Mary Louise Pratt, professor of Spanish and Portuguese and comparative literature, was recently elected second vice president of the 30,000-member Modern Language Association, the professional organization for scholars and teachers of languages and literatures. She will ascend to the presidency in 2003.
Stanford: What will be your first priority for the MLA?
We somehow have to create a public discourse that expresses what people care about in the humanities. Everyone who goes to college comes out with a story about the one literature or history or philosophy course that changed her life, but for some reason we don't have a good way of giving the public terms with which to defend what we are about.
You've just finished a year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, working with econometricians, sociologists and cultural anthropologists. What was a lunchtime conversation like?
Well, one group was working on adolescent problem behaviors -- drug use, alcohol use, pregnancy. And for me, the first question had to be, how is it that in some cultures the adolescent is not an object of suspicion, but a completely beloved creature? And what is "problem behavior"? Who is it a problem for? Us? The kid? For the people who'd gotten the grant from the federal government to figure out what to do about teen pregnancy, those kinds of speculative things weren't part of their job. But it's got to be somebody's job.
What else do you hope to accomplish during your MLA term?
For people not to be able to understand each other is a terrible thing, so I want to get us to see that it's really desirable to know more than one language. The first bilingual education battles in the United States were fought in Texas by Germans who wanted the right to continue schooling in their language, and in the 19th century, there were more newspapers in the United States published in other languages than in English. The idea of everyone speaking only English wasn't prescribed until the 1900s. But today the country is becoming more and more multilingual, and I think the ideal citizen has to be a polyglot, which is the norm in many, many countries.
Have you seen any encouraging signs on the national level?
Oh, yes. Despite organizations like "US English," you can see people's attitudes to second-language learning changing. And there's political capital involved -- President Bush held a Cinco de Mayo celebration on the White House lawn this year for the first time. Apparently he also made a speech in his Spanish, which is horrifying, and [House minority leader] Dick Gephardt was asked to comment in Spanish. It reminds me of growing up in Canada, watching the first Anglo politicians trying to speak French in public. It made your hair stand up if you cared about the language, but for French speakers, the fact that they were doing it was very important.
