The Foreign Language Requirement in the Liberal Arts College

Abstract

T HIS fall I was asked to draw up justification for the foreign language requirement in the liberal arts college. Well might I ask: should the languages be singled out? Why not ask the social sciences, the natural sciences, to justify their requirements; in fact, why should not the college as whole be asked to justify its existence? It seems that more and more in the United States educators and administrators forget that chronologically, the first institutions of higher learning in America are the liberal colleges.' It is also apparent that the faculties of the liberal arts colleges, instead of holding their own ground, have for the last three generations seen a rapid growth of undergraduate vocational colleges,2 and that they have accepted without much fight or resistance this invasion of what should have been services agencies. But the vocational subdivisions have grown to such an extent that they are about to choke the liberal arts colleges and impose their desires on them. If we, the liberal arts colleges and staff continue to be passive and to give in, it is easy to see that before long liberal education in the United States will be thing of the past. President James Bryant Conant of Harvard University contends that