POINTS OF LEVERAGE AN AGENDA FOR A NATIONAL FOUNDATION FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00530R000802120001-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 155
• Document Creation Date: December 23, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 13, 2013
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: January 1, 1986
• Content Type: MISC

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POINTS OF LEVERAGE
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RICHARD D. LAMBERT
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\ POINTS OF LEVERAGE
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Copies of this report may be obtained from:
Publications Office
Social Science Research Council
605 Third Avenue
New York, NY 10158
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POINTS OF LEVERAGE
An Agenda for a National Foundation
for International Studies
Richard D. Lambert
SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
NEW YORK
1986
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Printed in the United States of America
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Preface
In late 1984, the Smithsonian Institution hosted a dinner in
Washington, D.C. to discuss what might be done to stabilize long-
term federal support for international studies and foreign language
training. Subsequently, a smaller group of educators and foundation
officers gathered to initiate specific activities based on the recom-
mendations advanced during this dinner. For the persons involved,
the issues were not new. Many had, in one forum or another, par-
ticipated in similar discussions many times. Some had written on the
issue at hand and others had been active in establishing study groups
and committees and councils whose work bore on the adequacy of
existing programs in foreign language training and in area and in-
ternational studies. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that this dis-
cussion, like so many before it, led quickly to the conclusion that the
international challenges facing the society are inadequately and in
some instances ineptly serviced by the existing federal arrangements
for support of foreign and international studies.
A general plan emerged. It was suggested that improvement in
these matters might be served by presenting for public debate the
case for a National Foundation for Foreign Languages and Interna-
tional Studies, modeled on such similar successful national agencies
as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National
Endowment for the Arts, and the National Science Foundation. The
group was emboldened in this direction by the frequency with
which the idea of a National Foundation has been raised in congres-
sional circles and among some federal agencies. A two-stage pro-
gram was decided upon.
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First, to advance public discussion and legislative attention, the
group agreed that it would be useful to prepare an outline of the
actual legal form that a National Foundation might take. Through
the good offices of the Association of American Universities the
task was undertaken, resulting in the AAU report To Strengthen the
Nation's Investment in Foreign Languages and International Stud-
ies: A Legislative Proposal to Create a National Foundation for
Foreign Languages anthInternational Studies, published in October
1986, and available from the AAU office.
Second, a legislative proposal, however valuable in its own
terms, was not thought to discharge fully the responsibility of those
who wished to present before the public the case for a new National
Foundation. More extended analysis and justification was needed,
not unlike that represented in Science: The Endless Frontier, the
critical document published in 1945 by the U.S. Office of Scientific
Research and Development that was so instrumental in explaining
the national need for the National Science Foundation in the
immediate postwar years.
The foundations represented at the meeting which launched the
present effort felt it would be useful to commission a document
self-consciously modeled on Science: The Endless Frontier, and
turned for this task to Richard D. Lambert, a sociologist at the
University of Pennsylvania who had recently led the team that
prepared Beyond Growth: The Next Stage in Language and Area
Studies (Association of American Universities, 1984). Five founda-
tions provided support: The Carnegie Corporation of New York, the
Ford Foundation, the Exxon Education Foundation, the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Consultants
were asked to prepare background papers. Particularly helpful were
those prepared by Elinor Barber, Warren (Jim) Haas, Rose Hayden,
Harold Jacobson, Steve Kobrin, Ivo Lederer, Gene Lyons, and Cassie
Pyle. The Social Science Research Council served as a secretariat
and prepared the report for publication. The views expressed in the
report are those of the author and not necessarily those of the
funders, the consultants, or the Council.
The result of these efforts is before you. Points of Leverage,
although the work and responsibility of its author, is an essay which
reflects and represents a broad current of concern. The intent of
Richard Lambert's essay is no more, but no less, than that of
presenting for public discussion and debate the rationale for a
National Foundation for Foreign Languages and International Stud-
ies. It is the belief of those who sponsored this report that Richard
Lambert has done this task well.
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The next step is self-evident?wide consultation, informed
debate, and the representation of citizen views to members of
Congress and the executive branch. To facilitate public discussion
and education, the Coalition for the Advancement of Foreign
Language and International Studies (CAFLIS) has been formed, with
offices in Suite 730, One Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C. 20036.
The task of the Coalition is to insure that interested organizations
and individuals have full opportunity to voice their views. Those
who have formed the Coalition take for granted that whether there
should be a National Foundation, and, if so, what form it should
take, are decisions to be made by the political process. Points of
Leverage, and the larger effort of which it is a central part, is
presented in the expectation that it will inform citizen views, the
resulting public debate and discussion, and the eventual judgment
to be made by the Congress of the United States.
KENNETH PREWITT
The Rockefeller Foundation
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Contents
Preface, by Kenneth Prewitt
1 The Challenge of Internationalization
and the Response
1
Expansion 1
Response 2
Contradictions, Overlaps, Gaps 3
Statement of Purpose 5
2 Foreign Language Competency 9
A National Foundation for
International Studies 10
The Agenda 12
Needs and Use Surveys 13
Pilot Programs 14
A Common Metric 15
Necessary Prior Research 18
A National Foreign Language
Resource Center 22
Research and Materials 23
Training 24
Diffusion and Articulation 24
Evaluation 25
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3 International Expertise in Business 27
Foreign Language Competencies 31
The Need 31
A Business Specific Foreign Language
Agenda 33
Training of International Business Specialists 38
Content and Curriculum 38
Organizational Issues 40
Sources of Funding 45
Internationalizing General Business Education 46
4 The Training of Academic Specialists 51
Academically Trained Language and
Area Specialists 53
Language Training 56
A Common Metric 56
Higher-Level Language Skills 57
Skill Attrition, Skill Maintenance, and
Skill Upgrading 59
"Endangered Species" Languages 59
Area Training 61
Fellowship Support 61
Disciplinary Distribution 63
Language and Area Studies Centers 65
5 International Information Flows 69
Translation 73
Collective Information Services 77
Business-Academic Links in International
Information Flows 79
Large-Scale International Data Sets 82
Libraries 85
The Scale of International Collections 85
Collaborative Efforts among Libraries 88
6 Research 91
Client-Targeted Research 94
Topically Directed Research for
More General Use 95
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Investigator-Driven Research 100
Unrestricted Research Support 100
Regranting Programs 103
7 Overseas Linkages 109
The Functions of International
Exchanges and Training 115
Language Study Abroad 117
Foreign Experience and the Training of
International Business Executives 119
Overseas Training and Research of
Area Specialists 121
Students 121
Established Specialists 123
Overseas Research for the Disciplines
and Professions 124
8 International Education for the Successor
Generation
131
The Individual Student 137
Collegiate Level 139
Foreign Language Teaching at the
precollegiate Level 144
Substantive International Studies
at the Pre-Collegiate Level 147
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Chapter 1
The Challenge of
Internationalization and
the Response
EXPANSION
Before World War II, the United States was an essentially insular
country; international affairs were marginal to most of American
life. Since that time, more and more sectors of our economy and
our society have developed substantial?and growing?interna-
tional dimensions. Whether we like it or not ? and not all of the
consequences are benign?our center of gravity has, in many
aspects, moved to the global system. Foreign trade has become an
increasingly important component of our economy. American
companies export and import goods, manufacture them in plants
abroad, enter into contracts to construct buildings, plants, roads,
and the like, license technology, franchise everything from
hamburgers to hotels, offer financial services and insurance, lend
money to governments and private firms, sell services such as
advertising and business consulting. They move huge sums of
money hourly in the world capital market so as not to be
whiplashed by international fluctuations in the value of the
dollar. The inflow of foreign investment helps manage our
deficit, and transnationally dispersed manufacturing systems
muddy the distinction between domestic and foreign companies.
Wage scales in Korea, Mexico, Taiwan, and Hong Kong depress
those in the United States. We are engaged in complex alterna-
tive trade systems in which commodities- flow in intricate
multinational barter exchanges.
1
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Few days go by without U.S. involvement in a political crisis
in yet another country previously on the periphery of our
national attention. With increasing frequency, the internal and
international conflicts of other countries intrude into the domes-
tic politics and media of the United States. The invasion of
Grenada played on home television like an episode of Dallas.
Hijackers in 'Beirut directed their drama to the American living
room audience. A two-and-a-half-minute clip from a BBC film
showed on NBC helped to generate a billion-dollar American
government relief effort for Ethiopia and a $70 million show
business blitz to raise money for the same purpose. Our educa-
tional institutions, our scientists, our churches, our cultural
organizations?museums, orchestras, theater, film?now flow
across national boundaries almost as easily and as frequently as
they used to move across state boundaries.
RESPONSE
The American response to the internationalization of impor-
tant aspects of our society has been characteristically profuse,
multicentric, and immensely inventive. Municipalities and cham-
bers of commerce vie with one another to become "international
cities" or "favored nations," investing large sums of money,
energy, and hype. Our churches serve their expanded foreign
constituencies by satellite telecommunication and transnational
personal ministries. Large companies have become multination-
als or have developed extensive international divisions in their
home offices. There are some 2 million Americans living abroad,
and annually about four million trips abroad taken for business
purposes. Last year some 12 million Americans traveled abroad
for business or pleasure. There are 27,000 Americans studying
abroad and 343,000 foreign students registered at American
universities and colleges. Annually on the Fulbright program
alone, approximately 400 to 450 American students travel abroad
for study or research, and 1,000 foreign students come to the
United States. So far the Fulbright program has made it possible
for approximately 54,000 Americans to go abroad and 100,000
foreigners to come to the United States under its auspices.
Natural science and medical research have become international
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unuilenge of Internationalization 3
and collaborative. Our physicists operate cyclotrons 'and tele-
scopes that are jointly owned by a number of nations, and highly
successful programs are sustained with respect to meteorological
and other matters relating to the biosphere. Internationally
coauthored engineering and technology-related articles as a per-
centage of institutionally coauthored articles have risen from
13% in 1976 to 16% in 1980. In 1980, more than 40% of all
jointly authored articles in mathematics were international
collaborative efforts.
In education, 39 states have organized programs to promote
international education, and scattered throughout its various
departments and agencies, the federal government has 196 sep-
arate programs in support of foreign language and international
studies. The major professional association linking American
business schools has included international business training in
every degree requirement as part of its accreditation criteria.
Foreign language requirements and enrollments, after an omi-
nous sag, are climbing again. At our major universities there are
71 federally supported graduate-level programs producing ad-
vanced specialists who are expert on one or another of the
world's regions. Many colleges have developed substantial study-
abroad programs, and colleges and high schools have introduced?
global perspectives into their curricula. Some universities have
engaged in long-term service to economic and technical devel-
opment in the third world. And our federal government has
erected an elaborate set of educational institutions of its own to
train people for international missions and occupations unique
to the government.
CONTRADICTIONS, OVERLAPS, GAPS
Viewed from a national perspective, it is inevitable that the
separate objectives and trajectories of American responses to
internationalization would not produce a coherent, integrated,
balanced, and fully effective national strategy. For instance, we
are reducing the number of representatives of American business
and of the American press stationed abroad just as our enmesh-
ment in the world system is expanding exponentially. Large
corporations are able to build international expertise in-house,
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-1r r Luiv L., tJr 1_,D V .11,.t1l.se
but medium- and small-scale companies cannot afford to hire
international specialists, and they have nowhere to go for the
information needed to operate successfully abroad. Just as our
need for direct knowledge of multiple levels of other societies
increases, we become more dependent upon foreigners and
compradors for that information. And a number of our key
abstracting and scientific information storage organizations are
being quietly bought up by foreign firms, speeding immensely
the outflow of our advanced technology.
In foreign languages, we spend almost nothing on providing
foreign language training for English-speaking adult Americans
who may need to use another language in their work. Yet we
spend millions to serve the language needs of immigrant popu-
lations whose foreign language skills we are busily trying to
eradicate. We spend billions of dollars annually to train,millions
of American students in one or two years of French or German?
languages of countries that are no longer our primary trading
partners or cultural models?without having any way of know-
ing what level of competency those students have attained. We
are fairly sure, however, that the skills they have attained would
be barely enough for survival if they were called upon to use
them. Moreover, we have no idea?indeed, no way to measure?
what students retain of those competencies as adults, although
our suspicion is that it is close to zero.
In education, we provide federal funds for the training of
specialists on the non-Western world but subsidize the research
only of those studying the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. We
have no way of directing at least part of the research of language
and area specialists into issues of importance to public policy.
We put federal money into pilot projects in international educa-
tion at the undergraduate level and for mixing business and
international education, but we have no way of knowing which,
if any, of the experiments work or establish permanent roots.
After 30 years of federal support for campus-based international
studies, we are still in the "pilot project" stage. We subsidize the
creation of durable crossnational links for natural scientists, but
not for social scientists and humanists. We have created, at
taxpayers' expense, three parallel education systems for the
training of international specialists?one on our campuses, one
within the Department of State, one within the Department of
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unailenge of Internationalization
Defense?and they have almost nothing to do with each other.
Indeed, in general we have insulated from each other the inter-
national aspects of our major institutions?government, busi-
ness, academic, media?and as a consequence their strengths are
not mutually supportive. The establishment of overseas centers
for research and training of American scholars has roughly
followed the availability in particular countries of so-called
"excess currencies," with little thought given as to whether the
resultant geogrphic distribution of such centers maximally
serves the national interest. And money for the support of such
centers has to be bootlegged under appropriation categories not
specifically designated by Congress for that purpose.
We have no national policy on the accumulation and diffu-
sion of scientific and scholarly information, and gaps and over-
laps abound. We have funded the accumulation in 23 university
libraries of everything published in India and Pakistan, yet we
have put almost no national resources into library collections
with respect to other countries, nor into preserving the materials
we bought previously that are now disintegrating on library
shelves. And aside from the major university research libraries
whose collections are available primarily to those affiliated with
those universities, only the Library of Congress has an equiva-
lent international collection that serves the general public.
Widely available collections specifically serving the needs of
American business are almost nonexistent. Very substantial
specialized collections within the federal mission-oriented agen-
cies like the Department of Agriculture, the Agency for Interna-
tional Development, and the Department of Defense are not
generally available for public use, although they are assembled
with taxpayers' money.
STATEMENT OF PURPOSE
After 40 years of spasmodic and uncoordinated response to
the demands of the increasing internationalization of our soci-
ety, the time has come to put in place a National Foundation for
International Studies to make that response more effective by
(1) placing the various developments within some overall frame-
work of national needs; (2) identifying redundancies, misdirec-
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13 UP Lt. V CiViLTE
tions, and important gaps; (3) shifting existing resources and
marshaling new ones from the various sectors of our society to
better meet those needs; (4) assembling and disseminating data?
both serial and ad hoc?essential for national planning; and
(5) setting criteria and evaluating the effectiveness of programs
drawing upon national resources. Participating in that Founda-
tion, both in funding and in management, would be the segments
of our society already investing heavily in our response to
internationalization: various levels and agencies of government,
business, the private foundations, and universities. The Founda-
tion must serve not just as a granting agency responding to
external requests for funding, but as an initiator and imple-
menter of actions that are essential to the national interest.
Moreover, it must serve as an active coordinator and facilitator,
since many of the activities and programs with which it would
be concerned would take place independently in various govern-
ment agencies or private organizations.
Indeed, it should be stressed at the outset that the proposed
Foundation should not be viewed as the only organization, public
or private, that would be supporting international studies. As
will be noted throughout, the ample fruits of American pluralism
so evident in so many aspects of our society?the rich growth of
inventiveness and institution building; the remarkable expan-
sion of internationally focused interests and competencies
among talented scholars and educators in the humanities, the
social sciences, and the applied disciplines, as well as in leaders
in business and the professions; the proliferation of programs and
funding sources?are evident in abundance in international
studies as well. One measure of the success of the Foundation
would be the continued vitality of this rich resource base built up
over the past decades. Accordingly, we are not recommending a
single national policy, but a major new national response. It
should be clear that while some of the activities relevant to that
response would fall within the domain of the proposed Founda-
tion, some would not. At frequent intervals throughout this
report, this distinction will be carefully drawn and its implica-
tions made quite specific.
The primary substantive focus of the Foundation would be
the interface between government, business, and the scientific
and educational community as they relate to international
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unuilenge of Internationalization 7
affairs. One of its first activities should be to determine a
national agenda in meeting the increasing challenge of interna-
tionalization. As a contribution to that end, this report proposes
a set of priority issues to indicate the domains that might lie
within the Foundation's responsibilities, together with some
specific programmatic suggestions about where reallocation of
existing resources or the provision of new funding might maxi-
mally serve the national interest. Emphasis will be given to
problems that have arisen in the course of 40 years' growth,
including totally neglected or underdeveloped areas that require
attention. The spirit of the Foundation should be parsimoni-
ous?saving money as well as allocating additional money;
empirical?continuously measuring the results of programs
against the common purpose; and pluralistic?coordinating a
wide variety of highly dispersed activities and spreading the costs
equitably among the various levels of government and relevant
sectors of society.
The following pages will address a series of interrelated
challenges posed by our society's increased internationalization,
and will recommend steps the proposed Foundation might take
to help meet them:
1. improving the foreign language competencies of important
segments of our population;
2. enhancing the capacity of American business to be compet-
itive in an increasingly internationalized economy;
3. shoring up and improving our cadres of foreign affairs spe-
cialists;
4. expanding international communication and the gathering,
management, and analysis of information from abroad;
5. building durable linkages and opportunities for overseas
sojourns for those engaged in international studies; and
6. internationalizing the education of substantial portions of
the successor generation.
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Chapter 2
Foreign Language Competency
There is nothing more damaging to the American capacity to
cope in a global society than the abysmally low level of foreign
language competency of most Americans. Most of us are de-
voutly monolingual. This is not for want of investing money and
time in trying to get American school children to learn a foreign
language. Our annual investment in teaching foreign language in
our schools is more than $2 billion. Millions of students study
French, Spanish, or German for at least two years, and often for
four or six years, of their high school and college education. And
the number of students enrolled in foreign language classes, after
a period of decline, has begun to rise again. Many colleges and
universities are reinstituting a foreign language requirement for
admission or graduation, and several of our largest states are
proposing to require foreign language instruction for all high
school students.
The trouble is that while we invest an immense amount of
student and teacher time and huge amounts of money in foreign
language teaching, survey after survey documents how inade-
quate our current foreign language capacity is: the skills it
imparts are too low and too scholastic; the languages taught were
appropriate for the nineteenth century? but not for the twenty-
first; the ways of measuring skill acquisition are outmoded; the
levels of instruction are totally unarticulated, so that the cumu-
lative aspect of skill acquisition by a student is unattended and
accidental; and no one knows or seems concerned about how
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much of early foreign language training survives to be available
for adult use.
This is not to criticize the many hard-working teachers and
students now involved in foreign language education. It is
various aspects of the system as a whole that present the
problem: too limited time given to language acquisition; too
many students dragging their feet in learning a skill whose
utility to them is, at best, unclear; the low average level of
foreign language competency of too many teachers; the compart-
mentalization of instruction by semesters and between primary,
secondary, and tertiary schools; the lack of a way to measure
well just how much competency a student really has acquired.
Thus, while we welcome the growing foreign language course
enrollments and requirements as a recognition of the importance
of foreign language competency, putting more and more students
through, and pouring more and more resources into, the current
foreign language teaching system will not solve the national
problem.
A NATIONAL FOUNDATION FOR INTERNATIONAL
STUDIES
Hence, before we plunge into an expansion of a system that
now gives millions of students a little foreign language training
and relatively few a genuinely usable competency, a major shift
in emphasis, organization, and teaching technology is needed.
Otherwise, we will look back after another decade of spending
increasing amounts of student time and scarce national re-
sources on teaching foreign languages, and we will find ourselves
just where we are now: all but a few of us able to communicate
only in English in a polyglot world. We need a freshly thought-
through national foreign language agenda and a redirection of
national will and resources to improve the system.
A National Foundation for International Studies, or for that
matter the federal government as a whole, can play only a
marginal role in that process. The administration of foreign
language teaching policy is the responsibility of the state or the
local school district, and almost all of the billions of dollars spent
in the United States on foreign language instruction appears on
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?eign Language Competency 11
state budgets. There is, nevertheless, an important collective
responsibility at the national level that can assist in making the
marginal investment and providing the necessary intellectual
catalyst that a major shift in national policy demands. The high
degree of dispersion of foreign language instruction throughout
our thousands of school districts makes it unlikely that such a
transformation will well up spontaneously from the thousands of
classrooms. There are some things, such as setting national
standards, that must be done centrally or they will not be done at
all. Thus there must be a national as well as a state effort to
strengthen our foreign language teaching and learning system.
An attempt to create a coordinated national agenda comes at
a propitious time; there are many, many separate initiatives
afoot to work at pieces of that agenda. For instance, 32 of the
major national language education associations have grouped
together into a joint National Committee for Languages to
develop and work for a national agenda. The major private
foundations have begun to invest in a transformation of the
language teaching system. The Exxon Education Foundation, the
Ford Foundation, and the Pew Memorial Trust are funding a
National Foreign Language Resource Center to help create a
national agenda and to try to make progress on pivotal items on
that agenda. With the support of a number of private and public
funders, plus monies contributed by school systems throughout
the country, a system of academic alliances has been created to
bring together language teachers and administrators from high
schools, colleges and universities throughout the country to help
improve foreign language instruction. The Rockefeller Founda-
tion has provided $1.5 million in fellowship support to send high
school teachers of foreign languages abroad to upgrade their own
language competencies.
Meanwhile, the federal government has been funding work on
the improvement of language teaching capacity in the less com-
monly taught languages through Title VI of the Higher Education
Act (HEA), and in the reauthorized (1986) version of that act,
Congress has authorized the creation of two to five centers to
improve language pedagogy. The National Institute of Education
included improvement of foreign language instruction in its re-
cent grants to establish major centers for research on bilingual
education. The National Security Agency has funded develop-
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ment efforts in foreign language pedagogy, particularly in the use
of high technology in language teaching. The Department of De-
fense is considering how it may help in the development of our
national capacity for instruction in the languages spoken in the
Pacific Rim countries. The Education for Economic Security Act
(PI. 98-377) provides $5 million for the improvement of instruc-
tion in the critical languages. A number of bills aimed at this same
general purpose have been or are about to be introduced in Con-
gress: For example, Senator Simon's Foreign Language for Na-
tional Security Act of 1984 and Congressman Panetta's Foreign
Language and National Security Act of 1985.
These many initiatives in the improvement of the national
capacity to teach foreign languages are most encouraging. How-
ever, right at the beginning of this upsurge of interest and
investment, it is extremely important that a central planning,
initiating, coordinating, and implementing organization be put
in place to assure that the scattered efforts in the area of foreign
language education are cumulative, that they address the central
agenda issues, and, above all, that they are effective and represent
the best use of our national resources. This is particularly true of
the many federal funding programs, but it is equally true of those
in the private sector.
Language instruction has become an area in which the
American penchant for pluralism has become a vice. To effect
the changes desperately needed in foreign language instruction,
where the dispersion of control is already so great, a guiding
intelligence at the core is needed. Assuming such a catalytic role
in the development of a more effective system of foreign lan-
guage instruction would be a natural first priority for the pro-
posed National Foundation for International Studies.
Recommendation: A primary function of the Foundation should
be to provide central planning, coordination, and the necessary
marginal resources to improve the nation's foreign language
education system.
THE AGENDA
Where are the points of leverage for change in our foreign
language instructional system? How can an immense, highly
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dispersed foreign language education system begin to transform
itself? What can a centralized effort accomplish? How can the
various initiatives now under way be coordinated to make a
major difference? How can the collective national interest be
expressed as a determinant of priority areas of development?
How can we measure the effectiveness of efforts to introduce
change? In short, what should be the agenda for a national
Foundation in the strengthening of our national capacity to teach
foreign languages?
Needs and Use Surveys
The first agenda item is an action plan that starts with a
point of view. Stated simply, the national interest is concerned
not with the language instruction system per se, but with the
production and maintenance of usable foreign language compe-
tencies among adults, particularly those occupational groups
that need, or should need, them in their work. We add the phrase
"should need" because it can be reasonably argued that, from the
perspective of the national interest, some groups, such as inter-
nationally oriented business leaders, foreign service officers, staff
members of key congressional foreign affairs committees, mili-
tary attaches, or technical assistance workers, may need more
foreign language competency than we currently demand of them.
By focusing on adult needs for and use of foreign language
skills, we mean to dramatize the point that the national payoff
for the current large investment of time and money in foreign
language instruction must be measured against adult use. If, for
instance, very few people get enough skill to use it in real-life
situations, or if whatever skill they learn in school has totally
evaporated by the time they become fully functioning adults,
then the system must be changed. The trouble is that we know
almost nothing about the current or the most desirable adult use
of foreign language skills in the United States. Establishing what
adult foreign language skills are?perhaps, at the outset, only for
key occupational groups?and how those skills are used is a
necessary first step in the reorientation of our foreign language
instructional system. The technology for such adult needs- and
use surveys is well established in Europe and elsewhere, and
needs only to be adapted for use in the United States.
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Recommendation: The Foundation should cause surveys to be
made of current adult use of foreign languages, particularly in
key occupations in which foreign language use would be most
productive. It should seek to determine how the current use
pattern differs from optimal use, from the perspective of the
national interest, and to utilize the conclusions of these surveys
as guidelines for establishing priorities in an enhanced foreign
language education system.
Pilot Programs
Focusing on foreign language skills held by adults dramatizes
another difference between our own society and that of others.
We concentrate virtually all of our foreign language instruction
on young people enrolled in our formal educational system. In
other societies, there are facilities for adults ,to learn other
languages as the need for them becomes apparent. Here, adults'
only recourse is a few proprietary language schools, and these
tend to concentrate on a single teaching method, to teach only
the first levels of language competency, and to cover only the
most commonly taught languages. Our formal educational insti-
tutions, even in their continuing-education divisions, provide
very little foreign language instruction for adults. When they do
give instruction, they tend to force it into the same time frame,
teaching style, and pacing of regular school classes, while the
needs and timing of adults are often quite different. Moreover,
we have virtually no facilities for maintaining or refreshing
language skills once they are acquired.
While the success of fresh educational ventures must depend
upon their long-term economic viability, the current organiza-
tion of our language teaching system and the fiscal constraints
that colleges and universities now face make it difficult for these
institutions to take the risks involved in experimenting with the
creation of new teaching facilities aimed specifically at adult
audiences. What may fill a national need in the long term is not
tried by individual institutions for want of venture capital.
However, since the collective, national need for language teach-
ing facilities aimed particularly at adults is so clear, a few
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Foreign Language Competency 15
individual institutions should be given the entrepreneurial sup-
port to develop model programs for this purpose.
Recommendation: The Foundation should support the creation
of experimental pilot programs in a few college or university
continuing-education programs to give foreign language instruc-
tion to adults. Of particular interest would be programs geared
to the special pace and learning styles of adults, programs aimed
at skill maintenance and rejuvenation, and programs providing
instruction in the less commonly taught languages.
A Common Metric
An equally important agenda item for the Foundation is the
creation and diffusion of a common metric measuring, in an
objective, consistent fashion, the degree of proficiency a person?
student or adult?has in a foreign language. This metric should
be equivalent across all languages and be used to certify general
competency in all jobs for which a knowledge of a foreign
language is relevant: business, government, education, journal-
ism, and so on. In addition, the Foundation should assist in the
diffusion of the metric throughout the society so that its use
becomes truly universal, and a measurement of proficiency in
one language or occupation is equivalent to another. Our current
metric for the measurement of language competency?the length
of time a language was studied when first acquired?is not
sufficient. A new metric must be established that expresses
language competency in terms of an individual's ability to use
the language in increasingly demanding real- life situations with
increasing effectiveness. The metric must measure genuine
proficiency in the language, not just time spent in learning it.
The importance of establishing a common metric cannot be
exaggerated. For one thing, only with the widespread application
of a common metric will we have any reliable way of expressing
the real demands on foreign language skill of particular jobs.
Once developed, the common metric can be adopted as a crite-
rion of employment in language-relevant government and busi-
ness positions. This in turn would dramatize to students the
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16 POINTS OF LEVERAGE
utility of a foreign language competency for future employment,
providing the motivation for foreign language learning so sorely
needed in our educational system.
The development and adoption of a common metric will
have other beneficial effects as well. Only with the adoption of a
common metric will we begin to be able to measure the effec-
tiveness of all or parts of our foreign language teaching system.
Only with the adoption of a common metric will individual
students or adults have any idea of how much language compe-
tency they do or do not possess, compared either with others like
them or with the goal of full proficiency. Only with the adoption
of a common metric will we begin to know which of the various
language teaching methods works best for what kind of student
and in what kind of learning situation.
Fortunately, over the past decade a fair amount of work
toward establishing this common metric has been done. A
measurement scale ranging from 0 for no competency to 5 for
educated native-speaker competency, with half-point incre-
ments in between, was developed in the federal government's
language teaching programs?first the Foreign Service Institute,
then the Department of Defense and other agencies. Steps are
currently being taken to make such a scale applicable for
employment, job qualification, and promotion in as many federal
agencies as possible. Further, a joint government-academic effort
has been launched under the aegis of the American Council of
Teachers of Foreign Languages to adapt the metric to the aca-
demic learning situation.
As this worthwhile effort toward the establishment of a
universally used metric has progressed, a number of crucial
issues have arisen that must be faced. For one thing, the scale has
to be expanded at its lower end to provide rating gradations fine
enough at the beginning stages of learning to measure the small
incremental increases in language proficiency that are character-
istic of academic classroom situations.
