THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2025 77 AFSA NEWS Honoring Fallen Colleagues At its September 17, 2025, meeting, the AFSA Governing Board approved the addition of three names to the Virtual AFSA Memorial Plaque. These three Foreign Service officers, all of whom died overseas while serving with the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), are Francis P. Corrigan Jr., who died in an airplane crash during official travel in Laos in 1961; William H. Lewis, who died of cerebral malaria in Ghana in 1963; and Wayne A. Wilcox, who died in an airplane crash during official travel in France in 1974. Their names were not inscribed on the AFSA Memorial Plaques at the time of their deaths because AFSA had adopted more restrictive inscription criteria at that time. In 2001 AFSA restored the more inclusive criteria dating from the plaque’s inception in 1933 but did not review the names on the USIA Memorial Wall, which had been moved to the State Department’s C Street lobby in 1999, to determine if all who now qualified had been honored by AFSA. AFSA Awards and Plaques Committee chair John Naland and volunteer researcher FSO Lindsay Henderson recently conducted that review, prompting the addition of the three fallen USIA colleagues to the virtual plaque. In 2021 AFSA decided to honor any newly discovered deaths from past AFSA Responds to FSOT Changes On September 5, the State Department announced major updates to the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT). The updated exam, scheduled to be administered for the first time October 18-25, will feature a new logic and reasoning section, discontinue the situational judgment section and personal narrative essays, and refine the job knowledge and English expression portions to better align with job requirements. In a press release on the same day, AFSA strongly objected to one element of the rollout: the department’s new requirement that all candidates currently on the Foreign Service Officer register must retake the FSOT to remain eligible for selection. AFSA stated that the abrupt, retroactive change “abandons merit-based principles while putting an unfair burden on those who have already satisfied all the requirements to get into the Service.” AFSA warned that this reversal undermines trust in the fairness and consistency of the hiring process, sending the message that “rules change without warning” and that “merit matters only when convenient.” To read the full release, visit https://afsa.org/press. n decades on a virtual plaque to save space on the physical plaques for the names of current and future Foreign Service members who die in circumstances distinctive to overseas service. Eight colleagues are now honored on the virtual plaque. Anticipating that researchers in coming years will discover additional qualifying deaths from past decades, the Governing Board also instructed AFSA staff to inform a future board if the number of names on the virtual plaque ever reaches 26, enough to fill one of the three currently blank plaques in the C Street lobby. If in the intervening years relatively few additional contemporary deaths have been inscribed on the physical plaques, a future Governing Board may choose to approve inscription of the 26 virtual plaque names in chronological order on one of the blank physical plaques. To see the virtual plaque, visit https://afsa.org/ virtual-afsa-memorialplaque. n
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