 So, ladies and gentlemen, let me welcome you to the United States Institute of Peace. My name is Bill Taylor, and I'm the Executive Vice President here at the Institute of Peace. Some of you may not have been in this building before, some of you may not be familiar with the Institute of Peace, but we think we're well positioned to sponsor this, to co-sponsor, to work with the organizers of this international education in what place in U.S. diplomacy, because the Institute of Peace was founded in 1984, by the way, so some 33 years ago, 32 and a half years ago, with a very clear education mandate. And indeed, one of the core pieces of the Institute of Peace is our academy, and Dr. Jeff Helsing, who will come up here in a little bit, heads our academy, the Institute of Peace is focused on conflict, not just any conflict, but violent conflict. And so, what we do is see if there are ways that can be found to avoid conflict, avoid violent conflict, or to deal with violent conflict, or to clean up after violent conflict. And the academy, as an education piece, together with the diplomats, and of course being here at the Institute of Peace, we're now right across the street here from the State Department, and so it's a close working relationship between the education component, our academy, and diplomacy, and international peace building. So the Institute of Peace, we think, we're well positioned to welcome you here, glad that you had this opportunity. The Institute and the academy have focused for a long time on exchanges, and studying the sources of conflict by having people on the ground, having people in the regions come here, having our people go there. We work in the field in Afghanistan, in Iraq, I just got back from Tunisia over the weekend. This is an area, this intersection of education and diplomacy and peace building that we think is a really important connection. We're looking forward very much to this discussion. I am going to turn this over, having welcomed you here, to Jill Welsh, who is the Deputy Executive Director of Public Policy at NAFSA, the Association of International Educators. And as I say, Jeff will come on later on. We're very pleased that we've got some of our Maria and others, ambassadors here, and other experts to walk you through the day. So I am looking forward very much to this, and Jill, over to you. Thank you. Well, on behalf of NAFSA, I'd like to also welcome you here today. And I'd like to introduce first our distinguished panelists, then I'm going to make very few brief opening remarks, and then I'll turn it over to them, and they'll move in succession. To my left, we have Ambassador Richard LeBaron, non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and he's going to talk with us today about international education and a national strategy. Are we there yet? And then we have Waidehi Gokle, who is the Chief Executive Officer of CELIA, very well-respected virtual exchange organization, and she's going to talk about international education as a tool of diplomacy. Then we'll have Maria, Dr. Maria Steffen, the Senior Policy Fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, and also a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council to talk about diplomatic engagement with nonviolent activists and movements. And lastly, before we hear from Dr. Helsing, we'll have Dan Buccino speak with us. He's the Director of Johns Hopkins Civility Initiative and the Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Baby Medical Center, and he'll talk about civility as a key component of diplomacy, very timely topic. So after I make these remarks, I'll just invite Dr. Ambassador LaBaron up to speak, and then we'll just move through, and then I'll do a little bit of Q&A with them, and then we'll open it up to Q&A for the audience, and then Dr. Helsing will come up and speak with us to close us out. So it's an interesting time to be here today. NAFSA has a strategic plan in which we center ourselves in the debate about America's future as standing among those who see the United States as connected and part of, connected to and part of the global community. And we advocate for policies that foster a more peaceful world, hence our connection to the U.S. Institute of Peace, results in common sense immigration policy, encourage enlightened global engagement and sustain and inform civic culture through international education. This is the second year that NAFSA and USIP have partnered on an event during International Education Week, focusing on the connection between international education and foreign policy and peace building, and this year it seems the topic has taken on renewed urgency. I'm going to be a bit provocative, perhaps. For the past week, the nation has been reflecting on the results of the U.S. election and what it means for the kind of America we are and the kind of America we want to be and who we will become and how we will be seen by the world. At this point, there are frankly more questions than answers. We all know, however, that one of the most important factors in getting to the right answers is asking the right questions. So some of the key questions we believe the nation needs to focus on next include. Number one, will we continue to see ourselves as connected to the global community or will we now retreat into isolationism? Will the next administration in Congress prioritize peace building programs and will they recognize the domino effect that could occur if we pull back from our commitments in the world? Number two, how will President-elect Trump create unity in one of the most incredibly diverse nations in the world after running a campaign in which he threatened to ban all Muslims from the United States, was endorsed by racist groups like the KKK, and after being exposed for offensive sexist remarks at a time when women in this country and around the world are struggling against sexual violence. To focus on just one of these issues, the one that most directly intersects with international education, the potential impact of a ban or extreme vetting of Muslims, the impact could be significant, both in terms of building mutual understanding and cooperation between the United States and Muslim majority countries and in terms of the potential economic impact to our colleges and communities. Let me just share a quick back of the envelope calculation that we did based on today's data which we released on the economic benefits that international students bring to the nation. We do this annual analysis every year. Using the Pew Center's list of 49 countries identified as Muslim majority, we calculate using the open doors data that there would be nearly 157,000 international students from these countries studying in the United States last academic year. So using our formula of how we calculate spending in the U.S. by foreign students, that would mean that the U.S. would risk losing up to 4.9 billion U.S. dollars and having 60,000 fewer U.S. jobs if we make it unnecessarily difficult for these students to pursue an education here. And again, that's in addition to the untold foreign policy costs and lack of cooperation and understanding that would result if we were to create a chilling effect of students choosing the U.S. as their primary destination of study. Question number three, will the new administration and next Congress priorities include global learning for U.S. students? This is something I hope Ambassador LaBaron will be able to address about where we stand with an international education policy. Will there be a recognition that we live in a world in which a knowledge economy is key to success, in which a lack of understanding of the world threatens the ability of students to compete and cooperate effectively? So these are questions we're asking ourself at NAFSA, not speaking on behalf of the U.S. Institute of Peace, but just NAFSA, and we'll be asking our government, and I can assure you that organizations like NAFSA and others who care deeply about the values that make the U.S. connected to the global community will be watching closely and advocating fiercely for policies that advance diversity in our communities and campuses, make us a more welcoming and inclusive United States, ensure every U.S. student benefits from global learning and creates a participatory democracy for all Americans. Just to focus on that last comment for just a moment, we've long been focused on advocating for policies that create a globally engaged and welcoming United States. And last year, our board of directors launched an initiative which we've been calling the More Perfect Union Project aimed at addressing key threats to our democracy. It's difficult to promote democracy abroad when our own democracy has weaknesses. We recognize that issues like voter right suppression and due influence of money and politics, manipulation of congressional districts, a dearth of civic education and instability and our public discourse, something that Dan can address, pose fundamental challenges to whether we will continue to have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And we believe that these issues not only affect our democracy, but also affect how NAFSA as an organization can advocate for policies that specifically advance international education. So I'm about to turn this over to Ambassador LaBaron, but before I do, I just wanted to share just a couple of the comments that our CEO, Marlene Johnson, made last week on the day following the election as a word of encouragement. Now is the time to remember what we do. There are two things that will always be true. First, international education work is critical to the nation we want to be. And second, NAFSA plays an important role in advocating for policies that create common ground among diverse opinions. Our society and our world desperately need people who can build bridges. It is crucial that we stay actively engaged with and continue to learn from people of other countries and cultures. Moving forward into the next administration in Congress, NAFSA will continue our role in advocating for the ideals that have always made us strong. The future is almost always uncertain, but America was founded on the idea that we can create it together. We believe that isolationism and division diminishes us, and we believe that nations are more secure when we find common cause and common ground with others. As an association of professionals advancing international higher education, we stand among those who see the United States as connected to and strengthened by the global community. And we remain committed to creating a future in which students and scholars can freely exchange ideas where the best thinking on our most difficult problems can be debated, where creative solutions can be sought, and where fear is driven out of all of our institutions. So thank you for being here. Thank you for watching online. And now I'd like to turn it over to Ambassador Liberi. This is a temporary injury, and just it should be a lesson to you, never go to Montreal because they have these Airbnb units that trip you and you go flying through the air and you tear tendons that should never be torn. So if you're thinking about moving to Canada, object lesson here, it's not all it's cut out to be. Thank you, Bill, Taylor, for hosting a U.S. S.I.P. for hosting this event. It's such a beautiful setting. And thank you, Jill, for asking me to be part of it and for your work on international education. Thanks a lot. So here we are, another International Education Week, talking to each other again on a topic about which we are in wide agreement. We all believe deeply that education is important, that international education widens perspectives, inculcates a certain degree of empathy in its participants, prepares people for richer careers, and fosters deep bonds of kinship across borders. We all want to preserve funding for our part of that effort if not expand the funding. I suspect we all in this room pretty much think alike on this, except we don't. As