"Centers of Change: Forming Administrative Structures to Support Language Study"

This chapter considers language centers’ capacity to provide administrative leadership at colleges and universities in the United States. Our discussion outlines how the remodeling of the W.M. Keck Center for Language Study at Colgate University included the formation of new administrative structures that more effectively advocated for increased focus on the role language study plays in the overall academic curriculum. Language programs in our institution benefited from redefining the position of the language center director and forming a new Language Council, a body with representatives from all languages taught on campus that meets to discuss matters that are commonly shared across multiple programs. This new leadership structure has successfully advocated for an increased language requirement as part of a larger core curriculum revision, created new avenues to inform first-year students about language offerings, and improved the ways in which faculty outside of the languages advise students about language study. This chapter also lays out ongoing efforts to effectively implement the newly approved language requirement to ensure that student enrollment is more equitably distributed among programs while changing institutional perceptions so that students, faculty, and administrators value language study as an integral part of the institutional core curriculum.

-with support from Working Group LIN15: Multimodal Communication