Romance on the rebound

When Ignacio Lopez was asked to take over as chairman of the Romance Languages Department two years ago, he had some second thoughts. "You don't want to know what I was thinking," Lopez said. But within the past two years, the department has rebounded from faculty departures and retirements to become one of the University's strongest. Penn's Romance Languages Department has long been one of the most respected in the nation. In 1990, the National Research Council ranked Penn's French program number five in the country and the Spanish program number six. But faculty departures left programs understaffed. Spanish classes were overcrowded, and recruitment of new professors was faltering. "My experience in the Spanish Department has been that there aren't enough classes offered for the students who want to take them," College junior and Spanish minor Rachel Rosenblatt said. In the fall of 1999, Lopez inherited a department that had lost five Spanish professors, one French professor and an Italian junior professor. "I realized immediately that I needed the support of the deans to rebuild the department to the excellent status it had before," Lopez said. The department underwent an internal and external review to determine the necessary course of action. The School of Arts and Sciences was in the process of a major faculty recruitment campaign, and the Romance Languages Department was on the top of the list for immediate hirings. "It was critical for us to rebuild the Spanish section," Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences Rebecca Bushnell said. "It had taken the biggest hit. We know that this is an area of burgeoning interest for students." But the department didn't have to go far to find their first new staff member. Carlos Alonso was a member of the external review committee. Alonso -- who was the Spanish department chairman at Emory University at the time -- thought that Penn would be an interesting challenge for him. "I thought it would be interesting to see how one could affect changes in a department that had such a structure and a background," he said. "It's very challenging to see how you can move a luxury liner." Alonso was one of two major Latin American scholars that came to Penn in the fall of 1999. The other, Reinaldo Laddaga, arrived as a visiting professor. Last spring, Penn won a bidding war over Laddaga's services, making him an assistant professor at the University. "Bringing both Carlos and Reinaldo to Spanish and the Latin American Studies Department was a tremendous accomplishment," Bushnell said. But the recruitment did not stop with the Spanish program. This past fall, Harvard graduate student Maurice Samuels was hired to fill a vacancy in the French Department. Now, having taken dramatic steps in the rebuilding process, the department continues to grow in size. There are plans to hire three more Spanish faculty members and a junior professor for the Italian program within the next two years. Alonso, who will take over as department chairman effective July 1, said that class size is decreasing and the recruitment process is speeding up. "It's a clear sign that the administration is very interested in engaging in this as quickly as possible," Alonso said. "We need people to tread water." Alonso added that the increasing enrollment in Spanish classes has allowed the program to not only work with other foreign languages, but also with the English Department. "Spanish is very quickly becoming a second national language department," he said. "To talk about Spanish as a foreign language in the context of American academia is increasingly difficult." Lopez said the addition of new blood has helped reinvigorate the department and move it into a more modern context. But though Alonso remains optimistic, he cautioned against looking for immediate improvements. "We really won't know what kind of effect any of this will have until two or three years from now," he said.