Arabic Education

Via Ed Cohn I see this New York Times story on Arabic education in the U.S. The point that a bottleneck is developing at higher levels is definitely true...here at UW we have basically three - two years followed by an "Advanced Readings in Arabic" that takes third and above and in which I'm now sitting in as one of eight students. Numberwise, there are almost 60 students in first year and close to 30 in second year, so something has got to give.

An interesting aside to this article, of course, is the federal funding currently under attack from the right. A highly reliable source whom I didn't get permission to quote told me several weeks ago that Democrats led by Ron Kind of Wisconsin had proposed extending FLAS funding (scholarships for foreign language study currently available to graduate students) to undergraduates in certain target languages, but that Republicans had blocked it. This debate came amidst the Campus Watch-inspired assault on Title VI, which basically makes area studies in the U.S. possible. Some of the Campus Watch folks have predicted that if the current "advisory board" goes through (preferably with themselves appointed to it), it will find Title VI is not useful for "America's national interest" as they define it, and that Congress will decide to better spend the money elsewhere; presumably they would want to block something that made it even more useful than it already is. Many Republicans, of course, already want to eliminate the Department of Education, and attacking area and foreign language studies would help chip away at that. Such are the people now wrapping themselves in the flag on their righteous quest to make sure conservative governments get a de facto right to have people in academics support them, regardless of the intellectual merits.