Minding The Campus By David Randall
Last year, the Trump administration cut off funding for foreign language education and area studies, and there’s no need to weep. These programs are “inconsistent with Administration priorities and do not advance American interests or values,” and that’s true enough. The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has published several reports on how Middle East Studies Centers have become politicized vessels for foreign powers to exert soft power influence upon America.
These programs were created to educate a cadre of Americans prepared to serve America’s national interests by providing our government with information about the nature of the different regions of the world. Instead, they largely serve to staff a web of nonprofit organizations dedicated to frustrating the exertion of American power or subordinating it to the desires of our foreign rivals and clients. As a cherry on top, these programs staff universities with large numbers of professors and administrators intent on imposing a toxic combination of identity politics and anti-Americanism on our universities. Defunding these snake pits is a no-brainer.
What is more difficult is to figure out what to replace these programs with—and, indeed, whether to replace them at all. Does America still need to pay to educate citizens to learn about the outside world?
America’s Year Zero of 1945, as it prepared to establish its postwar global hegemony, was an extraordinarily different world. Vanishingly few Americans spoke Russian, much less—even including our plentiful missionaries—Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, and all the other languages of the world…
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