My Career in Slavic Linguistics: (Not!)
As some of you might remember, at the time of our project in Nalchik in 1963, I was a graduate student in Linguistics at the University of Chicago concentrating (I thought at the time) in Slavic Linguistics. I returned to Chicago after the project and continued my studies, which included courses in general linguistics as well Slavic linguistics. I was also studying the South Indian language Tamil, but mostly I had elected to do that in order to pay the bills (I had a fellowship supporting Tamil study.) But as time went on, despite my doing well in Slavic and Russian, I was given the distinct message from the Slavic Department that I "was not a Slavist" because I wasn't being orthodox in my approach to my studies. (I "should not have been studying Tamil" but when I then asked them for support of a similar kind, e.g. to study a Slavic language, they didn't offer it.)
I should note that when I told some people at Chicago that I had been in the Soviet Caucasus and had met speakers of Kabardian and Balkarian, I was informed huffily that I could not possibly have been there, because it was off limits to foreigners. Another idea of working perhaps on either Kabarian or Balkarian was also deemed unrealistic: I would never get permission to [re]enter the area, I was told. (This may have been true.)
Reinberg Camp, 1964.
I should mention that while in Chicago in 1963 I worked with AFSC on the possibility of the Chicago office of AFSC hosting the next Tripartite project, which of course did come about at Camp Reinberg. I wasn't able to attend it, because I had to be at a summer linguistics program, but I did help get it off the ground, and even attended the "Open House" one weekend (came back from southern Indiana for the day). My parents, who lived in suburban Chicago (Elmhurst, IL) also hosted a dinner at their house for about 10 participants, including Feola and Lena Shkarban, which my family enjoyed doing very much.
DDR, summer of 1964.
One thing that did happen in 1964, later in the summer was that the East Germans decided to have their own version of a Tripartite, and invited AFSC and FSC to send some folks over for a couple of weeks. We toured around to various places, and while there I got the idea to perhaps do a dissertation on a Slavic language (Sorbian, a.k.a. Wendisch) spoken in southeastern DDR. While we were in Leipzig I ran across some people there who were part of a Sorbian Seminar [department] and found some printed grammars. I thought perhaps I could work there, and returned to Chicago with great hopes. But still the Slavic department did not help me with funding or sponsorship.
What to do next?
After I got the news from the Slavic Department that they wouldn't help me, I then decided to focus more on India and applied for funding for dissertation research from the American Institute of Indian Studies and prepared to go to India in 1965. I did present myself for exams in Slavic in the spring of 1965, having taken the prerequisite courses. I passed a reading exam in Old Church Slavonic, but then was told by the Chair of the Department that I would not be allowed to take the exams I had prepared for, because I "was not a Slavist!" I returned home that day wondering what I would do instead, to make up the third field, and later received a phone call from two more rational members of the department: "Stankiewicz has gone out of down; come in and take the exam while he's away!" I took the exam, passed, promised to never darken their doorstep again, and went off to Wisconsin for a summer institute.
On my way to India in the fall of 1965, I did manage to go by way of Moscow and got a chance to see Yuri Emelyanov and his wife, and also (briefly) Lena Shkarban. I kept in contact with Yuri for years and wish I could meet him again.
My trip to India.
On the night I was to fly from Moscow to Delhi, China announced it would attack India in sympathy with (or just to gain advantage) with Pakistan (there was one of those periodic wars going on between India and Pakistan) so we couldn't fly over the Himalayas as I had hoped; we flew out over Iran, the Persian Gulf, and the Arabian Sea and landed instead in Bombay, and spent the day waiting to fly on to Delhi. Long day; hot, no food; little to drink. Arrived in Delhi in time for 'blackout'. Anyway, I went on to Madras and worked at the Annamalai University near Chidambaram for one year, and had many interesting experiences. I was studying the syntax of Tamil aspectual verbs, but little by little I got involved in some of the language politics of the region (the Tamils were very resistant to the language policy of India which had just come into effect) and this resulted, eventually, in my finding a research interest in this area that is now my primarily academic pursuit. I eventually developed a course in language policy, and have published on it more than on, say, Tamil syntax.
Davis, CA, 1996-67.
Just before I went to India, I had taught Kannada (another Dravidian language) for a Peace Corps project in Davis, California, and while there, received an offer to join the department of Anthropology at UC Davis after I returned from India. I did this, and began teaching linguistics courses in 1966. Two months later, Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California on a ticket of, among other things, punishing the student radicals at Berkeley, so the day after the election, the President of the UC system announced that everybody on a temporary appointment (I had not finished my Ph.D. yet) was terminated! That meant me, among others. So I had to spend the rest of the year finding another job, but all was well that ended well: I got a job offer to teach (Tamil!) at the University of Washington in Seattle and moved there in the fall of 1967.
More Tripartite Stuff!
During my year in California, I often saw Paul and Ann McGiffin, and Neil and Bronwen Horton; Nancy Kleiber (from Reinberg) was at Davis, too, and in fact took some courses from me. I became good friends with Nan and her husband Pierre, and we still are in touch, although they're in Hawaii now and we're on the east coast. Anyway, it came about that we Tripartiters convinced AFSC to sponsor a Tripartite project in the Bay Area, in a place called Hollister. The idea to continue the Tripartite projects had foundered in 1965, with the Vietnam War, and didn't do much in 1966, either. The 1967 attempt was a last-ditch attempt; it happened, but there was much contentiousness, often directed at us Americans, none of whom supported the Vietnam War, but that didn't matter. We worked in a migrant labor camp in Hollister, California, in the south-Bay area, had some good times too; all traveled together to Atlanta, GA, for some diversity, and then on to New York for the finale. Not much good feeling came out of this camp, and I've totally lost contact with anybody who was on it. Sad.
Seattle, 1967-95.
In Seattle, I taught Tamil and Linguistics for 28 years at the University of Washington. I finished my dissertation (on Tamil syntax) for the U. of Chicago, and received my Ph.D. in June, 1969. I eventually met my wife-to-be in Quaker meeting, and married Marilyn Gail Hornberg on June 10, 1978, in Seattle's University Friends Meeting. On June 1st, 1982, a baby boy was born in Calcutta, India, who was relinquished for adoption the next day by his birth mother, and whom we adopted a year later. (He arrived on July 14, 1982, aged 6 weeks, weighing 5 pounds.) Timothy Mark Rajendran Schiffman is now 20, ( (recent picture here) having just finished his first year of college. (Pictures of Tim and his prom date Rachel here.)
Eastward, Ho!
In 1995, I decided to apply for a job at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and we moved in July of that year to this house, in Haddonfield, NJ. The Tamil biz over time had gotten sort of tentative; the support for language and area studies that had arisen out of Sputnik and the Cold War was waning, since the Soviet Union had collapsed and 'wasn't a threat any more.' Languages like Tamil and Pashto just weren't important, so I opted for a job at Penn that looked more interesting, as Director of the Penn Language Center. I was appointed in the Department of South Asia Regional Studies, where I am "Professor of Dravidian Linguistics and Culture." My teaching at Penn has focused on Language Policy, Sociolinguistics, and a fun course for freshmen called Language and Popular Culture.
On September 11, 2001, things changed. Among other things, the US Government has just decided that maybe Tamil and Pashto and other South Asian languages are a bit more important than they thought, so suddenly large amounts of federal money will be available for these languages. I will take on responsibility for the pedagogical portion of a new South Asia Language Resource Center and will probably not be able to retire as soon as I had originally thought.
Anyway, to paraphrase Casey Stengel,
It's not over until it's over.
