Toward a Cultural Marshall Plan
TAYLOR, HUGH
A 50-year collaborative effort in Afro-Asian nations can save freedom Toward a Cultural Marshall Plan By Hugh Taylor SINCE THE SOVIET Union launched its first sputnik in 1957, a great deal has...
...The young men and women of these richer areas of the world will be required in large numbers to help the less fortunate poor...
...It will require not only a large measure of material, international support, but also lives, and particularly the lives of young people, dedicated to the cultural effort in distant lands...
...Are we preparing to match such efforts...
...foreign officers serving abroad could, very recently, speak the language of the countries to which they were sent...
...The professors have been paying for the students' babies...
...However, less emphasis has been placed on the fact that this is a global as well as a national need...
...One unpopular thought which I would plant in the minds of the would-be graduates or post-graduates of our college and university system, is the necessity of postponing the biologic urge to make "mates" of their "dates" until they have achieved the end-point of their educational careers...
...We need men and women educated to the limit of their own native abilities...
...then, and only then, shall ye have peace...
...We have come to live in an age when this cannot continue...
...both scientists and linguists, most of whom the West does not yet possess, with rewards negligible in the short term, apart from doing the job, and in the long term most uncertain...
...There is much more that we can do, both individually and as a nation...
...Their economies have so notably recovered that, with intelligent initiative, they could assist the United States and the British Commonwealth in formulating a new Marshall Plan, a Cultural Marshall Plan, for those newly independent lands, without a background of democracy, with, on the contrary, centuries of authoritarian tradition, whether of tribal kings or colonial rulers...
...it will require spiritual assets as as well as professional intelligence and competence...
...It is to this high calling that we could well respond with the full measure of our abilities...
...Many a college teacher has been short-changed on salary increases because of the burden imposed on the colleges by early-married students...
...At the moment, the evidence seems to indicate that we are not...
...To summarize the argument thus far it might be well to recall the words of Thomas Edison, "There's a way to do it better—find it...
...We live very close to the edge of disaster...
...There is evidence in all the recent scholarship and fellowship funds that this is becoming an increasing financial burden...
...Furthermore, from the standpoint of the future this may be even more alarming: Only eight per cent of the more than 1200 students recently appointed to Woodrow Wilson National Fellowships for the academic year 1960-61 will study foreign languages...
...We shall need them in huge numbers, for the national needs of a country such as this, as well as for the poorer countries of the world, to whom we must be neighbors or others will take our place...
...The rapid acceleration of this change can be seen on the whole continent of Africa, in the Near East, and in Southeast Asia...
...One thing which every young person in the United States can do, as an individual, is to follow the educational path as far as his talents and financial resources permit...
...Now, when a new tyranny threatens, armed with weapons of global destructiveness, H-bombs, intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear war heads, is there not an equal need for "blood, sweat and tears...
...On the younger generation lies the responsibility and the duty to seek out the new knowledge, the new techniques, the new political institutions, national and international, which may open up a new "brave and worthy chapter of man's history...
...The already high costs of higher education should not, more than necessary, be saddled with the extra costs of supporting young families in college and graduate school...
...The millions in far-off lands, the underdeveloped countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Pacific Islands will require the good neighbor efforts of the free world, especially of the United States, the British Commonwealth and the countries of Western Europe...
...That is the size of the problem...
...The most vivid impression made upon him during his visit was that those who received him in Moscow spoke his own Ghana dialect...
...In the past, nations have responded nobly to high calls on their capacities...
...About a decade ago the Marshall Plan brought succor and rehabilitation to the countries of Western Europe and they recovered marvelously...
...It has been said that only 10 per cent of the U.S...
...History is merciless to failure...
...Remember Winston Churchill's offer in 1940 of "blood, sweat and tears" to the British nation for an effort which finally resulted, with American help, in victory over one tyranny...
...Throughout all our history," writes Robert Oppenheimer, "arms have characteristically been the last arbiter of disputes...
...Man must cope, with an "awareness of the frailty of his institutions, of his society, and of himself, with the new problems and new choices" which face mankind...
...The other is the Soviet Union...
...One is the West, which means mainly the U.S...
...What Soviet Russia has achieved since the October Revolution of 1917 has not been lost on them, and once noticed, they too will essay the change...
...They will do it at great cost to themselves and others, but they will do it...
...China, in the hard core of the Communist world, is being carefully watched in every one of these new countries...
...It will involve us in sacrifices...
...The Russian Embassy in Ghana was to have a complement of 30 men, a requirement for their selection being facility in the languages of Ghana and one other special educational, technical or engineering competence, all 30 to form a corps of cultural attaches in the Embassy...
...This will call for many sacrifices, and we would do well to recall the true meaning of the word "sacrifice...
...If that is how it turns out, we shall have failed both practically and morally...
...He had been invited to visit Moscow and had accepted...
...Cannot a Cultural Marshall Plan, extending perhaps over 50 years, a collaborative effort of the free world in which the United States should play the major and leading role, bring about in the lands of India, Africa, South-East Asia, Latin America and the Middle East that technical, scientific and educational revolution which could save them for freedom...
...They are unwilling to become poorer and poorer relative to our increasing riches...
...Suggestive of one solution to these new problems and choices is an old passage in Sanskrit, with which I shall conclude: "Walk together, talk together, Oh ye peoples of the earth...
...It comes from the two Latin words ''sacrum facere" that is, to make sacred...
...Sir C. P. Snow described the situation quite graphically in his 1959 Rede Lecture...
...And, he continued, "There are only two sources [from which these requirements can be met...
...for a sacrificial effort, on behalf of constructive rather than destructive agencies...
...In 1958, at a world congress of Pax Romana in Vienna, I met a professor from Ghana who was spending a sabbatical year in Western Europe...
...Unfortunately, there is at hand no ready-made plan to accomplish the task...
...it will require restrictions on our own consumption of what we so abundantly produce and of which we are consuming a very high fraction for our own leisure and pleasure...
...The newly independent nations in Asia, Africa, and the Near East, as well as the underdeveloped countries of Latin America, are breaking away from the past...
...The requirements for the extension of the scientific revolution on a world scale, he said, are twofold: capital, and "after capital, as important as capital, is trained men...
...After all, one can still be a grandparent when he is 50 even if he postpones marriage until he is 25...
...These countries had a long tradition of stability and freedom of government which, with American assistance, they were able to re-establish...
...For, though I don't know how we can do what we need to do, or whether we shall do anything at all, I do know this: that if we don't do it, the Communist countries will in time...
...A 50-year collaborative effort in Afro-Asian nations can save freedom Toward a Cultural Marshall Plan By Hugh Taylor SINCE THE SOVIET Union launched its first sputnik in 1957, a great deal has been said and written about the pressing need for as many highly trained and educated people as this country can produce...
...In the dark days of our time there will be many opportunities for all of us to trace out the implications of that meaning...
...An immense capital outlay, an immense investment in men, SIR HUGH TAYLOR is president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and former Dean of the Princeton University Graduate School...
Vol. 43 • April 1960 • No. 17
