16

The University Looks Abroad

From 1945 on, American universities were increasingly engaged in technical-assistance programs for developing countries funded both by the major foundations, especially Ford, and also by the federal government. Indiana University was deeply involved in this effort for several reasons.

First, we recognized that in the early years of its development Indiana University along with other American universities had been greatly assisted by the older, European universities, particularly the German and French. Even as late as my undergraduate days there were men on our faculty who had won their Ph.D.’s abroad prior to the time when most American universities were equipped to offer the doctorate. So the American university, now among the strongest anywhere, had an obligation to repay its debt to the world of scholarship through extending assistance to the new universities in the developing lands.

Second, we realized that by our taking an active part in these international projects the benefits would be two-way: while lending whatever help we could to institutions abroad, we would be greatly enriching the store of experience, knowledge, and professional competence of our faculty participants in the assistance programs, who, upon their return, would bring to the campus a comparative view that would stimulate the atmosphere of learning in the university. We were somewhat motivated also by a missionary impulse to spread the American ideals of democratic higher education throughout the world. There is a bit of missionary zeal in all of us to propagate the ideals in which we believe. Pope John Paul I, in one of his few public statements, advocated mutual understanding in international life and social progress to “overcome hunger of body and ignorance of the mind,” especially in underdeveloped countries.¹ I suppose, in the final analysis, we were imbued with the conviction that our efforts might contribute to such a high purpose. Indiana University’s technical-assistance efforts spanned the globe. Through the years we undertook official university projects in Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Pakistan East and West, Afghanistan, Ghana, Nigeria, Yugoslavia, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, and the Philippines (see Appendix [I]). American universities engaged in technical-assistance contracts were criticized from time to time because of their unwillingness to make a total institutional commitment to the work they had undertaken to perform in their contracts. Some were accused, for instance, of being unwilling to recruit from their own departments for service abroad, hiring instead men from other institutions derisively referred to as “academic mercenaries.” From the beginning we adopted the position that, if we undertook these contracts, we should attempt to perform them abroad to the best of our ability and we should commit whatever resources of the university were needed to the work in the field.

Another problem had to be met. Faculty in various schools were said to be reluctant to accept foreign assignments lest they be forgotten by the promotions committees and officers of their home institutions and thereby miss the opportunity for advancement. Too, they feared they would have difficulty in reentering the academic community when they returned. We attempted to solve both problems by making a commitment to those who went abroad that they would receive appropriate credit for their accomplishments there and would not be forgotten at home. We undertook to recruit our best rather than those of whom we wished to be rid and soon were able to have an understanding on the part of the university community that service abroad was honored by both the general faculty and the administrative officers. This assurance was necessary for other reasons: persons who went to developing nations frequently worked under very difficult circumstances; there were many problems of a professional nature and hardships in living arrangements, schooling of children, and so on. It was easy for them to begin feeling forlorn and isolated.

All the overseas contracts called for periodic review by appropriate individuals from the campus and made financial provision for the trips. Thus it was feasible for the general administrative officers (the president, vice presidents, deans, and even occasionally trustees) to visit the field from time to time to offer encouragement and support to these bootstrap operations, particularly when discouraging developments had occurred. We also visited the field to help in negotiations for new or renewed contracts or to participate in official celebrations on the occasion of significant milestones of achievement. On these trips we scrupulously observed the ritual of making ceremonial calls on officials ranging from key bureaucrats to cabinet ministers, prime ministers, kings or heads of state. We used those occasions to assure the officials that we fully backed our project staff, that the resources of Indiana University were behind the project, and that we wanted to be as helpful as possible. In turn, our visits gave the officials an opportunity to air any objections or opinions that they were reluctant to express to our own people there. Apart from official university contracts, many of our specialists undertook technical-assistance assignments abroad as individuals.

