Verse

Verse                  “Look to the past to help create the future.                   Look to science and to poetry.                                        Combine innovation and interpretation.                 We need the best of both.                                   And it is universities that best provide them.”Footnote

Faust (2010).

In the early 2020s, it had been virtually impossible to read print media or view online sources without constant news about the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, and its devastating effects throughout the world. Since the Fellows, who contributed to this volume, all focus on comparative and international education, we are compelled to view our field – both its positive and challenging paradigms and policies – in terms of this overwhelming pandemic. While several chapters elucidated major aspects of the last half century through to the first decades of the twenty-first century of necessity, we must think critically of features for the next years of this decade.

Certainly, our work must be grounded in sound conceptual and theoretical frameworks and their translations into applied policy research and transfers into actual agendas to address concrete and emerging problems. Hence this chapter will reiterate fundamental components of the major sections of this volume and move into innovative territories – indeed as aspects of major missions and purposes of schools and universities. That is, teaching and learning, research and scholarship, and public engagement are beyond the walls of the academy. In undertaking these aims, this chapter will: (1) reiterate social and public challenges affecting education and impacts on various demographic populations; (2) explicate the importance of conceptual and theoretical frameworks and their groundings in social sciences and humanities; (3) posit the centrality of education and public policies; (4) elaborate the roles of external funding agencies on comparative and international education; and (5) envision contemporary and emerging motifs and paradigms.

Social and Public Challenges Affecting Education

Porous borders are the reality, as clearly evinced by the global COVID-19 pandemic. There are and cannot be distinct boundaries on how adverse realities affect millions of people. Hence continuous intellectual migration should become even more evident via various technological modes, including those we would not have envisioned before the current pandemic as epidemiologists share emergent research results in real-time. Such realities began to appear, particularly in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The following direct quote from Lindsay and Blanchett’s (2011) volume is an example.

A patient was rushed to a hospital emergency room with life-threatening conditions when no experienced senior physicians were available or on call. ‘What should I do to save the patient’s life?’ the young physician queried himself. His dilemma was abated by YouTube where he quickly located an illustrated medical procedure that he then utilized to save the patient. (p. xv)

Teaching, instruction, and learning are central missions of universities throughout the world. When schools and universities began closing in March and April 2020 to the time this manuscript proof was read in early February 2021, forms of virtual or online learning became constant realities. These were limited realities previously, as only select faculty had the ability to use them to full capacity, while other faculty opted not to use these technologies. So now, educators must develop and ascertain the best ways to deliver courses, seminars, meetings, and forums – via these technological modalities. Therefore, comparative and international educators must be particularly attuned to different learning styles, technological facilities, cultural alterations, and analyze them in different geographical areas. Some of these matters have been cited in chapters by Carnoy, Arnove, Klees, Schwille, Ghosh, and Ginsburg via their examinations of international testing, preservice and inservice teachers, and demographic student profiles. It is critical to explore the profound effects in multiple settings when totally unanticipated pandemics occur or when natural disasters completely obliterate sites killing thousands of people in its wake.

Coinciding with social challenges, a colleague and I discussed how to address critical aspects for this chapter. We pondered the implications of the massive protests and perhaps continuing movements around the globe, that appeared after the death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others who were killed brutally by police and other law enforcement officers (Philbrick and Yar 2020). The colleague voiced the issue of how does the field deal with “more visible forms of unequal impact?” The operative words were “more visible forms,” since unequal effects have existed for centuries affecting multiple demographic groups. What types of altered or new pedagogies and conceptual frameworks should emerge from these very new visible actualities, covered extensively by the media and online platforms?

This exchange prompted me to consider how we, as specialists in comparative and international education and affairs can foster modes to further enhance the field. Often there may be immediate visible events such as the current global pandemic, massive natural disasters, and the killings of unarmed people. Nevertheless, there are continuous invisible circumstances that stifle various demographic groups from advancing in both formal and informal educational realms. There may be visible factors that are treated as invisible factors in comparative and international research – differences in teacher qualifications or timeframe and length of public school years that are not part of the formal equations when comparing test scores among pupils who, on the surface appear, to be a similar age and/or year in school.

