I use “casualty” here in the wide sense. The East Asian languages and cultures department at Berkeley will not die next year. It will, however, sustain egregious injury.

Come next fall, according an article in the Daily Californian, classes in Japanese, Korean and Chinese will have to be cut by 40 percent, 66 percent and 54 percent, respectively. The number of students taking those classes will have to be reduced by at least 1,500. As a result, no students outside the EALC will be allowed to study those languages.

In other words, the option of adding a little Chinese or Korean or Japanese to, say, a degree in history or engineering or business will no longer exist as of next year. At one of the world’s foremost institutions for the study of Asia. At an institution that just cut the ribbon on a new building—the C.V. Starr East Asian Languages Library, cost: $46 million—to house it’s world class collection of Asian language materials.

I will admit to taking a certain perverse satisfaction in this turn of events vis-a-vis the library. It pained me to no end to walk by that building while it was under construction, knowing it would open precisely as I was scheduled to leave the school. Oh, how I seethed with jealousy at the convenient access later generations would have to a legendary collection that, in my time, was scattered about campus in various dusty basement corners, half-lost in the abyss of pre-digital card catalogs. Now it seems those later generations won’t have the skills to make use of the collection after all. (“Ha ha,” he chuckles to himself, twiddling his fingers with Burns-like glee. “Suckers!”)

I suspect students inside the EALC may also be secretly dancing a little victory jig, now that they have their department to themselves. While I can’t speak for Japanese or Korean, Chinese classes at Berkeley are woefully over-crowded. I took two semester’s worth of Mandarin under the EALC’s auspices while in journalism school and in both it proved necessary to drag chairs in from neighboring classrooms to accompany the hordes. I spoke an average of two minutes, at most, in each class–not effective when one is trying to learn a language of such infuriating difficulty. Compare that to my undergraduate experience at a private college, where my five Mandarin co-sufferers and I were forced to endure the excruciating and humiliating, but ultimately helpful, ordeal of speaking the language constantly.

In reality, of course, this has the makings of an unmitigated tragedy. An empty CVSEALL will be a sad, sad sight. And the advantage to language majors turns out to be no advantage at all. The way the math works out, classes will still be just as crowded, but without the advantage of those silent non-majors sitting politely–and silently–in the back. Imagine, a whole generation of Berkeley Chinese literature majors who don’t know how to speak the language because they all had to compete madly with their peers for scraps of time with their teachers.

According to an AP report last month, the number of college students studying Mandarin in the US jumped 50 percent between 2002 and 2006.

In view of the decision, one is tempted to assume the university’s administrators may be dipping a bit too often into the campus police station’s stash of confiscated marijuana. In fact, the EALC’s predicament is an unfortunate consequence of how languages are taught–or, rather, who teaches them.

The governor’s budget proposal for next year will cut $30 to $40 million in funds for Berkeley. Since tenure rules prevent downsizing the professorial population, the university has decided to cut positions for non-tenured lecturers. It just so happens that at Berkeley, as elsewhere, the responsibility for teaching foreign languages falls to lecturers.

Students have mounted a valiant campaign to fight the cuts, with a Facebook group, a couple blogs (here and here) and an online petition. I sincerely wish them the best. It’s been bad enough watching the journalism school drift rudderless after it’s failed dean search. Were UC Berkeley as a whole to slide into irrelevance because of this, it’ll just do horrible things to the obituary value of all that tuition money I pumped into the place.

To the students: Should the protest effort fail, here is the best DIY option I’ve found: www.nciku.com. You can start by looking up 涸辙之鲋.

[Image: C.V. Starr library dedication, by Peg Skorpinski]