Foreign Relations of the United States, 1917–1972, Volume VI, Public Diplomacy, 1961–1963

85. Address by the Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs (Battle)¹

Washington, June 26, 1962.

The Educational and Cultural Exchange Programs of the United States: Their Role in Foreign Relations

Like the nations of the world—new and old—I suppose government officials span the spectrum of development. Some have been on the job long enough to be fully developed—in the particular situations they are called upon to administer; others, like myself, are newly come to their present responsibilities and hence are, in the language of development, “newly developing.” All of us—to use Ambassador Galbraith’s metaphor for nations in their various stages of growth—are like “beads being moved along on a string,” being pushed farther along by experience and the responsibilities of office just as countries move farther along the line of development as they acquire additional experience and greater national maturity.

This comment will suggest one reason why, after only a few weeks in office, I do not feel disposed to make lengthy or ringing pronouncements. Instead I intend, hopefully, to stick to my subject, “The Educational and Cultural Exchange Programs of the United States,” to which I have added “Their Role in Foreign Relations.” Playing an effective role in our foreign relations is of course the end purpose of all our international activities.

I am grateful for the invitation to be here, to discuss with you some of the opportunities these programs present to us in Washington, to people in 120 countries of the world with which we have exchange agreements, and to you in literally hundreds of communities across the United States. And so I propose to present some first impressions of principal program activities and relationships in this great enterprise of providing purposeful exchanges in an environment of continuing international change.

You are attending this conference primarily because of your interest in the participant training program of AID. Your meetings have not been oriented primarily to the international political crises that occupy so much of the time and energy of diplomats. I am, however, reminded of a phrase that former Secretary of State Acheson used some years ago to describe the number of methods needed to conduct effectively our relations with the people of other countries. The phrase is “total diplomacy.”

The Government’s exchange programs provide an example of what he meant because, aside from diplomatic negotiation and economic and military cooperation, they constitute a further facet of our foreign relations—a facet that involves the movement of people for purposes of education, training, observation, and research and with essential supporting activities by citizens and community groups for foreign visitors coming to this country.

Within this aspect of our diplomacy—the exchange of persons—we of course have a great diversity of plans and programs. You have been well briefed on the aims and methods of AID’s participant training program. My first function, therefore, is to outline briefly the character and scope of the educational and cultural exchange programs of the Department of State. While other agencies have exchange activities, State and AID represent the great bulk of the exchanges that look to local communities and individual citizens for vital assistance and support.

Department of State Programs

The largest category of exchanges in the Department’s program is students. There were about 9,000 individuals in the Department’s total exchange-of-persons program this last academic year; of these almost half, some 4,000, were students—both American students going abroad and foreign students coming here.

Since our primary interest today is the foreign visitor, let me mention briefly three points of special interest about foreign students. The first is that only some 3,000 foreign students—about 5 percent of the estimated 58,000 foreign students in the United States this last academic year—were grantees under the Department’s own programs. With comparable AID grantees, the total of foreign students here under Government grants does not exceed 10 percent.

This leads to the second point I want to make, namely, our relationship to the other 90 percent. The Government, like your own organizations, feels a concern that all foreign students, regardless of how they came here, find the best total experience that can be made available to them. Both humanitarian purpose and national interest coincide on this point.

In accordance with the authorizations of the new Fulbright-Hays Act² for services to all foreign students, and in line with the importance attached to the whole question of foreign students by President Kennedy’s administration, we have been taking steps to stimulate greater private support activities for foreign students and to broaden government’s own participation. We cannot assume fixed financial support for all foreign students, but in every feasible way we want to help improve the quality of the total experience they have here. This means, for example, a series of efforts to help more foreign students find summer jobs or other useful summer experience, and I am glad to report that, through both private and governmental activity, we have made real gains on this problem this year. Before another year is out we hope there will be other substantial gains in improving and expanding procedures for selection, orientation, and counseling, both overseas and here.

Another point about the foreign students who come here under Department grants is that they are, for the most part, graduate students. About 85 percent of our foreign-student grant funds are “invested,” so to speak, on the graduate level.

A second principal category in the State Department program is, of course, foreign leaders and specialists. This program had its origins in the late thirties. Following World War II it took a major advancement in numbers because of the increase in German, Austrian, and Japanese grantees. As a historical footnote, the numbers of those grantees, and of those coming under the technical training programs of predecessor agencies of AID, led many American communities to realize the need for further organization if they were to assist adequately the Government’s program of acquainting such visitors with American life and institutions by firsthand observation. And as councils and other groups assisting with foreign leader and specialist grantees exchanged experiences, they saw the need for national coordinating services which has brought into being the cosponsor of this conference, COSERV [National Council for Community Services to International Visitors].

During this last academic year some 2,300 foreign leaders and specialists, including student leaders traveling in groups, were brought to this country by the Department for short-term, averaging about 60-day, visits. A word about the basic thinking behind this program will throw light on the programming arranged for these visitors after they get here. The people who occupy leadership or specialist roles in their own countries are usually active people; they have busy careers, special interests, and curiosity. They usually have well-defined professional or career interests. Their programming here is, therefore, built around the core of these interests. The range of counterpart relationships set up in this country must be as broad as the careers represented and may include supreme court justices, editors and publishers, heads of labor unions, government officials, university presidents, leaders of women’s organizations, and representatives of the creative arts, among others.

The aim in the invitations to foreign leaders and specialists is to bring to this country the “philosophical traveler,” in George Santayana’s memorable phrase—those who possess, as he said, “fixed interests and faculties, to be served by travel.”

From their visits here these “philosophical travelers” gain new insights into, and understanding of, American life and institutions. A leader in women’s activities in the Republic of Togo—and also Assistant Director of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs—was a recent grantee. She observed women at work here in a variety of fields, in schools and welfare institutions and civic activities, among others. Her visit was concentrated largely in small towns and rural areas since Togo is predominantly agricultural. Before leaving she spoke of the “sense of solidarity” women have in this country toward civic activities and her desire to encourage this sense in her own country.

Because of the excellent cooperation of private organizations of all kinds, the experience of foreign visitors can be rich and varied. An example from a wide variety was the visit of two newspaper editors from India to Emporia, Kansas, where William Allen White had made the Emporia Gazette a bellwether of American small-town life and thought. W.L. White, who succeeded his father as editor and publisher, reported their experience in an article in the Reader’s Digest in which he described the kind of “close view” they had “of an average American small town—not rich, and not poor.”

Foreign leaders are also invited in groups, according to professional interest, as well as individually. Likewise, leader groups of college students are brought to this country. Early next month, for example, 70 students from the University of São Paulo in Brazil will arrive for 3 weeks in this country. Ten days will be spent in a seminar at Harvard on American economic and political institutions. They will then be guests in private homes in New England and make a few days’ stop in Washington before returning to Brazil.

But it is like carrying coals to Newcastle to discuss foreign leader/specialist activities of the Department at any great length to this audience. Many of you could cite book, chapter, and verse from your own personal experience with grantees. I have discussed leader/specialist activities primarily to provide general background for some later remarks in which I want to try to relate the aims and purposes of the principal AID and State programs.

Both of these principal categories I have just discussed—foreign leaders and specialists and foreign students—are import categories. There are export categories we should at least note briefly: Students, scholars, teachers, professors, and American specialists have been going abroad under the Fulbright Act of 1946 and the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948,³ just as these acts have enabled us to bring in students and leader/specialists from abroad. Our import and export authorizations now arise under the Fulbright-Hays Act (the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act of 1961), which was passed overwhelmingly by both Houses of Congress last summer and which codifies and enlarges the authorizations previously available.

