The Strategic Importance of Language - Redux

In an editorial titled “To Deal With China, The US Needs More Experts,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek argued that to “compete and cooperate” with the PRC, US President Joe Biden’s administration should send more Americans to study there. The magazine noted that just 211 American scholars did so in the 2021-2022 academic year vs. nearly 15,000 a decade ago. Conversely, “more than 289,000 Chinese attended US colleges and universities last year, the biggest cohort of international students in the country.”

Why do so few Americans study in China? The BusinessWeek editorial singles out pandemic-era travel restrictions as the usual bogeyman, US-China tensions, and surveillance and harassment of foreigners by Chinese authorities. But it’s not just Wuhan and other China-related concerns keeping American undergrads and graduate students away. Domestically, it notes that some US universities shut down their China-based study programs and moved them to Taiwan, while others have reduced courses in Chinese language, culture, and history. Budget cuts have shut down all but five Confucius Institutes in the US. Finally, the Fulbright China program, “the biggest US-government-funded educational exchange, was suspended by former President Trump in 2020 “after the Communist party’s crackdown in Hong Kong” and kept shut down by Biden.

What’s the downside of this academic exodus? “Over time, this trend will weaken the US’s ability to deal with its chief rival…The Department of State has set a goal of recruiting additional diplomats, [military strategists, economists, technologists, political theorists] and other experts well-versed in Chinese language and history…There’s also reason to believe that greater engagement would help to lessen the risks of conflict.” The editorial ends with a call for the Biden administration to work with its Chinese counterparts to address various procedural issues, restrictions, security, visas, and other issues. The opinion piece concludes that “opening more paths for Americans to travel to and study in China would be a wise investment in US security.” That’s just on the geopolitical security and science side – add commerce, culture, entertainment, travel, and other sectors where globalization creates business opportunities for American companies (see CSA Research's “Can’t Read, Won’t Buy” series).

But wait, it’s not just the China programs that are broken. In November, the Modern Language Association released “Enrollments in Languages Other than English in the United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 2021.” While its data is several years old (2016-2021 academic years), the MLA report underscores the long-running decline of language studies in the US and the need for investment. Datapoints in the 107-page report include a decrease in total college and university enrollments in languages other than English by 16.6%; the disappearance of 961 language study programs; the drop in college-level language programs from 11,734 to 10,773; and declines in language programs including German (172), French (164), Chinese (105), and Arabic (80).

While disturbing in their own right, the BusinessWeek editorial and MLA reports evoke a strong sense of déjà vu. In March 2004 I wrote “Hoisted on the Petard of Linguistic Convenience,” a Common Sense Advisory brief contending that “Americans have been hoisted on our own petards of English and job protectionism.” That led to the then current situation where “certain government agencies lack the linguistic, cultural, and economic analysis skills to deal with our latest set of enemies” (read that full article from 2004 here).

Some advocacy groups, such as the Joint National Committee for Languages (JNCL) and the National Council for Languages and International Studies (NCLIS), are pushing to reverse these trends. Their mission is "to ensure that Americans have the opportunity to learn English and at least one other language." JNCL-NCLIS listed their current initiatives in their response to the MLA report.

In the final analysis, I sense that language studies in higher education are stuck in a repeating loop like the "Groundhog Day" film. Unlike that film's hero who was able to break the curse of reliving a day in his life, underfunded language education is doomed to repeat this loop. Until the United States comes up with a national language education policy that recognizes the importance of language in a deglobalizing world, we'll have to write posts like this every 20 years.