Conventional wisdom holds that the United States needs all the Arabic speakers it can get. But in Seattle this semester, Hussein Elkhafaifi had to turn 150 would-be Arabic students away.
“This is a major challenge for us because there is no correlation between the increased enrollment, which is now up about 127 percent, to the number of teachers who are trained,” says Elkhafaifi, an assistant professor and director of the University of Washington’s Arabic language program. “There’s no correlation between this desperate national security need, and here we are turning away 150 students.”
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