Larry Summers Is Wrong About Languages
March 6, 2012 - 3:00am
Soon after 9/11, Mike Wallace, then
still the most hard-hitting reporter for “60 Minutes,” sat down with several of
the heads of the intelligence community to discuss how the worst terrorist
attack in United States history could have happened. At the end of the
interview, he asked each of the five or six section heads: “So, tell me, how’s
your Arabic?”
Not surprisingly, not one of the
section heads spoke Arabic although several had some Russian and one offered
that he knew some Vietnamese. The story is worth remembering not because of the
embarrassment it caused the interviewed section heads but because their
helplessness was the result of a similarly misguided policy of linguistic
ignorance as the one advocated by Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard
University and former secretary of the Treasury.
Read more: Inside Higher Education
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment