Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU)
 
 

Academic Convocation Address,
October 3, 2001, at Fairleigh Dickinson University

Michael Sperling, Associate Provost for Interdisciplinary, Distributed and Global Learning
 

. . . it’s vital that Fairleigh Dickinson dedicate itself to forging the real distinctions between globalization and global education.

 FDU · Global Education · globaleducation.edu · GVF · help

Globalization Versus Global Education

That we live in the best of times and the worst of times has never had more meaning in my lifetime than over the past four weeks.  This simultaneity has been hard to bear.  Much has changed.  There is loss all around.  There have been moments for most of us when routine activities seem to have a pointlessness to them.  There has been an increased turning toward and reliance on those we love.  And there has been an increased urgency to the local and international dialogue on the meanings and motivations behind this state of affairs.  What we are left with is a veneer of anxiety, ready at any moment to metamorphose back into fear. 

At the same time, our rich lives demand living and response.  I think of Martin Buber’s characterization of the creative process: “This is the eternal source of art: a man is faced by a form which desires to be made through him into a work.  This form is no offspring of his soul, but is an appearance which steps up to it and demands of it the effective power.”  The world in front of us now demands such effective power.  We are confronted by disturbing forms of structures collapsed, families numb with disbelief, and a nation and world in crisis.  I ask myself daily if something useful will ever emerge from this horror – as there could be no better way to memorialize the enormous loss.  Such a process wouldn’t emanate from armies, but from the spirit and action of all the souls on earth and their collective institutions and organizations.  In our institution, Fairleigh Dickinson University, effective power means offering our students a rich teaching/learning environment, and in the process enriching and transforming our own professional lives.  It also means having commitments, and one of our prime commitments is to cultivate a global education, to educate our students as world citizens.  We do this through the medium of ideas, our gold standard.

Globalization

Globalization has become a common idea in national and international dialogue in recent years.  Global education has become a common idea at Fairleigh Dickinson University.  But what do we mean when we invoke each of these terms, and is there really any meaningful distinction between the two?  I’d like to spend a few minutes, emphasis on a few, offering some sense of what these two terms refer to and how they do, or don’t, correspond.  The foundation for these thoughts emerged from a great experience I shared during the summer of 2000 with eleven faculty colleagues on a week-long retreat at Wroxton.  We did that week what academics at their best do best, we wrestled with and challenged each other on ideas, and then vetted those ideas in the context of university curricular and policy action.  We also did what needed to be done as aspiring practitioners of British culture, we retired to the North Arms pub across the street from the College most evenings.

Globalization’s shifting and controversial parameters make it difficult to define.  It is clearly a dominant force, both positively and negatively, shaping the multiple environments in which we live.  Motivated by economic forces and driven by digital technologies and communications, globalization links individuals and institutions across the world with unprecedented interconnection and immediacy. In doing so, it in some ways democratizes and intensifies interdependence, and in other ways creates new forms of local reaction and self-definition.  While it may spread certain freedoms, higher living standards, and a sense of international relatedness, it also threatens the globe with a conformist “universal” economy and culture rooted in North American and Western ideas and interests.

Despite the ambiguities in definition and significance, and the anxieties and backlashes it generates, globalization will remain a dominant paradigm for the foreseeable future.  We have seen this fact horrifically reified in our national tragedy over the past several weeks.  Especially in America, which is so closely associated with economic and cultural globalization, the task of higher education must include the examination of and reflection on globalization as a force shaping the world in which we live.

Global Education

Global education, as a distinct construct from globalization, does what higher education has traditionally aimed to do: extend students’ awareness of the world in which they live by opening them to the diverse heritage of human thought, action, and creativity.  Global education places particular emphasis on the changes in communication and relationships among people throughout the world, highlighting such issues as human conflict, economic systems, human rights and social justice, human commonality and diversity, literatures and cultures, and the impact of the technological revolution.  While it continues to depend on the traditional branches of specialist knowledge, global education seeks to weaken the boundaries between disciplines and encourages emphasis on what interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary studies can bring to the understanding and solution of human problems.  Global education also implies, and should teach our students, that not everyone around the world in fact views global education with indifference – some may see it as a vehicle for promotion of globalization, which might itself be seen as the West’s effort to destabilize fragile balances in world economic and political systems.