Invisible factors are not always taken into account in cross-cultural or cross-national analyses, as Carnoy, Ghosh, Klees, and Samoff elucidate in their chapters. On the one hand, school testing and university league tables often do not reflect invisible factors such as de facto exclusive policies. For example, Lindsay’s chapter discussed the American Association of Universities. AAU desires to limit its membership to 60 plus members, although there are dozens of other American and Canadian universities that are as impressive in terms of quality of research, graduation rates of demographic groups, and international collaborations (Lindsay and Simeon 2014). This author, as Principal Investigator (PI) of a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, asked a senior associate chancellor why her university was not part of AAU, considering all the impressive research outcomes. She stated, “our students take longer to graduate with BA/BS degrees, than other AAU sites in our state. Higher graduation rates, within four years, are AAU criteria, even if unstated.” That university is one of the most demographically diverse in terms of student and faculty profiles. First-generation students, students of color, and those with special needs often take longer to graduate.

On the other hand, at the university level invisible factors are often tacitly acknowledged, and still overlooked when preparing domestic and international league tables for university rankings. As some researchers and policymakers emphasize, the apparent visible criteria of ranking university fellowship and grant proposals from faculty overlook or discount invisible conditions. Lamont (2010) and Lindsay (2012) discuss how fellowship and grant proposals are ranked on established criteria. Further, proposals from organizations, situated in or near Washington, D.C. continually rank higher than those from smaller metropolitan areas or in the Midwest or Southern parts of the United States. Similarly, various countries have devoted resources to select universities to enhance their status to obtain higher rankings on international league tables. China, Indonesia, and South Korea have established ministerial (equivalent to a cabinet entity in the United States) level criteria to allocate funds and promote research publications to foster higher recognitions via international league tables (Lindsay and Simeon 2014). Hayhoe’s chapter explicates how the term “normal university” is not perceived in the same manner as universities without the term “normal” as part of the organization’s brand and identity. A perusal of the THE World University Ranking (2020) indicates that no normal universities are ranked in the top 200, and barely cited in the next hundreds.

Conceptual and Theoretical Frameworks

As this discussion continues, the seminal conceptual framework of sociologist Goffman (1959) appears and identifies frontstage and backstage behaviors, decisions, and decision-makings. More recently, it was updated by sociologists Picca and Feagin (2007). These concepts originally derived from theater performances – where actors have one persona on stage and another backstage – are developed in relation to interpersonal presentations of the self and can be extended to larger milieu. The context, time, and place influence what is presented on the stage. Frontstage is presented in a public milieu while backstage is in a non-public or private environment. Frontstage behavior is transferable to a variety of public settings, even when they may appear dissimilar. For instance, American graduate students who interact informally in laboratories may automatically engage in similar behavior in another country where this is not the usual norm. Backstage behavior is non-public or perceived to be in non-public environments. General human behavior entails actions quite differently when she/he is not on stage or in public (Goffman 1959). Some backstage behavior may become frontstage, such as when a wireless microphone emits non-complimentary critique of another actor who is still on stage. Perhaps the “classic” examples emerge when politicians, in frontstage settings, publicly advocate positions and then work backstage to thwart policies associated with the public statements (Goffman 1959; Lindsay 2018; Picca and Feagin 2007).

During my Fulbright in Indonesia, I conversed with Ministry of Education – Division of Higher Education officials, university presidents, and deans regarding the transfer of the Division to the Ministry of Research and Technology. The public or frontstage position was to: (1) foster more research and technological innovations in Indonesian universities; and (2) help public universities become more internationally recognized by collaborative research with Australian, Western European, and North American universities. Public or frontstage support for the impending move was voiced and written. However, private backstage reluctances were expressed. After only a few years, the Division of Higher Education was returned to the Ministry of Education where faculty criteria still stressed extended research and international publications (Baswedan 2019). Ultimately, promotions to the rank of professor occur only after peer-reviewed publications appear in Western journals from the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia. I asked Indonesian faculty and administrators why journals in Japan or South Korea were not considered. Publicly these Asian countries are lauded, but not in comparison with Western nations.

