Speeches

Partnering in a Global World

I am truly honored to be here today with such forward-thinking individuals who are attempting to look beyond the walls of their own institutions for solutions to educating the next generation of students as they face a world of growing globalization.

Throughout the 1990s, we all heard the buzz about "thinking globally" and the importance of our "new global economy."

I know some of you who hear these words now might be taking this as your cue for a quick nap, since the topic of globalization has dominated so much of the news over the last few years. But please bear with me. The truth is that the idea of "going global" is no longer a novelty -- it is an essential requirement in the survival of nearly all enterprises in the new millennium.

Higher education is no exception. In fact, education in this era of globalization has been touted as the key to the growth in democracy, economic prosperity and economic stability. Leaders of nearly every nation have recognized the significant and lasting role education can have on a country and its economic vitality and how it can make a powerful difference in the lives of citizens. In fact, in the United States, education is one of the leading growth sectors when it comes to international trade. In the U.S., higher education is the fifth largest exporter of services.

Yet such economic-related concerns are but one of the forces in the global society. Broader societal change, including the domains of politics, culture, environment, and health also crosses borders each and every day. The need for international and multicultural understanding and cooperation has never been greater.

The need to graduate individuals who have a more expansive understanding of the world and its many facets has been expressed repeatedly by the growing numbers of companies that are multinational in scope. The increasing scarcity of resources and the decline in governmental support in some countries for research and scholarly activity that is essential to the prosperity of our nations point to a need for a more cooperative approach that will lessen the burden on individual institutions.

If higher education ignores the global perspectives that are influencing so much of life today, we as leaders of these institutions certainly fall short in our responsibilities to prepare our students for an international environment and to find solutions to some of the most pressing problems facing the world today.

There is no question that at the heart of this global revolution -- which is actually still in its infancy -- is the explosive growth in technology. From video conferencing to broadband access to desktops to virtual reality, emerging technologies continue to promise opportunities for expanding institutional cooperation both domestically and internationally.

The speed with which information technology has penetrated higher education has left us little time to understand fully its impact or to anticipate new developments. But what we do understand is that new information technologies are making it easier to reach more students, conduct research and explore new partnerships that can effortlessly cross continents.

For example, the highly interactive nature of recent developments in telecommunications technology are opening up unprecedented opportunities for distance education around the world. In the United States, the number of distance education programs increased 72 percent between 1995 and 1998. These interactive technologies, and the tremendous capacity of our networks also to serve as databases, libraries, and other information resources, are highly supportive of international collaboration in research and scholarship as well.

In this global environment, there can be no doubt that institutions of higher education around the world must forge links with partner institutions and scholars abroad to fulfill our education, research, and public service missions. In the words of the late United States Senator J. William Fulbright, who sponsored the international student exchange program that bears his name, "We must try, through education, to realize something new in the world -- by persuasion rather than by force, cooperatively rather than competitively, not for the purpose of gaining dominance for a nation or an ideology but for the purpose of helping every society develop its own concept of public decency and individual fulfillment."

I am happy to say that a growing number of partnerships among U.S. institutions and institutions in the United Kingdom have dotted the collaborative landscape in recent years, including many between my own institution and a number of those that are represented here today. Our British Science Exchange program with the universities of Glasgow in Scotland, Wales in Aberystwyth, Lancaster, Sussex, Leeds, Essex and Bath allows students to complete courses abroad that will count toward the completion of their degree. Our students also participate in a kinesiology program at Eastbourne University of Brighton; a communications and an economics program at the University of Manchester; and programs in environmental studies, computer science and business at the University College Northhampton.

In addition, Penn State has had an exchange arrangement since 1977 with the University of Leeds that exposes undergraduates in architectural engineering to a different context and cultural perspective for the study of buildings and architecture.

There are many other such cooperative efforts between Penn State and institutions here. In fact, every year hundreds of Penn State students spend time at institutions in the United Kingdom as part of our study abroad programs. And every year, your students travel to Penn State to enrich their learning experience by immersing themselves in a different culture and a different way of learning, to gain a broader view of the world.

Currently, there are 70 students from Britain enrolled at Penn State. Overall, Penn State is home to more than 3,600 international students and is ranked among the top 20 institutions in the United States in providing a home for international students.

We expect to continue to increase this number over the next few years. In the United States, nearly 515,000 international students are currently studying at American colleges and universities -- an increase of 4.8 percent over last year's total. However, this number still accounts for only about 4 percent of U.S. college enrollment. Worldwide there are about 1.5 million international students -- only about 130,000 of these students are from the United States. Clearly, as a nation, the U.S. must do a better job of providing opportunities for international linkages.

Effective education is no longer limited to our campuses. It is certainly no longer limited to the borders of our countries. I know most of us are eager to move toward a new cooperative paradigm; otherwise we would not be here.

In order to open wider our doors for international cooperation, there are several things we must do as institutions of higher education to facilitate this progress and break the limitations of our national thinking. The first is to better prepare our undergraduates with an international perspective. At Penn State, we have given priority to internationalizing the university and have taken a number of steps to move international studies and programs to the center of our teaching, research and outreach activities.

One measure we have taken is to require incoming undergraduate students to have some foreign language proficiency before they enter the University. This will better enable them to take advantage of international education opportunities once they are here. In some of our colleges, such as Liberal Arts, Business Administration, and Information Sciences and Technology, the requirement for a proficiency in a foreign language is even more stringent, requiring university-level proficiency . Although English is the predominant language of academe, the United States has fallen behind in teaching our students the importance of learning an additional language.

