"There Are Fascinating Possiblities Everywhere"

Chancellor Birgeneau on Study Abroad and International Exchange

With the staggering pace of economic and cultural globalization, as well as debates about the role of the United States in the world, U.S. political and educational leaders are focusing on the importance of global citizenship and international education in undergraduate education. For example, U.S. Senate Resolution 308 proclaimed 2006 the "Year of Study Abroad," recognizing that "educating students internationally is an important way to share the values of the United States, to create goodwill for the United States around the world, [and] to work toward a peaceful global society." Chancellor Robert Birgeneau met IAS students for a wide-ranging conversation about the importance of study abroad and international exchange for students, for Cal, and for the body politic. Joining the Chancellor were Stacy Pearl, Caitlin Sorensen, and David Wenger, peer advisers in the Education Abroad Program.

We understand that part of your commitment to international education stems from your own experience abroad early in your career. Can you tell us a little about that?

Well, my first experience living abroad was directly related to my education-I moved from Canada to the United States to go to school [at Yale University]. Later, I went to Oxford University as a Rutherford Memorial Fellow, a Canadian government fellowship. I spent a year at Oxford before starting my first "real" job, at Bell Laboratories. So my year abroad at Oxford was

really my second international experience, and it was fascinating. I had been living in the United States as a graduate student, and this was a

Chancellor Robert Birgeneau

remarkable time in U.S. history. It was especially interesting being in England, to get an outside perspective on the United States and the United States' role in the international arena.

Did that experience-of going from Canada to the United States and then to England-affect your view of the world?

Definitely. Many students going abroad have almost identical stories, which is one reason I've enjoyed talking to students about their study abroad experiences and sharing mine. My experience shows, I think, that you don't need to go very far away to see the world differently. My first experience studying in an "exotic" place was going from Toronto to New Haven, Connecticut, which may not seem terribly dramatic. But it did turn out to be striking, particularly the juxtaposition of Yale University, a great and very rich institution, with its surroundings. You would walk three blocks off-campus and go from what was then an all-white environment to an all-black environment with housing projects for the poor. I had simply not experienced that before-the shock of seeing the haves and the have-nots so intimately juxtaposed, and the extent to which inequality in the United States was race-based. So that prompted a political awakening, and certainly has influenced the role I, in part, have tried to play here at Berkeley in focusing on issues of diversity.

During my several years at Yale I ended up working quite actively on civil rights and equity issues, first in New Haven and then later in South Carolina and Georgia. By then we were very deeply into the Vietnam War, and when some of the leaders of the civil rights movement began to shift their energies toward opposing the war, I remember being quite annoyed. I thought they were incorrect-Martin Luther King among them, as well as a lot of people I knew who had been playing a leadership role in the civil rights movement-because I felt that the problems of racial inequality were so extreme that the leadership couldn't afford to be distracted. I was worried that attention would be diffused. I thought, "You can't solve all problems, right? So let's focus all of our energies on this one problem and see how much progress we can make."

In retrospect I realize that they understood something I did not, which was how racialized the U.S. military was, and by extension, how racialized the war in Vietnam was. So in this context, one of the most important things about going to England for me was being able to watch uncensored television news. That was an astounding eye-opener. I remember the first time I turned on the television to watch the evening news, I saw French footage from Vietnam, and it was nightmarish. I literally couldn't believe it. This was still during the Johnson administration, and at that point the news coverage people were seeing in the United States was comparatively sanitized. So suddenly it clicked for me, the connections between domestic racism and the war in Vietnam, and how destructive it was to the American character to be involved in the war and to be conducting it in this way. That had a major impact on me; perhaps it generated some cynicism, but unfortunately the cynicism was well founded.

It seems that you had a transformative experience even though the United States and the UK share many qualities with your native Canada. Traditionally study abroad has been focused on Europe, although students now are choosing from a much wider group of countries. What would you say to students trying to decide whether to go to, for example, a European country or a developing country?

