We sometimes think of innovation as new discoveries, a new software or medicine. We still have the image of the lone genius building something new in the basement or the garage. The basement or garage may still be part of innovation, but the genius is not alone. Innovation also and perhaps more importantly is the application of techniques and technologies in different ways that satisfy developing needs. After all, a new discovery that cannot be communicated or applied is as useful as … nothing. Innovation must always exist in a human society context.
I admit that I was a little confused when I saw that the Parsons School of Design at the New School in New York was on our list of visits. I was thinking in that narrow sense that design meant only something like making nice looking furniture, modern art or maybe high fashion. I was wrong.
People at Parsons explained that they work on teams to embed scientific and technical innovation into systems, i.e. designs that serve human needs. Theirs is a multi-disciplinary approach of engagement with complex problems of art, design, science & technology all wrapped into something that works for people They started with the example of their work on the solar decathlon/empowerhouse, where their team designed and built a modular house that was functional, comfortable, attractive and produced its own energy using passive and active solar power.
It was impressive as was the philosophy behind. You have to go where the problem is and help solve it for the people there with their cooperation of those affected by the problem and will be involved in implementing solutions, my kind of thing. Partnerships frame the definition of the problem and the solutions.
Parsons already has two SWB participants who are doing well, BTW.
The New School was founded in the 1920s, among others by people fleeing the tyranny of totalitarianism in Europe. You still get that feeling from the building, which was designed in the 1920s and by the decoration. Our room featured large murals by the Mexican artist Jose Orozco. It was a product of the times, featuring heroes like Gandhi and villains like Lenin and Stalin. I wondered why Hitler was not featured until I found out that it was pained in 1931, when Hitler was just a dark cloud on the horizon. A painting on the wall of the hall is from a bit later time, the Spanish civil war. You can see that below and it is self-explanatory. Let’s hope the world never has to go through a period that bad again. It is useful to be reminded of such dark times; I hope the memory helps us avoid it. George Santayana famously said that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. But it sometimes seems that those who remember don’t fare much better.
We visited two historically black colleges, Howard University in Washington and Morgan State in Baltimore. These universities at one time were designed for blacks, who were often excluded from other universities. Today they have enrollment of all races; hence the name “historically” instead of currently, but they still enroll relatively more African-American students on average.
The Dean at Morgan State explained some of the history. The Morrill Act in 1862 funded educational institutions by giving the states federal land to establish and endow “land-grant” colleges. These universities were supposed to concentrate on practical subjects such as agriculture, science and engineering. Many of our great public state universities are land grant colleges. Wisconsin and Minnesota are among them, but some private institutions such Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also started life as land grant institutions. While these institutions were not “white” few blacks could take advantage. A second Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1890 specified that states using federal land-grant funds must either make their schools open to both blacks and whites or allocate money for black colleges. Sixteen exclusively black institutions received 1890 land-grant funds, among them Morgan State. Howard is different. It is funded by the Federal government, one of only three institutions that get direct funds from the Feds.
Today these institutions maintain their commitment to sciences and practical arts, making them potentially good partners for the Science w/o Borders program.
The top two pictures show Morgan State University. The bottom is Howard.
Our Brazilian friends and I went to Micron in Manassas near Washington to give them an idea about how high tech firms are integrated into a well-functioning educational community. Micron makes computer memory. This is a very complex business with a heavy capital investment and a lot of R&D. The Micron people told us that they absolutely require three things: uninterrupted electrical power, an abundant water supply and an educated workforce. None of these things are as easy to get as they would first appear.
Uninterrupted power means exactly that. Even a little hiccup in power can cost thousands of dollars when the very expensive processes are interrupted. I am not exactly sure how water is used in making chips, but it evidently is a large part of the production. The educated labor force is a little surprising. There are not many people working at Micron. It would seem to me that you could import the relatively few people needed. The Micron folks explained that they were really talking about a kind of social ecosystem and a strong social ecosystem requires educated workforces in various businesses that support Micron in direct and indirect ways, as well as a diverse population that brings a variety of ideas.
Somebody questioned this idea, pointing out that Micron was headquartered in Boise, Idaho, hardly a big or diverse metro area. Our hosts admitted that this seemed to be an exception to the rule. They also explained how Micron came to be located in Idaho in the first place. It was a semi-random event. A rich guy called JR Simplot provided the start-up capital for Micron. Simplot made a fortune pioneering the production of frozen French fries and then made his fortune bigger by becoming the supplier to McDonalds.
Micron spends a lot of time and money trying to shrink the size of the memory it makes. This won’t be possible very much longer with the technologies and materials available. Some of the processors are currently only twenty atoms wide. That is 20 atoms. Think how small that is. They probably cannot shrink down to the subatomic level, so researchers are looking for alternatives to the flat silicon materials. This is the current holy grain and Micron is helping fund research at Virginia universities in search of it.
Later that day we went to the Naval Observatory. This is where my pictures came from. We could not take pictures in Micron so as not to potentially compromise proprietory information.
The main duty of the Naval Observatory use to be to keep perfect time and write almanacs for navigation. The device up top used to keep track of the changes in the earth’s rotation. The earth does not rotate at exactly the same time. There are a few seconds difference. Scientist are not sure why.
The Observatory has an interesting library. You can see it in the picture. It has some race books, including copies of Newton’s “Principia” (pictured) as well as Galileo and Copernicus.
The cost of higher education is through the roof. Well … it depends on what you mean.
Higher education is going through profound changes that are changing the shape, but we are still seeing only the old beast in a kind of persistence of vision scenario. We still see clearly the old world that we know and loved, the great universities with the names we all know. But this is always a limited resource, one that cannot be expanded. There are only so many “Top Universities”. That is why it is getting harder and harder to get into them and more expensive for the happy few who make the jump.
But maybe the big names like Harvard, Yale, Stanford and even our own beloved UVA are analogous to big names like Cadillac, Lincoln, Packard & Rolls Royce – great old luxury vehicles. The best universities had all the advantages, including things like professors with great credentials, big libraries and prestigious pedigrees. The only advantage that really remains is the pedigree. Internet has largely equalized the advantage of the libraries and we have trained up so many great professors in the last couple of generations that there really is not a significant difference among the top hundreds of institutions. The great old universities are the bright stars, but most of the educational universe is made up of the dark matter that we sometimes don’t see.
Lots of learning is not university-based at all. We have options. If you live in a decent sized city, you can go to free lectures at think tanks & foundations. W/o leaving your house, you can listen to a wide variety of courses on I-pad and you have an interactive experience online with programs such as the Khan Academy.
And then there are Community Colleges. I was mightily impressed by my visit to Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA). They have great facilities and faculty and they provide a quality education for only 25-33% of the cost of a public university and less than a tenth of the cost of a good private institution. Beyond that, they have open enrollment. This I like.
I dislike stringent entrance requirements. This wall you need to jump can determine your life chances and you have to jump this wall when you are too young to really know what is going on. Far better, IMO, is to have lots of chances, lots of options. After all, it doesn’t really matter what road you take to success if you arrive there. All the matters is if you know the material or not. I like the idea that you get to try until you succeed or until you decide to stop. Why be punitive? When Edison invented the light bulb, nobody penalized him for his thousands of “failures.”
Community colleges are flexible and responsive to the needs of customers. In Virginia, almost nobody is more than a half hour’s drive form a community college course. They take the courses to where the demand lies. NOVA sometimes holds the courses on the premises of firms.
Chip maker Micron told us that they decided to stay in Manassas partly because NOVA was responsive to training needs in math, ESL, tech writing and other STEM and George Mason was there for research support.
Our Brazilian friends seemed as impressed as I was and there are lots of places for cooperation on Science w/o Borders. NOVA already has students from many countries. They can take some of the Brazilian students in their second year. More importantly, NOVA has extensive experience in English teaching. They can bring some of the Brazilian students up to speed in English. It may be the start of a beautiful friendship.
