Middlebury College President Ronald D. Liebowitz joined over 100 other college presidents last week in Washington, D.C., for the Defense Department's Summit on International Education. During the two-day summit, President George W. Bush unveiled a plan to strengthen the foreign language skills of American students. For Middlebury College and the recently affiliated Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS), this proposal brings to the forefront of national attention a focus on the study of foreign languages already inherent in the College's curriculum.
"We both offer languages at the center of what we do in international education," said Liebowitz in reference to the College and MIIS. "Now this has become a major, central focus of the Bush administration."
Under this new plan, Bush will request $114 million in the 2007 fiscal year to fund the National Security Language Initiative. Approximately three quarters of this initial investment will come from the State and Education Departments. Additionally, the Department of Defense would earmark more than $750 million from 2007 to 2011 to train personnel in "critical languages." Bush did not, at last week's two-day summit in D.C., speak to the gathered college presidents regarding the much larger language initiative that will come through the Defense Department.
The President's request will be made formally in his budget proposal for the 2007 fiscal year. The initiative will also create a new National Language Services Corps of teachers and translators for the armed services and will strive to produce 1,000 new teachers of Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Hindi, Russian and other "critical languages." The budget proposal also includes plans for producing 2,000 advanced speakers of these critical langues by 2009, increasing funding for scholarships and creating new summer immersion programs.
Bush also spoke about the importance of facilitating the study of international students in America, and announced plans to expand the Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant Program to bring additional native speakers of critical languages to the United States. The president vowed to "find that proper balance between security and letting people come to our universities," a promise that garnered the loudest applause from the college presidents according to the Chronicle for Higher Education.
While Liebowitz predicted that the College and MIIS, as leaders in the study of foreign languages, would play a key role in achieving the administration's new goals, he noted that it may be some time before the immediate effect of the proposal is seen on campus. "Right now it's unclear how this $114 million initial seeding will be allocated," he said. "It's unclear how we and other institutions can tap into the funding."
Liebowitz did, however, point to MIIS's Graduate School of Language and Educational Linguistics as a program that may play a critical role in the new proposals in the near future. The program trains language speakers in educating new students and could prove a valuable resource in producing the teacher and student numbers targeted in Bush's initiative.
"The dearth of teachers of these critical languages is to me the missing piece," said Liebowitz.
He also noted that three of the College's nine summer language immersion programs are in critical languages. While the College does not currently teach Farsi or Urdu, he said it is possible that new languages would be added to the suite of Summer Language Schools in the future.
Liebowitz observed that the majority of presidents present at the summit welcomed the proposal but noted that some individuals have raised concerns. "There was a lot of enthusiasm among the college presidents," he said, "but also some degree of cynicism." According to Inside Higher Ed, many presidents have said that they will need more details to fully evaluate the proposal, and others have expressed concern about the Pentagon's large role in the language initiative.
Liebowitz, however, left the summit pleased with the event's message and outcome. "I'm delighted that finally this government and administration have recognized the importance of supporting foreign language study," he said.
Written by KATHRYN FLAGG
