We are delighted to report that the Institute for South Asia Studies (ISAS) received news this week of our receipt of two critical federal government awards.
This weekend, we got word that ISAS was again designated by the Department of Education as a National Resource Center (NRC) for South Asia. The NRC program has been important to ensuring the global diversity of United States university research, teaching, and community outreach. Many strong South Asia programs around the country compete to be National Resource Centers. Berkeley's selection is testimony to the great strength of its faculty and students, its deep community support and oversight, and the commitment of administrators across campus to sustaining our over one hundred years of leadership in South Asia scholarship and its broad dissemination. And we are grateful to the exceptionally dedicated and hard-working people both at the Department of Education and in Congress for sustaining the NRC Program. We cannot underestimate the importance of these grants. At Berkeley, it has enabled the Institute to focus attention in both research and teaching to emerging areas of scholarship across the sciences and engineering, the social sciences, and the humanities. It has enabled us to build links to community colleges and primary and secondary schools and to teachers. It has helped support the fantastic ISAS staff whose knowledge and skill have brought diverse faculty and student resources and the wonderful, broad, and passionate Bay Area community committed to cutting edge work and programs on South Asia.
We also received the news that we were again designated by the Department of Education as the recipient of the Foreign Language and Area Studies Program Fellowship, or FLAS. The FLAS enables students--both graduate students and exceptional undergraduates, in both primary research and professional fields--to study language intensively and to link language study to focused regional study relevant to that language. It is a critical support to training students rigorously and to supporting them with scholarship, particularly for the public university system. FLAS, along with the dedicated support of the Bay Area community, has enabled this campus to be a national center for so many South Asian languages, including Bangla, Hindi, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telegu, and Urdu.
Again, thanks to all of you for it is your record of work that has enabled us to receive these two prestigious and urgently important awards.