It absolutely depends on what the student wants to learn and what his or her life history has been. There are fascinating possibilities everywhere. I went to Oxford because by that point in my life I had committed myself to research and really wanted to be in a rich, robust research environment. But as with New Haven, it turned out that England was socially much more interesting and eye-opening than I expected. My wife and I, not out of choice but out of financial necessity, ended up living in a small, working-class village where every single person dropped out of school before the age of sixteen. As you know, the British educational system is heavily tracked, and so people who lived in this village tended to work in the Cowley Motor Works and did not have the opportunity to go to college. We became very friendly with the people in the village, and although it wasn't as though we'd gone to rural Nepal, we found there was much to learn.

If you were choosing to go on a study abroad program now as an undergraduate, where do you think you would choose?

If I were an undergraduate again I would probably go to Shanghai. China is so immensely interesting now. A student there would get a chance to watch history in the making, as the balance of economic power in the world changes with China's rapid development. Of course there would be the challenge of mastering some Mandarin, because you really have to if you want to benefit maximally from the experience. I could also imagine a city in South America like Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires, because that is another very complicated and interesting part of the world right now.

Here at Berkeley, in the College of Letters and Science we have an international studies requirement, and students can fulfill that requirement by going abroad or taking a course here. Some students decide not to go abroad because they fear that it will delay their graduation, or they fear their language skills aren't good enough, or they're just worried about negotiating an unfamiliar country. What is your advice to students who might be on the fence about studying abroad?

I'm a tremendous advocate for study abroad. I think it's a really important part of the life experience. I did it a little bit later, as a graduate student and postdoctoral fellow, but I really wish I had done it earlier-my youngest daughter went to England as an undergraduate. It's critical, in order to understand yourself and the people around you, to experience the world from the perspective of an entirely different culture, and to understand how other cultures perceive you. In this sense, even the anti-Americanism we hear about these days can be useful if you go into it with the right perspective. It's very worthwhile for young Americans to go abroad and explain to people what is good about the United States, with all of its opportunities and diversity and contradictions. This kind of exchange will help you think much more deeply about the society we live in than if you had stayed on campus.

Last year, Congress declared 2006 as the Year of Study Abroad, which suggests that at least some lawmakers agree on its importance. What in your view makes studying abroad a national priority?

It is a priority, especially if it's a two-way street. A group of university and college presidents including myself had a very interesting meeting earlier this year with President Bush and Secretary of State [Condoleezza] Rice and some other members of the administration. The President made the comment that as he traveled around the world, he noted that a remarkably large percentage of important national leaders, even in countries that may currently appear rather hostile to us, were actually educated in the United States. And he and Secretary Rice and Secretary [of Education Margaret] Spellman are quite aware that at this difficult diplomatic moment, the best international relations we have are among the faculty and students in universities. Within universities there is a kind of universality that, unfortunately, is missing in the rest of society, and indeed, one of the purposes of this meeting was to promote better interactions among university communities around the world as a way of establishing lines of communication that might not exist otherwise. I found that quite impressive.

So students are acting as ambassadors?

Yes, that's exactly right. Students and faculty are, on a daily basis, establishing and cementing relationships that have been frayed because of international events, especially in the Middle East, over the last several years.

In addition to sending students abroad and encouraging international students to study here, Berkeley collaborates with other universities internationally. For example, we recently joined the International Alliance of Research Universities [IARU], an alliance of ten major research universities. What drew you to it, and on what issues do you find international collaboration useful?

We have formed an alliance with Yale in the United States; Oxford and Cambridge in Britain; ETH [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule] in Zürich and the University of Copenhagen in continental Europe; the University of Tokyo, Beijing Normal University, and the National University of Singapore in Asia; and the Australian National University [ANU]. The drivers for this initially were ANU and the National University of Singapore, who felt a strong need to connect with other world universities. To me it looked like a really interesting opportunity, both for educational programs and for research, and also potentially for advocacy. There are many issues of global importance for which world-class research is crucial. Having strong statements from the leaders of some of the major international universities can help set the agenda. Another of the major alliances coming out of the IARU that we've just formed involves Cambridge and Yale. This alliance is focused on understanding, from an international perspective, the role of women in the academy, and especially in science and engineering. We are concerned with gender-specific issues and ultimately also issues of underrepresented minorities, and what we can learn from each other to improve access and equity. The academy is full of social issues on which an international perspective is valuable, and I think Berkeley is positioned well to be a world leader in those conversations.