Cornell recently celebrated a milestone: Its Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) has been designated a U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center (NRC) and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Center for 50 years. The Department of Education held a national conference to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Title VI funding March 19-21 in Washington, D.C.

The competitive NRC program provides grants to institutions of higher education to establish, strengthen and operate comprehensive undergraduate centers that are national resources for teaching modern foreign languages, especially the less commonly taught languages; international studies; conducting research; and more. The FLAS program provides grants to institutions for fellowships to graduate students engaged in foreign language or international studies.

SEAP's 18 core and five emeritus faculty members along with six instructors of less commonly taught Southeast Asian languages have collective knowledge of the region that amounts to one of the world's greatest concentrations of expertise on Southeast Asia. SEAP also boasts two outstanding resources: the John M. Echols Collection on Southeast Asia, the largest collections on the region (more 446,000 monographs, many in indigenous languages) and the George McT. Kahin Center for Advanced Research on Southeast Asia, which houses SEAP graduate students, visiting fellows and scholars, faculty members and SEAP's publication and outreach offices.

Along with SEAP, Cornell's Mario Einaudi Center's East Asia Program, South Asia Program and the Institute for European Studies have all received the NRC designation and FLAS grants. Annually the grants support 34 graduate students and 18 students with summer stipends, bringing $2.7 million to campus each year.