The University discontinued its Igbo courses this academic year amid low enrollment, funding constraints, and lack of a clear departmental home, just one year after introducing them.
According to Undergraduate Student Government (USG) President Elijah Jenkins, who spearheaded advocacy for the program during the 2022–23 and 2023–24 academic years, neither he nor other students involved in the initiative were informed in advance that Igbo was being discontinued. They only learned the courses would not return when they looked through the course catalog this year.
Courses in Igbo—the native language of the tribe in southeastern Nigeria by the same name—were first offered during the 2024–25 academic year, following a campaign by USG and the African and Caribbean Student Association led by Jenkins. A survey conducted by the Chicago Language Center (CLC) during the previous academic year had identified Igbo as the African language students were most interested in studying.
However, just five students enrolled in the program during its pilot year, and that low enrollment made it difficult to justify Igbo’s long-term continuation, according to CLC director Catherine Baumann, particularly in the context of ongoing cuts to the Division of the Arts & Humanities, which funded the program.
Jenkins added that some faculty members expressed uncertainty about whether student demand for Igbo would remain consistent over time. “Some professors were more hesitant in the sense that they thought that the course offering was gonna be considered like a fad,” he said.
Baumann attributed the low enrollment to several factors, including the fact that the Igbo courses were taught remotely by a single part-time instructor. The hiring process for the instructor had occurred late in the prior academic year, she said, and “no one’s going to move to Chicago to teach one class [of] Igbo a quarter.”
According to Baumann, this arrangement limited student recruitment and program visibility, as did the program’s lack of clear departmental oversight.
“There’s not a good place for it to live, because we don’t have an African center,” Baumann said.
Currently, the University offers two African languages: Swahili and, intermittently, Kinyarwanda. Many peer institutions, such as Harvard University and Stanford University, offer a much broader range of African language offerings, including Yoruba, Wolof, Twi, and Zulu.
According to Baumann, language instruction at UChicago is often tied to long-term faculty research interests and departmental infrastructure. In the case of African languages, those structures are comparatively limited. Fidèle Mpiranya, who teaches Swahili and Kinyarwanda at the University, described the position of African languages at UChicago as “isolated,” referring to Swahili as “kind of an island in the system.”
Swahili and Kinyarwanda are housed within the Department of Linguistics alongside several of what Baumann described as “orphan languages,” including American Sign Language and Modern Greek.
“A disadvantage to having a very sort of tenuous program is that no one’s really in charge of it,” she said.
Chris Kennedy, the chair of the linguistics department, said the department does not generally view itself as primarily responsible for language instruction. “We don’t see ourselves as a language teaching department,” he said. “We’ve taken responsibility for these other languages because the University thinks it’s important to oversee them.”
Kennedy noted that Swahili has remained at the University for decades despite relatively small enrollments. “The University has maintained its commitment to teaching this language, even though it’s not bringing in big enrollment numbers,” he said, with enrollments in the 2025–26 academic year ranging between two to four students quarterly.
Both Mpiranya and Baumann described ongoing student interest in African languages beyond Swahili. Mpiranya said students have expressed interest in languages such as Yoruba and Wolof, particularly students interested in connecting with West African histories and cultures.
Baumann similarly pointed to changing student demographics as a factor driving demand. “We have more students from Africa who would like to study their own languages,” she said.
Mpiranya also emphasized the academic importance of language study for students conducting research on the African continent. “It’s important to communicate directly with people you research on in a language they know,” he said. “It’s good [that students] interact, at least for a first contact, with the speaker there… in their own language.”
Despite the challenges associated with expanding African language instruction, Baumann and Kennedy pointed to several alternative pathways currently available to students, such as the Big Ten Academic Alliance CourseShare program, which allows students to enroll virtually in less commonly taught language courses offered at partner institutions, as well as the University’s Foreign Language Acquisition Grant program, which offers grants of $7,000 to support summer language study abroad.
According to Baumann, the University is also considering expanding collaboration specifically among quarter-system universities participating in CourseShare, which she said could make African language offerings more accessible to UChicago students.
Commenting on the importance of this accessibility, Jenkins said, “Africa is one of the largest continents, and it’s going to have a vital [impact on] the future of the world…. Historically, our university just doesn’t really engage [with] the continent of Africa in that manner.”
