Foreign-Language Requirements

Published online July 6, 2017

While the task force report addresses many of the outstanding issues with Princeton’s general education requirements (On the Campus, Dec. 7), I take issue with the requirement that “all A.B. students take at least one foreign-language course, regardless of existing proficiency.” I would like to see that modified by allowing those already proficient to alternatively build a significant portion of their senior thesis with references and quotations in that foreign language. In my own case, I took French at Princeton during my first two years but really didn’t learn it at all adequately until I discovered that fundamental reference for my thesis topic was a 200-plus-page, turn-of-the-20th-century math paper in French.