San Francisco State University proposed discontinuing the B.A. in Italian, B.A. in German and B.A. in Ethnic Studies through the College of Professional & Global Education, following historically low enrollment and faculty layoffs.
Claude Bartholomew, director of strategic initiatives and university curriculum coordinator, said that the programs under review had “limited enrollment,” a determining factor for their proposed discontinuance.
“Essentially, someone in the department has proposed that the program be discontinued,” Bartholomew said in an email. “The proposal has been approved by the department [chair], college [associate dean] and is moving forward to review by the academic senate.”
According to Frederik Green, chair of the modern languages department and vice chair of the Educational Policies Council, the Italian and German programs currently have three active majors, all of whom will graduate this year.
David Landy, the acting dean of the College of Liberal and Creative Arts, did not wish to comment on the proposed discontinuances.
The Italian department has not been able to sustain the necessary curriculum for the program, according to Green.
“We continue to offer Italian language classes, but we just haven’t been able to provide the curriculum necessary for the major,” Green said. “We wanted to make sure that we maintain some presence of Italian on this campus.”
Green also said that the German program is in a similar boat as the Italian program despite still having a tenured faculty member.
Ilona Vandergriff, the university’s only tenured German professor, is an SFSU alum and has been a faculty member at SFSU since 1996. She stated the proposed discontinuance of the German program has been “overall quite disappointing.”
“It was always very clear that enrollments all across the country were rapidly declining,” Vandergriff said. “It’s been declining, not just for German, but for foreign language enrollments in general.”
According to Green, the German and Italian majors will be consolidated into interdisciplinary minors that include lower division language classes, online courses and cross-listed courses offered in the department of modern languages and literatures.
“By definition, language departments are always somewhat interdisciplinary,” Vandergriff said. “Literature, linguistics as well as language study and the cultural and intercultural focus – all of that is part of any language program and so we are finding many areas across campus that are teaching things that align quite nicely with what we are and have been doing.”
Grace Yoo, dean of the College of Ethnic Studies, spoke on the discontinuance of the post-baccalaureate Ethnic Studies Certificate, an undergraduate online degree offered through the College of Professional & Global Education at SFSU. According to Yoo, the degree was a “duplicate” of the degree in race and resistance studies, which was not cost effective for the university.
“The CPaGE B.A. Ethnic Studies online degree operates on a self-support model, while “stateside” or traditional CSU degree programs, are government funded, structured and geared toward full-time degree-seeking students,” Yoo said in an email.
Yoo also said that the lack of financial aid for CPaGE programs was a deterrent for students to enroll and that there are no students enrolled in the program.
“CPaGE is outside of stateside, so it is not covered by Financial Aid. Students did not qualify for financial support to complete this degree program. Therefore, student enrollment was low,” Yoo said.
At the same time these losses are occurring, the modern languages department has been piloting a new credit-by-examination program for students who already possess language proficiency. Through this process, students would be able to take a proficiency exam and get academic credit for their level of competency.
“It’s a very exciting new initiative. It’s based on the governor’s mandate that the CSU really try to find and develop pathways for people that come with existing competencies,” Vandergriff said. “These competencies can be experience based, that includes heritage language learning.”
Green said that while he is sad about discontinuing the Italian and German majors, he recognized that there is less student interest and enrollment for those programs.
“The real problem for languages is that there is less and less student interest, and what’s a little unfortunate is that San Francisco State does not have a language requirement,” Green said. “A lot of other universities force their students to study a language because those universities recognize the extreme value of that. Our university doesn’t have a language requirement, which, as the chair of the Modern Language Department, I think that’s a great pity because there’s so much value to studying a language.”
Once the proposal is approved, current Italian and German majors will be taught out, no new students will be admitted to the majors and the degrees will be discontinued.
