As the director for the University of Oregon Global Studies Institute, I recently had an opportunity to travel to Tokyo for an inspiring and thought-provoking Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) meeting with senior international leaders. The timely keynote, “Higher Education in the Age of AI,” by Keio University President Kohei Itoh provided a forum for leaders to share their concerns about the ways artificial intelligence will affect students and faculty. On this trip, I also had the chance to reconnect with an old friend, Masayuki Ebihara, who stayed with my family as an exchange student in Oregon almost forty years ago. As Masayuki guided me through Tokyo, we reminisced about our decades and miles of global friendship. He shared a beautiful story about his favorite place we visited in Oregon’s high desert, Scout Lake, where on a clear August night the dark sky opens to a magical sea of stars and the Milky Way. Masayuki had never seen so many stars and marveled at the magnificence of the night sky. He shared the power of global experiences of stepping out of his comfort zone to travel with new people, places, and experiences.

Throughout this book are multiple perspectives from the “Extra! Extra! Don’t Kill the Messenger: Migrating to Stay Alive” symposium, which was funded in part by the University of Oregon Global Justice Program through a generous gift from the Savage Endowment for International Relations and Peace. The fund was established to bring experts on international relations, peace, and United Nations systems to the University of Oregon. While we cannot take all our students to all the places in the world, we can, via financing such as this fund, bring the world to our campus. Through such activities, students appreciate the global community far beyond the borders of Oregon.