Just got a tour of the Global Education Center at the University of North Carolina. You can take a look at it, too. The building brings together a wide array of institutes and programs dedicated to fostering international studies. By placing them all in the same building, there are many more opportunities for cooperation and intellectual inspiration.
At giant universities, it is almost impossible to spread publicity announcements around to all interested parties, which is why it useful to have one location where you know to look for international events.
Take the virtual tour of the building and you will see how the entrance is designed to hold large receptions, dinners and lectures, while the upper floors house advisors, institute offices and invited international fellows. From Eastern Europe to China, from the Cold War to the hot and trendy, all sorts of languages, cultures and nationalities are housed in one intellectual exchange.
At $44 million, the building took a combination of heavy hitter donors who plunked down the big cash, an army of contributors, corporate sponsors and the state of North Carolina, who paid about half the costs. Once you have such a building, you are going to want to use it. That is to say, building a Global Studies Center creates the momentum to continually further international studies. An upward spiral, you have the building, so you create international programs, which you house in the building that then creates more international events, etc.
Now for twice that amount of money, you can build your university a world-class hockey rink.
They say the hockey rink will be a multi-purpose arena. Maybe we can turn it into a combination ice palace and global studies center. When the sky boxes around the rink are not in use, we can let foreign language departments hold seminars in them.
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