Santa Clara University

Convocation 2003

International Education in an Era of Globalization:
Beyond Competence to Genuine Understanding of Cultures

Paul Locatelli, S.J.
University Convocation
Jan. 14, 2003

On March 6, 1991 the Persian Gulf war had just ended. President George Herbert Bush spoke of a new world order based on four key aspirations:

On September 11, 2001, aspirations for peace were shattered. September 11 has become a reference point for a profound change in the world order. If anything, it shattered Americans’ sense of order as much as it destroyed the Twin Towers. However, September 11 was not when this new world disorder began. For more than one decade, history had been moving in a direction different from the one the first President Bush envisioned.

Today, the world again is moving towards war in the Middle East rather than moving down the path of peace. It is slipping into economic de-stabilization rather than moving towards economic development that will ensure peace and progress. And even more to the point, there has been a radical change in the way we think about the new order of international politics, globalization and economic development, world religions and national cultures, peace and justice. We know the new world order needs to be fixed, and education must play a central role in this process.

Jesuit Education provides a model. On October 6, 2000, in the Mission Church, Father Peter Hans-Kolvenbach, S.J., the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, envisioned Jesuit education as a way of fashioning a new world order in human relations. In fact, he raised the bar for Jesuit higher education when he challenged us to develop the whole person in relation to the whole world. He said graduates of Jesuit universities like Santa Clara must be "whole persons of solidarity in the real world."² What then is this well-educated solidarity with reality?

A well-educated solidarity means recognizing that each one of us is bound to all of creation in a moral ecosystem. Solidarity is a readiness to connect with and support all who make up this global, moral ecosystem. Solidarity involves understanding and nurturing harmonious relationships across the dividing lines of culture, class and nationality.

But genuine solidarity has to be well educated. It is not content with fuzzy thinking because the problems that divide us are rooted in economic, technical, cultural and political structures that have to be intelligently analyzed and astutely managed.

A person with a well-educated solidarity appreciates the dignity of each individual person and the common good of all people. This person will pay special attention to the most fragile and vulnerable of our world because they are the ones most easily left out. Living as persons of solidarity requires both an intellectual and a personal commitment. It requires intellectual competence to understand the world and compassion to engage our lives in it.

The fact is that part of the world is benefiting from globalization while another part is being left out. But a well-educated solidarity does not stop at the flashpoints, the most visible problems of sweatshops, free trade coffee, the living wage, or the possibility of war with Iraq. Instead, an education that develops the whole person in light of the whole world will strive to include an international dimension to every aspect of learning and scholarship.

Solidarity requires educating both for inter-cultural competence and inter-cultural understanding. Before September 11, most educators believed that the key to an international education was inter-cultural competence in a globalizing world. People needed knowledge about other cultures and the ability to exercise their professional skills intelligently in different cultural contexts. In order to work effectively in a globalizing world, students needed to acquire the knowledge to work across national and political boundaries, particularly in the area of financial markets and business.

Since September 11, we are realizing that inter-cultural competence is not enough. Intellectual skills can be used simply for personal power or maximizing profits. If we are to achieve the higher aspirations of peace, stability, security and economic development for all, something more is needed. In addition to developing analytical and linguistic competence, a college education must also develop the capacity to build harmonious relationships among people who are very different. Beyond competence, therefore, a different kind of understanding is required, the understanding born of compassion and personal connection to people as part of the human family. The new era of globalization demands that universities change their goals in education.

A cartoonist in the Irish Times last June saw the need for this change. The cartoon shows a leader of the so-called G8, the 8 leading industrialized nations, handing a check to a Russian draped in rockets and bombs saying: "And the winner of $20 billion...to destroy weapons of mass destruction is Russia." Next to the Russian is an African holding in one hand an empty bowl with "Famine" written on it and in the other hand a pill container with the word "AIDS" on it. He asks "Aren’t Famine and AIDS weapons of mass destruction?" The G8 leader responds: "Yes... but YOUR destruction not OURS!"

