by Michael A. Fletcher
mfletcher@ccgmag.com
Cultural Literacy UPPING THE
OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCIES T
he Defense Language and National Security Education Office, the Pentagon’s foreign language and cultural education arm, stands as testimony to the belief that national security is achieved through the power of understanding as it is through
military might. The office was founded in the aftermath of the Gulf War, when then-Sen. David L.
Boren, an Oklahoma Democrat, held a series of hearings that revealed the need for the nation’ s defenders to have a better understanding of the world.
“The most important thing you can have is a group of highly intelligent people who are extremely well educated, who understand the cultures and speak the languages, who can go into [other] countries and be advocates for the United States.... It's human talent that is key to our national security,” Boren, now president of the Oklahoma University, said in a video posted on the office’s website:
The result has been a series of initiatives aimed at upping the cultural literacy of the national security agencies. The efforts include the prestigious Boren Awards for International for Inter- national Study, a fellowship and scholarship program that aims to train a cadre of people who know critical languages and under- stand distant cultures to work in the nation’s myriad national security agencies.
The program has awarded more than 5,000 scholarships to
U.S. undergraduate and graduate students who, in turn, commit themselves to using their skills in federal service. Officials credit the program with improving the country’s ability to teach critical languages through grants to colleges and universities. Students selected for the Boren awards receive intensive language training, foreign postings, and then a job. Scholars are re- quired to work in federal agencies for a period of time after complet- ing their academic work, which has attracted new talent to govern- ment, while creating opportunities for thousands of top students. Of special interest to federal recruiters are students with un- derstanding of science, technology, engineering and math. More
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than one in five scholarship and fellowship program have been minorities. Other are trained the agency’s six-year-old Language Flagship Program. Others are trained in any of seven languages widely spoken in African through its African Languages Initia- tive.
Dr. Michael Nugent, a longtime educator and an expert in language training, heads the office. US Black Engineer and Infor- mation Technology Magazine recently discussed his office’s mis- sion with him. An edited transcript of the conversation follows:
USBE&IT: Your office was born out of a post-mortem
of the Gulf War. What was it that people saw that led to its formation? Nugent: Sen. Boren felt that after the Gulf War there was a dearth of high-level government officials with foreign language skills. They had people at very high-level, key positions that didn’t have Arabic to the level that it should have been. He was then head of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and he called together a group of high-level people to discuss what needed to be done. Out of that came the legislation, the David L. Boren Act of 1991, which created the program.
USBE&IT: How close are you to fulfilling the agency’s stated mission of increasing the quantity, diversity, and qual- ity of the teaching and learning of subjects in the fields of foreign languages?
USBE&IT I WINTER 2012 51
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