President Zimpher Attends Summit at State Department

President Nancy L. Zimpher was among 120 university presidents who were invited to a U.S. University Summit on International Education in Washington D.C. last week. Co-sponsored by the Department of State and the Department of Education, the summit opened at the State Department with a welcome from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and a speech delivered by President George W. Bush.

Bush announced a national initiative to bolster the number of students studying critical foreign languages such as Arabic and Chinese, and to ease the way for more teachers of those languages to come to the United States.

The National Security Language Initiative announced by Bush aims to:

• Increase the number of Americans mastering critical need languages and start at a younger age;
• Increase the number of advanced-level speakers to foreign languages, with an emphasis on critical need languages;
• And increase the number of teachers of critical need languages and resources for them.

Bush indicated that foreign language skills are necessary to advance national security and global competitiveness. According to a Department of Education fact sheet, more than 200 million children in China are studying English, which is a compulsory subject for all Chinese primary school students, while only 24,000 out of about 54 million elementary and secondary school children in the United States are studying Chinese. Less than 1 percent of U.S. undergraduates take foreign language courses and less than 2 percent study abroad in any given year.

The Summit, held on Jan. 5 and 6, gave university presidents an opportunity to interact directly with Secretary Rice and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes and other government leaders in areas of consular affairs, public policy planning and visa regulations.  While the critical language initiative was a keynote idea announced by the Bush administration, the university presidents offered perspective on increasing study abroad opportunities for students, faculty exchanges, economic and development efforts abroad, and global work experiences toward a more comprehensive national approach to international education.  Presidents were also invited to consider joining teams of American university leaders traveling abroad over the next several years, to be coordinated by Undersecretary Karen Hughes, with the hope that the first such mission would be led by First Lady Laura Bush.

President Zimpher is the immediate past chair of the Committee on International Programs of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC). She serves on NASULGC’s Board of Directors and this year as the board’s chair-elect. In 2007, she will serve as chair.

The U.S. Department of State has posted materials from the summit  at http://exchanges.state.gov/universitysummit

The Institute for International Education prepared a report on international student and scholar mobility and global competition for international students for the Summit. To access a PDF of this special presentation, please go to: http://exchanges.state.gov/universitysummit/mobility_report.pdf (this file may take a minute to download).