In the first yeare after admission, for foure dayes of the weeke, all Students shall be exercised in the study of the Greeke and Hebrew Tongues."

When Harvard's President Charles Chauncy issued this statement in 1655, the university required a three year program of Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Syriac for undergraduates (a knowledge of Latin was assumed). This requirement eventually evolved into a two year requirement for those students not proficient in a foreign language. And this, in turn, was finally changed to a one year requirement in 1968.

Recently, the language requirement has become increasingly unpopular. Dwight Bolinger coordinator of Language Instruction, cites portions of letters received by his tutors from distressed undergraduates."

"The language requirement made my academic career at Harvard a...frustrating and disappointing one. It killed (my) chances to graduate with honors. It pulled down my grades in other subjects...I worked very hard at French but to no avail...I became so frustrated that I could not get any constructive studying done."

"The damn language requirement will be my nemesis. I took a year's leave primarily because of the strain the language requirement placed on my other courses...For those of us who have trouble with languages, the requirement is more than an inconvenience--it is a catastrophe."

It would be an understatement to say that many Harvard undergraduates remain unimpressed by the compulsory language courses. General reaction ranges from. "Well, it could be worse," to "Goddmann, it screws my entire freshman year!" There are of course, those students who maintain they are extremely pleased with their language classes, and that if it were not for the requirement, they would not have enrolled in such a course. For the average Harvard freshman, however, the language requirement represents, at best, an added incentive to take a language class, and at worst, a time-consuming psychological and academic disaster.

But there is a way out.

A waiver of the foreign language requirement, instituted eight years ago, excuses student with pertinent physiological disabilities from language courses. The waiver is aimed at aiding those with a specific reading disability called strephosymbolia, and also those with an auditory discrimination handicap.

Kenneth T. Dinklage, a UHS psychologist, says that strephosymbolia manifests itself in a student's tendency to reverse syllables or letters of words while reading, or to perceive a letter as its mirror image. That is, he may read "was" for "saw" and may see "b" for "d." There is also an inclination to confuse right and left. Dinklage gives an example of a quarterback with strephosymbolia who frequently wiped out his own backfield as he ran the opposite way from a play he himself had called.

The auditory discrimination handicap is an inability to distinguish adequately between sounds. Harvard's reliance upon the audio-lingual method of teaching a language makes a student with this handicap unable to participate or to learn properly in these courses.

There are fairly stringment guidelines for the granting of requirement waivers, in order to insure the legitimacy of a student's claim. If a student does poorly on the Foreign Language Placement Test, he is automatically given the Modern Language Aptitude Test to reveal the possible presence of language learning disabilities. If the test indicates the possibility of strephosymbolia or an auditory discrimination problem, he is interviewed by a UHS psychologist who determines whether a waiver is in order.

It is theoretically possible for a student to purposely fail the placement exam and the aptitude test, and then convince the psychologist of his need for an exemption. Indeed, students have succeeded in this poly. But Dinklage says there are safeguards in the interview that should disqualify those who are not legitimately in need of a waiver.

The guidelines for exempting students have been liberalized since the waiver's inception in 1963. At that time, it was necessary for a student to achieve a "suffering quotient" by failing a few language courses and thus proving his inability to learn a foreign language. According to Dinklage, there is now much more of an emphasis on spotting those who are specifically disabled in regard to language learning before they waste several semesters in a course.

Yet for many of the students who are not eligible for exemption, the language requirement remains a formidable obstacle. A survey cited by Bolinger, taken three years ago of 215 students who had not met the language requirement on entrance to Harvard, revealed the following:

Only 2 per cent thought that the requirement was good, while 31 per cent felt that it was bad and 30 per cent that it was "so-so." The remaining 12 per cent described the whole language experience as terrible and language study as detrimental to college work in general.