The Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures in the College of Arts and Sciences will have to cut $700,000, 14 full-time instructors and one part-time instructor to accommodate next year’s budget cuts, according to department chair Emily Batinski.
 
The instructors’ employment will end as of January 2011, Batinski said.
 
Programs being cut entirely include Japanese, Swahili, Portuguese and Russian. Instructors will also be terminated from German, Italian and Classics, which includes Latin, Greek and Hebrew.
 
Batinski said she was informed in June that the cuts would come from the foreign language department, and she spent the summer deciding whom to retain.
 
Batinski and Gaines Foster, College of Arts and Sciences interim dean, decided whom to cut based on student enrollment in each language program.
 
The Japanese program had 105 students, Portuguese had 36 students, Russian had 113 students and Swahili had 161 students, according to student enrollment for spring 2010. In comparison, Spanish had 2,810 students, and Latin had 1,675 students, according to Batinski.
 
Cutting language programs in the middle of the academic year raises the question of how students will finish their language requirements if their program is no longer available, Batinski said.
 
Foster said each college will have to determine its own language requirements, but the College of Arts and Sciences will accept students’ current language credits, and students will be able to finish their language credit requirements in another language.
 
The College of Arts and Sciences requires four semesters of language. If a student is currently taking Portuguese, they can finish their language requirements in a different language, beginning with the basic level.
 
“Loss of these languages makes our ability to meet student needs much more difficult,” Foster said.
 
Of the 14 instructors the department is laying off, seven are from the classical languages, two are from Italian, two are from German, and one each is from Japanese, Swahili and Russian. The part-time instructor is from Japanese.
 
“Aside from personal feelings, we are losing some really good instructors — very gifted, very hardworking [instructors],” Batinski said.
 
The 14 instructors join the roughly 400 who received notice of nonrenewal last semester.
 
“I think one thing that impressed the hell out of me as I was telling those people, is they spent the first 15 minutes asking me what happened to their students,” Foster said.
 
Batinski said she knows most of the professors well, and it will be painful to let them go.
 
“The department and students are losing a great deal,” Batinski said. “The students will not have the opportunity to study some languages.”
 
Batinski said some students have said they will leave the University to finish their language degree program.
 
 
 
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Contact Catherine Threlkeld at [email protected]