April 6, 1970
Page 10414
U.S. LACK OF SCHOLARLY COMPETENCE CALLED SCANDALOUS
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, the March 16 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education contains a thought-provoking article discussing the surprising lack of expertise on Vietnam in the American academic community. The article notes:
The United States does not have a single Vietnam scholar who:
Holds a full professorship;
Has substantial standing in his discipline;
Has a language background in Vietnamese, French, and Chinese;
Has conducted in-country field research; and
Has a body of published work dealing with Vietnam.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the full text of the article, entitled "U.S. Lack of Scholarly Competence on Vietnam Is Called a Scandal," written by William Hamilton Jones, be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
U.S. LACK OF SCHOLARLY COMPETENCE ON VIETNAM IS CALLED A SCANDAL
(By Wm. Hamilton Jones)
In a widely reported 1966 speech before the International Congress of Orientalists, John K. Fairbank, Harvard University's respected Sinologist, emphasized the almost total lack of American scholarly competence with regard to Vietnam.
"Not only have we been caught with our pants down, but with our pants off," he said. "We can't even send 100 specialists into the provinces of Vietnam to sit in the back room and read documents. We have this terrific firepower, and we tear things up. But we don't know what the people are saying."
FIELD IS "VERY LETHARGIC"
Today, three-and-a-half years later, Mr. Fairbanks finds little evidence of improvement. He says the field is "very lethargic," a judgment echoed by virtually every scholar working in the area.
"It's absolutely incredible to me," Mr. Fairbank continues, "that the American academic community has responded so slowly to such a clear need. The net result is a scandal."
At the highest level of competence, the lack of expertise on Vietnam has been dramatically apparent. When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held televised hearings on Vietnam, for instance, it could not locate an academic specialist of national stature. Instead, the central witnesses were George F. Kennan, an expert on Russia, and China scholar Fairbank.
NO ONE WITH ALL QUALIFICATIONS
Indeed, the United States does not have a single Vietnam scholar who:
Holds a full professorship,
Has substantial standing in his discipline,
Has a language background in Vietnamese, French and Chinese.
Has conducted in-country field research,
and
Has a body of published work dealing with Vietnam.
There are barely more than a dozen men nationally who combine knowledge of the Vietnamese language, a Ph. D. in a traditional discipline, and a scholarly commitment to Southeast Asia.
In a volume called Treasures in Trivia, Paul W. van der Veur, director of Southeast Asia studies at Ohio University, lists all doctoral dissertations written in the United States on Indochina. He finds that by mid-1968, 67 dissertations had been written dealing with Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia, with only two of these completed prior to 1945, and 47 done since 1960.
Only about half of the dissertations deal directly with Vietnam, and about half of those are foreign-policy dissertations that do not represent attempts to study specific aspects of the history, culture, or life of Vietnam.
Within a core of perhaps a score of scholars concerned with Vietnam, the disciplinary range is restricted. Historians and political scientists dominate the field. Very little work has been done in sociology, anthropology, economics, or literature.
There is, of course, a group of people who have written on Vietnam or the war. In general, however, they came to the study of Vietnam by way of an interest in American foreign policy or in other Asian nations, rather than on the basis of a continuing commitment to Vietnam.
Even now, when the continued American involvement in Southeast Asia might be expected to have swelled interest in Vietnam among graduate students, there are still few people concentrating their studies on Vietnam. A generous estimate is that no more than two dozen students are working on Ph. D.'s with a special interest in Vietnam.
WHY THE DEARTH
There are a variety of interrelated reasons for the dearth of Vietnamese scholars in the United States.
First, there has been little academic tradition to draw on. The U.S. had few missionary, trading, or colonial contacts with Southeast Asia, so scholars here never really had a basis for becoming interested in Vietnam the way they did in China or Korea.
Because the French were already involved in Vietnam, it was simpler for Americans to study the results of French scholarship. The liability of that attitude proved to be that, even after the French left Vietnam, a combination of chauvinism and bureaucratism impeded American access to primary source materials. In contrast, Cambodia, which was never a colonial country, has not presented American scholars with the practical difficulties Vietnam has.
