Tucked among the many horrible things that the current federal budget bill – the one Trump calls the “Big Beautiful Bill” – is a little noticed but profoundly impactful item. It terminates federal funding for university’s area studies centers and foreign language fellowships.

            For me this is personal. Much of my own career has been linked to these programs. My graduate school studies were funded by them and they were the life blood for academic units I’ve administered in my career.

            But it is not just me. Whole generations of area studies scholars have relied on this funding. It is perhaps the most important source of money for academic programs that train students in the diversity of the world’s cultures and languages. It trains not only scholars but also budding business leaders and diplomats, and is arguably one of the most effective ways in which the U.S. has maintained its global ties and international prominence.

            The collapse of this support is breathtaking.

            Area studies funding began during the Cold War when the government awoke to the importance of other cultures around the world. I suppose the thinking the time was that we needed information about these places since we might bomb them, or maybe we wanted to seek their support. Either way we needed to know more about them.

            Students eagerly accepted the funds as prerequisites to seeking global careers. Scholars and college administrators sought the funds to support the study of cultures and languages that otherwise might go by the wayside. Often classes in Hindi, Japanese, or Tagalog would be small and expensive, unable to exist without the federal money.

            For decades, universities throughout the country have relied on funding for Area studies centers and Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships supported through Title VI of the National Higher Education Act. In 1958 at the beginning of the Cold War the funding was established through the National Defense Education Act. It was transferred from the Defense Department to the Department of Education in 1965.

            One of these foreign language grants saved my graduate career. After my first year in graduate school at Berkeley in the 1960s, I had wasted much of my time in anti-Vietnam War protest marches and rallies, and had a strew of incompletes in my political science seminars. I was about to leave grad school and go to Vietnam as a stringer to report on the war when someone stole my motorcycle. It was my only source of funds. I had no money to go anywhere, much less Vietnam.

            My graduate school advisor at the time, Warren Ilchman, persuaded me to at least finish my MA thesis. I hurriedly completed it. Then as I was trying to figure out what I would do next, he called me with exciting news. My thesis received honors, and entitled me to receive a US-funded Foreign Language Grant. For the next three years I dutifully studied Hindi as if it was my job at McDonalds, since it was the only source of funding I had to complete my PhD.

            When I finished my degree I was desperately looking for a job, with no success. Again my thesis advisor came up with a solution, and again it involved federal area studies funding. Ilchman was chair of the Center for South Asia Studies at Berkeley, and he would appoint me to be its Project Director.

            I was elated at the title of my new position until I discovered that there was no money for my salary. Instead, as Project Director, I would have to write grants and raise money for the Center’s projects, and they would provide my salary out of administrative overhead. Much of these funds came from Title VI Area Studies support.

            I stayed at Berkeley for fifteen years, continuing to get grants as I maintained a half-time teaching position as Coordinator of the university’s religious studies program. When I left in 1989 it was to be dean of a new School of Hawai’ian, Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Hawai’i. The new School simply put together a cluster of a dozen or so area studies centers ranging from Chinese and Japanese to Korean, Filipino and Pacific Islands Studies, and a graduate program in Asian studies. My job was to help coordinate these and to keep them funded. The financial support came not only from the state of Hawaii but more importantly from federal area studies grants. Many of the students in our Asia studies graduate program relied on the foreign language studies fellowships, as I had in my own graduate school training.

            Needless to say, today my colleagues at Berkeley, Hawaii and at area studies centers across the world are devastated. What will become of their academic programs?

            My guess is that many will fold. Others will lumber on with local university and state support. But they will be a shell of their former selves. And America’s place in the world will have been diminished as a result.