MIT has established a new International Advisory Committee (IAC) to assess and support MIT's international activities, Provost L. Rafael Reif announced today.
The IAC will help to ensure that MIT's growing international activities "continue to advance our core missions of teaching, research and service," Reif wrote in an e-mail to the MIT faculty.
Reif charged the committee with designing a strategy to target countries and regions where MIT should focus its international efforts and identifying cross-cutting topics and themes. The IAC will also advise Reif and President Susan Hockfield on how to ensure that international initiatives and partnerships proposed by the MIT faculty serve the Institute's core mission.
"If we are to remain a leader in education and research in a globalizing world, we must maintain a pipeline to the world's best students, wherever they may reside. We must increase opportunities for our students to have diverse international educational experiences. We must engage actively in the world's most exciting research fields, wherever they may be found," Reif wrote. "It is increasingly clear that to accomplish all of this will require a more clearly articulated international strategy."
"Since the early 1990s, our society has come to realize the critical importance of international engagement to long-term competitiveness and global security. The establishment of the IAC reflects the fact that MIT itself, over the same period, has become in many critical respects a global university," said Associate Provost Philip S. Khoury, one of the co-chairs of the new committee.
Also co-chairing the committee is Claude R. Canizares, vice president for research and associate provost. Committee members are Professors Suzanne Berger (School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences), Diane E. Davis (School of Architecture and Planning), Steven D. Eppinger (MIT Sloan), Daniel Roos (School of Engineering), Robert J. Silbey (School of Science), George C. Verghese (School of Engineering) and Victor W. Zue (School of Engineering).
Ex officio members are Chancellor Phillip L. Clay, Dean for Undergraduate Education Daniel E. Hastings, Vice President for Resource Development Jeffrey L. Newton and incoming Chair of the Faculty Bish Sanyal.
The committee will report regularly to Hockfield, Reif and the Faculty Policy Committee, and will report from time to time to the MIT faculty on its progress.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on June 6, 2007 (download PDF).
