French major junior Lindsay Kent (pictured above) studies in the Languages and Literature office located in the basement of Welles Hall. Lack of enrollment in certain language classes have led to reductions in language courses (Malachy Dempsey/managing editor).
Decreased enrollment in Geneseo language classes has led to a reduction in amount of available courses. This follows national trends at other colleges and has negatively impacted professors.
Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Russian classes were cut down to one class each due to low enrollment numbers, starting this fall according to Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Stacey Robertson.
“We do a review of enrollment for all classes,” Robertson said. “If we have low-enrollment classes sometimes we have to make tough choices to not include those courses.”
Nationwide enrollment in foreign languages has dropped 9.2 percent from Fall 2013 to Fall 2016, the second largest since 1958, according to a study released by the Modern Language Association.
SUNY schools, including Monroe Community College and Brockport, have experienced decreased enrollments as well, according to Robertson.
The languages primarily affected at the college are outside of the Western world, concerning some students, including international relations major senior Peter Rapone over Eurocentrism in foreign education.
“It kind of shows a Eurocentric mindset for the education system here,” Rapone said. “Japanese, Chinese and Arabic are huge internationally for business and foreign diplomacy, so kind of losing that … advantage from the undergrad perspective is a bad thing.” French and Spanish classes did not seem to experience considerable setbacks Rapone believes, but the Italian language classes offered still remains on hiatus after the school failed to replace a professor who retired, according to Rapone.
Adjunct lecturer of Japanese language Tomomi Tewksbury hopes the two courses return in the near future.
“Since the fall of 2013, I have taught two Japanese classes per semester. Starting this
semester, I can only teach one,” Tewksbury said. “I feel that it is very unfortunate because I cannot give learning opportunities to all the students who want to study Japanese.”
The school tries to focus on faculty needs, but ultimately prioritizes the needs of the students, according to Robertson.
“We exist to serve students,” Robertson said. “We always try and consider the well-being of our faculty, but we cannot provide classes if we don’t have students.”
Seventy-seven percent of professors that teach beginner-level foreign language courses are part-time non-tenure track faculty, according to a 2012 survey of SUNY foreign language departments containing data from 23 campuses including Geneseo.
For intermediate level classes, the survey reported that 62 percent are part-time non-tenure track faculty, compared to 61 tenured track faculty.
Some students, including anthropology major junior Sarah Hashmi, feel it is regrettable that classes are being cut down, recalling her positive experience with Arabic.
“When I took Arabic for two semesters freshman year, it was such a great experience— my professor [Akil Aljaysh] made the class engaging and taught us about different cultural values as well,” Hashmi said. “Now that there is only one Arabic class available for students to take, I feel like so many students that are invested in learning this language are now disadvantaged.”
The school will offer online synchronous classes to the critical language consortium for students starting this spring, according to Robertson.
Students interested in taking higher level language courses not offered at the college have relied on online classes before, including Senior communication major Annie Renaud who took advanced Russian classes through Stony Brook University.
“[Russian] is a really valuable language ... it’s important that our country has people who can speak Russian so they can try to build better diplomatic relations,” Renaud said. “It was kind of disappointing to see because SUNY-wide you see language programs seem to be getting smaller where I think they should be getting larger.”
Renaud believes the school should focus on promoting these languages more.
“I wish that the college was doing more instead of just cutting classes to promote language learning,” Renaud said. “We live in a global economy so it’s important that everyone is able to speak another language.”
Rapone claims the administration has not been involved in efforts to promote language enrollment.
“There’s nothing really that has been done from the administration side,” Rapone said. “The only thing I would do at this point is increase interest and try and organize people so that hopefully languages don’t disappear.”