There is one further export category that ought to be made a part of this record. It is the category we call cultural presentations, a program under which American performing artists are sent abroad on tours to demonstrate the cultural interests and achievements of the American people. There has been great variety in the program, from the Juilliard String Quartet to Louis Armstrong, from Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain to a full-scale theatrical company, from the New York City Ballet to the Baird Marionettes. Until now, this program has been devoted exclusively to sending our own artists abroad, but, with the expanded legislative authority given to the Department under the new Fulbright-Hays Act, we hope to be able soon to begin to give limited assistance in bringing foreign artists to this country for nonprofit performances, principally for university and other academic audiences. This would provide a further opportunity for citizen and community participation.

Some Relationships In U.S. Exchange Programs

The programs we have been discussing—those of AID and of State—came into existence at different times and to serve different needs. But they are interrelated at several points and mutually reinforcing. All are fundamentally directed to a great aim of U.S. foreign policy: to help create the conditions for what President Kennedy has called “a free and diverse world”—rather than a rigid, monolithic world.

Diversity in exchange programs is necessary if we are to deal effectively with diverse peoples and their varied interests and needs in their different stages of development. State, for example, has its primary exchange focus on “mutual understanding.” In the new Fulbright-Hays Act the fundamental purpose is “to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries by means of educational and cultural exchange. . . .”

The act sets forth these further purposes:

. . . to strengthen the ties which unite us with other nations by demonstrating the educational and cultural interests, developments, and achievements of the people of the United States and other nations, and the contributions being made toward a peaceful and more fruitful life for people throughout the world; to promote international cooperation for educational and cultural advancement; and thus to assist in the development of friendly, sympathetic, and peaceful relations between the United States and the other countries of the world.

AID’s programs, as you have heard from others during this conference, contribute directly and effectively to mutual understanding, but their essential authorization goes to a different point. In the Act for International Development of 1961 strong emphasis was given to the concept of human resource development through “programs of technical cooperation.”⁴ The AID focus is first, and properly, on economic and social development, with human resource development a major and growing component of this effort. “The development of human resources is a prime objective of the Agency for International Development,” Mr. Hamilton [Fowler Hamilton, AID Administrator] has said. “Social and economic growth in any country depends in large measure upon the existence of effective technical and managerial skills in various fields of organized endeavor, public and private. . . .”

AID participant training grantees are here, first of all, for technical training on a project-oriented basis but are also enabled and encouraged to obtain a better understanding of American institutions and culture as a part of their “programming” while they are here. Here is one example of how the aims of AID coincide with our own.

Both AID and State cover a wide age range. In its academic grants AID begins at the preparatory school level, and in its support of the ASPAU program for African students—the African Scholarship Program of American Universities—undergirds the general academic training of highly selected undergraduate students. On the participant training level, the average age is about 30. The State programs cover the range from students to national leaders of senior rank.

The underlying, unifying idea in all our approaches—both governmental and nongovernmental—is that in diversity there is strength. We depend on diversity, on the contributions to our national life that come from all elements of our varied society. It marks our training programs and exchanges which must be directed toward highly developed countries, toward those just achieving industrialization, and toward others where this badge of modernity is not yet being worn. Different kinds of training and education are therefore required. And public support for this varied effort must necessarily rest on a broad and diverse base.

In calling this meeting AID has testified amply to its own faith in this general proposition. Here at this conference, for example, we have representatives of the land-grant colleges and State universities—those great centers of training and enlightenment which had their common origin a century ago in the farsighted act which the son of a Vermont blacksmith-farmer, Senator Justin Morrill, brought into being. We know it as the Morrill Act of 1862; the centennial anniversary date comes in just a few days from now.⁵ We are all, I think, even more aware than before of the dynamic role these institutions play not only, as in their founding years, in practical service to their State and regional communities, but now in varied services to an international constituency all across the world.