All universities, especially public universities are supposed to contribute to the general welfare. This means educating the people, giving advice to firms and producing public intellectual goods. NOVA people told us that they have three sorts of students. Some are the traditional type who are preparing for a four year institution; other are non-traditional students and still others are in it to hone their job stills. The task is to serve the people in their various permutations. When universities become more exclusive, they cannot do this task well anymore. Open enrollment is something we used to have and now don’t in good universities. That is why I like the idea. We need to make it easier to go in and out of the learning environment. We cannot set up walls that hold people back or need to be jumped.
We used to think that we graduated HS. Then we went to college. We came out four years later and we were done. This is changed. We no longer have the easily discerned boundaries and there is never a finish line for education. If we ever think we are finished, we ARE finished in the other sense of the word.
The picture up top show part of the NOVA campus in Annandale. Below is a computer lab where they teach development math. Students learn at their own pace. They have tutors to help, but much of this is programmed. The people at NOVA say that it works a lot better.
We are taking some of our Brazilian friends on the road, or maybe they are taking us. The bottom line is that twenty-eight leaders of Brazilian universities are going to the U.S. and I get to go with them along with the executive director of Fulbright in Brazil and one of my Brazilian Embassy colleagues. We will break into three groups going to the east, west and middle of the U.S. The first goal is to sell leaders of American institutions on Brazil and sell Brazilians on American institutions.
That will be the easy part. Enthusiasm for exchange is through the roof. The second goal is harder: we need to channel that enthusiasm into practical results with real-live students and scholars moving between our two countries.
This is a Brazilian program; we are helping them and helping ourselves by making sure they get a good reception in the U.S. Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff set in motion her plan, Ciência sem fronteiras or Science w/o Borders, to send 100,000 Brazilians to study overseas in the STEM fields (Science, technology, engineering & math). Half should go to the United States. President Obama’s 100,000 Strong for the Americas aspires to send students from the U.S. in the other direction.
Currently around 9000 Brazilians are studying in the U.S.; not many considering there are more than 192 million Brazilians. The Brazilians hope to get four or five times that number within the next few years. We got the first couple hundred Brazilian on planes for the U.S. last month. Now we have to do the same for a few thousand more. Our presidents have given us the direction, but if it is really going to happen it is up to us. Ringing in my mind is “If not us, who? If not now, when?” Maybe I am given to a littler hyperbole, but only a little.
We have the opportunity of a lifetime and what happens in the next couple of months will be crucial to the relations between the U.S. and Brazil for the next decades. This is not just hyperbole. In the next couple of years, we will exchange tens of thousands some of the best and brightest of our countries. If it works as I believe it will, this will create pathways and connections that become self-sustaining with a positive feedback loop. People and ideas will flow between the two biggest democracies in the hemisphere; friendships will flower.
My group will be on the east coast. I chose the east coast because it is the part of the country I know best, where I can add the most value. (I also am happy to have the opportunity to go home and will save the USG a little money on the days I can stay at my own house.) We will be in New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina. There are many more places we should go and we have not forgotten about them, but we had to go where we could in the short time we have. Our inability to reach a wider group is one reason I will write on this blog at every stop.
This will be a journey of discovery for me. I want to come back knowing more about the landscape of American higher education as pertains to exchanges. I want to understand the practical details of Science w/o Borders and the role that we can play to make it a greater success. And I want to make a record of all this so that I can share what I think will be an important learning experience.
It is often not the person who you touch but the person touched by that person who really makes the difference. This I noticed when we talked to a guy at a reception at our political counselor’s house last night. He had not been on one of our programs but had a close friend who had been. This friend visited reconciliation meetings in Manhattan as part of a Voluntary Visitor tour.
He told us that he did not get the idea from us – reconciliation meetings are an old idea after all – but knowing that such a model was working so well in the U.S. inspired him to go ahead with his push for an expansion of the reconciliation system in Brazil.
As background he told us that the general idea of a meeting of reconciliation had been around during the time of the Empire in Brazil, but had largely been abandoned with the advent of the republic, when many were animated by Positivist ideas of clear regulation applied everywhere the same. Results of a reconciliation meeting are more like common law. They are agreements among parties and specifically do not require the close exercise of specific rules.
