Art of overseasmanship: American at work abroad

"If we were talking about training Senators, for example, where would we begin?"
With this apparently irrelevant question, Dr. Henry Wriston helped set the tone for a Conference on Americans At Work Abroad, held in March, 1957, by the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Thirty-five men of wisdom and of experience in overseas operations. drawn from public agencies, voluntary and private enterprises, and the universities, came together at Syracuse to discuss a national research project on the Education and Training of Americans for Public Service Abroad, begun in the autumn of 1956 by the Maxwell School at Syracuse, and sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Senators are not normally "trained"; they just happen. So it is with most of the 100,000 American civilians who today are serving abroad and the thou sands more who join them every year. There is, by common observation, a large and growing "training gap" resulting from the explosive growth of American operations abroad and the natural lag in the adaptation of the American educational system to this new state of affairs.
The first research task was therefore to examine the new size and shape of our overseas establishment-the spectacular increase in the numbers of Americans overseas and the even more dramatic change in the character of what they are doing. Some of the preliminary findings of fact-limited to civilians abroad and excluding military personnel are presented in Part One of this volume.