Emeritus Professor of German
German at SSU 1969-2005: A Mosaic of Memories
There follows a string of vignettes arranged roughly chronologically from 1969 to 2005, the years respectively of my signing on as an assistant professor of German In the Sonoma State University Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and the year of my full retirement. These vignettes, it is hoped, will afford a broad understanding of the making and doing of our German program during those formative, ever-changing, multifaceted decades.
In the beginning, there was Marion Nielsen, founder in 1963 of both the department and of the German program, a fine scholar and teacher, a gifted translator, and a great mentor to me and Dr. Sterling Bennett. Marion hired Sterling in 1967, me in 1969, and we set about designing a German language and literature program that would mimic the then-current norms of the profession while breaking new socially responsible and pedagogically innovative ground. “Relevance” became the watchword of those turbulent times, and we paid homage to it via our involvement in the anti-Vietnam-war movement, both in our classrooms and in the campus community at large.
Pedagogically, our German-teaching watchword was from the start proficiency in all aspects of the language, most notably conversational proficiency. We wanted our graduates to leave SSU with strong listening and speaking skills, as well as understanding and appreciating German cultural and social icons as represented in German literature.
And we put our money where our mouth was, by requiring from early on that German major and minor students earn the Goethe Institute’s widely respected Zertifikat Deutsch (now known as the Goethe B1). We alone among the CSU’s then-21 campuses adopted this intermediate-level proficiency requirement. And we received the Goethe Institute’s appointment as an approved testing venue for the Certificate, a role which Sterling and I filled for about 25 years, offering testing to groups of students (our own and from afar) on a weekend late in the spring semester. This commitment was taken on and expanded by our esteemed colleague Dr. Michaela Grobbel, a tenure-track assistant professor hired to replace me upon my 2005 retirement, and her able assistant Dr. Kate Foley-Beining.. Earning the Zertifikat remains to this day a requirement for completion of SSU’s German minor.
Another program adjunct Sterling and I created was the semi-monthly Stammtisch-Abend, a popular evening gathering featuring fine beers and delicious snack desserts, where Deutsch was of course de rigueur.
One fine spring weekend in the mid-80’s we took this intensive model out into nature, with Sterling ferrying our group of ten or so students across Tomales Bay to a remote beach in his self-built ketch and us braving a chilly night under the stars, with much singing and camaraderie.
But back to curricular innovations. For a period of (if memory serves) five or six years in the mid-1970s we pioneered a revolutionary approach to lower-division skill courses called “Self-Paced German”. The conventional instruction model has students enrolling in courses with set unit totals and flexible grades. We turned this assumption on its head, with the help of an amazingly sympathetic registrar named Fred Jorgensen. We secured his permission to allow students to declare the number of units for a given course only at the end of the semester, ranging from one to as many as 16 units — depending on the amount of course materials the student had completed at a proficiency level of B or better. We adopted a text that lent itself to this self-paced approach, and set about coaching our students toward B-level completion of as many study units as they could handle. One exceptionally motivated and well-prepared student actually did earn 16 units of “A” credit, running through the whole gamut of lower-division course materials in one semester!
A nice concept. But the troublesome reality was that in the aggregate, students completed fewer than four credit units per semester, since they were relieved of the threat of a low grade. And the faculty allocation process awards FTEF (full-time equivalent faculty) on the basis of accumulation of FTES (full-time equivalent students) over time. So de facto, by allowing students to complete fewer credit units than the four-unit-per-semester norm, we were cooking our own professional goose. We finally bowed to this systemic pressure and abandoned the experiment after (I think) six years.
As for upper-division German program offerings, Sterling, Marion (till his death from cancer in 1981), and I continued to try to square the circle by offering a modicum of German literature courses simultaneously with a growing number of more socially and culturally relevant courses subsumed under the general sobriquet of “German Area Studies”. Among the more delightful such courses was one I offered twice during the 1980s titled “German through Song”. Our hardy troupe of about ten students spent the semester listening to, learning, and yes, performing a broad swath of German folk, pop, and show tunes to impromptu audiences in the Stevenson quad. Everyone’s favorite was the rollicking show tune made popular in the 1930s by the Comedian Harmonists sextet, titled “Wenn ich vergnügt bin, muss ich singen” (“When I’m happy I’ve got to sing”) with its wonderfully wacky refrain “eene meene deene kleene dacke decke poppelecke acka backa eier meyer weg.”
We also offered over the years a handful of courses of German literature in English translation, ranging e.g. from Brecht to Mann to Goethe’s Faust.
But all good things must come to an end. Our German major students kept slowly dwindling despite our commitment to “relevance”, and by 1995, when we enlisted a grand total of one enrollee in our senior seminar, the German major program was lamentably closed. We were, however, allowed to continue with our proficiency-based German minor, which mutatis mutandis continues to this day under the inspired leadership of Dr. Michaela Grobbel.
Indeed, the accomplishments of Dr. Grobbel, her students, and international supporters (documented elsewhere in this departmental website) are so beautifully impressive as to outshine our modest late-20th-century efforts reported above. The verdant growth of the German-speaking SSU community since Dr. Grobbel’s’ 2005 assumption of leadership merits our most fervent admiration and appreciation. She and they have brought to pass an active, lively version of the dreams that Marion, Sterling, and I so wistfully cherished.
by Philip Beard, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of German