International and Language Education for a Global Future: Fifty Years of U.S. Title VI and Fulbright-Hays Programs

5. The Growth of the Less Commonly Taught Languages in Title VI and Language Programs in the United States

At this juncture in world affairs, it has become essential to our national welfare, perhaps even to our survival, that we understand the culture, the psychology, the aspirations of other peoples. Such understanding begins with a knowledge of foreign languages, and the competence of our citizens in the languages of other lands has become a national resource of great importance. It is essential that we develop this resource. —Luther H. Evans, U.S. Librarian of Congress and Director General UNESCO, 19521 That the 130 Title VI National Resource Centers (NRCs) and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) universities have developed the capacity by 2006–2009 to offer approximately 195 less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) is an astonishing accomplishment made possible by a modest amount for funding from the U.S. Department of Education over the past fifty years.2 Each competitively selected NRC receives only approximately $230,000 annually for all aspects of language and area studies training and a roughly equal amount for six to ten FLAS fellowships for academic year language instruction.3 The small size of Title VI grants and limited number of FLAS fellowships contrasts markedly with the much higher federal funding of language capacity in the Foreign Service Institute, Defense Language Institute , and the National Security Agency.4 C H A P T E R 5 The Growth of the Less Commonly Taught Languages in Title VI and Language Programs in the United States David S. Wiley 89 This chapter reviews the character, strengths, and weaknesses of these Title VI and Fulbright-Hays (F-H) programs by briefly reviewing their history and their rationale. Then, it turns to the productivity of these language programs, followed by investigating how this language instruction in the universities articulates with recent federal government priorities for particular languages. The chapter concludes with a review of enrollments and FLAS fellowship allocations in each world area, drawing on the data tables in Appendix E. The Coming of Language Priorities before Sputnik Although the coming of modern LCTL studies is normally associated with the 1957 appearance of the Russian Sputnik, there are many precursors, even in the U.S. Office of Education (US/OE), as it was known in the years of the Great Depression. In 1932–1933, US/OE, in its National Survey of Secondary Education, had a special study of “Instruction in Foreign Languages” with a survey of 200 language courses in a dozen states. (Some of these courses were in the Scandinavian and other European languages found in the churches and schools of large immigrant communities .) By 1942, US/OE had created the Division of Inter-American Education Relations with thirty staff members to promote inter-American cooperation and solidarity, appointing three language consultants in Spanish, Portuguese, and English as a Foreign Language. During the same period, the private foundations and the growing experience of globalization led to developing new university area studies centers. In 1933, Rockefeller , followed by Ford and Carnegie, with larger investments in the 1950s, were pushing “academic instruction organized on an area basis (with language instruction as well) . . . [with] efforts [that] were decisive in assisting the universities to surmount their previous neglect of the non-Western world.”5 By 1946, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) already had found twenty-two universities offering forty-five instructional programs with language. By 1951, even when using fairly rigid criteria for an area program, the SSRC identified twenty-five integrated area studies programs with nineteen potential programs with sufficient or nearly sufficient language and area instruction capacity to become a center.6 In 1953, the US/OE convened a conference on the role of foreign languages in American education and sought to revive the Foreign Languages in the Elementary Schools (FLES) initiative. In 1954, there were fifty-five identifiable area studies centers in the United States, according to a State Department report, a number that doubled in only two years to 108 programs. US/OE had a full-time staff member in the field of foreign language teaching by 1956 to meet the growing demands for foreign language information and services.7 In 1957, before the rise of Sputnik, so many 90 D A V I D S . W I L E Y U.S. government agencies were enmeshed in global affairs that the commissioner of the US/OE, Lawrence G. Derthick, “convened a conference of representatives of 20 U.S. government...