The most powerful American foreign policy: Education

David Ignatius has a great column about the underestimated power of American education. American-style education is being rapidly exported all over the world, and foreign students are lining up to attend American universities at both a graduate and undergraduate level. In some cases, these students stay. In some cases, they return, bringing the values they learned here to their home countries:

America's great universities are in fact becoming global. They are the brand names for excellence -- drawing in the brightest students and faculty and giving them unparalleled opportunities. This is where the openness and freewheeling diversity of American life provide us a huge advantage over tighter, more homogeneous cultures. We give people the freedom to think and create -- and prosper from those activities -- in ways that no other country can match.

This "education power" may be the best long-term hope for dealing with U.S. troubles abroad. Global polls show that after the Iraq debacle, the rest of the world mistrusts America and its values. But there is one striking exception to this anti-Americanism, and that is education. American-style universities, colleges and schools are sprouting up around the world.

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What worries these university presidents is that at a time when the world's best and brightest are still hungry for an American education, U.S. immigration regulations are making it too hard for students to come here. That's shooting ourselves in the foot.

Pentagon generals are always bragging about their "smart bombs," which sometimes go wide of the target. American education is a smart bomb that actually works. When we think about the foreign outreach efforts by these university presidents and dozens of others, we should recognize that they are a national security asset -- making the world safer, as well as wiser.

I couldn't agree more. When we talk about soft-power, there is no power more effective than the export of cultural values. Cosmopolitanism, tolerance, individualism -- these are America's best ideas, and every student that attends an American university gets to see them under the best circumstances.

The institution that I thought of when I read this piece was the annex of Cornell's medical school in Qatar. It was set up a while ago by the sheikh. I think I heard about it on 60 minutes. Anyway, visiting professors from America are encouraged to go teach Qatari students in Western-style medicine in English and live there for several years. That always struck me as a fabulous way to really interact with people in the Middle East in a positive way.

Under these circumstances, travel restrictions on students are completely unacceptable. I hear so many stories about foreign graduate students having trouble getting back into the country when they visit home. A friend of mine from Canada was delayed for hours at JFK when she was returning from vacation. She is from Canada. Imagine how difficult it is for someone from Pakistan.

Hat-tip:
Daniel Drezner
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Lets see, The Iraq war cost (so far) 407B$/0.0267Bpeople or $15243 per Iraqi, which might have been better spent on education. That's about enough for a 4 year American public university scholarship (@12K/year) for 1/3 of all of the the men, women, children, and old folks in Iraq. Does anyone think the war have a better chance of working than education?

http://www.google.com/search?q=iraq+population
http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=182
http://www.princetonreview.com/college/finance/articles/save/costcolleg…

Cosmopolitanism, tolerance, individualism -- these are America's best ideas, and every student that attends an American university gets to see them under the best circumstances.

Really? Well (playing devils advocate here, as i'm in the open the borders side myself), does that mean we should let an Iranian into GWU or CalTech to study nuclear physics?

How can we trust that those we bring in really will accept american moral values of openness as we envision them, and not instead increasingly see the hypocrisy behind our foreign policies, the cultural freedoms that are so actively encouraged while being against every religion in the world (not just their own), the degree to which our system protects the rich as much as their own system does?

How do we keep them from destroying their supposed adopted country the way the London train bombers did?

This to me is the heart of the problem. How many people do we endanger by letting them all in including the .01% that are nutcases and will stay that way?

Cells take *years* before they actually act, all the while acting as if they adore everything about their new life in the west. What do you propose to deal with that reality while trying to teach american freedom (as we understand it) to those willing to accept it?

By Joe Shelby (not verified) on 12 Mar 2007 #permalink

True, American-style education is the model for the rest of the world, but education is not a panacea. Remember that most of the 9/11 hijackers were western-educated. Consider also the fact that a higher level of education seems to make someone more, not less, likely to become a suicide bomber.

Sayyid Qutb, one of the most important intellectual founders of the modern extremist Islamic ideology, was hardened in his conviction that Islam and Modernity cannot coexist while he was a college student in Colorado. Qutb's example is important because it gives insight into the reason why western education can have the opposite of its intended effect: to the pious, our society looks decadent and amoral (fundamentalist Christians hold a similar, if less deadly, view).

All this is not to say that education is a bad thing, or that exporting our higher education practices is on balance a negative thing. I suspect there are far more liberal (in the general sense) foreign alumni of our universities than jihadists. But I would hesitate to ascribe too much transformational power to the exporting of our education.

