AAC&U’s upcoming Annual Meeting, Shared Futures/Difficult Choices: Reclaiming a Democratic Vision for College Learning, Global Engagement, and Success, will challenge the current dangerously narrow vision for higher education that seems to value degrees exclusively for their economic and individual benefit rather than for higher education’s contribution to the common good.
One precedent for a broader democratic vision of college learning is the 1947 Truman Commission Report, Higher Education for American Democracy, which linked education to “a fuller realization of democracy in every phase of living”; the development of “international understanding and cooperation”, and “the solution of social problems.” Of course, such a democratic vision emerged alongside a Cold War strategy for global engagement that emphasized American dominance and containment.
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars has recently released “A National Strategic Narrative,” by Mr. Y. Purposefully echoing George Kennan’s famous 1947 “Mr. X” article that laid the groundwork for the Containment Policy, Mr. Y calls for a new way of thinking about the role of the United States in an interconnected and interdependent world.
The whole paper is well worth reading. I will quote its main point at length:
America’s national strategy in the second half of the last century was anchored in the belief that our global environment is a closed system to be controlled by mankind—through technology, power, and determination—to achieve security and prosperity. From that perspective, anything that challenged our national interests was perceived as a threat or a risk to be managed. For forty years our nation prospered and was kept secure through a strategy of containment. That strategy relied on control, deterrence, and the conviction that given the choice, people the world over share our vision for a better tomorrow. America emerged from the Twentieth Century as the most powerful nation on the earth. But we failed to recognize that dominance, like fossil fuel, is not a sustainable source of energy. The new century brought with it a reminder that the world, in fact, is a complex, open system—constantly changing. And change brings with it uncertainty. What we really failed to recognize, is that in uncertainty and change, there is opportunity and hope.
It is time for America to refocus our national interests and principles through a long lens on the global environment of tomorrow. It is time to move beyond a strategy of containment to a strategy of sustainment (sustainability); from an emphasis on power and control to an emphasis on strength and influence; from a defensive posture of exclusion, to a proactive posture of engagement. We must recognize that security means more than defense, and sustaining security requires adaptation and evolution, the leverage of converging interests and interdependencies.
This vision is consistent with the vision articulated in the influential national report issued by AAC&U as part of its LEAP initiative—namely, that “the world in which today’s students will make choices and compose lives is one of disruption rather than certainty, and of interdependence rather than insularity.”
Shared Futures is also the name of AAC&U’s global learning initiative. The current Shared Futures project, General Education for a Global Century, brings together thirty-two campus teams to build vertically and horizontally coherent general education curricula that engage all students—in all of their diversity—with questions similar to those animating Mr. Y’s article: What does it mean to be a responsible citizen in today’s global context? And how should one act in the face of large unsolved global problems?
Such questions are shaping general education designs that better prepare students for change and complexity even as they are shaping a new national strategic narrative. They should also deeply influence what we value about liberal education in a time of global interdependence, interconnection, and inequality.
