Montreal — Montreal is a mere 45 minutes by car across the border, but with its French-influenced culture and Canadian sensibilities, it may seem like another world to the many Americans attending the Society for College and University Planning annual conference. So attendees here were pushed to think about the major theme of the conference: global universities and global education.
Higher-education institutions are often married to their pasts, but they are heading into a world with daunting challenges that will require students to think broadly, to think globally, Martha Piper, a former president of the University of British Columbia, said at an opening session. Ms. Piper said that she had visited the University of Oxford once while the venerable institution was in the middle of some strategic planning. An administrator there remarked that he hoped the planning would finally bring Oxford into the 17th century.
A big part of preparing students for a different world means educating them in sustainability, she said. The University of British Columbia has taken on a number of sustainability initiatives, including renovating buildings for energy efficiency and pushing mass-transit options. Students have been integral to the process, starting programs like a student bus pass.
The university is also internationalizing its dormitories. It formed partnerships with overseas universities in Japan, Korea, China, and Mexico, and built student residences that reflect the architecture of the partner institutions. Students there get an immersion in the culture and language of the partner institutions.
Ms. Piper borrowed inspiration from an official in Singapore, who said that she would urge her grandson to study languages, science and technology, and cultural and religious studies to prepare for the new, globalized world.
In thinking about the future, Ms. Piper reached back to the past—to a prescient statement made in 1946 by Lester Bowles Pearson, a prime minister of Canada and Nobel Peace Prize winner. “Fear and suspicion engendered in Iran can easily spread to Great Bear Lake above the Arctic Circle in Canada and bedevil economic developments there,” she quotes. “There is, now, no refuge in remoteness.”
In the 1950s, Pearson anticipated the globalized world when he said that we are entering “an age when different civilizations will have to learn to live side by side in peaceful interchange, learning from each other, studying each other’s history and ideals and art and culture, mutually enriching each other’s lives. The alternative, in this overcrowded little world, is misunderstanding, tension, clash, and catastrophe.”
Ms. Piper said that if we don’t study each other’s history and learn to live side by side in a world that seems to get small and more crowded all the time, we will certainly see clash and catastrophe. “We don’t have another 50 years to act,” she said.
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