ACTA’s Academic Affairs Fellow Veronica Bryant is joined by Dr. Marie Kawthar Daouda, stipendiary lecturer in French at the University of Oxford’s Oriel College. Dr. Daouda teaches both literature and language, and her research focuses on the reception of antiquity in modern times and artistic representations of good and evil in periods of political and religious crisis. She is the author of Not Your Victim: How Our Obsession with Race Entraps and Divides Us. In their wide-ranging conversation, Drs. Bryant and Daouda discuss the role of language in shaping national, cultural, and individual identity.
Download a transcript of the podcast HERE.
Note: Please check any quotations against the audio recording. The views expressed by guests on this podcast are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of ACTA.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY An old joke goes, “If a person who speaks two languages is bilingual, and a person who speaks three languages is trilingual, what do you call a person who speaks one language? . . . An American.” Almost 80% of Americans speak only English; by contrast, just 25% of adults in the European […]
Since the colonial period, American higher education has prioritized foreign language study in both classical and modern languages. Yet in the twenty-first century, the United States faces a shortfall of professionals with strong language skills, jeopardizing both national security and global competitiveness. Eighty percent of Americans are monolingual, compared to only 25% of Europeans. A […]
Washington, DC — The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has released Ivory Tower of Babel: Rebuilding Language Learning in Higher Education for a More Secure and Competitive America, a new report examining the steep decline of foreign language study in U.S. higher education. The report shows that foreign language enrollments at colleges and […]
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