faculty, asking that they name a few of their outstanding M.A. students. The following list, suggested by faculty mentors, is not complete, but indicates what some of our finest graduate students are doing and how they have used their degrees. Frequently mentioned were many of our current faculty members; we have not included them on this list:
Faculty-nominated M.A. Recipients M.A. Student Year Further education, current employment Alan Brown 2001 Ph.D., U. of Arizona; now faculty U. of Kentucky Earl Brown 2003 Ph.D.; now faculty Kansas State U. Loredana 2003 Ph.D., Cornell U.; now faculty U. of Wisconsin Madison Comparone Ryan Davis 2003 Ph.D., Emory U.; now faculty Illinois State U. James B. Dewey 2006 U.S. State Department; serving in Mexico Jeff Gabbitas 2000 Ph.D., U of Arizona; now faculty Pima Community College Nathaniel Gardner 2000 Ph.D., U. College London; now faculty U. of Glasgow, Scotland Ana-Lisa Halling 2007 Ph.D., Vanderbilt U.; now faculty So. Indiana U. Baldomero Lago 1999 Ph.D., UNED, Madrid; now faculty & chair, Utah Valley U. Christopher Lewis 2006 Ph.D., Harvard; now faculty at U of Utah Ana Teixeira Loso 2004 Ph.D., Brown U.; now faculty Massachusetts Institute of Tech. Todd Mack 2007 Ph.D., Stanford; Adjunct, BYU Span & Port, Humanities Collin McKinney 2003 Ph.D., Cambridge; now faculty Bucknell U. Manuel Medina 1990 now faculty U. of Louisville Anita Melo 2001 Ph.D., U. of Georgia; now faculty Westpoint U. Ellen Oliveira 2005 Ph.D., U.C. Santa Barbara
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David Richter 2003 Ph.D., Vanderbilt U.; now faculty Utah State U. David Rock 1992 now faculty at BYU, Idaho Katherine Sanchez 1996 Ph.D., U.C. Santa Barbara; now faculty U. of Wisconsin, Mad. Ryan A. Spangler 2003 Ph.D., U. of Kentucky; now faculty Creighton U. John Storm 2002 Ph.D., Purdue U.; now faculty U. of Northern Iowa Greg Thompson 2001 Ph.D., U. of Arizona; now faculty Brigham Young U. Emily Tobey Ph.D. candidate, Indiana U.; adjunct Miami U. of Ohio Jonathan Wade 2005 Ph.D., Vanderbilt U.; now faculty Meredith College Relva Whetten 1979 Director, LDS Institutes; San Diego, California area Mike Wilson 2002 Ph.D., Cornell U. Author, critic; U. Católica, Chile David P. Wiseman 2006 Ph.D., Vanderbilt U.; now faculty Lewis-Clark State College Jason Yancey 2005 Ph.D., U. of Arizona; now faculty Grand Valley State U.
Indeed the department can be, and is, justifiably proud of the excellent graduate program and will continue to produce scores of students each year who “go out into the world” or continue more advanced graduate degrees at other universities. We are a very good “feeder school” for other universities and will continue that grand tradition. The above list shows that our graduates have gone to some of the best universities in the country for Ph.D. studies and are now teaching in excellent universities,
Our Undergraduates
Yes, we must taut and talk about our undergraduates, our life-blood, our constant, our joy. Similar to our graduate program, the department feels that it offers a very strong undergraduate degree. Too few statistics exist to back up this assertion but each faculty member holds plenty of anecdotal info which supports this claim. In 1999, in conjunction with the BYU Alumni Association, the College of Humanities published an Alumni Directory which lists the names and addresses of 2,827 students (pages 594-607) who had completed a degree in Portuguese and Spanish from the mid-1960s to 1998. This number, however, was based only on former students who returned a mail-back survey. The total number of students who have majored in one of the two languages taught in the department since it was possible to major in Spanish or Portuguese is more like 7,600, based on the very accurate records of graduates that the diligent departmental secretary has kept since the 1970s. Whatever the exact total number over the many years of our existence, in the calendar year 2012, fourteen students graduated with a B.A. degree in Portuguese, and 81 in Spanish, for a total of ninety-five. Some years have been much higher, with 170 to 180 graduates each year, hence the total of 7,600 noted above.
Yet we are truly a service department. The majority of our undergraduate enrollments come from students who are completing university general education classes, returned missionaries seeking credit for their foreign-language service, minors, older adults considering a Spanish or Portuguese- speaking mission, and a few who are simply interested in languages and cultures. In the same period mentioned above, the calendar year 2012, we had 7,054 undergraduate enrollments in the department; only 841 of those enrollments came from majors in the two languages. Hence, only 10.5% of all our undergraduate teaching is to majors; the other 89.5% represents service to students and the university. An examination of class rolls from our pan y agua (or should that be mantequilla?) classes - 321, 339, 355 - shows a similar relationship - only about twelve percent are Spanish or Portuguese majors at the time they enroll. Many are, or will become, minors in Portuguese or Spanish, but the majority will simply complete two or three courses, leaving the university with a good base in the language and culture of their mission.
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During the Fall semester of 2012, university records show 349 students with majors in Portuguese and Spanish. Relatively few of these 349 began their college careers with Spanish or Portuguese as a major area of emphasis; most of our majors “find” the language after a year or two of university study, or after a mission. In short, life experiences and Church service create desires and plans that are best met by in-depth language study. Some majors do indeed come from high school with four or five years of Spanish (rarely Portuguese) and declare a departmental major their first year. The number cited above, 349, represents what has become an average number of majors during the last fifteen to twenty years.
The breakdown into areas of emphasis of these 349 majors from our sample semester is revealing: Portuguese 39 Spanish teaching 24 Translation 19 Spanish (general) 267 Total 349
The number of Portuguese majors remains fairly constant from year to year, always between ten to twelve percent of total departmental majors. Spanish teaching majors at the present are quite low and have been declining since the 1970s and 80s, a time when many more students chose preparation for public school teaching as a major. Currently this emphasis limits the number of students who are accepted as teaching majors. The translation program teaches many more than the nineteen who are listed as majors but it also limits enrollment, accepting only a select few.
From the above list it is apparent that most students select the straight or general Spanish major, 267 students, or 77% of the total. They are often questioned, “What are you going to do with a major in Spanish (or Portuguese)?” We have no system to track each major but we know that we are great “suppliers” of students who continue graduate studies in such diverse fields as law school, dental and medical schools, MBA programs, M.A. and Ph.D. studies in Portuguese and Spanish and many other disciplines in humanities and social sciences. A very large number of returned missionaries find that they can complete all the requirements for their specific discipline (MBA, dental, medical, etc.) and still complete a Portuguese or Spanish bachelor’s degree, and in this way make themselves better candidates for graduate work. For example, a member of BYU’s second law school class, Grant Pace, majored in Spanish and later testified, “The very best preparation I ever had for law school was the Latin American short story class. In that class we did just what we do in law school – here we read stories (legal cases), then examine and analyze the details, and defend our point of view in front of others, just like we did in that Spanish class. Spanish was the best major I could have chosen for law school.”
The undergraduate programs in the department are diverse and will not be described here. Obviously they have undergone frequent evolution and changes since the department’s creation in 1967, but the total number of hours required, the specific type of mandatory and optional classes have remained surprisingly constant. Enrollment and number of undergraduate majors have climbed gradually from the late 1960s to the present, both enrollment and number of majors seem to have reached a plateau (“mesa” wouldn’t be a better word here, rather than a French term) since the mid-
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1990s. Currently we record approximately 3,300 undergraduate enrollments each semester in all our Portuguese and Spanish classes. During the fall semester, 2012, there were 2,806 undergraduate enrollments in Spanish and 561 in Portuguese. Undergraduates, 1960s and 70s
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We do not maintain records or statistics on what each of our B.A. students do after graduation. We have already indicated that many use the language as a springboard into other disciplines – law, medicine, dental school, MBA programs, and so on. Some go into public school teaching in the area and we continue to see them at least once a year at our Foreign Language Fair. Many pursue careers in which their Spanish or Portuguese is an assist to communicate with fellow employees and particularly with clients. Those who emphasize translation have been quite successful in finding work as court translators, or working in local, state and even the national government. Indeed many of our general majors find work with the multiple agencies of the United States government. One of these very outstanding undergrads is Robert Stephen Beecroft. Those who taught him remember him as very hard- working, question-asking, verbal, challenging. He graduated with a BA in Spanish in 1982, continued graduate work, passed the U.S. Department of State exam, and currently serves as ambassador to Iraq, an extremely sensitive, vital government post. A second example is John W. Dinkleman who received an A.A. degree in Spanish in 1980. He, like Beecroft, serves the United States in the Department of State
President Bateman congratulates 91-year-old C. Laird Snelgrove and his wife Edna Haynie Snelgrove. and is currently the chargé d’affaires in a rather sweet posting - the Bahamas. A chargé d’affaires is the individual in charge when no ambassador has been named. A third is Matt Ellsworth. He also serves in the U.S. Foreign Service, and has been posted to Washington, Abu Dhabi, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Mexico City, Baghdad, Phnom Penh, Peshawar and is now weathering the challenges in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Besides Spanish he also learned and uses Arabic, Russian, French and German. A fourth undergraduate is C. Laird Snelgrove, former mission president, community leader in Salt Lake City, and a very good ice cream maker. After five of his grandchildren graduated with honors from BYU, he decided to complete a degree here. Spanish was a logical and well-liked major; due to advanced age he struggled a bit but truly completed all the requirements for a B.A. degree in Spanish. He received the degree during Winter Semester, 2003 and was recognized as BYU’s oldest graduate ever.
Gonzalo Rojas, as a relatively new faculty member in the department, wrote a detailed letter to the chair, on 3 April, 1987. He had previously taught in Europe as well as at Columbia University, New York University, the Universities of Chicago, Pittsburg and Texas, and in the letter compared his BYU undergraduates with students at those universities. He stated:
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Cuando en el otoño de 1985 fui invitado a BYU y mi esposa y yo comenzamos a vivir este ámbito, nos llamó la atención el nivel de conocimiento de la lengua española por parte de los estudiantes, muchos de los cuales tienen un registro expresivo de primer orden. Este manejo del castellano . . . nos pareció algo del todo insólito por la gran cantidad de alumnos que lo hablan y escriben. Difícilmente habrá en otra parte un sector tan mayoritario de profesores y alumnos que hayan aprendido por dentro el proceso cultural de América Latina, viviendo allí, con experiencias personales directas, interesándose por la vida de cada país en sus pormenores. No basta leer sobre el desarrollo sino hay que vivirlo y ésa es la dinámica que se ofrece aquí.
Much of the following information and analysis, although focusing on faculty, courses, visitors and service, really deals with what we do for and with our undergraduate students.
AN AMAZING FACULTY
Who are the teachers of these many undergraduate and graduate students? What is their background? We have already referred to the early professors who were hired in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. The following list notes all full-time faculty by hiring year. The list was not easy to compose; some professors were hired as part-time before becoming full-time; we found a few contradictory dates. The list is valuable in that it shows rapid and dramatic increases in numbers during certain periods:
All Faculty, by year of hire at BYU
1925 de Jong, Gerrit, Jr. 1974 Labrum, Marian B. 1940 Valentine, Lee B 1975 Ramsey, Myriam de Castro 1949 Gibson, M. Carl 1976 Meredith, R. Alan 1949 Taylor, H. Darrel 1978 Melendez, Gloria S. 1953 Wilkins, Ernest J. 1980 Larson, Jerry W 1956 Anderson, C. Dixon 1981 Fails, Willis C. 1960 Hansen, Terrence L. 1983 Cluff, Russell M. 1962 Taylor, James S. 1985 Rosenberg, John R. 1963 Moon, Harold K. 1987 Forster, Merlin H. 1963 Rosen, Harold E. 1988 Jarman, Dale 1964 Brown, Jack V. 1989 Ghassemi, Ruth 1964 Compton, Merlin D. 1989 Rojas, Gonzalo 1965 Shreeve, Lyman Sid 1989 Turley, Jeffrey 1966 Ashworth, Peter P. 1990 Hoskisson, Joaquina V. 1966 Hall, Wendell H. 1991 Mathews, Thomas J. 1968 Dowdle, Harold L. 1991 Rojas, Hilda May 1968 Jackson, T. Wendell 1992 Lund, Christopher C (Kit) 1968 Valentine, Amy Y. 1993 Alba, Orlando 1969 Dennis, Ronald D. 1994 Hague, Daryl R. 1969 Jensen, Gordon K. 1994 Hegstrom, Valerie 1970 Quackenbush, L. Howard 1994 Pratt, Dale J. 1971 Vigo-Acosta, Carmen 1996 Garcia, Mara L. 1972 Clegg, J. Halvor 1996 Weatherford, Douglas 1972 Lyon, Thomas E. (Ted) 1998 Laraway, David P.
