Questions and Answers About Vision Council
Kalamazoo
Downtown Rotary Club
20 January 1996
AN INSIDER'S OUTSIDE VIEW OF KALAMAZOO
Timothy Light
Western Michigan University
My title today:
"An Insider's Outside View of Kalamazoo" was
chosen in order to take the privilege of being a
native--an insider, if you will--to reflect for a few
minutes with you on a few of the things that I have
learned from a career that has kept me focused outside
the United States. In the era of the much vaunted
"Global Village", I have come to believe that
these lessons are critical to the happy future of all
communities. Since returning to live in Kalamazoo over a
decade ago, I have also come to believe that our common
habits here are devoted to ignoring those lessons.
I claim to be an insider not through being on the inside
of Kalamazoo's business and politics. By both profession
and limited ability, I am clearly at the farthest edge of
either. My "insideness" is inherited. My
forebears came to Barry County in the 1830's and had
migrated via Richland to Kalamazoo within the next couple
of decades. Both my parents, two of my grandparents, and
more great- great-great- and great-great-great-
grandparents, aunts and uncles than I can possibly know
or recall were born and lived within thirty miles of this
place.
Growing up in an environment dominated by the
proliferation of one's kin taught Rule # I of Extended
Families, which my brothers and myriad cousins and I
mastered before we could walk or talk: Be careful. The
person who sees what you are doing is most likely a
relative, and they are sure to tell your mother. You may
decide after a few minutes that I have forgotten that
rule.
Like most Kalamazooans, native or not, I feel blessed to
live here. Kalamazoo--by which, of course, I mean the
whole county-- is a very good place. It is prosperous.
Our unemployment rate continues year after year to be
lower than that of the State and the nation. We have more
institutions of high culture per capita than anywhere I
know of. On any given weekend, there is more good live
theatre than anyone could possible attend. Our musical
opportunities seem almost limitless. We have a superb art
institute. With our three colleges and large university,
we are an educationally intensive place..
Kalamazooans are people of spontaneous generosity of
spirit. Newcomers and visitors regularly tell oldtimers
how warm they find this region--that is, warm people ,
not the weather! And Kalamazooans of all walks of life
and levels of income are legendary in their reputation
for philanthropic support. We are a truly volunteering
community to the degree that many of our cherished
institutions would be strapped if it were not for tens of
thousands of people giving their own time every year to
make it all work
Kalamazoo is indeed a good place to live.
Why, then, would three decades of living in, and
travelling around, other places (mostly Asia) give a
devoted native the foolish thought that it is probably
time for some talk that is franker than usual?
Put very simply, when I travel abroad, particularly to
Asia, I am repeatedly awestruck by a dynamism which
epitomizes not only the present, but seems certain to
presage the future as well. When I return to Kalamazoo,
what I hear and see mostly concerns the past. That is not
the past of two or three generations ago when the
foundation of the current structure, prosperity and
cultural life of our community was actually being laid
through the concerted hard work, imagination, and courage
of our predecessors, but a crippling nostalgia for a
pretty recent time well after the achievements which have
made Kalamazoo the great place that it is were already
accomplished and comfort had started to be our governing
habit.
Lest you imagine that what might be going on in
Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Cochin, or Bangalore
has little relevance to Kalamazoo and its high quality of
life, let me tell you about one pursuit that a few of my
colleagues and I have been engaged in on behalf of
Western over the past several years. Around eight of have
annually logged an estimated 300,000 miles recruiting
foreign students. We do that to help pay the bills. The
total of international students' tuition and fees now
equals approximately an eighth of the State's subsidy to
the University. That means, very bluntly, that our
university--the alma mater of many of you here and the
school of many of your children--is now to some degree
economically dependent upon decisions made by eighteen
and nineteen year olds from places that many in this room
could neither pronounce nor find on a map. It means that
the quality and extent of what the University offers your
children are substantially enhanced by those foreign
students. At one point within my own lifetime, the United
States (very much including Kalamazoo) offered its
educational opportunities basically as charity to
students brought here from impoverished countries
entirely at our choice. Today, we need as many of those
students as we can get and their home countries are no
longer poor. This dependence on international students
also means that we are no longer the only intellectual or
academic center of standards and quality for the world.
For on the whole--despite expected problems in English
for some students from abroad--the foreign students who
come to us meet or exceed standards set by many of our
own Michiganders. That is particularly true when it comes
to the subjects that require the most effort and
discipline, namely mathematics, science, and foreign
language.
