World Citizens - DePaul University

We also can no longer assume that immigrants are poorly educated
or lacking in occupational skills. Consider contemporary Chicago’s
diverse mix of immigrant economic niches: Filipino doctors, nurses
and medical technicians; Indian and Chinese information technology
specialists; Mexican laborers and service workers; Korean and Indian
start-up entrepreneurs, to mention but a few. Nor are our immigrants
limited to Catholic, Protestant and Jew, but now include growing thousands
of Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. It is also time to dispense with
the stereotypical image of the central city, immigrant enclave. Today’s
Chicago immigrants can be found in middle-class and even exclusive
suburban neighborhoods. Most crucially, we can no longer assume that
immigration is a one-way exodus from country of birth and at the cost
of severed family ties and lost friendships. Contemporary immigration
is frequently a two-way highway in which the back and forth are
fueled by low-cost telephone plans, satellite TV and the Internet.
slightly older law students, and returning adults in the College of
Commerce or the School for New Learning for jobs located very close
to home, in globalized Chicago. Others will leave our city, some drawn
to towns, cities and rural areas many flight hours and nation-states
beyond the borders of the United States. It is obviously one of our
university’s principal responsibilities to equip these various students—
lifelong Chicagoans, immigrant students who return to their countries
of birth, and American students who will relocate abroad—with the
academic, professional and technical skills necessary to perform their
varying economic roles. But it will be equally important for our university
to train them in skills of global citizenship, which will incline them
to observe and to appreciate variations in language, national identity
and local business cultures. As global citizens our graduates will
recognize that globalization is not simply a code word for “universal
Americanization.” DePaul graduates’ global citizenship skills will
Authors Larry Bennett
and John Koval (in hat)
explore Chicago’s Devon
Avenue neighborhood.
The reality of globalization within contemporary Chicago is not
merely increased foreign imports and exports, or industry-specific profit
and job losses due to cross-national competition. It is not merely the
greatly increased accessibility of formerly exotic vacation destinations.
It also means, as the title of our recently co-edited book proclaims, that
we have before us “a new Chicago.” And this Chicago is new not just
in the sense of the freshly rebuilt city that rose from the ashes of the
Great Fire of 1871. Ours is a socially and culturally transformed
new Chicago. Nor will our home metropolis’ evolution end with the
assimilation of the region’s current cohort of 1.6 million immigrants.
This generation of immigrants will drive contemporary change, and in
so doing contribute to ongoing changes in our region.
What does all of this mean for DePaul and its programs? Training
our students for the emergent globalized world means that we will
prepare many of our young liberal arts or computer science majors,
prepare them for a new world, some of whose dimensions cannot be
anticipated at this time. If we educate our students properly, they will
not simply be surfers riding the current wave of globalization. Rather,
they will be shapers of an emergent globalization that must produce a
more environmentally sustainable world, and coincidentally, a world
that needs to be more socially and economically balanced than the one
in which we live at present. And of course, all of this holds irrespective
of where our graduates “land,” in a corporate suite high above the west
Loop, serving an ethnically diverse citizenry in a far North Side ward
office, or running a nonprofit economic development program in Kenya.
Larry Bennett (professor of political science) and John Koval
(associate professor in sociology) are co-editors of “The New Chicago:
A Social and Cultural Analysis,” published by Temple University Press
in 2006. Other DePaul faculty co-editors on this volume are Michael
Bennett, Fassil Demissie, Roberta Garner and Kiljoong Kim.
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