CAS Alumni Magazine Features Pardee School’s Launch
The Fall 2014 issue of the Boston Univeristy College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) alumni magazine arts & sciences features a writeup on the launch of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, which is housed within CAS, focusing on the School’s “bold” mission: “to create a new generation of global leaders.”
The article, ‘Global Studies School Opens Its Doors’, written by Jeremy Schwab, highlight’s the Pardee School’s ambition to “support innovative education and research to help tackle the world’s most pressing political, social, and economic challenges.”
An excerpt from the article:
“We need to re-imagine what we mean by global studies, and indeed by ‘global,’” says founding Dean Adil Najam. “This is a school we wish to build to respond to the great challenges of our times: the challenges of peace and security we have inherited from the previous century, but also the new challenges of poverty and prosperity, of health and environment, of culture and identity, of technology and development, of governance and human rights. For a generation that already views itself as increasingly global in its own identity, this is a school that seeks to build not just global citizens, but global leaders.”
In Najam, the school has a dean who is both. A CAS professor of international relations and of earth and environment, he is an expert on climate change policy and South Asian politics. He was one of the lead authors of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and serves on the United Nations Committee on Development Policy. A former director of the Pardee Center, Najam was most recently the vice chancellor—which is equivalent to the president—of the Lahore University of Management Sciences in his native Pakistan.
Both Najam and Dean of Arts & Sciences Virginia Sapiro recognize the creation of the Pardee School as a pivotal moment in the history of global and international studies at CAS and BU.
“Once in a while, a university has the opportunity to take something it does well and transform it into something that makes it an international leader,” says Sapiro. “Mr. Pardee challenged us to create a new educational and research program aimed at advancing the progress of humanity, and we have accepted that challenge.”
Read the full article here.