Babel Babble

It was surprising and discouraging to learn that the Faculty Committee on Educational Policy has turned down a request for a Swahili course at Harvard. Surprising, because--all circumstances of the request aside--there is no reason why the University shouldn't teach a language as important as Swahili; and discouraging, because the sketchy arguments advanced by the committee against Swahili show a disturbing ignorance of why a great university teaches language in the first place.

Just as the ideal university would teach all there is to know about men and their ways, so an ideal university would provide instruction in all the human tongues. This is clearly utopian, beyond the reach of Departmental budgets, and some standards of selection must determine what languages Harvard should teach.

If a language has a literature worth reading, Harvard should teach it. If a language is interesting structurally or historically, Harvard should teach it; very properly, Harvard has a course in Gothic, which has only one extant text, because it is important linguistically. If a language is useful for scholarly research, Harvard should teach it; for example, Dutch (which Harvard doesn't teach) is invaluable for students of Fine Arts. And Harvard should teach living languages, so that its graduates may communicate with other men. This last is clearly the broadest and loosest criterion. Plainly, since even teaching all the living tongues is also beyond its means, Harvard should select those languages which matter most in today's world--those which represent thriving cultures (like modern Greek, which we don't teach), and those which many people speak.

Swahili clearly falls into this last category. As the lingua franca of about one-third of Africa, it is important now, and it will become more important twenty years from now. Quite simply, there is no reason why the University should not provide a course in it, unless the CEP is out to prove what nobody disputes: that it is oblivious to the desires of Harvard's students, even when their requests are perfectly sound.