Oregon State Contracts To Teach Army's Language Area Group
By John Burtner


Source: Oregon Stater May-June, 1943

One of the latest additions to the Army Specialized Training Unit at Oregon State College is a group of selected students sent here for foreign area and language study. This group of 125 men will spend at least 12 weeks on the campus in an intensive study of European and Asiatic languages and the history, geography, social and economic life and governments of European and Asiatic countries. Arrangements have been made to teach classes for them in German, French, Spanish and Russian. The new term for the group and additional engineering students starts July 12. The foreign area and language units are being placed in a few picked colleges throughout the country, including Washington and Stanford on the coast. The men are all former college students who were picked from the various campuses throughout the country. Oregon State probably attracted the attention of the army in this field because of a course in the Russian language given for the first time this past year. It was taught by Dr. F. A. Gilfillan, '18, dean of science.

A Special Russian instructor had been engaged for ther army work, however. She is Mrs. Antonina Fedorovna Riasanovsky of Eugene, author of the 1940 Atlantic Monthly prize novel, "The Family" and of its sequel, "The Children", published in 1942. Mrs. Riasanovsky was educated in Russia and Manchuria and is a graduate of the Universities of Petrograd. She has taken out her first American citizenship papers and says she is willing to take this position because "I should like to serve this country in this emergency."

Instructors sides Mrs. Riasanovsky who will teach the language and area students are Melissa Martin, '15. chairman of the modern languages department, who will teach Spanish; Mary Lewis, associate professor of modern languages, will have the German classes and Dr. C. B. Beall, University of Oregon, the classes in French.

Approximately 925 student soldiers were scheduled to be on campus by the start of the summer term. Oregon State has been designated as one of the few colleges in the United States to take what is known as the 9-A students who will pursue advanced courses in engineering comparable to graduate work. More than a hundred of these advanced students are expected.

The army now has taken over Waldo Hall in additional to the five-unit Men's Dormitory, and will probably occupy it for the duration. Arrangements have been made for just as good or better housing for women students, however, through use of unoccupied fraternity houses, women's cooperatives and the two new women's halls made from the two fraternity houses on the campus at the corner of the commerce building.

Russian Language Class, 1943

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