The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2005

the home of Arlington Hall Junior College, an all-female school founded in the 1920s, the 72-acre plot later served as a U.S. Army installation. In fact, four structures dating from the early history of the site as a junior college — the yellow-brick OldMain building, the girls’ gymnasium and two historic Sears Roebuck pre-fabricated cottages near Route 50 — have been renovated and incorporated into the current training center. The collegiate feeling carries over in other ways, as well. Because the buildings are connected, there’s a kind of shirtsleeves environment. Even in the dead of winter students can go anywhere without bundling up. Nor was that Arlington Hall’s only selling point. As FSI’s course catalog notes, historians have deemed the site noteworthy “for its local architectural importance and nationally significant role in American military intelli- gence operations.” At the beginning of World War II, the Roosevelt administration took over the school (then defunct due to financial problems) for the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, which would later break the Japanese army’s so-called Purple Code. In October 1989, the Defense Department moved its people elsewhere and transferred the facility to State. The hard part had just begun, however. Because of mas- sive asbestos removal and other structural issues, it ulti- mately cost $81 million to build the center. State almost lost the funding in 1989 and again in 1991 as the closing days of the Cold War increased budget-cutting pressure. Only a close partnership among the architects, FSI, State’s Bureau of Administration, the General Services Administration, the Office of Management and Budget and key congressional staffers kept the process on track. At the same time, State was also negotiating with neighborhood citizens’ groups, the National Capital Planning Commission, the Virginia Historical Association and bicycle enthusiasts. Fortunately, Grove recalls, sup- port from a graduate of the original Arlington Hall turned the tide. “On a cold winter night in 1989, a wonderful woman, Louise Hale, got up at a formal public session … and said she thought [building the NFATC] was an absolutely wonderful idea, and that ended any criticism.” The National Foreign Affairs Training Center opened in October 1993. In a May 2002 ceremony, the training center was renamed in honor of George P. Shultz, Secretary of State from 1982 to 1989, who was instru- mental in its establishment. Introducing him on that occasion, Secretary of State Colin Powell observed: “We have always known George to be a man keenly focused on the future, especially on preparing the rising genera- tion for service to the country. … It is not we who honor George Shultz by naming this center after him; rather, it is George Shultz who honors us and all who will pass through these halls by lending his name to this facility.” Although most FSI training takes place at the Shultz Center, there are several other training locations. The Warrenton Training Center houses much of the informa- tion management training. FSI also uses classrooms at three other State Department annexes, as well as Main State, for various courses. It conducts overseas training in language field schools in Tunis and Taipei, among other locations. Regional centers in Frankfurt, Vienna and Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., provide both regional and post- specific training to overseas personnel. In addition, FSI is expanding its distance-learning offerings. From Famine to Feast The move to the current campus was unquestionably a major step forward for FSI. But it coincided with seri- ous budget cutbacks for State, a significant drop in Foreign Service recruitment and a corresponding increase in pressure on personnel to reduce or even forgo time in training throughout the 1990s. As former FSI Director Lawrence Taylor noted at the time, “The State Department has a practical problem, because we have not staffed ourselves with a personnel float sufficient to allow a sizable percentage of our people to plan for regu- lar training, especially on any long-term basis.” The advent of the Diplomatic Readiness Initiative in 2001 largely repaired the damage from that period, but it has led to the opposite problem: unprecedented demand for all of FSI’s courses. In the past year, over 40,000 stu- dents (a record enrollment) took more than 425 class- room courses, including some 60 languages. FSI has coped in various ways with the unprecedent- ed demand for space and resources: making more effi- cient use of space, giving greater attention to classroom allocation, introducing a shift schedule for many lan- guages, and encouraging the various schools within FSI to be as creative as possible in designing courses. Going to shifts, in particular, has enabled FSI to maximize the number of students in incentive languages such as Arabic and Chinese. But as anyone who has tried to get on one of the late afternoon shuttles back to Rosslyn and Main State, eat lunch in the cafeteria between noon and 1 p.m. F O C U S J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 19