Although the French bachelor’s degree program increased from one to five students this semester, staff members say the foreign language program is limited in several regards, due to fewer curriculums requiring the courses and a tight budget.”Nicholls would love to have a booming foreign language program, but those two things have kept us behind,” Anita Tully, department head of languages and literatures, said.
English, history, mass communication and general studies are the only majors, aside from French, that require foreign language courses. Larry Howell, interim vice president for academic affairs, said more students were required to take the courses until 1998-99, when the Louisiana Board of Regents requested that the maximum number of hours required for graduation be decreased to 125.
This caused departments to examine their curriculums. “They (the departments) wanted students to be able to take all the courses they needed for their majors and wanted them to have a few electives,” Tully said. “It looked to most departments like foreign languages had to go.”
Last spring, however, the University of Louisiana System released an institutional review of Nicholls, prepared by national education consultant James Fisher. He suggested that every bachelor’s degree recipient should be required to take foreign language courses.
“Not only does Nicholls not require each student to acquire knowledge of a foreign language, but it also appears that the University is backing away from foreign language instruction overall,” Fisher wrote.
Howell said that just because a suggestion is in the review does not mean it will be changed, but the administration will examine the issue. He said there has been no progress toward requiring foreign language courses of all students, but the topic has not yet been discussed by the administration. Tully said she doubts foreign language will ever become a university-wide requirement at Nicholls.
Howell said other curriculums are looking into possibly requiring foreign language courses but did not elaborate on which curriculums or how many.
“If everyone had a nine-hour requirement in a course, then that program would progress but probably at the expense of something else,” Howell said. “You’d have to take out a requirement in one area to add one in another. I would like to see us be able to increase our foreign language requirements without it being detrimental to other disciplines and still stay in the number of required hours for graduation.”
He said it is also difficult to mandate curriculum changes because the accrediting agencies for many curriculums dictate the number of hours required in certain courses.
This situation is not unique to Nicholls. The American Council on Education reported in a 2001 study that 20 percent of American universities make foreign language a university-wide graduation requirement; 34 percent required it in 1965. Louisiana State University, Southeastern University and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette also do not have foreign language graduation requirements for all students. They do, however, require them for liberal arts majors.
The dwindling number of foreign language students has also contributed to the program’s 12 to 15 years of budget problems, Tully said. Faculty members said the budget problems are related to the small number of students enrolled in foreign language courses.
“The bigger the majors, the more professors you need and the more they’re willing to give you,” Tully said.
The problems have caused the number of languages that can be offered to drop from five to two and have left the program with two full-time instructors. As foreign language faculty members retired or died, they were not replaced due to the budget, Tully said. Since Dennis Durocher, assistant professor of languages and literatures, is the only full-time foreign language instructor with a doctorate, he must coordinate all the recruiting for the program.
“With a one person department, it’s just hard to see how you can get out into high schools and rebuild the program with maybe the one day a month you have free to do that type of recruiting,” Tully said. “We are just at the point where we need that second professor who ideally could teach a lot of French and some Spanish.”
Tully said the department has requested another foreign language teacher about once a semester, and the University has always said the budget is the reason why one cannot be hired.
“If he (Durocher) could continue to build (the program), then he would soon have a program where we could graduate eight students a year,” she said. The Board of Regents prefers a program to have eight graduates a year, but the problem arises when there are not enough teachers to accommodate these students.
Durocher teaches four courses a semester. However, if there were a steady influx of French majors entering the program every year, he would have to teach up to nine courses a semester, he said. Until the University has funds to hire another faculty member, the program would have to depend on part-time help, Tully said.
Howell said there are so few French graduates that Nicholls has been fighting to keep the French bachelor’s degree program, despite its failing to meet the requirements for a maintained major. The French degree will remain at Nicholls for now, Howell said.
Tully said: “It’s unreal that we wouldn’t have a French major in the French triangle; that is the heritage of this whole school.”
Durocher said he sees the situation as a cycle. “A lot of students may want to minor in French but there is not enough availability of the classes,” he said. “It’s cyclic. Nicholls doesn’t support the program because students aren’t interested. Students aren’t interested, because Nicholls doesn’t support the program.
