Sept. 25, 2001
Teaching in a Tempest
Faculty Take Advantage of the University’s Proximity
to IMF/World Bank to Address Globalization Issues
By Greg
Licamele
No one ever claimed globalization is easy to understand.
It’s more than power, money, and protesting. For example, the No.
1 cause of death of children outside the United States is intestinal
diseases contracted through contaminated water. That statistic on its
own may seem independent of globalization, but Lisa Benton-Short, assistant
professor of geography, says it’s related.
Professor of Law Lawrence Mitchell engages his students in talk about
the pluses and minuses of corporations maximizing stock prices. That,
too, is part of globalization.
So with GW being next door neighbors with the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund, faculty members are teaching, writing, researching, and
thinking about what globalization means. They want the University to
be a depot of information rather than a site of turmoil.
“We want students to have an ‘in-depth’ understanding
of the issues and to understand what is motivating the various viewpoints
on the issues, whether they have to do with jobs or environmental impact,”
says Donald R. Lehman, vice president for academic affairs. “It
gives those faculty members who are experts on the topic an opportunity
to share their knowledge while interacting with students across the
spectrum.”
To reach this goal, Lehman and University President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
began encouraging faculty members in early August to incorporate the
vast topic of globalization into the GW experience and beyond the “superficial”
news coverage.
Although the World Bank/IMF meetings have been cancelled, “it’s
a unique opportunity to have a learning experience out of something
that could otherwise be ignored or misunderstood,” says Hal Wolman,
director of GW’s Institute for Public Policy. Wolman organized
a faculty-student exchange Sept. 12 in the Media and Public Affairs
Building Auditorium to foster discussion about this conundrum known
as globalization. A series of short presentations by GW faculty members
helped illuminate the topic and provided students the opportunity to
ask questions.
Defining Globalization
Jarol Manheim, interim director of the School of Media and Public Affairs,
spoke at the forum about the history of the anti-globalization movement
and its likely direction.
“The real issue for many protesters is globalization, which they
define as a process through which corporate interests come to dominate
policymaking on labor standards, human rights, environmental protection
and a host of other issues,” Manheim says. He argues that the World
Bank and IMF “are not so much primary targets as they are targets
of opportunity.”
The World Bank and IMF provide an opportunity for the University and
its newest research center, the GW Center for the Study of Globalization,
to mobilize the arsenals of academic discourse. Under the direction
of John Forrer, the center acts as a clearinghouse of sorts for faculty
members researching globalization. Currently, the center is funding
14 projects in three areas: globalization and convergence; global financing
and investment; and globalization and information technology.
Beyond the research, Forrer is attempting to engage the IMF in a constant
dialogue with GW faculty members to “focus a little more attention
to reforming globalization to find some middle ground between those
who think it’s all good and those who are protesting.”
On Sept. 7, two IMF representatives met with GW faculty members in what
Forrer describes as an informal setting so professors could discuss
the research that both sides are conducting.
“They don’t have that much practice and they haven’t
dedicated that much time and experience to going out and trying to explain
themselves to people,” Forrer says of the IMF.
So what are the World Bank, IMF, and other similar non-governmental
organizations actually doing?
It depends on who you talk to.
The Location of Globalization
Benton-Short is no stranger to the topic of globalization, having taught
classes at Colgate University for the last six years. She cites changes
over the last 50 years in how the World Bank focuses its resources.
“A lot of the development projects of the 1950s and 1960s concentrated
on projects such as multi-million dollar dams and multi-billion dollar
highway construction,” Benton-Short explains. The projects required
countries to take out loans, in some cases, to afford these projects.
“Now, they’re in debt and in some cases they are in a debt
spiral,” Benton-Short adds. “It’s all they can do to
pay the interest on their loans. In some cases, it is debilitating their
economies.”
In addition to the debt issue, Benton-Short says another concern of
geographers is where the World Bank provides funds.
“We need to establish clean water pumps in each of the villages
(to fight problems such as disease),” Benton-Short says. “Instead
of giving a country $1 billion to build a road, why don’t we give
villages $100,000 each to construct a medical clinic, a school, and
some sort of clean-water system? These are what’s going to raise
people’s standard of living.”
As a geographer, Benton-Short looks at where globalization happens and
what the dynamics are for successful and unsuccessful global economies.
This semester she is teaching “Introduction to Human Geography,”
where her students are learning about global, regional, and local trends
in five key areas of geography: demographics, economics, cultural, political,
and environmental.
