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The Rice Thresher
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Change will apply retroactively to freshmen by Olivia Allison thresher editorial staff
About 10 minutes of discussion preceded the vote. English Professor Linda Driskill said that although she thought the requirement had been implemented poorly, it should not be abolished so quickly. "I think we've diagnosed the problem wrong," Driskill said. "We didn't change our ideas about the need for students to speak another language. ... I think we're hindering the students if we just blow out the requirement because I think [the faculty was] right in the first place, and what's wrong is the implementation." University Standing Committee on Undergraduate Curriculum Chair Jack Zammito said abolishing the requirement is the most efficient thing to do. "The existing implementation of the language proficiency requirement is not something we can go forward with," he said. "The most sensible way of dealing with that, to the faculty last time, was to abolish the whole program." Fewer than 10 of the estimated 75 faculty members in attendance voted against the abolition of the language requirement. Zammito, also the History Department chair, then presented a motion to "retroactively abolish" the requirement for students who matriculated this year. Freshmen will be able to apply foreign language courses toward their humanities distribution requirement even though first-year language courses were not intended to count as humanities distribution, the faculty decided when the language requirement was instituted in spring 1999. Provost Eugene Levy announced in November that current students can receive distribution credit for any courses offered for distribution credit since the 1997-'98 academic year. This was due to confusion about which classes were distribution in the General Announcements and printed schedules of courses offered last year. Only graduating seniors who have chosen to graduate under the 2000-'01 General Announcements will be required to fulfill the language requirement according to the motion passed at the faculty meeting. "We are legally bound to those students who proposed to graduate this year under our General Announcements 2000-'01 to allow them to use the language proficiency requirement because many of them have ... chosen to use that in place of the restricted distribution in the prior catalogs," Zammito said. Although little discussion took place regarding Zammito's motion, a lengthy discussion followed a proposed amendment to the motion that would make all first-year foreign language courses fulfill humanities distribution requirements. Statistics Professor Jim Thompson said he proposed the amendment because he thought engineering and science students need an incentive to take language courses. "Although it's true that science and engineering students can take a language, if they're not allowed to take that first-year sequence as part of the distribution requirements, they simply won't feel that they have time to do it." However, interim Dean of Humanities Gale Stokes said he did not think first-year language courses fit the goal of the distribution requirement. "First-year language courses [are] an introduction to culture," Stokes said. "It's an introduction to grammar, it's an introduction to the various modalities of speaking. But we did not feel that it entered deeply enough into those cultures or into the various aspects of language that it should qualify as an equivalent of, say, an introductory course in philosophy or history or English literature. "The point of distribution ... is to have a limited list of courses that will enrich the students in those three spheres that we have undertaken to identify as important to their general education, and first-year language does not, in my view, meet up with that requirement." English Professor Alan Grob agreed. He said abolishing the language requirement should force the faculty to rethink all decisions they have made since establishing the requirement. "I think we really have to rethink what we're doing fundamentally in some way that includes foreign languages in Group I [distribution] and will give students that incentive to take the step to learning a foreign language," Grob said. Currently, the dean of each school selects which courses will satisfy the distribution requirement. Their decisions are based on the recommendations of a committee composed of professors in the school. Zammito said he thought this procedure worked well in the past. "The deans don't do this unilaterally - they have committees and procedures. The procedures have ... not worked badly," Zammito said. "What we're trying to do is give our students some exposure to what the humanities have to offer, so I strongly support Dean Stokes' objection to this idea." President Malcolm Gillis said the amendment was not in order because it did not apply specifically to students mentioned in Zammito's motion - students who will graduate or who matriculated this year. Chemistry Professor Jim Kinsey asked that Stokes and the committee that selects humanities distribution courses reconsider making first-year languages distribution credit. Faculty members also discussed whether abolishing the requirement was unfair to sophomore and junior students who had planned their courses based on the requirement. Associate Director of Academic Advising Don Ostdiek said sophomores and juniors were advised not to plan their courses based on this year's General Announcements because only two sets of guidelines are applicable to them: those released the year they matriculated or those printed the year they will graduate. "Students are told that they cannot plan on what book will be there when they graduate," Ostdiek said. "When they plan their curriculum, they should be planning on the book they matriculate under, and it's at their own risk that they plan on graduating under the language requirement."
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