In Which I Passionately Defend 0.0004% of the Department of Education

Derek A. Petrey, Chair, Department of Humanities, Government and Modern Languages, Sinclair Community College

In 2024, the United States Department of Education (DoE) proposed to spend 90 billion dollars (source here). In an annual budget that exceeds $1 trillion, it is incredibly easy to write off the minuscule amount of a program that currently faces an existential crisis.  To drill down even further, I want to speak to Sinclair’s part in incurring around $80 million per year as part of the expenses paid out by programs sponsored by the division known as INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDIES (IEFLS).  To quote the DoE, “These programs support comprehensive language and area study centers within the United States, research and curriculum development, and opportunities for American scholars to study abroad. In addition to promoting general understanding of the peoples of other countries, the Department’s International Programs also serve important economic, diplomatic, defense, and other national security interests. The request would enable the Department to help maintain the national capacity in teaching and learning less commonly taught languages and associated area studies and to continue to work toward increasing the global competency of all U.S. students.” (ibid, p. 56)

The specific grant we applied for under the IEFL umbrella was the University International Studies and Foreign Languages grant. The UISFL grant (or as we called it, the “Useful” grant!) was beneficial to us. The initial grant was for two years, but during COVID we were able to get two one-year no-cost extensions to continue the work. Over the four years of the grant, a little over $140 thousand total was provided by the grant in support of our efforts to:

• create university-parallel courses for the first two years of Mandarin Chinese and Japanese
• update our conversational Chinese class
• create an East Asian Studies short-term certificate
• hold outreach cultural immersion events that engaged over 300 middle and high school students
• develop East Asian-themed cultural modules to internationalize and/or update courses in Communication, Religion, English as a Second Language, Business, Political Science, and Humanities
• support travel for faculty presentations at regional seminars related to Title VI funding
• provide scholarships for study abroad to Japanese students and travel support for faculty guides

I am very proud of everything our team did in implementing this grant.  It was admittedly a confusing process at times, as we dealt with various levels of oversight, and submitted at times a mind-numbing amount of progress reports, both to the administration and the DoE using their frankly Byzantine G5 secure grants management site.  Despite these obstacles, I was also heartened by the many people both within DoE and at Sinclair who provided guidance and encouragement as we navigated them.  

Knowing what I know now, I would do it all over again, due to the most important side effect of receiving this grant –  the support of this grant made for incredibly expedited course approvals.  When I arrived at Sinclair in 2003, I learned of the frustrations that my senior faculty had experienced in their attempt to create courses beyond the introductory conversational level in both Chinese and Japanese.  We would try every couple of years to restart this process, and we faced a slew of institutional barriers and challenges:

• could we guarantee enrollment?  
• shouldn’t we wait until the new Dean / Provost / Curriculum Coordinator / divisional realignment is settled? 
• could we wait until the new paperless curricular management system is implemented?  
• why couldn’t we wait until after the transition to semesters?  
• did we really need to add classes at this moment? 
• didn’t our department have enough classes already? 
• was it feasible to add a class when we were amid a budgetary crisis?
• shouldn’t we let the Ohio 36 process finalize before working on new classes? 

In the twenty years that I have been involved with curricular review at the college, nothing has had a more powerful effect on administrative buy-in than having the impetus of grant funding to allay development costs and as an external evaluation of the quality of our programs.  Stating that a course or certificate creation or revision was done in partial fulfillment of a DoE grant was a magic portal that brought classes to life. 

This work would not have been possible without the hard work of our department: Administrative Assistant Lora Bowling, Language Lab Coordinator RJ Yeomans, Professor Yvonne Stebbins, Robert “Bob” Miller, and Etsuko Strohecker (Japanese); Professors Yufeng Wang and Yuegen Yu (Chinese, East Asian History); Deans Phyllis Adams, Martha Hurley, and Myra Bozeman; our partners in the Grants Development Office at Sinclair (Melissa McCarthy, Sharon Ramsey, Steven Bright, Cordell Williams); the International Education Office at Sinclair (Director Deborah Gavlik, Administrative Assistant Monika Daubnerova) so many partners at the K-12 level, our East Asia Across the Curriculum faculty partners, Donald Hayashi, President of the Dayton chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League, and our initial Grants Liaison Carla White (DoE).  

In conclusion, I want to attest to the transformative power this program had for our department – fulfilling a decades-old dream of our faculty and helping us to expand our offerings at a time when many challenge the very notion of teaching modern languages and the need for national support for these initiatives.  I am grateful for the opportunity and hope that it remains an opportunity for other colleges and universities in the future.