Inclusion and Equity

When a greater than expected number of students signed up to study abroad in 2009, Loyola University Maryland faced a dilemma. Tuition dollars follow the students and in a troubled economy, the redirection of resources was “more than we had budgeted for,” said Loyola President Brian Linnane, S.J. The university considered telling some students to forego the opportunity, “but in the end, we thought, ‘How could we do this? International education and the opportunity to study abroad is what we sell. It would have had a chilling effect.’” Loyola found other ways to economize.

Loyola University Maryland had a mission to uphold, namely to “inspire students to learn, lead, and serve in a diverse and changing world.” Loyola—one of four Jesuit universities in the U.S. that bear the name—encourages students to go beyond the leafy campus confines, whether that be to grittier parts of Baltimore or to Bangkok, Thailand. More than two-thirds of Loyola’s 3,700 undergraduates study abroad, do internships, or perform service overseas. They choose from 34 semester- or year-long education abroad opportunities in 26 countries.

Coupling Study Abroad and Service

Increasingly Loyola students are encouraged to perform community service while living and learning in another country. “This is a big part of the identity of Loyola,” said André Colombat, dean of International Programs and professor of French, whose staff collaborates with the campus’ large Center for Community Service and Justice (CCSJ) on twinning academics and volunteering overseas. That center, which has a staff of 14, also runs international immersion trips to El Salvador and Mexico in which students perform volunteer work but don’t receive academic credit for it.

Several other service-learning programs carry credit, including a summer course taught in Guadeloupe, the French archipelago in the Caribbean, and semester programs in El Salvador and Chile, where Loyola has an exchange agreement with Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago.

French Professor Catherine Savell-Hebb takes students each summer to Marie-Galante in Guadeloupe, where they study French literature, hike through tropical forests to a volcano, and live with families in the beachfront town of Capesterre. They helped clean up after Hurricane Dean and, during more placid summers, taught computer skills to local children. The host stays are of particular importance to the professor who wants students to “be sensitive to what it means for the local families to host an American. They think nothing they have is good enough for us,” said Savell-Hebb.

“Often, later in life, little time bombs will go off, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, now I understand….Now it makes sense.’”

Andrea Goicochea, the CCSJ’s assistant director for International Immersion Programs and Justice Education, said, “I don’t know if their parents are thrilled with us because they may decide to go from studying law to (signing up) with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. Their lives in some ways have been turned upside down.” Goicochea, a former Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic who spent 15 years as a lay missioner for the Maryknoll Fathers, said the impact of seeing poverty first hand sometimes hits long after their return. “Often, later in life, little time bombs will go off, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, now I understand….Now it makes sense,’” she said.

Roadblocks to Volunteering Overseas

Arranging service learning outside the United States poses extra challenges. The Center for Community Service and Justice’s Robin Crews and Christina Harrison both have encountered roadblocks. In Spain, where Loyola sends students for a semester at the University of Alcalá, the Spanish organizations wanted a six-month commitment from prospective volunteers, said Harrison, associate director of Immersion Programs and Education, but “our students are only there for four months.”

In Newcastle, England, the obstacle was a criminal background check required before student volunteers can work with children. British students at the University of Newcastle “usually wait at least a semester” before they start, said Crews. “That eliminates any possibility of volunteering if your student is there for just one semester.” They are trying to work out such wrinkles. “It’s definitely a learning curve,” said Harrison.

Seeking More International Students

The university is seeking to attract more international students. Only 1 percent of undergraduates and 3 percent of all students are international. Most of the 170 international students take classes not on the Evergreen campus but in graduate programs 10 to 15 miles away that offer advanced degrees in pastoral counseling, Montessori education, computer science, and other fields. Forty percent of Loyola’s 6,000 students are enrolled in graduate programs.

Martha Wharton, assistant vice president for Academic Affairs and Diversity, said that Loyola is looking to bring more international students in on exchanges, especially while Loyola juniors study abroad. The first exchange students from a technological university in Singapore arrived this fall. Loyola also offers two-year scholarships and a joint Loyola degree to qualified graduates of St. John’s College, a junior college in Belize.

While the international enrollment is sparse, Loyola draws 85 percent of its students from outside Maryland. Many come from the nearby states of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania and from New England.

Learning Diversity in the Classroom

Conscious of the need to expose students to people and viewpoints outside their comfort zones, Loyola requires all undergraduates to complete a diversity course before graduation. Faculty and administrators spent two years discussing and shaping the requirement before the Academic Senate approved it in March 2004 after vigorous debate. It took effect with the class that entered in 2006. Students can meet this requirement by taking a course with “a substantial focus”—more than 50 percent—on one of three issues: global diversity, domestic diversity, or social justice.

