As University President Lee Bollinger pursues his goal of transforming Columbia into a global university, students have decided to spearhead their own venture into intercollegiate diplomacy and cultural exchange.
The Ivy-China U.S. Invitational, scheduled to begin on April 3, will be hosted by the Ivy Council in partnership with the Leadership Institute at Harvard College and Global China Connection. It is “a new chapter in US-China relations” that will bring together student body presidents from the U.S. and China, organizers said in a press release.
This week-long invitational—which held events at Harvard, Brown, and Yale—will conclude at Columbia this weekend. It is intended as an opportunity for American and Chinese student leaders to engage in comprehensive cultural exchange.
The year-old program, founded by Cornell students, included a trip to China last summer. The trip allowed 25 student-government leaders from the Ivy League—including Columbia Student Council President George Krebs, CC ’09, Engineering Student Council President Peter Valeiras, SEAS ’09, and presumptive Columbia College Student Council President Sue Yang, CC ’10—to meet with their Chinese student counterparts, members of the provincial government, and Shanghai business people.
“The importance of cultural exchange really cannot be underestimated,” Bing Chen, head of the Ivy Council and a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, said. The importance of the exchange, he added, was that “these people [Chinese student leaders] who will be the future leaders [of China] understand where we’re coming from and can work more effectively with us, and the same thing goes for us.”
While American student leadership is generally determined by the votes of fellow students, Chinese student leaders are chosen by the administrative officials and are endorsed by the state. “These people will be future prime ministers and heads of everything in China, quite literally,” Chen said.
Yang, who has been involved in planning the Columbia events of the invitational, said that the last month has been a “crazy scramble” to pull such a large-scale event together, especially in finding partnerships and funding.
Events for the weekend include a meeting with Provost Alan Brinkley, keynote addresses from Bill Clinton and Bill Gates via video, and a lineup of company CEOs.
Chen and Yang said they hope this type of student diplomacy will provide a model for schools outside of the Ivy League. They would also like for it to spread throughout Columbia. “Something that I’d really like to see out of this is for other groups to also take on student diplomacy,” Yang added.
“It’s really been phenomenal seeing how, even though everyone is so decentralized [the Ivy League schools participating], everyone has come together in the last two weeks to make it happen,” Yang said.
news@columbiaspectator.com
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