On February 10th, the Brock Senate approved motions which may give you increased options regarding your mandatory language requirements.

BUSU DOES NOT ADVISE YOU to take any unilateral action regarding your program without consulting your Academic Advisors. Please consult your advisor if you think this may affect you.

The Humanities faculty at Brock is the only one which required a second-language credit in order to graduate from the faculty. A decision at today's Senate meeting was made to repeal this requirement from the faculty level, and to allow individual departments to use their discretion to prescribe what that additional credit will be. Some departments may choose to keep a language requirement, while some may choose to prescribe an additional required course, and some may choose to allow students an elective credit.

An important consideration is that a second vote made this repeal of the language credit is retroactive. Most decisions of Senate are not retroactive, and BUSU would like to inform you of this unusual decision. This means that as a Humanities student, if you have not yet completed your second-language requirement, you may not be required to complete it. But if your program is choosing to maintain a language, you may still have to complete one.

If you are a Humanities major, and you have not completed (or you may be in the process of completing) your language credit in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Latin, Portugese, Japanese, Russian, Mandarin, or Sign Language, this decision affects you.

• You may elect to continue with the program requirements that were in place when you entered Brock. This always remains your right at all times, nobody may ever force you to switch away from these.
• Second-language skills are incredibly valuable, and you may choose to take/complete these courses for your additional benefit, especially if you are considering further education or careers where a second language is of great benefit
• You may elect to "jump forward" in your program calendar to the regulations that now exist, without a mandated language at the faculty level
• Please keep in mind, some programs may keep a language requirement, and may in fact become more prescriptive with your language choices (example: new program requirements for Music students will now include the requirement to take either French, German, Italian or Latin, and these students may no longer take some of the other languages to fulfil their requirements)

If this decision affects you, or could affect you, please contact your program advisor. DO NOT, we repeat DO NOT take any action to deregister yourself from existing courses without consulting your advisors.

This decision DOES NOT affect any other faculties, and DOES NOT affect the University-wide requirements of all students to take at least one credit in Science, one credit in Social Science, and one credit in Humanities (the three context credits). All students are still required to complete context credits for ALL Brock degrees.

For more information about this decision, please contact your Program Advisor, or BUSU VP University Affairs, Rob Lanteigne, at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or 905-688-5550 x.4198.