Why ex-Harvard head Larry Summers is wrong to say students don't need foreign languages

Larry Summers Is Wrong About Languages

March 6, 2012 - 3:00am

Michael Geisler

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 

USA: More Students Taking Arabic May Not Translate Into More Cultural Comprehension

Over the past decade, the federal government has provided resources to colleges to strengthen programs in Arabic and other languages deemed critical to the economy and security of the United States. That effort has increased the number of undergraduates whose first major was Arabic from 13 in 2002-3 to 57 in 2007-8, notes the Education Department's 2009 "Digest of Education Statistics," released on April 7.

And the number of students taking Arabic courses nearly doubled, to 24,000, between 2002 and 2006, according to the Modern Language Association.

But some scholars say that linguistic competence does not equal cultural competence—and that the latter is what is sorely needed.

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Area studies to lose direct cash

The British Academy is to stop direct funding through its Learned Society Programme. In a letter to the directors of the six societies involved, which represent "area studies" in the UK, it says the programme will end in 2012. The African Studies Association, the research committee of the Association for South-East Asian Studies, the British Association for South Asian Studies, the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, the Joint Initiative for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Society for Libyan Studies receive a total of about £150,000 a year from the academy. A spokesman for the academy said the learned societies would still be able to compete for other sources of funding after 2012.

Times Higher Education

Large foreign donations are influencing courses at British universities, according to a new report

Does money from foreign donors come with strings attached? Dangerously so, according to research last week that claimed foreign governments have corrupted British universities and threatened their academic impartiality.

The report, A Degree of Influence, from the Centre for Social Cohesion, lists the millions of pounds that leading UK universities have accepted from donors in the Middle East, Asia and Russia. Robin Simcox, the report's author, says foreign donors that give enough money get a say in how things are run. "Edinburgh and Cambridge received £8m each from Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia last year to set up Islamic studies centres," he says. "He gets to appoint as many as three or five members of the management committee."

7 April 2009
The Guardian

Report from the Centre for Social Cohesion

USA: Area Studies professors among best paid

Area, ethnic, cultural, and gender studies, in fact, beat related fields significantly at all levels — full professor, associate professor, and assistant professor. Full profs average $94,700, associates $71,014, and assistants $56,271. English profs at the full level came in $18,000 less, history full profs $15,000 less, visual and performing arts at $18,000 less, foreign languages and literatures at $12,000 less, and liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities at $13,000 less.

Chronicle of Higher Education