New initiative planned to raise university's international cachet

BY RAY DELGADO

The ever-changing nature of global politics, health crises, religious fundamentalism and technological advances requires constant scrutiny and action from academic experts.

Stanford is stacked high with professors and students who devote their careers to such issues, but the university can do more to tap their expertise, according to Provost John Etchemendy.

To that end, the university is planning an initiative to help raise its international profile by identifying issues of global importance and then providing resources, expertise and answers.

"Stanford has already become one of the great international universities, whether you measure by its faculty, its students, its reputation or its impact," Etchemendy said. "The International Initiative was not launched to achieve that status but in recognition of it. It is precisely because we are an international university that we have the obligation to help address the great issues facing the world today."

The provost has established a steering committee chaired by Coit Blacker, director of the Stanford Institute for International Studies, and Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, the Burton J. and DeeDee McMurtry Professor of Engineering and chair of the Department of Management Science and Engineering, to head up the International Initiative. The 18-member committee, which includes faculty members from the seven schools, has met twice with Etchemendy to discuss the goals of the initiative.

In some ways, the committee members walked away with more questions than answers from their initial meeting, Blacker said, but that was what was needed to begin the complicated process of identifying which issues of global concern Stanford experts should target.

"How does Stanford influence the world? It influences the world by reference to the ideas we generate and the people we educate," Blacker said. "Are we educating them appropriately? What's the value of the ideas we generate, and what ideas are we not generating? Those are the types of questions we asked ourselves."

To jumpstart the discussion, Paté-Cornell said the committee identified three areas of interest to Stanford scholars: peace and security; human development and health; and global management of the economy, which includes business, law and technology. "Some ideas are probably going to be a challenge," she said. "We're going to have to make some choices."

The initiative has been put on a fast track, with a preliminary report on the committee's ideas due by the end of Spring Quarter. Blacker and Paté-Cornell will then spend much of the summer pulling together a "consensus document" that will analyze the major international challenges and present recommendations about how Stanford can play a role in addressing them. The final set of recommendations should be ready by the fall, Blacker said.

Although the committee has been split into smaller subgroups to focus on some of the dominant global issues, committee members are still seeking input from the university community on issues that Stanford can or should address. Blacker suggested that feedback be funneled through committee members at the various schools. "Even with 16 really smart people on the committee, there's no guarantee that we're going to come up with everything," he said. "I think some of the most interesting ideas will come from the community." The committee chairs have also met with all the deans to discuss their ideas for the initiative.

Already, the committee has identified international peace and security as a key subject for Stanford scholars to address, with a focus on nuclear weapons, religious extremism and terrorism, Blacker said.

The university is uniquely capable of positioning itself as a global think tank because it offers the full range of academic and professional disciplines, Blacker said.

"We are a complete university, although we are not as deep as some places," Blacker said. "We're not only a world-class research university, but I think we do an outstanding job educating our undergraduates. I think whatever we do will further Stanford. We start from a very powerful position."

Etchemendy said he asked the committee to look to the future and identify issues and themes that will occupy the world in the next 25 to 50 years and then identify what resources will be needed for Stanford to provide leadership in addressing those issues.

"The issues run the gamut from political to economic to medical to technological," Etchemendy said. "What can be done about failed states? About the global HIV/AIDS epidemic? About the clash of fundamentalism and modernity? How do we deal with the potential threats of biological weapons in the hands of non-state actors, or nuclear weapons proliferating among rogue states? In all cases, these are problems that require both research and teaching: research into the problem, and the training of individuals capable of addressing the problem on a global stage."