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1998 Smead, Robert N. 2006 Fitzgibbon, Vanessa 1999 Sherman, Alvin F. (Lin) 2006 Martinsen, Rob Alan 1999 Stallings, Gregory C. 2006 Alvord, Scott M. 1999 Williams, Frederick G. 2008 Montgomery, Cherice 2000 Williams, Lynn 2009 Krause, James R. 2002 Bateman, Blair E. 2010 Lopez, Samuel 2003 Preto-Bay, Ana 2011 Nielson, Rex P. 2004 Lago, Baldomero 2012 Erik Larson 2004 Knapp, Nieves Perez 2012 Greg Thompson
The second list indicates faculty in alphabetical order and the year they were hired, as well as retirement dates. As already indicated, age sixty-five used to be a very firm retirement date at BYU (and most other businesses and universities), but is no longer the case. The department used to be able to plan new hires years in advance, according to when each professor reached sixty-five; current law obviously makes it more difficult for a chair to make long-term planning for new hires. The letter “P” in the chart indicates “to the present,” current faculty who are teaching at the time of this writing.
All Faculty, Alphabetical Order
Hire Retire/Departure Hire Retire/Departure Name date Date date Date Alba, Orlando 1993 p Knapp, Nieves Perez 2004 p Alvord, Scott M. 2006 p Krause, James R. 2009 p Anderson, C. Dixon 1956 1991 Labrum, Marian B. 1974 2008 Ashworth, Peter P. 1966 1999 Lago, Baldomero (?) 2004 2006 Bateman, Blair E. 2002 p Laraway, David P. 1998 p Brown, Jack V. 1964 1995 Larson, Erik 2012 P Clegg, J. Halvor 1972 2005 Larson, Jerry W 1980 2012 Cluff, Russell M. 1983 2011 Lopez, Samuel 2010 p Compton, Merlin D. 1964 1989 Lund, Christopher C. (Kit) 1992 2016 de Jong, Gerrit, Jr. 1925 1970 Lyon, Thomas E. (Ted) 1972 2007 Dennis, Ronald D. 1969 2004 Martinsen, Rob Alan 2007 p Dowdle, Harold L. 1968 1985 Mathews, Thomas J. 1991 1996 Fails, Willis C. 1981 p Melendez, Gloria S. 1978 1997 Fitzgibbon, Vanessa 2006 2016 Meredith, R. Alan 1976 2012 Forster, Merlin H. 1987 1998 Montgomery, Cherice 2008 p García, Mara L. 1996 p Moon, Harold K. 1963 1994 Ghassemi, Ruth 1989 1991 Nielson, Rex P. 2011 p Gibson, M. Carl 1949 1984 Quackenbush, L. Howard 1970 P Hague, Daryl R. 1994 p Pratt, Dale J. 1994 P Hall, Wendell H. 1966 1987 Preto-Bay, Ana 2003 p Hansen, Terrence L. 1960 1974 Ramsey, Myriam de Castro 1975 1997 Hegstrom, Valerie 1994 p Rojas, Gonzalo 1989 1994 Hoskisson, Joaquina V. 1990 p Rojas, Hilda May 1991 1995 Jackson, T. Wendell 1968 1993 Rosen, Harold E. 1963 1994 Jarman, Dale 1988 2003 Rosenberg, John R. 1985 p Jensen, Gordon K. 1969 2002 Sherman, Alvin F. (Lin) 1999 p
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Shreeve, Lyman Sid 1965 1980 Valentine, Amy Y. 1968 1981 Smead, Robert N. 1998 p Valentine, Lee B. 1940 1967 Spencer, Russell L. 1969 1973 Vigo-Acosta, Carmen 1971 1983 Stallings, Gregory C. 1999 p Weatherford, Douglas 1996 p Taylor, H. Darrel 1949 1963 Wilkins, Ernest J. 1953 1974 Taylor, James S. 1962 2001 Williams, Frederick G. 1999 p Thompson, Greg 2012 p Williams, Lynn 2000 p Turley, Jeffrey 1989 p
SHORT-TERM, FULL-TIME SPANISH/PORTUGUESE TEACHERS Ashworth, Peter P. 1962 - 1963 Pomeroy, Marion R. 1974 - 1975 Brown, Jack V. 1958 - 1960 Rhoades, Duane 1969 - 1970 Cagliari, Guillermina 1973 – 1973 Rojas, Gonzalo 1985 – 1989 Dennis, Ronald D. 1966 - 1967 Rojas, Hilda 1985 – 1991 Fitzgibbon , Vanessa 1996 - 1998 Shreeve, Lyman Sid 1955 - 1956 Hansen, Garth M. 1965 - 1966 Spencer, Russell L. 1970 - 1973 Kartchner, John Z. 1964 – 1967; 1999 – 2000 Walser, F. LeRoy 1964 – 1967 Knapp, Nieves Perez 1997 - 2003
BYU, as well as the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, has often been seen as an in-bred, too-homogeneous entity, with too-little diversity among its faculty. Since we basically hire committed LDS members we do indeed have some limitations. The following list indicates where each current faculty member received his or her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. It demonstrates mind-expanding diversity. Earlier comments on our graduate program might lead one to believe that all of our faculty receive their M.A. from BYU. Not true at all. There are fourteen universities represented among the twenty-eight professors with an M.A. degree. Twenty-nine of thirty professors have completed the Ph.D., at twenty- two different universities. Four completed their degree at the University of Texas, Austin, often ranked number one in the country for Spanish. Two professors in Portuguese completed the Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, frequently the first or second-ranked graduate program in that language. Three professors carried out and completed their Ph.D. studies at Cornell University, also a highly rated program and faculty. Four hold degrees granted by foreign universities, a further indication of heterogeneity among the faculty. Truly, the universities from which our current faculty received their highest degrees are among the finest. The list is enlightening.
Spanish and Portuguese Faculty - Advanced Degrees MA PhD Alba, Orlando University of Puerto Rico Univ. Nac. de Edu. a Distancia, Madrid Alvord, Scott University of Minnesota University of Minnesota Bateman, Blair Brigham Young University University of Minnesota Fails, Willis Brigham Young University University of Texas, Austin Fitzgibbon, Vanessa Brigham Young University University of Wisconsin, Madison Garcia, Mara Brigham Young University University of Kentucky Hague, Daryl MA- BYU; JD- U of Washington State U of New York, Binghamton Hegstrom, Valerie U of Kansas - Spanish; BYU - Comp Lit University of Kansas Hoskisson, Quina Brigham Young University
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Knapp, Nieves Brigham Young University Universidad de Oviedo, España Krause, James MA-BYU; Vanderbilt U. (Port.) Vanderbilt University Laraway, David BYU; Cornell University Cornell University Larson, Erik University of California, Davis University of California, Davis Lopez, Samuel Univ. Pontificia Comillas, Madrid Univ. Pontificia Comillas, Madrid Lund, Christopher University of Texas, Austin University of Texas, Austin Mack, Todd Brigham Young University Stanford University Martinsen, Rob Northern Arizona University University of Texas, Austin Montgomery, Cherice Wichita State University Michigan State University Nielson, Rex BYU-Comp Lit; Brown U. Brown University Pratt, Dale Cornell University Cornell University Quackenbush, Howard Brigham Young University University of Illinois Rosenberg, John Brigham Young University Cornell University Sherman, Lin Brigham Young University University of Virginia Smead, Robert Brigham Young University University of Texas, Austin Stallings, Greg Brigham Young University University of California, Irvine Thompson, Greg Brigham Young University University of Arizona Turley, Jeffrey Brigham Young University University of California, Berkley Weatherford, Doug Pennsylvania State University Williams, Fred University of Wisconsin University of Wisconsin Williams, Lynn University of London
There are six women faculty now teaching in the department. While this number may seem low in comparison to Spanish and Portuguese departments in other universities, it is the highest percentage ever (20%) for our department.
Many of our professors, both current and recently retired, have taught at other universities before coming to BYU, or even while on leave from BYU, giving them exposure and experience which enhanced their teaching and research in the department. Such experience has proven valuable in creating academic contacts and collaborative research. Members of the department have taught, as full- time professors at U.C.L.A., Rutgers, Columbia, Stanford, Chicago, the universities of Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Idaho State, Adams State, Weber State, Illinois, Texas, New Mexico, Notre Dame, Pittsburg U.C, Santa Barbara, Glasgow (Scotland), Universidad Iberoamericana, Universidad Nacional de México, and the University of Exeter (U.K.; Lynn Williams, 1978 – 2000), among even more. We are not as inbred as some might have supposed.
As already cited, former dean Bruce Clark, noted the pleasant congeniality that always seemed to exist among faculty members ever since the creation of the department. In 1980 the chair invited John W. Kronik, professor of Romance Languages at Cornell University, to conduct a thorough evaluation of the department. Kronik was frequently invited to review academic departments and was well known for his very candid appraisals. We had some fears about how he would view us. In the first paragraph of his BYU review, a section titled “The General Impression,” he also noted similar congeniality, cooperation and good will among the faculty:
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The visitor to BYU’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese comes away with a satisfying impression of the group. In fact, after several such evaluation assignments, I have to say that at no other institution have I seen such a spirit of collegiality, friendship, even brotherhood. No one here speaks in strident tones. I understand the special circumstances that foster such cohesiveness, and I can even perceive the dangers of a pervasive homogeneity of background, but I can only applaud the congeniality, the gentility, and the sense of family with which the Department members work together. Such an atmosphere, extremely rare these days in Hispanic groups, naturally makes for greater accomplishments, less waste of time, deeper devotion to the Department’s work and functions, and it redounds to the benefit of the students, both materially and spiritually.
In another section of his report Kronik again repeated that he was “struck by the devotion and seriousness with which all [faculty] members went about their business,” recognizing that not all were of equal talent, “but I had the feeling that everyone was making a distinct contribution to the total operation.” His review, maintained in departmental files, is surprisingly laudatory, but he noted “an obvious weakness [in] the paucity of native speakers . . . .” but then praised the quality of faculty language ability: “I have not come across a non-native group with as impeccable a command of Spanish and Portuguese as one finds here.” Expecting a more equal gender balance, he observed: “I would feel remiss if I did not mention the unaccountably small number of women teaching in the Department, along with the striking fact that the few who have joined the group are all at the bottom of the power structure.” Indeed, of the twenty- two full-time faculty in 1980, just five were women (McMaster, Melendez, Ramsey, Valentine and Vigo), and none had even achieved the associate professor rank However Amy Valentine had no advanced degree; Marian McMaster (Labrum) and Carmen Vigo had only completed their M.A. degrees; Gloria Melendez had completed John Kronik her Ph.D. at BYU a few weeks prior to the study, and Marian Ramsey was a relatively new assistant professor, having completed her Ph.D. in North Carolina in 1975. Kronik’s criticism had an obvious explanation, at least from our standpoint.