A thought-provoking aspect of the conceptual framework of frontstage and backstage is that there can be reversals or disjointed views. For instance, it is intriguing that many Western senior academic faculty engage in frontstage scholarship and publications that are critical of missions and purposes of funding bodies whether from the Federal or National government departments or ministries. Sometimes, these professionals were consulted and had input into revised mission and goals as Samoff’s and Lindsay’s chapters discuss. Yet faculty strive to obtain fellowships and grants from the same bodies where they ostensibly do not agree with many of the program goals or research studies in developing nations. In short, frontstage positions and backstage acquisitions are in opposition. Early in my sociology career at the University of the District of Columbia, one of my colleagues refused his salary for a period because he did not agree with established goals linked to the external funding. It is rare for most faculty to decline salary or accolades.

Today, most Western faculty accept endowed or named chairs from wealthy university patrons or philanthropic organizations, even when concern is levied against the funding organization. Sometimes, particular Federal or National president or prime minister espouses policies for diversity yet excludes the demographic and disciplinary foci of candidates. A particular Fulbright New Century program was designed to include specialists in higher education from several nations. Conspicuously absent were African American specialists. A woman (a former college provost and member of the presidential appointed Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board) raised the matter of exclusion of African Americans, despite many professors and associate professors who met the criteria. A response was that Africans were included. Yet European Americans were selected, including several from the same American Association of Universities. Europeans did not “replace” American Europeans. But Africans replaced African Americans. Frontstage and backstage actions were witnessed.

A select few conceptual or theoretical frameworks cannot address the multiple dimensions of comparative and international education and affairs. Conceptual frameworks stemming from analysis of race and other demographic characteristics are important at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels. Intersectionality of factors has received notable attention in the last quarter century by educators, although such multiple features have been examined for decades by political scientists, social psychologists, sociologists, and public affairs professionals. The challenge is what combinations of conceptual and/or theoretical frameworks are apropos for dynamic conditions. Chapters by Arnove, Stromquist, and Samoff elucidate frameworks of world-systems, gender, and colonialism and decolonization that encompass overlapping variables. Carnoy’s and Evans’ chapters discuss what sociologists classify as insider and outsider constructs (Merton 1972), while Schwille’s uses Bourdieu’s theoretical frameworks regarding the perceived status of particular disciplines over others. Carnoy (2019) describes how comparative education at Stanford was, at one time, relegated to an off-campus location, i.e., subjugation of the field. It could be contended that dynamics involving the transfer (in Indonesia) of the Division of Higher Education to the Ministry of Research and Technology and back to the Ministry of Education may also be examined in terms of sociopolitical realities of power and status relations coupled with the legitimacy of roles and views of senior executives within the two Ministries. What are the empirical results that can be captured adequately by combinations of frameworks as the field of comparative and international education expands during the 2020s?

Attention must be devoted to public and educational policies and organizational and structural frameworks. Thus, concepts from multiple disciplines are at play, since individual actions are manifested in the immediate societal or organizational conditions, linked with external policies. The original placement and movement of the Indonesian Division of Higher Education elucidate multiple conceptual frameworks, although initially explicating the transfer in terms of frontstage and backstage.

Education and Public Policies

The challenges are to comprehend which matters can be addressed in the immediate, intermediate, and long-range timeframes (Eryaman and Schneider 2017). For example, COVID-19 has severely affected public and private school and university education, throughout the world – with especially harsh impacts in developing countries as Winthrop (2020) writes regarding Ghanaian public school education. Lindsay and Moses (2020) discuss harsh consequences in Indonesia, Myanmar, and South Africa. Both of these articles emphasize the criticality of nations with majority youth populations that are vital to national and social development, thus expanding beyond the immediate and intermediate timeframes.

