Arabic studies spark interest
at colleges and universities
While Arabic programs in American universities are facing serious obstacles to growth, the Arabic program at Virginia Military Institute is expanding.
Since it was established in 1997, VMI’s Arabic program has constantly grown. Arabic ranks second only to Spanish in enrollment size, said Kathleen Bulger-Barnett, head of the Modern Languages and Cultures Department at VMI. Currently, 30 cadets are Arabic majors and eight are minors.
A Defense Department grant that last spring gave VMI $665,000 through the ROTC Language and Culture Project will fund at least 40 to 80 scholarships for students studying Arabic over three years, Bulger-Barnett said. The grant is intended to encourage students to study world regions critical to national security.
Bulger-Barnett said the Arabic program has grown at VMI because of current world events. VMI’s Arabic courses are designed to improve students’ linguistic skills while also raising their cultural and historical awareness.
“In order to be successful economically, politically, diplomatically and peacefully in global communication, the citizens of the world and its leaders must develop an understanding for non-U.S. languages and cultures,” she said.
As one result, VMI students studying Arabic will now have more opportunities to study abroad.
“Any cadet wanting to reach advanced proficiency in any language needs to spend a significant amount of time in the region where the language is spoken,” Bulger-Barnett said.
Nationally, enrollments in Arabic studies have increased 127 percent from 2002 to 2006, according to the National Middle East Language Resource Center. However, a shortage of tenured or full-time professors to teach Arabic could hinder potential growth in Arabic programs.
Erika Gilson, a senior lecturer in Turkish at Princeton University, told the journal Inside Higher Ed that attracting good language faculty in the future for universities could get more challenging.
“The majority of those who teach are in a category that is non-tenured -- here today, gone tomorrow,” Gilson told the journal.
At VMI, the program’s first full-time Arabic professor, Mohamed Taifi, was hired in 2003. With the Defense Department grant, VMI established an Arabic Center to help students at all levels in the Arabic program outside the classroom. VMI hired two part-time Arabic-speaking employees to tutor students and expose them to the written and spoken language.
Although VMI has been successful, Bulger-Barnett said there is room for improvement. For example, she said that in the future, the program should offer more advanced courses and create more study abroad opportunities, from internships to undergraduate research.
Patrick Hatcher, a professor of religion at Washington and Lee University who specializes in Islam, agreed that Arabic is becoming more important because of current events. Like Bulger-Barnett, Hatcher noted that Arabic-speaking countries are increasingly prominent in world economics and politics. Knowing Arabic is also essential to prevent confusion about Islam, Hatcher added.
“Many concepts are difficult to translate, and knowledge of how the language works helps a non-native speaker understand the richness of these words and concepts,” he said.
Neither Washington and Lee nor Southern Virginia University has an Arabic language program. However, W&L students can attend Arabic classes at VMI if there is space.
Hatcher also acknowledged that the demand for new programs outweighs the supply of Arabic instructors, but he has hopes for the growth of Arabic programs at American universities.
“Arabic has been somewhat neglected in U.S. education,” Hatcher said. “But this is gradually changing, just as programs in other non-European languages, such as Chinese, have been steadily growing in recent decades.”
Produced by
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