Offer introductory language courses year-round

One of the best parts of the University’s undergrad curriculum is the freedom to explore during your first two years (and to some degree, even after you’ve selected a major). We don’t have standard general education courses that every single freshman or sophomore has to take, like at Columbia. While writing seminar is required, the topics differ dramatically from class to class, and students are given the ability to rank their preferences, and even the distribution requirements we do have are, in my experience, extremely broad and flexible. The Admission website advertises Princeton as a place where undergraduates are “encouraged to explore the curriculum” and take classes unrelated to their prospective majors. The across-the-board high quality of the University’s departments means that it’s perfectly reasonable to come in as a math major and graduate with a comparative literature degree and expect a high-caliber experience in either department.

This freedom to explore, however, is significantly curtailed by the University’s language offerings. By offering 101- and 103-level language courses only in the fall, the University has created a system in which many students ‘miss the boat’ and are unable to try a language they would be interested in. During freshman and even sophomore year, students who discover a potential interest in a language or have a desire to become proficient in it can easily be left behind just because their interests shift during the school year instead of over the summer. This problem is not self-contained, however, because many certificates in content areas (e.g., Contemporary European Politics and Society as well as East Asian Studies) have a language component/requirement as well. Other classes in these content areas can trigger an interest in pursuing the certificate, but the inflexibility of the language requisites may make it impossible for students to fulfill this interest because they simply can’t afford to wait until the next fall to start the language.

For example, consider a student who —for any number of reasons or for no reason at all —decides to take an EAS class on modern Japanese politics in the fall of sophomore year. He becomes enamored by the subject and hopes to pursue an EAS certificate to further engage his interest. Now, while it’s conceivable that he could begin Japanese 101: Elementary Japanese I a few weeks into the add/drop period, in practice there is enormous incentive not to do this since being a few weeks behind in a 101 language class is far harder to catch up from than in most content classes. Therefore, whether or not the student decides to begin Japanese during or after the add/drop period, odds are in both cases he’ll instead wait until the following year. This places the student at an enormous disadvantage since he’ll have to take introductory language classes during each of his last four semesters at the University and won’t have the language ability necessary to conduct primary source research for the content classes taken for the certificate. It is unfair to this student that because of University scheduling restrictions, he is arbitrarily worse at Japanese (and therefore worse at EAS research) than other students in the certificate program and especially than he himself could have been.

By allowing students to take 101- and 103-levellanguage classes in either term, the University could allow them greater flexibility in catching up to their fellow students. Rather than waiting to begin a language until junior year, students could take 101 at the University in the spring, the equivalent of 102 over the summer and then join the ‘normal’ progression (i.e., join 105/107 depending on the language) in the fall of the following year. This would mean that by the fall of that second year, students would have taken three of the (usually) four required semesters of a language, instead of only one. The students could then continue in higher-level classes with everyone else or use their now ‘free’ course slots in their schedules to take the content classes required for that certificate or any other course that interests them.

The University’s flexibility of curriculum is one of the strong points of its undergraduate program. Yet to further encourage exploration all the way through sophomore year (before majors are declared), the University would do well to offer 100-level language courses in both their traditional and ‘off’ semesters. To truly be a school where one can come in as a biology major and graduate with a degree in French (and tons of other majors and certificates that have language components) without having to change one’s mind during first semester of freshman year, introductory/100-level language courses should be offered year-round.

Ryan Dukeman is a sophomore from Westwood, Mass. He can be reached at rdukeman@princeton.edu.