It's striking that these are exactly the values that the right wing is trying so hard to kill.

Joe, The problem you present is obviously an important one, but it is not an immigration issue, it is a problem to be dealt with by United Nations Inspectors and international law. For every 0.01% you are neglecting the other 99.99% that can potentially change the world when they return (if they do). At McGill in Montreal, Canada, we have several Iranian postdocs all of whom wanted to train in the US. They are all fantastic. Hard workers with keen minds. It is a great loss to the US that these bright young people were blocked (to do neuroscience research) by immigration. Since you are playing devil's advocate perhaps you would agree anyway.

By Theodore Price (not verified) on 12 Mar 2007 #permalink

Oh, I do. I'm just very used to the ".01% that ruin it for everybody" being applied en masse around me, from immigration to living without DRM, to the closing of bars because someone had a damn good fake ID, to...

Again, if someone in that .01% that got in to do harm to Americans succeeded, do you really expect the general population, especially the news media interviewing those affected by whatever they did, to go "yeah, but we shouldn't close our borders because this is America"?

I wish they wouldn't, but that's what ignorant associations achieve.

Britain is just as bad - they kicked out a multi-national rock group (based primarily in Holland) because 3 members of the band were Mexican, and in spite of piles of paper evidence to the contrary (including statements on file at the Mexican embassy in London and the British embassies in Holland and Mexico), the British authorities simply could not be convinced that the Mexican members had no intention to try and stay in the country as illegal residents. Absolute willful blindness.

I fear that to increase, but I at least wanted to express the mindset that leads to such paranoia and ignorance lest we ignore what we're dealing with.

By Joe Shelby (not verified) on 12 Mar 2007 #permalink

"Cosmopolitanism, tolerance, individualism -- these are America's best ideas, and every student that attends an American university gets to see them under the best circumstances."

It is interesting how you place cosmopolitism alongside with individualism, as the two spaces are, in many ways, opposed to each other. Individualism often works to promote isolation as either a personal isolation or a national isolation--a I can do it alone insistance. Cosmopolitism promotes not an insistence on individualism, but a communal space of understanding across borders and cultures. A respect for difference (your use of tolerance). As the Philosopher Appiah states in "Cosmopolitanism," cosmopolitanism is difference plus universality. In exporting our American specific "values," we do not support a true cosmopolitanism but a constructed universalism where American values are promoted as cosmopoltical values. I agree that boarders need to be loosened in order to help promote a cosmopolitical space but I also thing that these terms needs to be defined specifically. When left ambiguous, they can be used to justify almost any action�good, bad, or indifferent.

Accepting foreign students does more than exporting American cultural values. Some will stay in US and contribute to the American society, a point I tried to make in my comment to your post titled "Bill Gates on American Competitiveness." While I'm sure that Caltech and Harvard would be top schools without foreign-born faculties, I guess it doesn't hurt to have the Egyption-born Nobel prize winning chemist, Ahmed Zewail (Caltech), or the Iranian-born physicist Cumrun Vafa (Harvard). They are where they are now partly because they were allowed to study at American Universities (U Penn for Zewail and MIT and Princeton for Vafa).

I'm not advocating that everyone should get a free pass to come and study in US. But there are many talented people who are willing to come to US. US benefits from accepting them AND it is a good PR for what American society has to offer. Treating them like criminals is exactly like shooting yourself in the foot.

Yeah, but more to the point than just the science talent, is the talented people who come to the USA for school and then go into industry and technology. Just take Vinod Khosla and Sergey Brin, for starters, and any of the 100s of other migrants who came here and kicked off great companies or help companies make better products.

By boojieboy (not verified) on 13 Mar 2007 #permalink

The immigration issue is really so removed from the point of the piece as to be a non sequitor. Long term solutions to our problems with worlds views depend on showing people the benefits of egalitarian social systems. Education fits that aim to a T. To educate is to open closed minds. Simply because 100% of minds are not opened should not deter us. We are assimilating the world one student at a time and that is never a bad thing.

By J T Young (not verified) on 15 Mar 2007 #permalink

Long term solutions to our problems with worlds views depend on showing people the benefits of egalitarian social systems. Education fits that aim to a T. To educate is to open closed minds. Simply because 100% of minds are not opened should not deter us. We are assimilating the world one student at a time and that is never a bad thing.

Certainly words worth contemplating.