This letter is in response to the article, “Fired ‘foreign language 14′ confront Chancellor Martin,” published Oct. 1.
 Since Aug. 27, we have been trying to understand how firing a quarter of the foreign language faculty in the middle of the academic year is a constructive way of enforcing budget cuts. This move affects hundreds of students who may not be able to take courses they need to graduate or fulfill major requirements and sets the stage to devastate the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, the International Studies Program, the recently reinstated Comparative Literature degree and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. It is not only for our own sakes that the foreign language 14 have been asking the many questions that continue to go unanswered.  
Not satisfied with the answers received at the Budget Forum on Sept. 28, we finally met with Chancellor Michael Martin face to face on Sept. 30.
 Our agenda was centered around four questions:
1) What individual or committee authorized the cuts to foreign languages?
2) What authority does that individual or committee have to make changes to the curriculum?
3) Is it not reasonable to request an extension like that received by every other instructor on campus to finish the academic year with a sense of purpose and closure?
4) How many vacant lines (i.e. funds reserved for hiring needed academic staff) are being held in the budget which might possibly be tapped to come up with the $270,000 needed to pay these 14 instructors through the spring semester?
 The answer to question one is the academic equivalent of a firing squad.  Martin cites the Legislature for lack of funding, the Right Sizing Advisory Committee for the recommendation, and Gaines Foster, interim dean of the College of Humanities and Scoial Sciences, who “made the difficult decisions.” Foster insists that he was just following the Chancellor’s order (with the help of a team of lawyers).
In other words, we still don’t know which individual or committee authorized the cuts to foreign languages, and all of the above can rest easy in the knowledge that they may not have fired the fatal shot.
 Question two should be answered in the coming week when a resolution drafted by the American Association of University Professors (not by the foreign language F14 as stated in the article) may be considered by the Faculty Senate today.
 ”We live in hard times” and “the money simply isn’t there” are the Chancellor’s answers to question three. In other words, it is unreasonable to expect an extension of our contracts a mere 16 weeks.
 
 In answer to question four, Eric Monday, vice chancellor for finance and administrative services, said unused funds reserved for hiring academic faculty are usually returned to the college in which the faculty member was employed and are used to “hire instructors,” and pay for operating costs like telephones and other incidentals.  We requested a printout of the vacant faculty lines, and Monday said he would supply them. As of Friday at 5 p.m. these documents were not available.
 The conversation then took a turn which was not reported at all in The Daily Reveille and which is the crux of the foreign language
14’s protestations. Martin, Provost Jack Hamilton and Foster all have stated the University should be teaching more foreign languages, they contradict these public statements by cutting all languages for which some committee or other has found “insufficient demand.” As Chancellor of this University, Martin should understand this simple truth: If you offer only the languages that can be found at every middle school, high school, community college and university in the state, students end up with a cheapened education; but if you offer languages that will draw people to the University  — especially  critical and classical languages — the students will take the courses offered and will end up with something much more precious.  
 As soon as the cuts were announced in May, letters flooded in from across the country in defense of foreign languages, all which seem to have gone unheeded by the administration. That it has come to the point where languages and literatures, the basis of all humanities, are the first disciplines on the chopping block is a sad commentary on the state of education in Louisiana and sends a dangerous message to other universities around the country.
 The administration has let us down, and without the backing of the students and the rest of the faculty, the foreign language 14 are just yappy little dogs who have indeed “barked up the highest academic tree possible.”
 We express our sincerest thanks to the members of the AAUP for addressing our cause through the Faculty Senate. We urge the faculty to attend the Faculty Senate Meeting today at 3 p.m. in the Faculty Senate Chamber of the Student Union and to support the resolution, “No Confidence in the Budget-Cutting Process; Reclaiming Faculty Authority over the Curriculum; and Recommending an Across-the-Board Furlough over Layoffs.”
 
Althea Ashe, Dennis Martinez, Garrett McCutchan, Ann Ostrom, Angelika Roy, Jean Rutherford, Johanna Sandrock, Winsor Wheeler
Instructors of Foreign Languages and Literatures
 
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