Going above and beyond: a multicultural warrior an interview with Dr. Bates Hoffer.

Yu, Tong

1. You are the co-founder and the former president of the International Association for Intercultural Communication Studies (IAICS), would you please share with us the major achievements of IAICS since its foundation?

There are five areas of achievements that resulted from the founding of the IAICS.

First, IAICS decided to sponsor and thereby continue the very successful conferences which were first titled "International Conference on Cross-Cultural Communication" (ICCC). Two earlier ones were held in Seoul, Korea, and San Antonio, Texas. IAICS then sponsored the following conferences in China, USA, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mexico. At first the conferences were held in alternate years but are now yearly. The conferences have had attendees from every continent except Antarctica.

Second, IAICS began publishing its journal, "Intercultural Communication Studies," twice a year with occasional third and even fourth issues. The journal has allowed several dozen fine young scholars their first chance to publish in an international journal read around the world. In addition, the journal has included a Who's Who of articles by the major scholars in the field.

Third, the early emphasis of IAICS on intercultural communication around the Pacific rim led to scholars from the Far East and from the Americas to learn from each other and to set up joint research projects the results of which have been published in the journal. An underlying principle of IAICS is that intercultural communication research seen only from one perspective of the cultures involved may inadvertently miss some of the important differences that exist.

Fourth, IAICS took its conference to China for the first time in 1995. The conference was the first of its kind in China and has led to greatly increased interest in the field as well as to many friendships and joint projects by scholars in and outside of China. The co-director of the conference, held at the Harbin Institute of Technology, was Jia Yuxin of that university. He has since been president both of the China Association for Intercultural Communication and of IAICS and he is on the Board of Directors for IAICS

Fifth, a few years after the Harbin conference IAICS decided to broaden its scope from the Pacific rim to the world in general. That decision was an easy one because the conferences had already attracted scholar from every continent except Antarctica. As part of that decision, IAICS began formal associations with other organizations, such as the China Association for Intercultural Communication and the Japanese Association for Asian Englishes.

2. As the editor of Intercultural Communication Studies (ICS), you've witnessed the development of intercultural communication in the States and in other countries, are you happy with its current development trajectory? Where do you think the intercultural communication should be heading in the future?

Intercultural communication in the sense of governmental communication has been at a high level for a long time through the traditions of diplomacy. Communication within general cultures is also a field being studied well, with more and more of the world's cultures joining the research. Two other areas can be noted.

Communication between cultural groups within a country is of course a current study, yet further study is necessary as some countries become more multicultural. China has over 30 different recognized cultural groups. New York City has over 200 home languages spoken by the school children. Other cities such as Los Angeles have similar numbers. Friction between groups within a country could be eased through more attention to the communication among them.

Another area that greatly interests me is research on communication between cultural groups that involves scholars from each culture. As noted above, the viewpoint from both sides helps identify underlying problem points that might be missed by a single scholar. Two examples follow.

The first example is an American professor who lived several years in Japan and was convinced that his humor was just right for the Japanese. I attended one of his talks and afterwards a Japanese friend of mine told me of a problem. The professor's humor embarrassed the Japanese who attended his talks and they were covering up their embarrassment with smiles. The professor was convinced he was funny, but his intended humor was actually making the entire audience uncomfortable. I did say a word to the professor, but he told me that I was wrong. In this case, he was convinced he understood the culture because he had lived there longer than I had. In this instance his cultural understanding was negligible.

For another simple example, I'll mention a small research project by John Koo and me. Koo, a native Korean, was professor at the University of Alaska and I, a native of the USA, was a professor at Trinity University in the USA. We traveled to a small town in southwest Korea to do some nonverbal communication research. While he talked with a small group of Korean teachers, I sat in the background and observed several interesting differences from my own nonverbal system. When we later compared notes, he as a member of the culture had not even noticed most of the differences. The gestures were natural and part of the normal flow of Korean conversation to him. Some of the gestures I could not interpret, but Koo explained them for me. We published our results in a Korean journal. This example is a short one, but longer and better ones have been published in the IAICS journal.

3. You are a world renowned scholar and an excellent teacher who has secured a national award in teaching. Your administrative work has been well recognized and appreciated by your colleagues. You are also very active in many professional organizations. How did you manage to fulfill all those different roles so successfully?