SOME CHURCH SERVICE
We previously noted the very high number of departmental faculty members who have been called to serve as mission presidents. Twelve have served the LDS Church in this way, laying aside their academic research and professional development to teach and inspire young missionaries. It is a feather in the “sombrero” (or chapeu, or gorro) of the department that the Church has chosen to call so many of its faculty, likely an indication that these professors have proven that they know how to show love, discipline and spirituality in working with the youth of the Church. These callings have often come at the most productive part of the professor’s career, delaying or even eliminating productive research and publication. Such callings also affirm the willingness and sweetness of the wives of these men, who also must demonstrate unmitigated love for young, sometimes boundry-pushing missionaries. Often the pressures on the wives are greater than on the men – most have to learn and master a new language at
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an advanced age, juggle family obligations and always be “up.” The faculty members and their wives who have received and accepted this unique holy calling are:
MISSION PRESIDENTS -- Department of Spanish and Portuguese Name Years of service Mission James Barker (called from U. of U.) 1942 - 1944; 1947 - 1950 Argentina; France Sid Shreeve (part-time in 1951) 1951 - 1955 Uruguay and Paraguay Lee Valentine 1952 - 1956 Argentina Ernest J. Wilkins 1961; 1963 - 1970 LTM, MTC, Provo Terrence Hansen 1964 - 1967 Cen. Am.; Guatemala/El Salvador Dixon Anderson 1972 - 1975 Buenos Aires, Argentina Wendell Hall 1981 - 1984 Buenos Aires S. & N., Argentina Fred Williams (called from UCSB) 1991 - 1993 Sao Paulo Interlagos, Brazil Willis Fails 1991 - 1994 Sao Paulo East, Brazil Halvor Clegg 1995 - 1998 Milan, Italy Ron Dennis 1996 - 1999 Fortaleza, Brazil Ted Lyon 1996 - 1999 Osorno, Chile
Several of these men and their wives (oh, don’t forget the wives!) have accepted second and third extended Church service calls. After serving three years in Central America, Terrence and Glenna Hanson served for nearly four more as the second president of the MTC in Provo (1970-1974). Sid and Afton Shreeve returned to Argentina as president of the MTC in that area (1986-1987) and also aided in establishing the MTC in Bogota, Colombia. Wendell and Merrill Hall served as head of the MTC in Chile for a year, 1989-1990. Halvor and Miriam Clegg served joyously as president of the MTC in Santo Domingo (2005-2007), as well as counselor in the large Provo MTC from 2009 through 2011. Ted and Cheryl Lyon presided over the MTC in Chile, from 2002 to 2004, and then were again called as president of the Santiago, Chile temple (2007-2010). Fred and Carol Williams postponed their family needs and Fred’s vibrant research, to preside over the temple in Recife, Brazil, 2009-2012. While at BYU many of the departmental faculty members have been called to serve as branch presidents at the Provo MTC. After retirement, many couples have served full-time missions, usually in Latin American countries. A single example, among many, is the case of Ron and Gracemarie Dennis who served as executive secretary of the MTC in Brazil.
EXTENDING BYU BEYOND BYU
Visiting Lecturers
In our dynamic department, Spanish and Portuguese faculty members have often felt the need to bring authors, critics and outstanding professors to campus, to lecture and teach, to enhance our programs, to enthuse our students. We have been able to find the funding which has allowed us to host some of the most outstanding writers and critics in our disciplines. Bringing outsiders to BYU has proven to be valuable for the faculty, but especially for our students, who need expanded exposure. As we meet former students, twenty or thirty years later, they often say, “I still recall my excitement when Borges came, and even remember the words he spoke,” or “Ana Maria Matute’s lecture really allowed me to feel her humanity, her warmth, her love of children, including me.” BYU Librarian Mark Grover
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recently stated that “Borges’s visit is still such a vivid memory for me. Even now when I read his stories I hear his voice, as if he were narrating it in my mind at this moment.” The presence of authors whose works the students had read in Spanish 339, 441 or 451 thrilled them, animating their interest in and love for the Spanish language and culture. Sadly, we have not brought many Portuguese or Brazilian writers and critics. Despite various searches it has not been possible to find the names of all who have spoken on campus, but among the memorable are:
Terrence Hansen and Jorge Luis Borges, 1971
Jorge Luis Borges Apr 1971 Short story writer and Silvia Molina Nov 1987 Mexican, novelist, poet, Argentina essayist J. Donald Bowen Apr 1972 Foreign language Rolando Hinojosa-S. Oct 1988 Mexican-American scholar, USA novelist, U. of Texas Jorge Icaza Oct 1972 Novelist, Ecuador Ana Maria Matute Mar 1990 Novelist, short story Fernando Alegría Mar 1973 Novelist, critic; Chile; writer, Spain Stanford David Lagmanovich Jan 1992 Critic, U. of Tucumán, Tomas Rivera Mar 1974 Chicano short story Argentina writer, Texas, California Francisco Borda Apr 1992 Nelson Osorio Nov 1974 Critic, Chile; released Luis Lorenzo-Rivero Sep 1992 U. of Utah from Pinochet’s prisons Stephen C. Jett Sep 1992 UC Davis Fernando Belaunde T. Oct 1975 Ex-president, Peru Harald Wentzlaff- Oct 1992 U. of Bamberg, Germany Jorge Luis Borges Apr 1976 repeat visitor, see 1971 Eggebert Torcuato de Tella Nov 1976 Professor of history and Frances Karttunen Nov 1992 U. of Texas sociology, Univ. of Bs. As. Kunibert Baumann Feb 1993 U. of Bamberg, Germany Emilio Carballido Jun 1978 Mexican playwright Francisco Marcos- Feb 1996 Rodolfo Anaya Feb 1982 Mexican-American Marín novelist, New Mexico Ronald Sousa Oct 1996 U. of Illinois Gustavo Sainz May 1983 Novelist, Mexico Edgardo E. Torres 1996 California Public Carlos Fuentes May 1983 Novelist, Mexico; at U. of Education; BYU graduate Utah, with BYU Manuel Alvar Mar 1997 State U. of N.Y., Albany; participation Spanish Academy Nick Shumway Nov 1983 Critic, Texas Jean Rene Aymes Apr 1997 Sorbonne, Paris
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Jaime Alazraki Sep 1987 Critic, Harvard, Argentina Brianda Domecq 1997 Mexico, writer María Elena de Valdés 1997 U. of Toronto Juan Carlos Rulfo 2006 Mexico, filmmaker, son of Juan John Lipski Feb 1998 Rulfo Carlos dos Santos 2000 Ambassador to U.N., Víctor Jiménez 2006 Mexico, director of Fundación Mozambique Juan Rulfo Clark A. Colahan Oct 2001 Whitman College, Roberto Rochin 2006 Mexico, filmmaker Washington Bruno Estañol 2007 Mexico, writer Rubens Antonio 2002 Ambassador to U.S., Brazil Flávio Flores da Cunha 2007 Military Supreme Court Judge, Barbosa Bierrenback Brazil Ana María Shua 2002 Argentina, writer Cláudio Lembo 2007 Former governor, State of Sao César A. Alva Lescano 2002 Pres. Inst. de Est. Vallejianos; Paulo, Brazil Amy Williamsen 2002 U. of Arizona Barry Olsen 2008 Monterrey Inst. Of Bruce Burningham 2003 critic, U.S.C. International Studies Adolfo José Melfi 2004 Chancellor, U. de Sao Paulo Antonio Pérez Henárez 2010 Spain John Slater 2005 U. of Colorado Adriana Lisboa 2011 Brazil, writer Laura Vidler 2005 West Point Sandra Kogut 2011 Brazil, filmmaker Edward H. Friedman 2005 Vanderbilt; campus-wide Ungali Ba Ka Khosa 2012 Novelist, Mozambique forum speaker; Don Quixote Nuno Brito 2013 Ambassador to U.S., Portugal Cecilia Cavanaugh 2006 Chestnut Hill College David Darst 2006 Florida St. U.
We note the visit of Ambassador Nuno Brito from Portugal in 2013 but must also mention that over the past twenty years several members of the department have responded to university requests hosting five ambassadors from Spain as well as multiple visits of ambassadors from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, and Peru. These visits always resulted in campus lectures as well as a chance for faculty and students to mingle with and update themselves on current conditions in these countries.
One might ask (1) how we have established these contacts and made the invitations and (2), where the money has come from to pay honoraria? The second question attests to BYU’s generosity – the money has usually come from the departmental budget of Spanish and Portuguese, in cooperation with Latin American Studies, the dean’s office, and even general university funds in some cases. Rarely if ever has funding been a problem in bringing foreign visitors. The first question is more complex and varies with each individual. The 1971 and 1976 visits of the famous Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges may serve as example. In 1968 Ted Lyon, then a professor at the University of Oklahoma, made a contact and held a long interview with Borges in Buenos Aires. Among many topics they discussed Mormonism, and Borges indicated a strong desire to visit “Mormon Utah.” Lyon contacted friends at his alma mater, the University of Utah, who contacted BYU for additional funding and exposure. It was a relatively simple procedure, and BYU got its Borges. Most campus visits and lectures have been arranged through friends and colleagues at other universities, or by simply calling the author on the phone. It was the energy of individual faculty members that usually started the ball a-rolling. Funding has rarely been a problem – the department and BYU have been amazingly open and generous with purse strings.
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Graduate student Anabel Piñero, Borges, Ted Lyon, 1976
Visiting Professors
A second way in which we have extended BYU is through visiting professors whom we have contracted to teach a full semester. In the early 1980s the chair requested and received permission from the dean to leave one departmental slot open (those elusive FTEs) to allow us to court and bring well- known visiting professors to campus. The obvious intent was to provide our students with enriching and demanding academic experiences beyond what we could provide. The program was somewhat expensive, but mind-expanding for the students as well as the faculty. Among our memorable and important visiting professors:
John W. Kronik W, 1982 Cornell U., literary criticism (also Pres. of M.L.A.) Lon Pearson F,W, 82-83 Chair, Univ of Nebraska, Kearny; Lat. Am. Lit. Merlin H. Forster F, 1983 Chair, U. of Texas; Latin American Lit. Norman P. Sacks W, 1985 U. of Wisconsin; sociolinguistics Gonzalo Rojas F, 1985 Poet, literary criticism Francisco Ruiz Ramon W, 1987 U of Chicago; Vanderbilt U. Max Echeverria F, 1988; 1998 U. of Concepcion; psycholinguistics Silvia Molina F, 1988 Novelist, Mexico Luis Lorenzo Rivera S, 1991 U. of Utah
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Orlando Alba F,1991 – W,93 Pontificia U. Cat. Madre Maestra, Dom. Rep. Francisco da Silva Borda W, 1992 U. Estadual Paulista Roberto Mayoral W, 1993 U. de Granada, translation Jorge Rodriguez Padrón F, 1994; F, 2008 Spain, profesor de institutos Luis Guzmán F, 1996 Chile, artist Kirk Widdison F,W 1996-97 BYU Idaho Frederick G. Williams F,W 1997-98 U.C. Santa Barbara Glauco Ortolano F, 1998 BYU graduate John Kartchner F,2000; W, 2001 Weber State U. Casey Law F,2000; W,2001 BYU graduate Robert Strong F, 2001 – 2003 Wartburg College, Iowa Ana Preto Bay F, 2003 – W, 07 BYU graduate
Major Mini Courses
As faculty sponsorship and finances ebbed and evolved during the late 1980s and early 1990s, this program of semester-long visitors gave way to a new concept of week-long mini-courses. Each separate area of emphasis within the department (linguistics, literature, pedagogy, translation) took responsibility for identifying up-to-date, exciting professors who would come to BYU and teach an intensive mini-course, worth one credit. The courses usually last five days and give students exposure to some of the finest minds and research in our disciplines. During the past twenty three years at least 70 mini-courses have been offered in the department. Too often we experience problems in stimulating our goal-oriented, finish-as-soon-as-possible students to enroll in these unique classes; classes have usually been very small - from five to ten students Federico Patán, his wife, and Gloria Meléndez (on right), 1999. only. We need to find a better way to help our students enroll in these courses. Those who do are rewarded by exposure to some of the “giants” in our field. We do not have a complete record of the mini-courses we have offered, especially in the early years. Behind each of these innovative critics and writers, leaders in their fields of specialty, there is a story, a relationship that one of our faculty established with him or her in a foreign country, at a professional conference, or in a university. Among those who have graciously taught these mini-courses at BYU are:
Alvar, Manuel 1997 U. of Albany Blue, William R. 2005 Penn State U. Borrego Nieto, Julio 2012 Salamanca, Spain Brown, J. Andrew 2009 Washington U., St. Louis Brown, Kenneth 2000 U. of Calgary Campos, Marco Antonio 2005 UNAM, Mexico Cypess, Sandra 2011 U. of Maryland
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Day, Stuart 2013 U. of Kansas De Bruyne, Jacques 1998 U. of Gante, Belgium Díaz-Mas, Paloma 2007 CSIC, Madrid Dixon, Paul 2012 Purdue U. Fortune, Tara W. 2003 U. of Minnesota Friedman, Ed 1997 Indiana U; Vanderbilt Galloway, Vicki 2006 Georgia Institute of Technology Guilherme, Manuela 2005 Coimbra, Portugal Gies, David 2000 U. of Virginia González, Aníbal 1997 Penn. State U. Goodall, Grant 2010 U.C., San Diego Green, John 2008 U. of Bradford, England Gunterman, Gail 1997 Arizona State Hart, Stephen 2003 U. College, London Johnshoy, Marlene 2008 U. of Minnesota Jrade, Cathy L. 2002 Vanderbilt Klee, Carol 2009 U. of Minnesota John W. Kronik 2001 Cornell John M. Lipski 1998 U. of New Mexico Liskin-Gasparro, Judith U. of Iowa López Morales, Humberto 1993, 2007 Real Academia Española Medley, Frank W. 2004 West Virginia U. Met, Myriam 2012 administrator, Maryland Moreno Fernández, Francisco 2013 Universidad de Alcalá de Henares Navajas, Gonzalo 2008 U.C. Irvine Otto, Sue K. 1999 U. of Iowa Patán, Federico 1999 Mexico; critic Pharies, David 2011 U. of Florida Penny, Ralph 2001 U. of London Poot-Herrera, Sara 2007 U.C. Santa Barbara Poplack, Shana 2001 U. of Ottowa Potowski, Kim 2009 U. of Illinois, Chicago Rios-Font, Wadda 2005 Brown U. Ruiz de Mendoza, Francisco 2004 U. of La Rioja, Spain Samper, Jose Antonio 2006 U. Las Palmas Samperio, Guillermo 2003 Mexico, writer Sanchez, Kathryn 2003 U. of Wisconsin, Madison Sandrock, Paul 2011 ACTFL Schulz, Renate 1996 U. of Arizona Schwegler, Armin 2002 U.C, Irvine Tedick, Diane J. 2011 U. of Minnesota Terry, Robert 2004 U. of Richmond, Virginia Valis, Noel 2011 Yale U. Wilson, Mike 2010 U. Católica, Chile Wright, Roger 2004 U. of Liverpool
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BYU students with mini-course professor John Green, 2008
Students, both graduate and undergraduate, receive one hour of credit for the week-long seminar. The titles of these mini courses are often more dynamic, more innovative, than the standard, sometimes repetitive catalog courses (339, 345, 355, 441, 451, etc.). Among these exciting titles are “Los sefardíes. Literatura, identitdad y mentalidades,” “El Mundo de Don Juan,” “Spanish Historical Morphosyntax,” “Bilingualism and Language Transfer,” “Utopias of History in Spanish Contemporary Narrative and Film,” “Realism, Economics and Law,” “Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics,” and “Brazilian Women Writers – ‘Star Gazing and the Quest for Subjecthood’.”
