Preface
p. 7-10
Texte intégral
1The University of New Orleans (UNO) and the Leopold-Franzens University of Innsbruck (LFUI) have been cultivating a transatlantic university partnership for some 35 years. This partnership has grown out of the six-week summer school program UNO has organized in Innsbruck since 1976. The two universities signed a partnership treaty in 1982. A multitude of programs grew out of this. No Austrian university has such a deep relationship with an American university as does LFUI with UNO. Student and faculty exchange programs, conferences and joint publications are now regular parts of the agenda. The UNO-LFUI exchange of students grew, when international student mobility dramatically increased in Austria after the end of the Cold War in 1989-91 and Austria’s accession to the European Union in 1995. In 1997, CenterAustria was founded at UNO to coordinate all of these activities. In 2010, LFUI opened up a “New Orleans Office” to coordinate the many activities with UNO. Both institutions thus acknowledge the important role of this bilateral university partnership. These days, some 70 Innsbruck students come to UNO every year to study for a semester or two; they learn about different pedagogical approaches, which makes them see the world with different eyes.
2Studying abroad today also means getting an education to prepare them for what might be called “global citizenship” – attaining the education, social and interpersonal skills to function in the global city. Strong universities and their international student bodies are part of the make-up of global cities. Students not only open their eyes to the United States and the American South, they also gather first-hand impressions of New Orleans, one of the most unique American cities. More than 10,000 American students have studied with the UNO Summer School and the Academic Year Abroad programs in Innsbruck; more than 1,000 Innsbruck students have studied at UNO.
3International student mobility has become a vital part of a nation’s soft power positioning it in the global arena; it is also part of nation branding. Students who return home with positive impressions of the place where they studied will carry these “scratches on their mind” for the rest of their lives. During the academic year of 2010/11, 723,000 foreign students studied at American universities – 20 percent of the global total. These students added $20 billion to the American economy. More importantly, these students engaged in cross-cultural dialogue. They learned about “American values”. International student mobility is increasingly seen as a component of a nation’s public diplomacy, as the British scholar Giles Scott-Smith reminds us. Educating young people also means educating the elite of the future. In this sense, studying abroad within the context of the UNO-LFUI partnership also means contributing to the “Americanization” of young Austrians and the “Austrianization” of young Americans. An increasingly global politics of education also signifies an “explicitly non-coercive mode of imperial power” (Paul A. Kramer).
4Cities like New Orleans and Innsbruck, of course, want to establish and promote their own “brands” in the world. New Orleans’reputation is that of a musical and party city. New Orleans’global brand is its role as the cradle of jazz and the “Big Easy” – Mardi Gras is billed as the “biggest free party on earth”. Innsbruck’s brand is that of a “capital of the Alps”. Innsbruck and the Tyrol boast of being a hub of winter sports and home of two winter Olympics. These brands give even smaller and mid-sized cities like Innsbruck and New Orleans the status of “global cities”. The cities’fine educational institutions attract international students to “university towns” like Innsbruck and New Orleans; it helps define their positions and standing in the world as “global cities”. We must not only think of trade and finance when we think of global cities but also of culture and educational opportunities.
5University partnerships such as the UNO-LFUI model bring foreign students to town, open their minds and horizons, add economic benefit to the host cities and institutions, and help define the brands of these cities. In the case of Innsbruck and New Orleans, the university partnership has also led to a city partnership. Innsbruck has named one of its bridges over the Inn River “New Orleans Bridge”. There is a fancy marker in the busiest tourist sector of town that gives the distance to New Orleans (and to all other partner cities). Recently, a New Orleans street lamp has been set up in a residential development in a public housing project, where it joins street lights from other mid-sized partner cities of Innsbruck such as Freiburg in Germany, Grenoble in France, and Sarajevo in Bosnia. The City of Innsbruck organizes a highly popular “New Orleans Jazz Festival” every summer; 250 “UNO Summer School” students and 30 Summer School faculty members with their families are visible in Innsbruck during the six weeks of the program. The University of Innsbruck named a lecture hall for the “University of New Orleans”. Overall, the city of Innsbruck is well aware of the benefits it derives from international students and appreciates them as much as the millions of tourists visiting every year. In this sense, Innsbruck is a global city.
6While there is a conference room named after the University of Innsbruck at UNO, no such public awareness and recognition of partner cities has been advanced by the city of New Orleans. While the “brand of New Orleans” is very strong in Innsbruck, apart from the UNO campus, the “brand of Innsbruck” does not exist in New Orleans. In other words, Innsbruck is much more aware of what the unique UNO-LFUI partnership is doing for the city. New Orleans with its seven universities is oblivious to the universities’import of foreign students and the 59 million dollars of economic impact they had on the city in 2011/12 (17 million of which were produced by UNO’s international students). The mayor’s office seems to be unaware of the numerous university partnerships of the city’s seven universities that add manifold short and long-term benefits to the city and its global brand. New Orleans refuses to recognize what international students bring to the city and how much they contribute financially to the community’s well-being. New Orleans only recognizes the economic power of millions of tourists coming to town for a few days to attend sporting and cultural events or to enjoy fine dining and partying. It does not see the thousands of foreign students, living in the city for a semester or a year or even longer and becoming life-long ambassadors for the city in their home countries. In this sense, New Orleans is not a global but a provincial city.
7Annual symposia, producing intense transatlantic academic discourses, have been a significant part of the UNO-LFUI university partnership since 1982. Different areas of a comparative research have been a premier focus of these symposia, which have included topics like European Economic Integration and New Orleans Urban Development (1990), Comparative urban Revitalization Strategies (1992), Tourism and Festivals (1999), Satchmo Meets Amadeus: New Orleans and Salzburg – Two Cities and Their Sounds of Music (2000), and Gated Cities: The Privatization of Urban Space (2004). Most of the papers of these annual UNO-LFUI symposia have been published. Global Cities expands the horizon from a transatlantic to a global comparison and fits well into this long tradition of annual conferences.
8Finally, we would like to thank Andreas Exenberger and Philipp Strobl for organizing the meeting in Innsbruck in early November 2011 and the sponsors in Innsbruck for making the visiting scholars’stay enjoyable and memorable. They produced an academic program on a very high level. LFUI Rektor Tilmann Märk took time off his busy schedule to welcome the visitors to his fine institution. The International Office under Mathias Schennach provided financial support as did CenterAustria at UNO. Klaus Frantz, the coordinator of UNO affairs at LFUI, and Christina Sturn of the UNO Office at LFUI also helped to make the meeting possible. At innsbruck university press, Birgit Holzner was instrumental in bringing the papers to publication. At UNO, James Mokhiber contributed to the academic content of the program. Gertraud Griessner and the CenterAustria staff were crucial in organizational details in making the conference possible. Our copy editor Inge Fink, on very short notice, turned the contributors’academic prose into smooth English. We would like to thank all of them for making the symposium and this publication possible.
9New Orleans, winter 2012/13
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