Country of Exiles by William R. Leach

Author:William R. Leach
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307760517
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

CAMPUS AS OUTSIDER HEAVEN

The new university had one last aspect to it, which rounded out the internationalism shaped by the business alliances and by the recruitment of foreign-born talent. This aspect was a campus culture hospitable to the outside world in a way unlike anything Americans had known in the past.

Many universities have reconfigured campus intellectual life to meet the needs of non-native-born students. Earlier, when such students enrolled in America’s best universities, they never encountered campuses that assisted them as universities do today. Since 1980, however, elite schools have provided international students with clubs, newspapers, magazines, and special societies. They have employed hundreds of immigration lawyers and foreign student advisers, whose sole business was to know the immigration laws and to help students and faculty understand and finesse them. One Indian-born scholar has observed that “most universities have so many international faculty” that “they’ve gotten used to [dealing] with how immigration works.… They have a person in the personnel office [whose] job is to handle all the relevant matters about foreign faculty.”73

Friendly provisions, moreover, have accommodated nearly all “outsiders,” domestic as well as foreign. In prior decades, schools sought to attract students with athletics, clubs, and “Greek” societies.74 But, after 1980, they added to the menu of enticements; they tried to make campuses seem like utopian spaces in which most “outsider” voices (ethnic, racial, sexual) found expression and acceptance. Fed by an older stream of racial-gender politics and by the new immigration, “diversity practices” sprang up on many campuses to encourage students to “break the prejudice habit” and “embrace the Other.”75 An army of university administrators committed themselves to “de-provincializing” their student bodies (particularly the American-born students).76 Obsessed with demography, they hired people for such new positions as “Multicultural director” or “diversity ombudsman”; they also redesigned their facilities to express the “multicultural” vision. The University of California, Santa Barbara, for instance, has both a large “Multicultural Theater”—explicitly to reflect the interests of Asians, Hispanics, African-Americans, gays, and lesbians—and a glass-enclosed multicultural space on the second floor of the student library, plainly visible and separate, where one can find the special gender and ethnic collections.77

Finally, universities founded a range of institutes and programs that directed the intellectual energies of the university away from national to global interests, from the inside to the outside.

In 1996, the College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, created the Global and International Studies Program, a full degree program modeled after the recently created UCLA International Development Studies Program, and International Relations Program at UC, Davis. Designed to examine “transnational processes,” postcolonial peoples, and “diasporic” men and women uprooted and in motion, the program was headed by Mark Juergensmeyer, professor of politics and religion and a practicing liberal Protestant minister. Though born in a small Illinois town, he viewed America as “dissolving territory” and hoped to prepare his students for “world citizenship.”78

In the same year, the University of Chicago opened a new path in the humanities—“a new intellectual configuration,” or a

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