Civics 101: a Prime Export : U.S. Universities Prepare for Global Change

A collateral aspect of the events in China--I’m a little surprised that it is not more broadly recognized--is the degree to which American higher education exerts a powerful force upon the life of nations. Our universities have become the world’s gold standard and our most successful export. They are contributing enormously to our international stature, and to the strength and influence of the position we may occupy among the nations of the 21st Century.

Let me begin an account of this remarkable development with a story.

About a year ago, a young man who had recently completed a doctorate in our School of Education stopped in my office to see me. He had been among the graduate students who came to us in one of the early waves from the People’s Republic of China. After receiving his Ph.D., he completed a year’s apprenticeship to the president of another major university and now was on his way home to China.

I asked how he felt about being part of a takeover generation in a country where leaders tend to be elders, and where the dreadful events of the Cultural Revolution are of such recent memory. He replied that he had confidence in the future of academic life in China, he feared no repetition of the Cultural Revolution and was looking forward to the future.

But then he said, “Of course, there will be a period of some difficulty. For a while, leadership is going to be in the hands of a generation of people most of whom received their education in the ‘50s in the Soviet Union. But after they’re gone, my group will take over--and we have mostly been educated in the United States.”

Since that conversation, there has been a rapprochement between China and the Soviet Union after 20 years of hostility. Not long ago, such news would have sent officials in Washington into a state of red alert. But now we have a general sense that some warming of Sino-Soviet relations might be a good thing. I suspect that our own new openness toward the Soviet Union had something to do with it. In turn, our voluminous media coverage of change in the Soviet Union is bound to have some influence on the 30,000 students from the People’s Republic now studying in American universities.

The influence of our universities in world affairs is an important advantage for this country to build on, but it needs to be understood and accompanied by an equivalent effort to educate our young people about the new international realities.

From the Cold War through various versions of detente, and now to glasnost and perestroika, descriptions of the state of the world have focused tightly on the character of U.S.-Soviet relations. Our attention is magnified by fear--the knowledge that nuclear arsenals maintained by both nations could make any lesion in the relationship a terminal one.

Other changes include drastic realignments in international economic power, with new strength in the Pacific Basin and in the European Community. They include new forces of religious fundamentalism in many nations, and a rise in civil disorder, terrorism and drug trafficking. They include a disappearance of boundaries between national financial markets, leaving private corporations and media capable of integrating global order in a way that many nations cannot. They include overpopulation and rising expectations on the part of developing nations, set against a depressing record of failure to achieve government stability and economic improvement.

These are strong forces; they would be certain to produce significant effects on world order all by themselves. But in fact they are aligned with a new global concern, perhaps even more powerful and moving than all the others--the environment.

If one country manufactures chlorofluorocarbons, it affects the ozone layer that affords equal protection to all countries. States that burn coal generate acid rain that falls on states that don’t. Nations that burn their forests and nations that consume large amounts of fossil fuel per capita contribute carbon dioxide to the atmospheric greenhouse and contribute to global warming, but we all get warm together.

All of these forces will profoundly rearrange the power relationships among nations by changing what they want from one another.

In fact, it is not even outlandish to imagine that sometime in the next century, a treaty will be concluded through which certain nations agree to limit rates of population growth in return for fixed ceilings of fossil fuel consumption or carbon dioxide production in other nations.

To begin to understand such a world, one must first have some grasp of what is coming to be called earth systems science: the annual energy budget of the Earth, primary productivity, oceanography and meteorology, the physical geography of major land masses, the principles of ecology and biological diversity, and the properties of ecosystems that determine their utility in the service of man. Such courses are now given in a handful of universities. Yet they are part of the essential intellectual equipment that students will need to navigate intelligently in the interdependent world of the future.

We cannot cope with these challenges by standing still. The problems may be ours to recognize, but their solution will depend on the generation we are educating now. Fortunately, we have a great asset: universities that are the envy of the world and beginning to play a large role in international education. They can be the key to a better future if we are alert enough, and flexible enough, to adapt them to these rapidly advancing new challenges. This is not only to prepare Americans for important kinds of leadership. As our universities broaden their perspective, and as able and dedicated people from all over the world continue to seek their education here, we Americans will be enriched as fellow voyagers on this tiny blue planet.