The following are remarks delivered by John Tessitore during a panel discussion, “Multilingualism for Global Citizenship,” on February 10, 2025, at the Brandeis University Mandel Center for the Humanities.
I want to thank Esha Senchaudhuri and the Mandel Center for inviting me to participate in this discussion.
I’m an unusual participant…an American Studies PhD whose French isn’t up to snuff.
I’m here because I was the director of the last major national, collaborative effort to improve language education in America: the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Commission on Language Learning.
That Commission was planned in 2014 and created in 2015 in response to a bipartisan call from members of the US Senate and the House of Representatives, eight in all, who were interested in the topic.
The previous national effort was organized way back during the Carter Administration, so a high-level strategic exercise seemed long overdue.
The Commission had eighteen official commissioners, drawn from a range of fields and disciplines…as well as a very, very long list of advisers.
In 2017, it issued its report, America’s Languages: Investing in Language Education for the Twenty-First Century.
Following publication, we took the report on the road. We discussed its recommendations with academics, school teachers, other policy makers, and the general public. And we tried to make things happen.
Through much of that process, Esha was my partner in crime, which couldn’t have been easy. As I’m sure she’d tell you, blue ribbon commissions are very challenging to manage, and I think I was working three simultaneously at that point. I hope I was not a beast.
In any case, our language commission had a pretty good run on a shoestring budget, resulting in new language programs at different institutions, a few bits of legislation, the creation of an America’s Languages caucus in Congress, and some new investments.
We had such a good run, in fact, that…
Following our initial effort, the higher ed language community—by which I mean the scholarly and teacher associations—convinced the American Academy to continue in its role as convener, extending the life of the Commission through a new entity, the America’s Languages Working Group, which I chaired.
So I’m here today as an outsider who ended up on the inside of the American language education enterprise, for about seven years.
My comments, therefore, are about a past effort to address the provocation that Esha introduced at the outset: “A global outlook is important to our individual and collective well-being, and multilingualism is crucial for developing such an outlook.”
Rather than a point-for-point recapitulation of all of our efforts—and there were many facets to the work I just described—I thought it would be more interesting and useful to describe some of the challenges we faced, what I think our strengths were, and what I would do differently in hindsight.
To begin, it’s important to say that our projects existed in a very different environment than the one we face today.
Yes, the America’s Languages report was published during Donald Trump’s first year in office…but we didn’t face a headwind anywhere near as strong as the one such a report would face today.
In fact, when we started discussing a possible language report with members of Congress, way back in 2014, it was not particularly difficult to gather a bipartisan group of supporters.
Republicans at that time gave us one warning. We had to write a report that did not ask for new federal money.
But that was not unusual. Those were the marching orders of many academic and policy reports at that time. I’d already written several in response to policy-maker requests, all of whom would say to me, “Give us some things we can support that won’t require new revenue streams.” I was used to that challenge.
And I think we kept to the spirit if not the letter of that promise.
The other objection we heard about our plan for a language commission—aside from the squeamishness about investment–was about the need for such a report.
And the context for that objection also strikes me now as very much of its time.
It didn’t come from Republican lawmakers. It came from business leaders, many of whom seemed to share a faith that Google Translate would obviate the need for any new language education at all.
Most conversations I had with a business-people in 2014 and 2015 ended up sounding like an episode of Star Trek: “Why would you do this report when we’ll all carry a universal translator in our pocket, any minute now?”
Ultimately we got past those concerns, and received bipartisan support, for two major reasons.
The first reason was a big surprise to me.
Early on in the process, when I was going door-to-door in Congress, looking for backers, I found myself in the office of Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois, a fiscally conservative Republican. His staff told me that he was inclined to support our commission idea as long as we made a real effort to include recommendations that supported Native American languages.
I had no experience with language politics at that time, but it was explained to me that every senator had a Native American community among their constituents, and that most if not all senators looked for opportunities to engage in positive ways when they could.
The language issue provided a means of positive engagement.
It’s hard to imagine today, but in 2014, for our effort, Native American languages were a unifying concern.
The second way in which languages could be made a bipartisan issue is evident in the words of the call we received. Here’s one representative sentence:
“How does language learning influence economic growth, cultural diplomacy, the productivity of future generations, and the fulfillment of all Americans?”
You can hear it: As long as we could put language education in the context of power (soft or hard) and economic strength, we could have our commission.
So how did we respond?
The America’s language report grouped a lot of ideas and suggestions under five major recommendations.
- Increase the number of language teachers at all levels
- Supplement language instruction through public private partnerships
- Support heritage languages already spoken in the United States
- Provide targeted support for Native American languages
- Promote opportunities for study abroad
As you can probably hear, America’s Languages was ultimately a capacity-building report for more languages spoken and valued by more Americans.
Much of what we recommended was predictable.
But the most important recommendation, to me, was also the most innovative in the history of language policy. #3. Supporting heritage languages.
That emphasis, twenty percent of our recommendations devoted to heritage languages…that was new. It was not an emphasis of the Carter administration’s report. I don’t think the Carter administration report even mentioned heritage languages, or even the idea.
But the argument behind that recommendation is simple. In a nation of immigrants, the phenomenon of language death—in which a language community becomes exclusively English-speaking in a matter of generations—represents a tremendous waste of a distinctly American resource.
An immigrant nation like ours shouldn’t need to reinvent the language wheel with each new cohort of students or, worse, each new international crisis. It would be much more efficient, and more strategic, and more just, to honor and foster the languages that flow here naturally.
Recommendation #3 on heritage languages recontextualizes capacity building as capacity maintenance. Which is a very different proposition.
Unfortunately, #3 also proved to be the hardest to sell, mostly because I couldn’t find an organized, national group of allies to help me amplify the message.
This is a fact of advocacy: You have a better chance of success when others are advocating with you.
And there were plenty of people and organizations advocating the other recommendations.
#1, increasing the number of teachers, has an obvious constituency: teacher and academic associations.
#2, public private partnerships, served the business community.
#4, supporting Native American language education, was backed by the tribes and by federal legislative mandates.
#5, study abroad, had the support of higher ed, as well as some study abroad interest groups.
But where do you go to find a ground game for heritage communities?
I will be honest. If I didn’t have to play the political games of commission management…
and if I didn’t fear that my colleagues in academia would be territorial and fight for every crumb and advantage, and hold grudges…
and if I didn’t know that the report had to serve everyone or everyone would kill it…
I would have written a very different report focusing exclusively on the heritage language and Native American recommendations, and especially on the capacity-building potential of heritage languages.
If language capacity is the goal (rather than departmental funding, for example), an alliance with heritage language communities represented the real growth opportunity of our report.
In addition, that recommendation spoke to matters of inclusion and exclusion, social justice, civil justice, and cultural survival…not as a scholarly exercise but in real terms, on the ground, in communities.
In today’s political climate—which is so different from the climate of 2014, when we started planning the commission, or even from 2022 when we launched the America’s Languages website—a heritage language commission is not even a pipe dream. It’s an impossibility.
But I’d still love to give it a try some day. And I’d even try tomorrow if someone would be willing try it with me.
First Idea Communications 