[Just in case employees of the media rush out and
manufacture a scandal out of a single context-free fact
that I have just mentioned, let me quickly add that our
recruitment of foreign students is a very fair bargain
for all concerned. The University as it now exists is the
result of eight decades of investment by Michigan
citizens and state governments. What we charge foreign
students is exactly what we charge Americans from states
other than Michigan, and for all of them it is a bargain,
which it is even more for those from within our state.]
The countries from which we recruit most of these
students are marked by high economic growth rates, very
high educational standards, an admirable work ethic, a
remarkable number of people who possess the skills needed
to be participants in a global marketplace, a media
establishment which, while they too have their own quota
of tawdry scandal-mongering, relish in their
responsibility for ensuring that their people are
genuinely informed on the major issues of the world, and
by a national flexibility and readiness to respond to
change. Today, it is not just the four little tigers of
Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore which are the
among the world's economic pacesetters. Malaysia is
already a full member of that group. Huge Indonesia is
rapidly approaching take off, and once war-torn Vietnam
already shows clear signs of leading the next generation
of little tigers. Even those huge unwieldly behemoths,
China and India, now support respective economic growth
rates of ten and six percent annually. And, despite
sharing between them a third of the world's population,
the burden of carrying the world's longest cultural
histories, and being the inventors of bureaucracy, at
least significant parts of those two countries have
developed flexible and adaptable mindsets that are
carrying them into a future prosperity and economic power
that would have seemed unbelievable even ten years ago.
Moreover, already certain Latin American countries seem
poised to join this group.
The contrast between what one experiences in the dynamic
and forward-thinking regions of the world and what one
finds on return to Kalamazoo was partly summarized in the
Gazette's year-end editorial of December 29th. The writer
cited the extended problems with the Mall, a dispute
between Vicksburg and Brady Township, the suits between
Portage and Kalamazoo over water and sewage, and between
two parts of Kalamazoo over zoning, and the continued
irresolution of the District Court consolidation.
That unhappy list could be stated another way. The
problem is not which side you take on any of these
issues. The problem is that it is these issues and ones
like them which perennially dominate our collective
agenda in Kalamazoo County. Looked at from the outside,
we in Kalamazoo appear to be so in love with the problems
that we have with each other that it is difficult not to
think that the high value we assign to these problems
results from their unparalleled usefulness in shielding
our vision from attending to what happens anywhere
outside of ourselves.
If we want to find nearby entities that look at least
partially like the dynamos of Asia, we need go only as
far as Battle Creek and Grand Rapids. Two or three
decades ago, both of those cities faced difficulties far
worse than anything we have had to deal with. They solved
their problems and in so doing developed a mindset of
flexibility and an outward orientation that has brought
astonishing renewals to both Calhoun and Kent Counties.
Last week, a Kalamazoo economic developer told me that
when a prospective investor or company owner inquires
anywhere in the Battle Creek region, he finds a
co-ordinated city, township, and county instantly ready
to be of service, but when an inquiry is made here, it is
sometimes only random chance that determines whether the
needed services that belong to the twenty-some
governments we have in the county will come together to
give a co-ordinated response to ensure bringing the
investment or business here rather than elsewhere.
We in Kalamazoo County talk as though each of our
twenty-some separate jurisdictions actually means
something by itself, and we foolishly perpetuate a tax
structure which isolates each of us in our tiny unit from
sharing obligations that ought to be common to all of us.
Let's be honest. The Richland area where I live and of
course our other suburbs would now be long dead former
farming villages if there were no city here. And the city
would be pretty unviable if there weren't so many coming
to work everyday from outside the city limits.
Let's be honest about the terribly ambiguous relationship
between the city and its suburbs. Sure, there is
something of a story about what happened thirty years ago
between Kalamazoo and Portage. And I bet that even some
folks in this room continue to treasure the grudges
resulting from that incident. But the larger context is
that most Midwestern cities have suffered a combination
of departure for lower tax areas and white flight. On
this Martin Luther King Day of all days we must
acknowledge the truth of the latter. Those who read
yesterday's Gazette will recall that now half of the
Kalamazoo Public Schools District pupils are black,
confirming how much flight there has been. But we should
also recall that the same article pointed out that the
elementary school leading the MEAP scores this year is a
largely black school. Both of those facts are important
for a discussion about a community that is too
complacent.
That too many people are still pleased to take sides
between Portage and Kalamazoo tells us how unwilling we
are to forego our local history of spats and acknowledge
that we are merely a small part of national trend that is
leaving unhealthy tensions between cities and suburbs in
every place that does not consciously set about to repair
the damage and move forward into a better future for all.
