President’s Message – Fall 2015

I would like to start off by wishing all of you in our learning language community a fantastic 2015-2016 academic year. I not only wish you this in my name but also in the name of our FLANC executive council. We all know that, as language teachers, we often do not earn high salaries and furthermore, many of our non-tenured faculty make even less. I know how difficult it can be when we do not have access to all the resources we need to teach the way we would like. Languages are often not a priority on our campuses or elsewhere. In academia today the word “productivity” appears to be more often spoken than the word “humanities”. This is an uncomfortable reality. But, as we always say at the executive council, “we love what we do because we love languages”. We, the younger members of the council (and many of us are more than 40!) learned how to deeply love languages and our profession from those teachers who were part of the council before us. And new generation of teachers will come. We are working to leave them a strong and vibrant organization that will support them in the future.

I would also like to cordially invite you to our conference in November. Thanks to our kind friend, Francisco Zermeño, and his college, we will host our conference in Chabot College, Hayward this year. Because of their great hospitality, I know we will have another innovative and productive conference. Please visit our website fla-nc.org for more information.

All the best and I hope to see you in Hayward,

Dr. Fabián Banga
President
Berkeley, August 29, 2015