IIE Blog: Letter from Cape Town: Finding Shakespeare

IIE’s President and CEO, Allan Goodman attended the British Council’s Annual "Going Global" conference in Cape Town, and offered his perspective on the role of higher education in today’s refugee crisis. Throughout the conference, many references were made to Shakespeare, in which Goodman said, "I note how ironic it is that the only surviving piece of paper that contains something written in Shakespeare's own hand is a scene about refugees. It is from a play (authored by someone else) about those fleeing continental sectarian violence [...] Shakespeare asks the audience to imagine what it would be like facing such conditions. Five centuries later, his words still have the capacity to remind us that we could all be refugees. Shakespeare indeed lives."