Area Studies and Government

Matthew Yglesias has some issues with Lee Smith's Title VI column. As regular readers might suspect, I do, too. As I commented in Yglesias's thread:

"There are many things I wonder about looking at these stats. One is the degree to which they include with funding FLAS money, which at UW accounts for about half of all "Title VI" funding but which by law can go only to grad students. (At least some Democrats tried to change this last year.) More important, I wonder if they count Title VI-A in with Title VI. Title VI-A is just for languages and undergraduate development - in theory, the "experts" produced by Title VI programs go out into the world and build programs under Title VI-A. So if you look strictly at Title VI, you're missing a huge part of the story.

"Finally, I wonder about this degree-granting business. By that, I assume they mean area studies majors. But there are very few of those in proportion to people who take and benefit from the classes. You can be an International Relations major and use Arabic as your language, for example. I've had students in Islamic history who weren't concentrating in Middle East Studies but were reserves or ROTC and just wanted background in the region. I doubt this shows up in their stats."