Then, we have here the comparatively youthful COSERV group, cosponsor of this conference, which only in May, under the leadership of Mrs. Charles N. Bang of the Cleveland World Affairs Council, completed its first independent regional conference. We all look confidently ahead to the growing benefits to come from this Council’s coordinating work on behalf of some 75 individual community organizations in 65 cities, from Honolulu to New York and from Miami to Seattle.

The National Association of Foreign Student Advisers is another great source of strength for the exchange effort. Its members are directly involved in personal problems on more than 1,200 college and university campuses of the Nation, and they also keep closely attuned to new national needs and policies. NAFSA brings unique experience and service and dedication to the needs of our growing numbers of foreign student visitors.

Many other organizations represented here, as well as other parts of the academic community, government, industry, and labor—all sectors, public and private—provide additional centers of strength. As a result, we have in this combination of strengths a new affirmation of the traditional American faith in diversity—in different kinds of organizations and individuals coming together voluntarily to build unified strength for a common task.

This conference has afforded us all a chance to see the identities and complementarities of interest of private organizations, individuals, and government. And it has given us in government the opportunity to express our great sense of dependence on the voluntary service of diverse private groups and private citizens, and our deep gratitude to you for it.

Our interlocking interests are leading to the preparation of a booklet we hope to have available by early fall. The Department does not have, by its very nature, as many publications of an instructive type as do some other government agencies with special constituencies—with publications, for example, such as seed-testing manuals or on how to start a small business. I have often wished we might do something of the kind. I am now able to say that we will have a booklet that will meet the general specification. It is a sort of seed manual, in a sense. It is a booklet on The Seed of Nations—a phrase the President used in a talk to foreign students at the White House—and it deals with foreign students and what American communities and organizations and families are doing, and can do, to help them.⁶ For they are “the seed of nations” and our citizens have the great opportunity of being their hosts and their friends. Many of you know well the role of host and friend to foreign students.

National and International Goals

The goals we seek through exchanges are as varied as the situations they are designed to meet. Exchanges as a means of reaching these goals are concerned with developed and developing nations, both friendly and unfriendly. They deal with people. As such they are directed to individuals in all varieties of human, professional, social, political, and economic contexts. They relate to all the factors that contribute to nation building and mutual understanding. These include, for example, human resource development and the preservation of indigenous national cultures.

Human resource development, the growth of individuals through training and education, has become a major new national and international goal in recent years. It has likewise become a major new field of academic study. Economists have been giving increasing attention to such matters as the “capital value of man” and the yield on investment in human resources.

“Development,” once of limited meaning, has in the last few years been expanded to embrace human resource development, which lies at the base of economic and social growth. AID has pointed out that the “human resources gap” varies from country to country in the light of a nation’s objectives and development goals. If human resource development plans are to meet individual country situations, they must be flexible. Individual country planning is therefore being given strong emphasis in the Government. This effort to relate exchange programs to particular needs and priorities and objectives of individual countries, and integrating them with other relevant activities, is leading to closer collaboration in the exchanges of AID, State, and other agencies, public and private.

There is need for mutually reinforcing efforts, too, in preserving national cultures in nations on the road to industrialization. This is a vitally important aspect of nation building. The impact of modernization will mean changes, but the changes need to be adaptations of old cultural patterns, old value systems, and historic symbols so that these social moorings will not be swept away. Everything feasible must be done to preserve the indigenous arts, the national monuments, and other great symbols of a society’s traditions. A common language, common ethnic origins, and common geography may not make a nation. There are cultural experiences and traditions, usually expressed in the plastic arts or in dance or music, that may really be the social bonding that holds a people together. We must therefore think in terms of helping to safeguard these indigenous arts as an early and essential part of any country plan. Fortunately, the cultural roots of most nations lie deep. For example, Secretary of State Rusk has recently pointed to the loyalty of the peoples of Eastern Europe to their national cultures and to their sense of nationhood.⁷

The goals we seek were illuminated a few weeks ago at the University of California in Berkeley, where President Kennedy spoke on the role of the university in the building of world order.⁸ “. . . the pursuit of knowledge itself implies,” he said, “a world where men are free to follow out the logic of their own ideas. . . . It implies, I believe, the kind of world which is emerging before our eyes—the world produced by the revolution of national independence which is today, and has been since 1945, sweeping across the face of the world.”