I undertook four of these myself during the years: (1) a consultancy to the Pakistan Commission on National Education in 1959; (2) membership on the Advisory Committee to Haile Selassie for the development of the national university in Addis Ababa, a committee that was created in 1966 and carried on its work for a few years thereafter; (3) a mission for the Ford Foundation to Peru in 1967, when the head of the Ford office in Lima was Peter Fraenkel, as an advisor to the Inter-University Council on planning for the further development of higher education in Peru; and (4) in 1974 a study for the Public Service Review Commission of Nigeria of the readiness and ability of the Nigerian universities to train students for the development function of the country.

Over the years it so happened that the university had a series of contracts with two countries in particular: Pakistan and Thailand. Descriptions of the projects in each of these countries may serve for all the rest to illustrate kinds of university involvement in technical assistance and the nature of my own participation.

The projects in Pakistan were financed for the most part by the Ford Foundation, and through the years this situation enabled us to achieve a felicitous working arrangement with Ford Foundation officers in New York and with its staff in Pakistan. The Foundation had selected Pakistan as one of the developing countries where it wished to concentrate its efforts, and Indiana University was chosen to play an important role in realizing the Foundation’s program.

The first project there was a contract to assist with the development of the Khyber Medical College of the new University of Peshawar. This was the first Pakistani medical college to be administratively part of a university rather than under the Ministry of Health. The experience of the late Paul A. Nicoll, Chief of Party and Professor of Physiology, at Peshawar led to the establishment of the Postgraduate Basic Medical Sciences Institute at the University of Karachi. We also undertook to assist Punjab University at Lahore in establishing an Institute of Education and Research for the improvement of teacher training and eventually in building a new teachers’ college campus; to assist in the development of the Institute of Business Administration at the University of Dacca for the training of master’s and doctoral students; and to play a major role in the creation and building of a national university for graduate students at Islamabad, the new capital of Pakistan.

To make the need for technical assistance in Pakistan understandable, it is essential to describe conditions after Partition in 1947. The partition of India into two entities, one Hindu India and the other Moslem Pakistan East and West, created one of the great social upheavals of modern times. There was extensive migration of Hindus from the Pakistan areas into India and, conversely, migration of Moslems from India outward to the Pakistani territories. A new nation of approximately seventy-three million people was created overnight, so to speak. This nation, already an old society, had some of the physical structures of a developed society such as railroads, shops, factories, farms, and so on, but almost in a matter of weeks the people had to organize their own monetary system, government, postal system, social services, and an educational system tailored to the needs of the new nation. What they had inherited had been cast in the British-Indian mold, and not only were their social institutions radically disrupted by Partition, they were also wholly inappropriate and inadequate to serve in the new context. It is one of the miracles of the century that the Pakistani people were able to accomplish so much in so little time and to establish a major nation that began to function notwithstanding the ruptures and fragmentations produced by the new geographical boundaries and the new political necessities of independence.

In education the situation was especially critical. The educational system that the Pakistani inherited had been instituted by the British in the eighteenth century and was designed to produce civil servants to manage the country under the direction of their British rulers. Moreover, as all instruction was in English a major part of the population was barred from entry into the school system even at the beginning level. A few young men of great promise were sent abroad for advanced training with the expectation that they would come back to help meet the professional and technical needs of the subcontinent, but too frequently they remained abroad and so became a brain drain instead of a brain bank.

To further complicate the situation, after Partition nearly all the Hindu teachers, and there had been many in the Pakistan areas, migrated to India and hundreds of thousands of Moslem students moved from India into Pakistan. With more students and fewer teachers the resources of personnel, buildings, and facilities were wholly inadequate. It is a great wonder that the system did not fall into complete chaos but instead kept going somehow.

As would be expected in a society whose members had been starved for education so long, there was popular pressure for rapid expansion. Universities were quickly founded between the years 1947 and 1953 at Hyderabad in the Sind, at Karachi and Peshawar in West Pakistan, and at Rajshahi in East Pakistan. Each of these had a number of affiliated colleges such as agriculture, engineering, medicine, liberal arts, sciences, education, law, and commerce. All were established in such a rush that there was really no time for adequate planning and preparation, and many problems arose.

