This change, said David Gershkoff ’06, chair of Yale’s Academics Committee—a student group within the Yale College Council that discusses educational issues—will pave the way for a more complicated system of requirements.
“You have two problems [with the current system],” Gershkoff said. “One of them is the fact that you can get your Groups I’s without writing, two, you can get your Group IV courses without math.”
The new requirements, he says, will still ensure a broad education for Yale students while addressing those two weak areas.
The change to the language requirements, which Gershkoff said were likely more welcomed by the students, was a point of hot contention among faculty. The Yale Daily News reported that about 75 percent of those present voted to accept the change.
Yale had previously not required that any entering student demonstrating proficiency in a foreign language take language classes at college. The faculty’s vote now mandates that every student in the college take at least one language course.
Additionally, while students not demonstrating proficiency used to have to take four language classes, they are now required to complete just three.
Several professors protested the latter change, saying it would leave students with a less complete knowledge of another language.
“It marks a debasement of our curriculum,” Former Yale College dean and history professor Donald Kagan told The Yale Daily News.
Ethics, Politics and Economics director Seyla Benhabib, a former Harvard professor, said she voted against the changes because there was not enough discussion of the committee’s recommendation.
“There was a lot of concern [from] my colleagues in the language departments about the specifics of the proposal,” Benhabib told The Yale Daily News. “I did not like the fact that the committee was so defensive and that they did not entertain enough objections and counterarguments.”
But Gershkoff said both aspects of the faculty’s decision would benefit students, and that he knew many students who loved languages enough to begin a third or a fourth while at Yale.
“As Dean Brodhead said, language is not something in which you get to a level of proficiency and then stop as soon as possible,” Gershkoff added.
Lessening the requirements for students without proficiency, he said, would make the requirement less burdensome while keeping language central.
The third faculty decision will allow faculty councils to determine which of the academic areas a course should fall into. Previously, courses were assigned to areas based on which department the professor who taught it belonged to.
Brodhead said he was pleased about the tone and scope of the review and about the dedication of those who participated.
“Independence of intelligence is a central virtue in an academic community, so it would be wrong to expect unanimous agreement in an exercise like this,” he added. “But we’re all in it together and I expect good cooperation even from those who voiced dissent.”
—Staff writer Laura L. Krug can be reached at krug@fas.harvard.edu.