University Forum on the Global University
Information Note #4 – Student Views on 5th Year Experiment
5TH YEAR GLOBAL FELLOWSHIP 2012-13
Rationale of the Project
It is generally accepted that globalizing the University means not only traveling but also
changing the way we know. A University of Columbia's stature should approach this in at
least three ways: making such mind change available to every student at the University
through a nuanced transformation of the mainstream curriculum; fostering such mind
change through careful hiring and faculty development; and, fostering it through
developing a vanguard of the best who can lead this process out in the world in the future
and also continue to advise the Columbia community.
It is this third way that has been tried in the 2012-13 5th Year Global Fellowship Program.
As Bill Keller, the editor of the Op-Ed page of The New York Times has remarked in the
context of unmanned drones: There is no substitute to going there. It costs more and it is
risky, but it is better than information received digitally. Like many analyses born of war,
this one is generalizable and we have proceeded in this conviction.
If we had required a specific project from this hand-picked few at the end of the Program
year, we would have got something like an enhanced 5th-year abroad on the model of the
old junior year abroad; which certainly has its virtues but does not fit the necessity to
globalize the mind. To do this, it is necessary to leave the classroom. Our own intention is
that the experience should transform, not replicate, that we should develop evaluative
processes that can measure change according to the real needs of a new global university.
Selection Process
We chose 6 fellows out of 75 applications from the entire Columbia and Barnard
community. We chose them on the basis of projects to travel that were as far removed as
possible from "academic tourism." We chose them insofar as they showed an effort to learn
how to know beyond the easy digital access that produces a simulacrum of knowing. We
were also careful to choose young men and women who were ready for change, rather than
eager to “help” through already existing networks, and the application of already acquired
knowledge. These projects were learning projects, not projects to enhance research or
assist global human development – though, as is evident from their final comments, those
we chose will indeed be better prepared for these endeavors than their fellow-graduates.
Transformation
When they set out, the students were all critical of the Columbia Core. We, the faculty, did
not give them any support in this, nor did we negate their criticism. After three weeks of
discussion, as to how a Fellow could approach such projects without either an already
decided set of questions leading to a pre-figured goal, or, once again, academic tourism, we
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did say that we would like to be able to hear from them how in the future we should
rethink the Core, to enhance its capacities to prepare students for globality.
The group has returned transformed. They have given us suggestions that global thought
should be undertaken differently from what they had assumed when they had set out. They
have told us that global business, with its too-quick desire to create a culture of empathy
but without transforming their globalized forms of profit-making, can benefit from their
own openness to bafflement leading to productive questions that cannot be answered
quickly. They have realized that one of the problems confronting students at Columbia
today is not the apparent Eurocentrism of the old Core, or the culturalism of the Global
Core, but the superficial globality of many sectors of the world at large.
Suggestions for Improvement
These realizations will mold their own future in ways that cannot yet be surmised. And, as
with all pilot projects that are complex, there are many rough edges to smooth. We would
like the opportunity to repeat this experiment until the idea of creating a Columbia
vanguard that prepares itself slowly to instruct us in globalization can be less imperfect.
We should, for example, give more time to the selection process, make the interviews
longer and more nuanced. In the initial proseminar, we should discuss individual projects
and customize the discussions without giving too many instructions. From the Global
Center-Europe come ideas of peer mentoring (starting from tested estimation of
undergraduate expectations)which we would like to develop further through the
interaction between the first group and the next. We will begin to consider the experience
of the first group can begin to affect globalist pedagogy? Now that the mind-changing
aspect of the Global Centers is being emphasized, we would like to relate and contribute to
the University’s global agenda, including the strategy for the Global Centers and other
global programs, becoming a part of the future initiatives of the University. We are
prepared, if necessary, to think of a smaller number rather than expand and dilute the
quality of the undertaking.