Brazilians like to make laws, he commented tangentially, but sometimes don’t think enough of how these laws will be implemented. For example, he joked that he would not be surprised if there was a law against floods. This sometimes overweening love of rules, even if they won’t be followed, impedes sometimes messy but effective institutions such as reconciliation meetings.
These bodies are specifically NOT courts; a judge is not involved in the actual sessions. A judge can legally sign (and enforce) an agreement that comes out of the reconciliation session, but does not intervene in the formation of the agreement itself.
He admits that the meetings are not uniform throughout Brazil and that there is significant resistance by lawyers and judges. Some of this is principled – they don’t think justice is properly served, but some is probably just that they see the meetings as eroding their privileged position. Many people prefer the alternative to the court system, which is very slow and can be very expensive to use.
When somebody used the term arbitration, our friend pointed out that this was specifically not what the reconciliation meetings were doing. Arbitration, he thought, would not fit in well with Brazilian cultural norms. They either decide by themselves or go to the judge. Judges are involved in the reconciliation meetings, however. They record the agreement which becomes legally enforceable as a contract.
We have been sending IVLP and VV groups of Brazilian lawyers and jurist to the U.S. for some time and it seems to have a positive effect. Brazil’s legal system is based mostly in code law and so resembles continental Europe much more than a country like the U.S. which leans on common law. However many commercial and regulatory rules are based on similar principles in our countries. We can learn from each other.
Another guest at the party gave me the two minute version of Brazilian legal history. Brazil started off as a code law country, with Continental European style laws with roots in the Napoleonic or even the Justinian codes. But in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, Brazilian elites were fascinated by the U.S. experience. They thought that they could learn from the other large republic in the Americas. So some Brazilian legal practice acquired an American accent. He mentioned specifically Ruy Barbosa. This is a name I knew from streets named after him, but I learned that he was a great figure in Brazilian political, legal and literary circles. I was a little embarrassed not to know more. He is certainly someone I should get to know better.
My picture is unrelated to the story. It is left over from my recent trip and shows a dock on the Amazon.
It is as if one world lassoed another and pulled it closer. That is what this bridge across the Rio Negro did. It is the first bridge you encounter as you come up the Amazon system. The river is just too wide everywhere else and besides there is nothing much to connect.
There is nothing much to connect here either – yet. The long high bridge now ties the unremarkable village of Iranduba with Manaus might seem like a waste of money. But it is changing things. You used to have to take a ferry for a couple hours to get to Iranduba & there were few reasons to make the trip; you can now drive in fifteen minutes. This has the practical effect of creating new land in Manaus and you can already see what will happen in the next few years. As you cross the bridge into this formerly distant peninsula between the Solimões and Rio Negro, the first thing you notice is all the real estate signs. It reminded me of Northern Virginia in the boom times. This will soon be suburbs and exurbs, probably mostly high end from the looks of the pictures advertising the new developments.
From my public affairs angle, I thought this would be the ideal time to connect local leaders with Americans who have experienced similar growth in the not very distant past. Development is inevitable, but it can be done well or poorly. There is a lot of wetland and nature that should be properly protected. If done well, they can avoid the damage caused by rising water and erosion. I say avoid the damage, because they cannot avoid the water and can avoid damage by not building in some places. People like to build on low areas near water. They shouldn’t do it. Beyond that, I hope that there is better planning. Manaus is not an attractive city. Just spreading it across the river would be a bad idea. Maybe some of these guys should visit Curitiba. They plan right down there (although this week’s “Veja” indicates that not all is well in Curitiba’s suburbs.)
The village of Iranduba evidently has only two claims to fame, or did before the recent Anschluß with Manaus. It was a place that produced bricks and natural rubber condoms. The brick making is the one that the town fathers choose to emphasize but the monument they chose to erect could be appropriate to both, as you can see from the picture above. Below is the other factory Lam-Latex.
Besides these industries, there seemed to be a lot of fishing and cattle ranching. I don’t know what will happen to the former ferry port on the Solimões. My first thought was that it would atrophy and fade away, but if the town grows I could envision it becoming a kind of tourist attraction.
We visited a big marketplace where the locals could buy all they needed.The fish were very fresh, many were still alive. I could not identify them, but they said some were piranhas. Besides fish, there were butcher shops, produce stands, stands selling clothes etc.
