Address at the induction ceremony of Phi Beta Kappa, University of Illinois at Chicago, May 1, 2007.
It is truly an honor for me to stand before you this afternoon and share in your great achievement and excitement at your induction into the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honor society committed to excellence in the Liberal Arts and Sciences. I know if I had undertaken my undergraduate studies in this country, I would have worked very hard and felt immensely proud to join the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Of course there is no guarantee I would have qualified! What I know for sure, however, is that I would not be here this afternoon without a liberal arts education, an education that provided me with the intellectual and intercultural skills to traverse, since my undergraduate days thirty one years ago, eight universities in six countries on three continents, first as a graduate student, then as a professor: learning, researching, teaching, writing and publishing. Liberal arts education made me a citizen of the world, able to negotiate different climes and cultures, to function intelligently in our exceedingly complex and increasingly integrated world. Compared to the world of my undergraduate days, your world is far more globalized, a lot more demanding in its pressures and possibilities. Hence, the title of my brief remarks this afternoon: “The Importance of a Liberal Education in Our Globalizing World.”
The value of a liberal arts education in general is too well known for a lengthy recounting. Suffice it to say, a liberal education gives every generation of students, as it gave mine, skills that are essential not only for the job market but for leading more fulfilling lives. At the very least it provides six sets of capacities or competencies: cognitive, communicative, computational, cultural, civic, and concrete. Cognitive competency refers to critical and analytical thinking that comes out of exposure to, and the need to comprehend and evaluate diverse and complex materials about the human condition, products of the human imagination, and dynamics of the natural world. Out of all those sometimes dreaded class research assignments, presentations, and discussions develop written and communicative skills essential in all careers, and for interpersonal and intercultural social conviviality. Living in a world bombarded by statistics and measurements, by the commodification and electronification of everyday life, computational skills are simply indispensable.
By cultural skills I mean the ability to understand, and sometimes appreciate, difference, the socially constructed differences of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, and ability—in short, culture—which are often inscribed with dangerous hierarchies and chauvinisms that have caused the world so much war and destruction, pain and suffering. A liberal arts education can foster an examined life essential to civic engagement, to critical citizenship, for it enhances the capacity to care and comment on issues outside one’s narrow professional interests, to engage the burning issues of the day. And of course liberal education has a concrete, a practical, dimension. Indeed it provides the foundation for the professions and technical fields. Lest we forget, professions and technical proficiencies may change, but the ability to learn, adapt, think, and analyze, to communicate and interact with people from different backgrounds, and to be creative in solving old and new problems will always be in demand. It is in this sense that liberal education is actually more practical and empowering than is often assumed: by giving you skills, not just content, it prepares you best for lifelong employment and the capacity to cope with change.
I would like to argue that the skills of liberal education are in greater demand than ever in our new century, a century marked by the persistence of age-old and the emergence of new, or apparently new, problems and possibilities. If we peeled away all the ideological rhetoric or analytical paradigms advocated by people of different political or disciplinary persuasions, we would find that fundamentally these challenges center on the enduring questions of human existence, survival and interaction on this lovely, but fragile and increasingly threatened planet. The processes, perils, and prospects that characterize our contemporary world are often configured in popular and scholarly discourses around the concept or construct of globalization. Understood as a historical process the world has been globalizing for a long time. Certainly globalization didn’t start the other day with CNN or the Internet or Nike. One could even say the world has been globalizing ever since the first modern humans left Africa some 60,000 years ago to populate the rest of the world. Or if we come to more recent times, ever since the emergence of the modern world system in the sixteenth century centered around the Atlantic world that brought together the so-called old worlds of Africa and Eurasia and what were to become the Americas.
Forgive my historian’s digression, but I am paid to think and talk about the past! In its ordinary usage the term globalization refers to the intensification of international connections, contacts, and communication across countries and continents, the growth of a more interdependent world integrated by new information and communication technologies since the end of the Cold War. It entails transnational communications and exchanges of capital, commodities and cultures, of ideas, images and iconographies, of practices, peoples and places, of values, vices and viruses. For education, and for your generation, the implications are as clear as they are profound. Let me isolate three, what I call intercultural literacy, interdisciplinary literacy, and instrumental literacy.
Cultural flows are intensifying all across the globe, more so in the global North or among the developed countries. Historically of course Europe exported its populations to the rest of the world. Now migrations flows are predominantly from the global South—the developing countries—to the global North. It is important to insert a qualifying note: while the increase in global migrations appears massive—from 75.5 million in 1960 to 190.6 million in 2005, in relative terms this represented an increase from 2.5% to 3% of the world population; in other words, 97% of the world’s people still live in the countries of their birth. But the change in the direction of migration flows will mean that your generation will have to become used, as people in the global South have been over many generations, to new populations bringing in new languages, foods, customs, musics, religions—in shorthand new cultures. In your increasingly demographically diverse society, intercultural literacy will become more imperative for personal, professional and even political success. The broad-based education of the liberal arts equips you well for this multicultural world not only because you often learn with people from different cultures and countries, or about different cultures and countries, but also the different culture and country of your own culture and country a generation ago or several hundred years ago.
