Why “Transnational”?
by
Jeffrey S. Lehman
In my role as president I speak often about the distinctive qualities of our beloved university that, taken together, make Cornell unique. I frequently describe Cornell as a “transnational” university. And sometimes that particular adjective prompts questions: Why do I say, “transnational”? Why not “multinational” or “international” or “global” or some more familiar term?
The problem with those other adjectives is that, in one way or another, each has come to imply the replacement of national identity with a single new “world” identity. “Transnational” can be given a more modest understanding. It can imply the act of transcending but not abandoning national identity, recognizing the world beyond our borders without feeling pressure to fashion some kind of one-size-fits-all substitute.*
Cornell’s identity has always been bound up with America, without ever having been bound down. As the land grant university of New York State, Cornell is rooted in American soil. Yet those roots have never implied parochialism. In the same way New York has long embraced the open spirit of Emma Lazarus’s words on the Statue of Liberty, Cornell has always welcomed students and ideas from the world over.
Two commitments together define a modern transnational university. The first is to help students develop a transnational perspective on the human condition. Such a perspective enables a student to be grounded in his or her own cultural identity, to recognize the many ways that different cultures have pursued shared ideals, and to resist the impulse to presume other cultures inferior only because they are different. A transnational perspective embodies a vision of universalism that reinforces and is reinforced by pluralism.
To nurture such a perspective in our students, we must construct our university as a diverse community where students from around the world have the opportunity to mingle with one another while studying the broadest possible array of languages, cultures, and histories. And we must then press our students to live actively integrated lives within that community, in which they experience a constant ebb and flow between people like themselves and people who are different.
The second organizing commitment is to support the continued emergence of a unified worldwide community of researchers. The challenges that confront our world today know no national boundaries, and they call for collaborative responses from the world’s best thinkers. Today’s research universities are nodes on a loosely coupled global research network, formed through a web of overlapping, mostly bilateral agreements. In the future we will need to ensure that communication across that network becomes faster and more efficient. We will need to ensure that people – students and teachers – can move swiftly from node to node, so that they can discover, work with, and learn from one another, and participate in the development of a true transnational academic culture.
Cornell continues to exemplify the spirit of transnationalism. Students from more than 120 nations come to our campuses in Ithaca and New York City, and hundreds of our students make time in their educational careers to study at our program in Rome or at other programs around the world. Our medical campus in Qatar anchors a bold educational experiment on the Arabian peninsula. And a set of new partnerships with leading universities in China and Singapore has opened up new possibilities for our students and faculty. In the years to come, I expect that we will continue to find new ways to strengthen Cornell’s presence in the world. We will thereby enhance our ability to make distinctive contributions as America’s exemplary transnational university.
* In the legal context, the great scholar Philip Jessup popularized the term “transnational law” to describe all laws, including laws adopted by individual nations from their own perspectives, which regulate actions that transcend national boundaries.
