Dept. Sees Beijing Bounce

Building upon a recent trend, Harvard’s Chinese language classes have been filling to unprecedented levels this week, straining department administrators as today’s deadline for class enrollment nears.

Overall attendance at Chinese language courses were estimated around 480 students as of Wednesday, down slightly from nearly 500 on Monday, according to Shengli Feng, the director of the Chinese language program. These numbers are still substantially higher than the approximately 350 students who Feng said enrolled last year.

“What we saw Monday was very, very surprising,” Feng noted. “More than 100 more students than last fall.”

“I’m sure there will be less because some people are shopping,” he added. “But still very, very many students. Too many.”

A Modern Language Association report issued last November cited the steady rise of student enrollment in Chinese language courses nationwide, spotting a 50 percent hike from 2002-2006. Harvard enrollment figures have shown an upward trend over the same time period. 2005 saw the enrollment of 273 Chinese language students, followed by 348 the following year, and roughly 350 last year.

The glut of potential students this year has led to new departmental hires, according to Feng, who, drawing on his professional contacts and posting a search through the Chinese Language Teachers Association, has recruited four new language instructors since the beginning of the week.

Still, Feng said, the situation remains strained, and more hires are a possibility.

“I stay here for the whole day every day and even after 6 o’clock,” he said. “Sections are over 50 people.”

“[Instructors] come to me; they say, ‘I cannot teach so many people, there are people standing outside the door, you cannot teach a language course like this,’” he added.

Christopher K. Lee ’12, who planned to enroll in Chinese Bx: “Elementary Chinese for Advanced Beginners,” said that the high attendance figures for the class had not escaped his notice, though they did not affect his desire to take the course.

“It was really immense,” Lee said. “My 10 o’clock section was 27 people. It’s really disproportionately sized. I really want to take it, though. The teacher’s great, and it’s really interesting.”

Asked about the rise in interest, Feng pointed to both administrative policy and the enthusiasm sparked by the Beijing Olympics.

“We had a very good system last year because the dean approved two new preceptor positions, giving us some opportunity to improve the enrollment,” Feng said. “And the other reason is the Olympics.”

But China Studies Professor William C. Kirby, who will co-teach Historical Study A-13: “China: Traditions and Transformations” this semester with colleague Peter K. Bol, was reluctant to ascribe attendance at his class—students filled the aisles at the first meeting—to this summer’s international sporting spectacle. But Kirby did not shy away from the subject while teaching—opening the class with 20 minutes of clips from the Olympics’ opening ceremonies.

“The Olympics are an extraordinary event and an extraordinarily successful event, and I don’t think it is surprising that it would enhance interest in China,” Kirby said. “But if you look at the Chinese program and the strength of teaching across the College, this has been building steadily for some time.”

David L. Howell, chair of the East Asian studies department at Princeton, also traced rising enrollments in language courses to a larger trend rather than the Olympics themselves.

“I’d have to go back to the records to see exactly when, but over the past five or six years enrollments...in Chinese have doubled or more than doubled,” Howell said. “For me it’s still too soon to tell about the Beijing Olympics. In broader terms, a lot of our students feel that the 21st century is going to be the Chinese century. They’re interested in learning more about China.”

Even if the Olympics haven’t had an effect on students’ motivation yet, Kirby appeared to have a few ideas about how to change that.

“Professor Bol and I are trying to work on the issue of grade inflation, and so instead of giving As, Bs and Cs, we’re going to give medals for different competitions in the class,” he said. “And we’ll just have a big medal ceremony at the end.”

—Staff writer Christian B. Flow can be reached at cflow@fas.harvard.edu.