Pardee School Hosts Alumni for Global Town Hall
On December 1, 2020, the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global of Global Studies at Boston University hosted a Global Town Hall for the school’s alumni led by Adil Najam, Dean of the Pardee School. This was the 11th and concluding event in a months long series of global networking events that brought together members of the Pardee School alumni community from around the world.
After a brief introduction by Bob Sherburne, Assistant Dean at the Pardee School, Dean Najam spoke about the “state of the Pardee School.” He said that the Pardee School alumni community is over 10,000 strong, emphasizing that this includes those who graduated from BU’s Department of International Relations prior to the Pardee School’s founding. A primary challenge of the Pardee School has been identifying its global alumni and creating an active community, and attendees supported this mission and voiced their excitement about bolstering the community.
Dean Najam went on to say that the Pardee School, now in its seventh year of operation, has become a renowned school of global studies uniquely positioned to tackled the world’s most pressing issues. He said that other similar schools were founded and built around specific issues of the time – “foreign affairs” following WWI, and “diplomacy” following WWII – and the Pardee School’s focus on interdisciplinary study go beyond any single issue. While topics of international affairs and diplomacy are still very important, Dean Najam said the Pardee School’s global vision is vital to advancing human progress as there is not a single issue today that can be tackled without understanding it from a global perspective.
Following Najam’s remarks, alumni shared their stories with fellow attendees including their various professions – military service, international development, television production, finance, lobbying, and communications to name a few – and how they have been fairing during the COVID-19 pandemic. They were then broken into breakout groups to connect on a more personal level.
The event brought together alumni from all over the world, including Boston, Colombia, Edinburgh, Geneva, Greece, New York, Toronto, Washington, D.C., as well as a number of other countries, states, and cities.