CENTER FOR CULTURAL AND TECHNICAL INTERCHANGE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST

(East-West Center)

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1961

SUBCOMMITTEE ON STATE DEPARTMENT ORGANIZATION

AND FOREIGN OPERATIONS.

The subcommittee met at 10 a.m. in the conference room of the board of regents, at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii, Hon. Wayne L. Hays (chairman) presiding.

Chairman HAYS. The committee will come to order. This morning the first witness we have will be Murray Turnbull, the acting chancellor of the East-West Center, who will speak on two subjects: (1), The objectives, programs, organization, and progress of the Center, and (2), the problems and difficulties and efforts to solve them.

STATEMENT OF MURRAY TURNBULL, ACTING CHANCELLOR, CENTER FOR CULTURAL AND TECHNICAL INTERCHANGE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII

Mr. TURNBULL. Thank you Mr. Chairman. On the 25th of October, 1960, the university signed an agreement with the Department of State to establish and operate the Center, and on the 8th of November, 13 months ago, we received our first funds to operate this organization. I would like to point out that at that time we had in the university our first two students of the Center, who were brought here in anticipation of this program. Our staff consisted of one full-time person serving as interim director and a secretary and part-time student clerk. We now have 60 professional and 24 clerical and stenographic people on our staff. We have added 26 people to the university instructional staff to handle the additional burdens placed by the coming of these students. We have 198 Asian students from some 23 countries and areas in the Pacific and 32 students from the United States from 17 of the States. Our objective, as you are well aware, is to seek mutual understanding between these people from the various Asian countries and the United States. In carrying out this objective we have planned and developed and placed into effect a program which has three primary units. I would like to describe the nature of each of these programs and try to indicate to you how they are fitted together. I believe I might suggest this by indicating first the nature of the oranizational structure of the Center itself. The Center has as its principal administrative officer a chancellor, a position now filled by an acting chancellor, who is responsible under our agreement with the Department of State to the board of regents, but who reports to the board

through the office of the president of the university. To the chancellor report the three heads of the three principal units which the Center carries under its responsibility. The first of these is the director of student programs, who administers the programs in the Center which have to do with student scholarships, student grants, and the various studies and special programs, which I would like to describe a little bit later, for the students.

The second of these reporting to the chancellor is the head of what we have named advanced projects, and this is the organization which has to do with the awarding of senior grants, that is, those to univer sity professors, leaders, researchers, and specialists of various kinds who are not students but who are making some significant contribution either in their own communities or their own field of study. The third unit in the organization is made up of a series of technical, inservice, or job training programs, again reporting to the chancellor through the director of such a training unit. The chancellor's office. in overseeing the general administration of the Center, takes general responsibility for plans, for operations, for the preparing of budgets and, of course, for an evaluation of plans and how they are proceed ing. I would like to say that we have attempted to do this at all times on the basis of nine basic objectives which we established, and we proposed, at the beginning of the organization of the Center, which were national in their character and were devised in the national interests. These objectives having to do with American relationships with other countries in Asia, development of mutual understanding, with the achievement of excellence of programs, and so on, are all listed in the documents I submitted into the record yesterday and were thoroughly agreed upon by the Department of State and all the various consult ants and experts who have worked with us since that time. The Center has, in the light of these objectives, from its beginning, sought the assistance and consultation of a large number of people to advise us in the development of our programs in the direction in which we should go and in meeting the kinds of problems with which we are confronted. In the very beginning, in October of last year, we sent out into Asia to some 19 countries, 5 principals of the university, from the administration of the university, to explain the nature of the Center and its objectives, to meet with educational officials, with people of many institutions in Asia, and with governmental officials, to indicate the kind of programs we are trying to develop, to seek their support and assistance, and to establish some preliminary procedures for screening students and to solicit various suggestions from several hundreds of people in Asia as to the kind of programs we could wisely develop and use in carrying out our objectives.

