Global Collaborations: The Role of Higher Education in Diverse Democracies (India, South Africa, The United States)

Edgar F. Beckham, Editor

FOREWORD

Education ... should cultivate the factual and imaginative prerequisites for recognizing humanity in the stranger and the other ... [I]gnorance and distance cramp the consciousness.
Martha C. Nussbaum
For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism

Since its founding in 1915, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has historically been resolutely focused on higher education within the United States. Such an insular perspective is no longer viable for the Association and its member institutions anymore than it is for our nation. If any still clung to such a view on September 10, 2001, it was not possible to do so after September 11, 2001. Many had, of course, recognized much earlier that we live in an interdependent, if unequal world. With increasing attentiveness over the last decade in particular, American colleges and universities have begun to internationalize their curriculum, faculty, and students in order to prepare their graduates to live responsibly and work effectively in a globally integrated environment.

But we in the academy are, for the most part, just beginning to figure out how to do such work with more integrity and humility. Funded by the Ford Foundation, the Tri-National Seminar on Diversity and Higher Education involved delegates from higher education in India, South Africa, and the United States, who met annually over a three-year period from 1997 through 1999. These seminars represent one small but immensely important step towards deepening intercultural understandings and developing transnational partnerships.

The volume in your hand, Global Collaborations: The Role of Higher Education in Diverse Democracies edited by Edgar F. Beckham and produced by AAC&U, is the third in a series of publications following the October 1999 seminar in the United States. The first volume, Diversity, Democracy, and Higher Education: A View from Three Nations edited by Edgar F. Beckham and produced by AAC&U, represents the collected papers from the January 1997 seminar in India. The second volume of papers from the March 1998 South Africa seminar, Diversity and Unity: The Role of Higher Education in Building Democracy, was produced by the Centre for Higher Education Transformation (CHET) and edited by Michael Cross, Nico Cloete, Edgar Beckham, Ann Harper, Jasbir Jain, and Caryn McTighe Musil. AAC&U distributes the first and third volumes; CHET distributes the middle volume.

Though separated by oceans and mountain ranges and anchored on three separate continents, all three nations are democracies that emerged from their colonial status only after sustained organized resistance. From the crucible of social change movements with democratic commitments to equality, opportunity, and dignity in the face of stubbornly persistent systems of violence, inequality, and social stratification, each country understood higher education's powerful potential when put to service for civic purposes. Each also understood the challenge of diversity to democratic societies. Diversity tests the moral commitments of democracy just as democracy offers a vision of the common good to people from otherwise diverse backgrounds. Reconciling the diversity within their own populations without entirely eradicating cultural differences is a yearning revealed in the three national mottos: India's Unity in Diversity; South Africa's Diversity and Unity; and the United States' E pluribus unum (From many, one). It was within such a context that Tri-National Seminar conversations framed some of the parameters of a new kind of global education that would be comparative in nature, reciprocal in practice, and committed to social justice.

AAC&U is proud to have served as the convenor for the last of the three seminars held in Tarrytown, New York and Albuquerque, New Mexico in October of 1999. We have functioned as one of the three sponsoring associations throughout the life of the project along with The Educational Resources Centre (ERC) in India and The Centre for Higher Education Transformation (CHET) in South Africa. Sharada Nayak, managing trustee of ERC, was India's country coordinator for the U.S. seminar. Nico Cloete, director of CHET, was South Africa's country coordinator. I served in that role for AAC&U working in close coordination with my AAC&U colleagues, Edgar F. Beckham and Daniel Hiroyuki Teraguchi.

