By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

President Neil L. Rudenstine spoke before a distinguished audience of educators and government leaders this past Sunday when he delivered the opening keynote address at the annual meeting of the American Council on Education (ACE).

In a talk delivered as the Robert H. Atwell Distinguished Lecture, Rudenstine discussed some of the major challenges facing higher education, focusing especially on increasing globalization, the impact of new information technologies, and the value of student diversity.

Other speakers at the conference, which ran from Feb. 23-25, included President Bill Clinton, Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, and United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

In his talk, Rudenstine emphasized the multiplicity of views and attitudes that has come to characterize the world in general during recent decades.

"All of us recognize that we are now actors in a drama that has become global in nature," he said. "We must take into account powerful new systems and forces that operate fairly autonomously above and through and around the traditional geographic grid of nation-states and regions."

In response to this increasing globalization, Rudenstine said, American colleges and universities must continue to open their doors to students and scholars from abroad, while also enlarging opportunities for American students to come to know other cultures firsthand. In addition, he said, it is time for a vigorous reaffirmation of the importance of international studies in both teaching and research, in ways that accommodate the growing emphasis on subjects -- such as ethnic conflict, environmental protection, and the emergence of new democracies -- that cut across national and regional borders.

Rudenstine also emphasized the power of new information technologies to enhance teaching and learning.

"The Internet and its related systems represent a genuine revolution in learning," he said, "one that is having a deep and lasting impact on formal education in ways that other modern technological innovations (such as radio or film or television) have never achieved."

Rudenstine said that such innovations as online library catalogs, electronic discussion groups, and the development of new digital course materials are already doing much to extend and enrich traditional forms of learning.

"Equally important," he said, "the Internet reinforces the idea of the student as an active, energetic agent in the process of learning. It places the student in the driver's seat, so to speak, and makes clear that very little will happen unless someone takes command. The student becomes an inquirer, discoverer, and apprentice scholar, engaged in a form of research, of learning by searching and pursuing -- as well as by communicating and collaborating."

He noted that some of the concerns expressed about the Internet -- that it contains an overabundance of information of mixed quality, and can distract people from face-to-face human contact -- echo worries expressed more than a century ago, when inexpensive mass printing took hold and major research libraries began to grow rapidly.

Our challenge, he said, "is to organize these new resources and to put them to the best possible educational use -- just as we learned to use earlier complex methods and systems," he said.

Rudenstine concluded with some remarks on the topic of student diversity.

He called attention to the importance of learning from other individuals with views and backgrounds different from one's own and pointed out that while the lessons of diversity are not easy, on the whole, great progress has been made during the past several decades in achieving tolerance on college campuses.

"This enterprise must be continued," he said. "It is currently under fire -- in court cases and in other forums. Given this situation, it is our task to explain -- as thoughtfully as we can -- why student diversity is in fact central to the very process of education, why students who are educated among a diverse group of peers are likely to be far more effective as citizens and leaders in a nation and world that are themselves diverse."

ACE has a membership of more than 1,700 accredited colleges and universities and serves as a forum for the discussion of major issues relating to higher education. This was the organization's 79th annual meeting.