The Foreign Service Journal, October 2008

nation and inspired a generation of American youth to consider inter- national public service. According to Senator Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., it was the accomplishment of which his brother was most proud. Under the leadership of the Peace Corps’ first director, Pres. Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, the number of volunteers quickly grew to 16,000. By the 1970s, however, the Peace Corps’ popularity waned as opposition to the Vietnam War grew, along with general mistrust of government programs. Appropriations declined, the number of volunteers fell to around 6,000, and the orga- nization receded from public view. During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Peace Corps experienced some growth, to around 7,000 volunteers. But it has been under the current administration that the agency has received its strongest support in recent years. It currently fields about 8,000 volunteers, the largest number since the 1970s, in 74 countries. Falling Short of Its Potential Even so, many supporters believe the Peace Corps is falling well short of its potential. Pres. Clinton called for 10,000 Peace Corps Volunteers, and President George W. Bush was even more ambitious, proposing expansion to 14,000 volunteers. The problem in meeting such goals has not been inability to attract recruits or a lack of demand for their services, but insufficient congressional appropriations. Quantity is not the only area in which the agency is falling short of its potential; there are quality issues, as well. Even those who are friendly to the concept of the Peace Corps and want to see it strengthened, not abol- ished, have pointed out problems such as: • Unwillingness to close high- cost programs and deploy volun- teers flexibly, where they can have the greatest impact; • Inadequate support and super- vision for volunteers in many pro- grams; • Uneven quality and high turn- over of staff (at least partially because of the Peace Corps’ rule that staff members can serve no longer than five years, in order to preclude the develop- ment of a career — and careerist — bureaucracy); and • Mediocre leadership by most of the political appointees at Peace Corps headquarters in recent years. For more details, see “Think Again: The Peace Corps” in the April issue of Foreign Policy by Robert Strauss, a former Peace Corps country director in Cameroon who is now a well-informed and thoughtful critic of the agency ( www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms. php?story_id=4295). The Right Stuff? One of the problems Strauss flags is volunteer quali- ty. The recruitment process is not very selective, he says, and during his tenure as country director he found there were only “a few highly motivated and capable individu- als.” He states that the “vast majority … weren’t sure what to do with their lives, were fresh out of school and seeking a government-subsidized travel experience or something to bolster their resumés,” or were looking for a way “to escape a humdrum life or recent divorce.” Admittedly, any assessment of this sort is highly sub- jective. I can only report my own, far different, evalua- tion of the quality of the 434 volunteers I led as Peace Corps country director in Niger from 2000 to 2006. Having come to the position from a university job, my frame of reference for assessing the volunteers was pri- marily graduate students, people of comparable age and background. In general, I found the Peace Corps Volunteers to be at least their equal in intellectual abili- ty and far superior in motivation, dedication and charac- ter. And the better I got to know them, the more I admired and respected them. Niger presents arguably the most difficult environ- F O C U S 28 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 Even those who are friendly to the concept of the Peace Corps and want to see it strengthened, not abolished, have pointed out problems. James R. Bullington was a Foreign Service officer from 1962 to 1989, serving as ambassador to Burundi among many other postings. After a stint in academia, he was Peace Corps country director in Niamey from 2000 to 2006, an experience he recounts in Adventures in Service with Peace Corps in Niger (BookSurge Publishing, 2007). Ambassador Bullington is currently editor of the online magazine American Diplomacy (www.american diplomacy.org ).