" . . . as I could not and did not aspire to venture beyond my little plot of cultivated land, all I had left was the possibility of digging down, underneath, towards the roots. My own but also the world's."
- from the 1998 Nobel Prize Lecture of Jose Saramago
Citing these particular words of this brilliant novelist may at first seem a strange choice to open a conference on the future of international educational exchange in an era of globalization. But what Saramago has consistently found is a global perspective about people, places and things. He just does it unconventionally and, what is especially appealing, he practices his craft without regard to the conventional boundaries (including geo-political ones) that separate people and cultures.
There are many moments during the period of their fellowship, I suspect, that the students and scholars we have the honor to serve find themselves searching for meaning in ways and in a sequence that would not immediately occur to us as practical. For many, the value of the experience is only clear after they have returned home. But whenever it occurs, the "digging down" is almost invariably transforming. As I am going to argue, nothing could be more important for the world. It gives the successor generation the chance, as Saramago put it elsewhere in his Nobel prize lecture, "to revise the future."
We Can Do That?
What is equally amazing is that the "little plot of cultivated land" where much of this is going to take place for Fulbrighters is the "modern" university.
I put the word "modern" in quotation marks because I am not sure about how ready universities are for globalization. For nearly a thousand years now, campuses have been defined by their walls and towers and are renown for the separation of the faculty and students from the life and commerce of the town. The chief academic officers of most American universities are even today called Provosts, a medieval word meaning the keeper of a prison. Elsewhere, the counterpart term of "rector" is used, which also has a medieval origin and denotes the spiritual head of a church parish. While we may think of our great research universities as having given birth to the modern (and all the technology that underpins it today), higher education is among the last to adopt changes in the society at large and the academic disciplines exist, in part, to protect themselves from forces just like that of globalization: unpredictable and especially potent at breaking down barriers and borders.
In sum, those who live and work inside universities are not unlike the inhabitants of the marvelous Iberian stone raft about which Saramago writes in one of his novels: oblivious to the pandemonium they may cause.
It is not surprising, then, that in perhaps the single best book about understanding globalization, The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman, the word education is not mentioned even once in the index. This compares with 50 citations for Internet, 16 for McDonald's, and 11 for Microsoft Corporation. There is, in fact, still surprisingly little discussion of the role education can and will play in the 21st century. This means that as an industry our customers are way ahead of us in preparing themselves for what is coming. One of the prime ways, in fact, that the successor generation is getting ready for life and work in an era of globalization is to seek study and teaching opportunities outside the culture in which they were originally educated. The demand for such opportunities will only increase. For our part, we have to make sure that as students and scholars participate in programs such as Fulbright, their home campuses and future employers highly value the experience and credential.
What's Ahead?
The Fulbright opportunity also will have an impact on one other set of problems being created by globalization. According to the research department at IIE, sometime between 2020 and 2035, more people will be ready for post-secondary education than went to university in all of human history. And as the President of the World Bank observed recently, we are heading into "a world where the communications revolution holds out the promise of universal access to knowledge."
The conjunction of these two dynamics is not entirely good news. At present, some 88 million students are enrolled in post-secondary educational institutions. Most universities are already operating at full capacity and those systems that have the resources to grow may well be located in the wrong place. American and European universities enroll more than half of all students but two thirds of the world's college-age population lives elsewhere. Only 7 percent of China's college age population have been able to find a seat in Chinese universities, and unfortunately there are fewer seats in all of that country's universities than there are in California. Qualified applicants already outnumber the seats available just about everywhere; but in many developing countries, the ratio is 60:1. Moreover, no country appears to have the resources to build campuses and train professors fast enough to meet demand.
The problem is that by 2010, the worldwide demand for higher education will increase to 100 million persons, according to a recent study by the British government. And by 2025, this number could be as high as 125 million.
The demands of globalization are likely to require that students learn to learn in ways and about things that extend beyond their borders, creating virtually everywhere unprecedented levels of mobility. Fulbrighters will be a key resource in helping universities adjust to these dynamics.
As this happens, like most other features of globalization, there is likely to be a backlash against America. The Minister of Education of France already believes that Europe needs to launch a counterattack. "That our students go and study in the United States and Britain is entirely desirable, but that Americans install their universities throughout the world, all on the same model and with the same courses, is a catastrophe." Assuring that such a polarizing event does not occur involves thinking of education as a global commodity and promoting what Simon Schwartzman has called the "universalization" of many things in higher education but especially the transparency of standards and unfettered access to distance learning. Again, Fulbrighters can help assure that such developments occur by creating new courses that draw from the best of a number of systems and disciplines.
