I’m a big fan of unintended consequences of the lofty kind, and that appears to be the case here. Angkor Wat has begotten a tourism industry, and the tourism industry has at least provided the financial means for a nascent private university system growing up on annual student tuitions of $400 a year. The personally transformative aspect to students simply being able to spend their evenings in school (after day-long work), is itself inspiring. This harkens me back to my earlier blog on understanding the historical and experiential context of students.

In our student recruitment work we are always evaluating the level of motivation of students as part of the matrix of factors to determine the likelihood of success. In the Cambodian context, the article nicely paints a picture of a motivation-rich environment in which students are tremendously appreciative of the opportunity to study. Perhaps, Siem Reap is far from being a “good market” for international student recruiters. But it is a great environment in which faculty, or even students, could make an academic contribution while advancing international connections for students springing from a modern legacy of atrocity and isolation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/world/asia/cambodias-angkor-wat-temple-ruins-brings-tourists-and-higher-education-opportunites-for-tour-guides.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

I had finished my blog and was just reviewing it when I received an email. At that moment, I hadn’t conceived of this opening blog in 3 parts, nor even two. I immediately realized through this email that the blog was not complete, and that what I had written had to have a Part I and a Part II.

I opened the email to find a photo of my Bubbe perhaps as a girl of 16 or 17. In a crystalline moment it all came together for me. There is a part untold in each of the Parts I and II, and it revolves around my Bubbe.

For Part I, I hadn’t mentioned that at a very early juncture, as we were cutting away the brush in our new endeavour, I said to Mel something along the lines of “we are too unformed, and too uninformed, we need a guiding light in our company”. I proposed that we immediately install my late Bubbe as the chief to whom our actions would be accountable. My Bubbe had passed away some years earlier in January of 1990 but Mel immediately grasped both the concept and the suggestion. She became the chief immediately.

The photo of my Bubbe also impacts on what is now Part II of this blog. You see my Bubbe, much as she was striking above all for her transcendently generous spirit, was impressively well-read, knowledgeable, and thoughtful. It would come with some astonishment to know that she never attended a day of school in her life. Why not? The answer has to be examined in context. Aside from the narrow strokes of her particular family, the answer revolves around several broad brush factors including these: she was a villager, in feudal Russia, poor, Jewish, last-born of 11, forced with her family to flee their home in pogroms and, of course, female.

Those who have had it tend to think of formal education not as a right, or a privilege, but simply as a given, like a meal or a pair of shoes. But of course it is far from being so to a huge proportion of children today.

Feudal Russia was ultimately replaced by the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union. Marxist-Leninist ideology itself, but not the Soviet Union, nurtured the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot joined the Communist Party while living in France. An ideology whose offshoot was used to justify the spread of formal education to the masses in Castro’s Cuba, was, in another offshoot, justification for its absolute abolishment in Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

Part of the value of the internationalization of education involves setting and sharing standards: standards for access and standards for quality. Any land can do better than it does today and no land’s standards for access and quality are safe from erosion. The Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge is in the past, but the mentality and the brutality that ushered it to life will always be with us.

Which brings me back to Cambodia. In my first year of university I took a course on the World War II Holocaust. Our course did not remotely touch upon the unimaginable and heinous reign of the Khmer Rouge regime, even though it was only ousted by invading Vietnamese soldiers earlier that year. In 1979, the world was a long way from being a global village (and is not yet there as untold atrocities continue in Congo and elsewhere far from rolling cameras). The crimes of the Khmer Rouge were of the worst in recorded human history and it so happened that my visit here in Siam Reap coincided with the start of ‘Trial 002′ of three of the Khmer Rouge leaders. Over thirty years on, it is not expected that any more than 4 people will be convicted of crimes which led to an estimated 1.7 million deaths.

All these years later I find myself back in school so to speak; grateful that the gaping shortcomings in my knowledge, awareness and emotional connectedness are starkly exposed as only then can I address them. I find myself as confused as I ever was as a teenager in university. Atrocity. Impunity. Incomprehensible injustice.

The Khmer Rouge regime was not one without ideology. One of its central ideological pillars was to eradicate all prior knowledge, to create a “Ground Zero”. Those with real or suspected trace elements of education were slaughtered for that very reason. Those with higher education were necessarily the most reviled.

At first blush, perhaps one thinks that the Khmer Rouge reign of terror is a thing apart from the internationalization of education, an historical artefact. But it is not. In each environment there is a context. A context that informs both the desires and obstacles of young people seeking an overseas education. In our work we encounter a variety of forces that intersect with our work: misogyny, racism, homophobia, political repression, religious fundamentalism are but some of these.

To the extent we grapple with understanding the context, we can do a better job. A better job of projecting the values of the institutions we represent. It’s been rewarding to me to come across students and fresh graduates from the U.S., Canada and elsewhere coming to Cambodia and teaching in educational institutions and orphanages. But understanding context also enables us to do a better job of helping these institutions refine their own values and work to live up to them. One could not help but be moved by the generous spirit of locals, especially children, sharing freely emotions and food alike in a way so instructive as a how-to guide on welcoming a foreigner.

Up close in our work, we can see that access to education and higher education in a free-thinking and free-of-fear environment is not a given in the world. This is writ nowhere as large as in Cambodia. A young person in Cambodia like nowhere else knows the true value of education. We cannot take it for granted; not in Cambodia, and not anywhere.

We stumbled upon education, higher education, international education in 1996 and by 1997, the predecessor to Higher-Edge, Bazaar 2000 was formed. If not quite coup de foudre it did manifest for us the passion that comes with falling in love with something, and it has never lost the sensibility of its French expression with its concomitant jolting experience of shock. We have since worked with tens of thousands of students, as well as educators, governmental and NGO officials in dozens of countries.. We’ve travelled across Asia, South America and Africa and confronted the challenges of setting up operations in nearly twenty countries. Natural disasters, civil insurrection and sociology, anthropology, religion, political science, philosophy all on a global scale have become part and parcel of our daily lives, and of our daily decision-making. In other words, we’ve been repaid with the most extraordinary education and the opportunity to connect ourselves to the world.

Our pointed insights sharpen understanding of individual market places worldwide, and always, there are useful marketing implications.

Our blogs advise on enhancing diligence and probity in international student recruitment work, including the thorny issue of working with counterparts overseas.

Above all, you will find thought-provoking guidance on how to make sense of the whirlpool of swirling trends and forces. We view our work through a kaleidoscope, and it empowers and enables robust, malleable and strategic planning. Around the world, that’s who we are and what we do.