Dean Najam Keynotes at Global Citizenship Summit
Dean Adil Najam of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University was invited to present keynote address at the Mellon Global Citizenship Summit organized by the Salzburg Global Seminars and the Mellon Global Citizenship Program. The Summit was held in Kingsport, TN, from September 29 – October 1, 2016.
Najam’s keynote talk was titled “Global Citizenship Education – A 21st Century Imperative,” and focused on some of the key challenges and opportunities in higher education in terms of global citizenship education. Speaking to an audience of higher education administrators and teachers, Dean Adil Najam shared the experience of establishing the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston Univeristy and the School’s approach to ‘globalness’ and training a generation of young leaders equipped to deal with the pressing global and international challenges of our times.
Najam suggested that we live in “global times” and it is imperative for higher education to confront this reality and equip students with the tools and skills needed to excel in these “global times.” In particular, he highlighted the key questions that are central to this challenge, including (a) questions of defining the global and its relationship to the international as well as the local, (b) questions of dealing with multiple ‘citizenships’ which is now a widespread reality both geographically and technologically, and (c) structuring global citizenship as a set of meaningful concepts as well as useful skills.
Adil Najam is the inaugural dean of the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston Univeristy and was the former Vice Chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Lahore, Pakistan. Read more on him, here.