Idaho State cuts courses on four languages

POCATELLO – Students will not be able to take Chinese, Russian, Latin or Arabic courses at Idaho State University next year, the chairman of the language department says.

Four of the nine languages offered at the state university in eastern Idaho are being cut in the fall because of faculty cuts and low student enrollment, said department Chairman Jim Fogelquist.

“With some of the languages that are difficult, the demand tends to be low,” Fogelquist told the Idaho State Journal. “Languages like Chinese and Arabic are more easily sustained in larger urban areas.”

The department will lay off the professor who taught Chinese this year. Professors who taught Russian and Latin are retiring at the end of the school year and their positions will be left empty.

The Arabic instructor will go back to teaching just chemistry on the Pocatello campus.

The university will still offer majors and minors in French, German and Spanish, along with a minor in Japanese. Shoshoni courses are also offered in conjunction with the anthropology department, Fogelquist said.

At least two of the languages being eliminated – Chinese and Arabic – were targeted for cancellation largely because of low enrollment, university Provost Gary Olson said.

“Some languages always draw lots of students, such as Spanish. Some languages, it’s touch and go,” Olson said. “It would be fiscally irresponsible for a university to run tiny programs that didn’t draw many students when you have a program next to it that’s drawing so many students you can’t staff the classes.”

Administrators at the Pocatello school, facing an estimated $17 million shortfall during the next fiscal year, said earlier this month they planned to lay off 73 employees and eliminate another 77 unfilled positions.

Students could not earn degrees in three of the languages that will be canceled next year because the university has offered only two years of instruction in Chinese, Arabic and Latin.