ABSTRACT
US administrators working with Confucius Institutes spoke frequently about foreign language study as an important component of building an internationally competitive university. The blast announced an international education conference being organized by an institutional recipient of a US Department of Education’s UISFL grant. The document articulates the opportunity-out-of-crisis metaphor that administrators at Westerly Fish, Centerville, and Eastern Rapids universities often enunciated: An avalanche is coming. The growth of the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, the BRIC economies, and rising standards of education across much of the developing world are obviously major gains for humanity, but they post a significant additional threat to under-educated youth. Barber, Donnelly, and Rizvi who are directors at the Pearson Company deploy a future-oriented rhetoric that Lawrence Summers also articulates in the work’s preface: ‘The solid classical buildings of great universities may look permanent but the storms of change now threaten them’.
