Effective Fall Quarter 2005, undergraduate students entering the Medill School of Journalism will need to fulfill an academic requirement emphasizing global and cultural studies, including at least three foreign language classes.

“It sends a signal to the students that we think that understanding a language and the culture that goes with that language is an important part of understanding the real world,” Medill Dean Loren Ghiglione said.

The “global and diverse cultures” requirement, which will affect those entering Medill next fall and beyond, will not replace existing course requirements. Every Medill undergraduate must complete 45 courses to graduate. The new requirement ensures that eight to 11 of the 45 courses fit into a “global and diverse cultures” curriculum.

Under the new requirement, students must take three courses of a foreign language or meet proficiency standards set by the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Medill students currently are not mandated to take a foreign language.

But the global requirement goes beyond taking foreign language courses, said Richard Gordon, who has served as co-chairman of Medill’s curriculum committee, which proposed the changes, since fall 2002.

“It’s a more sophisticated proposal than a foreign language requirement,” said Gordon, who also is an associate professor.

The curriculum change will act as an “overlay” requirement for students, meaning the classes meeting the global and cultures aspect also will satisfy Medill’s distribution requirements, Gordon said.

Medill faculty gathered an initial list of more than 300 courses — including classes in anthropology, art history, gender studies, linguistics, performance studies, political science and sociology — that will meet the new requirement. A finalized list has not been made.

How Medill’s new requirement will affect enrollment numbers in Weinberg classes will remain unknown until the change takes effect in the 2005-06 academic year, Ghiglione said.

“We have no way of knowing what the (Medill) students will ask for,” Ghiglione said.

Medill hopes to offer extra courses to non-Medill students in exchange for putting more students in Weinberg classes, Ghiglione said.

Most Medill students will not be affected by the new requirement because many of these required classes are “courses that people are already taking,” Gordon said.

“It’s a pretty broad list, and a student who’s already seeking a broad education would likely have touched on these courses anyway,” he said.

The “global and diverse cultures” requirement, approved by the faculty in April, uses some feedback from a faculty group that reviewed the school’s curriculum in fall 2002, Gordon said.

The group recommended four additions to the curriculum: students should show proficiency in a foreign language; a course in diversity should be required for all Medill undergraduates; a three-course “diverse cultures” requirement should be added; and faculty should bring teachings on diversity into current courses.

Requiring a focus on international issues is “fantastic,” said Nick Burt, a Medill sophomore.

“(Journalists) have to understand how events that affect them daily fit into the context of international relations,” Burt said.

Journalism students especially can benefit from knowing a foreign language or how other cultures work, because they can compare the American media system to other media throughout the world, Burt said. “Enabling people to read a newspaper in another language or explore a culture that hasn’t been interpreted by Americans is quite an asset.”

Reach Angela Tablac at [email protected].