“Students come away with a better sense of the complexities behind
what they are seeing in the news,” Benton-Short says. “We
look at cultural globalization debates — are we all eating McDonald’s,
wearing Levi’s, and listening to Hollywood music, and is this destroying
culture? In the end, I hope the students walk away with a sense that
there’s a lot more complexity to the dynamic.”
No one ever claimed globalization is easy to understand.
Corporate Impact
Lawrence Mitchell of the Law School focuses his research on corporations
and their impact on the global economy. With a grant from the Ford Foundation,
he is leading the International Institute for Corporate Governance &
Accountability (IICGA). According to its Web site (www.gwu.edu/~iicga),
the institute delves into the issues of corporate wealth and economic
justice.
“These (corporations) are operated with the narrow goal of enhancing
the wealth of their capital contributors,” Mitchell says. “The
result has been to increase the wealth of the already wealthy.”
IICGA is building a global network of scholars, business people, non-governmental
and governmental officials to focus on globalization, particularly the
increasing dominance of American forms of doing business on other parts
of the world.
Mitchell just a wrote a book, “Corporate Irresponsibility: America’s
Newest Export,” which addresses many issues the IICGA will examine.
“I lay a lot of the responsibility on American corporations and
American market practices,” he says. “While I think that’s
appropriately where it belongs for the most part, it’s also the
case that sovereign governments don’t have to permit this to occur.
They are perfectly capable of saying, ‘keep your money.’ On
the other hand, it takes a lot for a sovereign government, particularly
of a nation that isn’t as wealthy as ours, to say no.”
When asked if the World Bank and IMF have done anything wrong, Mitchell
replies affirmatively, echoing some of Benton-Short’s words.
“What they’ve done wrong is a gross insensitivity to the cultural
norms of the countries they are attempting to help,” Mitchell explains.
“They’ve imposed conditions on loans and financing that are
difficult for these countries to achieve. They haven’t paid adequate
attention to their stated goals of eradicating world poverty.”
Forrer, from a different perspective, has a slightly different take
on the World Bank and IMF missions.
“It’s incredibly complicated,” Forrer says, “but
it’s not as if the IMF and the World Bank are undertaking policies
that knowingly are stupid or have bad results. There are smart people
trying to do smart things, but there’s always room for improvement.”
Understanding The Protesters
Eradicating world poverty is one goal of the protesters. However, some
GW faculty members believe the protesters cannot effectively articulate
their goals because there are too many interests.
“I wish I understood the movement a little bit better,” Benton-Short
says. “I don’t know if you’ll find anybody that does.
Unlike the environmental movement, which really began with consensus,
it’s clear there are different elements making up this movement
and not all of them have the same goals.”
Susan Phillips, dean of the School of Business and Public Management,
recently returned from a meeting of central banks from around the world
in Jackson Hole, WY. She says at one panel discussion, an IMF official
talked about protesters and how the Internet is serving as a tool to
organize the anti-globalism movement.
“He made a comment that more people need to speak out against anti-globalism,”
Phillips says. “Business people don’t tend to react. They’ll
observe it. They are not protesting. So he was encouraging more people
to comment about what are the favorable impacts of trade and some of
the economic development issues.”
Though the movement might be well-organized, Mitchell says protesters
aren’t clear on what they see as the issue. The IICGA is trying
to give them a focal point and explanations.
But will explanations and research cause the protest movement to stop?
“I believe these demonstrations are a manifestation of a long cycle
of social protest,” SMPA’s Manheim says, “and that cyclical
factors, rather than idiosyncratic factors or policy actions, are the
only thing that will eventually lead them to fade away. But that will
not happen anytime soon.”
Forrer, who believes the protests are “healthy,” says, “The
IMF has to deal with such a range of complexities when they do their
job, that I’m not sure there’s a single action that they might
do differently (for protests to stop). There might be a lot of small,
little things they can do, that in the end, would lead to a better result.”
But Forrer sees discourse as a primary solution to bring perspective
to all of the parties involved.
“The issue is how do we find a way to incorporate the protest movement’s
ideas for what would be constructive and get it channeled into the kind
of decision-making budget and policy actions of these large organizations,”
Forrer says. “That’s difficult, but we’re fortunate to
have the globalization center here and I think because we’re so
close, maybe we can play part of the role in having that dialogue.”
Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu
