Petition urges UMass to keep Arabic program

AMHERST — University of Massachusetts administrators are being asked to maintain the Four-skilled Arabic language program, affiliated with the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures and run through the Five College Consortium, which is scheduled to conclude after the fall 2026 semester.

A petition letter with more than 1,000 signatures was recently delivered to Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, dean of the college of humanities and fine arts, and Fouad Abd-El-Khalick, provost and senior vice chancellor for academic affairs, with a request that a decision to terminate the program be rescinded.

The petition went to UMass officials, though the decision to cancel the intensive language program was actually made by the Five Colleges Consortium, which has four Five College lecturers in Arabic.

“We are disheartened to see that the UMass administration lacks the commitment to continue a program that has been running successfully for the last 15 years, serving students who desire to study the Middle East, its languages, politics, culture and history,” the petition reads. “Although the administration has cited low enrollment numbers as the reason for discontinuing the program, the fact is that no other language program with similar enrollment numbers has been closed.”

UMass issued a statement in response to the petition: “Arabic continues to be taught on the UMass Amherst campus by a tenured professor of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies, who offers courses in elementary, intermediate and advanced Arabic.”

That statement also notes that the Five Colleges Consortium discontinued and withdrew its funding of the Five College Arabic Language Initiative due to low enrollment. In addition, that initiative was neither fully funded nor administered by UMass.

A spokesperson for the Five Colleges did not respond to request for comment.

The petition advocacy comes from a group of UMass faculty, librarians, students and staff, with the petition noting that Arabic is the fifth most spoken language in the world and that it is important for a research university with global ambitions to offer the best Arabic instruction to its students.

Four-skilled Arabic instruction is a way of teaching the language that focuses on reading, writing, listening and speaking, integrating linguistic and cultural skills, offering a unique pedagogical approach that supporters, like Fareen Parvez, an associate professor of sociology, say is more intensive than elementary study.

Parvez said the university has not offered good reasoning for eliminating the program.

“They have pointed to low enrollment numbers and other factors, which do not make sense to us,” Parvez said. “It’s not at all a high-cost program. We also reject the idea that low numbers are a good measure of the value of an academic program.” 

At the same time last fall, Amherst College announced it would no longer offer Arabic instruction, citing the Five College provosts’ unanimous vote to terminate the initiative and dissolve the Languages, Literatures and Cultures Arabic.

The petition was launched publicly at a People’s Assembly on campus on March 12.

The post Petition urges UMass to keep Arabic program appeared first on Daily Hampshire Gazette.