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356 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. ix (1964)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0356 and id is 1 raw text is: FOREWORD The world beyond the North Atlantic community of nations is no longer out of bounds to American scholarship. The study of hitherto neglected societies and cultures has become a normal part of scholarly activity and the regular business of many students. To be sure, such studies receive more attention in graduate schools than in undergraduate colleges and are more prominent in some universities than in others, but they are already an accepted if not yet a standard part of the academic enterprise. This change has become evident only since the Second World War. It was scarcely foreseen by the academic world of thirty years ago, although a few pioneers had begun to grope their way toward what, for want of a better term, we now call non-Western studies. While the expression is imprecise and potentially misleading, its negative ele- ment accurately reflects the common feature that brings together highly disparate cultures under a single label-the factor of neglect. Since Latin America and Slavic Europe have been almost as badly neglected in the curriculum as Asia and Africa, it is pragmatically justifiable to treat them as part of the non-Western world. In the words of a recent report addressed to the liberal arts college, The essential purpose of non-Western studies is not to enlarge the fraction of the world that the student knows about but to redress the present neglect of some of the varieties of human experience that must be taken account of in liberal education. 1 This symposium was born of a conviction that non-Western studies have now passed their period of probation. The seventeen articles document this thesis by showing the degree to which the neglected cultures are receiving the scholarly attention of humanists and social scientists, historians and linguists. Although this is the first systematic analysis of the non-Western emphasis in higher educa- tion, the authors, not content with a summing-up, also address themselves to the outlook for future development. In doing so they make clear that the momentum of non-Western studies is far from spent and that this fruitful stimulus has still to penetrate large sectors of higher education. These articles cover the beginning that was made by the early pioneers before the Second World War; the significance of foundation and government support; the reason emphasis was originally placed on training graduate students; the effort to integrate language-learning with area subjects; the evolution from area studies as an interdisciplinary activity which often gave degrees to area programs, degrees for which were usually given by any one of the several disciplines; and, finally, they describe the continuous increase of undergraduate participation in non- Western studies. Since 1951, when Wendell C. Bennett identified twenty-five integrated area pro- grams, there has been a steady increase of non-Western studies at the graduate level. By 1964, according to a directory issued by the Department of State, there 1 Non-Western Studies in the Liberal Arts College (Washington, D.C.: Association of Amer- ican Colleges, 1964). ix

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