Americans Abroad
Mosher, Frederick C.
Americans Abroad From Main Street to the Left Bank: students and scholars abroad by John A. Garraty and Walter Adams. Michigan State University Press. 216 pp. $4. Is the World Our Campus? by...
...In recent years a variety of travel books, novels, and journalistic accounts have dramatized these shortcomings and performed a public service in attracting attention to this serious problem of American national performance...
...The Syracuse study of The Overseas Americans has a broader focus and reflects a somewhat more ambitious research effort...
...It is little wonder, therefore, that our ventures into world affairs have been attended by at least occasional mistakes, embarrassments, and failures...
...Yet it is doubtful that any amount of scientific research in areas of enormous complexity such as American operations overseas will lead to incontrovertible findings and recommendations for the future...
...rather it concerns such general subjects as problems of student relationships with Europeans, problems of academic adjustment, impact of the programs upon the students' personalities, and effects upon European educational systems...
...They have approached difficult topics with sympathy, understanding, curiosity, and insight...
...Perhaps the greatest contribution of research in such a field is to educate us so that our thinking for the future may be richer and our decisions wiser...
...Our new international responsibilities were thrust upon us rather than sought and built up step by step...
...and the branch system whereby an American university sets up and operates a branch in Europe, like Stanford University at Stuttgart...
...Intensive interviews were conducted with employees—as well as foreign nationals—in six selected countries...
...The reader is frequently unsure which of the conclusions and proposals are based upon research findings and which were formulated in the writers' minds independently of, and perhaps prior to, the research...
...In this respect, these studies have contributed significantly...
...These three books are highly readable and challenging explorations of topics of great importance to all of us...
...The two short volumes by Adams and Garraty were prepared under the auspices of Michigan State University's Institute of Research on Overseas Programs, organized several years ago to study overseas activities of American universities under a grant from the Carnegie Corporation...
...McGraw-Hill...
...The books under consideration here are products of just such kinds of studies...
...Reviewed by Frederick C. Mosher It requires no great acuity to observe that the role of the United States in the affairs of the world beyond our borders has changed remarkably in the last two decades...
...This research has been carried on by the Maxwell Graduate School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and has resulted in more than a dozen publications...
...It is now particularly timely that we should be provided systematic, thoughtful, and objective evaluations and critiques of various aspects of our overseas work that we may better plan and operate in the future...
...This is probably the best informed— and the most informative—of all recent studies on the work and lives of Americans away from home...
...The report itself is based almost exclusively on several hundred interviews conducted in Europe with participants, leaders, teachers, and others, both European and American...
...It estimates that there are more than 100,-000 such persons, of whom about one-third work for the government, somewhat fewer than that for missionaries, and about one-quarter for business...
...Prominent among them have been Burdick and Lederer's The Ugly American, Philip Wylie's The Innocents Abroad, and Eben Neal Baty's Citizen Abroad...
...It is not in any sense a statisical analysis...
...The study deals with the reasons Americans work abroad, their special problems of living and working there, including particularly what is referred to as culture shock, the attributes of the successful overseas worker, and the significance of our overseas commitments for American education...
...180 pp...
...by Walter Adams and John A. Garraty...
...Here again, the principal research tool is the interview...
...From Main Street to the Left Bank describes and evaluates the variety of programs for American college students in Europe...
...We had—and still have— even no established body of doctrine, nor any very solid understanding of objectives to govern our overseas activities...
...The authors report that there were more than 7,000 young Americans studying in Europe in 1956-57...
...The two reports by Adams and Garraty deal entirely with educational programs in continental Europe and Turkey...
...From a largely self-contained, insulated, and introversive society, we have emerged with historic suddenness to a posture of intense interest in the developments of every country and of almost pathological concern about the attitudes of other people towards ourselves...
...is a description and appraisal of various inter-university arrangements of this kind in Europe and Turkey in such fields as public administration, business, veterinary medicine, and others...
...Early in the Eisenhower Administration, the International Cooperation Administration promoted a system of technical assistance under which American universities, with government assistance, would enter directly into contracts with foreign universities in the development and conduct of educational and research programs overseas...
...The Overseas Americans by Harlan Cleveland, Gerard J. Mangone, and John Clarke Adams...
...Based again upon an extensive program of interviewing, this work concerns the problems of administering such programs, of academic adjustment, curriculum, financial management, and inter-cultural relationships of American and native faculties...
...We were little prepared for them by prior experience, by training, or by the accustomed set of our spectacles...
...The Overseas Americans is the culminating report of a study begun in 1956, also under the auspices of the Carnegie Corporation...
...3.75...
...Principal attention is directed to the three kinds of formally organized programs: the straight exchange arrangement between a European and an American university...
...Unlike the other two, it is aimed at the less developed, non-European countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin-America, and concerns itself principally with Americans having full-time jobs overseas...
...the "Junior Year Abroad" arrangement begun in the Twenties by the University of Delaware and by Smith College and widely spreading in recent years...
Vol. 24 • November 1960 • No. 11
