Straws in the Wind - Part 297

From Inside Higher Ed: The Trump administration cut off funding for area studies and foreign language education in September, putting an end to the flow of financial support for centers and programs that assisted national security strategy for decades. Justifying the cuts, the administration has said these kinds of programs are “inconsistent with Administration priorities and do not advance American interests or values.” For years, area studies centers were funded through National Resource Center grants as part of Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965. Congress partially restored this funding in its most recent budget, but the damage to area studies may be irreversible. 

The University of Washington, home to one of the nation’s oldest area studies centers, lost $2.5 million in National Resource Center and foreign language grants—half of which went directly to student scholarships—for the 2025–26 academic year. The University of Michigan lost about $3.4 million and the University of Kansas lost $2 million. Western Washington University’s Center for Canadian-American Studies reportedly took a 70 percent hit to its budget after the Title VI funds were pulled.

...Facing a hostile presidential administration, institutions are unlikely to stick their necks out too far for area studies, said Zachary Lockman, a historian and professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University. “They’re skeptical. They’re all in austerity mode. They’re under attack,” Lockman said. “Many of them just want to fly under the radar and remain invisible, so giving money to people whom the Department of Education sees as enemies of the Trump administration doesn’t seem like a wise tactic to them.” ...

[The] symbiotic government–university partnership worked for a while. But in the 1970s, while the U.S. was at war in Vietnam, that relationship began to fracture, experts explained. Government officials started to think that they weren’t getting their anticipated return on investment, [Osamah] Khalil [of Syracuse University] said. It was never a requirement that recipients of federal fellowships work for the government afterward—and in large part, they did not, he said. “One of the things that came out of Vietnam was this idea that ‘We’re not getting the experts that we wanted out of this. We’re getting campus radicals who are protesting U.S. foreign policy’”... 

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/business/academic-programs/2026/03/26/area-studies-once-vital-wither-without-funding.