Education Without Borders: Internationalizing American Universities
Shirley M. Tilghman
President, Princeton University
August 27, 2009

Instilling a global perspective in our students, exposing them to the histories, languages, religious traditions and cultures of countries other than their own, and building academic bridges between schools and colleges and their respective faculties around the world is today a scholarly imperative. The long-term costs of complacency in this arena are very high indeed. Why? Because the subjects our students study, with whom they study, and where they study, as well as the opportunities that we provide for them to encounter what is unfamiliar both here and abroad, will color their vision of the world and shape their interactions with its peoples for the rest of their lives.

Today is not a time when any of us, let alone the leaders of tomorrow, can afford to view our neighbors through a purely domestic lens; to see the world in the form of Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker cartoon, in which everything beyond the Hudson River is reduced to insignificance. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, our world has never been so small or, as Thomas Friedman would put it, so flat, thanks to technologies that have altered our relationship with time and space in ways that would startle even Albert Einstein. From outsourcing to file sharing to videoconferencing, the lives of men and women thousands of miles away are becoming intertwined with ours with a greater immediacy than ever before. Places like Shenzhen in China or Bangalore in India may be largely unknown to most Americans, which is itself a problem, but these dynamic cities are transforming the international economy and, with it, that of the United States. Increasingly, decisions taken, products made, and ideas developed in other countries will affect our own prosperity, which means that we need to know as much about our international trading partners as possible and be prepared to work constructively with their industries and universities.

Scientific and technological expertise is no longer the preserve of North America and Europe, and we cannot assume that faculty and student talent will always flow in our direction. Whether the measure is patents issued or papers published, the United States is losing intellectual “market share” to other nations, not because of a diminution in the vitality of the U.S. scientific enterprise so much as to the fact that the rest of the world is beginning to catch up. Universities in China and India are furiously expanding their capacities for educating students and conducting scientific and engineering research, using the U.S. higher education system as the model.

The changing character of international education and commerce is not the only reason to think globally today. At long last, we are coming to realize that environmental practices in one nation or region can have a profound effect on others—just visit Africa’s Sahel or the far north of my own country, Canada—and that we must come to an international political agreement on reducing manmade greenhouse gas emissions to match the scientific consensus that has emerged. In this context, as in many others, we really are our brother’s—and sister’s—keeper. And then there is the military and ideological conflict that is beamed into our homes around the clock from the streets of Bagdad, Madrid, London and Glasgow, and the mountains of Afghanistan. We need to cultivate a far deeper understanding of the Muslim world in this country if we are to play a positive role in securing a better future for the Middle East and make common cause against the forces of extremism.

To be effective in the 21st century, educational institutions will have to become truly cosmopolitan, a concept best articulated by Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose own multicultural upbringing in the U.K. and Ghana nurtured his belief—and here I quote his newest book—that “no local loyalty can ever justify forgetting that each human being has responsibilities to every other.” His hope, which should also be our own, is to make “it harder to think of the world as divided between the West and the Rest; between locals and moderns; between a bloodless ethic of profit and a bloody ethic of identity; between ‘us’ and ‘them.’” To paraphrase another Princeton scholar, Cornel West, we need to train a generation to imagine themselves in another’s skin.

Across the United States, schools and colleges are taking steps—some tentative; some far-reaching—to internationalize themselves while maintaining their national identities, a balance that must be carefully struck if cosmopolitanism, with its dual appreciation of the universal and the particular, is to take root. Approaches vary, as you would expect in a higher education system where colleges and universities have the freedom to construct their individual educational programs without government oversight.

Most U.S. universities are beginning to ask whether they consider themselves American universities with global perspectives, or global universities that happen to be based in the U.S. The difference between those perspectives is subtle, to be sure, but I would argue quite real. The first metric to use to answer that question is whether the campus itself is composed of people from around the world. For example, almost 40% of graduate students at Princeton come from outside the U.S., while 11% of our entering undergraduate freshman class are international students. I am sometimes asked whether I could imagine a day in which international students comprise the majority of our student body. I am not prepared to answer that question today, but it is one that must be considered as universities position themselves to be part of a global education network. It has been true for some time that our faculties are highly international, and that we compete globally for the best scholars, scientists and engineers. I had not realized until I began to write this address, however, that fully 39% of our faculty are foreign-born—myself included.

Another way to assess whether a university is looking outward or inward is to ask whether its students are encountering the world outside the United States as an integral part of their education. Some universities, like Princeton, have historically required that undergraduates study a foreign language, but increasingly students are fulfilling that requirement with languages like Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Arabic and Swahili, instead of the traditional European romance languages and German. While we do not explicitly require that students take one or more courses whose content would expose them to the world outside the U.S., it would be the truly perverse student who could navigate our stringent academic requirements without doing so. However, there are some colleges that have made this the central feature of their curriculum. Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, for example, encourages every student to study outside the country, and at their commencement, students march with a flag of the country or countries in which they have studied. Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, on the other hand, makes a convincing argument that there is nothing inherently better about studying a subject like chemistry abroad rather than at Bard, and their foreign programs are tailored to the fields of study where residence abroad contributes to the educational mission. Unfortunately, there are too many study abroad programs that are little more than “fun in the sun,” with students living and studying in relative isolation with other American students, taught by the same American faculty they would have had at home. I prefer the kind of exchange program we have developed with Oxford University, where our students are registered as Oxford students, live in the colleges, work with a tutor, and take Oxford classes.

There is no doubt in my mind that while university administrators have been leisurely pondering how they might instill an international perspective within their colleges and universities, our faculty have gotten the jump on us, and are fully engaged with international collaborations. In fact, this is precisely how it should be—for universities tend to work best when ideas are allowed to percolate up through the faculty in a “bottom-up” fashion, rather than having a “top-down” approach imposed on them. The most important thing an administration can do is to get out of the way, reduce bureaucratic barriers when they exist for no good purpose, and to provide seed funding when appropriate.

When universities adopt strategic plans for internationalization, some have chosen to focus on specific areas of the world. Yale, for example, has clearly identified China as the primary focus of its international activities, while Cornell has placed a major bet on its future collaborations within India. Most, however, have done what Princeton has done, and that is to “let a thousand flowers bloom” wherever the interest and academic strengths of the faculty lead us. The most significant “top down” initiatives that colleges and universities have undertaken are those that involve the establishment of satellite campuses outside the U.S. Princeton is not likely to establish a campus abroad in the near future for one primary reason. There is no asset that is of more value to us than the Princeton name. A degree from Princeton University has a particular meaning in the world today, and until we are absolutely persuaded that we could replicate the Princeton educational experience on another site, we are not inclined to lend our name to a degree. It has taken us 261 years to create the ethos that makes Princeton so successful, and we do not underestimate the challenge of replicating it elsewhere in a few short years.

There is a larger risk that colleges and universities must confront when considering how they will enhance their global footprint, and that is maintaining the engagement of the faculty in the educational mission at home. While we pride ourselves that the Princeton faculty balances with great agility the dual demands of teaching and research, it is also the case that the scholarly demands on faculty have greatly increased over the past few decades. One consequence is that the relationship between the university and the faculty has been diminished to some extent, and there are some who feel a far greater allegiance to their profession than to the university. As the university encourages its faculty to take on the additional challenge of working and competing in a global world, there is some risk that the ties that bind us together as an educational institution will be further loosened.

When Newsweek magazine ranked the top 100 global universities this year, it did not come as a complete surprise that 15 of the top 20 universities were American. If a similar survey conducted in 2107 is to have the same outcome, it will be essential for American universities to succeed in their ambitions to become truly global institutions. If you believe, as I do, that our schools and universities must continue to pursue our historic mission of educating the future leaders of the world, we have a responsibility to ensure that those leaders are truly cosmopolitan, true global citizens. They can only become so if the colleges and universities they attend are cosmopolitan as well. That is our challenge.

This guest perspective is an abridged version of a speech that President Tilghman delivered at the Global Connections Seminar at Hotchkiss School on July 11, 2007