Remarks at the U.S. University Presidents Summit on International Education Dinner

SECRETARY RICE: Thank you very much. I want to thank Margaret Spellings -- Secretary Spellings, my good and great colleague. We started out working together in the campaign of a governor and then ended up together in the White House. And she is someone of such passionate commitment to these issues. And Margaret, I just want to thank you for what you do every day to make sure that our children are well educated and that they can take full advantage of the wonderful opportunities that education can provide. So thank you for your leadership.

(Applause.)

I'd also like to thank Dina Powell who, if you will notice, is doing this despite an upcoming event of some import. But Dina has been a wonderful Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs and has really taken on, in a passionate way, the issues of educational exchange and education and so Dina, thank you, for your leadership as well. And I think Dina's story as an immigrant to this country is the purely American story. It's a story that many could tell and it's a story that she's now able to tell throughout the Middle East, particularly to women of the Middle East, in a way that is very impressive to them and I think gives them an eye into what democracy can really mean for the individual. So Dina, thanks.

(Applause.)

I also just want to thank the members of Congress who are here. There are numerous members of the Administration here -- Cabinet secretaries, White House staff. And I want to thank you for joining us, this distinguished group. But most of all, I want to thank you the university presidents, the community college presidents, those of you who are here to help us to think about what more we can do to make certain that America remains a place that is really open for education. It is so critical to our future and it is so critical to the future of the world. I'm very glad that we are having this opportunity to be here.

Now, as you might imagine, I feel particularly comfortable in this setting. I look around, I see a lot of old friends from education. I see the President of Stanford back there. I remember that I think I'm still even a tenured faculty member at Stanford. (Laughter.) I see friends from California. I see people with whom I was Provost -- they're now Presidents of their university. They've done rather well from those days as Provost. And it's just great to be in this setting because higher education is so critical and so special.

Higher education has always been special in my family. And in fact, we all have our heroes. My particular hero, or one of my particular heroes, is my paternal grandfather and he is my hero because he was actually the one who decided, as a sharecropper's son, in Ewtah -- that's E-W-T-A-H -- Alabama that he was going to get book-learning. And so someplace around 1916 or 1917, he asked people coming through where a colored man could get a college education. And they told him about little Stillman College, which was some 60 miles away from where he lived. They said, "You know, if you can go to Stillman, you can get an education." And so he saved up his cotton, he went off to Stillman College and he went through his first year. And then in the second year, they said, "Okay, how do you plan to pay for college now?" And he said, "But I'm out of cotton." They said, "Then you're out of luck." He said, "Well, how are those boys going to college?" And they said, "Well, you see, they have what's called a scholarship and if you wanted to be a Presbyterian minister, then you could have a scholarship, too." (Laughter.) And my grandfather said, "You know, it's exactly what I had in mind." (Laughter.) And my family has been Presbyterian and college-educated ever since. (Laughter.)

(Applause.)

Somehow, my grandfather knew that higher education would be transforming for him. And what he couldn't have known is that the American higher educational system would not just be transforming for a young boy from Ewtah, Alabama but in fact for people around the world. This transformative capability of American higher education has been very clear to me in my work as a professor because I witnessed the life changing potential of international exchange among my American students who studied abroad and among the diverse foreign students who studied at Stanford from every region of the world who regularly enriched my classrooms in ways that only they could do.

For some of them, this wasn't their first time in America; but for some of them, it was not just their first time in America, it was their first time away from home at all. A few of these students are deeply ingrained in my memory. I remember teaching a young woman from Timishoara, Romania, who had been through as a 13-year old, some of the worst violence in Romania during the December Revolution. And one day, we were talking and she wanted to know whether in segregated Birmingham in 1963 during violence I had experienced something like she had where young children had been killed. And I told her about my experience in losing a little classmate, Denise MacNair, in the church that was bombed at 16th Street in September of 1963. And I suddenly realized that across this vast divide from Romania to Birmingham, Alabama, there was a common experience that brought us together. She's still a young woman who now works in Paris. She stops by from time to time. She was here a month or so ago to see me. She's a student that will always -- I'll always remember.

I also remember an Afghan student whose father was a minister, an Afghan minister. He was killed by the Taliban while fighting to end the tyrannical rule. And he and his mother had made it to the United States and now he was studying here.

So for these students and many like them, the university and America itself was a sanctuary for open inquiry and self-improvement where, for the first time in their lives, they were safe and free to pursue the cause of knowledge in a condition of freedom.

Now, as Secretary of State, I have a new appreciation for how education can bridge those national boundaries. I can't tell you how many times I've met foreign leaders and heads of state who studied in America. I think you could tell today the President is passionate about this because he sits down across from these leaders and they've gone to all kinds of schools in the United States. They've gone to community colleges, they've gone to small colleges, they've gone to land-grant colleges, they've gone to research universities. They've all had the common experience of being -- of studying in America. And the experience then becomes one that binds them to us in a way that can never be broken.

Now, the international colleagues who have lived and studied in America, this experience remains fresh and vivid and most just light up at the mention of their time here. On a recent trip to Saudi Arabia, of all places, I was meeting with the princes of the royal family and some members of the foreign ministry and we got into a conversation and one of them said proudly, "I'm a Trojan." (Laughter.) Another piped up that he, like me, was a "Pioneer" from the University of Denver. And I had that kind of interaction over and over again. But you know, in Saudi Arabia, it is true of my generation that these students studied in America. But with the next generation, they are not studying in America. That is something that we must correct and that we must change.

As Secretary, one of my highest priorities is to reinvigorate our efforts to connect America to the people of the world through education. In today’s international system, the distance between here and there is getting smaller. The time it takes people and ideas to traverse the globe is rapidly shrinking. And the thoughts and actions of individuals carry more impact than ever. And as a result, exchanges between peoples are as important as exchanges between diplomats.

