There is an anthill of little rumors forming, all about the up and coming changes to the General Education Curriculum, the full effects of which should be settling in for fall 2012. One in particular has caught my… ear, and I’d like to address it in greater length: that of languages.
With the altogether dour financial times, the world languages program at SMU has arguably taken the biggest budget blows. The Russian department, for one, has been forcibly reduced to less than a handful of instructors (three professors; three affiliated faculty).
The French program, to cite further but briefly, is now severely understaffed with the resignation of Professor Barbara Abad and the effective semi-retirement of Professor William Beauchamp as of this fall. Of the remaining professors, there are only two full-time; one is tenure-track, the other is the chair. The three-year-long effort to hire additional assistant professors has been for the most part balked at and only just this year answered with the venue of a visiting lecturer, Professor Jean Claude Bondol.
I cannot make a sweeping generalization only because the Spanish department is still mammoth and will, given our time and place, stay much the same if not blossom further.
The board of advisors for the new G.E.C., when evaluating the role of languages in a liberal arts education, came wisely to the decision that it is important that our students diversify their tongue. I will not make the arguments for it here, you have heard them all; but as a native Frenchman, you may well guess where I stand on the issue: Vive la Langue!
To that end however, or so the rumor goes, the board considered permitting the completion of a Rosetta Stone course to be analogous to completing intro-level language classes. The rigorous details of the plan I have not heard about, and therefore I cannot say much more, but I can be revolted (the French are good at that) and would like to explain why.
You may find it cliché but a language is not something you speak; it is something you breathe. There is an intrinsic IN-dividuality, as Professor Brandy Alvarez is keen to mention in her Dante and Boccaccio classes, to a language, a sort of indivisible corporeity. The body, you might say, is the pronunciation of syllables and breaths to a coherent end. The soul is the culture, the literature, the art, food, mentality, and geo-history for which you are learning the language in the first place. To divorce the two, the way any language-learning software cannot help but doing, is to commit a felony… a very, very, small felony, but one nonetheless.
On the pragmatic side, the school would have to find a way to universalize the access to Rosetta Stone which is, as many software pirates know, quite expensive ($179 by Amazon price). To that I do have a suggestion; if the administration is heart-bent on computerizing intro-level classes, it may consider the thoroughly cheaper use of Babbel.com, a language-learning web site whose price for a 6-month commitment is a total of $44.70. The pedagogical method is entirely analogous and the little pictures are funnier. May the administration use the saved funds to build another lavishly unnecessary fountain. Or host Ke$ha. Again.
Arnaud Zimmern is a sophomore majoring in mathematics, English, French, and German. He can be reached for comment at [email protected]
