Minorities in Language Classes
In a letter “University Standards and Minorities” (Dec. 1), the writer opines that at Cal State Long Beach in the 1960s there was “an unwritten internal policy to apply stricter standards to minority or foreign students in the foreign language department.”
This impresses me as a rather subjective personal observation of questionable validity.
I did not attend Cal State Long Beach, but in that period I studied foreign languages at Fullerton, Rio Hondo and East Los Angeles Community College, Cal State Fullerton and UC Irvine and never once observed any prejudice against native-speaking minority students (whatever that means in a language class).
California is a “cluster” of languages and many native speakers enrolled in their own languages not to learn anything but to get an “A” with little effort.
I took Russian classes where 75% of the students were native speakers who spent all of 10 minutes on assignments that took me two or three hours to complete! However, there was no prejudice on the part of the instructors against those “minorities,” at least that I could see.
ROBERT MILLS
Cypress
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