President's Office-2004 Convocation

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For Global Citizenship
2004 Convocation Address
August 26, 2004

All of us here today celebrate the arrival of Elizabethtown’s Class of 2008, the largest freshman class in our 105-year history. As you first-year students begin your studies, we renew our historic vocation of teaching and learning with you. Your presence will reinvigorate our work, and just so, your lives will also change in ways yet to be discovered. For this work of liberal education is nothing less than a liberating and transforming experience for all involved. Because we take "pleasure in the pursuit of knowledge," itself, as Bart Giamatti notes (A Free and Ordered Space, p.123) we step outside the conventional and taken-for-granted to see the world anew. That pursuit of knowledge, he contends, "joins and is finally at one with our general human desire for a life elevated by dignity, decency and moral progress." A liberal education thus leads "to some sense of citizenship, to some shared assumptions about individual freedoms and institutional needs, to some sense of the full claims of self as they are to be shared with others." (p.213)

Giamatti’s insight that liberal education is linked to a "sense of citizenship" is now recognized nationwide as an essential element of a liberal education. (cf. Schneider, "Practicing Liberal Education, 2003"). In the more than 20 years since he spoke those words, however, the world has changed dramatically, and so has citizenship. The world is now "a single place," (Roland Robertson, Globalization, 1992) and this global world now intersects all other worlds, ours included. We cannot hold it at a distance, for it is literally here, not there, and we are part of the world as it is part of us.

With regard to citizenship, as Saskia Sassen has observed, ("Citizenship Destabilized," 2003, p.14) that this process of globalization has "destabilized" citizenship, until now firmly situated within nation-states. It has created both the opportunity and necessity for a new "global citizenship" that transcends allegiance to a particular country through a larger identification with humankind (Robertson, Globalization, 1992). All of us remain citizens of our home nations, and if you’re like me, you’re still singing our national anthem with enthusiasm and pride, but as Stoddard and Cornwell make clear (2003, p.44), "the present conditions of life on our planet have made it impossible to separate being a member of" a national society "from being a citizen of the world." The liberal education you receive here must therefore prepare you specifically "for global citizenship" as the basis for life in the 21st century -- locally, nationally, and globally.

None of us can yet fully articulate all the dimensions of global citizenship because it is still an emerging and incompletely developed institution. But we know enough about globalization to begin sketching some of the defining features around which global citizenship will evolve. Here I focus only on three central capacities which can be well nourished in your studies here – principles, people, and process.

One fundamental resource for global citizenship is a commitment to universal ethical principles, such as human rights. Like everything else about the globe, human rights claims are vigorously contested by those with different interests or cultural understandings. But as Ishay has pointed out (The History of Human Rights, 2004), the history of those struggles has tended to favor the gradual acceptance and extension of new rights, beginning with the type of political rights embedded in the U.S. constitution and thereafter including various social and cultural rights.
A second way people tie their citizenship to the globe is by their empathy for people solely as human beings, regardless of their race, creed or culture. Indeed, as Richard Rorty argues ("Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality," 1993), the key to limiting humanitarian abuses in the world is not reason alone but also sentiment, a capacity to accept and appreciate even an alien as a genuine human being deserving of dignity and respect. When that is absent and others are viewed as non-human, then atrocities are more likely. It is dramatic to see the difference between the dehumanizing genocidal attacks in Sudan, for example, with the plea of one "global citizen" I met in small-town Maine who sent a personal letter to his friends at church to gather funds to help people suffering across the sea.
A third basis for global citizenship is a commitment to a process of discourse over difference. As a multicultural reality, the globe is rife with significant differences, even among those who count themselves as globalists. A nationalist mind often seeks to compel consent or compliance with its own viewpoint – militarily, politically, or economically. But a global mind, as Stoddard and Cornwall have shown ("Peripheral Visions," 2003), seeks not to triumph but to build some larger understanding through a process of triangulating complex viewpoints (think GPS) to locate an "overlapping consensus" – the critical thinking of global citizens. Since we cannot default to the interests of our group, all issues require the application of critical intelligence to multiple competing claims in order to discern what is important and true, what is necessary and reasonable action in the global arena.

Every liberal education should be a globalizing one, but Elizabethtown offers a distinctive approach, owing to our particular mission and heritage. In keeping with the Brethren faith of our founders, Elizabethtown’s mission declares that "the college affirms the values of peace, non-violence, human dignity, and social justice and seeks to make those values manifest in the global community." Our motto, known to all of you already I trust, is "Educate for Service."

We have built a robust program of international studies that last year sent more than 100 students abroad for credit-bearing experiences and brought almost 100 from other countries here to study at Elizabethtown. No one should miss the opportunity to study abroad, for it is a transforming experience.
In addition, we have hired a substantial number of international faculty, and across the curriculum the faculty actively address global realities in their courses wherever relevant. We have re-introduced a foreign language requirement in our core curriculum and just last spring, our Business department received a 2-year $175,000 grant to strengthen the international component of their program and to enrich campus efforts to internationalize.
Further, we actively promote service learning in the academic program and the co-curriculum. In particular, you will have an opportunity to get involved in our "Into the Streets" program this fall, and I encourage you also to make a commitment to ongoing service, including civic engagement, and connect it to your academic work whenever possible.
Finally, we support an academic program of Peace Studies and we encourage active commitments to peacemaking, all the way from interpersonal conflict resolution to action against war. Peacemaking is an art in short supply in our world, and we hope you will take the time here to familiarize yourself with its possibilities.

We want students to be fully acquainted with the globe and its impact, here and abroad, academically and experientially. We seek to engage you in lives of service now and for life, here and around the world. And in a world riven with war and conflict, we hope to foster the understanding and experience necessary for you to become peacemakers in the world you will inherit. For we will be looking to you in the generation ahead to build a global community that enhances life rather than diminishing it.

To be sure, you will find multiple viewpoints about what those commitments entail and how to realize them among our faculty and student body. That combination of seriousness about our historic commitments and hospitality to all points of view about them is essential to provide you a distinctive education for global citizenship, one that is engaged with the deepest human values and yearnings while challenging you to build your own viewpoints and critical intelligence in encounters with the great variety of human thinking about these issues. Our discussion of the war in Iraq over the past two years has been emblematic of that dual commitment, as we engaged the issues of peace and justice from all points of view.

To enhance our capacity to deliver on this global mission, we are instituting this year a new Center for Global Citizenship under the leadership of Dr. Ron McAllister, formerly college Provost and now Professor of Sociology and Peace and Conflict Studies. There we will bring together our existing programs of international studies, service learning, and peacemaking to foster more integration among them and greater possibilities for you. I hope all of you will engage yourselves in each of the three main elements of the Center’s program in some way during your time at Elizabethtown.

In addition, I invite you to explore the possibilities for global citizenship in all your studies here, especially those that help you build principles for global action, empathy for people of all backgrounds, and the capacity to process complex differences effectively. For that will provide the foundation for you to become global citizens of some distinction, the mark of Elizabethtown’s global education for service and peacemaking in your lives and in our world. Now is your time to claim the possibilities of this education for global citizenship. Today, we open the door to those possibilities for you and pledge the best efforts of our splendid faculty and staff to help you realize them. Welcome to this new world of learning.