Many of our undergraduate majors have an international component For example, all of the programs in our College of Business have an international option that requires study abroad. Our new general education curriculum - those university-wide courses students take regardless of their major -- has been redesigned to include a strong international component.

At Penn State, we believe that the internationalization of the University begins with faculty. Collaborative research across international borders and professional travel opportunities abroad enable our professors to incorporate important global perspectives in the curricula. More than 1,400 courses at Penn State have at least one-quarter of their content with an international thrust.

Another area that I have already touched upon, but that requires our attention in order to foster a cooperative international environment, is technology. Needless to say, we couldn't ignore this one, even if we wanted to.

We have already seen the transformation that global technology has had on the world, but there are still many nations and many institutions of higher education that cannot fully participate in the promise that these emerging technologies hold.

Further standardization of the protocols or common procedures used to communicate with one another, process information and perform high-level functions across networks would be helpful. In this way, access to the global information system will be more universal.

In fact, this is one of the goals of Internet 2, corporately known as the University Consortium for Advanced Internet Development. The rapid growth of the Internet, and more importantly the promise of the Internet for scholarly exchange and collaborative research at the highest levels, has created opportunities that will require more clearly articulated international cooperation.

Penn State was a founding member of Internet2, a next-generation network that is substantially faster than the current Internet. More than 180 universities and about 70 companies are participating in Internet2, developing new applications in areas such as medicine, computer science and communications.

A major goal of Interent2 is to transfer new network services and applications rapidly to all levels of educational use and to the broader Internet community, both nationally and internationally. One example of an extraordinary new application that has been developed and is currently being used by Penn State and other institutions is ImmersaDesk, a virtual reality technology that allows users to interact with their research environment. This application, which can allow real-time data sharing, has already been used for climatological data visualization, architectural design, and molecular modeling, and it holds promise for research into interactive data mining, virtual surgery, and many other areas of data simulation and modeling.

Here in Europe, you are also building a high-speed research network known as GEANT, that will connect research institutions in 30 countries. Similar to Internet2, the European network is expected to serve as a testing ground for new applications in fields such as medicine and telecommunications.

This type of collaboration is what is needed to ensure that researchers and scholars have access to important new technologies and advances in science.

There are, of course, not inconsequential costs associated with these cooperative efforts. This brings me to my third point: We must strongly encourage our governments to make a greater commitment to the use of taxpayer dollars for funding cooperative ventures outside our borders.

Some headway was made in this area recently when the U.S. Department of Energy agreed to provide $531 million toward the construction of a $6 billion particle accelerator near the French-Swiss border. It is the first time the U.S. agreed to fund the construction of such a facility outside the United States. More than 4,000 scientists from 35 countries are helping to build this megascale research project.

Another example that involves my own institution is the Hobby-Eberly telescope, a major facility located in a remote area of Texas that involves our faculty in astronomy and astrophysics in collaboration with colleagues in the U.S. and Germany. An interesting new development is the construction of a parallel telescope in South Africa that involves additional partners and will allow the second telescope to cover the southern hemisphere as the Hobby-Eberly telescope covers the northern hemisphere.

Although other collaborations would not require such large investments, governments have historically been reluctant to provide support for international projects or facilities that would find their home in another nation -- in part because of the potential backlash from taxpayers. There is also concern about which country's industries will benefit most economically and technologically from these international ventures. Educating the general public about the critical need for international cooperation in this era of globalization is an important component that higher education must not overlook.

In addition, institutions of higher education must lobby for increased support from national and international foundations and governments for the funding of think tanks - the Salzburg Seminar is an excellent example -- that can promote global dialogue on issues of pressing international educational concern. These centers of expertise can bring together individuals from different countries to find solutions to shared worldwide problems.

The final area that institutions of higher education must address as they collaborate internationally is the need to involve less-developed countries in their plans. Many countries, particularly in this post-Cold War era, have much to contribute in the way of scholarship and research, but have little in the way of financial resources.

This fact was dramatically illustrated for me during a recent trip to Moscow where I was part of a team evaluating and consulting with a Russian university. The economic transition of the Soviet Union to a market economy has resulted in a real scarcity of funds that is having a profound impact on higher education and scientific research.

When paying distinguished faculty a salary commensurate with what an entry-level worker makes in the private sector is considered impossible, there is little chance that governmental support for collaboration can be provided in an equitable fashion. Even though many nations don't have the financial resources to reach out internationally, they often have great expertise, a strong commitment to the advancement of science and technology, and much to contribute to the cultural diversity that can be brought to a study.

Focusing for a moment longer on Russia, I want to mention that The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace recently issued a report on the state of U.S.-Russian relations in which it stated that supporting higher education and research in the former Soviet Union is "democracy assistance in its most elemental form, since it is impossible to imagine a vibrant democracy and a healthy civil society in a nation where higher education and research are starved of resources or disfigured by ideologies appropriately consigned to the 'dustbin of history.'"

Spin the globe and you will find many countries in comparable predicaments. Finding ways to engage these countries in multinational educational and scholarly endeavors will dramatically increase their economic, social and cultural wealth -- for as we know, an educated populace is the key to the survival of any nation.

At the same time, our countries and our institutions also benefit by building stronger ties to other members of our worldwide community.

Partnering on an international scale, whether through distance education, study abroad programs, faculty exchanges, membership in a consortium or a larger research endeavor, is a requisite for the future.

The sooner we join forces with other institutions across the globe, the sooner we can begin meeting the ever-changing needs of our dynamic world.