As I’ve just reported, the National Research Council of the National Academies has commenced its $1.5 million review of Title VI, the federal subsidy program for language and area studies in universities. The first question members of the review committee should ask themselves is this: is Title VI doing the job Congress thinks it’s doing?

Title VI has always been marketed to Congress as a language program, first and foremost. Students on Title VI fellowships, Congress is told, are gaining proficiency in difficult languages, while they study some history, political science, anthropology, and so on. The grand old man of Title VI, Richard Lambert, who did important evaluations of the program, once explained how he sold it:

Language competencies were always in the forefront of our public presentations. When we marched up the hill and testified [before Congress], we always argued that without Title VI the nation would not have enough speakers of, say, Cambodian, or later, Farsi, to meet our national need, and we had a catalog of horror stories on what that incapacity had done to damage our national interests.

In the immediate post-9/11 panic, the Title VI lobby again used language “horror stories,” this time about Arabic, to extract a 26-percent increase in funding, the largest single increase in the program’s history.

But it’s part of the deep tradition of academic dissimulation about Title VI to present it as a hard language program, when in practice it’s something entirely different. Lambert admitted the reality:

Over the years, although students have been required to take language courses as a condition for holding fellowships, the area studies portion of Title VI became dominant, in part, perhaps, because the majority of the national resource center chairs were held by area, not language, specialists.

What was the result of the dominance by area specialists? Kenneth D. Whitehead, a U.S. Department of Education official, directly administered Title VI between 1982 and 1986, and monitored it as assistant secretary for postsecondary education from 1986 to 1989. His criticism of Title VI was unsparing:

We were not getting a good value for our dollar. Many of those who studied “hard” languages (e.g., Arabic, Persian, Chinese) in Title VI-supported programs turned out to be less proficient than they needed to be to work effectively in diplomacy, intelligence, aid-related work, and even international business. It was a common assumption in my day that the graduates of the government-operated Foreign Service Institute and Defense Language Institute were more proficient in “hard” languages than their university-trained colleagues.

I also found academic-area specialists generally to be less interested in the languages of their world areas than in cultural, economic, political, and social questions. They didn’t seem to think that language proficiency would do much to advance their academic careers. This was no secret, and many government servants openly wondered whether Title VI served any national need at all.

The most recent review of Title VI, conducted by the National Foreign Language Center, confirmed this gradual subversion of the program. The Center’s 2000 report on the contribution of Title VI to “national language capacity” acknowledged that “over the years, the original focus on language has been replaced with a much broader mandate for area and international studies.” Result: “functional linguistic competence in the graduates of the nation’s colleges and universities has tended to diminish.” First recommendation: “Refocus Title VI/Fulbright-Hays on language.”Of course, the Title VI beneficiaries in academe do have an excellent command of English, which they’ve deployed again and again to cover up the dirty secret of Title VI. (See a prime example, and my demolition of it, here.) So we owe a particular debt to a major university president, who has just given us a perfect explanation of how academe subverted the program.

John V. Lombardi is chancellor and a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In January he participated in a higher education summit at the State Department, devoted to international education. President George Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice addressed the summit, announcing a $114 million National Security Language Initiative (NSLI). Now the NSLI, as Stanley Kurtz has pointed out, bypasses the universities, in favor of K-12 early language instruction and the government’s own language institutes. So why announce it at a higher ed summit? Perhaps it was to provoke academe’s leaders. Do you, the universities, want to be a part of the great language push? Come up with solutions. (And don’t make it Title VI. The administration has asked for a measily one-percent increase in Title VI funding for FY07.)

On his return home, Lombardi wrote an open letter to Rice and Margaret Spellings, secretary of education. There he made this incredibly frank confession:

We in the universities and colleges have much experience in taking tightly focused government programs and diffusing their intent to flow money into activities more central to our interests. If you fund language and area studies, we will leverage the language effort to get more resources for area studies, literature studies and culture studies. These are good things, but they do not address the national need you articulated at the summit, learning language.

Further, we in the colleges and universities are expert at avoiding effective performance measurement. If the nation needs college educated graduates functionally literate in a number of less commonly taught languages, the only way to get this result is to fund programs that will test the graduates. If you want us to graduate students with a command of spoken and written Arabic, Urdu or Mandarin, you need to fund a program that delivers money to institutions that demonstrate the functional literacy of its graduates in these languages through standardized tests. Otherwise, we will train people for you who can read some things in some languages, have traveled and lived in the countries where some of these languages are spoken, but who may or may not have functional usable literacy.

That, in a nutshell, is what went wrong in Title VI. Universities “leverage[d] the language effort to get more resources for area studies, literature studies and culture studies.” And that’s why the United States now has to fund a whole raft of new language programs to do what Title VI should have been doing all along. Unfortunately, at over $90 million a year, Title VI still eats up a large amount of the money that could be used to fund targeted, measurable language programs. The Title VI elephant, with its voracious appetite, has actually become an obstacle in the path of an effective national language policy.

To some extent, the National Research Council has an impossible mission. An evaluation of Title VI will miss the point if it isn’t situated in two contexts: (1) national needs, in government and beyond–needs that are complex and difficult to define; and (2) the array of other programs that have grown up to answer the deficit left by Title VI. But one thing is certain: no honest person thinks Title VI can be left as it is, or simply tweaked. If the National Research Council spends $1.5 million to tell us that things are just fine, it will have been a stupendous waste of the taxpayers’ money.

