Courses
in the major are more important than language courses.
This
seemed to be the real motivation behind removing the foreign-language
requirement. Majors at Bridgewater State College are limited to
approximately 36 hours, but a number of programs require "cognate"
courses in other disciplines that bring the total closer to 50 or more
hours. In order to give students a greater degree of flexibility in
their class selection, a major goal of the core curriculum "review" was
to reduce the size of the core curriculum.
(I put the word "review" in quotes above, because an
academic review typically begins with a careful examination of the
current program and comparisons to peer institutions, neither of which
was part of this process, though several faculty members asked for
both.)
An undergraduate major with 50 or more credits is
not, in my view, an undergraduate major. It is a professional or
quasi-graduate program.
Removing
language requirement gives students freedom of choice.
This
is not an academic argument, and it was not applied to other learning
priorities during the debate. Once a student has made a choice to
pursue higher education at a particular institution, it is the
responsibility of the faculty to establish priorities. One purpose of
general education is to prepare students to make choices about subjects
they would like to learn in greater depth. Many benefits of higher
education -- particularly outside of one's chosen major -- become
apparent only after they have
been completed. A consumer model in which people take whatever they
like is perhaps appealing, but it is not higher education.
Since I did not prevail in this debate, and students
do now have a choice, I feel obligated to provide as many students as I
can with some other ways of thinking about the question.
A
foreign language requirement gives one department a "monopoly" in the
curriculum.
This is a bit difficult to explain,
because it was another non-academic argument. Most core curriculum
requirements are broad enough that they can be met by courses offered
by two or more departments. Since Bridgewater has only one Foreign
Languages Department, it would control the "market" for this category
of course. This argument had the effect of creating a "turf" battle
where one need not exist.
Anything short of total fluency is a waste of time, so a one- or
two-year requirement is worse than no requirement.
Here is where I fear I
contributed to the problem. At an early stage of the debate, I said
that we should increase the requirement from one year to two years,
which is what most schools require. I even argued that the one-year
requirement was more of an inoculation than a valuable learning
experience. Since I thought we were having a serious discussion about
providing the strongest possible curriculum, I made this statement with
the intention of encouraging my colleagues to support an expanded language requirement. In
retrospect, I should not have created this opening for opponents of the
language requirement -- a two-year requirement was apparently out of
the question, and if a one-year is not very useful, we should not make
students complete it. Had I known that a ZERO was a possibility, I
would never have complained about the inadequacy of the one-year
requirement!
Since the debate took place, I have had the
opportunity to travel to Nicaragua and Cape Verde with BSC students. I
found that even those with minimal language education were able to make
some use of it, and that a rudimentary understanding of Spanish or
Portuguese was enough to make a difference for these students and for
the people they met.
Language learning is a luxury
state college students cannot afford.
I really do not like to
acknowledge this, but the debate about the foreign-language requirement
at Bridgewater State College included an element of class bias. This
was the suggestion that we should remove the foreign-language
requirement so that students could focus on courses with more direct
vocational benefits. Many political leaders outside of the
state-college system would like to see us move in a vocational
direction, and away from the provision of top-notch liberal-arts
program. Elite schools can continue to provide this for the children of
the rich and the academically exceptional, but ordinary young people
from middle- and working-class families do not have the time for real
learning at that level. Anything that we do at the state colleges that
sacrifices liberal-arts education in order to provide for vocational
preparation lends support to this view, and is a disservice to our core
constituents.
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