Chinese studies
gain popularity
after Nixon trip
by Jacqu in Saunders
It is not merely peace and ping pong competition
that were served by President Nixon's visit to China.
Quite suddenly, Chinese-language and culture courses
have become the rage on U.S. campuses.
That is not to say that the numbers of Chinese
scholars even approach those taking French or
Spanish but the increase is, nevertheless, formidable.
One UCLA professor describes his basic
Chinese-language class as "crawling with students,"
and a professor at the University of Wisconsin says:
"I never thought I'd see the day when I had to go out
searching for a bigger classroom."
The students themselves seem a different breed
from many of those who took Chinese in the past.
Previously it had seemed almost a dead-end course of
studies.
Indeed, the half-dozen or so major centers of East
Asian studies in the U.S. were geared to small
classes and to the library rather than the field trip.
Their astonishment at the sudden spurt in enrollment
last fall, therefore, has been considerable.
At the University of Michigan, for example, Larry
Sullivan after discovering that his beginning course
in Chinese government had been inadvertently
omitted from the catalogue put up two or three
posters to advertise it around the campus. To his
amazement, 40 students registered in a single
day and Sullivan hurriedly closed the class.
Though ping pong diplomacy started the big run
on Chinese courses, there had already been some
acce'eration during the late '60s. I n part, that was the
doing of Maoist campus radicals who thought they
were willing to back their revolutionary zeal with the
hard work it takes to plow through the rudiments of
basic Chinese.
But these seldom lasted the semester. In fact, they
helped make Chinese Language I into one of the most
dropped-out-of courses on many campuses.
Now this pattern is changing. "Usually by
mid-semester half the class will drop out, but this
year two-thirds of the class is still here," says Dale
Johnson, who teaches Chinese studies at Oberlin
College in Ohio. "In fact, we're probably stealing
some of the students who would have majored in
Romance languages."
Yet many teachers of Chinese courses are less than
euphoric about the new interest in their departments.
Some consider it merely a fad. Others are worried
about getting the funding to pay for teaching all these
new students. And a number just seem bemused by
their new popularity.
(Newsweek F eature Service)
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