Second, the scale works best for speaking and for listening
comprehension, skills that are best measured in face-to-face
interviews. Making the metric equally effective for reading and
writing skills remains a challenge.
Third, as the metric expands into the difficult languages,
particularly those with especially complex orthographies such as
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Foreign Language Competency 17
Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic, some of the criteria used for
dealing with the European languages that are most like our own
have to be specially adapted to their needs.
Fourth, the development of proficiency testing strategies that
are consistent and valid in a large number and variety of testing
situations is a major challenge just beginning to be faced. What
works well in a few tightly controlled testing situations with an
experienced staff is easily corrupted when large numbers of
people are to be tested, and when the staff administering and
judging the tests have widely varying amounts of experience.
Transforming pilot programs in applying the common metric
into institutionalized, large-scale programs inevitably runs into a
series of major problems: inventing new ways of testing a
person's language competency that measure genuine proficiency
but are relatively immune to variations in the ability and
perspectives of those doing the rating; developing tests that can
be administered to large numbers of people at the same time;
providing training for substantial numbers of professionals to
administer and interpret accurately the test results; constructing
a national network of testing sites to make proficiency certifica-
tion universally available?these are major challenges yet to be
faced.
And when these challenges have been met, getting the use of
the metric to be near-universal in as many sections of the
population as possible, particularly among major employers such
as international business and government, is a difficult market-
ing task that will take years to accomplish.
With all of its difficulties, retaining momentum in the
movement toward a common metric is essential for the devel-
opment of a meaningful national policy in foreign language
learning and use. Without such a metric we will continue to
have no way of measuring performance against objectives, no
way of distinguishing excellence in teaching ,from pro forma,
low-quality pedagogy, no way of setting up occupational quali-
fications that can recognize and utilize foreign language skills,
and no way of moving language-competent individuals from one
job to another with a meaningful certification of their skill level
in that language. It is, indeed, an indication of the non-goal-
oriented nature of our language teaching system, and the low
value that we place on foreign language competency, that we
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18 POINTS OF LEVERAGE
have not created such a metric before. The further development
and diffusion of the common metric should be a major goal of the
proposed Foundation.
Recommendation: The Foundation should continue and expand
the efforts already under way toward the creation and adoption
of a reliable national metric for foreign language proficiency in
as many languages as possible, and in as many employment
situations as possible. Support should be provided to create an
effective national network of test sites and to train and certify
the professionals who would administer and interpret the tests.
NECESSARY PRIOR RESEARCH
Many of the prerequisites to an improvement in our foreign
language teaching system are not ready on the shelf just waiting
to be applied. A number of them require prior research, but that
research must be highly focused, highly applied in its orienta-
tion. It should lead directly to the preparation of new teaching
materials or pedagogical practices. As we will note, such applied
research in the field of language pedagogy is precisely the kind of
inquiry that the existing national programs in support of re-
search, both public and private, tend not to reach. First, however,
what are some of the items on the research agenda that are
important to the development of our national foreign language
policy?
, First, we need to develop criteria for evaluating the many
competing innovations in language pedagogy. Another revolu-
tionary teaching method?the monitor method, suggestopedia,
total physical response, to name just a few of the more recent
ones?seems to come along every year or so. We have no
systematic way of determining what works best with what kind
of student, at what level of instruction, and in what kind of
learning situation. It would seem that such information would
be essential for teachers or school administrators who are trying
to decide what works for them. However, such a methodology for
evaluating the effectiveness of language instructional programs
is not now available in even the most rudimentary form. At
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Foreign Language Competency 19
present, the foreign language field is decidedly nonempirical in
its decisions about the use of pedagogical techniques; this
situation must be changed.
Second, if we are to focus on adult language competencies,
then knowing something about the loss, retention, and rejuve-
nation of school-learned language skills would seem to be a
crucial ingredient in the formation of sensible policy. While in
the past two or three years, two major research projects have
developed?one in the private sector and one in the Department
of Defense?to discover something about the rate and pattern of
skill loss, we have a long way to go before sensible skill
maintenance and rejuvenation programs can be developed.
Third, most of the existing technology for foreign language
instruction is appropriate for the beginning and intermediate
competency levels. We must develop the capacity to train people
to a near-native level of competency in a foreign language, or
even the best-trained Americans will continue to be language
cripples, using their foreign language skills haltingly and inaccu-
rately. There are no materials available, nor even any general
pedagogical guidelines, for instruction in upper-level skills.
Fourth, much of the demand among adults for foreign lan-
guage competency?for instance, international business manag-
ers assigned abroad?is idiosyncratic, comes in fits and starts, and
may be highly specialized in purpose. This situation clearly calls
for the development of individualized and, to the extent possible,
self-instructional materials. However, our foreign language teach-
ing system tends to be classroom-oriented, with students sitting
together in a class and marching in step through a common set of
materials. Except for some commercially available materials that
are of uncertain quality, tend to be limited to the early stages of
language learning, and are concentrated in the most commonly
taught languages, self-instructional materials are not generally
available. Recently, a number of substantial efforts to remedy this
situation have been made by the National Association for Self-
Instructional Language Programs, by the Ohio State University,
and by the Foreign Service Institute. Research leading to the
development of materials and teaching strategies for individual-
ized or self-instructional materials is an important area for na-
tional investment.
Finally, language instruction lends itself well to automation
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LU POINTS OF LEVERAGE
of some of the teaching and testing processes. A major national
investment in the development of effective automated teaching
technology may help alleviate some of the problems of the
uneven quality of instruction in our highly dispersed language
teaching system. It can assist in the development of a common
metric and a viable testing network. It can help us create a more
individualized teaching system and make language instruction
more available to learners outside the classroom. Within the last
10 years there has been a flowering of research and experimen-
tation in the applicability of the newer high-technology teaching
devices to foreign language instruction, much of it funded by the
National Security Agency. What has been accomplished so far,
however, is just a beginning. With a few exceptions, application
of the newer technology tends to be limited to the most com-
monly taught languages, and to the early learning stages of those.
Some of the most promising developments are in the use of live
video programs picked up via satellite from broadcasts in the
Soviet Union and other countries. Research and development in
this area should be encouraged, and materials should be made
more widely available.
It is one of the peculiarities of the way in which support is
distributed throughout the government agencies?and until very
recently, private support in this area has been conspicuously
lacking?that there is no program under which the funding of
these kinds of research comfortably fits. Or rather, it is more
accurate to say that while the government has invested substan-
tial sums for research on foreign language instruction, the money
has almost all been spent on the improvement of teaching within
the government's own language teaching programs. The govern-
ment has invested very little in the diffusion of the knowledge
gained within that system to the nongovernment world, nor has
it been engaged in supporting research to improve the national
language teaching system as a whole. And no one else has moved
in to fill the vacuum. In this regard, it is useful to quote the
recent findings in Beyond Growth: The Next Stage in Language
and Area Studies:
The private-foundations have, by and large, not been inter-
ested in investing in the research and development recently,
there has been almost no place to go for such support. The
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Foreign Language Competency 21
International Education Program of the Department of Educa-
tion has some research funds under Title VI, but they have
generally amounted to less than $1 million annually and must
also be used to support all other evaluative and prescriptive
research on area studies. Moreover, in part because of the
limitation of funds, the International Education Program's ten-
dency has been to fund small, isolated projects; larger, longer-
term ventures that might have greater impact cannot be sup-
ported.
Research on language pedagogy has not been part of the
mission of any of the other granting agencies of the federal
government. The Education Division of the National Endow-
ment for the Humanities (NEH) has supported the development
of teaching materials?even this seems to be coming to an
end?and the training of language teachers on a pilot program
basis, but neither the Education nor the Research Divisions of
the NEH can support basic pedagogical research for the trans-
formation of the field. The Research Division of NEH does
include research related to language learning, but to qualify for
funding under NEH's research program, work must be on
literature or linguistic features of the language, not language
learning itself, and, in particular, not on anything measuring
language proficiency or evaluating the effectiveness of alterna-
tive methods of language teaching. Even though almost half of
the humanists on our campuses are engaged in language instruc-
tion, as a research topic, language instruction is not a humanity!
Even when the staff of the NEH chooses to encourage the
submission of such projects, the screening committees tend to
weed them out. . . .
The National Science Foundation's (NSF) lingusitics section
might have been expected to be interested in language pedagogy,
but it is not. As in the NEH, the moment a research topic
becomes applied and particularly when it touches upon lan-
guage testing or pedagogical research, it falls outside of the
self-defined mission of the NSF. . . .
For most of its history, the Fund for Improvement of
Post-Secondary Education was not interested in language in-
struction. Although it is now interested?it has recently
awarded a grant for the creation of a major proficiency testing
center for the commonly taught languages?its funds are ex-
tremely limited. Moreover, it has the same bias as the NEH; it
will fund experimental action programs, but not the basic
research to inform those programs before they are created.
The National Institute of Education, which does fund ped-
agogical research and institution formation, has traditionally
limited itself to secondary and primary education, to the com-
monly taught languages, and to bilingual education. Moreover,
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LL ?UM/ 13 Vt. LtVEKAGE
that agency has had drastically reduced funding over the past
several years so that a new definition of scope is unlikely.
Recently, the National Security Agency has been awarding
funds for research on foreign language pedagogy. It has been
particularly active in promoting the use of high-technology
instrumentation in language instruction and in the establish-
ment of criteria for proficiency testing. . . .1
There have been some changes in this situation during the
past year. For instance, the National Institute of Education has
appended funding for research on second-language learning to a
recent grant for bilingual education research. But basically, the
situation described above still obtains. Support for research in
foreign language pedagogy falls between the cracks of federal
programs in support of research. Support of research on issues
such as those suggested earlier should provide a natural role for
the proposed Foundation.
Recommendation: The Foundation should provide sustained
funding for research and experimentation related to the im-
provement of foreign language pedagogy. First priority in that
research should be given to (I) evaluation technology to assess
the effectiveness of various teaching methodologies; (2) lan-
guage skill attrition, retention, and rejuvenation; (3) instruc-
tional strategies for upper-level skill acquisition; (4) individual-
ized and self-paced instruction; and (5) the application of
communications technology to language instruction.
A NATIONAL FOREIGN LANGUAGE RESOURCE
CENTER
The transformation of such a large and diffuse enterprise as
our national language teaching system is not likely to occur
without the assistance of one or more organizations whose
principal task is to carry out that transformation. Just casting
government and private funds widely on such an extensive sea
'Richard D. Lambert et al., Beyond Growth: The Next Stage in Language and
Area Studies (Washington, DC: Association of American Universities, 1984),
pp. 89-91.
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vuzeign Language Competency 23
will not accomplish the purpose. Nor will the traditional, rela-
tively passive role of government funding suffice. If major
changes in the national language teaching system are to occur,
more proactive programs, ones specifically created to effect
change, not just to support existing activities, must be developed.
What is needed is a national foreign language resource center to
serve as a catalyst in that transformation. Its tasks would be to
create, evaluate, and work for the adoption of satisfactory tech-
niques of language instruction capable of carrying a wide variety
,of learners to a -high enough level of competency to permit
genuine use. The functions of the center would be (1) carrying
out or commissioning the research and materials development
required for that transformation; (2) implementation of the
strategies that emerge from this research, particularly with
regard to training; (3) diffusion and articulation; and (4) evalua-
tion. In terms of audience, the center would serve the needs of
primary and secondary school teachers and administrators; col-
lege and university teachers providing language instruction as
part of the general education requirement; language teachers
training area specialists; language teachers for government em-
ployees; language teachers in proprietary institutions; and lan-
guage teachers of foreign business language.
Research and Materials
The research agenda of the center would parallel the items
listed above in the overall national agenda. We include under the
rubric of "research" the conduct of experimental classrooms to
ensure that theoretical findings are translated into actual peda-
gogical practice. Since not all of the requisite skills would be
gathered into the center, some of the necessary research would
be conducted in a more dispersed fashion at the major language
teaching institutions throughout the country, including those in
the federal government. With respect to research, in addition to
conducting some crucial work in-house, the center's functions
would also include setting a collective agenda for research
relating to effective language pedagogy, coordinating it, making
it cumulative, and ensuring that the research advances actual
classroom teaching and student learning.
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If a major advance in language pedagogy is to take place, the
center must be able not only to create new materials but also to
gather and collect feedback from the many dispersed innovators
now producing language teaching materials all over the country.
The need is particularly great where the preparation of these
materials is a cottage industry.
Training
Training, the first aspect of implementation, includes all of
the following priorities:
1. The center should develop a capacity to train teachers whose
education has been lingustics, the literature of the language,
or both. The pedagogical training envisioned would have to
be language-specific and geared as much to the linguistic
needs of American speakers as to the structure of the lan-
guage itself.
2. The center should create and administer intensive instruc-
tion programs for students enrolled in secondary schools and
colleges, as well as those in business and government. That
is, the center should offer intensive study "abroad" as an
alternative to extensive language programs. Another major
audience would be members of the lay public who wanted to
study a foreign language intensively and exclusively.
3. The center should act as an institution of last resort for
instruction in the truly scarce languages as universities
curtail their language and area studies programs, with all of
them tending to drop the same peripheral languages.
Diffusion and Articulation
Diffusion and articulation can be considered together, for we
need to think of ways to involve teachers at all levels of the
educational system in ongoing study of foreign language peda-
gogy and refinement of teaching techniques. The center would
put in place collaboratives that would enable professionals not
only to stay in touch with primary research, but also to make
contributions to the research agenda. A renewed sense of profes-
sional rigor would likely accompany the growth of greater
understanding of the teaching of foreign languages.
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Foreign Language Competency 25
Evaluation
The center would serve as an impartial evaluator of the
effectiveness of teaching programs and teaching methods for
different types of students, learning time required, and cost. It
would also serve as a major administration and validation center
for the common metric.
The creation of such a national foreign language resource
center by the Foundation would follow the model of the National
Institutes of Health centers, the regional centers established by
the National Institute of Education, or the collaborative science
centers established by the National Science Foundation. One
difference would be that they would be expected to gain
nonfederal support as well. Several of the private foundations?
Exxon, Ford, Pew?have already provided funds for the creation
and maintenance of such a center.
Recommendation: The Foundation should help create and sus-
tain a national foreign language resource center to assist in the
upgrading of the national foreign language teaching system by
conducting and coordinating the needed research; preparing
new teaching materials as needed; training teachers; adminis-
tering intensive teaching programs; providing instruction in
languages not taught elsewhere; articulating the various levels
of instruction; diffusing the results of research and experimen-
tation in new teaching technologies; evaluating teaching meth-
odologies and programs; and managing a national proficiency
test network to administer the common metric.
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Chapter 3
International Expertise in
Business
As a nation we are engaged in a struggle to establish a new
position in the world economy. The evidence of the deterioration
in our old position is all around us: huge trade deficits that
persist even when the value of the dollar subsides; the intrusion
into our economy of vast sums of volatile foreign capital; the
surrender in our own country of numerous product markets to
foreign producers; the loss of many of our traditional markets
overseas and our limited penetration of new ones; the decline in
the reputation of our manufactured goods for dependability; the
increasing emphasis on the export of raw materials (food, to-
bacco, lumber, oil) rather than manufactured goods?not long
ago a characteristic of developing countries. The well-being of a
generation of American citizens will depend on our capacity to
overcome these trends.
Part of that capacity is our ability as a nation to train future
generations of business leaders to cope more effectively in the
global economy. It is essential that we capture the rich
experience that American and non-American business leaders
have acquired in international business, that we codify it,
expand it, and translate it into a learning strategy so that we can
train American business leaders of the future to be even more
' effective in the conduct of our international business. At
'present, we have just begun this process; international business
training both within our corporations and on our campuses is
still largely a cottage industry. The proper mix between general
27
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business skills and knowledge of context and cultural differ-
ences; the refashioning of business skill instruction to make it
more relevant to international business; and the division of
labor and the interface between campus-based and intracorpora-
tion instruction have yet to be worked out. The bits and pieces,
fits and starts, waxing and waning, of corporate and university
experiments in this area have almost no relationship to each
other; much less do they come together into a coherent national
strategy. It is essential that business leaders and educators face
this challenge directly and develop a coherent national strategy
to meet it.
The need for a centrally developed national policy is urgent.
The national interest is not now being adequately served by the
sum of the policies of individual corporations and universities.
Waiting for an effective national strategy to emerge from the
separate decisions of thousands of companies and educational
institutions will not get us there. Indeed, a number of mutually
reinforcing trends in American international business are march-
ing in the other direction, diminishing the demand for, supply of,
and utilization of international skills by Americans.
First and foremost is the increasingly short-term perspective
of many segments of American business. The individual firm's
showing a profit on next quarter's balance sheet is what drives
strategic decisions about long-run policies for business. Second is
the trend toward decentralization, turning firms into largely
federal structures in which the overseas sections are mostly
staffed by and under the control of foreign nationals. We have
gone more than twice as far as the Japanese in this direction, and
considerably farther than the Europeans.' Third is the sharing by
business leaders of America's general devout monolingualism,
made possible by the willingness of so many foreigners to learn
English. Fourth is the decreasing number of American business
employees stationed abroad?quick trips and telecommunica-
tions suffice.2 While part of this trend is a by-product of the
sharply escalating costs of maintaining an American business
manager overseas, part is due to the high failure rate?higher
'Rosalie Tung, "Selection and Training Procedures of U.S., European, and
Japanese Multinationals, California Management Review, 25: (1983) 57-71.
2Stephen J. Kobrin, International Expertise in American Business, report no. 6
(New York: Institute of International Education, 1984), pp. 42-43.
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International Expertise in Business 29
than that of any other country?of Americans sent abroad. 3 The
combined effect is to shrink the pool of American business
executives who become skilled internationalists through pro-
longed residence abroad, as the current generation did. The fifth
trend is the tendency of American international firms to hire
foreign nationals at the managerial level as well. 4 America just
does not prepare enough of its own citizens to be true cosmopol-
itans the way other countries do.
While each of these trends is understandable from the per-
spective of the individual firm, taken together they lead to a
shrinking pool of American nationals with the expertise to deal
with international business, and an increasing dependence on
the nationals of other countries to conduct American interna-
tional business. Increasingly, it is not a matter of companies'
choosing to hire transnationally for the requisite internationally
relevant skills; they have no other choice. From the long-term
national perspective, as distinct from the short-term perspective
of the individual firm, this situation is unhealthy. What is ironic
is that we have the greatest national resource base to apply to
truly innovative international training, much of it developed at
considerable expense to the American taxpayer, but we do not
link it with the challenge of international business. And we have
within the American business community individuals who are
unequaled in the world for their skills in coping with the global
economy, who have served as quasi-diplomats and formulators of
our foreign economic policy as well as representing their own
firms, but we do not harness those skills to the training of the
generation that will succeed them.
What is clearly needed is an integrated plan for training a
cadre of Americans to lead the American business enterprise in
the global economy of the coming decades. It is unlikely that we
will adopt the Japanese solution: 70 of the leading Japanese
business firms have pooled their resources to establish an Inter-
national University to train their employees for service in the
global economy. Our resources and our solution are likely to be
much more dispersed and piecemeal. This makes it all the more
'Tung, "Selection and Training Procedures."
'Ronald E. Berenheim, Managing the International Company: Building a
Global Perspective, report no. 814 (New York: The Conference Board, 1982), chap. 2.
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important that an intelligent centralized effort be made to
develop and integrate the various parts of our national training
capacity?within companies, in proprietary schools specializing
in executive training, and on university campuses. It is time to
think where we would like to be in 10 years, then ask ourselves
how we get there.
To develop and implement such a policy should be a primary
purpose of the proposed National Foundation for International
Studies. For this purpose both public and private funds should be
marshaled and administered through an active planning board of
international business advisors, much like the National Science
Board of the National Science Foundation. This advisory board
would include distinguished American international business
leaders, educators, officials representing relevant federal agen-
cies, and chambers of commerce. Its initial task would be to
ascertain the current state of training for international business
and to make recommendations on how it could be improved.
Thereafter, programmatic funds would be provided for long-term
development of key aspects of the training process.
Recommendation: The Foundation should assist in the develop-
ment of a national strategy for training, both within companies
and on campuses, future generations of American international
business leaders. To initiate this process, a board of interna-
tional business advisors should be created to assess our current
resources, to make recommendations for key points of invest-
ment, and to supervise long-term support programs dedicated to
the provision of such training. For this purpose, both public and
private funds should be collected and administered.
There are many aspects of the training of future international
business leaders that could be addressed, and the set of recom-
mendations offered would differ depending upon whether they
were directed at undergraduate business training, the MBA, or
Ph.D. training There are three topical domains that both are
central to the process and have high leverage for improving the
current situation. Accordingly, they make a natural agenda that
such a panel should address: (1) foreign language competencies of
business executives; (2) the creation of a combination of business-
related, general international, and country-specific skills in a
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International Expertise in Business 31
substantial body of specialists resident both within business and
within the major universities; and (3) the internationalization of
the core business curriculum to affect the training of as many
future managers as possible.
FOREIGN LANGUAGE COMPETENCIES
The Need
Nowhere is the lack of international training for American
business executives more apparent, nowhere are the long-term
costs of the current situation more damaging, than with respect
to the very limited command of foreign languages by American
business leaders. To do business with us, all others must learn
our language. If they can't manage it, we will hire or require
them to hire someone of their own nationality who speaks both
their and our language to translate for us. And yet they must buy
our products.
What makes this arrogance possible is the widespread diffu-
sion throughout the world of varying amounts of English. Amer-
ica is both blessed and cursed by the fact that English has become
almost universal as the common language of business. It is a
blessing in that it enables English-speaking American business
leaders to travel widely throughout the world and find people
who have spent many years struggling to learn enough English to
communicate with them. They can send and receive communi-
cations relatively safe in the belief that most of the time both the
sending and the receiving will be in English. The worldwide
availability of English is an enormous advantage for American
business, one envied by every non-English-speaking country of
the world. It is difficult to imagine the remarkable spread of
American business throughout the world without it.
The wide pervasiveness of English in the international busi-
ness community is also a curse. It appears to make it unneces-
sary for American business leaders to acquire a competency in
foreign languages. Study after study 5 indicates the low value
'5For a full review of the literature on this topic, see Marrianne Inman, "Foreign
Languages and the Multinational Corporation," in James E. Perkins, The Presidential
Commission on Foreign Languages and International Studies: Background Papers
and Studies (V/ashington DC: Government Printing Office, 1979), pp. 247-310.
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given to foreign language competency by American business
through the mid-1970s, and as recently as the mid-1980s com-
panies were still not using foreign language competency as a
criterion for selecting executives for overseas service, nor giving
it much importance in the recruitment of new personne1.6
One reason for the relatively low importance given to foreign
language competency by many American corporations in recruit-
ing American managers for overseas assignments is that it is
possible to live and conduct some business in most countries
with just a knowledge of English and a smattering of household
and travel phrases in the local language. Local colleagues, ser-
vants, and the coterie of hangers-on that adorns the edge of any
foreign community serve as intermediaries between monolin-
gual American business leaders and the society that surrounds
them. Moreover, for official business, company policy can assure
that English is used for all of the official documents and corre-
spondence that the American will see. And when an American
business leader walks into a conference, the language of discus-
sion immediately changes to English.
All American business ,leaders know that this pattern is
immensely limiting; the monolingual American is a captive of
the people who commmand his or her language. This is most
dramatic in countries where English is hardly used at all, as in
China or Japan, but it occurs elsewhere as well. All of the real
business can go on in the native language around the American
business executives, across them, and over their heads, with only
what is filtered through a translator available to them. As
anybody with any foreign experience knows, that filter is often
highly selective and skewed. In negotiations, the lack of a
command of the local language can be fatal. Moreover, company
after company is discovering that crucial communication with
foreign affiliates within the multinational firm can often be
immensely improved if both sides have some command of
several languages.7
Whatever the limitations and advantages of the present
system of English as a business lingua franca, it is not likely to
continue into the indefinite future. For one thing, alas, more and
more countries?not just the French?in more and more situa-
6Kobrin, International Expertise, chap. 4.
'Ibid.
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international Expertise in Business 33
tions are unwilling to switch into English when an American is
involved. Our monolingualism is increasingly seen as our own
problem, not theirs. In the future, if not now, American business
will be a prime victim of our devout monolingualism and of the
overall ineffectiveness of our national foreign language teaching
and learning system.
The implication of this situation is that business has a major
stake in the general improvement of foreign language instruction
in the United States. It cannot provide within the company all or
even a large part of the foreign language skills that a fully
effective overseas-based manager requires; for many languages
the learning-time demands are too great, and it is too late in life
for employees to start learning foreign languages anyhow. More
job applicants must appear at the personnel office with a more
effective command of a foreign language. Hence, business should
participate heavily in the implementation of the general agenda
for improving the national foreign language teaching system
capacity in our school system as a whole. It has a major stake in
the outcome.
A Business Specific Foreign Language Agenda
In addition to a concern for the general improvement of
foreign language instruction in the United States, there are
specific portions of that national agenda that are of particular
importance to business. Here is that subset of items selected
from the overall national language agenda, together with an
indication of their special relevance to business needs. The items
are presented in the order of importance given to them by most
business leaders.
Higher-level language skills. While a fair amount of the
current demand by business executives for foreign language
instruction is for relatively low levels of skill in that language,
enough to travel and cope at a level a little above that of a tourist,
we need to bring at least some American business leaders to a
near-native level of skill in a foreign language. At present,
neither the teaching technology nor the language instructional
facilities to accomplish this goal exist.
There are prototypes for the provision of skill level training?
for instance, the overseas advanced language training schools
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such as those supported by the U.S. Department of Education in
Taipei, Tokyo, and Cairo. However, they serve academic clien-
teles almost exclusively. In addition, there are a few such
a
dvanced-level language training facilities for federal employees,
largely those in the Department of State and the intelligence
agencies. There are no equivalent schools available for American
business executives. Surely, we have a major national interest in
moving more American business leaders beyond what might be
called "abominable fluency" to a high level of skill in foreign
languages. To accomplish this goal will require the creation of
new facilities specially geared to the needs of business, or the
admission of business executives to the existing facilities.
Adult-oriented language learning resources. Business em-
ployees who discover as adults that their jobs require a knowl-
edge of a foreign language should compose the primary clientele
for adult-oriented language learning establishments. This is in
fact the case in many other countries of the world, where a large
number of learning centers and television and correspondence
schools have been set up to cater to this need. We have no
equivalent institutions, although there are a few proprietary
language schools in the United States that will give executives a
few weeks of introductory instruction in the major European
languages. However, their effectiveness has never been tested,
and their use is sporadic and uncoordinated. It is unfortunate
that our formal educational system does not serve the needs of
adult learners of foreign languages. By and large, our colleges and
universities are organized to teach only their own full-time
students, and their courses are given in a nonintensive fashion
spread over several semesters or-years. In addition, most of them
seek to teach students only enough language to meet the foreign
language requirement, or perhaps to study literature. The needs
of business executives just do not fit the time schedule, the
objectives, or the technology of traditional college and university
courses. Either specialized teaching programs geared to business
needs will have to be developed on campuses?as indeed is now
being done in a few places for Japanese language instruction?or
new mechanisms outside of the current formal educational
system need to be established.
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---tional Expertise in Business 35
Under the general heading of adult language education is an
aspect of language instruction that is equally if not more impor-
tant to business leaders whose work demands occasional rather
than continuous contact with other countries. For them, the
depreciation of an important occupational asset through the
attrition over time of language competencies is a special prob-
lem. Our national inattention to the maintenance and rejuvena-
tion of language skills once acquired is especially damaging for
American business executives.
Individualized instruction. No matter how much can be
accomplished in setting up language schools, the needs of indi-
vidual business executives, given the nature of their assign-
ments, will often require language learning strategies that can be
administered by the students themselves. We have now had
several decades of experience in developing self-instructional
programs; there is even a national association that encourages
and administers such programs on many campuses. There is no
reason why a similar set of programs cannot be established for
business. Moreover, recent advances in the development of
computer-assisted videotape or videodisc instruction programs
hold. great promise of making language teaching a much more
flexible, much less classroom-bound enterprise. Given the fact
that the demand for foreign language instruction among business
executives is likely to continue to be dispersed and occasional,
and to vary from one individual to another, investment by
business in the development of these more flexible teaching
technologies would be well worth the cost.
Less commonly taught languages. The time and effort de-
manded of learners seeking to acquire a fluency in the commonly
taught languages?mainly French, Spanish, and German?are
relatively low. Hence, it is possible to bring substantial numbers
of American business executives to genuinely useful levels of
language competency in those languages even after their employ-
ment by a firm. This is so both because the languages are
intrinsically less difficult for English speakers to learn, and
because many educated Americans have had a base-line exposure
to them in the course of their formal education. This situation
does not hold true for those requiring a working knowledge of
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one of the less commonly taught languages. To reach fluency in
these "difficult languages"?mainly Japanese, Chinese, and Ar-
abic?takes much longer and requires much greater effort. Learn-
ing them from scratch while fully employed in business is
extremely difficult.
