The Title VI funds were vital for some UW-Madison programs.

“The Title VI grants, from my conversations, helped pay for different centers throughout the United States,” Woller said. “So for example, at UW-Madison, the way that these grants work is they put money into a Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UW-Madison. Congress says, ‘Here is X amount of dollars and with this amount of money, you should start a center on an interest.’ And that interest was Southeast Asian for us. There are other centers as well. There is the African Center, the LatinX Center and an East Asian Center as well. But the one that we are focused on right now is the Southeast Asian Center. And originally, that was paid for through Title VI grants that the current administration moved around so that the money is not found. That money that was being given to the center was then able to pay for a graduate student to teach the Filipino Language Program. When the money was cut from those grants, the person who was teaching the class, their money was gone. Now there is nothing that can pay for those teachers anymore, the only teacher that we had. We went to the university. We talked to them about it. We were like, ‘Hey the money is gone, but what is going to go on?’ We learned that the university is stretched thin. They have to cut their budget. And since this role was paid for by the federal government, they couldn’t afford to keep it going.”

Gordon Thunder, who is the retired head of the Ho-Chunk language department, once said, ‘The language is the culture and the culture is the language.” This is very true for FASO.

“FASO, the Filipino American Student Organization has been around since the 1990s,” Woller said. “We were originally founded by students who originally were just taking the language program. So they were taking the Filipino language class on campus and they would meet every Friday. They would hang out and talk. They’d be on the Union Terrace and just relax. Them hanging out initially is how my organization got started. The Filipino language being taught on campus is huge because the largest Filipino club and the only Filipino club on campus is a direct descendant of it. We are very interlinked. A lot of our members still take the class. A lot of our members come from the class. It’s very much like we are interlinked a lot in a lot of different ways. Obviously we are separate entities and we are not the same. FASO loves to advertise the program. We love it when people from the Filipino program come join us at our events. We try to support each other the best we can.”

Like what happens with 3^rd and 4^th generation Spanish language speakers, the proficiency in Tagalog is lost along the way.

“I know a few personal stories of people who learned Filipino as a kid and then have had teachers tell their parents, ‘No, you shouldn’t be teaching your child Filipino because they are starting to develop an accent,’” Woller said. “With that, a class like this is a great way to make sure that kid might have been stopped as a child to learn this language, but now that they are in college, they can pick it up. Maybe at the start of their life, they were learning it and then it got cut off. But now here is this language and they can keep learning. It’s very similar to what happens with Spanish. People just stop speaking it after a few generations. And this class is very much a part of a way to say, ‘Let’s rethink that. How do we make sure that people do learn the language later on life so that they can know it and better connect with their family members in The Philippines.’”

The Midwest has a relatively large Filipino population that is centered in Chicago. There aren’t enough Tagalog language programs to meet the need.

“There are three schools I can think of off the top of my head that teach Tagalog in the Midwest,” Woller said. “It’s going to be Michigan, Northern Illinois University and UW-Madison. Currently there are three of us. But you have to think that Chicago’s population of Filipinos is really, really high. And there are only three colleges in all of the Midwest. And there are all of these Filipinos throughout the Midwest. And there are only three universities that teach it. That’s definitely not enough.”

Relatively speaking, the UW-Madison Tagalog program is well used given that many foreign language programs centered on Southeast Asian languages are small, yet are important for UW-Madison students who wish to serve in the U.S. diplomatic corps in Southeast Asia.

“Last semester, we had around 20 students in both levels,” Woller said. “Currently UW-Madison teaches Level 1 and Level 2 of Filipino. So Level 1 is the beginners class and Level 2 is more intermediate. In the beginners class, I think they had about 18 students last semester. And in then intermediate class, they had around six. This semester, I think they have 18 students in total. This class is pretty large for a language class, especially for one where you can’t get a minor in Filipino Language. You get it as a certificate in Southeast Asian Studies. Currently now, they have around 15 in-class students for Level 1 and three students for Level 2. That may not sound like a lot, but it’s actually the largest amount of students taking a Southeast Asian language class on campus. This is a language class that people want to take and consistently do take. As the co-president of FASO, I can’t say how many members of the organization that I have talked to have said, ‘If this course is offered next semester, I would take it.’ It is something that people enjoy and people want to learn.”

And if the Filipino Language Program is shut down, there will be very limited opportunities for students to take it even if it is offered online.

“Currently if you look at the Filipino program at UW-Madison, it’s part of the Big 10 Alliance where the program is taught,” Woller said. “At Michigan and UW-Madison because it is part of the Big 10 Alliance, it can be taught online as well. And it is. So if the Filipino Language Program goes away from UW-Madison, they stop teaching it in person because they can’t afford the instructor anymore, which is what is going to probably happen. A lot of the students will have to go virtual. The issue with that is the University of Michigan could only take so many students. If they only have one lecturer who can work on all of this stuff, if you then give them the 15-18 students who we have at UW-Madison on line and they already have X number od students, some of the students who are taking the class at UW-Madison are not going to be able to learn the language anymore. That’s not to say that Michigan isn’t a great university. It is. They are absolutely amazing. And they have a great teacher there. But they can only take so many students. It means that we are going to lose some people along the way. And that is something that we are really trying to figure out how do we best handle that situation.”

The Filipino Language Program is a relatively small part of the UW-Madison’s budget.

“The current understanding that we have is for Filipino Language to pay for an instructor to teach Levels 1 and 2, we would need $67,000. And we would have to have that for every year. So to have a teacher teach Levels 1 and 2 of Tagalog for one year is $67,000. That’s ball park. We talked to some people at the university on maybe creating an endowment. And that number is a lot higher. And so that’s a whole another conversation as well.”