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More Global Yale
After
September 11, the University's growing international initiatives
took on a grim sense of urgency.
November
2001
by Mark Alden Branch '86
As Yale
geared up for a new academic year at the beginning of September,
there was an air of excitement about the latest developments in
the University's efforts to become more international in its focus.
Former deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott '68 was arriving
to start the work of the new Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
(YCSG), a larger and more diverse group of international students than ever before was finding its way around the campus,
and the University was anticipating the October Tercentennial visit
of former president Bill Clinton '73JD to give a speech on "global
perspectives."
But
then, on September 11, when twin plumes of smoke from the World
Trade Center towers could be seen from the top of Harkness Tower,
the University's interest in international affairs suddenly became
far more sober -- and more essential. The attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon instantly threw into high relief the perils
of globalization and the need to better appreciate the world beyond
America's shores.
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"Globalization
is like gravity. We're here to find out what it is, how
it works, and what can be done about it."
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While
Talbott's think tank is the most prominent new international initiative
oncampus,
other equally important programs have been gaining strength in recent
years. "Strobe Talbott's arrival is part of a long line of intellectual
investments in global matters since Rick Levin became President,"
says history professor Paul Kennedy, who directs the International
Security Studies program.
Levin
first emphasized the importance of becoming a "world university"
in his 1993 inaugural address, in which he called upon Yale to "focus even more on global issues" and "aspire to educate leaders for the
whole world." Since then, evidence of an international consciousness
at Yale and throughout the world has only grown stronger. Now, as
global terrorism moves to the top of the list of American foreign-policy
concerns, scholars at Yale and elsewhere have the daunting task
of explaining the situation in which the world now finds itself.
Most
Yale scholars agree that globalization is one of the most important
causes of the terrorism practiced by Osama bin Laden and other Islamic
fundamentalist groups. Where they disagree is in defining how globalization is responsible -- and how the West can respond.
For
many Americans, globalization moved to the front burner only in
September 1999, when protesters disrupted the World Trade Organization's
meeting in Seattle. The Seattle events turned talk of globalization
into a debate over free trade and American cultural hegemony, with
a passionate cry of protest over both subjects from a coalition
of labor, human rights, and environmental groups. The September
11 attacks have been seen by many as an attack on globalization
-- an effort to frustrate the spread of Western values into the
Muslim world.
But
Talbott says that protests and anxieties about globalization cannot
stop the phenomenon. "Globalization is like gravity," he says. "It's
not a policy, it's not a program. It's not good, it's not evil.
It's happening. We're here to find out what it is, how it works,
and what can be done about it."
Of
course, international contact and influence is nothing new. "Long-distance
movement is as old as the species," says sociology professor Deborah
Davis, who is director of academic programs for the YCSG. "What
gives it currency is the intensity and the speed. Before, these
movements were slower and more linear."
The
increased speed of globalization, fueled by the Internet and ease
of transportation, results in "a sense of lost control," according
to veteran journalist Nayan Chanda, director of publications for
the YCSG. "Globalization is threatening. The forces at play are
so huge that you feel helpless."
In
a panel discussion at Battell Chapel five days after the September
11 attacks, Talbott maintained that a root cause of terrorism like
that sponsored by bin Laden is the "vastly growing divide between
the haves and the have-nots, between those who feel like winners
in the process of globalization and those who feel like losers."
He warned that the international development and aid programs that
could get at those root causes may be in jeopardy. "Congress will
be tempted to deal with a big budget crunch by squeezing down precisely
those programs that must be beefed up," said Talbott.
But
Kennedy, who was also on the panel, is skeptical about the idea
that America can win over the Muslim world by investing more heavily
in it. "When the West comes in," says Kennedy, "even in a benign
and well-intentioned form, it brings along its magazines, its young
people, its gender relationships. Whether our own cultural messages
and aggressiveness could be tempered somewhat is a question for
us." While Kennedy's views were well received by the audience at
the panel discussion, history professor and former Yale College
dean Donald Kagan blasted them and those of the other panelists
as "blaming the victim." Kagan wrote in the Yale Daily News that "whatever one thinks about American power and its role in the
world, surely it should not change to make [terrorists] less angry."
It
is the secular nature of Western culture that most threatens Islamic
fundamentalists, explains Lamin Sanneh, a professor in the
Divinity School who is a scholar of both Islam and Christianity.
"The Muslims perceive that the West, and America in particular,
has privatized religion, and has been successful on the world stage
while doing so," says Sanneh. "That achievement is an affront to
the radicals in the Muslim world," which has long viewed church
and state as one.
