Columbia Global Centers
The Columbia Global Centers are research facilities established by Columbia in locations around the globe. The first of these centers opened in March 2009 in Amman, Jordan and Beijing, China, and additional facilities are slated to open in Paris (at Columbia's preexisting campus at Reid Hall) and Mumbai. Additional locations are planned for the future.
Contents
Rationale
Despite Columbia being an academic institution that is deeply internationalized, with hundreds of research collaborations, dual-degree programs, internships, and related programs spread across by profession, discipline and region, there has been a missing link. Columbia’s leadership believes that growing faculty energy and student demand can reach new levels of scholarship and teaching through a network of integrated global centers. While some U.S. universities have built new branch campuses and degree-granting schools abroad, Columbia is taking a different path. The Columbia Global Centers will provide flexible regional hubs for a wide range of activities and resources intended to enhance the quality of research and learning at the university and around the world. The focus is on establishing a network of partnerships in international capitals to address complex global challenges collaboratively by bringing together scholars, students, public officials, private enterprise, and innovators from a broad range of fields.
In the 19th century, there was an explosion of scholarly specialization—in response, Columbia helped invent the now familiar disciplinary departments. In the early 20th century, there was a need for institutions to house research and teaching spilling across departmental boundaries—in response, Columbia helped invent the now familiar interdisciplinary centers and functional Institutes. And in the mid-20th century, there was need for strengthened language instruction and area expertise. In response, Columbia helped invent the now familiar regional institutes. The history of universities is spelled out in institutional re-invention when current structures inadequately service expanding scholarly ambitions and courses relevant to new careers.
The faculty demand for global scholarship and student demand for global careers is not being adequately met today, especially in ways that do not require a lifetime commitment to regional expertise. Global Centers offer an opportunity to take advantage of these opportunities.
What are the Global Centers?
They are not satellite campuses, overseas profit centers, or operations under the umbrella of a partner institution. Each is or will be independently chartered. Currently, two exist: Middle-East (Amman, Jordan) and East Asia (Beijing, China) both opened in March 2009; next in line are Europe (Paris, France) and South Asia (Mumbai, India).
Directed by resident faculty members, and guided by university-wide faculty steering committees, centers individually and the network collectively favors teaching and research that coordinates across two or more world regions, that connects multiple departments and schools; and, that involves scientists and scholars from those regions. Activities that combine research and teaching with service opportunities – as is the case for many professional school and Earth Institute initiatives – receives valued logistic support from the Centers.
Unlike traditional satellite campuses, the centers are strictly research offices with skeleton staffs, designed to make Columbia's approach to the globalization of education stand out - and to cost relatively little, compared to full-scale teaching operations like those run by New York University. Each center will pursue a set of University-wide core activities that will evolve over time. The centers are expected to encourage collaboration across academic disciplines at Columbia. Some of the research and scholarly initiatives will be regionally focused; others will involve multiple centers, and in some instances the full complement of centers will be engaged across many continents.
Although faculty and students are expected to travel through these centers and spend time in these regions, the long-term viability and sustainability of the centers is contingent upon a continuous, rotating faculty presence. This could be accomplished through the establishment of center-specific research fellowships and affiliate or visiting faculty positions. The centers are also intended to support a significant expansion of opportunities for Columbia students to do work abroad, particularly those who may not want to spend a full semester or academic year off-campus.
Management
Columbia’s Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs, Kenneth Prewitt, is director of the Office of Global Centers. Prewitt joined the faculty of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in 2002 after a long professional career, initially as a professor at the University of Chicago and then as director of the National Opinion Research Center, president of the Social Science Research Council, senior vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and director of the U.S. Bureau of the Census.
Each center will have an oversight advisory board consisting of campus-based and regional members and a campus-based faculty steering committee, which will recommend and develop appropriate programs and projects.
Columbia Global Center, Amman
The Amman center opened with the assistance of Jordan's Queen Rania and was funded by grants from both the US government and the government of Jordan.
Safwan Masri directs the global center in Amman. For more than two decades, he has been a member of the Columbia Business School faculty, including 13 years as the school’s Vice Dean. His expertise is business development in the Middle East, with an emphasis on education and economic reform, and his academic work has focused on supply chain management and structural change in the financial service industry. He sits on a number of nonprofit boards and is also chair of the board of King’s Academy, a high school for academically gifted students in Jordan.
Current activities
Current projects in Amman include collaborating with Jordanian resources toward accomplishing educational reforms and enhancing teacher and social worker skills, as well as undertaking several initiatives in the arts and architecture.
The signature program in the region, and the catalyst for the center’s launch in Jordan, is an independent training and education center, under the patronage of Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah through the Queen Rania Teacher Academy (QRTA), is a collaborative effort of the Center, Columbia’s Teachers College, and Jordan’s Ministry of Education. Providing in-service training programs and the country’s first-ever induction program training new teachers to nearly 400 teachers in 2009.
The Columbia School of Social Work has partnered with Jordanian nongovernmental and government entities to offer an intensive course on the foundations of social work to regional practitioners. This program, designed by the school’s faculty and regional collaborators, provides a model for Columbia faculty engagement with opportunities, needs, and expertise throughout the Middle East. This summer, the Jordan Social Work Education for Excellence Program (JSWEEP) graduated nearly 100 service workers and managers—bringing the total number of program graduates to roughly 200—as part of a broader effort to promote professionalization of the discipline in Jordan.
The Center has also been selected, working with the Earth Institute, as the MENA-region node of the Global Soil Mapping Initiative. Professor Jeffrey Sachs initially identified Jordan as a potential locus of this research, following his visit to the Center, and the Earth Institute will work with Jordan’s Ministry of Agriculture to house the research endeavor at the Center. The Ministry will delegate a full-time staff member to begin gathering soil composition data from Morocco to Kazakhstan, and this information will be digitized in publicly accessible, searchable databases. A formal ceremony announcing Amman as the node could take place in summer 2010.
