Internationalisation and the Making of Global Citizens

Keynote Address
Academic Cooperation Association
Berlin, 19 May 2007

It is a privilege for an American cousin to be given this hallowed space in your program.  It is also a first for me.  Usually, I am dessert – or the only thing preventing an audience from having it.  I don’t quite know how I will explain to my colleagues back home that  this time the ACA organizers were so worried about what I might say (or fail to say) that they put me in between two unforgettable musical performances.

When I began typing the theme of this Conference, "The Many Faces of Internationalisation," my computer told me that I had misspelled the word "internationalization."  That is a good place to start my remarks.  As heads of organizations that are involved in promoting international education, all of us – especially those on the next session’s panel – are also a bit like the proverbial American and Englishman of whom Bernard Shaw once said "were two people divided by a common language."  There are indeed many meanings of internationalization among us here and in use today.  But, as I will argue, there are still not enough advocates for actually accomplishing it.

For only the second time in a thousand years, most scholars are agreed on the proposition that the world is flat.  I had my own flat world experience just a few months ago in Singapore. Alighting from a taxi at the entrance to the new Lee Kuan Yew Graduate School of Public Policy, a young Vietnamese woman said: "Professor Goodman: do you remember me?"  I did, in fact, because just 18 months before, she had interviewed me in Hanoi for the online journal of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, where she worked as a reporter.  At the end of the interview, she asked about graduate schools and scholarships.  We talked a lot about America but I also recommended she look into the Lee Kwan Yew School in Singapore.  She is now finishing her first year in the Master’s program there.  And since they have an exchange agreement with the School of Public and International Affairs at Columbia, she has applied to do her second year in New York.  So one face of internationalization is that to a growing number of students, the world is indeed flat.

Another face is that it is not flat enough. 

Of the 200 sovereign states that exist today, in only twenty of them does the enrollment of international students exceed 1%.  Three-quarters of all these students head for just five countries: the U.S., UK, Germany, France, and Australia.  And while the U.S. is the leading destination, over half of all the students who come to us attend just 150 of our 4,000 accredited colleges and universities.

As this decade began, many American colleges and universities changed their "view books" to stress the importance of internationalization and how the campus and the curriculum were aiming at making students into global citizens.  We did this in response to a myriad of reports and strategic planning exercises, the findings of the annual survey of college bound high school seniors which began to show that well over half expected to study abroad, and out of a sense that the world was going our way in any case.  As administrators, we also knew that we were becoming ever more dependent on legions of Indian and Chinese graduate students to serve as teaching assistants in the science labs and section leaders in the economics and finance courses that were becoming so popular.  But with less than 3% of the American professorate having been born in other countries and less than 1% of our students studying abroad during any given year, it can also be said that internationalization turned out to be only skin deep.

The least pretty face of internationalization for me, consequently, is that no matter how you spell it, there are many faculty members who do not believe it is an essential part of what it means to become educated.  This is perhaps our greatest and common challenge. 

As much as I wish more Americans would study abroad and as sure as I am that many more students will come to all of our countries, I have come to realize that it is the current generation of faculty who are falling behind.  Sometimes this is because we think (as faculty) that our books and journals are the only ones that ought to be read.  Sometimes it is because there appears to be no place or time in the curriculum for study abroad.  At other times, it is because we do not know where to send our students for a quality experience.  Or we do not think that any academic experience could be as good as the one a young person gets in Cambridge Massachusetts.  And for many faculty, coming as I do from a country where until recently only 20% of our citizens even had a passport, it may be because we have ourselves not traveled abroad.

The conjunction of all these dynamics has a profound effect on Americans.  As the latest surveys from the National Geographic Society indicate, most Americans are un-informed about the world.  Sixty percent today still cannot find Iraq on a map; Seventy-five percent can’t locate Iran, Israel, or North Korea.  Fifty percent can’t find New York City, either.  Forty percent think Rwanda is not in Africa and twenty percent think that the continent’s largest country, Sudan, is in Asia.  No wonder that the most recent study by the National Research Council of the National Academies on “International Education and Foreign Languages” begins with the finding that "A pervasive lack of knowledge about foreign cultures and foreign languages threatens the security of the United States as well as its ability to compete in the global marketplace and produce an informed citizenry."

There is a poem by Rilke that captures, for me, what is still to be done about internationalization.

Again and again in history, some people wake up.
They have no ground in the crowd
And they move to broader, deeper laws.
The future speaks ruthlessly through them.
They change the world.

All of us need to lead in our countries to make better global citizens.  When we do that, we will know yet another – and perhaps the most important – face of internationalization.

To conclude, I want to return to the challenge facing my own country.  While there is considerable debate about when the world discovered America, there is less controversy over when America discovered the world. 

It may surprise you to know that even before we were a country, we were concerned about keeping the world at bay.  In a commencement address at the College of William and Mary, in 1699, the speaker opined that "learning abroad only meant time lost in travel, exposure to disease, corruption of morals, and loss of wealth and riches" and urged young Virginians to remain at home.  And even Thomas Jefferson, who knew so much of the world, was equally wary.  He built the University of Virginia, in part, to prevent sending Americans abroad les they acquire "a fondness for luxury and dissipation, became fascinated with the privileges of the European aristocrats, contracted a partiality for monarchy … ."  Over many years, many other leading figures in higher education agreed. 

So for much of our history, in fact, educators were not preoccupied with the title of my talk.  Now, of course, it is hard to find a mission statement or strategic plan that does not say one of the purposes of education is to create globally aware, competent international citizens.  We have never needed such citizens and these values more.  They remain in short supply, as do places where Americans, especially, can go to study.  My colleagues and I, consequently, are extremely grateful to the people of Europe for opening their doors through programs like Fulbright and Erasmus Mundus, which make it possible for our emerging leaders and the successor generation to better understand the world we share and to do so before we start trying to change it.