'We are the World" is the title of the 1985 charity single written by Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson. The song was recorded by the superstar ensemble USA for Africa and called upon each of us to see the entire world as our neighbors.

America's public universities have been promoting a similar message for decades. In distinctive ways appropriate to their unique missions and contexts, our public universities broadly engage in the world around them as a function of good stewardship. Helping others and learning from others are good for all of us; they can help foster understanding and tolerance and lead to a better world.

Global education and service are of significance to colleges and universities to more effectively prepare students to work in a borderless world and to give back to the people and world around us. It is more than just discussing global issues in the classroom. It is faculty and community involvement, study abroad, hosting international students and expanding service learning. In order to be working in a global world you really have to know what it's like to work with people who are different from you.

"Over the course of history, students and universities have played important, often transformative roles in guiding us toward a healthier, more equitable, sustainable, and prosperous global community. Today they face unprecedented global challenges relating to climate change, extreme poverty, malnutrition and disease, and equitable treatment of all people in our world." Those words are as true today as when former President Bill Clinton wrote them in 2008.

We faced many global challenges during 2010, starting with the 7.0 earthquake in Haiti on Jan. 12. In response to this natural disaster, Millersville University students and faculty, as well as many other higher education institutions, coordinated a Haiti Relief Project. Dr. James Cosentino, a Millersville professor, provided direction for the project by working with the United Nations and several nongovernmental organizations. He also worked with Lancaster Regional Hospital and its clinics to gather medical supplies ranging from children's crutches to antibiotics.

Both a university professor, Dr. John Wallace, and alumnae Emma Eck, have focused their attention on projects to tackle extreme poverty, malnutrition and disease in the world. Dr. Wallace is working on a serious disease, Buruli ulcer, or BU, a necrotizing skin ailment common throughout the equatorial regions of the world. While easily and inexpensively treatable if addressed in its early stages, if left untreated BU can cause terrible open sores that may result in loss of limbs and, in extreme cases, bone cancer. As a medical entomologist, his efforts are focused on research, specifically, on the role that biting flies, such as mosquitoes, and the environment may play in the transmission and maintenance of the mycobacterium that cause this disease. From a humanitarian perspective, he has enlisted the help of the Millersville and Lancaster communities as well as student clubs to address health care needs of Buruli patients in Ghana and Benin. To date, this service-oriented group of students and community members are working with a newly established nongovernmental organization (NGO), the Buruli Ulcer Victims Aid Foundation in Kumasi, Ghana to improve access to health care for Buruli patients.

Emma Eck left a good-paying job in the Lancaster area to move to Rwanda to establish a science lab at the boarding school where she volunteers as a biology and chemistry teacher. She is also launching an HIV-education program. Emma, who is working with some of the children of 1990s genocide victims, is traveling under the aegis of WorldTeach, a 23-year-old non-profit service project based at Harvard University. "A perfect world," she mused, "would be everyone taking care of their neighbors."

Other Millersville alumni are also helping to change the world in positive ways. The Pulitzer Center recently chose five grand prize winners of YouTube Project: Report. One of the five winners was Millersville alum, former Sunday News reporter and current University of Miami student Paul Franz. He said the multimedia piece he did on migrant workers from South Florida's Haitian communities "Florida's Modern Day Slavery" gave him an increased sensitivity to people from different cultures and backgrounds.

Reflecting on the work and service of students, faculty and alumni brings me back to Emma Eck's simple, but profound, observation that if everyone took it upon themselves to care for their neighbors we would have a more perfect world. After all, we are — all of us — the world!