A local university taps the best minds in Asia and the Middle East, hoping to create some renewable energy
By Jeannette Cooperman
Photograph by Mary Butkus
The arrivals took Washington University as close to red-carpet excitement as academe ever gets.
Shenghong Wang, president of Fudan University in Shanghai. Lawrence J. Lau, president of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Ralph Cicerone, president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences ...
They milled in the lobby of the Saint Louis Club on May 4, men in impeccably tailored dark suits, women in shimmering pastel brocades, western cocktail dresses or impeccably tailored dark suits. The crowd blended far more smoothly than it would have in any prior decade: no cultural stumbles, no fumbled pronunciations or overcompensation. Dignitaries from Ankara, Jakarta and Taipei made easy small talk as waiters proffered iced shrimp and poured glass after glass of good wine.
Binglin Gu, president of Tsinghua University. Khunying Suchada Kiranandana, president of Chulalongkorn University. Thomas Pickering, former ambassador to India, Russia, Israel and the United Nations ...
It was the first global symposium hosted by the new McDonnell International Scholars Academy—Wash. U.’s attempt to bring together the best minds in Asia and the Middle East, collaborate on world problems and shape future leaders. Participants would brainstorm about what they consider to be the world’s two biggest challenges: energy (with consumption expected to double by 2050) and the environment.
Chang Young Jung, president of Yonsei University in Seoul. Usman Chatib Warsa, rector of the University of Indonesia. Si-Chen Lee, president of National Taiwan University ...
“The scholars,” as they’re embarrassed to be known, stood on the periphery, trading grins as they watched their alma maters’ presidents chat with their Wash. U. professors. These 18 graduate students, cream of the global crop, had been sharing apartments, going out to dinner together and comparing notes for almost a year now. A bit self-consciously, they’d assumed their roles as future leaders who were expected to continue networking as their spheres of influence grew.
“We joke about how we are waiting for one of our scholar friends in chemical or environmental engineering to invent something that will save the world,” Karavikar Svetasreni wrote later in an email, “and scholars in law school can patent the ideas and those in business school will take it to market and those in political science can make sure we get support from the government.” An MBA student, Svetasreni plans to return to rural Thailand to “help communities develop their traditional products to suit consumer tastes and take them to market here in the United States.”
Ryotaro Kato earned a medical degree at the University of Tokyo and came to Wash. U. to add a law degree; he intends to work in healthcare, where he’d like to make policy decisions. When he was accepted as a scholar, he worried a bit: “At the government level, there’s a lot of tension between Japan and other Asian countries, so I was a little afraid of being surrounded.” He did notice a little diffidence in the other scholars: “Some wouldn’t come up and talk unless someone introduced us. But once we got over the initial hurdle, I realized we all kind of liked drinking and talking about silly things. I had much more in common with them than with many other Japanese people.”
Kato expects the bonds forged in this program to make a serious difference. “Back when Japan and Russia entered into war, we couldn’t reach a peace settlement because Russia wouldn’t give up anything. Teddy Roosevelt helped us because he was a good friend of a Japanese diplomat from their Harvard Law years. I’m sure one day, if we scholars keep trying to be successful, we’ll meet again.”
The club’s lights dimmed, glowed, dimmed again. The guests walked in to dinner.
“In this world of highly interactive technologies, nothing can replace interactions between people,” Wash. U. chancellor Mark Wrighton said at the podium, confessing, “I could hardly penetrate the conversation earlier!” (He was seated with Lap-Chee Tsui, vice chancellor of the University of Hong Kong, and Ashok Misra, director of the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay.)
James Wertsch, Marshall S. Snow Professor in Arts & Sciences and director of the scholars program, later said that even as the program grows, Wash. U. will hold the line at about 35 university partners, the top three or four in each country. “I actually objected to this at the outset; I said we ought to think about some universities that are developing,” Wertsch admitted. “But I think Mark [Wrighton] was right. Now we have this club that everybody wants to join. And these are high-profile, high-demand universities.” The scholars will never number more than 100, he added. “The tight relationship is not made among 5,000 people.”
After dinner, Thomas Pickering, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, voiced his own ideas about “Iran and the Future of Global Energy Supplies.” Across the room, Rafi Melnick listened closely. He is dean of the School of Government at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, the first private university in Israel. “It’s the typical view of the State Department, nothing new,” he murmured afterward. “Our experience with Iran is quite different.” Others at his table leaned forward, and opinions slid like pucks across the smooth white tablecloth.
“I want to meet some people here,” Melnick confided, “because Washington University Medical School has an excellent reputation and we are planning to open a med school in northern Israel, near the border with Lebanon. It’s complicated; we need some governmental decisions. Also, my president asked me to see if there were contacts we could develop with Asian universities. The universities in Israel are very well connected with the United States, but not so well with Asia.”
Across the table sat Randolph J. Guschl, director of the DuPont Center for Collaborative Research & Education. “What Mark is doing here is uniquely different,” he remarked, adding that he remembered Wrighton from way back. “When he was getting out of Caltech with his Ph.D. in chemistry, I was getting mine at the University of Illinois, and we all knew about the wunderkind.
“Now,” he continued, “the major research universities are all trying to figure out how you globalize the university—but their plan is not something they can pull off because they don’t have the relationships Wrighton has.”
Saturday’s sessions covered everything from the elements—air quality, water supply—to various countries’ specific challenges: seawater desalination in Israel, coal-fired plants in China, the construction of a tidal power plant in Korea. At a gala dinner under the Arch, Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, spoke about “How Humans Cause Climate Change.”
“In the United States, we are just now acknowledging the damage of global warming and environmental degradation,” Wertsch noted, “but people elsewhere get this. It’s not a political thing for them. They have a hard time understanding all this ‘left,’ ‘Al Gore’ stuff. And they know anybody who does not recognize the potential to make a huge amount of money out of fighting global warming is crazy.”
At the symposium’s end, the university presidents in attendance issued a global call to action, and Wrighton announced that Wash. U. would direct an additional $500,000 to the scholars program to encourage breakthrough research, green energy technologies and teaching focused on the issues raised. Partner universities would report the results at a follow-up summit in Hong Kong in December 2008.
On June 4, Wash. U. took the first huge step: Wrighton announced the creation of a new International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability, pledging to invest more than $55 million in the initiative.
Future McDonnell International Scholars conferences may address poverty or infectious disease worldwide. More and more corporations are signing on as program sponsors, hoping to lure the scholars to work for them—and that relationship, too, calls for diplomatic finesse. “We say right at the outset that we make decisions about the admission of all scholars,” Wertsch noted. “Monsanto is trying to burnish its reputation around the world; that’s no secret. But if they say they want an MBA from India—well, that we can work with.”
Twelve 2007–'08 scholars have already been chosen, and they’re a bit different from their predecessors. “We could fill every year with fantastic applications from science, business and engineering, but we need this to be a university-wide project,” Wertsch explained. “We want buy-in from the whole university, we want to offer the scholars the richest experience possible and we want a broad distribution of our scholars. So this fall we will have two scholars in social work, one in art, one in philosophy, one in architecture, one in law, one in economics, two in engineering and three in business.”
And so the network grows.
