Global Collaborations: An Open Door Initiative
The world of higher education is changing under our feet. Ideas in every field are becoming international. Across the disciplines, to be at the cutting edge of science and thought is to be in dialog with global peers. Brown is an open scholarly community --- we must do all we can to ensure that our doors remain open to scholars and ideas from all locations and perspectives. Moreover, as we reach to become a truly global research university, we must insure that our faculty and graduate students have the most productive opportunities to share their research with colleagues from their field working at the cutting edge of contemporary science and thought wherever in the world they may be found.
Brown has relationships with universities across the globe, from Armenia to Tanzania, Cuba to the United Kingdom. These relationships enable over 30 percent of Brown undergraduates to study abroad, graduate students to benefit from global peers and mentors, and for Brown faculty to engage with students and colleagues around the world in teaching/advising relationships and collaborative research projects. These international collaborations have also allowed students, visiting scholars and faculty from colleague universities abroad to spend time at Brown in ways that have that deepened and broadened teaching and supervisory relationships and research collaborations. Today we are exploring several new and innovative approaches to such partnerships – from video-conferencing classrooms across continents, to trilateral collaborations with multiple universities that conduct sustained dialogue on specific topics. Our effort going forward is to broaden and deepen international relationships so that Brown students and faculty truly think, conduct research and teach in the context of a global community of scholars.