The committee's charge was to think big thoughts, to imagine a future beyond the solutions and definitions of the present, to project W&L's involvement in the outside world into the next decade and beyond. The liberal education we offer our students is supposed to provide them with intellectual perspectives and general skills which will enable them to meet challenges we only dimly imagine. We congratulate ourselves on a challenging and supportive learning environment, rich in resources, but at the same time we decry the comfortable insularity and homogeneity that characterize a substantial part of the W&L experience. So we have to ask what we're not doing very well, where the holes are in what we offer and what we teach, and what our students do not have exposure to in four years in Lexington. Obviously, some areas of expertise and disciplines are beyond the scope of a small liberal arts institution, but our scale also facilitates a certain flexibility and innovative spirit that larger institutions might well envy.
The original (May 1999) proposal for Global Studies arose from my observation that
Most of our students don't know much about the world outside the United States, and the existing structure of disciplines and majors and general education requirements seems to conspire to keep it that way. There doesn't seem to be room for courses and resource development to support teaching in the global realm of how do we think about the world?
I think of Global Studies as an integral part of General Education in the first two years of study, as a part of the process of building the intellectual capital (including understanding of context, skill with analytical tools, and experience with public presentation) which will inform the choice of major, of intellectual focus, and of career choice. In this context, I imagine a range of issue-focused (and thus generally trans-disciplinary, and collaboratively-taught) courses which address on a world scale the historical, contemporary, and prospective problems of
vital issues and processes such as demography, urbanization, human rights, health, modernization, infrastructural development, industrialization, food production, communication, technology, education, and ecological change [my May 1999 list, just a beginning --I imagine courses as focused as The AIDS Epidemic, as broad-ranging as Global Communication, as specialized as The Electron].Such courses would deal with real-world problems which are (in most cases) beyond the expertise of any one person or department, and benefit greatly from multiple perspectives. Collaborations between sciences (natural and social) and humanities are easily imagined, and would be broadening and even fun for instructors as well as for students. These courses would emphasize how to set about the study of complex problems, and would deal with data, teaching exploratory and analytical skills applicable to most other subjects that students will encounter in subsequent courses.
This part of Global and International Studies is explicitly aimed at the Freshman year, during which students engage in all sorts of reality testing and make basic decisions on the paths they will follow in subsequent years. Courses with transdisciplinary and global perspective would provide immediate context for the development of international interests and concerns, and lead to better informed decisions about international studies and programs. There could certainly be upper level Global Studies courses, focused on specific problems or tools (like remote sensing), but primary direction to freshmen seems likely to produce interesting and even unique results.
Because we understand from Dean Boetsch that additional faculty positions are unlikely, the scheme I have in mind is closely connected to the reform of General Education (Dean Boetsch estimates that discussion on this reform will take place during the 2002-3 academic year), but its beginnings need not be delayed until then. Interdisciplinary and University Scholars courses and existing Programs (Environmental Studies, Poverty, perhaps others as well) might offer testbeds for course development, with minimal external support. Much of the necessary support software (such as ArcView GIS for mapping, and various database and statistical packages) is already available, and the elements of the requisite information infrastructure (databases, library and media facilities) are present or under development.
Interdisciplinary collaboration between W&L faculty would be fostered by approved niches, such as a General Education designation for Global Studies that escapes the stranglehold of Social Science OR Natural Science OR Humanities. The time-tested institutional reification of these categories blinds us to the obvious fact that many interesting problems and questions escape their constraints. Why shouldn't General Education be issue-focused instead of discipline-focused? We need to escape from the (mistaken, but widely accepted) definition of General Education as something to be endured, a smattering of the humanities for pre-meds and a lab science experience for C-School types.
If we wish to encourage more international collaboration and to remove the (apparent perception of) disadvantage to those who raise their noses from campus and disciplinary grindstones, a Global and International Studies Program should make available funds for
A Global and International Studies Program should be able to fund both ends of an international collaboration, allowing a W&L faculty member to propose a visit to another institution and providing full support for a reciprocal visit to W&L. I imagine these exchanges as 2-4 week visits, outside the familiar sabbatical structure, and built around research and teaching interests of collaborators. The disciplinary connections thus established might result in exchanges of students or to other continuing alliances between persons and institutions. The point here is to provide the seed money to foster collaboration by exchange, emphasizing the prospective benefits to W&L.
