issue 11 by doraliu from【wintogether】

doraliuUID: 2842061

Issue11
Allnations should help support the development of a global university designed to engage students in the process of solving the world's most persistent socialproblems。

Ourplant is an ever unsafe place to live on with terrorism, climate change,economic crisis that compel us to find out a way out and a global university appears to be an appealing solution, but I suspect that it is only an illusion;a beautiful flower bears no fruits.

Thestatement assumes firstly that we can identify the most persistent social problems, secondly such a global university can be established and should receive support from all nations, thirdly that a global university can help in addressing those problems; but as far as I am concerned, the three assumptions are all open to doubt.

Firstly,how to definite the most persistent social problems and who should be authority in defining them. As to the first question, the answer can be totally different when different nations are concerned. I guess to people of Afghan or Iraq would consider American draw its armies back the most persistent problem while American would take the surrender of those nations a problem but not the most important one; it is now trying its best to come out of economic crisis; and when the second one is considered, it is very possible that the most powerful country would in place; for example, when American decided that China RMB appreciation a big issue, china was in huge pressure rising the exchange rate and was switching from a rather firm stiff exchangerate policy to a more flexible one. It is the strong that makes the rules and weak that follows; so I am convinced that the identification of the most persistent social problem would be in question.

Secondly, even we can identify the most persistent problem troubling us, the feasibility of establishing such a university is a question;who should be the management, the faculty and who should the university enrolled? Unless all these questions are answered with great prudence, the realizationof the global university would be of question. Considering the huge impact ofthe global university, the management in charge of the university should be decent, impartial, wise, profound and with faith. And we should not take forgranted that there are a lot of qualified person. We are born to be with affection to our motherland which would lead to partial decisions; we would be driven by personal interests to possess wrong judgments; and it is even more difficult as to who should be enrolled. Ostensibly, the university should give permission to the most intelligent students with excellent leadership skills form all around world; but an in-depth review would bring the flaws of such assumption in sight for it is never easy to define intelligent in different cultures. So I am confident that I am just practical but not pessimistic about the establishment of the global university.


Thirdly, suppose we have overcome all difficulties; we build aglobal university and we agree on what are persistent problems, such as economic crisis, climate change, terrorism, we need to prove that the global university does help in solving these problems. Take terrorism for example. We examine how a global university can help in defeating terrorism; terrorism exits because of culture difference, because of the gap between rich and poor, and maybe because of religious mania; so what the global university would do insolving these problems?
Supporters might believe that misunderstanding caused these problems, we should strive to achieve mutual understanding and the global university enable people to put feet inothers’ shoes; but my point is that nowadays with easy access to various information,we if still don't tolerant different views of an issue, it is not that we are in short of communication, in lack of information, it is that are we willing to accept？Are we tolerance enough to accept different religious, politics and ideologies？ The global university, if stopped at the level of gathering people together, so they can understand each other, it could not achieve much.


In sum, the global university could do little in delivering “persistentglobal problems” because it was not feasible in practicing.