American business can, of course, throw up its hands and
allow the pre'sent situation to continue in which almost no
American executive has the ability to communicate in any of the
difficult languages. If, however, we wish to remedy this situa-
tion, there are two options available. Either business will have to
invest both the resources and the time to make the learning of
difficult languages possible for their employees?and there are
indications that a number. of firms are willing to do just that, for
the Japanese language at least?or they will have to recruit those
who have already had a great deal of instruction in those
languages before they come into business, adding the requisite _
technical skills and company experience after employment
rather than the other way around. There is some indication that"
this is also happening particularly with reference to Japanese._
Whichever way business chooses to go?that is, either pro-
viding language training to individuals selected solely for their
technical competency and experience in the company, or recruit-
ing with foreign language competency in mind and adding the
technical or company-specific skills later?the result will depend
on the availability of a_cadie of effective teachers. Given the
obvious need, it is a national tragedy that the immense resources
of our campus-based language and area studies centers, where the
less commonly taught languages are already available?a na-
tional resource unparalleled anywhere else in the world?are not
tapped for this purpose. This is especially true for the rarest of
the less commonly taught languages. The only places in the
country, and for some languages the only places in the world, one
can go to for English-medium instruction in some of the African
languages, the languages of Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central
Asia, and Eastern Europe, are the American language and area
studies programs.
Accordingly, business, through the Foundation, should en-
courage a number of language and area studies centers to estab-
lish language teaching facilities geared specifically to the time
and functional demands of business. The teaching of business
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international Expertise in Business 37
French, German, and Spanish is now fashionable on many
campuses. It is with respect to the less commonly taught
languages for business use that we will have a special need, and
our existing facilities will give us a comparative advantage over
the rest of the world.
Special business language training units should be developed
within one or two campus-based language and area studies
centers for each world area. These centers would be chosen on a
competitive basis, and should include both domestic and over-
seas language training. This is a very favorable time for such a
development. A decline in student demand for instruction in
many of the less commonly taught languages, and increasingly
constrained university budgets, may cause many of those lan-
guages to be dropped from the curriculum. It will be ironic if in
10 years, as our economic relations inevitably expand into more
and more countries, campus-based resources to provide business
executives with the necessary training in the languages of those
countries will have disappeared. Now is the time to consider
fresh ways to encourage the language and area studies centers to
serve the language training needs of international business.
A common metric. Little progress can be made in the im-
provement of the level of foreign language competency of Amer-
ican business executives unless it is included as part of the job
requirements for positions in major American corporations. This,
in turn, requires two things: first, the recognition that foreign
language competency is important, and second, a way of express-
ing that competency in a uniform fashion so that there can be
agreement on its meaning. Hence, business has an interest in the
development and widespread use of a scale to measure objectively
and consistently an individual's ability to perform in a foreign
language. Indeed, business, along with government?for which a
similar need is apparent?should take the lead in setting universal
standards of measured foreign language proficiency in as many
languages as possible, and in helping to construct the mechanisms
for national test administration that would make this possible.
The adoption of clearly stated criteria tied to occupational use in
business would not only further the development of a common
metric for the society as a whole, but would dramatize the im-
portance of real language competency for students in the schools
and colleges in a way that nothing else could.
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Recommendation: Business, through the Foundation, should en-
courage the increasing use of foreign languages by its employees,
and should strengthen American foreign language teaching ca-
pacity in those aspects of particular interest to business: (1) the
provision of training at the upper skill levels; (2) the creation of
facilities for adult language learning and retention; (3) the im-
provement of our capacity to provide individualized instruction;
(4) the utilization of the resources of campus-based language and
area studies programs to provide instruction to business execu-
tives in the less commonly taught languages; and (5) the devel-
opment of a common metric of language proficiency.
TRAINING OF INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS
SPECIALISTS
Content and Curriculum
Reshaping our future in international business will depend in
large measure on the creation of a pool of highly trained special-
ists who have an especially profound knowledge of one or
another aspect of our commercial foreign affairs. Some of these
specialists will be employed by individual corporations, some
will serve in the consultancy organizations that businesses call
upon as needed, some will be employed in government agencies,
and some will stay on campus to conduct research and to teach.
A key leverage point for enhancing our standing in the global
economy is in the training of these future specialists.
At present, many of the older generation of specialists have
not been formally trained; rather, they developed their skills
from service abroad and from on-the-job experience in interna-
tional business affairs. Increasingly, however, corporations are
realizing that dealing with the international economic system is
so complex and requires so special a set of skills that they are
turning to formal training programs to prepare employees for
international work. Many of the largest of the multinationals
have themselves developed an in-house training program to serve
the special needs of their own executives. There are proprietary
schools whose primary purpose is to serve this need. Most of
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international Expertise in Business 39
these programs are aimed at midlevel executive training, since
for some years to come companies will probably remain more
likely to provide training for international service to executives
well past the formal education stage than to hire large numbers
of new employees who already have such training. Accordingly,
attention to the appropriate content and location of such mid-
career training is an important element on the national agenda.
In the long run, however, the training of a cadre of interna-
tional business experts will be the responsibility of our univer-
sities and colleges, and this is where the bulk of the growth has
occurred. A large number of specialized international business
training programs have grown up on various campuses around
the nation. It is a rare business school that does not have a center,
a certificate program, a major, a department, or a school dedi-
cated to the training of specialists to serve American business
abroad.
The fundamental issue in the training of international busi-
ness specialists is substantive: what should the content of that
training be? The component parts of that training as it appears in
most centers are clear. A fully developed program will offer
training on a full range of technical business skills plus a
specialization in one of them; some courses concentrating on the
international aspects of those skills; courses on the context of
the international system, usually both at the level of the global
system and in one or more particular countries; some training in
a foreign language; and a domestic or overseas internship with an
international company. The field, however, is in a period of
immense ferment. The content and utility of each segment, their
relative balance and level are being fiercely debated. Particularly
troublesome is the mix of contextual and business courses; even
when both types of courses are required, they are often just piled
on top of each other and left for the student to mix. Indeed, the
substance of the field is being formulated right now.
Two preliminary steps need to be taken. The first is to
ascertain quickly what the content of the training in most
institutions currently is, and what seems to work and what does
not. The second is to determine for those students previously
trained in the programs what their postgraduation experience has
been, so that planning for the future can reflect patterns of actual
utilization. Some of the major programs have already begun to
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review their graduates' careers. A more general review of the
kind that the Rand Corporation8 conducted of language and area
studies graduates would be quite useful.
Flowing from the results of these surveys should be a
program to promote, make cumulative, evaluate, and dissemi-
nate the results of curricular experimentation. The pursuit of a
uniform curriculum is neither desirable nor achievable, and
various programs operate at different levels and serve different
purposes. Nevertheless, some notion of the content of an ideal
and of a minimal curriculum would be the goal of this effort. And
it behooves the American corporations that have a major stake in
international business to take a hand in the creation of that
curriculum. It is their future that is being discussed. This should
be one of the functions of the Foundation's board of international
business advisors.
Recommendation: The Foundation's board of international bus-
iness advisors should sponsor preliminary surveys of the current
organization and curricular content of training programs for
international business specialists, and of the experience of
graduates of those programs. Based on the results of these
surveys, recommendations for and investment in the develop-
ment of effective training programs should be made. This
shaping of the international business training program would be
a dynamic process, one that would require continuous attention
over time.
Organizational Issues
Aside from issues of content and curriculum, there are very
general issues of structure and organization that must be ad-
dressed.
Demand for Specialists. The first thing to say is that we
probably do not need more programs. As in any fashionable
movement in higher education, enthusiasms tend to produce
'Lorraine M. McDonnell, Cathleen Statz, and Robert Madison, Federal Support
Systems for Training Foreign Language and Area Specialists: The Education and
Careers of FLAS Fellowship Recipients (Santa Monica, CA: The Rand Corporation,
1983).
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Expertise in Business 41
more academic enterprises, which graduate more students than
the market is likely to absorb. Surveys conducted by some of the
best-established programs9 indicate that their graduates are fully
placed, but the employment prospects of students trained specif-
ically for international business in many of the newer, smaller
programs are less certain. We should not repeat the unlimited
supply-side economics followed in our national policy for the
training for language and area specialists. Until we have clearer
data on effective demand for and utilization of training for
international business specialists, it seems prudent to halt the
multiplication of programs.
Costs. International business programs, like language and
area studies centers, which in many ways they resemble, incur
substantial additional costs above and beyond what an estab-
lished discipline or department encounters. They need to collect
faculty with the necessary skills from a wide variety of disci-
plines and specialties. They require extraordinary expenditures
on library and information resources. They need to support
foreign language instruction, often in a high-unit-cost, semituto-
rial form, to produce kinds of skills not encompassed in the
normal college-level course, and in languages in which the
general enrollments may be quite low.
Travel abroad. More than other university specialties, par-
ticularly those in the business school, international business
training programs need to develop durable external links both
with multinational firms located in the United States and with
the foreign environment in which business practices in a wide
variety of countries.
Fellowship support. Similarly, the extra costs for students
adding the international training and exposure to their regular
course load can be considerable. A full two-year program at the
Wharton School's Lauder Institute of International Management
and International Studies, for instance, can represent an out-of-
pocket cost of $50,000 for a student, and this does not include the
opportunity costs of the salary forgone while that student is
enrolled in the program. This is probably an extreme, and it
9Kate Gillespie, "International Business and the MBA: Are There Jobs after
Graduation?" Annual Meeting of the Academy of International Business, October
1985 (mimeo).
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includes the extra costs of foreign language study and tutorials,
internships, and the tuition for a dual degree, one in the business
school and the other an area-focused degree in arts and sciences.
Other programs may provide fewer of these special features, and
the price will be lower accordingly. However, if training for
international business is going to select the very best students
regardless of their personal resources, some creative financing of
these costs, at least for the short run, seems called for. Given the
probable future income of many of these graduates, a system
with a large loan component is appropriate. And businesses can
cut the costs to the individual student by underwriting the
internships and the foreign language study out of unrepatriated
funds. More generally, extension of Higher Education Act (HEA)
Title VI fellowships to include students training to serve in
international business, combined with corporate support, the
latter possibly comprising fellowships with the company's name
attached, would help alleviate this problem.
Another advantage of the establishment of a fellowship
program is that it would begin to address a problem that has not
even surfaced as yet. The history of the growth of language and
area studies indicated that a laissez-faire system of student
recruitment and training resulted in an uneven distribution of
disciplines and geographic foci, with gaps in specialties and
countries where important national interests lay. We have no
information whatsoever on the concentration by business spe-
cialty of graduates of international business programs. If general
impressions have any validity, a bunching of students in a few
specialties is occurring, while there are very few students study-
ing to be specialists in others. For instance, in terms of business
specialties, there seem to be a large number of managerial
generalists being produced, and specialists on international fi-
nance and marketing. There seem to be far fewer specialists
being trained who know well such subjects as government-
business interaction on the international scene, management of
manufacturing units, accounting, business law, or labor rela-
tions. At some point, a policy of targeting and supplementation
of fellowships similar to that used in language and area studies
will be called for.
Guarding against obsolescence. Campus-based training for
international business constantly runs the risk of obsolescence
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Expertise in Business 43
as the actual conduct of foreign commerce changes with ever-
increasing speed. To guard against this, programs must con-
stantly bring to the classroom a flow of business leaders who are
engaged in the day-to-day affairs of business, and it must con-
stantly have available at least some of the flow of data that is
available to practicing business leaders.
The first of these requires that corporations, as an invest-
ment in their own future, make it possible for their international
executives to serve as lecturers and short-term visitors on
campuses. This is the reverse of the usual executive seminars in
which the information is supposed to flow the other way. Let
international business leaders help educate the students they
may eventually employ. An endowed lecturer-cum-visitor pro-
gram somewhat like the Chubb lectures at Yale would be an
ideal format.
The second calls both for funding for acquisition of data by
the campus programs, and for the development of a systematic
program of making available on campuses information that
flows routinely through international business channels. Stu-
dents should have to learn to drink from the same gushing fire
hose of information that business executives do, and learn to
filter that flow, direct it, and utilize it in making business
decisions.
Area-specific business skills. Perhaps the most ominous of
the gaps in our long-range strategy for international business is
our failure to focus very much of the training of international
business specialists on the conduct of business with a particular
country or part of the world. And yet if we are to improve our
performance in the future growth areas of the world, the coun-
tries of Latin America, Asia, and Africa; if we are to move, as the
Japanese did, into the low-cost, widely dispersed markets for
consumer goods; if we are to negotiate our way effectively
around the labyrinth of government regulations that different
countries have erected; if we are, as the traveling salesman in
The Music Man put it, to "get to know the territory" then we
must find a training pattern that effectively deals with particular
business climates in particular countries or parts of the world.
Training in general internationalist business skills relating to all
foreign countries is just not enough.
Fortunately, the nation already has at hand substantial uni-
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versity resources dealing with particular countries or parts of the
world: the campus-based language and area studies centers.
Other countries would have to invent such centers to take the
steps now available to us. To date, however, very few language
and area studies centers or their faculty have had any contact
with American international business. A recent review of the
publications of the faculty of the government-supported lan-
guage and area studies centers showed the very limited interest
in topics of direct relevance to business.10 This is so in part
because the disciplines represented and the training and research
undertaken by the faculty of language and area studies centers
tend to be concentrated in specialties?language and literature,
history, anthropology, political science?that are of limited im-
mediate interest to business. Moreover, arts and sciences faculty
members, who constitute almost all of the language and area
specialists, do not have the technical business skills that are
required to participate effectively in the business world.
It would be possible, however, to build on the broad strengths
of one or two language and area studies centers dealing with each
world area by adding supplemental segments of four or five
additional staff members versed both in business skills and in
language and area competencies. These segments would be added
to one, or at most two, of the major centers in, for instance,
African studies or Southeast Asian studies, and would consist of
a cluster of faculty and students who would combine a deep
language and area competency with a specialty in one or more of
the business skills and industries relevant to that country. The
latter is as important as the former, and a special effort would
have to be launched to put these dual skills in the same
individual. The beginnings of such supplemental segments al-
ready exist: for instance, Stanford and Michigan for East Asia;
Michigan State for Africa; Michigan for Southeast Asia; Texas,
UCLA, and Tulane for Latin America. The provision of specially
earmarked grants from business and HEA Title VI would help to
crystallize these center segments.
The purposes of these center segments would be to (1)
'Richard D. Lambert et al., Beyond Growth: The Next Stage in Language and
Area Studies (Washington, DC: Association of American Universities, 1984), pp.
167-68.
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international Expertise in Business 45
maintain up-to-date information on the general business climate
in a particular country or region of the world; (2) monitor the
flow of that area's business activities within the United States;
(3) provide a capacity to conduct basic research on international-
business-related-subjects relevant to that area, as well as more
applied contract research on topics assigned by particular
clients; (4) provide resource people to serve as consultants as
needed; and (5) develop courses and training materials for use
both within the center itself and by companies carrying out their
own training.
Sources of Funding
What kind of funding and management is needed to sustain
and enhance these international business training programs?
Again, the history of language and area studies centers is instruc-
tive. In the early days, the extra costs of maintaining language and
area studies centers and supporting their students were met by
grants from the major private foundations. They are now provided
by public monies through HEA Title VI. Similarly, a decade or so
ago, international business programs received foundation and cor-
porate support to help them get started, but that support has begun
to wane. However, in contrast to the case for language and area
studies, there are no large-scale public programs to provide du-
rable support as the private monies disappear. The one major
federal funding program for international business training, HEA
Title VI, Part B (now at the level of $2 million per year), does not
meet any of these enumerated needs on a continuing basis. For-
tunately, this year for the first time, one of the international
business centers, the Wharton School's Lauder Institute, has qual-
ified to become a center under Part A of that act. This will provide
for that program some of the crucial general support for the kinds
of expenses indicated above. The Title VI, Part A, umbrella should
be stretched to include several more centers. Similar investments
by business in the long-term viability of international business
centers on our campuses are called for. Indeed, since the benefits
of these training programs would accrue, in large measure, to
corporations, the use of federal tax revenues for this purpose
should be dependent upon the provision of matching grants from
businesses.
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40 POINTS OF LEVERAGE
Recommendation: The Foundation, through its board of inter-
national business advisors, should help support training pro-
grams for international business specialists by expanding their
representation in the HEA Title VI, Part A, center and fellowship
competition. In addition, the board should help raise the match-
ing private funds to supplement federal support. This support
should be directed toward paying the extra costs of maintaining
these training programs and of their students, and the creation
of supplemental center segments that would combine the re-
sources of existing language and area studies programs with
international business centers.
INTERNATIONALIZING GENERAL BUSINESS
EDUCATION
The third of the major agenda items for the Foundation to
address, through its board of international business advisors,
would be to add an international dimension to the training of as
many as possible of the nation's future business managers. It is
one thing to produce specialists to serve the needs of interna-
tional business, but we cannot afford to leave untouched the
education of the rest of the business students whose activities,
whether they know it or want it or not, will be inevitably
intertwined With events in the global economy.
Until recently, international managers could be defined by
role: traders, lending officers, expatriates assigned abroad, and
the like. Now, however, it is likely that many managers in
"domestic" jobs will be involved in international transactions.
The postwar revolution in transport and communications and
the resulting integration of the world economy is blurring the
lines between domestic and international business, between
domestic and international jobs. The result is that international
business may now be part of the responsibilities of a large
proportion of managers in large and small companies. Many will
be exposed to crossborder transactions , and will need some
international skills. Products are developed on a multicountry
basis, and product development specialists need knowledge of
other markets and regular meetings with colleagues based in
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international Expertise in Business 47
other countries. In many industries, production is coordinated
transnationally, and plant managers must deal regularly with
their counterparts abroad. Cost pressures require that compo-
nents be purchased where they can be produced most efficiently,
and that involves having purchasing managers who are comfort-
able in an international environment. Packaging and even adver-
tising are increasingly standardized across borders. Product de-
sign and marketing decisions call for attention to the needs of a
variety of countries, not just our own. Countertrading calls for
knowledge of the complexity of many economies at once, and
fluctuations in the twenty-four-hour international money mar-
kets to guard against severe capital loss. And above all, business
leaders need to watch their foreign competitors as they compete
for markets both here and abroad.
In a 1984 study," two-thirds of America's major firms
reported an increase over the past decade in the number of
managers involved internationally through short-term travel or
other contacts, and most expected that trend to continue into the
future. There are now more than 4 million international trips
taken by American business employees each year, and the
number grows annually. The pace of international contacts is
increasing rapidly, as is the proportion of company employees
involved on a regular basis in those contacts. Surely, a larger
proportion of the training of all future business executives
should reflect these facts and prepare them for the internation-
ally connected role that many of them will be called on to play.
To reach the majority of students training to be business
managers, not just those who consider themselves to be future
specialists in international business, it will be necessary to
change the content of the basic business skill subjects that
constitute the core curriculum?management, finance, account-
ing, business law, employee relations, insurance, marketing,
operations management, technology, mergers and acquisitions,
and so on. It is in these courses that the U.S.-centered view of the
world still resides. Under the guise of teaching abstract, largely
quantitive, general principles, the idiosyncrasies of different
economic systems or cultural contexts are washed out, and the
examples chosen are overwhelmingly American. The normal
11Kobrin, International Expertise, p. 7.
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PUIN UP LEVERAGE
business training is an exercise in American studies. The cure for
this is not the introduction of more specialized courses?like
international accounting or international finance?that sit in a
ghetto on the edge of the curriculum, to be taken by only a few
specialists. Until the perspective of the mainline business skill
courses is changed, international business will remain a curios-
ity tacked on at the end of courses but never quite reached; or it
will reside in a few courses taken without enthusiasm by a few
students, like a humanities elective. It must be brought into the
mainstream of training.
To make the radical shift in perspective that is needed, to
wrench these courses away from their overwhelmingly Ameri-
can focus, calls for a national effort something like the one
undertaken more than a decade ago to upgrade the teaching of
mathematics and science. It will not be easy. A recent attempt by
the American Academy of Collegiate Schools of Business to
require an international business component in the curriculum
as part of its accreditation standards had little or no effect on
most campuses.12 Making the necessary changes will call for a
concerted effort over a long haul. It means taking a hard look at
the actual substance of the undergraduate and MBA core busi-
ness skill curricula, with a sharp eye for points where interna-
tional materials might appropriately be introduced. It means
convincing the textbook authors and publishers not just to add a
section at the end of the book on international aspects of a
particular business subject, but to incorporate an international
perspective throughout.
In addition to amending the textbooks and teaching materi-
als in the basic skill courses, if what students learn is to remain
current, a deliberate effort needs to be launched to assure that the
teachers of the basic courses are supplied with necessary case
studies on international problems and issues. A recent study's
indicated that the supply of widely available case materials in
'Lee Nehrt, Case Studies of Internationalization of the Business School
Curriculum (St. Louis MO: American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business,
1981); see also, John Thanopoulos, editor, International Business Curriculae: A
Global Survey (Waco TX: Academy of International Business, 1986).
'Lawrence G. Franko, Cases in International Business and Economics: Their
Availability and Diffusion (New York: National Council on Foreign Languages and
International Studies, October 1984).
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international Expertise in Business 49
international business were old, that they were concentrated on
a few topics such as the early stages of the establishment of a
factory or fluctuations in currency rates, and that many impor-
tant topics and sections of the world were very lightly covered. If
the training of future business executives for participation in the
global economy is to be brought up to speed, it is essential that
businesses continuously feed back into the training process the
rich experience they are acquiring every day. Dropping behind in
the recency and comprehensiveness of teaching materials is like
teaching students mechanical skills on antique machinery.
What is clearly needed is a collaborative effort bringing
together the experience and insights of distinguished interna-
tional business leaders and the educators who write the text-
books and teach the classes. It is in the nation's interest that this
quantum jump ahead in the international orientation of the
education of our future business managers be taken. This is
clearly a role that the Foundation, through the board of interna-
tional business advisors should play.
Recommendation: The Foundation, through its board of inter-
national- business advisors, should initiate and fund a continu-
ing collaborative effort of American businesses and business
school faculty to deparochialize the core business school curric-
ulum. This effort would include the enrichment of the basic
skill course textbooks and the provision of especially targeted
case materials.
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Chapter 4
The Training of Academic
Specialists
Business executives who can cope in a global economy are only
one example of the kinds of professionals with special interna-
tionally oriented skills that the nation will need in the coming
decades. Similar attention must be paid to the preparation of
those going into other professions such as journalism, law,
secondary and primary school teaching, public health, govern-
ment, diplomacy, and the like. However, in these professions
there has been much less attention paid to how to train interna-
tional specialists or how to incorporate an international dimen-
sion into training more generally. There are, however, some
attempts afoot to address the special needs of the professions. For
instance, at present the nine member institutions in the Associ-
ation of Professional Schools of International Affairs (APRA) are
engaged in a major review of their own goals and curricula under
the guidance of Robert Goheen. And various state teachers'
organizations have been interested in introducing international
dimensions into both the training and the certification of sec-
ondary and primary school teachers. These attempts, as they
mature, should be of great interest to the National Foundation
for International Studies, and should enter into the design of its
future planning. By and large, however, the educational issues in
these fields are very similar to those for business.
Here we are concerned with the training of academic inter-
national affairs specialists. And within that general topic, the
51
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POINTS OF LEVERAGE
emphasis in this chapter, as in the last one, will be training. Many
of the issues that pertain to the current operation of campus-based
international studies will be considered in subsequent chapters,
particularly those dealing with research, information resources,
and overseas linkages. The present chapter is devoted largely to
the education of academic international specialists.
The most fully developed model for the training of interna-
tional affairs specialists is what is generally called language and
area studies. There are, of course, many other academic interna-
tional affairs specialists who do not concentrate on a particular
country or set of countries, or who do not consider themselves
area specialists?for instance, specialists in the politics or eco-
nomics of the world system; analysts in the field of arms and
security; or experts on one or another transnational theme such
as world hunger, demography, or labor relations. However, to the
extent that the training of such experts is seen as an educational
issue, training for such specialized international expertise tends
to be, carried on within the confines of the normal academic
disciplines. Moreover, in the main these specialties are viewed
more as research than as training domains, and it is in this aspect
that they will be given more direct attention. In fact, when in
subsequent chapters we talk about such issues as research,
library resources, and durable overseas linkages, it should be
clearly understood that we are speaking of all international
specialists, not just those who consider themselves part of
language and area studies.
With respect to specialized training, however, most of the
discussion will concentrate on the education of language and
area specialists. This is because most of the issues concerning
the training of academic specialists have arisen in their clearest
form in such training. Moreover, it is in support of language and
area studies that the most fully developed, longest-lasting
federal support program for the training of international
specialists has been in effect. The discussion that follows will be
concerned with three aspects of the training: ( 1 ) training in the
languages of the area of specialization; (2) the provision of the
substantive knowledge of the area sufficient to produce the
equivalent of the "old hand"; and (3) the sustenance of the
campus-based centers that carry out that specialized training.
But first a little history.
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miming of Academic Specialists 53
ACADEMICALLY TRAINED LANGUAGE AND AREA
SPECIALISTS
Our World War II entry into an immensely expanded world
affected our educational system as well as our economy. Our
academic tunnel vision, focused almost exclusively on the United
States and Western Europe, was clearly inadequate, as our na-
tional interest was intertwined with events in countries in Asia,
the Middle East, and North Africa, countries that most of us knew
only as quickly forgotten names in a geography book. As our
wartime need for knowledge about these unfamiliar regions be-
came apparent, we realized that except for a handful of mission-
aries, professors of history or literature, diplomats, and business
executives,' there were very few of us who knew the societies in
those regions well enough to inform either military or public
policy. As our war needs for people with a command of the lan-
guages and a knowledge of the culture and society of particular
countries, especially non-Western countries, became urgent, we
established specialized training programs on our campuses to
produce what were called language and area specialists.2
After the war, when military support was withdrawn from
these programs, the universities and the major private founda-
tions?Carnegie, Ford, Rockefeller?provided the resources and
the initiative to expand our slim scholarly resources on the
non-Western world into a set of full-blown language and area
studies centers, only with a scholarly rather than a military
focus. 3 The prototypes of the campus-based centers were, there-
fore, already in place when the government policy was again
directed to the costs of our national ignorance about many parts
of the world, especially our durable enemy, the Soviet Union.
The federal government's reentry into support for language
and area studies followed an ignorance-induced shock similar to
'For a history of the early period of international studies, see Robert E.
McCaughey, International Studies and Academic Enterprise: A Chapter in the
Enclosure of American Learning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
'Kurt E. Muller, "National Security and Language Compentence: U.S. Armed
Forces and Transnational Communication" (Masters Thesis, U.S. Army Command
and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth KS, 1983)
'Robert B. Hall, Area Studies with Special Reference to Their Application for
Research in the Social Sciences (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1947).
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the one we experienced in World War II: the Russians' launching
of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 in spite of our firm belief that
they were a decade or so behind us in scientific development.
The conclusion drawn from this experience was that there were
not enough Americans who knew the Soviet Union well enough
to be able to foretell this important event. In the following year,
the National Defense Education Act was passed, and reincar-
nated as part of the omnibus Higher Education Act (HEA), it
provides the most durable, almost the only, federal support for
adding an international component to the American educational
system. HEA Title VI of that Act provides support for what are
now 93 campus-based centers, 81 of them dealing with a partic-
ular world area, not only the Soviet Union, but all of the other
parts of the world as well. It also provides fellowship support for
students studying to be regional specialists in those centers.4 A
specially targeted section of the Fulbright-Hays Act supports
some of the overseas activities of the faculty and students of the
centers.
The immense growth of academic language and area studies,
nurtured by private institutional, foundation, and state and
federal government support, can serve as a prototype of the
productive use of national resources drawn from a variety of
sources in support of international studies. It is unparalleled
anywhere else in the world; indeed, other countries are now
seeking to emulate it. We tend to take it for granted, but if it did
not exist we would be trying desperately to create it, and at a cost
that would be almost unimaginable.
We have now completed some 40 years in the development of
our national resource base in language and area studies. During
those four decades of growth, years in which our national
resource base in academic language and area studies was so small
that growth in almost any direction was welcome, our national
policy with respect to the composition and functions of aca-
demic language and area studies has essentially been laissez-
'See Richard D. Lambert, Language and Area Studies Review, monograph 17
(Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1973), and Sue E.
Berryman et al., Foreign Language and International Studies Specialists: The
Marketplace and National Policy, prepared for the President's Commission on
Foreign Languages and International Studies (Santa Monica CA: The Rand Corpora-
tion, 1979).
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Training of Academic Specialists 55
faire. Now language and area studies is entering a more mature,
less expansive phase. The current need is for assuring long-term
support for this carefully built-up resource base, tempered by
some greater attention within the field itself to structure and
functions, to making it possible for language and area studies to
fulfill more fully its original purpose, and to increasing its
responsiveness to changing national needs. The current practice
of annually threatening an abrupt cutoff of support for the
program makes long-range planning impossible. The need for a
fresh policy with respect to long-term support of language and
area studies is made all the more pressing because the increasing
budgetary constraints on campuses, which encourage universi-
ties to discontinue instruction in the more exotic languages and
coverage of all but the largest countries, have put our national
resource base in real jeopardy.
Fortunately, to guide us in the development of a longer-term,
more focused national strategy, we have available several s de-
tailed surveys of campus-based language and area studies pro-
grams and their graduates, and of other members of the language
and area studies community. Together they present a fairly
complete account of the immense accomplishments that have
been achieved, the original goals that have and have not been
fully met, and the fresh functions that may now be demanded of
language and area specialists by an expanding and increasingly
complex national interest. For a highly specific and detailed
agenda for language and area studies, these reports should be
consulted.
The field of language and area studies encompasses all of the
aspects of international studies covered in this report: the
training and maintenance of a cadre of specialists; the creation,
gathering, storage, and dissemination of information; the inter-
nationalization of the education of students in general and
important segments of the public at large; and the construction
and maintenance of durable international linkages. In this chap-
ter, we will be concerned only with the first of these, the training
and maintenance of highly qualified language and area special-
'For references, see Richard D. Lambert et al., Beyond Growth: The Next Stage
in Language and Area Studies (Washington DC: Association of American Universi-
ties, 1984). (
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ists. This, in turn, divides naturally into foreign language com-
petencies and area expertise.
