Anthropologist and College President Jim Young Kim often quips, "My predecessor, John Sloan Dickey used to say that the world's troubles are your troubles ... and there is nothing wrong with the world that better human beings cannot fix.'"
This maxim, though ever so slightly humorous in context, is an integral part of what makes Dartmouth... well, Dartmouth. The College's emphasis on an international education makes our men and women better students of the world, more fully equipped for a Fulbright Scholarship or even a career at the International Monetary Fund. And all this begins with courses like Indigenous Australian Art and the Politics of Curatorship.
Entering his classroom, Stephen Gilchrist, a guest curator at the Hood Museum, engages his students with his quiet yet captivating voice, analyzing a colorful and seemingly arbitrary collection of dots entitled "Possum Dreaming." In his course, he noted that western art criticism fails in capturing the essence of Aboriginal art. Apparently, the cleverly concealed bush turkey in the artwork was not actually pointillist, and referring to it that way is a cultural expropriation, he said.
The contentious concept of cultural expropriation is a topic discussed by Uzbekistani music professor Theodore Levin. Many know that Billy Joel had a 1987 concert in Central Asia, but few know that Levin, a resident ethnomusicologist, organized it. On the first day of class, Levin handed out a chart citing the four domains of world music: the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and cultural advocacy.
"[Students] shouldn't necessarily like the music they're listening to, but they should understand it," Levin said.
One of his favorite Uzbekistani colleagues came to address the class last week. He didn't speak English, so students heard him in translation.
"The point of the class is how people hear the world through their own musical traditions," Levin said.
Now, even after understanding what Gilchrist was talking about, it is difficult to understand that strictly adhering to ethnic boundaries is the only way of consuming cross-cultural media. In the ancient halls of Thornton, for example, religion postdoctoral fellow Nancy Lin discusses an idea she calls "trans-culturation" in her class titled Tibetan Buddhism.
Lin's course is about "not only adopting a religion, but adopting the culture of India," she said. Indeed, the class itself reflects this dynamic in microcosm it is not only a course on religious tradition, but it is also a study of history, society and "the visual culture of a place."
The big fuss over the study of international cultures becomes more apparent when attending one of economics professor Doug Irwin's lively lectures about international trade.
"I don't need to motivate [students]," Irwin said. "If they're in this class, they already embody the spirit of internationalism."
Although his class focuses on pure economics, he teaches net capital outflows in such an artistic way that it rivals the aesthetic creativity of bark art from West Arnhem Land in Australia or even Capoeira music from Brazil.
It is impossible to think about contemporary economics without considering the international component, according to Irwin.
But even outside of passive classroom learning, students must actually get out there and interact with these fantastic international cultures firsthand to fully understand them. Not before taking Development Economics with professor Sandip Sukhtankar, however.
Be it the concept of sequential holdup as it relates to corruption, or why child labor improves school attendance, Sukhtankar discusses common misconceptions about aiding the world's poor in her course.
But far from a culminating experience in international studies, all these classes simply make students realize how much they don't know. Dartmouth's international studies minor, however, allows students to truly hone in on these global cultures. Offering courses in over 25 departments, ranging from the Virtual Medicine and Cyber Care to the Anthropology of Tourism, Dartmouth never permits students to exhaust their curiosities. But at a college where departments as disparate as art history and economics can still find academic common ground, anything can happen.
International education is akin to a Pokemon, perpetually in a state of evolution. Replete with countless FSPs, an interdisciplinary foundation and updated with the current events of each new day, the field is constantly in flux. As busy as we college students are, Dartmouth makes it viable for us to keep up as internationalists. We'd be fools not to take advantage of it.
After all, better human beings can fix the world's troubles, and better human beings come from Dartmouth.
