Comment on this article A More Global Yale
After September 11, the University’s growing international initiatives took on a grim sense of urgency.
November 2001
by Mark Alden Branch ’86 As Yale geared up for a new academic year at the beginning of September, there was an air of excitement about the latest developments in the University’s efforts to become more international in its focus. Former deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott '68 was arriving to start the work of the new Yale Center for the Study of Globalization (YCSG), a larger and more diverse group of international students than ever before was finding its way around the campus, and the University was anticipating the October Tercentennial visit of former president Bill Clinton '73JD to give a speech on “global perspectives.” But then, on September 11, when twin plumes of smoke from the World Trade Center towers could be seen from the top of Harkness Tower, the University’s interest in international affairs suddenly became far more sober—and more essential. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon instantly threw into high relief the perils of globalization and the need to better appreciate the world beyond America’s shores.
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“Globalization is like gravity. We’re here to find out how it works.”
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While Talbott’s think tank is the most prominent new international initiative oncampus, other equally important programs have been gaining strength in recent years. “Strobe Talbott’s arrival is part of a long line of intellectual investments in global matters since Rick Levin became President,” says history professor Paul Kennedy, who directs the International Security Studies program. Levin first emphasized the importance of becoming a “world university” in his 1993 inaugural address, in which he called upon Yale to “focus even more on global issues” and “aspire to educate leaders for the whole world.” Since then, evidence of an international consciousness at Yale and throughout the world has only grown stronger. Now, as global terrorism moves to the top of the list of American foreign-policy concerns, scholars at Yale and elsewhere have the daunting task of explaining the situation in which the world now finds itself. Most Yale scholars agree that globalization is one of the most important causes of the terrorism practiced by Osama bin Laden and other Islamic fundamentalist groups. Where they disagree is in defining how globalization is responsible—and how the West can respond. For many Americans, globalization moved to the front burner only in September 1999, when protesters disrupted the World Trade Organization’s meeting in Seattle. The Seattle events turned talk of globalization into a debate over free trade and American cultural hegemony, with a passionate cry of protest over both subjects from a coalition of labor, human rights, and environmental groups. The September 11 attacks have been seen by many as an attack on globalization—an effort to frustrate the spread of Western values into the Muslim world. But Talbott says that protests and anxieties about globalization cannot stop the phenomenon. “Globalization is like gravity,” he says. “It’s not a policy, it’s not a program. It’s not good, it’s not evil. It’s happening. We’re here to find out what it is, how it works, and what can be done about it.” Of course, international contact and influence is nothing new. “Long-distance movement is as old as the species,” says sociology professor Deborah Davis, who is director of academic programs for the YCSG. “What gives it currency is the intensity and the speed. Before, these movements were slower and more linear.” The increased speed of globalization, fueled by the Internet and ease of transportation, results in “a sense of lost control,” according to veteran journalist Nayan Chanda, director of publications for the YCSG. “Globalization is threatening. The forces at play are so huge that you feel helpless.” In a panel discussion at Battell Chapel five days after the September 11 attacks, Talbott maintained that a root cause of terrorism like that sponsored by bin Laden is the “vastly growing divide between the haves and the have-nots, between those who feel like winners in the process of globalization and those who feel like losers.” He warned that the international development and aid programs that could get at those root causes may be in jeopardy. “Congress will be tempted to deal with a big budget crunch by squeezing down precisely those programs that must be beefed up,” said Talbott. But Kennedy, who was also on the panel, is skeptical about the idea that America can win over the Muslim world by investing more heavily in it. “When the West comes in,” says Kennedy, “even in a benign and well-intentioned form, it brings along its magazines, its young people, its gender relationships. Whether our own cultural messages