About the Office
The Vice Provost for International Relations is a new position at Columbia, created to bring greater institutional coherence and oversight to international programming University-wide. The post reflects the importance that the President and the Provost place on Columbia's continuing leadership role in global networks of academic research, learning, and exchange.
Columbia has a rich history of engagement with the world, and a commitment to newly exploring the institutional consequences of thinking globally for disciplinary and curricular structures. To this end, the Vice Provost will help to coordinate existing international research and education programs; oversee agreements with partner programs around the world and develop policies and procedures for ensuring their coherence and conformity to institutional rules and regulations; provide leadership for increasing grants and gifts in support of a global agenda; and, working with the President, the Provost, and the Deans along with the faculties, the Vice Provost will help to articulate Columbia's international vision and academic leadership. The Office will host visits of foreign delegations, and will encourage Columbia's own exploration of ever-widening opportunities for further international research, study, and projects, for students and faculty alike.
The animating impulse behind the work of this office, has been well captured by a recent statement of President Bollinger: “In these days of rapid globalization and a more interconnected world, we have a tremendous responsibility to ensure that our collective scholarship and expertise reach across boundaries, whether between countries or traditional academic disciplines. We can no longer mix with the world because we are curious about it, or because it provides the foil against which to better understand ourselves. Today we learn about other cultures, other nations, and other views because we must do so, because our lives depend on one another.”
