D. BACKGROUND AND ORIGINS
Hunter College is a four-year college within the City University of New York. Currently over 20,000 full and part-time undergraduate and graduate students attend classes at Hunter's three different locations (Main Campus at 68th Street, School of social Work at 79th Street, School of Health Sciences at 25th Street). Most Hunter students are immigrants or the children of immigrants; collectively, they speak more than 100 languages. The school's diversity is one of its most immediately visible and compelling characteristics, and within the wider phenomenon of diversity, its language diversity is among its greatest assets. The Language Diversity Initiative is a direct outgrowth of an earlier FIPSE-funded effort to harness that diversity in the service of the city.

In 1992, the Hunter College Center for the Study of Family Policy[1] began a project to use the language skills of Hunter undergraduates to improve the delivery of health services to patients who had limited proficiency in English (LEP). By recruiting and training bi- and multi-lingual students to serve as volunteer medical interpreters, the Center hoped to improve patient care, help students with proficiency in Languages Other than English to value their language skills, and call attention to the undervalued language resources among students. Beginning with seed money grants from two local foundations, the Community Interpreter Project (CIP) received FIPSE funding under the Community Service Competition and eventually a four-year grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. The Project operated for 6 years and trained close to 300 students--speakers of Arabic, Chinese Dialects, Haitian Creole, Spanish, and Russian--to serve as interpreters. Collectively, they provided 15,000 hours of on site service as interpreters in New York City's public hospitals and community-based clinics. Over the course of CIP's lifespan, it became clear that tying project to an academic institution was inadequate for the interpretation needs of medical care providers. Hospitals require interpreters around the clock and throughout the year. Given the academic calendar, student interpreters could only be present for part of the week, and part of the year. As a result, the Director of the Community Interpreter Project, Dr. Suzanne Michael, helped the Center for Immigrant Health (formerly known as the New York Task Force on Immigrant Health) establish its own year round training sessions. In addition, she provided consultation and technical assistance to hospital volunteer departments eager to recruit and deploy their own volunteer interpreters.

Meanwhile, although CIP had proven a less effective response to the language gap in patient care than originally expected, it was more effective than anticipated in another area: its impact upon the students it recruited and trained. Throughout the project, the CIP Director and the Board and leadership of the Center for the Study of Family Policy were impressed with the extent to which the community interpreter experience empowered students to claim and reclaim their heritage languages. CIP’s formative and impact evaluation data indicated that the recognition and use of students’ languages other than English positively impacted students’:

• sense of self,
• self-esteem, and
• confidence about their ability to successfully complete college and pursue a professional career.

Yet, despite the College's official celebration-of-diversity stance, the atmosphere at Hunter was devaluing languages other than English. Even though the College requires monolingual English speakers to pass four semesters of a "foreign" language, it had found few ways to encourage bi-lingual and multi-lingual students to conserve, use, and nurture their languages. The Language Diversity Initiative grew directly from this perception. Because the Center for the Study of Family Policy was the home of the Community Interpreter Project, it was the Center, with cooperation from the sociology Department and the Office of then Provost Laura Schorr, which designed and sought funding for the LDI. The location of the Language Diversity Initiative at the Center proved to be both advantageous and disadvantageous. Prior to LDI, the Center had been the home of the Community Interpreter Project. The Center provided part-time administrative staff as well as computers, fax and copy machine to facilitate the Language Diversity Initiative activities. The Center also was a neutral location from which LDI could operate, independent of traditional departmental constraints, and could engage faculty and staff from Hunter's many academic departments and its four schools (Arts and Sciences, Education, Social Work and Health Sciences). Lastly, the Center’s budget was separate from the tax-levy funding of departments. FIPSE funds thus enabled the Language Diversity Initiative through the Center to offer faculty and departments resources that are rare at Hunter--a number of course releases and funds to pay for books, journals and administrative costs, e.g. photocopying.

On the other hand, centers within CUNY cannot offer credit-bearing courses. Thus one important disadvantage of the Language Diversity Initiative’s location at the Center was our inability to sponsor our own courses. We had, however, learned through our Community Interpreter Project experience, the importance of working with departments to create courses that fit within and are recognized parts of departmental courses of study. As a result, LDI was designed to provide course releases to foster the development of new curricula that met both the objectives of the initiative as well as the needs of the departments. Ultimately, as will be discussed below, this strategy proved the less effective of the two LDI core strategies. Another disadvantage of the Center’s location was that center work is not part of the calculus for decisions about faculty promotion and tenure. Thus the Language Diversity Initiative’s position in the Center prevented LDI from creating its own courses, and limited the extent to which its incentives (funded resources) could attract faculty investment. Finally, over the life of LDI’s funding, the Center underwent its own self-study, lost its principle advocate within the administration, and had three different directors. Currently, the Center for the Study of Family Policy’s continuation is under discussion.

Problems associated with the location of the Language Diversity Initiative in a center would have been less significant if the College had had stable leadership throughout the project period. In fact, however, the opposite was true. The Provost who committed the College to the project left almost immediately after the grant was secured; the College had two acting provosts and three Presidents in the ensuing period, as well as a constantly shifting landscape at the levels of Associate Provosts, Deans and Associate Deans. The chairpersonship of the Sociology department also changed during this period. These staffing changes included shifts in individual and college priorities. In addition, during the project's first year, Dr. Poppendieck, the co-PI, stepped down from her position as assistant dean of Arts and Sciences, and thus LDI lost a committed and invested advocate in the administration. Collectively, the above changes inhibited the extent to which the Language Diversity Initiative became an integrated aspect of college life.