Educational exchange, in fact, may turn out to be the way new fields of intercultural knowledge are invented. For example, I think the kind of exchange experiences that our organizations sponsor and facilitate are already helping to lay the groundwork for the following inter-disciplinary disciplines:
- - financial anthropology. It is now clear that markets, businesses, and banks of all types are exerting unprecedentedly powerful forces on governments, societies, and people. These dynamics are re-defining loyalties and generally flattening the hierarchies (gender, age, experience) that used to determine status and power. Because this is a transnational phenomenon, it cannot be studied in a single discipline, much less in a single country.
- - transnational demography. There are massive populations shifts underway that affect virtually everything that governments can do. The age, health, and location (rural vs. urban, homeless vs. sheltered, and the whole range of factors that affect mobility) of people may well define the limits for public policy and the responsibility of governments to provide security and prosperity. How these dynamics play out may increasingly have to be studied by examining units of analysis (such as Kenichi Omae's "region state") that do not involve (and are not constrained by) the nation state at all.
- - globalization sociology. We now know that globalization has not been kind to all countries or lifted all markets, and also that some initially very American things (e.g., McDonalds in East Asia, KFC in the Middle East and North Africa, and Nike apparel everywhere) get morphed in ways that enable consumers to think of them as part and parcel of the local culture. Understanding these mechanics will be as important to the future business leader who wants to successfully market a product as to a diplomat who wishes to restore peace or improve international relations. You cannot gain that understanding by virtual reality; it takes living in another society.
The returning Fulbright student and scholar will increasingly be bringing back a new knowledge base that is both interdisciplinary and intercultural. Appended to this essay are a list of thought-provoking books and articles where these themes and subjects are explored and which might also make up a "summer reading" list for Fulbrighters after they have had the experience in order to help them internalize and sort out the ways in which the perspectives they will have gained can make a difference in the societies to which they are returning.
Implications for Fulbright Commissions
When the headquarters of the IIE were built, the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations was Adlai Stevenson and he gave the dedication lecture. His words then still explain much about the special role that our organizations play:
" . . . education is . . . the process of acquiring knowledge and then communicating it, so that, generation by generation, a great deposit of shared understanding is accumulated, a universal city of the mind arises, insight by insight, discovery by discovery."
Programs that promote the international exchange of people and ideas are the intellectual power lines and thoroughfares of the future. The Fulbright Program sets a world standard for how those capacities ought to be constructed. It has the advantage, through your existence, of drawing on the best minds and resources for making this happen in even better and more profound ways in a century where knowledge has become a global commodity.
The work of the commissions represented here is thus central to shaping the future.
The binational concept that is at the core of your functioning will be more important than ever before in assuring that as higher education globalizes, it does not do so in a way that is complicated by the perception that this is just another facet of America's superpower status. At its root, binationalism - one of the first initiatives taken on a regional basis by the Institute when in the 1920s and early 1930s we helped established binational centers in Latin America - is about mutual understanding. We promote it because the result of the process is likely to contribute much more to human progress than if educational systems were restricted in their development to the influences and discoveries that happen only within the borders of one country.
In perhaps no other aspect of international relations does mutual understanding carry with it such potential for positive change. As Senator Fulbright liked to remind us, international educational exchange transforms nations into people and humanizes international relations with a certainty that no other form of diplomacy or interaction between societies can offer. Nothing could do more to make the world of this century a less dangerous place.
"Summer-after" Reading List
- Philip G. Altbach and Patti McGill Peterson, eds., "Higher Education in the 21st Century: Global Challenge and National Response," (New York: Institute of International Education, 1999)
- Montserrat Guibernau I Berdun, "Nations Without States: Political Communities in a Global Age," (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1999).
- Derek Bok, "Universities and the Future of America," (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1990).
- Paulo Coelho, "The Alchemist," (San Francisco: Harpers, 1993)
- Council on Foreign Relations, "The Future of the International Financial Architecture," (www.cfr.org)
- Peter F. Drucker, "Post Capitalist Society," (New York: Harperbusiness, 1993).
- Francis Fukuyama, "The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order," (New York: The Free Press, 1999).
- Allan E. Goodman, "A Brief History of the Future," (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1993).
- Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, eds., "Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress," (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
- Henry Kaufman, "Of Money and Markets," (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000).
- Nicholas Negrponte, "Being Digital," (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).
- Kenichi Omae, "The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy," (New York: Harperbusiness, 1999) and "The Invisible Continent: Four Strategic Imperatives of the New Economy," (New York: Harperbusiness, 2000).
- Jose Saramago, "The Stone Raft," (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995).
- Amartya Sen, "Development as Freedom," (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).
- James L. Watson, "Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia," (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