a polity, as voters, many citizens see the world through a very different lens. First, they see lots of problems. They see terrorism. They suspect a specific religion as the source of that terrorism. They see massive flows of refugees. They see the failure of our Congress to pass any sort of sensible immigration laws. They see highly problematic levels of unemployment and low wages that seem permanent. They see populations of huge countries like India and China racing to catch up with the West. They see armed conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, South Sudan that don't seem to have an end in sight and for which Washington does not seem to have a solution or even a clear idea that can be easily explained of why most Americans should care about these conflicts. Many of the voters who prevailed on November 8 see only the negative results of globalization. Faced with this, the temptation is to do everything we can to isolate ourselves from the world's issues. America first was an early theme of our president-elect. The impulse is to wall ourselves off either literally or with restrictive entry policies. We doubt our abilities to influence change in the world and terms such as nation building are used with undisguised scorn. We fret about the size and skills of our military, even as it is by far the most capable, well-equipped force in the world. We want the world to be a better place, but we're not sure that we can do much to make it better. So it seems to me, at this juncture, the burden of proof is now on the advocates and practitioners of international education. On those who value engagement with the world, we need to make the case. And we need to make it in a convincing way in the face of strong support for doing more at home and less abroad. My thesis and my deep conviction is that the United States can make the world a better place, and we can do this even in the most problematic areas of the world, such as the Middle East. But let me start with some basic truths. First, the vast bulk of political, economic, and social change emerges from within societies. It doesn't come from the outside. Second, change isn't quick and it isn't easy. We sometimes forget that not 100 years after our own independence, we fought a civil war, the bloodiest war of our history, and today we are still dealing with some of the same issues that drove that conflict. Third, history is not a linear process with a guarantee of gradual progress. Every country, every country is capable of making huge mistakes, tragic miscalculations, and committing terrible acts of violence. So what do we do? I believe we need to double down on our engagement with the world. Let me talk about the Middle East and Europe as two examples of regions where we need to do more, not less. During the campaign, Mr. Trump repeatedly said about the Syrian opposition forces that, quote, we don't even know who these people are. And I can think of some other examples of when we really didn't know who these people were. How about the Hutis of Yemen? I was giving a speech about two years ago with a group of Middle East experts larger than this group, and I asked the group, who could tell me what a Huti is? One lone youngster in the back had actually some knowledge of what a Huti, what it means to be a Huti. And how many Americans have even an elementary grasp of why precisely the US is supporting Saudi Arabia in a war against the Hutis? Or the Arab Spring, who were those people? They came out of nowhere. I was a diplomat then, I was surprised. I bet you everybody in this room was surprised when suddenly in Tunisia this movement arose and very, none of us predicted it, and very few of us predicted how resilient authoritarian regimes would be in batting down these democratic impulses. The stunning and willful lack of knowledge that took the US into Iraq continues to be a source of anger and frustration, especially for those who actually went there. And served and for the families of those who did not return. In Europe where one would think, one would think we'd had better insights given our closeness to the British, for example. Like the elites of London where I used to live in that bubble, we missed it, missed it completely. Another bubble burst. We could not comprehend the decision of the British voters. International education can no longer sit by the sidelines watching these big issues go by. It cannot only be seen as a good way to round out one's undergraduate career. It can't be seen as a nice thing to do. It needs to be seen as a necessary and critical element of US foreign and security policy. If we are to engage the world effectively, the recent record demonstrates that we simply need to know the world better. And we need to do that in a systematic strategic way. If we want to deal with the sources of terrorism, if we want to deal with the genuine reasons for trade imbalances, the rationales for people to become migrants and refugees, then we need to go out and do the work and understand these complex issues. We have that responsibility to our country's future. Such a strategy of engagement to protect American interests would include expansion of education programs that we know have an impact but which seem woefully inadequate to me to have the scale of impact needed now. We need more international educational exchanges of all kinds. We need to engage and learn from the students who come to the United States and make sure they continue to bring their perspectives to our campuses. We need to do a much better job of keeping in touch with foreign alumni in the Middle East and elsewhere. They can be a tremendous source of perspective and local knowledge. We need to expand our international short-term exchange programs. We know that, and we've known for a long time, that these exchanges, such as the International Visitor Leadership Program, work. Shortly after 9-11, a report was issued called Changing Minds and Winning Peace. Some of you may know it as the Derigian Report and he was the chair of that effort. In a passage that got very little attention, that group said, quote, wherever we went from Egypt to Senegal to Turkey, we heard that exchange programs are the single most effective means to improve attitudes towards the United States. I've seen that as a diplomat. I've seen the tremendous life-changing impact, not just change of attitudes about the United States, but the life-changing impact of exchanges going both ways. These are hugely successful programs. We need to promote remote learning that actually does a better job of emulating direct people-to-people exchanges and does it on the scale necessary for real impact. That is a mission being tackled by the Stevens Initiative and I think it's the most fitting tribute I can imagine for my colleague, Chris Stevens. We need to think through the long-term prospects for an expansion of US universities into the Middle East and other regions, the same for English language training. We know that English language training is popular and an effective way of reaching millions of people. We also need to expand programs that allow Americans to engage in deep study and analysis of foreign countries such as the Fulbright program. We need to know, for example, just how bad things are getting in Europe. As the forces for integration weaken in Europe, how great is the risk of a slide back into a major European conflict? Did anyone notice on Veterans Day last Friday, for example, that there are over 600,000 living veterans of World War II? Do we think that the Holocaust was ancient history? Even when there are 100,000 survivors still among us? In historical terms, we are no more than a minute past the massive wars of millions of casualties of Europe, less than a minute historically, and we sometimes think of it as ancient history, to be romanticized and for movies to be made up. We need to encourage more Americans from all different economic and social backgrounds to pursue international educational opportunities and we need to offer the kind of assistance that makes it genuinely possible for students of limited means to do so. We need to think of ways to make international civilian study or service a viable option for those in our society who now often think of the military as their best or only viable option as young adults. For those of us who value international engagement and international education as one important element of engagement with the world, we need a strategy that goes beyond simply protecting funding. We need to be a force for a long-term strategy of engagement that is convincing and durable in the face of enormous skepticism about what such engagement brings to Americans. We need to fashion a strategy that recognizes education as a critical means for the United States to gain a deeper understanding of the world, to avoid commitment of US force without a base of necessary knowledge, and to sustain a foreign and security policy that a great nation and its citizens can trust in and can be proud of. Despite our fears, our lack of confidence, our questioning of our own abilities, the United States is still very much an important force in the world. Millions of people are inspired by our values and sometimes disappointed when we are seen to deviate from them. Leadership is not all that important when everything is going well. It is important at times like this when there are doubts, when there are real challenges, and when there are growing fishers in our international system. Your leadership, your expertise, your imagination, your advocacy, they are critical now more than ever. Thank you. So I might speak from here, if that's all right. I have not recently been to Montreal, although I am Canadian. Thank you to the folks at NAFSA and USIP for having me at this event. Certainly very much in line with what my organization does. We conduct virtual exchange programs for post-secondary youth around the world. We bring together students from North America, from Europe, from the MENA region, as well as South and Southeast Asia, in facilitated dialogue. And quite like the title of the field suggests, it's virtual, so it's all done without planes and trains and automobiles. So it's funny, I was reflecting back to last year, I was down in DC, I was invited to an event at the Department of Education to speak quite as the ambassador said, about, you know, in a room full of people, who are we all agree about the fact that we need to increase the number of young people who have these experiences and how do we do that? And I prepared my talking points and then the week prior to that speaking engagement, several things happened locally, domestically, globally. And I started off the speaking engagement on a bit of a soapbox saying, you know, I feel like we're failing, we're failing each other, we're failing the planet, and making a bit of a call to action saying it's our responsibility to ensure that the next generations are better empowered to do this better, to look after each other better, to connect better across lines of difference. And as I sat on the train this morning coming down here from Philadelphia, I thought, I don't really, little did I know how relevant the same irritation and sort of anger and existential questioning that went on a year ago is happening again and in a more amplified way, perhaps. So I think the key question to ask is, what is it that's happening and why did this all come to be? And from my perspective, and there are many, but from my perspective, at the heart of all of this lies exactly what the ambassador was pointing out in many ways, which is, as people, as humanity, we gravitate to like. We gravitate to folks who reflect what we already think and feel, we like to engage, we like to believe we're engaging in heated, deliberative discussions, but more often than not we're doing it with the folks who are going to reinforce that which we already say. And it's rare to be provided opportunities to do that with people who are bringing starkly distinct or different points