The pressing question, then, is whether Title VI is reformable. Here Chancellor Lombardi points the way, in his letter to Rice and Spelling:

You must be specific about what you want, specific about how you will know when you get it, and specific about the test you will apply to validate the learning accomplished. This is difficult in cultural studies, but it is not at all hard in language acquisition.

Since it’s easy to measure results in language acquisition and difficult in cultural studies, the conclusion is obvious: language acquisition must be restored to its place of primacy in Title VI. Doing that means imposing a rigorous set of tests and measurements that would blunt the admitted tendency of academe to divert the money to soft areas that academics love, and where performance can’t be measured.

The last assessment of Title VI recommended this refocusing, but didn’t propose a way to do it. The mission of the National Research Council is to figure out just that. And if it can’t envision a practical and effective way to reorient the program, it should have the courage to announce this: after nearly half a century, the time has come to retire Title VI from America’s service.

Remember Title VI? That’s the federal subsidy program for area studies in universities. It’s this money that funds 17 National Resource Centers on the Middle East at U.S. universities. (One example: the Middle East Institute at Columbia, directed by Rashid Khalidi.) An average National Resource Center, with fellowships in the package, will receive about half a million dollars a year in taxpayer subsidies. The U.S. Department of Education administers the program. Today, a Congressionally-mandated review of Title VI gets underway at the National Research Council, part of the Washington-based National Academies (pictured).

Here’s the context. A couple of years back, when the scars of 9/11 were still fresh, Stanley Kurtz and I joined a campaign to reform Title VI. The program, as initially conceived in the 1950s, was supposed to produce grads fluent in foreign languages, who would go on to serve the country’s growing need for area expertise. But over the decades, service-averse academics turned it into a slush fund for subsidizing their pet grad students, who were being groomed for academe. Trendy theory replaced language proficiency as selection criteria. And some centers plowed the money into bogus “outreach”–university-based programs that siphoned taxpayer money to off-campus radicals, who used it to propagandize K-12 teachers.

We proposed a modest solution: a Title VI advisory board, appointed by Congress, to make recommendations to Capitol Hill and the Ed Department on aligning Title VI with national priorities. In 2003, the board concept appeared in the House bill for the higher ed reauthorization. In reaction, the program’s tenured dependents let out a great howl, which spread right through academe like the Danish cartoon mania. The campaign featured wild charges that the board would turn into an inquisition, and that Kurtz and I would be its Torquemadas. In fact, the proposed board lacked any authority; it would have been advisory only, and its members would have been appointed by bipartisan consent. The idea of a board wasn’t even new: the Title VI program had one in years past. But hell hath no fury like a professor held accountable, and the howls reached some Senators. Title VI reform may eventually make it through Congress, but it’s currently stuck in the bog of the delayed reauthorization.

That’s another story. But it was the prospect of a board that gave birth to the idea of a review. Now who do you think would have dreaded the board most? Well, Columbia University, for starters. Two years ago, a Columbia dean, Lisa Anderson, proposed that the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies assess Title VI, as an alternative to a Congressionally-appointed board. (You remember Dean Anderson, don’t you? She was Joseph Massad’s thesis advisor and supporter, and she raised the secret money for the Edward Said Chair.) Anderson had a line into the NRC: she had just served on an NRC panel to investigate aspects of terrorism. She floated the NRC idea to journalist Todd Gitlin, and Columbia’s in-house lobbyist also amplified it: “We feel that an advisory board with goals set by an independent body such as the National Academy of Sciences would make most sense.” This proposal went up to Senate Democrats, who dropped it into the FY 04 appropriation for the Ed Department. Congress ended up earmarking $1.5 million for a contract with the NRC, for a review of Title VI.

That review begins this morning, with the first meeting of the review committee and a “public forum.”

From our point of view, the NRC review was born in sin, a brainchild of the stonewallers and whitewashers on Morningside Heights. It’s the sweet dream of the Title VI “community,” some of whose members have rushed to Washington to make their statements this morning. (They include Amy Newhall, executive director of the Juan Cole-led Middle East Studies Association, and David Wiley, African studies mandarin and advocate of an academic boycott of the National Security Education Program, an alternative to Title VI.)

But in a spirit of fairness, we’re prepared to hold our fire and see whether the NRC has the grit to dig hard and find the truth. We’re not awed by its credentials. We respect smarts. We’re keen to see whether the committee members are savvy enough to plow aside the heaps of propaganda and disinformation about to be dumped on them by subsidized “stakeholders.” And we want to see how much ingenuity the NRC shows in ferreting out contradictory evidence, which is part of its mandate. It’s not enough for the committee to sit back and wait for submissions. They’ve got to get out there and collect their own data.

As a service to the committee, we’ll help it ask the tough questions, by posing some of them ourselves. We’ll also be looking carefully at all of the submissions to the committee, exposing distortions of fact and picking holes in faulty logic. We don’t need ten minutes at the old-fashioned “open mic.” We’re right here on the Internet, and we’ll take as much time as we need.