A second problem has been that the commitment necessary to become a Vietnam scholar is prohibitive for many people. Mastery of language alone is likely to take five or seven years of intensive work, since fluency in Vietnamese and French, as well as in Chinese, is required for anyone concerned with historical questions.
Add to language and area training the normal time necessary to complete a Ph. D., and the total elapsed time to achieve specialized competence on Vietnam can easily run to 10 years.
PRACTICAL OBSTACLES EXIST
Even those willing to vault the first two hurdles have faced a number of practical obstacles in recent years. For the most part, these difficulties have existed because of the war and the U.S. government's deep involvement.
For example, access to Vietnam, particularly North Vietnam, has been a formidable problem.
Extended in-country research requiring free movement will continue to be virtually impossible for some time. In addition, many important government documents have been classified.
Another factor is money. The amount of available fellowship funds seems disproportionately low when measured against the years of study required. Nor has money for research been readily available, except for operational research under government contracts, an arrangement most scholars prefer to avoid.
As a result, Vietnam has never been a particularly inviting prospect for scholars with any stirrings of interest in Asia. Compounding the situation, colleges and universities themselves have been slow to accept and encourage area specialists.
The overall effect, notes I. Milton Sacks, a political scientist at Brandeis University and himself a Vietnam scholar, has been a feeling "that Vietnam has been ignored out of temerity – a judgment which doesn't speak well for American higher education."
In general, the interest of American colleges and universities in Vietnam has fallen within one of two broad categories: Vietnamese studies, where the concern is to build a base for academic understanding of the people, the culture, and the country; or technical assistance, where the concern is to provide aid in terms of American advice and expertise to the Vietnamese.
Technical assistance involves practical help of various kinds in fields such as engineering and agriculture, and is usually carried out under government contract, normally through the Agency for International Development.
In recent years, however, technical assistance frequently has been viewed suspiciously, largely as a result of the disclosure that the Central Intelligence Agency was using a Michigan State University project in Vietnam as a cover for some of its agents.
Vietnamese studies have developed along quite different lines from technical assistance. Their bases of strength overlap little if at all. For example: Michigan State, with a large AID contract in Vietnam for public administration projects, has never developed a competence in Vietnamese studies.
12 UNIVERSITY PROGRAMS
There are no fully reliable surveys of precisely what institutional resources for Vietnamese studies exist in the United States.
This past January, Education and World Affairs, a New York foundation, could locate only 12 universities with language and area studies programs for Southeast Asia.
Of those 12 institutions, seven have varying degrees of capability in Vietnamese studies: the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Hawaii, the University of Michigan, and Cornell, Harvard, Yale, and Southern Illinois Universities.
The programs vary in strength, depending on such factors as library resources, available people, breadth of language training, and the climate toward area studies programs in general at each institution. Of the seven, only four – Cornell, Harvard, Yale, and Southern Illinois – have concentrated enough resources and people to support Vietnamese studies across a broad spectrum of disciplines.
There is wide agreement that Cornell's program in Vietnamese studies is the best in the country. In library resources, for instance, Cornell is well ahead of the Other three institutions, having roughly 5,000 Vietnamese language books and another 5,000 on order.
Two of the outstanding young Vietnam historians – David Marr and John Whitmore – are at Cornell. Mr. Marr came to Cornell last fall from Berkeley, where he had completed his doctoral work and then taught Vietnamese history for a year. Mr. Whitmore, who joined Yale's history department after receiving his Ph.D. from Cornell, has returned to Cornell this year as a visiting lecturer.
Much of Yale's reputation in Vietnamese studies derived from the fact that since the early 1950's, Paul Mus, the highly regarded French scholar, spent one semester a year at the university.
Mr. Mus' recent death put a serious crimp in Yale's capabilities in Vietnamese studies, although the university still is very strong in language training. The first Vietnamese language course in the country was offered at Yale in 1957, and Yale continues to cosponsor with Cornell a summer language institute, where Vietnamese is taught.
