4. Facing the Global Future

Globalization and the Internet

The opportunities for participating in globalized education and research across the entire range of disciplines are perhaps most dramatically registered through the explosive development of the Internet. E-mail certainly has contributed significantly to the closer and closer collaboration among scientists and engineers around the world--and is now doing so among humanists and social scientists as well. Net-based learning in both education and research will surely continue to accelerate. And Columbia intends to be among the leaders in this arena as well.

In recent years there have been numerous initiatives in enlisting what have become known as the new media as resources for our teaching and learning. Many of these initiatives have received support from Columbia Innovation Enterprise, a central unit that administers our efforts to secure patents on the intellectual property produced at the University and then also oversees the reinvestment in education and research of the central University share of revenues from those patents. In the past year, we have decided to organize a central resource for the support of faculty who seek to integrate the Internet into their teaching and the learning of our students. Located in offices in the newly renovated second floor of Butler Library, the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning was by June 30, 1999, already working with eighty-four faculty members as they incorporate the power of the Internet into our curricula on campus.

Even as we focus our attention on enhancing the education we offer to our campus community, we are also seriously exploring ways that we can appropriately project the enormous intellectual capital that Columbia represents onto the Internet. At the level of specific course or course-like segments, we are developing offerings in, for example, business or other forms of continuing education. But our overall aim is to express on the Internet the depth and range of resources that constitute the University. Achieving that aim is very much a work in progress. We have assembled a first-rate team of seasoned professionals to stimulate and support the effort, and we are in conversation with a number of potential strategic partners. There will certainly be many twists and turns in the paths we follow--or, more likely, collaborate in constructing. But our goal is clear: to assure that Columbia occupies on the Internet the same space to which we have aspired on our campuses, the highest quality of inquiry with an intentionally global reach worthy of our location in America's leading world city.

Happily, Columbia is well positioned for pressing ahead with our global agenda. The fundamental strengths of our location in New York and our long history of international involvement are reinforced by substantial forward momentum across the institution--in the remarkable increases in applications from excellent students, in our recruitment of outstanding faculty, in our securing more research support, in our sound financial condition, and in our accelerating fund-raising totals. Those achievements result from the leadership of the Trustees and their exceptional chair, Stephen Friedman '62L, as well as the combined efforts of extraordinary faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends of Columbia. For that leadership and all of those efforts, I express heartfelt thanks.

GEORGE RUPP President, Columbia University