There had been criticism that the system Pakistan inherited did not concern itself with the critical requirements for the economic and political development of the society and that it was unconcerned about the cultural and religious aspirations of the new nation. As thoughtful leaders viewed this churning, rapid growth, they recognized the great urgency for a national study to identify necessary reforms and especially to chart the course for an educational system that would meet the needs of the new nation. Thus the President’s Commission on National Education was appointed in December, 1958, and installed on January 5, 1959, by the president of Pakistan, General Mohammad Ayub Khan.

Heading the commission was a remarkable Pakistani educator, R. M. Sharif, the education secretary of the government in West Pakistan, a man who had had important educational and ministerial experience in both India and Pakistan. The secretary of the commission was Raziuddin Siddiqi, who at that time was a founding member of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission with special responsibility for developing nuclear science. Dr. Siddiqi had been the vice chancellor of Osmania University in Hyderabad, India, and then founder and vice chancellor of the University of Peshawar. He is perhaps the most remarkable leader of education in that part of the world, having made an unparalleled contribution to the whole field of education in both the subcontinent and the developing world. Other members of this distinguished commission included M. K. Afridi, vice chancellor of Peshawar University and later head of the World Health Organization; R. M. Ewing of the Forman Christian College at Lahore,² a man from a family long dedicated to missionary educational work in India; General Mohammad Khan, Director of Army Education, who was a psychologist and a man of exceptional ability; and Atwar Husain, a member of the faculty of Dacca University, one of the persons with whom we were to continue contact through the years.

The commission sought the aid of some outside consultants: from the United States, John Warner, president of the Carnegie Intitute of Technology at Pittsburgh, and me. We each spent about a month full-time there. Two eminent Pakistani scholars then teaching abroad, I. H. Qureshi at Columbia University and Abdus Salam (co-winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics) at Imperial College, London, were brought back for consultation.

The commission worked with great intensity. In the beginning its members traveled to all sections of Pakistan, both East and West, to conduct hearings at which a variety of citizens had been invited to express their views. For me it was a revealing experience to listen firsthand to the views and attitudes of the people of Pakistan and to see a considerable portion of the country in the process. Pakistan at that time was just beginning its great development and still was extraordinarily picturesque. Even in the port city of Karachi, the streets were filled with a curious variety of traffic: occasional flocks of sheep, herds of water buffalo, now and then a heavily loaded camel train, pedicabs, and pedestrians. Once in a while we spotted a relic of the British rule—an aging Rolls Royce—being steered in and around the moving stream.

One interesting incident that occurred during my service with the commission in Karachi may be worthy of recounting. In the course of our deliberations it was reported that President Ayub Khan was unhappy that rich Pakistanis were not contributing financially to the development of education, especially higher education. His unhappiness arose in part from reports of the generosity of American individuals to their universities. I pointed out to the commission that a powerful factor stimulating personal philanthropic gifts was the provision by our federal government that allowed these gifts to be tax deductible. In due course I was summoned to meet with President Ayub Khan, who asked for my advice as to how Pakistanis could be stimulated to give to worthy causes including higher education as rich people in the United States did. I repeated to him what I had said to the commission about tax deductible gifts. He grasped the idea, questioned me closely about it, and in time, I was told, he pushed a similar provision through the Pakistan government.

After our hearings throughout the country, we settled down in Karachi and worked steadily many hours every day. I joined the commission in mid-March and left in mid-April. President Ayub Khan had requested the completion of the report in six months because of his urgent need to have its recommendations. Although the deadline was not met, the final report was presented to him before the end of the summer.

The printed report comprises a sizable volume of more than three hundred pages and is remarkable in its extent and quality, considering the time allotted. It has come to be known through the years as the Sharif Commission Report, and it is now viewed, in light of the perspective of twenty years, as one of the best presentations on higher education and education in general in that part of the world—in fact, in any of the developing nations during that era. It can be quite accurately described as the bible for educational reorganization and direction in Pakistan.