HARVARD'S APPROACH
While Cornell and Yale have developed competence in Vietnamese studies on the basis of Southeast Asian studies programs, Harvard's strength in Vietnamese studies as grown out of the university's well-known Chinese studies program.
Vietnam owes a great deal to Chinese influence, and Harvard can claim a third outstanding young historian of Vietnam – Alexander Woodside – who is well-grounded in Chinese history, as well. After studying Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese, Mr. Woodside received his doctorate from Harvard in 1968.
Vietnamese studies at Harvard received a substantial boost last month when the Ford Foundation announced a $300,000 grant to the university to help establish an endowed professorship of Vietnamese studies.
Harvard also is planning to begin Vietnamese language instruction, perhaps as early as next fall.
One of the most visible lacks in Vietnamese studies has been that no comprehensive center of scholarly expertise on Vietnam exists anywhere. The competence in the field is divided among a number of institutions and nowhere is it really drawn together.
SOUTHERN ILLINOIS' EFFORT
Last July, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale launched an ambitious effort to remedy that situation. Creating a Center for Vietnamese Studies and Programs, the university made the largest single institutional commitment to Vietnamese studies that has been undertaken in the country.
The center received its initial funding from a five-year, $1-million grant from the Agency for International Development. While AID is concerned primarily with technical assistance, its grant to Southern Illinois was intended specifically to help the university develop an academic competence in Vietnamese studies.
"The center is really just beginning," says Horace B. Jacobini, its director and a professor of government st Southern Illinois. "We are focusing now on getting staff, an appalling problem given the scarcity of people with academic competence on Vietnam. We are making progress in terms of developing library resources, and we are in the process of developing a scholarly journal for Vietnam and Southeast Asia, since at present none exists in this country."
The center's plan calls for combining teaching and research with a number of "service functions," such as providing consultation and training services for private and governmental organizations working in Vietnam, sponsoring conferences, and maintaining inventories of people and programs dealing with Vietnam at various colleges and universities. In addition, the center is exploring the idea of establishing "sisterhood" relationships with five Vietnamese universities.
A fellowship program administered by the center already is helping to support the work of three students in Vietnamese studies at other institutions.
Despite the fact that the center is only barely operational, it has generated a variety of misgivings. One outside consultant, himself a Vietnamese scholar, resigned his advisory post because he felt some people at the center "favored programs in support of the United States position in Vietnam over any patient, long-term development of academic excellence."
Others, feeling that expertise on Vietnam cannot be built apart from a regional competence, have criticized the center for having a "one-country orientation." Mr. Jacobini, however, points out that Southern Illinois has had an Asian studies program for several years, although it has not been degree granting.
ORIENTATION SEEN AS ADVANTAGE
He maintains that the one-country orientation was an advantage when the proposal for the center came before the statewide planning board in Illinois, since it made clear that the center would not replicate Southeast Asian studies at Northern Illinois University.
"Our main feeling was that out of all this trauma and experience in Vietnam, there ought to be a university somewhere that sought to develop a special expertise," Mr. Jacobini says.
He says the proposal for the center did grow out of a long-term, well-proved Southern Illinois interest in Vietnam. For several years, the university has had two technical assistance contracts in Vietnam with AID – one in elementary education, one in vocational education. In all, 41 people at Southern Illinois have served in Vietnam, and the university has acted as a host for 57 Vietnamese studying in this country.
Late last month there was an abrupt escalation of the controversy surrounding the center when students at Carbondale held a two-day demonstration to protest the center's activities and the fact that it was receiving funds from AID. The students demanded a voice in reviewing all technical assistance contracts undertaken by the university.
Criticism of the center was directed at a description contained in the AID grant, itself, which said the grant was made to "strengthen the existing competency of the Southern Illinois Center for Vietnamese Studies and Programs for its programs of technical assistance and consultation, research and training related to the economic and social needs of Vietnam and its postwar reconstruction."
Opponents of the center claimed that such technical assistance would imply that the center – and, by extension the university – were part of the U.S. government's military and political strategy.
