Larry D. Lauer

At the recent Worldviews Conference on Higher Education and Media in Toronto I had a very interesting conversation with Phillip Altbach, one of the top experts in the world on international higher education. We discussed the idea that international education was a major form of soft power and has the potential to significantly improve cross-culture understanding. And as such, it also is one of our purest forms of public diplomacy.

I have been approaching this topic from a perspective I gained from being associated with a think tank in Washington that concentrates on national security issues. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) houses some of the world’s most recognized experts on national security problems and solutions.

Early in my association with  CSIS I became familiar with an often quoted report that introduced the concept of “smart power.” The report presented a set of strategic communication and diplomatic initiatives to advance US interests around the world that continue to influence U.S. foreign policy programs. In that report, the importance of the idea of “soft power” was also specifically mentioned.

In my study of strategic and international communication I have come to believe that soft-power and public diplomacy go hand-in-hand. People-to-people exchanges, and more recently interactive digital media, are the best tools we have to produce greater world understanding.  And through my long years of teaching and speaking abroad I have also come to believe that international higher education is the purest form we have of public diplomacy.

Teaching, learning, focused research, consulting projects and other interactive international educational collaborations all contribute to a more secure world. The more faculty and students get to know each across cultures and ideologies the more national security fears tend to fade, and the more mutual understanding improves.

Higher education is already a global industry. Our potential to enable world peace and diminish security threats is therefore unprecedented. If we use social media to encourage its potential, and the news media take initiative to both advance and monitor it, we can once and for all realize this potential.

In the months ahead I will be exploring this topic in greater depth. As I transition from a vice-chancellor and professor in August to a vice-chancellor emeritus and a research and teaching fellow, I will be posting more about what I am learning. Stay tuned.

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This week I was on two panels at the Worldviews Conference on Higher Education and Media in Toronto. One of them was on branding, and I previewed it in last weeks’ post. The other one was titled: “National Security, Social Media and the Publicity of Academic Findings.”  This one could be addressed from many vantage points, and frankly I struggled with how to approach it.

We were told our topic was inspired by news media coverage of instances of the Canadian government censuring academics, raising academic freedom and transparency questions about accessing sponsored research findings. Of course, social media played a complicating role in these situations, and also raises additional complicated  security and privacy issues in general. To be sure, academic freedom, privacy and transparency questions abound today as universities become more global and find themselves operating in multiple cultures and dealing with multiple government policies.

I have been both a practitioner and an academic who has been teaching strategic and international communication in a journalism school. So fundamentally I believe in as much transparency as is possible. But as a practical matter, in my work I have come to accept the proprietary nature of commissioned research. And so these days I make the assumption that researchers who take commissions to do government studies understand that up front.

Now you might argue that governments are public not private entities and as such should be completely transparent, except possibly for a few national security activities. But it’s simply a fact that elected administrations will always be advancing their ideology related policies, and that information they gather will often be proprietary. This is a reality, even though they may have campaigned on a platform of more transparency!

So in today’s world it is the job of the news media to find out as much as possible about what governments are doing, especially  their wrong-doings. Reporters will therefore continue to try to uncover the findings of proprietary research, as they should. This is a critically important form of checks and balances, and I believe its in this ongoing process that gradual social progress can be made.

All this is to say that proprietary agreements must always be clearly understood upfront, be they with governments or with universities housing government projects. That means that even inside today’s universities, researchers must be clear about  when and if their findings can be published. For true academics, research projects with no strings will always be preferred, but that will not always be the case.

Just how much social media complicates these proprietary issues and raises additional issues about government intrusions into our personal lives, will confuse matters for a long time. Most of us still want to draw a privacy line that can’t be crossed. But today that line always wiggles a bit every time government intrusion charges, terrorists threats, or even exciting new internet opportunities, appear.

One of my students responded to all this by blurting, “There is no such thing as privacy any more. Get used to it!”  For some people this may sound simplistic and naive. Nonetheless, it’s probably true.

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