In March of this year we brought here some 27 distinguished individuals from foundations, educational institutions, and governmental agencies from the mainland of the United States, and had a meeting consulting with them and with a number of people of our own community, to discuss precisely these same things. From that meeting we acquired a great many suggestions. We had many differences of view. We published a report on that meeting, which we are providing to you, and we have, of course, taken account of the suggestions made At a slightly later date this year the new Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs, Mr. Coombs, came out

to us.

here in order to see for himself what we were trying to do, very much as your committee, I believe, is doing now, except at an earlier state, and in turn to confer with us about the growth and development of the Center. We found this an extremely useful and helpful meeting and I believe that Mr. Coombs also profited from it. As a result of this meeting, the board of regents asked a consultant group headed by Dr. Clark Kerr, with Dr. John Gardner of the Carnegie Foundation; Dr. Herman Wells, president of Indiana University, and Dr. Glenn Taggart as staff assistant from Michigan State University, to come out and review our plans and make suggestions to us which might help us carry out our objectives. In the report which they presented to us again which is also available to you-they presented some 25 basic recommendations which had to do primarily with modifications to make the Center more autonomous in its operation, and secondly, to revise some of the scope and magnitude of the Center, particularly in respect to its rate of growth and to identify certain areas on which we might build. This was followed on the part of the Center immediately by an implementation plan which was approved by the board of regents and which we put into effect as rapidly as possible. Most of those 25 recommendations we have long been operating under. A few of them are long-range ones, which we work into gradually.

In addition to this the Center has employed a number of special consultants. We brought out here in May Dr. Sudhir Sen, who is Director of Programs for the United Nations Technical Assistance Board, who spent 2 weeks surveying our technical training programs in the State, with his great knowledge of Asian training problems, and presented to us a lengthy document of recommendations, which we are implementing rapidly, and in a moment I will describe at least two programs which have been initiated as a result of this. We also brought here Dr. Robert Gitler, who came to us from Japan, but who is from the American Library Association; Dr. Ray Swank, from Stanford University Library. Dr. Gitler just completed an extensive report for us on our university library and on the kinds of programs we might possibly and usefully develop to meet the needs for library training, for example, in Asian countries. We brought here 32 scientists, from all over Asia, to the Pacific Science Congress. We employed one of our faculty members to work last summer with that group. He prepared a report on their suggestions and recommendations, their review of the program, which in turn we are considering and which we intend to follow up. In addition to these consultants, of course, we meet frequently with many people from Asian countries and surrounding countries who come through here to learn about our programs and who always make suggestions to us, which we consider as thoroughly as we can. I would like now to turn to the programs and outline for you as briefly as I can but with, I hope, some thoroughness the nature of these programs. Since the student program is the most complex and the most involved and it, in turn, leads to certain other problems raised yesterday, I prefer to treat it last in the list, and, therefore, would like to describe, first of all, and explain to you the technical training aspects of the Center.

We have operated in Hawaii since 1954 a series of inservice, on-thejob, technical training programs for some 3,000 people who have been brought here from Asia, sponsored by ICA, by UNESCO, by WHO, and by other such agencies around the world.

