This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2010, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
In contrast to their intense rivalry on the football field, Utah's two leading universities joined forces to secure one of the most coveted designations in academic circles. The U.S. Department of Education last month accorded the University of Utah and Brigham Young University status as a National Resource Center (NRC) for Asia.
"This is the most exciting thing to happen to Asian Studies in this state ever. It puts us on an international map. It's a recognition of academic and pedagogic excellence and allows us to build up new programs rapidly," said history professor Janet Theiss, who directs the U.'s Asia Center.
The Utah schools join just a handful of other universities with a pan-Asia NRC. Most have a tighter regional focus Southeast and Far East Asia. The new grant is worth $4.5 million spread over four years. About half the money will support the NRC center and the rest will go to scholarships. Among the first things Theiss intends to do with the money is hire a full-time outreach director.
The schools will expand their advising and professional internships in Asia and broaden language offerings in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Hindi-Urdu, Thai, Indonesian and Vietnamese. And the U. is currently working with several Salt Lake City high schools to develop a Chinese language curriculum.
Every four years, about 125 university area-studies centers win this funding under Title VI of the Higher Education Act, a provision intended to foster greater public understanding of the politics, culture, history and languages of the world's major geographic regions.
In this latest four-year funding cycle, BYU also won NRC status for its Center for the Study of Europe, while the U.'s Middle East Center lost its grant after 50 straight years of federal funding. The U. has declined to release pertinent documents that would explain why the grant was lost.
NRC status is nowhere near as lucrative as an ESPN broadcast contract or membership in the Pac-10 athletic conference, but universities can leverage the designation to win other grants and secure visits from world leaders and renowned scholars.
The honor seems fitting for a state whose governor, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., was plucked from the Statehouse last year to serve as ambassador to China.
"The university's Asia Center will now have a larger national footprint and the added funding means new, top faculty hires, curriculum development, research and cultural events," said a statement from U. President Michael Young, himself an international legal scholar fluent in Japanese and Korean.
The U. shares the NRC designation with the Asian Studies program at BYU's Kennedy Center for International Studies. The two universities created the Intermountain Consortium for Asian and Pacific Island Studies to combine their collective strengths in pursuit of the grant.
"Given the rise of Asia in world politics, it's important that Utah use its unique resources to promote knowledge and understanding of China, Korea and Japan," said BYU's Eric Hyer, a political scientist who directs the Asian Studies program.
On their own, the schools probably lacked the breadth to achieve NRC status, Theiss said. For example, BYU is stronger in Korean and Southeast Asia, the U. in South Asia.
"We have a better research library. The U. has a graduate program. Interstate 15 is an umbilical cord that ties us together," Hyer said. "The U. library alone would not have been sufficient, but combined with BYU and our family history library, it's quite a solid collection."
Among BYU's many library holdings are writings and photographs of journalist Helen Foster Snow, a Cedar City native who documented the early phases of China's Communist revolution in the 1930s.
The U.'s International Studies program has boomed, growing from 33 majors at its inception in 2003 to 543, making it the fastest growing interdisciplinary major. About a fifth of these students choose Asia as their emphasis. As of last spring, the U. and BYU had 55 and 41 students, respectively, majoring in Asian Studies, and another 46 minoring in it.
The goal of the grant is not to increase the majors, though, but to broadly serve all students and off-campus communities.
"Not all students interested in Asia are in the Asian Studies degree program," Theiss said. "A key mission is to produce students who combine area-studies expertise with public service careers."
The Asian connection
The University of Utah's Asia Center now shares National Resource Center status with BYU's Asian Studies program. The designation comes with a federal grant to support the two programs, as well as scholarships for graduate students. The U.'s Asia Center houses the Confucius Institute, while BYU has the Chinese Flagship Program.