Rethinking the Role of International Education: A Call to Action

I am very pleased to have this opportunity to share with you some perspectives on the very unique time in which we are living and the implications that it has for international higher education. Certainly, some of the things that I’m going be sharing with you are the specific topics that you are dealing with if you are struggling with some kind of normalcy after the pandemic.

What is challenging is the fact that we are talking about the future. And when we talk about the future, one of the big challenges is we do not always know what is going to happen. Of course, most of the time we don’t. Albert Einstein used to say, “Why bother about the future, if it will happen?”

I remember when I was a teenager, I used to read a very important journal: Reader’s Digest. One day, I was reading a quote and it stuck in my mind. It said, “When I think about the future, I become worried about the present.” Today’s world is a world in which we are extremely concerned about what is going to happen, and that impacts our lives and, of course, impacts also our work—the work and the impact of the work that we do, in this particular case, for students.

It is important to start by trying to make sure that all of us have a sense of the fact that there is good news. And the good news is that we live in a