Asian Accent

In the last few years, when the United States suddenly discovered that the non-white two-thirds of the world was moving, students, too, began to shift their sights from the Folies and the Isle of Capri to the area from Japan to the Gold Coast. To meet this new interest in emergent nations, many undergraduate student projects have grown up--all vaguely concerned with "an exchange of ideas" and "international understanding."

Trouble developed when these projects failed to exchange ideas with each other. Valuable techniques of a successful "team" to India were often unavailable for later exchanges, and it was not rare for two or three student groups to converge on New Delhi at once. To bring together organizations with student activities in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the Ford Foundation and other groups recently called a conference at the Experiment in International Living, at Putney, Vermont.

Nearly thirty groups sent representatives to Putney. Students from Minnesota's SPAN (Student Project for Amity among Nations) told of studying a special problem, like the refugee situation, in either India or Turkey, and then returning to their university to write a thesis and receive credit. A young farmer from Ohio described living with an Indian farm family for two months under the International Farm Youth Exchange. A Stanford student explained a program of "reverse exchange" by which foreign students take up undergraduate programs here and live in college derms.

Aside from these programs of individual exchanges, there were many travel groups. UCLA's "Project India" for three summers has sent goodwill missions to Indian universities, and California at Berkeley followed with a more hurried trip to Pakistan, India, and Ceylon. The American Friends Service Committee has also sponsored travel, although most of the attendance at its work camps and seminars in Asia was composed of Asians from nearby countries.

Material assistance, as opposed to travel, is the basis for World University Service, which receives contributions from college students around the world for various exchanges of aid. As one example of such assistance, the University of California sent a group of students to Indonesia to develop an affiliation with the University of Indonesia. Students at California are now attempting to raise half the money for a new $50,000 student center near Jakarta, and courses about South East Asia have already appeared in California's curriculum.

Whether the program is one of individual exchange, travel teams, or material aid, the problem of objectives confronts the American. All the programs wish to benefit not only the participant and the U.S. college, but also to meet some need among foreign students--whether this need is for more facts about the U.S. or for a student health center. And it was in trying to fill these needs that most groups ran into trouble. For America's sterco-typical desire to "do good" is often suspect, especially in former colonial territories. It was not surprising that Americans in Calcutta found it difficult to induce Indian students to join them in a village work project--no matter how much the students needed the work and the village needed the project.

If traveling student salesmen are not the best agents for exporting American techniques needed in these countries, then the effort must come from the Asians themselves. But many at Putney concluded that American students can play an important role by working with foreign students who are already in this country. Over 8,000 Asians and 4,600 Middle Easterners are now studying in the United States, and few of these students have much contact with American undergraduates. This is a task that requires not a trip across the Pacific, but one across Massachusetts Avenue to the Graduate Center.