The Maryland Foreign-Study Centers

Abstract

W HEN Mark Twain said, little learning makes the whole world kin (with the accent on learning, not on little), he meant to say that the peoples of this earth should learn to understand one another in order to get along more peacefully than in the past. It is partly for this reason that in our colleges we teach and study foreign languages, comparative literature, international relations, and world history. Again, it was for this reason that the University of Maryland in the spring of 1947 established its Foreign Study Centers in Switzerland and in France. It was a project for graduate students and as such had no precedent in the history of American education. To be sure, various foreign-study projects had been in operation on the undergraduate level. A student from an accredited American college may spend his third undergraduate year at the University of Zurich or Basel. After his return he will receive full credit for this junior year in Switzerland, provided that he took his work under the supervision of the American Council on College Study in Switzerland, whose headquarters are in Baltimore, Maryland. Several colleges, such as Smith, Sweet Briar, and Rosary, have their own junior-year groups studying at French-speaking universities in France and Switzerland. The University of Maryland was the first, and is so far the only, institution of higher learning which inaugurated a project for graduate studies abroad. Any student who has completed his undergraduate work and has taken at least two years of the language spoken at the foreign university which he plans to attend may apply for admission to the Foreign Study Center through the Graduate School of the University of Maryland. The major fields offered at the present time are limited to languages, literature, history, geography, political science, psychology, and sociology. The Foreign Study office is attached to the Foreign Language Department and is headed by A. E. Zucker; the director of the program is Edmund E. Miller, who is in charge of the administration of the centers at Zurich and Paris. A professor of the Foreign Language Department, as resident dean, supervises the academic work of the students. The resident deans for Paris were William F. Falls (I947-48), William R. Quynn (I948-49), and L. Clark Keating, I949-50; for Zurich, Dieter Cunz (I947-48), F. C. A. Koelln