Incoming first-year students accepted into the School of Arts and Sciences will have to take four semesters of a foreign language due to a recently internal vote by the School of Arts and Sciences Honors Program.
The school’s faculty voted on the requirement last May, and the decision passed with only six members of the faculty voting against it. School of Arts and Sciences Acting Dean Ziva Galili first brought up the issue; previously there were no language requirements.
“This is extremely important,” said Chair of Germanic, Russian and Eastern European Languages and Literature Nicholas Rennie. “We owe it to students to make it clear that we consider this a real priority and something that is going to be important in their lives outside of Rutgers.”
The idea for the new requirement was seriously considered because if enacted, it would help spread global awareness, Area Dean Sarolta Takacs said.
“We voted in a joint faculty meeting of the School of Arts and Sciences in May of 2008 to accept the foreign language requirement,” Takacs said. “That’s a new requirement that was added to all the other requirements honors students must complete.”
Takacs presented a motion approved by the School of Arts and Sciences Honors Committee on May 7, 2008 to implement a language requirement. Faculty from the natural and physical sciences questioned the appropriateness for the new requirement.
“We had to study this, think about it and really see whether it was a good idea,” Takacs said. “We even had scientists looking at how it would affect the students.”
After the School of Arts and Sciences did their due diligence on the matter, it was decided that the new requirement would be a huge benefit to the incoming honors students.
“If you want to really understand how other cultures operate and how [they] see the world, there is no more effective way then to learn their languages,” Rennie said. “Ideally, I think it would be wonderful if we provided this to all students in the University.”
The concern about the new requirement is that the students will have trouble scheduling their classes for their respective majors and minors around the new foreign language classes they must take, Takacs said.
“We actually checked and discussed this matter heavily at the meeting,” Takacs said. “What we found was that it would not hurt the students in this regard. To graduate, the honors students still have to have the same 120 credits to graduate.”
The amendments added to the requirement give students the opportunity to place out of one semester of taking foreign language classes.
Students who place out of the fourth semester of language can choose between taking a course in the culture of language, language literature or a course on just speaking a certain language rather than reading and writing it.
“A student can take a class just on speaking Chinese, for example,” Takacs said. “Chinese is a hard language to read and write because of the amount of different symbols in the language, so a student may want to learn to refine his/her speech in the Chinese language.”
Departments on other University campuses believe that the School of Arts and Sciences Honors Program is doing the right thing by implementing the new requirement.
“I certainly support the idea of requiring more foreign language study and believe that in our increasingly interconnected, hot, flat and crowded world, we should be doing more to promote the knowledge of languages other than English among educated Americans,” said Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at Rutgers-Camden James Rushing.
Honors students must complete 120 credits and maintain a grade point average of 3.250 during the first year at Rutgers and 3.500 each semester after.
Honors program requires two years of language
Published: Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Updated: Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Be the first to comment on this article!