Americans bid a sad farewell to legendary jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg in recent weeks, simultaneously celebrating her extraordinary contributions over 50 years to advancing gender equality and other important human rights issues in the United States. Justice Ginsburg’s life affirmed what all of us in international education have long known to be an essential truth: that study and research abroad transform and enrich individual lives, and more broadly, the character of nations.
Soon after her graduation from Columbia Law School in 1959 and subsequent clerkship with a federal judge, Justice Ginsburg began work at Columbia as Associate Director of the law school’s Project on International Procedure. In that position, she partnered with a Swedish legal scholar Anders Bruzelius to write a book on Swedish legal procedure, which led her to study Swedish and travel to Lund in 1962 for intensive research.
Justice Ginsburg later said “my eyes were opened up in Sweden” to the real possibility of gender equality, after observing eight times as many female law students in Swedish law schools as in the United States, women in senior judicial positions, and active debates in Swedish society about gross gender inequality in performing household chores that had largely been quiet in the U.S. at the time. Justice Ginsburg’s Swedish “lessons” excited her lifelong passion for gender equality, the benefits of which all Americans enjoy today.
It is this kind of powerful story that drives UVA to expand global experiences for all our students in every field – the sciences, engineering, humanities, business, the social sciences, and the law – in order to enrich our perspective in pursuing the more perfect union America’s founders, however flawed, envisioned. We will continue those efforts by resuming our active study abroad programs as soon as it is safe to do so, and by supplementing them with virtual global experiences that we are developing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our international student presence here on Grounds is an equally valuable component of our quest to establish UVA as a global university because of the extraordinary insights and perspectives they bring from their home countries. As President Ryan recently noted, international students are an essential part of our identity as a University and integral members of our community. In recent weeks, our international students have faced new pressures with a proposal from U.S. immigration authorities to constrain the duration of how long they may study in the U.S. We have assured our international students that the University will work hard to address their concerns about this proposal by joining together with other institutions across the U.S. to strongly urge the government to drop it.
Keeping America’s position as the number one destination for international study in the world – a key component of U.S. economic success and innovation – requires no less.
Stay Global!
