Other Woes

've been wondering lately what multiculturalism was. I remember, of course, that it was a cause c´l²bre of the 80's and 90's, a big deal on campus, a hot ticket at the Modern Language Association. I remember all the talk about overthrowing the ''dead white males'' of the old canon and opening it up to the ''subaltern'' and the ''displaced'' and the ''other.'' And I figure that along the way it got some good writers included on reading lists, where they should have been in the first place, and some good writers dropped too. What it apparently did not do was promote the study of other languages, or indeed of other cultures.

During the very years when the multicultural movement was extending its influence, the study of foreign languages was falling into a general malaise. Enrollments were dropping, the ranks of competent language instructors thinning out and foreign-language requirements quietly disappearing. For example, according to the American Council on Education, 34 percent of all four-year American colleges and universities made foreign-language study a graduation requirement in 1965, while only 20 percent do now. Since the 60's, the percentage of college students enrolled in language classes has shrunk by half. And for all the multiculti buzz about respecting and exploring other cultures, the number of students who studied abroad remained tiny, the length of their stays got shorter and the list of countries they preferred -- Germany, England, France -- scarcely diversified. (How many parents, footing the bill, want to send their junior to, say, Uzbekistan? How many college students, laser-focused on landing a job on Wall Street or a slot in law school, want to put their G.P.A.'s at risk by studying, say, Urdu?) Meanwhile, disciplines that might once have sponsored in-depth study of other cultures -- political science, for example -- were taken over by scholars who eschewed fieldwork in favor of computer models and game theory.

There are plenty of reasons that Americans don't flock to language study, from geographic isolation to our traditional assimilationist credo to the widespread use of English. We don't have to! But if multiculturalism is not precisely to blame, it is odd that a movement so flamboyantly dedicated to the celebration of cultural diversity did so little to check our tendencies to cultural isolationism. In fact, it may have reinforced them, by lulling us into the sense that we were getting a resoundingly global education when all we were really getting was a little Arundhati Roy here, a little Toni Morrison there. (In multiculturalism, somehow, black American culture was cast as other, even alien, when in fact it is as inextricably and influentially American as a culture can be.) Multiculturalism was easy, whereas deep knowledge of another place, predicated as it usually is on linguistic competence, is hard. Besides, the impulse behind multiculturalism was politicized inclusion. You were meant to reach out to groups with historical grievances against the white male population of the United States and to celebrate their accomplishments. It was the upbeat ethnic-festival approach, which is nice, but which also allows you to leave out a lot of groups, like those that speak difficult languages or live in rough neighborhoods of the world or don't seem to treat women particularly well.

Of course, none of this would seem all that urgent if it weren't for Sept. 11. But now, suddenly, the fact that the colleges and universities in the United States graduated a total of nine Arabic majors last year seems to matter a great deal. So does the fact that the F.B.I. had to issue those slightly pathetic pleas for Arabic and Pashto translators in the days after the attacks. And so, most disturbingly, do reports that there were warning signs in F.B.I. intercepts about the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, warnings that went unheeded because the agency didn't translate them until later. Now Arabic-language classes at some colleges are filling up, and scholarly books on Islam are re-emerging as best sellers.

In truth, this is an old pattern. It was the cold war, and Sputnik in particular, that spurred the growth of language and area studies in the United States and the Vietnam War that encouraged serious scholarship on East Asia. It would be pleasant to think that ideas and research agendas are independent of national-security concerns or war. But in the United States the latter have been much more important, especially in language studies, than high-minded commitment to the ''other'' ever was. Probably the best place in the country to study hard languages is the U.S. military training institute in Monterey, Calif. And the National Security Education Program, which began in the early 1990's under the supervision of the Department of Defense, has been one of the most lucrative sources of scholarship money for undergraduate and graduate students pursuing ''strategic'' languages like Farsi, Arabic and Mandarin -- with special emphasis on historically black colleges and un-elite two-year institutions. Partly it's a matter of financing -- national-security needs free up money in a way that celebration of difference just doesn't. And partly it's a matter of motivation. Americans don't like to learn difficult languages, and to take them on, we seem to need a motivation more urgent than the vague feeling that we ought to expand our horizons -- something like a wartime imperative or even the religious calling that makes those clean-cut, white-bread Mormon missionaries some of the most dedicated students of foreign languages around. Either way, there's an irresistible twist in the fact that the conservative establishment may have done more to advance our understanding of what the other is saying -- literally, anyway -- than the P.C. academy ever did. Multiculturalism may not have prodded us to study cultures fundamentally different from our own; the war on terrorism will have to.

Margaret Talbot is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and a contributing writer for the magazine.