1. Spanish and Portuguese and Latin American History might be the best undergraduate majors; they seem to be more research oriented than the other majors and to attract more independent people. I realized this one semester when I was teaching in Comparative Literature and Women’s Studies, both, as well, at the senior and graduate levels and when I got back, in the afternoon, to my junior level Latin American Culture course in Spanish, it was the most sophisticated group I’d seen that day.
2. My university might be significantly better than many of yours. One of my friends at an officially much better university, and a private one, reports that nowadays undergraduates are rarely taught by professors at all, but only by adjuncts. I suppose a good PhD adjunct is better than a stale MA instructor, if that were the choice, but don’t you think it’s kind of cold to have things set up such that students are never taught by actual professors?
3. Perhaps this is why people no longer get the insider advice and information I got from faculty starting freshman year – they do not meet any professors. Do you think?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
“One of my friends at an officially much better university, and a private one, reports that nowadays undergraduates are rarely taught by professors at all, but only by adjuncts”
– At my PhD-granting institution – a very expensive private school – only about 1/3 of undergrad courses were taught by actual professors. They preferred to teach grad courses, so the undergrads got instructors and grad students to teach them.
Yes – Yale / Harvard / Princeton are famous for this but the place I’m talking about is a few rungs below these so I am still flabbergasted. Quite recently it wasn’t that way.
At my job interview to my current school I was asked repeatedly if I realized that I would have to teach lower-level language courses and whether I was OK with that.
Yes, and at mine here. I said I was OK with that but I did not realize what it meant to do it in the political circumstances we have had (asst profs getting fired for speaking Spanish, etc.). So my advice to new faculty would be, try to listen hard at the on campus interview to figure out how onerous these language classes and the situation around them will really be. Don’t ask – it’s indiscreet – but really listen.