No one doubts that globalization is one of the most important trends of today. As American universities expand their global footprint with branch campuses in Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and elsewhere, many faculty are concerned about oppressive governance, human-rights violations, and lack of academic freedom abroad. Meanwhile administrators grapple with how these new ventures--and globalization in general--will change teaching and research in the United States. As higher education seeks new audiences, will it be able to maintain the significance and character of the liberal arts, which have played such a crucial role in the educational mission of the American university? Similarly educators increasingly agree that all undergraduates ought to pursue some study abroad. But should it involve language study and full cultural immersion? Or short-term travel and networking through internships and other kinds of programs? What does "global" really mean? It took a world war to propel Americans to make a serious commitment to global study. At the dawn of the World War II, the United States was the only allied great power without a formal and central institution to collect global "intelligence," and universities were notoriously deficient in studying parts of the world outside Europe and North America. When Franklin D. Roosevelt recruited William J. (Wild Bill) Donovan in 1941 to be his first coordinator of information, Donovan established the Research and Analysis Branch in Washington, D.C., and started hiring top academics. The fledgling office was reborn as a key unit of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), itself established a few months after Pearl Harbor. As the United States joined the Allied war effort, Donovan hired several senior, and a great many younger, academics, principally from the Ivy League, to coordinate the collection, sorting, and analysis of material relevant to the war. Although academics were initially recruited by discipline (like history, anthropology, geography, economics, politics), Donovan's "dean" of the OSS, the Harvard historian William L. Langer, soon recognized the need for area-specific interdisciplinary teams. That represented a major departure, as interdisciplinary research was still largely undeveloped in universities in the years before the war. Now, without a world war or a cold war, people have the luxury to move to the global in a more deliberative, engaged, disciplined, and intellectually serious (and less directly politicized) way than when area studies began. The future depends on understanding the new demands of globalization.