My parents taught me to do my best and work hard in every aspect of life. I have tried to follow that advice. In my vocation as a teaching professor, I worked to make each class one which I would have liked, one in which I would have learned as much as possible, and one which used the best scholarship. In terms of scholarship, I have had the same voracious appetite for learning that my father had. I try to learn all that I can about a subject without regard to any particular field of study. When I find something that has not been adequately explored in print, I try to make a contribution in that area, whether it is intercultural communication, literature, computer education, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, English language education, or so on. In terms of scholarly organizations, I find that the best way to keep interested in a field and up-to-date in a field involves not only reading the books and journals but also meeting and discussing topics with colleagues on a regular basis.

Recent technological advances have made it easier to work jointly on research/publication projects. Email has made basic communication much faster than mail. Yet, meeting face-to-face for discussions as much as possible seems to me a far superior way than Emailing back and forth. The discussions themselves are exercises in intercultural communication and any problems can be solved on the spot. Email is a good, fast way to communicate, but we should always be aware of its limitations. There have been times when I traveled to visit a foreign scholar for the sole purpose of discussing our joint work while communicating face-toface.

4. You have always attached importance to the interdisciplinary aspects of your teaching and research, why this approach or focus?

My undergraduate degree was in English literature. That study involves the works and the authors but also the literary history and culture in which they lived. As you get deeper into the field and try to analyze the major works, you see the importance of knowing the art history and political history leading to the understanding of each work. When you read a major work that comes from another language and culture, you realize that you must study that language and culture to understand better its deeper meanings.

My role models were my professors in the graduate Linguistics Program at the University of Texas at Austin. Each was a faculty member of a language department as well as the linguistics program. They had all studied one or more languages as well as the cultural and literary traditions of each. All had lived in the country or countries of their study for various periods of time. They brought their broad understanding to their courses. I have tried to follow their example. As one of those scholar quoted, "We stand on the shoulders of previous scholars."

My interest in languages and cultures led me as an undergraduate student to study Spanish language, history, and related courses in which we read and were taught in Spanish, I also took Japanese literature and began the first of two intensive years of Japanese language. In graduate school I took more Japanese language and two intensive years of Chinese language as well as courses on Chinese history and literature. A graduate anthropology course covered China, Korea, and Japan. As a graduate student, I become a graduate assistant for the course on the literature of those three countries. That multidisciplinary background was a good one for beginning a more in-depth look at the languages and cultures of various countries, especially those of the Far East.

5. You have been an author, co-author or editor of numerous book, articles, and reviews, which boast an impressive breadth and depth of thoughts. How did you accomplish that?

As noted earlier, I have always been interested in learning as much as I can about any subject in which I am interested. Also, I like to share that knowledge with others and in turn to learn from them. My co-authors and co-editors have always extended my range of interests and my knowledge about the field.

In terms of courses, I liked to team-teach them with scholars from other disciplines because that arrangement allowed me to continue to be a student, in a sense. Among the two dozen or so team-taught courses was a course that included professors from Computer Science, from Psychology, and from Education, one course that included professors from Art History, History, and Religion, and one course included professors from French, Russian, and Spanish. I also taught at different times three different courses with three different scholars from Japan who were temporarily based in my office for a semester. In summary, I have been fortunate to learn from many colleagues while I was teaching for those 42 years.

6. You have lots of experiences in collaborating with professors from different departments, programs and countries in teaching courses and conduction research, how do you understand the collaboration between scholars? What effect, if any, do you believe the opportunity to exchange ideas and scholarship with international colleagues could have on the study of communication in general and on the individual cultures in particular.

Collaboration with other scholars while developing and teaching a course begins with a concept of a course that involves other disciplines. For example, one course was designed to help computer and other students to explain to non-computer people the programs that they developed. My part was the general conception of the course and the teaching of the technical writing skills needed to bring clarity to the non-computer person. A computer professor dealt with the problems he had when he worked in a business. After he constructed a program, it was turned over to others to write the explanation. Often they had little computer training or little technical writing training. An education professor discussed the different ways in which people learn. A communication professor dealt with the various types of interpersonal communication used in writing.

