The Henry Luce Foundation has awarded NIU’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies a grant of $572,000.

“Eight centers (including NIU’s) known for their SEA programs were invited to apply for the grant,” said Michael Aung-Thwin, director of NIU’s center.

Besides NIU, the Universities of Michigan, Wisconsin, California-Berkeley and Hawaii; and Yale, Cornell and Ohio Universities were invited to apply for the four and one-half million dollars, he said.

“Everyone got a chunk of it, but we got a chunk at the top,” Aung-Thwin said.

The reason NIU recieved such a big chunk was because the center submitted a proposal showing it had a strong program. He also said the center received the grant because of NIU’s commitment and support and because of the center’s creativity.

Clark Neher, professor and chairman of NIU’s political science department, said the reason NIU was recognized was because, “We have the strongest Southeast Asian program.

He attributes it also to the quality of the faculty and students involved.

Neher has been an associate for SEA studies for 18 years. He teaches an undergraduate course—Government and Politics of Southeast Asia. He also teaches graduate seminars.

Aung-Thwin said three faculty positions will be created with the money awarded. “There will be a position in Burmese Language and Literature, an anthropologist in religious studies contributing to a general education course as well as an anthropology class in Southeast Asia, and a curator for the Donn Hart Southeast Asian collection in the Founders Memorial Library,” he said.

He said the general education course, Southeast Asia: Crossroads of the World, is taught by 23 faculty members of different departments.

Aung-Thwin said, “The center is an administrative body and not a department.”

Because the center is not a department, each course is filed according to the discipline, he said.

“The collection (Hart’s SEA collection in the library) contains 41,000 volumes of works on Southeast Asia and is represented with seven or eight different languages,” Aung-Thwin said.

It is progressed in Thai and Indonesian languages and newly with Burmese, he said.

NIU’S SEA program offers a summer institute which includes other universities known for their SEA programs.

Aung-Thwin said, “It is intensive training in Southeast Asian languages which rotates from university to university who offer the program.”

When a student cannot fulfill the language requirement during the year because of other obligations, they can have the language under their belt in a ten-week intensive study, he said.

“In ‘86-’87 we hosted it and in ‘88-’89 University of Hawaii- Honolulu will be hosting it,” Aung-Thwin said.

The last time it was tallied there were at least 63 courses related to SEA, he said.