The Tri-National Seminars have built upon AAC&U's ongoing commitment to international issues even as it transformed our conceptions of how to think about our work. The most visible global project at AAC&U in the last decade was Engaging Cultural Legacies: Shaping Core Curricula in the Humanities funded from 1990-1993 in two successive grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Of the sixty-three institutions involved in the project, three-quarters of the participating schools opted to create world culture courses for their general education core. At about the same time, AAC&U also began to work internationally with other higher education systems. The first led to a conference in the former Soviet Union as glasnost was unleashing a reassessment. The second produced a sustained set of projects with Japan to develop bilateral institutional agreements for students and to develop more courses about Japan in U.S. college curricula. By the mid-nineties, AAC&U had identified "fostering global engagement in a diverse but connected world" as one of the Association's five key strategic priorities.

AAC&U's newest global initiative is called Shared Futures: Education for a World Lived in Common. Its first funded project, Liberal Education and Global Citizenship: The Arts of Democracy, is sponsored by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education in the U.S. Department of Education. A curriculum and faculty development project, it is deeply influenced by the conversations of the Tri-National Seminars. Liberal Education and Global Citizenship seeks to generate new knowledge about global issues and globalization; spur greater civic engagement and social responsibility; promote a deeper knowledge of, debate about, and practice of democracy; and cultivate intercultural competencies.

Complementing its forays into global issues, in 1993 AAC&U launched a multi-project decade-long initiative called American Commitments: Diversity, Democracy, and Liberal Learning. It eventually included over 200 institutions directly in AAC&U funded projects and over 500 in a national network of institutions. Despite the fact that American Commitments deliberately focused on what it means to be a diverse democracy within the United States given its particular history, the initiative actually prepared the groundwork conceptually for the transnational exchanges. American Commitments was grounded in an exploration of the meaning of democracy--both its aspirations and its failures, promoted an analysis of power and domination, advocated a comparative approach to multiple communities shaping the U.S., and recommended that all students have an experiential course in justice seeking through which they would work in partnership with people and communities that had not yet experienced but were seeking democracy's full promise of equal opportunity.

Such a framing within a national context was of enormous use within an international context. It helped keep the conversation about democracy from sliding into platitudes. It also provided a common thread as all three countries continued to struggle with questions of subordination, voice, and authenticity both within and between the delegations themselves and within and between their home countries and the larger global network. Cultivating an analysis of power also helped foster candid critiques of pervasive domination, whether of U.S. hegemony, patriarchy that had no borders, or racial and caste stratifications that scarred all three countries. The framing from American Commitments also reinforced the value of a comparative approach as the three delegations investigated common issues that surfaced in all three nations, though each recognized and sought to clarify their locally specific and historically situated circumstances. Finally, the American Commitments framing helped weld a shared commitment to affirming higher education's civic role.

Each of the three delegations were convinced that higher education provided important public space where faculty, students, and staff could learn how to negotiate the tensions explicit in their nation's civic creeds. With its 8,000 colleges and universities, India, for example, looks to higher education as one vehicle for defining its national identity and charting economic development. For its part, South Africa is reinventing its higher education system to reinforce the non-racial democracy it has recently established. In the United States, where nearly three out of four high school graduates attend college, there is an unprecedented opportunity to educate students about how to develop intercultural competencies for our increasingly diverse America.

In all three nations, higher education often functions as the place where volatile, socially divisive differences can be resolved, or at least understood more fully. Delegates from the three nations talked collectively of higher education as offering what Maxine Green calls "authentic spaces of possibility." Campuses are public space where instead of walking past one another, students might experience what a South African educator called "moments of encounter." We agreed that one of the central challenges at this moment in history was to deliberately structure such encounters to enhance student learning both within and outside of the classroom.

In conversations within the Tri-National Seminar that could be both contentious and convergent, we hammered out agendas with cross-cutting relevance in all three nations. The India seminar in 1997 investigated affirmative action, academic governance structures, and faculty development. The 1998 seminar held in South Africa focused on campus-community connections, gender and citizenship, and how to assess the impact of diversity in higher education. The final 1999 seminar in the United States re-examined affirmative action, considered ways to transform the curriculum and diversify faculty and staff, and explored how to create campus climates of engagement.