Mr. Jacobini, responding to the charges, says: "We conceive of programs as meaning lecture series, our journal, and efforts of that sort. Technical assistance as we conceive it is not the province of the center."
PROBLEMS OF DEVELOPMENT
While there have been indications of new vitality in the field of Vietnamese studies, important problems remain that could limit the pace of further development.
First, within the small community of scholars interested in Vietnam, there is some division between those who have been involved in or provided advice toward the formation of government policy in Vietnam, and those who have not done so.
In a sense, the existence of the division is reflected in the two "superstructure" academic groups concerned with Vietnam: the Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group (SEADG), and the Inter-university Southeast Asia Committee (ISAC).
Created in 1966, SEADG is an offspring of the Asia Society, which is supported by AID money. While SEADG has been given about $500,000 in AID funds to dispense for research at its own discretion, the group's activities generally have been to provide advisory help to AID officers. The SEADG council on Vietnamese studies includes government members, and its main function apparently is to serve as a channel between the academic community and the government.
The inter-university committee, on the other hand, was set up in late 1968, with the help of a Ford grant, as a deliberative body that would generally monitor the field of Vietnamese studies.
A Vietnam studies coordinating committee was formed as a Subcommittee of ISAC in January. In contrast to SEADG's council on Vietnamese studies, this group seems primarily concerned with defining and developing possible cooperative ventures between universities in order to strengthen Vietnamese studies.
The maze of acronyms and subcommittees reflects two different groups of people concerned with Vietnamese studies working in a relatively uncoordinated – and at times mutually suspicious – manner.
LACK OF STUDENT INTEREST
A second problem is that there seems to be no widespread student interest in Vietnamese studies, although no one is quite sure why.
"My own hypothesis," says Mr. Marr, "is that many students today feel that Americans just don't belong in Vietnam in any way, shape, or form – even as scholars. Given the fact that a lot of students are alienated from the war, they want to avoid tangling themselves in the rat's nest. There's a feeling that it's a very loaded subject."
On a less political level, others argue that students are attracted to a field by the professors who stimulate their interest and respect. The short supply of Vietnam scholars, according to this line of reasoning, is bound to affect the degree of interest shown by undergraduates.
In fact, the only consistent pool of students seems to be made up of veterans, Peace Corps Volunteers, and International Voluntary Service returnees.
"These people want to understand more about Vietnam," says Mr. Whitmore of Cornell. "They have gotten involved, learned some of the language, gotten to know the country and people, and found they liked the area. From that they want to move on to a more disciplined understanding of what their experiences have been about."
Along this line, Vietnamese language training provided by Defense Department language institutes may be expected, by giving a basic acquaintance with Vietnamese, to stimulate increased interest among veterans in resuming academic work. Between 1964 and 1969, the institutes taught Vietnamese to 16,127 servicemen, in courses ranging in length from 12 to 47 weeks.
Meanwhile, there is a clear need for a great deal of academic "housekeeping" work in the field. For example, at present there is no bibliographic listing of government-held documents concerning Vietnam. On a more substantive level, library development and translations are two areas badly in need of strengthening.
The future of Vietnamese studies is very much tied to the fortunes of area and international studies as a whole. Shifts in federal funding priorities, therefore, are likely to have a sharp impact on the growth of Vietnamese studies, especially since a number of foundations have cut back their international education grants in recent years.
Under the proposed federal budget for fiscal 1971, moreover, funds for two of the largest programs of support for international education – and indirectly for Vietnamese studies – would be reduced by one-third.
The new budget would provide $6-million for foreign language and area studies support under the National Defense Education Act and for fellowships under the Fulbright-Hays Act. Those programs received between $17-million and $18-million a year for fiscal 1969 and 1970. According to the U.S. Office of Education, the Administration plans to phase out both programs in 1972.
"I think the budget cuts will create some very serious problems," says Mr. Jacobini. "They will clearly slow the potential for research, among other things."
Adds Mr. Whitmore: "Vietnamese studies are very much wrapped up with other area studies. If money begins to dry up across the board, Vietnamese studies will find it almost impossible to expand in terms of people, or library resources – two crucial areas."