What would we need for Japanese minor?

Things are moving forward with the new Japanese visiting position, and we have set up interviews with ten different candidates at a major Asian studies conference a couple of weekends from now. Plus, with the new third-year language and Japanese civ courses on the schedule for next year, I've begun to once again get the question, "So does this mean we're getting a Japanese major or minor?" Well, probably... but not yet. I've talked with you before about the challenges involved in getting a Japanese minor set up, and I thought now was a good time to put some concrete numbers out so we all know exactly what we're dealing with.

First, a quick comparison with the other minors offered through the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures shows that most of them require about 20-22 course hours beyond the 201 level. That would mean 4 credits for 202, then 6 for the third-year sequence, plus 10-12 additional course hours in linguistics, literature, etc. For all the European languages, this also includes literature in the original language, which is usually taken in the third year, often at the same time as third-year language. This is not generally a requirement for Japanese minors at most US institutions, though, as it is very difficult for students to approach real Japanese literary texts until at least after three years of language study. Fortunately, the faculty in MLL appear to understand this and there would probably be only a few objections raised to a minor that included Japanese literature only in translation. I would, though, like to eventually add a Japanese language through literature course at the 4th year level

Chinese is a bit different from the other MLL languages, in that there is no actual Chinese minor or major offered through MLL. Instead, they are offered through East Asian Studies, the same avenue that is currently open to those who want a minor related to Japanese. As many of you have found, though, even if you take Japanese to fulfill the EAS minor language requirements, the other courses are mostly Chinese-oriented (including those that claim to cover all of East Asia). Due to limited faculty in Chinese language, the Chinese major that was just begun this year actually had to be created by making it a Chinese studies rather than a Chinese language model, which means it includes many courses about China taught in English outside the MLL department. As I've said before, there are many Chinese-focused faculty in other departments and no Japanese-focused ones. And while I am working to change that, for now we can't really rely on East Asian Studies to supply a real Japanese minor.

So that leaves us with the MLL model. The way I see it, we will need a bare minimum of four additional courses on the books besides the third-year language course, and we will need to offer them with enough regularity that someone can expect to be able to complete the non-language requirements in less than two years (say, one class per semester offered over the course of a two-year cycle). This will not happen in the next few years, and here is why:

The new visitor will be taking over all three sections of JPN 101-102 for the coming three years, leaving me free to teach second year (2 sections in fall and 1 in winter) and any new courses we might add. Even if we don't expand at all, that only leaves me the time to teach third year and a single literature/civ/culture class per year. And if we do increase our numbers, that will just create the need for additional sections of first and second year before we will be able to expand to higher levels of language. Those additional sections will be taught by whatever adjunct lecturers we are able to find to cover a class or two, or by increasing the workload for the visitor (which isn't necessarily a problem, since visitors are often willing to take on additional sections... and are paid for them far better than tenure-track faculty are for teaching an overload -- grrr!). However, getting additional sections of existing classes approved is far easier than adding entirely new courses, and the college tends to respond to demonstrated need rather than anticipate growth. At any rate, it is doubtful that we will get an additional tenure-track position approved before the year the visitor is due to leave in three years. If by that time enrollments have remained strong, we may be able to replace the visitor with another tenure track position. And at that point we can also start talking about hiring yet another full-time visitor to take on three sections of language and allowing both me and the new tenure-track hire to teach more content courses in addition to language... and that's when we might be able to start discussing a minor. Even if everything goes our way, it will probably take at least three years.

There are reasons to feel encouraged, and if nothing else an increase in the number of Japanese courses means an increase in the type of courses that can be applied to the EAS minor with Japanese focus, but I'm afraid it is still too soon to start counting on a Japanese minor coming through in the next few years.