By interdisciplinary literacy, I mean the ability to understand phenomena from multiple angles, the skills to see connections, to seek multiple solutions for problems, the tolerance to think critically, creatively, and collaboratively. While the disciplines will be with us for the foreseeable future, no discipline, by itself, can any longer claim, if it ever did, to solve the fundamental questions of human existence confronting us today—from war and violence, human rights, and the implications of the demographic transformations of states, nations, and regions, to the ethical and cultural implications of the defining technologies of our times (information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and environmental technology), to the construction, reconstruction and intersections of identities (social, religious, linguistic) at various scales from the local to the global. In a world of information explosion and glut, personal punditry and performance, in a democratized publishing and podcasting world of blogs, U Tube, MySpace, and Wikipedia, the need for discerning intelligence, the ability to sift the grains of knowledge from the chaff will become more critical than ever. A general liberal education prepares you eminently for such a task, the competency and curiosity to understand or at least to appreciate different subject matters or complexities of an issue, to read and evaluate multiple cultural and scientific texts, the rigor to make sense of competing, and sometimes confusing, data, representations, and interpretations.
Finally, the rapid changes taking place in the world of work require flexible, transferable skills, in short, the capacity for lifelong learning. This is what liberal education does best; it teaches you the ability to learn continuously, think critically, and to confront new challenges creatively. For a growing number of people the days of a one-career lifetime are gone forever. Most of you will probably have several careers, not just jobs, over the next thirty to forty years of your working lives. The technical skills you learn today are likely to be obsolete by the time you reach my age, just as many of the things you take for granted today were hardly imaginable when I was an undergraduate student. By the time I graduated in 1976, Microsoft was only a year old but personal computers had not yet been invented, and the birth of the Internet was nearly a decade away, so were cellular networks for mobile phones, and we used index cards to check for books in the library. In Cape Town I was told they call us the BC generation, before computers! The erosion of the old stabilities in the world of work, or the social security of familiarity, requires the instrumental literacy of liberal education, the capacity to change and adapt.
These changes are partly engendered by technology and partly by growing global economic interdependencies, as well as shifting geographies of production and consumption as new economic powers emerge eclipsing the old economic powers. What happens in the Niger Delta in Nigeria immediately affects the price of the gas you put in your car right here in Chicago because Nigeria supplies 20% of U.S. oil imports. Changing levels of wages in Central America affect immigration levels to the U.S. And when the Chinese economy coughs, the U.S. economy feels the chill immediately, for China is the U.S.’s second largest trading partner after Canada and the largest buyer of U.S. treasury bonds, partly financed by its large trade deficit with the U.S. This means China helps finance the U.S. debt, the largest in the world, and props up the US economy. If current trends continue, China’s GDP will overtake the U.S. according to some economists in twenty years. Already, last year, China produced more cars than the U.S.
This is to suggest to you that you will soon be entering a much more economically competitive world, a more transnational world, a more multicultural world, a world that demands the ability to learn new skills, to interact with people from other parts of the world either directly or indirectly in the very commodities and services you consume in your everyday lives. Besides its inter- or trans-disciplinary orientation, liberal education needs to become more transnational and to equip you with translational skills, the ability to make sense of the unfamiliar. For me, the liberal education I acquired at the University of Malawi from 1972 to 1976—the broad knowledge of the humanities, social sciences, and sciences—gave me a lifelong appreciation of the immeasurable beauty of learning and discovery, the infinite joys of curiosity, a love of debate and free exchange of ideas, of an engaged life of the mind, and an abiding commitment to democratic values and opposition to oppression within or among countries.
You will do fine if you use the skills you acquire in your liberal arts education effectively, to live an examined or reflexive life, to cultivate your humanity, an engaged and ethical humanity committed to the pursuit of the nobler inclinations than the ignoble instincts of our species that has made our entangled global histories often unhappy. Your induction into Phi Beta Kappa Society is recognition enough that you are well equipped to becoming engaged and productive citizens not only of the U.S., but of our rapidly shrinking world. It will no longer be enough for your generation to simply be good citizens of nation states; you will increasingly have to become concerned citizens of a global community. If nothing else, it is because the global is right here in cities such as Chicago. Congratulations and thank you!
First Written April 30, 2007