Farther down the road are more tourist attractions in transition. You can see in the pictures. It reminds me of those little resorts on small lakes in Wisconsin. Most of them have now become bigger, moved high-end or faded away. I think the days of the little lakes lodges are fleeting.
The beach you see in the picture is on the Rio Negro. The water is very warm and shallow. This is a high water time on the Rio Negro, as you can tell from the submerged trees and bushes. Our Brazilian friend told us that the beach had gone out another twenty meters a few weeks earlier.
Below is the characteristic we environment near Iranduba. I joked with our Brazilian friends that I expected alligators. They pointed out that this was not true, since this was anaconda habitat. I expect people moving into new subdivisions won’t be able to keep small dogs and cats … at least not for long. I thought my colleague Justen should wade into the water and see if he could scare up a couple of the big snakes, but he was unenthusiastic about the idea.
Last week was our youth and education week. Our posts in Brasília, São Paulo, Rio and Recife processed almost 600 program participants (37 Youth Ambassadors, 20 Student Leaders, and 540 Public School English Teachers, CAPL). This launch is a big step in a continuing success in connection the American and the Brazilian nations and an investment in the future.
The biggest group was the 540 teachers of English. Minister of Education Mercadante and Ambassador Shannon gave the high profile send off in Brasília as did teams in São Paulo, Rio, and Recife. Our Brazilian friends recognize the need for English and they are encouraging progress with a six week capacity building programs at eighteen higher education institutions throughout the U.S. The picture above is from that event. We also signed an agreement to keep the program going with another 540 teachers going out in July.
Our part of the program is identifying programs in the U.S. as well has helping with visas and logistics. Our Brazilian friends are doing the heavy lifting and supporting the teachers. I love this program and I am proud of the input we had in helping shape it. Participants are all public school teachers representing all twenty-six states in Brazil plus the Federal District. We all think that spreading the benefits to all corners of the country is an important goal. I got to meet a lot of the teachers. For many, this was their first time travelling outside Brazil and many had not even travelled much within Brazil. This will be a life changing experience for them and I hope they will be able to change and improve the lives of countless students when they get back. This is a big deal and being part of the aspirations of so many people is a fantastic privilege.
I have written about Youth Ambassadors before. The Youth Ambassadors are also chosen from public schools with special care taken to make sure that every Brazilian state is represented. This is “our” program in that we organize it, but it also has become a shared success with our Brazilian partners. We had almost 17,000 applicants for the thirty-seven available slots. Our partners throughout Brazil winnow this number down to a manageable number (about 200). After that, my colleagues read through all applications and make the final choices. It is a tough job. We could easily send 500 w/o diminishing quality, but I don’t have the staff or the cash to make it happen. I am trying to think of ways to get somebody else to take up some of the slack.
This year we are partnering with EMBRATUR for the first time. EMBRATUR is the Brazilian tourist agency. One of the reasons why Youth Ambassadors is so well accepted here is that it truly is a partnership. We are not just explaining America to Brazilians but also helping Americans understand Brazilians. EMBRATUR helped with materials and information, helping our Youth Ambassadors know their own country. Many of the Youth Ambassadors have not traveled much in Brazil and it is great to have a partner like EMBRATUR.
This week we also launched this year’s Student Leaders. Twenty of them will go to University of Tennessee in Knoxville. The Student Leaders are older than the Youth Ambassadors and different from the SwB students because they are studying subjects such as political science and history. I think we generally do a good job with youth in Brazil because we have such great youth to work with. I am inspired when I talk to them and glad that they want to learn about the U.S.
We held a big pizza party at Casa Thomas Jefferson to honor all the groups that were leaving from Brasília. Similar events were held in Rio, São Paulo and Recife, but I can best describe ours. 141 “youth” showed up for the party. I put youth in quotation marks because the teachers are youth in comparison to me but maybe not all are youth in comparison to … very young people. One of our staff acted as MC and did a wonderful job. Everyone seemed to have a good time, but it was a little loud for me. The Youth Ambassadors seemed to love Gangham style. I didn’t know what that was until a few weeks ago and I can see why kids like it. They all got up and danced frenetically when it came on. I didn’t dance.