The benefits of these three horizon-expanding academic activities - conferences, visiting professors and mini courses - are easily demonstrable. Merlin Forster accepted an invitation to teach as a visiting professor in 1983. He experienced BYU as a professor (although he had been here as an undergraduate in 1946 and the 1950s) and liked what he saw; we had a chance to get to know him and his teaching – and we liked what we saw. Four years later he gave up a very prestigious chairmanship at the highly-ranked University of Texas to accept full-time employment at BYU. His presence has increased the status and quality of all we do in the department.
In 1984 the chair talked with Gonzalo Rojas about the possibility of coming for a semester. It may be of minor historical interest to note that before we could offer him a contract, the chair had to convince the university administration that Gonzalo was not a communist, fleeing the violent persecution of artists and intellectuals during the Pinochet regime in Chile. Once approved and on campus our students were charmed by his energy, his depth of literary knowledge, and his ability to see and create poetry in Provo. Shortly after this initial visiting professorship, we hired Gonzalo and later his wife, Hilda, as full-time professors. During his tenure at BYU the Gonzalo Rojas queen and king of Spain presented Gonzalo with the Reina Sofia award, feting him as the best poet in the Spanish language that year, the quincentennial year of discovery, 1992. Gonzalo humbly accepted the honor, as a representative of BYU.
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In 1980 we invited John Kronik, from Cornell University, to conduct an external review of the department. We enjoyed his gracious personality as well as the thorough and quite positive evaluation he made. He apparently experienced similar positive feelings. Two years later, he and his wife Eva returned for an entire semester, igniting and enthusing both graduate and undergraduate students with a type of literary criticism in which our faculty was not well-versed. He also taught a mind-expanding seminar in semiotics to the departmental faculty. Kronik became a life-long friend of BYU, accepting and working closely with some of our best graduate students as they completed Ph.D. degrees at Cornell. He returned again in 2001 and presented a mini-course for the department.
Many of our graduate students have been accepted to prestigious Ph.D. programs because their future professors knew BYU from first-hand experience as visiting professors or mini-course teachers. In short, we have been better because we extended BYU beyond BYU.
STUDYING ABROAD
In a previous section of this history we noted BYU’s early sponsorship of study abroad programs in Mexico and Spain. These programs were not created to provide professors with “something to do in their spare time,” rather to create foreign learning experiences for students studying Portuguese and Spanish. In short, the goal was to move language and cultural learning beyond the limits of Provo. Study abroad programs of course exist in most major universities in the world, and are generally evaluated very highly by students as a giant step in language acquisition and cultural appreciation. Many universities have created consortia or cooperatives which bring more students and faculty together than a single university can provide, spreading the burdens (and joys) of recruiting and administering these expensive programs. Due to our unique Church-based structures and beliefs, we have rarely been able to join with other institutions for such programs (and we certainly should do this with other BYU campuses, to better staff and sponsor these experiences). There is not a single year in the Annual Statistical and Historical Report that directorship of study abroad programs does not figure prominently in departmental discussions. We offer plenty of foreign programs – the problem has been finding experienced professors who can take three or four months away from their regular campus research, their Church assignments, or disrupt the lives of their often-large families, Gloria Meléndez (back to camera) and Octavio to serve as program directors or assistants. Paz, Mexico City, 1996.
Despite these disincentives, since the late 1950s the department has carried out regular and very successful study abroad programs in the following countries and towns:
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Country Location Spanish Mexico Mexico City Puebla Hermosillo Mérida Guadalajara Spain Madrid Alcalá de Henares Salamanca Dominican Republic Santiago Costa Rica San José Chile Concepción Chillán Portuguese Brazil Recife São Paulo Rio de Janeiro Mozambique Maputo
A large number of our undergraduates already have the unique advantage of living for 18 or 24 months abroad, while they serve missions in a foreign country, and hence may not have the money or time to again go abroad. However in recent years we are finding that many of our undergraduates have served their Spanish- speaking missions in the United States and often yearn for the chance to experience that language abroad. This should increase our numbers in study abroad activities. The above chart indicates the creativity of faculty members who have not been willing to simply establish a program and let it continue unchanged. The faculty in both Portuguese and Spanish continue to find new countries and cities in which to Mozambique 2000, BYU students distribute food in refugee camp. create foreign study activities. And the “search” must go on - innovate, more, better.
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Fred Williams and BYU students with Mozambique writer Mia Couto, 2004. The overall administration of these programs has normally been controlled by BYU’s Continuing Education Division, or in the Study Abroad Office of the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies. We have already noted that this structure caused some problems and concerns as early as the 1960s, and the friction between department and outside administration continues, albeit with general good will and desire to cooperate. Perhaps in a response to certain administrative constraints, the department has occasionally sponsored our own small study programs, usually related to specific courses – for example the intensive Spanish 101 and 102 students have completed their study in Guadalajara, or the conversation classes have spent half of the semester in (relatively nearby) Hermosillo, Mexico.
At one point, from the 1970s into the 1980s BYU actually owned a large center (Residencia) in Madrid. Students were housed in this dorm- like building, with its own classrooms and cafeteria. Similar centers functioned in Paris, London and Vienna. Legal problems, irregular numbers of students each semester, 2013 Study abroad; in Segovia. and the inability to control all aspects of the experience caused the university, with departmental approval, to sell all but the London centers.
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Jim and Deanne Taylor and family with students, Madrid, 1978.
In a 1971 stake conference in Puebla, Mexico, saints from the ward in Nealtican noticed a large LDS family who were visiting from the United States, and talked with them. The Mexican members, mainly of indigenous background, asked the North American mother how many of her children had died in childhood. When she responded that none had died, and that all seven were living, the Nealticans each told of how many of their children had died of typhoid and diarrhea. The Mexican members noted how clean, tall and healthy the North American children seemed. After this brief encounter in a stake conference one of the women from Nealtican wrote a simple letter, in labored handwriting. She addressed it to the First Presidency of the LDS Church and told of her experience with the North American family. She stated that most of the members in Nealtican were not able to read or write, that normally about half of their children died before age one, that they were often sick. Would you (the Church) please send someone to help us, the letter humbly pled? A missionary helped her send it to Salt Lake City.
The letter eventually wound up in the office of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and a departmental proposal was created and presented to new President Dallin Oaks. It called for BYU students from the Departments of Food Science and Nutrition, Building Construction, and Spanish, to go to the Puebla Stake and work with the members, as per their request. The original proposal was rejected by Church authorities twice but through the indefatigable efforts of Sid Shreeve and others, it was finally approved, and BYU launched Project Mexico, begun in the summer, 1972. Students from the above-noted departments taught literacy, nutrition, health, sanitation, family gardening and building techniques to eager members. The students lived in Puebla but traveled to Nealtican, Xalitzintla, Atlixo, Cacalotepec, and many other rural areas each day to teach and enthuse the Project Mexico, 1973.
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grateful members. It was often difficult to keep the students healthy but the “convivencia” of BYU students with rural LDS members produced a bond of learning for both groups. Ted Lyon and Howard Quackenbush began directing the program in 1973. This interdisciplinary program evolved over many years, sometimes using the facilities and faculty of local universities to better prepare our students. One hundred and twenty-four BYU students participated in the summer of 1974, working in towns scattered over five Mexican states. Eventually the “Project” moved from Mexico, into Guatemala, and then Honduras and El Salvador, under the diligent direction of Howard Quackenbush.
Since that early beginning, the idea of service-learning abroad, foreign internships, individual study/learning activities and other such programs has prospered, allowing students the chance to tailor their own learning experiences. These have often been cooperative efforts between BYU and LDS Church offices. At present one of the most dynamic collaborative programs is the LDS Employment Services Internship. BYU students, using their Portuguese or Spanish spend an entire semester in any one of scores of countries, teaching the hands-on, well-proved LDS approach to job- seeking. The results, both for the out-of-work members, as Project Mexico, 1974. well as for our BYU students, are truly amazing. Members (and their friends) find employment; BYU students find international friendships and develop unique language and human relations skills. Many of these individual programs enjoy some departmental ownership, thus reducing the too-frequent frictions that have existed between departments and the David M. Kennedy Center which, by administrative fiat, oversees all out-of-country programs
DRAMATIC PRESENTATIONS
As early as the 1930s the Spanish Club organized occasional short dramatic presentations on campus, giving its members the opportunity to memorize and speak in front of small audiences. In the 1960s the newly-organized Sigma Delta Pi sponsored plays, to encourage a deeper understanding of the traditions of Spanish drama. And since that date the department has often put on full-length drama in the original language. Once again, this dramatic activity did not grow out of some strange need to “keep the faculty busy,” but to provide real artistic experiences for our students. Dramatic presentation requires a tremendous amount of work for the faculty involved. The professors who regularly taught, and still teach, courses in theatre and drama have been the prime force involved in the time-and- energy-consuming process of play selection, try-outs, staging, approvals, rehearsals, and the actual presentation of the plays. These professors are: Kay Moon, Howard Quackenbush, Valerie Hegstrom, Dale Pratt, and Vanessa Fitzgibbon. Many other departmental professors have assisted. Often a professor or two has taken a role in these dramas, but they principally feature student performers, both graduate and undergraduate students. Valerie and Dale have extended Spanish Golden Age theatre much beyond the BYU campus, taking their students “on the road” to other universities and venues in Utah, and to Idaho, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona and Texas. Many of these Golden Age plays were directed by students, including Jason Yancey, Anna-Lisa Halling, Laura Pratt and Sarah Butler. A history such as this should limit praise for specific individuals, but here we must render sincere honor and laud for those faculty members who have put in so much time and academic energy to regularly provide such amazing artistic experiences for their and our students. Thank you.
