The Role of Universities in a Global Community

President J. Michael Adams delivered the keynote address at the Northeast Asian Forum of University Presidents on May 22, 2006, in Seoul, South Korea.

Our Connected World

On February 5, 1997, Somprasong Land, a large Thai property development company, failed to meet its interest obligation on Eurobonds. That one crisis frightened the Thai stock market. On March 3^rd Finance Minister Viravan suspended trading in bank and financial shares for one day. The following five days saw depositors withdraw an estimated $1.2 billion from finance companies. The stock market dropped to a five-year low and, by the middle of the spring, Thailand’s largest finance company, Finance One, was bankrupt.

The impact spread quickly to other nations. Banks cut back on loans and rapidly raised interest rates. Companies and financial institutions fell throughout East Asia. For example, South Korea’s third largest carmaker, Kia Motors, asked for emergency loans and was eventually taken over by Hyundai. Investors lost confidence and rushed to take their money elsewhere. The value of currencies plummeted. Stock markets crashed.

What started as a local financial crisis in Thailand quickly became regional in its devastation and global in its impact. Within two years, Malaysia’s economy shrank by 25 percent, South Korea’s by 45 percent and Indonesia’s by 80 percent.

Because of so many integrated links, economic aftershocks spread to other regions and were felt in Russia and Brazil. The same banks that held Thai baht also held Brazilian reales. The crisis eventually caused the single biggest point loss ever of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the New York Stock Exchange suspended trading.

In an interconnected economic world, we are all vulnerable.

On a warm August afternoon in 2003, a few failed transmission lines in the American state of Ohio started a chain reaction that, in a matter of minutes, shut down power in eight Midwestern and Northeastern states and Canada.

The massive blackout knocked out a hundred power plants, closed 12 airports, and cost at least $6 billion. More than 50 million people were without power — some for as long as two days. In an interconnected, technological world we are all vulnerable.

Like our economic system and our energy grid, our human network has grown closer. The potential for dangerous chain reactions exists in nearly every sphere of life. The disease SARS spread to 30 countries in three months. Avian flu appears to be similarly spreading from nation to nation. Terrorists plot, plan and strike people everywhere. Poverty breeds desperation in the human community, while pollution and global warming emerge as conspicuous companions around the world.

But not everything is black or white. These connections can also be positive.

They can help us advance global causes, and thereby advance our personal hopes. Economic ties have generated great growth and production, helping to raise the living standards for millions. Technological connections have helped us to spread new ideas, communicate closely with each other and provided greater access to information and education. Democracy, once the exception, is now the norm around the world. Citizens groups have grown in size and stature, and increasingly have the power to influence governments, shape market realities and help determine global health, labor and environmental standards.

These connections carry with them the promise of a better world. But to fulfill the promise of this connected world, we have to understand what is going on. The most common characteristic of these connections is that they pass borders without review — no passport required. That means that we will only solve world problems and maximize benefits for our species by working beyond national borders, cultural boundaries and personal biases.

As world educators and university leaders we have the responsibility to prepare our students to survive and succeed in this new, interconnected world.

The Role of Education

In The Outline of History (1920), H.G. Wells wrote, “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

It’s a tragic but undeniable fact that some institutions designed to school the leaders of tomorrow often cannot escape from the past. There is a rigid set of assumptions that many educators will not reconsider. They’re often guilty of using yesterday’s answers for today’s questions.

Required reading for those interested in educational reform should be The Saber-Tooth Curriculum by J. Abner Peddiwell [a.k.a. Harold Benjamin]. Published in 1939, and even more relevant today, the book offers a tongue-in-cheek description of a supposed groundbreaking discovery of the Paleolithic school system. According to Peddiwell’s “research,” the original purpose of schooling was to provide basic life skills to young people:

• Saber-tooth tiger scaring
• Fish-grabbing
• Clubbing woolly-horses

The entire education system was built around developing these core skills.

As the ice age passed, the saber-tooth tigers succumbed to pneumonia, silt from receding glaciers made streams too murky to see fish and the small horses went east to the dry plains. Yet, Peddiwell described, schools continued teaching the same basic life skills, maintaining that they defined an educated person. Educators who suggested there was no relationship between real life and fish-grabbing were branded as heretics.

While written as a humorous satire, Benjamin’s message is painfully current 67 years later. Education must become more flexible and begin adapting to the world of today and tomorrow. That means having the courage to rephrase the routine questions and alter the usual vocabulary. It means changing the foundation of the formula, building more bridges between people and cultures and ensuring we produce citizens of the world.

Yet schools and colleges have been slow to respond to globalization, and many continue to provide a saber-tooth curriculum.

Many prominent educators believe that schools should first and foremost develop loyal citizens with a strong sense of national identity. These are important lessons, and we must cherish and help develop local, national and regional communities. However, schools need to balance the celebrations of national heritage with sharing stories from other nations, cultures and peoples.

The challenge is great, but there is no other option. We must be global or risk being irrelevant. Like it or not, we live in a global community. We must update the saber-tooth curriculum or suffer the fate of the saber-tooth tiger.

Human destinies are connected in ways never before imagined, so we must learn about each other. Most of the corporate community understands the need for adaptation. They understand the global playing field. They know that events around the world influence their business. They cross the globe in search of profits and develop relationships and bonds everywhere.

If we want to ensure humanity’s prosperity and address the complex challenges of the 21^st century, we must help students understand and be able to work with others from around the world. And, if we want our students to be successful professionals, we had better teach them about our world.

The world has changed, and we as educators must understand what those changes mean, or our students never will.

Preparing World Citizens

We’ve had centuries to develop bonds of nationalism, and schools and universities have helped to create a strong sense of national community and national identity. But today, in our interconnected and interdependent world, we have to expand our sphere of consideration and develop a sense of world citizenship.

A world citizen is someone who understands the interconnected nature of our planet. A world citizen can retain pride as a Korean, a Thai, an American or a Chinese, while simultaneously adding a level of attachment that recognizes that we are all in this together. A world citizen is committed to acting on behalf of humanity everywhere.

World citizenship is not a new idea. Advocates range from the Greek Stoics and Confucius to Martin Luther King, Jr. Many great thinkers across centuries and cultures have spoken to the spirit of the concept.

“No man is an island … any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

John Donne, Devotions (XVII),1624

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham City Jail, 1963

“… mankind’s sole salvation lies in everyone making everything his business; in the people of the East being vitally concerned with what is thought in the West, the people of the West vitally concerned with what goes on in the East.”

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Noble Lecture Address, 1970

“When a certain community is destroyed, in reality it destroys a part of all of us. Any conflict within humanity should be considered a family conflict.”

The Dalai Lama, 2006

Certainly, we enjoy many different cultural traditions but we also share many values and common needs and desires. As Confucius wrote, we are “close to one another by nature.” And because of the level of connections today, it is obvious we now share the same destiny aboard this planet. In the words of the Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore, “The time has come to make another great moral adjustment which will comprehend the whole world and not fractional groups of nationality.”

It’s all about connections.

The Importance of Leadership

We must teach our students to become world citizens. There are many ways to do this, and there are many paths to a global education. But it starts with us. It starts with strong leaders who can help create the environment in which students might learn about the world beyond the horizon and prosper as world citizens.

How should we proceed? I believe as presidents we must make bold moves to foster and implement a global education for our students. I believe we have a unique opportunity to improve our students, our institutions and our world.

1)      Presidents must make a clear personal statement about the importance of students learning about other cultures, countries and people.

2)      Presidents must make an institutional declaration that guides our colleagues in their actions and interactions.

3)      Presidents must identify and encourage talented faculty to create unique learning environments on campus and connections to the larger world.

4)      Presidents must build upon their traditions and use their local resources, as well as take advantage of the latest technological tools.

At Fairleigh Dickinson University, we had a tradition of international learning for more than 60 years, but we felt we needed to formalize our commitment.

So, in 2000, we adopted a new mission:

Fairleigh Dickinson University is a center of academic excellence dedicated to the preparation of world citizens through global education.

From there, we encouraged faculty and provided them the support and direction to help breathe life into the mission. Some of our changes have been extraordinary, particularly our use of technology to foster greater connections with other cultures. For example, we became the first traditional university to require that all undergraduate students take one online learning course per year. We use distance learning to bring the world to our students.

We introduced the concept of Global Virtual Faculty™ and now have 50 experts from around the world under contract. Individuals such as:

• An economics professor from Malaysia
• An English literature expert from Jamaica
• The editor-in-chief of the Times of India

These individuals collaborate online with our campus-based faculty. The point is to help students understand that where you sit in this world influences how you see the problem — and possible solutions.

We are located close to the United Nations, so we regularly bring ambassadors to campus — over the past four years we have hosted more than 60 ambassadors and heads of states.

Building upon your own resources and traditions, you can create many different opportunities for students to learn about people from around the world and to make connections with those in other lands.

The Promise of the Future

Kwame Anthony Appiah is an extraordinary man. Raised in Ghana, with a mother who was British, he learned early on that having multiple identities and understanding different cultures is a source of great joy and satisfaction. We can all take joy in our separate identities and the many facets of those identities, while still remembering what we have in common.

Appiah is now a professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, not far from Fairleigh Dickinson. In his latest book, he says the challenge — and it’s really our challenge as educators — “is to take minds and hearts formed over the long millennia of living in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become.”

We are the ones who can make this possible. Higher education has the opportunity for a leadership role.We can build more bridges between people and cultures, and prepare citizens of the world. Gandhi said, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” We can do it.

Appiah adds that in our interconnected world, “Conversations across boundaries can be delightful, or just vexing: what they mainly are, though, is inevitable.” In this new world, we WILL come into contact with each other. And when we do, we don’t have to agree, but we have to understand each other.

Our students — the next generation — must solve very difficult problems. To solve these problems, they must work together across cultures and countries.

I believe that the leaders in this room and the many great educators throughout the world can help our students understand each other and understand how our lives are connected. If we succeed, our great hopes for the future of humanity will be fulfilled.