November 8, 2001
The Home Front: Campus landscape altered by Sept. 11.
Since Sept. 11, Americans and people living throughout the world have been adjusting to new realities and new questions. Can we build terror-resistant buildings and cities? Does mass communications aid terrorists, or deter them? Need we sacrifice our civil liberties as the price for security? Do international studies programs help us respond to global threats? How can we go on with our daily lives in the face of such horrific losses? For the rest of fall quarter, University Week will explore such questions in a weekly question-and-answer column with faculty and staff in such fields as law, architecture, communications, information sciences and international studies. This week’s interview is with the people who coordinate UW study and outreach on the regions caught up in the current war. Felicia Hecker is associate director of the Middle East Center. Keith Snodgrass is associate director of the South Asia Center.
University Week: How have your jobs changed since Sept. 11?
Keith Snodgrass: The Jackson School has 12 area centers that conduct teacher training and public events and lectures, as well as advising students and many other things. Our South Asia Center covers India and Pakistan, and one of the big changes for us since Sept. 11 is that people are actually interested now in hearing about Pakistan.
UWeek: They weren’t so interested before?
Snodgrass: We at the Jackson School had, for various reasons, become pretty much focused on India. This situation has raised the profile of Pakistan, obviously, but also, generally, the importance of looking at South Asia as a region.
UWeek: And how does that manifest itself at the South Asia Center?
Snodgrass: I am being asked to speak in more schools. We’ve also gotten calls from local news media, mostly about ways they can connect with the local South Asian community. One reporter from The Seattle Times did an article about turbans, so I hooked him up with people from the Sikh temple down in Renton.
UWeek: Do we have faculty members who focus on Pakistan?
Snodgrass: There are several who have done field work in Pakistan. And in my graduate work I did research on the intersection of politics and religion in Pakistan. So most of the kinds of questions that people have been asking, I’ve been able to answer. But something that hasn’t really generated any calls is the whole issue of refugees, and I have a feeling that as winter approaches, the profile on that is going to get much, much higher.
UWeek: Do you have graduate students in South Asian Studies?
Snodgrass: There’s no doctorate, but three Army Foreign Area Officers have recently earned – or are working on earning – master’s degrees and will be posted in Quetta, Pakistan.
UWeek: Are they proficient in languages?
Snodgrass: That’s what they come here for: Urdu. It’s the most widely spoken language of Pakistan.
UWeek: What about the Middle East Center – do you also enroll military personnel?
Felicia Hecker: About one or two a year. The section of the Pentagon that handles training people on the Middle East was hit by the plane and destroyed, and so I recently was given a new contact there. And I regularly get inquiries from Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base.
UWeek: And has all that picked up since Sept. 11?
Hecker: What they’ve done is that they’ve said, “We’ve got people. How flexible can you be with fitting them into your program?” And I’ve always responded that as long as they meet University requirements, we make every attempt to accommodate them.
UWeek: So they send these soldiers here full-time for a year and a half. Do they wear their uniforms while they’re here?
Hecker: No, but they’re usually in culture shock. I talked to one just recently who said, “I can’t get used to this academic life – it’s so casual!”
UWeek: What about the public’s interest in the Middle East. I would imagine the Middle East Center has seen the same increase in activity as the South Asia Center?
Hecker: Actually, there are differences. We already had a fair amount of public interest in the Middle East, and it has been growing. Every time we’ve brought in a speaker on a hot-button issue, like the Arab-Israeli conflict, we could always bring in a good audience from the public.
UWeek: But you never had to book Hec Edmundson Pavilion in the past, as you did for two of your Open Classroom lectures recently.
Hecker: In the 90-year history of the Jackson School, those are the largest lectures that we have ever had. What is remarkable is that the general breadth of interest in all of the Middle East and Central Asia and Pakistan has increased, compared to just the hot-button issues that people were narrowly focused on before. Now you see people interested in understanding Islam, terrorist networks – things involving vast areas of the globe
UWeek: Implicit is the notion that if the public understands these places – which of course most of us will never visit – it will help us as a democracy to formulate better policies, make better decisions?
Hecker: In the Open Classroom lecture series, the theme over and over has been interaction between cultures. And of course, we at the University, that’s what we do – that’s our product: education and creating an environment for better understanding. My center is a National Resource Center, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Education and is one of only 13 in the United States on the Middle East. So part of our mission as a center is educating the population outside the University. And that includes K-12, the media, the general public – everyone.
UWeek: In terms of student enrollment, are more people signing up?
Hecker: Our courses were mainly filled before Sept. 11. Then after Sept. 11, we got just a huge number of people, and many didn’t get in. Many of our instructors agreed to raise the cap on enrollments to accommodate more students.
UWeek: What about language courses?
Hecker: Arabic and Hebrew are always filled. We have some of the highest enrollments nationwide in our courses.
UWeek: How does the UW rank, overall, in studying other parts of the world?
Hecker: Frankly, I think our strongest area is East Asia. Historically, that’s always been true. It’s because of the outreach group, the resources, the faculty, the endowment, the location on the Pacific Rim.
UWeek: At both your centers, you deal with areas of the world torn by intense long-term conflict, especially between India and Pakistan and between Israel and Palestinian groups. Yet you have professors and students from those places all mixed together – how is it that all of this doesn’t spill over into the classroom?
Snodgrass: I think there’s some very heated debate in the classrooms sometimes, but that’s as far as it goes – debate. With public programs you have to be careful. We’ve had things in the South Asia Center on the Punjab and the whole Sikh separatist movement. In the Southeast Asia Center, they’ve had Vietnamese authors who some members of the local community considered insufficiently anti-communist, and police had to come.
Uweek: For your students, what kinds of jobs can they expect upon graduation, aside from the military?
Hecker: We send a number of people on to the Foreign Service. A lot of our MA students go into nonprofit work. And then, in the Ph.D. program, every student we’ve graduated has found a teaching position in the United States at an institution of higher education. So it’s a remarkable track record.
UWeek: That would indicate a bright future for these area studies programs.
Snodgrass: Something that I would like to stress is the importance of maintaining a really broad-based academic program. Like in this instance, not to go completely overboard just responding to what happened on Sept. 11.
UWeek: That’s a good point. Two years ago, it was WTO in the news, and the focus was largely on Asia.
Hecker: Now we see, under these very unfortunate circumstances, how important it is to strengthen our understanding of all regions of the world.
