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In the midst of a pandemic, we seldom hear universities mentioned as crucial sites for international understanding and cooperation, notes Ilaria Scaglia, studied and taught international history in the United States before joining Aston University in Birmingham as a Lecturer in Modern History in 2018.
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| Photo: Moshe Harosh via Pixabay |
Images of students confined to their housing dominate the media cycle. More generally, business models that reduce programmes to products, students to customers, and education to a means for economic growth prevail. Political activism on-campus is rarely encouraged or celebrated in public life.
A hundred years ago, in the aftermath of the First World War, the situation was quite different. The League of Nations regarded education as central to the propagation of ideas of peace. It also considered universities as critical crossroads for international communication. Its Committee for Intellectual Cooperation, staffed largely by academics, pushed for student and faculty exchange and coordinated communications among a wide array of organisations. After 1945, these programs continued; and in subsequent decades programmes such as the European Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students (ERASMUS) built and expanded on this tradition.
Pandemics and deadly diseases did not stop the work of putting education—and especially universities—at work to build international understanding and cooperation. Inspired by the League’s work, Dr Louis Vauthier established an international University Sanatorium in the Swiss village of Leysin...
What would a strategy inspired by this history look like in practice? First, it would make us conceptualise “student experience” in a different way, bringing out its collective features and the intercultural, political, and civic values of learning. Second, at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has slowed down student and faculty travel, and despite efforts at digitisation, access to both libraries and archives has been greatly reduced, it would prioritise student and faculty exchanges as key to the formation of future generations of world citizens; it would also protect access to research facilities to include the vitality of what Vauthier would have called “intellectual” work in the recipe for future cultural, societal, and civic life both domestically and abroad.
Source: OUPblog
