Since opening its doors in 1805, Carolina has made foreign language learning an essential part of its curriculum. Classical languages — Latin and Greek — are still taught, but they're now among a much larger group of languages offered, along with many opportunities for students to put their foreign language skills in practice.
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to Remembering the Days, where we explore the stories and talk with the people who are part of the rich history of the University of South Carolina. I’m Evan Faulkenbury.
To start this episode, I’m going to turn it over to Sammy Munson, a freshman who has some interesting background on Carolina’s first president, Jonathan Maxcy.
[Reading in Latin.]
Did you catch all that? No, it’s not gibberish, it’s Latin. Sammy is studying classics and Latin, and I asked him to meet me at the Maxcy Monument for a quick lesson.
When you walk up to the Maxcy Monument on the Horseshoe, you’ll notice Latin inscriptions on all four sides. After Maxcy died, students honored his memory by funding the monument and inscribing his accomplishments in Latin. Teaching classic languages — Latin and Greek —was a fundamental part of every student’s education at Carolina before the Civil War when we were known as South Carolina College.
In this episode, we’re exploring the long history of language learning at Carolina. Not just Latin, but languages in general. Since its founding, Carolina has championed language learning to its students. Being able to read, write and speak in other languages is a foundational principle here. And today we’re tracing how and why that came to be.
These days, USC offers students about a dozen languages they can choose to study — Latin, Greek, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian.
Just to confuse your ears a little more, here’s a clip of a Russian table meeting I dropped by so I could see first-hand how students at Carolina immerse themselves in language learning:
[Speaking in Russian.]
No, I didn’t get any of that either. But when I visited, I saw Dr. Olesya Kisselev from the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures leading about a dozen students in a Russian language lesson. She was showing clips of early Russian cartoon films and having students engage with what they were hearing. These are sharp students, and they are part of a larger program here based in the South Quad residence hall — the Global Fellows LLC or Living Learning Community.
The idea for living and learning communities has been around at USC since 1972. That year, Carolina’s Living and Learning program launched under the leadership of Jan Jordan, starting with English courses in the old Tower’s residence halls, or the Honeycombs. Other universities, namely Cornell and Michigan State, had started using dormitories in fresh ways to help students associate learning and community-building together. By the mid-1980s, more residence halls on campus had their own unique Living and Learning Program.
Over time, more Living and Learning Communities started in residence halls around campus with specific themes. Today, there are several such communities, including Capstone Scholars, First Generation and the Preston Residential College for Leadership.
Another one is Global Fellows, which used to be in Maxcy College, and now resides in South Quad. This LLC is part of Global Carolina, which houses the Education Abroad Office and supports international students on campus. Global Fellows students learn about cultures from around the world and get involved in more regular language learning. They also cook and share meals together, celebrating cuisines from every corner of the globe.
To learn more about Global Fellows and current language learning, I met Dr. Krista Van Fleit, associate professor of Chinese literature and language and the faculty director of Global Fellows in South Quad.
Krista Van Fleit: “We are a combination of American freshmen, and some sophomores, some continuing students, but then they house some international students in our community. And so, students pay a fee to be part of this community, and then we do programming that encourages cross-cultural understanding, international experiences, language study, and we do a lot of cooking of international dishes. And trying to get these really different groups of students to have a structured way for communication.”
Dr. Van Fleit organizes special programs for her residents, and there’s also a research grant program for students who want to study abroad. It’s a good deal. She also makes sure there are active language tables. These are planned times when instructors visit South Quad and lead a language lesson.
Krista Van Fleit: “So, we partner with the Department of Languages, Literature and Cultures to host language conversations here in the dorm. So each language does it in their own way. Spanish they send two of their instructors over for I think two hours a week, and they can either do just conversation practice, or they do some tutoring sometimes. And those events, the language table events are open to everybody on campus. Like, everybody studying language can come over here and practice. So, right now we have Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, French, Spanish and maybe two more that I can't remember.
Global Fellows is a newer, innovative way to encourage language learning at USC, but it’s a far cry from what it was during the first half of the 19th century. Just to be admitted into South Carolina College, applicants in these early years had to already be proficient in Greek and Latin. In an entry exam, they had to translate Latin into English from Virgil’s Aeneid, and from Greek to English a passage from the Gospel of John. In addition to their other studies, they would be reading Homer, Horace, Cicero and other ancient writers in their original languages. At various, times, students also were required to take classes in French, German and even Hebrew.
Depending on the college president and faculty members’ capabilities, some students took more languages than others, but classical language learning remained a priority for all students before the Civil War. In 1887, Professor Franklin C. Woodward, who was later Carolina’s president, became chair of English Language, Literature, and Rhetoric. By 1910, a separate Modern Language Department was teaching students at the still-very-small university. And now, we have the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures having merged together several language-specific departments in the early 2000s.
After all this time, USC still teaches classic languages, namely, Latin and Greek. Dr. Hunter Gardner, a professor of classics at USC, teaches Latin and other subjects. How exactly did she become interested in a so-called “dead” language?
Hunter Gardner: “It took me a while to come around to the language learning part. I grew up with the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones films, and I wanted to be an archaeologist. But once I got into studying the archaeology, I realized I needed to do some of the languages as well. And when I finally came out of the other side of grad school,I was much more interested in the language side, especially Latin poetry.
Once I started reading Latin poetry, I realized that because Latin is sort of a contained dead language, there are relatively few vocabulary words in Latin, and each word has to have multiple meanings. So I realized there was so much nuance to this poetry, and it could be interpreted in so many different ways, depending on which meaning you wanted to tease out of the word. It just got really fascinating when I read Virgil the first time around, for instance, I saw it as sort of a propaganda work in honor of the Emperor Augustus. And then when I read it a second time, teasing out other meanings, it was more of a critique of the Augustan regime. So I just found it fascinating that the poetry could be so complex.”
We spent a long while talking about the beauty of Latin, its complexity and how students at Carolina for a long time have been studying this language. Some might say that there really isn’t any point in studying Latin anymore, and I asked Dr. Gardner what she makes of that argument:
Hunter Gardner: “There are the sort of practical effects of knowing Latin. You learn so many word roots by studying Latin, and that'll help you build your English vocabulary, and do well on the SATs and the GREs and things like that. But I think more importantly is this body of literature was critical to the founding, our founding fathers in the United States. And you know, a lot of those documents, the Constitution, has its roots in ancient thought. As long as we are connected to that body of original works of Cicero and Plato and Seneca, we will be reminded of how we got to be the nation that we are. If we stopped studying Latin and Greek, we would cut off really a great source of our own tradition and our own heritage.”
That’s a pretty good answer, and it fits this current year 2026 as America honors its 250th anniversary and as USC celebrates its 225th.
To fully explore what language learning looks like today compared to the past at Carolina, there was one more person I wanted to talk to — Morgan Morris Inabinet, the director of the Education Abroad Office.
Inabinet was a history major at Furman University, and she brings her love of history to her position today coordinating USC students and their study abroad experiences. She told me a little about the origins of how study abroad came to be.
Morgan Inabinet: “We saw an expansion of study abroad post-World War II. I think we see the earliest foundations of it — the concept of the grand tour back in the 17th, 18th centuries. This was obviously something that was only available for the most elite of the elite, particularly in the UK among the aristocratic class. But that was the first kind of formalization that international travel could be an educational experience. It was really viewed as the capstone of an elite education at that point.”
After World War II, as universities expanded in the U.S., study abroad options widened and became less expensive. We talked about how unique, affordable, and life-altering study abroad opportunities through USC can be for today’s students, and I wanted to know more about what role language plays. I never did study abroad, and I wanted to know if students needed to know another language before applying.
Morgan Inabinet: “Historically, there was a common perception that you needed to have some proficiency in another language prior to studying abroad. There has been a big shift in that in the last 20 years, really with the emergence of what some people call bubble programs, where there's this whole economy of study abroad programs that cater to U.S. study abroad students. So the language of instruction is typically English. Students are typically living with other U.S. study abroad students. We've seen huge growth in our numbers in our overall study abroad numbers here at USC. Back in 1995, there were 152 USC students studying abroad. This year, we'll have over 1,200 just in spring semester.”
You heard that right. For Spring 2026, we’ll have over 1,200 USC students doing study abroad.
Today, students who want to use study abroad as a way to solidify their knowledge of another language and culture often have specific career aspirations.
Morgan Inabinet: “I think a lot of our students that I talked to who are coming in working towards proficiency or fluency in a foreign language, have a career goal in mind that will utilize that language. And that's what they're working towards. Whether they're interested in a career in the foreign service or they're an international business major who's interested in working in a large multinational corporation, they are looking to have a return on that investment in the sense of both an investment in the years that they spent learning that language and an ROI on a study-abroad experience. So that is, I think, a bit of a shift when we think back to how language learning started.”
Whether you’re a Gamecock abroad immersing yourself in a language or just trying to experience another culture, study abroad has something for every student.
Today, USC students aren’t all required to study Latin and Greek and to become proficient in another language, but all these opportunities still exist on what is becoming a more global campus every single year.
On the next Remembering the Days, Chris Horn and I talk with Dennis Pruitt. Dennis led student affairs at USC for decades. All that talk nowadays about how great the student experience is at Carolina outside the classroom? Well, that’s largely Dennis’ doing. That’s next time on Remembering the Days.