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Career in higher education for polyglots | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Languages & Work |  | |
| Po-ru Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5479 days ago 173 posts - 235 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Spanish, Norwegian, Mandarin, French | Message 1 of 7 24 December 2015 at 10:34am | IP Logged | ||
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Hello everyone,
I am not sure if anyone else is in the same situation as me, but I figured to ask this question as maybe people have been through something similar. I am a Ph.D. candidate and will be obtaining my degree relatively soon. I am hoping to pursue a career in higher education as a teacher and researcher, ideally teaching and researching topics broadly related to the intersection of language and cultural learning. I believe that this may be the best way to combine my passion for learning languages with scholarly pursuits in the most realistic way. However, most academics, even in fields related to language learning, still do not consider the study of many languages a serious scholarly endeavor. As Professor Arguelles and others have rightly observed, academics today are much more interesting in specializing in some very narrow field, rather than trying to obtain a more universal understanding. Obviously, this is a terrible recipe for intellectualism and the direction of higher education, but it is nonetheless the reality. Therefore, if I pursue this I would need to balance my professorial responsibilities (teaching, publishing, etc.) with my own self-study. This fact would require excellent time management, but I don’t anticipate this being a big problem. A few years ago, I posted about pursuing polyglottery while being a Ph.D. student and got some good advice from this forum. I have since managed to do so to a small extent and if I had managed my time better and realized what was expected out of my requirements sooner, I could have done so even better. I was wondering if anyone else has been in a similar situation and if anyone had any thoughts about this? It would be great to hear from some others who maybe have trotted the same path. Edited by Po-ru on 24 December 2015 at 10:44am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| vell Newbie United States Joined 3792 days ago 17 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 2 of 7 02 January 2016 at 2:54am | IP Logged | ||
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In North America the academic placement rate for PHDs is something like 4%. Unless you're
better than everyone else in your field, you probably won't have to worry about balancing life as a professor and polyglot for a long time... It's like asking how to be in the NFL and be a polyglot. You should probably just get into the NFL first. Sorry. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Po-ru Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5479 days ago 173 posts - 235 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Spanish, Norwegian, Mandarin, French | Message 3 of 7 05 January 2016 at 1:32am | IP Logged | ||
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Vell, this seems like a slightly too pessimistic view to take on. While the window of the traditional tenure
track academia route may be closing in North America, there is a growing ESL industry throughout the world. While your advice is sound, my main question was how to make a career out of polyglottery within higher education? For example, Alexander Arguelles always talked about hoping that the study of languages would play a more mainstream role in higher education, which with the exception of English unfortunately looks like it is not. I was just wondering how those of us who studied multiple languages and aspire to be polyglots might try to balance this endeavor with a career as a university instructor. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Rhian Moderator France Joined 6496 days ago 265 posts - 288 votes Speaks: English* Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 7 05 January 2016 at 2:13am | IP Logged | ||
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Might be worth posting on the other forum too, just
to see if you can get a few extra responses. It's www.forum.language-learners.org and is a little more active than this forum at the moment. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 5 of 7 09 January 2016 at 12:48am | IP Logged | ||
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Many linguistics profs are polyglots, at least in Russia and probably many other European countries.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Po-ru Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5479 days ago 173 posts - 235 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Spanish, Norwegian, Mandarin, French | Message 6 of 7 20 January 2016 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | ||
Yes, I have noticed that. It just seems, at least superficially, that more scholars from Russia and Eastern Europe take language study much more seriously than scholars in the Americas and the UK do. Might you have any specific examples of well known Russian linguists/polyglots that I might be able to google search? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vell Newbie United States Joined 3792 days ago 17 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 7 of 7 22 January 2016 at 7:49am | IP Logged | ||
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Many American linguists are proficient in several languages as well. Ken Hale is one of the most notable. He was an
insanely gifted polyglot, but he's famous in linguistics for his contributions to syntactic theory. It's cool that he can speak so many difficult languages, but nobody in the academic world cares about that. I know it's negative, but there's really no place in academia for polyglottery. There's nothing academic about it. There's nothing to research and unless you're some kind of a savant, you're not even qualified to be teaching your non-native languages at a college level. I would be willing to bet that even an established polyglot like Arguelles would be unable to ever find any serious academic position in North America. I know you said about looking outside of NA and Europe, but still... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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