Talking Back

From the Daily Bruin: The UC implemented a virtual language education initiative in January, sparking pushback from instructors amid language program cuts. The Global Language Network, which was designed by UC humanities deans, allows faculty from different UC campuses to provide digital foreign language instruction to all University students.* The program was first designed in May 2023 to address a major decline in language class enrollment since 2019, said Alexandra Minna Stern, the dean of UCLA’s division of humanities and the network’s leader.

The network will adapt a subset of UC language courses – focusing on less commonly taught languages – students can enroll in over UC Online, a virtual cross-campus platform, Stern said. However, the program is intended to eventually include all languages taught across the UC, totaling more than 100, according to the GLN website. UC language instructors and department leaders alleged that they were not consulted during GLN’s development, adding that they only found out about it years after its initiation, through word of mouth or by randomly accessing its website. Others said they only discovered its existence when they were asked to fill out a questionnaire on it in 2025, after the network proposal was submitted to UC Provost Katherine Newman...

Michael Cooperson, UCLA’s Near Eastern Languages and Cultures department chair, said a humanities dean told him that language classes with fewer than 15 students enrolled would eventually be cut and some would be moved online. However, these languages will only be taught by one campus each, as a result of GLN. He clarified in an email statement that Reem Hanna-Harwell, a senior associate dean in the division of humanities who is now UCLA’s interim CFO, said this to him at a meeting. Hanna-Harwell, who became UCLA’s interim chief financial officer in February, did not respond to a request for comment on the alleged statement...

Full story at https://dailybruin.com/2026/04/02/some-uc-language-programs-are-getting-moved-online-these-professors-arent-happy.

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How effective learning languages online is - particularly for languages not commonly spoken in the US - needs to be studied. It is easy to get carried away by technological possibilities. Consider this statement from 1935:

Radio broadcasting is one of the greatest educational tools which has ever been placed at the disposal of civilized man. It is an instantaneous, universal means of communication. It is not a new art, but is a means of multiplying the efficiency of oral communication just as the printing press multiplied the effectiveness of the written word. In addition to that, it has certain decided advantages over the printed page which it in part supplants and in part supplements.**

So maybe try it out in a limited way before making wholesale changes?

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*https://www.ucop.edu/uc-online/programs-and-initiatives/global-language-network/index.html.

**Tracy F. Tyler, "Radio and Education," The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Feb., 1935), pp. 115-117: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20258384.