The Trump administration cut off funding for area studies and foreign language education in September, putting an end to the flow of financial support for centers and programs that assisted national security strategy for decades. Justifying the cuts, the administration has said these kinds of programs are “inconsistent with Administration priorities and do not advance American interests or values.”
For years, area studies centers were funded through National Resource Center grants as part of Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965. Congress partially restored this funding in its most recent budget, but the damage to area studies may be irreversible. The University of Washington, home to one of the nation’s oldest area studies centers, lost $2.5 million in National Resource Center and foreign language grants—half of which went directly to student scholarships—for the 2025–26 academic year. The University of Michigan lost about $3.4 million and the University of Kansas lost $2 million. Western Washington University’s Center for Canadian-American Studies reportedly took a 70 percent hit to its budget after the Title VI funds were pulled.
Osamah Khalil, a history professor focused on Middle Eastern studies at Syracuse University, likened the Title VI funds to a sourdough starter: Roughly 10 percent of area studies funding came from the federal government, and the universities put forward the rest. Shortly after the September cuts, some individual institutions’ support for these programs began to fold, too. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill began to dismantle its six area studies centers in December. The University of Texas at Austin opted to combine some of its area studies departments into one department earlier this year.
Areas studies programs typically combine multiple humanities and social sciences disciplines with language studies. Sometimes they’re stand-alone departments, but they’re often structured as centers, given their interdisciplinary focus. Either way, they’re not typically large programs, even where they fill important service or general education roles. And institutions frequently justify consolidations by pointing to relatively low numbers of majors. But major head counts are no reason to cut the programs, said Kat Tracy, a visiting English professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who specializes in 13th- to 15th-century England and the Viking age. Such departments contribute to general education requirements and a well-rounded liberal arts education, she said.
“People consider cutting smaller programs [because] they think that these programs are not valuable,” Tracy said. “They may not seem the most important to the casual observer … but they should be preserved—and in some cases, expanded—because we’re just a much better society the more information and knowledge we have.”
Facing a hostile presidential administration, institutions are unlikely to stick their necks out too far for area studies, said Zachary Lockman, a historian and professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University.
“They’re skeptical. They’re all in austerity mode. They’re under attack,” Lockman said. “Many of them just want to fly under the radar and remain invisible, so giving money to people whom the Department of Education sees as enemies of the Trump administration doesn’t seem like a wise tactic to them.”
An American Priority
While the Trump administration has so far taken an especially aggressive approach to dismantling area studies, it’s not an original idea, experts explained. Republican presidential administrations have worked to shutter these centers for decades.
Area studies as distinct disciplines grew out of World War II, Lockman said. The first area studies centers—at selective institutions like Columbia University, Harvard University, Cornell University and the University of Washington—were funded by the Carnegie Endowment and the Rockefeller Foundation. “Old Wilsonian internationalists” who believed Americans needed to know more about the world, he said.
“America is now a global superpower,” Lockman said of the postwar United States. “It has forces deployed around the world. It has to make policy decisions regarding all sorts of places, so you need to train people with knowledge of these places and encourage the study of languages for which there’s not much practical use in the United States.”
In the mid-1950s, the Ford Foundation joined the push to fund area studies “on a much larger scale,” Lockman continued. Partnered with the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies, Ford began to pump money into area studies across the board. The University of Michigan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology both established area studies centers during that time. These early centers and others like them typically focused on China, other areas of East Asia and the Soviet Union—U.S. adversaries at the time.
Then, in 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik into orbit.
“There’s this freak-out in the United States—‘The Soviets are ahead of us! They’ve sent up a satellite’—and you begin to get large-scale federal funding for higher education, which is new,” Lockman said. This included funding for National Resource Centers, signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower as part of the National Defense Education Act and later made part of the Higher Education Act of 1965.
Meanwhile, the job market for area studies graduates was growing.
“The U.S. government grew in the early Cold War, and then, of course, NATO was founded and the United Nations got bigger,” Khalil, of Syracuse, said. “There was a perceived need for people who are trained in different areas that can staff [those institutions].”
Renewed Attacks
This symbiotic government–university partnership worked for a while. But in the 1970s, while the U.S. was at war in Vietnam, that relationship began to fracture, experts explained. Government officials started to think that they weren’t getting their anticipated return on investment, Khalil said. It was never a requirement that recipients of federal fellowships work for the government afterward—and in large part, they did not, he said.
“One of the things that came out of Vietnam was this idea that ‘We’re not getting the experts that we wanted out of this. We’re getting campus radicals who are protesting U.S. foreign policy,’” he said.
Richard Nixon’s administration was the first to push back on federal funding for area studies, Khalil said. He sought to cut and eliminate the federal funding for National Resource Centers, and thus began a decades-long push and pull between Republican presidential administrations and Democrats in Congress. Federal funding for area studies steadily decreased over time until the 1990s, when the George H. W. Bush administration introduced a new, steep round of cuts and tied some foreign language fellowships, such as the Boren fellowship, to government service requirements.
In the 1990s, student interest in Middle Eastern studies grew, and it spiked after Sept. 11, 2001. “Suddenly it was no longer acceptable—even for relatively small colleges—not to have anyone who could teach about the Middle East and teach about Islam,” Lockman said.
But the funding never matched the surge in interest, Khalil explained. This was a regret of the George W. Bush administration. In his memoir, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote that after Sept. 11, the administration should have “pushed for more education and scholarship on Islam and more training in languages like Arabic, Pashtu, and Farsi.”
Student interest has since plateaued, Lockman explained. Middle Eastern studies’ growth has largely stagnated or declined since around 2011, despite the United States’ continued involvement in the region.
According to an analysis by the Modern Language Association, language enrollments over all fell 29 percent between 2009 and 2021. Enrollments in Arabic, specifically, fell 35 percent over that period. The organization has also argued that Title VI funding, which peaked in 2010, “is an essential factor for the recovery of the language field.”
The way that colleges and universities hire for history departments has also affected the size of area studies departments, said Alexander Martin, a history professor in the Department of German and Russian at the University of Notre Dame. Many area studies professors hold joint appointments within their area of study as well as another humanities department, such as English, history or art.
“The traditional way that you would define a history faculty position would be: ‘We’re looking for an expert on modern French history, early modern China,’ or something like that. In other words, there’s a place and there’s a time period,” Martin said. At Notre Dame, for example, “There’s a new emphasis, probably within the last 10 years, on trying to hire faculty who do not fit into clear chronological or geographic spaces. Sometime over the last decade, there’s been a shift toward ‘We’re looking for a historian of world religion or a specialist in environmental history.’”
Ultimately, the future of area studies will likely depend on whether individual institutions choose to support them—which is detrimental for the United States as a whole, Lockman said.
“I suspect area studies will survive … but they’ll be much diminished, and the cost of that is what we’re seeing in the news,” he said. U.S. officials “seem to be surprised by Iran’s reaction [to U.S. attacks], which, if they talked to anyone who knows anything about Iran in the scholarly world, they would have heard a pretty good account of what’s likely to ensue.”
