The early University of Southern Maine decision to eliminate the French major, based as it was on strictly budgetary considerations (too few majors), was, I suggest, a slap in the face of the growing community of French-speaking African asylum-seekers, whose community is growing by the day. Moreover, that decision represents (from the get-go) a basic contradiction of the “community” criterion in the metropolitan university formula.

Why was no one spurred to rethink the French program in an interdisciplinary manner: namely, looking at the introduction of the French language in the former Belgian Congo and many other former colonies in Africa as an important subject for critical post-colonial investigation?

It would, in fact, have been a rich interdisciplinary study that could have brought together a number of disciplinary approaches at the university.

Especially important would be the collaboration of the French-speaking African community itself, many of whose constituents come with academic and experiential knowledge that would be both enriching and critical to such an undertaking.

Along with community interaction, career is featured as a primary goal, a goal that might seem to exploit the current crisis of student debt – especially when the proposal as a whole is understood to reflect the neoliberalism that has emerged on the world stage in reaction to our shared monetary crisis.

Unfortunately, this kind of undertaking would require a degree of seriousness that strikes me as absent in the information that has been presented thus far by the metropolitan university proposal.

Janet Varner Gunn

Portland

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