The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts will be going away for a long weekend at an undisclosed location. Any relaxation, however, will be tempered by the sobering read that Charles King serves up in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. The title, “The Decline of International Studies,” is enough to depress me. The message is even more depressing:  The rise of the United States as a global power was the product of more than merely economic and military advantages. Where the country was truly hegemonic was in its unmatched knowledge of the hidden interior of other nations: their languages and cultures, their histories and political systems, their local economies and human geographies. Through programs such as Title VIII, the U.S. government created a remarkable community of minutemen of the mind: scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates who possessed the linguistic skills, historical sensitivity, and sheer intellectual curiosity to peer deeply into foreign societies. Policymakers sometimes learned to listen to them, and not infrequently, these scholars even became policymakers themselves….  But things are changing. Shifting priorities at the national level, a misreading of the effects of globalization, and academics’ own drift away from knowing real things about real places have combined to weaken this vital component of the United States’ intellectual capital. Educational institutions and the disciplines they preserve are retreating from the task of cultivating men and women who are comfortable moving around the globe, both literally and figuratively. Government agencies, in turn, are reducing their overall support and narrowing it to fields deemed relevant to U.S. national security—and even to specific research topics within them. Worse, academic research is now subject to the same “culture war” attacks that federal lawmakers used to reserve for profane rap lyrics and blasphemous artwork. Unless Washington stops this downward spiral, these changes will not only weaken national readiness. They will also erode the habit of mind that good international affairs education was always supposed to produce: an appreciation for people, practices, and ideas that are not one’s own.  Now while I think the assertions in the first paragraph might be somewhat overblown, you should read the whole thing. King certainly takes some shots at my own discipline of international relations (“one of the academy’s most parochial disciplines”) but he also follows the money — and the money has been wanting as of late. Nonprofit foundations aren’t giving as much, and federal government spending to fund international studies has atrophied in every area except the Department of Defense.  The political problem is that training a broad base of people with a diverse array of foreign-language and area experiences is like paying for insurance. It only seems necessary during an acute crisis when, suddenly, experts in the ethnography of eastern Ukraine or the politics of health care in Sierra Leone or the persecution of religious minorities in Myanmar are badly needed. But to ensure a cadre of trained experts before they are needed, one has to fund studies that seem unnecessary at the time they are funded.  A decade ago, I’d have said that the best response would be to de-politicize National Science Foundation funding for the social and behavioral sciences and restore programs like the Foreign Language Assistance Program by converting them into endowments that don’t need annual funding from the federal government. I’m sufficiently jaded, however, to have little hope that Congress will actually stop self-sabotaging U.S. foreign policy.  Rather, let me suggest a different tack. When reading King’s article, what becomes clear is that the sums of money needed to restore international studies funding back to sustainable levels is not that much — less than half a billion dollars. So while trying to cajole the government to restore prior funding levels makes sense, fostering private-sector support for international studies makes even more sense. Both philanthropists concerned with fostering a more globally-educated class of Americans and multinational corporations interested in better understanding geopolitical risks and rewards have a vested interest in funding more international studies — even if those studies might seem far afield from short-term concerns.  Surely, in this era of billionaires seeking to influence the political landscape, there are a few of them with sufficient far-sightedness to leave their mark on the ability of the United States to run a competent foreign policy? Right?
The state of international studies in the United States is not good. What can be done to improve it?