4. Facing the Global Future

As we enter a new century and the world becomes smaller each day, Columbia commands great assets in the competition for high-caliber students and faculty. Excellence in teaching and superb area studies programs make our University a world leader, as do the size and quality of our international faculty and student population and the prominence of our alumni abroad. And our location in New York City affords us an enormous comparative advantage.

But leadership is only as strong as foresight. To advance Columbia's standing as an international university, we must keep expanding the global awareness of our curricula and encourage more American students to participate in study abroad. We must also continue our stepped-up efforts to attract the best minds to Columbia from the world at large.

To continue to move in this direction will require even greater diversification of our complement of international students and scholars and of our destinations for study outside the United States. In addition to nurturing our strong, established partnerships, we will need to create new ones in developing regions and countries. We will also need to ensure that faculty searches are international in their scope, and incorporate into the criteria for tenure and promotion a greater valuation of international collaborations.

Fortunately, the internationalization of Columbia is already well advanced. But this is no time to rest on our laurels. We must constantly anticipate the profound impact of globalization in the coming decades.

Prevention of Maternal Mortality Conference, Accra, 1996

Three areas illustrate how fundamental that impact will be. Two concern the quite different ways that globalization demands further engagement in the sciences and engineering on the one hand and the arts, humanities, and social sciences on the other. And the third is what may be the greatest opportunity of all for globalized education and research, the Internet.

Internationalization in Science and Engineering

A paradox in the internationalization of education and research is that fields in which the least attention is accorded to intercultural interaction are the most inclusive in achieving participation from around the world. While there is relatively little rhetoric about aspirations for it, there is in fact an international science and technology community. This achievement testifies eloquently to the power of mathematics and science-based inquiry to elicit and allow collaboration from all quarters and admirably illustrates how a focus on shared investigation may more readily overcome cultural divisions than does direct concern with those divisions themselves.

Yet globalization nonetheless demands focused attention from the sciences and engineering. Even though there is an international science and engineering community, this community conspicuously does not include the world's poorest countries. Nor does the agenda of science and engineering incorporate the special and urgent needs of those poorest countries.

(above) Joseph Graziano, Ph.D. (center), and Habibul Asahn, M.D. (left), two of the principal investigators from the Mailman School of Public Health, visited Bangladesh to research causes of and remedies from arsenic poisoning from well water. (left) A young girl in Bangladesh shows lesions on her hands, that signal arsenic poisoning.

Here advances in human health offer an arresting index of scientific attention. The focus is on the diseases of rich countries: cardiovascular ailments, cancer, Alzheimer's disease. In the few cases where health risks are shared across the rich-poor divide, the therapies developed are so costly as to be completely unavailable to citizens of the poorest countries, with AIDS as the most dramatic example. Our Mailman School of Public Health has developed programs that are admirable exceptions to this generalization, including the just launched program in maternal health, AMDD (Averting Maternal Death and Disability), funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But the overall pattern is still inescapable.

The absence of the poorest countries from the world's science and engineering agenda is only exacerbated by the internationalization of opportunity for promising scientists and engineers. In the very poorest countries, talent for mathematically based advanced education and research has almost no chance to be nurtured and recognized. But in some of the less developed countries--notably India and China--enormously accomplished students are prepared. Many of these students in turn pursue advanced education and research in the West. As a result, at least their initial contributions are to the established science and technology agenda.

Until the recent past, the initial pattern came to dominate entire careers because so many of these recruited students remained in the West. This pattern has been changing, notably in the cases of Taiwan and India, with the result that native talent recruited abroad returns to contribute to scientific and technical development in the country of origin. But even in such cases, the focus is less on the special problems of poor countries than on the development of globally competitive science and technology, for example in computational software and telecommunications.

The challenge for the international community is to expand the science and technology agenda so that it includes the special and urgent needs of the poorest countries. That means attention to diseases like malaria and tuberculosis, which are not major threats to industrialized countries but wreak devastation in poor countries. It also means genetic research and advances in biotechnology devoted to enhancing crops that will grow in sub-Saharan Africa and other tropical areas.

The international science and engineering community cannot, of course, address this challenge simply on its own. National and multinational government agencies and corporations will have to play crucial roles in providing funding and structuring incentives for participation in initiatives that the market alone does not commend. So too will foundations and other nongovernmental organizations. And to press for this expansion of the science and engineering agenda is one contribution that universities as well must make in engaging globalization more fully in the coming decades.