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Among the many plays presented by students and faculty of the department have been:
Name Author Date La barca sin pescador Alejandro Casona May 1972 Juicio final José de Jesús Martínez Nov 1973 Un hogar sólido Elena Garro Nov 1973 La detonación Buero Vallejo 1974 Auto de la triple porfía Emilio Carballido Winter 1975 Auto de la zona intermedia Emilio Carballido Winter, 1975 La casa de Bernarda Alba Federico García Lorca Fall, 1975 (by Latin American students) La molinera de arcos Alejandro Casona Mar 1976 El mancebo que casó con mujer brava Nov 1976 La palabras en la arena Buero Vallejo Apr 1978 El retablo de las maravillas Miguel de Cervantes Apr 1978 Muerte en el barrio (Fuenteovejuna) Lope de Vega Mar 1979 El caballero de las espuelas de oro Alejandro Casona Mar 1980 Los vendidos Luiz Valdez 1980 La barca sin pescador Alejandro Casona Nov 1983 El caballero de las espuelas de oro Alejandro Casona Mar 1985 La detonación Buero Vallejo Feb 1987 En la ardiente oscuridad Buero Vallejo Apr 1991 Los Fantoches Carlos Solórzano Mar 1992 El Censo Emilio Carballido Mar 1992 La historia de un flemón Osvaldo Dragún Mar 1992 La historia del hombre que se convirtió en perro Osvaldo Dragún Mar 1992 Estudio en blanco y negro Virgilio Piñera Winter 1995 Una mariposa blanca Gabriela Roetke Winter1995 Cámara lenta, historia de una cara Eduardo Pavlovsky Winter 1995 El Censo Emilio Carballido Mar 2002 Los Fantoches Carlos Solórzano Mar 2002 La dama duende Pedro Calderón de la Barca Winter 2002 also, Loa al Divino Orfeo Pedro Calderón de la Barca Winter2002 Don Gil de las calzas verdes Tirso de Molina Winter 2003 also, Retablo de la maravillas Miguel de Cervantes Winter 2003 El muerto disimulado Ángela de Azevedo Winter 2004 El caballero de Olmedo Lope de Vega Winter 2005 Las cortes de la muerte various Fall 2005 Un hogar sólido Elena Garro Winter 2007 Los Fantoches Carlos Solórzano Winter 2007 El Censo Emilio Carballido Winter 2007 El narciso en su opinión Guillén de Castro Winter 2007 La muerte del apetito Sor Marcela de San Félix Winter 2008
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El retrato vivo Agustín Moreto Winter 2008
Hal Clegg, Peter Ashworth and Kay Moon, “El caballero de las espuelas de oro”
This list may not be one hundred percent complete but it is very close to every drama we have produced here. It demonstrates the type and scope of the dramas presented by students and faculty of Spanish – theatrical productions of Spain from the Golden Age to the Twentieth Century, different genres of drama from several Latin American countries, and even a play by a Mexican-American playwright (Valdez). Because we have such a large and healthy Portuguese language program, we have done what very few universities in the country can do – presented plays in Portuguese. These have usually been directed by Vanessa Fitzgibbon, and include:
A Trilogia das Barcas 3 short plays in one Mar 2007 Morte e vida Severina João Cabral de Melo Neto Mar 2008 Odorico, O Bem Amado Alfredo Dias Gomes Mar 2009 O Auto da Compadecida Ariano Suassuna Apr 2010
In the late 1960s the department began a yearly program of folk dances from all over Latin America. Sid Shreeve often traveled to Mexico and places farther south and where he purchased scores of regional dance costumes. There were beautiful white lace costumes from Oaxaca, bright colors from Puebla, traditional dresses from Mexico City, many from Guatemala, Brazil, etc. Native students would then teach the dances to enthused returned missionaries from those countries as well as to our own basic language students. The program was often the highlight of the scholastic year for students, faculty and the community – always a full audience, standing room only. It was so popular that the Young Ambassadors, or another of the performing groups on campus, started performing these folk dances to a broader audience and soon (early 1980s) the administration made the decision that this very popular program should not belong to an academic department and all our hundreds of costumes were given to
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a newly-formed group, the Lamanite Generation, and the BYU Folk Dancers. Some department members felt a bit miffed that we were not recognized for this original contribution to the group now known as Living Legends.
SOME FACULTY RECOGNITION
The College of Humanities, as well as the university administration, have frequently determined that the faculty of the Department were worthy of unique recognition. It may be of value to note the names of those who have been granted awards and honors by campus entities. This list is not intended to exalt (hey, that’s a good “más allá” word) one faculty over another – all faculty have made and continue to make excellent contributions in their unique areas. Two stanzas from Longfellow’s “The Builders” are appropriate to our department:
“All are architects of Fate, Working in these walls of Time; Some with massive deeds and great, Some with ornaments of rhyme.
Nothing useless is or low; Each thing in its place is best; And what seems but idle show Strengthens and supports the rest.”
And so, the following is only intended to show those who the College and the University have honored for their research, teaching and service.
College of Humanities Distinguished Faculty Award (discontinued, 1984) James S. Taylor 1979
P.A. Christensen Humanities Lecture Harold Kay Moon 1983 Ted Lyon 1987 L. Howard Quackenbush 1992 Merlin H. Forster 1994 Russell M. Cluff 1997 Frederick G. Williams 2001
James L. Barker Lectureship Jerry W. Larson 1994-1995
College of Humanities Awards Howard Quackenbush 1996 Ludwig-Weber-Siebach Howard Quackenbush 2006 Humanities Professorship Orlando Alba 2007 Scheuber-Veinz Professorship Mara Garcia 2010 Humanities Professorship Mara Garcia 2013 Excellence in teaching
Benjamin Cluff, Jr. Award for Excellence in Teacher Education (David O. McKay School of Education) Blair Bateman 2011
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Forum/Devotional Speakers Ted Lyon 1990 Gloria Melendez 1997 John Rosenberg 1999 Joaquina Hoskisson 2003 Lin Sherman 2007 Lynn Williams 2011
Outstanding Adjunct Faculty Gloria Stallings 2012
Alcuin General Education Fellows Ted Lyon 1986 John R. Rosenberg 1991 L. Howard Quackenbush 1993 James S. Taylor 1999 Valerie Hegstrom 2005 David P. Laraway 2010
Karl G. Maeser Research and Creative Arts L. Howard Quackenbush 1989
Karl G. Maeser Excellence in Teaching J. Halvor Clegg 1993 Jerry W. Larson 2000
Karl G. Maeser Distinguished Faculty Lecturer Ted Lyon 1989-1990
Honors Professor of the Year Ted Lyon 1984-1985
BYU Professorship Merlin H. Forster 1987 H. Darrel Taylor Professorship Frederick G. Williams 1999 Gerrit de Jong, Jr. Professorship
Douglas R. Stewart Teaching and Learning Fellowship Jerry W. Larson 2007
David O. McKay Humanities Award Gerrit de Jong 1972
W. P. Lloyd Distinction in Graduate Education Merlin H. Forster 1995
Many other professors have been feted and awarded with honors outside the university. These are simply too numerous and too diverse to note here. But we observe that major universities in the world, government-sponsored organizations (N.E.A., N.D.E.A., N.E.H., A.C.L.S., etc.), volunteer organizations (NGOs), major professional organizations and even many non-U.S. governments have honored a large number of BYU faculty members. These include the governments of Spain, Portugal,
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Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Chile, Argentina and Mozambique. The awards and recognitions indicate that Department faculty members have extended themselves beyond the classroom and campus and served nations and peoples in Europe, Africa and Latin America. A few examples, among scores, will have to suffice. In 1992 the king and queen of Spain awarded the “Reina Sofía Prize” to faculty member Gonzalo Rojas; he was hailed as the “best poet in the Spanish language” during that celebratory year when the world trumpeted the “discovery” of the Americas.
The government of Chile named Ted Lyon as its Honorary Consul for the western United States, in which capacity he served for many years. In 2010 Chile honored Lyon with the Bernardo O’Higgins award, the highest honor Chile bestows to a foreigner. In 1997 the Brazilian Society of Language and Literature recognized Christopher (Kit) Lund “for relevant services rendered in the cause of teaching and research in the area of Linguistics, Philology, and Literature,” awarding him the Oscar Nobiling Medal. John Rosenberg was granted the “Cruz de Oficial de la Orden de Mérito Civil” in 2011, an indication of the high esteem with which he is held in that country.
“TEXTING”
As indicated earlier, many of the young and dynamic professors of Spanish and Portuguese recognized the inadequacy of the language textbooks they were using, and felt the urgency to create their own. We have already mentioned the texts created by Barker, de Jong, and Wilkinson and Hansen. Dixon Anderson and Alan Meredith formed a hard-working, innovative team, experimenting and creating new teaching materials, and in 1988 published Háblame a uniquely innovative text for teaching basic Spanish. The first edition was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; it was not well marketed but was indeed adopted by many universities in the United States. The text was a trendsetter in the market and most basic Spanish textbooks now follow the lead in using a continuous storyline throughout to introduce new grammar vocabulary and culture. Anderson and Meredith were the first to harmonize their text to the newly emerging ACTFL Oral Proficiency Guidelines.
Meredith, Anderson and many other teachers in the department have recognized the need for a text to accommodate the Spanish or Portuguese of returned missionaries at the third year level. To this effect Dixon Anderson published Patterns of Spanish in 2004. However there is still a need to integrate the unique experience of returned missionaries who come to us speaking good Portuguese or Spanish but not proficient in grammar, writing and reading. The task cries for professorial energies and time in both languages. After our basic third-year courses (321,322), students typically continue their language studies in linguistics or literature. Kay Moon saw the need to help these students understand basic literary criticism in Spanish, experimented with many texts in his classes and created Spanish Literature: A Critical Approach. It was published by Xerox College Publishing 1972 but never received sufficient advertising and exposure to create the national popularity it merited. It was used regularly at BYU in Spanish 339 classes for many years, and was considered a very fine text. Ed Friedman, the principal author of Aproximaciones, the current text often used in Spanish 339, acknowledges his direct inspiration in Kay’s excellent text. He confided to me that even the title of his text, “Aproximaciones” was “borrowed” from Moon’s word, “Approach.” Ernest J. Wilkins, in 1971 also used the Xerox College Publishing and compiled Por los senderos de los hispánico: Cuentos y teatro minúsculo, a reader for intermediate level, third year students of Spanish.
Dynamic, innovative Jerry Larson came to BYU in 1980 and began working on many projects, among them collaborating with the author of Español a lo vivo, Ernest Wilkins. Wilkins had left BYU in 1974 but continued active in the profession. Jerry was actually not a member of the department either
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(his FTE was in the College of Humanities) but he enhanced and up-dated “A lo Vivo.” Jerry’s influence began with the fifth edition (1986) and continued through the seventh, in 1990. The fact that two teams (Anderson/Meredith and Larson/Wilkins) of respected colleagues had both published basic Spanish texts created some tension and made choosing between favorite texts a matter of departmental tension for a period of time. Háblame eventually won out.
Orlando Alba published Manual de fonética lingüística in 2001. It too is used as a text in advanced Spanish linguistic classes and demonstrates Orlando’s great scholarship and innovative approach to the subject. It would be an enjoyable task to compare it with Barker’s 1944 Spanish Phonetic Manual.
Following the fine tradition of Gerrit de Jong, Fred Williams has carefully selected, written introductions, and made the translations, and in the first decade of the twenty-first century, published four major anthologies, texts which continue to be popular in commercial bookstores as well as university classes. These are: Poets of Brazil, A Bilingual Selection, 2004; Poets of Mozambique, A Bilingual Selection, 2006; Poets of Portugal, A Bilingual Selection of Poems from the Thirteenth through the Twentieth Centuries, 2007; and Poets of Cape Verde, 2010. Each volume is nearly 500 pages long and includes the most representative poetry of the writers of the four countries. The translations are very well done and these texts will surely fix a place for Fred as the preserver of Portuguese culture and literature in the world. BYU continues as a leader in the study of Portuguese in the United States.