Several of history Professor Elizabeth Schmidt’s courses fulfill the requirement. Schmidt specializes in African history. “I have many courses with few history majors, but lots of business and global studies majors,” said Schmidt. One of her courses has a service-learning component. Her students not only learn in the classroom about strife in Africa, but also tutor African refugee children in downtown Baltimore. “I can’t tell you how many business majors I’ve had who (do this) a bit grudgingly, and then they get into it and keep tutoring after they leave my class,” she said.

Senior Meg Young shared the professor’s passion for African studies. Young, a global studies and French major from Greensboro, North Carolina, signed up with the Peace Corps after graduation to work in a small village in South Africa. Young spent one semester studying in Ghana and a second in Montpellier, France. Young, a star swimmer in high school, even got to help coach the Ghanaian national swim team while in Accra. “Everyone was so welcoming in Ghana,” said Young. “People ask me, ‘What did you learn? What was the biggest difference?’ I say what I learned was that there weren’t that many differences.”

Teaching in Thailand

Two other global studies majors, Chelsea Catsam of Pomfret, Connecticut, and Paulina Stachnik of Carmel, New York, packed their bags after graduation to spend a year in Thailand teaching English to children in Catholic schools. They are part of a corps of 30 graduates that Loyola selects and sends to Bangkok each year. Catsam, who aspires to become an international lawyer, spent her junior year in France and traveled across much of Europe, but was intent on broadening her horizons after college. “Asia is just so exciting for me,” she said.

“People ask me, ‘What did you learn? What was the biggest difference?’ I say what I learned was that there weren’t that many differences.”

Stachnik is a native of Krakow, Poland, whose family emigrated to the United States when she was 6. She spent a semester in Bangkok, took a Loyola study tour to India, and spent a summer studying in Prague, Czech Republic. “I came to Loyola largely because their study abroad programs were so highly emphasized,” said Stachnik. “I’m in good company here. The best thing about Jesuit education is that it opens the world up to you and once you open that, it’s hard to close.”

Success of Global Studies Major

Global studies is a recent creation at Loyola, launched in 2006 as an interdisciplinary amalgam of history, economics, political science, and sociology courses. Students have voted for the major with their feet: the first eight majors graduated in 2009, 18 in 2010, and 40 are on tap to graduate in 2011.

Sociologist Michael Burton, the first chair of global studies, said there had been discussions among the faculty for years about offering an international studies major. It finally took hold despite worries that it might siphon off majors from the four contributing departments. Those faculty concerns have been mitigated by the fact that many students have double majors.

Economics professor Marianne Ward, current chair of global studies, said the program’s name was deliberately chosen over the more common “international studies” because “we felt that ‘international studies’ had an implicit focus on the notion of the nation state…. Many issues in the current world environment transcend national boundaries. We wanted to capture that notion.”

Students must take macro and microeconomics, along with a modern Western civilization course that focuses on arts and culture. Comparative politics and statistics courses also are required, along with a senior seminar. The language requirement is the same as that for all undergraduates: two years. The global studies majors must either study abroad or do an internship with a company or NGO doing international work, domestically or overseas.

Bursting the Loyola ‘Bubble’

Senior Lauren Brown of Wellesley, Massachusetts, who spent her junior year in Beijing and Buenos Aires, said, “There’s a definite Loyola ‘bubble.’ We might just be a small group who is very internationally aware. (But) I think we’re moving in the right direction of breaking this bubble.” President Linnane and Vice President for Academic Affairs Timothy Law Snyder both are intent on bursting those bubbles, for students and faculty alike. “Even some that study abroad retain that bubble about themselves because they seek not to venture out and take risks,” said Snyder. He stressed the importance of increasing the diversity across the institution. “We are saying that the more diverse our student body, our faculty, our curriculum, our administration, our leadership, and our approaches can be, the healthier we will be,” said Snyder, a mathematician.

Snyder noted that when Loyola produced the first draft of a new strategic plan in 2008, students came forward and pressed the case for expanding the global studies program. Loyola is doing just that, with plans to hire six additional faculty in the field.

Looking After the President in Bangkok

Linnane and Snyder visited Loyola’s semester program at Assumption University in Bangkok in 2007; each blogged about the experience. More recently Linnane visited a Jesuit center for scholarship in Beijing. His snapshot of the Great Wall of China wound up on the back cover of the April 2010 Loyola magazine.