Mrs. BOLTON. Who do you mean by "we"? The university? Mr. TURNBULL. No: this was originally an agency of the State of Hawaii, that is an administrative unit, known for those years up until just this last year, as the International Cooperation Center. This agency formed the nucleus of what is now our training agency and was transferred into our organization just last April. On the basis of this experience and the training programs developed, whiei. cover a wide range of activities from tropical agriculture to traffic safety to vocational education, we are now developing a series of programs which will enable us not only to continue those but to add to them through the funds provided for the Center for special technical training for people from Asia. I would like to mention three of these which are crucial and which are immediate. Two of them will go into effect in February. One of these is a pilot training project for 12 students from several Asian countries who will come here in a program of vocational education in which we will make use of the 3 excellent technical training schools which we have in the State of Hawaii to provide courses in shop management, in carpentry, in electrical mechanics, and so on. These people will spend about 3 months here before they return to their own countries to provide this kind of new knowledge to the people with whom they work in their own businesses, in their own governmental agencies, and in other organizations to which they belong. The second program is a rather unique one to us, also recommended to us by Dr. Sen on the basis of our strengths here. This is a program in tropical agriculture, particularly in the extension services of our tropical agriculture program. Again, in February, we will bring in some 12 people from Asian countries who will spend 3 months here working in the field, not at the university but in the field, in agricultural extension methods and other agricultural practices—marketing, production methods, and so on. They will then be sent to Japan for 3 weeks, and in Japan they will spend their time working on small farm implements, with which the Japanese have a great deal of experience and a great deal to offer. Some of these people, in turn, will be sent on to Taiwan for 3 weeks, following that course of study, for some work there in the area of the use of fertilizers, where there are special resources and special knowledge. This is a multiple-country type of training program which we are initiating as a pilot project. These technical training programs, then, will continue to be financed by the new Agency for International Development, by UNESCO, by the World Health Organization, FAO, and other such organizations, but the Center now has funds not only to administer these programs but to develop others of the sort I just described, including one which we are at work on this week in planning for a middle management training program and one which we expect to initiate next year in public health.

The second program which I would like to describe again briefly, if I can, is the program which has to do with the senior grantees or senior individuals whom we seek to bring together to carry on research, to exchange ideas and information on basic issues and problems of deep concern to all of our countries. This concerns, first of all, a series of grants to senior scholars, university professors, other researchers and specialists, who come here for varying periods, some of them for a semester, some of them for a full year. These people

all do their own independent research; they do not teach although they give many lectures and provide, by other means, access to their knowledge and information. We have brought such people in economics, in genetics, in microbiology, in meteorology, in public health, in industrial relations, for example, in small teams so that individuals from different countries could engage in a joint research project or could exchange basic ideas about a common problem. I can give you an example or two of this. We have on our campus at the present time two scholars from Japan and one from Pennsylvania under this program who are carrying on a project, a research project, with respect to the history and literature of Okinawa, which will provide some basic material for historians and for scholars on the whole field of Okinawan development. We have just brought in from Japan a senior scholar, a man whose field is economics, whose special concern has to do with labor relations, and he is assisting us not only in carrying out his own research but in preparations for a special conference which we will sponsor next spring on comparative labor and industrial relations problems in the Pacific, to which we will bring a number of scholars from different countries. Now in addition to these scholars who come in independently, or whenever possible in relation to each other, we are also seeking to sponsor certain conferences. I have just described one. We are planning another one next spring in the field of scholarly publications in the Pacific and Asia. What are the problems of scholarly publications? How do we disseminate information? How do we make scientific materials available? We want to bring some topflight people here to discuss this and then move on from there in carrying out research which will bring it into effect. We have a small project going on right now in which we are making a survey of the agencies dealing with economic research in Asia and southeast Asia. Again this is a pilot project which may suggest further research.

We are working on a small project to carry on a program of American studies in Asia. How are American studies taught in Asian universities? How much, where, and to what effect? Again this is with the view of assisting Asian institutions. We also operate in relation to this senior program a small agency which we call the translation bureau, which is there to provide assistance to the scholars and researchers in these programs in translating basic documents which they need for their work, and we have undertaken so far several such projects in support, for example, of a tsunami or seismic wave research project for which we provided some assistance this summer. There are many more aspects of these programs. We have had here in the advanced projects senior program for scholars who have completed their work so far. We have nine in residence today. We have five more appointed who will be coming this year. I think that is sufficient detail for the moment unless you have questions about that later on. I would like to discuss the third part of our program, which of course is a very complicated one, a very complex one, which has to do with the provision of opportunities for students of promise, students of ability, from the countries of Asia beginning with South Korea and Japan, coming down through Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao, the Philippines, Indonesia, and the Pacific Island territories, the territories of the Pacific, and a portion of southeast Asia, including Cambodi