of view across that table to you and enforcing that you come to the table and you represent your points of view and you do so respectfully. And I think that the truth of it is, that's not our natural modus operandi. And however, in order for us to move forward from the point we're at right now, it needs to be. And so this idea that young people really need to meet each other and spend time together and engage with one another is true, but for this reason and that line of difference need not be international, it can be into community, it can be across the street from you, it can be the next county, but for us to really truly learn how to engage constructively with one another is an imperative. And that to me really is what underlies what happened this past week. We weren't listening to each other. And that's what we need to do more of. And so it kind of comes up to the thing that underlines this is the notion of contact theory, which I'm sure everybody knows about. The idea is that if I've met Maria face-to-face or if I've engaged with her in a meaningful way, I'm much more likely to come to her aid should I see her in distress and I'm much less likely to pick up a proverbial rock. And this is understood. This is proven. So if the more we can meet one another, the more we can understand each other, the more that we can understand that different perspectives exist and can respectively exist, the better. The program that we run through my organization is an interesting one. It speaks to a lot of what the ambassador was talking about in terms of why are we doing it? We're doing it to expose young people to their peer groups globally. We're doing it to build skills that we believe the communities and economies of tomorrow they're going to need in order to succeed in those. And the most interesting part of it is we're using what's out there to make it happen, which is you can't put everybody on a plane, actually. You just can't. And you can't do it for enumerate reasons, not just safety, security, finances, whether you want to or not, whether it goes against the grain of your culture, of your religion, but you can use technology to enable more and more diverse people to have such an experience. And you can't leave it to technology. So technology by itself is not going to do it. So for example, all the big new media, social media giants who talk about building bridges, let's think for just five seconds about what happens when you get online and you're in your own social media space, you're very much in your echo chamber. And if you're not, then you're in a comment box that goes so quickly to the bottom because it's anonymous and it's easy and you can say whatever you want and you've never met that person, you've never had anything to do with them. But if you use technology in the right way and you provide people with opportunities to engage in a sustained way where they can see one another, they can hear one another, they can talk to each other, our evaluation work that we've done in conjunction with some partner scientists out of MIT and UPenn, they've been able to show that the notion of contact, classical contact, can actually translate into virtual contact. Again, you have to use technology in the right way but it does translate. And the other sort of implication is that this generation coming up only knows life through technology. So for them, the communities they build online are just as real and important and present to them as the friends and neighbors and families that they have. So what to me personally, outing my age feels awkward and maybe how could I possibly make a friend online that I feel as deeply about as someone that I made in person. It's different for them. And they identify as a much more global collective and this global climate that is burgeoning right now shown this week here, shown earlier in Europe with the Brexit vote and sort of leanings in leadership around moving back to national borders and moving back to more sort of right-leaning policies from politicians everywhere sits juxtaposed to the identity that this generation is actually building for themselves. And if so, if we don't create more opportunities and if we don't indeed double down on this notion of international engagement for diplomacy, we're gonna have an entire generation of people with the next essential crisis because they don't identify with where the pendulum is shifting to right now. So I'll stop there. I think I'll stay seated as well. So thanks first of all to NAFSA and USIP for organizing the event today. I should say at the outset that I probably owe most of my career to international education. I grew up in Vermont and my first ever, ever overseas experience was as a junior at Boston College. I did my junior year abroad in Strasbourg, France at L'Institut et Tute Politique. That was my first ever time overseas. Got to exchange ideas, concepts, fun with internationals from all over Europe and beyond. It was incredibly formative because I then ended up applying for a Fulbright the following year before I started graduate studies. So I spent the following year in Bonn, Germany trying to understand European integration and European common foreign insecurity policy from a German perspective. And interestingly I was just in Germany last week. It was the first time I'd been back in many years to talk about nonviolent action, movements and just peace. And I ended up finding the couple that hosted me for the beginning of my Fulbright year. And I didn't know if they were alive because they were late 80s and early 90s and I found them still there. So ended up spending an afternoon with them before going on and giving talks. And so I owe a debt of gratitude for sure to the Fulbright program. And I personally feel that investing in international education in these types of exchanges is so underappreciated and such a profoundly powerful investment that I encourage all efforts to expand and further resource these programs because it definitely had a life changing effect on me. More to the topic of diplomacy and nonviolent movements and nonviolent action. So I've spent my professional life both teaching in the university, in the non-profit sector and in the US government, in the State Department and now at the US Institute of Peace, that place in between working with and writing about activism and civil resistance and nonviolent movements. And at the same time working on dynamics of authoritarianism. So it's an interesting time now in our country to have some expertise in both authoritarianism and civil resistance. But the reason, so I began to study nonviolent movements because historically they've been powerful in advancing human rights, civil rights, political liberties, freedoms all around the world. And we know historically that ordinary people coming together and using nonviolent direct action tactics like silent vigils, marches, protests, consumer boycotts, civil disobedience, non-cooperation have played incredibly important roles in advancing social and political change, whether it's the civil rights movement in our country, the current Black Lives Matter movement, LGBT movement in other parts of the world, the 89 revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, the people power movement in the Philippines that challenged dictatorship without violence and succeeded. So we know that this form of nonviolent collective action has been a powerful form of change internationally. And we also know which educators from around the world have found particularly interesting and useful. We know that nonviolent action is more effective than violence at this point. We know empirically. And so a study that I worked on a few years ago with another political scientist, Erica Chenoweth, which collected data on about 330 violent and nonviolent campaigns from 1900 to 2006, we compared which form of resistance, violent or nonviolent, has been more effective in challenging the most formidable opponents, so dictatorships, authoritarian regimes, foreign military occupations. And we found to the surprise of many that nonviolent resistance has been twice as effective historically as violence. And that finding has, which culminated in a book called Why Civil Resistance Works, has certainly been integrated in teaching about peace education, conflict studies, nonviolence around the world, because it's demonstrated to be a functional, effective functional alternative to violence. And then this raises the question of what does it mean if we know that nonviolent movements for women's rights, for targeting corruption, for good governance, for democracy, if we know that nonviolent movements are effective, what does it mean to effectively support them from the outside? And this is tricky because on the one hand, nonviolent movements thrive on their local legitimacy, authenticity, you don't wanna do anything from the outside that's going to imperil activists or that's going to delegitimize movements or that's going to create rifts and divisions because anytime money of course is thrown into a situation that can often cause divisions and rifts. And often the people leading these movements are not elites who speak perfect English in capitals. They're people outside of capitals in communities who are community organizers dedicated to their grassroots work, which are often individuals that diplomats and others have a tough time accessing. Yet these are the individuals and people who drive change around the world. And so when I was in the State Department, I grew acquainted with this particular guide which is called a Diplomats Handbook for Democracy Development Support. And basically this is a guidebook that looks at how diplomats in particular have used various tools at their disposal to support activists, to support dissidents and to support transitions to democracy around the world. And the interesting thing about this handbook which has case studies, so it has both a toolkit, the tools that diplomats have both in terms of meetings and solidarity and public declarations and demarches and all these tools that diplomats have. And it's looking at how diplomats from other countries and other democracies have used these tools as well. So by design, the Diplomats Handbook was designed to promote exchange between diplomats from different democratic countries about what it means to effectively support non-violent catalysts and change agents. And so this for me has been a very powerful and important tool in a way to connect diplomacy, which of course traditionally is about state to state relations, but a way to connect diplomacy to the civil society actors, activists who drive change around the world. So it's been a useful tool. But I think I'll end by bringing it back to the idea of the international exchanges. One thing we know from learning from activists from around the world, whether they're Egyptians, North Koreans, Belarusians, Zimbabweans or the like is that activists like to learn from other activists. And they appreciate exchanges and learning from peers in other struggles. And so the great thing about non-violent action and movement building is that it's a skills-based activity. It's not completely magic why non-violent campaigns succeed or fail, and people can learn to do it better. So one thing we've tried to do here at USIP is to create an online course, which is about civil resistance and the dynamics of non-violent movements. Anyone from around the world can take it. There it's a self-guided course. They can communicate with others who are taking the course from around the world to have that type of exchange. But beyond the online, as we were saying, it has to be online and it has to be offline. And there is a power involved in effectively promoting, training, peer mentoring, coaching involving activists from the United States. So I think about powerful programs like YALI, the Young Africa Leaders Initiative. And the role that these type of programs can play in connecting activists and organizers from other countries, Africa