Lehman at Australian Higher Ed Summit: Teach Students the Skills Needed in An Era of Globalization

At a gathering of university administrators and higher education thought leaders in Melbourne, Vice Chancellor Jeffrey Lehman challenged the audience to ensure that today’s young adults develop “six critical qualities” necessary for success in a society constantly being reshaped by globalization and smart machines: algorithmic thinking, critical analysis, creativity, social perceptiveness, the ability to persuade, and ambidependence.

During his keynote address to the AFR Higher Education Summit on August 28, Lehman spoke of NYU Shanghai’s pioneering efforts to develop a curriculum, pedagogical style and culture to instill these same critical qualities in its students.                

“NYU Shanghai was conceived in spirit to be a true experiment,” Lehman said. “It was designed to explore genuinely new approaches to higher education – new for China, new for NYU, and indeed new for higher education generally.”

Noting the difference between algorithmic thinking and the simple, vocational mastery of a programming or coding language, Lehman explained how NYU Shanghai prioritized the former as much as the latter.  

“What really matters is for students to cultivate a more abstract capacity for problem decomposition that they can apply to a wide set of intellectual domains, from programming languages to theoretical mathematics to philosophy,” Lehman said.

Arguing that “cosmopolitan age” is a better description for the times we live than “globalization” since the term “cosmopolitan” encompasses the ideas of “universality” with “respect for difference,” Lehman said that universities had to do more than just build diverse student bodies. Success for a university in our cosmopolitan age, Lehman said, should be the extent to which each student experiences engagement with people who are similar and engagement with people who are different.

Vice Chancellor Lehman also spoke proudly of welcoming the 455 members of the new Class of 2022, half of whom were from across China and the rest from 38 different countries.

“I impressed upon them the importance of stretching themselves, of pushing to make sure that every day includes an ebb and flow between easy interactions with ‘mates’ from homeland and interactions with classmates from a different world,” he said.

In addition to the keynote address, Vice Chancellor Lehman also joined a panel discussion with academics and business leaders to analyze the significance and prospects of the Chinese market for the Australian education sector.