“No one can doubt,” he continued, “that the wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men.”

We look hopefully forward to “a free and diverse world”—toward a “more flexible world order,” as the President has described it. We know that, as we press forward toward this goal, the role of education and training becomes ever more important to this kind of world.

The conduct of educational and cultural exchanges and training programs gives strong support to the broad national aim of building, with other peoples, a community of independent nations. In the underdeveloped areas in the southern half of the world, for example, we can encourage the emergence—from all the ferment of modernization—of a genuine community of independent nations. We can help them modernize, not in our image but in the image they themselves formulate out of their own unique histories, cultures, aspirations, and observations of other cultures and societies.

Perhaps the principal fact that distinguishes the United States from the Communist world, with respect to the less developed countries, is that our aspirations for these countries largely coincide with their aspirations for themselves. Our political aims, then, are for a world in which their, and our, aspirations can be realized. This cannot be a rigid, monolithic world. It can only be a free and diverse world.

The need for the services you provide—for participant trainees, foreign leaders and specialists, and the like, as well as foreign students—can be expected to rise in the years ahead as the numbers of such visitors increase. We will need more hands and heads to do the job. We will need to look at our procedures as still developing. The attention and help that may be suited to the needs of a visitor from a Western society may fail to meet some of the needs of those now coming in increasing numbers from the non-Western world. We have by no means yet found all the best ways to help the foreign student or trainee or leader or specialist realize the maximum value from his experience in this country.

Here is an area for almost unlimited initiative and imagination on the part of individual volunteers and groups who share a concern for the foreign visitor. Your experience, evolving out of thoughtful service in a variety of forms, can help those in other communities—and those of us in government—toward more useful planning and action. The experience some community groups have had in providing training sessions for host families, for example, should be widely shared.

In this brief time I have only tried to touch some of the highlights which this subject and this occasion suggest. I am confident the pattern of diversity will serve well to meet the increasing demands of the years ahead. With your continuing imaginative and generous help—and, hopefully, your growing numbers—our varied programs, public and private, for bringing foreign visitors to this country can be increasingly important factors in the “total diplomacy” our times require.

1. Source: Department of State Bulletin, July 16, 1962, pp. 110–116. Battle spoke before a national conference, organized by the Agency for International Development, on AID’s international training programs. All brackets are in the original.
2. See footnote 2, Document 52.
3. See footnotes 2 and 3, Document 1.
4. The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (see footnote 21, Document 24), which established AID, is also referred to as the Act for International Development of 1961.
5. Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, also known as the Land-Grant College Act, into law on July 2, 1862.
6. In remarks made on May 10, 1961, at the White House before 1,000 foreign students attending colleges in the Washington area, the President stated: “You represent, really, the seed for your country. In every case all of you represent a sacrifice not only on behalf of yourselves but in behalf of your country and the people within your country who were responsible for sending you here to study.” (Public Papers: Kennedy, 1961, p. 372)
7. Bulletin of Jan. 15, 1962, p. 83. [Footnote is in the original. Rusk spoke before the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Washington on December 30, 1961. In his remarks, he stated: “Despite a Communist monopoly of education and propaganda, the peoples of Eastern Europe remain loyal to their culture and to their nationhood.” (Department of State Bulletin, January 15, 1962, p. 87)]
8. Ibid., Apr. 16, 1962, p. 615. [Footnote is in the original. The President spoke at the March 22 Charter Day ceremonies held in Memorial Stadium at the University of California-Berkeley. The address is also printed in Public Papers: Kennedy, 1962, pp. 263–266.]