and beyond, to organizers and activists from the United States so that they can learn from each other. And now, at this time in our history, this type of peer learning between activists and organizers from different countries about how to navigate repression, how to advance civil and political rights in tough environments is probably needed now more than ever. So with that, I'll conclude. Thank you. Well, thanks. I guess I'll stay here too. Thanks very much for the opportunity to be here today. I do a lot of things professionally, but I guess the thing that I'm thinking is most relevant to today's event is that I'm the father of two daughters who studied abroad last year. So I have a very personal and recent experience with the place and power of international education. Some of what I am going to talk about may seem to be way too idealistic and way too simplistic, especially following the events of last week, but it may seem simple, but it's certainly not easy. And I think the eternal truths bear repeating. So we gotta get back to work with that. But just to summarize, I think civility usually requires someone packing because many of us have very different definitions of that. Civility derives, of course, from the Latin word civitas, meaning city, in the sense of civic community. So civility has always been expressly concerned with city life and society. And I think in our increasingly global and increasingly urbanized world in which I think the majority of the world population in fact lives in cities or will soon live in cities, these ideas are more important than ever. From civitas comes the word civilitas, which means the conduct becoming citizens in good standing, willing to give of themselves for the good of the city and increasingly the world as we become increasingly globalized. So Stephen Carter from Yale Law sort of defines civility as the sum of the many sacrifices we are called we are called to make for the sake of living together. So basically as my mother said, just behave yourself. But beyond that we need to respect ourselves and respect others. Civility allows disagreement to take place without violence. It allows us to disagree without being disagreeable. And I couldn't help but pull out an old quote from a British psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnecott, after the election. It's really very prescient. He said, the essence of democratic machinery is the free vote. It ensures the freedom of people to express deep feelings apart from conscious thoughts. In the exercise of the secret vote, the whole responsibility for action is taken by the individual if he is healthy enough to take it. The vote expresses the outcome of the struggle within himself. And I think that may have something to do with why all the polls were wrong. But that's for another day. But so the challenge for us, and I think something that civility will help us with is we must try to stay civil not because others always are, but because we are. We need to focus our attention back on the public square, the common good that undergirds our national and global destinies. We heard a little bit about contact theory and its power even online. I like to think about the cosmopolitan canopy, Elijah Anderson, also from Yale, talks about how just coming together in cities, in markets, on the subway, exposes us to different kinds of people and tolerance and comity comes through contact. The more contact we have with each other, the more civil we can become. Now I'm part of the Hopkins Civility Initiative which was founded in 1998 out of a belief that civility, manners, and politeness are not trivial. And also recognizing that this is a perpetually renewable idea we've been discussing and arguing about civility for 2,000 years. And in fact, some of the arguments keep coming up. But we also believe that no society can survive without civility. And that at its heart, it really is an ethical practice. It's about an obedience to the unenforceable. It's a form of benevolent awareness that requires respect, restraint, and consideration. Many of you may know my colleague, Pierre Massimo Forney's book, Choosing Civility. If any of you travel between Baltimore and DC in Howard County, you see the choose civility bumper stickers. That book is sort of the foundational text of the Hopkins Civility Initiative. And it has allowed us to go around the country and a bit around the world talking about civility to a wide variety of sectors, medical and mental health systems, colleges, elementary schools, religious organizations, libraries, prisons, community service organizations, government agencies, the military. Which I think really speaks to the need and the demand and a renewed need and demand from wide sectors of society. We've also worked with a number of communities where we've seen how possibilities to sort of scale up these civility initiatives, starting again from the premise of contact theory, one person to one person, to organization, to communities. So if we believe that the good life is in fact a function of relationships, we believe that civility can offer us some of the tools of purposeful poise and relational competence that can help us do relationships better. Civility is one of those great things that's both good for business and good for you. It's expedient and polite, but it also helps things, get things done in perhaps more self-interested sort of ways. And in fact, I think civility is diplomacy and diplomacy is civility. Civility is not at all about how you feel but about how you make others feel. It's about how we act towards other people. And I think it is at the cornerstone of all ethical systems, which is really the principle of respect for persons in which we must treat others as ends in themselves, not as means toward our own ends. Now, many, most faith traditions have some variant on the golden rule, which is sort of a good start into the civility discourse, but I don't think it's sufficient. I don't think it's enough. And in fact, we've begun to ask people to think one step beyond the golden rule. The golden rule is a little bit self-referential, but we're asking people to think first of other people's comfort and convenience. If something may not be okay for somebody else, maybe we don't need to insist on it. And George Bernard Shaw captured this well in Man and Superman when he said, do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same. So we need to think about doing unto others as they would have you do unto them. And one of the best ways, the simplest ways to represent this to me and make the difference between civility and manners is, for instance, we're obliged to cover our head in some houses of worship and uncover our heads in other houses of worship. Very different gestures, very different expressions of manners, but both driven by the same interest in being respectful in all cases. Just to glance a little bit about civility, issues of civility and incivility in the academy, I think we've had a chance over the past few years to sort of rehearse some of the issues which are gonna be coming. Rit even larger in the days and weeks ahead. But we hear about vindictive protectiveness, microaggressions, trigger warnings. The Atlantic had an interesting story about this a year or so ago. But I think in the universities, in the academies, and I think that this goes, is the same internationally, where universities were established to help us debate without anger, to respect others differing opinions about complex questions in order to generate better questions, not just simple answers. There's an interesting survey of provosts in higher education recently, which sort of reproduces the problems of civility education over the past 2000 years. And basically, 624 chief academic officers, university provosts, said most of them thought that civility at their campus was pretty good, but that they were very concerned about civility at other campuses. So this is the problem of civility and incivility for 2000. It's not my problem, it's those people. If only we could get those people to act right, then things would be a lot better. And so getting all of us to sort of own the change on the local level is part of the challenge. The other tension in the academy these days is faculty is very concerned that civility as a criteria for hiring and promotion and all that may restrict academic freedom, whereas the provosts and the administrators are not that concerned about that. They think it's a legitimate criteria for hiring and promotion and retention. So those struggles will continue. You know, some of the issues of civility and incivility in the academy that we've sort of begun to think about is that there's a little bit of an us versus them problem. You know, the faculty don't think that the students know how to behave, they don't respect their elders, they have a consumerist mentality, all of that kind of stuff. But I think our students sometimes experience us as unfair, unhelpful, disengaged, arrogant and sarcastic. So we are not prepared for them either. I think one of the things that we can do in the academy and in education is help differentiate the trivial from the valuable. In the internet age, everything goes and nothing matters, as Philip Roth said. The internet makes everything available and therefore everything appears equally valid. I think the academy still has a place in helping people discern what's truly valuable and meaningful. And I think the other role of educators in the academy, and I think that this can happen online as well, is to differentiate sort of knowledge retention, which is something that we do in the academy from knowledge retrieval, which is what any of us can do on Google. Without some retained knowledge, there really is no effective thinking and no wise choices and no good life. So as I wrap up, Francis Hutchison, actually, who was a big influence on some of the writers of the Declaration of Independence, reminded us that the surest way to private happiness is to do publicly useful actions. So as a therapist, I see that happiness is not a mood state. It's not really pleasure or self-esteem, but rather it's an engaged life. It's a civil life. It's a life of relational competence and purposeful poise in which we can utilize our strengths and love work, friends, family, community, charity, and the like. It's a capacity to be absorbed in life even when one is not well. Franklin Roosevelt said, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships, the ability of all people, of all kinds to live together in the same world at peace. I think civility can help us do that. And we all work for civility when we're smart enough to imagine its rewards. So with that, maybe we can have a conversation. Thank you, each of you. So I'm gonna just take us through a few questions and then we'll open it up to the audience. Actually, I think I'm gonna start with Dan just as you try to catch your breath, because I recently re-listened to an interview with Vincent Harding about the topic of civility and he was making the case that Martin Luther King, Jr. really wasn't just part of a civil rights movement and looking for civility, but really a beloved community. And then he made the case that what we need to do in our society today is to learn how to do democracy with a truly diverse America, more diverse than it's ever been. And I'm wondering if you could just sort of speak to whether your definition of civility speaks to that, is there a definition of civility that's fundamentally a kind of privileged white Western one or are there other definitions of civility we should consider? Well, I think insofar as civility is about respect and restraint, respect for oneself and respect for others, the example that I use about covering and uncovering your heads in different houses of worship, I think rather than asserting one's privilege, it requires us to restrain ourselves and respect the others and consider that maybe there are other ways to do things. Let's talk about it, let's not assume that