By SHANNON O. WELLS
To acclaimed international journalist Jeff Trimble, the study of foreign languages at the university level represents something beyond an alternative to speaking and writing in English.
“When undergraduates ask me, when I’m lecturing or teaching classes, (about) courses to take, I always recommend, first, foreign language,” he said. “And that is not just skating over the surface, but really looking for some opportunity for an immersive experience and learning a foreign language pretty well.
“First, it makes your world a lot bigger,” he noted. “There’s a lot of the world that is not in the English language, and that world opens up to you when you learn another language, and that includes cultures and history, literature, music. That’s one part of it.”
The other part, Trimble explained, comes down to pragmatism.
“While knowing a foreign language may not get you your first job or your second job, if you have that foreign language in your pocket … it can serve as an asset to help leverage you way ahead of the game, competitively, against others who are vying for a position,” he added. “So it may facilitate a lateral move within an organization.”
With testimonials like this, it’s no wonder Kathleen Manukyan, executive director of Pitt’s Summer Language Institute (SLI), invited Trimble, U.S. News and World Report’s Moscow bureau chief during the 1980s perestroika era, to speak at the annual SLI Keynote forum, set for 2 p.m. July 2 in Cathedral of Learning, Room 324. In addition to his address, Trimble, who has worked as an international journalist, editor and media manager for more than 35 years, will interact with SLI students in a mock “press conference” among other activities.
Manukyan said the keynote is among her and her SLI colleagues’ ongoing efforts to distinguish the summer program from some of its competitors by offering interactive opportunities for students and faculty who specialize in different languages.
“A lot of that happens at our social events, our picnics and extracurricular activities, and sometimes teachers will get together to combine for a cultural activity or a lecture,” she said. “But we like to have at least one academic-based program that brings the entire institute into the same room — including the same virtual room, because we do have a few online attendees — for one academic event. And so we call that our keynote lecture.”
The goal is to choose a guest who can “speak to all of the cultures we study, at least a little bit,” that in previous years have included a linguist and an artificial intelligence specialist focused on language learning. “And this year we’ve chosen (Trimble), because he had really a wide-ranging journalistic and public policy career that touches on all of the countries where our languages are spoken.”
Kindred spirits
Trimble recently met Manukyan at the annual Midwest Slavic Conference held at The Ohio State University in Columbus. He has worked there since 2018 as lecturer in the School of Communication and the Department of Political Science.
“We fell into conversation, and she was kind enough to sit through, with the DEA attendees there, a talk that I did for that group” whose opening session theme was the end of the Cold War, he said. “And as that period coincides with when I was based in Moscow, as correspondent for U.S. News and World Report magazine.’
Trimble talked about that era, focusing on glasnost, Gorbachev’s late 1980s policy of transparency and openness that was part of his ambitious reform package at the end of the Soviet Union’s existence.
“Katie then followed up with an invitation to come (to Pitt),” he added, “and I’m shaping a somewhat different presentation for this (Pitt) group that’s a little more wide ranging given the broader range of languages represented. Specifically, this is for language students.”
Trimble served most recently as deputy director of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the government agency that oversees all U.S.-funded non-military international broadcasting, including Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The BBG, renamed in 2018 the U.S. Agency for Global Media Networks, distributes content in more than 60 languages to a measured weekly global audience of more than 300 million people.
Trimble credits his study of Russian at Ohio State as leading to a prestigious gig as correspondent for a major international news outlet in the late 1980s.
“There were plenty of other people with a lot more journalistic experience than I had at U.S. News and World Report who could have gone to Moscow,” he said. “But the editors, I think wisely, were looking for someone who — given the fact that Soviet society was opening up, you could talk to people more, you could travel more easily — could step into that environment with some knowledge of the language.”
While other correspondents who didn’t know Russian “did really well in their journalism,” he clarified, “they had to rely quite a lot on local assistance for that … But I think the ones who, as I look back on their coverage, really shone, are the ones who (studied) Russian language.”
No longer welcome
Trimble said his interest in Slavic languages came naturally. His mother was born in Milwaukee, Wisc., to Ukrainian immigrants. Growing up hearing and processing the Ukrainian his grandparents spoke he found was “interesting and appealing.”
The high school he attended north of Columbus offered Russian classes. “So I took Russian in high school, and then went down to Ohio State, and when I decided to go into … international journalism, it was an obvious choice because the No. 1 adversary and foreign topic of interest in the United States was the Soviet Union.”
It was “fairly easy to study Russian,” he said, because there was ample funding available for Russian studies, rooted in the U.S. government being caught off guard by the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957. American leaders “kind of panicked and started throwing all kinds of resources and money to figuring out what is the Soviet Union. ‘What are they up to?’ and ‘We need people to know Russian.’”
In 1958, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, which paid for Trimble’s graduate education in Slavic languages and literature. “It’s still around today and funds languages that are considered to be of strategic importance to the United States,” he noted, including Arabic and Mandarin.
While he said he felt “perfectly comfortable” visiting the Soviet Union even in the “depths of the Cold War” in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, Trimble’s most recent visit to Moscow, in 2016, was a completely different story.
“It was a very unpleasant trip. I was in U.S. international broadcasting at the time, and our correspondents from our two networks that operate in Russian language, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Libert,y were under increasing pressure from authorities,” he said. “We had unpleasantries entering and leaving the country. That did not leave a good taste in my mouth.
“Unfortunately, a place to which I devoted so much of my life and career suddenly was very hostile to me and what I was doing,” Trimble added. “I would not go to Russia today under, I think, any circumstances, and I would not advise any American citizen to do so. Full stop.”
A beautiful language
Concurring with Trimble’s assessment, Manukyan said the SLI finds other means to immerse Russian language students than traveling there under the President Vladimir Putin-led regime. This includes working with the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and the ProjectGo program for ROTC cadets in Narva, Estonia, on the Russian border.
“And we’ll be opening a new program that combines five weeks of our SLI Domestic Russian Program plus five weeks of study in Riga, Latvia, which is a city where many people speak Russian on a daily basis as their first language.”
Manukyan said she knows two people in academia who are on a “list of undesirables” supposedly never to be allowed inside Russia’s borders again, including a faculty member from Pitt and another from Ohio State. “It’s a really dire situation and beyond what any of us, I think, could have envisioned even a few years ago.”
Regardless of the current geopolitical state, Trimble finds the inherent beauty and intricacy of the Slavic languages continues to intrigue and enchant him.
“Studying any foreign language opens a new world to you because it gives you insights (and) perspective on how other cultures think about things,” he said, “and they don’t necessarily think about things the same way we do, and that’s reflected in language.”
Noting the “old joke” about Eskimos having 15 different words for snow because of how much of it they experience, Trimble noted that “we (in English) don’t have 15 words for snow. So there are those kinds of things captured in a foreign language.
“In the case of Russian, and this would apply to the other Slavic languages, they are beautiful literary and poetic languages,” he added. “Because the Slavic languages allow you to express a lot of things in a single word, when you try to render them in English, you need kind of a longer explanation.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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