USU Chinese program should not be cut
Dear Editor,
In the Wednesday March 22nd edition of The Utah Statesman there was an article written by Aaron Falk which discussed the cutbacks that are being made in the Chinese program at Utah State University.
The decision made by the department of languages, philosophy and speech communication department is both irresponsible and unfortunate. I feel very strongly about this issue, I myself choose Utah State impart, because they had a Chinese program.
Mr. Falk mentioned in his article that Mandarin is, “the most widely spoken languages in the world” I would add to his statement by saying there are more Mandarin speakers in the world than there are English, Spanish, German and French combined (CIA factbook). Something that confuses me greatly is that Utah State offers full bachelor degrees in all four of these languages. Yet, with China’s exploding economy never a greater need for American Chinese speakers in political, economic and business arenas they cut funding to the Chinese program.
You would think with all of these developments in China it would be pretty obvious that any decent university would seek to either begin a Chinese program, or improve their existing one. This is in fact what is happening throughout the country at more and more universities; but not at USU. WHY?
In Mr. Falk’s article he said that the Department Head Charlie Huenemann said that they are actually “dip[ping] into extra resources” to keep the Korean department going. There is something very wrong when administration is willing to “dip into extra resources” for a program that rarely has more than six students registrar per semester (which is the case for the Korean classes), but is so readily willing to cut the Chinese program. I can’t believe my tuition is actually paying administration to not think.
This decision to cut the Chinese program will have unavoidable repercussions on the future students of Utah State University. I hope that this letter will reach the eyes of some responsible administrator or student that will help correct this huge error and irrational decision.
Joshua Law