Let's be honest. We talk a grand ideology of free
enterprise. But our economy is heavily dependent upon the
health care industry, and health care is heavily
subsidized by government. The University and the
Community College are of course governmental entities,
and even the private colleges and vocational schools are
partly supported through public student scholarships and
loans. If you add in public education and all other
government entities (including the new and much welcomed
post office facility), the primary or secondary role that
government plays in our economy is very substantial.
Let's be honest about our history. When the merger of
Pharmacia and Upjohn was announced two years ago, the
reaction was like a county-wide wake. For over a week,
the Gazette replayed the same story, rearranging the same
quotes from the same people, just as used to be the case
with reports on the demise of elderly leaders in former
Eastern Europe. When did we become that dependent on a
single company? Kalamazoo was once "Celery
City" and then "Paper City". In its years
of real greatness Kalamazoo's economy was buoyed up by a
host of hard-working and growing businesses. Neither a
single company nor governmentally supported enterprises
dominated.
By merely mourning the end of our era as an international
headquarters community, we failed to tell ourselves the
real stories of what has been happening to us and what it
all means in a wider context. There are at least two such
stories that should have been front page. Locally, the
story was that we fooled ourselves into thinking that we
could be comfortably safe with increasing dependence upon
one company and governmental entities or heavily
governmentally supported entities, and therefore we did
not need to do the hard thinking that would result in our
making ourselves attractive to potential investors and
owners. Internationally, the real story was told by Jan
Eckberg, Board Chairman of Pharmacia and Upjohn, when he
explained that the business plan for the merged companies
required that sales to Asia would have to jump within
five years from minuscule proportions to a substantial
share of the company's overall marketing. (It is no
accident that Eckberg's list of countries who must
provide the new customer base for P & U is virtually
the same list from which Western recruits foreign
students.)
Let's be really aware of who we are.. Not only was our
historical base a plethora of businesses, but present-day
Kalamazoo is also far more beholden to a large number of
medium and small businesses than we often tell ourselves
publicly. National statistics have told us for over a
decade that the bulk of job creation has come from small
businesses, while the vast majority of layoffs has come
from the older larger ones. Again, our most publicly
shared understanding of who we are and what our future
understates this reality.
Let's be aware of our context. National leaders tell us
that the global market place is already here. Communities
and individuals who want a future must expect to find it
through international trade. In the future-oriented
dynamic countries it is accepted by everyone that
communities which will participate in that global market
place are defined by a populace which is multilingual and
broadly educated in the geography, history, and economics
of a world whose parts increasingly influence each other.
Are we preparing to join the global market in which our
competitors and partners are so educated? Frankly, I
doubt it.
Yes, there are a few glimmers of formal awareness of what
has already come elsewhere. The shape of the Lincoln
International School is one, though it is hard to tell
what ripple effect that institution has. And last spring
I attended a foreign language day at Gull Lake High
School that demonstrated an astonishingly high standard
of French and Spanish.
But generally, our mindset continues to be remarkably
that of yesterday. Consider the languages which we teach
at all levels of education in Kalamazoo County. They are
entirely European plus a tiny bit of Chinese and Japanese
at Western and K-. Now consider one fact. For the first
time since the industrial revolution began two hundred
and fifty years ago, it is now the countries and regions
with the largest populations which either already have or
soon will have the world's fastest economic growth rates.
Those countries either already are or soon will be the
major producers of the largest numbers of goods and
services for as long in the future as anyone can imagine.
(China, for example, recently became the largest producer
of crude steel, replacing declining Japan.) Short of a
global catastrophe, it is those countries and regions
which will define the economy and structure of the world
for the next century.
Those regions and countries naturally include Latin
America, and the young Kalamazooans who are preparing
themselves in Spanish and an understanding of that
immensely complex area will find real need for what they
know.
The other major places are China in East Asia, Indonesia
in Southeast Asia, India and Pakistan in South Asia. That
means that in rough order of immediate need, the
Americans who wish to be part of the global world of
tomorrow will need many among their numbers who know
Chinese, Bahasa (the language of Indonesia and Malaysia
with a combined population of two hundred million),
Hindi-Urdu, the language group of Pakistan and Northern
India, and sooner or later probably one or two other
languages of India. Well before the coming century is
very old, Arabic, the world's third largest language,
will be numbered amongst those that international players
will need to know.
