The Articulate American

When William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick wrote last year's bestselling novel, The Ugly American (Norton; $3.95), they meant the title for the hero: a hard-palmed U.S. engineer working in Southeast Asia, who stood in sharp contrast to bumbling American officials abroad. A thesis writer might well peer into how the nation has curiously misused the title ever since. It has come to mean the very bumblers whom the authors denounced. The "Ugly American" is now a villain.

Overdue. Despite this irony, the book has roused the nation. All over the U.S. last week the "Ugly American" was being transformed into the "Articulate American"--a citizen trained to go overseas with brains, skill and understanding. In the biggest effort so far, Washington's American University announced a six-week course sponsored by the 70-corporation Business Council for International Understanding, which will train any U.S. executive (and wife) before he tackles a foreign assignment. Aims: a working knowledge of the new culture and language, an ability to explain and defend the U.S. abroad, expert tutoring from State Department officials. "Long overdue," said Republic Steel (and B.C.I.U. Policy Board) Chairman Charles M. White. "It could mean the end of the overseas misfit."

On a smaller but deeper scale is the new course (tuition: $1,000) at Syracuse University's Maxwell Graduate School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, which is aimed at training U.S. graduate students for foreign jobs with business and Government. Last week Maxwell's current eight students were finishing up three months' intensive study of U.S. society and policy, Italian culture and language. They will soon go to Rome for four more months of living with Italian families and adapting their skills (economics, journalism, forestry) to the country.

Outbound. Even more practical are programs at the University of Pittsburgh and Montana State College. Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs runs short courses for foreign-bound executives; it also puts graduate students to work for two or three months in international agencies. Montana's ten graduate students (tuition: $500) are not only sharpening their specialties in the classroom. Next month they will put them to grass-roots work by living among the state's Cheyenne Indians and next winter in a Mexican village. The most ambitious scheme of all is planned by Manhattan's Committee for an International Institute: a three-month language and culture course for as many as 300 executives and their wives at a time. No campus could be more symbolic than the one the committee is trying to buy: New York Bay's now abandoned port of entry for wave on wave of foreign immigrants--Ellis Island.

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