This week we will open electronic voting to eligible faculty of the College of Arts & Sciences on the question of whether basic proficiency in a second language will be a specific degree requirement for the Bachelor of Arts when the BU Hub goes into effect as the university-wide general education program. It is therefore timely to reexamine the role of second-language study in a liberal education in the arts and sciences.
I note that this is not the first time the College has debated this issue. In 1997, in response to a court order in the Guckenberger v. BU case, a committee of faculty examined whether the foreign language requirement was essential to the liberal arts curriculum, such that it could not be satisfied through course substitution. Several of the faculty who served on that committee, which included the late Susan Jackson, remain on our faculty today. The committee generated a report concluding that the language requirement is “fundamental to the nature of the liberal arts degree” at BU, and the court accepted this determination. The report stated, “A mind cooped up within a single culture is not liberally educated, and knowledge of a foreign language is essential to countering parochialism of outlook and knowledge.”
Twenty years later, we are again considering the same question in the context of the CAS faculty vote on a proposal from the Academic Policy Committee. I ask that each faculty member carefully consider the question and participate in the vote. There are both benefits (goods) and costs, which I describe below.
In my view, study of (or proficiency in) a second language uniquely combines three kinds of intellectual goods: multicultural insight, linguistic skill, and mental dexterity. First, the study of languages provides insight into cultures. Our language structures how we think about the social and natural world, highlighting for us some aspects and concealing others. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that, “die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt” (the limits of my language mean the limits of my world). A liberal education aims to provide the ability to expand the limits of one’s mind and world, and language study is instrumental in this quest.
Second, the ability to read and speak multiple languages is an essential skill for other intellectual and practical pursuits that a liberal education aims to enable. A deep understanding of the intended meaning of poets, philosophers, and creative artists requires reading and viewing works in their original languages. Archival research or research using media–ranging from journals to lab reports to newspapers, blogs, and tweets–all requires the access that linguistic skill provides. These are the kinds of research that we teach in the arts and sciences, and without these skills our students are significantly limited in the research they can pursue.
Finally, study of languages trains the mind to solve puzzles and think about the world from multiple perspectives. When first learning a language, students must learn to figure out ways to express their points by drawing on the limited vocabulary and grammar they know. Indeed, this kind of puzzling through, figuring out how to adequately express in one language what was initially composed in another, is intrinsic to the work of translation even at the expert level. As knowledge of the new language increases, students begin to learn idioms and metaphorical representations that the language has built into it. They begin to be able to see cultural presuppositions of the new language that allow them to question their own. These are problem solving and critical thinking skills – they enable us to see things in a new way and see the shortcomings as well as the benefits of different ways of conceiving experience.
Together, these three intellectual goods can only be gained through the study of a second language. While study of the history and cultural productions of different times and places through texts and lectures in English provides some basic access and knowledge, it is inevitably secondhand knowledge. It is not the direct access that an elite liberal education aims to empower. While study of academic disciplines also trains the mind to think critically from different perspectives, language learning does so in a uniquely mind-expanding way, like learning mathematics yet more attuned to human cultures. This is only to say that language learning offers something that study of nothing else does. And this positive difference is inherent in the education we seek to provide.
Any proposed requirement imposes costs that should be carefully weighed against the merits of the requirement. All requirements reduce students’ choice in designing their path to a degree, eliminating some options for additional degree programs, majors, minors, and electives, and turning away some students who would not otherwise choose such courses. Approving the APC proposal to impose a second-language requirement would effectively add three courses to the 10-12 courses that the BU Hub is projected to require of students. Given that the BU Hub permits overlap with major requirements, that number should fall by at least two and likely three for every major; thus, the total would be 12-13 to complete non-major requirements for the BA degree. This compares well to the current BA non-major requirements, including the existing foreign language requirement, of 12 courses. Thus, students would not be impeded any more in pursuing majors or minors than they are now by retaining a second-language requirement.
Once again, we as a college are considering whether language study is a fundamental part of a CAS bachelor’s degree. I believe that the goods that language learning offer are substantial and intrinsic to a liberal education in the arts and sciences, and the costs of imposing a requirement minimal. I therefore urge the faculty to support the proposed second-language BA-specific requirement.