Recruitment Experiences in Area Studies Library Organizations: The Case of ACRL's Western European Studies Section (WESS)*

Background

While “area studies” in American higher education dates back to the 1930s, it was only with the rise of the Cold War and the passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in 1958 that government leaders formally acknowledged the pressing need for America, in the interest of national security, to be better informed about heretofore neglected areas of the globe. From the outset, then, area studies was implicitly understood to exclude Western Europe and North America. The NDEA used area studies as a vehicle for the nation to meet its new security challenges by providing funding that helped create centers and institutes at leading universities on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the Near and Middle East, Latin America, and elsewhere. These interdisciplinary centers facilitated the study of scores of foreign languages and the respective cultures of these world areas, becoming storehouses for the accumulation of intellectual and material capital that would in turn provide a source of expertise for the government’s national security needs and concomitant benefits to the academic and business communities.