This is the time of year communicators are tempted to do the standard “year in review,” and sometimes follow it a bit later with resolutions for the coming year. “I resolve to fix this, and to do better at that…” we promise the whole world!
Following that custom, this is the time of year when my current “lessons learned” exercise first came to life. My editing approach was to identify only the “best” and the “worst” happenings each year… but sometimes I must confess I ended up just putting my notes aside! None of it seemed very important.
But this year the worst happenings clustered under the general theme “our awful polarized politics.” And I must say I have been emotionally struck by the degree to which this horrible national condition has affected my thinking, and therefore my work!
Our totally dysfunctional congress has eliminated any possibility of finding resources to support important research and projects. But that almost seems irrelevant now. Even more, our legislators have embarrassed us terribly in the eyes of the rest of the world! Our leadership role is fading fast.
Polarization totally eliminated any hope of influencing narrow thinking on important national issues. Extreme ideologies drove otherwise honorable representatives and senators to the most unattractive behavior and name-calling imaginable. Real experts were never truly engaged. Jobs were cut in the name of creating jobs, without revealing detailed analysis. Budgets were cut to generate revenue, all without any details on how this kind of plan will actually work.
And, of course. there never was a respectful reference to days when genuine statesman could put differences on hold and achieve reasonable compromise. We have forgotten that this actually worked for the good of the country. Our society has been sadly soured by all this, and the world disappointed. And now we are even losing confidence in our own economic future.
But the best of the year was my delightful discovery of the high potential of my own industry, higher education. Indeed, the internationalization of higher education is establishing a solid framework for world problem-solving, and therefore has the potential to transcend petty national politics.
I had the privilege of sitting in on all the sessions of the American Council on Education’s (ACE) Blue Ribbon Panel on Global Engagement. Twenty university CEO’s from around the world were invited to meet in Washington over an entire year to consider the issues related to internationalization. And several of us “expert presenters” and observers were invited to join them. That experience, combined with two trips to Australia and one to India, convinced me that higher education is now a truly global enterprise, and we should now all see our individual institutional missions in a global problem-solving context.
My past resolutions tended to be more building on the best of the year, rather than on trying to fix the worst. Focusing on the worst tends to reinforce the negative and result in a kind of plateau-type feeling in institutions. But building on the best, making it even better and more visionary, tends to reinforce the positive and an overall institutional feeling of moving ahead.
So this year I say: “I resolve to achieve a better understanding of the potential of my industry of higher education to be a world problem-solver, and to do what I can to advance the cause.”
I know from experience that when educators meet our tendency is to get more interested in each other’s culture, religion, food, and ideas. I, of course, realize that political ideologies exist in these forums as well. But the ” we agree to disagree” academic standard still persists. And, in the final analysis, I know that if we are ever to produce truly internationally savvy world leaders, and make headway on solving our looming life-threatening problems, it will be the world’s great academic institutions, large and small, that lead the way!
Larry D. Lauer 