The Purdue Language Program

Extract

The Forgotten Man in the Purdue undergraduate language program was, as in most such programs, the non-major. Required to “pass off” four semesters of a foreign language, he endured (and we endured him) for two years of grammar and translation, usually interlinear, of the classics. Meanwhile our attention was primarily devoted to the dwindling minority of majors and minors. But the forgotten man did not forget us. Every June, as seniors became graduates, there was an increase in the ranks of the more or less influential citizens who remembered without enthusiasm their deadening experience with a presumably living language. It seems likely that a considerable portion of American isolationism and apathy to the national need for foreign languages can be traced to this experience on the part of our former students.