“What Americans don’t know about foreign languages, cultures, and histories, has — and will — hurt us,” assert Glenn C. Altschuler, Professor of American Studies at Cornell University, and David Wippman, President of Hamilton College. “Funding for such efforts, which has never been adequate, has declined precipitously in recent years, putting the country’s national security and economic competitiveness at risk. It will take a major public-private effort to fill the void.”
Two pieces of legislation — Title VI of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958 (renamed the Higher Education Act in 1965), supplemented by the Fulbright-Hays Act of 1961, encouraged foreign language acquisition and overseas study. But funding has been cut almost in half since 2010. Even before that, academia seriously cut back on regional studies, meaning Americans assigned to Iraq and Afghanistan lacked basic cultural literacy, which seriously “hampered our ability to collect intelligence on the growing insurgency there.” Over 300 million Chinese students are studying English, while only 200,000 American students are studying Chinese.
“It’s time for the Department of Education, colleges and universities, foundations, and major corporations to collaborate to provide the resources for a 21st century area studies renaissance. Title VI provides the template. The prospect of continued global leadership by the United States rests on bi-partisan support for far more extensive use of it,” the authors conclude in their piece for The Hill.