TW: These are somewhat feel good stories but represent the U.S. and others trying to do good things. Soft power is disdained by some but to me the day the U.S. stops performing things like building American Universities abroad will be a sad day. The day emerging powers start doing so will be a good one (and no madrassas do not count in my book).
From NYT:
" Back in late 1991, when things seemed very dark in the Balkans, I came to this nondescript town of 70,000 or so at the foot of the Rila and Pirin mountains, and found something rare, and inspiring.
At the time, Serbs and Croats were dying by the scores — for their leaders’ delusions — in the ruins of the city of Vukovar...it was trebly refreshing, on a wintry Balkan day, to talk to the pioneering souls who had then just set up the American University in Bulgaria.
...The enthusiasm of the 13 American and 3 Bulgarian faculty, and the first 195 students, was hard to miss. “This is where the action is, this is where people are making choices that have rarely been made in history,” gushed Janet Connolly, then a 62-year-old law professor from Temple University. “We’re not just learning the ropes,” said John Fleming, another American faculty member. “We’re weaving them.”
In the years since, the university has known ups and downs — visits from Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, but also disputes over authority and customary uncertainty over funding.
...Funded from the start by the Bulgarian government, the Blagoevgrad authorities, the U.S. government and the Open Society Foundation of George Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire, the university has swollen to about 1,100 students. They live in gleaming residence halls and enjoy a 100,000-volume library, the largest such in southeastern Europe.
Between 30 and 40 percent of the students come from outside Bulgaria — many from other former Communist countries as far east as Mongolia. Faculty, too, is international, with around 40 percent American. Instruction, of course, is in English.
...The salutatorian, with a 3.98 grade point average and acceptance letters from eight American schools for graduate studies, was Laila Zulkaphil, from Ulan Bator, Mongolia. She heads to Georgetown University in Washington this autumn to study conflict resolution.
...To list all this sounds boosterish, and also misses the point that most of this university’s graduates stay in their home regions, declining to join the “brain drain” that took so many bright Balkan youngsters West.
...As Slavenka Drakulic, the Croatian writer who gave the keynote address, noted: “Freedom is a rare and precious fruit in this part of the world.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/world/europe/29iht-letter.html
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