This month, the federal government notified national resource centers at the University that the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship program will no longer be funded.
The fellowship, which has sponsored University students since the ’60s, allocates funding to students studying foreign languages or area studies. The program prioritizes the study of Less Commonly Taught Languages.
Under the University’s Illinois Global Institute, six Title VI-funded national resource centers offer FLAS to students: the Center for Global Studies, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, European Union Center, Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Center for African Studies and the Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian Center.
Funding for FLAS is awarded to universities in four-year cycles, and 2025-2026 would be the final year of this cycle. Administrators typically receive notification of funding during the summer, but this past summer ended without any communication from the federal government.
According to Maureen Marshall, deputy director at Illinois Global Institute, 53 students at the University were recommended for FLAS for the 2025-2026 academic year. But without communication regarding funding, students and administrators were unsure about the future of the program.
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“We have students who decided to leave the University because they didn’t know if they were going to have funding or not,” said Kasia Szremski, associate director for the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
Two weeks ago, the cultural centers received a Noncontinuation of Award notification from the Department of Education. The notification said that they would no longer be funding FLAS fellows at the school.
“What that letter basically communicated is that the Department of Education no longer sees the FLAS program as being supportive of American values or national interests, so they will not be funding the program going forward,” Szremski said.
Some cultural centers have carryover funds from last year, which will be used to sponsor some fellows, but not all will have this opportunity.
The future of the program is deeply personal for Sylvia Techmanski, senior in LAS and AHS. Her family has had to seek alternative funding for her education since her father lost his job two months ago. She hopes to become a speech-language pathologist for Portuguese and Spanish-speaking families, which will necessitate graduate school for her.
“I’ve been taking Portuguese classes for the past three years now,” Techmanski said in an interview with The Daily Illini. “I have a lot of connections in Rio, where I studied, and Brazilians that live here. I’m very invested in Brazilian families and helping their children preserve Portuguese as they’re acquiring English as a speech-language pathologist.”
Techmanski was a FLAS fellow last year. She will be receiving carryover funding from the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies this year.
“I am very grateful that Dr. Szremski has been able to offer me and a handful of other students the fellowship for this year using the rollover from previous years,” Techmanski wrote in an email following the notification. “Additionally, I am worried that FLAS will not be renewed for the next four years, thus having an impact on my graduate school funding.”
The program facilitates the “development of a pool of international experts to meet national needs,” according to the ED website. Fellows have historically gone on to work in national security and international business, as well as providing language services in multicultural communities like Champaign-Urbana.
Szremski said it’s possible that the FLAS program will be funded in the future through new appropriation bills, though she thinks it’s unlikely during this administration.
“Regardless of what the current administration thinks, the government does need people who speak foreign languages and have expertise in other areas,” Szremski said.
