This coming school year (2018-2019), Drury will add courses in Mandarin Chinese that students can take at the main campus. Drury already has foreign language classes in Spanish, French, Arabic and Greek. Until now, students wanting to take Chinese language courses would have to go to the Missouri State Foreign Language Institute, with whom Drury has a special agreement. But now a native speaker will be able to teach it to them on campus.

Students have the Drury Asian Studies program to thank for this as it receives a traveling Mandarin Chinese Fulbright scholar. In this program Drury will receive a new native Mandarin Chinese-speaking language professor every year to replace the old one leaving. In exchange, the annual teacher will have the chance to take a few classes while at Drury and get to experience American culture.

This is the same program that the Drury Middle East Studies Program has for Arabic.

Once full registration for the fall 2018 semester comes around, students will be able to register for the courses. Mandarin 101 will be taught in the fall, and Mandarin 102 will be taught in the spring of that same academic year.

The director for the Asian Studies Program and Drury professor of philosophy, Chris Panza, is not certain exactly who the professor will be yet, only that in the coming days they will be assigned to Drury. It could be someone from mainland China or even someone from Taiwan.

For Panza, the choice to apply for a Chinese-speaker was a thought out and strategic one, meant to give students a useful language to study.

“We would absolutely love to offer Japanese, Korean, and Hindi on campus,” said Panza, “but we’re a small university so we have to make difficult choices. Our thought was that the world influence of China as a country is undeniable. After all, 20 percent of the world’s population is Chinese, and Mandarin is the most spoken language on the planet. So, given that we could only choose one, Mandarin was the natural choice to make.”

With Chinese now being available on campus the Asian Studies minor has chosen to require that students complete one full year of basic Mandarin Chinese as well as the other coursework.

“We thought,” explained Panza, “the best way to really create a robust Asian Studies program required both offering Mandarin classes at Drury and having a person on campus who is native to Asia, and who could interact with students through fun on-campus activities and in doing so truly serve as an “ambassador” for Asian culture at Drury. Applying for a Fulbright Scholar allowed us to do both.”

Panza hopes that a Fulbright scholar will entice Drury students to take Asian studies courses and become interested in the field.

“Asian culture offers an incredible richness of history, literature, philosophy, and art – through it a student can truly learn to take a look at the world, society, and life’s big questions from a very different perspective.”

Article written by Johan Englén.