I'm not sure of the particulars, but it looks like the Bowdoin Student Government passed two resolutions asking the administration to begin Arabic language instructions. Part of one bill says, "it is the opinion of BSG that the Academic Affairs division of the College should address these requests for the teaching of Arabic."
Obviously I'm impressed that the student body is pushing their administration in their desire to expand the range of languages taught. And no matter what your political views are, I would hope most people realize that knowledge of Arabic today is as important to U.S. policy as Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, French and other world languages.
And while we're at it, we shouldn't forget Persian (Iran), Kurdish (Northern Iraq) and Urdu (Pakistan) either - I think we really do want to try to understand what's going on in these regions as well.