LANGUAGE TRAINING
As in the case of business, a plan for the development of
foreign language training in language and area studies parallels
the general national agenda, but several portions of that agenda
are of special relevance.
A Common Metric
We take as fundamental to the notion of a language and area
specialist that such a specialist should have a high level of
competency in one or more of the languages of the area in which
expertise is professed. However, currently we really do not know
the actual level of language competency of most members of the
existing pool of specialists, whether at the end of training or later
during their professional careers. Since language and area spe-
cialists, unlike most high school and college students enrolled in
foreign language classes, are striving not only to attain but to use
a language competency, both the measurement of the effective-
ness of teaching programs and the degree of skill of the individual
student or trained specialist are of critical importance. Accord-
ingly, language and area studies has a special interest in the
development of a universally comprehensible, uniformly applied
standard of measurement of foreign language proficiency.
However, while the need for such a common metric is
especially pressing in language and area studies, its development
and adoption raise special problems not found in the more
commonly taught languages. For instance, given the greater
length of time it takes an American to learn languages such as
Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic, there are special problems of
relating the current proficiency standards to the lower-level
language skills. Similarly, the spe-cial problems introduced by
complex orthographies in such languages make the proficiency
standards developed for the commonly taught languages rather
difficult to apply. This problem is especially troublesome since
the ILR/ACTFL (Inter-Agency Language Roundtable/American
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Training of Academic Specialists 57
Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages) standards that are
increasingly used for the commonly taught languages are rather
poorly developed in reading and writing, the skills in which
problems of the very different orthographies are most relevant.
Third, the nature of the languages themselves, the instructional
process, and the availability of teaching materials differ so
widely among the less commonly taught languages?for in-
stance, between Yoruba and Chinese?that the construction of a
metric that is uniform across languages and still useful for the
instructional process is difficult to achieve. A major develop-
ment effort is needed that is specifically targeted on and adapted
to the needs of the various languages most commonly taught in
language and area studies programs.
Recommendation: The National Foundation for International
Studies should encourage and support a major effort to extend
the common metric to as many as possible of the less commonly
taught languages and to all four of the skills: speaking, listening,
reading, and writing.
Higher-Level Language Skills
One of the most common criticisms of language and area
studies programs is that they produce too few specialists with a
truly advanced competency in a foreign language. Without a
precise metric, it is difficult to accept or reject this criticism, and
the level of language competency varies from one world area to
another. The sharp decline of enrollments in the upper as
compared with the lower levels of language instruction and the
limited number of semesters of language training seen on many
Ph.D.-level transcripts of Foreign Language and Area Studies
Fellows would indicate that the problem of too low a level of
language competency is a real one. Whatever the data show,
however, it is clear that the development of training in higher-
level skills is of great concern to language and area studies,
where a substantial portion of the specialists should be expected
to attain near-native fluency in speaking, listening, reading, and
even writing a language of the region as well.
To increase the general level of language competency of stu-
dents training to be specialists, three interrelated developments
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o POINTS OF LEVERAGE
must occur. First, the field must establish and insist on a higher
level of language skills both among those training to be specialists
and among specialists themselves. A start on this process would
be to introduce proficiency test criteria into the qualifications for
fellowships for advanced training of language and area specialists.
Second, a central part of the planning and support for the
training of language and area specialists must include overseas
language training. It is difficult, if not impossible, to reach a high
level of proficiency solely through training in the United States.
Hence, opportunities for topping off domestic language training
with directed language learning overseas are essential to the
upgrading of the language competencies of area specialists. At
present, if such opportunities are provided at all, they take place
in the overseas advanced language training centers. But the
existence of these centers is precarious: they have never received
direct appropriations and are supported under omnibus catego-
ries that can always shift to other priorities. Moreover, the
number of languages for which such centers is available is under
a dozen; there are no such facilities for the majority of the
languages taught in the language and area studies programs. And
the number of students admitted to the centers that do exist is
very limited. A direct, specially targeted, and carefully planned
program of support for overseas language training centers is an
essential step in raising the level of language competencies.
Third, the technology of instruction and the teaching mate-
rials related to the acquisition of upper-level language skills?
how to take someone from an ILR/ACTFL level 2 to near-native
fluency?are all quite primitive. It is no wonder that many
Americans who seek to be experts on a particular country remain
language cripples throughout their careers. Each one must invent
the upper end of the pathway for himself.
Recommendation: The Foundation should seek to enhance the
language proficiency level of existing and trainee language and
area specialists by establishing high language proficiency stan-
dards for any fellowships it provides, by creating a direct,
planned support system for an expanded network of overseas
advanced language training centers, and by promoting research
and development leading to the creation of a teaching system
and set of materials focused on upper-level language skills.
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Training of Academic Specialists 59
Skill Attrition, Skill Maintenance, and Skill Upgrading
As in the rest of the language teaching system, the only
systematic investment made is in first-time skill acquisition. For
practicing language and area specialists, particularly those whose
trips to their country of specialization are relatively infrequent,
the language skills once learned can wither quickly from disuse.
We have no information to guide us, but it is likely that we are
losing language-competent specialists almost as rapidly as we
produce them. This wasteful process makes no sense. There are
several specific steps that can be taken.
First, we are just beginning to understand what specific
aspects of a language people lose and how fast. Our understand-
ing of this process of loss and the tests to measure it should be a
high priority for research supported by the Foundation. Second,
we are just beginning to set in place programs that will refurbish
lost skills. There is no point in trying to fit an established
language and area specialist into a semester- or year-long class
where instruction is aimed at first-time learners and follows the
rhythm and timing of regular student enrollees. Instruction
needs to be geared to what the specialist has specifically forgot-
ten, and offered in a format that makes learning possible for the
adult learner. Ideally, since it is upper-level skills that are lost,
such training should take place in the country where the lan-
guage is spoken, possibly at one of the overseas language training
programs. Third, we have not even begun to develop in a
systematic fashion the materials and the teaching technology
that will reinforce existing language skills so that they do not
erode.
Recommendation: The Foundation should encourage the devel-
opment of the necessary tests, teaching strategies, facilities, and
materials to sustain and refurbish language skills of 'the existing
cadre of specialists.
"Endangered Species" Languages
There is another important item on the agenda with respect
to language training that is not represented in the more general
national agenda: the maintenance of a capacity to teach to a
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ou POINTS OF LEVERAGE
limited number of people a wide variety of languages for which
there may be only occasional demand. Our current national
capacity to provide instruction in these "least commonly
taught" languages lies within the government language teaching
schools and, in the private sector, mainly in the HEA-supported
language and area studies programs.
Some of the less commonly taught or low-density languages,
as they are often called, are taught in the State Department,
Defense Department, and intelligence agency language schools;
many others, particularly some of the African and South Asian
languages, are not. In general, Defense Department and intelli-
gence agency language schools tend to concentrate on the lan-
guages spoken in recent or potential enemy countries. It is
theoretically possible for the government language schools to
acquire staff to teach all of these languages, and to make their
own classes available when needed for nongovernment learners.
To some extent, this already happens with the Foreign Service
Institute. However, as a general policy this solution is likely to
be extremely costly, and problems of security when the teaching
establishment is in the Department of Defense or other intelli-
gence agencies would make it difficult to implement.
For whatever reason, we have chosen to depend on our
universities to 'sustain our national capacity to teach as full a
range as possible of the less commonly taught languages. Given
our generally laissez-faire approach and the pressures for curtail-
ment of "fringe activities" that now dominate our campuses, it is
not surprising that the coverage of these languages is quite
uneven. With respect to each country or world area, there are one
or two languages?for instance, Arabic for the Middle East,
Chinese and Japanese for East Asia, Hindi for South Asia,
Russian for Eastern Europe?for which student demand, while
modest compared with that for French, German, and Spanish, is
adequate to assure their continued representation on a number of
campuses. Outside of these languages there are many others?for
instance, most of the African and the Central, South and South-
east Asian languages, and, in the Middle East, Turkish, Farsi,
Pushtu, and Berber?that are offered on university campuses as a
national service in spite of their high cost and negligible enroll-
ments. However, as resources become scarce on all campuses, it
is precisely these languages that are in danger of disappearing.
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Training of Academic Specialists 61
_ The capacity to provide instruction in these languages on
demand is a precious national resource that no other nation in the
world possesses. A collective strategy to retain that capacity must
be developed. The current federal investment in scarce language
instruction is about $10,000 per center per year for all of the
languages the centers teach. Either more of the funds allocated to
centers will have to be allocated to the sustenance of the "en-
dangered languages," or a specially earmarked support program
will have to be mounted to assure that at least one institution
maintains the capacity to teach these languages on demand. Some
of these languages can be taught only occasionally in specially
mounted collaborative summer programs. As a place of last resort,
the national foreign language resource center, described earlier in
the chapter on language policy in general, could be utilized to
provide such "endangered language" instruction.
Recommendation: The Foundation should monitor the national
capacity to teach the "endangered languages" in both the public
and the private sector. A sensible division of labor and arrange-
ments for access to instruction across the public/private line
must be developed. Where necessary, funds should be provided
to assure the continued offering of instruction in these languages
where it is in danger of disappearing. As a place of last resort, the
national foreign language resource center could provide instruc-
tion in those languages.
AREA TRAINING
Fellowship Support
The other segment of the training of a language and area
specialist is the development of a deep knowledge of the country
or world area in which he or she specializes. A number of recent
surveys6 and the analysis of transcripts of graduating students
6See ibid., and Lorraine McDonnell, Cathleen Stasz, and Rodger Madison,
Federal Support for the Training of Foreign Language and Area Specialists: The
Education and Careers of FLAS Fellowship Recipients, prepared for the U.S.
Department of Education (Santa Monica CA: The Rand Corporation, 1983).
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Oh PUIN OF LEVERAGE
completing their training to be specialists have indicated that the
drift of time, the imperatives of the university structure, and the
scale and form of fellowship support have combined to curtail the
amount and the range of area-specific training that students re-
ceive. Overall, these surveys find that the training of specialists
has been grafted onto the fragmented structure of classes and
faculty that is dispersed throughout the various disciplines. This
development has meant that the strongest, sometimes the only,
area- specific part of the training of area experts is in the discipline
in which they major. Over the years, the nonmajor component of
students' coursework has become a smaller and smaller portion
of their overall training, and increasingly it tends to come in the
form of courses that lie solely within their own discipline. In such
circumstances, it becomes more difficult to assure that area ex-
perts will have the minimal corpus of general knowledge on their
area from the perspective of a number of disciplines that should
mark them off as fully qualified specialists.
In short, the strong pressures of the system of graduate
education in the United States militate against the breadth and
depth of training needed to make a fully qualified area specialist.
Stealing the time from normal Ph.D.-level disciplinary training
to invest in language training puts strains on the normal educa-
tional sequence and lengthens the time of study considerably.
Such stretching of the length of training is limited not only by
institutional pressures but also by the extra costs to students
who, by the time they complete graduate school, are already
deeply in debt. A strong generalist component often just does not
get added.
The answer recommended by these surveys is the provision
of lengthened, targeted fellowships to enable students to add the
necessary supplemental components of language and area exper-
tise to their graduate training. The HEA Title VI fellowships
which currently provide for only one or two years of training per
student, on the average, and whose distribution is totally con-
trolled by the centers, are useful for the initial stage when
potential specialists are being recruited. Supplementing this
system, we need to establish an entirely new type of fellowship
allowing the student time for the extra training required to add
together an area, a language, and a discipline, plus a foreign
sojourn. To allow for the necessary overseas training, the fellow-
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iraming of Academic Specialists 63
ships should be tenable both in the United States and abroad.
These fellowships should be given to individual students based
on a national competition in which the student, not the institu-
tion, is the basis for the judgment. The training now provided for
military foreign affairs officers provides for just such a long-term,
flexible combination of domestic and overseas training. To
assure that the level of language competency of this select body
of specialists is raised and sustained, a qualification for entry into
this competition would be the demonstration of a high level of
proficiency in a language of the region.
Recommendation: The Foundation should administer a nation-
ally competitive fellowship program providing for lengthened
and broadened training both in the United States and abroad.
Acceptance into that program would require demonstration of a
high level of language proficiency.
Disciplinary Distribution
Another consequence of the imprint of academic disciplinary
preferences on the composition of the national cadre of academ-
ically trained language and area specialists is that the disciplinary
distribution of specialists and students training to be specialists
is skewed. Both faculty and students are heavily concentrated in
just four disciplines: history, language and literature, anthropol-
ogy, and political science. Economics and sociology, two disci-
plines that one might have expected to be heavily represented in
language and area studies, are opposed as a matter of faith. Indeed,
there is anecdotal evidence that the senior scholars who, in spite
of these disciplinary antagonisms, have developed a language and
area expertise and hold major academic appointments will not be
replaced when they retire. The applied and professional disci-
plines that might both inform public policy and provide employ-
ees for the nonacademic sectors of our society are hardly repre-
sented at all. This emphasis on the four basic disciplines is not
surprising when we remember that for the first two decades of its
existence, the federal support for language and area studies was
aimed at the production of teachers. In fact, until 1980 candidates
for HEA Title VI fellowships had to sign a statement that they
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Fulivi 3 Uh LtV.E.KAGE
would be teachers or the equivalent. The four core disciplines
were precisely those in which courses in language and area studies
were likely to be welcome and, hence, the educational job market
has been strongest.
Education will continue to be the largest employment market
for language and area specialists, and from the perspective of the
national interest, it is where they can have the greatest societal
impact. Hence, the representation of these core teaching disci-
plines should not be penalized. Moreover, there is evidence that
the production of language and area specialists for the academic
marketplace, given the rate of retirement and death of the existing
pool, is about in equilibrium. Training just for the academic mar-
ketplace, however, is no longer enough. As this report argues
throughout, the expanding internationalization of many sections
of our society calls for the training of specialists with a profound
knowledge of other countries but whose disciplinary specializa-
tion is in fields not heavily represented in language and area
studies. The combination of business and language and area stud-
ies mentioned earlier is a case in point. A similar case could be
made for engineering, journalism, or even medicine.
It is not likely that increased funding for the training of
specialists in general?in the expectation that the desired kinds
of specialists will materialize?will alone accomplish the desired
purpose. Nor will assigning priorities in the allocation of fellow-
ships to all centers, as is currently the practice, suffice to fill in
the missing kinds of specialists. Instead, resources must be
directed specifically to pinpointed disciplinary and professional
specialties, both to assure the continuation of the existing
complement of specialists with unusual combinations of skills
where it is in danger of erosion, and to add to the stock where
important new competencies must be created.
Recommendation: The Foundation should develop a separate
fellowship competition aimed at the production of language and
area specialists in underrepresented disciplinary and applied
and professional specialties in which there is a demonstrated
national interest.
'Elinor G. Barber and Warren Ilchman, International Studies Review (New
York: The Ford Foundation, 1979), and Lambert et al., Beyond Growth, pp. 128-41.
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1 raining of Academic Specialists 65
LANGUAGE AND AREA STUDIES CENTERS'.
The field of language and area studies is composed of not only
individual specialists and trainees but also clusters of scholars
organized on campuses as centers or institutes. The scale of such
centers and institutes ranges from two or three faculty members
and their students to large centers with more than 100 faculty
members and an annual budget of $4 million or $5 million. The
upper end of that organizational continuum comprises the cen-
,-
ters supported under HEA Title VI. Which individual programs
qualify for such support varies from year to year, but over the
past decade about 10 to 12 centers have been supported for each
of the major world areas.
The resultant combination of institutional, private founda-
tion, and state and federal government support can serve as a
prototype of the productive use of national resources drawn from
a variety of sources in support of international studies. The
felicitous consequences of 30 years of combined private and
public investment were summarized in a recent comprehensive
review of the current state of language and area studies:8
The result was the creation of a network of institutions
unmatched anywhere in the world, a national resource whose
loss would immensely impoverish the capacity of our demo-
cratic society and our government to understand the complex,
interrelated world in which we live. In addition to the training
of specialists, these centers provide instruction about other
countries to a substantial portion of the future electorate;
provide a catalyst for internationalizing the perspective of
primary and secondary education; inform the general public on
important national events in the countries they study; serve the
media and the public policy makers; assemble library and
resource materials on other parts of the world; establish and
maintain training facilities used by government and private
sector organizations as well as by their own students who
require overseas experience; and provide durable overseas link-
ages with scholars and political leaders in the service of our
long-range public diplomacy.
The creation of this network of centers, and the expanding
pool of language and area specialists trained at these centers who
'Lambert et al., Beyond Growth, pp. 9-10.
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found employment in the academic world, government, and busi-
ness, was made possible by the allocation of both university and
external resources drawn from the private and public sectors. It
was apparent to all that there were extra costs involved in the
creation and sustenance of training programs that marshaled fac-
ulty and instructional resources across disciplinary and school
lines, constantly upgraded and reinforced that faculty's transna-
tional competencies, offered courses and degree programs on coun-
tries and in languages for which general student enrollments
would always be light, and made unusually heavy demands upon
library and other collectively held university resources. Language
and area studies centers, like most interdisciplinary programs on
campuses, cut across the grain of most universities, and constant
battles need to be fought and fresh resources need to be invested
to retain the integrity of those programs.
In recent years, the costs of maintaining a language and area
studies program and of training students to a high degree of
competency have increased immensely, as has everything else.
At the same time, both internal and external funding for these
programs have shrunk substantially. The results are what might
have been expected. As private foundation support has con-
tracted; as federal support has paid for less and less of the cost of
sustaining these programs (it is now down to 5% of total costs,
and each year it has been in danger of totally disappearing) as the
constraints on university budgets get tighter and tighter; as
general support for students declines and the debt load from
tuition payments becomes increasingly oppressive; as all these
forces conspire to undermine the combination of funding that
made the growth of language and area studies possible, the
centers are beginning to fray at the edges. Carefully built-up
faculty coalitions, the commitment of institutions to sustain
these high-cost programs, and the ability of the centers to attract
and keep the best students regardless of their personal resources
are all seriously eroding. Particularly pernicious has been the
annual threat under two administrations to remove the federal
part of that combination, the funding provided under HEA Title
VI. Fortunately, the U.S. Congress has taken the longer view, but
the annual uncertainty about the availability of the crucial
federal funding makes any long-term planning immensely diffi-
cult and puts these campus centers in increasing jeopardy.
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iiummg of Academic Specialists 67
Recommendation: The Foundation, by sustaining a continuing
budget allocation for the items currently included in HEA Title
VI, should provide long-term, dependable support for the main-
tenance of our national resource base in language and area
studies and for the training of students to become specialists on
other countries.
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Chapter 5
International Information Flows
While there is a clear need for expert personnel in meeting the
challenge of the internationalization of our society, only a few
experts on international affairs are likely to be employed in our
major business, government, and educational institutions. For
most of the society, for most of the time, our ability to cope in an
international environment will depend not on experts, but on
the supply of information and organized knowledge. It is true
that experts may help collect and interpret it, but it is the
information that is essential.
The normal flow of information into and out of the United
States is, of course, immense, and no centralized agency could nor
should hope to manage it. However, if we are to marshal our
national information resources for the difficult times ahead, we
cannot continue to do things as we have done them in the past.
We are ill-served by the current piecemeal, lopsided international
information system in which tax monies are spent on redundan-
cies and miss areas of high national interest, and square wheels
are reinvented with appalling regularity. There is a set of func-
tions with respect to international information flows that are
crucial to our national interest but just will not be done unless a
central organization like the National Foundation for Interna-
tional Studies undertakes them: agenda setting, constant moni-
toring of needs and resources, and the creation and maintenance
of key support systems. In targeting its activities, the primary
focus of the Foundation should be on those aspects of the flow of
69
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1l.11.1V I 3 lir LC VC/CAUL
international information in which our collective need is greatest,
the public rather than the private interest is paramount, and the
normal processes of information creation, flow, and management
are most unsatisfactory. There is much to do.
It is curious that the governmental action that comes closest
to a national policy with respect to international information
flows is a negative one: controls on the export of the results of
scientific and technological research originating in the United
States.1 To deal with this issue we have erected an elaborate legal
and administrative structure to attempt to stem the outward
flow of high technology.2 We have not gone quite so far in our
concern for technology imports, although there is a growing
realization that our survival in the global economy requires an
expanded and more systematic effort to import the results of
scientific and technological research carried on elsewhere. This
realization has encouraged discussion in the White House3 and
in Congress4 about the advisability of developing a government-
supported national information policy similar to those developed
in England, France, Germany, Japan, and other countries of the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD). 5 Given our persistent reluctance to centralize control of
almost any aspect of our economy or our society,6 it is unlikely
that we will construct a government-managed international
information policy. It is likely, however, that a national effort
will be mobilized to help support services that import interna-
tional technical information, starting with Japan.7
It is also odd that in this increasing concern for the export
and import of technological information, we have paid very little
Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on University Responsiveness
to National Security Requirements (Washington DC: Office of the Undersecretary of
Defense for Research and Engineering, 1982).
'Ibid., pp. 4-1 to 4-10.
3Science, Technology, Development and Innovation: Role of Scientific Infor-
mation (Washington DC: White House Office of Science and Technology Policy,
1984).
4 Information, Technology, R&D: Critical Trends and Issues (Washington DC:
Congress of the United States, Office of Technology Assessment, 1985), chap. 7.
'Ibid., pp. 215-16.
6Chalmers Johnson, The Industrial Policy Debate (San Francisco: Institute for
Contemporary Studies, 1984), pp. 19-26.
7"Pace Picks Up in Translations of Japanese Technical Articles," Wall Street
Journal, December 27, 1985, p. 11.
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international Information Flows 71
attention to the collective needs of American international
business for information on other countries as it participates in
the global economy, or to the needs of those who plan and carry
out public policy, or to the needs of social scientists and
humanists who help educate the public both within and outside
of our schools and universities. It is to serving the information
needs of business, public policy, and education that the efforts of
the Foundation should be directed.
Fortunately, in developing an effective policy to serve these
needs, we have the advantage of long experience and a great deal
of public discussion about the role of government and business
support for information services in science and technology.8
With respect to international information flows for international
business and international studies, some of these issues take on
a greater urgency; there are other issues that arise out of the
special problems inherent in all transnational transactions.
First, the national attention that has been almost exclusively
focused on the flow of scientific and technological information
must be extended to include information specifically about other
countries, particularly social scientific and humanistic informa-
tion. Special emphasis should be given to information that is
relevant to our participation in the global economy, to the
formation of public policy, and to the needs of our educational
system.
Second, a major problem choking adequate information
flows is the inadequacy of services for the translation of foreign
language materials into English. Our present support system of
ad hoc arrangements within corporations, government agencies
serving their own employees' needs, and proprietary organiza-
tions providing translations for a fee is inadequate.
Third, we have a major national problem in the segmentation
of information sources so that strengths in one domain?busi-
ness, government, academic?cannot be made available to the
others. In the absence of adequate mechanisms to facilitate
transsectoral information flows, not only do we suffer immense
redundancies in both the nature and the costs of the information
8See "Testimony of Rodney M. Nichols before the Task Force on Science
Policy," Hearings on Science and the Mission Agencies, Committee on Science and
Technology, October 23, 1985.
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/L POINTS OF LEVERAGE
collected, we also encourage a growing set of adversarial rela-
tionships, particularly between the government and the aca-
demic world, that threaten to make transfers of information and
knowledge increasingly difficult.
Fourth, the most effective points of national leverage on
international flows of information are the facilities that collect,
manage, store, and distribute information and knowledge. Yet we
are almost absentmindedly allowing foreign concerns to gain
control of some of the most important U.S.-based information
services in the natural sciences; and there are almost no equiv-
alents to these scientific information services in business and
social sciences.
Moreover, in the face of increasing budgetary pressures, our
long-term repositories of information and knowledge, our librar-
ies, are curtailing their acquisition of foreign publications, and
all of them are dropping the same things at the same time.
Simultaneously, large numbers of previously acquired publica-
tions sit in library storerooms either uncatalogued or unshelved,
and many of them, because of their more vulnerable physical
composition, are deteriorating with each passing year.
This is a large, complex, and costly agenda. Many of the
resources for the maintenance and expansion of this segment of
our international information policy are dispersed between pub-
lic and private organizations and at many levels of government.
The appropriate role for the Foundation would be at the margin,
providing continuous stock taking, agenda setting, support ser-
vice creation and maintenance, and, where needed, durable,
targeted funding to enable our national information needs to be
met. Within this broader mandate, the Foundation should con-
centrate its efforts on those issues in which the combination of
public and private initiative could be most effectively used, and
leverage at the national level could have the greatest multiplier
effect in meeting our national needs. As an initial agenda for its
activities, we propose ( 1 ) assuring the ready availability of
translation services; and (2) sustaining and expanding our facil-
ities for the storage, management, and dissemination of interna-
tional information. In the implementation of policies in each of
these domains, the Foundation should continuously seek to
coordinate and make mutually supportive the resources in the
private and various levels of the public sector.
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onal Information Flows 73
Recommendation: The Foundation should take as a major part
of its responsibility the enhancement and management of the
flow of international information other than that concerned
with science and technology. It should concentrate its activities
on translation services and on the management and storage of
information.
TRANSLATION
In view of the low level of foreign language competency
among Americans, one obvious chokepoint that inhibits the
import of international information is the need to translate
almost all foreign language materials into English before we can
deal with them. As noted in an earlier chapter, because English
has been a kind of lingua franca for much of international
communication, particularly in business, we have been able to
limp along ignoring materials not available in English. In areas
other than business, and increasingly there as the scope of our
enterprise expands into new markets, our dependence on English
has been, and will become, more and more limiting. Since it is
not likely that we will overcome our national foreign language
disabilities in the short run, the adequacy of our international
information flows will continue to depend upon our capacity to
provide translation services.
Curiously, at a national level we have paid almost no
attention to this problem. At present, we have a very limited,
highly dispersed, =coordinated capacity for providing transla-
tion when it is needed. Translation services tend to be ad hoc,
cover relatively few languages, and are not readily available to
large numbers of potential users. Our large multinational corpo-
rations can meet most of their translation needs within the
corporation, but even for them, the large transnational flows of
information and the translation of materials in the less com-
monly taught languages sometimes present problems. The intel-
ligence and external affairs sections of the federal government
have their own translation capacities as well. To the extent that
translation facilities are available for general use on a continuous
basis, they tend to serve the scientific and technical community,
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but even here the coverage is spotty. For other sections of the
society, securing accurate, timely translation of materials, par-
ticularly for the non-European languages, can be a major prob-
lem. For all practical purposes, most sections of our society are
limited in their international information reception to materials
in English.
What is to be done? At the outset, we need a national
assessment of our capacities and needs in foreign language
translation of the kind recently carried out in France9 by a
committee advising the prime minister. We may not want to go
so far as to create the American equivalent of a "Centre National
de la Traduction," similar to those already in place in a number
of other European countries. However, we should at least take
steps to assure that the necessary services are available at a
reasonable cost and to a substantial number of users somewhere
in the national system, and that the availability of these services
be made more widely known. This is the system that is proposed
for Japanese in the pending Senate bill, the Japanese Technical
Information Act. This stock taking, monitoring, and service
directory function is one that the proposed Foundation should
support.
We can afford to allow the proposed Foundation to play this
marginal role where a review of existing facilities indicates that
translation services are adequate and readily available. Where
they are not, the creation of centrally initiated facilities may be
called for. The initiation of facilities to provide translation
services for the special needs of business, particularly for the
many companies that wish to conduct business abroad but do
not have the advantage of a multinational corporation, should be
a joint business-government venture. On the business side, the
interests of various companies would be served either on a
fee-for-service basis or by membership fees. On the government
side, various levels of government should be called on to partic-
ipate. In particular, state governments, and some of the major
metropolitan governments, might join with chambers of com-
merce to help create and sustain such facilities. The role of the
federal government, through the Foundation, would be similar to
9Jean-Pierre van Deth, La traduction et Pinterpretation en France (Paris:
Premier Ministre, Commissariat General de la Langue Francaise, 1985).
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international Information Flows 75
that played in the Higher Education Act (HEA) Title VI, Part B,
where matching business-federal funding is required to help
initiate the creation of new facilities. Indeed, an expansion of the
scope of Part B would be a procedurally simple way of meeting
this need.
The greatest difficulty, and the need that at present is least
adequately met, is in providing adequate translation facilities for
what are often called the "critical" or "less commonly taught"
languages, that is, the languages spoken outside of Western
Europe. In this respect, we have potentially an immense advan-
tage over other countries. National facilities for translation in
the European countries deal almost entirely with the languages
of Europe, although a few of them cover Arabic, Chinese, and
Japanese. No other nation can match our national capacity to
deal with so many of the non-European languages, thanks in
large part to the development of our campus-based language and
area studies centers. In them we have professional staff engaged
in the teaching of most of the non-European languages. It is
startling to note that we have made no systematic use, indeed to
our knowledge almost no use at all, of this national resource to
meet this obvious national need.
We cannot, of course, just direct these centers to begin to
perform this function. There are special skills involved in trans-
lation that the faculty and students currently oriented to aca-
demic research do not have. Some supplemental professional
training would obviously be required to train language specialists
and language speakers to do accurate translation, and the lan-
guage skill level of many graduates of the center programs would
have to be raised substantially. In the short run, foreign-born
speakers of the languages will have to be marshaled. Moreover,
on the campuses of the major universities where these language
and area studies centers tend to be located, it is usually possible
to find foreign-born professors and students with the disciplinary
skills necessary for technical translation. In the long run, this
national resource base in which the public investment is already
quite large should be used to provide this service. Adding the
supplemental skills in translation, raising the language compe-
tency levels of graduates of the program, and underwriting the
costs of the extra staff needed to carry out this service would,
from a national perspective, be a cost-effective and efficient way
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/0 POINTS OF LEVERAGE
to create a national network of translation facilities in the
critical languages.
