CEP Vote Keeps Languages Rule

The Committee on Educational Policy has decided not to abolish the language requirement and not to retain it in its present from.

The CEP will wait until later this month to recommend a new set of regulations. It voted, 9-1, December 20, to retain the requirement and voted unanimously to scrap the present form.

Dean Ford, chairman of the CEP, refused to discuss the alternatives which the Committee is considering. "There are still so many possibilities open," he explained, "that it would be unfair to come down on any particular one."

Ford had earlier indicated that the CEP might recommend no changes in the substance of the requirement while instructing the Administrative Board to be more liberal in granting exemptions. Now a physical learning disorder--strephosymbolia--is the only recognized excuse for escaping the requirement.

Jack M. Stein, Chairman of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature, said last night that he thinks the CEP will instruct the Ad Board "to be a little more liberal and a little more systematic."

Case By Case

"The Ad Board has been improvising case by case decisions," he explained. "I've got a hunch the CEP will ask them to come to some understanding on a set of standards, perhaps working out the rules with the language departments."

Stein and Dwight L. Bolinger, proftssor of Romance Languages and Literatures, both sent letters to the CEP in December supporting retention of the of the language requirement.

"Pass-fail has taken the curse off the requirement," Stein said last night. "Now no one will have to ruin his average with a bad grade in a language course." Both the German and Romance Language Departments voted in December to open all their elementary language courses to pass-fail students.

Undergraduates can satisfy the present requirement in three ways: by scoring 560 on a College Board achievement test or a comparable test at Harvard; by taking two full language courses here; or by taking one full course in a language if they studied it for two years in high school.