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Testimony of Gilbert Merkx June 19, 2003 Chairman Hoekstra, Members of the Committee, Ladies and Gentlemen, my name is Gilbert Merkx. I am a professor at Duke University, where I serve as Vice Provost for International Affairs and Director of the Center for International Studies, which receives Title VI funding. Before coming to Duke two years ago, I spent twenty years as Director of the Latin American and Iberian Institute at the University of New Mexico, which also was a Title VI center. I serve as the co-chairman of the Council of Directors of Title VI National Resource Centers for Foreign Language and Area Studies. I stepped down last year after twenty years as Editor of the Latin American Research Review, the official journal of the Latin American Studies Association. I should also tell you that I was a founding member of the Group of Advisors of the National Security Education Program of the Department of Defense and that I served for several years as the Chairman of the NSEP Group of Advisors. In sum, I am well acquainted with both of these two important international education programs. Title VI is one of the most cost-effective Federal programs ever introduced. Since its initiation by the Eisenhower Administration, Title VI has been the primary federal program supporting the development of college and university-based foreign language and area programs. Title VI funds have induced universities to invest large sums in language and area programs. Currently, every Title VI dollar granted leverages more than ten dollars out of educational institutions receiving grants. Title VI-funded centers have trained military officers and personnel for our intelligence agencies, as well as teachers for all levels of our educational system. Title VI centers have also produced in-depth knowledge that has vastly deepened our understanding of other societies. Title VI centers and fellowships serve the nationīs national security needs in two different ways. Over the long term, they produce new cadres of personnel trained in foreign languages and knowledgeable about foreign areas, as well as a cumulative body of knowledge about international affairs, which provide manpower for government agencies and an intellectual foundation for intelligence. In the short run, they can serve as an on-call resource to be drawn on in times of crisis, analogous to the National Guard. One of the graduates of the New Mexico center I directed labored a number of years in obscurity as a specialist on a small, ignored country, until that country, El Salvador, erupted in civil war. He then became a valued member of our intelligence community. Likewise, expertise at Title VI centers about other formerly obscure localities such as Somalia, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Yemen, to name a few examples, suddenly emerged as important and useful to our nationīs security agencies. Let me give some examples of how the Title VI centers that I have directed at New Mexico and at Duke have directly served the national interest. In my 20 years as Director at New Mexico, forty-four active-duty Foreign Area Officers of the United States Army and 4 Air Force officers received M.A. degrees in Latin American Studies. During the period of the Central American conflict, my center hosted four workshops for the Defense Intelligence Agency in which academic specialists from around the country, whom I selected, met with intelligence officers from the DIA, CIA and State Department to discuss security issues in a confidential setting. In 1997 my center organized and hosted a conference, in collaboration with the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Southern Command, the National Guard Bureau, and the Inter-American Defense Board, on the subject of civil-military issues in the Americas, attended by 150 military, civilian, and academic personnel. At Duke University, the Center for International Studies that I direct houses both the Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS) and the Program in Asian Security Studies (PASS) program, both of which interact regularly with national security agencies and military institutions. Shortly before the war in Iraq, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, visited TISS to share with us the Administrationīs views, anticipating remarks he was to make to the nation at the side of Secretary Rumsfeld a couple of days later. In our successful proposal last fall to the Department of Education for a grant to support the work of the Center for International Studies, we pledged to focus on two issues over next three-years: international human rights and international security. I give these examples to make it clear than within the Title VI community there are people like myself who actively collaborate with our national security and defense institutions. I do not claim to be typical of all foreign area specialists. As in every academic enterprise, Title VI centers involve faculty of many different intellectual interests and political perspectives, some of whom collaborate with national security agencies and some of whom choose not to do so, but nonetheless support the larger Title VI enterprise of research and training. I do collaborate with national security agencies and I consider myself part of the mainstream of foreign area studies: if I were not, I would not have been elected co-chairman of the Title VI NRC directorsī group, nor would I have been repeatedly renewed as editor of the leading journal in Latin American studies. Just as foreign area specialists are a diverse group, Title VI-funded centers are a diverse lot. There are different bodies of knowledge for different world areas. History plays a more important role for areas with the heritage of ancient civilizations, such as China, the Indian subcontinent, and the Middle East, than for regions with newer nations such as Latin America and Africa. Among those centers that cover one world area, there will be differences in geographic and disciplinary coverage. For example, my New Mexico center was strong in coverage of Mexico, Brazil, and the Southern Cone, but weak on the Caribbean basin, while the center at the University of Florida was strong in Caribbean and Brazilian studies but weaker on Mexico and the Southern Cone. New Mexico had particular strengths in political economy, military issues, and art history, while Florida had strong programs on migration, environment, and public opinion. I have been speaking about the role of Title VI in stimulating foreign language and area studies through its National Resource Centers and fellowships program. I should add that all these resource centers also engage in outreach to public schools and other forms of citizen education. The centers and fellowship program is only one of several Title VI programs, which together work to internationalize higher education at all levels. Other Title VI programs support undergraduate international education, international research, the development of resources for foreign language teaching, international business education, the recruitment of students from minority groups, and the introduction of new technologies for foreign information access. All together, these grant programs have made U.S. higher education more internationalized than it has ever been in the past. The National Security Education program, which I also strongly support, has also been very helpful in strengthening our expertise. Despite these two small but valuable programs, I do not believe that we are close to meeting all our nationīs needs. International expertise on our campuses is not a luxury. It is essential to our nationīs long-term ability to deal with a complex and occasionally dangerous world environment. Title VI has been essential to building expertise and it is essential for maintaining that expertise, but at current funding levels it is not a panacea. In January of this year, the Duke Center for International Studies hosted a conference of some 300 educators on the subject of "Global Challenges and U.S. Higher Education". Our plenary speakers included the Chairman and CEO of General Motors, Richard Wagoner; the Undersecretary of Education, Eugene Hickok; and Admiral Bobby Inman, former Director of the DIA and former Deputy Director of the CIA. I would like to close by quoting from Admiral Inmanīs address to the conference: "The needs of the country, whether involving national security or the global economy, are continuing to grow at a faster rate than we are equipping ourselves to deal with. And I remain as persuaded now as I was when I first encountered this problem back in 1958 that the key to our response is the pool of talented citizens who have the depth of knowledge of the cultures, of the languages, of the economies of all the countries we interact with around the world. I remain as committed to Title VI and what it does as I was back when it was reauthorized a couple of times in my tenure of service. But frankly, I still consider it only a bucket as compared to the fire hose that we need desperately as we move into a post-bipolar world." Mr. Chairman, I thank you for the opportunity to express my views to the Subcommittee. Gilbert W. Merkx. |