Recently, various high-placed officials in the University have recommended that our students, particularly first-year students, need to become more cosmopolitan and explore the new and untried, the unfamiliar and the distant. Seemingly uncontroversial, this recommendation appears to be at the core of the University's mission aimed at preparing students for lives "in the nation's service and the service of all nations." Yet, I think this suggestion is far from uncontroversial: At the risk of slight exaggeration, such a recommendation strikes me to be as necessary as an admonishment for students to stop studying so hard on Thursday nights but instead to get out and enjoy themselves. Oddly, to recommend that students open themselves to what they are not is to recommend that they become more of what they already are: Citizens of the world, open to everything, closed to nothing. Should the role of the University be to deepen these existing commitments or to present alternatives, even to move students away from dominating proclivities?
Having read dozens of applications to a Freshman seminar and numerous statements by students in the Residential College in which I am an advisor, what struck me above all is how cosmopolitan the first year students already are. Not only have most traveled outside the country already — in many cases having lived abroad for a substantial period of time — but many intend to pursue careers in an international field, whether in public service, diplomacy, business or law, among others. For many, Sept. 11 represented a watershed event that moved many to dedicate their lives' efforts to improving the international arena. It's both shocking and impressive to read an 18-year old's intentions to become ambassador to Spain, U.N. representative, international lawyer or a highly-placed member of the Foreign Service.
Things were not always this way, of course. Universities were in part designed to confront and overcome the narrow prejudices of incoming students, young men and women who grew up in limited circumstances with little exposure to the greater world and less comprehension of its complexity. John Locke reflects this earlier mission of higher education in arguing that education's primary aim is to "remove some of the rubbish that lies in the way of Knowledge." About 150 years ago, Henry Adams could describe his Harvard University education thus: "It taught little, and that little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of facts, but docile. The graduate had few strong prejudices. He knew little, but his mind remained supple, ready to receive knowledge."
Today's incoming students are marked by an extraordinary absence of such limiting prejudice: In many cases they are already "kosmou polits," citizens of the world, even of the cosmos. From a tender age the world has been brought to them, and they to the world: Overwhelmingly by means of the media, including popular culture; by educations steeped in multiculturalism; in increasingly diverse communities; and through extraordinary mobility, both domestically and internationally. At 18, I could barely imagine what courses I should take, much less what my career ought to be; I had barely been outside my hometown, much less my State and never outside the country; and I had almost no interest in other cultures, having been almost exclusively steeped in stories and myths of America. I needed a cosmopolitan education, and I'm grateful that I received one. I'm not positive what our students need, but I'm far from certain it's a recommendation to think globally. They're already doing that, almost without surcease.
What I found most curious, albeit not surprising, in these many heartfelt essays about the effects of Sept. 11 on the views and ambitions of young people was that, amid the ardent dedication to international affairs in its many forms, there was very little explicit identification with those professions that sacrificed most visibly and painfully on that day: Firefighters, policemen, EMT workers, eventually soldiers. I did not encounter an essay that indicated an interest in volunteering as a firefighter or joining the National Guard or ROTC (though I don't doubt for an instant that some have and will). Such professions are decidedly non-cosmopolitan — in some instances even anti-cosmopolitan. They reflect a dedication to the immediate and to the local (and in the case of the military, to the nation in the abstract, to one's comrades in the immediate). I was moved to reflect whether an emphasis on cosmopolitanism that merely reinforced existing predilections on the part of the student body might tacitly permit — even encourage — a neglect of the meaning, role and duties of citizenship. Does citizenship of the world imply a benign indifference, or even outright hostility, to citizenship in a polity? If that's a remote possibility, then at least part of the mission of the University ought to be aimed at counterbalancing such neglect, of reminding students that democracy is above all defined by citizenship — of "ruling and being ruled in turn" — and not, in the first instance, abandoning one's home for the world. Patrick Deneen is a professor in the Politics Department and a fellow in the James Madison Program. He may be reached at pdeneen@princeton.edu.
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