Deans' Corner —
The University: an international community of students and scholars

Ralph Hexter, L&S Executive Dean and Dean of Arts & Humanities

June 5, 2003

Deans' Corner Archive

"Deans' Corner" is a new feature of our website. The plural possessive "Deans'" is significant because Letters & Science is a college of five deans, reflecting the disciplinary scope and diversity of Berkeley's largest school or college —37 departments, over 800 ladder faculty, roughly 18,300 undergraduates, and some 2,800 graduate students.

The five of us meet on many occasions, but one of our standard rituals is a weekly deans' lunch. These noontime gatherings often have a full formal agenda, but we usually have time to discuss at least one larger issue. It's interesting in these discussions how differences between our disciplinary perspectives emerge, but also how often deep commonalities surface and weave their way into the web of our thinking. Over the coming months all of us will take a turn in the "Deans' Corner." These are not L&S position papers or enunciations of college policy, but personal reflections on a topic of current interest, or simply something that has struck our fancy. Think of this as our L&S virtual "Op Ed" page, or — if you prefer a concrete metaphor — our Sproul Plaza

Now it's my turn.

I've had many reasons to think about foreign study over the past months. The current dilemma Berkeley recently faced, and is still facing — how to deal with the possibility that a new student coming to Berkeley or a student or faculty member returning from vacation or a research trip, depending on his or her itinerary, may be infected with the SARS virus — is only the most publicized and most sharply defined. The campus has already cancelled some of its own foreign study programs in regions where SARS is currently on the rise, as earlier in the year we and other institutions had to consider bringing students back from areas where the possibility of war or terrorism seemed particularly strong. We have long worked closely with our wonderful office of International Students and Scholars, which has always handled all the required paperwork. Since 9/11, the amount of work, the degree of scrutiny, and the cost of even inadvertent non-compliance have all increased many times over. Faculty we are recruiting from abroad, and visiting lecturers and researchers, face increasing waits and even worries about their visas. We recently found ourselves confronted by another quandary when several faculty discovered that the non-U.S. citizens in their classes were not welcome on field trips they had planned, to facilities deemed sensitive, as an integral part of their courses. In advance of a final policy in consultation with the Academic Senate, the administration has underscored our commitment that all our students have equal access to educational opportunities.

There is no question that we must be prudent in public health and security matters, certainly no less so with foreign students and scholars than with the other groups of visitors from overseas, but certainly no more so. Institutions of higher education are always in and of their own country, but they are also key sites of international learning and exchange of ideas, from the global reach of the areas and cultures studied, the languages they teach, and the students and scholars who gather on our campuses.

This has been a rather long introduction and "scene-setting" to the reflection that inspired my first soapbox stand in the Dean' Corner, which was simply how important foreign study has been, and continues to be for me. Though my primary training has been at American universities, I spent three years at an English university and completed my graduate research in Germany, connected to an institution of higher education there. I have spent a year at a research institute in Italy, and keep up the scholarly contacts I made in all of these countries. When I thought about it, I realized that international education experience is the rule rather than the exception for the current quintet of L&S Deans. Kwong-loi Shun, Dean of the Undergraduate Division — alas, now in his final months with us before taking up an important post at the University of Toronto in that foreign land Canada — taught at the University of Singapore and received much of his training at universities in England and Hong Kong, as Geoffrey Owen, Dean of the Biological Sciences, did in England. When I asked George Breslauer, Dean of the Social Sciences and a specialist in Soviet and now post-Soviet Russian politics, about his international experiences, he told me that he fell in love with the study of foreign languages already in junior high school. "I spent a summer in Spain at the age of 15, and went to college determined to be a Spanish Literature major. But I'd also studied Russian and ended up majoring in Political Science, writing my PhD dissertation on contemporary Soviet politics." Dean Breslauer first visited the USSR in 1974, when he spent five months at Moscow State University.

