Dear Colleagues,

Washington Retrospective

WELCOME BY SAI FELICIA KRISHNA-HENSEL

Dear Colleagues,

This is the “finest hour” of the second international Millennium Conference. It is the “finest” because it gives me the opportunity to extend to all of you a very warm welcome to the forum and the nation’s capital.

We are fortunate in being able to continue the dialogue that we began in Paris in 1999. This was a dialogue that came about as a means of bringing a fresh perspective and an understanding of the changing international system at the beginning of the new millennium. Something about the process of transition from one century into an other was exciting and it provided an opportunity to reexamine and reassess the nature of the changing international system.

We all recognize that as traditional boundaries are blurred, new boundaries are emerging. As traditional cultures are transformed new ethnic identities are emerging. As long standing institutions are challenged by the enormity of the problems that have to be dealt with, population growth, environmental change and degradation, human rights issues and so on, non-traditional organizations are coming forth with unique solutions.

Boundaries between disciplines and boundaries between professions are not exempt from the transformation in progress. The world of the twenty-first century is a world of challenges and opportunities that are best approached from a cooperative perspective, as we seek to understand our complex world.

A conference of this nature does not happen without the support and encouragement of many including, the CISS membership and Executive Council, the Co-sponsors, and ISA Headquarters. My sincerest thanks extend to all of the supporters. We are privileged to have with us tonight, ISA President Craig Murphy who will give the formal address. Please join me in welcoming President Murphy.

ADDRESS OF ISA PRESIDENT CRAIG MURPHY AT CISS/ISA 2000

GLOBALIZATION AND THE LIBERAL ARTS UNIVERSITY

Throughout the last generation American undergraduate liberal arts institutions have been unusually successful. Since the late 1960s few colleges and universities faced the kind of crises that compel institutions to rethink their missions. As a result, much of what American colleges do reflects the habits of thought developed in response to the crises of the late 1960s combined with the learning gained by today’s college leaders (trustees, administrators, and senior faculty) as they reflect back on their own undergraduate experience, which took place, for the most part, in the early 1960s.

Thus, in one sense, what American liberal arts education today reflects is the intellectual trajectory of the ideal curriculum imagined by the thoughtful student of 1965, as tempered by the changes made necessary by the opening of American society, and by the critique of American involvement in Vietnam, that typified the Johnson and Nixon years.

The main intellectual arguments for “global education” have to do with differences between the world of 1965 and the world that our students will live in when they are most likely to occupy roles of influence as great or greater than those now occupied by college leaders. After all, the fundamental purpose of a college is to bring together older and younger scholars to preserve and extend the knowledge of the larger community of which we are a part. We do this, in large part, in order to maintain the coherence of our society both over time (in recognition of our individual mortality) and in the face of challenges that otherwise might threaten to rip our community apart. Therefore, when we can anticipate changes that younger scholars, our students, will face, it is our duty to take them into account and to consider changing the balance of what we teach in light of them.

Many of the unprecedented attributes of the world our traditional students will be asked to lead are already known. When our students are middle-aged they will live in a world of nine billion people, three times the size of the world in which today’s college leaders went to school. The global consequences of that unprecedented human population growth are already known. For example:

Our student’s lives will span one of the most rapid moment of destruction of the diversity of life in the planet’s history, and the first such moment caused by the unconscious sum of myriad conscious human actions. Much of the living world that was known to students of 1965 will be made history before 2035. Our students will be expected to lead a world in which this damage -- with whatever its consequences -- is already done.
Our student’s lives have already seen the first moment in history when human action has crippled some of our planet’s largest sub-systems. Students of 1965 knew that concerted human action could make rivers lifeless and fill mountain valleys with smog. Students of 2000 know that man can transform oceans, layers of the atmosphere, and ecological zones that cover a third of a continent.

The scale of the consequences of the way in which we relate to the rest of the living world has changed over the last generation. So has the scale of the consequences of the way in which we relate to each other:

Students in 1965 lived in a world in which national and multilateral economic regulation allowed democratic societies to inject some social purpose into economies that operate through our selfish pursuit of individual interests. Students in 2000 live in a world in which at least one critical part of the economy -- global financial markets -- are no longer regulated, and, many scholars believe, can never be regulated again, making the fundamental problem of democratic governance increasingly difficult, and perhaps even intractable.
Yet, the students of 2000 live in a world in which more than two-thirds of us live in societies where governments are formally democratic, if increasingly powerless, while in 1965 students lived in a world in which less than a third of us lived in formal democracies, most of which were somewhat effective. In 2035 we may live in a world in which all of us enjoy citizenship in formal democracies, but democracies that are substantively irrelevant. For the American student of 1965 whose liberal arts education had convinced her of the desirability of the American political system, the consequences of that conviction for her role as a citizen in the U.S. and a larger world were relatively clear. The dilemmas faced by young men and women with democratic convictions, today, are much more difficult.
Students of 1965 lived in a world driven by deep inequalities, and enlivened by social movements committed to its elimination. Since 1965 global inequalities in income and wealth have accelerated at a phenomenally unprecedented pace. According to most estimates, wealth has concentrated more in the last 30 years than in the entire period since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. According to some estimates, the bifurcation of wealth increased more in the last 30 years than in the entire period from the Agricultural Revolution to 1965. Today Bill Gates’s personal wealth is greater than the combined wealth of the world’s poorest 450 million people. In 1965 you would have had to combine the entire Forbes 400 to get that much. (J. Paul Getty’s wealth in 1965 was only equal to that of the poorest 25 million.) Today the Forbes 400 have wealth equal to that of the poorest two billion, a third of humanity.
Students of 1965 lived in a world in which Europeans and their descendents not only controlled most of the world’s wealth and power, they also made up a significant portion of the world’s population. The large cities of the Europe and North America we also the large cities of the world. The UN tells us that even the Boston area was one of the world’s largest urban area. In the world in which our students will be middle-aged, Europeans and their descendents will still control half of humanity’s wealth, but they will be a distinct minority of its population. Even the largest of the European and North American cities will be at the bottom of the list of world’s 50 largest (Boston, Detroit, Manchester, Stockholm, and similar-sized urban areas are now are to the global cities as Worcester, Massachusetts was to Boston in 1965.) and the majorities in many of those urban areas will not be descendents of Europeans. A white American liberal arts student of 1965 could honestly believe that by studying the history, culture, and politics of people like himself that he would understand much of humanity. That would be much more difficult today.

All of this implies that our students will need to understand some different things about science, about the social world and about ethics than what many of our educational leaders know from reflection on their own experience.