Provost Lange: 'Move out of your intellectual and cultural comfort zones'

President Brodhead, deanly colleagues, members of the faculty, returning students, it is my pleasure to be able to speak to you today. New graduate and professional students: To greet you in a manner reflective of my theme: (Welcome offered in Chinese, Hindi, Arabic and Italian.)

If any have not yet guessed: Welcome to Duke.

Speaking to the faculty last winter, President Brodhead outlined his vision, our vision, for a truly international Duke University: "A strategic international Duke would be one that decided where in the world it is of highest institutional value for us to be active and presented our strengths not separately but together, as collaborative contributors in the work of complex problem-solving -- teams of Duke partners that could help partners in other countries form the communities of trained intelligence our world increasingly needs." I want today to discuss with you the reasoning behind this vision and its implications for the University and for you. This is a moment of immense potential for Duke University. Having become one of the premiere universities in the United States and the world in the comparatively short period of less than 90 years, we are now poised to move to the next stage of our leadership at the global scale. You will be an integral part of that process, both as beneficiaries and as protagonists both while at Duke and after you leave. As this suggests, I want to encourage you not just to observe but to embrace internationalization as part of your formal and informal education. Doing so will not only enrich the University but will be the best way to prepare yourselves for professional lives whether in an educational setting or in a profession beyond the University. First, a little history. As many of you know, Duke became a University in 1924, the beneficiary of the vision and generosity of James B. Duke. From its outset, the University had an ambition to educate, to expand knowledge through research, and to serve, and in its early decades that combined mission was often led by its professional schools, especially Medicine and Law. As an undergraduate and graduate training institution, those decades were primarily as a regional institution, soon the leading institution of higher education in the South. Ten years after the Second World War ended, however, it was apparent that Duke's success and even more its ambitions extended far beyond the region and the professions. A major initiative began to expand graduate programs and Duke gained in national reputation and attraction for students and faculty in all its endeavors. At the same time, in the mid-1950s, the University created the Center for Commonwealth Studies, a significant institutional recognition that with national ambitions came the necessity to engage the world beyond the United States. The international thrust of the '60s and early '70s stalled somewhat in the 1980s. While there was a Center for International Studies, it cannot be said that the international was a central feature of Duke. There were relatively few international students at the undergraduate and graduate and professional levels and international faculty were also relatively rare. By the early 1990s, however, it was apparent that a new international strategy was needed. With the Soviet Union crumbling and the forces of globalization beginning to take hold, Duke launched a process of strategic planning for internationalizing the University. Several features characterized that plan: • First, it was primarily a plan about bringing the world to Duke -- making Duke a magnet for students and faculty from abroad. • Second, we needed to build international research and learning expertise and capability on campus and in the curricula. • Third, to be successful, this would need to be a campus-wide, strategic priority, confined neither to individual schools nor to an international center. It would need to be a pervasive process throughout the University, reflective of a common institutional understanding and commitment. This strategy met with great success in terms of its own goals: • There has been enormous growth in the number of international students. We have gone from one percent of the undergrads in 1993 to 10 percent in 2008, and we have a growing amount of financial aid to support some of those international undergraduates; • Over 45 percent of our undergraduates study abroad and now many also do DukeEngage international experiences. • The percentage of international graduate students has grown from 20 percent in 1993 to over 38 percent this year • Most of our professional schools have large and growing percentages of international students • Almost 100 members of our tenured, tenure-track and regular rank faculty have international passports.

