What Higher Education Can Learn from Global Affairs
The world has never been more interconnected, yet many graduates enter the workforce without the global awareness and adaptability that interconnection demands. At the same time, nations and institutions are struggling with the very skill higher education exists to teach: how to collaborate across differences on shared problems. That raises a question worth sitting with. What can higher education learn from the world of global affairs, and how should it prepare students to lead in it?
In this episode of Radical Cooperation, Dr. Michael Horowitz speaks with Dr. Stewart Prest, a political scientist and lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, whose work focuses on democracy, international cooperation, and the geopolitical trends shaping our world. Their conversation ranges from why cooperation between democracies rests on a sense of shared identity rather than pure transaction, to how decades of economic integration across North America became so hardwired that unwinding it carries real costs. Dr. Prest also explains why Canada’s higher education sector developed so differently from the American one, and what that means for students on both sides of the border.
Rather than treating global affairs as distant from campus life, this conversation traces the direct lines between international dynamics and the institutions, students, and communities higher education serves. It closes on a practical note about what educators can actually do: build relationships across borders, help people see the world with clear eyes, and start with concrete projects that can scale.
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