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The Real Language Crisis

We are becoming a nation of second-language illiterates, and recent draconian cuts to language teaching in colleges and universities are exacerbating an already serious problem.
By Russell A. Berman

We in America are confronting a stark alternative: either open ourselves to an appreciation of human plurality and the diversity of cultures around the globe or limit ourselves to a narrowly normative culture. Will American schools and colleges provide students with opportunities to learn to understand other voices, or will our educational system succumb to the temptations of isolationism and xenophobia?

These stakes are high—too high, evidently, to be left to the faculty. As a sign of the times, it is not generally faculty members who are in charge but rather administrators, who are asking whether the university can afford to teach second languages. In fact, they don’t ask, they just declare, “No, we can’t.”

Some college and university leaders do not want to let this economic crisis go to waste, and, pleading resource constraints, they wield the ax. Wherever the ax falls, there is crisis, and it falls with uncanny regularity on the programs that convey cultural difference: languages.

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