Christopher J. Lucas

The Scribal Tablet-House in Ancient Mesopotamia

THE PIVOTAL ROLE of the scribe in the development of Mesopotamian culture can scarcely be exaggerated. His was the cohesive force that helped preserve and enrich one of mankinds very earliest civilizations throughout its long historical career, that impressed upon it its unique form and character, and that maintained and revitalized its vast body of traditions, customs, and ideals over the span of almost three millennia, doing so in spite of repeated social, political, and intellectual changes. With the deployment of the first practical system of writing-an innovation which obviously lent societal mores a permanence and continuity heretofore lacking-the scribe emerged early as a central figure in the workings of Mesopotamia. Thus armed with a means of fixing thought on clay, it was inevitable perhaps that the tablet-writer should come to occupy a strategic position in his several roles as temple functionary, court secretary, royal counselor, civil bureaucrat, commercial correspondent, poet, and scholar. The role and importance of the tupsarru, it has been rightly observed, might be likened to those of the clergy in medieval Europe; his lore, tupsarrutu, to that extensive body of knowledge, skills, and savoir-faire covered by the Islamic term adab. (1) Any holistic appreciation for the Mesopotamian cradle of civilization, arguably, will accord pre-eminence to the scribe and his craft in ancient Near Eastern society. Traditional Assyriological scholarship, it must be said, has been duly cognizant of the practical and literary achievements of the Mesopotamian scribe, and has explored in some detail the scribal contribution to the historical evolution of both form and content in the extant - albeit fragmentary-corpus of Sumero-Akkadian and Babylonian literature. Less well developed, however, (with a few notable exceptions) has been concern and appreciation for the pedagogic means whereby scribes were prepared for their vocation, the institutions in which their training and subsequent scholarly endeavor were conducted, the character of those documents employed as objects of study, and, generally, the nature, content, and organization of formal school curricula. This is to say that while the appli

Foreign Students and Centers of Higher Learning in Antiquity

Whenever a center of scholarship and learning arose in ancient times, the gathering of scholars it drew invariably included “foreigners”—that is, students not native to the immediate local area. Hence, in a very real sense some of the precedents for recruiting, accommodating, and supervising international students in today’s institutions were established centuries ago. Many of the earliest issues pertaining to the hosting of nonlocals likewise still prevail in contemporary academe.

The Early 1900s: Foreign Student Enrollments and Emerging Support

The progressive movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was one of several ideological forces that contributed to the rising status of American institutions of higher learning in the early 1900s. Progressivism was partly an expression of social conscience, generated to a large degree by the growing middle class, in the presence of conditions born of the urbanization and industrialization of a formerly agrarian society. Following decades of what historian Frederick Rudolph describes as “free-wheeling, atomistic individualism,” a movement that elevated service as a motivation for learning began to gather strength: Progressivism was Theodore Roosevelt as a police commissioner of New York, setting forth in a black cloak at midnight, in search of crime and delinquent police officers … it was Robert La Follette fighting the lumber interests of Wisconsin, as elsewhere good Progressives fought other interests of privilege: the railroads, the utility gang, the sugar trust, the farm-machinery trust, even the bicycle trust. Progressivism was a gigantic effort to deal with the discovery that the United States was a land of small farms and country stores no longer….1

Epilogue: Challenges and Imperatives

Questions surrounding the issuance of visas for students seeking entry into the United States reflected one of the major security controversies that dominated discussions of American foreign policy throughout the early 2000s. The advisability of building what some critics disparaged as an “Orwellian” computerized tracking program (the system that became SEVIS) to monitor foreign students during their stay in the U.S. was another. Third, the proposal to deny international students access to certain “sensitive” courses of study and information deemed critical to homeland security represented still another issue prompting sharp divisions of opinion.

The Late Twentieth Century

Near the end of the twentieth century, there was growing concern on the part of American educators (and politicians) about new and robust competition from other countries for foreign student enrollments. In 1995, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Australian universities were forecasting a five-fold increase in fee-paying foreign students over the next fifteen years.1 Based on a study by the International Development Program, the overseas marketing arm of the Australian Vice-Chancellor’s committee, the report went on to say that the enrollment gain was predicted to add an estimated four and a half billion U.S. dollars a year to the Australian economy.

Early American Colleges and Education Exchange

Given the prestige of Europe’s academic institutions, it is hardly surprising that America’s colonial and antebellum colleges failed to attract many foreign students. Not until the mid-1800s did students from places such as India and China begin to enroll in sizable numbers in the United States. In common with the rest of the world, American students usually looked to the academic centers of England or Germany when seeking the most prestigious higher learning available. The practice of studying abroad during the early years of America’s independence thus became the precursor to all education exchange to follow and helped set the conditions that in time created a two-way migration.

The 1960s and 1970s

At 3:30 on the afternoon of May 10, 1962, President John F. Kennedy spoke before a small gathering of international students on the South Lawn of the White House. He and the first lady, Jackie, were very interested in international students and education exchange. “All of us, at least many of us, have been foreign students,” the president told the group. “The Secretary of State, the Under Secretary of State, the head of the Policy Planning were all Rhodes scholars; the Deputy Attorney General and others; the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. My wife was a student in Paris for a year. I studied at the London School of Economics…”1

The World War II Years and Their Aftermath

As war clouds gathered on the horizon in the late summer of 1939, many observers feared for the future well-being of institutions of higher learning and, for that matter, for Western civilization itself. It was clearly apparent that education exchange programs would be early casualties of the conflict to come—the very programs whose brave, high-minded initiatives were intended in part to avert the devastation that now seemed likely to engulf the globe. There was no question about the need to suspend such programs in view of the threats posed to student safety under wartime conditions. Commenting on the situation in Europe, an early 1939 article in Time magazine reported: Saddest educator was white-haired Dr. Stephen Duggan, director of the Institute of International Education, founded in 1919 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to promote world good will by international exchange of university students. Dr. Duggan expected the war to play hob with the education of 8,000 U.S. students abroad, 7,500 foreign students in the U.S. Sadly he announced that his Institute had had to cancel the fellowships of 300 U.S. scholars due to go to Europe this fall. As he prepared to send 100 others to Canada, South America and the Far East, Peacemaker Duggan said stoutly: “I look upon this war as an interlude in our work. We intend to continue stronger than before.”1

The Opening Years of the Twenty-First Century

As noted in the previous chapter, when it was determined that at least one of the terrorists who participated in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing had entered the country on a student visa, a cacophony of demands erupted, calling for closer surveillance of all international students residing within the country’s borders.1 Galvanized by the attack, Congress responded in September 1996 with the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, legislation that mandated the creation of an electronic reporting and tracking system for international students. By June 1997, the Coordinated Interagency Partnership Regulating International Students, or CIPRIS, a federal task force assembled in 1995, began testing a pilot version of its computerized tracking system in cooperation with twenty-one universities in the Southeast.

Foreign Students, McCarthyism, and the Cold War

A mid the exhilaration generated by the end of World War II, most war-weary Americans looked forward to peace at last and a return to “normalcy.” As world events revealed, however, the United States soon found itself drawn into increasingly ominous “Cold War” confrontations with its erstwhile wartime ally, the Soviet Union.