MANSFIELD — An out-of-town visitor has some broad business insights on Mansfield that he plans to use in his Virginia classroom.
Micheal G. Anderson, adjunct professor at Northern Virginia Community College in Springfield, Virginia, and a retired foreign service officer, visited Mansfield earlier this week. He met with Scott Schaut at the Mansfield Memorial Museum and reporters while discussing globalization and the impact it’s had on the city.
Mansfield will be the fourth and final place discussed in Anderson’s course, “Globalization and it’s Discontents,” which will be taught in four 90-minute sessions in May.
Other locations featured in the course are on Russia, France and Poland.
Each session will include a Skype conversation with a representative from the featured location. Anderson said that the Skype portion of the course is especially important because it allows the class to interact with and ask questions from local experts.
“The objective of these conversations will be to try to find out how economic and cultural globalization has affected them personally and, beyond that, the places and people where they live and work,” he writes in the course overview.
Anderson came across Mansfield during the last election and recognized it as a “manageable” place to research. It allowed him to look at globalization in the United States on a smaller scale.
“This session differs from the three foregoing presentations in that we will be looking at a particular city in the United States, instead of the country as a whole,” Anderson wrote in the course overview. “And, unlike the other three examples of opposition to globalization, we will seek to avoid looking at the political dimensions of this issue and instead focus on how corporate-level decisions have contributed to the disappearance of manufacturing from previously vibrant industrial areas.”
Anderson knows the story of the General Motors closure in 2010 and how the Westinghouse appliance plant left in the 1990s. He came here to see where Mansfield stands now and how globalization has affected the city.
He said that for better or worse, his take on globalization is that it’s “inevitable.”
