they would then use Rockefeller and Ford money to pay the salaries of these young scholars for a few years, on the understanding that if they did well from a disciplinary viewpoint, they would be moved over to their department’s regular salary budget. The second step was to make sure the youngsters did a lot of undergraduate teaching on subjects having nothing to do with Southeast Asia. In my case, I taught subjects like ‘Traditions of Socialism’, ‘Politics in the British Commonwealth’, ‘The Political Role of the Military’, or ‘Politics and Literature’. This involved a lot of work, but it protected the program from lapsing into isolation and Orientalism. The crucial thing was that every professor in the program should have a firm base in a discipline, and be able to teach many more subjects than just Southeast Asia.
It was still quite hard to realize these goals in the 1950s, but the situation changed greatly in the 1960s. First, the Russians’ achievement in putting an astronaut into space ahead of the Americans alarmed many politically powerful people and institutions in the US. Part of the humiliation was attributed to the backwardness of American universities. But there were wider anxieties as well: the war in Korea, the rising power of Mao’s China, the growing crisis in Indochina, wars in South Asia, instability in the Middle East, and so on. Starting around 1960, a huge amount of money was poured into the universities in the form of scholarships, language courses and the like. Area programs like Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program for the first time began to receive a lot of money from the state.
This change created a clear semi-generational break among the students. The whole time I was a graduate student, my classmates and I never received any scholarships; we paid for our education by working as teaching assistants to professors with large classes. We took this for granted, assumed it was good practice for the future, and even quite enjoyed it. By 1961, the number of graduate students had visibly increased, most had scholarships, and some were rather annoyed if they were forced (for their own good) to teach.
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