Down with Monolinguism!

The campus was awash this summer with foreigners and would-be foreigners, brought to Hanover under the auspices of the College's new Language Outreach Education program. Known to the savvy as LORE, it is the most recent brain child of Professor John Rassias. For ten days in July, 125 people from 25 states and the District of Columbia ate, slept, and drank a second language French, German, Italian, or Spanish in the first of the Alumni Language Programs (that's ALPS, of course). From 79-year-old Curtis Wright '27 to 14-year-old Lauri Lynn Fields, daughter of Randolph Fields '63, they pledged themselves to the rigid code of the Rassias intensive language model, vowing to speak only the language being learned for the entire ten days, under pain of a nickel fine for every word of English allowed to violate their lips.

Rassias described the program as a whopping success, claiming chat the only problem the students and their staff of 35 encountered was the July heat. The graduation ceremonies set the sleepy summer campus ablaze with national flags and academic vestments. The commencement parade wound its colorful way across the Green to the skirl of the pipes and settled down in a verdant spot behind the River Cluster for speeches, several renditions of the ALPS theme song ("Down with Monolinguism!"), and a tender presentation to Rassias of a pair of fat red suspenders to hold up his droopy trousers. The aftermath has been equally inspiring, according to Rassias, who has received reports of several spontaneously generated alumni language groups dedicated to the .convivial practicing of newly acquired skills.

Then, in August, arrived the real foreigners 35 Japanese students of English language and American culture. They came on a United Travel Service program set up by Kenichi Ikeno, who first contacted Rassias two years ago about siting one of his company's English programs at Dartmouth because he wanted "a firstclass program at one of the top institutions in the United States and a chance to understand New England and its people."

Rassias rounded up enough families to host the Japanese participants for three weeks and organized a staff of 15 local and imported faculty and student assistants for them. The high-pressure, intensive English language program (subject to the same vow and nickel-fine arrangement as ALPS) was varied with cultural expeditions ranging from Fenway Park and the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston to Dan & Whit's General Store in Norwich.

The high point for Rassias was a group sing that happened after a potluck supper at the farm of Lafayette and Mayme Noda in nearby Meriden, New Hampshire.

"The tea ceremony is still taught in Japan," he explained, "and the playing of the. guitar is part of it. One of the students had brought her guitar with her, and I looked up just at twilight to see her and an American student, also with a guitar, sitting side by side, playing Beatles songs for the group. Everywhere there were mingled Japanese and American faces a living symbol of peace and harmony."

Rassias and Japanese students roll dice in class as an aid to doing sums in English.