A nearly unanimous vote on April 16 created a new general education curriculum that eliminates introductory foreign language and culture requirements at GW’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. The new curriculum will focus on perspective, analysis and communication. The goal of these three categories is for students to develop analytical skills that can be used beyond graduation to solve complex problems from different perspectives, according to an announcement posted April 20 on the Arts and Sciences website.

The college currently requires two courses either in a language by placement or in foreign cultures. This will be eliminated from the curriculum in fall 2011, and introductory language courses will no longer count toward general education requirements. Only advanced foreign language courses will be counted as critical thinking requirements, said Candace Smith, executive director of media relations at GW.

Although professors voted almost unanimously for the new curriculum, some professors of the foreign language department said they would like to see introductory courses count toward general education requirements.

Richard Robin, a professor of Russian, said he was disappointed foreign languages were eliminated from the requirements because students who are interested in taking courses in a strategic language — a language necessary for national security, commerce or cultural understanding, such as Arabic or Russian — cannot get credit for it.

“Under the new rules, you cannot get general curriculum credits to satisfy (requirements) unless you’re taking fourth-year courses,” he said. “No one starts at fourth year for strategic languages.”

Young-Key Kim-Renaud, chair of the East Asian language department, also expressed her concerns regarding the possibility of introductory courses not counting for credits.

“The real value of foreign education is in the beginning,” she said.

Both Robin and Kim-Renaud said they felt GW was more interested in courses that involve critical thinking, even though foreign languages also offer that.

To define what critical and creative thinking are is dangerous because people have their own interpretations, Kim-Renaud said.

“Maybe people think if you take an initial language course, your path will be from language to literature, end of story,” Robin said.

The change in requirements is not entirely finalized, Robin said. The general education curriculum still has to be approved by the academic president, vice president and the Middle States Accredited Association. This means there is still a chance for the curriculum change to be overturned.

A month prior to the vote, Kim-Renaud sent a letter to Teresa Murphy, associate professor of American studies and chair of the general education requirements committee, to explain her stance on the matter. She also sent the letter to GW faculty members.

Within the letter, she emphasized the importance of language and described how foreign languages fit all criteria — perspective, analysis and communication — upon which the general education curriculum focuses.

“Language acquisition, whether it is mother tongue or second language or another language than the mother tongue, involves a highly analytical and creative interpretive process,” she said. “Nobody just repeats what they heard and speaks out the sentences they heard. Every effort is a creative process.”

Kim-Renaud said she received 10 responses to her letter from faculty members who emphasized the need for foreign language in education.

“It’s a pity that such an important part of American education is actually going in a wrong direction,” Kim-Renaud said.

Despite GW’s plan, Robin said he does not anticipate the elimination of foreign languages to threaten other schools.

“My feeling is that Americans are always allergic to learning a foreign language,” he said. “There seems to be a disease that hit GW specifically.”