Reasons for Maltese demotion ‘a red herring’ – Henry Frendo
Matthew Vella
Historian Henry Frendo has joined the chorus of disapproval against a decision by the University of Malta’s senate to eliminate the option to submit dissertations or written examination papers in Maltese.
Over 1,300 Facebook users have also joined a group expressing its opposition to the changes in university assessment rules.
Frendo – the director of the Institute of Maltese Studies – has taken issue with the dean of the Faculty of Arts, historian Dominic Fenech, who also sits on the senate and who last week told MaltaToday that one of the university’s selling points “is the fact that lectures and assessment take place in English.”
The university’s assessment rules were amended in October to make the sole language of assessment in English, except for areas of study involving a language. Not all faculties were elated at this development, with the Institute of Maltese Studies requesting an exception in the case of its recently inaugurated Masters’ course.
Senate eventually consented to this request, but only with regard to two specific study-units: Maltese Literature, and Maltese Language and Ethnicity.
“Fenech’s statement concerning external examiners and ‘international standards’ is a red herring,” Frendo said.
“Neither the MA student cohort in Maltese Studies, nor the Institute of Maltese Studies’ boards ever asked that theses – which is where external examiners come in – be not written in English; or indeed, for that matter, that lectures be not delivered in English. Quite the opposite. The request was simply that where, as is usual, the examiners understood Maltese as well as English, then these particular students could be allowed, exceptionally, a choice of language in answering their exam questions, that is, the option to write about ‘Malteseness’ in their native tongue, as the students had asked, and not necessarily in English.”
Last week Fenech said the issue of external examiners was an important consideration for the Senate, as the use of English for assessment enables the University to maintain international standards.
Frendo said there was no request that the same exam paper in any unit need be set in Maltese as well as in English.
“We are dealing here with paying, post-graduate mature students and almost exclusively Maltese students, all of whom understand English perfectly well, but who, at the same time feel strongly about the intimate nexus of language to culture, nationality and identity – the more so in an area of studies largely dedicated to Maltese ethnicity, mores and lifestyle, in post-colonial times,” Frendo said.
Frendo added that the Senate’s motivation was ‘logistical’ out of fear that creating a precedent to allow the use of Maltese would “upset the generally exclusive recourse to English” unless courses were exclusively language or literature-driven. “Statutorily, its instruction stands and therefore it has to be conformed to as it stands.”
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