A Global Network of Interreligious Scholarship and Leadership

The GTU is a diverse multicultural and international community of scholarship, discourse, and intellectual creativity that brings a vast array of perspectives from around the world into conversation with one another. But to fulfill its true potential as a global leader and hub of interreligious education and dialogue, the GTU must extend its reach more widely. Beyond serving as a resource for its diverse campus community and broader network of local affiliates, it must embrace a “borderless” and “boundary-less” approach to interreligious learning, forging international partnerships and providing online entrypoints to our vast scholarly resources that allow the GTU to reach and serve audiences worldwide.

Our campus is already a rich, educational meeting grounds where interreligious and international scholar-explorers gather, share wisdom, learn from one another, and mutually inspire new directions in service and scholarship for the greater good. From my very first days as president, I have felt blessed to be part of a community where so many diverse cultures, nations, and religions come together. The international nature of the GTU can be seen in our doctoral program, for example, which currently includes citizens of nearly twenty different nations. The percentage of international students continues to increase; half of this year’s entering doctoral class were international students, including a scholar who is the first person from her Lahu tribe in Myanmar to enter a PhD program. We know many of these educators, leaders, and activists will return to their homelands and employ their GTU education to serve the communities there, like so many GTU alumni before them.  

But to really extend the GTU’s international influence, we must more fully embrace the digital age, increasingly moving beyond just brick-and-mortar learning to employ global communication technologies and online programming. We must invest heavily in developing digital degree and certificate programs, online educational events and resources, and other digital outreach that can serve communities outside our borders. Our location near the technological hub of the Silicon Valley positions the GTU well for such growth. But fully implementing such a vision will also require building on institutional connections here and abroad, including our existing cooperative relationship with the University of California, Berkeley, the schools and universities within the GTU consortium, as well as expanding our network of international partnerships.

During the first year of my presidency, I’ve had opportunity to travel internationally to get to know better some of the communities the GTU serves, and to discuss collaborative possibilities with leaders in those communities, including many prestigious GTU alumni. Dean Uriah Kim and I spent a week in Korea earlier this year, where we not only had dinner with 15 GTU alumni who are professors, pastors, and leaders in universities,  seminaries and churches across Korea, but also engaged in numerous creative conversations about developing more intentional and thoughtful partnerships between the GTU and Korean institutions. I had similar experiences on visits to Hong Kong, as well as in India, where I spent a weekend at the ISKCON Govardhan Eco-Village discussing partnership possibilities with its visionary leader Radhanath Swami, as well as with leaders at the Center for Peace Research at Baranas Hindu University in Varanasi. These trips were inspirational—but they represent the mere starting point for innovative new partnerships the GTU aspires to establish and grow.

As president, one of my goals is to position the GTU to continue to expand its partnerships with local industries, nonprofits, and universities that have established the Bay Area as a global thought leader, and to go beyond our immediate environs by increasing collaboration with universities, institutes, and initiatives worldwide. Through such efforts we can further expand the reach of the GTU’s innovative approach to interreligious and interdisciplinary learning and leadership.

The entire global GTU community is invited to watch the live streaming video broadcast of the Inauguration of Rabbi Daniel Lehmann as the Eighth President of the Graduate Theological Union. The event will be streamed at 5:30 pm PST on Thursday, October 24, 2019, live from International House in Berkeley, CA. View the video here. Mark your calendar now!

Read President Lehmann’s earlier reflections on pluralism and interreligious innovation and professional opportunities through applied interreligious engagement.