Omens and Portents

“Can’t repeat the past?...Why of course you can!” Jay Gatsby’s heroic illusion has reverberated in my mind throughout discussions of post-pandemic international education. We gaze into a crystal ball seeking threads of evidence to justify that which we wish for and that which we fear. New language litters our conversations. “Zoom” used to mean go faster or upwards. It now means stay still. “To be muted” was once a consequence of repression but now describes a technological error that impedes communication. “New normal” signifies a widely held belief (or illusion) that in some way or another our world has changed forever.

The only thing we can be sure of is that the baggage of the past remains; legacies for good and ill persist. In this essay, I will try to examine virtual space, mobility, and the “inauguration” we anticipate. I have no thesis but take some consolation in the words of playwright Brian Friel: “confusion is not an ignoble condition.”

Virtual Space

We were plunged quite suddenly into virtual reality (an oxymoron?) and, for the time being, this is the primary environment in which we function. There are some benefits there. By way of illustration, I regularly attend seminars at the Centre for Global Higher Education in London. For the most part, the same 15 or so trudge in to recycle familiar ideas. Now, around 80 - 100 people “attend” from all over the world bringing diverse perspectives. The meetings are demonstrably more inclusive; faculty join the conversation, and the Global South is well represented. That is not the norm in the major international education conferences.

Wider representation is, in the context of education abroad, an ethical imperative. Online learning may offer a mechanism for broadening participation, but participation in what? The computer screen can, certainly, operate as an additional medium of instruction (not how most of us use it though). You can learn a great deal about Ghana in Philadelphia, or become an expert on British politics in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. That knowledge, however significant, remains theoretical. Education abroad, in contrast, empowers students to inhabit the spaces they have studied, to translate words and images into felt experience. Mind and body are engaged through smell, taste, sight, touch, and sound.

This points to one of the limitations of online learning. Beyond the pandemic, technology will continue to offer mediated, filtered, versions of other worlds. There is nothing new in this. For centuries humanity has attempted to represent, interpret, translate, and disseminate images of that which they could dream or see. The Lascaux Cave paintings in France are estimated to be about 17,300 years old. They enable the viewer to make an imaginative leap into an experience that is not their own. Seeing these representations of hunting is not, of course, the same as chasing animals with a spear. The ultimate difference between the cave paintings and the computer screen is the medium. The function is largely the same: to present images that approximate external realities.

However, this cannot replicate social, emotional, and serendipitous encounters. A computer and painting (and the play, poem, or book) are powerful tools through which we may broaden knowledge and understanding. But, the screen, like the page, stage, or canvas, is a defined and limited universe. Time and space are restricted. Accidents rarely happen and it is impossible to get lost. In short, studying about abroad is not the same thing as studying abroad. When students physically enter a new environment, they may discover messy contradictions, puzzling ambiguities, and disturbing disassociations. At that point, students own their experience: actuality is uncontrolled and unmediated, and what they ultimately learn may not be what we had expected them to learn.

Virtual reality can be a more inclusive space, but it is not inevitably so. As a mechanism for widening participation, outcomes may not be those intended. An academic environment, at home or abroad, is common space likely to offer resources that facilitate learning. Studying at home depends on what home is like. The more privileged enjoy privacy and a computer. For others, home may not be so conducive to study. In national or global contexts, conditions for this mode of learning are manifestly unequal.

Education creates distinctions, as indicated by alphabetical and numerical systems we employ to grade students. The marketing of education abroad enforces the notion of hierarchy. Benefits of participation are no longer primarily framed in terms of social good or international understanding. The rhetoric focuses on personal benefit; “global competence” leads to greater employability and distinguishes participants from the lumpen rest. The objective of widening participation is to broaden the base of an elite: evolutionary, not revolutionary.

An optimistic outcome of the pandemic might be a return to a sense that academic mobility is a social good. It has become clear that, despite walls, borders are porous. The pandemic demonstrates two realities: infections and ideas respect no frontiers; transnational cooperation is critical.

The Flight of the Birds

Travel has become problematic. Prior to the pandemic, activists rightly worried at the impact on climate, while increasingly militant nationalism perceived the foreign as a threat. The tourist and traveler were irresponsible despoilers; the refugee became an alien; the foreigner an intruder.

In post-pandemic reality, these legacies are unlikely to go away. In international education we have learned that what we do is political and contested. We believe that mobility enriches education, that encounters with the unfamiliar are not a threat but an opportunity to learn what Isabel Wilkerson calls “radical empathy.” That is not the same as passive tolerance or sympathy. Instead, it implies contact, action, and engagement.

Many people are immobile by circumstance. Many are forced to be mobile. But to choose immobility is a form of parochial isolationism or, at least, a failure of curiosity. Travel for many purposes, pleasure, education, business, is embedded in contemporary reality. After the current restrictions disappear, there will certainly be renewed demand for mobility. The fable of King Cnut (aka Canute) and the tide demonstrates the futility of attempting to restrain the inevitable. Cnut sat on the edge of a beach and ordered the tides to cease encroaching. Not surprisingly, this did not save his feet from getting wet. The route towards a cleaner environment is, surely, the development of less polluting fuel rather than unrealistic and ultimately damaging restrictions on mobility. Such restrictions can, in any case, only be imposed by xenophobic legislation or authoritarian control.