Today, every American studying abroad is an ambassador for our nation, an individual who represents the true nature of our people and the principles of freedom and democracy for which we stand. Similarly, every foreign student attending one of our universities represents an opportunity to enhance democracy in America and to strengthen the cause of freedom abroad. Our citizens learn from the different perspectives that foreign students bring to our classrooms. They learn that it was hard to grow up in Timishoara and that most Americans will never experience anything like it. And when these students ultimately return to their home overseas, they have new friends that they have met and memories of America that they will never forget.

America’s mission in this new century must be to welcome more foreign students to our nation and send more of our citizens abroad to study. To be successful, our government and our universities must forge a new partnership for education exchange, a partnership that rests on new thinking and new action.

In the Summit that we are launching tonight, we will begin a discussion about how we can work together to achieve our common goals. And this evening, I would like to suggest four pillars that should sustain our partnership as we work towards these goals.

First, we must work together to expand existing programs with proven records of success. One is the Fulbright Scholarship Program which, over the past six decades, has brought a quarter of a million students from 185 countries to study in America. Another newer program is the Gilman Scholarship which, in just the past five years, has enabled 2,200 American students to study abroad. One of those students, Tomas Henderson, is a psychology and Russian double major from Howard University. He recently studied in St. Petersburg. He was so inspired by his experience that upon return, he created a campus organization to help other Howard students go abroad to study.

Second, we must cultivate new relationships for education exchange with countries that are playing an increasingly important international role. As the global center of gravity shifts from West to East, and as regions like the Broader Middle East struggle to embrace democratic reform, American students must be at the forefront of our engagement with countries like China and India, Iraq and Afghanistan. To prepare young Americans to understand the peoples who will help to define the 21^st century, nothing is more important than our ability to converse in their native tongues. And that is why the new National Security Language Initiative that was launched today by President Bush is a critical goal and a critical initiative of this Administration.

At the same time, we must actively recruit students from these new strategic countries to live and study in America. And here we're faced with massive untapped potential. There's a multitude of eager young people out there just waiting to hear from us. In the Philippines, for example, for every one student accepted to study in the United States, we in the State Department receive 22 serious inquiries about doing so. In Morocco, that ratio is 33 to 1; and in Colombia it's 40 to 1. Countries like Nepal and Zimbabwe and Malaysia and Mongolia have similar stories. We must find a way to help these students to realize their dreams -- studying in America -- because if we do not reach them, others will.

Third, we must actively seek out and open our universities to talented but underprivileged students and to students from diverse backgrounds, because after all, diversity is more than the external markings of race or gender. America’s universities are enriched by qualified students from all walks of life, not just those who possess elite backgrounds and enjoy elite privileges.

We in the State Department are currently reaching out to women teachers in Africa and journalists in the Middle East and the indigenous populations of South America. We are launching new development programs to teach English and to unleash the natural talent of thousands of underprivileged adolescents in the Middle East and elsewhere. And we are encouraging all of these young people to consider a future in American higher education.

Finally, as the President said earlier today and you all cheered, we as a nation must continue to improve our visa policies. (Applause.) Of course, much of the work is to be done by those of us in government. But to ensure that we are meeting the needs of both our universities and our prospective foreign students, we will require consistent help from you, the private sector. There are legitimate security concerns that must be met and we need your help in meeting them. I will make a promise to you: if you are prepared to help us to make certain that we can achieve a balance between openness and security, we are prepared to work with you to do so.

The United States has never been more eager to welcome foreign students to our country. And in the past four years, we have scrutinized and improved every aspect of our visa process. We are now better able to get the information we need to process student visas more quickly. We are hiring more consular officers and training them better and sending them out to foreign communities to explain how local students can best apply for a visa. Our embassies and consulates have established special, expedited visa interviews for prospective foreign students.

And we're seeing results. We are now approving 97 percent of our visas in just one or two days and we are radically shortening the amount of time that it takes to process the rest. And last year, we increased the number of visas we issued for the first time since the September 11 attacks. Equally important, we are achieving much of this growth by dramatically increasing the number of students that we welcome from countries like Korea and China and India and Saudi Arabia.

Nonetheless, we obviously have more work to do. We have more work to do in reality and we have more work to do in the perception of America's openness. Secretary of Homeland Security Mike Chertoff and I are especially appreciative of the dialogue that we've been having with America’s academic community. And in the coming weeks, we look forward to sharing with you our ideas to make America more open, while still maintaining our security.

In this time of unprecedented international change, America’s universities have a unique global role to play, not just as recipients and educators of foreign students, but as institutions that prepare America’s next generation of international leaders as well. That is why we have convened this Summit and why we ask you to join us. The dialogue we are initiating today will help us to reach a common understanding of our priorities and to further our national interests through international education.

I look forward to the discussions that we are going to have today and tomorrow because America's position in the world today is unprecedented. We have a unique opportunity to combine our great power with our democratic principles and to help better the lives of millions of people. As an academic myself, I believe that educated people have a special responsibility to give back to the nation that has given them so much. Few Americans are in a position to use their great talents for such great purposes. So let me urge all of you to encourage your students to consider a life of service upon graduation, perhaps a life of service in the diplomacy of our nation through the Foreign Service, through our military forces, through our intelligence services or somehow in public service. Public service is a wonderful way to give back. But so, too, is mobilizing all that America can mobilize, not just from the government, but from the private sector, from our universities to make certain that we're reaching out to others and that they are reaching back to us.

In that important and crucial work for our security, for our safety and for our values, I welcome and look forward to your partnership.

Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

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