From his earliest years at BYU Howard Quackenbush created a unique critical niche and has become a recognized world expert in Latin American theatre. He has published numerous critical works including four anthologies that are often used as texts. They are: Devotas irreverencias: El auto en el teatro latinoamericano Las razones del caos: Antología del teatro de la vanguardia y del absurdo Antología del teatro dominicano contemporáneo, vols. I-II La mujer frente al espejo: Antología anotada de dramaturgas dominicanas contemporáneas
COMMUNICATIONS
When the Department of Spanish and Portuguese was created in 1967 chairman Carl Gibson continued the tradition inherited from the past, and held weekly faculty meetings, every Tuesday at noon. Some faculty recall that such regular meetings were a drag, perhaps a waste of time in some ways, nevertheless they created a unified, communicating department that talked about its problems, and socialized with considerable frequency. The regular meetings allowed faculty members to present, vent, and discuss details and duties. Minutes from most of these early faculty meetings still exist, in files and folders in the department. Not surprisingly, some of the same topics which occupy current faculty meetings are also present in those minutes. Likely the most-discussed, and sometimes heated topic was how to best handle and in which classes to place returned missionaries. Various texts, approaches and levels have been proposed and tried over the years. Many professors created their own texts and materials, given the rather unique experience of these eager students who generally demonstrate a high level of verbal ability, plenty of confidence, but a weaker preparation in writing and critical thinking in Portuguese or Spanish. Related to the frequent departmental discussions on placement is the regular topic of how to test and grant credit for the beginning and intermediate courses that returned missionaries usually bypass. Cherilee B. DeVore has compiled a short history of the sixteen-credit exam, the ups and downs, fees and credits, grades, and grumping about the process. Her history is available on the departmental history shelf. Beyond these concerns related to returning missionaries, the next-
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most frequently mentioned item in departmental minutes has been the continual search for faculty members to direct study abroad programs. We kept on creating and developing new experiences for foreign study, but constantly had to battle to find directors.
Part of each weekly faculty meeting consisted of reports from the various departmental committees. During one year, in the late 1970s, there were twenty-three different committees, which sometimes overlapped, and perhaps spent too much time in committee meetings, but it certainly lent a feeling of democratic involvement. A sample of the secretary’s minutes of a 1979 faculty meeting may be instructive. The agenda consisted of twenty-five items; we only reproduce the first eleven, on the next page.
Weekly faculty meetings continued until 1982 when the department accepted a twice-a-month schedule. At first it seemed that “something was missing,” that is, that we had lost our weekly association with each other. As an attempt to justify less frequent meetings but still assure communication (in days before email), the department began to publish occasional newsletters for faculty. The first was “On Goings” (a rather unimaginative title) in the 1980s; in the 1990s the name was changed to “La Trompeta” and its focus expanded to include student news. By 2001 “La Voz” proclaimed departmental news and events to both students and faculty. As a dynamic, never-satisfied with the quo (of status) department, each new publication was an improvement and amplification. Copies of these newsletters exist in the yearly statistical reports of the department. And, in a similar fashion, during the 1990s faculty meetings resolved themselves into monthly meetings, a practice which continues to be the current pattern.
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No history of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese would be complete without mentioning Cherilee Beus DeVore! Cherilee hails from the rural town of Hooper, in northern Utah, where she learned the rigors and joys of farming and gardening. She served a mission in Monterrey, Mexico, from 1966 to 1968, and later graduated from Weber State University, in 1970 with a degree in Spanish and Music (the same path that Carl Gibson had pursued as an undergraduate at BYU). After work with Hispanics in California she was admitted to graduate school at BYU, but in 1975 applied for and accepted the job as the secretary of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She has known and worked for all nine chairs of the Department, beginning with M. Carl Gibson. Few other departments at
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BYU have had the benefit of a person with such long service and vital institutional memory. Faculty and administrators come to her to get a perspective on the Department, to understand the past and its relationship to the present. She has maintained many of the files and records that have been so necessary to this history. She has obviously “learned her way around” the university and can “get things done” through her knowledge and experience. Her main duties have included keeping up the detailed minutes of all department meetings, preparing class schedules, overseeing legal work such as contracts, visiting professors, mini courses and more. She prepares letters, orders texts each semester and oversees all departmental financial transactions. Cherilee has also been responsible for departmental steak fries, taco salad lunches, mid-afternoon brownie snacks, tomatoes from her garden, and scores of other tasty treats for hungry faculty. She freely and frequently shares her musical talents, often cooperating with other musically-endowed faculty members. She Cherilee Beus DeVore rarely seems to get sick and has surely accumulated a hundred or more sick days. She just seems to be “always there.” She often takes her vacation weeks in November, a “slow” month in departmental administration, during which she typically prunes fruit trees, builds a shed, a chicken coop or even a barn. Thank you, Cherilee.
Nor would his history be honest without proper praise for the unique service provided by Mark L. Grover, Senior Librarian for Latin America. Mark first came to the BYU library in 1973, and (sadly, for us at least) retired in 2013. In the 1980s he took a short leave and completed a Ph.D. in history at Indiana University, after which he returned to his position in the BYU library. In his nearly 40 years at BYU he always proved willing, capable, dedicated, even devoted support service to all departmental faculty. Many of us had experienced librarians at other universities who seemed to spend their time protecting the collection, or merely cataloguing it. Mark truly opened the library to faculty and students. He extended his emphasis to cover Spain and Portugal as well as Latin America and amicably helped the faculty build a truly outstanding library in Spanish and Portuguese. Mark was so well thought of that he frequently taught the senior seminar in Latin American Studies and for five years (1987 – 1992) served as director of Latin American Studies on campus. At the request of any faculty member he would host our students in the library, Mark L. Grover teaching them the fundamentals of computer research and ways to wind through the labyrinth of the library. Much more than a librarian, Mark was ever a well-disposed dedicated collaborator, truly a colleague in and for the department.
“No problema”
It might appear from the above that the department sails along effortlessly and upwardly, (with Cherilee) [please note the forced rhyme], all goodness and light. Using the innocent, too-literal “no problema” of our first-year Spanish students, we affirm that we have had problems and will continue to face new ones. We have already mentioned the frequent discussions (sometime in the Spanish sense of
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that word) regarding how to grant credit to returned missionaries, and the difficulty in finding directors for study abroad programs. Many other problems and concerns characterize the department. As the number of students taking foreign languages grew, so did the faculty. In the 1950s and 60s the pattern for most faculty was to complete a Master’s degree, begin teaching in the department, then request a leave of absence to work on, and, hopefully, complete a Ph.D. at a major university, and eventually return to the department. By the late 1960s and certainly from 1970 to the present, the expectation has been that new faculty members would come to the department with their Ph.D. in hand, or at least all classwork completed. Expectations on the faculty soon increased as national and international recognition became essential. Despite a very heavy burden as dean, Bruce Clark himself collaborated with colleagues and published anthologies and occasional essays. When Richard Cracroft became dean in 1981, he brought with him a dynamic, even prolific record of publication. From his background at the University of Wisconsin he simply expected real professors to follow suite. With the backup (push?) of his associate dean Garold Davis, research and publication were rightly recognized and obviously expected. Many of the older faculty members of the Department were caught in a changing situation where the rules for advancement had shifted. It would be incorrect to say that we adopted the norm “Publish or Perish” but it is not incorrect to say that the norm in the college became “Publish, or just don’t expect a very good salary increase.” On November 11, 1982 the chair of the department wrote to a faculty member serving as mission president in Argentina, stating that
Our new dean, Richard Cracroft, is a real slave driver. I mean that in a very positive sense. He is insisting, requiring and pushing the faculty into productivity and publication. The graduate program in the college has been revised, putting a strong emphasis on students working [only] with individual professors who are publishing scholars. I view this as a very healthy thing, yet it is causing discomfort for some of our faculty members who have not been too productive in the past. We look forward to your imagination and creativity when you return.
The key word became “productivity,” and in annual interviews faculty members were expected to show publication, or, to give some other indication of academic productivity – such as work on innovative courses, creation of computer programs, better methods for language learning, teaching aids that could be shared with colleagues, and more. In 1984 (not really a very fateful year) the College of Humanities distributed the “Deans’ Merit for Scholarship and Professional Activity,” a point system which attempted to quantify academic productivity. We reproduce it here:
“In addition to university cost-of-living adjustment and department merit salary, an additional increase in salary will be awarded to faculty members qualifying for “Deans’ merit for scholarship and professional activity.” The amount of increase will be determined by the amount allotted to the College and by the scholarship merit as measured by the following criteria. As a guide, scholarship merit increases for the past two years have ranged from $200 (10 points) to $2,000 (35-40 points).”
Points Book with major publishing company 20 Book with local publisher 10 Revised book or new edition 7 Edited book with introductory essay, with major publishing company 10 with local publisher 5 Computer generated book 7
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Article, refereed national journal 5 Article, non-refereed national journal 3 Article, state journal 2 Section of book with major publisher 5 Editor of national professional journal 15 Editor of state professional journal 10 Associate editor of national professional journal 10 Associate editor of state professional journal 5 Manuscript reviewer for major publisher 2 (each ms.) Papers and Speeches, at national or international meeting 10 at regional or state meeting 5 at local meeting 3 Officer of professional organization, national 10 regional or state 5 Section leader of professional organization, national 5 regional 3
The point system was not lovingly popular with many faculty but it certainly set the College on a course which rewarded those professors who were counted productive. This was the Ronald Reagan era and salary increases were quite generous if one was publishing and actively involved in his or her field.
Computers were just becoming part of the academic scene and the college was quick to jump aboard, expecting that they would increase productivity. In the above-cited letter to one of his faculty serving in Argentina, the chair noted that “We continue to amass many computers and printers. The college has just purchased a Kurzweil Scanner, which reads a text automatically into a computer, quite an exciting thing. We also have Word Star, Screen Writer, Superscribe, Apple Writer and many others.” In today’s computer world, these are simply antiquated, elementary programs, but a powerful and early beginning for computers and research at BYU.
In his 1984 history of the College of Humanities retired dean Bruce Clark lists “Recruiting, evaluating and rewarding the faculty” as his main concern during the 1960s, 70s and early 80s. He, along with succeeding deans, fought to bring faculty compensation in line with other universities. He appointed committees on rank advancement, teacher evaluations, and a special one directed at fairness (with respect to salary) for faculty. Yet those who were productive were rewarded, and many of the long-serving faculty fell behind in compensation and status during the 1980s.
A frequent concern during this period was faculty rank advancement. As college expectations increased, so did frustrations, upset feelings, and occasional anger. In the fall of 1987 the Departmental Rank Advancement Committee approved six recommendations for advancement and passed them on to the College Committee. A few weeks later, in his diary, the chair confided, “Today [Dec 1] the roof sort of fell in. We got the results of the College Rank Advancement Committee on our 6 people up for consideration. All were denied! I was especially angered that the College Comm. had overturned our Dept. Committee’s unanimous decision on (_____) and (____). How sad, and how completely wrong. All day, truly all, spent counseling with the faculty.” The two individuals, represented by the blank lines above, were good teachers and very productive in creating teaching and computer aids, but indeed had published very little in academic journals. One of them had even authored a popular textbook, but at
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this early moment of insistence on academic publication, a creative textbook was not esteemed as high as it should have been. The next day (Dec. 2, 1987) the chair’s journal notes: “All day, except for 2 hours of enjoyable teaching, spent with dean and faculty members, on the problem of rank and lack of advancement! My psychological energies are really consumed by this darn thing.”
Evaluations by professors from outside the university, as well as frequent self-studies within the department point to occasional problems. Most outside evaluators have found much more to praise than to criticize. We have already quoted from John Kronik’s 1980 detailed review, probably the most insightful outside evaluation we have yet received. In 1997 Harriet S. Turner, chair of Modern Languages at the University of Nebraska effected a formal evaluation. Her report praises “the level of technological and bibliographical support provided to teaching and research in Hispanic Studies. This support is exceptional. Through the development of innovative software programs . . . BYU is among the leading universities in the world in this endeavor.” She praises teaching in the department, stating that “there is no doubt that quality of teaching at all levels is excellent, and, in many instances, exceptional.” All students, she informs us, “expressed admiration for their teachers and for the administration of the department.” She praised the “enthusiastic and informed responses” of every student in the classes she visited. Probably too much approbation, even hyperbole, but we seem to like such praise. Her recommendations and criticism dealt with the allocation of slots and faculty specialization in the department; she felt that we should re-structure specialties according to three areas: (1) Medieval and Renaissance Studies, (2) Modern Literature and Culture, and (3) Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition. We have not put many of her recommendations in place.
Each time BYU has to complete a study for re-accreditation, we agonize through the process of departmental self-evaluation. These studies are necessary, analytical, much longer, and more complete on a descriptive level than the ten or fifteen pages submitted by outside reviewers. All are on file in the department. A unique and important analysis, not occasioned by a university self-study, is our own 1989 “Ten-year Plan.” The extensive, thoughtful study was chaired by John Rosenberg, with the assistance of all the members of the Steering Committee of the Department. The 48 pages truly point to needed changes and have charted the direction of the department since that time. This foundational study is bound and also on file in the department office.
