Last summer featured a brief debate on how best to address the presence of nearly 50,000 unaccompanied
children in the US – Mexico border region. Yet the news coverage hardly mentioned that the children were merely the latest indicator of humanitarian crisis in a region where every year several hundred individuals dehydrate and die in a baking desert.

This crisis has developed in near simultaneity with more than a decade of assertions from higher education leaders that we in colleges and universities either should—or indeed already do—create global citizens. And it reveals just how empty our global citizenship leadership has been. Or it illuminates the extent to which many who use the term global citizen may actually mean globally competitive capitalists who excel across cultures.

In this month’s International Educator, globalsl.org editor Eric Hartman considers the role that higher education should play in fostering meaningful connection, respect, dignity, and acceptance across cultures and around the world. Read the full article here.

Photo above: The US-Mexico Border Region, near Agua Prieta, by Shannon Wheatley Hartman