Foreign Languages Are a National Interest

Ever since Benjamin Franklin wielded his fluent French to persuade Parisian elites to support the War of Independence, foreign language knowledge has enabled American diplomats and representatives—not to mention spies—to promote the nation’s interests. 

During World War II and throughout the Cold War, colleges provided education in languages deemed essential for national defense. Those programs were a great success. In the 1940s, Harvard, Michigan, and Berkeley founded secret schools in Japanese, often led by Japanese-Americans. Other institutions opened foreign language programs thereafter. In the wake of Sputnik in 1958, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act.

In recent years, however, the federal government is suffering from a shortage of language experts. In 2020, the Council on Foreign Relations reported that 15% of language-designated positions overseas were vacant and 24% filled by officers with insufficient training. As former CIA agent Glenn Corn said to me in an interview in March of this year, “What I saw over time is a lot of the officers didn’t really take it seriously. The government’s paying them to go study a language, and they just don’t put 110% or even 100% into it.…People study a language and they go overseas; they don’t really use it because it’s not comfortable. It’s comfortable to speak with other Americans or speak with people that work in the embassy who speak English.” 

Given the decline of language programs in higher education, that shortage isn’t surprising. A March 2026 report from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), Ivory Tower of Babel, traces this deterioration. Today, a fraction of a percent of college students major in any foreign language. Enrollments in language classes fell 59% from 1965 to 2016. Last year, Indiana’s House Bill 1001 threatened to close as many as 12 core language degree programs at public higher education institutions because of low enrollment. Nationally, enrollments in Russian language programs dropped by nearly one-half (46%) between 1974 and 2021, while Spanish enrollments dropped nearly one-fifth (18%) in the short period from 2016 to 2021. The number of Arabic students plummeted by more than one-quarter (27%) in the same five-year spread. Given the heightened tensions in the areas in which those languages are spoken, the shrinking pipeline of experts is a threat to effective American operations abroad. 

College leaders are conscious of the importance of international understanding, but they aim for it in the wrong way. For 16 years, ACTA has also been monitoring general education requirements, including foreign languages, in its What Will They Learn?® project. At present, only 11% of colleges require foreign language study at an intermediate level. Instead of emphasizing language learning, they have built learning outcomes such as “global diversity”  (University of Massachusetts – Amherst), “global citizenship” (University of Tennessee – Knoxville), and “intercultural and global awareness” (Virginia Tech). But if students have not first acquired basic language competency, such lessons in diversity and “otherness” do not prepare them for serious work in international affairs. 

There are reasons for this dereliction. Coursework in global awareness is a vehicle for globalist ideology. Faculty can take up issues of immigration, imperialism and colonialism, ethnic studies, and other pet topics of the Left. And students can dabble in a culture and get a good grade. That cannot happen in foreign language courses, where students must parse parts of speech, master unfamiliar vocabulary, and engage in hours of practice in rudimentary conversation. 

Colleges are failing the American national interest in pursuit of a spurious catechism in cultural difference. We need a renewed commitment to languages—the kind of commitment seen in the mid-20th century—fitted to the challenges of today. 

The obvious lever of reform is general education requirements. Through general education, colleges mandate the knowledge and skills that every graduate of an institution should possess. Traditionally, general education courses were broad and foundational; for instance, all undergraduates would take the same sequence in History of Western Civilization from Ancients to Moderns, or a survey of political thought including study of the Founding documents. As noted above, in recent decades, the focus has changed. The old general education requirements have been fragmented into hundreds of courses, many on niche topics with an ideological edge. 

This is why legislators in certain states have stepped in, requiring that colleges in their state return to the fundamentals. South Carolina’s REACH Act has all students read the Founding documents and the Constitution in a required course on American history and government. Ohio passed similar legislation and added Adam Smith to the primary texts. This year, Iowa mandated two general education courses, one in U.S. history and one in U.S. government. 

Foreign languages deserve the same attention. The study of them serves the national interest. General education mandates for language study can restore linguistic proficiency to its rightful place in American higher education, and improve our foreign relations.

Veronica Bryant is Academic Affairs Fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.