Thoughts on Global Studies, August 2000

William Klingelhofer and I were going to get together to consider what to do next with respect to Global Studies, but August is already slipping out from under us (and I'm about to go on a two week vacation myself), so here's a summary of my current thinking, primarily for him and other members of the Advisory Committee. It's more of a whine than I mean it to be, so I'm working on it... it will change during the day, I think.

The need to expose American students to questions of global scope is pretty clear and not really in dispute. In higher education generally, most freshmen arrive knowing little about the world beyond their comfortable upbringing, and many graduate without experiencing challenges to their complacency. They learn career skills and pick up smatterings of knowledge in areas outside their chosen major, but most don't pay much attention to the world beyond the campus. Few make systematic study of international issues, and fewer still develop the skills or the motivation to attempt transcultural contacts. For most American college students, the world beyond America's borders is seen as generally uninteresting and occasionally puzzling or dangerous, but largely irrelevant. The soundbites of mainstream TV news, which minimize complexities and emphasize pathos, limit information even further. Addressing this deficit in knowledge, awareness and skills requires extraordinary measures --innovative programs, effective incentives, institutional commitment, augmented pedagogical infrastructure.

Washington & Lee can claim a sensitivity to matters international, exemplified by the International Education Subcommittee report, which led to creation of the Office of International Education, and the activities of the Advisory Committee of which I have been a member. The various proposals circulated among committee members during the last two years share an assumption that things should and can be better: that W&L should and can allocate resources to increase international opportunities for faculty and students. We hope to broaden the range of cultural awareness by increasing contact opportunities, and increases in diversity of students and faculty are noticeable at W&L. We seek to provide a larger proportion of our students with opportunities for international travel and study, and expect that such experiences will broaden outlook and deepen perspective. But cultural variety on the campus and enhanced possibilities for overseas travel and study are only part of the treatment. I think it is also necessary to broaden the range of issues to which students are exposed in coursework, to include

• perspectives that combine those of individual academic disciplines, to address issues of health, demography, development, environment, and communication
• practical experience in handling data about the state and trajectory of large-scale systems, and
• more contact with the processes and consequences of globalization.

I have been searching for examples of successful implementation of such internationalizing and globalizing goals, but I have found few that seem to have tried to address the problem on a campus-wide basis, and none that we are likely to emulate. We aren't likely to commit to creation of new programs without relevant models for success and dedicated funding to support course development, and we aren't about to change the structure of General Education to incorporate interdisciplinary and global components if there is nobody with the skills and interests to teach the courses. Accordingly, we need to develop some strategies to work toward the creation of a climate in which a substantial number of faculty members become committed to the vision. The way forward is via experiment and demonstration.

My own work offers me opportunities to explore the problems and practicalities of research and teaching with spatial data at various scales. My immersion in GIS has allowed me to work at developing access to spatial information at levels from local to global (see my report on last month's International Conference on GIS in Education [www.wlu.edu/~hblackme/giswork/sanberdoo.html] and a summary page on GIS, Scale and Visualization [miley.wlu.edu/gis/globe/nearandfar.html]) and I intend to make extensive use of ArcView as a teaching tool in Anthropology 230 (Anthropology of East Asia) in the Fall term. In my capacity as a reference librarian I hope to provoke opportunities to demonstrate the powers of GIS in various other courses as well, and intend to continue to work toward development of GIS interests and capabilities within the Associated Colleges of the South. Elsewhere I've written about data problems more generally.

Is Global Studies merely today's hype, just the latest in a long series of academic panaceas and buzzwords, or does the new century really pose new challenges, such that liberal education must rethink its goals and methods? Do new means of communication and new analytical tools require reallocation of pedagogical resources? My conviction in the affirmative doesn't seem to shared by most faculty colleagues, who are in any case busy enough with existing responsibilities that additional demands are not welcome. My experience with innovation in electronic media in the last decade suggests that new information technologies are adopted only when they prove themselves to be inescapably essential --when they can be seen to make more than enough difference to make the effort to learn them worthwhile, or when external requirements compel adoption.

I have tended to see the impetus for Global Studies as data-driven: the vast quantities of satellite imagery and statistical information made accessible by developments in the computer realm make it essential that students (and faculty) in many disciplines become adept at analyzing and managing data. These data allow us to know more and make better informed decisions about resources, but also demand that we take more into account in making decisions. The systems we manage are progressively larger, more interdigitated, and more sensitive than formerly, and our skills and knowledge must expand accordingly. We have technologies to manage, analyze, display and distribute data at global and world-regional scale; these technologies should not be the property of priesthoods, and should become part of the equipment of liberally educated people.

Making sense of data floods appeals to those who enjoy quantitative wrangling, but something less abstract and more narrative would appeal to wider audiences. The processes of globalization are a likely candidate, affecting as they do most academic disciplines. The Center for Global, International and Regional Studies at UC Santa Cruz has a clear statement of the problem in its Mission Statement:

...the growing recognition that human activities, while anchored in specific regions and locales, are also linked to other places and levels via complex political, economic, social and cultural networks of communication and action. In other words, the local, regional, international and global are all implicated in this emerging complex system to which we attach the term "globalization."

...Globalization, as we see it, therefore refers on the one hand to accelerating interdependence and multi-layered integration of societies, economies, polities and cultures and, on the other, to equally important dissident, oppositional processes of resistance generated as global dynamics are localized into states, societies and regions.

...We must educate not only engineers but managers, writers and, above all, our liberal arts students regarding the pathbreaking technical changes that are underlying Globalization processes.

(from http://www2.ucsc.edu/cgirs/mission.html)

In short, I conclude that a Global Studies Program is unlikely at W&L under present circumstances, no matter how laudable its goals. I'm not ready to give up on the efforts to develop the necessary tools and skills and to persuade colleagues to widen perspectives, but I think any success will have to be one person at a time.