Students who have expressed interest in taking Portuguese at Tufts may soon see their wishes come true.
In an October Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate survey, 23.4 percent of students who responded said they would want to study new languages at Tufts if certain courses were offered.
In a follow up question, Hindi, Korean and Portuguese ranked as the most popular choices for potential new language offerings.
Acting on the survey results, the Senate passed a resolution on Sunday to "respectfully urge the Tufts University Department of Romance Languages to establish two consecutive basic level courses for the Portuguese language."
Jos?© Antonio Mazzotti, the chair of the Romance languages department since September, offered to teach the two classes.
The resolution also called for the creation of a third-level course if interest continues, so that students could use Portuguese to fulfill the School of Arts and Sciences' three-semester language requirement.
"The goal of the resolution was just to make a statement from the student body that allows members of the education committee to go back to the administration and really show that this is what students want," Senate Historian and sophomore Neil DiBiase said.
Mazzotti, who came to Tufts in September from Harvard, taught Portuguese as an assistant professor at Temple University in 1994.
He expressed reservations that even with the currently high level of demand, plans might not come to fruition.
"Unfortunately, the administration has denied our third official request to bring Portuguese back to Tufts," Mazzotti told the Daily in an e-mail.
Despite setbacks in instituting a Portuguese course, the administration is behind the current measure, according to Dean of Arts and Sciences Robert Sternberg.
"I strongly support the initiation of such a program," Sternberg told the Daily in an e-mail. "I also strongly believe that such a program will be initiated within a relatively short amount of time."
Sternberg said the reason for the previous lack of official support was purely financial.
"Most programs have more costs than they appear to have. For example, if you introduce a new language, one professor cannot teach all the courses and sections it might require. So one has to hire either new full- or part-time people to teach the courses," he said.
Sternberg remains hopeful that an influx of funding in the future will allow the administration to successfully offer the courses.
"My hope is that the money will be there soon so that this program can get going," Sternberg said, "but when we do it, we must do it right, and we will."
According to Mazzotti, the Romance Languages department offered Portuguese until the mid '90s.
Dean of Undergraduate Education James Glaser said that the program stopped because of dwindling enrollment paralleled by increasing student interest in different languages.
"The number of students taking the language was very small," Glaser said in an e-mail to the Daily. "The choice was to have a tiny program that served a handful of students or to use the slot to support a different [language] that had a larger student following."
Mazzotti said that the resurfacing of interest in Portuguese reflects larger demographic trends.
"Portuguese is a critical absence at Tufts. Given the Medford [campus] location, the growing Portuguese population surrounding Tufts, and the students' interest in the language and culture, the demand is there," he said.
There are an estimated 200,000 Portuguese speakers in the greater Boston area, according to the Massachusetts Alliance of Portuguese Speakers, a group that provides support and services to local Portuguese-speaking communities.
"Generally, we believe that there are up to 1 million Portuguese speakers in Massachusetts and that this population is the largest foreign language group in the state," according to the organization's Web site.
According to Mazzotti, Portuguese would also mesh with other academic pursuits currently available to students.
"Portuguese would also enhance the existing Latin American [studies] minor and the new major that is about to be approved by the faculty in April," he said. "There have been several students from [the Fletcher School] who have inquired about Portuguese; especially after going to Brazil, they feel the need to have at least a basic knowledge of Portuguese in addition or in lieu of Spanish."
He believes that civic service also plays into language offerings. "Furthermore, we should be able to work with some of the social justice and civic engagement projects, especially those that have to do with the population in the Medford/Somerville area," Mazzotti said. "There is something telling if a [university] is unable to address the reality surrounding its location, when it claims to be strongly committed to civil engagement."
Greg Meiselbach, a sophomore TCU senator and a co-author of the resolution, hopes the survey and resolution will encourage the administration to redouble its efforts.
"I hope that this resolution signifies student support for a Portuguese program, and combined with [help from] Jos?© Mazzotti and academic department support, [it] would be a compelling reason to have a Portuguese program," he said.
The Senate has not yet passed resolutions to urge the administration to create programs for Hindi or Korean, based partly on the lack of qualified instructors. Still, the Senate will continue to consider pushing for the addition of more languages, DiBiase said.
"This is one step in our efforts to continue to [expand] the language program here, so by no means is it going to be Portuguese and done," he said.