For another course--one that won a national award--I organized a course on the nature of language, starting with the "language" of the genetic code, moving through several levels of animal communication systems, summarizing the research on teaching primates sign language and then spending over 50% of the course on the variations in types of human language. The primary collaborator was a psychology professor who covered brain and language. We brought in four experts in fields including surgical brain operations and effects on language, early childhood language acquisition, and nonverbal communication. In scholarly collaboration in teaching, the teachers who are there for all classes learn a great deal of material that is outside their own field. The process is intellectually quite rewarding.

Collaboration with other scholars follows the same pattern of research project conception and identification of others who are experts in particular areas of the topic. Both or all scholars work on the topic, communicate frequently, double-check each other's work, and both go over the final paper, article, or book carefully. As in scholarly collaboration in teaching, the scholars who actively participate in all areas of the research learn the most.

As noted elsewhere in this interview, I consider the opportunity to teach, do research, and publish with scholars of other cultures to be an indispensable part of the field of intercultural communication. Let me give one example of how important knowledge of intercultural communication is in scholarly collaboration. In 1969 the National Science Foundation set up over 30 joint research committees consisting of US scholars and Japanese scholars. I was lucky enough to be one of the six US scholars on the sociolinguistics committee. We met in Hawaii, Tokyo, San Antonio, and Hawaii again over the next several years. A few years into our joint collaboration on various research projects and publications, I learned that every other committee had dissolved within a few years. The scholars seemed unable to work across cultural lines. Our committee was the only committee dealing with sociolinguistics across cultures and we had essentially no trouble maintaining communication and joint research.

To summarize my answer, intercultural collaboration is a vital necessity to deepen our understanding of intercultural communication.

7. You have spent nearly five percent of your adult life in Japan, and the influence of Japanese roots can be seen in some of your works. In what ways has that experience affected your personal and professional worldview?

My first year in Japan was as an exchange researcher. I represented the Linguistics Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin and two

professors from Tokyo Electrical Engineering College (Tokyo Denki Daigaku) spent their time in Austin. My wife and I and our first child lived in a nice apartment that was part of a large house. The woman who owned the house spoke no English, so I spoke my then halting Japanese with her. That year of living, commuting, shopping, and traveling within Japan helped me better understand the daily lives of Japanese and at least somewhat better understand the cultural values which I had been studying. Working with the Japanese professors and instructors at the university help me understand the Japanese work values better as well.

Perhaps the most interesting thing that I learned occurred when I met an American representative of General Electric who was working with some big companies in Japan and who himself knew essentially nothing about Japan or the Japanese. Over my teaching career, I used him as an example of someone who had no skills whatsoever in intercultural communication and who insisted that the Japanese had to change all their habits. Another interesting person that I met was an American Ph.D. candidate who would travel around Japan explaining to Japanese what was wrong with their education system and their communication system. From my experience with those two people, I vowed to never say anything negative about Japan or the Japanese until I knew as much as possible about the subjects. Thus, my time in Japan was not spent in preaching American values to the Japanese but in learning as much as I could about Japanese values.

Another major result of living in Japan for that year, much of another year, and the more than 20 other visits has been that I met a wide range of Japanese scholars. In the intervening years, I have worked with several of them on various types of research and publication projects. Both the living experiences and the personal interaction with Japanese scholars have been the major contributions to my view of how international scholars can best work together.

Let me add a personal note that best exemplifies the potential of living and studying within the foreign culture. In Japan I was invited to give a talk at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. A member of that class was Nobuyuki Honna. We crossed paths again in 1977 in Texas while he was a Fulbright scholar in Ft. Worth, Texas. In 1983 he accepted my university's invitation to spend a semester with us as a Japan Visiting Scholar, sponsored by the Japan Foundation. We taught a course together and began a history of many dozens of publications. Along with John Koo and myself, Honna was a founder of the IAICS, its president for a term, and remains of the Board of Directors.

8. You have been the President of six church-related organizations including one School Board, and the President of six professional organizations, what motivated you to involve in those service commitments?

My family was and is quite religious. We try to live by the maxim "To whom much is given, much will be required." I obtained a Ph.D. and a tenured position at a fine university. Thus I wanted to contribute whatever I could in terms of both the profession and my church.

In addition to belonging to several professional organizations, I helped set up the Linguistic Association of the Southwest, a regional organization of the Linguistic Society, and the Southwest Conference on Asian Studies, a regional association of the Association for Asian Studies. In both cases the motivation was establishing regional organizations so that scholars from the area could meet in smaller groups to share ideas and to encourage graduate students and younger scholars to join in the research efforts.

