U.S. ambassador to Mongolia visits WWU
Jonathan Addleton, the U.S. ambassador to Mongolia, visited Western’s campus on Thursday, March 4. He met with Western faculty, staff and students and toured the campus.
“We were pleased to welcome Ambassador Addleton to the Western campus and to share with him some of the innovative teaching and research activities taking place here in International Studies generally and with specific regard to Mongolia,” said Doug Nord, director of Western’s Center for International Studies.
Ambassador Addleton viewed Western’s current work in International Studies and East Asian Studies and visited a class on Mongolian language offered by Professor Ed Vajda. This introductory class (35 students) represents the largest number of students studying Mongolian at any university in the United States. Funding for this course comes via a Title VI grant ($175,000) from U.S. Department of Education’s Undergraduate International Education and Foreign Language Program that the Center for International Studies received this past August to enhance international studies offerings and foreign language courses on campus. The title of the grant is “Entering the Global Community: Enhancing Student and Faculty Involvement in Asia-Pacific Studies.”
The ambassador also visited Western Libraries, which houses the largest collection of books on Mongolia in North America.
“Mongolians as a people have been experiencing significant economic, social and environmental change over the past two decades and our developing links with them allow us to better understand the challenges they have confronted and the opportunities for collaborative interaction that are before us today,” Nord said.
Prior to his current assignment, Ambassador Addleton served as the USAID Mission Director in Ulaanbaatar (2001-2004). Addleton has been a career member of the U.S. Foreign Service since 1984. Previous assignments include service as USAID Representative to the European Union in Belgium; USAID Mission Director in Pakistan, Cambodia, and Mongolia; and USAID Program Officer in Jordan, Kazakhstan, South Africa, and Yemen. During his previous three-year tenure in Mongolia (2001-2004), he traveled extensively within the country and was involved in a number of USAID-funded programs, including the revitalization of Xaan Bank as well as small business development through the Ger and Gobi initiatives.
Western offers a program in Mongolian Studies and Western Libraries houses a collection broadly representative of all parts of Mongolia; it also has many works on the Buryat, Kalmyk, Oirat, Daghur, Dongxiang, Engger (Eastern Yugur) and other Mongolian groups. In 1989, a survey was conducted of Mongolian holdings at libraries in the United States and Canada. The result, based on figures supplied by each library and published in the newsletter of the Mongolia Society, revealed that the largest category, defined as having more than 500 titles, includes only Western Washington University, with approximately 2,800 titles, and the Library of Congress. In 1990 the American government recognized the national importance of Western Washington University's Mongolia Program by awarding a major grant to assist in the library acquisitioning process and the publication of a printed catalog.