By the third and final seminar, delegates also agreed that the seminars had served their purpose well and that future transnational collaborations should be wide-ranging in scope and structure and be sponsored through multiple agencies and institutions. Seminar participants recommended four broad areas for future transnational work: international dialogue, conceptual frameworks, structural questions, and expanding the knowledge base of higher education.

In the first area, delegates recommended international consultations and discussions with other democratic countries on the many meanings of diversity and their implications. To refine conceptual frameworks for future exchanges, delegates recommended producing and disseminating information about social stratification and its social consequences, with special attention to various kinds of inequities. Possibilities ranged from joint research projects to sharing education materials, to organizing comparative curriculum and faculty/staff development, and using new information technology. Structural issues include the role of state, courts, public policy, and social movements as they affect students' access to higher education, their retention and achievement, and the learning environments cultivated by colleges.

Finally, the continued expansion and refinement of knowledge itself was seen as a critical point of collaboration in curriculum, scholarship, and faculty development. There were two areas identified as of particular urgency at the moment and likely to be enhanced by cross-cultural comparisons. The first was acknowledging the insufficiently investigated knowledge that was rooted in indigenous communities or in the kind of local knowledge derived from more marginalized communities whether across class and gender, castes and religion, or ethnicity and race. The second was globalization. Delegates recommended that it be examined both in its positive promise to open up new opportunities for equity, economic development, and world community, as well as its more negative potential to fuel economic disparities, homogenize cultures, and undermine nation-states in favor of international corporate conglomerates.

AAC&U is eager to tackle this ambitious agenda and to work with colleges and universities in the United States to forge partnerships beyond our borders to do the comparative, integrative intellectual work at the heart of today's global education. We believe such collaborations will heighten the sense of our shared futures and trigger our sense of social responsibility for the welfare not just of our own nation but of the world. By doing so, higher education can heed Martha Nussbaum's cautionary words and learn how to recognize the humanity in the stranger and the other. In the process, we can expand our consciousness through knowledge and connections rather than cramp it through ignorance and distance. In the spirit of that inquiry and commitment and in hopes global collaborations will flourish, AAC&U is pleased to offer this volume in partnership with our sister organizations, The Educational Resources Centre in India and The Centre for Higher Education Transformation in South Africa.

Caryn McTighe Musil, Vice President
Office of Diversity, Equity, and Global Initiatives
Association of American Colleges and Universities
January 6, 2002

Opening Remarks

The Ford Foundation's Commitment to a Global Vision
Susan Berresford

Susan Berresford, the president of the Ford Foundation, made the following remarks on the opening day of the Tri-National Seminar on Diversity and Higher Education. She welcomed the three countries' delegates to the final seminar of the three-year Ford Foundation-sponsored project and shared with them her vision of how the experiment in transnational conversations was a portent of new intellectual and political alignments.

Thank you very much for inviting me to open this third Tri-National Seminar on diversity in higher education. I admire this project enormously, and for many reasons. Let me talk about two of them today. First is the substantive concern that underlies this program--how we manage and make an asset of diversity in all the countries around the world. Second, this project represents a model of comparative international activity that I value highly and that I believe should be a prominent feature of projects supported by the Ford Foundation. This seminar series is one of the earliest such projects out of the box. With this third seminar you have traveled quite far down the line. That makes your outcomes very important for the future of the Foundation's work.

The need to transform diversity into an asset derives from the reality that societies around the world are becoming increasingly diverse, partly as a result of the movement of people and peoples around the world, and partly because all of us are becoming more conscious of the diversity in our communities. The question is whether this growing diversity will help us reach a higher level of human welfare and development or inhibit our progress. All the major institutions in our societies have to grapple with this question--schools, colleges and universities, employment systems, health programs.