Pictures show some of the groups, plus the pizza makers and CTJ Southwest.
I would call it a public diplomacy triumph & I don’t think it is hyperbole to say so. We held “visa days” in Rio, São Paulo & Brasilia for student going to the U.S. on Science w/o Borders scholarships. There were about 600 served today. The Brazilian government estimates that they will have sent 1500 to the U.S. by summer and more from then on thousands more.
In Brasilia, we held a big event to talk to them about the U.S. and get them ready to go to the U.S. They will be spread out all over the U.S.
We called our event “Burgers w/o Borders.” The Ambassador and other American officers cooked and served hamburgers, American style, on a fried on a Webber grill. (I cooked too, as you can see in the picture.) Our goal was to create an American style cookout.
Always I try to learn from our successes as well as our failures and so I have been thinking about this. Getting this first wave of Brazilians to the U.S. only a few months after the Brazilian president announced the outlines of the program is a definite success. In the midst of such success, we need to determine the role of our team. How different would be the outcome if we did things differently? We don’t want to be like the rooster taking credit for the sunrise, but we also don’t want to attribute to luck what was influenced or even shaped by our efforts. You cannot learn from experience if you take credit for everything or take credit for nothing.
Results are important, but the only way to improve is to study the process that went into the results. The challenge is when we study the process already knowing how the story ended. Knowing the outcome, we work backwards, emphasizing events that seem to have contributed to what we know happened, but may not have done so, may not be duplicable or may not be recognizable in advance. Some people say that hindsight is 20/20, but this overestimates our ability to understand the real processes and underestimates our tendencies to tell good stories and create narratives even where they don’t exist. Our stories usually overestimate deliberate actions of individuals involved, undervalue the importance of interactions among actors and neglect almost entirely the role of random events. We also tend to emphasize our own contributions. This is not only because we are egocentric, but also because information about our own actions is more readily available to us. With those caveats in mind, I am thinking through the process.
I have written earlier about the larger program, Science w/o Borders. You can read about it here. I won’t repeat. Let me talk here specifically about our visa days/Burgers w/o Borders, the reception we gave the students that made it an event, marked a transition, and created an impression.
First let me be open about what I think I can take credit for doing (caveats above applying). I take credit for taking this program seriously and conveying the urgency to colleagues around Brazil. I knew where we wanted to be. Leadership is intangible in many ways. Big successes or failures often look impossible before they happen, but then inevitable after the fact. By extension the person pushing it sometimes seems nuts before and irrelevant after. That was my role (yes – to seem nuts before & irrelevant after, and I did it well.) I didn’t let things slip, pushed for success and let everyone know that I would back them up. W/o this leadership, I am convinced we would not have achieved this result. In the bigger picture, w/o the Mission’s consistent, proactive support, I do not believe the students would have gone this semester. We would have had a trickle in the fall semester and it would have seemed to be the natural outcome.
“My” biggest contribution was putting the right people in the right places and letting them do what they were good at doing. I have been teaching my Brazilian colleagues the use of the word “honcho” both as a noun and a verb. I use it in a particular fashion. For me the honcho, or the person honchoing, does what is needed to make something work. He/she doesn’t always have specific power he/she is working with in other cases and has to enlist cooperation through a variety of persuasion and power methods.
I asked my colleague Lana to honcho the logistics of the program at the Embassy. She did a great job of coordinating the work of others. I think it is important that the big boss (i.e. me in this case) back the honcho, but not be in charge of details. This gives the actual honcho the ability to refer to higher authority and strengthens his/her ability to implement. You would think that having the ability to make the final decision would be strength, but it is often weakness. IMO, we in State often make decisions at too high a level and/or with too much consensus. My father told me that I should never spend a dollar to make a nickel decision. The honcho can make decisions with the cover of the big boss using the resort to higher authority if there are problems (i.e. can say “I would like to do it, but you know how the boss is.”)