my way is the right way. So I think it is not about asserting privilege and in fact just the opposite. And if you could pick up a little more on some of the points you were making about the Academy and how it plays out with these issues, is there more to say about academic freedom and restricting free speech? What is higher ed to do to strike that right balance? I mean, I think that they're fighting and duking it out vigorously these days. University of Chicago sort of came out with a statement recently, basically saying that we believe colleges should equip students to thrive in a world of ideas and words that they cannot always control. But I think in the classroom we can establish standards of behavior, just policies around cell phones and laptops and we can enforce that with our students. I think that certainly faculty and administration are gonna need to come together and agree on, I think there is some role for civility in the Academy, but to come to some agreement about how far those policies, what those policies will look like and entail and how that they won't restrict academic freedom. I don't think academic freedom entitles you to say hateful things. Great, thank you. We'll probably come back to you in just a minute. Maria, let's talk with you a little bit more about your fascinating work. Who in here was so encouraged by the effect, twice as effective a nonviolent movement? I've heard many people asking what do these protests mean in the streets now, wherever they may be in the US or abroad for whatever reason and do they really matter and it's just so encouraging to hear that. Why should diplomats pay attention to these movements? Yeah, well I think linking it to the president and your interesting comment about what it means to do democracy supporting democratic development is one of the tasks of our diplomats of course, supporting human rights democracy around the world and I think it's worthwhile to pay attention to movements just because historically they've played such an important role in advancing democracy. The vast majority of transitions from authoritarianism to democracy around the world have been driven by bottom up nonviolent movements and so it behooves our diplomats of course to first understand how nonviolent movements work, why they succeed, they succeed by the way when they are inclusive and participatory. So what does it mean to support without harming or undermining inclusive participatory grassroots movements as a way to promote an advanced democracy? So and I think we're seeing protests as you noted we're seeing protests happening around the world not just in this country in Europe and beyond so clearly people, ordinary people are not feeling part of or feeling that they have a voice in the normal political processes in their countries and so they are looking to sometimes extra institutional means in order to assert voice and in order to challenge various injustices in their society and the thing about movements is is that nonviolent movements are in a way schoolhouses for democracy because when you're building broad based coalitions that involve women, youth, workers, religious leaders, artists, collectives, bringing these groups together and engaging in nonviolent collective action involves skills that are very important to advance democracy. So for those reasons I think it's important that diplomats pay attention to them. And to take that a little further this handbook that you found so helpful could you give us a couple of examples of particularly useful tools to help local change? So like I said the handbook has about a dozen different case studies which are very helpful especially to the extent that you're working with students from universities and countries around the world so it includes case studies like Tunisia, like Egypt, Russia, Cuba, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Chile, Philippines and it basically examines what diplomats and embassies can do to both create an enabling environment for nonviolent action and expressions of human rights and to provide assistance to dissidents, Democrats and the like. So I mean I think one really excellent example Burma, Myanmar is a case study in the diplomats handbook and we're very fortunate here at USIP to have Ambassador Derek Mitchell who was our special envoy and later ambassador to Burma and I think Burma is one really good case where we had a very effective diplomatic engagement strategy that combined both engagement, diplomatic engagement assistance openings but with a firm grounding in human rights protection and democratic development. So to the extent that there's a remarkable political opening happening now in Burma it's going through a fragile but hopeful transition to democracy. The US government and other democracies coordinated assistance that involved linking assistance to economic assistance, exchange programs, Humphrey, Fulbright and the like vastly expanded starting in 2011 which was a very positive development but all of these engagement strategies were linked to the release of political prisoners. The start of peace processes with the ethnic armed groups. So it was an interesting case where there was a lot of focus on protection of human rights showing solidarity to political prisoners, Alansansuki and the like. So being very strong and supportive of human rights while at the same time offering carrots in the way of economic and diplomatic assistance. So it's one of the really great case studies in the handbook. Excellent, thank you. So I think let's go to you and I have a feeling this question might tie back to something Dan said but talk to us more about how we can collaborate across sectors to truly create, to vastly increase the number of students who can have meaningful cross-cultural experiences. Yeah, thank you. The ambassador mentioned that there's the Stevens Initiative which is housed in the Aspen Institute and they are playing a key role in scaling up what is an up and coming field which is what we call virtual exchange. The field came about really because there was a sense amongst a few folks who were doing this kind of work across K through 12 education as well as with youth beyond that who felt that they didn't quite fit into any one sector, the work didn't fit in. It wasn't entirely peace-building, it wasn't entirely education and it was so keenly linked with the world of technology. And I feel that given where we're at today and given what's happening, I think that if sectors can truly come together, if policymakers, educators, students themselves, if the demand and the voice around wanting this exposure to be available to more and more diverse young people can happen, then I think we stand a chance of actually bringing to fruition the scale with which this should be happening. And to follow on a little bit more of what that might look like, would Celia, what Celia has done in the international scale of creating facilitated conversations that cross very different opinions, would it help create the civil conversation wherever it may be, domestic or abroad? Do you do domestic conversations? I think, well, it's interesting we're actually in the process of engaging some partners in the US in conversation around doing some more domestic work where we work on some of the campus civility issues. So the idea would be that when students land on a campus, they often, again, they'll often seek to hang out with the folks that they're going to have most in common with if you can create the possibility that they've met across all those lines, that if an external event or an event on campus should happen rather than everybody siloing into their allegiances that they have had the engagement and exposure with one another in a meaningful way such that that civility can extend across those lines. But more than that, I think it's important to note that over the years, we've been doing this for about 13 years and time and time again, what we hear from alumni and participants of the program is that they, and I think this is true in general of the field, is that young people who have the opportunity to do this or our facilitators who are actually professionals, they're not necessarily youth, but the feedback is clear, is that the skills and the manner of engagement that happens when you have this dialogue is easily transferred then to your community, your family, the rest of campus, and so on and so forth. So it's sort of like you have this little microcosm within which you practice these skills and engage in this way, and then it just filters in and it becomes sort of understood learning behavior that you use in all spaces of life. So yeah, I think it could. It's very encouraging. Just to be clear, I'm not at all trying to dissuade you from your true mission, which I think is so important if the US is going to stay connected to the world. I think it's wonderful that it translates. So let me bring it back to the ambassador, Ambassador LaBara, and to talk a little bit more about some of the big picture policy changes that we would need to see. I want to share just a little bit of data that we just got in from NAFSA. I haven't released a report on this data yet, and then I'm going to ask you about how we would increase support in the American public, and with the caveat that the polling data is somewhat questioned now compared to what we might have all thought before last week, we did a pre-election and post-election survey as part of an omnibus that surveyed voters, and it was a survey that surveyed voters about a number of issues, and then we had a few questions specific to international education in the survey, and I think the news is overall very good. We found that overall voters believe that being part of a global community makes the U.S. stronger and more secure by 60%, 60% felt that way, and a strong majority, particularly compared to, which is, excuse me, a strong majority, particularly compared to the only 21% who believe it makes the U.S. weaker and less secure. So for whatever we may be thinking about, does the, do the American public still see the United States as connected and more secure when we're connected, 60% say yes and 21% say no? When we asked how essential voters think studying abroad, learning foreign languages, and learning about other cultures are to the American educational experience, a full 75% believed they were essential, and we asked the same question in 2012, and the numbers are stronger now than they were then. And then lastly, when we asked whether voters agree or disagree that our nation is better off when more of our students are internationally educated and understand other cultures and languages, 83% agree and a mere 14% disagree. So Ambassador LaBaron, talk to us a bit more about how we could sell this greater support for international education to the public and to the government. Well, if your data's correct, we don't have a very difficult job. I suspect the data is a little bit skewed by the questions. It sounds like Apple Pie. Everybody likes Apple Pie. But one of the great disservice is academia and the specific academic debt who's very distinguished, a guy named Joseph Nye is to invent the term soft diplomacy to include things like educational exchanges and Fulbright and things like that. I think ever since that, it's been put in this box of softness. No, not really that cool, not really that necessary, not like special forces or, you know, cutting edge radars, it's soft stuff. What I've tried to demonstrate or sort of portray in my remarks was, it's not soft at all. And look at the things that have happened to people in the last 20 years in our society because we didn't know what the hell we were doing overseas. People killed, maimed, thousands and, you know, both Americans and Middle Easterners. So there's a price to pay for this lack of knowledge. And I think that's how you make the case to the American people. And it's an American people who are skeptical, as I was saying, that we know what we're doing as diplomats, as military