Latitudes: A Campus Campaign Seeks to Add a Foreign Language. Yes, Add.

Picture: Latitudes, The Chronicle of Higher Education

In an article by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Karin Fischer writes an overview of struggles faced by university students in regards to immigration and representation. The first part of the article focuses on how Foreign-language enrollments are tumbling on American campuses, but a group of students wants to expand the opportunity to learn Tagalog at Brown University.

A group of students at Brown University are urging the college to add Tagalog to the two-dozen foreign languages it offers. More than 1,000 students, professors, alumni, and staff members have signed a petition started by Brown’s Filipino Alliance to establish Tagalog language courses.

Vietnamese is the only Southeast Asian language currently offered at Brown.

“It’s a matter of representation,” said Alexa Theodoropoulos, a junior and one of the leaders of the Tagalog@Brown campaign. “It demonstrates the university’s commitment to students of our background.” There are about 4.6 million Filipino Americans, and the population has doubled over the past two decades.

Without a formal language program, Tagalog is only taught at Brown when students organize a course themselves, through what the university calls Group Independent Study Projects (GISP). But the onus is on students to propose the course, create the curriculum, and collaboratively teach the classes, said Anna Zulueta, a co-leader of the campaign. (A sponsoring faculty member does the grading.)