To: Anne Lopes, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs. Re: The Reduction of Italian courses at Brooklyn College. As Director of Italian American Studies at Queens College I am writing to register my dismay over the recent action taken to severely reduce the Italian course offerings at Brooklyn College.  

In my more than forty years of creating, cultivating and teaching Italian American Studies at the university level, I have never seen such action taken by an administration.  Your decision to deactivate the major and minor and to offer only a few language courses signals a death knell for the study of one of the most important historical and contemporary languages of scholarship and commercial activity.