We have also developed some highly innovative international programs, including: • The path-breaking Global Executive MBA program, which led the way among business schools in the mid-1990s. • Duke has a large international LLM program in the Law School. • There's been startling growth of the Duke Center for International Development, which long trained international civil servants here in its PIDP program and now trains large numbers of public administrators from India, China and numerous other countries both in their own countries and here at Duke. • The development of Duke Corporate Education, rated for six years in a row as the No. 1 tailored corporate education company in the world and which has a presence in the U.S., Europe, India, and soon the Middle East and Asia. • The presence of as many federally funded Title 6 area studies centers as any U.S. university. The internationalization strategy of the early 1990s was intended to engage a globalizing world. It reflected the sense at the time that we were in the presence of a new and rather unique force transforming the world and that the U.S. would be the preeminent economic and cultural force in that world. On the economic side, the power and benefits of international trade and the acceleration of transactions through technology would break down traditionalist and protectionist barriers to commercial and financial market forces. Social and political institutions that prevented the free play of such forces in the name of social protection or special interests would erode as the benefits of relatively unfettered markets became apparent. Culturally, there would be a diminution or erasure of the local by the global, the breaking down of barriers to cultural transmission and hence the growing homogenization of values, language, social norms and practices. In effect, many believed there would be a pervasive spread of American values, norms, habits and of English as the predominant language. Local cultures would decline in importance, certainly for those rapidly growing numbers of people engaged in global economic and cultural transactions. Of course, things have turned out to be substantially more contradictory, or one might say, using a nineteenth century term, dialectical, than the early globalization "optimists" anticipated. On the one hand, globalization has advanced apace and many benefits have resulted. Access to the global economy and freer trade have contributed to greatly increased wealth and the promise of more for vast populations in previously very poor regions and countries. There has been an enormous increase in the volume and pace of trade and, even more so of communications. There has also been a dramatic diffusion of talent and opportunity in the world, and with it, diffusion of those willing to seek out that talent and respond to the opportunities: • Patents are now far more widely dispersed than even a decade ago. • Scholarly publishing in the major journals now far more often originates from scholars conducting their research outside the United States and, increasingly, from scholars who were not even trained in the U.S. • Educational institutions abroad are rapidly improving, intensifying the competition for the most talented students and scholars, more of whom are staying at home to complete their educations rather than coming to the States. • Scholars who expatriated to the United States are now far more interested in returning to their home countries, at least on a part-time basis, to do their teaching and scholarship. This is likely to become a competitive element as U.S. universities compete for their talents. On the other hand -- Increasingly it is evident that there are numerous features of today's globalization that are less "new" than is sometimes thought, and that there are lessons to be learned from this past. There have been other periods in world history in which the combination of new technology and political might had vastly increased human interaction and when it appeared the cultural and social norms of one nation might become dominant over the local norms of many. Of course, these years came to an end, sometimes tragically. This offers a sobering lesson in humility and a caution about complacently assuming that the world will, so to speak, come to us. It also tells us that if we remain anchored at home, we may not continue to reap the benefits of the global diffusion of talent and ideas. We have also increasingly come to recognize that globalization brings absolute, and in some cases, relative, winners but also absolute losers. While the rising economic tide that open international markets creates does eventually lift many, and perhaps most, boats, there are some who either have no boat or who drown, swamped by that rising tide. Thus, there are vast parts and populations of the world that are left out of, or even the victims of, the prosperity brought to others by globalization of the economy. For these areas to prosper or just improve, it is often important that health, education and basic needs be addressed, often with the assistance of others. There is, therefore, an accelerated need for global service, rather than globalization complacency. It has also become apparent that people do not forsake their historical values and institutions easily, something we should, of course, always have understood. People do not necessarily value the same things and there is no reason to expect them to do so. Hence what is put on offer by a globalized economy or by satellite and web-enhanced global culture is not uniformly appealing. Some simply do not join the global culture. Others join intense minorities willing to take up the challenge of resistance in the name of sometimes local, sometimes global, alternative cultures, values and languages. We cannot, therefore, simply sit back and expect the world to become "like us." We must reach out and seek to learn about, and eventually understand, the cultures, values and motivations of others. They are likely to be enduring and to play a significant role in the shaping of even a world in which globalization forces are also at work. In other words, we know today that globalization may well dictate that we will need to interact with these other cultures and values, but not on our own terms. These dialectical trends have enormous implications for all universities, and certainly for one, like Duke. Briefly put, our aspirations as an institution are to recruit the most talented students and faculty, to advance knowledge at the frontiers of research, to put the knowledge developed within our walls at the service of the larger society, and to assure that the knowledge our students develop is, where appropriate, honed through engagement with the world and reflects learning we draw from the world. It is these enduring institutional goals, and their intersection with the analysis that highlights the dramatic possibilities, but also the continuing contradictions and travails of the contemporary world that underlie the necessity of the next strategic phase of the internationalization of Duke. The era in which you live and into which you will graduate will be one of enormous opportunity -- . and danger, on a worldwide scale. Our international strategy must prepare Duke, and you, to thrive in such a world. If, then, the previous stage of our strategy was one of "Duke as magnet" -- of drawing talent to our campus -- this new stage