(It is very important that if we delegate responsibility, we also need to delegate authority for most decisions and freedom to make them. I hate it when someone gives responsibility and then comes back to second-guess or revisit all the decisions. Good leaders, IMO, add value by asking good questions and sharing experience when appropriate. Bad leaders subtract value by “taking charge” of details or “holding people accountable” while not giving them enough freedom to be responsible. I am aware that I also suffer those faults and try tread lightly on working systems. I think of good leadership in forestry terms: know the environment; plant the right trees; thin and trim as appropriate; protect them from pests them; give them enough but not too much fertilizer to grow and let the system develop, all the time accepting that it is more complex in its details than you can understand.)
Another important “small” success was giving the program a catchy name. A project with a good name is almost always done better than one w/o one. We chose “Burgers w/o Borders” because it was a lighthearted parallel to “Science w/o Borders”. It also had the advantage of fitting the program and the beauty of alliteration. In other words, it is easy to say; appropriate and memorable in the sense that it evokes a concrete image.
My colleagues had lots of ideas about making the event memorable in other ways. We had T-shirts and umbrellas to make the pictures memorable. Look at the picture down of the crowd with the umbrellas. Now imagine it with just a couple people with ordinary clothes and no umbrellas. Look at my picture with the Burgers w/o Borders apron and the cowboy hat. Image makes a difference, doesn’t it?
On the day of the event, we put all hands on deck. There was some redundancy, but you need slack. Better to have someone standing around unneeded than have someone needed not standing by.
Media was willing to cover the event because it was an event. Our press section colleagues were able to sell the it using the hook of the cookout event. They could promise good visuals and interesting stories from the student. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Science w/o Borders had been in the news recently. A good PD rule of thumb is that you should not create your own wave when you can catch and ride higher on one that is already coming your way. People are interested in “their” events, not ours. We also encouraged the students to bring and use their cameras and cellular phones. Young people are natural creators on social media, but you need to create opportunities for them. Since Burgers w/o Borders was not in the Embassy proper, security let them keep their devices.
Of course, much of the success was created by others. Our Consular sections all over Brazil were keys to success. They were fantastically cooperative. After all, visa day required visas. As I alluded immediately above, our security folks were also very helpful and flexible. This was a case where we were lucky, lucky to have great colleagues. I really cannot “analyze” that, except to say that keeping colleagues in the loop, showing them respect and understanding their needs is essential in any cooperative endeavor, and this category includes almost all human activities.
Of course, our Brazilian friends will see it differently. From their point of view, WE are the support activity for their program and they are right. We are supporting their success. They are right too. It is a win all around, enough to go around.
P.S. Students arrived on buses and had to line up to get through security. A line is a great PR opportunity, as all politicians know. You have a captive audience eager for some diversion. I worked the line on the way in, stopping to talk to forty or fifty Brazilians on as individuals. I think this made a great impression on the students. We spoke in Portuguese outside the Embassy and then English inside to show the transition. We joked about the quality of my hamburgers and generally made the personal connection. I think this is something they will take with them and remember for a long time.
We have been getting lots of visitors in Brazil. They have to come now, since much activity shut down for the holidays a couple of weeks from now and will not really recommence until after Carnival.
The most interesting for me was a visit by a delegation from the State of Massachusetts led by Governor Deval Patrick. Most of the delegation consisted of business people representing high-tech and life-science firms, but there were also representatives of Massachusetts’ universities. We were happy to see them, since they fit in well with our support for the Ciência sem Fronteiras project. The universities reps said that they were interested in taking Brazilian students and the Brazilians are interested in going to Massachusetts, so it looks like we have the beginnings of a beautiful friendship.
Massachusetts is a case study in the value of education. The state has gone through good times and hard times, but it always adapts. The high levels of education make this much easier. I gave a short presentation to the group and they were pleased when I called their home a “state of brains” but I was not trying to flatter. Massachusetts has long been one of the case studies I use when talking about renewal, resilience and the crucial role that education plays in easing transitions.
Nobody can predict the future with any certainty. The best plans and most elegant adaptions to current conditions will someday become useless and maybe even dysfunctional when technologies, trade patterns or other relationships change. Education cannot protect you from change, but it can help you identify trends and develop options to deal with them.