Because of the extra costs involved and current limitations
on the demand for these services, it makes no sense to tack this
responsibility onto all 93 of the HEA Title VI centers. The
identification and support of one translation center for each
world area?Africa, East Asia, Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union, Central Asia, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast
Asia?would suffice. There are two possible sets of centers that
might be called upon to perform this function. Under the newer
version of HEA Title VI, it is proposed to create a national
language resource center for each world area. The addition of a
translation function to these centers would be one way of
providing general translation services.
For more specialized needs, such as those of business, how-
ever, it might be more useful to attach this function to those
centers that have been identified as having a special research and
teaching capacity with respect to business in their world area. It
will be recalled that earlier we recommended that supplemental
clusters of five or six scholars working in specialized areas such
as international business, agriculture, or labor relations be added
to a limited number of centers specializing in each world area.
The centers that had created these supplemental clusters of
specialists would be the natural bases for the establishment of
the translation facilities for the use of business. The addition of
these translation service centers to existing language and area
studies centers would be supported either by an expansion in the
current HEA Title VI funding?business-specific centers might
be funded under Part B of that act?or through a separate upport
program initiated by the proposed Foundation.
One further step toward coping with the translation problem
is the development of computer translation technology. It is
ironic that the first major impetus to the development of such a
technology occurred 40 years too early when at the end of World
War II, the U.S. military services, particulary the U.S. Navy,
invested heavily in making machine translation possible. After a
very large investment of funds and a frustrating lack of accom-
plishment, the effort was turned over to the National Science
Foundation, and a few years later, for all practical purposes it was
abandoned. In recent years, however, with advances in computer
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linvinational Information Flows 77
technology and in studies of artificial intelligence, and with the
reentry of theoretical linguists into foreign language learning,
investment in the development of machine translation is again
taking place on a limited basis. There is some evidence that for
discourse in limited topical areas with a fairly narrow vocabu-
lary, such as those that may occur in scientific or business
communication, machine translations at least as error-free as
those provided by a number of different human translators are
now possible. Investment in the expansion of this capacity holds
great promise for assisting in "unchoking" the international
information flow.
Recommendation: The Foundation should monitor, and where
necessary, establish readily available translation services sup-
ported by both public and private funds. For the less commonly
taught languages, the possibility of establishing such services as
adjuncts to existing language and area studies centers should be
explored. The Foundation should also assist in the development
of automated translation facilities.
COLLECTIVE INFORMATION SERVICES
A second point of leverage for the enhancement of interna-
tional information flows is the improvement of the centralized
services that gather, manage, store, and distribute international
information. For many purposes, the central problem concerning
international information is not to increase the flow, but to
select what is useful from the gushing stream of raw information
that modern states exude, to transform it into a usable form, to
store it in such a fashion that it can be readily retrieved, and to
distribute it to those who will use it. In this matter we have a
great deal to learn from the scientific and technical community,
which has been coping with this problem for half a century.
Indeed, it is ironic that American scientific information systems
have themselves become part of other countries' strategies for
enhancing international information flows. There is a growing
concernlo about the purchase by foreign firms of major American
I? Science, Technology and Development, pp. 2-3.
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scientific information storage and distribution systems, which
let them have immediate access to the products of our high-
technology research without worrying about export restrictions.
A recent report of the White House Office of Science and
Technology Policy noted,
Elsevier of the Netherlands, a major science publisher and
owner of the abstracting service Excerpta Medica, in 1979,
announced with its acquisition of Education and Economic
Systems, Inc. that it was entering the information services
market and planned to make further acquisitions. It subse-
quently acquired Congressional Information Services, Inc. of
Washington and Greenwood Press which produces the Index to
Congressional Papers (Hearings, Reports, etc.). It has developed
a consortium of publishers (Adonis) to provide document deliv-
ery (copies of research articles from their journals) in the world,
including the U.S. market. It is involved in a joint venture to
distribute TV programming in Europe by satellite.
Thyssen-Bornemisza of the Netherlands acquired several U.S.
firms?the Bibliographic Retrieval Systems, which is the third
largest vendor of online computerized databases, as well as
Information Handling Services, Indian Head and Predicasts.
Pergamon Press which is also a major publisher has purchased
the UK Infoline to serve as a host computer for Euronet and also
provide services into the United States. It has an -exclusive '-
agreement with the USSR All-Union Institute for Scientific and
Technical Information (VINITI) for English language abstracts of
the Soviet literature. It acquired U.S. patent files for a Video
Patsearch database (on line access with interactive videodisc
display of drawings and chemical structures). This is available
through the Pergamon Infoline network. Pergamon has also
reached database agreements with several research centers in
the UK which has resulted in the withdrawal of these databases
from the U.S. Organization, Dialog. Pergamon has joined with
Telesystems in France to form a company to acquire other
companies and databases so that it will become a major Euro-
pean force in online information retrieval."
The problem with social science and humanistic information
service organizations is not that they are so valuable that other
nations are vying to acquire them, but that they are at about the
stage that the natural sciences and technology had reached 40
11 Ibid., pp. 3-4.
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International Information Flows 79
years ago. And within the general set of services, those relating to
international information are even more primitive and underde-
veloped. We cannot hope to cope with the huge and rapidly
expanding flow of information from other societies without
facing squarely the problem of managing that flow. In this, we
have much to learn from our experience in the management of
scientific and technological information flows. We are far ahead
of every other country in the reservoir of people and organiza-
tions that focus their activities on other countries, particularly
countries outside of Western Europe. We have just begun to
create and sustain the national-level institutions to service
information about other countries. Moreover, as in so many
other aspects of our society, the relevant people and organiza-
tions are scattered throughout the various segments of our
society, and we have almost no mechanisms for pooling infor-
mation across their natural boundaries to serve our overall
national interest. As we will note below, the flow of information
between our intelligence agencies and our academic community
raises special problems, but this is less true of other agencies of
the federal government such as Agriculture, Commerce, the
Agency for International Development, Treasury, and Health
and Human Services, and not true at all of state and local
governments. In addition, we can surely do more in the interface
between business and the academic world, and this is a good
place to start. The model proposed below might well be adapted
for use with specific mission-oriented governmental agencies.
Business-Academic Links in International Information
Flows
It should be said at the outset that most of the international
information needed on a day-to-day basis by business leaders is
quite specific to a particular firm or industry, must be tailored to
the solution of a very specific problem, and must be available
almost immediately. Moreover, a great deal of information is
proprietary and is part of the competitive advantage of one firm
over others. There is nothing in the academic world that could or
should attempt to service such needs. Where a link between
business and academic international information services would
be fruitful would be in the processing of information of longer-
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8U POINTS OF LEVERAGE
term importance, particularly background information on partic-
ular economies and societies that form the context for business
decisions. It is foolish to have every company assembling and
interpreting demographic, political, attitudinal, legal, and social
organizational information on its own. And when one dips below
the level of the largest multinationals?and even there, for many
countries?the internal capacity to gather and interpret such
data is totally lacking. Most companies must fly blind in
conducting business with many countries of the world. This may
not show up in short-term, individual business decisions in
which the terms of a decision can be narrowly circumscribed and
the cost of errors is bearable, but for our long-term interests in
the world econoMy, ignorance can be truly costly. And from the
standpoint of the society as a whole, knowledge about those
business-related issues that are relevant to the formation of
public policy?for instance, the overall profile and conduct of a
country's economy vis-?is the United States, the relationships
between currency control, industrial subsidies, and tariffs, the
collective impact of countertrading on our international busi-
ness position, the aggregate effect of separately negotiated loans,
expropriation policy and practice?is not likely to emerge from
the information that individual firms collect and publish.
To meet these needs, it is proposed that a series of
experimental centers be established to gather, store, and
disseminate such information relevant to mid- and long-term
business policy. To some extent, such facilities exist. Campus-
based econometric research centers, trade associations, interna-
tional banks, proprietary consultancy services, and overseas
subsidiaries already serve as international information proces-
sors. A first priority should be a national assessment of the
coverage and availability of such services. This should be carried
out under the aegis of the board of international business
advisors of the Foundation recommended in the previous
section. What is unlikely to be widely available are the country-
or region-specific services that permit a variety of indicators and
information sources to be placed side by side to make a coherent
picture. Especially for countries where the interpretation of
government-issued statistics is an arcane exercise in tea leaf
reading, and where they are published in languages and scripts
not easily comprehensible to most business executives, the
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international Information Flows 81
processing and interpreting of data require expertise not readily
duplicated in individual companies. For the countries of
Western Europe, the need is less pressing.
It is in the interest of the business community, the academic
community, and the nation to build information processing,
storage, and dissemination facilities close to the existing cadres
of experts who can judge their value and interpret them. Such a
procedure would be considerably more effective and considerably
less costly than the wasteful duplication of such services by
every company wanting to do business abroad. As in the case of
translation services, such services should be established either as
part of or adjoining carefully selected language and area studies
centers. Also as in the case of translation services, special skills
and facilities would have to be added to the existing cadres of
scholars. There are some prototype centers that now publish
business-relevant information series, mainly for Latin America,
but what is called for is a combination of business and academic
experience not now encountered in any center.
From the perspective of business, such information service
organizations would serve as resource centers for a broad range of
information on particular countries or world regions, collected
and interpreted by individuals for whom the study of that
country or world region is a life work. For the academic commu-
nity, it provides a basis for educating both faculty and students to
the most current needs of business. For the nation it provides an
information base to assist in the formation of national economic
policy, and it begins to use some of the skills built up at
considerable public expense to serve public needs outside of the
educational system itself. Given these interlocking interests, the
cost of establishing and sustaining such centers should be borne
by private business, government, and the university in a match-
ing grant formula similar to that currently employed in Part B of
HEA Title VI, only with a five-year support basis so that the
center could have time to get under way and to plan for a
substantial period of time. In addition, the center should be able
to charge a fee for unusual demands on its time or for services
tailored to individual company clients. Aside from putting some
of the burden on the principal beneficiaries, this sort of funding
would assure that such centers would be responsive to business
and public needs.
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Recommendation: The Foundation, through its board of inter-
national business advisors, should cause to be conducted a
survey of existing information management systems serving
international business to determine where significant gaps
occur. On an experimental basis it should also initiate centers
affiliated with or part of one or more existing language and area
studies centers for each world area to gather, interpret, and
distribute business-relevant information. The costs of such
centers would be jointly met by business, government, and the
host university on a matching basis similar to that contained in
Part B of HEA Title VI.
Large-Scale International Data Sets
There is another clear need and point of leverage for the
management of international information that is similar to,
indeed overlaps, information services tailored to the needs of
business. We refer to the need for research support systems to
manage international information flows for the social sciences
more generally. In particular, we refer to the special costs and
problems of control raised by large sets of social and political
data that are increasingly needed for the more sophisticated
analysis of international affairs. Social science research on other
countries, which has traditionally been a kind of cottage industry
carried out by individual scholars performing a small amount of
processing on limited amounts of data, is increasingly being
supplemented by more elaborate analysis of large bodies of data.
In the natural sciences, the recent acceleration of this increase in
the scale of the data to be managed is being serviced in part by
the National Science Foundation's making available supercom-
puters for the use of the scientific research community. The
volume of reliable quantitative data about economic, political,
and social phenomena that are important for research on inter-
national affairs has increased dramatically since the 1950s, in
terms of both geographical and substantive coverage.
Quantitative data about economic, political, and social phe-
nomena are collected by a variety of public and private resources.
Governments collect basic census data. All governments main-
tain basic national economic accounts. Many governments col-
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International Information Flows 83
lect other economic and social data. International organizations
compile, standardize, and publish these data. Opinion data are
collected in most countries by a variety of public and private
sources. Data about sensitive political and social phenomena are
collected mainly by scholars. Some of these data will make up
part of the information base for the proposed region-specific
international business information centers described above. Oth-
ers will be of interest primarily to researchers both in and out of
government. Such data involve acquisition and management
costs that are prohibitive for any individual researcher or any
particular investigation. They constitute what Kenneth Prewitt
has called "a collective resource."12
Some facilities for collecting and managing such data already
exist. The most important of these is the Inter-University
Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). Founded
in the 1960s, the ICPSR is a consortium of some 300 academic
institutions and consortia of academic institutions. More than
50 are outside the United States. The ICPSR archive has about
20,000 data sets, about two-thirds of them dealing with other
countries, mainly those of Western Europe. The Roper Center at
the University of Connecticut is headquarters for the Interna-
tional Survey Library Association and maintains an archive of
basic data from more than 10,000 public opinion surveys. The
international ones?about 45% of the holdings?are supplied by
80 organizations in 74 foreign countries. There are similar
archives and data bases available for more specialized topics,
such as the Educational Resource Information Center (ERIC)
Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics.
As in the case of business, these central information storage
services are good points of leverage for managing international
information flows, and they are therefore useful places for the
Foundation to direct its attention. There are three issues that
should be on the Foundation's agenda.
First, the coverage of data is limited by the special purposes
of the archiving organization and by the differential participation
of various countries around the world. This is especially true for
noneconomic issues and for countries 'beyond those relatively
'For a discussion of the needs of social science in this respect, see Kenneth
Prewitt, "Annual Report of the President," Annual Report 1984-1985 (New York:
Social Science Research Council, 1985), pp. xviii-xxi.
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84 POINTS OF LEVERAGE
industrialized countries that are members of the OECD. There
are many existing data collections dealing with demographic and
social phenomena that are not included in archives. Funds
should be provided to include these collections. Obtaining data
from non-Western countries would probably depend on, among
other factors, developing a more extensive network of contacts
with scholars in these countries, a point we will return to later.'
Second, data collected in other countries often need to be
standardized. A great deal of useful work on this problem has
been accomplished by international organizations, and the Na-
tional Science Foundation has invested substantial resources and
planning in greater standardization. Relatively little progress has
been made, however, with respect to data collected by individual
scholars and teams of scholars. Standardization among academ-
ics will be achieved only through voluntary collaboration and
greater contact among scholars in different countries. The Foun-
dation might fruitfully join the National Science Foundation in
working toward that goal.
Finally, the overriding problem of all data archives is to
increase their use by those for whom the data might be helpful.
For instance, while data concerning non-U.S. surveys constitute
almost half of the holdings of the Roper Center, they account for
only 2% of the use. This poses two problems. The first is to
assure that the data are in good condition and that their existence
is widely known. The second is to invest in ways to transport
either the user to the data or, in this age of microcomputers, the
data to the user. Both require the investment of funds. ,As a rule
of parsimony, however, scarce financial resources should not
continue to be invested in sections of data collection where
evidence indicates that such data are never, rarely, or unlikely to
be used. This is particularly true of some of the time-bound data
with a short life span.
Recommendation: ,The Foundation should invest in the man-
agement and storage of international information in existing
data banks and encourage the creation of new ones where major
national need can be demonstrated. It should be further con-
cerned with extending their coverage, standardizing the form for
crosscoun try comparability, and expanding use of the archives:
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LIBRARIES
The Scale of International Collections
Most information services and data banks have the historical
depth of a ticker tape. The repositories of durable international
information are, of course, our libraries where materials /that
have made it into print and binding are stored. We have devel-
oped magnificent collections of periodicals and books from all
parts of the world and scattered them among our major research
universities. As financial constraints on libraries in general and
on international studies interests in particular have increased,
our ability to sustain and expand these collections diminishes.
Many of the problems faced by international studies are merely
exaggerated versions of those facing libraries in general; others
are specific to the assembling and maintenance of international
publications.
The expansion of university library collections to support
international studies generally and research and instruction on
specific world areas is largely a development of the past 30 years.
The increase of area studies centers and the globalization of
acquisitions by many research libraries transformed those librar-
ies in terms of costs, staff composition, managerial organization,
and space requirements. The development of campus-based
language and area studies centers in an, increasing number of
universities both brought to the campus extensive government
and private foundation funding and put pressure on universities
to pour their own resources into the acquisition and manage-
ment of periodicals and books from abroad. The P.L. 480 program
brought even greater quantities of publications to libraries. The
result was immensely accelerated library growth and a tradition
of self-sufficiency for each campus collection?and the size and
costs of area-specific collections are immense.
The scale and costs of sustaining the largest and the average
area-specific collection differ by world area. In 1981, for instance,
the average size of an East Asian collection at a university with
an HEA Title VI center13 was about 300,000 volumes, of which
'Ann L. Schneider, "Libraries of Title VI Centers: Some Impressions and Some
Questions," (Washington DC: Department of Education, 1982), p. 2.
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00 FOIN (Jh LL vt.KAGE
248,000 were in Asian languages. The largest collections con-
tained approximately 700,000 volumes. Publications from Africa
and Southeast Asian countries were considerably smaller, at
about 70,000 on the average, but got as high as 200,000 volumes.
The average annual cost of acquisitions for an East Asian
collection in 1981 was about $140,000, plus an additional
$11,000 for specialists to handle it. The largest East Asian
collections cost $250,000 annually for acquistion and $40,000 for
personnel. Taking all of the world areas outside of Western
Europe, the universities with HEA Title VI centers had acquired
on the average 1.25 million books published in or on those
countries, of which 850,000 were in languages other than Eng-
lish. If one were to add the books on Western Europe and Canada,
the numbers would expand immensely. These are, in short, huge
collections hungry for funds to provide for their maintenance and
expansion.
The strong financial picture that prevailed during the years of
development and made this impressive growth possible has now
changed. Foundation and government support for international
programs has declined for more than a decade, and libraries have
borne more than their share of the cuts. In a battle between the
urgent and the important, between, for instance, sustaining fac-
ulty salaries and the purchase of books, the former will always win
out. Moreover, much of the P.L. 480 program, which provided for
the acquisition of books with "excess" currencies, has been
phased out. Of the last remnants, India went on a dollar payment
basis in October 1985, and Pakistan will do likewise in October
1986. The gradual erosion of "soft money," coupled with a long
period of inflation in book and journal costs, has reduced and
distorted established collecting patterns, making them broader in
coverage but less comprehensive in terms of depth. As a result,
very few research libraries are now maintaining retrospective
acquisition programs as they once did, and related activities such
as preservation have largely fallen by the wayside.
It is clear that in these times of greater fiscal restraint, it is
unlikely that external funding characteristic of an earlier era will
be sufficient to continue to maintain all of these substantial
library resources at their former level. It would be a tragedy,
however, if the financial constraints common to all libraries
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international Information Flows 87
were to cause all libraries to stop acquiring the same kinds of
books and the same periodicals. Some libraries must be enabled
to continue collecting and processing as comprehensively as
possible in a particular world area. It would also be a tragedy if
accidental shifts in the availability of external funds for partic-
ular world areas were to bias inordinately the extent and shape of
our collections. For instance, the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commis-
sion has provided support for university-based library collections
on Japan, as have Japanese business interests through the Japan
Foundation. In the absence of similar funding for other countries,
our collections will inevitably become skewed.
It is in the national interest, not just the local university's
interest, that several repository collections be sustained for each
world area, and therefore central funds should be directed to a
small subset of libraries identified as national resource collec-
tions. Other libraries should be encouraged to find an appropriate
level for somewhat smaller, less comprehensive collections that
would serve most of the needs of their own faculty and students
and the surrounding region.
To assure the continued vitality of libraries at these different
levels, funds should be allocated to meet the extra costs of
acquiring and handling non-Western materials. These supple-
mental funds could be administered through the current HEA
Title VI machinery, and the choice of national versus regional or
local collections should be made on a competitive basis. To
assure that the funds were, in fact, spent on libraries, this
allocation would appear as a line item in a center's budget, would
have to be used for specifically library-related purposes, and
would require separate annual reporting by the grantees.
Recommendation: The Foundation should monitor and help
sustain our major collections of books and periodicals in the
libraries of our research universities. It should help establish
several target levels for collections, ranging from comprehensive
national resource libraries to smaller, inwardly focused or
regional libraries. It should administer a program of support for
the extra costs of international collections graduated by such
collection levels.
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Collaborative Efforts among Libraries
In addition to nurturing individual library collections with
specifically earmarked funds, as in the case of the other interna-
tional information import systems discussed earlier, the key
points of leverage to sustain and improve these collections are in
the central mechanisms that allow for cooperation, division of
responsibility, and freer movement of materials among institu-
tions. If such collaboration and exchange facilities do not work
well, all pressures to plan for rational, multilevel growth among
the various universities will fail.
Libraries have realized this and are turning to cooperative
ventures and seeking way S to establish productive interdepen-
dence. Their search for cooperation and reduction of redundancy
started early. Immediately after World War II, the Farmington
Plan promoted the concept of shared responsibility for collecting,
with the objective of assuring the availability in the United
States of at least one copy of every important book. Since then,
important collaborative organizations have emerged to help
share the load. The On-line Computerized Library Center
(OCLC), which has some 37,000 libraries as members, the
Research Library Group, and the Center for Research Libraries
already provide a number of centralized, collaborative services
for their members, as does the Library of Congress. These include
supplying records to the bibliographic system; cooperative cata-
loguing; the construction of master bibliographic files; a linked
computer system to promote cooperative cataloguing; providing
for uniform transcriptions of non-Roman alphabets; and comput-
erized files of information characterizing the strength of existing
collections and the level of current acquisitions.
There are other'collective tasks, either just begun or still in
the future, in which cooperative efforts would be quite reward-
ing. These include bringing sizable backlogs of uncatalogued or
partially catalogued materials on-line; cooperative acquisition
programs to make the hunt for materials in other countries more
mutually supportive and less competitive; training a larger
number of librarians dispersed throughout our national library
system to handle materials in the less commonly taught lan-
guages; raising the technical level of librarians whose specialty is
the handling of materials in foreign languages but who have not
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International Information Flows 89
kept current in the rapidly moving area of computer and video-
disc technology; making the transfer of stored materials and not
just bibliographic references easier among libraries and between
libraries and users; linking intragovernment bibliographic ser-
vices such as the Department of Commerce's National Techni-
cal Information Service with those on campuses; and transferring
to microfilm or other long-term storage systems the materials
deteriorating on many library shelves.'
The Foundation's concentration of resources on these collec-
tive needs and collective solutions would be an effective way to
use our scarce national resources parsimoniously. Its special role
should be to meet the extra costs and special problems arising
from the fact that the materials to be collected and processed are
international; it ? should serve as a kind of special pleader or
amicus curiae, to more broadly based support programs, to assure
that these extra costs and special problems receive the attention
they require. Indeed, one of the Foundation's first steps should be
the creation of a public-cum-private committee?much like the
board of international business advisors discussed earlier?that
would draw up a highly specific national agenda.
Recommendation: The Foundation should support the national
effort at collaboration and collective planning in the field of
library resources with a special emphasis on assuring that the
collaborative programs adequately manage international mate-
rials. To this end, a national advisory committee to oversee
international aspects of library development should be created,
and it should advise the Foundation on where its funds might
most effectively be expended.
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Chapter 6
Research
We cannot simply depend upon the flow of information routinely
coming from abroad, no matter how abundant and wide-ranging
it is. That information must be turned into organized knowledge,
and most frequently fresh information has to be gathered to
provide intelligent answers to important questions. In short, the
management and utilization of the expanding flow of interna-
tional information calls for a capacity to conduct research and for
the resources to make that research effective.
Our current system of support for internationally focused
research is seriously flawed. It is costly, highly variable, and
without directive intelligence where that is appropriate. It con-
centrates on the most immediate, most client-specific issues at
one extreme, and at the other, on the most general research
issues as specified by academic disciplines rather than what we
need to know about other societies. Moreover, it is absurd that
we have now spent well over a quarter of a billion dollars through
Title VI of the Higher Education Act (HEA) to create, shape, and
sustain a pool of experts on other countries, but we have given no
concerted attention to enabling them to conduct the research
they are trained to do. Nor have we any way to specify what kind
of research is needed to serve our various public purposes. There
is no central place where the question can be asked as to what we
need to know about our international environment and for what
purpose, nor any way of putting resources into the search for
answers. Nor are our facilities well developed for encouraging
91
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YL POINTS OF LEVERAGE
the undirected investigator-driven iniatives such as those that
nourish basic research in the natural sciences.
The results are a national research product on international
affairs that is haphazard and noncumulative, and a system that
neither directs research into topics of great public interest nor
encourages the free creation of a body of basic knowledge about
other countries in the humanities and social sciences that will ,
inform our long-term educational and public policy needs. The
time has come to reallocate existing funds and to provide new
monies for internationally oriented research to better serve the
national need.
The construction of a new centralized initiative in the
promotion of internationally oriented research in the social
sciences and humanities raises the same series of issues that
delayed the founding of the National Science Foundation for five
years, and that still bedevil relations between the research
community and the federal government in the natural sciences:1
the value of pluralism versus centralization in support sources;
applied versus basic research; the propriety of government versus
private support for particular activities; research in which both
the topic and the conduct of the research are set by mission-
oriented agencies, versus investigator-initiated research sup-
ported by general granting organizations; prescriptive versus
reactive project selection; research taking place within an agency
or company versus research contracted out.
The fact that the new initiative we are proposing deals with
the social sciences and the humanities, and will sponsor research
that is transnational instead of domestic in scope, gives these
issues a special importance. We need a strategy for creating the
best mix of centralized versus individual decision making and
private versus government support, a mix that draws on the
experience in the natural sciences, but is tailored to the partic-
ularities of internationally oriented research. We will try to
provide a framework for sorting some of these issues out, for
making the clear distinctions that will make it possible to have
'For an insightful discussion of these issues as they relate to the natural
sciences, see "Testimony of Rodney M. Nichols before the Task Force on Science
Policy," Hearings on Science and the Mission Agencies, Committee on Science and
Technology, U.S. Congress, October 23, 1985.
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Research 93
the benefits of prescriptive, instrumental research where it is
called for, while preserving and expanding our facilities for
individual-initiated, basic research in the social sciences and,
especially, the humanities. Above all, we need a strategy that
will disarm some of the hostility that ill-placed mixing of these
domains has too often created.
To achieve such a strategy for promoting internationally
oriented research in the social sciences and the humanities, it is
useful to consider a rough classification that is commonly used
in planning for research and development in the natural sciences:
(1) product- or problem-targeted research that serves the specific
needs of a business or mission-oriented government client;
(2) technological research that, while still applied in its purpose,
serves more general developmental needs of many potential
clients; and (3) basic research that provides the underpinning for
the other two. The first of these takes place largely within
particular companies, the government's own research establish-
ment, or in highly focused, contracts between government and
business and campus-based research establishments. It is in the
second and, to an even greater extent, the third category that the
immense sums ($4.2 billion in 1982) in support of scientific
research on university campuses are spent. For instance, in that
year the Department of Defense alone allocated 47% of its
budget for fundamental research and development to campus-
based activities, 35% to government laboratories, and 18% to
industry. Paralleling this continuum from the most applied to
the most basic research are differences in the extent to which the
user or the investigator sets the research agenda.
A similar distinction can be made with respect to social
science and humanities research on international topics. One
type of research responds to the very specific needs of a client,
such as a particular business firm or a mission-oriented agency;
the second focuses on broader topics of more general interest that
are nevertheless still oriented to the needs of eventual users,
such as those making public policy or conducting international
business more broadly defined; and the third is the undirected,
basic research in which the topic reflects the interests of the
investigators and not a specific set of clients.
It should be made clear that these are general divisions about
the nature of the research enterprise, not necessarily about the
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94 POINTS OF LEVERAGE
people who conduct the research. Indeed, one of our major
national needs is to encourage those who normally confine
themselves to client-targeted research to engage in the investi-
gation of broader policy themes or in basic research, and for some
basic researchers to get a sense of service to specific clients or the
policy needs of the nation at large. It should also be clear that
listing these three different research functions in the above order
does not constitute an assertion of their intrinsic importance, or
an implicit judgment of the relative scale of support to be
allocated to each.
CLIENT-TARGETED RESEARCH
If we count the immense volume of internationally oriented
research that takes place within individual corporations and add
research carried out by the intelligence agencies, the overwhelm-
ing proportion of our national investment in international re-
search now falls in the first category, research tailored to the
needs of particular clients. The vast majority of such research is
conducted in-house; indeed, outsiders usually either lack the
specific technical expertise or share the client's perspective on
the particular problem too much to be genuinely helpful. There
are, however, a few examples of external contracting of client-
targeted research. Businesses occasionally contract with univer-
sities for targeted project research on international matters. For
instance, the University of Minnesota has recently established a
University Research Consortium attached to the campus where
faculty members provide precisely this kind of service on a fee
basis. More commonly, companies engage the services of one of
the nonacademic research and consulting organizations like the
Conference Board in an ad hoc fashion for particular projects.
Similarly, a government agency may contract with a not-for-
profit research organization like the Rand Corporation for anal-
ysis of very specific policy issues of interest to them. Indeed, the
Rand Corporation was initially established by the U.S. Air Force
precisely to play such a role.
The support of such client-targeted research should not be a
function of the proposed National Foundation for International
Studies. Its beneficiaries and purposes are too narrowly defined to
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Research 95
make a claim on general public research funds. Moreover, when
such research involves university personnel, it often runs head on
into a dispute about the openness and general availability of the
results of campus-based research and the uses to which it will be
put. Most business information gathered through research is pro-
prietary and closely guarded as part of a company's cOmparative
advantage. It is not available for general dissemination. The prob-
lem is especially troublesome in contracting for internationally
oriented research conducted by the academic community for di-
rect use by the intelligence community. Not only are the results
of government-contracted research sometimes classified, but for
most members of the academic international studies research
community there is a strongly held belief that the direct mixing
of academic and intelligence-oriented research is unhealthy. At
the minimum, as we will note later, such mixing can raise im-
mense barriers for academics trying to gain access to other coun-
tries to conduct research. Whether it should or not is irrelevant;
it does. In a curious variant of the Heisenberg principle, intelli-
gence agency sponsorship of overseas academic research can
make it impossible to gather the information it is designed to
collect.
Government mission agencies other than those concerned
with intelligence?for example, State, Treasury, Commerce,
Agriculture, the Agency for International Development, Labor?
have long and successful traditions of supporting targeted re-
search on international topics of direct interest to them. The
basic point is that such research lies outside of the scope of the
Foundation, and should continue to be funded by and under the
control of the client corporation or agency that supports it.
Recommendation: The Foundation should not assume respon-
sibility for the promotion of research that serves the special
needs of particular clients either in business or in government.
TOPICALLY DIRECTED RESEARCH FOR MORE
GENERAL USE
It is one thing to let the market completely determine the
conduct of research serving the very specific interests of corpo-
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71.1 U1 LLVLKJi&1
rate or agency clients. It is quite another to be unable to set any
research agenda at all, to have no way to direct research toward
topics of pressing national interest. We should be able to encour-
age high-quality research on general questions whose answers
are crucial to, for instance, our international competitiveness in
the world economy, or problems to which those charged with the
conduct of our foreign policy wish to direct some of our best
research minds. Such research is the equivalent of the second
level in the tripartite classification of natural science research
discussed earlier.
It is interesting to note that in the private sector, we have
already shifted much of the support available for internationally
oriented research to this second category. With a few exceptions,
many of the major private foundations have focused their grants
on research into topical domains of the foundations' own choos-
ing, rather than that of an investigator. Such foundation-set
research agendas tend to cover a fairly narrow span of topics.
Arms and security studies and peace research are only the most
recent examples.
In contrast to private foundation research funding, we have
no mechanism for setting a research agenda for the allocation of
public funds, nor can we establish proactive programs to encour-
age research on topics of great national importance. We tend
either to fund client-specific research of the first kind discussed
above, or to provide unrestricted support for the third kind of
research to be discussed below, in which the topic is completely
at the discretion of the investigator. We have no mechanisms for
directing our national research effort into the middle ground left
untouched by the short-term interests of particular clients or the
topical drift of self-nominated investigators. It is in this area that
the Foundation might make a major national contribution.
What kind of topics might make up such an agenda? Exam-
ples might be taken from a list recently published by the
Committee for Economic Development2 following up on the
President's Commission on Industrial Competitiveness:3
2Suggested Additional Research on U.S. Industrial Competitiveness (Washing-
ton DC: Committee on Economic Development, September 1985).
'Global Competition: The New Reality (Washington DC: President's Commis-
sion on Industrial Competitiveness, January 1985),
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Research 97
Compare the tax treatments of particular industries in the
major trading countries of the world, and judge their relative
effects on resource flows and international competitiveness.
Monitor and evaluate various kinds of government interven-
tion in or regulation of foreign exchange markets.
Synthesize existing findings on invasions of international
property rights and evident gaps in the protection thereof. . . .
Design a model program for worldwide protection of intellectual
property rights.
Develop a statistical series showing the comparative after-
tax costs of private capital in several of the world's leading
financial markets.
Develop a sound and convincing basis on which the long-
term structure of future debt and equity flows to LDC's can be
built.
These topics, of course, pointed as they are to international
business, are all transnational and lie within the discipline of
economics. However, similar lists could be, in fact have been,
drawn up for other disciplines and topical domains: terrorism,
revitalizing mature cities, historical roots for pro- and anti-
Americanism, the absorption of guest workers into host societ-
ies, comparative patterns of public and private support for the
arts and the humanities, Islamic civilizations. In general, such
topics would have a very general relevance to public policy, and
would be broadly stated so that the creative problem shaping of
the researcher could help clarify the issues. They would be
chosen not only for their intrinsic importance but because they
are neglected by the general drift of research topic selection.
There are a number of dangers that must be avoided in
establishing such a program of targeted research support. To
mention just a few, if we select as an agenda a set of issues that
focus solely on the implementation of existing public policy, we
will quickly destroy the usefulness of the process. The topics
should be chosen to cover a wide range of subjects. If they are to
serve their purpose, they must guard against being translated
into client-oriented projects of the kind described in the first
category above. Moreover, the agenda setting must be distributed
widely throughout the society and among the various mission
agencies of the government. Rodney Nichols, in his, recent
testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee
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on Science and Technology,4 eloquently warned against the
consequences of growing single-agency dominance in the fund-
ing of scientific research. Such a development would be even
more damaging in the social sciences and humanities.
In addition to setting a national research agenda of topics of
special interest, the Foundation should adopt a proactive policy
in several other respects. In spite of the efforts of federal policy
under HEA Title VI to develop scholarly resources focusing on all
of the non-Western world, within each of the major world areas,
some countries and sections of countries get the lion's share of
the attention. In South Asian studies the most studied countries
are India?and North India at that?and Pakistan. In Latin
American studies they are Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. In the
Middle East they are Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and Israel. In Southeast
Asia they are the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand. In Africa
they are South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya. In Eastern
Europe they are the Soviet Union and Poland. Similarly, there are
particular languages within each world area on which the re-
search needed to prepare adequate teaching materials concen-
trates, leaving other languages only very lightly covered.5
It is interesting to note that in the normal drift of academic
research interests, later generations of scholars tend to spread out
into countries and regions for which the density of prior research
is low.6 There remain a number of countries, regions, and
languages that fall almost completely outside of existing re-
search interests, yet they are of current or possible future
importance to public policy. Examples of such countries and
regions are the Indian Ocean, the mountain states of the Hima-
layas, the Baltic and Balkan states in Eastern Europe, the island
states in the South Pacific, many parts of Africa, the Caribbean
countries, Belize, Guyana, Inner Asia, the Dead Sea states, and,
within the major countries, whole sections like Western China
or Northeast India. There is an equivalent list of neglected
languages for which neither the government nor the university
'Nichols, "Testimony."
'These country and language concentrations and omissions are given in detail in
Richard D. Lambert et al., Beyond Growth: The Next Stage in Language and Area
Studies (Washington DC: Association of American Universities, 1984).
6See Richard D. Lambert et al., National Targets for South Asia Specialists (New
York: National Council on Foreign Languages and International Studies, 1981).
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Research 99
community has carried out the research needed to prepare
teaching and translating materials. 7 These regions and languages
are excellent candidates for a targeted research strategy. We have
no way of directing research toward them now.
Additional candidates for targeted research are those studies
that serve the overall needs of the field as a whole. Here is where
the research needed to carry out the transformation of foreign
language instruction would be supported.8 What the highly
dispersed and amorphous field of international studies needs is
the capacity to carry out rigorous evaluation and planning
activities, charting the national need and determining what has
worked and what has not. Except for a tiny program under HEA
Title VI, international studies has no capacity for self-evaluation
now. Even the Evaluation and Assessment Branch of the Na-
tional Endowment for the Humanities no longer funds such
research. Without this evaluation and planning capacity, neither
the Foundation nor anyone else can perform the crucial moni-
toring and agenda setting; and, except for the hunches and
enthusiasms that have dominated policy formulation so far,
there is no sound basis for directing national investment to the
points of leverage where its impact will be greatest. In the
natural sciences, such research is conducted by organizations
like the National Academy of Science or the various disciplinary
associations. There are no equivalent mechanisms in interna-
tional studies, where the ,need is, if anything, more pressing.
Support for such work in the social sciences and the humanities
as they relate to international studies should be made available
on a proactive basis under this part of the Foundation's program.
Recommendation: The Foundation should establish a proactive
program of research support to direct research toward topics of
great national importance, to fill in gaps in country or language
coverage, and to carry out the evaluation and planning activities
for the field as a whole. To establish the priorities for and to
supervise this proactive program, a distinguished national ad-
7John L. D. Clark and Dora E. Johnson, A Survey of Materials Development
Needs in the Less Commonly Taught Languages (Washington DC: Center for
Applied Linguistics, 1982).
'For a detailed research agenda, see Lambert et al., Beyond Growth, chap 2.
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-WU rviiv VC LE V TE
visory group should be established, comprising research schol-
ars and representatives of universities, major international
business firms, national research organizations and government
agencies along lines similar to the National Science Board. Both
private and public funds should be provided to support research
on the topics selected by the group.
INVESTIGATOR-DRIVEN RESEARCH
Unrestricted Research Support
It would be exceedingly foolish to concentrate all research
funding in the client-oriented and proactive categories. Indeed, -
the American research tradition, the envy of the world, assumes
that research managers, no matter how wise and prescient,
cannot predict the great ideas, the ways of viewing a problem,
that at first seem merely, curious. Policymakers for the natural
sciences9 are acutely aware of the need for a balance between
research in which the topic is targeted by the client to be served
and the basic research carried out under open, peer-reviewed
competitions, in which the subject is chosen by the investigator.
It was to serve this tradition that the National Science
Foundation (NSF) and, later, the National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH) were established. One might have expected
that these two organizations, one covering basic research in the
social sciences and the other in the humanities, would suffice. A
review") of the recent grant-making history of the two organiza-
tions indicated, however, that they only touch the edges of the
need. While each organization does provide support for a certain
'kind of international research in the social sciences and human-
ities?for instance, in fiscal 1983 the Social and Economic
Sciences section of NSF awarded $3 million in grants that had an
international component, or 12.5% of its overall grants in that
category?their defined missions permit them to cover only a
9See Nichols, "Testimony."
mFor the Beyond Growth study, a detailed analysis was made of all grants
between 1978 and 1980 that had an international focus and the membership of all
relevant selection committees for both NSF and NEH.
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Research 101
portion of the research that would provide the necessary orga-
nized knowledge about other societies.
NSF conceives of its function as the advancement of basic
science, primarily the natural sciences, and the academic disci-
plines that compose it. Consequently, NSF tends to fund only
research at the "hard science" end of the social sciences; this
research must therefore be heavily quantitative and bent to the
format of scientific proof, and it must have methodological or
theoretical importance for the discipline as a whole. NSF's grant
competitions and screening committees are organized around
disciplines or subdisciplinary topical themes; and its interna-
tional grants fit into this format. This is an immensely useful
function, and the management of such grants belongs precisely
where it is?within the NSF format. The difficulty lies in the fact
that such a structure does not lend itself to the awarding of
grants on the basis of what we need to know about an interna-
tional problem or a particular country. Such grants may be as
rigorous in their methodology as those supported by NSF, but
their special appeal is their contribution to our understanding of
the global society, not the extent to which they contribute to the
advancement of a discipline or basic science in general.
The approach of NEH represents a different 'problem for
international studies. Except for regranting programs adminis-
tered through the joint committees of the Social Science Re-
search Council and the American Council of Learned Societies,
which we will mention below, NEH's regular peer review system
for research proposals prefers projects that are historical or
literary in focus, and preferably both?in other words projects
that rather faithfully reflect the center of gravity of the human-
ities disciplines. The coverage of topics in what might be called
the contemporary humanities?that is, the current cultural and
literary trends that help us understand other societies today?is
much slimmer than the coverage of great civilizations and
literatures of the past.
The basic point is that neither NSF nor NEH is concerned
with the production of organized knowledge about other societ-
ies; they march to different drummers. In neither organization
would the argument for research support be persuasive on the
basis of the importance to the United States of acquiring sub-
stantive knowledge of an internationally oriented topic?that is,
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on the grounds that the nation desperately needs to know
something about the character of terrorism in the Middle East, or
the influence of tribalism on politics in Africa, or the manipu-
lation of exchange rates in less developed countries, or the effect
of fundamentalism in Israel on its foreign policy, or the doctrinal
basis of Shiite revolts. Such projects would be acceptable to NSF
screening panels not on the basis of the intrinsic importance of
the topic, but on the "high science" style of analysis. The
essentially descriptive treatment that such topics require would
not qualify. Similarly, most of them would not pass the review
panels of the traditional humanists who screen projects at NEH.
Nor would other federal programs that one might expect to
support such research be likely to do so. The Fulbright program
is not primarily oriented to research, and support under that
program is limited to individual fellowships for relatively brief
overseas sojourns, not for the more extensive and longer-range
research that significant work on these topics would demand.
Moreover, the topics of research projects are screened by bina-
tional selection committees involving both the United States
and the host country where the research visit is to take place. It
is difficult to imagine any of the topics indicated above surviving
the Fulbright selection process.
In order to understand how the mosaic of federal research
support programs, each with its own definition of what is
appropriate research, misses important internationally oriented
research domains, it is instructive to take the classic case of a
research topic that is vitally important to international studies
but falls between the cracks of all existing federal funding
programs: research leading to the improvement of foreign lan-
guage instruction. NSF will not touch it because it is too applied
and too atheoretical. NEH will not fund such research because
its interest is the content of documents in other languages, not
how anyone develops the skill to read those documents or
communicates with the people who write them. There is a tiny
program under HEA Title VI in which foreign language teaching
research can compete with a variety of other evaluative and
planning research topics for one or two $30,000 grants annually.
The rest of the Department of Education is not interested in
research on foreign language teaching, except as a small adjunct
to bilingual education. In a recent round of substantial Depart-
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Research 103
ment of Education grants to support 10 campus-based centers for
research related to education," none of them was concerned
with foreign language instruction. Until quite recently, there
was a program within the National Security Agency supporting
external research on foreign language instruction, but the agen-
cy's mission orientation limited the scope of the research it
could fund, and it now appears that even that program will
disappear in any event. In the meantime, the federal government
invests millions of dollars each year in research and development
of its in-house foreign language teaching capacity, but it has no
mechanism for developing such a capacity in the private sector,
where the national need is at least equally great.
A similar case could be made for many important domains of
internationally oriented research. This mismatch between the
research tasks that need to be done and the general mechanisms
we have for allocating resources is one of the primary incentives
for creating a freestanding National Foundation for International
Studies. We are very unlikely to be able to put in place the or-
ganization of information and knowledge about other parts of the
world so long as we try to fit the requirements of that task about
the edges of existing programs whose principal orientation is
elsewhere. The analysis of political trends in other societies need
not be "hard science" to merit public support. Work on modern
foreign language teaching need not remain unfunded because it is
not a traditional humanity. Selection of overseas research topics
should not be determined by the least common denominator
among the interests and sensitivities of two countries.
Recommendation: A major function of the Foundation should be
to supply dependable, substantial funding for investigator-
initiated research on topics selected for their importance to our
understanding of other countries and the international system.
Regranting Programs
In establishing a program to support internationally oriented
research, it would be well to avoid constructing another major
""$54 Million Awarded by the U.S. for 10 Education Study Units", New York
Times, December 1, 1985, p. 39.
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1-l-,11V 1 a liP LE V GIVilyt,
administrative structure similar to those now managing NSF, or
NEH, or similar research funding agencies. Moreover, the kind of
country, regional, and topical expertise needed for the selection
and review of projects in international studies is exceedingly
complex and requires special knowledge, much of 'which can be
found only in the private sector. The most efficient way to
proceed is through contracting for the services of regranting
organizations. One of the first tasks of the Foundation should be
to explore the several experiments in allocating research funds to
the nongovernmental organizations that serve as regranting
authorities for the allocation of specific research grants, subject
to general policy setting and review by the Foundation.
Fortunately, smile models have already been developed for
that purpose, and before proceeding their experience should be
reviewed. In the private sector, the Ford Foundation has long
provided funds in support of unrestricted basic research through
the joint committees of the Social Science Research Council
(SSRC) and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
Over many years, the International Research and Exchanges Board
(IREX) has received substantial support from a number of private
foundations, as has the American Institute of Indian Studies
(AIIS), to distribute grants for research in Eastern Europe and
India, respectively. The Hewlett Foundation has provided endow-
ments to a number of the major research universities to provide
seed money for international research by scholars on particular
campuses. Within the federal government, one of the most suc-
cessful programs in support of unrestricted, investigator-
originated internationally oriented research is administered by
NEH. It is essentially a regrant program bypassing the normal
NEH review process for individual projects. NEH makes available
to the area-specific joint committees of SSRC/ACLS funds for
internationally oriented humanities research, with "humanities"
defined very broadly. There is no equivalent social science re-
granting program at NSF, although while excess currencies were
available, NSF, NEH, and, more consistently, the Smithsonian
Institution provided nonconvertible Indian rupees in the equiv-
alent of a regrant strategy to the AIIS to be distributed to indi-
vidual American scholars in support of their research in India.
Another federal regrant program supporting internatio,nally
oriented research was recently established for Soviet and East
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Research 105
European studies under the Soviet-East European Research and
Training Act of 1983 (PI. 98-164, Title VIII, 97 Stat. 1047-50).
This program, administered through the Department of State, is
in its second year of operation and is entirely a regrant program.
More than $4 million is allocated annually, mainly for research
in block grants to national-level scholarly organizations such as
the SSRC/ACLS joint committees, the Kennan Institute of the
Woodrow Wilson Center at the Smithsonian Institution, IREX,
the National Council for Soviet and East European Research, the
Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Harvard
Russian Research Center. They, in turn, distribute the funds on
competitive application to individual researchers. In addition, a
few grants are given to nonprofit organizations and universities
for activities in training, bibliographic work, and publication, but
essentially Title VIII is a regrant research program.
It is interesting to examine a sample of the topics of the
research supported by Title VIII, topics that illustrate clearly the
functions of basic, investigator-originated research in enriching
our understanding of other societies. They provide the broad
canvas against which public policy deliberations must stand.
1. The Demographic Revolution in the USSR
2. Soviet Support for Revolutions in the Third World
3. Soviet Political Leadership, 1976-1986
4. Bank-rolling in the USSR: Impact of Western Capital on the
Soviet Union
5. Construction of East European and Soviet Macroeconomic
Databank
6. End of a Peasant Society: The Transformation of the Soviet
Countryside
7. Female Labor Force Participation in the USSR
8. The Genesis of Soviet Threat Perceptions
9. History of Russian and Soviet Public Health
10. Islam and Nationalism: Ivan's Political Agenda
11. Soviet Data Bank: Career Patterns in the Soviet Bureau-
cracy
12. Soviet Union and the Two Germanies: Perceptions and
Policies, 1984-1986
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13. A Very Long Dream: Sixty Years of Czech Communist
Literature
14. A Social History of Engineers and Engineering Culture in
Russia and the USSR, 1880-1980
Evaluation reports on NEH and the Title VIII regranting
programs indicate that they have been quite successful in pro-
viding funds for an impressive array of research on topics of the
investigator's choosing. The record also shows that the regrant-
ing organizations have administered the selection process so that
issues of quality and the importance of the topic were para-
mount. This experience with regranting programs suggests ways
in which the basic, investigator-originated segment may be
funded without the construction of an elaborate intragov-
ernmental infrastructure and without bending the research
agenda to the current, short-term needs of particular clients.
There are problems with these programs. First, not all world
areas or topical domains have as rich a national scholarly super-
structure that can be marshaled to direct a regrant program. In
South Asian studies, the AIIS has, to date, been solely concerned
with overseas research, and there is no mechanism for dealing
with U.S.-based research projects. Where natural regranting or-
ganizations do not exist, either the Foundation would have to
assume responsibility for the programs itself, or perhaps another
organization with long experience in managing international
scholarly research, such as the Smithsonian Institution, could be
called upon to play the regranting role. The second problem is that
these programs are too limited in scope, and the third is that their
funding is too uncertain. The NEH regrant program covers only
the humanities, and is subject to the uncertainties of biannual
application and funding. The Title VIII program supports research
only on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and its future is
uncertain, since it is a small program buried in a mission-oriented
agency whose primary mission has nothing to do with research.
Pilot projects and piecemeal solutions will not meet the
demands for organized knowledge about other countries that the
coming decades will bring. To provide durable, cross-sectional
support for research in international studies, an organization for
which this is a principal purpose will have to be created. This is
a task for the Foundation.
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Research 107
Recommendation: The Foundation should explore ways of ex-
panding and reproducing successful regranting programs to
cover all of the world areas and relevant disciplines. Where a
sufficient number of existing organizations have a demon-
strated capacity to administer such grants, they should be asked
to compete for and administer the funds. In those areas, the
Foundation should play a policy setting and review role. Where
there are no or too few such organizations, the Foundation itself,
or another federal organization with a history of successfully
administering internationally oriented research (such as the
Smithsonian Institution), should administer the funds.
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Chapter 7
Overseas Linkages
We obviously cannot deal with the increasing internationaliza-
tion of our society by staying at home. Nor do we. Our increasing
absorption into the global society has been accompanied by an
American diaspora sending our citizens in ever-increasing num-
bers to each and every part of the world. Before World War II
American travelers to, say, New Delhi or Osaka were few and the
number of American residents there minuscule. Now it is
difficult to stand for very long in the airport of even so remote a
place as Leh, Ladakh, without meeting at least one other Amer-
ican?tourist, business executive, government official, professor,
student. Recent terrorist attacks on air travelers and eddies of
anti-Americanism may stanch some of the flow for a while, but
millions of Americans will continue to travel abroad.
There is little point in trying to limit or direct much of this
outflow, but part of the movement of people, ideas, and skills is
so essential to our national interest that special government and
privately supported programs have been developed to sustain it.
Basing our international linkages solely upon the somewhat
random process of individual-initiated journeys would assure
that some of the most important ones would not occur. It is not
surprising, therefore, that a thicket of intersecting but separately
funded and administered programs, both public and private,
should have grown up to foster what are usually referred to as
international exchange and training programs. Almost every
federal government agency and many private foundations have
109
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their own. Together, they constitute a potpourri of nationally
supported international exchange and training programs,
amounting to somewhere near $1 billion annually. In 1984,
federal programs for international exchange and training in-
volved approximately 90,000 participants moving into and out of
the United States and cost $742.1 million,' and this is without
counting an approximately, $100 million program conducted by
the Department of Energy for taking physicists and other atomic
scientists to and from the United States. Programs sponsored by
nongovernment organizations, universities, and colleges would
add many more millions of dollars and thousands of participants.
In addition to programs of the U.S. government that provide
direct support for international exchanges, federal funds mix
freely with private funds and even those of other governments to
sponsor a number of exchanges. The Institute of International
Education, a private organization in New York, in 1984 admin-
istered 163 different transnational education and training pro-
grams sponsored by 120 governments, foundations, corporations,
universities, and binational and international agencies world-
wide.2 In 1984, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and
the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) jointly ex-
pended federal funds (primarily on regranting authority from the
National Endowment for the Humanities) and private founda-
tion funds (primarily from the Ford, Hewlett and McArthur
Foundations) to send 67 predoctoral and 132 postdoctoral re-
search scholars to 66 countries. In 1984, the International
Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), again mixing federal and
private monies, sent 25 American graduate students, 27 profes-
sors and 31 language teachers to the Soviet Union while 21
students, 25 professors and 32 language' teachers came here.
Additionally, the United States sent 63 junior and senior scholars
to the seven other East European countries with which IREX
organizes exchanges, while 78 scholars came here. Some foun-
dations run their own programs, for example, the Marshall Fund,
'For these and other data on governmentally supported international exchange
and training programs as of 1984, see Report on U.S. Government International
Research and Training Programs, 1984 (Washington DC: United States Information
Agency, 1985, mimeo).
'Sponsored Projects, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: The Institute of Inter-
national Education, 1984), p. 5.
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Overseas Linkages 111
the Scandinavian Foundation, and the Luce Foundation. And
individual multinational corporations sponsor educational ex-
change programs for their own employees' children as well as
others, for example, Caltex, American Express, Banco de Bilbao,
Chase Manhattan, Citibank, Ford Motor Company, RCA, and
Levi Strauss. In aggregate, then, these programs involve substan-
tial sums of public and private monies, and large numbers of
people.
The consequence of such a rich array of programs for inter-
national exchange and training is, in one respect, a tribute to our
country's diversity, its mix of public and private support in
meeting national needs. Seen cross-sectionally, however, it bor-
ders on chaos. For instance, the combination of U.S. government
agencies separately sponsoring exchanges seems bizarre to the
cultural affairs officer sitting in an embassy overseas who has to
deal separately with each program. For example, in India for
1984, programs bringing Indians to the United States included
two different programs in the Agency for International Develop-
ment (AID), two in the Department of Agriculture, one in
Commerce, three in Interior, two in Transportation, six in
Health and Human Services, two in the National Science Foun-
dation (NSF), and seven in the U.S. Information Agency (USIA).
There were 17 different U.S. government programs taking Amer-
icans to India. Similarly, there were 25 different agency programs
taking Japanese to the United States and 27 taking Americans to
Japan.3 And if we add the privately funded programs, the com-
plexity increases even more. Each of these programs doubtless
has its own rationale and mandate, but surely some overall
planning articulating the various programs would not be out of
order. Is a mirror image of the American governmental structure
the way to organize our exchanges with these countries, partic-
ularly when most individual agency programs have developed
with little reference to what other agencies are doing, or to the
overall complex of government-sponsored programs?
Similar questions could be asked about the overall geo-
graphic profile of our exchanges. If we were to start from scratch,
would the distribution of international exchange and training
'For country profiles, see Report on U.S. Government International Research
and Training Programs, 1984, appendix A.
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114 i-unvi 3 (Jr LtlitKAGE
programs among the different countries be what we have now?
Leaving aside the Department of Defense training programs as a
special case, would we by design put some one-fourth of all of our
exchange and training resources into just six countries: the
United Kingdom, Germany, Egypt, India, Japan, and the Philip-
pines? Would we send almost one-third of the Americans we
send abroad under official auspices to Western Europe and
Canada, and only half as many to Latin America and the
Caribbean? Perhaps, but at a minimum this pattern of concen-
tration needs to be debated.
And given the likely change in the nature of technology
flows in the world of the future, should we spend so overwhelm-
ing a proportion of our national resources on training people from
other countries compared with the need to send Americans
abroad (42,252 foreigners versus 14,736 Americans in 1984)?
Would we put quite so much stress on training and the export of
American technology,4 compared with a strategy for importing
or exchanging technology and ideas with other nations? Would
military training supported by the Department of Defense
(16,980 foreigners) loom quite so large in our strategy, or AID
(10,143), or the Peace Corps (5,661)? Together these programs
alone reach almost twice as many foreign nationals as the total
number of Americans served. Reflecting, as it does, the period of
unrivaled American technological supremacy, the period in
which we believed that the answer to the world's problems lay in
bringing all nations to a technological par with the United States,
is this emphasis on technology export the one best suited for the
decades to come? And if the balance ever was heavily tilted in
favor of American intellectual supremacy, the intellectual world
is much more clearly multicentric now. How, in these changed
circumstances, do we develop a technological and intellectual
import policy to match our highly developed export policy?
These are the kinds of issues that the National Foundation
for International Studies should address through the collection of
the relevant data and through the conduct of the public dialogue
'For an interesting discussion of this issue with respect to our reopened
scholarly relations with China, see David M. Lampton, Joyce Madancy, and Kristen
M. Williams, A Relationship Restored: Trends in U.S.-China Educational Ex-
changes, 1978-1984 (Washington DC: National Academy Press, 1986).
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Overseas Linkages 113
needed to create an overall national strategy. We are not suggest-
ing that in the area of overseas linkages, any more than in the
support of research discussed in the previous chapter, our system
of productive pluralism should give way to a single czar in charge
of all exchanges, nor that our exchange policy should be bent to
a single purpose. It would be useful, however, if the Foundation
were to take a more than occasional look at what the full range
of transnational exchange and training programs is with respect
to a particular country or set of countries, private as well as
public. A start on this process is represented by the establish-
ment within USIA of an Exchanges Policy and Coordination
Unit, which maintains a computerized file of federal agency
programs, and issues an annual report summarizing and aggre-
gating data pertaining to those programs. This unit was estab-
lished as a result, in part, of a General Accounting Office report5
urging "meaningful coordination" of our international exchange
and training programs. There is no evidence, however, that
policy decisions have been made on the basis of these data, nor
do they include consideration of any of the diverse private
programs that are also operating in this area.
The essential point, however, is not just to assemble another
computerized data bank, no matter how rich, but to use the
cross-sectional data currently available to consider what our
overall national policy ought to be. For a while, it looked as
though this would be done. In June 1982, USIA established an
Advisory Panel on International Educational Exchange. At the
outset it seemed as if it would make an attempt at establishing
an overall federal policy in this area. Its mandate was to deter-
mine "the purposes, magnitude, and format of international
exchange programs in each of the following sectors in the United
States: the U.S. Government, the private non-profit sector, the
private-for-profit sector, and higher education."6 However, by
the time the final report was written, the panel's recommenda-
tions were focused solely on the Fulbright program, leaving the
others in the data bank.
5Coordination of International Exchange and Training Programs (Washington
DC: General Accounting Office, 1978).
6Minutes of the First Meeting of the Advisory Panel on International Educa-
tional Exchange (Washington DC: United States Information Agency, 1982, mimeo),
p. 1. The final report was issued in March 1986.
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i-unv13 Ur LEVC.KIIC;E
What is needed, of course, is a periodic look at the overall
dimensions of our transnational exchange and training programs.
At the minimum we must create a grid of purposes, clients,
countries, and programs so that the government's various pro-
grams can fit into an overall national strategy, privatizing and
helping to marshal nongovernmental resources where appropri-
ate, funding and administering those that are obviously the
responsibility of the federal government, and helping to facilitate
and coordinate the full range of national activities. We mean by
this "coordination" and not "central control." International
exchanges are almost the prototype of the "mixed economy" in
international studies?that is, some portion comprises govern-
mental activities, the other private. The sponsors are widely
dispersed both within the government and in the private sector.
The exchanges also involve delicate bilateral negotiations that
must be conducted separately with many different foreign gov-
ernments. The difficult task is to develop a coordinating and
facilitating strategy that retains the best of the energy and
inventiveness of the individual initiatives but allows the nation
constantly to take the overview: measuring the effect of the
many dispersed initiatives against an overall national agenda;
calling attention to cross-purposes and overlap; consolidating or
subdividing programs where that is useful; and calling attention
to, and in some cases actively seeking to fill in, glaring gaps in
our national coverage.
This would surely be a useful role for a Foundation con-
cerned with international activities more generally. Its proposed
role as both a private and a public entity would enable it to
address both kinds of programs. Whether it should carry out
these activities internally or contract them out to an organiza-
tion is a question to be decided on the basis of efficiency and
cost-effectiveness. In any event, the criterion for judging the
success of such a venture should not be the comprehensiveness
of the data base?although this is surely a consideration?but the
extent to which policy decisions are made based on its findings.
Recommendation: The Foundation should play a central role in
international exchanges as fact finder, planner, coordinator,
resource marshaler, and, for some programs, funder and admin-
istrator of international exchanges.
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Overseas Linkages 115
THE FUNCTIONS OF INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGES
AND TRAINING
Questions concerning the mix of sponsors, countries, and
domestic versus overseas investments are worthy of examina-
tion. Even more important, however, is a fresh look at the
fundamental purposes of exchanges, with a particular eye to
whether some of the important purposes outlined in the preced-
ing sections of this report are being realized. In the most general
terms, our international exchange and training programs serve
the following principal purposes:
1. They train nationals of other countries in a particular skill or,
more generally, expose them to our educational system,
particularly echnical education. This function includes, for
instance, such programs as the Department of Defense's
International Military Education and Training Program and
Foreign Military Sales Program; AID's Academic and Tech-
nical Training; the Food and Drug Administration's Foreign
Visitor's Program; the Center for Disease Control's Visiting
Scientist Program; the Peace Corps; the Department of
Agriculture's International Training Program; the Depart-
ment of Interior's training programs administered through
the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and
the U.S. Geological Survey; the Department of Labor's Tech-
nical Assistance Programs; and, in the Department of Trans-
portation, the Federal Aviation Administration's and the U.S.
Coast Guard's classroom and on-the-job training for foreign
nationals. To some extent, the Fulbright lecturers program
fits within this category as well, as do what might be called
the "show and tell" programs in which the various agen-
cies?in addition to those mentioned, such organizations as
the Census Bureau, the Library of Congress, the Small
Business Administration, and the Social Security Adminis-
tration?introduce foreign nationals to their activities.
In addition to the publicly supported programs, there are
a wide variety of private programs dedicated to the provision
of technical training for foreign nationals. For instance, this
has been a principal interest of the Ford Foundation for many
years; and the Rockefeller Foundation has just committed
$300 million over the next five years to promote social and
economic development in the third world, building upon the
2,000 or so scientists and technicians it has helped train over
the years. There are a number of nongovernmental organiza-
tions that specialize in providing just such services. And of
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course, substantial university funds serve this purpose
through the award of fellowships or teaching assistantships
to foreign students.
2. Historically, our second major purpose in international ex-
change and training programs is to expose foreigners to the
United States and Americans to other countries as part of our
public diplomacy, and as an investment in long-term famil-
iarity with and friendly attitudes toward the host country.
This is the central purpose of USIA's short-term visitor
program and the Fulbright program, which explains their
traditional emphasis on first-time visits. It motivates the
recently inaugurated Youth Exchange Initiative, the East-
West Center, most of the General Exchange Agreement with
the Soviet Union, the programs of the Japan-U.S. Friendship
Commission, and a large number of privately financed pro-
grams for high school and college students, including many
study-abroad programs financed jointly by institutions and
individuals. It is to serve this purpose that the various
cultural exchanges in the visual and performing arts are
conducted.
3. A third purpose is to facilitate the more equal exchange of
technology and information?to create and maintain an
international scientific network. This sort of network, in-
cluding transnational sharing of research facilities and col-
laborative research, has been especially notable in the natural
and health sciences. This includes the public health visitor
and guest worker programs in which foreign scientists are
invited to work in various laboratories, such as those main-
tained by the National Institutes of Health, the Alcohol,
Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration, the Food
and Drug Administration, the Department of Energy, and
NASA. NSF's cooperative science program falls into this
category. Its goal is to maintain a two-way street between the
United States and other countries in the promotion of inter-
national science. In addition, other governments, interna-
tional organizations, and major universities contribute to
this function of international exchange.
4. The fourth function, the least developed of them all, is the
support of research about other countries and the overseas
training of those who conduct that research. This includes
the research scholar portion of the Fulbright programs, the
Smithsonian, and the National Endowment for the Human-
ities (NEH) and NSF international research grant programs,
plus research funds provided by private foundations either
directly or through broker organizations such as IREX or the
SSRC/ACLS.
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These, then, allowing a little for overlap and for a few spe-
cialized rograms that do not quite fit, are our de facto policy goals
for international exchange and training programs. Clearly, the
proposed Foundation could not and should not attempt to inter-
vene in all of these programs. It would be foolish to try to recreate
in a new entity the expertise and experience required to carry out
the first two functions, and, to the extent that it involves the
natural and health sciences, the third function. The Foundation's
special contribution would lie in other areas: ( 1 ) extending the
goal of durable international science networks (the third goal
mentioned above) to the social sciences and the humanities;
(2) putting on a solid footing programs to promote adequate re-
search on other countries (the fourth goal mentioned above); and
(3) introducing fresh programs to serve several goals that are high
on the national agenda for the future, but that are not covered in
any of the existing programs. Let us start with the latter.
LANGUAGE STUDY ABROAD
Until very recently, there was little, if anything, in exchange
and training programs that was dedicated to raising the level of
foreign language competency of Americans. This statement is a
little too sweeping in that occasionally there were foreign
language prerequisites, explicit or implicit, in predoctoral-level
overseas research grants, and sometimes individuals were al-
lowed to spend some of their fellowship time studying a lan-
guage. Fellowships granted under Title VI of the Higher Educa-
tion Act (HEA) can be and have been held at the advanced
overseas language training programs. And many university- and
college-sponsored study-abroad programs are either overt or
thinly veiled foreign language learning programs.
What the statement means is that we have not really looked
at the relationship of overseas exposure to the acquisition and
reinforcement of foreign language skills. And yet, if citizens
whose career requires a foreign language skill are to be other than
novices, they will benefit by topping off their domestic training
with a disciplined course of training overseas. If they are going to
keep those skills active or rejuvenate them after a period Of
disuse, then repeated periods of exposure in the country where
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110 PUIAI 1J UP LEVERAGE
they are spoken is absolutely essential. And while professionals
who need to use a foreign language skill for professional purposes
need such exposure, an even more urgent case can be made for
foreign language teachers who might infect generations of stu-
dents with their inadequate or decaying competencies. The
rhythm, purposes, and mode of selection of our current overseas
fellowship programs are not, to put it gently, pointed in that
direction. The Rockefeller Foundation has just introduced a
competitive program to send secondary school teachers abroad
for just this purpose. This pilot program needs to be watched and,
if successful, extrapolated with a combination of state and
federal funds. Similar programs need to be aimed at other groups
with "a need to know."
What is needed, of course, are not just the fellowships to send
the people abroad for language training, but the creation and
sustenance of the institutions where that training can effectively
be given. Although not limited to them, this need is especially
pressing with respect to some of the less commonly taught
languages, and has led to the creation of interuniversity consortia
to provide post-second-year intensive training in six countries for
students training to be language and area specialists. Oddly
enough, the federal support given to these programs comes not
from funds appropriated for this purpose, but out of Fulbright-
Hays funds administered through the Department of Education,
which are designated for group projects abroad in general. This is
a precarious source of funding and makes difficult the establish-
ment of long-term planning attuned to the needs of overseas
language training. Beyond that, it puts these students into
competition for funding with a host of other unrelated applicants
and, given the limited amount of funding, makes their support
uncertain. The overseas advanced language training centers
require an appropriation at a level sufficient to carry out an
expanded mission.
These programs are now limited by and large to students
preparing to be area specialists. The need is much more general.
As is the case in other aspects of foreign language training, the
overwhelming allocation of government resources is confined to
government personnel. The Department of State and the Depart-
ment of Defense maintain extensive overseas language training
programs for government employees. As already noted, some
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Overseas Linkages 119
resources need to be invested in the private sector as well.
Similar overseas language programs are needed for American
business executives, for established academics, and for other
professionals with a need to acquire high-level skills. Training in
the United States is not enough, and just dumping these learners
into jerry-built indigenous language training schools in many
countries of the world is not a solution.
Recommendation: The Foundation should provide sustained
support for overseas language training centers to provide in-
struction at an advanced level and on an intensive ,basis for
academic and nonacademic personnel.
FOREIGN EXPERIENCE AND THE TRAINING OF
INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS EXECUTIVES
The second aspect of the national agenda that should be of
concern to the Foundation is the training of future business spe-
cialists to help improve our international competitiveness. It is
curious that this pressing national need has entered so little into
the planning for future directions of exchange programs. Part of
the reason for this is that our notion of the function of exchanges
is still rooted, in part, in the notion of the United States as the
principal creator of science, technology, and business systems. It
is under this premise that such a large portion of our international
exchange and training is aimed at one-way technological transfer,
as indicated earlier. The tens of thousands of foreign visitors who
come to learn under our technology-transfer exchange and train-
ing programs, plus the 350,000 foreign students who annually
study at our major universities, indicate that we still have a major
scientific and technological base that draws people from abroad.
But in many areas our dominance, our near-monopoly of tech-
nology and technical education, is beginning to slip. The coun-
tries with substantial AID and Peace Corps programs are con-
tracting more and more to a subset of the least developed
countries in Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Latin
America and the Caribbean. In earlier days, international science
was dominated by Americans. Now only about a third of world-
class international science is carried out in the United States. The
same is true in the health sciences.
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Nowhere is this multicentric trend in the location of tech-
nological innovation clearer than in business training. While
Harvard, Stanford, and the Wharton School still attract large
numbers of foreign students, increasingly other institutions,
particularly in Europe, are drawing them as well. The training
pathways of American students studying to be business leaders,
particularly those planning to specialize in international busi-
ness, need to be rethought. They must learn to live in a
multicentric business world where both companies and educa-
tional institutions are worldwide. Some recognition of this fact
may be seen in the decision by the American Society of Engi-
neers to send several hundred American engineering students to
Japan. American business students need to be exposed to the
different business perspectives in companies and training insti-
tutions in other countries. They need opportunities to study or
intern abroad to give them a more global perspective on the
conduct of American business. And what is good for students is
also appropriate for the continuing educational experience of
business leaders. ,Executive seminars that provide training to
midcareer business executives now occasionally take place in a
foreign setting. This practice needs to be much more general.
Needless to say, none of the federally supported exchange and
training programs is aimed at the needs of students training to be
business leaders or of those already engaged in business. To some
extent, international exposure and training already occurs within
the large multinationals, but it is not generally available outside
of them. A more collective national capacity to foster such in-
ternational experience is clearly needed. And since the invest-
ment in international expertise of business students and execu-
tives will benefit individual companies as well as the nation as a
whole, some of the costs of this kind of exchange should be borne
by business. There are already precedents for this in the Office of
Private Sector Programs and in the private sector contributions to
the President's International Youth Exchange Initiative in USIA.
An easy way to begin experimentation in this area is to include
overseas activities under Part B of HEA Title VI.
Recommendation: The Foundation, through its board of inter-
national business advisors, should help to accumulate both pub-
lic and private resources to create opportunities for students to
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study in business training schools abroad and to intern with
foreign-based firms.
OVERSEAS TRAINING AND RESEARCH OF AREA
SPECIALISTS
Students
Opportunities for foreign study among students training to
be academic specialists on other countries are currently funded
through a variety of sources. They include a section of Fulbright-
Hays that is administered by the Department of Education in
conjunction with the HEA Title VI program for just this purpose;
dissertation-level grants, largely using NEH and Ford Foundation
funds, retailed through the area-oriented joint committees of
SSRC/ACLS; a similar program through IREX; an indeterminate
share of USIA's general Fulbright program for American students
wishing to study abroad; and fellowships, again largely with
federal funds, awarded by overseas research service organizations
like the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), which
regrants NSF, NEH, and Smithsonian funds, largely in "surplus"
currencies.
This diversity of sources, each with its own guidelines and
application procedures, makes the search for fellowship funds for
exposure to the country on which one wants to become a
specialist a complex and harzardous process. The rhythm of
graduate training brings the student to the fieldwork stage of his
or her education in a particular year; the scramble to find the
resources to conduct that fieldwork?without which the student
will not become a fully trained specialist?leaves both the
timing and the outcome of that search in considerable doubt.
The funds available for work in particular world regions is
dependent on program preferences that have little to do with the
nation's need for trained specialists on that area. Moreover, funds
for the foreign sojourn come almost entirely at the dissertation
stage, when all of the coursework has been completed. Equally
fruitful would be opportunities for students to spend abroad
perhaps briefer periods of time, earlier in their training, both to
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ILL POINTS OF LEVERAGE
advance language skills and to give substantive courses the sense
of reality that only a visit to the country of specialization can
provide.
In short, the current system of providing grants allowing
future language and area specialists to visit their countries of
specialization is capricious, inflexible, and poorly tailored to the
needs of students. There is a provision in the newly reauthorized
HEA Title VI for the incorporation of funds for foreign travel into
the fellowship package of students chosen for longer-term sup-
port. If this second tier of fellowships is adequately supported,
overseas training may be fitted more effectively into the overall
training of specialists. There will still be a need, however, for
open-competition fellowships for students who do not quite fit
into the full longitudinal pattern?they come to an area special-
ization too late, they are in disciplines in which the amount of
time that can be devoted to area specialization is limited, they
are trained at universities where there is no major language and
area studies center for their region.
The support and management of the overseas training of
future language and area specialists is a finite task that should be
at a minimum coordinated and at a maximum fully carried out
by a single organization, preferably one concerned with the
support and management of the other aspects of language and
area studies as well. It could allocate the individual grants
through national organizations such as the SSRC/ACLS joint
committees, IREX, or AIIS, where peer review and selection can
be most effectively carried out; but a collective intelligence
would be given to issues of distribution, numbers, and evaluation
so that the process could best serve the national interest. The
proposed Foundation is a natural candidate for such a role.
Recommendation: The Foundation should fund a program of
fellowships for overseas study and research by students training
to be language and area specialists. Some of this fellowship
support would be integrated into the new second-tier fellow-
ships to be created under the reauthorized HEA Title VI, while
some of it would be retained in a pool available to a wider range
of students. These funds could be used not only for dissertation-
year research but for earlier visits for language training and
general familiarization. The Foundation could dispense fellow-
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Overseas Linkages 123
ship monies through existing national organizations currently
engaged in selecting and monitoring such grants. It would
continue to play a planning Sand monitoring role in the overall
fellowship program.
Established Specialists
The need for overseas exposure for those training to be
language and area specialists is equally great for established
specialists. By the term "established specialists" we mean not
just academics on the faculty of universities, but people with a
high degree of competency on other countries. This would
include people in public policy positions, journalists, educa-
tional administrators, and others who are fully using that com-
petency professionally in various occupations throughout the
society. For all such people, the obsolescence of a language and
area competency can be very rapid indeed, and normal sabbatical
rhythms make the fraying of competencies likely. It seems odd
that we invest so heavily in the training of new specialists but do
so little to sustain the competencies of the existing pool. The
situation of sparse, uncoordinated, ill-fitting fellowship support
for students is even more striking for specialists. The only
fellowship support specifically aimed at their needs is the small
program of 40 grants annually covering all countries for faculty
research abroad under Fulbright-Hays as administered by the
Department of Education, plus a few country-targeted programs
administered by regranting organizations such as IREX and AIIS.
The joint committees of SSRC/ACLS have small amounts of
money to dispense for marginal, supplemental research support
for faculty, but not on the scale to make a major research trip
possible. Some scholars fit into the general faculty research
category of the Fulbright-Hays program administered by USIA,
but these are relatively few (716 for the whole world in 1984);
more than half of them (392 in 1984) are for Western Europe,
where language and area studies tends not to be well represented;
they have to cover the entire research community, not just area
specialists; and often there is a preference for first-time visits
rather than the repeated-visit pattern more characteristic of area
specialists.
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Also like students, established specialists have needs not met
by academic-year-long grants tied to a specific research project.
Even more than the students, they need flexible funds to be spent
on short-term visits to sustain contacts with scholars in the host
country, to rehone language skills, and, particularly in the social
sciences, to keep up to date with current events. Very few
funding programs allow for such necessary functions.
While programs serving academic specialists are sparse and
unintegrated, there are none, or almost none, serving nonaca-
demic specialists. Theoretically, a number of programs admit
nonacademic participants, but in fact their orientations and
screening procedures make nonacademic applicants very un-
likely, and those actually winning awards even less common. If
a program is to serve nonacademics, it must do so deliberately.
Recommendation: The Foundation should provide funds for
overseas visits by established professionals specializing on other
countries. Special programs should be developed for key non-
academic groups. All fellowships should be flexible as to pur-
pose and duration, and should be funded at a level so that
high-quality candidates could participate without immense
personal sacrifice. The allocation and administration of the
individual fellowships should be carried out by organizations
already established in the field, organizations that are accus-
tomed to the management of overseas fellowship programs; but
the general planning, distribution, fiscal control, and monitor-
ing functions of the program would be the responsibility of the
Foundation.
OVERSEAS RESEARCH FOR THE DISCIPLINES AND
PROFESSIONS
While the needs for overseas visits of area specialists are both
pressing and obvious, there is a broader intrinsic need of Amer-
ican scholars in general for overseas research opportunities. It is
self-evident that American scholarship as a whole would be
severely hampered were it not for the opportunity for overseas
research. This fact is clearest when we consider those academic
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Overseas Linkages 125
disciplines and specialties that exist, or largely exist, only
because they take as their subject matter phenomena that do not
occur, or only partially occur, within our national boundaries.
Many scientific disciplines expand the knowledge base for which
they are responsible in direct relation to their access to materials
and sites not located in the United States: anthropology, archae-
ology, botany, entomology, geology, linguistics, natural products
chemistry, primatology, and zoology, to name some obvious
examples. Were specialists in these fields limited to the United
States, the sciences for which they are responsible would be
severely limited in scope and importance. To this list can be
added many other specialties in both the humanities and the
social sciences that describe themselves as "comparative," as in
comparative economics or comparative literature. Thus the
leading rationale for overseas scholarship is that whole disci-
plines and specialties would disappear, or nearly so, in its
absence.
Closely related to this category of internationally oriented
disciplines are those that take as their research matter phenom-
ena having to do with relations among nations. Scholars in these
disciplines would be adversely affected by a diminution of
overseas research opportunities. A case in point is research on
international economics?trade and tariffs, the international
monetary system, the transnational flow of capital and labor.
. There are also the investigation of international law and politics
and, of course, international security. Then there are topics that
spill across international boundaries. Human migration, infec-
tious diseases, Islamic fundamentalism, and transnational sci-
ence are all obvious examples. In these instances, then, we
discover other aspects of science that draw their subject matter
not from a single culture or nation, but from the facts of
intercultural and international life. To conduct research in these
specialties requires opportunities to travel and study abroad.
There is a third category of disciplines that may not be
crossnational or international in focus, but that advance in part
through sharing with colleagues abroad, disciplines including
such long-established fields as mathematics and physics, and
such newer specialties as computer science and cognitive sci-
ence. A significant "international science structure" has been
put in place since the end of World War II in order to realize the
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126 POINTS OF LEVERAGE
substantial advantages of scientific sharing and collegiality.7 As
we noted earlier in the case of business and technological
development, scientific and scholarly research has become in-
creasingly multicentric. If we do not permit our scientists and
scholars to "go where the action is," as a nation we will slip
behind and become largely irrelevant to the cutting edge of
knowledge.
, Because the need for interaction between scientists in the
physical and health sciences has been so' obvious, elaborate
structures, both governmental and private, have been erected to
make that interaction possible. Some problems limiting the
mobility of scientists remain: conflicting national tax policies,
national restrictions on the issuance of work permits, making
provision for dual-career families, and home institution sabbat-
ical and promotion policies.8 But programs supporting American
participation in international aspects of the natural and health
sciences are substantial. They include such extensive programs
as NSF's Cooperative Science Program, which in 1984 supported
1,287 American scientists, and Projects Related to Biological
Diversity Conservation and Natural Resource Management. In
adddition, there are numerous bilateral arrangements such as the
Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Initiative. The National Insti-
tutes of Health administer a number of international fellowships
through the Fogarty International Center, which include grants
by foreign governments (Great Britain, France, Sweden, Switzer-
land, Germany, the USSR, Romania) to American scientists. The
Department of Energy spends about $100 million a year on
international scientific exchanges involving nuclear and fossil
energy, including the management of internationally owned
scientific equipment. An elaborate program of scientific cooper-
ation to which the United States contributes both funds and
personnel is maintained by NATO as well.
In addition to the government-funded international pro-
grams, in the physical and health sciences there is an extensive
network of private and semipublic organizations that provide a
7For a discussion of the issues relating to the internationalization of science, see
International Mobility of Scientists and Engineers (Washington DC: National
Research Council, 1981).
8Ibid, pp. 5-6. ?
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durable scaffolding to international science. For instance, the
national academies of science, including our own, have interna-
tional divisions that mediate scientific contact across national
boundaries. So do the various professional associations for the
scientific disciplines. These organizations and their functions are
so extensive that they are gathered together into an International
Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), which provides a place for
constant liaison across national boundaries.
Although the same transformation toward multicentric re-
search that characterized the physical sciences after World War II
is now taking place in the social sciences and humanities, the
apparatus for scientific communication and collaboration is very
weak in those disciplines. To some extent, the limited amount of
transnational activity in the social sciences and the humanities
is a reflection of the nature of those disciplines themselves. For
instance, the social sciences and humanities are not so politi-
cally neutral as many of the natural sciences. Social scientists in
particular as well as some humanists can quickly venture into
areas with a high political content, and there is no structure of
agreed-on methods and theoretical style with which to surmount
the particularities of national perspectives.
But this only makes the task more difficult, not less urgent.
The current support system for scholarly transnational interac-
tion is weak and getting weaker. NSF's collaborative science
program, which devotes $25 million per year to the promotion of
America's role in international science, spends a minuscule
amount of that money on the social sciences, even though those
sciences fall within NSF's mandate. At the outset, Vannevar
Bush, the organization's founder was opposed to including the
social sciences in the NSF, and they fit uncomfortably there to
this day. In the promotion of international social science, they
play almost no role. The NEH, meanwhile, has a strong bias in
favor of activities that take place within the United States;
finding NEH funding for Americans to host a humanistic
conference somewhere outside the United States is an uphill
battle.
Some of the efforts to bridge the social sciences internation-
ally resided in weak organizations such as the International
Social Science Council, which tried to play for the social sciences
the role that the ICSU played for the natural sciences. Other
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1L5 POINTS OF LEVERAGE
segmental organizations, such as the International Institute for
Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, that attempt to bridge
scholarship between the countries in the East and the West are
weakly rooted. Moreover, these plus a number of humanistically
oriented transnational organizations were heavily dependent for
funding on the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The twin processes of the
diversion of UNESCO to the development needs of the third
world and the withdrawal of the United States from funding that
organization made our participation in even these weak efforts
minimal.
In addition to these organizational weaknesses in the devel-
opment of international social science and the humanities, in
country after country the efforts of individual American scholars
to conduct social science and humanistic research in their
territory is becoming more and more circumscribed. As it was
put in the report of a conference on the topic held on November
18-19, 1985:
U.S. scholars long had the freedom to pursue their research
interests in regions of the world that were either colonies of
western nations or economically and politically subservient to
the West. However, since World War II, the situation has
changed dramatically. Many of the new nations which have
emerged in the past 40 years do not allow foreign scholars
unrestricted access to visit and pursue their studies. The
post-war emergence of the Soviet Union and the United States
as antagonistic superpowers has complicated the issue further.
Among the other barriers that have been erected worldwide are
the withholding of visas, close scrutiny of proposed projects,
and the negotiation of reciprocal flows of scholars and
scholarship.9
The extent of and reasons for this increasingly crippling state
of affairs differ from country to country, as do the steps necessary
to work in the new environment. Essentially, there is no problem
with respect to the countries of Western Europe and Japan. In the
case of the Soviet Union and other politically adverse countries,
strict reciprocity across the range of exchanges in detailed
'Report on the Research Access Conference, November 18-19, 1985 (Washington
DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1986, mimeo).
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bilateral agreements is necessary. In others, the problem is the
limited size and competencies of local scholarly elites, and until
the social science and humanistic scholarly community grows
stronger, relationships with American scholars will continue to
be difficult. Sometimes the problem is the increasing expansion
of the state into control of international research access, accom-
panied by increasingly dense bureaucratization and the multipli-
cation of veto groups. The long-term answer is the careful
development of durable scholarly networks to nourish the trans-
national norms of scholarship that can withstand the creeping
trend toward constraint.
This role of promoter of international social science and
humanities, a role imperfectly carried out and now dropped by
UNESCO, is one the Foundation could play. To do so, it should
be able to speak as coordinator of the full range of exchange and
training programs funded by the U.S. government. Linking such
programs together rather than watching the eddies of interna-
tional politics divert them one by one is a necessary step.
The participation of Americans in the international social
sciences and humanities is a delicate and complex task. It is now
the responsibility of no central body. There are, however, orga-
nizations in existence focusing on particular countries. IREX, for
instance, manages these matters with respect to the Soviet bloc
countries. There are a series of broker organizations?the Amer-
ican Academy in Rome, the American Institute of Yemeni
Studies, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the American
Institute of Iranian Studies, the American Insitute of Pakistan
Studies, the American Research Center in Egypt?that now serve
as mediators between the American and the foreign social
science and humanities scholarly communities. Although they
are organized into a formal Council of Scholarly Research Abroad
under the aegis of the Smithsonian Institution, the resources
available for their important task are very, very small. Some of
the SSRC/ACLS joint committees appoint foreign scholars to
their membership, providing foreign input into the planning and
peer review process. These and similar activities can be part of a
multifaceted strategy to build durable linkages across national
boundaries in the social sciences and the humanities. The cost of,
continuing with the present system is increasing parochialism
and isolation.
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Recommendation: The Foundation should take responsibility
for the promotion of international cooperation in the social
sciences and the humanities in much the same fashion as this
task is now carried out for the natural sciences. It should play
both a direct funding role, like NSF's role in the Cooperative
Science Program, and an indirect role in strengthening the
intermediate-level institutions currently engaged in creating
and sustaining transnational linkages.
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Chapter 8
International Education for
the Successor Generation
Most of the discussion of the role of the proposed National
Foundation for International Studies so far has concentrated on
the training and informational roles of international affairs
specialists, whether in academic or nonacademic employment.
There is, however, the much broader issue of the cosmopolitani-
zation of the American public as part of its general education. In
a democratic society such as ours, it is foolish to build a
scaffolding of limited elites who alone possess the skills to deal
effectively in the interdependent world without attending to the
knowledge and understanding of international affairs in the
general populace.
It seems clear that repeated efforts to address this broader
problem have been of limited effectiveness because of the enor-
mity of the problem, the immense dispersion of the educational
system, and the lack of agreement on just what the content of
that knowledge and understanding should be and to whom it
should be given, when, where, and how. Moreover, it is not clear
just what a central body at the national level such as the
proposed Foundation could accomplish in this area. Decisions as
to curriculum and text materials are the choices of colleges or
individual professors, and at the precollegiate level are matters
for state and local decisions. The federal government's few forays
into this area have been painful and largely ineffective. The cost
multiplier of trying to deal with the United States' 15,200 or so
131
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school districts and over 3,000 institutions of postsecondary
education is enormous and the echo effect of pilot programs
quite limited.
However, the widespread recognition of the need for intro-
ducing an international perspective into our general educational
system and the very fact that decision making is widely dis-
persed have led to a remarkable upwelling of activity. A mini
social movement is afoot to promote what is loosely referred to
as international education. There are literally hundreds of na-
tional and regional' nongovernmental organizations devoted
solely to this purpose. Almost every one of the national institu-
tional membership groups and teachers' organizations has a
division specializing in international education. At the state
level, there are standing committees of governors and of chief
state school officers concerned with international education, and
within states there are often special commissions or committees
that have this as their primary charge. Recently, some of our
major metropolises, in seeking to become "international cities,"
have been promoting international education in their areas.
At the same, time many universities and an even greater
number of liberal arts colleges have separate administrators and
special programs for dealing with the international aspects of
their curriculum, and there are numerous consortia of post-
secondary institutions, often combining the full range of insti-
tutional levels, that help to reinforce individual campus initia-
tives and to sustain interinstitutional collaborative efforts.
Scattered throughout the country there is a very active system of
academic alliances that bring together secondary school teachers
and administrators with their counterparts at the college and
university levels to jointly plan international, mainly language-
related, teaching strategies. Citizen groups in organizations such
as world affairs councils, United Nations associations, and the
like act to extend international education to the general public.
