The College's 200th birthday party began on a cold Friday night in February when hundreds of students and faculty members marched to Memorial Chapel.
There they heard historian Paul Kennedy describe the severe challenges of the twenty-first century.
Kennedy, the J. Richard Dilworth Professor of History at Yale, is the author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1988), an examination of the connections between economic strength and military might and his projections of which nations would dominate the twenty-first century.
(The text of his speech follows.) Kennedy was awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree from the College. His citation said:
“A historian, said Samuel Eliot Morison, should become immersed in the period of his choice yet stand apart now and then for a fresh view. Few historians have taken that advice as brilliantly as you. Your book,
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, was a striking account of the political, economic, and military dynamics of our time. It turned out to be a bestseller-testimony that a well-done academic monograph in history can help us see our own problems clearly. Your latest book,
Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, goes even further as a guide to understanding global change. Perceptive observer of international affairs, you impel us to look to our past as we prepare for our future.”
Also honored was Sheri Willems, an English teacher and chair of the Language Arts Department at Brandywine High School in Niles, Mich. She received the Gideon Hawley Teacher Recognition Award as a secondary school teacher who has had a lasting influence on a Union student. She was nominated by Jason Leitz, a senior biology major.
Willems teaches courses in English, American literature, communication, writing, and speech.
Gideon Hawley was an 1809 graduate of the College who became New York's first superintendent of public education and a founder of what is now the University at Albany, the first campus in the State University of New York system. The award is given annually by the College.
Higher education's
responsibilities
Shortly after your freshman class of 1997 graduates, this institution will receive the incoming class of the year 2000. What an interesting and curious feeling that could be. The century of Lenin, Wilson, Roosevelt, Hitler, Einstein, Freud, Churchill, Stalin, but also the century of the suffragettes, of Ghandi, of Green Peace, of Mother Theresa, of the Civil Rights movement, is drawing to a close.
The forces that challenge and test our human condition-the forces of technology, demography, political disintegration, cultural animosities, ecological damage-are severe and in many respects increasing. If they are to be contained and then channeled into fruitful directions, we will have to rely upon the greatest resource we possess-educated and intelligent women and men who can understand what is happening in our world and offer creative responses to those challenges.
At the beginning, center, and end of this awesome task of preparing for the twenty-first century, therefore, lies knowledge, understanding, critical analysis, in a word: education. This is why what you will be doing over the next years, and what your successors will do over the next few decades, is so important to our collective future. What Union College and other institutions of education possess is the potential to affect our human condition for the better.
But why, it may be asked, why this underlying concern about the future? Are we not out of the Cold War and into a new world order? Are not the stock markets at record heights? Are not western values triumphing across the globe?
We should be concerned, I believe, because of a number of profound transnational tendencies that threaten disruption, instability, discord. Like the buildup of atmospheric pressures or the movement of tectonic plates, these may be scarcely noticed at first.
New technologies bright with promise for their inventors and investors also contain the potential to undermine traditional ways of making things, growing things, trading things. Prototype factories in Japan, where robots have replaced humans in assembly and manufacture, point perhaps to the end of the factory system as we know it. Laboratory-made food stuffs, artificial sweeteners, genetically-altered vanilla, artificial cocoa, orange juice, and other staples raise questions about the viability of traditional farming.
Massive flows of twenty-four-hour-aday currency and capital exchanges dwarf national banks and economies, even national governments. Multinational companies, pressed by the increasing pace of our globalized economy, switch investment product lines and jobs from one continent to another.
Demographically, the pressures for change world wide are at least as severe. Our planet is adding ninety-five million extra people each year with the overwhelming bulk of that forecast to occur in poor, resource-depleted countries. Within poor countries, a gigantic and internal migration is taking place as peasants seeking jobs
stream into vast shanty cities with totally inadequate facilities
In such circumstances, these demographically-adolescent societies, where half the population will be aged less than eighteen years old, offer ideal conditions for social and political turbulence. They also provide a push factor for the fast-growing migrations of eager peasants from poor to richer societies, in turn provoking a backlash against immigrants.
Finally, the prodigious consumption habits of rich societies, especially our own; the swift but crude industrialization process in some Asian developing countries; and the economic activities of billions of desperate cultivators, herdsmen, foresters, and peasants are impacting upon our natural environment.
These technological, demographic, and environmental forces for change increasingly interact with the domain of politics, regional rivalries, territorial quarrels, and ethnic and religious tensions. The confusion and the pressures also encourage the popularity of demographic and fundamentalist political movements and the disparaging of
other cultures and other peoples.
Can anything be done? Of course, in theory. What if we employed the tens of thousands of scientists and engineers now released from Cold War related research to produce solutions to our global
problems? These solutions could range from the truly dramatic and large scale, like a significant breakthrough in solar or photovoltaic energy systems, to the low level, such as appropriate, sustainable, village-based technologies that are in experimental form in parts of West Africa and India.
Changing priorities clearly requires political leaders with a global vision and a willingness to articulate larger universal principles. Perhaps we have such leaders now, or perhaps they are so concentrated upon domestic fiscal and health care issues, admittedly important, that they will be slow and hesitant to act.
What then could get them to change priorities? In a democracy like ours, the answer is clear-persistent pressure and expressions of concern, especially by the more articulate members of the public, by university and college-educated people, by executives, bankers, teachers, scientists, health care specialists, by the graduates and future graduates of Union College, and by your equivalents at Yale, Duke, Adelphi, Swarthmore, and the other 3,000 institutions of higher education in this country.
But why should our graduates be expected to press our political leaders to respond positively and intelligently to global trends if we university educators have not taught them about these matters?
Of course, universities and colleges should pursue knowledge for its own sake. But that is not their single purpose. Otherwise, we should all be like All Souls College at Oxford, where there are neither undergraduates nor graduates-only professors pursuing research.
Of course, universities and colleges should seek to prepare students in practical ways for future jobs. But that is not their sole purpose, either. Otherwise, we might all be better off being converted to trade schools.
Of course, we should strive to produce the idealized well-rounded human being. But that doesn't mean that all institutions in the United States should convert themselves to small, liberal arts colleges.
At Yale and many other large universities we are only now beginning to respond to the challenge. We have not, for example, seriously reconsidered our curriculum with its heavy emphasis on traditional disciplinary boundaries and ever-greater specialization. Consider what could be done if our students came to see and understand the interactions and the consequences of the ever-quickening pace of scientific and technological change upon our own society and upon our global society. How can we expect the next generation of citizens, voters, and political leaders to respond intelligently in the future if they haven't even learned what is going on in this world of ours at present?
Has not the time come to encourage more in the study of comparative cultures, religions, belief systems-not to denigrate or marginalize our own, but simply to obtain a better understanding of how other peoples in other cultures interpret the role of the individual, society, gender, authority, global issues?
I rather doubt that such changes could be taught or taught well by a single professor or by a single department. The type of courses I've just outlined reaches across the boundaries of
history, political science, economics, the natural sciences, the environment, engineering, demography,
anthropology, regional studies, the arts, culture and religion. In the real world, all of those elements interact. In the world of academe, those elements are all too often separated into specialized disciplines.
Regardless of how and to what extent American higher education decides to restructure itself, we can all surely agree about the significance of the issue. You have given skills, knowledge, training, hope to thousands of your students who are contributing greatly to American society, and you're also living proof that it is possible to create a vibrant, scholarly community. You are educating today's and tomorrow's citizens of America, but let us also strive so that they acquire an appreciation of the need to become world citizens. If we can transmit that global ethos to the present and future generations of our students, the results could be immense and beneficial. The least we can to is try.