Mark Richards, Dean of Physical Sciences, turns out also to have spent time in Spain. "Before studying geophysics," he wrote me, "one of my most formative experiences was studying classical guitar (and "castellano" Spanish) in Madrid. Geophysics itself is a highly international endeavor. I was a postdoc and then twice a visiting scholar at the Australian National University in Canberra. I learned rotational dynamics as a Visiting Scholar at Ecole Normale Superieure (Paris), and I've done field work in Brazil, Ecuador (Galapagos), and Tahiti. (OK, the last was mostly for fun.) Geophysicists with no knowledge of other languages (especially French) often find themselves a bit handicapped, even though the common language of mathematics and computer-ese tend to form bridges readily. Half of my graduate students have come from Europe (Germany, Italy, and Spain). Right now I'm leading an effort to get the international geodynamics community to agree on a very large project to develop high performance computational tools. This involves key collaborators in France, Germany, Australia, Britain, Canada, and Japan." I had been joking with Dean Richards, who currently studies Mars, that his next trip would be to the red planet itself, leaving us merely earthly internationalists in the dust. He responded by saying that if he ever does get to Mars, it will most likely be in the company of Russian, French, or Japanese colleagues and that by that time, the lander module is likely to be manufactured in Hong Kong or Singapore.

All these global experiences in our own education, along with ongoing contacts with universities outside the United States, contribute to the breadth of our vision, our ability to step back and look at Berkeley and the entire American higher education system in a broader context. For one thing, we know why so many look to American universities and particularly Berkeley as a model to emulate. Not long ago several of the L&S deans were consulted by the University of Uppsala in Sweden on a reorganization plan they were contemplating, and this summer, while in Holland to participate in a graduate student's doctoral defense, I will speak to the Rector (comparable to our Chancellor) and other administrators at the University of Utrecht on the transformations they are undertaking in compliance with the Bologna Accord, the EU-wide mandate to develop a sequence of BA/MA/PhD degrees more common in British and above all U.S. universities. We can be justly proud of our university system, for its quality, the diversity of its institutional forms, its power to promote individual originality as well as disciplinary innovation and interdisciplinary collation, and its accessibility.

Keeping in touch with former colleagues abroad is also a valuable exercise in terms of maintaining a general international vision. Yes, one can access foreign media in numerous ways, but one often gains the sharpest insights when one looks at a world one thinks one knows well — as an academic myself, I am for the moment thinking of the university world — and then realizes with a start how different those worlds are across borders both linguistic and literal.

I was reminded of this recently when I happened to be reading the report mailed to me thrice yearly as a former recipient of a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) grant to study in Munich. The views of many current and former fellowship holders are represented in this magazine, and reading it is always illuminating, usually in some unexpected way. As a student of languages myself I of course pay attention to changes in usage, and I'm constantly amazed at the amount of English that creeps into this publication: "Postdocs," "Alumni club," "Ranking" are now all German nouns, and from the university world — I'm not even counting words like "Hacker" and "online" from the world of computers. That is an old story.

More interesting, though, this time were the words that, while I could translate them into English, I realized had virtually no currency today in our world. Four that struck me as recurring more than once in this single number of the DAAD Letter — yes, "Letter" appears to be now another "German" word! — were Vernunft, Dialog, Verständigung, and Solidarität, which mean, in turn, "reason," "dialogue," "mutual understanding," and "solidarity." Each of these appeared, again, I repeat, more than once, and each was used by more than one writer. As you might imagine, they occurred primarily in the context of international relations referring not so much to the interaction of governments as to the modes of contact between citizens, especially citizens of different countries and cultures. Nor is this surprising in an organ for, and with many pieces by current and former international students.

It would be easy to dismiss the prominence of these words in a German publication — this is "Old Europe," after all. But the people who wrote these words were not only Europeans but from the Ivory Coast, Cuba, and Argentina as well. I think it bears some reflecting — certainly I want to meditate on this myself — why one so rarely if ever hears a sentence that includes the words "reason" or "dialogue" or "mutual understanding" on our campus or in our public discourse. Particularly foreign to our contemporary language is the world "solidarity," which moved two of the correspondents to expatiate on its overtones for them. For example, an African student praised the "solidarity" among fellow doctoral candidates. I found one formulation, from another correspondent, particularly striking: "Solidarity means renunciation of one's self." This same writer remarked that "dialogue presupposes a readiness to change."*

Such sentiments seem appropriate indeed to an educational setting. Why, then, do they sound so foreign?

 

* "Solidarität bedeutet Verzicht auf sich selbst"; “Dialog setzt Bereitschaft zur Veränderung voraus…," Orestes Sandoval, in DAAD Letter 1/03, p. 7.