Since I can't be at our next meeting I want to summarize the important things I heard at UVa. I'm sure that William and Steve heard some other messages and would summarize differently, but you'll hear them directly.Pretty much every speaker made some reference to (a) globalization and (b) multidisciplinarity, and several talked explicitly about the necessity for universities (and academic disciplines) to "change what they teach" (John Casteen, President of UVa), both by broadening the scope of individual and departmental interests and competencies and by interdisciplinary cooperation. The challenge is to "engage the university in real problems" and "focus on problems that happen in international space, generated by international dynamics" (Sheila Biddle, Columbia), and "to make the apparently distant relevant" (Richard Guerrant, UVa Medical School).
I want to go into some detail on the remarks of three of the speakers whose specific examples of subjects and approaches seem to me especially relevant to how we might think about the prospects and means of providing more global and international content to the W&L community. It's not irrelevant that all three are from the sciences, usually thought of as the disciplines most difficult to involve in international and interdisciplinary initiatives.
Donald Kennedy, biologist , President Emeritus and now Bing Professor of Environmental Science at Stanford, described his own path into international subjects (he now teaches a Freshman seminar on environmental problems), impelled by the necessity to situate his own work in evolutionary biology in the real world. He used rubber as an extended example of the necessity for a multidisciplinary view, sketching the development from 19th century beginnings as a wild crop gathered in Brazil by slaughter-tapping, through Henry Ford's attempts to establish plantations in Brazil (a fungus blight put an end to that), the theft of seed by the British and development of rubber clones at Kew Gardens and their export to Ceylon and Malaya, the chemical saga of the WWII race to develop synthetic rubber... and on to the story of importation to the US of tire casings from Japan, with larvae of the mosquito Aedes albopictus as hitchhikers, and their apparent role in the spread of several diseases (malaria, dengue fever, the recent encephalitis/virus outbreak in New York), and the precautions taken by Malaysia to decontaminate airline passengers arriving from South America who might be carrying spores of the blight fungus. This tale of how we have changed global biota and global economy is easily replicable in other realms, the point being that no single perspective is adequate to construct an understanding of the story: it's transdisciplinary, a real-world problem, with all sorts of ramifications that exemplify the sort of thing would make an exemplary centerpiece for a cross-disciplinary course for freshmen. Kennedy didn't include a number of other related tales --20th century rubber slavery in the Belgian Congo (root cause of many of the problems of today's Zaire/Congo), the story of "development" in Southeast Asia and Liberia, or tire fires in various places in the US.
Richard Guerrant, Director of the Office of International Health in the Division of Geographic and Internal Medicine at UVa, a self-proclaimed "diarrhea guy", talked about a 20+ year collaboration in Fortaleza North East Brazil), which assesses the social costs of pre-2 year diarrhea, malnutrition, and impairment of child development, and exemplifies the importance of "making the apparently distant relevant" to the education of North American students. He stressed the importance of putting together multiple perspectives to deal with real-world problems, and said that in his experience, international activity was not "downtime" for academics --indeed, "the best UP time" for scholars is working in international areas.
Bo Sundkvist, Vice-Chancellor of University of Uppsala, former Dean of the Faculty of Science and Technology and Dean of Physics, described several international collaborations of the University of Uppsala, remarkable for their breadth and variety: (1) a largely-undergraduate Baltic University program, focused on the problems of the Baltic drainage basin and involving 3000 students in 160 universities in 14 countries, with courses distributed by satellite TV, video, and computer conferencin g, in English. (2) the International Science Program, which has cooperative arrangements in physical and chemical sciences, mostly in MSc and PhD programs, with a large number of African countries, and (3) Uppsala's Center for Environment and Development Studies, which grew out of student demand and initiative (on the model of the University of Bologna in the 13th century, where students hired professors). The point here is that even so staid and ancient a foundation as Uppsala has found the organizational means and flexibility to embark on remarkable new programs, based in collaboration.
Among other subjects addressed by speakers: the thread of interinstitutional collaboration (partnership, engagement) was repeated several times, leading me to wonder what the range of W&L's interinstitutional arrangements includes.
Several speakers described developments in language teaching at other universities. Particularly interesting was a program called Speaking Freely at NYU (described by Matthew Santirocco, NYU Dean of Arts and Sciences), which offers extraordinarily popular non-credit opportunities for students to experiment with a wide range of languages, some of which aren't taught at NYU. It seems to me that W&L could offer something similar by a modest investment in CD-ROM and other 'teach yourself' materials in languages we don't teach. The question of measurement of effective language competence was discussed by Daniel Davidson (American Councils for International Education), with the clear (and data-supported) conclusion that a semester abroad rarely leads to the leap to real communication effectiveness, for which a year of immersion language study is necessary. It's unlikely that many W&L students would wish to make that sort of time investment during their four years, so we have even more reason to explore other means to augment language teaching.
Listening to a day and a half of presentations further clarified for me what I think are some of the goals and purposes of "internationalization", and means for accomplishment at W&L:
To accomplish these objectives it's necessary to get to students earlier. Everything I heard suggests that curricular reform is essential, changing what we teach to "build in positive incentives for international contacts, working and living" (Mary McDonnell, SSRC), for students and faculty alike. No mean task --and the Freshman Year and General Education seem to me the likely loci for such change, especially given the disciplinary narrowing that several speakers noted for recent decades.
All in all, a useful day and a half. I'm encouraged that so many universities seem to be grappling with the same questions, delighted to hear some of my pet ideas about the importance of global education echoed by so many high-toned folks, and rather discouraged by the scope and scale of the transformational task at W&L.