Patrick F. Leahy
Feria Internacional del Libro | Panama City, Panama | August 17, 2016
Buenas tardes a todos! Este es mi primer viaje a Panama. Quiero darles las gracias por su hospitalidad! I am
so pleased to have all of you here today. Thank you for taking precious time out of your busy schedules to
join us.
I would like to welcome in a special way my fellow university rectors and presidents — educators all. The
American writer Henry Adams said: “A teacher affects eternity. He (or she) can never tell where his (or
her) influence stops.” Thank you all for the ways in which you affect your students for eternity.
After I say a little bit about Wilkes University, I’d like to briefly address three questions, which I believe
are relevant for this particular meeting and for this conference in general. They are: 1) Why is it important
for students to have a global understanding? 2) What do students need to learn today in order to gain
this global understanding? 3) How is Wilkes promoting this global understanding among its students?
Following my remarks, I look forward to some dialogue on these questions and others.
Since many of you do not know much about Wilkes University, allow me to share with you a bit about
us. Wilkes University is a unique American university. (Doesn’t every university president say that about
his or her institution?) We offer all of the programs and activities of a larger, research university across six
schools — College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences; College of Science & Engineering; School of
Business & Leadership; School of Education; School of Nursing; and a School of Pharmacy. Through a
renewed dedication to scholarship, research, and entrepreneurial activity, more discovery is happening at
Wilkes than ever before.
But we offer all of these programs and activities in the caring, mentoring culture of a smaller, liberal arts
college. Our university, unlike many of yours, has only 5,000 students, who are roughly divided equally
between undergraduate and graduate students.
This combination is unique in American higher education. We feel that it is special. In fact, just last fall
The Economist for the first time in its 173-year history ranked American colleges and universities for
the economic value that they return to their students. Of 1,275 schools ranked nationwide, Wilkes was
ranked 25th — just ahead of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (It wasn’t my ranking; it was
The Economist’s.) From an international perspective, we offer an ideal location in Pennsylvania. Wilkes
is located in the small, historic city of Wilkes-Barre, and we are by car only 2 hours to New York and
to Philadelphia, 3.5 hours to Washington, DC, and only 3 hours to the greatest city on the East Coast,
Baltimore, Maryland (my hometown). We are a unique, American, private university.
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Let me now address the three questions. First, why? Why is it important for students to have a global
understanding today? We live in a global community, of course. And further advances in technology are
shrinking our world more and more each day. The Internet, after all, is called the World Wide Web. It is
just that — a web of activities, all interconnected and intertwined and interwoven. Panama knows this as
well as any country around the world. Imagine for a moment if the Panama Canal did not exist. Imagine
what that would do to global commerce and global geopolitics.
Let me give you another example. On June 23 of this year I was minding my own business in
Pennsylvania, doing my job as the president of Wilkes. On the other side of the Atlantic, thousands of
miles away, the people of Great Britain went to the polls in the famous Brexit election. I did not vote in
the election. I had nothing at all to do with it. Other than being an interested observer, I really didn’t care
too much what they decided. It is their democracy, not mine. The people of Great Britain would decide.
Then, after the election, through no fault of my own, my retirement account dropped 35 percent. The
fund, which I had been meticulously building over two decades to care for my family and me, lost one
third of its value in two days. Fortunately, I have since recovered most of those losses, but it was a stark
reminder to me of just how interconnected we are, whether we like it or not.
Regardless of what you hear during elections in Great Britain or in the United States, globalization
is here to stay. Globalization as a political or economic concept may, in fact, need some tweaking,
but globalization as a synonym for global community is here to stay. Don’t let anyone suggest to you
otherwise. No matter who you are, no matter what you do, all of us are citizens of the world now. The
question is: Should we embrace it or not?
The second question then is: What do our students need to learn today in order to gain this global
understanding? In short, students need to understand and appreciate the rich diversity of the human race.
Just because people are born into different ethnic groups or political situations or socioeconomic classes
does not make them better or worse. It just makes them different. And to be honest, even different people
are really not all that different. Our President Bill Clinton famously said: “I believe one of the great truths
to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome is that in genetic terms, all human
beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same.”
Students need to visit different countries and different cultures and immerse themselves in those cultures.
We need our students to get beyond tourism and become, even if for a short time, a part of that culture.
Students need to feel uncomfortable. They need to feel what it is like to be a minority of sorts. This will
make them much more aware and sensitive to diversity in their own countries.
Students need to learn another language. One of the great regrets of my life is that I have not — at
least not yet anyway — learned Spanish. I studied it a bit in school. But, when the time came for me
to consider a study abroad experience, I opted for Scotland instead of Spain. It was an amazing, fullyear experience in so many ways, but immersing myself in another Anglo culture limited my overseas
experience. In later years I was able to live in Moscow, Russia, for a while, so I was able to recover this lost
opportunity.
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Finally, students today need to get comfortable with travel. If people today are global citizens, then they
must get comfortable traveling the globe. The CEO of a major U.S. corporation recently visited our home
campus. Most of the growth in his particular business will come in Asia in the coming decades, so he
spends countless hours on planes to and from China. He told our students: “If you want to be relevant
in the 21st century, then you must travel.” We need to push our students, some of whom have never left
home or never flown on a plane, to travel outside of their home territories. In other words, we need to
push them to travel outside of their comfort zones.
So if we talked about why a global understanding is important and what students need to do to obtain
that global understanding, then I’d like to conclude with how Wilkes is going about promoting this global
understanding among its students. In short, we are doing what we can, given our current resources and
scope. We have a rich history at our university of educating students from the Middle East and from Asia.
One year ago, we launched our Latin America and Caribbean Initiative to expand relationships in this part
of the world. And we started here in Panama, the literal and figurative gateway to this region.
We began with the MEDUCA Panama Bilingual Program, bringing teachers from here in Panama to
our home campus in Pennsylvania to immerse themselves in the English language and to learn additional
teaching methods. Our third cohort arrives on campus next week. This week, we are strengthening
our collaboration with IFARHU to bring more Panamanian students to Wilkes, some on scholarship,
as a gesture of our commitment. And, we are exploring with fellow universities and the Ciudad del
Saber exchange opportunities to bring our U.S. students and faculty members here to Panama. We are
very enthusiastic about the potential for increased partnerships. Queremos trabajar con ustedes. Estamos
compremetidos.
I often say to my colleagues back home that higher education is the world’s most compelling work. That
is a bold statement. After all, the medical field saves people’s lives. The legal community rights wrongs.
The business industry develops and markets products and services that make life more convenient. And
the government sector serves the public – at least when done well like our U.S. Embassy here in Panama.
Why then is higher education any more compelling than any of these fields? Because if those of us
who work in higher education do our jobs well, then we have a chance to educate the people who will
populate all of these fields. If we do our jobs well, then we can affect our students and our world, as Henry
Adams suggests, for eternity.
Muchas gracias!
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