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About the Author:
Ralph D. Winter is a senior mission thinker who has been actively involved from the beginning of the massive mission transition from simply thinking in terms of countries or individuals to thinking in terms of peoples. He is founder of the
U.S. Center for World Mission,
and is currently chancellor of
William Carey
International University. |
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There are lots of animals with highly developed senses for invisible magnetic currents, for very faint smells, for amazing eyesight. There are many animals that even have intelligence of a sort. There is only one animal that determinedly remembers the past, systematically studies the environment, both discovers and employs the laws of nature, and makes elaborate plans for the future.
That thinking, talking, book-writing animal has been probing and puzzling over reality for about 10,000 years, not much longer. The reason we can feel safe in recognizing that relatively brief period of time is simple. There is no earlier evidence of anything so complicated or so difficult as the selective breeding of both plants and animals, of wolves into friendly dogs, and weeds into ears of corn, wheat, rice and potatoes. No cave man in decades or centuries-or millennia-ever accomplished such goals.
More recently, however, the disciplined study of our planetary environment has been undertaken by the emergence of an altogether new institution, the university, which is committed to the study of the entire universe. That is why, one might suppose, it deserves to be called a \"univers-ity.\"
Having said this, we must admit that the average person might well see the university otherwise. The fictional average person might say that the university is intended primarily to pass information on to a new generation of students. It is all about students, and degrees, and programs of study. Students must come first. I freely recognize that this could well be what most people think. And, this perspective is partly true.
But the nature of what is being passed on, I submit, is even more important than the process of passing it on. The quality of insight, its truth, its inherent value, must weigh more than the process of passing those insights on, or there would be no use in the passing-on process. It is only to the degree that the university tradition has actually aided in the discovery of the laws of nature and society, that it is qualified to bequeath its knowledge to the next generation.
Furthermore-let\'s admit it-universities have passed on a large amount of rubbish. They have also failed to study the right thing at the right time. It took the Second WW to produce the very first departments of Southeast Asian studies in the United States. It is now taking the turmoil in the Middle East- terrorists no less-to produce dozens of new university departments of Islamic studies, even though for almost 1,000 years the Islamic tradition itself led the world in university studies. This kind of blinkered, restricted vision we cannot praise.
Southern Britain had been literate for 300 years at the time Rome withdrew its legions, a little after 400 AD. However, during the next half millennium Britain sagged back into savagery while Islam took over much of the Mediterranean civilization with its scholars, scientists, and philosophers. Even after a thousand years, one of the best libraries in Europe was the one at St. Gallen in Switzerland, with 400 precious hand-wrought books. Meanwhile across the Pyrenees mountains in Spain, in the Muslim city of Cordova, the largest city in the world at that time, was a library not of 400 books but 400,000 books.
But by then universities in Europe had begun to imbibe the secrets of the south. Soon, borne aloft by the use of moveable type, the handful of universities, which were not much more than grade schools, began to attract scholars who had earlier worked outside of the schools. For example, Copernicus, Kepler, Tycho Brae, and Galileo were not associated primarily with universities.
Two patterns can be discerned. Some universities originated from the initiative of students clamoring for knowledge, and jointly paying scholars to teach them. Others began with a cluster of scholars seeking to pursue their studies by supporting themselves through teaching students. Gradually both types of universities emerged from a background of mainly passing on knowledge to the deliberate increase of knowledge.
With moveable type in the mix, plus the challenges of Islamic superiority in almost every field, European civilization leaped ahead in the next 300 years to the place where we in the West have almost totally forgotten our great debt to the Islamic tradition.
Nevertheless, the university tradition, for all its drawbacks and limitations, is a good thing, a substantial thing, that has both penetrated many of the secrets of nature and has also prepared, even inspired, many millions of younger people to move in different, often superior directions.
Today throughout the world several things have penetrated pervasively-the Singer sewing machine, Coca Cola, the VCR, jeans, radio, television and now digital disks. Some things have potential benefit, like the idea of literacy and schools, or the incredibly widespread use of double entry accounting. Other things are harmful, like the unrestrained promotion of American cigarettes, or, ironically, the extensive destruction of life through the commercially driven use of baby formula replacing breast milk in bottles almost inevitably filled with polluted water.
The Christian faith is also one of those highly penetrating phenomena. But the university tradition, all things considered, leads the way in global influence over any other one artifact of Western culture. Deceptively, this pervasiveness around the world is not visible from our location in the United States. We have grown up with the university, and take it for granted. Thus, few American citizens can imagine the extreme respect, even worship, accorded to the university phenomenon in the non-Western world. Yet nothing we have done in the West has gained greater interest among the leaders of the nonWestern world than the university.
