OUR VIEW: Cutting lower-level Chinese classes was a bad move by USU

The recent decision to cut the Mandarin Chinese classes below the 3000 level was a bad move for the language department and the university as a whole.

Now only people who already have two or more years of experience in the language will be able to take classes here at USU. So while those students will be unaffected, everyone else will be.

University officials said that students would have to find other sources to get to language skills to attend the higher-level courses, citing the Internet as an option

We wish all interested students good luck in finding such a Web site that gets you to the level of the native speakers and returned LDS missionaries who generally make up the Chinese 3010 class.

We don’t feel the need to stress how important a language Chinese will be in the future. A May 2005 issue of Newsweek put it best with their headline, “The Future Doesn’t Speak French.”

Nationwide, high schools are investing money in offering their students the chance to learn Chinese. Do we really want to be the school that shrugs its shoulders at the future?

We encourage the university to take another look at the situation. Surely there is another way to save money without cutting the legs out from underneath the Chinese program.