Many professors at Connecticut College are dealing with complex questions about the nature of education and its connections to the study of the world at large. These questions arise in the context of a $700,000 grant that the College has received from the Mellon Global Initiative. There are 17 professors on three task forces working to come up with ways to best utilize the grant over three years. The vision of the Mellon Global Initiative is to integrate students’ global learning experiences into existing courses so students can better use these experiences within the framework of their Connecticut College education. According to Professor Amy Dooling of the East Asian Studies department, the aim of the grant is to create a home for a global education on campus since many globally oriented courses do not fit within the existing disciplineary divisions.
Professor Andrea Lanoux, Chair of the Slavic Studies department, describes her goals for students’ global education saying, “I want to reimagine the educational experience at Connecticut College to build a structure involving interactions between international students who represent the global on our campus, the Study Abroad Office, CISLA, SATA and all components dealing with an international education so as to make it as intellectually productive as possible for everyone involved.”
For Lanoux, the college abroad experience was an invaluable one, an expereince she describes as having changed her life. She feels it is important that these opportunities be made more available to college students. She believes Connecticut College is a great place to begin, saying, “That the Mellon Foundation has provided the grant is reflective of the promise they see in us as an institution.” This grant is just the latest of many that the College received to advance global learning; previous grants were connected to Language Learning and Global Environmental Justice.
These appear to be well intentioned initiatives. Students who have studied away describe their experiences abroad in one word, usually a variation of “Great!” or “Awful!”—nothing that complicated their understanding of the world or challenged old beliefs. A sophomore I spoke to went so far as to say that many students want to study abroad to just party at an exotic new location.
Professor Lanoux observed how the lack of a proper framework meant that students often found it difficult to pursue ideas and research questions that they discover. With the grant from the Mellon Global Initiative, she believes that the College will be able to improve this situation.
Professor Sunil Bhatia, Chair of the Human Development Department, believes that “the grant has begun a conversation in the College about conceptions of the local and the global in different contexts,” a conversation the College needs to have. This discussion, Bhatia believes, will need the College to go through a process of “self-reflexivity”–a reflection on its place in the world involving a great deal of critique and introspection.
This process is not always a very comfortable one. Professor Bhatia believes that students need to be taught this as well so that when they travel abroad and study in a broader world context, “they do not end up reinforcing some of their own privileges” that come from being a part of the world in a limited way.
In reflecting on its place in the global world, the College would also need to consider how the grant relates to different members of the campus community. Students on campus are a diverse lot and engage with the notion of the global in very different ways. As one professor put it, “there needs to be more interrogation of this word ‘global.’”
In interviews on campus, students demonstrated a variety of reactions ot the Mellon Global Initiative grant. One student worries that the grant is yet another step in creating yet a new generation of “young imperialists,” Americans who see themselves not as subject to or even participants in the world, but as changers of it. She fears that these students will not understand the contexts of the world’s problems and continue a legacy of neocolonialism. Other students are puzzled by the idea, questioning the necessity of such a grant.
Professor David Kim of the Religious Studies Department, in discussing these student concerns, stated that it was “with those kinds of concerns [about cultural imperialism] that the work of the grant was initiated.” According to Kim, part of the motive for providing a global education at Conn is “to make students self-aware, with a deep understanding of their social location.” Kim also underscored the importance of working interdisciplinarily, since the majority of world issues cannot improve from uni-disciplinary treatment.
In my view, with such an aim the Mellon Global Initiative can bring about precisely such a positive change for students. Many students at Connecticut College come here with parochial, often very one-sided perspectives on how the world works. The aim of a global education should be for students to discover a diversity of opinions and fuller information so that they can engage with the world in more thoughtful ways.
In the relevant words of a professor from one of my classes, “One of the problems with contemporary multiculturalism is that there are complex questions but no easy answers.” This is precisely the case with ideas about the global. For a global education to work in the best way possible, faculty, students and staff need to think deeply about the important questions that are connected to it. The conversation has begun, and it should be one that is further broadened and encouraged over the next few years. •
