The Foreign Service Journal, April 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2021 11 Consulate Stuttgart and Vice Consul Spalding merit recognition for making a serious contribution to rescuing Jewish families from the Holocaust. Gabriel Faber, Ph.D. candidate Bar Ilan University, Center for Nanotechnology Tel Aviv, Israel How the U.S. Can Compete with China in Africa In an April 2016 FSJ article, “Develop- ment Aid to Africa: Time for Plan B?” I proposed building universities in African nations. Such an initiative is even more timely today, when the scope of Chi- nese inroads into Africa has begun to be appreciated. The crux of the proposal is as follows. • U.S. univer- sity centers can help Africans build their societies with a foundation in freedom of thinking and free enterprise. • The hunger of Africans for U.S. educa- tion and the low quality of most universities in Africa are additional driv- ing forces. Africans know that the U.S. higher educa- tion system is the best in the world. • University graduates will be the leaders of the African nations—in gov- ernment as well as the private sector. They will come from the demographic that I propose be targeted: the educa- tion-hungry, driven visionaries, bril- liant but deficient in academic skills, from poor rural settings with dismal public education systems. • The programs would be modeled on the U.S. system of accessibility for average There was no little anxiety when my great-grandparents, Sauli Goldmeier and his wife, Mali, journeyed in the winter from their home in central Germany to Stuttgart to seek an entry visa to the United States and escape the furnaces of Europe as they were beginning to heat. They must have wondered about the official who might issue the desired prize. Would he be sympathetic or obdurate? They were surely aware of the thou- sands of legal immigration quota spots fromGermany to the United States that were going unfilled every year. What they likely did not know was that this was part of a deliberate strategy by the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration to suppress immigration to the U.S. by bureaucratic means. Fortunately for them, their visa application landed on the desk of Vice Consul Francis L. Spalding. Spalding’s exact work in this case is something I will always wonder about, but his heroics are documented. We know he worked with the U.S. consulate in Luxemburg to supply Jews with the necessary papers. Describing the events of Kristallnacht in Stuttgart, for instance, Consul General Samuel Honaker wrote: “For more than five days the office has been inundated with people. Each day a larger and larger crowd has besieged the consulate, filling the rooms and overflowing into the cor- ridors of a building six stories high. …The entire staff has responded most loyally. … I wish especially to mention … Vice Consul Spalding.” In fact, of the 18,000 visas issued worldwide under the German quota in 1938, 10,000 came from the small Stuttgart consulate. Vice Consul Spalding would be named an “Honorable Diplomat” in the files of the Holocaust Museum for the number of visas he issued to Jewish applicants. citizens, which for Africa means that the programs need to be nearly free. • A tightly controlled student applicant selection process will avoid endemic fraud and bribery and recruit the best and brightest students, albeit with remedial needs because of the poor quality of public schools the majority of them attend. To make such a U.S. State Depart- ment–sponsored effort more cost- effective, I propose constructing one modest, state-of-the-art classroom/ lecture/computer lab building on each of several campuses of willing African universities, and staffing these centers with two to five American IT and educa- tion professionals. Online courses and programs from U.S. universities would serve as the program’s founda- tion, provided they are adapted to Africans, who are community- oriented. The small U.S. staff would admin- ister online courses (massive open online courses, or MOOCs, as well as contracted courses). I did this hybrid type of teaching—a MOOC course from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on genetic engineering in the development of pharmaceuticals— at St. John’s University of Tanzania (2011-2016), and it worked well. I streamed the lectures to the students in a lecture hall, helped them understand the content, gave them links to transcripts and carefully proctored the exams. Staffing would not need to be expen- sive: The U.S. has a surfeit of talented individuals with doctorates who would