In these illustrations, the types of public schools and universities and their domestic or global contexts help determine which of the three foci will be the most prominent. Public and university policies as presented by legislative bodies (macro-levels), executive government branches (macro and sometimes meso-levels), and postsecondary institutions (macro and micro-levels) articulate and set the tone for what types of educational and socioeconomic and political matters are addressed – in the frontstage. Regardless of the settings, the vast majority of universities espouse sound academic endeavors and engagement in larger societal issues as those cited in chapters by Carnoy, Hayhoe, Schwille, Evans, and Lindsay. Such endeavors often advocate the inclusion of diverse students and professionals who should or will contribute to social progress via evolving policies. Overall purposes are to explicate the presence and modification of applied policies in multiple nations. That is, advanced industrialized nations and developing or emerging nations are intertwined with the latter being continually affected by policies and sociopolitical conditions of the former.

We postulate that cooperative interaction among geopolitical regions should be mutually beneficial to educational sites and successful outcomes. Indeed, salient comparative educational analyses should occur within and among geopolitical blocs and organizations such as SADEC (Southern African Development Community), ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations – that includes Australia), the G-7, and the G-20. The G-7 and G-20 nations represent the top 7 and 20 major counties, respectively, that address economic, financial, and some political conditions on a global level.Footnote 2

Klees’ chapter maintains that the underlying premises, or what I term philosophical perspectives, influence how issues are viewed and the subsequent questions raised thereof. In the fields of applied policy research, this important tenet is or should be part of the scaffolds. The outcomes or results, to considerable extent, are shaped by the premises. Is the basic premise to bolster standing or prestige, for example, through additional revenues? Indonesian and Chinese research entities and universities are cooperating on the development of COVID-19 vaccines and select other international endeavors (Soeriaatmadja 2020). The Chinese-based Glover Biopharmaceuticals is undertaking vaccine trials in Australia (Felter 2020). Some contend it is for prestige to boost their standing among nations, by being the first or among the top to develop vaccines, and for revenues. Or is it to create viable options to improve educational, health, and social conditions for students and educators as Arnove’s, Ghosh’s, and Schwille’s chapters might question? It is likely both categories as suggested by Bera (2020).

Perhaps equally notable conceptual and theoretical frameworks are listed in Arnove’s, Carnoy’s, Ghosh’s, and Samoff’s chapters. Their theoretical frameworks are more akin to macro and meso-level policies, although data collection is at the micro educational sites for students’ and teachers’ performances. Schwille’s discussion of Bourdieu’s sociological thesis appears to be grounded, in some respects, to sociological and philosophical premises, as are aspects of Klees’ and Ghosh’s chapters. They include humanistic educational and social settings. Hence the works of Appiah (2003, 2017) provide multi-disciplinary nexuses for examining phenomena that may establish foundations contributing to public policy. Combined public and educational policy formation and implementation will, of necessity, be developed and/or expanded in technological realms as presented next.

In several emerging African and Asian countries, over 25 years ago, various technological modes skipped traditional technology such as landline telephones as means of communication during the HIV/AIDs pandemic, especially since electricity and constant electrical power sources were absent (Lindsay and Moses 2020). Over a decade ago, I engaged in a Fulbright at Eduardo Mondale University. Upon my arrival at the airport in Maputo, Mozambique, an American embassy official gave me a cell phone. While in Mozambique, I often thought of the potential educational purposes of ubiquitous cell phones in offices and homes, which had never used landline telephones. One day at the University office, I picked up my office phone and prepared to dial a local number. My office mate immediately exclaimed, “Use your cell phone! It costs more to dial from your office phone!” (Lindsay 2008). Contemporary technology had bypassed the old modes as the nation leaps toward modern communication and technology. Eduardo Mondlane University graduate students prepared PowerPoints, used flash drives, and sent text messages as routine modes, comparable to counterparts in comprehensive American universities (Lindsay 2008).

