Chinese Language Studies: Interest steadily increasing with SLC students

by Ben Silverman

Monday November 28, 2005

Every Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, Senior Mallory Carlson leaves the Sarah Lawrence campus at 9:30 a.m. and spends 90 minutes commuting into the city for a 90-minute class. She then spends another 90 minutes returning to campus. While many SLC students commute into the city for work or internships a few days a week, Carlson travels off-campus for a class that is essential to her course of study.

Carlson is one of more than 10 students (including this reporter) who over the past three years have taken Chinese language classes off-campus. Though strenuous, expensive (she estimated that the commute costs her $500 each semester) and time consuming, Carlson says it is worth it.

"After spending a year in China, I don’t want my language to slip," Carlson said. "The next time I go back, I want to have improved, not regressed."

According to some students and faculty members, the growing interest in studying the Chinese language stems in part from China’s rapidly growing economic and military power.

Senior Evelyn Atkinson, who studied Chinese intensively before coming to Sarah Lawrence, explained, "Chinese is the most important language in the world, and it is definitely the language of the future. You read the newspaper in the morning and see that China is mentioned in most sections—business, technology, [culture]. Knowing how to communicate in Chinese puts you in touch with a quarter of the planet."

Senior Julie Klinger said, "As someone seeking a rigorous liberal arts education with long-term goals in the field of international affairs, it would be a mistake and an oversight not to study Chinese." Klinger studied Mandarin at Columbia University and lived in China for a year.

Sarah Lawrence religion professor T. Griffith Foulk believes that the student interest stems from more than current affairs. "Our three top level scholars teaching Chinese studies classes have generated huge student interest," Foulk said.

One such student is Junior Gretchen York. "I didn’t expect to enjoy studying Chinese history," York said. "But there I was at the end of the fall semester of Ellen Neskar’s lecture desiring to further my knowledge of the subject." York studied at the intensive summer session of Cornell University’s Full-year Asian Language Concentration program and now takes classes at The China Institute in Manhattan.

Klinger attributes part of the increased interest in the language to the range of topics to which Chinese relates. "Chinese language is relevant to historical and contemporary studies of international relations, religion, history, sociology, politics, arts and literature," Klinger explained.

Junior Princess Falls said, "I love the education that I receive at Sarah Lawrence but I am still looking to graduate a semester early because of the absence of Chinese."

"The number of students studying Chinese over the summer and off-campus is steadily increasing," said Asian studies professor Ellen Neskar.

Sarah Lawrence students have studied an array of languages, including Hungarian, Polish, Ukrainian, Arabic and Advanced Japanese at Columbia over the past few years. The level of student interest in Chinese, however, has been the greatest by far.

"I don’t want to put languages up against each other, choosing one over the other," Foulk said. "I believe in teaching languages." But, he added, "We have this many students studying Chinese, and we’ve made it hard. If we made it easier, the number of students studying Chinese would double."

"Chinese, along with English and Spanish, is one of the three most important languages in the world," Foulk said. "If we want to prepare our students for this world, we really have to be teaching Chinese."