AREA STUDIES
Nearly every evaluation effected by non-BYU professors lauds the breadth of the faculty in both Spanish and Portuguese, and recommends the creation or expansion of Luzo, Hispanic and Latin American study programs. As early as 1958 a university-wide Broad-Field Majors Committee recommended that a Hispanic-American Studies program be created. Once again, the excitement of a single individual, Lee B. Valentine, energized the idea into a program; Lee functioned as the first coordinator, in 1958. In 1965 Spanish professor Dixon Anderson worked out a name change, Latin American Studies, the title still used at present. Although the program involves both social sciences and the humanities, most of the coordinators (or directors) have come from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. The College-appointed coordinators have been:
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Latin American Studies Lee Valentine 1958-1964 Dixon Anderson 1964-1965 Merlin Compton 1965-1966 Sid Shreeve 1966-1967 Wesley Craig (Sociology) 1967-1970 Sid Shreeve 1970-1975 Ted Lyon 1975-1979 John Hawkins (Anthropology) 1979-1982 Howard Quackenbush 1982-1983 ______Mark Grover (Library) 1987-1992 Russ Cluff 1993-1996 Tom Pearcy (History) 1996-1998 Renata Forste (Sociology) 1998-2001 George Handley (Humanities) 2001-2004 Ted Lyon 2004-2007 Kit Lund 2007-present
The Latin American Area Studies program accepts many of the same literature and culture courses we use for our majors and minors – Portuguese and Spanish 339, 355, 451 and other specialized classes. As a result we occasionally have to work out accommodations and substitutions for the students who want to major in both areas.
The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed student protests, marches promoting racial equality, strikes by the United Farm Workers, and general social upheaval and political unrest, in society in general as well as on many university campuses. BYU did not experience the violence and demonstrations, but we did try to teach about and understand the movement. Within Latin American Studies a special emphasis in Spanish-speaking American Studies was formed in 1974 but soon morphed into Mexican-American Studies, as a separate program, with Halvor Clegg as coordinator. The program, often called Chicano Studies in most other universities, attracted many Anglo-American students who wanted to work with minorities in the U.S., as well as many fairly “rowdy” activist Hispanos. These students found a real pater familias in Clegg who somehow kept their buoyancy and rebellion in check. Clegg developed the first class in Mexican American language and linguistics, and had to cloak it with the title “Border Spanish” to avoid the political tussles over the more descriptive word “Chicano.” The course was recognized as a first in the U.S. and was featured as such in the N.Y. Times. Howard Quackenbush and Ted Lyon developed first-ever-at-BYU courses in Mexican American literature, culture and drama. In 1980 Quackenbush presented a Chicano play, “Los vendidos”.
To add credibility and strengthen this program we brought several prominent Hispanic- American speakers. Tomás Rivera, an early activist as well as an excellent short story writer, spoke on campus in 1974, just as the program was getting under way. Mexican-American students from California and Texas related to his life as migrant-turned academic; he later became chancellor of a University of California campus. Rudolfo Anaya, a Hispano from New Mexico spoke to students and faculty in 1982, having already published his popular Bless Me, Ultima and showed the students that despite humble and rural beginnings, they could achieve great heights. Among the undergraduate students in the program there were many standouts. Jesse Aros, a tattooed, one-armed, former gang member (Crypts) and LDS convert from Los Angeles, graduated in the program and continued academic
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studies. He currently teaches at a California university. George Rodrigues, so imbued with political activism that he almost wanted to burn buildings at BYU, focused his energies on graduation and accepted work in the U.S. Department of State and later the Department of Education, where he continued actively pushing minority causes.
The Mexican American Studies program was discontinued in 1983; it had been switched from the College of Humanities, where it had achieved a vibrant life, to the Kennedy Center for International Studies and did not quite fit the mold of an international program. Halvor Clegg directed and coordinated the unique program during the entire length of its existence.
In the 1970s several language professors structured a Russian Studies program at BYU. After a few short years it evolved into a European Studies program, with Douglas F. Tobler (History) and Garold N. Davis (German) as its early coordinators. Hans-Wilhelm Kelling (German) coordinated the program for eleven years (1987-1998). No professors of Spanish or Portuguese have ever directed this area studies program but many have taught and still teach classes in Spanish and Portuguese culture, language and literature which are basic to student needs. Several faculty members have received research and study grants through the program. The name was eventually changed to the Center for the Study of Europe and 2003 it received federal monies to support the Center. Under the direction of Wade Jacoby it continues to fill a vital role for students and faculty with interests in Europe, specifically Portugal and Spain as they relate to our department.
GOODNESS GREATNESS
By the 1970s, and certainly through the 1980s, and continuing to the present, the department had achieved not only local recognition, but excellence at the national and international level. One of these indications of excellence is the awarding and presence on campus of Summer Seminars, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Merlin Forster, with his reputation as a world-class scholar on Latin American literature, applied for and received the designation as teacher and organizer of the first seminar, in 1989. Scores of public and private school teachers from across the United States and some foreign countries completed applications to participate. Fifteen were selected, given a government stipend, and nervously travelled to Utah. So successful was the first seminar that over the next nine years, four others were held on BYU campus. Each seminar lasted five weeks, and required intense reading and day-long commitment to classes, research and writing of papers. A participant during the first year, Susan H. Ungar, a Spanish teacher from the International School in Brussels, Belgium, praised the program: “I didn’t particularly choose Utah, although I [had] heard great things about Salt Lake City, especially winter skiing, but I didn’t expect to find such a great university here because you always associate great universities with the East Coast or California. But I have realized there is more value here because it is so intimate and so complete.” (BYU Universe, July 26, 1989). The title of the first three summer seminars (held in 1989, 1990, 1993) was “Fiction of Fictions: Reading Jorge Luis Borges.” The participants thrilled to the in-depth teaching by Merlin Forster and his assistant, Dale Jarman, and decided to publish their papers in a notebook-sized book. In 1996 and 1998 Merlin teamed with his chair, John Rosenberg, submitted a proposal and twice taught “Modern Hispanic Drama: A Meta-theatrical Approach.” Once again, many student reviews lauded the professors and the course as their “best learning experience ever.” The fact that the N.E.H. continued granting the sponsorship of summer seminars to BYU professors indicates the high level of scholarship, trust and obvious results from the courses. Hooked on the joy of this teaching, Rosenberg also directed N.E.H. seminars in Madrid in 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2011.
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In 2000 the course offerings in Portuguese at BYU were expanded beyond Portugal and Brazil to include the literatures and cultures of the five Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa (Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, São Tomé & Príncipe), and the one country and two regions of Portuguese-speaking Asia (East Timor; Goa, India; Macau, China). Like Spanish literature courses, Portuguese literature courses had focused primarily on European and American writers; but after the independence movements of the mid-1970s, literature departments across the world have widened their lenses to include a much richer blend of writers. It was also in 2000 that the first of a dozen BYU study abroad programs in Mozambique were begun. Again, BYU is leading the country in these unique classes and study programs.
The Instituto de Estudios Vallejianos was founded at Brigham Young University on August 6, 2002 and officially inaugurated on November 15, 2002. Mara L. Garcia must be mentioned, and lauded, as the moving force, the energy, the power behind the creation of the Instituto, and its continued vitality. Its purpose is to promote and disseminate the works of Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo (and other Hispanic writers), as well as sponsor cultural and literary activities for our students and the community in general. The Cesar Vallejo Institute in Utah is a chapter of the broader Cesar Vallejo Institute in Trujillo (Peru) founded 31 years ago. The Department of Spanish and Portuguese of Brigham Young University sponsors this chapter, which was the first chapter established in the United States. The founding members are: Drs. Merlin Forster, Juan Mejia, Howard Quackenbush, Russell Cluff, Doug Weatherford, Ted Lyon, David Laraway and Mara L. Garcia (President-founder). The Institute has published books, newsletters, “El Heraldo Vallejiano” and “Folios Vallejianos,”and maintains a website exclusively for Cesar Vallejo. Every November the Instituto celebrates its founding with cultural and poetic activities. Generally about 400 people participate in these activities.
A little known but vital contribution of the department to the LDS Church is the “translation” of the LDS “Topical Guide” into Spanish. The word “translation” is placed in quotation marks because the project was much more involved than merely translating directly from English to Spanish. In the early 1980s members of the department volunteered their “extra” time, and under the thorough organization of Carl Gibson each member took a section of the English version. But we soon discovered that a simple word like “Wages” in English elicited seven different words in the Spanish scriptures – salario, pago, pagas, etc. Hence each faculty member had to correlate his or her assigned English section with Gibson – an amazing organizational task in a day when computing was so infant. This volunteer assignment for the Church began in 1982, shortly after the Church had published the King James Bible with the new “Topical Guide” for the study of the scriptures. Jim Jewel, a former student in the department, was working in the Church Translation Department and further coordinated our efforts. With his help we also incorporated much of the “Bible Dictionary” into the same “Topical Guide” headings and made a unique offering, that in some ways is an improvement over the English Guide. We completed our work in 1984. Years later, retired Professor Jim Taylor and his wife Deanna also worked on and coordinated the efforts of scores of native speakers in Spain and Latin America in creating the new version of the Bible in more-updated Spanish (2009).
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We also count many other activities in our service-to-Church and service-to students. Gloria Melendez, with the assistance of other department members, continued a long-standing tradition by organizing a Spanish Choir. Many students have been thrilled to be able to continue singing in Spanish and made the choir an exciting part of their Spanish studies. The choir has sung at Christmas programs, Día de los Reyes Magos, departmental activities and dinners, and has even travelled as far as El Paso, Texas to perform. The choir, like so many other activities in the department, is rarely a constant, but has waxed and waned according to the interests and energies of individual faculty members. It may be in need of revival and restoration at the present time.
While teaching at the University of Wisconsin Ted Lyon founded a literary journal, naming it Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana. The original intent of the journal was to help students and faculty keep current with the rapidly expanding and innovative literatures of Brazil and all the Spanish-speaking countries in the western hemisphere. It was, and still is, the only academic journal devoted exclusively to Latin American literature and culture in both Spanish and Portuguese. When Lyon came to BYU in the fall of 1972, the journal’s headquarters remained in Wisconsin but in 1980 Lyon brought the editorial offices to BYU. Several BYU faculty members published in the journal and served on its board of editors. Lyon continued as editor from the 1980s through 1996 when he was called to serve the Church in Chile. Chasqui is now in its forty-second year of continuous publication and is considered as one of the most dynamic and important literary journals in the field.
In 1976 Don Jarvis, professor of Russian at BYU, began pushing the administration to create foreign language houses, especially for majors and minors who had not served a foreign mission and could not afford study abroad programs. The goal was to provide an intensive, stay-in-the-language-only locale for serious students who wanted to demand more of themselves and advance more rapidly in their language skills. It was a long task (two years) to obtain administrative approval but after scores of memos and meetings, houses were created for students of Russian and Italian. The Spanish house commenced in 1980, with eleven women students. Harold Dowdle carried the burden of recruiting and perpetuating the program for the department. Its first location was indeed just a house, a rather ancient pioneer home south of campus; over the years it moved around to various campus sites. In 1991 a permanent home was created for all the language houses, and a Portuguese house was added that year.
During the 1960s and 70s many professors discussed our unique language situation with so many returned missionaries who were both verbally fluent and vitally interested in the language and culture. We talked of our ability to create a serious Spanish translation program in the department. Under the direction of Wendell Hall the department commenced granting a Certificate in Translation in 1976. And like so many other academic activities it grew, evolved and “morphed” into the strong program it is today. The department wisely recognized that a good program needed to translate into one’s native language, so Uruguayan faculty member Marian Barbieri Labrum volunteered and retrained herself to strengthen the Spanish side of the translation program. Russell Cluff, with his truly bilingual background from the Mexican Mormon colonies, represented the English flank. Years later Cluff tended more into literature and Daryl Hague became the excellent English expert. When Marian Labrum began suffering the tragic effects of multiple sclerosis, a series of part-time faculty who were native speakers stepped in to carry that side of the program. At present Samuel López aptly carries the Spanish part. Admission to the program is by application and only outstanding, well-prepared students enter. Our dedicated translation professors regularly attend the best conferences and bring major scholars who deliver lectures and teach our mini-courses. At the present we do not have a translation emphasis or
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certificate in Portuguese. We not-too-humbly affirm that our Spanish translation classes, students and professors represent one of the finest translation programs in the country.
