Boren Fellow in China – Photo Credit: Boren Awards Website
Last week I served on the national selection panel for the Boren Fellowships of the National Security Education Program (NSEP). The fellowships are for graduate students (in rare cases for recent undergrads). NSEP also runs a scholarship program for undergrads (I know less about this). Both are administered by the Institute for International Education. Information about the graduate fellowships is here and undergraduate scholarship information is here.
In short the Boren website says, “Boren Scholarships and Fellowships provide unique funding opportunities for U.S. undergraduate and graduate students to add an important international and language component to their educations. We focus on geographic areas, languages, and fields of study that are critical to U.S. interests and underrepresented in study abroad.” Basically, $25,000 for language study and a research project in most parts of the world except the Americas (with some exceptions) and Western Europe. Master’s and doctoral students have an equal shot at a fellowship (it need not be dissertation research).
This year 519 students applied (up 45 from last year) with 97 awards made. 143 institutions were represented in the applicant pool for study in 91 countries and 68 languages. Applicants came from 35 academic disciplines: 28% international affairs, 10% political science, 9% language/literature, 7% area studies, 4% education, 4% history.
The breakdown of languages that awardees will study is interesting: 29% Arabic, 10% Mandarin, 8% Portuguese, 6% Japanese. Last year’s leading languages for awardees were Arabic, Mandarin, Russian and Swahili.
Clearly, the APSIA schools like SAIS, Fletcher and Georgetown dominate the competition but everyone involved with the programs seems eager to expand the pool well beyond APSIA schools (and have made great strides in doing so).
There was a time when the source of funding for this fellowship (through DoD) and the service requirement (a year of service in the federal government in one of the many agencies working on international affairs) were seen as negatives to many institutions. That time seems to have gone by and applications now come from a wide swath of institutions – and the fellows do their service without controversy. David L. Boren, now president of the University of Oklahoma, was a Democratic senator from that state and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee when he introduced the legislation creating the program in the early 1990s. The program faced fierce opposition in its first few years, especially from the Middle East Studies Association and the African Studies Association (both organizations still have resolutions opposing the programs, with the ASA having reaffirmed their position in 2008). More about the controversy is available in Chronicle of Higher Education article from 2000. Despite the controversies, I think that US Government investment in learning languages and carrying out research overseas is money well spent. I was a Boren Fellow in Morocco in the 1990s and did not experience any of the negative outcomes predicted by the program’s critics. But here are some of the positive outcomes of the program (from the Boren Forum Alumni Group):
National Security Education Program statistics: 1994-2009
- Total Boren Scholarships Awarded: 2,608
- Total Boren Fellowships Awarded: 1,452
- Total Flagship Fellowships Awarded: 177
- Total EHLS Scholarships Awarded: 112
- Total Countries in which Scholars/Fellows Have Studied: 120
- Total Less Commonly Taught Languages Studies by Scholars/Fellows: 110