The student-run Global Issues Forum hosted its first event last Thursday after a hiatus last academic year. The Forum hosted David Firestein, a decorated foreign service officer and the president and CEO of the George H.W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations. Firestein’s talk was titled “Collision Course: The Extended Rupture in U.S.-China Relations.”
The Global Issues Forum began during the 2023–2024 academic year under the leadership of Rem Johannknecht ’26 and Maya Prakash ’26, both members of the Global Scholars program. The Global Issues Forum is intended to “create a space for finding solutions and answering complex questions,” according to Johannknecht.
The talk centered around Firestein’s belief that U.S. policy toward China has become unnecessarily hostile, a trend that he said began during President Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign and has persisted ever since. According to Firestein, this shift has been quantifiably bad for the American economy.
Student engagement among Global Scholars has increased in recent years, according to Magnús Bernhardsson, professor of history and former director of the Global Scholars program. “Student input, student participation, and student planning [were] paramount here,” he told the Record. Bernhardsson hopes that the strong student participation in planning the talk will encourage participation and attendance from the student body beyond the Global Scholars cohort.
The talk was attended by students, faculty, and Town residents. Johannknecht explained that involving a greater swath of the College and Town community in the Forum is one of his goals. “David’s visit was a great example of that, because he didn’t just interact with Global Scholars, but he participated in an open career session [and] he attended Chinese language tables,” Johannknecht said.
William Ling-Regan ’28, another member of the Global Scholars program who introduced Firestein at the talk, is looking forward to what’s next for the Forum. “We have this incredible Global Issues Forum, and now our cohort is really passionate about using that forum to talk about issues that we haven’t talked about before,” he told the Record.
The Forum will also serve as a model for the projects of the next class of Global Scholars. “They’ve been building the plane as they fly it, and now we have that plane, and we want to continue flying it,” Ling-Regan said. “But, we don’t want to rest on those laurels, and I think we want to keep coming up with new and creative ways to get the program involved in the broader Williams community.”
Maya Prakash, an Executive Editor At-Large on the Record and organizer of this event, was not involved in the writing or editing of this article.