We have already mentioned the creation of language laboratories and the use of technology to assist our students and enhance our teaching, most often at the level of basic language-learning. Technology and its relationship to more advanced humanities seemed contradictory and confusing to many professors. Yet shortly after the College of Humanities was created (1965) the dean and various professors met and discussed forming a center or institute for language studies. Finally in 1970 (again, after a very lengthy administrative delay) a center was formed and a professor of the department, Ernest Wilkins was named its first director; he had just been released after eight years as president of the MTC. Wilkins selected three assistants, among them Jim Taylor who received the assignment to work with language teacher training. The somewhat cumbersome, perhaps restrictive title was the Center for Specialized Language Studies. In 1972 it evolved into the Language Research Center. It soon identified one of its major missions to work with computer-assisted language translation, which grew so rapidly that it was moved from the college and became a separate center.
Wilkins served for four years as director of the Language Research Center; Jim Taylor, highly respected for his language-learning methodologies, was then named the director, serving for three years until 1977. Associate Dean Max Rogers and Professor Randall Jones, both with German language background, guided the center from 1977 through the 1980s, creating new interests and research, with various changes of title and emphasis. The developing and expanding college language lab was also brought under the jurisdiction of the center and Jerry Larson (College of Humanities and Spanish Department) was hired to give it new vitality. Even though he was not an official member of our department, Jerry attended faculty meetings, professional conferences in Spanish, and taught classes in the department. He truly ignited language and computer learning, created programs and computer testing and helped make BYU a recognized language and humanities research center in the world. In 1989 Harold Hendricks assumed the role of supervisor of the Humanities Resource Center, an entity within the broader Center. Randall Jones was released as director of the Center in 1989 and Jerry Larson became its next logical head. Under Larson’s leadership the name was again changed to the Humanities Technology Research Support Center. In 2012 yet another name change emerged from the center’s many computers; it is now known as the Office of Digital Humanities. Three professors related to the Department of Spanish and Portuguese have demonstrated innovative and amazing leadership in creating and making this oft-name-changing center a dynamic, respected entity on campus and throughout the country. Hundreds of professors and researchers from other universities have come to BYU to study and learn from the Center’s activities. Among these visitors, Virginia Foster, from Arizona State, in 1986 commented, “You lead the world; I wonder if we’ll ever do half as much at ASU.” While it is not an official program of the Department it has served our needs so very well. It is unfair to only give it two paragraphs here – it deserves a hundred pages.
In 2001 Ambassador Javier Rupérez of Spain travelled to BYU and signed the documents that established the Spanish Resource Center on the BYU campus. The center, located in the University Parkway Building, houses a materials and media library and is directed by a full-time employee of the Spanish Ministry of Education who has expertise in the teaching of Spanish as a second language. Since 2002 four asesores have been assigned to BYU, the latest being Sonia Cabrerizo. The center collaborates with Spanish teachers in surrounding schools and works with the department’s Spanish Education faculty in providing valuable professional development experiences. Shortly after the creation of the Resource Center, BYU faculty mediated an agreement between Utah’s State Office of Education and the Spanish Ministry of Education which, among other things, brings dozens of highly qualified teachers
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from Spain each year to visiting positions in Utah’s schools. The whole experience with Spain and the Spanish Resource Center is a unique and amazing fete of cooperation that enhances BYU, Spain, and the teaching of Spanish in Utah.
Any attempt to demonstrate greatness must include those professors who have been called to serve as department chairs. Even though Darrel Taylor served as chair of the large Language Department, his allegiance and interests were decidedly Spanish and Portuguese. We have already discussed Carl Gibson and his contributions. The list on page 26 identifies the nine men and their years of service. All had established high research and teaching credentials before their call as chair. All continued their innovative teaching and vital research during their chairmanship, serving as excellent examples to other faculty members. Merlin Forster had already proven his calm, fair, democratic style of leadership at the University of Illinois and the sometimes-cantankerous University of Texas. Kit Lund continues serving, Kit Lund as the successful coordinator of Latin American Studies in the Kennedy Center. John Rosenberg’s short but dynamic four years as chair were cut short to allow him to accept responsibilities in the College of Humanities, where he now serves as the innovative, hard-working, deep-thinking dean of the college. David Laraway Three of the chairs have served as mission presidents; two of these as presidents of LDS Missionary Training Centers in Latin America (Chile, Dominican Republic), and one as temple president in Chile. Our current Chair, David Laraway exhibits a thoroughness, fairness and a pleasant nature which keeps chairmanship pressures from burdening other members of the department.
WORKSHOPS, CONFERENCES, EXHIBITS
In 1986 newly-hired John Rosenberg proposed an ambitious activity for the department. To commemorate 150 years since the death of Spanish writer Mariano José de Lara, Rosenberg suggested a symposium, bringing first-rate scholars to Provo. With the help of graduate students Lin Sherman, John Pironti, Kristin Jensen and dozens of others, John carefully planned and organized the “Symposium on Spanish Romanticism.” On February 14 – 16, 1987, the best scholars from the United States, Latin America and Europe gathered to celebrate Romanticism with our faculty and students. Javier Herrero (U. of Virginia), Susan Kirkpatrick (U.C. San Diego), Francisco Ruiz Ramón (U. of Chicago), Jean Rene Aymes (U. de Francois Rabelais, Paris), John Kronik (Cornell), Donald Shaw (U. of Edinburg, Scotland and U. of Virginia), Dinko Cvitanovic (U. of Bahia Blanca, Argentina), Paul Ilie (USC), David Gies (U. of Virginia) and other greats enhanced our campus and thrilled our students for three days. Students picked up most of these visitors at the airport and hosted them for the entire conference. In this way, several of our graduate students established academic contacts that later served them for future Ph.D. studies. BYU professor Kay Moon directed his especially adapted performance of Antonio Buero Vallejo’s “La detonación,” which details the life and times of Lara. Very generous support for the conference came
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from the Spanish Ministry of Education, as a result of Rosenberg’s personal contacts there; the department and college also participated in the expenses. A fine 238-page book, Resonancias románticas, was published the next year by the prestigious publishing house Porrua in Madrid. The high quality of the planning, the student participation, the outstanding field-leading scholars, and the excellent post-conference publication all established a standard for first-class conferences in the department.
In 1999, newly-hired professor Frederick G. Williams celebrated the Gerrit de Jong professorship by organizing a symposium, “The Portuguese Age of Discovery,” which included an exhibit and a professional recital (by his wife Carol). This was likely the first conference in Portuguese ever held at BYU. It included three parts (recital, exhibit, and conference) and brought guest artists from California. Speakers included the Dean of the College, Director of the Kennedy Center, Chairman of the Department, Senior Hispanic Librarian, plus professors and family members. It was held in the Museum of Art, one of the sponsors. The recital mirrored the life and music of Dr. Gerrit de Jong, Jr., as did the exhibit, which also included rare books from the library on Portuguese literature. Soon after, Carol Williams became a member of the Mormon Tabernacle choir. The two-day event was a proper musical and professional tribute to Portuquese, to Dr. de Jong, and to the professorship that bears his name.
In 2004-2005 the Department of Spanish and Portuguese hosted several events to commemorate the publication of the first book of Cervantes’ Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605). The celebration lasted three semesters and included: 1. A series of courses in which students studied precursor texts to the Quijote, the Quijote itself, and then works written after the publication of the Quijote that were influenced by it. 2. Dale Pratt and Jason Yancey, an M.A. student from the department, organized an exhibit in Special Collections of the Harold B. Lee Library. The exhibit was entitled, Wheels, Windmills and Webs: Don Quijote’s Library and the History of Reading. The exhibit featured a reading wheel that was built by Jason Yancey. 3. The Golden Age Theater Group under the direction of Valerie Hegstrom performed Las cortes de la muerte, a work by Lope de Vega y Carpio, that figures in the second book of the Quijote. 4. Alvin Sherman and his Quijote class worked closely with Marian Wardle to organize a book exhibit featuring engravings from editions of the Quijote over the past 400 years. Two students were selected to work on the translation of the description plaques that accompanied each edition. 5. Alvin Sherman organized and chaired Quijote 1605-2005. Framing the Quijote. A Celebration of the Publication of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quijote de la Mancha, held on October 12-15, 2005. Dr. Edward Friedman was the Honorary Chair. The conference included presentations on varying aspects of the work. We hosted five prominent Cervantists, Mariana Brownlee (Princeton University), Edward Friedman (Vanderbilt University), Thomas Lathrop (Founding Editor of Juan de la Cuesta Publications), Michael McGaha (Pomona College), and Eduardo Urbina (Texas A&M University). The conference was enhanced by visits to the Museum of Art and Special Collections exhibits as well as a performance of Las cortes de la muerte. 6. During the course of the year the BYU Theater Department produced and preformed Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna in English. 7. Alvin Sherman edited and published an edition of the presentations from the conference with an Introduction written by John Rosenberg. 8. The conference was generously supported financially by the Program for Cultural Cooperation between U.S. Universities and Spain’s Ministry of Culture, Brigham Young University’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese and College of Humanities.
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9. Dr. Edward Friedman was invited by President Cecil Samuelson to deliver the University Forum on October 18, 2005 entitled, “The heart of Don Quijote.”
During the winter and spring of 2006, the Department hosted two events commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the death of Juan Rulfo, by celebrating his life, his literature and his passion for the visual image. Doug Weatherford was the prime mover in organizing the events, wisely using the energies of graduate students David Wiseman and Serena Call. The exhibit, hosted on campus at the Museum of Art, carried the profound title “Photographing Silence: Juan Rulfo’s Mexico” and included 62 original images belonging to the author’s widow. Concurrent with the exhibition, Weatherford organized a unique film and lecture series that included ten Rulfo-related films, five lectures, and dialogue with two Mexican film directors, (Roberto Rochín and the author’s youngest son, Juan Carlos Rulfo). The lecturers included two distinguished visitors from Mexico (Víctor Jiménez and Jorge Zepeda) plus three departmental faculty members who had published significant studies on Rulfo – Cluff, Lyon, Weatherford. The fact that Weatherford was able to arrange to have the exhibit featured in the Museum of Art was of prime importance, and an indicator of the quality of the exhibit. The local press praised the activities, with an article entitled “When silence speaks volumes.” The exhibit and the films helped us establish film as a valid art form, to be studied in our advanced classes.
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FACULTY PHOTO GALLERY
We include the following pictures for historical purposes (but cannot fully eliminate the humor that may result from these ancient photos, resurrected from secret departmental files).
Orlando Alba Dixon Anderson Blair Bateman
Jack Brown Hal Clegg Merlin Compton
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Russell Cluff Ron Dennis Harold Dowdle
Willis Fails Vanessa Fitzgibbon Merlin Forster
Mara Garcia Daryl Hague Wendell Hall
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Valerie HegstromQuina Hoskisson Wendell Jackson
Dale Jarman Marian Labrum Jerry Larson
Alan Meredith Kay Moon Dale Pratt
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Howard Quackenbush John Rosenberg Lin Sherman
Sid Shreeve Rob Smead Greg Stallings
Jim Taylor Jeff TurleyAmy Valentine
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Carmen Vigo Doug Weatherford
Lynn Williams Fred Williams
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Some Departmental Homes
David O. McKay Building Karl G. Maeser Building
Faculty Office Building Jesse Knight Building
A Tentative Ending
This history should record so much more of our amazing department. Sigma Delta Pi deserves a whole chapter (pun intended).Joseph FieldingEach retired Smith Building faculty member should be individually mentioned and honored, especially those hired from 1970 to the present. We should detail the energies of our past and present Career Nights. The Foreign Language Fair, which occupies the time and energy of so many faculty and students each April, merits many pages. The creation and function of the graduate student journal La Marca Hispánica must be chronicled. The formation of the Spanish Language and Cultural Center, in 1982, created by Dixon Anderson in the Amanda Knight Hall is entitled to various pages. Our Summer Language Institutes cry out for historical preservation. And so much more. But for now they will have to remain in the “tintero.”
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Our introduction cited a somewhat pessimistic quote from Jorge Luis Borges about the futility of academic (historical?) endeavors. We conclude with a slight paraphrase of the last lines of his optimistic old-age poem, “Elogio de la sombra”:
Siempre en [la] vida fueron demasiadas las cosas ...... tantas cosas. Ahora . . . llegamos a nuestro centro, A nuestra álgebra y nuestra clave, A nuestro espejo. Pronto sabremos quiénes somos.
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