On Oct 30, 2007, at 3:12 PM, dredmond at efn.org wrote:
> Actually, it does matter. Some folks will always learn outside of the
> university, but universities are indispensable centers of knowledge,
> research and learning.
Speaking of which...
Financial Times - October 30, 2007
Yale president urges US leaders to escape their 'insular' thinking By David Turner in London Published: October 30 2007 02:00 | Last updated: October 30 2007 02:00
according to the head of Yale University, President George W. Bush's alma mater.
Richard Levin, the president of Yale, said America's Ivy League universities had educated many US leaders who had then often made unwise foreign policy decisions because they lacked a global perspective.
He specifically cited the US's decision to enter the second world war more than two years after it started and US leaders' enthusiasm for tariffs during the 1930s depression, a policy widely thought to have aggravated the world's economic problems.
Mr Levin steered clear of directly criticising Mr Bush. When first running for president, Mr Bush was notoriously unable to name the president of Pakistan, referred to Greeks as "Grecians" and struggled to tell the difference between Slovenia and Slovakia.
Yale is trying to become more international by increasing its proportion of foreign undergraduates, which has risen from 2 per cent when Mr Levin became president in 1993 to almost 10 per cent. It also encourages every undergraduate student to spend some time studying abroad.
"If our educational leaders had pushed this [internationalisation] earlier they might have changed America," Mr Levin told the Financial Times. "A major motivation for this internationalisation effort . . . is to combat the tremendous insularity of leaders in America."
The distinguished economist - who studied at Oxford, Stanford and Yale - added: "I also do believe that for personal success in life, in a much more interdependent world, the capacity to understand another culture has to become one of the prerequisites of an educated person."
Mr Levin, who advises a group of Chinese universities at the request of the Beijing government, also said the Chinese system's encouragement of early educational specialisation was a "big mistake".
He said: "I've been urging changes in China in the opposite direction for their elite universities, to become more like American universities, to have general education for the first two years and then go on to specialist education." He explained: "Yale is educating people to be leaders in every profession, and I think breadth is very important. You can't tell how the world will change."