Lecture at the Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award Presentation
Tufts University
November 18, 2004

The Closing of the American Mind: A Progress Report

By Dr. Allan E. Goodman

President and CEO, Institute of International Education

I am honored to have my name linked to Jean Mayer’s. He thought across disciplines and cultures. And Mayer’s career and contributions are wonderful examples of how America benefits from opening our doors to international students. Of course he did it the hard way by escaping from a WWII prison camp and traveling with forged papers to get to the U.S. He studied at Yale and the Sorbonne and went on to fight to alleviate famine in the U.S. and overseas. His mind was open and eager to experience the world, and he urged all with whom he came in contact to do the same.

And I was particularly pleased to receive this invitation to speak tonight since it falls during the nation’s fifth marking of International Education Week. This “IEW“ began with a conference the Institute hosted at the National Press Club in Washington on the value of international education to American higher education and the release of our annual “Open Doors” census of student flows to and from the United States. My colleagues and I also addressed all of the new consular officers being trained at the Foreign Service Institute on the importance of international education to America. And the week will end for me tomorrow at a speech in Philadelphia to a regional conference of foreign student advisors who have served so well in challenging times to keep our academic doors open.

The week is also a little bit like the World Series. The United States declared the week for the whole world, nearly all of its events take place in America, and all involve only American institutions. But I am complaining neither about the outcome of the Series nor the award. The focus on international education is needed more than ever, especially at home.

Those of us in the field tend to forget how unconnected most Americans still are to the world. Eight-seven percent of college-educated adults cannot find Iraq on a map. Eighty-three percent of our citizens do not have a passport; and half of those who do are either over 60 or under 5 years of age. Seventy percent of Americans today can neither name the president of Russia nor identify the job that Kofi Annan holds. Sixty percent believe we have a fully-functioning anti-missile shield that is protecting us as we speak from terrorists and rouge states. And at the school – sometimes known as the Fletcher on the Potomac -- where I served as a dean before coming to the Institute, usually only 3 out of 300 of the world’s smartest freshmen can pass a world geography placement test. And those three tend not to be U.S. citizens.

Becoming the world’s sole superpower has not coincided with greater American understanding of world. Recent events in Iraq, the Middle East, and Africa underscore this point. Media coverage of international news is actually at an all-time low. And while foreign policy figured prominently in the election, twice as many voters ranked domestic issues as their top concerns compared to those who cited either the war on terrorism or the situation in Iraq.

Professor Allan Bloom holds the university -- and the forces of insulation and isolation at play within it -- directly responsible for our closed-mindedness on many fronts. I think he is right.

While the United States is the number one destination of students from other countries, according to the Institute's "Open Doors 2004" report (which we publish with support from the Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs), half of the nearly 600,000 foreign students that study here do so in only 125 institutions. Nation-wide, international students account for only about 4 percent of total enrollment. This means that most Americans are in school with other Americans and that in most classrooms there is no international or intercultural perspective. What is missing is what Professor Bloom said was so precious about a college student's intellectual space and time: "These are charmed years when he can, if he so chooses, become anything he wishes and when he has the opportunity to survey his alternatives, not merely those current in his time or provided by careers, but those available to him as a human being. The importance of these years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization's only chance to get to him."

Americans are profoundly and historically ambivalent about civilization. Thomas Jefferson, for example, built the University of Virginia to prevent young Americans from getting too much of it in Europe lest they develop “a fondness for luxury and dissipation, became fascinated with the privileges of the European aristocrats, contracted a partiality for monarchy and were drawn into a spirit of female intrigue, destructive of their own and others’ happiness.” These views were shared, in fact, by all the great founding fathers of American higher education and prevailed for nearly two centuries. Junior Year Study Abroad was only invented in 1923 and, for many years, involved just 12 schools. And today, when we debate civilization-type matters we do so along the lines of whether or not we are either the proverbial last word on the subject (e.g., as “end of history” adherents argue) or in the midst of an epochal clash (in which the adversary is not very civilized).

One of the least threatening ways that civilization comes at us is still in the classroom and around the coffee bar on a college campus. The encounter in a seminar discussion or in a study group that an American might have with a foreign student introduces not only different and more ways of working on and solving a problem but also entirely different ways of thinking. Such interaction –which, of course lies at the heart of the EPIIC Program here -- has the capacity to introduce the idea that civilization matters and that there may be more than one of them at work in the world.

I also know that no one who studies abroad remains unchanged by the experience. Part of the change that occurs is the widening of a person's intellectual horizons and a dissolving of borders and boundaries. As the late Senator J. William Fulbright put it, "nations are transformed into people." There is something profoundly civilizing about that, too.

But civilization in the sense of which I am speaking is still not reaching American students today. And, despite the fact that many colleges and universities now have an aspiration to be full players in this era of globalization in their mission statement, there is little prospect that American students' stunningly limited contact with the world and opportunity for immersion in another culture will increase substantially without dramatic action. In “Open Doors” this week, we reported a major increase – 8.5% -- in the number of Americans studying abroad. But the number still amounts to less than 1% of all our citizens enrolled in higher education.

Some trend lines, in fact, are even pointing in the wrong direction. According to a new report on "Internationalization of U.S. Higher Education," undertaken by the American Council on Education as part of a Ford Foundation project, for example, the number of students enrolled in foreign language courses has declined by fifty percent since the high-water mark of 16% in the 1960s. In the same time period, the number of colleges and universities that required the study of a foreign language for admission also declined from one-third to one-fifth. In the sixties (a decade which Professor Bloom mainly deplores), almost 90 percent of the 4-year colleges in the United States had a language requirement for graduation. Today the figure is under 60 percent and well under 10 percent for those who actually require the student to take college level courses rather than pass a proficiency exam. This is, perhaps, a reflection of trends in the faculty where, as a number of reports have found, "United States scholars are less likely than most other world scholars to regard international activity as important. They are the least likely to work abroad, collaborate with scholars abroad, or express interest in literature from abroad." The ACE study also found that 90% of U.S. institutions did not take a faculty member’s international work or activities into account in promotion and tenure decisions and that for those schools where an international course requirement existed, just taking one did the trick for two-thirds of them.

But even if Americans do not study abroad in large numbers, there is a dynamic that could make our universities more international.

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. At present, about 100 million students are enrolled in post-secondary educational institutions. By 2025, this number could be three times bigger.

Most universities outside the U.S. 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 has 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. Together, the states of California and New York have 254 accredited colleges and universities. Only 9 countries have more than that.

America today has over 4,000 accredited institutions of higher education. That represents about one-third of the entire world’s capacity. While there is much talk these days about other countries competing with the U.S. for international students, neither the 39 universities of Australia nor the 259 in the United Kingdom have the capacity to absorb the numbers that we do. If every school in the United States that did not already have 100 international students enrolled aimed to get to that number, some 3,000 U.S. higher educational institutions would be involved in reaching out to the world.

To Americans today, "abroad" still denotes a place primarily for vacation rather than learning.To change this outlook in the successor generation, we need to change what we define as an educated person to include study outside America not as a luxury or an option but as a core requirement. The scholarship programs like the Fulbright, Rhodes, Marshall, and Gilman – and initiatives like EPIIC and the Tufts International Research Program which received the Institute’s Heiskell Prize -- that promote the exchange of people and ideas, and promote study abroad, are thus the leading edge of a paradigm shift. Perhaps more than anything else they hold the key to whether or not the generation of Americans we are now educating will prosper in an age when the most critical success factor for countries as well as companies are people whose minds are open to the world.

Jean Mayer would have been the first to understand that.