PSU Magazine Spring 2001

P hilip Carbone '70 spent his entire career with the CIA. It wasn't what he set out to do at all, but for 27 years he monitored foreign open sources for the United States-the magazine, new papers, and television of other countries. He and his wife, Lillian '69, wanted to experience life in the far-flung cor– ners of the world, and work with the CIA provided that opportunity. Now that they have retired to Newport, Oregon, Carbone says he could never have predicted in his youth the course his life would take. "I would say that Portland State really changed my life. It really deter– mined everything else that happened after that." A native Portlander, Carbone came to PSU on the GI Bill. He knew he wanted to study omething exotic and chose Arabic language cla e . Through this choice he came into contact with the Middle Ea t Studie program. "I sort of backed into it," he recall . But once there he was completely taken with the opportunity to tudy the entire Arabic culture: the politics, the economic , even the geography of the area. S tories like Carbone's are not unusual in the Middle East tud– ies Center's 31-year history at Portland State. The certificate program draws students majoring in anthropology, hi tory, language, and political science. Many have gone on to dynamic careers that incorporate their intere t in and knowledge of the Middle East. In fact, creating such experts was what the U.S. government had in mind when it provided initial funding t r the center and others like it in the heyday of the Cold War. Until the end of World War 11, the We t regarded the East with an eye almo t solely focused on the differ– ences between the two. It was the mysteriou and the unknowable that scholars sought in uch houses of learning as the Oriental Institute in Chicago, where studies were pretty much limited to Eastern arts, litera– ture, and archeology. The war, of course, changed all that. It not only changed the way we saw the rest of the world, but al o the way we saw ourselves. The world had tilted slightly and every ne every– where truggled to reorient themselves to the new emerging reality. Nowhere was that more apparent than at the Vanport Extension Center, precur or to PSU, created in the after– math of the war to meet the needs of returning soldiers. "New and daunting danger had to be faced," says Jon Mandaville, current director of the Middle East tudies Center and a former student in the program himself, "and clas ical litera– ture, no matter its beauty or its merit, would not take the United States where it needed to go in thi regard." One of the most necessary areas of knowledge at the time was one in which the United States was woefully deficient: knowledge of other people and culture . Thi gap threatened the peace, which had been recently won. "We really weren't prepared at the time," Mandaville ay . "That is to say, to take on the fading empires of Britain and France and also to face the challenges of the Cold War. By the mid-fiftie it was clear we didn't have the manpower to do this in the Middle East or elsewhere for that matter. We didn't have anyone who spoke lan– guages; we hadn't been an empire before." And it wasn't just languages. It was knowledge of the politics and the his– tory of areas of the world that we as a country had previously been content to ignore. We knew where the gaps were; we just hadn't developed the mechanisms that would give us the knowledge and the expertise required. A young profes or who had worked in naval intelligence understood very well the huge gap between what the country wanted and what it had to work with. Fred Cox brought the same vigor and enthusiasm to his work at Portland State as he had to hi primary area of interest during the war, the Middle East. It was a pas ion with him, the quest to both acquire and disburse knowledge about this relatively obscure part of the world. He joined the faculty as a professor of history but it wa n't long before he was advocating for the e tablishment of an area studies pro– gram at the fledgling in titution, and the area he wanted to work in was, quite naturally, the Middle East. By all account , Cox was a force to be reckoned with. He pursued his con– tacts in the federal government and ingratiated himself with Oregon's con– gresswoman, Rep. Edith Green. When the government was ready to fund undergraduate work in area tudies, Cox was first in line. That was how, in 1960, Portland tate College found itself with the first federally funded undergraduate Middle Ea t Studies Center in the nation. It was a coup for the school and put Portland State on the acad mic map both statewide and nationally. For the students in the program, it was an avenue that led to career in govern– ment, academia, and business. P eter Bechtold '61, the program's fir t graduate, tells a story about arriving at the doors of the c liege Peter Bechtold, first graduate of the program, is a director at the U.S. State Department's Foreign Service Institute in Virginia with $5 in hi pocket. He wanted to go to college but he didn't have any money. Being a European by birth, he wasn't eligible for the GI Bill. Cox, however, saw hi potential, and took him in. Bechtold wasn't one to squan– der an opportunity and he parlayed his undergraduate work at Portland State into a full scholarship at Princeton, SPRI G 2001 P U MAGAZI E 13