A respect for the university which is that exaggerated is not entirely justified, but there are substantial reasons for its existence. In this area Third World leaders may be more perceptive than Westerners have been, who to some extent have \"seen through\" our universities.
Nevertheless, the West has gone around the world in the form of countless \"nongovernment organizations,\" mainly religious, to plant at least a million schools. The largest technical university in Latin America was established by missionaries. The largest university in Asia focused on agricultural development is a missionary established institution at Allahabad. But of central focus in our outreach has been grade schools and \"Bible schools.\" On the other hand, the resulting human product of our impact, namely, emerging national leaders, have sized up the situation and initiated not theological schools but new universities. In this distinction they differ greatly from us in the West, they are far more favorable to the university tradition than to an alternate religious tradition.
I cannot easily forget how limited my vision was back in 1966 when I left Guatemala. As a member of the first board of directors of a new university, the Universidad Mariano Galvez, I had stood for a photograph of that small group. Little did I realize what was going on. I shrugged my shoulders. What do we need another university for? Today, that school has 30,000 students, and in the intervening period has supplied all of the judges in Guatemala. This one school may be one of the oldest of many new universities that have sprung up in the past 25 years in the non-Western world. One report tells us of 41 new such universities sponsored, note, not by \"missionaries\" but by national Christian leaders.
I don\'t suppose that a new university in Guatemala, in a poverty-stricken country, has all the luxurious and expensive perks of a USA university. But that is not all important, is it? It is certainly as good as or better than most colleges and universities in this country if you go back only a 100 years. It is undoubtedly far superior to the grade-school-like \"colleges\" in which our founding fathers and early American philosophers were reared.
Thus, in any case, irretrievably, the university pattern has now caught-on world wide. We must deplore its weaknesses and excesses, and at the same time contribute to its potential. There is no way to avoid the influence of this one cultural pattern.
WCIU may be at this point the only institution of higher learning anywhere in the world that is exclusively focused on offering the benefits of higher education to the present and future workers within the thousands of zealous non-government agencies at work in every part of the globe.
Some may feel that insofar as most of these agencies are highly religious we ought not to work for and through them since we seriously believe we promote a broader and more complex understanding of what the socalled developing nations really need.
But, in actual fact, a major NGO like SIM International, with a history of more than a century, fielding a thousand workers in dozens of countries, has made contributions, for example, to the entire school system of Nigeria outstripping virtually all other outside influences. In literally hundreds of other locations around the world these highly religious NGOs are loaded with projects that contribute to agriculture, business, medicine, education, technology and politics. Virtually all the United Nations representatives from Africa have come through schools planted and watered by these kinds of agencies.
It came to me years ago as I reflected on things happening around me in Guatemala, that my agency and others like it were the only agencies ready and willing to tackle any and all problems arising in society, whether a need was the development of pyrithreum for fighting fleas, drilling bored-hole latrines, introducing superior genetic strains of cattle, the development of small businesses, or modeling democratic government in a subsection of hundreds of rural communities throughout the mountains and valleys of that country. Every other type of agency-Peace Corps, US AID, even specialized religious relief agencies-were focusing on a single piece of the jigsaw puzzle.
Thus, it is crucial that we not underestimate the impact of the world\'s nongovernment agencies, faith-based or not, seeking to make a difference cross-culturally. This is the plain reason why our university exists and is dedicated to drawing its students from that sphere in order to improve precisely that particular major force, fostering it, refining it, and extending it, through disciplined higher education.
Universities can do the wrong thing, but they can also lead the way into knowledge frontiers, and in addition, provide strategic direction, backbone, and accountability for both faculty and students. All of this can make great contributions to the recovery of full human potential in the global battle against ignorance, prejudice, fear, and, yes, hatred that stalks still too many of the world\'s communities.
In that battle our one institution here has only begun to fight. Yet, already some of our materials are in use in a hundred other schools. In addition, in the course of the lifetime of our university we have indirectly arrested the attention of over 70,000 in this country alone whose appetite for new challenges has been whetted by a fifteen-week introduction into a vision for international development globally.
Our degree-graduates since our previous commencement ceremony only represent the tip of a vast iceberg of potential activity. In the face of much larger need, then, our mandate is to maintain high standards of workmanship while maintaining flexibility and single-minded focus on the intermediate goal of enhancing the global network of NGOs. Our graduates thus far, as symbolized by those we honor here tonight, have eminently lived up to our ideals. For that fact we are very appreciative. May I tonight publicly thank both those graduates who could not be with us, and those who are present, for the high quality of the work they have done. We are very proud of you. |
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