The
positive and negative consequences of globalization will all be
grist for the mill at the YCSG, says Davis. "Critics of globalization
should have a place and a platform here. We want it to be a place
where people with differing opinions can engage in a sustained and
serious debate."
The
Center's director has seen that debate from more than one vantage
point. Strobe Talbott has covered international affairs as a journalist
(he spent 21 years as a reporter, bureau chief, and columnist for Time) and influenced them as the deputy secretary of state
in the Clinton administration. (Since leaving government, he has
been at work on a book on U.S.-Russian relations during the Clinton-Yeltsin
years; it will be published by Random House in the spring.) In November
1999, just after the Seattle protests, Talbott began talking to
Levin about the possibility of leading a new Yale institution devoted
to globalization, a topic that had long interested him. The plan
was announced publicly in November 2000.
Unlike
the YCIAS, the YCSG will not sponsor courses or degree programs.
Talbott says it will focus on teaching, scholarship, outreach, and
conflict resolution. Its first publication will be a response to
the September 11 attacks: a book of essays by Yale scholars titled The Age of Terror: America and the World After September 11 to
be published by Basic Books in January. Another of the Center's
publishing initiatives will be an online journal about globalization
called YaleGlobal, which will be overseen by Nayan Chanda,
a former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review.
Talbott's
plans also include forays into "Track II diplomacy," an approach
to international conflict resolution that is different from official
(or Track I) negotiations. "There are a lot of conflicts in the
world with roots that are political, religious, or environmental,"
says Talbott. "We aim to get representatives of civil society to
the University and get them talking about the root causes of these
conflicts."
Such
discussions -- along with the YCSG's other activities -- will take
place in the Davies Mansion at the top of Prospect Hill and next
door to the Divinity School, a magnificent former home that the
University is currently bringing back from a near-ruined state.
(The Center's temporary home is at 55 Whitney Avenue.)
The
mansion will also house another of Yale's new international initiatives,
the World Fellows Program, which will bring leaders from abroad
to Yale for a semester to study globalization. Dan Esty, a professor
of environmental law and policy and former Environmental Protection
Agency official, will be the program's director; Brooke Shearer,
who ran the White House Fellows program from 1993 to 1997 (and who
is married to Talbott) will be executive director, responsible for
day-to-day operations.
Esty,
Shearer, and others involved with the Program will spend this year
preparing for and selecting the first crop of approximately 20 fellows
for arrival in the fall of 2002. Esty defines them as "people from
all walks of life, in early- to mid-career, who are in a leadership
trajectory in their own society." Yale faculty and alumni with international
ties will help identify promising candidates, but anyone can apply.
Once
selected, the fellows will have access to people, courses, and other
resources around the University. With the help of a faculty mentor,
they will devise a course of study for themselves that meets their
needs and interests. Esty and other faculty will teach a core seminar
for all the fellows featuring units on different aspects of globalization.
The fellows will have offices in the Davies Mansion.
While
the fellows soak up all they can of Yale, Esty and Shearer hope
the University will make full use of the fellows, too. They will
likely give talks and master's teas, and perhaps even contribute
to residential college seminars. "We want very much to give the
fellows an opportunity to give back to Yale and to get intimately
involved with the University as quickly as possible," says Shearer.
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"We're
building a network of Yale-connected people to give Yale a
window on the world."
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Once
the fellows return to their home countries, it is hoped that their
Yale allegiance -- strengthened through biennial reunion-conferences
-- will further Yale's reputation as a global University. "We're
building a network of Yale-connected people," says Esty. "This is
a serious and substantial program to give Yale a window on the world."
The
World Fellows Program and the Center for the Study of Globalization
were announced together last fall, along with the decision to admit
international students to Yale College without regard to their ability
to pay and the creation of three new interdisciplinary professorships
in international studies. The cumulative weight of the initiatives
made a dramatic impact, bringing Yale's global aspirations to the
fore. But Yale's commitment to the study of the rest of the world
has been growing quietly in a number of existing programs over the
past 20 years, reversing a postwar slide in influence and direction.
"Fifty,
60, or 70 years ago, this place was in the forefront of international
matters," says Paul Kennedy. "We had the Yale Institute of International
Affairs, with heavy hitters like Arnold Wolfers and Bernard Brodie.
It was the place to be." But when A. Whitney Griswold became President
in 1950, he abolished the Institute. "Lots of the faculty went to
Princeton," says Kennedy, "which two years later founded the Woodrow
Wilson School of International Affairs."
The
reputation of international affairs everywhere was tarnished by
the fiasco of Vietnam, a war conceived by the "best and the brightest":
Ivy League and think-tank policymakers like Walt Rostow '36, McGeorge
Bundy '40, and Robert MacNamara. It was not until the 1980s that
Yale began to pick up the pieces.
YCIAS,
which is the locus for most international activity on campus, grew
out of something called the Concilium on International and Area
Studies, founded in 1961. It was renamed in 1983 as Yale's interest
in international affairs was reawakening. Since then, it has grown
steadily in visibility and importance, acquiring a permanent home
on campus in 1994, when Luce Hall was completed on Hillhouse Avenue.
YCIAS has become a kind of umbrella for any number of programs -- in any number of disciplines -- that deal with things international.
Its organizational chart includes eight faculty councils that oversee
undergraduate and graduate "area studies" programs (the newest is
South Asian studies), plus more specialized programs ranging from
the International Political Economy Initiative to the Gilder Lehrman
Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. YCIAS
also administers the international studies major for undergraduates
and the master's degree program in international relations.
"There's
been a real exponential growth curve since about the time Luce Hall
was built," says YCIAS director Gustav Ranis. "The budget for YCIAS
has grown from $3 million to almost $10 million in the last five
years, and we've gone from 150 events a year to 500."
The
professional schools have also seen their share of increased global
awareness during the Levin administration. Jeffrey Garten's appointment
to lead the School of Management in 1995 signaled a new emphasis on international business at SOM. Garten had been undersecretary of commerce for international trade
from 1993 to 1995. Under his direction, the School has attracted
prominent speakers from around the world and an increasing number
of international students (now about 30 percent), and last year
the school started the International Center for Finance, which studies
global financial markets.
At
the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Dean Gus
Speth '64, '69LLB has parlayed his experience as director of
the United Nations Development Program into a focus on global environmental
issues. And in the School of Medicine's Department of Epidemiology
and Public Health, Dean Michael Merson, a former head of the UN's
World Health Organization, has established a global health program.
With
all this activity based in separate schools and centers around the
University, there are bound to be "turf" issues over grant
proposals, recruiting new faculty, or housing new programs. YCIAS
has a coordinating role to help manage such problems, but the YCSG
answers directly to the President's office. Talbott says YCIAS is
the Center's "most important institutional partner," and that the
two are "totally complementary enterprises." In fact, they are already
considering a joint project on Central Asia and the Caucasus, the
oil-rich region of former Soviet republics that YCIAS has just begin
to study.
The
Central Asia project was already in discussion before the events
of September 11, but they have since acquired even more relevance.
In other parts of the University, scholars are beginning to think
about how teaching and research will change as a result of a new
international-affairs landscape.
"The effects of the September 11 attacks and America's response may be
almost as dramatic as the fall of the Berlin Wall in altering the
strategic landscape," says history professor John
Lewis Gaddis, an authority on the Cold War and international
strategy. "We're not dealing with states, we cannot take domestic
security for granted, and we will need to rethink alliances."
The
question of just how to implement an undeclared "war" on terrorism
will occupy some quarters of the University, including the International
Security Studies program, where Kennedy and Gaddis teach a year-long
graduate seminar in "grand strategy," or broad strategic thinking
in international affairs. "It's going to change our agenda, and
who we have as guests," says Gaddis. "We will be talking about what
strategy will work for dealing with this particular crisis. That's
what we should be pushing ourselves and our students to consider."
But
beyond questions of the near-term response to the attacks, many
in the University will be stepping up efforts to understand terrorism's
root causes. The Divinity School's Lamin Sanneh says religion is
a key to the new foreign affairs landscape. "We need to have a cluster
of courses that deal with the encounter between ancient religions
and the modern West," says Sanneh. "It can't be done within traditional
departments. We have to identify a whole new structure."
Yale
will surely be helped in this area by the participation of international
students, both in Yale College and in the graduate and professional
schools. While these students are doubtless interested in learning
about America, their perspective tends to be less provincial than
that of the student of days gone by. The same is true for the increasing
numbers of domestic students with international backgrounds. "Migration
has brought new diasporas to the world," says Ranis. "Students retain
interest in their own heritage, or in some cases recapture it after
a generation of assimilation."
But
Dan Esty says a working knowledge of the planet is going to be an
important part of a Yale education for all students now. "Any person
coming out of Yale in this cen- tury will have a life full of the
kinds of international interactions that were once quite rare,"
says Esty. "It's Yale's job to prepare them."  |
