Languages as Knowledge Reservoirs

In the spring of 2016 the eminent medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman (who, likeme, has spent much of his career in contact with China) convened a day-longmeeting at the American Academy to address the crisis in area studies and foreign-language learning. Thirty or so concerned professionals showed up: language teachers; historians; professors of literatures bothanglophoneandother, bothancient and modern; linguists; political scientists; anthropologists; sociologists; specialists in public health—and we could easily have drawn on the population of natural scientists, engineers, and computer researchers,whose labs are asmultinational as any place on earth. Given that this was a national and not a supranational academy, we focused on shortcomings in theUnited States.We talked about the receding importance of foreign-language study as recognized in college entrance and graduation requirements; about the plight of the humanities, social sciences, and liberal arts generally; about the job anxiety that pulls students away from time-consuming language classes and in-country experiences; about the creeping English-only norms of globalization; about the failure of the overburdened primary-education system in