John Koo, Nobuyuki Honna and I saw in the 1980's that intercultural communication studies involving Asian and Western scholars could be further developed and so we established the International Association for Intercultural Communication Studies. We have had many graduate students and even some university seniors presenting papers and having them published in the organization's journal. It is very gratifying to see younger scholars whom one has helped become mature scholars recognized in the field.

9. Many scholars believe that their role is solely to produce knowledge while others believe that scholars have an obligation to bring about social change. It seems you belong to the latter because you not only write and speak about your ideas, but also pursue their implications to successful ends. What do you consider to be the primary role of a researcher?

The primary role of a pure researcher is research, since that activity and the publication of the results are vital to any scholarly progress in a field. Without the publications, each scholar would have to start from the beginning to learn about a topic.

Some researchers also contribute their expertise not only by publishing but also by presenting their work at conferences or other meetings. Such scholars are excellent assets to any field.

Scholars based at colleges and universities tend to combine research and publication with teaching. These scholars are the backbone of any field.

Some of these three types of scholars feel the need to communicate their research results not only to their students in the classroom and to their colleagues but also to a wider audience by giving workshops, talking to diverse audiences, working with businesses, setting up conferences for the general public, and so on.

Any successful academic field will have scholars from all four categories. In my case I happened to feel most comfortable in the third category but I admire those from any category who do their best and contribute in the way they judge best.

10. Could you tell us some of the experiences you have had that are important to learning the ropes as a new student and scholar in the discipline?

Studying Latin and the history of the Roman Empire in high school and Spanish language, history and literature in Spanish early in college expanded my understanding of peoples in an academic way. Yet taking intensive Japanese language and Japan-related courses and then spending a year in Tokyo doing research at a university and living in a Japanese neighborhood were crucial to understanding at least a bit more in depth about that culture.

My friends who studied abroad but who stayed with their classmates or within American enclaves learned much less about the cultures in which they lived. I think it is crucial for better understanding to be forced-in a sense-to communicate constantly within the foreign context. The "living" experience--as mentioned earlier--plus study of the culture's history, social history, religion(s), literature, and so on also add depth to one's understanding of another culture. If possible, it is also helpful to return and stay in the other culture occasionally to retain and deepen that understanding.

11. What are some of your plans in recent years?

Over the years of partial and then complete retirement from teaching, I have maintained an office at Trinity University and have published a few articles and books dealing with intercultural communication. One co-edited book was published in 2009, two more are scheduled for 2010 or 2011, and I am working on another for 2011 or 2012. I will continue to contribute to the field as long as I can.

On the religion side, I am involved in various parish groups and give occasional presentations for the parish and for related organizations.

On the personal side, my wife and I have been visiting some foreign countries and parts of the USA that we had never seen before. Travel is always a good way to help one's understanding of the differences between cultures and between regions in one's own country.

12. As our interview comes to an end, we would like to thank you again for your great contributions to the field of communication, and for accepting this interview. Please make a final conclusion and share with us any final words of wisdom that you may have.

It has been my pleasure to answer these questions. There are several points that I would like to make, but I will limit myself to three points as we close this interview.

First, the scholars in IAICS seem to me to be dedicated to learning more and more about intercultural communication, to teaching others what they learn, and to be interested in improving their own ability to communicate easily and well in another culture. The last point is not always the case in other fields. During the years that I have been interested in nonverbal communication and participating in conferences abroad, I noticed that some of the scholars--including some ranked among the best--were still using their native nonverbal communication system no matter which language they were using and no matter the background of the other person in the conversation. Our native system is so embedded in our behavior that it is often automatic. Thus it is often hard to remember to use a system that can be best understood by the other person.

Second, I simply cannot emphasize enough how much I learned from the other scholars with whom I did joint teaching and joint research over the last forty-five years.

Third, in the field of intercultural communication, I have been blessed to have worked with some of the best scholars in the world and have found them to be not only among the best in their field but also among the nicest people that I have encountered in my half century as a graduate student and then professor.

Correspondence to:

Tong Yu

Department of Foreign Languages

China Jiliang University

Hangzhou, P.R. China

Email: mailtoyt@126.com

Tong Yu

China Jiliang University