DAVID HELFAND Special to The Globe and Mail
Last month, I sat in a meeting, organized by the Conference Board of Canada, in which academic leaders listened to what people who hire university graduates often find missing in the candidates they interview. From IBM to city managers, and from pipeline companies to NGOs, the refrain was the same: They wanted (and were not finding) people who can communicate effectively and persuasively, people who can collaborate across departments to solve problems, people with emotional intelligence who can transcend age and cultural differences and who possess the resilience to embrace failure as a learning experience.
[…] In Singapore, a city-state to which the word “liberal” is rarely applied, Yale University has partnered with the National University of Singapore to create Yale-NUS which opened last September on the classic liberal arts and sciences model. And the Aga Khan Development Network is planning four liberal arts institutions in Arusha, Tanzania and the Central Asian republics, formed to educate leaders for these emerging economies.
Ismailimail 