At a time, such as this, when we feel increasingly and often indiscriminately awash with information, and when we sense a decentralization of the traditional forms of political and intellectual authority, global education places a premium on the ability to think critically and ethically.  The ability to effectively access, interpret, evaluate and apply information is essential for facing a constantly changing work environment, for continuing self-education, and for participation as an ethical and responsible member of a global society.  A global education can also be an antidote to the sadly universal human tendency to lose track of the experiences of others as seen through their eyes.  This loss of empathy is often fueled by an antipathy toward authority that seems to leave us always prepared to cheer the downfall of “the big guy on the block.”  Consider the reaction of many around the world now to their perception of the “deflating” of America – yet how many of these individuals would encounter a family grieving over the loss of a loved one in the World Trade Center and say that they deserve to be in pain, that their loved one deserved to die?  No country, and none of us, is immune from this loss of empathic vision.

In trying to elucidate the concepts of globalization and global education, what I have begun to argue for is that juxtaposing them is, to some extent, misguided.  Globalization is an inter-national and intra-national force, while global education is a teaching/learning paradigm.  Thus, their areas of focus are in different domains.  Perhaps not quite apples and oranges, but at the least apples and pears.  Yet global education to many around the world merely invokes the notion of globalization with all its potentially American-centric and negative attributions.  Thus, one of the biggest challenges in realizing the distinction is that unlike global education, globalization is an inherently anxiety-provoking term.  While it frames the world in communal terms, it also, and more explosively, threatens many with a loss of individuality.

The Leader's Task

As the leader in global education, it’s vital that Fairleigh Dickinson dedicate itself to forging the real distinctions between globalization and global education.  Being the leader is a moniker that we have to grow into.  Notwithstanding a solid foundation from our institution’s beginnings, each of us needs to forge a new understanding and commitment for what global education should come to mean.  Given the events of the past few weeks, it seems to me that global education’s emphasis on the appreciation of multiple perspectives is more crucial than ever.  As we face a justified national swell of anger and indignation, we must not let this drown out the need to keep vigilant in our examination of our place in the world and to comprehend the multiple causalities consistent with this.  I believe world citizenship demands that we be able to tolerate the ambiguity of both punishing injustice and simultaneously understanding its causes.

Fairleigh Dickinson is certainly not the first higher education institution to invoke the term global education, yet we can be the leader in its implementation.  It’s similar to what the beaver said to the rabbit as they stared up at the immense earthworks of the Hoover Dam:  “No, I didn’t actually build it – but it’s based loosely on an idea of mine.”  I believe that our university will build the Hoover dam of global education through efforts such as our new global virtual faculty program.  When you bring together, as we have done this fall semester, thirteen adjunct scholars and practitioners from around the world in partnership with twelve of our faculty teaching sections of the first distance learning course, The Global Challenge, an experience of creative synergy is almost irrepressible.  In the past two weeks, on the shared listserv for both on-site and global virtual faculty teaching The Global Challenge, the dialogue has been enriching.  It underscores the very simple fact that we need to talk to each other, to see the world through the eyes of others.  In the absence of this, we remain myopically self-referential.  As globalization takes hold, the world needs global education now more than ever, and, in higher education, FDU can, and will, be a leader.
 


FDU · Global Education · globaleducation.edu · GVF · help
Copyright © 1998-2001, Fairleigh Dickinson University.  Information on the FDU web pages is provided as a convenience for the University community and others seeking information.  While the University intends the information distributed here to be accurate and timely, it is the responsibility of  the user to verify the information. [Latest update 011004]