As our colleges and universities have watered down their content over the years to make room for fluff courses and politicized junk, foreign language requirements have largely been abandoned. Is that a problem?
In today’s Martin Center article, Veronica Bryant argues that it is.
She writes:
In recent years, however, the federal government is suffering from a shortage of language experts. In 2020, the Council on Foreign Relations reported that 15% of language-designated positions overseas were vacant and 24% filled by officers with insufficient training. As former CIA agent Glenn Corn said to me in an interview in March of this year, “What I saw over time is a lot of the officers didn’t really take it seriously. The government’s paying them to go study a language, and they just don’t put 110% or even 100% into it. . . . People study a language and they go overseas; they don’t really use it because it’s not comfortable. It’s comfortable to speak with other Americans or speak with people that work in the embassy who speak English.”
It’s not that college leaders don’t understand the importance of international understanding, but they seem to prefer woke programs stressing “international citizenship,” which is often just a platform for anti-American or anti-Western sentiments.
Read the whole thing.