Look East

The Ford Foundation last week pumped $15.1 million into the study of non-Western countries, a field sorely neglected by most U.S. colleges and universities. (The Russian language is getting more attention, but the entire U.S. last year produced only one Ph.D. in Chinese.) To endow "area study" professorships and boost research on everything from Soviet society to African tribalism, Ford funneled its money into three universities that have done most in the field: Harvard ($5,600,000), Columbia ($5,500,000) and California ($4,000,000). Ford aims to put crash programs on a permanent basis for the next ten years. As one foundation official put it: "It just isn't sensible for the American educational establishment to be so far out of balance in its concentration on the Western European part of the world. If we don't develop a pretty high degree of sophistication in our knowledge of Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, we're in trouble."

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