In Bangkok, students led Linnane and another Jesuit visitor to an “enormous open air market” for lunch one Sunday. Afterward, when the priests decided to make their own way back to the hotel, the students tried to talk them out of it. The two Jesuits did make the trip back unescorted, but what Linnane took away was that these Loyola students felt “they had come to own Bangkok—and they did.”

The Importance of Asia

Linnane believes it is especially important for Loyola to expose students to Asia and other cultures outside “the rich intellectual tradition of the Christian West where our roots are as a Jesuit, Catholic institution.” Karyl Leggio, dean of Loyola’s Sellinger School of Business and Management, is also looking to the East for internships and study tours for her students. “We’re good with European experiences; we do okay with South America. We’re not doing nearly enough with Asia,” said Leggio, a professor of finance who is an authority on China’s largely unregulated stock markets. “If you’re coming out of business school and not thinking of studying in Asia, you’re making a mistake.”

Leggio, who came to Loyola from the University of Missouri at Kansas City, wondered beforehand about the relevance of religious-based education for MBA students. “Once I got here I realized it was absolutely the wrong concern,” said Leggio. “The Jesuits are about social justice and giving back to the poor and helping in the community. That is precisely the way you do business education if you want to do it well, I believe.

When the University of San Diego opened its Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice, its leaders wanted to not just teach about human rights but to make a genuine contribution to solving conflicts in strife-torn countries. They came up with the idea of offering a respite on the San Diego campus where often unsung peace activists could recharge their batteries, inspire students, and at the same time get professional help to craft a narrative of their struggles against violence back home. The Women PeaceMakers Program was born. 

Since 2003 some 32 women have spent eight weeks on the Catholic university’s campus overlooking Mission Bay, speaking to classes and community groups, learning about U.S. programs that help victims recover from trauma, and working with writers on their personal narratives. They visit social justice organizations working to alleviate poverty in this city near the Mexican border—and they go on excursions to the famous San Diego Zoo and to Disneyland in Anaheim.

Their travel to the United States is covered by the program, and the peacemakers, who share apartments on campus and cook together, receive a stipend of $4,000 for living expenses. The entire program is underwritten by the Fred J. Hansen Foundation, named for a benefactor who made a fortune in real estate and avocado farming. The foundation, led by trustee Tony Dimitroff, also supports the Hansen Institute for World Peace at San Diego State University, which has done extensive work in the Middle East.

“Like a Queen Walking on Air”

Christiana Thorpe, a former nun, school principal, and deputy minister of education in Sierra Leone, went home in 2004 and became Sierra Leone’s Chief Electoral Commissioner, presiding over the free and fair 2007 elections and now preparing for the 2012 balloting.

Thorpe, who founded an NGO to educate girls displaced by civil war, said in an interview via Skype from Freetown about the Women PeaceMakers Program, “When I came back after that experience, I was ready to take on anything or anybody else in the world. I was really empowered.” 

“Back home it was a very lonely experience, a very lonely journey, dealing with women and girls who are traumatized and trying to get them reconciled either with their communities or their family members,” she said. “Eventually, you yourself are almost traumatized. You don’t look for thanks in this kind of work, but when you get the odd thanks, it makes you feel like a queen walking on air.” 

Working with a professional writer to put her story on paper also “was a big eye-opener for me. I didn’t realize I had so much to offer. If it were not for the Women PeaceMakers Program, I would not have realized the extent of work I had been doing toward peacebuilding within my country,” said Thorpe.

Absent From the Negotiating Table and From History

Dee Aker, the Kroc Institute’s deputy director, helped design and still directs the program. Aker, a psychological anthropologist by training, is a former journalist who has worked on four continents in education and on helping people make the transition from conflicts. “We realized that no one was recognizing what we were seeing on the ground, how women were…making powerful decisions and having a major impact on averting or ending conflicts,” Aker said. “Women never got invited to the negotiation table. They are just behind the scenes.”

The Kroc Institute has special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. The Women PeaceMakers Program hosts biennial conferences in support of efforts to improve the status of women and girls. The 2010 conference produced a report on the 10th anniversary of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, a landmark that stressed the importance of women’s “equal participation and full involvement in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security.” Among the speakers were Monica McWilliams, who helped end Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence, and Luz Méndez, one of only two women who participated in the negotiations that ended Guatemala’s civil war in 1996.