The cartoon captures the necessity of combining competence and power with deep human understanding. Without that fundamental sense of connection, of understanding the world of those who suffer, knowledge and power are blind. The cartoon forces us to ask who counts in the arena of the global economic policy, and who doesn’t count. If these eight highly competent leaders understood more compassionately the plight of citizens of Africa, would they have made a different decision? If an African had been part of the conversation, would these decisions have been different? If these eight men and their staffs had a different sort of education, would they have taken the destruction of millions of people through AIDS as seriously as they did disarmament?

The important lesson is that to be attentive to the reality immediately around you, you must have a genuine experience of the broader world as it is, not as seen in some disconnected way from the television or print media.

Most of us do not have any experience with the 80% of the world population who live in poverty, or the 70% who are illiterate and unable to use or have access to technology. We do not really know the 50% of humanity who suffer from malnutrition even though our world produces an equivalent of 3,000 calories of food per person each day.

Many of us -- myself included -- must stretch our imagination to be attentive to these and other realities. And unless we do, we fail to grasp the gravity of a world in which 3 billion people are living on less than $2 per day.

The test of well-educated solidarity is not whether we can work with overseas partners, but whether we have become global citizens, people who accept the challenge of the global common good and work to overcome what threatens it.

Solidarity requires that we think critically and creatively about our world. Thomas Friedman, who opened this academic year with a major address, says "globalization is everything and its opposite." It is everything because we are living in a time of great opportunities and great benefits. Globalization can help us share many good things across the world: language, ideas, art, culture, music, technology, science, financial resources, economic development, and even democracy and freedom. At the same time, this process of global integration brings with it the opposite, as when terrorists can use global means of communication and finance to undermine international security.

Globalization is neither all good nor all bad. But the shadow side of globalization will persist as long as the poor do not benefit from economic development and advancements in medicine, or as long as some people resort to violence to resist modern influences or when they retreat into ideological isolation that despises those of other races, religions and cultures.

Persons with a well-educated solidarity advance the good and seek to correct the opposites. They have a world view that connects all people across the face of the earth. Sociologist Saskia Sassen articulates well this reality. She argues that we must heed the voices of the poor who teach us that "no matter how far away geographically, we in the rich countries can no longer fully escape or ignore poverty, wars, and disease in the global south, ..." .³

Likewise, Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations, is a true global citizen. He argues "If globalization is to succeed, it must succeed for poor and rich alike. It must deliver rights no less than riches. It must provide social justice and equity no less than economic prosperity and enhanced communication..."

Sassen and Annan address the new challenge for Jesuit higher education today. It must be broadly humanistic and include social justice because of our faith commitment. This commitment has two important dimensions: First, realize that our relationship with God reflects our relationship with each other. If our relations with others are characterized by understanding and justice, so will we face towards God. If we are defensive or vengeful towards others, we cut ourselves off from our God. This faith commitment also fosters dialogue among people of different religions, with each religion respected as a source of goodness and a gift of God’ s love.

Thinking critically in a pedagogy of solidarity requires people to be engaged with each other in dialogue and experience. Thinking critically begins with a commitment to intellectual excellence. It also is rooted in a deep ethical commitment to engage the world truthfully and to change whatever threatens the integrity of people and the planet.

In Jesuit education, thinking critically is the necessary expression of a faith that seeks justice for all. Our graduates cannot work to heal the world unless they understand it in all of its complexities through a pedagogy of critical engagement.

Epistemologists and educators from John Dewey to Paulo Freire have called for such a pedagogy. Freire put it well when he wrote: "Apart from inquiry, apart from praxis, [people] cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry [people] pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other".⁴

This pedagogy of solidarity also has implications for research and other forms of scholarly activity that are crucial to the mission of the academy in general and to Santa Clara in particular. All research, done well and conducted ethically, is of value because it discloses reality. But research about social and economic issues in a global context runs the risk of examining other cultures at arm’s length. In the pursuit of objectivity, research can stop at competent analysis and not proceed to engaged understanding. That further step comes from entering into dialogue with people or seeing and smelling what life is like from where they stand.