In terms of national-level support, almost every major private
foundation has invested in at least one, and usually several,
promising pilot programs in international education. The federal
government's response has been ambivalent and halting. In spite
of the heavy emphasis on general education in several specially
commissioned reports?for instance, the presidential commis-
sion report, chaired by James Perkins and entitled Strength
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International Education 133
through Wisdom,' and one commissioned by the secretary of
education, chaired by James Holderman and entitled Critical
Needs in International Education2?the government has not
agreed to take on this task. Several times, however, it has come
close.3
The most expansive statement of federal intent came from
Lyndon Johnson; it was first formally introduced in a speech at
the Smithsonian Institution's bicentennial celebration in Sep-
tember 1965, and was reiterated in his special message to
Congress on February 2, 1966, in support of Congressman John
Brademas and Senator Wayne Morse's International Education
Act. Johnson wrote: "No child should grow to manhood in
America without realizing the promise and the peril of the world
beyond our borders. Progress in teaching about world affairs
must not lag behind progress made in other areas of education."4
He urged the establishment of regional educational laboratories
to stimulate new programs in international education at the
elementary and secondary levels, the growth of school-to-school
partnerships to be administered by the Peace Corps, the creation
of an American Education Placement Service to find placement
for American professors and teachers overseas, an enhanced
program of international conferences of leaders, and an increase
in the international flow of books and educational materials.
The International Education Act of 1966 was somewhat
more limited than Johnson's broader vision, and shifted the
primary focus from a more diffuse thrust at changing the full
range of our educational system to a concentration on post-
secondary institutions. That act's primary purpose, however,
was still to internationalize the education of a substantial
'Strength through Wisdom: A Critique of U.S. Capability, Report to the
President from the President's Commission on Foreign Languages and International
Studies, James A. Perkins, chairman (Washington DC: Government Printing Office,
1979).
'Critical Needs in International Education: Recommendations for Action,
Report to the Secretary of Education by the National Advisory Board on International
Education Programs, James B. Holderman, chairman (Washington DC: Government
Printing Office, 1983).
'For a thorough review of the history of federal support for this aspect of
international education, see Rose L. Hayden, Federal Support for International
Education: Assessing the Options (New York: National Council on Foreign Lan-
guages and International Studies, 1985).
'Quoted in ibid., p. 17.
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portion of the general populace by strengthening international
education programs at the undergraduate level. It included mak-
ing grants "for comprehensive programs to strengthen and im-
prove undergraduate instruction in international studies." These
included funds to support faculty planning, training of faculty
members abroad, expansion of foreign language courses, interna-
tional studies components of the social sciences and humanities,
student work-study programs abroad, and bringing foreign teach-
ers and scholars to campuses. Although the International Edu-
cation Act was actually passed, and even renewed once by
Congress, funds for it were never appropriated.
However, there were federal programs aimed at providing
international education to a broad range of students at various
levels of the educational system, and in and out of the classroom.
For instance, in the old National Defense Education Act (NDEA)
Title VI, a Citizens' Education Amendment (section 603, later
Part N) was aimed at precisely the general educational goal. Its
purpose was to "stimulate educational programs to increase the
understanding of students and the public in the United States
about the cultures, actions and interconnections of nations and
peoples in order better to evaluate the international and domes-
tic impact of major national policies." Grants could be given to
any public or private organization. Priority was given to teacher
retraining, post-study-abroad workshops, and summer programs
for teachers, but it also included citizens' awareness forums,
foreign student programs, and television, radio, and other audio-
visual programs. The Citizens' Education grant program actually
ran for a brief period of time, dispensing funds to organizations
like the American Federation of Teachers, the Constitutional
Rights Foundation, WETA-TV, the World Education Center, and
the Experiment in International Living, plus a substantial num-
ber of local school systems, state departments of public instruc-
tion, and colleges and universities.
The Citizens' Education program, however, was lost in what
can best be described as a fit of congressional absentmindedness.
When Title VI was reincarnated as part of the Higher Education
Act (HEA) in 1980, items having to do with primary and
secondary education were transferred to the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act. In the process, the Citizens' Education
portion of Title VI that was supposed to reside in that act was
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International Education 135
deleted. In the following year when the Omnibus Budget Recon-
ciliation Act was being written, there was some discussion of
including the provisions of the Citizens' Education Amendment
along with 40 other programs in the block grants provided by the
federal government to state education agencies. It was not so
listed, and although states are entitled to spend block grant
monies for the promotion of international education, given the
reduction in the general funding level and other demands for
educational funds at the state level, in fact a minuscule amount
of the block grant monies were spent for international education.
There have been several bills introduced, aimed particularly
at foreign language teaching, that have proposed either to provide
per capita funds to school districts to upgrade foreign language
instruction or, at the other extreme, to provide a direct per capita
subsidy to parents to encourage their children to study a foreign
language. 5 Only one of these bills has made it through the
complete process of enactment and appropriation, and it was for
demonstration projects.
And yet the federal government does support some of these
general international education purposes through parts of pro-
grams and pieces of legislation. After all, the primary rationale
for the student Fulbright program, even though the selection
process is heavily focused on the presumed value of the research
product students promise to produce, is the general international
education of an influential portion of the populace. In addition,
there are teacher-exchange programs managed by the U.S. Infor-
mation Agency, and foreign experience for teachers is supported
by the Department of Education under its Summer Seminars
program and its Group Projects Abroad.
Similarly, in the current HEA Title VI program, as much as
75% of the federally supported activities of the language and area
studies centers actually take place at the undergraduate level,
and each center has had a responsibility to expend 15% of the
monies it receives under HEA Title VI on what is called "out-
reach," a catchall phrase for exactly the kinds of activities we are
referring to. There are also nine centers chosen specifically as
undergraduate language and area studies centers. In addition,
5See, for instance, the bills introduced by Paul Simon and Leon Panetta, S. 1631
and H.R. 3048.
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there is a $3 million per year program under HEA Title VI to fund
innovative experiments in international education, generally at
liberal arts colleges. Moreover, a substantial portion of the HEA
Title VI, Part B, monies allocated for linking international
business and higher education is in fact given to the liberal arts
and community colleges. In the future this emphasis on under-
graduate education is likely to expand even further in HEA Title
VI. In the proposed reauthorization of that act, there will be a
separate section as well as a distinctive set of criteria just for
undergraduate-oriented centers.
The federal government's reluctance to take on the mam-
moth task of cosmopolitanizing the national educational system
is wise. Part of the problem of the earlier proposals, such as the
International Education Act, was that they proposed that the
federal government take on a substantial responsibility for
cosmopolitanizing all of American education, intervening at
many points and in many places in the educational process.
Consequently, the potential cost to the federal government was
immense. Rose L. Hayden reports that "all in all, the price tag
attached to President Johnson's programs in international edu-
cation and health was $524 million [in 1966], roughly $1.5 billion
in constant 1985 dollars."6 It is highly unlikely that the former
sum, let alone the latter, would be allocated for that purpose in
these days of fiscal restraint. Even the proposed Citizens' Edu-
cation Amendment which would have expanded the federal
mandate, was limited to $2 million annually for seed money and
venture captital.
A case can be made, however, for a more modest, more
pointed federal program keyed to activities whose main base of
support is elsewhere, or to a limited set of initiatives that only a
national program can accomplish. We have selected four kinds of
activity that the proposed Foundation might engage in, each one
representing a widening of the clientele to be served in the
successor generation. Paralleling the expansion of the clienteles,
our recommendations call for decreases in the proportion of
responsibility that rests with the federal government and in-
creases in collaboration among federal, state, and local govern-
ments as well as private funders. We have also chosen these four
6Hayden, Federal Support for International Education, p. 18.
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International Education 137
points of leverage because they have a high multiplier effect,
providing the maximal cosmopolitanizing impact on the dis-
persed educational system for the lowest level of federal invest-
ment.
We are proposing the establishment of Foundation programs
to (1) provide international experience for gifted students of
demonstrated high foreign language competency and knowledge
of another society; (2) assist in the internationalization of under-
graduate general education programs; (3) upgrade the foreign
language competency of secondary school teachers; and (4) pro-
vide for coordination, sharing, and resource development in
substantive international studies at the precollegiate level. The
goal of all of these programs would be to help internationalize
the education of the successor generation.
THE INDIVIDUAL STUDENT
We start with the program that is most narrowly focused and
for which the responsibility should be almost entirely at the
national level. The purpose of the program would be to create
both a dramatic point of recruitment and a reward system for
high-achievement students seeking an internationally oriented
career. We propose the creation of two highly competitive
fellowship programs providing for sojourns abroad, one aimed at
the period between the end of high school and entrance into
college, and the other at the equivalent period between under-
graduate and graduate training. These fellowships might, but
need not, require enrollment in an educational institution
abroad. The prototype for them is a highly successful German
fellowship program that provides for just such an exposure at the
end of secondary school training, and permits the recipients to
immerse themselves in a variety of educational experiences
abroad.
The periods between high school and college and between
college and graduate school are the points of greatest flexibility
in students' career choices, and the points at which substantial
overseas experience can most effectively enrich their perspective
in their subsequent education. Our educational system provides
a constant narrowing of focus as students move from general
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education through advanced degrees. At the Ph.D. dissertation
level, the scope has narrowed to a pinpoint. Interrupting this
relentless march toward specialization with a relatively unstruc-
tured international experience at these key points of transition
would allow students to broaden their occupational choices to
include international careers. These are also the times when an
individual, living at a student standard of living, is most likely to
get a full immersion in the country in which he or she lives. By
the time that midcareer business executives, for instance, are
contemplating a move overseas, for most of them it is too late
and their occupational role too restrictive for an immersion in
another culture.
Like the Rhodes Scholarships, the fellowships must be given
sufficient prestige and support that they can serve not only as
pivotal training experiences for the individual student but also as
motivation and reward for high attainment in the earlier educa-
tion experience. To qualify, students would have to demonstrate
a very high level of foreign language fluency as measured by the
common metric we proposed earlier, and a fundamental knowl-
edge of the foreign country in which they choose to reside. Both
these screening tasks should be carried out in the manner of, and
perhaps through, the Educational Testing Service's advanced
placement examinations or the National Merit Scholarships.
The selection process should deliberately provide for the inclu-
sion of candidates specializing in the natural sciences or some of
the other disciplines that tend to be underrepresented in inter-
national studies, such as economics, psychology, and the visual
and performing arts.
The fellowships should also allow for second visits rather
than reflect the Fulbright program's emphasis on first visits. It is
often on the second visit, after the tourist phase is over, that the
most fruitful exposure to another country takes place. Further,
the fellowships should cover the full costs of the overseas
sojourn so that even the least affluent students could afford to
participate.
While this fellowship program is proposed here as a national
competition, some of the states with highly developed interna-
tional studies interests might want to initiate their own pro-
grams, particularly those that are establishing centralized edu-
cational institutions with an international focus, such as the
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International Education 139
governor's schools for international studies that a number of
states have established.
The expected national payoffs from such a fellowship system
would be both the recruitment of students who might become
international affairs experts in various fields and disciplines, and
the cosmopolitanization of high-achievement members of the
successor generation who, even if they did not become experts,
would bring to their future occupations an international perspec-
tive that they would otherwise not have. At the end of a suitable
period of time, the postgraduation experience of those who had
held these fellowships should be examined to see whether the
desired effect had been achieved.
The creation and funding of such fellowships on an experi-
mental basis could be undertaken by the proposed Foundation.
Its long-term management could be handled through a nongov-
ernment organization or through the Fulbright program admini-
stration.
Recommendation: The Foundation should establish highly com-
petitive fellowship programs for post-high-school and post-
collegiate periods of foreign sojourn. Some of the fellowships
should be earmarked for disciplines and professional groups not
well represented in international studies. Selection should be
based upon high performance in a foreign language, a clear
study, and deep knowledge of the country to be visited.
COLLEGIATE LEVEL
The second point of leverage for cosmopolitanizing the
education of the successor generation is in the general education
portion of collegiate education (that is, courses taken outside the
major). While a focus on postsecondary education does not reach
all of our future citizens, it reaches a substantial portion of those
who will provide leadership in our society, and it does so at a
level of education sophisticated enough to prepare them to deal
with the complexities of our international environment. As we
will note, a focus on higher education with its 3,000 or so
institutions provides a more limited, more effective point for
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introducing international studies into the general educational
system than a focus on the 15,200 school districts in the United
States. And within higher education, particular points of leverage
are the liberal arts colleges, whose primary purpose is to provide
a broad education for their students. A federal program aimed
specifically at undergraduate international education could have
a major impact in preparing the general public of the future to
cope in the international environment.
There is already a great deal of developmental activity under
way, much of it supported by funds from private foundations and
the federal government. As was noted earlier, the HEA Title VI
program alone? even leaving aside the investment in undergrad-
uate international education that takes place in the comprehen-
sive language and area studies programs?has been investing
some $3 million per year directly in general international edu-
cation at the undergraduate level. The newly reauthorized HEA
Title VI will have a new category of grants aimed at funding
undergraduate international education over the long term rather
than just providing short-term seed money for new programs, as
Title VI does now. In addition, Part B of Title VI, which provides
federal support for the creation of linkages between business and
higher educational institutions, provides the majority of that
support to undergraduate institutions.
The bane of undergraduate program maintenance is the
prevailing pattern of external funding that provides a sudden
infusion of monies to enable an institution to start a new
program or to make a quantum jump in the scale of existing
programs. The one exception to this is the undergraduate lan-
guage and area studies programs supported under HEA Title VI
that receive grants on the same three-year renewable cycle as
graduate programs. In practice such programs constitute the
lower end?in some world area groups, the middle range?of the
size continuum of the language and area studies centers, and
their specifically undergraduate orientation is at best problem:
atic. For other undergraduate programs, the common practice is
that the institution receives a seed money grant, then the same
intrainstitutional economics take over that made it difficult to
sustain international programs in the first place. The conse-
quences of this boom-and-bust strategy are shallow roots and a
high mortality rate for undergraduate international studies pro-
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International Education 141
grams. Clearly, a strategy is needed for the provision of durable
external support for longer-term institutionalization.
This strategy, however, if it is to be effective, must be based
upon a firmer determination of where the national interest lies in
the promotion of collegiate international studies. If the federal
government and the private foundations are going to continue,
and to expand, their support for international studies at the
undergraduate level, some hard questions have to be asked about
the service of such programs to the general national purpose, as
well as about the realization of strictly intrainstitutional goals.
For some three decades, individual institutions and consortia of
institutions have been developing their international studies
programs, but we have very little information on the collective
effects of such programs and courses on the internationalization
of students' outlooks. Nor has there been an examination of
what the intellectual content of such courses and programs is, let
alone what it should be. A prerequisite to providing national-
level support for undergraduate international studies should be
the adoption of an empirical frame of mind, one that would
weigh alternative schemes for cosmopolitanizing the outlook of
students against some standard of demonstrated effectiveness
and service to the national purpose.
The usual undergraduate international education program is
a mixture of several different components. Normally, they are
( 1 ) work-study-abroad programs for students; (2) faculty enrich-
ment through professional experience overseas; (3) individual
courses with a substantial international content; (4) organized
internationally oriented majors and minors; and (5) the promo-
tion of an international ambience through the importation of
foreign professors and students. In making decisions as to where
to focus national support for undergraduate international educa-
tion and which institutions should be the beneficiaries of public
support, each of these program segments?and for an instituion,
all of them collectively?must be weighed against overall na-
tional objectives.
From the national perspective, there are two basic purposes
of undergraduate international studies programs against which
their success can be measured: ( I) providing the largest possible
number and variety of students with a substantial informational
and empathetic base in international affairs; and (2) providing
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the start-up training for students who will become international
affairs specialists. The former calls for reaching out to all
students with some international training, the latter for ration-
alized course concentrations including the early stages of lan-
guage training for students who will go on to specialist training
at the graduate level.
It will be noted that overall program goals specify outcomes
in terms of student benefits rather than characteristics of the
programs per se. Hence, measures of achievement of any of the
individual program segments and their collective impact must be
expressed in terms of student accomplishments. This leads to
such criteria of success as the following: Is the full range of
students in an institution being served by study-abroad programs
and specialized courses or majors, or just the foreign language,
history, or political science majors? From the perspective of
graduate education or later occupational placement, is there any
evidence that the programs bring an appreciable number of
students into internationally oriented careers? Does faculty
enrichment really result in any clear spinoffs in student training?
What is the relative cost-effectiveness of each of these compo-
nents in contributing to either or both of the two goals?general
education for most students, and serving as a feeder into the
pipeline of specialization?
The general point to be made is that before a strategy for
sustained national support for undergraduate education can be
launched, a thorough examination of program goals and accom-
plishments must be undertaken. The highly idiosyncratic, spas-
modic growth that now characterizes the field should be fitted
into a more deliberate national strategy, with clear criteria both
for selection of the campus programs worthy of support and for
retrospective evaluation of the effectiveness of those programs.
We cannot afford to expand our investment in undergraduate
international education until some of the nebulous aspects are
made more concrete and the desirable outcomes specified.
Accordingly, the Foundation could make an essential contri-
bution by assisting in the development of student-outcome-
focused criteria for success in undergraduate international stud-
ies programs. The many experiments in curriculum, course
content, and program mix that have developed on many different
campuses over the past several decades need to be examined and
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the most effective of them given support. A program of national-
level funding for undergraduate international studies should be
directed to the consolidation and rationalization of what has
been developed on the various campuses up to the present, and to
the initiation of fresh experimentation to develop prototypical
models appropriate for different levels and types of institutions.
Its goal should be the very wide diffusion through the collegiate
educational system of successful models of international studies,
both in the major and especially in the general education portion
of the curriculum.
Once these models have been identified and shown to be
effective, and once the demand for international education at the
precollegiate level matures, the models developed in undergrad-
uate institutions should be widely diffused into the secondary
and even the primary education system. In fact, in the case of
comprehensive international studies centers, undergraduate pro-
grams receiving federal support should be required to spend a
portion of their federal monies on what is called "outreach". It is
from the outreach activities of the undergraduate programs that
the stimulus for development of a secondary education strategy
for substantive international studies could best be developed.
The time is ripe for a hard-headed look at the accomplish-
ments of past efforts in international education at the collegiate
level, and for providing long-range support for a set of programs
demonstrating the greatest service to the national goals. Once
such programs were selected on the basis of a clear set of evalu-
ative criteria at the national level, they could serve as guideposts
for other programs at the collegiate level and even for precollegiate
education as well. The setting of the evaluative criteria, the fund-
ing of developmental efforts in the short term, and basic support
over the long term would be natural functions for the proposed
Foundation.
Recommendation: The Foundation should fund and direct an
effort to develop evaluative criteria based on the national interest
for international studies programs at the undergraduate level.
For the most successful programs it should provide funds for
longer-term support on a five-year cycle, and it should take steps
to assure that such programs serve as prototypes for similar pro-
grams at both the collegiate and the precollegiate level.
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144 ?UM 1 J CH, LEVERAGE
FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING AT THE
PRECOLLEGIATE LEVEL
The broadest approach to the successor generation is to
introduce an international perspective into primary and second-
ary education. However, as we noted earlier, responsibility for
these levels of education does not lie primarily with the federal
government, nor are they amenable to direct intervention from a
national organization, no matter how laudable the cause. None-
theless, there is a federal role in helping to coordinate and
aggregate local effort so that it becomes more cumulative and
more effective. International studies is a prime candidate for
such an effort, since the benefits of cosmopolitanizing the
successor generation are so obviously national rather than local,
and since to the extent that such studies reach overseas, the
federal government alone has the mechanisms for asssuring the
necessary foreign contacts and access. At the same time, given
the immensely expanded demand on resources that a full-scale
effort in all 15,200 school districts would require, the national
role must be selected with a careful eye on parsimony. This and
the following section will show how limited federal intervention
might be most effective in each of the two main components of
-international studies at the precollegiate level: foreign language
instruction, and substantive instruction about other countries
and the global society.
It is interesting to note that almost all of the discussion of
state-level activity under the rubric of "foreign language and
international studies," and most of the proposed federal legisla-
tion aimed at promoting such studies at the state and local level,
turns out to be foreign language training and not substantive
international studies. It seems that the generalized feeling that
something must be done to deparochialize America has been
translated almost entirely into a widespread movement to intro-
duce or strengthen foreign language requirements. A May 1983
survey of state educational authorities by the National Council
on Foreign Language and International Studies 7 found a sharp
increase in the importance these authorities assigned to foreign
language study between 1969 and 1980, and an even more
7Ibid., p. 41.
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International Education 145
pronounced increase between 1980 and 1983. For instance, in the
southern states alone, in 1969 only 36% of the state education
agency representatives rated foreign language high in impor-
tance, while in 1983 67% did so. This increase in the general
importance given to foreign language instruction has been ac-
companied by a major expansion in legislatively or administra-
tively mandated foreign language requirements. Now 23 states
require that foreign language instruction be made available in
schools, and most of the rest have reported their intention to do
so.8 And more and more colleges and universities are requiring
foreign language study for admission. This, of course, has an
immense feedback effect on the demand for foreign language
instruction in the schools.
Throughout rthis report we have commented at considerable
length on some aspects of the problems of foreign language
instruction. Almost all of the preceding recommendations, how-
ever, called for centralized activities to be carried out mainly by
institutions of higher education. We still believe that much of
this centralized development effort is necessary before large
amounts of fresh national resources are poured into the existing
system of foreign language instruction. It is clear, however, that
proceeding with centralized innovation without involving and
assisting the large numbers of dedicated teachers currently
engaged in foreign language instruction is of limited value.
Moreover, the surge in foreign language requirements is placing
immense stress on the existing system, stress that is being felt
acutely throughout the country. For a local school administrator
or a college dean, expanded foreign language requirements trans-
late into a need for more teachers, and there is neither the lead
time nor the facilities to train large numbers of new teachers if
the new requirements are to be fulfilled. The result will be the
further dilution of the skill levels our students actually attain in
a foreign language.
To exacerbate further the problem for many school districts,
this sudden swelling of demand for foreign language teachers is
8For an even more current survey with a brief exposition of the nature of the
requirements and recommendations, see Jamie B. Draper, Elizabeth H. Graham, and
Tamara S. Johnstone, "State Initiatives and Activities in International Studies"
(Washington DC: Joint National Committee on Languages, March 1986, mimeo).
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taking place just when there is immense ferment and experimen-
tation concerning the proper way to teach foreign languages.
Older ways of providing instruction are becoming unsettled, and
new technologies and methodologies are being dumped into the
system with increasing frequency, confronting school adminis-
trators and teachers with the constant threat of obsolescence.
Moreover, most of these new technologies call for costly equip-
ment and are more labor-intensive than current instructional
systems. They demand considerably higher levels of both lan-
guage and teaching skills on the part of the teacher than current
methods normally require. For the teachers, there is the added
threat of attrition in the level and currency of their own language
skills, particularly oral skills. Most teachers do not have the
opportunity to hone those skills periodically to the required level
of competency. Both the students and the teachers suffer from
that loss.
The problems of a suddenly increased demand for language
teachers and the need to upgrade the existing corps of teachers
confront almost every school district. It seems foolish to have
each of the 50 states inventing a solution individually. Moreover,
the solution for such problems often requires taking actions that
cross the boundaries of institutional levels? going from second-
ary to tertiary education, for instance?and across political bound-
aries. Fortunately, steps are being taken toward a cooperative
solution. The Council of Chief State School Officers 9 has recently
proposed the creation of a consultation and assistance program to
help states cope with the demands raised by expanded foreign
language requirements. The need for coordinated action at the
state level provides an excellent opportunity for limited federal
investment in internationalizing the education of the next gen-
eration. A cooperative program, initiated by the states and jointly
funded by state and federal monies, would perform a very useful
function at the ultimate distribution end of foreign language in-
struction, the individual classroom; but it would work through
one or a few points of leverage, such as the chief state school
officers or some other appropriate official. Such a program would
9"International Dimensions of Education: Position Paper and Recommenda-
tions for Action" (Washington DC: Council of Chief State School Officers, November
1985, mimeo).
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International Education 147
provide support for fellowships to speed the training of new co-
horts of teachers, and in-service training programs linked with
periodic overseas sojourns to assure both currency and fluency in
the skills of the existing corps of teachers. The selection of the
teachers for these fellowships should require demonstrated for-
eign language proficiency as measured by the common metric.
Indeed, the fellowhips could be linked to domestic training in new
developments in foreign language pedagogy including those
spelled out earlier in this report.
The federal contribution would be particularly important in
the overseas part of the program, since chaos would ensue if the
arrangements for teachers traveling abroad for language skill
reinforcement and upgrading had to be negotiated by each of the
50 states in each of the relevant countries. Central management
of such a program is essential, and only the federal government
has the capacity for making effective educational arrangements
in many countries abroad. The proposed Foundation would be a
natural place to locate the management of the federal side of the
language teacher training program.
Recommendation: The Foundation should join with the states
through the chief state school officers in supporting and man-
aging a cooperative program to increase the supply of qualified
language teachers, and to sustain and upgrade existing foreign
language teachers' competencies, through the sharing of suc-
cessful innovative teaching strategies, in-service training pro-
grams, and fellowships for foreign sojourns. Care should .be
taken that programs dealing with the wide base of the language
teaching system are interrelated with the more centralized
innovations and changes in language teaching recommended
throughout this report.
SUBSTANTIVE INTERNATIONAL STUDIES AT THE
PRECOLLEGIATE LEVEL
While we know what is meant by foreign language training at
the elementary or secondary level, it is much less clear what the
content of courses and the style of instruction should be to
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140 PUIN13 Oh LEVLKAG-E
provide our future citizens with what is usually called global
awareness or a global perspective. Most reports that propose such
cosmopolitanization write eloquently of American students'
ignorance of international matters,10 but the reports are rather
imprecise as to how that ignorance is to be corrected. In primary
and secondary schools, substantive instruction in international
studies takes the form of courses in world geography, world
history, and comparative cultures and peoples, with perhaps a
few courses on the global environment or conflict resolution. In
the more progressive schools, there is also an attempt to create
for the students an occasional international ambience through
the presence of foreign visitors, through student exchanges and
class trips abroad, and by exposing students on campus to the
dress, handicrafts, and foods of other countries.
Unlike foreign language instruction, these ventures into the
introduction of international education into the primary and
secondary school curricula tend to reflect the interest and
enthusiasm of particular teachers or the selection of a particular
textbook rather than the commitment of the educational system
as a whole. International studies other than foreign language
instruction is given relatively low priority by the state education
administrators. Only one state?Hawaii--requires by law that
international studies be in school curricula, and only 12 other
states through legislation or regulation recommend its inclusion
in the school curriculum. The swelling movement in favor of
extending substantive international education at the precollegi-
ate level does not appear to be as strong as the drive for enhanced
language requirements. Nor is international studies likely to be
expanded through a change in the coverage of the textbooks.
Most publishers do not view the internationalization of their
textbooks as a particularly useful or economically rewarding
thing to do. The parochialism of the students, the textbooks, and
most of the teachers is fairly evenly matched.
The relatively primitive level of development of interna-
tional studies at the primary and secondary school levels, the
dispersed decision making on curricula and teaching materials,
the relatively low level of competency on international affairs of
1?See, for instance, Ernest L. Boyer, High School: A Report on Secondary
Education in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1983).
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International Education 149
most teachers, and the weak administrative support for intro-
ducing international studies materials into the curriculum mean
that the precollegiate level is probably not the place to initiate a
concerted drive to cosmopolitanize the education of the succes-
sor generation. A direct attack on the content of substantive
courses in precollegiate international studies- will have to await
the development of greater systemic support of the kind that is
coming to characterize foreign language study.
There is, however, a useful role for a national Foundation
even at this early stage of the development of substantive
international studies at the elementary and secondary school
levels. While not quite so abundant as counterpart efforts at the
collegiate level, there are many scattered efforts to develop
curricula and teaching materials suitable for this purpose. In
addition, there have been a number of attempts to link higher
education and precollegiate education so that innovations that
occur in the former can be diffused and transformed to be
effective in the latter. Moreover, there have been many ad hoc
attempts at providing teachers with the requisite competencies
to bring an international dimension into the schools?work-
shops, group travel abroad, special summer seminars, foreign
curriculum consultants. Several dozen national organizations
exist whose primary purpose is to introduce international per-
spectives into precollegiate education. All of the internationally
oriented professional associations have special sections for
which this is the primary purpose. Teachers' organizations,
particularly the sections dealing with social studies, have stand-
ing committees on international education. Several of the major
private foundations have funded interesting pilot projects dedi-
cated to the same goal.
The overwhelming impression one receives from this rich
undergrowth is one of diffuseness?interesting experimentation,
but little accumulation. What is clearly needed at this stage of
development are facilities for the sharing of experience and
materials, for the accumulation, evaluation, and dissemination
of promising approaches and materials. In the earlier version of
NDEA Title VI there was a provision for the creation of regional
international studies resource centers to play just such a role.
When the elementary and secondary education items were
separated from that act, that provision was lost. The usefulness
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of a few such centers is even more evident now than it was then.
Accordingly, we recommend the establishment of a relatively
few experimental education laboratories in international educa-
tion to serve as facilitating, coordinating, resource mobilization,
dissemination, and training centers. So that the efforts of such
centers have some impact on what actually happens in the
schools, they should be responsible to and partially funded by the
state school system. In this way, national and local resources and
programmatic experimentation could mingle to begin to develop
a successful strategy for introducing an international perspective
into the education of all members of the successor generation.
Recommendation: The Foundation, in collaboration with state
and local authorities through the chief state school officers,
should create and sustain a few experimental international
studies resource centers to help accumulate, evaluate, and
disperse teaching materials and the results of curricular exper-
imentation throughout the precollegiate educational system.
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