It was that commission’s recommendations concerning higher education, graduate education, and the development of research potential in the country that in time led to the movement to create a national graduate university at Islamabad, the new capital, a project with which I was to be personally involved over a period of years and through which I had the privilege of being associated again with Dr. Siddiqi, this time as a collaborator, and of having further contact with that admirable senior statesman, Mr. Sharif. The creation of the university at Islamabad was the means selected to try to achieve the goals and objectives recommended by the Sharif Commission. It was so conceived that it eventually came to represent a new initiative and an example of the so-called higher higher education in the Third World. Because the project as it unfolded involved nearly every segment of Indiana University including many of my colleagues, a description of the effort may be of interest.

The part of the Sharif Commission Report dealing with post graduate studies and research concluded that this area had not been developed properly in existing Pakistani universities. It had not flourished for a number of reasons: lack of equipment and resources, lack of tradition, and, mainly, lack of a faculty competent to offer that level of work. The specialists were just not available largely because some of the best and the brightest, after being trained abroad, stayed abroad. The commission had noted that resources were not sufficient to develop every university into a center of excellence. Eventually it was decided that the government’s effort should be concentrated in the beginning on a single, new, unitary university devoted solely to postgraduate studies.

The next decision was to locate the experimental institution at Islamabad. It was to be supported by the national government and the hope was that in time it would be surrounded by national institutes of research. The university was to be selective in enrollment, drawing its students from the brightest graduates of the other universities, and by its high promise to lure back top Pakistani scholars teaching abroad. It was an ambitious, innovative, and daring experiment that caught the imagination of those interested in educational improvement in the developing nations all around the globe. Dr. Siddiqi was able to project a great dream and his idea caught fire internationally. I sometimes have explained what he with his helpers was attempting to do by pointing to the special genius of Johns Hopkins University and what it did for American higher education. Johns Hopkins was founded as a graduate institution with high standards for admission. As aspiring students of other institutions sought to qualify for admission to Johns Hopkins, they in effect forced upward the standards of their own schools. The planners hoped that the University of Islamabad would have a national impact, raising standards throughout as well as training highly competent Ph.D.’s for the nation’s leadership.

The starting of a new university of the highest rank required hard currency, that is, foreign currency. Pakistani currency was in short supply, was blocked, and could not be used for the purchase of many things required to bring a university into existence. Thus the United Nations Development Fund under the leadership of Paul Hoffman joined the Ford Foundation in some funding, and UNESCO gave a little help, principally with personnel. These funds, dispersed through the Indiana University Foundation, paid for the travel of Dr. Siddiqi and Mr. Sharif throughout the world as they examined graduate institutions. Hard currency also paid for the cost of architectural designing and for consultants to go to Pakistan to assist with the planning. Professor Edward Najam of Indiana University and I secured top consultants from Europe and throughout the United States to work with the planners in Islamabad.

A beautiful site overlooking Islamabad was selected, and the distinguished American architect Edward Durrell Stone was engaged to design the buildings of the campus as an integrated unit with an architecture indigenous to the region and on an international level of distinction.³ Several members of the Indiana University faculty and staff, acting as consultants to the architect, helped to plan the facilities; for example, Harold Jordan was a consultant on the student union building, Cecil Byrd on the library, Lynne Merritt and others on the physics and chemistry laboratories, and Stanley Hagstrom on the computer center.

Academic work got underway in temporary quarters while the new plant was being built. Dr. Siddiqi went to country after country recruiting outstanding scholars for his faculty. The boldness and originality of the plan caught the imagination of Pakistani scholars living abroad, and Dr. Siddiqi was a very energetic and persuasive recruiter. He rather quickly realized one of the major objectives of the plan, namely, the repatriation of Pakistani scholars. In fact, approximately fifty first-rate men agreed to return from various pursuits in which they were occupied. This feat perhaps represents the only really successful reversal of the brain drain in the Third World. From the very beginning he was also able to attract first-rate students from all over Pakistan East and West—not in large numbers, because he was very selective, but in sufficient quantity to validate the objective he had of stimulating promising students to achieve well in the established universities with the goal of being admitted to Islamabad.