It is now some of these languages which predominate in
both the pre-collegiate and university curricula of some
of the states of Australia.. Where are we in Kalamazoo on
this matter? That question could probably be answered
simply by considering how many people in Kalamazoo know
what Bahasa is.
The answer to our too frequently meeting a demand for
flexibility and a global orientation with self-absorption
and rigidity is definitely not to start pointing fingers
and blaming. It is the problem of all of us. All of us
contribute to the maintenance of our current situation.
It will require a major change in all of us to remedy it.
There are, of course, far too many specific remedies that
we need to undertake for me to list them now--to say
nothing of my pretending to know what they all should be.
There are a few general steps that we must take. Those
are easily stated. Must of the rest of what we need
follows from those.
First, we need individually and collectively to recognize
our common interdependence throughout the county. We
should privately and collectively praise and reward
collaborative efforts and shame divisiveness.
Second, in conversation as well as in public speaking
about ourselves, we should insist on the full context in
the stories that we tell about ourselves. Let us be sure
that our histories are told in their fullness and not in
mere nostalgia. Recall the adage that nostalgia is to
memory as diet soda is to a fine wine. And let us not
permit anyone even to imply the destructive myth that
Kalamazoo's long-term prosperity will be founded on
ignorance of the world, to say nothing of isolation from
our near neighbors.
Third, let us begin to demand from each other much higher
levels of performance in our proper roles.
--Demand of us in education that we really begin to
prepare today's young for their global future. We are not
doing nearly enough of that now. If even one tenth of the
verbal energy and spilt ink that are devoted to the
Friday evening and Saturday afternoon athletic
entertainment sponsored by our schools and colleges were
directed towards what we really are supposed to be about,
why, then, we would very quickly start trying to catch up
with the Australians.
--Demand of our governmental entities--all of them
together--that they collectively show how they are
bettering the lives of all of us in Kalamazoo. Insist
that they show how they together are preparing us for the
next century.
--Demand of our media that our local stories are told
with their full histories and complexities. And demand
that they broadly inform us on those trends in the
world--especially the cultural and economic trends--which
will affect our lives in decades to come.
--Demand of our public speakers' programs that they
increase their attention to that world outside of
Kalamazoo which is already setting the pace for the world
and which will either set Kalamazoo's pace or pass us by.
As I said, this is the merest start on a list of what we
need to do together. What I have tried to say today can
be summed up in a brief story about Sri Lanka, --formerly
called Ceylon. Sri Lanka should have been the fifth
little tiger alongside of Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and
Singapore. In the 1950's and 60's--about the same time
that Grand Rapids looked the worst--Sri Lanka had an
excellent university system, the highest overall
education rate amongst its populace, the highest standard
of living, low unemployment and a successful economy. In
the early 1960's Lee Kwan Yew, the leader of Singapore,
used to campaign by pointing out Sri Lanka to his
countrymen and promising that with hard work they could
catch up with that successful country. Then Sri Lanka
turned inward. Satisfied with its own capacities and
proud of its high standard of living and demonstrable
cultural achievements, Sri Lanka discouraged investment
and participation in the economic development all around
it. Over twenty years, it fell to becoming the poorest of
those nations that initially had a chance at rapid
development.
Sri Lanka has spent the past decade in a crippling civil
war instigated by its ethnic minority which sees itself
as particularly disadvantaged in a society where even the
best off are stagnant. Malaysia, by contrast, also had
disastrous racial problems in the last 1960's, and
decided that a deliberate drive for prosperity for all
would be the only thing that would keep the country
together.
Singapore's Lee Kwan Yew continues to use Sri Lanka in
his speeches, telling his compatriots that if
Singaporeans don't keep on working hard and adapting,
they will end up like Sri Lanka.
I do not believe that this will happen to Kalamazoo. We
have too many people with too much devotion to the place
and far too much intelligence to wish it to happen. But
we must not take a happy future for granted. We will have
to work at changing our habits of mind and work, and we
will have to do that together. The sign of our success
will come in a decade or two when someone stands up in
front of a future Rotary and gives a talk in which his
inside and outside views of Kalamazoo are the same.
_______
1.Having
been arranged months in advance, this talk was given on
the day celebrated both for the Presidential Inauguration
and Martin Luther King, jr. Day. Because it was intended
that I speak on Kalamazoo's state in the world, I did not
make much overt reference to King Day. However, I feel
that much of what I have tried to say here is a logical
extension for the next generation for those of us were
present to hear Dr. King in August of 1963.
