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Dear [Recipient's Name],

I was shocked to hear that UC Berkeley’s Near Eastern Studies (NES) Department has announced its intention to end its affiliation with the nationally recognized, award-winning program Arabic Without Walls. This decision is particularly surprising because the program, while providing a tremendous service to UC Berkeley students, as well as students throughout the UC system, is self-sufficient and does not impact the Near Eastern Studies Department in terms of funding, faculty, or class offerings. The Arabic language program at UC Berkeley is recognized for its continual quality and high standards, and the Arabic Without Walls online course has no negative impacts on the Berkeley campus classes. To the contrary, the online course is currently being used by both students and instructors of UC Berkeley’s Arabic courses as an additional technology-based teaching and learning resource, as it provides numerous high quality multimedia files including listening activities and videos, pronunciation exercises, and grammar review quizzes. I would expect that it is in the best interest of any UC Berkeley department, and the Berkeley campus as a whole, to not only support, but to take advantage of affiliation with such a highly respected program as Arabic Without Walls. The U.S. Department of Education highly values this program, as evidenced by their funding the program with a half-million dollar grant. The UC Office of the President agrees that the program is worthwhile, as they have financed the program through the upcoming academic year. Moreover, this program contributes to the prestige of the UC Berkeley campus, as it was nationally recognized for its cutting-edge pedagogical methodology and technology use by the Computer-Aided Language Instruction Consortium, the Esperantic Studies Foundation, as well as Lernu.net, and received the 2008 "Access to Language Education" Award. Arabic Without Walls provides a tremendous benefit to UC Berkeley students, as well as students on other UC campuses, who may enroll in the online course without additional registration fees. In addition to providing electronic resources for Berkeley Arabic courses, Arabic Without Walls also benefits the entire UC Berkeley campus through a collaborative exchange program between UC Berkeley and other universities: when Berkeley provides access to this online course to other universities, our campus can also reciprocally access their online courses, which is a great benefit for all Berkeley students. The resources are available for this program; the Berkeley Near Eastern Studies Department, which wants to cancel the program, pays nothing. Moreover, between 2002 and 2006, enrollments in university Arabic language courses have increased 126.5%. However, this exponential growth in classroom-based Arabic courses is still not sufficient to meet demands for Arabic language speakers in the United States. As stated by Derek Roff, chair of the Esperanto "Access to Language Education" Award evaluation committee, "If this program is being cancelled, we will have lost the best resource that exists in this country for training future Arabic speakers." Why is the NES Department cancelling the prestigious Arabic Without Walls program when it costs the department nothing and greatly benefits the entire UC Berkeley campus? As stated by Robert Blake, director of the UC Consortium for Language Learning and Teaching, “Most of their [NES Department’s] arguments didn't seem to hold any water in that we weren't taking away from local programs at Berkeley and we're not costing them anything administratively,” he said. “It was an opportunity for cooperation and innovation, and Berkeley seems to be losing that.” Please allow the Arabic Without Walls program to continue to operate, and the Arabic program at Cal to continue to flourish.