College establishes new Arabic major

With much of the Arab world undergoing revolutionary change, Middlebury students are taking another step towards understanding the region. Following a vote of approval at the December faculty meeting, the College will offer a Bachelor of Arts degree in Arabic.

Previously, students — while able to study the language for four years — were only awarded a minor or a focus in Middle East studies as part of the International Studies major.

The program has been a work in progress for the past decade, explained Assistant Professor of Arabic and Acting Director of the program Samuel Liebhaber.

“[Creating a major] required getting all our ducks in a row, and it took a while to get to that point,” Liebhaber said. “It took time to get staff in place to assure students the possibility to finish the major.”

Liebhaber emphasized, though, that the College is ahead of the curve.  The concept of an Arabic major, especially in a small liberal arts college, is a fairly recent phenomenon.

The major will allow students to focus in either literature or linguistics, offering opportunities for study not previously available to students.

“The goal of the Arabic major,” according to the department website, “is to achieve advanced language proficiency in the four areas of language performance: speaking, listening, reading and writing.”

Students will study both Modern Standard Arabic as well as colloquial Arabic.

Those choosing the literature track will study both poetry and prose from throughout Arabic history and the pre-Islamic period with the goal of identifying key literary themes and applying critical analysis to the texts.

The linguistics track will offer students rigorous study from diachronic, synchronic and sociolinguistic perspectives to better understand the history and evolution of the language.

Students are tentatively supportive of the layout of the new major.

“I feel like the division of the major into the two distinct tracks is well conceived,” new Arabic major Paul Rosenfeld ’12 wrote in an e-mail, “because it gives an opportunity to study literature, if someone is interested in Arabic literature, or to pursue the track on linguistics, if someone is more interested in different aspects of the language.”

Rosenfeld, who has opted for the linguistics track, worries about the depth the track offers.

“The one problem with the linguistics track is that the department is still relatively small, so it can sometimes be difficult to find all of the necessary linguistics courses. But I think this problem will ease when the major becomes more established.”

Because of the advanced nature of the language, the program has consistently emphasized study abroad as an essential step towards mastery. However, with the instability in Egypt, the

College’s only official Arabic-speaking school abroad, plans have become complicated. Nevertheless, Vice President for Language Schools, Schools Abroad and Graduate Programs Michael Geisler remains confident that there will be options for Arabic immersion for the fall 2011 semester.

“As of now, we still have a program in place in Alexandria that we have put on a one-semester hiatus during the crisis,” Geisler wrote in an e-mail. Its reinstatement is pending an analysis of the safety and stability of the region.

The College is also in the final stages of an agreement with the University of Jordan at Amman, though Geisler emphasized that there as well it is too early to make a confident determination, as regional stability and safety has been in flux.

While faculty overwhelmingly supported the creation of an Arabic major in the December meeting, the idea has not always garnered support.

In an interview with the Campus in 1980, then-Professor of Political Science Murray Dry expressed concerns about the potentially political nature of an Arabic Studies program because of its questionable funding sources.

“The proposals in Arab Studies evince a political intention as opposed to an academic one,” Dry told the Campus in 1980. “The ground for the study is the political importance of the area and the conflict, not the tendency to heighten intellectual capacities” as it would need to be to be a part of a liberal arts education.

He went on to cite the example Georgetown University Arabic Studies program, which received subsidies from Libya and awarded an endowed chair in Arab culture to “a personal friend” of Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yassir Arafat.

Now, however, he is in support of the program for its non-partisan nature.

“[The current program’s] independence and academic strength are a tribute to the administration and faculty who were responsible for bringing it into being as well as those who administer it and teach in it today,” Dry wrote in an e-mail. “This reflects a positive development for the College, in my opinion.”

Arabic Major Home Page