Night Static

Overseas radio deserves a better hearing. When Wired Magazine stalks the edge of change, and wired undergraduates eagerly anticipate the wireless era heralded by small-dish satellite equipment that downloads digitized video in real time, listening to Die Deutsche Welle seems anachronistic.

But wireless voice message endures as an alternative to the gross and growing limitations of United States newspapers and broadcast journalism aimed at lower-class audiences, and to the continuing narrowness of the World Wide Web. In a post-1960s university, overseas radio offers a portal opening on planetary discussion, albeit a portal open far wider to undergraduates learned in languages other than English.

American foreign-language competency eroded in the years following the mid-1960s decay of college-curriculum foreign language requirements. No analysis reveals more quickly the appalling betrayal of American public schools by liberal arts colleges than any inquiry into that decay.

Nowadays few undergraduates know much about mid-1960s curriculum changes, such as that intimate relation between the old merit-based financial aid system and the mid-1960s innovation that endures as "pass/fail," the rapid disappearance of courses in geography and physical anthropology or the demise of the mandatory five-course-a-term (with option for a sixth) requirement. Few undergraduates know that solid liberal arts schools once assumed that secondary-school seniors applied with a minimum of four years, and sometimes six or more years, of foreign-language study.

In Freshman Week long ago, foreign-language placement examinations placed first-years in appropriate, required foreign-language courses. Rarely did secondary-school course-work enable a student to "test out" of a foreign-language study: doing brilliantly on the test meant either entering advanced courses or entertaining the option of starting another language from scratch. Depending on concentration, an undergraduate might find himself or herself continuing in a foreign language, or studying a related one, every term until graduation.

Public high school, and by the early 1960s, public junior high schools, had to provide quality foreign-language (or Latin) instruction not only to give seniors a chance for acceptance at first-rate liberal arts institutions, but to enable them to do well enough in their first year and after to have a fair shot at merit-based financial aid (the higher the grade average, the more scholarship and the less loan and part-time-job requirement). Since early 1960s undergraduates had begun to think of spending a term or so abroad, public schools focused on more than learning to read a foreign language. They emphasized ALM, audio-lingual method.

So when at Christmas in 1962 my parents gave me a superb Hallicrafters world-band radio receiver that I might hear German away from my classroom, I was already primed to listen. For a rural junior-high school kid, the radio was a Christmas-day magic box, and once I strung copper wire from the house to a huge white pine far out in the swamp, I grasped that box's reach.

Certainly I listened to Die Deutsche Welle, the German Waves, night after night struggling to understand not just the news, but poetry and folksong. But I found the BBC and Radio Moscow, in time Radio Netherlands and the static-cracked voices of new African nations, and by ninth grade I knew that other countries not only had a different slant on the news, they had different news altogether, some aimed to listeners in their former colonies and to emigrants in South America or East Africa, but most aimed at anyone who cared to caress the fine-tuning dial.

In my undergraduate days, the Hallicrafters brought news of the decay of the French West African Empire, the enduring South American boundary disputes, and above all, the deepening provincialism of a United States at war in a former French colony it considered wholly Asian. Accidental daybreak listening lured me into programming directed at non-American listeners deeply intrigued by all things American, including the vagaries of American English. For 35 years I listened, lately with a magnificent solid-state receiver I rescued one graduation day from a curbside trash barrel and refitted with a long copper antenna, realizing that my hour-a-day rowboat restoration projects proceed best when the world whispers in my boatshop.

Often the saw or caulking mallet falls silent while I listen to that whispering, hearing the view from Paris about how the phrase "Native American" subverts United States immigrant assimilation, the opinion from India about the unwillingness of United States intellectuals to seriously analyze Federal farm policy, the laughter from Spain about American feminists as unable to go top-free on beaches as they are unable to nudge Congress toward state-funded daycare, the careful analysis from a half-dozen countries of Muslim imperialism versus the iconography of Madonna, the reminder from Rome that Italy once governed one-third of present-day Somalia. Not liberal, not conservative, not European or Asian begins to designate overseas programming. Only different comes anywhere close, although at Harvard strange might do as well.

Harvard graduates squashed against glass ceilings often mistake the role of foreign-language proficiency in the squashing. Lately I find myself counseling alumni who failed the foreign language test, not only in Freshman Week or subsequent undergraduate years when they did nothing with languages other than English, but years later, the day the corporate computer looks for who put French above the bottom margin of a resume and summons the Harvard grad upstairs onto the deepest carpet to translate the prioritaire fax from Gabon.

Or they are still flunking the exam by not using their foreign-language training to carve niches in firms expanding into world markets often years ahead of United States ones. And never, ever (in my experience) do the alumni realize that once upon a time, in secondary school or even earlier, they learned a language other than English not because they might one day have business in Quebec or be stationed in Frankfurt (what rural New England kids heard in 1962 before anyone mentioned "junior year abroad") but in part at least, in order to learn how to learn one.

When management gives eight months' notice of international transfer, a Harvard graduate ought to have time to learn something of the newly required language. But instead, my graduates harp as my undergraduates do, about a shrinking planet, international business and the Web, all the while scarcely realizing that a love of languages other than English endures as one great divide between public-high-school graduates and private-school graduates.

After the mid-1960s college curriculum changes, foreign-language competency became more and more the province of graduates of private schools aware that while no longer required, foreign languages are critical in any liberal arts education and should be studied, requirements or not. Overseas radio programmers know that those who listen in languages other than English are among the most powerful people in the United States, and comprise a different audience than listened even 20 years ago. They are people who went to college well and accurately, especially if they are under 30, and who know something of missing fields like geography and physical anthropology, fields that enable one to travel well. They are listeners who think in terms far more sophisticated than the narrow ones of English-only United States news media.

Few places offer the surfeit of foreign newspapers one finds in Harvard Square, and few cities, and fewer suburbs, provide much akin to the mind-opening experience of living among foreign students. Harvard graduates its students into fast-paced lives set in remarkably sterile, monolingual places, where finding Le Monde or Der Spiegel proves difficult, and locating other periodicals is impossible.

Overseas radio is cheap (a good receiver and coil of copper wire cost less than $300), and unlike the Web, coexists effortlessly with washing dishes, pumping the stepping machine or restoring rowboats, nourishing the mind while the body relaxes from hours-long keyboard pounding. It breaks listeners free of computer-terminal chairs and of the monolingual sterility imposed by address and job, but it rewards best those who know more than English and who listen in the clear-air hours just after five in the morning or after eight at night.

Every undergraduate ought to take a fifth course each term in a language other than English. It is time to reinstitute a rigorous foreign-language requirement, and string some copper wire atop Harvard houses.

John R. Stilgoe is Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies.