Creating Global Citizens: International Education and Academic Freedom

Speech by U.S. Ambassador Marie T. Huhtala

CREATING GLOBAL CITIZENS: INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION AND ACADEMIC FREEDOM

TO INAUGURATE THE PUSAT PEMBANGUNAN
AKADEMIK (PPA) PUBLIC POLICY LECTURE SERIES
January 27, 2004 – Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM)

-- Yang Bahagia Professor Dato’ Dr. Mohammed Noor Embi, Deputy Vice Chancellor, UKM,

-- Professor Dr. Muhammad Yahaya, Director, Pusat Pembangunan Akademik,

-- Professor Dr. Che Husna Azhari, Assistant Director, Pusat Pembangunan Akademik,

-- Faculty members and students of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia:

It is an honor and a privilege for me to address this distinguished academic audience. I am particularly happy to be here because many of you are part of the Faculty of Education. I have tremendous admiration for everyone involved in the important work of education. As a society we all have the obligation to educate the next generation and prepare them for the challenges of the future, and teachers and professors exercise that responsibility most directly. This is an awesome charge, with tremendous importance for the future of your nation and the world at large.

I would like to start my remarks with a true story. Many years ago, I had a friend and colleague whom I admired very much because of his extensive educational background and highly developed intellect. This person had attended a prestigious U.S. university, where he earned a bachelor of arts and a doctorate of jurisprudence by the age of 25. He served as a clerk to one of our Supreme Court Justices before joining the U.S. Foreign Service, where I got to know him. He had an extensive classical music library, which he knew backwards and forwards, and he had read hundreds of books in many fields. But what impressed me the most about my friend was what he said to me one time, in utter sincerity: “I am constantly humbled by the vast extent of my ignorance.” My friend was a real scholar because he knew that he had much more to learn.

Nowadays we all understand that an education does not end the day you get your diploma, whether it’s a bachelor’s, master’s or Ph.D. In our rapidly changing world, education is a life-long task, and all truly educated people recognize that. Just take the field of computers. When I was getting my bachelors degree in Santa Clara, California, in the part of the country that would eventually be called Silicon Valley, computers were huge and bulky creations the size of a room. Foreign language majors like me never got near them; they were reserved for the math, physics and engineering students. And those students frequently had to come in in the middle of the night to insert the hundreds of punch cards that made up a simple computer program. If you had asked me then if I saw a future in computers for myself, I would have laughed at you.

Now, of course, the ability to use word processing and perform Internet searches is a minimal requirement for all educated persons, not just scientists. I am sure all of you are proficient in these tasks, not to mention e-mailing and SMS messaging. Students these days learn these skills in school, but those of us in my generation have had to do so as part of our life-long learning project.

It is true that education is forever becoming a more complex task. Nowadays a well-educated person has to be proficient in several languages, familiar with his country’s history and political system, and able to perform well in his or her chosen field. But I have a more far reaching proposition to make to you: In this twenty-first century, a well-educated person has to be a citizen of the world. To be well-rounded you have to have an in-depth understanding of world history, geography and political issues, and you have to understand and participate in the great challenges of your era.

No country is an island these days – we are all linked in an interdependent system. For example, when the U.S. was struck by terrorists in September 2001, many Malaysians watched events unfold live on television. Within a short time the ramifications of that terrible day swept around the globe. Visa procedures were tightened up and air travel became more difficult, not to mention more expensive. In short order the U.S. went to war with Afghanistan, a conflict that affected the entire region. At the same time governments around the world recognized the need to crack down on terrorist groups in their midst and began to cooperate on freezing the financial assets of terrorist groups under United Nations instructions. What may have looked like an isolated attack on New York and Washington on September 11 quickly changed the lives of people everywhere, including in Malaysia.

There are many other ways to illustrate the growing interrelationships and interdependence of our countries and regions. Trade flows link us in ways that were unimaginable a generation ago. The U.S. and Malaysia share booming business ties, with over $30 billion a year in two-way trade. The U.S. is the largest single investor in Malaysia and the biggest market for Malaysian goods; our companies invested here employ over 100,000 Malaysians. Malaysia, for its part, is the 10th largest trading partner of the U.S., well ahead of all its ASEAN neighbors as well as Hong Kong, Australia and India. Most Americans, like most Malaysians, don’t realize how closely their own jobs are tied to international trade. Currency fluctuations in the dollar, the euro, and the yen affect prices and markets everywhere. Understanding the world you live in means comprehending the international financial and trade linkages that affect every country’s stock exchange, every business person’s bottom line.

A well-educated person also has to have a good grasp of international politics and foreign affairs. This is a realization that has been slow to develop in my own country. For many decades people in America were content to concentrate on their own daily lives, believing they were insulated from the rest of the world by the two great oceans that separate us from Asia and Europe. That illusion was shattered forcibly on September 11. As we mourned the dead and cleaned up the terrible devastation in New York and Washington, we began to come to terms with the terrible reality of international terrorism. And we began to ask, why did so many in the rest of the world, particularly the Muslim world, harbor intense grievances against us?

That is a question that still transfixes us, and it has brought forth a deep and thoughtful effort to examine our policies and to understand the point of view of other peoples around the world. Today in the U.S. there is a boom in Muslim studies, for example, as universities, journals and scholars explore a religion and culture that we have not understood very well in the past. In many book stores in the U.S. it is difficult to buy a copy of the Holy Koran – all copies have been sold out. We have turned with interest to the many Muslim communities living in our country, peacefully and productively, to try to understand their values and aspirations. There are around 8 million Muslims living in America now, most of whom are U.S. citizens. Some of the most heart-warming stories I’ve read in the aftermath of 9/11 concerned the efforts of local American communities to protect the Islamic communities and mosques in their neighborhoods from potentially violent reaction to the terror attacks.

As scholars, you know that the search for objective truth can be long and arduous. In your research, you are trained to go to primary sources wherever possible, recognizing that secondary sources offering commentary or interpretation of historical events can frequently obscure rather than enlighten. Given the importance of international politics, where misunderstandings can lead to armed conflict, it is especially important to consult original sources and strive to understand the policies and intentions of the major players.

That is why I have devoted many hours to informing Malaysians about the true policies and intentions of the U.S. government. I recognize that our actions will not always be popular, here or anywhere else, but what concerns me is that those policies are so often misrepresented in the popular press. As scholars, you should be interested in hearing from a primary source rather than relying on second or third-hand accounts. Then and only then can you make your own judgments about whether or not the U.S. is a force for good in the world and a trusted partner.

Fortunately, we have an excellent primary source at hand in the recent article written by Secretary of State Colin Powell in the January/February issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. The article is called “A Strategy of Partnerships,” and I recommend it to you highly. In fact, I would like to quote a few key passages now.

The Secretary takes issue with the common belief that U.S. policy is focused exclusively on fighting terrorism, that we are unilateralist by design, imbalanced in favor of military methods and biased toward preemptive war on a global scale. I’m sure those accusations sound familiar to you. Mr. Powell takes them on and rebuts them, one by one.

He notes that while it is true that fighting international terrorism is now the number one priority of the U.S., the breadth of our strategy transcends that objective. “A strategy limited to dealing with immediate threats would in the end fail to defeat them – just as bailing water out of a boat would not fix a leak.” He describes the Administration’s National Security Strategy – which incidentally is available for anyone to read on the world wide web – which defines U.S. policy priorities in eight substantive sections. “Together, these parts add up to an integrated strategy that is broad and deep, far ranging and forward looking, attuned as much to opportunities for the United States as to the dangers it faces.”

Our strategy is based on maintaining and developing the partnerships we have built around the world, first and foremost with the United Nations. It is a great distortion to say the U.S. has sidelined the United Nations in the run-up to last year’s Iraq war. Indeed, the Coalition took military action to enforce 12 years of UN Security Council resolutions on Iraq, resolutions that Saddam Hussein routinely ignored. Remember that President Bush went before the UN on September 12, 2002 to make his case for the UN’s enforcing those 16 resolutions, and the Security Council voted unanimously in November to urge Iraq one last time to comply with its obligation, with a warning of strong consequences if it refused. We tried unsuccessfully for a further resolution to unite the international community in the months before Operation Iraqi Freedom began, and returned to the UN in May 2003, after Operation Iraqi Freedom, to secure a resolution lifting the sanctions against Iraq that had become obsolete. In August we secured yet another resolution recognizing the Iraqi Governing Council, and at present we are deeply engaged in persuading the UN to return to Iraq and take an active part in the reconstruction effort. These are not the actions of a superpower intent on sidelining the UN.

The Secretary’s article explains the inclusion of the concept of preemption in the National Security Strategy of 2002. First, he said, the Administration made that concept, which had always existed, explicit in the difficult days after 9/11 “to reassure the American people that the government possessed common sense.” Anyone knows that if you have a clear and present danger that cannot be deterred by the means you have at hand, you must deal with it in some fashion. You cannot just wait for future attacks to occur without taking action. A second reason for mentioning preemption as a part of our strategy was to put international terrorists, and the countries that supported them, on notice that they were “in big trouble.” But the Secretary cautioned that observers have since exaggerated both the scope and the centrality of preemption in U.S. strategy as a whole. “Preemption applies only to the undeterrable threats that come from non-state actors such as terrorist groups. It was never meant to displace deterrence, only to supplement it.” And the discussion of preemption in the National Security document took up only two sentences in the 40-page document, making it far from the central thrust of the strategy.

The Secretary discussed at some length the many partnerships the U.S. is engaged in around the world, both the ones the Administration inherited like NATO and our many bilateral alliances and the new ones it has initiated, like the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS and the Middle East Partnership Initiative. He described our efforts to achieve a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict through our membership in the Quartet, a partnership with the EU, Russia and the UN. He talked about our effort to control the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction through the Proliferation Security Initiative, a voluntary 11-nation effort to work together to seize materials related to WMD in transit to countries of concern. The President has called on other nations to join in this effort, and I hope many of them will do so. Mr. Powell also referred to the many American initiatives to promote worldwide economic development through the Millennium Challenge Account and a host of free trade agreements.

The United States strategy is rooted in the promotion of freedom and dignity worldwide, including the rule of law, limits on the absolute power of the state, free speech, freedom of worship, equal justice, respect for women, religious and ethnic tolerance, and respect for private property. (I note that these are all concepts that are highly valued here in Malaysia as well.) The U.S. does not believe that international politics needs to be a zero-sum game, where national strength and security for one nation has to threaten the security of others. Instead, we want all the world’s powers to pull together to solve problems common to all.

Chief among those problems, in this day and age, is terrorism, which threatens the world order itself. As Powell said, “The civilized world has spent more than a thousand years trying to limit the destructiveness of war. Drawing a distinction between civilians and combatants has been an essential part of this process. But terrorism aims to erase that distinction by attacking civilians.” We cannot allow this to continue.

My country works hard to have the best relations we can with nations large and small, old and new. The past decade has seen important advances in our relations with Russia, China, India and Pakistan. We are cooperating closely with China, Russia, Japan and South Korea to meet the challenges posed by the specter of nuclear weapons in North Korea. “Around the globe, American diplomacy is designed to satisfy not only our own national interests, but also those of international security as a whole.” We do not take the present peace among the world’s nations for granted; we work to prevent major war even as we promote human dignity and democracy, helping people to raise themselves from poverty and to transform the inadequate system of global public health. Secretary Powell concluded by saying, “We fight terrorism because we must, but we seek a better world because we can.”

Those, my friends, are the considered views of the Secretary of State. I have gone into them in some detail because, first, I find this an extremely cogent summary of U.S. policy, and secondly, because this remarkable article has not been reprinted by media here in Malaysia. I believe it is important for you to consider what he has to say, even if you do not agree with everything he had to say. Referring to primary sources is the best and often the only way you are going to be able to make reasoned judgments that will qualify you to be informed global citizens.

I would like to say a word now about international education and academic freedom. First I must salute your government for placing so much emphasis on higher education and for supporting premier universities here. Yours is a young country, with less than 50 years of independence, but you have already put yourselves on the map with outstanding centers of learning such as UKM, University of Malaya, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Universiti Institute Technologi Mara, the Multimedia University and the International Islamic University. I actively encourage American students and scholars to spend more time in academic exchanges here, just as so many Malaysians go to the U.S. to further their education. We can all benefit from this type of exchange, and I’m a great believer in it.

About 30 percent of all students attending major U.S. universities were not born in America, and all our best schools actively encourage foreign students to apply because they value the diverse points of view foreigners bring. This allows the best minds from around the world to come to America to solve problems together, and it makes our universities much more competitive. This is one of the main reasons why American universities are able to achieve dramatic research breakthroughs so regularly, including a high percentage of Nobel prizes.

For those of you that are interested, I note that the process of getting a student visa for the U.S. has been greatly improved in the last year. The lengthy delays we experienced in 2002 are a thing of the past, and we approve the vast majority of all applications. We now have an on-line visa application on our embassy home page, which greatly simplifies the process, and our Malaysian-American Commission on Educational Exchange, MACEE, offers free counseling and advice to Malaysians interested in studying in the U.S.

But you don’t have to go to another country to enjoy the benefits of academic freedom. There is no reason why it cannot exist and flourish in any university, in any country. The best minds, after all, are those that are constantly tested and allowed to constantly challenge ideas. In the U.S. students are required to think independently and critically, to challenge orthodoxy even as they master the canon of received knowledge. This kind of freedom breeds innovation and creativity, which lead to scientific and technical breakthroughs and deeper understanding.

It is so important for all of us to be inspired by the pure joy of learning. Sometimes completely unexpected breakthroughs occur when someone is pursuing knowledge for its own sake. The history of science is full of such events. In 1895 a German physicist, Wilhelm Roentgen, was working in his lab studying cathode ray tubes when he inadvertently stumbled upon the existence of x-rays. This source of energy, previously unsuspected, led to the development of radiology as a key medical diagnostic tool, as well as many other uses. The British scientist Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin by accident in 1928 when it appeared by accident on an unwashed culture plate; he noted that other bacteria did not grow on the spot where the penicillin was. Later other scientists refined the substance, produced it in quantity and turned it into the first of the great “miracle drugs” of the 20th century.

In more recent years, one of the greatest sources of unexpected discoveries with practical applications has been the American space program. We have all heard of the exciting achievements of the early years of space exploration, the early manned orbits of the earth, the journeys to the Moon, the development of the U.S. space shuttle, the Russian space station Mir and the International Space Station now being completed. We have also heard of the many tragedies and losses in space. What is surprising is the long list of technological breakthroughs coming out of the space program, things which have materially improved the lives of millions of people around the world. These include:

# CAT scanners and MRI technology used in hospitals, which came from technology developed to make computer-enhanced pictures of the Moon during the Apollo programs.

# Kidney dialysis machines, developed as a result of a chemical process developed by NASA.

# Insulin pumps for diabetics, based on technology used on the Mars Viking spacecraft.

# Programmable heart pacemakers, which were first developed in the 1970s using NASA satellite electrical systems.

# Fetal heart monitors for unborn infants, developed from technology originally used to measure airflow over aircraft wings.

# Surgical probes used to treat brain tumors in children, which resulted from special lighting technology developed for plant growth experiments on space shuttle missions.

# Infrared hand-held cameras originally used to observe blazing plumes from the space shuttle have helped firefighters point out hot spots in brush fires.

# The whole field of satellite communications comes from the space program. Thanks to satellites we all enjoy live news broadcasting from anywhere in the world, we stay in touch with families and business associates using cell phone networks, we enjoy accurate weather forecasts, we can pinpoint our location using the global positioning system and we use convenient ATMs when we need cash.

Right now the two NASA Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, are on the surface of Mars, exploring the ground and sending back millions of bits of new information about the Red Planet. (Spirit is temporarily out of order, but NASA expects to get it back online soon.) The pictures of Mars already on TV, beamed from 300 million miles away, are just amazing. The Rovers are expected to provide important information about our neighbor planet, perhaps even answer the age-old question of whether there is life elsewhere in our solar system. How useful will that information be? We don’t really know yet, but for sheer open-ended scientific research it can’t be beat.

As scholars, and citizens of the world in the 21st century, you must be excited about what is going on and what lies ahead. I, for one, am thrilled by our President’s recent announcement of a new American vision for space exploration efforts in this new century. The U.S. plans to undertake a sustained human and robotic program to explore the solar system. We will start by sending robots to the Moon by 2008 – just four years from now – and will send the first human expeditions to the Moon during the period 2015-2020. We plan to use the Moon as a stepping stone to enable sustained future exploration of Mars, the asteroid belt, and other destinations. And we don’t plan to do this all alone; the President has called on other nations to join us in this journey, in a spirit of cooperation and friendship.

Of course the plan will be expensive, and naturally there are those who say we cannot afford to go back into space as long as there is poverty and hardship on earth. But that is the kind of thinking that would have prevented Columbus from sailing to the New World, or discouraged the early traders who brought Islam to the Malay Peninsula. Humans have always had an impulse for exploration, for scientific discovery, and for meeting new challenges. I vividly remember the excitement we all felt back in 1969 when we watched the first two astronauts step out on the surface of the Moon. It is the destiny of mankind to reach out beyond our home planet just as the earliest seafarers had to leave their home ports and venture out on the open sea.

Whatever you may think of this plan, it offers tremendous opportunities for bright scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs around the world. Just think of the technological spinoffs we can expect from this new space effort, and the incalculable benefits for humans around the world. I should think you will all want to be a part of this great adventure!

In conclusion, let me say I envy you. All of you are extremely lucky to be pursuing your education in this day and age. The opportunities before you are dazzling, and you can make important contributions to the world as a whole. Someday there will be Malaysian astronauts, Malaysian Nobel prize winners, and Malaysian statesmen solving difficult international problems. I’m betting some of those great men and women will have studied here at UKM. All this can happen if your generation seeks to become true intellectuals, pursuing knowledge honestly, asking the hard questions and always going back to those primary sources. I wish you great success, and good luck. Your nation is lucky to have you, and you can make Malaysia proud.

Thank you.

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