DeBARY, Wm. Theodore:Special Remarks
The High School Chinese Language Program
at
Columbia
Wm. Theodore de Bary
John Mitchell Mason Professor and
Provost Emeritus of Columbia University
Special Remarks
2012 International Conference
on
Chinese Language Teaching
Columbia University
May 25, 2012
I regret that a previous engagement prevents me from attending this celebration of C.P. Sobelman’s retirement. She was recruited by me to join Columbia University for our newly established High School Chinese Language Program in 1963. The inauguration of the High School Chinese Language Program here at Columbia in 1963 was a significant development in the history of Chinese studies in America, coming after a great expansion at Columbia of our East Asian language program in the 1960s. We had grown to the point that we were ready for a major new adventure, and it was the inauguration of the National Defense Education Act in 1958 that provided support for the expansion.
At a national conference conducted by the Office of Education at Princeton in 1963 I was invited by the head of the Office of Education, Donald Bigelow, to give a keynote speech in which I emphasized that the new program should not serve only the narrow interests of national defense understood in military terms -- that is in the training of military personnel -- but should be understood as integral with cultural studies – which is to say that true language learning could only be done in parallel with cultural studies, in other words that the meaning of words and terms necessarily involved the understanding of the cultural medium and context.
Since this would obviously mean a more protracted program of study, not just a high speed one, it was natural to have this process start earlier than the college years. It was in this connection that we proposed the High School Chinese Language Program, and with NDEA/Office of Education support were able to recruit such professionally and technically competent personnel as Russell Maeth and Chih-PingChang Sobelman to head the new program. Before long Mrs. Sobelman became the Director of the program and subsequently lent her great entrepreneurial skills to her leadership as Coordinator of the East Asian Department’s Chinese language program.
This was in the 1960s, which culminated in the 1968 radical disturbances that threatened to shut down all of our educational activities, including language studies – which depend greatly on sustained language drill and practice. Against this threat, Chih-Ping managed to salvage the language program, and when the new University Senate was established in 1969-70 to restore the University’s authority, she was elected as a representative of the non-tenured faculty from the Faculty of Philosophy. Thus she contributed not only to the sustaining the Chinese language program, but to sustaining the life of the University at a critical time.
You can see from this that the High School Chinese Language Program, from rather modest beginnings made a contribution not only to the development of Chinese language teaching in this pioneering American program, but also to the life of the University at large.
It is very appropriate then that we should have a ceremony like this to commemorate this important chapter in US education and its role in Columbia history.
-End –
-Speaker: Wm. Theodore de Bary
’41CC ’53GSAS ’94HON
John Mitchell Mason Professor and
Provost Emeritus of Columbia University
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