While the immediate aforementioned technological features were becoming fairly common, the COVID-19 pandemic requires the immediate necessity of multiple online and virtual modes for pedagogical delivery, student development, and transmission of cooperative research projects. Schwille’s and Evans’ chapters stress the importance of collaboration both within schools/colleges of education and colleagues in the same university, along with those in domestic consortiums and international venues. Recently, select Federal and National departments and Ministries of Education and Research and Technology, along with philanthropic organizations, have issued new requests for proposals and/or reallocated budgetary funds for critical problems. Such alterations and proposals are to undertake novel modes of cooperative online and virtual communications and instruction. Notably, the massive displaced internal populace and migrations to escape civil conflicts and natural disasters in Syria, Iraq, Indonesia, South Africa, and Venezuela – of the last decades and the 2020s – also prompted online instruction involving international education specialists.

The evolving uses of technology were spurred additionally by COVID-19 and other massive challenges. This represented opportunities to disseminate in multiple modalities in preparing professionals for a range of educational portfolios that can contribute to social cohesion and lessen discriminations against demographic groups different from one’s own. While these innovative forms are emerging, careful appropriate micro-, meso-, and macro- policies should help ensure that mutable forms of gender, racial, class, and other non-visible or backstage discriminatory de facto practices do not continue or emerge – as chapters by Stromquist, Ghosh, Samoff, and Lindsay offer. Basically, what is asserted is that comparative and international education professionals must be attuned to dynamic circumstances. It is mandatory that adverse social and educational mutations do not emerge – as somewhat analogous to those in the biological and chemical sciences with the mutated COVID-19.

External Funding by Government and Philanthropic Organizations

Regarding the last illustrations, Lindsay’s and Evans’ chapters articulated the importance of external funding, especially for comprehensive doctoral research universities. Seeking and being awarded external funding that demonstrates meritorious achievements sponsors individual faculty and contributes to university coffers. In the vast majority of social science and educational departments and schools, external funding has become a de facto, if not de jure, criteria for promotion and tenure to associate professor (in comprehensive doctoral universities) with tenure in the United States and England. It is sine qua non for becoming a professor. Yet for women and other particular gender groups, this can be challenging since evaluations and promotions regularly occur when there are children and/or other family members who need care. In the case of international education and affairs specialists, field research and scholarship typically occur away from the home site. Merit and prestige via fellowship and grant acquisitions are juxtaposed with multiple policy level edicts.

Perhaps the aforementioned realities could be tempered in view of vastly changing demographic characteristics in emerging and developed countries coupled with people of color and women in decision- and policy-making positions in government and philanthropic funding bodies. Witness Lindsay’s chapter about people of color and women being the Chief Executive Officers of a number of major American philanthropic foundations. (Note, however, that the percentages of people of color are still quite underrepresented in executive positions.) During the Presidential administrations of Barack Obama and George W. Bush, there were various indices of additional diversity compared to previous administrations. Even with such increased diversity, the fields of comparative and international education and affairs, that prepare professionals to work in international settings, present a somewhat mixed portrait. Evans’ chapter discussed how international education doctoral graduates, often from non-American countries, have become ambassadors, cabinet officers, and executives in international organizations. A notable domestic example at Evans’ university was an African American woman doctoral graduate who was appointed to ambassadorial posts by three different American presidents. Another African American woman and other doctoral graduates developed and administered multi-million dollars in international education projects, via the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) with American universities and university partners in other nations.

