Canal Zone

On Dec. 31, 1999, the U.S. turned over the Panama Canal to Panama.

Ten years earlier, the U.S. invaded Panama, and overthrew Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.

(Noriega was commonly referred to with that compound modifier as if it were part of his name like Muammar al-Gaddafi as Libyan strongman; Michael Skakel as Kennedy cousin; Pioneer Institute as right-leaning or sometimes softened to “market-oriented.”)

In the early 1990s, a NEBHE team undertook missions to Panama to study the possibility of turning old Canal Zone infrastructure into a University of the Americas in Panama.

NEBHE was asked because the new Panama institution would be modeled after the great liberal arts institutions of New England. It would seek U.S. accreditation.

It would aim to graduate students proficient in English and Spanish … and “through the quantitative analysis/computer science requirements, be sufficiently well educated to be able to confront … the promise as well as the pitfalls of technological change and information overload.”

Some of those New England missionaries were my most cherished mentors: NEBHE President Jack Hoy and Bob Woodbury of UMaine and UMass.

One of the other players was a business leader named Fernando Eleta, who apparently was also behind a very popular song in Panama. Others included players behind Suffolk Downs, the Boston-area horse track. And importantly, NEBHE delegates David Knapp (UMass president and friend) and Bennett Katz of Maine.

The Canal Zone ultimately became home to a branch campus of Florida State University (coincidentally, the institution that our journal made much of after FSU beat out MIT for a major research grant in the 1990s). Also a very NEBHE-ish City of Knowledge.

Panama has become something of a global center.