Scientia: Research at the University of Tennessee
End Notes: Ready for the World
By LOREN CRABTREE
UT is helping its students develop skills that will enable them to succeed in the complex, rapidly changing global environment
As the world rapidly grows ever smaller, while at the same time increasing in complexity, we at the University of Tennessee are stepping up our efforts to help students gain the international and intercultural expertise they need to succeed in today's world.
No matter what discipline our students study, no matter where they come from, no matter where their career path ultimately will lead them, they need to develop the skills that will enable them to succeed in this world, this very complex, rapidly changing global environment. Launched this spring, UT's "Ready for the World" initiative is part of a long-range plan to transform the campus into a culture of diversity that best prepares our students for working and competing in the 21st century. The program calls for internationalizing the curriculum, increasing global competency of faculty and staff, and focusing on the intercultural issues of particular concern to the university.
A recent bestseller, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Friedman, a Pulitzer prize–winning author and columnist for The New York Times, ties strongly into our initiative and helps explain why this program is so important to us here at UT. This book is Friedman's account of the great changes occurring as lightning-swift advances in technology and communications are putting people all over the globe in touch as never before, creating an explosion of wealth in India and China and challenging the rest of us to run even faster just to stay in place.
What Friedman describes, in essence, is that the world has grown flat, and it's becoming flatter by the day. Certain flatteners, especially the Internet and its associated technologies, have combined with political forces and changes since the early 1990s to create a very different world. The result is that we have appearing around the world a knowledge meritocracy that's no longer dependent on geographic location. There's so much stress in the international system now that it's not clear where we're going; hence our students have to be flexible in thinking about what they're going to do over the next 80 years or so. The globe is a precarious place these days, and that's why we need to prepare our students to understand the world in all its complexities. We work increasingly in real time, without regard for geography, without regard for distance and time or even languages.
These are different times, different places, and different peoples that we must engage.
Another reason for paying close attention to this book and to UT's new program is that the United States is enormously powerful, but it's also enormously vulnerable. Examples of our vulnerability are everywhere to be seen, especially since the attacks of 9/11, but they were there before. It's essential that we learn how to deal with the rest of the world at a much more profound level than we do now.
I'd also like to highlight the fact that Ready for the World is an international, intercultural initiative. We must do a much better job in bringing diversity into play domestically, whether it's religious, cultural, ethnic, racial, or intellectual. This diversity can enrich us; it can also endanger us if we don't deal properly with it. Just look at the recent demonstrations across the country for fair immigration laws as an example of what's going on here at home, even in Tennessee.
Consequently, we're trying to bring international and intercultural elements into the very heart of what we do here at UT, ensuring that all of our graduates have certain soft skills that will enable them to work and succeed in today's complex, pluralistic world. It's important that our students and all of us understand that we have to engage seriously the ideas of other people, try to walk a little while in their shoes, live in their minds, and understand that these are different times, different places, and different peoples that we must engage.
To do this, we plan to devote $1.5 millions over the next 5 years to faculty recruiting and new initiatives, campus programming, transforming the curriculum, new scholarships and study-abroad opportunities, and further support of campus diversity efforts. As many as 100 general education courses will be reworked to integrate cultural awareness. Likewise, UT faculty members are working to strengthen interdisciplinary programs and integrate study abroad into general-education, as well as departmental, requirements.
My hope is that this is an initiative that reaches all of our students, no matter what discipline they study.
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Loren Crabtree is the chancellor of the flagship campus of the University of Tennessee system.
For more information on UT's Ready for the World initiative, go to www.tennessee.edu/readyfortheworld.