Conference Agenda

International debate exchanges, in which university students traveled abroad with the purpose of participating in intercollegiate debate events, can be traced back to the early twentieth century (Hall & Rhodes, 1972; Branham, 1996). Many of these exchanges garnered widespread media attention and commentary about university students placed in international competition, and thus are rich sources of information about the history of international education and communication (Woods, 2018). Based on archival research, this paper focuses on international debate tours undertaken by two U.S. universities in 1927 and 1928 that were unique in scope because they were premised on round-the-world travel. The University of Oregon debaters toured through Hawaii, Japan, China, the Philippines, India, England, Scotland, and Ireland, publishing periodic travel reports in the Christian Science Monitor that recounted both their formal debates and impressions from meetings with world leaders like Benito Mussolini and Mahatma Gandhi. Bates College (Maine) students traveled to Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and India. They characterized their round-the-world tour as an exercise in what they called “practical internationalism,” suggesting that it offered an antidote to nationalist and nativist rhetoric that dominated public discourse of the era. Round-the-world tours can be placed in the context of other experiments in international education, such as the floating university (Pietsch, 2023). This paper argues that they represent consequential attempts by U.S. universities to use this type of intellectual exchange as the basis for diplomacy and offer insight into how the U.S. envisioned its place in the world amid the broader circumstances of the interwar period. Yet it also considers these expeditions within the broader history of circumnavigation narratives (Chaplin, 2012) and mobilizes the ancient rhetorical concept of magnitude (megethos) (Olson, 2021) as a lens through which to understand how desire to travel and experience the globe too often gives way to exoticize, exploit, and conquer Others.

Created in 1940, the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA) aimed to deal with different issues in Latin American countries, seeking greater cooperation between them and the US while combating the influence of the Axis countries during the Second World War. Despite its primary interest in economic matters, the OIAA also worked on other fronts that could influence the strengthening of ties and the construction of a positive image of the US, including several intellectual exchange and cultural projects. Concern with education at its different levels was also very present throughout the existence of the OIAA, being gradually transferred to other divisions until its closure in 1946. (Rowland, 1947; Cramer & Prutsch, 2012; Sadlier, 2012). It is possible to identify two main ways the OIAA worked on educational issues: surveys on the reality in each country and investing in educational projects. The former often fed the latter. In the case of educational projects, it is also possible to identify some categories: projects proposed by the OIAA, those designed in collaboration with other divisions, or those created by other organizations but which had the support of the OIAA. In this paper, I focus specifically on educational projects related to intellectual exchanges between the US and Latin America, which had the support of the OIAA. The objective is to explore the arguments for carrying out such exchanges and, through scrutiny of the discourses, identify imperialist traces. The approach to the object of study is based on a contrapuntal reading (Said, 2011), seeking to explore the silences and narratives constructed from an imperialist perspective, envisioning cultural practices of domination of which one is not always aware or deliberately omits. It is also based on a transnational approach (Roldan Vera, Fuchs, 2019), specifically the notion of networks, to understand better the OIAA's modus operandi in choosing the exchange project participants. The primary sources are OIAA's documents that are part of the Nelson Rockefeller collection at the Rockefeller Archive Center, especially surveys on the educational reality in Latin American countries and reports on exchange projects. Based on preliminary mappings, it was possible to identify investments in projects that included sending English teachers or specialists in vocational education from the US to Latin America and granting scholarships for Latin American educators to specialize in different areas in the US. Some of the arguments were to ensure good relations through the education of future generations and to build strategic networks in Latin America by choosing appropriate candidates for the exchange activities.

This presentation aims to collaborate on the research on Intellectual exchange programs as spaces of imperialism and resistance, showing how the Rockefeller Foundation reshaped agronomical formal training in Chilean universities during the 1950s and 1960s. By following university authorities and scholars from the two leading research-oriented institutions in Chilean agronomy, the University of Chile and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, my research shows that Rockefeller training programs were crucial to the growth and sustainability of faculty positions and the purchase of technical machinery for different topics in agronomy, giving more complexity to academic careers and the production of knowledge (Garrido, 2017) in the agronomy related areas for the period. Intellectual collaboration and academic transnational networks (see Rivera 2018, 2022) have proven to be crucial for understanding contemporary Latin American history of education and play a vital role in the historiography of the links between social, political, and economic agendas of the twentieth-century (Quesada 2013; 2015). Rockefeller Foundation-aided scholarship has gained notoriety in the recent history of Science and Technology approaches and the history of education in Latin America (see Cueto, 2022) mainly because it helps to build a conception of knowledge and education that is transnational as it is sensitive to power disparities. The Chilean case, as shown by recent historiographical works such as Cueto (1995), Quesada (2013), and Zarate & Gonzalez (2015), presents relevant antecedents for the history of the Cold War dynamics and the later neoliberalizating educational politics that shaped primary, secondary, and – as I focus on – higher education. These findings – from the analysis of several Rockefeller Foundation collections on travel grants and postgraduate awards by Chilean engineers and agronomists - however, do not indicate submission from Chilean universities to the Rockefeller Foundation or North American agenda but rather show, by creative strategies by Chilean authorities, the drawing of a highly locally oriented education pathway for agronomists in the country. The growth of agronomical research and education also shows us how government interest in research and university logic for academic life merged during the 20th century, conforming to a collaboration space for co-creating a development narrative and strengthening the idea of “national scientists,” which is at the center of discussion for interdisciplinary work in the history of education and knowledge production research as Science Diplomacy most notorious research has previously shown.

This presentation focuses on the remarkable global spread of a particular college admissions test, the American Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), during the Cold War. It specifically seeks to analyze how, why, and by whom the SAT, and its underlying Western-inspired conceptualizations of "aptitude" and "merit," were disseminated, appropriated, and resisted by multiple actors in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and Australia and on both sides of the iron curtain. The presentation focuses on Educational This presentation focuses on the remarkable global spread of a U.S. college admissions test, the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), during the Cold War. It analyzes how, why, by whom, and where the SAT and its underlying Western-inspired conceptualizations of "aptitude" and "merit" were disseminated, appropriated, and resisted by various actors in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and Australia, and on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Focusing on the world's largest private nonprofit educational testing and assessment organization, Educational Testing Service (ETS), producer and administrator of the SAT, the presentation seeks to explore the alliances with public and private actors such as the Ford Foundation, the intellectual exchanges, articulation of interests, and promotion of ideas that ETS has deployed over time in different continents. Drawing on studies of cultural transfer (Steiner-Khamsi & Waldow, 2013) and perspectives on global history (Stoler & Cooper, 1997; Tschurenev, 2014), the presentation aims firstly to analyze the globalization of the SAT as an imperial project in the context of the Cold War by reconstructing the mechanisms, strategies and dissemination networks deployed by the ETS to build a transnational community of psychometric experts who were able to introduce and translate the SAT into local contexts. Second, it analyzes and compares the active processes of domestication, internalization and resistance deployed by the local actors.