In time the institution moved from its temporary quarters to its new campus, which included not only teaching facilities but also residential quarters for both faculty and students in handsome and functional structures. I was privileged to attend the elaborate dedicatory ceremony, held on October 5, 1971. President Ayub Khan, who had been one of the principal supporters of the institution, had retired by that time and his successor Yahya Khan presided.

The institution was already off to a promising start when Dr. Siddiqi, having reached the mandatory age limit, retired as vice chancellor. Then with the coming to power of a new socialist regime under President Bhutto, the original concept for the university was all but abandoned, and soon it began to operate just as any other university without regard to its special mission.

Both Dr. Siddiqi and I think that the idea behind it was sound, that the dream that inspired it was prophetic, and that eventually the institution will be restored to the role for which it was created: as a research center and producer of leaders for Pakistan and as an example for the rest of the developing world. I spent a great deal of time as a consultant on this project and as a catalyst for Indiana University’s participation, during which the resources of our institution were more broadly utilized, in my estimation, than by any other of our technical-assistance projects with the possible exception of the one in Kabul.⁴ It was an exciting and stimulating adventure.

Another example of our technical-assistance effort abroad is to be found in Thailand, one of the most interesting countries in the world. To the best of my memory, our very first contact with officialdom of Thailand occurred in October, 1948, when His Excellency the Permanent Under Secretary for Education in the Ministry of Education, Mom Luang Pin Malakul, visited here. He had become interested in Indiana University because two Thai students were working for advanced degrees in audio-visual education under Lawrence Larson. Malakul, in the United States on a round-the-world trip to a UNESCO conference in Beirut, stopped to see them. I enjoyed my visit with Mom Luang Pin from the moment of meeting. He was handsome, imaginative, and congenial. Trained at Oxford, he was the most powerful Thai leader in the educational field, greatly respected for his experience, professional competence, dedication, and wisdom. His wife, Khunying—now, Tanphuying (titles conferred by the king)—Dusdi Malakul, who was related to the Thai royal family, was an influential figure in women’s and civic affairs. He was received by Indiana University as an official guest and accorded the courtesies that his distinction deserved. I spent much time with him, entertaining him, showing him the university, describing its resources, and discussing the problems in educational development that he foresaw in Thailand. This was the beginning of a personal friendship that has continued to this day.

By fortunate circumstance Willis Porter, then a member of the faculty of the State Teachers College at Oneonta, New York, had been recruited by the International Cooperation Administration (ICA), predecessor of the Agency for International Development (AID), to have a look at the state of teacher education in Thailand and to recommend a course of action, if needed, to expand and modernize the system. In due course he formulated an ambitious program and forwarded it to Washington; Indiana University was in turn asked to consider undertaking it. At about that time Walter Laves, who was soon to join our faculty as head of the government department, stopped in Bangkok enroute to Burma on UNESCO business, learned about the program, and briefly explored what training there was for public administration in Thailand. John Ashton, one of our vice presidents and dean of our graduate school, made a trip to Bangkok to meet with Dr. Porter; soon thereafter Dean Wendell Wright of the School of Education, also a vice president, spent ten days in Thailand discussing the program with the people in the Thai ministry. While there he was able to persuade Dr. Porter to remain in Thailand to direct the project, which we had decided to undertake, but we asked that he resign his position at Oneonta and become a tenured member of the Indiana University faculty, in line with the policy we had formed to have all our technical-assistance projects directed by regular members of our faculty.

In brief, the contract called for us to assist in the development of a national school of teacher education to train teachers for the whole of Thailand. The base was to be a recently founded, small College of Education at Prasarn Mitr in Bangkok, and the program envisioned its complete rehabilitation and major expansion. In time the contract was broadened to include assistance to the Division of Teacher Education at Chulalongkorn, the first and most important university at the time in Thailand, located at Bangkok. Porter helped to guide the development of this small division of education at Chulalongkorn into a strong professional college. Provision was made not only for us to advise and assist with the College of Education at Prasarn Mitr, but also for promising young men and women to be sent to the United States—principally to Indiana University—for training as future faculty members in Thailand.⁵ We were to furnish personnel, representing a variety of fields, who could assist in expansion and modernization of the curriculum, in the preparation of teaching materials illustrated with objects and customs indigenous to Thailand, and in the planning and development of the buildings, including particularly a major library. To this project Indiana University unstintingly committed its resources, and during the eight-year life of the contract a firm and sound foundation was laid by the Thai-American effort to strengthen teacher training in Thailand.