It is necessary to develop expertise in global and transdisciplinary questions, by combining existing skills and interests and fostering innovative research and teaching. This requires an administratively and financially supportive environment for the development of new courses. Collaborations in the classroom usually emerge from conversations among friends, but what feeds them is the sense that the results would be appreciated by students, and recognized as legitimate activity by colleagues. Identity as a liberal arts institution that especially values teaching should make W&L likely setting for this sort of enterprise, but time (release time from courses for study and planning, time away from research) is the most common reason I've heard for the low frequency of classroom collaboration. Just how to deal with this escapes me --perhaps some sort of Dean's (or, rather, Deans') Challenge Fund to consider proposals for collaborations and participate in interdepartmental reorganizations to accomodate successful proposals? Strategic short-term use of visiting faculty positions to bridge the development of the Program? Creative administration is probably as important as monetary support in this arena.Since a net increase in staff and number of courses taught is not likely, in the long term the pool of teaching hours would come primarily from reorganization of the existing structure of General Education, and especially from artful collaborations under sections 4, 5 and 6 (Humanities, Science and Mathematics, Social Sciences).
For students: incentives could include --as a part of the courses-- the opportunity to develop (competitive) proposals for "mini-Watson" experiences (international travel, internships, etc.) which program funding would support during the summer following the course. Such a possibility would accomplish several desirable goals: getting more people involved in focused and relevant international experience earlier, providing a larger pool of students who actively think and talk about international subjects, and building an experiential base for later Watson proposals. The administrative costs of judging proposals and administering funds would be more than compensated by the resulting interest and involvement in real-world problems and issues.
- Place international topics and resources before students earlier and in problem-focused contexts
- Develop skills in locating and managing information necessary to adopt a global perspective, emphasizing practical familiarity with tools for
in at least one of the global issues described above.
- finding information about,
- handling data to describe and analyze, and
- making public presentation of findings
(Practical familiarity emphasizes the hands-on skills akin to those gained in lab science courses, and takes the student through the process of problem definition, research, and communication. In principle, these skills are transferable to later work in disciplines, and explicitly include material sometimes labelled as "library", "quantitative", and "computer" skills)
- Offer direct experience with multiple perspectives on and intellectual frameworks for analysis of contemporary real-world problems. This includes the vital skills of evaluating and integrating alternative explanations and changing the scope (world, continental, national, regional, local) of investigation.
(Appreciation for complexity and interconnectedness is the point here, rather than the search for solutions. The lesson is often that it's necessary to seek outside perspectives, to gather more information and learn from unexpected sources)
- Encourage broadened geographical knowledge, acquired in the context of analysis of concrete problems of transnational scope.
(This is a stalking horse for one of my personal crusades, the raising of spatial consciousness. We're not going to have a Geography department, but it's really much more important to get maps, map use, and map consciousness into other departments. ArcView is an important piece of that, because it provides the wherewithal to manipulate and distribute geographical information, but what I really want to encourage is a much higher level of basic what's-where knowledge and why-it-matters awareness)
Other programs that may be useful for some aspects of what they seem to be doing are Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Research (www.systems.org) and Dartmouth (www.dartmouth.edu/~asia/GlobalST.htm). Others on my list of programs should also be investigated, though many of them are really "International Studies" masquerading as "Global" --they seem to lack explicit connection to world data.
We also need to look into past and present W&L efforts in the areas of Program development and collaborative, cross-listed, and interdisciplinary courses, to see how they were arranged and how they are actually conducted. Chemistry 110 (Chemistry of the Earth), Physics/Chemistry 104 (Conceptual Foundations of Quantum Theory), Politics/Journalism 203 (State and Local Government), Economics/Management 201 and 203 (Statistics, Quantitative Models), Journalism/Law 399 (Contemporary Problems in Law and Journalism) are collaborations I find in the 1999-2000 course listings.