The Hindi/Urdu language program at the University of Colorado Boulder was at the risk of being discontinued from its current form. CU administration was considering transforming the curriculum to a direct self learning program but thanks to student and faculty pushback, CU has reconsidered its decision.

The program, the only one of its kind at CU, teaches South Asian language courses and South Asian-based content courses. Some of the courses the program offers include beginning, intermediate, and advanced Hindi, Introduction to South Asian civilizations and Devotional Literature in South Asia.

The Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations established a Hindi minor in 2017. Since then, students have been able to take courses under this program to complete their Hindi minor. However, due to the pandemic, the Hindi/Urdu department has seen a significant decrease in the number of students enrolling in the program.

“The problem is we just don’t have enough students in our program,” said Keller Kimbrough, the Chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations. “We’ve got eight students in first year Hindi this semester. We don’t have a single student in second year Hindi. So we had to cancel second year Hindi.”

However, the issue is not just that students aren’t enrolling. There’s an open faculty position in the department that they are not able to fill. Currently, there is only one professor teaching the language courses in the program, leaving nobody else in the department to teach some of the other courses that were popular amongst students prior to the pandemic.

Professor Kimbrough said that he had a meeting set up with the Division Dean of Arts and Humanities to discuss the future of the program on Feb. 2, however it was rescheduled due to a snow day. They’re currently set to meet on Feb. 15.

“I think that all it is, is convincing the administration that it’s worth it,” he added. “It’s worth the cost when we have so few students.”

John-Michael Rivera, a divisional dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, stated that there was never a conversation to discontinue the program.

“The Hindi program was never going to end at CU,” Rivera said.
Instead, Rivera said they were considering converting the program to direct self learning. Given the student and faculty pushback, Rivera is reconsidering his decision.

“Because of the extremely low enrollment over the last five years, we were going to convert it to direct self learning and build a program within ALTEC (Anderson Language and Technology Center) to maintain it in its present form,” he said.

“What the petition showed me is how excited they are about particular [curricula] and the importance they see in this,” Rivera said. “And I simply didn’t know honestly, because I was looking at the enrollments of no one taking these classes and I was like, ‘Oh, students must not really care about it’. When I realized, ‘Oh, actually students were very involved in this.’”

Nidhi Arya, currently the only professor in the Hindi/Urdu program, teaches the Hindi language courses that the program offers. In comparison to other Asian languages offered under the department, she says Hindi has the lowest enrollment.

“Because of that, they said that since [the] beginning you are the lowest enrollment in the department, so no benefit,” she said.

For students who identify as South Asian, this program means more than just a curriculum.

“I think courses that offer South Asian languages, South Asian history and all of that makes South Asian students like on this campus feel represented,” said Anushka Thummalapenta, the President of South Asian Students Association at CU Boulder.

After the administration’s decision to consider cutting the program, the South Asian Students Association and CU Student Government started a petition to “save the Hindi/Urdu program.”

“CU administration has failed to communicate their decision to students and faculty and have also failed to consider the impacts it would have on the student body,” the students wrote in the online petition. “Students affiliated with this program will no longer have adequate representation on campus, both academically and/or culturally.”

“We’ve gotten a very strong reaction, and rightfully so, because you cannot just cut an entire program and not tell anybody,” Thummalapenta said. “That’s not okay.”

As of Feb. 11, the petition had 541 signatures.

“Seeing this overwhelming support from the faculty side and the student side as well was very, like ‘we all came together as a community to help save our program,’” Thummalapenta said. “So it’s very nice.”