Search

This report on the study of neglected languages in United States colleges and universities in 1962–63 shows that the neglect is diminishing, with enrollments of some 17,000 in foreign languages except the “big five”: French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. In 168 colleges and universities in the United States, 68 “neglected” foreign languages are being taught in 270 departments by over a thousand teachers to more than eleven thousand students, a figure we reach by estimating that each student is enrolled in about one and a half courses in the language. The five languages in which the largest enrollments were reported are Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and Norwegian.

For about 150 years, the United States pursued a policy of relatively unrestricted immigration. Since 1924, however, we have pursued a policy of drastically restricted immigration, with the restrictions based on considerations which many persons have believed to be discriminatory, unjust, and not based on facts. In the early I950's, it seemed that changes in this policy might be effected. The final result, the McCarranWalter Act,1 however, although undoubtedly a more efficient instrument than the 1924 law,2 still clashes with the democratic ideals held by most Americans and not only perpetuates most of the injustices of the earlier legislation, but adds new discriminations of its own. We shall here concern ourselves not with the entire law, but rather with the principle upon which it is based: that it is not desirable for the United States to permit more than a small amount of immigration, and that such immigration should be specifically and unequally allocated among various countries. The assumptions here embodied are that the place of birth of an immigrant is a reliable indication of his capability of becoming a desirable American, and that people from some countries are not sufficiently likely to become desirable Americans that we can afford to chance the entry of more than a hundred or two a year. It is a serious matter when a majority of Congress votes in favor of an immigration law based on the assumption that mankind is divided into fixed breeds, some superior to others. On the contrary, as Edward Corsi has said:3

T HE PRINCIPAL IDEOLOGICAL reference in Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand: A Chapter from an Abortive Romance" is to the "unpardonable sin" of the title-character; the principal event of the story is his suicide by leaping into a furnace. Hawthorne seems to connect the two, the sin and the suicide, in a peculiar way through the name Brand. Just before killing himself Brand feels that he has nothing further to seek; no more to achieve. "'My task is done, and well done!"' he thinks. What he has done is probably stated in his soliloquy of farewell