O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

My department has recommended abolishing its foreign language requirement for Ph.D. candidates.

Hooray! Yippee!

Oh wait, I already took the French exam.

Dang it.

This announcement (not yet made official by the College of LAS) has nonetheless brought cheers to the lips of many first- and second-year graduate students. In much the same way that a snow day brings cheers to students of all ages.

It means less work, obviously.

But does it also mean that the Ph.D. program is less effective? After all, the stringent requirements we place on obtaining a degree would be reduced.

In the mathematics department, the language requirement consists entirely of one exam, proving your proficiency in a language other than English.

When I sat down to take mine, I was facing about four pages out of a French textbook with an hour’s worth of time to translate them. At my side were a French grammar, a basic English-French dictionary and a dictionary of scientific terms in four different languages. The idea was to replicate conditions under which an academic might want to translate an article as part of their research.

Except those conditions are outdated. I’ve translated articles from French, German, Russian and Portuguese all without the aid of printed dictionaries. Instead, I used Google Translate or one of the half-dozen other online dictionaries, which are faster and generally more accurate.

Translating online still requires some skill, especially because jargon translates very badly: The mathematical notion of a “field” has nothing to do with “an open land free of woods and buildings.” But the skill required is so minimal compared with using printed dictionaries that it seems rather silly to test for it.

So, rather than adopt the language test to include online resources, the department has argued to drop it altogether.

In fact, English has become the lingua franca for many academic communities, much as Latin was in times past.

There are still fields where English is not the dominant language, but at least in mathematics it tends to be. I’ve co-authored papers with a Romanian, a Russian and a Frenchman, all without knowing Romanian, Russian or French.

So a second language is certainly not a necessity for academic work, but I would still encourage anyone considering a life in academia to pick up the basics of a second language anyway.

As it is, yes, if there is a particular paper I want to read in French, I can sit down with Google Translate, spend a reasonable amount of time with it and come away with a good understanding. But I cannot, with my rudimentary understanding, browse a list of titles and abstracts and hope to make heads or tails of any of it without Googling every word. The amount I would find useful, given the time I would devote to translating, is painfully small.

So if I’m reading a French paper, it’s often only because an English paper pointed me to it in the first place; and native English speakers tend to refer our friends or colleagues to other English-based works. There might be a treasure trove of work out there (not to mention TV shows, music and whatnot that I might enjoy outside of work) that I simply never see because my English-speaking community is so insulated from the French-speaking community.

In the absence of a language test itself, this may be one of the best things any department can do for its students: to break down the linguistic bubbles we wrap ourselves in and foster collaboration and communication across the language barrier.

That alone would make me want to cheer “Ô Jour frabbejeais! Calleau! Callai!”

Joseph is a graduate student in Mathematics. He can be reached at [email protected].