The effort was fortunate in attracting some remarkable Thai leadership, and it was greatly facilitated by the sympathetic and sensitive help of Bhunthin Attagara, who occupied strategic positions first as director of external affairs and later as director general of teacher education. The first president of the college was Saroj Buasri, who had been trained in the United States and was familiar with modern practices in teacher training. Its vice president, likewise trained in the United States, was Khunying Ubol. She was importantly involved from the beginning, and her husband, Malai Huvanandana, was until his death in 1979 to play a significant role in a later project undertaken by the university.

We assigned thirty-two staff members to the Thailand project for periods ranging from several months to a few years, only three of whom were recruited from outside the Indiana University faculty. The men and women for the most part were senior, mature members of the faculty, leaders in their respective specialties. Their willingness to enter into this endeavor was heartening; I think that it was the nature of the program that made our people willing to interrupt their careers here and spend some time in Bangkok.

Progress at the College of Education was steady and certain from the very beginning. Today the main campus of the College at Prasarn Mitr is handsome, well equipped, and enriched by a major library, and the institution has branch campuses throughout Thailand.⁶ Objective observers testify that the college has been a major influence in raising the level of instruction of the school system of Thailand and in so doing has made a fundamental contribution to the educational advance of the country.

While we were involved with the College of Education, we began negotiations for our program in public administration, a project that Walter Laves had developed as a result of an interest dating from the earlier visit to Bangkok. Indiana University’s responsibility under this contract was to provide professional personnel to advise and to aid in the training of staff for the new Institute of Public Administration to be located at Thammasat University. We were also to advise concerning its organization and its methods of teaching, its research and consultative services, conference and training programs, training aids, professional associations, publications, and library development.

The formal relationship between Indiana University and Thammasat University, begun May 3, 1955, originally was to have lasted three years, but the period was later extended, terminating in October, 1964. For assisting Thammasat University to train men and women for government and public service, Indiana University made a major commitment of personnel. In all, forty-five faculty and staff members were sent to Bangkok for service, including two who were later to become presidents of Indiana University, Joseph L. Sutton and John W. Ryan. Generally the families of the faculty members accompanied them to Thailand. In turn, during this period forty-one carefully selected Thai men and women were sent to this country for advanced degrees, thirty-five of them to Indiana University and the other six to institutions for curricula we did not have. Toward the end of our relationship Thai leaders began to feel the need for greater expertise and sophistication in the broad field of development administration. Whereas the Institute of Public Administration had been providing training for the public sector, it was now thought that this base of training should be broadened; with that idea as an impetus, the National Institute for Development Administration (NIDA) was established by royal proclamation on March 23, 1966, and given university status shortly thereafter. NIDA was a cooperative effort by four bodies: the Thai government, the Ford Foundation, the Midwestern Universities Consortium for International Activities (MUCIA),⁷ and Indiana University. It had a somewhat broader base than the Institute of Public Administration. In fact, the program of the Institute of Public Administration at Thammasat was merged into this new center and became the School of Public Administration within NIDA. In addition to the School of Public Administration and the School of Business Administration, NIDA had a School of Development Economics, a School of Applied Statistics, a Research Center, a Training Center, a Development Document Center, and an English Training Center. It was officially designated a graduate school and granted authority to give master’s and doctoral degrees. The contract for the program was with MUCIA, but the Indiana University Graduate School of Business was selected as the administrative agency for the grant because of our involvement and experience in Thailand.