leaders, as political leaders. They're not sure we know what we're doing or why we're doing it, especially in the Middle East. And that was clear in this election, you know, a lot of people were questioning why are we spending all this money out there? Why is my son or daughter out there? When are they coming back? When are they gonna have to go back again? These are serious questions for real families. And we need to recognize that and give them serious answers of why we're engaged. And part of that argument is that we do need to understand these people better because we need to understand what the American interests are and how we project our interests, how we protect the American people. So I don't think it's a hard sell, but it's a different sell. And we have to do it in the same vigorous way that we sell military power. You know, it can't be seen as a stepchild. It has to be integrated with all the elements of American power and not perceived as soft but perceived as a part of a strategy of engagement that protects and sustains Americans. So that's the short answer. That's an excellent answer. We're getting to the audience in just a second. I can see we have a follow-on question for that. I think that what you just said about how Americans don't trust that we know what we're doing is borne out also by the data. 90% of those who answered said that they agree that our nation needs an education system that produces educators, business leaders and diplomats who understand cultures and languages. And we had done that question kind of separate from should our students be internationally educated? It was kind of do our leaders seem to know about countries and cultures and 90% said yes. So I think they were bearing out what you just said. Do you think that international education is taken seriously by the US government? I mean, you kind of just spoke to that. Do you have more to say about that? No, who's the answer? I think it's taken seriously by pockets of the US government. The Education Department and the State Department on the civilian side. And even within the State Department, little sections. The sections that are not considered all that important. I mean, if you're a diplomat, these days you wanna be in a geographical bureau. You don't wanna be in the education, cultural, exchanges business unless you really like doing that. But the senior diplomats who get promoted are not from there. There are people who do things out in the field in dangerous places. And usually our political officers are not public diplomacy officers. And that's just a culture in the State Department that's been true for a long time. On the military side, it's interesting. I'd say the most international education that's been going on in the government has been going on in special forces commands. Because they gotta go out there. They wanna know what they're gonna face when they get there. Because they don't have a huge logistical tail. So they wanna have the most situational awareness that they can possibly have. So special forces commands are huge consumers of education about international environments. And they're not biased consumers. They don't wanna know only about military capabilities in Yemen or they wanna know about what do I need to know about tribes? Teach me about tribes in the Middle East. And not just in the Middle East, but in this particular section of South Yemen or this particular section of Algeria. And so it's a very, they have probably promoted international education within government more than anybody because they understand how necessary it is because they've actually been out there under threat. And I think that's what we have to apply across the board to apply that same level of urgency. That as I was saying, I mean, for the civilian side, it's always been, or since the Cold War in effect, it's been a nice thing to do. During the Cold War, it was a necessary thing to do. It lost that cache. And we have to bring that back in some way. I don't think it's that hard, but we have to think about it in different ways and value it in different ways. So before I open it up to the audience, and I'll come back to you with further questions. After we've gotten a few from the audience, do any of the panelists want to comment on any of the other panelists' remarks? I actually want to share with the ambassador that we talk about what are some of these skills, these intangibles that we want to build through exchange and things like empathy and cross-cultural communication and so on and so forth. And people often like to call them soft skills. So I'm waging a campaign saying these are power skills. These are not soft skills. I think you should join my campaign. Yeah, I have, I already have. One of the ways that we've been talking about it is about the hard science of soft skills. And that being at Hopkins, we've been obliged to do research and show that whether it's in clinical settings or in a business setting around employee engagement and retention, that there are very powerful ways to show that these soft skills really do have a lot of power. Yeah, and didn't we move beyond soft power to smart power? We tried. An evolution, but maybe not. But I mean, I think, I mean, it's just to quantify, I mean, just to put in a database where beneficiaries of these exchange programs now are in their societies, both in civil society, in government, in other organizations. And I mean, already that would be incredibly helpful just to demonstrate the power of the partnerships that have come out of these things. So not just awareness in exchange of ideas and culture, but like literally these are our diplomatic partners. These are our business partners. These are our civil society partners. And that you can't really cultivate those types of relationships outside, you know, outside these types of international exchanges. So I think it's beyond soft and maybe even beyond smart to something else. Okay, if you'd like to make your way to the mic right there. Thank you very much to the panel. And I just wanted to see how many of you actually teach right now? Ah, interesting. Okay, I was wondering, and how many of you are part of study abroad programs? What about the rest of you? I'm gonna ask, yeah, I'm gonna find out this audience. In geo sector, I think. Yeah, I have a first question. You brought up hard power, soft power. Nye brings up a very important concept and it does it in such a way that reinforces gender stereotypes in the worst possible way. The hard soft dichotomy, I call it the gendered weakness strength dichotomy. So it's about how we talk about power. And anytime softness is associated with effeminate. So my question sometimes is, is diplomacy pushed to the side? Is it made effeminate? Is it feminized in some way as having T, British style? So that's a general question. Second thing is, I'm wondering how we grapple with the problem that education and educators in the United States are viewed as elites? And then my third point, I'm sorry, taking up my time, is that the contact hypothesis is very difficult to achieve. That intercultural communication scholars point out that it must be supported, supervised carefully, guided carefully because I tell my students, think of your high school and high school cliques. The jocks versus the drama geeks versus this and that, do you know each other but do you really understand one another? Do Israelis and Palestinians really understand each other even though they have daily contact with one another? So the contact hypothesis is very important. It's very difficult to achieve and so we need to think about all of the different ways in which we make it possible. So thank you. Thank you, and before you give the mic up, I should have asked, could you identify yourself? Sorry. Oh, I always forget that part. I forgot that. Well, Mrs. Dahl used to be with the University of Nebraska in Omaha and we're getting rid of everything except American history. And as an East Asianist, this really bothered me. My friend who teaches British literature, which I think is great fun, her students think it's too foreign. So there are some areas in which we're having pushback of some sort, I'm concerned. Thank you. So? I mean, I get that objection a lot. Oh, isn't civility just about how you pour the tea in which knife and fork to use and it's for girls and it's for sissies and it doesn't have any, it's for white people, it doesn't have any. But when you go to the Jessup Correctional Facility, when you go to talk to people whose lives are literally at stake on the streets of Baltimore, there become very powerful reasons to think about civility and how they are getting along with people beyond which fork and spoon to use. So we were very quickly able to get past that with a lot of people I meet with. Let me take a stab at two of your questions at once. And I hesitate to talk about women in power but I will do anyway. But I also want to combine that with the thrust of your question about elites and I want to personalize that. I come from a family where I was the first college graduate. My father was a fireman. I don't think he expected me to become a diplomat. I know he did not. But the society didn't say you couldn't. It didn't say you couldn't because you couldn't afford a college education. We could, barely, but we could. It didn't say you couldn't because you were from Colorado rather than Boston or New York or Washington. And so what I fear a little bit now that's going on in terms of attitudes towards international education is it may be getting a bad rep because it seems to me that the people who get it are the people who already have it, in a sense, in large measure. And that's a gross generalization but it's parents of kids. And I hope it's not accurate. It's not inaccurate, it is accurate. Okay, and that's why I said in my remarks that I want a person like me growing up in South Carolina who gets out of high school barely and says, well, gosh, I should join the military. What an opportunity they'll take care of me. They'll give me an education. I can do the VA, the Veterans Bill and so forth. I want them to also be able to think about, well, you could be a diplomat. You could be an international educator. You could study abroad. Not just the people who are in these programs already and know about them already, like all of you, that people don't know. And if those people, if they don't know and they don't have those opportunities, the chances of resentment and view of international experience and education as a privileged elite seems to me to be almost inevitable. I mean, I would just say very quickly that I mean, the best diplomats, of course, are not only engaging with elites. I mean, the best diplomats are engaging with civil society, with reminisce groups and the like and that's what makes them great. And they get out of capitals and they interact. They show solidarity. They march in the streets. I mean, my inspiration for joining the State Department a number of years ago was an ambassador, Mark Palmer, who incidentally inspired this book. So Mark Palmer was our ambassador in Hungary during the 89 Revolution. And of course, as ambassador, he was dealing with the elites, with the regime interacting, but also he was inviting dissidents to his residence and he was showing solidarity when they were marching in the streets. And it's like, that's what makes for great diplomats, I think. And the whole idea of the feminization of diplomacy and power. I mean, a lot of us in the field of nonviolent action and movement building, half of our job is to reimagine what power is. And that power doesn't just flow from the barrel of a gun. Power can be expressed through organized citizen action and that's what transforms the world. And I don't know if that's masculine or feminine, but anyway, power doesn't equal violence. Force doesn't equal violence. There are ways to bring about change without violence and by exerting power differently. I think just to speak to what I heard from you as well, which is this idea of