In five years, Columbia University has created a network of eight global centers. Safwan M. Masri, Columbia’s executive vice president for global centers and global development, explains in Inside Higher Ed why an already globally engaged university created these centers: "No. 1 was a concerted strategic effort to facilitate and support the engagement in a structured manner around the world. And No. 2 was a global context for engaging. It’s one thing to engage in East Asia, and to understand and study East Asia as East Asia, and it’s another thing to look at certain issues in East Asia and put them in a global context and be able to do comparative research."