A soft-power education institute for an ever-changing region

Signing the Manila Pact in 1954, the country positioned itself at the heart of the multilateral collective defence alliance called the Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation (Seato). Bangkok was the hub of the classical hard power international organisation, which included Australia, France, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

In those days, Asia really did not possess graduate education in science and technology of the calibre of the superpowers. And of the worrisome threats that abounded, the region’s lack of homegrown technological capacity was high on the list. Indeed, long before the halcyon days of its 1980s and 90s economic boom, Thailand, like its neighbours around Asia, required vastly higher levels of professional skills, training and expertise to construct the more advanced, technologically-driven societies seen in America and Europe.

But brain drain was a real concern. Keen on acquiring knowledge, and absent educational opportunities at home for postgraduate education in engineering, many of the region’s best and brightest often completed a one-way trek to the West’s top universities, never to return.  

“Soft power” – an international relations theory popularised by Harvard University’s Joseph Nye – offers some explanation. It describes how a country can use its powers of persuasion and its ability to attract to achieve its goals. Non-nation state actors too, such as international organisations, can play a soft power role via the profusion of culture, diplomacy, business – and even education.

Fancy then, that an embryonic institution born in 1959 called the Seato Graduate School of Engineering, later to become the Asian Institute of Technology, would grow into such an influential educational asset for the Kingdom and the region. For 53 years, AIT, located north of Bangkok, has exemplified subtle soft power emanating from Thailand. Ever in tune with an evolving region and the world, AIT changed accordingly.

As the founding country and host nation, the Kingdom has generously supported the institute by donating land and allocating a considerable budget for scholarships and operations funds. Looking back, the return on this investment has been considerable. For more than five decades, AIT has boosted the Thai government’s efforts to make Thailand a bona fide international higher learning hub by attracting smart people from other countries to study and do graduate-level research. In doing so, Thailand has become a nexus for nurturing homegrown scientific, technical and managerial capabilities relevant to the country’s needs and to the situation and circumstances of a developing continent.

Put succinctly, AIT is very much “Asia's institute” – albeit imbued with a quintessential Thai imprint. It was an AIT computer scientist who developed the “.th” Internet domain name in the early 1990s, and researchers in Pathum Thani helped discover the “Asian Brown Cloud”. Consider the numbers: 90 per cent of AIT’s 19,000 plus alumni reside in Asia, and Thai nationals make up 28 per cent of all AIT Masters and PhD alumni from 88 countries.

Along the way, many believe the school’s unique ethos has contributed to achieving the vision of its founders, of peace in the region, by spurring the vast potential of its people. From being honoured with Asia’s Magsaysay Award in 1989, and the Friendship Order of the Government of Vietnam in 2006, AIT has played a significant role in capacity building at a pan-regional level. Ask senior officials in Taiwan, and they will tell you the island’s large cadre of AIT-educated engineers constructed upwards of “at least” 90 per cent of its public infrastructure. This year, as Myanmar opened its doors somewhat to the world, AIT was there to welcome to Thailand 40 new graduate students selected from a pool of 700 applicants.

With over 2,000 enrolled annually at its Pathum Thani province campus, AIT is home to a cosmopolitan concentration of foreign students who bring invaluable diversity to learning in this country. They take in Thailand’s best features: its inclusiveness, tolerance, and creativity. Living here, they come to enjoy the warmth of the Thai people and understand its refined culture. Once educated in Thailand, AIT graduates also retain a lifelong sense of connection to the Kingdom, and act as its ambassadors while networking across a continent in their professional lives.

Owing to its international inter-governmental status, AIT remains a special meld of minds, nationalities, ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds. All bring sought-after skills and all communicate in the universal languages of science and English. A recent commencement speaker from the Ford Foundation got it right when he said: “The harmony and diversity in culture and ideas witnessed at AIT is a role model for the world to emulate.”

That’s because, as an institute for the whole of Asia, AIT thinks and operates on levels that transcend boundaries. Through its research focus on sustainable development in the context of climate change, it pushes new knowledge and practical solutions outward across borders at a time when the challenges to wellbeing and security are intensifying.

This is how AIT distinguishes itself from the crowd of traditional national universities. By connecting people in Asia as part of a growing regional and global knowledge base, AIT finds great purpose in investigating ideas to reconcile today’s global imperative of achieving economic development with social and environmental sustainability.

Still, as the world and region continue to evolve, so too must Thailand and AIT to better address new challenges such as sustainable development and the need for greater investments in human capacity and education. For although the pathways to progress may be as varied as Asia’s nearly 4 billion people, more equitable and inclusive prosperity has to be predicated on the whole continent, getting issues like sustainability and inequality right.

Just like a half century before, the current age presents an opportunity for a changing AIT to be yet again a key hub for “soft power” through leadership in science and technology, training, education and professional development based out of Thailand but increasingly linked to the Asean Economic Community (AEC) and South Asia, in line with emerging, growing economies. 

To make this vision real, though, requires revitalised commitment by all stakeholders as well as by new partners in government, civil society and business. For if knowledge is, indeed, power, AIT is happy to have its brand of international learning stamped “Made in Thailand” for export to and the benefit of the region.

 

Professor Said Irandoust is president of the Asian Institute of Technology.