education itself being assumed as a form of elitism. And I think that going back to kind of this idea of whose responsibility is it to make this available. And I think that the more policy sectors, education sectors, the private sector even gets behind this notion that this engagement should be amply available then the more it's going to happen. And then for those of us in the field, the onus is upon us to ensure that the institutions that we partner with are as diverse and as varied. You've got Imams in training at a religious training center in Cairo. You've got students from rural Egypt. You've got students from Bluefield State in West Virginia as well as Brown. So trying to ensure that everybody has access. And then in terms of the contact hypothesis, there's absolutely no doubt about that. I think one of the reasons why within again the field of virtual exchange, one of the reasons it does translate is because all virtual exchanges are moderated. So that dialogue process, we coin the philosophy that we use and we call it you drive into the curb of the conversation. And so the facilitators are really there to try and ensure that you don't just try and seek one comfortable area and skirt around all the issues that are going to make you uncomfortable when you talk about them. But that I think is really what creates that notion of contact, even though you're not sitting in the same room. There's a question over on the side. There are several actually in, okay. Hi, so I'm a student at GW and there's been a lot of talk about young people. So I actually wanted to play devil's advocate and push back a little bit. So from this past week we've seen in the exit polls that young people with millennials overwhelmingly did not vote for the candidate that was a racist xenophobic demagogue. So my question is if international education is so important for building democracy and helping make Americans more friendly to the rest of the world, how is it applicable to the baby boomers and the greatest generation? Word. Can I just say word? Is that gonna? I don't know who wants to tackle that question. I'm actually not entirely sure. I understood the second part of the question because I was so impressed with the first part. Are you calling out those who didn't look out for the future? I'm sorry, I didn't understand the second part. I see, okay. How to expose a cultural understanding to people who aren't at college age. Well, I'm just gonna offer one thing and then I'd like the others to jump in. What many people don't appreciate is that 75% of our college students are non-traditional today. And that's defined in a variety of ways, including age. So while we do hope that our young people who graduate high school make it to college, there are people who are in a different age range who are in the university setting and study abroad programs need to serve them better. We need more options. You're losing time with family or time with work and all of those issues can play into whether someone can choose a cultural experience abroad for that age. And I'm just talking about in the university setting. I opened this up to the others here for response. Oh, I mean, so I come at it from a slightly different perspective. So when it comes to movements as well, effective movements are able to bridge generational divisions. And I think we're looking at core issues in the United States right now, whether it's money in politics, whether it's racism, whether it's bigotry, we're supporting collective action that intentionally brings youth together with older gen in order to work to change legislation, work to change attitudes and behaviors is critical and is a way forward. It's sort of non-traditional education, but it's a form of action that could maybe help a support dialogue between generations so you don't have these two different maps who did the older generation and younger generation vote for that doesn't pit urban areas against rural areas, but finds a way to bring people together against the issues around that people were aggrieved by and that sort of they responded to when they voted in the way that they did in the last election. I wanted to add one more thing about following on Maria's comment about the generations. There's a wonderful demographer sociologist at FIU who does studies every, I think he does it yearly on Cuban-Americans opinions of whether Cubas should be normalized, whether we should normalize more with Cuba and it's the older generation in that case who says no, people who left Cuba when the Castro regime took power and then their younger generation says yes, we should normalize and Guillermo Greenier points out they're not making any more of those anymore, the older generation, what we're making more of is these, the younger generation and I think that brings me some hope. But to win, you've got to bring together the wisdom of the elders with the energy of the youth and that's how change happens so it can't be one or the other. Absolutely. There were other questions down here in the front and then well, you know, can you see, yeah. Thank you very much. So if we are acknowledging the decentralization of truth and acknowledging the truth in individual narrative, how can programs facilitating international exchange maintain a level of authenticity in cultural experience? And then the question is, in a globalized community, is there even such a thing as communal cultural experience? My name is Jason Katz and I'm a student at GW, would be the introduction, so. So I think there was a lot to your question. I think I'm going to take the very last part of it which is the notion of can there be an understanding of communal culture? And I would say that it's almost yet to be defined and understood and I think that part of what exchange can do is help facilitate that. So to help talk about that and then to come to conclusion, is there such a thing that we can still call a shared communal culture or is that a thing of the past or is it something we're redefining together? But the point is that you do it together. So that would be my challenge to you. I have more queries with NAFSA. Just listening to this and I don't look at the title International Educational Place in US Diplomacy and chatting with a former colleague. He scratched me a note and said, did international education fail the US? And hearing these comments, it's kind of like, I don't know whether this is too late for this conversation or it's to be had to research. Did international education fail the US that we're not getting the word out to people and having them understand, they appreciate the value international education global learning takes for US diplomacy to even happen. As to whether we've done a terrific job or hopefully we did encouraging students to come here, but are we not doing enough for the US citizen to go out and appreciate it and what we've done for diplomacy. As you say, we've minimized it to a soft skill. We downgraded it and just the importance of bringing it back onto the curriculum, not having British literature be considered too foreign was it, just more of a comment. If I could start on that and I'd love others to join in. When it comes to whether we're preparing Americans to be globally engaged, I think we are failing. And currently we only measure mobility of students and at that we only measure those schools that report those students who they know who go. So there are students who have an international or global education experience perhaps with Celia that don't get measured in those numbers, but it's criminally low and it's also not very diverse. So we are failing in that regard and many, many years ago NAFSA did a study to see what would it take to get US higher education to focus squarely on this issue and what would it take for the government to focus squarely on the issue as Ambassador Lou Barron was pointing out, the need for specifically for study abroad in that case, not for the whole picture of what global learning entails. It was only on study abroad. And what we found was that there are so many barriers that exist for students who want to study abroad and financial need is not the primary one, though it is perhaps the primary perception. It's whether the campus creates a culture that lets every student know that study abroad or global learning in some other format and I want to get to one of the questions I meant to ask you in a minute. It should be happening for every student and it should be the norm, not the exception and the culture of the campus should support it. It should be integrated into the major so if you're in a STEM field, you don't lose time to graduation. It should be affordable. I would venture to say if you're a dreamer, provisions should be made to figure out who's gonna pay your advanced parole fee so that you can study abroad. These students who are part of our society, they're American in every way and they're part of society and they desperately wanna know the world just because their parents brought them here from another country. It doesn't mean that they know the world any better than the rest of us if they don't get to see it firsthand so we did this study and we found that the barriers were primarily campus based and institutional in nature and we've been attacking this for more than a decade without all that much progress. We had a bill in Congress that passed the House twice and couldn't quite get out of the Senate and now Senator Durbin and Senator Wicker have introduced it again in the Senate and are looking to introduce it again in the next Congress. In fact, they called the day after the election to ask about adding Americans with disabilities to the bill so that we could get Americans with disabilities abroad so that when they introduce it next year, they want that in there which is a positive sign that they're still thinking ahead in that way. But we have to do much, much more. I will say the shining examples that I see are for example, Simon award winners, NAFSA's awards that we give every year and there are other awards as well but that event will happen tomorrow during International Education Week and that highlights campuses who take this seriously and who are models for what you need to do to change the campus culture. Other comments? I think it's the other piece to it which is bringing students to the campus from elsewhere and having been an international student myself a couple of times on a couple of different continents, I think unless that is really, really well structured and organized and truly integrated into the ethos of your campus, international students will come and they will hang out with international students and they will leave and that in and of itself is a problem and so I think the more the culture of engagement across all those lines can be truly made to be a fabric of the campus by increasing both the opportunities that are available to the vast majority of campuses but also the diversity of students, the more fruitful the exchange experience will be in my opinion. And I would just note quickly, some of you may know Tom Carruthers who's a democracy and a democracy promotion expert here in the U.S. and he wrote an article in Foreign Policy a few months ago called Democracy Promoter Look Homeward and it's basically about how to use programs, tools and approaches that various U.S. democracy promotion organizations use abroad and turning those inward and using those to improve and inform our own democratic processes and to more systematically integrate lessons learned from the messy democratization processes that are happening in other countries to inform our own domestic situation. So at least I think the democracy promotion community is starting to have a deep conversation about what it means to really promote a serious exchange so it's not about preaching, it's about integration. We actually had Tom Carruthers come speak to one of our more perfect union events and I think he took something from your playbook and that he talked about that then he also talked