We should not, however, be tempted to argue that study abroad is essential. Outstanding individuals have achieved great wisdom without going anywhere at all. Julian of Norwich (born 1343- c. 1416) lived most of her 73 years in contemplative isolation and wrote Revelations of Divine Love. Henry Thoreau (1817–1862) never wandered far from home but his essays demonstrate that mind can transcend the restraints of place. Similarly, the poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) spent almost all her short life in Amherst, Massachusetts while achieving profound insights into the human condition:

These strangers, in a foreign World,
Protection asked of thee –
Befriend them, Lest yourself in Heaven
Be found a refugee.

These wise figures demonstrate that the mind can transcend that which divides us. A journey may also be into the self. The claim that education abroad is essential fails to recognize the critical importance of the mobile imagination, introspection without which education, anywhere, is impoverished.

Nonetheless, mobility creates opportunities to enhance education. Students may cross the most difficult border of all: that which separates the self from the stranger. The flight of birds is a metaphor that reminds us of freedoms that we will regain when the skies are again open.

There are, though, students for whom studying abroad is not a realistic option because of economic and/or political reasons. Travel for education is a privilege enjoyed by relatively few. To argue that it is essential reflects a neo-imperialist assumption that the freedoms and resources available to relatively wealthy elites represent international quality standards.

Inauguration

Someone said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.

T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent

Inauguration brings new hope. However, T.S. Eliot reminds us that we are profoundly connected to what has gone before. Nothing has been entirely new since we nibbled at the Edenic apple. Nonetheless, each generation imagines that what happens to them is in some way unique and of global historical significance. That is, of course, not always the case.

There is, for example, nothing new about associating infection with foreigners. There are biblical sources, the leper as a physical and moral pariah is one of many. In medieval Europe, Jews and Roma were believed to be literally and metaphorically carriers of plague. In 1938, Himmler planned to combat “the Gypsy Plague.” Robert Ritter led the pseudo - scientific Racial Hygiene Research Unit, enforcing the idea of the stranger as impure, unclean, and a threat to community health.

Ethnic cleansing belongs to the same cluster of noxious ideas. Italian politician Matteo Salvini spoke of “a mass cleansing street by street, piazza by piazza, neighborhood by neighborhood” to root out Roma. A similar motivation led Bosnian Serb forces in March 1992 to wage a campaign—including deportation, murder, torture, and rape—to drive Muslims and Croatians out of eastern Bosnia. And then, COVID-19 becomes the “Chinese” virus which has gone from rhetoric through prejudice to racial violence in a few turbulent months. A variant named by scientists as B.1.617.2 becomes nationalized as “Indian.” The current pandemic has reenforced a malicious myth that associates disease with (almost always) non-Christian, non-White strangers. The notion of “purity of blood,” which has persisted for over 500 years, is at the root of fears of infection through contact with foreigners.

It would be naively optimistic to imagine that birds will fly into blue skies cleansed of these embedded, sometimes fatal, associations. They have polluted consciousness for over 2,000 years.

On a more mundane level, the pandemic may also have a short to medium term impact upon where students study. Whatever the reality, some locations are likely to be considered less safe. Positive stories about the Global South rarely penetrate the popular imagination. A consequence might be that students choose in even greater numbers to study in Western Europe or Australasia.

Higher education will re-emerge into an environment in which knowledge has been politicized. A hierarchy of disciplines prioritizes STEM and denigrates the humanities and social sciences. International scientific cooperation has had remarkable success in speedy development of vaccines, but it will need the social scientists to analyze the uneven impact of the virus, poets and novelists to reimagine pain, fear, resilience, and courage. There are things to be learned beyond chemistry and statistics.

The objective to decolonize our work will also persist though how to understand what that means will be hampered by the impoverishment of the humanities. Historians unearth hidden histories. Literature reveals voices that have been muted or silenced by the power of colonial narratives, but the disciplines required to enact that archeology are precisely those under sustained assault.

I do not want to conclude with the voice of a Jeremiah, however. It is in the nature of humans to want to see history as a pattern of progressive movement rather than as, the playwright Alan Bennett, asserts in The History Boys: “It's just one fucking thing after another.” “Post” does not always mean after. Postcolonialism, postmodernism obscure significant legacies. Post works best with discernible events such as post-war. It may, we can hope, have meaning in a post-pandemic environment where we become conscious again of the interdependence of nations and recognize that humanity, however fractured, exists in a shared space.

Young people will also continue to be resilient, curious, and to travel. like birds in flight, beyond parochialism. They will seek to cross borders within the world and within themselves. In these troubled times as we await another inauguration, we might find inspiration in the words of Julian of Norwich. At a time of plague and war, she saw omens of hope, envisioned a pathway beyond darkness and suffering: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

About the Author

Michael Woolf, Ph.D., is deputy president of CAPA: The Global Education Network and was the recipient of the Peter A. Wollitzer Advocacy Award (2020) from the Forum on Education Abroad. Thoughts on Education Abroad is a monthly column of his short essays.