Rwandan Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence Anastase Shyaka Leaves Deep Imprint on Northern Virginia Community College and George Mason University

Beverly Blois Dean, Humanities Division Northern Virginia Community College

Peter Mandaville Director, Center for Global Studies George Mason University

During the 2007 spring and summer semesters, Northern Virginia Community College (NVCC) and George Mason University (GMU) jointly hosted Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence (SIR) Dr. Anastase Shyaka, director of the National University of Rwanda’s Center for Conflict Management.  Shyaka, as we called him, truly became a fixture in NVCC’s classrooms and in the overall operation of GMU’s Center for Global Studies.

For NVCC, Shyaka was our first-ever SIR, and his time here coincided with an institution-wide internationalization of curriculum and student activities.  Our nascent peace/stability operations and conflict analysis and resolution courses benefited immensely from Shyaka’s discussions and hands-on collaboration with Prof. James Hanlon and his students.  We seized upon the occasion to offer these classes together with Shyaka’s contemporary African politics course.  And we were able to arrange a ‘homecoming’ by one of our most illustrious NVCC graduates, His Excellency Crispin Gregoire, permanent UN ambassador from Dominica.  Bringing together Prof. Hanlon’s and Shyaka’s classes for an entire afternoon with Crispin was a truly memorable experience for us all.

In a series of presentations at both GMU and NVCC, and through his informal mentoring of faculty and interaction with students in and out of the classroom, Shyaka left an indelible mark on both institutions.  Our partnering, which was proposed by Dr. Peter Mandaville, director of GMU’s Center for Global Studies, has effectively drawn a community college and a major state university much closer together, especially in our conscious efforts to afford students and faculty a richer, more globally-focused campus culture.

Besides his several campus roles, Shyaka was able to interact with such Washington, DC organizations as the U.S. Institute of Peace, Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, and the National Endowment for Democracy.  Through these interactions, Shyaka was able to communicate Rwanda’s post-conflict priorities to policy-makers and foreign assistance professionals and in turn learned how developments in his country are viewed here.

And, there has been life after our SIR experience.  GMU and NVCC collaborated to bring Shyaka back last November for a series of presentations on new thinking about the political integration of Africa, a project with renewed momentum of late.  As a partisan of what he terms the “United States of Africa,” Shyaka addressed this topic most energetically.

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