Academic ambassadors in the Middle East: The university contract program in Turkey and Iran, 1950--1970

This dissertation examines the performance of American university advisors in the administration of technical assistance to Turkey and Iran during the first two decades of the Cold War. University advisors sought to improve and expand both formal and informal educational opportunities by demonstrating to Turks and Iranians pedagogical and administrative practices that had worked well in the United States. In so doing, most American university personnel acted in good faith and showed a genuine concern for improving quality of life for the Turks and Iranians with whom they worked. But these academic ambassadors had to negotiate cultural traditions that they did not fully understand, and they lacked a mechanism for altering the basic values in Turkish and Iranian society. As a result, the university contract program was only partially successful in encouraging educational improvements in these two countries.;American advisors achieved their most significant successes when they allowed host country officials a high degree of control over technical assistance projects even if that meant the net result would be a different kind of educational reform or institution than they had originally intended to create. The reality that some techniques that worked well in the United States would not do so abroad and the modest size of the technical assistance project also combined to limit American influence on education reform and expansion in these two countries.