The College's Department of Modern Languages and Literatures has a United Nations flavor.
Pilar Moyano, department chair, notes that among the full-time faculty, “one is from Chile, two from China, one from Colombia, one from France, four from Germany, one from Japan, one from Puerto Rico, one from Senegal, two from Spain, and seven from the United States. We also have adjunct faculty who were born in Brazil, Bulgaria, Italy, Japan, and Russia. And we have four students-language assistants who come to us for a year-from France, Germany, Japan, and Mexico.”
And it's important to realize that it's not just words and sounds and grammar that are taught in their classes, she adds. “You can't teach these things without teaching other peoples' view
of the world. You have to understand how people think, feel, and behave if you are going to express ideas in their appropriate cultural context. In other words, the study of languages, national literatures, and cultures facilitates the understanding
of alternative ways of organizing experience, which leads to
better comprehension of the world and one's place in it.”