In recent years, scholars of international relations have awakened to a key historiographic blind spot in the field of diplomatic history: international education. That international education has long flown under the radar is not a reflection of its relatedness to official diplomatic practices—indeed, since at least the 1930s, officials in the US Department of State have cultivated a robust philosophy of soft power and cultural exchange in which international education is a crown jewel. Even before its official incorporation into public policy, educators, philanthropists, and religious leaders considered educating foreign students in US institutions of higher education a valuable opportunity to advance US interests by spreading American political ideals and forging international bonds of friendship and understanding. Yet because of traditional disciplinary and methodological divides between historians of education and historians of foreign relations, little is known about the actual geopolitical consequences of twentieth-century experiments in international education. In the past decade, a new cadre of historians of US foreign relations has sought to rectify this historical blind spot, and has thus crossed over into the realm of education history.
In Losing Hearts and Minds, historian Matthew K. Shannon offers a case study of tremendous import for those seeking to advance our understanding of international education beyond a comprehension of policy goals and lofty educational ideals. International education, Shannon argues, was at the heart of the Washington-Tehran Cold War alliance, and he has the numbers to back up the claim: while approximately five hundred Iranian students sought degrees from US institutions in 1950, by the late 1970s there were upwards of fifty thousand. At the dawn of the Iranian Revolution, Iran sent more students to study in the US than any other country (p. 3). While some were undergraduates, most were graduate students seeking professional degrees in fields like public administration, government, nuclear engineering, and even military training—the kinds of educational training, in short, that suited Iran's “developmental needs” (p. 36).
From the start, the circulation of Iranian students in the US was overladen with political aims. From the perspective of US officials, education would serve as a vector of soft power, stitching together the cultural and emotional foundations of a political alliance between America and the Iran of anticommunist dictator Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Less of a sentimental goodwill initiative than a political and economic calculation, US Cold War officials saw in the mobility of Iranian students an opportunity to advance American interests in the Middle East through the cultivation of human capital. From the shah's perspective, US-educated Iranians would return home with the military, technical, and administrative skills necessary to advance his modernization program. Both countries stood to gain from this seemingly cosmopolitan circuit of exchange, and often in insidious ways: American military equipment sold to Iran, after all, required Iranians properly educated in its use.
Yet, Shannon argues, what actually occurred was far more complex and unruly. Some Iranian students, intimately aware of the shah's authoritarianism and human rights abuses, were quick to identify the gap between America's purported embrace of liberal and democratic ideals and its simultaneous aiding and abetting of an authoritarian regime. Forming their own Iranian student organizations while also forging alliances with the free speech and New Left student movements, Iranian students found in the US an opportunity to organize a powerful diasporic resistance movement. They organized public protests, embraced the rights-based rhetoric of Western activists, and took their critiques of the Pahlavi government to their American classmates and teachers, the press, and even directly to the ears of US government officials like Attorney General Robert Kennedy. While many Iranian students did return home to take up government positions, Iranian student activism in the US became such a concern that Iran established departments to monitor student activity and gather intelligence through undercover networks of informants. American officials, ever wary of signs of leftist radicalization, similarly monitored the activities of foreign students through CIA informants in organizations like the US National Student Association.
Shannon carefully objects to the notion that Iranian students became in any way converted to anti-Americanism through their experiences in the US, but he nonetheless shares a startling revelation: according to official estimates, fifty of the Iranian students who took the sixty-six US embassy workers hostage in 1979 had studied in America. A project in human engineering gone awry, they used their knowledge of English and US culture not to forge a closer relationship between America and Iran, but rather to translate embassy documents, interrogate their captives, and act as spokespeople to the international media. At the same time, however, Shannon gives hope to those eager to find redemption in the political ideals of international education. More recently, he points out, many of those at the helm of Iran's foreign ministry who forged the Iran nuclear deal in 2015 were also educated in the United States. Despite exposing the mixed results and unanticipated consequences of this massive Cold War experiment, Shannon maintains his own faith in international education, concluding that it can positively influence diplomacy by stimulating intercultural dialogue, empathy, and cross-cultural understanding (p. 164).
In telling this fascinating and troubling transnational history, Shannon illustrates to diplomatic historians how much can be gained by attending seriously to the political significance of education. He rightfully exposes the wishful fallacy that international education, in all its forms, might somehow be situated beyond the scope of politics. But for historians of education, Losing Hearts and Minds will read more like foreign relations history than education history. The questions of how and what students really learned, and how their US-based educational experiences might have informed their political activities, identities, or interior emotional lives, remain largely marginalized in Shannon's narrative. Shannon is more interested in the political activities of Iranians who fall under the category of “student” than in the social and cultural experiences of being a student studying in a foreign country. Aside from their political activities, we know startling little about the subjects of Shannon's study. Empathy and cross-cultural understanding are pretty ideals, but presumably such ideals posed numerous pedagogical challenges for teachers and students alike. How did Iranian students negotiate their educational journeys? Did some experience a transformation of ideals and identity? So far from home and witness to some of the most turbulent decades in US domestic history, how did they navigate the ever-present cross-cultural challenges posed by race, religion, class, gender, and sexuality—and all while also seeking an education? One imagines that such experiences are of untold political consequence. If we are to develop a fuller understanding of the past by bridging education history and the history of foreign relations, historians of education—trained to identify how social, cultural, personal, and political histories become intertwined in the fulcrum of education—will have much to offer and should join the conversation.