about the importance of a new movement of sorts and that our institutions such as they are whether they be government or higher ed or whatever they be, they're doing a job and we need to disrupt a little bit and create another thing that could lead us to look at these questions more deeply and that that would be good for the advancement of that so maybe he's been reading your handbook. Down here. I'm Evie, I'm a student at American University and I personally have had study abroad experiences and it was transformative for me personally but I've often wondered my impact on the community and I know in some ways it was beneficial but in other ways I've worried about kind of perpetuating certain ideas of like kind of like this American like idealism that like I don't know. And so basically my question to you is how can we encourage intercultural relations that they are just as beneficial to the individuals that we come in contact with as ourselves instead of kind of having this better than their mindset? Let me redress that a little bit because I agree with you that some international education is a waste of time. You spend six weeks or eight weeks in Barcelona. It's not international education, that's sex, alcohol and good food. You know, it's not about education, it's about making new friends. Maybe that's valuable but it's, you know, I know where you're coming from here. So I think we need to really re-examine sometimes what we call education. I was shocked by the number of places that don't have a year abroad anymore because that's too damaging to the academic curricula of the precious little university than their professors who don't have those students for a year. And so they can only spare these students for six weeks in Barcelona. That's nonsense. If you're somewhere six weeks, you barely know where you are. You know, a diplomat is barely any good until he or she has been there a year, barely. You know, so we need to think about if you're gonna go abroad, let's make the conditions at least viable for a real experience rather than some sort of extended tourism and prepare students for that and prepare deans and department heads and so forth for it as well. So I think we need to take it seriously and that's part of taking it seriously. I think the point that Ambassador LaBear and Just Raised really gets to the curricular connection in Study Abroad and I think there are some good models. Even shorter term, I would not venture to say how many of those programs do the best of the good model, I actually don't know. But some of the better models have a course that focuses very deeply on important questions for a year and has some experience. You know, a little island program of a quicksort that's a touristic one in nature is not that kind of thing. But we're seeing more universities try to connect the Study Abroad experience to the curriculum and that's a good sign. There is still some that don't do that as much. Saw a question up near the top, I thought, no? Do we have any from Twitter, Miss O'Connell? Not yet? Okay, there's a question at the very top. Hello, thank you all for your comments today. My name is Anna Brochis and I'm also a student at American University and I just had a question about how we talk about international education on how it can transform people on an individual level about personal transformation, seeing people changing their attitudes about other parts of the world. But I'm curious about how we can make that individual become a larger part of our societies as we've seen sort of with this recent election. How do we get that beyond just the few individuals who have studied abroad and reach out to the larger community in transforming larger issues about the world and about foreign policy? Thank you. You know, I'd like to address that briefly. I think what we haven't talked about is politics. You know, you need to engage. If you want to change the place, you need to engage in the process. There's no magic into that. I mean, you engage through your party, you engage through civil society organizations, you engage through alumni organizations, you engage through, you know, your local neighborhood, other parts of your city or in community, and you develop strategies of engagement. These are not complex, but it takes a lot of work, you know? And there's, I think, overlooking pure, old-fashioned political influence creates some risk for us. And we need to really figure out how to integrate, as you say, these experiences into that. And that basically means individuals get involved in politics, and when they do, they bring that experience with them. It's not a quick and easy thing, but I think that's the core of the answer. I would agree with that, and I would just add that it bubbles up to what policies we have and how that bubbles back down. So in the year 2000, NAFSA and the Alliance for Educational Exchange started to promote this idea that we should have a US international education policy, that we should actually have a government that prioritizes this and integrates it into all the various national interests that we have, and really makes its power and strong and important. And President Bill Clinton signed an executive memorandum directing agencies to do that, and out of that, the one, I would say, absolutely remaining thing that is endured as International Education Week, because that was part of what was envisioned at the time. And so now, every November, during this week, campuses and embassies celebrate and try to draw attention to the importance of these things. And I've seen some progress from going from merely cultural food fairs, which are great, to more substantive discussions, and I think that's really positive. I just want to emphasize the ambassador's point about people getting engaged and influencing policy, because if the government, at the highest level, doesn't say that this is important, then we have the university's kind of hearing messages about what is most important, and they will focus on those things. So in the time since 2000 to now, we have seen universities prioritize, especially with the opening of Cuba, they have started to prioritize developing sustainable partnerships with that nation. They're concerned about whether there'll be a retrenchment on that now, and we have to work very hard to maintain the openness. We've begun to build, and we've seen various pockets and progress of universities really focusing on it as an institution or focusing on relations with other nations, and so I think it's both politics up, but also the importance of getting that to happen, because once that happens, the signal comes back down, and people take that seriously, institutions take that seriously. I also think that's the power of each individual who has this experience is then in contact and talking to and has the capacity to enlist, you know, ultimately by way of a movement, someone else, and that we find happens all the time. So young people who go abroad or young people who have some kind of exchange experience who then talk about it intergenerationally to the point that was made before, but also with their peer groups in a sort of rallying way. So I don't think we should underestimate the power of the individual in that way either in terms of the individual experience, I mean. And at the same time, that's exactly right, but movements succeed because they have organization and structure, so it makes me think, you know, how often do we exploit Fulbright alumni communities to rally around certain issues that are pressing at the moment? I mean, how often are they getting together and showing collective voice? Because at least you have infrastructure in place with many of these programs, and that's the natural sort of starting point for effective advocacy, I would say. Dr. Helsing, you want to come up and close us out? Thank you to our panelists. Dr. Helsing is going to close us out now. Great, thank you very much. Thank you to the panel for a very rich discussion and the participation of the audience. I just, I'm going to conclude with just a few brief remarks and I'm going to actually start with a panel I moderated earlier this morning, which was focusing on the need to enhance coordination between development agencies like the World Bank and humanitarian relief agencies like the International Committee for the Red Cross. One of the things that we concluded at the end of this panel was that G'd be really great if we could work more closely together, that we ought to pull together, leverage our resources and strengths and as a kind of good, we can do better work. And one of the people in the audience said, but in the end, isn't it really about self-interest? And in fact, in order to develop the cooperation, collaboration that you need to be effective dealing with protracted conflicts like in Syria, that everyone who's going to be able to contribute will do so because it is in their interest to do so. And I think one of the things that we don't do enough in education is actually appeal to self-interest. And I go back to the time when I was a senior in college and I was on a university committee focusing on study abroad. And at the first meeting, I sat down next to the Dean of the School of Engineering, being a young, naive 21-year-old. I looked at him and he said, what are you doing here? Study abroad, engineering? And he said, if I can get engineering students abroad and have an experience where they have to deal with other cultures, where they have to problem solve in ways they're not used to, they will become better engineers. And that's my job and that's my goal. So I think we need to also really be intentional about what we're doing and appeal to self-interest. Here at the US Institute of Peace, we're actually working with our PeaceTech Lab and Drexel University School of Engineering to help them develop a master's degree in peace engineering. What does that mean? Well, in the panel that I just moderated this morning, when we talk about building peace and managing protracted conflicts, engineers are critical to the ability to deliver services and relief because you've got to deal with issues of water, sanitation, delivery of food, logistics. It's not just about sort of the politics. It's not just about international relations. It's about some very basic needs and skills. So international education has to really run the gamut of the skills and tools and competencies that we provide our students. And so it's layering in intercultural competencies adds to the ability to be effective as engineers, as healthcare workers, even as the military, all of the different players, actors that are engaged in this globalized world. The other thing I would say is because somebody mentioned elite a couple of times, I don't want NAFSA or those of us engaged in international education to also forget about the very good education that's done at the community college level. And then in fact, working at developing tools and competencies that really benefit the communities in which those colleges serves, that may be as an effective or even more effective model of education for developing societies than study abroad of the Ivy League schools and so on and so forth. And there's some really good work being done at community colleges where they're expanding exchanges, where they're working. There's a consortium that used to be based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa or Cedar Falls, but it still may be there, but they've done a lot of really good work in enhancing the ability of community colleges also to make a difference. So I make those remarks only to not narrow the conversation but to broaden what has been a really terrific conversation that I've enjoyed and that USIP has been very, very pleased to be able to host and pleased to be able to continue to partner with NAFSA. So with that, I thank our NAFSA colleagues. Again, please join me in thanking the panel. And I hope all of you will be able to continue these kinds of discussions and your good work. Thank you.