The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2006

Coombs as a predator. Elsewhere, Rep. John J. Rooney, D-N.Y., of the House Appropriations Committee, used Coombs for his annual game of death by a thousand cuts. True, Coombs was no incrementalist. With the economist’s mathematical certain- ty and the short time-frames of any appointee, he could seem impatient — even Fulbright urged him to suffer the uninformed. Eyes on the horizon, Coombs did not see his support falling away. Washington was not entirely ready for new frontiers. After State, Coombs found his niche. His calm post-mortem, The Fourth Dimension of Foreign Policy (Council on Foreign Relations, 1964), was, in its time, the best book ever written in any country on the diploma- cy of education and culture. In Paris, he founded UNESCO’s Institute for International Educational Planning: until 1968, Coombs was unofficial “Dean of Education” to the world. Since 1963, IIEP has trained more than 5,000 planners, who today hold senior positions in educational man- agement and teaching in 190 coun- tries. The World Crisis in Education (Oxford University Press, 1968), vali- dated 15 years later by an updated vol- ume, is the world’s leading textbook on educational costs. Events today have shown that the submersion of culture and education in a propaganda framework, perpetu- ated in the phrase “public diplomacy,” sells both sides short. Propaganda — or spin — is indispensable, especially in time of war. But wars come and go, whereas the need for intercultural communication never ends. For Coombs, education provided an appropriate, enduring, unthreatening, productive and decent way of linking U.S. power with the world. The goal: to lead universities in a grand attack on ignorance, obscurantism and intoler- ance. For Coombs, sharing education was a low-cost way of dealing with cul- tural clash, over time. And it maxi- mized America’s greatest wealth: edu- cation and its deep-dyed traditions of humanizing power. Richard T. Arndt FSO, retired Denver, Colo. 10 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 6 L E T T E R S Send your letters to: journal@afsa.org . Note that all letters are subject to editing for style, format and length.