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that was favourable to the rise of the left, which had not collaborated with the Imperial Japanese forces. No other region in the world had this profile.
    The US actively worked to counteract this trend, with the formation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), and open and covert interventions in Burma, Indochina, Indonesia, the Philippines and even Siam. American state anxiety about Southeast Asia increased rapidly in the 1960s with the disastrous Vietnam War, which later engulfed both Laos and Cambodia. The irony was that this war, which Southeast Asia scholars mostly opposed, was also the source of the rise of well-funded Southeast Asia programs across the US. But after the American defeat in 1975–76, there was a popular revulsion, and for a long time few people wanted to think about Southeast Asia. State and private financial support began to dry up. Excellent students of the region who were unlucky enough to finish their PhDs in the late 1970s and early 1980s found it very difficult to get academic jobs in America. Many moved to Australia, the UK, New Zealand or Canada. Others were forced to seek careers in the civil service, the diplomatic corps, UN agencies, big corporations and even the CIA. Besides, not only Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia but also Burma were now completely closed to American researchers. Enrolments fell, and new students, often asinterested in MAs as in PhDs, were less focused on scholarly careers and more on practical training for professional work in medicine, development assistance and so forth. It was really not till the late 1980s, when Southeast Asia emerged – briefly, and only in some places – as a newly industrializing tiger economy (following Japan, Korea and Taiwan), that Southeast Asian studies really made a comeback. In the field of political science, ‘political economy’ became all the rage.
    By comparison with other area studies, Southeast Asian studies, by its very novelty, came to be threatened by a serious structural problem which has only recently been resolved. When the small founding generation of scholars began to retire in the 1980s, it often happened that universities decided not to replace them, but rather to invest in other fields and specializations. More importantly, the bulk of academic specialists on Southeast Asia had been recruited, very young, during the Vietnam War and the Great Boom. Most of this generation did not start to retire till near the end of the twentieth century. The result was a kind of ‘lost generation’ – highly qualified youngsters who could not get the jobs they deserved because of the peculiar top-heavy age structure of the faculty pyramid (in long-established fields, with normal pyramids, they would have had little trouble). Hence it was common to find programs in the early 1990s with distinguished elderly professors and excellent young ones, and very few people in between.
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    This chapter has mainly been about global political and economic changes, large institutions and structures, and educational policies in connection with the development of the Southeast Asia program at Cornell University. To provide a link between the first chapter and the one that follows, on my experiences doing fieldwork in different parts of Southeast Asia, let me conclude here with some personal recollections.
    At the beginning I felt very lost. In the Cornell department of government I was expected not only to help teach undergraduates comparative politics, American politics (America evidently could not be compared!) and political theory – about which I knew next to nothing – but to take graduate courses in these fields as well. I was a real ‘baby’, only twenty-one years old, extremely ignorant, and with no competence at all in any Southeast Asian language. But student solidarity was amazingly strong. The older students were really like elder brothers and sisters, patiently teaching me, guiding me,