Faculty and Students Call for More Stability in the German Program

Hope is to One Day Have a German Major

NewsMiriam Lafontaine — Published March 21, 2017

Contracted as a Limited Term Appointment, the longest he can run the program is three years. In addition to that, every nine months he has to reapply to be coordinator and compete with others who apply to the same position.

“It’s unstable always, because I never know, will I get rehired?” he said.

It’s the standard for faculty members at Concordia who work under LTAs. Call outs for LTA positions are made each year, regardless of how well one performs in their position. Once a professor’s three years have run out they have to wait two years to be eligible again.

“That’s the sad thing about it, it’s not related to how well you perform,” Bronner explained.

LTAs create a lack of stability and continuity in the program, he said. It’s hard for coordinators of the German minor—who tend to be LTAs— to make long-term goals for the program, since there’s no sure way of knowing if the next person who comes after them will still be on board with the former coordinator’s plans.

Having a LTA as a coordinator, Bronner said, also makes it harder to maintain institutional knowledge, which can be frustrating for teachers who have to start a working relationship with a new coordinator every few years.

His hope is that one day the administration will turn the coordinator position into an Extended Term Appointment. Under ETA contracts, those in the position work for a mini¬mum of three years before having to go through a renewal process. If they’re renewed after their third year, they can get contracts of five years.

Every year the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science reconsiders if the coordinator position will remain as an LTA, or if it’ll be turned into an ETA position. But they can also decide to drop the position completely.

If the coordinator position were dropped, the minor would no longer exist, and the remaining courses would turn into elective courses.

Mark Hale, the chair of the Classics, Modern Languages and Linguistics Department, which the German minor is a part of, has been advocating to keep the program alive in the face of this possibility.

“He has been defending the German pro¬gram for years,” Bronner said. “I think without him, it wouldn’t exist anymore.”

For the next year, it’s certain that the German minor will still be up and running, since a callout for applicants has been made for Bronner’s position. But whether that will still be case the year after is uncertain.

“It is an ongoing fear that we don’t know what’s going to happen with the German program. We hope we can get a stable program,” he said.

Bronner, the Concordia German Language Student Association, and Hale hope that one day there will be a German major at Concordia, like there had been before it was dropped in 2003. They also hope more faculty in the program could work under ETAs. Doing so would better allow for the creation of a German major, according to Hale.

But unfortunately, “The total number of ETAs available to the university is limited by its collective agreements, putting the administration in a difficult position to satisfy this request,” wrote Hale in an email.

The CGLSA will soon be presenting a petition to students advocating for the creation of a German major. They will also petition for an increase in extended term appointment positions within the program. Shugofa Danesh, the president of the CGLSA, said the plan is to release the petition in April.

Danesh is almost done with the minor, but hasn’t gotten all that she’s wanted. She wishes taking German as a major was an option.

“If there’s people who are interested in that, why not give them the opportunity?” she asked.

The German minor may be a small program, but it’s an active and successful program, say Bronner and Danesh. Since Bronner’s time, he’s never had to cancel a class due to lack of student interest and enrolment rates in the program have gone up.

From 2013 to 2014 there were 393 students enrolled in German courses, according to statistics compiled by the Classics, Modern Languages and Linguistics Department. But as of this year, the number has gone up to 487 students.

A summer exchange program, which would be done in collaboration with other German universities, is also in the works for the summer of 2018.

Last year the department organized several events and created new courses, like “Dandies, Tricksters, and Flaneurs in German Literature” and “Whispers from the other side: Death and Unworldliness in German Literature and Film.”

Last March, the program invited famous Swiss author Christian Kracht for a talk, and filmmaker David Shalko, who is well known in Austria, will also make an appearance on March 28. They have also long worked with the Goethe-Institut, a German cultural association that operates in 159 cities around the world.

An error that was made in the original publication in regards to enrolments rates has since been corrected.