Faculty Refuses Credit For Course in Swahili

The Faculty Committee on Educational Policy has turned down a student proposal that the University offer a half course in Swahili this Spring for Credit.

According to Peter C. Goldmark '62, vice president of PBH, preliminary preparations for the course had reached the stage of deciding whether meetings should be held in the morning or afternoon, when the Faculty made its unexpected decision.

Goldmark, who was leader of last year's Project Tanganyika which sent 20 students to teach English in Africa, began to work toward installing Swahili in the catalogue in November. Goldmark said he had "guaranteed" 25-30 students, and had found an instructor, a Tanganyikan graduate student at Boston College who agreed to give the course.

Dean Monro, who admits he was "optimistic" at first, had even secured the sponsorship for the Chairman of the Department of Linguistics.

"I encouraged him in the beginning," Monro said, "but I turned out to be wrong.

"It's a matter of educational policy, and the general feeling is that the University should not become involved in a one-shot 'service' course of this kind, which aims only at conversational facility."

Goldmark remarked that next summer's project Tanganyika, which has already enlisted 16 volunteers, will not suffer much from the decision. A private course in Swahili will be arranged again this year, as it was last, with funds collected for the project. Even so, "it's a pretty crucial question - the scope of a liberal education in 1962."

Goldmark said he "understood the Faculty's point of view" and thought they might be right, but felt that the course should not be rejected simply "because it has immediate application" and because it is different from the other language courses and unreconcilable with "an ivory tower approach."

He pointed out that a quarter of Africa speaks Swahili - over 50 million people - and that many students unconnected with Project Tanganyika have expressed interest in the course for purely academic reasons.

Monro said that the Faculty was reluctant to give credit for a language in which no literature is presently being studied at the University. "One has to define a difference between languages somewhere. Nigeria, for example, has 200 languages now in use."

However, Monro said there is a possibility that the University will finance a non-credit course in Swahili this Spring depending on the cost of such a project.