The USAID and the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID)Footnote 3 have allocated grants and contracts to American and British universities for projects during the emergence of new nations, that broke the yokes of formal colonialism in the aftermath of contemporary civil conflicts in emerging nations, as Samoff’s and Lindsay’s chapters review. As developing nations continue to chart their own paths, yet simultaneously influenced by global geopolitical conditions, they will continue to exude larger voices and demand agency. Since these are still emerging nations, compared to the United States and other Western ones, there are huge gaps in economic viability, educational facilities, and other indicators of national socioeconomic conditions and individual livelihoods. What does this portend for professionals in comparative and international education and affairs as we envision new paradigms?

Contemporary and Emerging Motifs and Paradigms

Our chapters present arrays of topics that have been foci of scholarly and professional work during the past decades, and in some cases for over a half century. Central to our discussions are the critical importance of conceptual and theoretical frameworks as we examine empirical data and conditions in ranges of educational settings. Chapters have also elucidated topics that should be explored further in the field and within the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), and similar professional bodies on the continents. Themes encompass inter alia: (1) paradigms from nations situated throughout the world; (2) educational finance policies, including those for profit-making schools and universities; (3) interplay of gender with formal structures and policies; and (4) criticality of university and non-university settings of teacher education and subsequent conditions of teachers. Further creative modifications and additional topics and paradigms can and should be examined through the lenses of comparative and international education via the following illustrations.

Stromquist’s and Samoff’s chapters expound on the roles of the formal government of the state or nation. Lowther and Lindsay (2009) engaged in conversations with young adult prisoners, convicted of terrorism. In 2015, Lindsay was in a nation where a university student provided a guided tour of the campus grounds and the surrounding city. He casually explained how university students and those not enrolled were buried in a particular cemetery. Those buried there, had been willing to give up their lives for their causes that had not been sanctioned by the state or formal political parties, in the region. I pondered the current and likely future roles of such “independent” actors and if there are roles that secondary schools and universities can exert to thwart such violent actions – as Ghosh’s chapter currently suggests the need for educational institutions to embed social cohesion in the curriculum.

In the United States and other countries, non-state actors engage in violent acts to achieve their aims that may be related to religious views, political principles and goals, or natural resources like land and water (Crimaldi 2020; Ray 2020; UN News 2020). For example,  one Boston Marathon bomber  was a student. These acts are distinguished from “criminal violence” such as robberies and random killings (Lowther and Lindsay 2009). What kinds of frameworks or paradigms may be modified or developed to curtail or, desirably, prevent such atrocities – from non-state actors – as we have seen in recent carnages? What multi-disciplinary perspectives – from several social sciences, international relations, public health, and comparative and international education – will be necessary?

One of the first areas requiring multi-disciplinary perspectives is climate change. A New York Times article stated approximately 1% of the Earth has current climatic conditions comparable to the Sahara desert. By 2070, this could increase to 20% of the Earth’s landmass (Lustgarten 2020). While this may seem in the distant future, we bear in mind that today’s 20 years of age university students will be completing their careers in 2070. Many of the new retirees’ students will be mid-career and will be working into 2100.

Climate change has necessitated migration of populaces, from the Caribbean and Central America to seek livelihoods internally in the United States, and elsewhere (Baez et al. 2017; Semple 2019). The United Nations (UN News 2019) is analyzing climate migration from African nations to European ones. Both climate change and migration (Lustgarten 2020) raise issues of how educational sites will be physically constructed where limited natural resources are present even in new migratory sites (Lustgarten 2020). For example, water will be a scare commodity, and many environments will not be near freshwater rivers or oceans where desalination can be options. What does this entail for educational policies that establish criteria for school locations via school mapping? What does this mean for teaching and learning ambiences with limited natural resources, that curtail children’s and youth’s developments?

