Today I found this story about the State Department intending to promote more student exchanges between Latin America and the United States. As the story points out, the government has determined that it is important for us to promote much more student exchanges between the two regions as we are geographically, politically and economically linked. The article also points out that at this time these exchanges are quite limited in relation to our actual relations. As a long-time professor at UMass, this doesn’t come as a surprise to me, and I must confess that I am disappointed by the limited scope of this relationship. My experience is that many more of my students, for one reason or another, tend to prefer Spain over Latin America as a study destination. The irony, however, is that often the interest in Spanish is because of the geographical proximity to our southern neighbors (and the increased Latin American population in the US), but the choice of a place to study the language is dictated by other reasons. A few years back I read this interesting article about the history of Spanish studies in the United States which in a way addresses some of the reasons behind this contradiction.
Beyond this, I’d also like to point out that I find another interesting aspect to this story: the fact that much of the $1,000,000 (a small amount if you really consider it) is going to be dedicated to make Latin American universities better cater to US students. On the surface, a good proposition, but I wonder to what degree specifically catering to US students and creating special programs for them defeats part of the purpose of going abroad – to learn the way in which other societies function.
Any thoughts?