By Richard Ekman

“It’s a Small World After All,” was the theme of the Pepsi pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. Then and for years afterward, in many ways the globe was indeed shrinking. Over the past half-century, new technologies have made it easier for people in all countries—including Americans—to stay in touch with each other. Increasingly a global culture seemed to be developing, often with American products, American music, American television, and American-accented English in a privileged place. Disturbing exceptions were isolated and embargoed, most recently by labeling them as “axis of evil” governments pushing values that were alien to global unity. Our irrepressible American optimism encouraged us to think that such exceptions were just temporary setbacks in the enlightened progress of the “Small World,” the ever more unified planet. Today, although Pepsi (and its rival Coke) are both big businesses worldwide, cultures across the globe seem once again more fractured than unified, and our world seems more dangerous than small.

Campuses usually reflect the surrounding popular tendencies, and the interest of U.S. campuses in internationalization is no exception. American college students are studying abroad in larger numbers. Despite visa restrictions, more international students are coming here (although not graduate students from China or the Middle East). Curriculum committees on U.S. campuses are earnestly trying to broaden what is taught to encompass more of the developing world. Tom Friedman says we must do all this or we will lose out to China and India, but for many students the impulse to learn more about others stems from a belief in the common humanity we all share and recognition of the importance of living harmoniously in the world.

Whatever the motivation, our experience has been uneven. Especially disappointing has been our nation’s—and our colleges’—lack of success in building more productive relations between the U.S. and Muslim-majority countries. Islamic countries ought to, logically, be closer to the West than they are. The shared touchstones of market economies and widespread knowledge of English among young people are not trivial. Even closer to our professional concerns, the creation of new private colleges and universities, often in a self-consciously American model, is now as much a growth industry in Muslim-majority countries as it has been in Eastern Europe and Latin America for three decades. American colleges and philanthropic foundations ought to embrace the trend in all regions of the globe. Many new, but already high quality, private institutions in Muslim countries are eager to incorporate elements of American undergraduate general education and to forge closer relations with U.S. institutions. Noteworthy for their emerging American-style general education programs are the Aga Khan University in Pakistan, the Independent University of Bangladesh, Al Akhawayn University in Morocco, the American University of Kuwait, Forman Christian College in Pakistan, the American University-Central Asia in Kyrgystan, and the American University of Sharjah in the UAE. Another hallmark of these institutions is that they offer more than the often narrow professional programs that can dominate when the state controls higher education, as is still frequently the case. The new universities also employ pedagogies that depart from the passive learning from lectures and rote memorization that still prevails at many institutions.

Two recent conferences in Istanbul in which I participated provided a forum to begin to build stronger relations. A December 2005 conference brought together private university presidents from many Muslim-majority countries, along with a few U.S. college presidents, among them David Maxwell of Drake University (IA), Elizabeth Coleman of Bennington College (VT), and Richard Detweiler of the Great Lakes Colleges Association. The conference was organized by the Hollings Center, a then-new organization launched with Congressional funding that is dedicated to dialogue and exchange between the U.S. and Muslim-majority countries, and is named for former Senator Ernest Hollings. The conference generated considerable optimism about additional steps toward cooperation. The Council of Independent Colleges, for example, arranged for two of the participants from institutions in Morocco (Al Akhawayn University) and Jordan (Philadelphia University) to participate in the 2006 CIC Institute for Chief Academic Officers, where they conferred with many U.S. counterparts about possible faculty and student exchanges, or other partnerships.

In January 2007, the Hollings Center hosted a second meeting in Istanbul, reconvening the original group and adding new participants drawn from 13 Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa. U.S. presidents Lee Pelton of Willamette University (OR), Richard Wilson of Illinois Wesleyan University, Pamela Jolicoeur of Concordia College (MN), Dorothy Yancy of Johnson C. Smith University (NC), and provost Pamela Gunter-Smith of Drew University (NJ) joined the group’s representation of smaller U.S. private institutions.

The discussions at both conferences established common ground as well as important differences between American and other institutions. One harsh fact is that, to date, American students and faculty members have shown little interest in exchange programs with universities in most Muslim countries. While Arabic language study has increased a lot in the U.S. recently, the numbers are still very small; and the traffic in student exchanges, while growing, is still a trickle. In 2004–2005, 32,000 U.S. students went to the United Kingdom; 24,000 went to Italy; and 15,000 went to France. But during the same period (2004–2005), only 807 U.S. students traveled to Egypt, an increase of 41 percent over the previous year. For Turkey, there were 454 students from the U.S., up 127 percent. For the United Arab Emirates, the number was 84, a 320 percent increase. In Pakistan, the number was three, down from five. To be sure, there is legitimate worry about physical safety for Americans in some of these countries, but not all.

The talk in Istanbul about the tension between the goal of college as preparation for a career and as purveyor of a general education was surprisingly familiar—including the parental expectation that college prepare a student for a job and the faculty expectation that something broader be the main goal. And the discussions about quality assurance were very much like ours, except that the non-Americans were more eager than the Americans for international validation by a single standard of the quality of their institutions. It was difficult for many of the non-Americans to visualize how the U.S. system of voluntary accreditation, which relies on self-studies and keeps the government at arms-length, could be applied in their countries.

Moreover, what it means to be “independent” in a country with a state religion, especially if the university is avowedly secular, presents a very different set of issues from a situation in which the institution is Islamic and/or the government is officially secular. There is no single Muslim-country model for a private college or university.

Why does this matter? Samuel Huntington may have overdrawn the “clash of civilizations” in his ground-breaking work, but the differences are still fundamental. Each of the U.S. institutions that participated in the conference committed to do something quickly—however modest—to demonstrate good faith in establishing additional grounds for cooperation. CIC and the Hollings Center will seek to build support for some of the promising but more expensive ideas that emerged—such as a program through which teams of experienced U.S. college presidents might visit and provide support to campuses in Muslim countries, a program that CIC would be in a good position to coordinate.

Some non-Americans at the conference said they believe that U.S.-Middle East relations, including in the universities, are in a long-term state of deterioration. It is all the more remarkable that they participated, given the strong anti-U.S. sentiment many of them face at home. Most argued that more frequent interaction is needed with U.S. colleges. The grim realism that we are not one worldwide happy family was sobering to all. But there was also confidence that we in the colleges and universities of the U.S. and of Muslim-majority countries can do more to learn one another’s languages and basic texts, to probe the differences in what we teach and why, and to prepare a new generation of people who have studied in countries that differ in important ways from their home countries. Perhaps it is the case, after all, that higher education is one of the few aspects of America that is still widely admired throughout the world.