In addition, in preparation for 2009's global environment summit in Copenhagen, the Center partnered with the Embassy of Sweden and Jordan’s European Union delegation to host a conference in October examining the regional implications of global climate issues.
Other innovative partnerships include Professor Andrew Dolkart and eight GSAPP students completing the first stage of the Ibrahim Hashim House Preservation Project to restore the historic 1930s home of Jordan’s first prime minister in downtown Amman.
Future Activities
The Center and QRTA are jointly exploring a partnership with Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies to implement Jordan-based components of a global teacher exchange to promote professional development and growth.
Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation will launch a major research lab at the Amman center to be used for collaborative research, events, projects, exhibitions, and cultural exchanges involving students, scholars, and designers from Columbia University and throughout the Middle East.
The School of the Arts is also pursuing initiatives in the region, including the engagement of film scholars with regional experts, participation in film festivals, and facilitation of graduate student exchanges.
Planning continues regarding the Music of the Muslim World archive, in partnership with the Archive of Contemporary Music, Columbia’s Arts Initiative, Columbia University Libraries, and others. A project manager has been hired locally to organize preparation for the April 2010 launch of the digital music archive and live-music initiative.
The center is also collaborating with SIPA and the Earth Institute to explore the feasibility of offering executive education programs, including possibly master’s degrees, in international development for senior managers.
Columbia Global Center, Beijing
The Beijing Center, also launched in March 2009, provides a base for activities throughout East Asia, where Columbia's ties are longstanding and deep.
Xiaobo Lü, professor of political science at Barnard College and former director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia, serves as Director of the Beijing global center. Professor Lü is an expert in Chinese politics and political economy. He has authored numerous books and articles and is currently on the editorial board of several international scholarly journals, including the Journal of Chinese Political Science.
Current activities
The Center's current projects include providing assistance with the negotiation and legal processes to establish a Collaborative Center for Advanced Genomic Research by Tsinghua-University and Columbia. Research at the Center will initially be concentrated in the field of genomics and personalized medicine. The Center also plans to facilitate student and faculty exchanges between Tsinghua University and Columbia, providing for laboratory and study visits in Beijing and in New York by research scientists on the faculty and graduate students from the two institutions.
A signature program in the Beijing Center is Studio X, initiated by Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP). According to GSAPP Dean Mark Wigley, the fact that fully one-half of all construction projects underway in the world are underway in China creates an imperative for Columbia students to gain experience there. GSAPP has rented a large urban space in Beijing to provide studios for Columbia students working with Chinese counterparts on design and preservation projects and to provide a venue for Columbia-related activities. The Beijing Center is facilitating steps to bringing this project to fruition. The studio — like its Studio X counterpart in New York — will provide a dynamic design center for collaborative projects, experimental research, and regular gatherings of colleagues dedicated to emergent thought. These studios allow historians, theorists, graphic designers, spatial data analysts, media analysts, video artists, and landscape designers the opportunity to come together and remove barriers between education and action.
The Executive Public Policy Training Program at Peking University is an eight-week, mid-career program for senior Chinese government officials. The curriculum, which combines policy, economics, and management, was designed and is taught by faculty from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, the London School of Economics, Sciences Po, and Peking University. Columbia faculty who travel to Beijing each summer to teach in the program will benefit from the opportunity to base themselves at the Beijing center. They will also add to the intellectual life of the center and benefit from the opportunity to use the center to interact with Columbia alumni and scholars who are in the city for other projects.
Held at the end of October 2009, CGC Beijing worked with Initiative For Policy Dialogue (IPD) to organize a conference in Beijing of the China Task Force, a collaborative research project of IPD with several Chinese and British universities. A co-sponsor of the first China Task Force’s meeting to held in China, Chinese and Western scholars and Chinese policymakers will discuss financial regulation in China after the financial crisis, as well as regulation in other sectors, as part of IPD's ongoing policy-oriented study of China's transition to a market economy.
Future activities
CGS Beijing is also in the process of developing and supporting a summer program in Beijing for Columbia Career Education, aiding the School of Social Work to develop a program of elderly care and professional training in social work with the Ministry of Civil Affairs and Peking University and a Visiting International Student Program in partnership with Barnard College.
Future of the Global Centers project
Columbia envisions opening "four to six" additional such centers in the coming years; the next are scheduled to open in India and in Paris.
Columbia's Paris facility, Reid Hall, is not officially a Global Center, but it is already being used for similar activities. In a newly signed MOU between Columbia (on behalf of MSPH) and the L’ École des Hautes Etudes en Santé Publique (EHESP), Reid Hall will host the consortium’s ambitious project to shape public health in the 21st century. As a part of the agreement, MSPH and EHESP will search for innovative, productive and forward-looking ways to utilize Reid Hall for joint programs or programs of mutual interest, including teaching and research. An Arts-focused initiative in West Africa is also using Reid Hall as the base of operations.
Active planning is underway with donors and the Indian government to establish a Global Center in coordination with the Earth Institute in Mumbai.
Columbia's acquisition and creation of a study center at Casa Murano in Venice raises the possibility that a Global Center could be created there. The university has also expressed interest in opening centers in Russia, Central Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Global Centers map
This map reflects Columbia's current and officially planned facilities around the world.
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31.817827, 34.582032, Global Center Amman, Jordan 40.05789, 115.792969, Global Center Beijing, China 46.691654, 2.941407, Planned Global Center Paris France 17.157588, 73.957032, Planned Global Center Mumbai, India 40.860357, -74.050781, Columbia University, New York, USA </googlemap>