This topic has absorbed the attention of the Ford Foundation for many years, in too many ways to delineate here today. In the United States, our work on diversity often creates controversy and subjects the Foundation to the criticism that we favor certain groups unfairly or that our advocacy of equity sacrifices excellence. The criticism is sharpest in the struggle over affirmative action that is occurring in the United States today.

I think all of us in this country who believe in affirmative action feel very envious of you who live and work in India and South Africa, where there are constitutional protections for affirmative action. That's the way it should be. But here in the United States, our courts are chipping away at affirmative action programs and significantly reducing them. So far, the Ford Foundation has been able to persevere and protect the affirmative action programs we believe in. For example, the Ford Foundation continues to be the largest private provider of minority graduate fellowships in the country. And we have maintained the program despite the attacks on affirmative action. I hope we can continue that. We believe that affirmative action is necessary and that it ought to be lawful.

I believe in affirmative action for many reasons. Let me mention three. First, affirmative action is consistent with our national values and absolutely essential to the achievement of our national goals of equity, fairness, and decency. The natural process will not get us there. What we still need to do is build the conceptual bridges between our aspirations as a society and the affirmative efforts that will get us where we want to be.

Secondly, I believe that affirmative intentions and actions are needed on many fronts in this society. For example, I think we have a lot of work to do to build truthful histories of how we got where we are, how we developed the discriminatory patterns that plague our society, because, unless we understand how we constructed these patterns, we will not understand how long it will take and how much effort it will take to deconstruct them and build something better in their place. I think we also need truthful stories about our success in overcoming the barriers that our discriminatory patterns have created, because such stories can show people that the success results from struggle. It is not the result of some quiet evolution in which the mere passage of time moves us ahead. The struggle involves power, and no one gives up power very easily. We have to demonstrate that to the larger society.

I think all of us believe that affirmative action is absolutely essential in educational institutions and, particularly, in the elite educational institutions in this country that confer special privileges on their members. There ought to be equal access to those privileges. And obviously we need affirmative action in employment, where hard work and talent should pay off equally for everyone. I also think we need something like affirmative action in our cultural life and in our artistic life. When we come to know and appreciate the cultural products of groups that have been marginalized or underrepresented, it helps us begin to understand the groups and their worldviews. Sometimes the worldviews are different from our own, which enriches us, and sometimes we're surprised to discover that they are not so different and that we all have much in common.

The third belief that I have about affirmative action, and the last one that I want to mention today, is that we will not get where we want to go unless we have very clear goals and timetables. What is so odd to me in this country is how perfectly understood this principle is in corporate management. In every corporate boardroom, business and financial goals are discussed in terms of time frames and the specific incentives needed to achieve the goals on schedule. But, when the talk turns to diversity goals, people shy away from these essential management techniques. I was interested-and somewhat amused-to learn that the South Africa Rugby League now has goals and timetables even for the racial diversity of players on the field at any one time. That demonstrates the specificity required in an effective affirmative action program. I am very envious of the Indian system, with its goals for women in education and government. We in the United States have a great deal to learn from you. I believe that the current state of affairs in this country is morally wrong and that there is nothing wrong with using incentives to get to the right place.

But these are controversial beliefs in our country right now, and you can rest assured that those of us who are associated with the Foundation are going to fight for affirmative action because we believe in it. We're going to do our best to build public understanding of affirmative action and its importance. I think we all recognize that our progress will not be steady. Life doesn't work that way. There are stops and starts and defeats. But what impresses me most is the determination of people like all of you around this room to keep up the struggle. We're not going to give up. If we get defeated one day, we'll still be here to fight the next day. It's fun to fight for things you believe in.

