Foreign Affairs

David Brooks’ is a rare voice of reason and common sense at that graying lady of American newspapers, The New York Times. It was disappointing, then, to see Brooks make a major mistake in one of his recent columns, a generally solid piece giving advice and guidance to college students present and future.

The New York Times’ conservative made a mistake not in arguing that students should take a course in ancient Greece, read Plato, or learn a foreign language. These are suggestions so obviously beneficial as to be immune from all but the most unhinged rants.

Where Brooks stumbled is somewhere a large chunk of academia also seems to be stumbling: study abroad.

The idea of “study abroad” is similar to those tired suggestions of “interdisciplinary” courses or courses in the “sciences” that are often bandied about as a panacea for the ills of American higher education. I, like most people at Harvard, know numerous people that have studied abroad—though usually only for a semester, merely half the length Brooks recommends for a properly “transformative” experience.

While everyone I know who has gone abroad has enjoyed the experience, the situation is perhaps not quite what Brooks had in mind.

Student recollections of semesters abroad usually fall into two main components. First, those happily lengthy commentaries on the intensity, frequency, and general delightfulness of drinking bouts. Friends from home, gaffes in the local language, and involvement with the local authorities all make supporting appearances in these stories.

After the commentary on partying, then come the brief, usually cursory, remarks on classes—more specifically, comments on their ease.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with college kids taking it easy and enjoying the relatively more enlightened drinking laws that govern the rest of humanity. But for a country that will soon face rapidly intensifying political, economic, and military challenges, encouraging trips that are essentially extended vacations might not be the best strategy.

Brooks is right to suggest that American students do more to broaden their horizons and dispel the “provincialism” that too often seems to characterize them. By all means. Let young Americans spend more time in other countries. Let them travel, and let them learn foreign languages by the dozen.

But if one is serious about maintaining America’s position as the world’s leader in higher education, “study abroad” as it is currently understood is not the answer; the world is too competitive a place to have students wasting a quarter of their college years accumulating drinking stories, no matter how humorous or enjoyable.



Mark A. Adomanis ’07, a Crimson editorial editor, is a government concentrator in Eliot House.