Méndez, vice president of the National Union of Guatemalan Women and a 2004 Woman PeaceMaker, spoke of organizing “courts of conscience” where women could speak out for the first time about the sexual violence inflicted on them in Guatemala’s decades-long civil war. “It was so liberating for them,” she said, and also secured their place in the historical record. In Guatemala “as in many countries,” she said, women often “are (left) out of history.”

No Shortage of Candidates

“We’ve had lawyers, government officials, a chief of police for a tribal area, a woman who took on the blasphemy law in Pakistan” and other activists as Women PeaceMakers, said Aker. The institute worried at first about getting word out about the program, but with the UN connection that has not been a problem, and it receives hundreds of applications each year.

The peacemakers have come from two dozen countries in the midst or not-long-removed from conflicts. On a couple of occasions, things were so unsettled that the prospective woman peacemaker could not leave and the institute had to choose someone else, said program officer Jen Freeman, formerly one of the “peacewriters.”

Aker and Freeman have journeyed to Nepal and the Philippines to hold regional conferences for alumnae and others involved in conflict resolution.

Combination of Art and Science

Merlie “Milet” Mendoza, a humanitarian worker in the Philippines, came to San Diego in fall 2010 two years after she was kidnapped and held for two months by militants in the Sulu archipelago, where she had been helping poor Muslim communities. Mendoza is a former official in the Corazon Aquino administration who moved from government to grassroots organizing in 1989 and led a peace coalition in troubled Mindanao.

In her PeaceMaker narrative, Mendoza said, “Peacemaking and conflict management go beyond the rational. They touch on the sacred and the divine. It is a combination of art and a science. It is about goodness.”

Another 2010 PeaceMakers Program participant was the Liberian peace activist and social worker Vaiba Kebeh Flomo, who helped organize the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace that brought pressure on the government of Charles Taylor and rebel forces to sign an accord in 2003. She later mobilized women to register and vote in the 2005 elections that made Ellen JohnsonSirleaf Africa’s first elected female president. 

A Need to Do More

Flomo helped unite Christian and Muslim women’s groups, who at one point, like the Greek women seeking to stop the Peloponnesian War in Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, withheld sex to pressure men to end the violence. Flomo was among the Liberian women featured in the 2008 documentary, Pray the Devil Back to Hell. 

In reaching out to Muslim women, Flomo, who worked for the Lutheran Church of Liberia’s Trauma Healing and Reconciliation Program, repeated one message: “In time of war, women and children suffer most. The bullet cannot pick and choose. Once it is in the air it is not looking for a Christian, it is not looking for a Muslim. It comes to anyone.”

Flomo, now back at work in Monrovia, said via Skype that her stay in San Diego “helped my self-esteem. After I told my story and I saw myself—‘Oh, this is where I came from and this is where I am’—it brought me to another level in my work. It made me think that if I came this far, I need to do more.”

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University of San Diego

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New York University’s prodigious number of international students (7,200) and participation in education abroad (4,300) have long solidified its place among the most international U.S. universities. Now it has laid claim to the title of the world’s first “global network university,” with a new liberal arts college open in Abu Dhabi, a second in the works for Shanghai, and nearly a dozen other sites around the world where NYU students go to study. Most of its 43,000 students still throng the buildings with their signature violet flags that surround Washington Square. Amending the 1831 pronouncement by Albert Gallatin and other founders that they were creating a university “in and of the city,” President John Sexton describes today’s NYU as “in and of the world.” 

Sexton, seated in his office atop red sandstone Bobst Library with a red-tailed hawk nesting outside his window, said the concept of the global network university is still evolving, but like a Polaroid picture becoming clearer over time. It is not, he emphasized, merely a hub-and-spoke arrangement or set of affiliated branches. “We see the university as an organism, a circulatory system” for faculty and students to move between continents for learning and research, Sexton said. He recalled a conversation over breakfast at Chequers with then Chancellor of the Exchequer of Britain Gordon Brown, who remarked that NYU’s ambitious conception brought to mind the Italian Renaissance “and the way the talent class moved among Milan and Venice and Florence and Rome.” That captures in a nutshell “the world view in which we see ourselves operating,” said Sexton.

The peripatetic Sexton had just returned from a 12day journey to Abu Dhabi, Singapore, South Korea, and Abu Dhabi again. A Brooklyn native, Sexton was schooled by the Jesuits at Fordham University to be a professor of religion, then retooled at Harvard Law School as a legal scholar. He has played a multitude of parts—champion high school debate coach, clerk to the Chief Justice of the United States, law school dean, and chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He is wont to quote Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Buber, Diogenes (“I am a citizen of the world”), and Charley Winans, his mentor and faculty legend at Brooklyn Prep.