The project was fortunate in its leadership from the very beginning. Bunchana Atthakor, a highly respected figure, was the first rector. The second rector was Malai Huvanandana, a man whose warm relationships with Indiana University were continued through the years by personal visits and through his children who became Indiana University students. He had been dean of the program at Thammasat. Choop Karnajanaprakorn was the vice rector and in NIDA’S formative period he and Malai shared their responsibilities, with Dr. Malai concentrating on external affairs while Dr. Choop concentrated on the academic organization. Dr. Malai, an influential figure in Bangkok, was able to secure support for the building of an efficient and attractive physical plant. Dr. Choop, who had been trained at Indiana University as a participant under the Thammasat contract, was an excellent academic leader. With the retirement of Malai in 1972, Choop became rector, and thus we had in the beginning years of this project continuity of leadership, a very important asset. The representative of the Ford Foundation in Bangkok, first George Gant and then Howard Schaller, gave the project warm and intelligent support. Howard Schaller had been chief of party of the MUCIA-NIDA project and, prior to that, a professor in our business school. He is now back at Indiana as associate dean for administration in the business school.

Altogether, some forty outstanding Thais were recruited through NIDA to come to the United States for advanced training, four of them at Indiana University. NIDA’S progress was vigorous and sustained from the beginning and all evidence indicates that the institution has made a major contribution to research and to the training of personnel for the development process in Thailand. Especially in the field of business administration, the influence of its M.B.A.’s is being felt increasingly in the private sector, and these graduates are rapidly assuming positions of economic leadership.

I made a number of trips to Thailand during these years to give encouragement and assistance to our staff as best I could and to renew friendships with the Thai leaders who had been influential in support of our programs. Included among these, in addition to individuals already mentioned, were Nob Palakavansa, Sudchi and Maria Laosantara, Field Marshal Thanom Kittikajorn, Prince Wan Waithayakon, Prince Dhani Nivat, and His Majesty King Bhumiphol Aduldej, who, from my first audience to the time I received from his hand an honorary degree from the College of Education, evidenced warm support for and a keen interest in our collaborative efforts. I especially treasure my Thai friends. They are a talented, attractive, sensitive people, and, in the work of modernizing their ancient society, they deserve every possible measure of success.

Throughout all these years Willis Porter and Walter Laves were active, energetic entrepreneurs, participants, interpreters, and ambassadors of these successful programs. In the early years, until his death in 1961, Dean Wright also was an active participant. This Thailand–Indiana University relationship, begun in 1954 and continued through the early 1970s in formal ways, now is maintained by warm personal ties and continuing enrollment of outstanding Thai students at Indiana University. The regular influx of students from Thailand and their return to serve their country have given us the largest alumni group in any foreign land, men and women who are now rapidly assuming positions of leadership. Of Thailand’s seven provinces, four have been governed at one time or another by an alumnus of Indiana University. In those days we sometimes referred to the “Bloomington-Bangkok axis,” and I indeed am proud of the linkages, personal and professional, that were created during that period.

Typically our technical-assistance contracts for aiding institutions or nations abroad with their educational systems made provision for personnel from these institutions to be sent to Indiana University for specialized training to lead the pattern of change being developed in the home country. From time to time we undertook also to train here personnel in whose countries we did not have an institutional base. For example, in 1956 we entered into an ICA program to train teachers from Belo Horizonte, Brazil—members of an elementary-teacher-education faculty. The beginning group of nineteen arrived in 1956; twenty more came in each of the three succeeding years. In 1956 we also undertook a twelve-month’s program of training for twenty-five Puerto Rican teachers of English, who were given courses in English, government, and linguistics.

A contract was awarded us by ICA at approximately the same time for our Audio-Visual Center to train in its specialty twenty-nine students from thirteen countries. Following their yearlong stay on the Indiana campus they returned to their own countries to positions of leadership in the audio-visual and mass-communication fields. Participants in this program were from Afghanistan, Brazil, Egypt, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Panama, Thailand, Uruguay, and Vietnam. Because of the large number of countries involved, this contract had special complexities that had to be dealt with.