and aggressiveness could be tempered somewhat is a question for us.” While Kennedy’s views were well received by the audience at the panel discussion, history professor and former Yale College dean Donald Kagan blasted them and those of the other panelists as “blaming the victim.” Kagan wrote in the Yale Daily News that “whatever one thinks about American power and its role in the world, surely it should not change to make [terrorists] less angry.” It is the secular nature of Western culture that most threatens Islamic fundamentalists, explains Lamin Sanneh, a professor in the Divinity School who is a scholar of both Islam and Christianity. “The Muslims perceive that the West, and America in particular, has privatized religion, and has been successful on the world stage while doing so,” says Sanneh. “That achievement is an affront to the radicals in the Muslim world,” which has long viewed church and state as one. The positive and negative consequences of globalization will all be grist for the mill at the YCSG, says Davis. “Critics of globalization should have a place and a platform here. We want it to be a place where people with differing opinions can engage in a sustained and serious debate.” The Center’s director has seen that debate from more than one vantage point. Strobe Talbott has covered international affairs as a journalist (he spent 21 years as a reporter, bureau chief, and columnist for Time) and influenced them as the deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration. (Since leaving government, he has been at work on a book on U.S.-Russian relations during the Clinton-Yeltsin years; it will be published by Random House in the spring.) In November 1999, just after the Seattle protests, Talbott began talking to Levin about the possibility of leading a new Yale institution devoted to globalization, a topic that had long interested him. The plan was announced publicly in November 2000. Unlike the YCIAS, the YCSG will not sponsor courses or degree programs. Talbott says it will focus on teaching, scholarship, outreach, and conflict resolution. Its first publication will be a response to the September 11 attacks: a book of essays by Yale scholars titled The Age of Terror: America and the World After September 11 to be published by Basic Books in January. Another of the Center’s publishing initiatives will be an online journal about globalization called YaleGlobal, which will be overseen by Nayan Chanda, a former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review. Talbott’s plans also include forays into “Track II diplomacy,” an approach to international conflict resolution that is different from official (or Track I) negotiations. “There are a lot of conflicts in the world with roots that are political, religious, or environmental,” says Talbott. “We aim to get representatives of civil society to the University and get them talking about the root causes of these conflicts.” Such discussions—along with the YCSG’s other activities—will take place in the Davies Mansion at the top of Prospect Hill and next door to the Divinity School, a magnificent former home that the University is currently bringing back from a near-ruined state. (The Center’s temporary home is at 55 Whitney Avenue.) The mansion will also house another of Yale’s new international initiatives, the World Fellows Program, which will bring leaders from abroad to Yale for a semester to study globalization. Dan Esty, a professor of environmental law and policy and former Environmental Protection Agency official, will be the program’s director; Brooke Shearer, who ran the White House Fellows program from 1993 to 1997 (and who is married to Talbott) will be executive director, responsible for day-to-day operations. Esty, Shearer, and others involved with the Program will spend this year preparing for and selecting the first crop of approximately 20 fellows for arrival in the fall of 2002. Esty defines them as “people from all walks of life, in early- to mid-career, who are in a leadership trajectory in their own society.” Yale faculty and alumni with international ties will help identify promising candidates, but anyone can apply. Once selected, the fellows will have access to people, courses, and other resources around the University. With the help of a faculty mentor, they will devise a course of study for themselves that meets their needs and interests. Esty and other faculty will teach a core seminar for all the fellows featuring units on different aspects of globalization. The fellows will have offices in the Davies Mansion. While the fellows soak up all they can of Yale, Esty and Shearer hope the University will make full use of the fellows, too. They will likely give talks and master’s teas, and perhaps even contribute to residential college seminars. “We want very much to give the fellows an opportunity to give back to Yale and to get intimately involved with the University as quickly as possible,” says Shearer.