Student Reports
We conclude with some excerpts from what the students have themselves written. We
have selected them on the basis of their maturity, their practicality. We have not edited
them. We have italicized them for ease of reading. It should be mentioned that these
arguments received enthusiastic collective support from the students in our final class
discussion:
Two of them suggested that the methodology of the 5th-year Fellows’ Program used the
same methodology as the Columbia Core and thus helped them to understand and build on
the Core experience. Not having been students of the Core ourselves, we the faculty found
this point new, instructive, and exceptionally useful:
a)It might be asked, what good comes of having adolescents blast through the Western
Canon, spending no more than a few class discussions on works that demand a lifetime
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of careful study, with little to no guidance or context provided by any secondary
sources. Given that Columbia’s Core Curriculum is approaching its 100th anniversary,
clearly, the University recognizes that there are still many values to this undertaking:
the value of inviting young students into a tradition and community of learning
through their exposure to these foundational works; the value of the confidence that
arises as they realize that it is within their capacities to explore and engage such texts
head on; the value of the responsibility that grows out of realizing they now have a
stake in a history of ideas that largely accounts for the state of the world that they
inherit; and, of course, the value of confronting and dwelling with those most
fundamental, fertile questions upon which the entire edifice rests.
It may be (and most probably is being) asked, what good comes from allowing recently
graduated Columbia undergrads the chance to cut a path around the world, passing
through countries that take years to understand, with minimal guidance and structure
for an academic year. A grateful recipient of the inaugural Fifth Year Fellowship, I can
say with certainty that precisely those same values that redeem the Core, are those
that make this program worth continuing. . . . The Core Curriculum is referred to as
one of “the founding experiments in liberal higher education.” It is my hope that one
hundred years from now, the Fifth Year Fellowship will be celebrated as one of “the
founding experiments in global higher education.”
b) One might argue that a program such as this one, which produces what could be
described as superficial and passing touristic encounters and which is not meant to
produce highly specialized knowledge, is not academically valuable. We mustn’t forget,
however, that going through the Core one is always a stranger in passing to the great
texts which would otherwise require years of study, and yet one learns to become at
ease navigating among the strangeness and contradictoriness of that world of great
ideas. The value of this program does not lie in what it delivers in the form of
knowledge, but, just like the Core, in the form of people. And the counterintuitive
manner by which it creates that value, by way of equilibrating and stimulating rather
than by isolating and testing, is kindred of the way in which liberal arts universities
have for centuries been creating value in all its forms, by funding and promoting the
production and pursuit of knowledge and wisdom not conditional on their return on
investment but for their own sake. As a grateful and proud Columbian, I hope that the
liberal values that gave form to this university, to my education, and to this program
keep being zealously and bravely promoted and perfected into more programs such as
this one.
All emphasized that this Program had allowed them the possibility of establishing future
global networks significantly different from global academics helping in research projects
or people involved in global innovation – where researchers deal with objects of “questionoriented” research. We have attached the clearest one:
Through the many connections I forged along my travels, I now feel very much a part
of a global community of people who are thinking through, learning from, and moving
around the world. Conversations begun in Beijing, Brasilia, Berlin, are being
continued-- ideas, readings traded back and forth--via email, letters, and skype. Being
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left largely to my own devices to negotiate logistics, set up meetings, and transcend
local tourist infrastructures, I have gained a confidence and comfort moving through
the world that I would never have gained had the program been more structured. In
fact, precisely because of the freedom I was afforded, my sense of responsibility to
make it an intellectually meaningful and productive experience was all the more
heightened. Finally, I found myself again confronted by some of “the most difficult
questions about human experience,” however, not in the form of abstract, theoretical
formulations, but in population crisis in urban China, on the devastated beaches of
Northern Sri Lanka, within the sprawling favelas of Rio de Janeiro, or in the refugee
camps in Pakistan. Thus, along with the many questions I bring back with me to New
York, these seven months later, I bring with me a sense of urgency and responsibility to
orient my future work towards reworking those ideas towards a more just global
reality.
Many emphasized a new way of knowing through disorientation, and the need for a new
evaluative vision. Indeed, we the faculty are also aware that every new undertaking and
especially those for which financial support is requested, will be subject to evaluation. The
method of evaluation must, however, be appropriate to the undertaking being reviewed.
One of the most challenging and potentially transformative “discoveries” of the 5th Year
Global Fellowship initiative was the invention of a new kind of experimentation – one that
is as relevant for the pure sciences as for the human and social sciences. Because they were
able to undertake their investigations without the demand for a finished product, and
because they were not testing hypotheses in order to generate new evidence of the validity
(or not) of their already existing ideas, the participants were able to see and experience a
kind of experiment whose outcome was and is an openness to new and changing forms of
learning (not merely new kinds of knowledge). This openness to new forms of learning is
exactly what is necessary to prepare individuals for a world that will continue to change,
and which must therefore be the scene and object of constant adjustment and
reorientation. It is possible to say, therefore, that the 5th Year Global Scholars program is
an experiment in method – a pedagogical method essential for living in any future
globality. Its “results” will only become visible in years to come, but for this reason they
are that much more important than those which can be measured now, according to the
criteria of the present moment:
a) The fifth-year fellowship creates precisely the kind of space where a global
education can be imagined. It assumes that a global education is more than a
required Major African Texts course or a semester at the Columbia campus in
Beijing. It is more than wave upon wave of Columbia envoys sent abroad to undertake
specific research projects, allowing their investigations to be guided by assumptions
masquerading as questions, and ultimately replicating these very same
assumptions. These kinds of programs are highly invaluable. Not only are they
wonderful opportunities for undergraduate students but they contribute massively to
the Columbia University community at large. However, as these ventures operate in
the realm of information and what is known, they continue to skirt around the edges of
the unknown which is precisely what the [sic] this fellowship is structured to engage. . .
. This structure must not only come from the fellow herself, but the fellow must be
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constantly interrogating and adapting her methodology to accommodate the
unexpected. What sets the fifth-year fellowship apart is that the fellows are invited to
push out against “the global” with the expectation that the global will push back in
ways that could not have been calculated in advance; to inhabit spaces that prompt
them to reconsider their established approaches and reformulate their
premeditations. Central to the negotiation of this space between knowledge systems in
a humbling and transformative way is the kind of structural openness that allows the
fellow to adapt to changing circumstances, environments, and ideas. I am convinced
that it is in this space between different systems of knowledge that the face of a
Columbia global education will emerge. The fellows are invited not just to dwell in this
space, but even to create such a space to dwell in. In this way, through the Fifth-Year
Fellowship, Columbia students are not just passively allowing a global education to
wash over them, but they are actively constructing such an education for themselves.
b) The Fifth Year Fellowship radically departs from other programs it could be likened
to, perhaps most because its ultimate objective is not a research project, resulting in an
information product. Instead, we learned that generating different kinds of questions
mattered. It was in this way that we opposed the instinct to reproduce that which we
already know, i.e. that which we have information about. This could only be done
through the disorientation that happens through travel; the development of a visceral
awareness that seemingly peripheral aspects of a place are in fact central in thinking
about it. To develop a different knowledge base one had to resist inertia in the
direction of comfort and familiarity, and thus abandon certain methodologies for the
purpose of inhabiting new social worlds.
c) The fifth year fellowship coincides with the time that graduates are making
decisions about their future trajectories. At this particular conjuncture, to entrench
oneself into other ways of being in the world, as well as arguably the more difficult
task of approaching different ways of knowing the world, has been most valuable for
me - as I try to imagine not only what to do but also where to be. It was especially
through close discussions with the other Fifth Year Fellows, that I came to consider,
more and more the place of the ethical in this future that I am beginning to envision
for myself.
We end with a few sentences from the excellent INTERACT postdoctoral fellow specially
assigned to the 5th-year Fellows’ Program. They make clear that our pilot energizes not
only the best of emerging Columbia graduates and tenured Columbia faculty but also handpicked young scholars (the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society had 90+
applicants for this postdoctoral fellowship) at the beginning of their professional
careers. It cannot be overemphasized that this is an extension of the Columbia footprint
into the teaching of the Humanities, a worldwide endeavor that is in decline because of a
conventional view of globality and globalization. The 5th-year Fellowship is a pioneer here
as well:
Openness to the unexpected, then, generated for our students not only an intellectual
humility but also a capacity to rethink the University from those who have emerged
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changed by its pedagogical approach. Our fellows are recently graduated leaders from
the Columbia community, whose experience might serve to offer subtle, gradual, but
necessary changes to the University’s approach to global research and learning . . .
. [T]he group has returned transformed and is prepared to advise Columbia in its
methodological approach to Global pedagogy.
We look forward to a positive response,
Respectfully submitted,
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Charles R. Armstrong
Rosalind C. Morris
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