One of our very rewarding student-training programs was undertaken by the School of Business. Working under a subcontract from the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business, in cooperation with ICA, the business school brought nine teachers from various European countries—West Germany, France, Italy, Greece, and Turkey—to study here in January, 1956. These men were selected by the European Productivity Agency as potential leaders in a movement to modernize and update the training for business in Europe as one phase of the mighty effort that grew out of the Marshall Plan. The program continued for six years with approximately sixty participants, and time has proved it to have been unusually successful, for the men who were trained here returned home to become leaders not only in business education but also in major industries and government bureaus dealing with economic matters. As a group these men occupy a remarkable position of influence in the European community and remain loyal, active Indiana University alumni.

The 1950s were a period of such intense activity in the international field that by 1959 I could say in my State of the University address, under the general title of “The University Abroad,” after having reported on several new contracts entered into during the previous year, that

these contracts not only contribute richly to the development of their respective countries, but also serve to spread the fame and name of Indiana University throughout the world.

Science and scholarship are truly universal. American universities are called upon in increasing measure to make them so. During the past year individual scholars from our institution were busily engaged in research and scholarly activities in more than twenty countries around the world. Our students were drawn from sixty-five nations, and our alumni were living and practicing their professions in every part of the globe. Truly, the sun never sets on the work of a great university.

During this time, in addition to our technical-assistance projects, collaborative arrangements were made with other universities and, as I’ve mentioned above, professors undertook consultancies in their special fields under contracts with governments or foundations. Indiana University over a period of years established teaching centers for our students abroad in Germany at the University of Hamburg, in France at the University of Strasbourg, in Spain at the University of Madrid, in Italy at the University of Bologna, and in Peru at San Marcos University.⁸ It was a period also of sweeping curricular enrichment in our university system through introduction of non-Western and other international studies in response to the internationalization of higher education then taking place throughout the country. The dislocations of the great wars and the development of rapid air transportation and worldwide communication systems had produced a comprehension that our world was shrinking or that, in the words of our distinguished alumnus Wendell Willkie, we truly live in One World.

This mighty impulse toward internationalization, this realization of the universality of knowledge and the importance of that recognition in our teaching, research, and service are unlikely ever to be diminished or discounted. I am pleased that the university under the leadership of President John Ryan continues to be deeply involved in overseas technical-assistance and other international programs. President Ryan, himself an expert on Asian matters, sets an example by frequent participation in international conferences dealing with Asia and by service on a number of committees and commissions in this field.

It seems to me, however, that another fifty years will be needed to assess with any degree of accuracy the true value of the strong technical-assistance efforts made by the universities, the foundations, and a variety of church and international organizations in the postwar era on behalf of the developing Third World nations. That these nations have made great economic progress is already apparent. Yet to be seen, however, is how stable their political institutions will become; and yet to be discerned, it seems to me, is whether or not the endeavors of the American universities and of many of the universities and governments of Europe made a contribution in both short-term and long-term results.

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1. International Herald-Tribune, Paris, August 28, 1978.

2. The Forman Christian College at Lahore was recognized as one of the best of the teaching colleges in Pakistan. The list of commission members illustrates the quality that was mobilized for this work.

3. Stone also designed the capitol at Islamabad, as well as other principal buildings there, and the U.S. embassy at Delhi.

4. The Kabul contract involved a substantial number of people but dealt with a more limited range of problems, principally related to administration.

5. Four Thai alumni of Indiana University are now college presidents in Thailand.

6. In 1975 the College of Education was named Srinakharinwirst University by royal decree. Its present president is Sasidom. Of the eleven vice presidents at the parent and regional campuses, the majority are Indiana University graduates including my friend Vichitr Sinsiri. The enrollment is 25,000, the largest university enrollment in Thailand.

7. MUCIA was incorporated in 1964 by the University of Illinois, Indiana University, Michigan State University, and the University of Wisconsin to improve their technical assistance abroad and the academic benefit to each campus from their overseas activities.

8. At present the study centers abroad include the Catholic University of Peru, Lima; University of Sao Paulo, Brazil; the universities of Strasbourg, Hamburg, Bologna, and Madrid; the Hochschule für Musik, Vienna; the Hebrew University, Jerusalem; and the University of Kent, Canterbury, England.