It was formally announced Sept. 16 at Beloit College’s Academic Senate meeting that the College will no longer be offering a French major or minor for students to complete. The current cohort of seniors majoring or minoring in French will graduate with their degrees, but students will not be able to earn a degree in French from Beloit after this academic year. French is not the first modern language program to cease operating a major or minor in recent years at the college, as the last decade has seen the departures of the German, Russian, and Chinese departments. Introductory and advanced Chinese courses are still being offered, but there are no degrees available. Two seniors will finish their French major this semester, but according to Associate Professor of French Joseph Derosier, there are no other students who have declared a French major.
Professor Derosier emphasized the far-reaching opportunities that a French language education at Beloit can present, highlighting former students who have completed graduate programs in a variety of fields, including anthropology and political science. Derosier also mentioned that, under Professor Emeritus of French Jack Street, who taught at Beloit College from 1961 to 2015 and passed away in 2021, the college offered a study abroad seminar in Rennes, France. According to the Beloit College website, this seminar was available from 1975 to 1997. Study abroad programs took a “big hit” from the COVID-19 pandemic, Derosier said. According to Derosier, the number of French students interested in study abroad opportunities has declined in recent years. “If students come to [Beloit] and want to study abroad in a francophone country, [they] are going to need French to be able to do that,” Derosier said.
According to Derosier, the Global Experience Seminar conducted in Senegal over the summer is a way of returning to seminars like the one in Rennes, but on a different scale. Vivian Kopka’27, one of the students who studied in Senegal and one of the two seniors completing their degrees this year, spoke about her time in Senegal and what French education at Beloit has meant to her. Kopka shared that she was inspired to learn a world language because of her mother’s experience as a fluent French speaker, a French major in college, and as an au pair in Paris in her youth. Kopka adds that “Taking French at Beloit has been such a wonderful experience because it puts me with people that also struggle to learn a new language and those who are also inspired and invigorated, because [learning a new language] is so difficult.”
Kopka’s knowledge of Francophone countries across the world has also deepened as a result of her education at Beloit. “It’s so important to have that well-rounded collegiate experience of being able to read in French or English about French-speaking countries,” Kopka said. On attending the Global Experience Seminar in Senegal, Kopka mentioned that “[being in Senegal] really taught me that there’s such a vast amount of French speakers,” adding that the reason for this is centuries of French colonialism and how it has “seeped into many aspects of global life and trade.” She also spoke about how special speaking French and being able to communicate in Senegal was: “Even though there are many other native languages spoken in Senegal, it was still meaningful that I was able to communicate and connect with people, even if it was in their colonizer’s language.” Another Global Experience Seminar in Senegal is still tentatively scheduled for summer 2028.
With dwindling interest in French language courses at the college post-COVID, those French courses are, as Derosier put it, “on the books” — but, he said, that fact does not guarantee their ability to offer a major or minor. Elaborating on this point, he expressed that with a single faculty member — himself — teaching French courses, it isn’t feasible to maintain the major and minor. “It’s not fair to students to promise something that I can’t deliver on,” he said. The workload is also not necessarily sustainable for Derosier; he described taking on individual projects as “exhausting.” Eliminating the major and minor is not sudden. Derosier said that he has followed research like the aforementioned MLA study, and “seen the writing on the wall.”
However, the dissolution of the major and minor remains difficult news to bear for Derosier and deliver to students. “There’s a mourning period of losing the French language, and that is unfortunate,” he said. He admitted, however, that keeping or losing the major and minor was ultimately beyond his control. On the decision to let the major and minor go, Derosier said he values “doing the work I want to be doing” and “teaching literature and film with students” over “trying to save something that I know I can’t save.” Due to a lack of interest in French language study, Derosier has diversified the courses he teaches, pivoting to classes taught in English and medieval studies, in which he has a research background.
Derosier said that when he was first hired to teach at the college, there were two full-time faculty members devoted to French at Beloit. A short time later, this number went down to one full-time and one part-time faculty member. Now, Derosier is the only full-time faculty member teaching in the department. Derosier said that, currently, there are not enough students to teach more advanced second- and third-semester French courses. To help stem this problem, Derosier said that he has attempted to offer free and open educational resources due to the high costs of French language textbooks. “It’s a broader cultural turn away from language learning, and taking the risk of studying abroad [and] learning a language,” he said. He went on to cite research by the Modern Language Association which shows that the amount of students interested in pursuing language study is diminishing. A 2021 study by the organization found a 16.6% drop in college and university enrollments in world language courses since the MLA’s last published report in 2016.
Abigale Krepelka’29, who came to Beloit as a first-year student having already scored a five on the AP French Exam while also accruing college credits in French through AP courses, would be one student eligible for such advanced classes. She spoke about her high school French teacher, a native speaker, who inspired her to continue her French education, as well as the value of the tight-knit community in her small AP French class of six students. She took Beloit College’s placement exam and was placed in a 215-level French course. Krepelka was only able to enroll in the class in spring 2026, and the 215 course is the only French language class she has taken at the college. Krepelka, already a double major in Creative Writing and Education and Youth Studies, was looking into declaring a French minor. “I see a French minor as something that can be really resume-building, and I have always known that I wanted to study abroad,” she said.
For Krepelka, part of the difficulty of losing the degree has been the fact that, as she put it, “I was kind of banking on my study abroad experience to both flesh out my French credits and give me a lot more experience with [speaking the language].” Krepelka said that she still intends to study abroad, but having the opportunity to take more French courses at the college would have strengthened her readiness to do so in a Francophone country. She shared that she has been looking into opportunities to go abroad to Western France or Eastern Switzerland in meetings with the Global Experience Office. Krepelka also expressed a need for extracurricular support for French at Beloit College. For the French language to be fostered more extensively among students, she said, “French Club would need to make a pretty extreme comeback.” According to her, part of the reason French Club is no longer active owes to the graduation of a majority of last year’s executive board members.
Derosier, meanwhile, spoke about how his entrance into the field of French and Francophone studies was first precipitated by his interest in literature. “When I started, I was teaching advanced courses entirely in French. Some of them felt like grad-level in terms of the students that we had and the great work that was going on,” Derosier says. He added that, as the French program has contracted and seen less interest, it has become more difficult to create a pipeline that ensures each course has enough students. Talking about the breakdown of this advanced students pipeline, Derosier said that, while he currently teaches some advanced students, his class size is not as large as it used to be. Because Derosier can no longer offer many of these advanced courses, he now focuses on teaching more courses in translation related to literature and media studies.
Working in between departments and concentrations has the potential to redevelop the humanities in a way that better serves students. “There are legitimate critiques of the disciplinary nature of academia and how we structured things based on different silos,” Derosier said. He also discussed how a “full buy-in” from the college’s administration on the Center for Integrative Learning’s block program, which allows students to design their own interdisciplinary majors and minors, could provide a better path forward for the humanities at Beloit. This could also be a method that sustains the liberal arts ethos on which Beloit was founded, opening up opportunities to mix in disciplines like music and STEM into interdisciplinary blocks. “These are all related in terms of how cognition works,” Derosier said. adding that this connection can be codified if “we can be thinking differently and encouraging students to see the value of the humanities through different pathways.”
Moving forward from the loss of a storied major and department that has been a pillar of Beloit College’s liberal arts tradition will not happen immediately, but as Derosier elucidates, “for the humanities to thrive, we have to be participating in [them]; we have to be part of that.”
Featured image: Betty Cavicchia’27
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