The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2005

to do but absorb the lectures and look happy.” In the 1920s a train- ing school instructed new officers, but there was no provision for advanced training until the Foreign Service Act of 1946 formally man- dated the establishment of such a facility. Today, nearly six decades later, all members of the Foreign Service at all levels, along with their Civil Service colleagues and Foreign Service Nationals, are expected to hone their professional skills and acquire new ones throughout their careers. While a good deal of that learning happens on the job and on the employee’s own time, of course, the Foreign Service Institute is charged with designing and providing formal instruction to all employees of foreign affairs agencies. More than a decade after FSI’s move to Arlington Hall, we look back at how the institution has evolved and examine how well it is fulfilling its mission today. To assist in this endeavor, we sent an AFSANET message to mem- bers inviting them to share their own experiences with FSI and Foreign Service training. (See p. 32 for a com- pilation of those responses.) FSI’s Early Years The original Foreign Service Institute, founded in 1947, was in the Mayfair Building at 2115 C Street NW, near the new War Building, which was about to become the center of State Department operations. The facility included four schools: Basic Officer Training, Advanced Officer Training, Management and Administrative Training and Language Training. From the beginning, FSI sought to utilize state-of- the-art technology to facilitate learning. Thus, under its first director, Dr. Henry Smith Jr., the School of Language Training incorporated intensive methods of language instruction that only the armed forces used at the time. Smith acquired $10,000 worth of basic manu- als and phonograph records from the U.S. Army, and invested $30,000 more in record players, SoundScriber tape recording machines and other equipment. Those initial efforts were not sustained, however. The 1954 Wriston Report assessing the State Department’s management severe- ly criticized the insufficient amount of support and resources devoted to the fledgling Foreign Service Institute. The following year, the Mayfair Building underwent a complete renovation, and the training pro- gram was revitalized as well, with old courses revamped and a combination of new, shorter courses and longer specialized training added. For the first time, courses were open to wives. The new program included three periods of concentrated, full-time training — for new officers, for those in mid-career, and for senior officers. There was constant emphasis on increasing language skills. Debate continued, however, over training needs — the amount and timing of training, who should be trained and how best to do it all. Meanwhile, the training program shifted from one temporary location to another, eventually migrating from Washington, D.C., to two State Department annex build- ings in Arlington, Va.: SA-3 and SA-15. In 1986, even as plans were under way to move FSI to its current site at Arlington Hall, professional training once again got a new look, with new classes and a new curriculum that moved away from the traditional lecture-based format. For instance, in “ConGen Rosslyn” (still going strong today), future consular officers play-acted as an American in a foreign jail and an official who has come to visit. The new approaches to training were welcome, but as former FSI Director Brandon Grove acknowledged in a 1993 interview (see p. 22), there was a more fundamen- tal problem: “The training conditions at FSI Rosslyn [were] just awful. An environment does not determine what you can do, but it conditions the way you do it and how you feel about your work.” He then predicted: “Training provided at Arlington Hall will transform the Foreign Service.” The Big Move One major attraction of the new site was that Arlington Hall was designed to be a campus. Originally F O C U S 18 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 5 From the beginning, FSI sought to utilize state-of-the-art technology to facilitate learning. Steven Alan Honley, a Foreign Service officer from 1985 to 1997, is the editor of the Journal . During his time in the Service, he studied three languages (Spanish, French and Russian) and took several profes- sional and area studies courses at the Foreign Service Institute, both at the Shultz Training Center and FSI’s old home in Rosslyn.