Tomorrow's homework: reading, writing, and Arabic

WASHINGTON -- President Bush announced a new initiative that will begin teaching Arabic and other ''critical need" languages to American students -- some as young as kindergarteners -- so they can eventually help the US government win the long-term struggle against terrorism.

''We're living in extraordinary times," Bush said in a speech that signaled his desire to see schools and universities play a greater role in the war against Islamic extremism. ''I wish I could report to you the war on terror was over. It's not."

Speaking at the State Department, Bush told an audience of about 70 university professors that the program could help the United States gain vital intelligence for the ongoing war, as well as improve the country's image abroad and help spread democracy throughout the world.

The program, called the National Security Language Initiative, will expand existing government-supported programs for language study and establish new programs -- dubbed Director of National Intelligence ''feeder programs" -- at elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, and colleges. Those new programs would provide training in languages such as Arabic, Urdu, and Farsi to 400 students and 400 teachers in 2007 and up to 3,000 of each by 2011.

The president spoke at the start of a two-day meeting of university presidents invited by the State Department in part to discuss how universities can help further national security interests and help improve the country's image abroad.

Bush plans to ask Congress for $114 million to fund the program in 2007; $24 million would go toward federal grants to teach ''critical need" languages -- including Arabic, Chinese, and Hindi -- from kindergarten through high school under the Department of Education's Foreign Language Assistance Program, and $13.2 million would go to expanding a program whose aim is to produce 2,000 advanced speakers of those languages.

The initiative will increase the pool of scholarships available for students to study foreign languages abroad, create a State Department-sponsored language immersion summer program, and beef up the US Fulbright scholarship program's language component.

Underscoring the importance of the program, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte -- who oversees the CIA and the FBI -- were in the audience, seated among the university presidents during Bush's speech. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice co-hosted.

Bush said the new language-training initiative is vital to long-term US military and intelligence operations. He said Rumsfeld ''wants his young soldiers, who are on the front lines of finding these killers, to be able to speak their language and be able to listen to the people in the communities in which they live."

''We need intelligence officers who when somebody says something in Arabic or Farsi or Urdu, knows what they're talking about," Bush said.

Rice told the audience that the initiative is similar to US government-funded programs during the Cold War, when she learned Russian and became a noted Sovietologist.

''I was one of those young people who fell in love with the study of the Soviet Union and of Russia, but I was also told that it was a patriotic and good thing to do for my country," Rice said. ''This country made a huge intellectual investment in winning the Cold War. In universities across the country, people studied the cultures and the languages of Eastern Europe and of Asia and of places that we had not known before World War II."

Only two presidents from Massachusetts universities came to the summit: from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A spokesman for Harvard University's president, Lawrence H. Summers, said he had been invited but could not attend.

UMass Chancellor John V. Lombardi, lauded Bush's speech and said Amherst had been a ''big participant" in language programs during the Cold War and is eager to participate again. ''Now we need to do it for the next generation," he said.

But Boston College law professor Kent Greenfield, who heads an organization that sued Rumsfeld over military recruiting on campus, said universities must be careful not to be co-opted by the government's agenda.

''I think the Cold War is instructive," he said. ''During the 1950s and the McCarthy era, what really hurt America at that time was the absence of independent voices and skepticism. It is not un-American to be skeptical, to be independent of the government."

In his off-the-cuff remarks, Bush called for a deeper knowledge of languages that can help American diplomats persuade the rest of the world to become democracies, which would mean the end of terrorism. But it was the president's promise to fix the problem of foreign students being denied visas -- a major issue since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- that brought him sustained applause from the university presidents.