There is an extensive body of research on theoretical and policy frameworks that examine issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and social status, that were used during my NSF grants (Simeon and Lindsay 2017) and in critical works (Gates 2007; Kendi 2016; Lindsay 1980). With changing migratory patterns, the traditional paradigms of comparative analysis within and among countries may not align with recent research. For instance, during my NSF grants observations indicated that numerous “distant citizens” from former British colonies migrated to England and often resided in enclaves, as observed in Leicester, England, where de facto public schools and banks were primarily utilized and/or formed by Muslims. During the early 2000s, the designation “Black and Minority Ethnics” (BMEs) was used to combine the range of non-European origins of demographic groups. There was considerable diversity among the thousands of school and university students who were lumped into this category. From approximately 2015 onward, slightly more specificity occurred as witnessed in the group becoming “Black Asian and Minority Ethnics.” Asians expressed the necessity for their clear BAME identification (Sandhu 2018). In the relatively same timeframe, Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) evolved into Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer Intersexual Asexual (LGBTQIA), the newer nomenclature. How might comparative and international education specialists tease out empirical data and subsequent micro school and university policies coupled with macro ones at the national levels, when demographic identifications are changing?

During an NSF grant, I was at a London National Health Service (NHS) hospital where there were over a dozen classifications of Black people whose origins were somewhere on the African continent or diaspora. People of Bahamian, Jamaican, Ghanaian, Kenyan, Nigerian, Somalian, and Zambian ancestry did not wish to be viewed as monolithic Blacks. According to interviewees, there are notable socioeconomic and status differences so that Nigerians and Jamaicans are perceived as having better educational and career options than other Blacks. Similarly, immigrants from Georgia, Greece, Poland, and Ukraine did not wish to be simply “whites migrants.” So, public health and education services had to grapple with these distinctions in terms of health care and teaching – rather than simply viewing the various demographic groups as “disadvantaged” or recipients of unequal opportunities. They are and may be disadvantaged and at risk for unequal educational attainment and public health, since education and health are closely linked amid epidemics and chronic illnesses. However, cultural conditions and learning styles do not equate the same monolithic pedagogies and treatments. Might this be similar to Samoff’s chapter of describing people as poor versus impoverished?

As previously cited, extensive use of alternative and/or new technologies are necessitated by global pandemics and regional epidemics. Multi-disciplinary teams and consortiums of specialists in instructional technology, curriculum, educational psychology, and comparative and international education will have to delve into the efficient modalities and outcomes from pre-kindergarten through doctoral and professional levels. Such associations can employ micro and macro-levels of analyses.

School districts, colleges and universities, and professional training programs compete for state and provincial and federal or government funds. Concurrently, other public organizations provide requests for financial allocations. In the meantime, philanthropic bodies elicit proposals to address their missions and goals. With multiple competitors, universities can articulate that their three major functions – teaching and learning, scholarship and research, and public engagement – benefit all sectors of education. In turn, benefits are accrued to other public bodies. Such rationales may not suffice when there are herculean public health and economic crises emanating from diseases or natural disasters causing the diversion of educational funds to immediate catastrophes. Gutman and Moreno (2019) elucidate the centrality of ethical premises with competing financial disbursements among patient care, public health, and education. Klees’ and Lindsay’s chapters link the roles of ethics in decision-making with important competing social and educational essentials.

As précises, we can heed sage advice from my PhD faculty advisor, in international administration at American University and Doyle and Ikenberry (2018). They were attuned to the vicissitudes of the overwhelming political ambience in Washington, D.C., the United Nations, and other international bodies. The advisor voiced that we should continue numerous types of empirical research and policy development and also be prepared for the unexpected by allowing time in our agendas and schedules to address immediate urgent realities. Doyle and Ikenberry (2018) surmised that theories change in light of: evolving issues; desired changes; and theories contributing to change. We can query ourselves and ask “how do we move beyond intersections of theories, policies, and programs to anticipate challenges and plan for contingencies?” The current global pandemic, unfortunately, will not be the last overwhelming emergency that confronts schools and universities. Traditional foci in comparative and international education and affairs should continue and simultaneously realize that expertise will be elicited to address unknown phenomena. We will have built upon the past to create future innovations and interpretations – to paraphrase former Harvard University President Drew Faust – as quoted at the beginning of this chapter.