When the East Asian National Resource Center (NRC) was established at Columbia in 1960, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean were not yet widely studied in the United States. Recognizing its importance as a center of excellence engaged in the cultivation of American international experts, the US Department of Education included Columbia among its first Title VI grantees, tasked with educating future generations of East Asia scholars and professionals. Nearly 60 years after earning this recognition, the Institute continues to serve as the home of Columbia’s NRC, contributing to the teaching of East Asian languages and promoting understanding of the economies, politics, societies and cultures of the region. Today the Weatherhead East Asian Institute (WEAI) develops new programs and materials to expand East Asian studies at Columbia and beyond, thanks in part to the Department of Education’s decades of unbroken support for the NRC.
WEAI is often described as a hub for East Asian studies at Columbia. Physically located on the 9th floor of the International Affairs Building, the Institute is a place for scholars and students to gather, to host events that promote discourse on the latest issues in East Asian studies. It is also a community of the faculty and affiliates that comprise it, and an administrator of funding for research and programs that pave new directions in the study of East Asia. If WEAI is a hub, the NRC can perhaps best be described as the web that connects East Asian resources across Columbia—stemming from the academic departments, centers, and institutes like WEAI, and the programs they administer—and brings them to the world beyond.
According to WEAI Executive Director Nicole Vartanian, the NRC “has been the mechanism for Weatherhead to connect with communities off campus in meaningful ways to help further the study of East Asia, and is a really vital part of our mission to ensure that all of the expertise that we have is shared as broadly and as widely as possible with communities outside of our immediate reach.” Of particular importance in this regard has been the outreach program, begun as part of the NRC and now a major national institution, providing resources for K-12 and college teachers, study programs online and abroad for teachers, and a host of open access web resources. The outreach program, Asia for Educators, is administered by Roberta H. Martin and Karen Kane at WEAI.
In keeping with the current aims of the NRC to “engage the real world” and to “engage underserved students and teachers,” WEAI has worked to improve public access to its pool of resources. Each year, the Institute hosts numerous free, public events, and endeavors to make their content available online for those unable to attend. The NRC has also forged collaborative partnerships with other higher-ed institutions, including a collaboration with City University of New York (CUNY) schools— most recently Hunter College’s Chinese Flagship Center, where WEAI this year supported a Chinese speech contest for high school students.
“There are so many ways we provide resources for students, teachers, and faculty across all levels of the educational system,” said WEAI Research Scholar Kim Brandt, who currently leads the NRC. “Whether it’s the syllabi we produce, or serving as a resource for universities, colleges, high schools, and elementary schools in our region. Our collaboration with CUNY especially is an important new development in a much longer ongoing effort to support and to provide resources to underserved teachers and students, and to do so creatively.”
WEAI is currently working with colleagues in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALAC) to develop two new overseas Chinese language and internship programs: one for medical students and the other for engineering and science students. The Institute is also developing a full-year advanced business Chinese course and textbook.
“The NRC enables us to develop and grow incrementally each cycle,” said WEAI Assistant Director Katherine Forshay. “There has been a concerted effort to develop a roster of activities where we felt there was excitement and initiative and an interest in making real progress.”
Madeleine Zelin, Dean Lung Professor of Chinese Studies at Columbia University, led the NRC for 30 years, cementing Columbia’s reputation as a pioneer in contemporary East Asian studies.
“When I started teaching, language programs were still using textbooks created for missionaries,” Zelin noted. Thanks to the NRC grant, “our language program received support to enhance not only the development of new, more innovative contemporary textbooks, but new courses as well,” she said.
The NRC at Columbia has distinguished itself by “supporting the development of teaching materials that continuously upgrade students’ experience and keep in touch with the changing contemporary worlds in which these languages are spoken,” said Zelin. She noted new courses that, for example, prepare students to analyze content on Chinese websites and social media.
NRC funding has also allowed the Institute to “address needs and interests on campus that otherwise, without this funding, there really wouldn’t be support for,” Vartanian explained. In 1999 the Modern Tibetan Studies (MTS) program was established, becoming the first university program dedicated to the study of modern Tibet in the US. Beginning in the 1990s, WEAI also began to invest more formally in the study of Southeast Asia. Today WEAI is the administrative base for the New York Southeast Asia Network, a joint effort with New York University and Seton Hall University. The Institute also recently helped to launch the Vietnamese Studies initiative at Columbia, which began on a smaller scale with programs supported by NRC funding and has since become an academic program now fully sponsored by Columbia.
“It’s because of this track record of showing that seeding these projects has yielded really significant new directions” that the Department of Education has consistently renewed its funding support for the NRC at Columbia for nearly 60 years, Vartanian said.
Zelin notes that the quality and creativity of the resources offered by the NRC through the years has also helped the Institute maintain this distinction—from the impressive collections of the C.V. Starr East Asian Library, which receives NRC funds, to the teaching syllabi made available by postdoctoral fellows at the Institute, to, most recently, the Chinese speech contest at the Hunter College Chinese Flagship Center.
In turn, Zelin added, the NRC has allowed WEAI to reach out to students “who are not necessarily area studies aficionados but will be going on to different professions— to provide for them a relevant way to become literate in East Asian languages that they can then use in their future work experience.”
This article originally appeared in the September issue of the WEAI 70 Years newsletter.
