Joe Wilensky

Fredrik Logevall, vice provost for international affairs, chats with attendees after his Nov. 18 talk, "Global Cornell: Why It Matters," at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies' celebration of International Education Week.

Cornell needs to produce graduates who have cross-cultural awareness, “who can move nimbly and with sensitivity in all four corners of the globe,” said Fredrik Logevall, vice provost for international affairs, at a Nov. 18 talk.

Logevall spoke to a standing-room-only audience in the Biotechnology Building on “Global Cornell: Why It Matters” to kick off the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies’ celebration of International Education Week, Nov. 18-22.

Logevall, who directs the Einaudi Center and is the Stephen and Madeline
 Anbinder Professor of History, is rolling out his plans as part of the university’s response to a 2012 white paper from President David Skorton that noted Cornell had slipped in international competitiveness and influence and challenged the university to regain its global edge. The white paper was followed by a faculty task force report that offered more than two dozen specific recommendations. “We’ve adopted almost all of them,” said Provost Kent Fuchs, who introduced Logevall. “The report gave us a road map, and we are agreeing to follow it.”

Logevall, who spoke to university council members and trustees about his plans in October, said that in this talk, he wanted to focus on why it matters.

He spoke briefly about Cornell’s long history of being international, including students and professors from outside the United States dating to Cornell’s earliest years and the university’s overseas research and outreach and the area studies programs and increased foreign language offerings created after World War II.

Cornell has many comparative advantages, including “individual faculty members who are world leaders in their field, departments on the cutting edge of international research, and faculty and graduate students connected, in their research areas, to scholars all over the world,” Logevall said. He noted that international students at Cornell today make up more than 9 percent of the undergraduate student body, 25 percent of professional students and almost 45 percent of graduate students.

But we have more to do, he said, to make Cornell “the exemplary international university in an increasingly interconnected world.” But he also said there had been evidence of “a disconnect between rhetoric and action” on Cornell’s part. “We are beginning now to rectify this. We do need to reclaim the lost ground, and we can reclaim it.”

There are institutional reasons why this matters, he said, noting that Cornell needs to remain competitive and hire the best faculty, which today means those who work in an international context.

“Universities are uniquely positioned to respond to the challenges of globalization,” Logevall said, “as conduits of ideas, as laboratories for cutting-edge research, and also as international, cosmopolitan communities in miniature.”

If Cornell reaches its stated strategic goal becoming a top-10 world research university, “it will be because every aspect of Cornell’s identity will derive at least in part from its status as a global university,” he said.

But even more important, he stressed, is preparing Cornell’s students for global citizenship and cross-cultural awareness. He summarized his goal in a word – empathy – which means understanding the thoughts and feelings of others (different from sympathy, which he defined as feeling with others, being in agreement with them).

“Empathy by itself is not enough; it’s not some sort of guarantee that we will have a peaceful world where we can work through our problems,” he said, “but it is an essential prerequisite for such a world.”

Logevall closed by quoting J. William Fulbright, the Arkansas senator (1945-75) and supporter of the international exchange program that bears his name:

“International education is the most significant current project designed to continue the process of humanizing mankind to the point, we would hope, that people can learn to live in peace. … We must try to expand the boundaries of human wisdom, empathy and perception, and there’s no way of doing that except through education.”