First Thought
Insights drawn weekly from Karin Fischer’s global-education newsletter, latitude(s). Subscribe here.
Undisputedly, the past year — the past several years, really — have been a bad-news time for international education. So here’s something a little different this week: a recent rallying cry for the reinvigoration and renewed importance of international education. And the person making the case is not who you might expect.
At last week’s Association of International Education Administrators conference, I was asked to moderate the closing plenary, a conversation with Michael Osterholm, a leading epidemiologist and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. The man’s a public-health rock star, and I was a little intimidated that I might have to reel him in from talking about mRNA vaccines and spike proteins to focus in on international research and collaboration.
But Osterholm, who has traveled around the work for his work and as a U.S. State Department science envoy, told me that global research ties have been critical in fighting the pandemic. To be effective in moments of crisis, such partnerships have to be nurtured over time.
The role that colleges play — in cultivating international science, in welcoming students from overseas and sending others abroad, and through curriculum that emphasizes the 21st-century challenge of working across borders — is critical, Osterholm said:
“You can’t consider yourself an institution of higher learning unless you understand the importance of international education. To me, that’s like trying to play a baseball game without pitchers. It doesn’t work.”
Read more from Karin in this week’s latitude(s).