We do not enter into this kind of understanding if we only deal with people in large masses, where their individuality is blended into an economic or statistical multitude. A pedagogy of solidarity requires contact with particular human beings in those other cultures whose lives are shaped by specific problems and opportunities. We do not merely talk about problems, we exchange ideas and seek solutions with specific people who face those problems.

Solidarity is learned by contact more than by concepts.⁵ Contact with actual people puts a human face on the problems of our times. AIDS then is not only a global epidemic but the tragedy of someone we should know. When our study of different cultures and socio-economic classes engages actual people, critical thinking is enhanced: the contact makes the concepts come alive. Our program in El Salvador, for example, challenges the illusions of privilege and individualism, and opens students to new realities and a well-educated solidarity. Contact with actual poor people can help us see the larger picture that can be obscured in technical discussions.

We must also use our imagination in this pedagogy. Often literature and the arts convey to us a sense of the inner reality of life in other times or cultures so that we come to identify with the characters of Toni Morrison or Francisco Jimenez.

When the Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen spoke here in November, he pointed out that the debate on whether the gap between the rich and poor of this world is growing slightly wider or slightly narrower can miss the point. The real issue, Sen said, was the moral scandal of billions of people living and dying in abject poverty. This is a scandal that must not be allowed to exist until decades of economic development alleviate it. Professor Sen’s familiarity with his native India thus locates technical discussions of macroeconomics within a larger framework of human solidarity.

Genuine inter-cultural understanding and genuine solidarity provide the best chance of inspiring people to act in moral, responsible ways that will build a new world order different from the one we are now experiencing.

Given this ideal and the growing realization that leaders for the new world order must think in solidarity, rather than in isolation, our educational challenge is to prepare responsible global citizens with inter-cultural understanding who will make the world better.

I argue, then, that a Santa Clara, Jesuit education must include, at least, four interwoven, international dimensions.

From this, how can we - as a community of scholars - bring inter-cultural knowledge and understanding to the campus?

First, highlight campus programs abroad such as the Law School’s International Law program. It provides an excellent way for developing such understanding. And, through the undergraduate International Program, hundreds of Santa Clara students each year study in other countries around the world. The quality of learning depends not on them taking American culture there but on the depth of inter-cultural understanding that they gain and bring back. I wonder how the experience and understanding gained through these two programs can be enriched and better shared on this campus.

Second, the Institute on Globalization has assembled a wide spectrum of viewpoints to challenge our thinking and stretch our imaginations. Students who like grass roots presentations need to hear from corporate and business leaders. And students who like talks by business leaders should also pay heed to the presentations in the Globalization from Below series. Also, visit the de Saisset Museum for the new exhibits that show the faces of the poorest of the poor. The photographs by Sebastiao Salgado put a human face on the grand concepts about global integration and its costs and benefits.

Third, The Lilly Endowment has awarded Santa Clara a $2 million grant over 5 years. This grant capitalizes on our shift to Residential Learning Communities and the new pedagogy of solidarity in Jesuit education.

It will build on these developments in three ways. It will enable students in the Residential Learning Communities to examine critical life choices in light of their faith commitments and inspire them to serve others. Faculty and Staff Development programs will provide mentors for students in this learning experience. And, immersion trips will create opportunities for over 1000 students to engage a world marked by great promise and suffering.

Finally, I am grateful to the many faculty who have redesigned their courses and put together new courses so that we can reflect on globalization across the disciplines. You have shown that serious academic work can be done on the most pressing concerns of our world. I encourage students to continue to take those courses and make the connections. I encourage faculty to make the study of global issues a permanent part of their courses in the years to come.

In the end, inter-cultural understanding is about having the passion to honor the dignity of each individual and to promote the common good of all as a global community.

So, my conclusion is one sentence: As the Peace Corps seeks to "ruin you for life," a Santa Clara education seeks to change who you are - and inspire you to make the world more humane and just, more faith- and peace-filled.

Notes: