First
Inaugural Address of Jeffrey Sean Lehman
As
President of Cornell University
Doha,
Qatar
October
12, 2003
As salaamu aleikum.
Your Highnesses,
Excellencies, Honored Hosts, Honored Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen:
We have chosen to begin this week of my
inauguration as the eleventh President of Cornell University here, on the
campus of the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, for two reasons. The first is to signal the importance
of this extraordinary campus to our University. The second is more generally to signal Cornell’s unique role
in the world.
This
campus is only the third campus of Cornell that admits students to a full
course of study, teaches them, and ultimately will award them a Cornell
degree. It is the first Cornell
campus to be established outside the United States. Its extraordinary success means that it will not be the
last.
Here in Doha, Cornell is truly honored to
be part of a remarkable enterprise.
His Highness, the Emir, is bringing about an astonishing national
transformation. His vision is
truly inspiring: Constitutional
democracy. Religious
understanding. Shared economic
prosperity. Full participation by
all citizens.
To
have such a transformation take place smoothly and quickly requires exceptional
leadership. His Highness, the
Emir, and Her Highness, Sheikha Mouza, have recognized that education must be
at the center of any such transformation.
Excellent education of all forms, including excellent medical education. Excellent education for the men and
women of their nation and their region.
They are an inspiring expression of the Islamic ideal Talab al-’ilm,
seeking knowledge to the ends of the earth.
The historian Frederick Rudolph, writing
in 1977, described Cornell University as “the first American university” because
of its revolutionary vision of higher education. We are honored that Cornell is today a part of Education
City, a revolutionary vision for Qatari higher education. And we believe that Ezra Cornell
himself would be proud of the way that his American university has matured into
the transnational university of the future.
In
the revolutionary formulation of its founder, Cornell University was designed
to be “an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”
Cornell was the first great university of North
America designed to be open to all kinds of students and to pursue all
questions that challenge the human species, both humanist and scientific, with
equal fervor and with uncompromising rigor.
At the time of its founding, Cornell spoke
to the need for American universities to address the changes brought about by
America’s industrial revolution.
Higher education was required for the industrial class as well as for
the professional class. Higher
education was required for women as well as for men. Higher education needed to combine its traditional emphasis
on the classic languages and humanistic disciplines with an equal and
correlative emphasis on theoretical and applied science.
Today that language – any person, any
study – must address the changes that have transformed our world over the past
fifty years and that are continuing today. A revolution in the technologies of communication,
computation, and transportation.
The breathtaking implications of that technological revolution for the
movement of people around the globe and for their appreciation of one
another. The consequences of that
movement for the spread, adaptation, and mixing of political, economic, and
cultural norms. Despite the
persistence of misunderstanding and conflict, we are witnessing the
evolutionary development of a truly transnational pluralistic culture – a
culture that includes profoundly important universal aspirations while
retaining equally important regional, national, and local variation.
The American professor Ali Asani has
written about the importance within the Quran of “the idea that God’s message
is universal, but its manifestations plural,” and he cites a verse which
proclaims that a single divine message has inspired an array of world religions,
all of which call for respect. The
Quran contains a vision of universalism that reinforces and is reinforced by
pluralism. And today this vision
is animating progress everywhere.
Two weeks ago, I was an invited speaker
at The U.S.-Arab Economic Forum in Detroit, Michigan, a conference designed to
examine the theme “One world, two cultures, endless possibilities.” The organizers asked me to speak about
how American institutions can partner with Arab governments and civil society
to create high-impact educational ventures. And I spoke about this campus, here in Doha, as a shining
and hopeful example of the future of higher education worldwide.
This morning I want to emphasize why this
development is so fundamentally important, for education and for all
humanity. It is essential that we
resist those who would attribute all transnational initiatives to the changing
global economic order. Falling
transportation costs and rising technological capacity are important factors.
They are, truly, what enabled the creation of this campus. But the transnational imperative goes
far beyond that.
Why are all of us who gather here today
so interested in other countries, their people, their societies? One reason is certainly
comparativist. We believe,
rightly, that we will gain new insight into ourselves and our own society by
better understanding how other societies and cultures have taken different
paths to resolve similar social questions.
Yet I think an even more significant
reason is fundamentally humanist.
Even while we respect the importance of national borders, a core part of
us subscribes to a community that includes all human beings. We are affirmed whenever we recognize
ourselves in people from different cultures. We are ennobled when we appreciate that people everywhere
share a joint responsibility to care for the planet we all inhabit.
The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has
written powerfully about the importance of educating today’s students for world
citizenship. In her recent book, Cultivating
Humanity, she has emphasized the way in which such an education must
proceed: from a premise that elevates our shared identity as members of the
human species above our identities as members of national or group
communities. The goal is not to
pretend that national or group identities do not exist; it is to allow us to
appreciate them for the role they play in a larger drama. In Nussbaum’s words, “Only a human
identity that transcends these divisions shows us why we should look at one
another with respect across them.”
Cornell – birthplace of the integration
of theory and application within American higher education, champion of the
equal dignity of humanism and science, exemplar of openness to all peoples and
to the critical examination of ideas – has a special duty to nurture a
transnational perspective on the human condition.
What does such a perspective entail? In its essence, a transnational
perspective must be open and engaged.
Open to new ideas, new ways of thinking, new ways of feeling. A transnational perspective must
recognize the world’s radically varied texture without rushing to presume some
variants superior and others inferior.
A transnational perspective is different from a global perspective
because it transcends nationalism without insisting on a unitary global
substitute. It embodies the
Quranic vision of universalism that reinforces and is reinforced by pluralism.
Such a vision entails much more than a
detached acceptance of alternative perspectives, however. A transnational perspective implies a
willingness to engage. To
participate in the efforts of people everywhere to better understand the world
and to improve the conditions of their lives. To advocate for certain humanist values, even while
listening carefully and respectfully to those who might reject those
values.
From the moment of its founding, Cornell
University has engaged the world.
Cornell was founded in 1865, and among the 412 students in its first
entering class were five students who had come from overseas.
Over the years, thousands and thousands
of students have come to Cornell from around the world, studied, and returned
to their home countries prepared to provide extraordinary leadership. Consider the example of Hu Shih. After graduating from Cornell in 1914,
he returned to China to become one of his country’s most prominent
intellectuals, President of Beijing University, and Ambassador to the United
States. Hu’s advocacy led to the
adoption of a new, vernacular written language as the official language of
China, fundamentally transforming his society.
Today Cornell is embracing the challenges
of transnational humanistic and scientific education on an unprecedented
scale.
At the level of the individual, this year
more than 500 undergraduate students from the Ithaca campus are studying abroad
in 45 different countries, and over 3000 students from more than 120 different
countries around the world have come to Ithaca to pursue their educations.
Programmatically, Cornell’s Mario Einaudi
Center for International Studies and the Cornell International Institute for
Food, Agriculture and Development help to sustain dozens of interdisciplinary
programs that transcend traditional academic, professional, and national
boundaries as they help students understand major regions of the globe. And
every year the School of Criticism and Theory, directed by Cornell Professor
Dominick Lacapra, brings leading scholars from every corner of the world to our
Ithaca campus for an intensive six-week program of seminars, colloquia, and
lectures exploring literature's relationship with history, art, anthropology,
and the law.
Outside of Ithaca, Cornell’s presence is
felt in every corner of our planet.
Permit me to offer just three examples from among many.
The International Rice Research Institute
was founded in 1960 in Los Banos, the Philippines, by Cornell Professor Robert
Chandler. The IRRI helped to
trigger the Green Revolution that vastly multiplied food yields across Asia. Today a successor of Professor
Chandler’s on the Cornell faculty, Professor Susan McCouch, is making the tools
of post-genomic molecular biology available to rice breeders and farmers
throughout the world who want to know how their indigenous wild species can
help provide the basis for durable, high quality, high yielding rice for their
region.
Consider as well the United Nations
University in Tokyo, Japan. The
UNU is home to 13 different institutes and training centers around the
world. The program that is
coordinated from the United States is the Food and Nutrition Programme for
Human and Social Development, which since 1995 has been led by Professor
Cutberto Garza at Cornell. The
Food and Nutrition Programme helps developing countries worldwide to develop
local institutions with the capacity to fulfill their populations’ nutritional
needs. Recently, the program
initiated the development of a ten-year action plan for enhancing capacity in
food in nutrition in the Middle East.
Finally, consider the Institute for the
Study of the Continents. Directed
by Cornell Professor Bryan Isacks, the Institute leads collaborative studies of
tectonics and geodynamics with partner governments and universities in
Argentina, Chile, China, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and
Turkey. At the same time, one of
the Institute’s programs is producing a digital geoscience library that will
ultimately offer researchers around the world a comprehensive set of
interdisciplinary tools for analyzing the world’s complex of interrelated
systems.
These are a sampling of Cornell’s activities
in the world today. I believe that
these activities have made a difference to the quality of life around the
world. I know that they have made
a difference to Cornell, bringing us exposure to cultural insights and
perspectives from other nations that have enabled us to understand our world
and our own lives in new ways.
The future demands more, and, true to its
tradition, Cornell will continue to innovate in ways that others may
follow. Our University will
continue to give bold expression to the ideal of education for world
citizenship and to the ideal of engagement with the most challenging issues
that face us. In the nineteenth
century, Cornell was established as the model for a new kind of university. In the twenty-first century, Cornell
will continue to renew that model, showing the way for higher education to
nurture a transnational perspective on humanity.
The Weill Cornell Medical College in
Qatar is designed to promote healing.
Every day, the classes that are taught here will serve the cause of
human health throughout the region by helping us to meet the challenges of
disease. But I think it might also
promote a different kind of healing as well.
War and violence, hate and
misunderstanding continue to scar our planet. I hope that the commitment to higher education that His
Highness and Her Highness have shown in Qatar might become a model for the
region, and for the world. We know
that, at their best, universities are powerful engines of human transformation.
Students and faculty from very different backgrounds are brought together, and
through study and discussion they come to view the world in new ways. Endeavors such as Education City can
point the way to mutual respect, understanding, and peace, in ways that few
other social institutions can.
This is an extraordinarily important project. I am truly privileged to be able to begin my inaugural week here, on our newest campus, in Qatar.
