Downshift

It took the Committee on Educational Policy the better part of two months to puzzle out a revision of Harvard's language requirement, and the proposal that goes to the Faculty next week drips with evidence of a long debate's compromise. The plan to shift the requirement to one full course in the freshman year doesn't follow the HPC's recommendation to see the rule junked completely, nor will it please those who think Harvard already asks too little foreign language knowledge of its undergraduates. But the proposal is a logical and ingenious approach to an impossible situation and therefore deserves Faculty approval.

The need for softening the present rule, which forces many students into two full years of foreign language study, has become increasingly evident. A proliferation of paignant hardship cases has made the administrative board chafe under a strict rule that limits exemptions to those with a medically attested learning disability. And as one language professor wryly noted last week, the rule has helped induce a Cambridge epidemic of that rare disease--strephosymbolia. A subclause of the new plan wisely allows the ad board to excuse a student from the requirement if his instructor says that further language study would do him no good.

Student may resent the CEP's caution in not eliminating the requirement altogether, but that was never a live possibility. Ending the requirement would significantly weaken the teaching wing of language departments' graduate programs. Also Dean Ford and others feel that it is vital for Harvard to have a statement supporting the value of language study built into the structure of its curriculum.

On the other hand, even enthusiastic language instructors admit that the theoretically valuable educational experience "doesn't take" with some students. Forcing these students to slog through a second year of painful confusion after a bad first year seems a cruel and unnatural punishment. What Dean Ford calls the "cultural shock value" of trying to piece together thought in another language should register almost as strongly on a student after one year as after two.

Those who are sensitive to hints of Harvard paternalism may be disturbed by the CEP's decision to make all who do not satisfy the requirement pass it with a full course during their freshman year. The rationale seems a little exploitative--grab those freshmen while they're young and callow and haven't learned to avoid studying until reading period. The language departments will be cornering a share of the market of freshman academic eagerness--with the effect of decreasing the range of courses from which many freshmen will be able to choose.

But the counter arguments for moving the requirement to the freshman year are convincing. The required course is remedial--and should be part of the freshman program by the same logic that puts Expository Writing 10 there. The best time to build on any earlier language training is during a student's first year, before he has forgotten all he learned in secondary school.

A healthy proportion of Harvard and Radcliffe students (60 to 70 per cent according to Jack M. Stein, Chairman of the German Department) continue language study here voluntarily, so the modifications of the requirement won't depopulate Harvard language courses. Next year the CEP may be able to forego its annual and always lengthy theoretical debate on language study. For the student the change may not be the optimum solution, but it is the only politically feasible one and will eliminate the worst hardships of the present scheme.