must be one of projection, of establishing Duke's presence abroad, in key sites, and as a University and not just through isolated individual school efforts. This stage must, as the President's quote already indicated, be concerted across the University and strategic. It must be coordinated at the University level and by a broad strategic vision, but still grounded in the entrepreneurialism and invention of the schools' faculties and Deans. It cannot make us present everywhere and therefore we must choose carefully where to dedicate our efforts, places where our access to talent and our impact can be greatest, where the risks are well balanced by the potential rewards in terms of our mission. It must also be one in which we fully recognize that we are an institution of both teaching and learning, of basic research and applied knowledge, of solitary thought and independent research and of teamwork and engagement, and that we must do these things on a global scale. We must also move to this next stage of our internationalization in a way that is distinctively "Duke"- built -- beyond the obvious qualities of excellence -- on values and principles by which we are already distinctive and distinguished. Let me highlight two of these: First, we must take full advantage, and it is an enormous one, of the ability of our schools and disciplines to work with one another across institutional boundaries. Duke has the possibility to be able to establish itself abroad not simply though the presence and identity of one school but of several, working together in the acts of discovery, teaching, learning and engagement. We are already learning, as we work with potential collaborators abroad, what an advantage this is. We also have a strategic commitment to putting our knowledge at the service of society and of the engagement with others that this entails. As I have stressed, this will be a critical feature of what must be part of the mission of the University in the world of possibilities and contradictions that is emerging. And -- I am sure some of you have already thought of this -- these two principles -- interdisciplinarity and knowledge in the service of society -- are mutually reinforcing. The practical problems we engage beyond Duke's walls do not generally lend themselves to singular disciplinary solutions. They require thinking and applications rooted in the intersections of the basic and applied work of several disciplines. Duke, as a University with a long commitment to cross-disciplinary and cross-school work is extremely well positioned to take on these engagements and make an impact. It means our schools will need to collaborate at the sites we choose; that we will have a collective institutional and programmatic presence. What then are the implications for you -- for the graduate and professional students of Duke? -- and hence, in many cases, for the opportunities we must provide you? Let's start with career preparation. The first guiding principle must be extension and openness, rather than insularity or isolation, whether in a lab, an office, a discipline, or a community of like-minded persons. Whether a graduate or professional student, you cannot afford to isolate yourselves from engagement with other cultures and global processes, to complacently expect the world to come to you. And let me stress, this applies equally to U.S.-born and -raised students engaging other cultures and to students from abroad who come to Duke and need to learn to engage the cultures of societies other than their own, including that of the U.S. How these manifest in your own education and career preparation will vary markedly but I think it is a principle for all of you. They may be most obvious today for the business school student who knows she will have to work abroad -- although it wasn't that long ago that I heard from a business school faculty member that "business is business" -- but it will apply to the social scientist -- whatever the problem or society he works on -- or laboratory scientists as well. We have certainly learned, over the last decade, that while "science is science," what problems are addressed and how they are approached varies substantially and importantly across cultures and across the structure of the institutions supporting the scientific endeavor. This can have a profound effect on the likely future collaborations among scientists. Our new strategy also has implications for how we teach, and for those of you who will play a role in teaching. You will need to learn how to teach students from diverse backgrounds and with cultural expectations that differ substantially from each other. Learning your craft will include how in teaching we take greatest advantage of what this cultural diversity brings to the classroom. We also need to learn, together, how we best foster the qualities of cultural and intellectual openness in our programs and in the experiences we help structure for you. Each of our schools and departments must address this opportunity, and necessity -- and you can help us do so. This may well mean further developing the resources within the University that foster historical, cultural and linguistic understanding of different parts of the world and making those resources available across our schools. As this suggests, you have a central role to play in our new strategy, not only as its beneficiaries but as part of its creation and implementation. To play that role, I encourage you to do a few things. First and foremost, embrace the opportunity, move out of your intellectual and cultural comfort zones, engage the great diversity that our campus offers and the even greater diversity that we enable for many of you beyond the campus. Search out the opportunities to learn in greater depth about the parts of the world that interest you and that can enrich your studies. Seek opportunities to engage students from other cultures no matter where you come from or where you think you are going. We too, as a University, have a role here, for we need to take greater advantage of the international and cultural diversity of our graduate and professional students in undergraduate international training and service, including Study Abroad and DukeEngage. There are opportunities here for career development for graduate and professional students as they participate in our programs. Seek out roles you can play in our increasingly far-flung university enterprise. As we develop our international Duke sites, there will be significant opportunities for our graduate and professional students to work and study abroad as part of their careers here at Duke. Take the fullest possible advantage of the global community that Duke, here in Durham and in the world, is becoming. You are, as I have said, arriving at Duke in a moment of international strategic flowering, one which will strengthen every aspect of how to project Duke into the world and draw the greatest talent to our global campus, how we prepare our students for the world, how we contribute new basic and applied knowledge to the world and how we engage the most pressing problems that the world, a contradictorily globalizing world, presents to us. You are fortunate to be able to join us in this enterprise as part of the exciting educational experience in which you are about to embark, and we are fortunate to have you join us as you prepare for your careers. As I said at the outset, welcome to Duke.