Opinion | Why Stanford University must strengthen, rather than cut, its Cantonese courses
- The plan damages the university’s global reputation and undermines its self-professed commitment to diversity
- As the most widely-spoken Sinitic language other than Mandarin, Cantonese offers a more pluralistic understanding of China
With more than 80 million speakers globally, Cantonese remains a vital and useful language. In the United States alone, Census Bureau data shows that there are nearly as many self-reported Cantonese speakers (459,000) as Mandarin speakers (487,000) among those who specify a variety of Chinese.
After an initial outcry over its effective cancellation of Cantonese, the university’s School of Humanities and Sciences has committed to only two courses this autumn, to be taught by an hourly contractor without health insurance or job benefits.
This sets the programme back a quarter of a century – it started with just two courses in 1997 taught by a salaried instructor – and profoundly disrespects the contributions of long-time Cantonese lecturer Dr Sik Lee Dennig.
After earning her PhD in educational linguistics at Stanford, Dennig single-handedly nurtured the Cantonese programme over two decades, only for her position to be eliminated without consultation. It is unconscionable for a world-class institution to ask educators such as Dennig to accept an hourly position with no guarantee of stability.