What do Kamala Harris, Obama, and 1 million students have in common?
August 12, 2024
All eyes are on the U.S. Democratic nominee for President, Kamala Harris. And while her Black and South Asian heritage is the main topic of discussion in many circles, there’s another reason why her ascent in the U.S. political landscape resonates with many of us in the field of international education. It also brings to mind another U.S. leader whose nomination not only stirred the imagination of many Americans but whose heritage also speaks to how American universities have helped the U.S. connect to the world.
Here’s what Kamala Harris and Barack Obama have in common beyond their shared racial background…
Obama’s father and Harris’s parents came to the U.S. as foreign students from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. The senior Obama arrived in the U.S. in the 1960s during the “African Airlift,” an ambitious scholarship program, which was the brainchild of Tom Mboya, a trade unionist and Kenyan leader, and John F. Kennedy, who asked the Kennedy Foundation to pay for the airfare of 250 Kenyan scholars, including the senior Obama.
The group of 81 East African students after landing in New York and before dispersing to colleges throughout the United States and Canada. Photo courtesy of the Airlift to America project.
Between 1959 and 1963, 800 postgraduate students from Kenya received scholarships to study in the U.S. and Canada, including the Nobel Prize winner, Wangari Maathai, whose stirring remarks at the 2006 NAFSA Annual Conference left a deep impression on me as it was also my first-ever international education conference. While Obama senior was not officially part of the airlift since he had other funds for his air travel to the University of Hawaii, he is nonetheless considered part of the “airlift generation” from Africa.
What happened after Tom Mboya launched the African airlift captures the impact of international education beyond any numbers…
Susan Mboya,Tom Mboya’s daughter, grew up with the strong influence of an American education in their home and circle. When I interviewed her for my book, she described her own educational path as “decidedly American,” obtaining all her degrees at universities in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Before Susan, her mother, who was part of the airlift, had obtained a degree from Ohio. But the influence of an American education did not end with these two generations of Mboyas. Dr. Susan Mboya has not only encouraged all her nephews and nieces to study in the U.S., but she went on to found the Zawadi Africa Education Fund that was inspired by her parents’ legacy and gives underprivileged Kenyan girls an opportunity to study abroad in the U.S. What grew out of an idea her father had in the 1960s is continuing to have an impact on generations of Kenyan students today.
For Shyamala Gopalan, Kamala Harris’s mother, the path as an international student to the U.S. was different and, unlike the senior Obama, she ended up staying and joining the ranks of skilled immigrants who could once again come to the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s when the country overhauled its immigration policies to attract the world’s best and brightest.
This is a path I know well, having arrived in the U.S. as a female international student from India in 1992, 34 years after Dr. Gopalan, but carrying the same educational aspirations and the dreams of my forbearers. And even before Dr. Gopalan and 83 years before I received my doctorate from an American university, there was a Miss. K. Tulaskar, an Indian graduate student at UC Berkeley, who in a 1915 article titled, Why Should Hindu Girls Go to America described what drew her to the U.S.: the broadening of the mind through travel and education, and the fluidity of the American education system that encouraged flexibility and experimentation as opposed to rigid doctrines.This is what had attracted international students like Shyamala Gopalan and remains true for the over 1 million international students who study in the U.S. today.
The similar journeys to America but the different outcomes for the senior Obama, Gopalan, and the Mboyas also underscore the importance of international students whether they stay on in the U.S. and become valuable immigrants, or return to their home countries and become cultural ambassadors for the U.S., widening America’s influence and helping build bridges. By remaining in the U.S. Dr. Gopalan contributed to ground-breaking research on breast cancer, one among many immigrants who today constitute half of the doctoral-level science workforce in the U.S. and are indispensable to U.S.science and innovation. As Kamala Harris said in her 2020 victory speech upon becoming Vice President: America is a “…country of possibility,” words that inspired the sub-title of my book.
Read & Listen!
Episode 43: Four African Students, MIT, and dreams of a Made-in-America degree: Arthur Musah on his new film, Brief Tender Light
Episode 44: The trifecta of being a Black, Undocumented, and Immigrant Student: Dr. Felecia Russell on her new book
On the Road…Events, Talks & Workshops
In June I was invited back a second time by Yale University’s Office of International Students and Scholars, this time around to do a workshop on Diversity Equity Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB) issues for a campus-wide global division whose work touches international students, international scholars, and other newcomers to the campus from other countries.
In early August I joined the Rutgers Global team at their annual retreat to talk about the intersecting areas of international higher education and current trends. Rutgers University has always been a leader in the internationalization space and it was a great learning opportunity for me as well.
Connect with us if you’d like to learn more about hosting a workshop or talk on your campus!
CLIENT & PARTNER SPOTLIGHT!
I’m delighted that my firm, Rajika Bhandari Advisors, has the opportunity to partner with a wide range of mission-driven organizations and institutions in the field of international education. In each newsletter issue, I will be featuring one of our clients and partners, and our work with them. This month, it’s the Alliance for International Exchange, the collective public policy voice of the exchange community in the U.S. We are privileged to have the opportunity to implement a large-scale impact study of the alumni and hosts/employers of four significant J-1 exchange programs: Au Pair; Camp Counselor; Summer Work Travel, and Intern and Trainee. Stay tuned as we begin to release findings from this important study in the fall!
VOTE FOR MY SXSW EDU 2025 PANEL!
I’m thrilled to be partnering with Dr. Andrea Golato, Dean of the Graduate College at Texas State University, on a proposed panel at next year’s SXSW EDU conference. Panels are picked on the basis of votes (among other criteria). Could you do me a favor and please take a minute to vote for my panel titled America Calling: The Impact of Global Higher Education?
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