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“We’re building a network of Yale-connected people to give Yale a window on the world.” |
Once the fellows return to their home countries, it is hoped that their Yale allegiance—strengthened through biennial reunion-conferences—will further Yale’s reputation as a global University. “We’re building a network of Yale-connected people,” says Esty. “This is a serious and substantial program to give Yale a window on the world.” The World Fellows Program and the Center for the Study of Globalization were announced together last fall, along with the decision to admit international students to Yale College without regard to their ability to pay and the creation of three new interdisciplinary professorships in international studies. The cumulative weight of the initiatives made a dramatic impact, bringing Yale’s global aspirations to the fore. But Yale’s commitment to the study of the rest of the world has been growing quietly in a number of existing programs over the past 20 years, reversing a postwar slide in influence and direction. “Fifty, 60, or 70 years ago, this place was in the forefront of international matters,” says Paul Kennedy. “We had the Yale Institute of International Affairs, with heavy hitters like Arnold Wolfers and Bernard Brodie. It was the place to be.” But when A. Whitney Griswold became President in 1950, he abolished the Institute. “Lots of the faculty went to Princeton,” says Kennedy, “which two years later founded the Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs.” The reputation of international affairs everywhere was tarnished by the fiasco of Vietnam, a war conceived by the “best and the brightest”: Ivy League and think-tank policymakers like Walt Rostow '36, McGeorge Bundy '40, and Robert MacNamara. It was not until the 1980s that Yale began to pick up the pieces. YCIAS, which is the locus for most international activity on campus, grew out of something called the Concilium on International and Area Studies, founded in 1961. It was renamed in 1983 as Yale’s interest in international affairs was reawakening. Since then, it has grown steadily in visibility and importance, acquiring a permanent home on campus in 1994, when Luce Hall was completed on Hillhouse Avenue. YCIAS has become a kind of umbrella for any number of programs—in any number of disciplines—that deal with things international. Its organizational chart includes eight faculty councils that oversee undergraduate and graduate “area studies” programs (the newest is South Asian studies), plus more specialized programs ranging from the International Political Economy Initiative to the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. YCIAS also administers the international studies major for undergraduates and the master’s degree program in international relations. “There’s been a real exponential growth curve since about the time Luce Hall was built,” says YCIAS director Gustav Ranis. “The budget for YCIAS has grown from $3 million to almost $10 million in the last five years, and we’ve gone from 150 events a year to 500.” The professional schools have also seen their share of increased global awareness during the Levin administration. Jeffrey Garten’s appointment to lead the School of Management in 1995 signaled a new emphasis on international business at SOM. Garten had been undersecretary of commerce for international trade from 1993 to 1995. Under his direction, the School has attracted prominent speakers from around the world and an increasing number of international students (now about 30 percent), and last year the school started the International Center for Finance, which studies global financial markets. At the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Dean Gus Speth '64, ‘69LLB has parlayed his experience as director of the United Nations Development Program into a focus on global environmental issues. And in the School of Medicine’s Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Dean Michael Merson, a former head of the UN’s World Health Organization, has established a global health program. With all this activity based in separate schools and centers around the University, there are bound to be “turf” issues over grant proposals, recruiting new faculty, or housing new programs. YCIAS has a coordinating role to help manage such problems, but the YCSG answers directly to the President’s office. Talbott says YCIAS is the Center’s “most important institutional partner,” and that the two are “totally complementary enterprises.” In fact, they are already considering a joint project on Central Asia and the Caucasus, the oil-rich region of former Soviet republics that YCIAS has just begin to study. The Central Asia project was already in discussion before the events of September 11, but they have since acquired even more relevance. In other parts of the University, scholars are beginning to think about how teaching and research will change as a result of a new international-affairs landscape. “The effects of the September 11 attacks and America’s response may be almost as dramatic as the fall of the Berlin Wall in altering the strategic landscape,” says history professor John Lewis Gaddis, an authority on the Cold War and international strategy. “We’re not dealing with states, we cannot take domestic security for granted, and we will need to rethink alliances.” The question of just how to implement an undeclared “war” on terrorism will occupy some quarters of the University, including the International Security Studies program, where Kennedy and Gaddis teach a year-long graduate seminar in “grand strategy,” or broad strategic thinking in international affairs. “It’s going to change our agenda, and who we have as guests,” says Gaddis. “We will be talking about what strategy will work for dealing with this particular crisis. That’s what we should be pushing ourselves and our students to consider.” But beyond questions of the near-term response to the attacks, many in the University will be stepping up efforts to understand terrorism’s root causes. The Divinity School’s Lamin Sanneh says religion is a key to the new foreign affairs landscape. “We need to have a cluster of courses that deal with the encounter between ancient religions and the modern West,” says Sanneh. “It can’t be done within traditional departments. We have to identify a whole new structure.” Yale will surely be helped in this area by the participation of international students, both in Yale College and in the graduate and professional schools. While these students are doubtless interested in learning about America, their perspective tends to be less provincial than that of the student of days gone by. The same is true for the increasing numbers of domestic students with international backgrounds. “Migration has brought new diasporas to the world,” says Ranis. “Students retain interest in their own heritage, or in some cases recapture it after a generation of assimilation.” But Dan Esty says a working knowledge of the planet is going to be an important part of a Yale education for all students now. “Any person coming out of Yale in this cen- tury will have a life full of the kinds of international interactions that were once quite rare,” says Esty. “It’s Yale’s job to prepare them.”  |
