Research at risk: Cultural fluency and critical language expertise

In the wake of World War II, Congress recognized a need to better understand the cultures of countries around the world: for national security, trade and diplomacy. In 1958, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, which created National Resource Centers (NRCs) at universities to train experts in regions critical to U.S. interests.

Cornell's Southeast Asia Program(SEAP) earned NRC status that year, with the South Asia Program(SAP) following in 1985. Together, the programs educate students in languages such as Indonesian, Burmese and Nepali, which are rarely taught in the United States. Graduates of the Cornell programs have gone on to distinguished careers in foreign service, the military, government, international business, development and academia.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Education formally ended the National Resource Center program, a loss of approximately $1 million in funding a year.

"The termination of these programs and the blow to area studies training is a loss that goes well beyond the dollar amount," said Wendy Wolford, vice provost for international affairs. "NRC funding has supported generations of students who have helped bring knowledge, insight and cultural understanding to U.S. interactions with some of the world's most populous and strategic countries."

Now, faculty, administrators and students of SAP and SEAP, part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, must determine how to carry on without federal support.

"Our mission is to be a global resource for knowledge, scholarship, training and exchange of ideas and information about South Asia and Southeast Asia," said Tom Pepinsky, SEAP director from 2021-24 and the Walter F. LaFeber Professor of Government in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) and professor of public policy in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy. "This means teaching languages. This means teaching history and literature and politics and culture. It means maintaining one of the most prominent collections of related materials in the world outside of the Library of Congress."

Language studies are core to the Cornell programs, which bring distant lands and customs to students in Ithaca.

Cornell created the only existing textbooks for some languages, like Sinhala, which is spoken in Sri Lanka, said Thamora Fishel,SEAP associate director. "Nepali is not taught at all levels anywhere else," she said. "We're one of two places where Burmese is taught at all levels."

Continuing to teach these languages is important, said SEAP faculty member and past director Abby Cohn, professor and chair of linguistics (A&S). For instance, Indonesia is the fourth-largest country in the world by population, but fewer than 20 universities, including Cornell, teach Indonesian.

SEAP scholars study countries that are home to more than 700 million people total, while SAP's studies represent 1.9 billion people, including India, the second-most populous country in the world.

"These are big countries," Pepinsky said. "They are in the world's most strategically valuable sea lanes. They have natural resources of untold richness. They are some of the last preserves of global biodiversity. It's as far away as you can go from here, and it's big and it's important."

The loss in funding has also eliminated Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships, primarily offered by NRCs, for graduate and undergraduate students. The fellowships are a pillar of SAP and SEAP, which administer them, Pepinsky said.

Typically, around 15 Cornell students receive FLAS fellowships to fund their studies and travel abroad to do field work. This year only a handful of students will receive fellowships, using leftover funds from last year. Students who otherwise would have received them had to find alternative sources of funding, for instance by taking teaching assistant positions, and scratch their plans to study languages and conduct research abroad.

During her time at Cornell, Phoebe Dailey Wagner, M.P.S. '24, received a FLAS fellowship to study Hindi and traveled to India to study the impact of climate change on sacred sites in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Through interviews with people who live there, she found that less snow means people must travel farther from the sacred sites they care for to find water for their livestock. Speaking Hindi gave her a deeper understanding and was a more ethical way to conduct research, she said.

"I think that there's a level of respect and understanding that is demonstrated in taking a language study seriously," she said. "It was not only good preparation on my end, but it also allowed for a deeper level of connection with the people I was speaking with in India."

Collaboration

SEAP and seven other NRCs focused on Southeast Asia work together as a consortium: Graduate Education and Training in Southeast Asia (GETSEA). Formed in 2020 and led by Cornell, the consortium supports graduate training and expands national access to language instruction. For instance, if Cornell students want to study a language not taught at the university, GETSEA scholarships cover tuition so they can take a virtual course at another university.

"Before, we were trying to collaborate to meet the needs of individual students who just happened to be at an institution where they couldn't study that language," Cohn said. "Now it's an existential crisis."

GETSEA has received a four-year, $1 million grantfrom the Henry Luce Foundation to create a broader collaborative framework to sustain the field amid mounting federal challenges.

The foundation funded GETSEA with smaller grants previously but stepped up its contribution in response to the funding gap.

"Even though $1 million seems like a lot of money," said Cohn, principal investigator on the grant, "it's a drop in the bucket compared to what's being lost across all of the institutions that have NRCs."

Ellen Lust, director of the Einaudi Center and professor of public policy (Brooks School) and government (A&S), expects the impacts on students - and on the United States' future - to be profound.

"If federal funding cuts continue," Lust said, "it's going to be key to develop creative solutions like GETSEA to address the gap. We are actively exploring ways to help our students acquire these critical skills for the 21st century."