The Making of an English Department (1975–1982): A Personal Account

The paper attempts to tell the story of the English department at Mohammed V University in Rabat for the period between 1975 and 1982, a period which roughly corresponds with the author’s three terms as chair. After a brief overview on the general background and the situation of higher education in Morocco, the document focuses on the multiple challenges of building and managing a foreign language department that saw enrolment increase at unsustainable rates. Challenges included the transformation of a French-based department of etudes anglaises to a theoretically based four-year EFL program with specializations in literature, linguistics and cultural studies; dealing with a centralized, politicized system and unwieldy curricula; and ensuring academic standards despite the constraints of insufficient teaching and library resources. It further details, in a highly concentrated manner, how the department met the challenges, introduced and generalized new pedagogic practices and made proposals that impacted the on-going debates on curricular reform, particularly the license program and the FF/CEUS 10-year experiment whose graduates from our department now constitute the mainstays of English in several Moroccan universities.