While affirmative action is a particular concern in the United States right now, there are similar concerns in India and South Africa. The issue in all three countries is how to change the patterns of advantage, however they may differ from place to place, that have been the accepted ways of living, working, and being with each other, ways that leave millions of people in despair, lacking decent living conditions and the freedoms they desire. In regard specifically to education, the issue is how to build educational structures that enable people to prosper and be free individually and at the same time to share in a common undertaking and pursue a common good. We also need to craft educational experiences that create a national climate receptive to debate and experimentation on matters of diversity and pluralism. So your work is terribly important to me and to the staff of the Foundation because it is so consistent with the values, concerns, and purposes that the Foundation has at its very heart. We want you to succeed substantively and help us think about these problems and work to solve them.

The second reason I think your work is very important is that it represents a model of thinking and working collaboratively and across national boundaries. You were at the Ford Foundation's headquarters last evening, and you know that in addition to the New York office, there are thirteen offices around the world that represent the Ford Foundation in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Russia. When I came to the Foundation over thirty years ago, though the offices were vaguely linked, each acted like a separate foundation, selecting activities it thought appropriate to its time and place. Today we say that the Ford Foundation should operate in two modes. It should continue to generate practical, useful knowledge about how to improve people's lives in a particular place and in particular institutions. But at the same time it ought to produce comparative knowledge that guides international thinking about the problems we address, knowledge that has both particular and general applicability.

We want the Foundation to be bifocal, to concentrate, for example, on helping colleges and universities in India grapple with Indian issues of diversity, and, at the same time, use the experience of Indian institutions to make leaders of higher education in South Africa and the United States more thoughtful about their work on diversity. There are many projects at the Ford Foundation that lend themselves to this approach. They address problems that are shared by just about every country in the world. We need to address them in ways that respond both to the particular situation and to global needs.

Today's technology makes it easier for us to do this kind of work. We can now speed the exchange of ideas and spread learning in ways that were not possible in the past.

We have also begun to organize ourselves in the Foundation in ways that help us think more broadly about issues. We have created what we call affinity groups of our staff and key grantees on major topics that we work on--all the people who make grants on human rights, for example, and their major grantees. The affinity groups meet annually to craft strategies and to engage in comparative exercises. The open question is whether comparative efforts really produce useful knowledge and reflection that inform decision-making. Can they really lead to new thinking on topics like diversity and pluralism? Can they produce clear pictures of models for experimentation and adaptation that are useful to people in different locations? In other words, can they go beyond the simple exchange of ideas and experience to something that really influences policy and practice worldwide? We hope to produce affirmative answers to the question. The task is difficult and essential.

The Tri-National Seminar on Diversity and Higher Education is one of our earliest efforts of this kind, and so you are ahead of the curve. Your project is now maturing to the point where we can ask, did this work or not? I'm sure many of you had a valuable experience in the project, but did we have the outcome in the end that we really had hoped for? As I have said, we've made a big bet at the Foundation on this kind of approach. We have built new program structures and internationalized our staff as part of the effort and we have new ways of allocating money to encourage this kind of work. So we are counting on your experience in this series of seminars to help us think about the key questions and produce useful answers.

You are at such an important stage for us to be learning from you. It's particularly important at this moment to begin thinking hard about the products that come out of this effort. As with any kind of product, it is important to focus on whom you are trying to reach and how best to reach them. Who is the audience? Whom are you trying to influence--both in your own countries and in other countries? And is this done best through books and papers or videos and TV programs? We ought to be very expansive in thinking about the ways that we carry messages from this program.

As I see it, you have two huge challenges ahead of you. One is to refine and distill the knowledge, know-how, and reflections you are generating, the intellectual ideas that come out of the comparative analysis that you've done. The second challenge is to make those insights accessible to educators and decision makers and thought leaders. I know of no group better equipped to think through these matters.

I hope that in every way possible the Ford Foundation will assist you in doing what you think ought to be the next steps for this project, including the products that should result from it and where they should go. This is an experiment, and we are all learning as we go along. There's no right way to do this work, but we want to go down the best looking pathway we can discern at this time.

I would close simply by saying again that the value of this project for us is the substantive concern that drives it, which is at the heart of the Foundation's mission and goals and vision of the world.

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