Seeking an Edge in Global Talent Competition

Sexton believes NYU has gained an edge in a global competition for talent, such as the prominent economist it landed by offering to let him teach every fourth year in Abu Dhabi, closer to his wife’s family in Pakistan. He can envision the future Shanghai campus luring a world-class mathematician with aging parents in China. Already Sexton and Alfred Bloom, vice chancellor for NYU Abu Dhabi, boast of creating “the world’s honors college” in the Middle East emirate. NYU and its Abu Dhabi patron flew several hundred high school seniors to the emirate for weekend visits before admitting the first class of 149, one-third American. The median SAT verbal and math scores were 1470. NYU Abu Dhabi in May awarded $16 million over five years for four joint-faculty research projects that will be based in Abu Dhabi and deal with climate modeling, computer security and privacy, cloud computing, and computational physics. Sexton has promised that all of NYU’s overseas operations will be self-sustaining and won’t siphon resources from Washington Square.

Vice Provost for Globalization and Multicultural Affairs Ulrich Baer presides over NYU’s 10 global academic centers for education abroad in Accra, Ghana; Berlin, Germany; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Florence, Italy; London, England; Madrid, Spain; Paris, France; Prague, Czech Republic; Shanghai, China, and Tel Aviv, Israel. Two sites are planned for Sydney, Australia, and Washington, D.C., and Sexton expects to open two more in South America and South Asia. With Abu Dhabi—Washington Square students will be able to spend a semester there—NYU’s global network will feature at least 16 sites by 2014.

Baer, who rowed crew at Harvard as an international student from Germany and did his PhD in comparative literature at Yale, has authored books on photography and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and edited a literary anthology about the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. Apart from providing academic and intellectual leadership for NYU’s global network, Baer’s duties now include negotiating long-term leases for more housing in London and Paris as well as explaining to NYU students why they can party in dorms in some parts of the world but not others. “The university is just starting to grasp what it means to operate globally like most corporations do,” he said. “You move people around. When you’re in Shanghai, do we pay for your dental insurance or not?” 

“I felt like I had died and gone to international education heaven.”

An Ethos of Education Abroad

Given the size of NYU’s education abroad program, it might be expected that this enterprise operates from a high visibility office with heavy foot traffic. That is not the case. Although NYU aspires to soon unify international operations in a single location, Baer and the Office of Global Programs currently occupy a suite on the eleventh floor of Bobst Library, while most education abroad staff work out of the lower level of a high-rise residence ten blocks away. They make education abroad pitches at innumerable orientation sessions but leave it to academic advisers within NYU’s 16 schools to close the sales. “Each college has a point person. By the time they get to us, they typically have decided,” said Associate Director Jaci Czarnecki. “We might meet with them to talk about which location makes the most sense and what they need to do to apply and be admitted and get there.” Education abroad is so ingrained in the NYU experience that most students don’t need a lot of convincing, she added. 

Some undergraduates are admitted to spend their first year at NYU centers in Florence, London, Paris, or Shanghai. Sophomore Mercedes Moya, U.S. born but raised in Paris, started at La Pietra, the Florence estate where students live and attend classes. “For me, New York is abroad,” said Moya, a politics and Italian major. “It was the city that drew me here. New York is definitely the capital of the world.”

Nearly 1,000 business majors study abroad each year, according to Susan Greenbaum, associate dean of the Stern School of Business. Over spring break last March, Stern flew 650 juniors in its international economics course to Budapest, Buenos Aires, or Singapore to visit businesses. An alumni benefactor supports the program. Stern also now offers a business and political economy degree in which students spend two semesters in London and a third in Shanghai. “We hope that we’ve lit them on fire” for work in the international arena, Greenbaum said.

Wanted: More International Undergraduates

The Office for International Students and Scholars (OISS) already occupies prime real estate a block from Washington Square. NYU enrolls more than 6,700 international students—one-third are undergraduates. The countries that send the most students to NYU are South Korea (1,400), China (almost 1,200), and India (more than 1,000). Most pursue master’s degrees or PhDs, but the 2,035 international undergraduates are double the number of five years ago. (Some 1,000 graduates are on Optional Practical Training.) OISS director David Austell said that when he arrived at NYU in 2007, “I felt like I had died and gone to international education heaven.”

Sexton aims to boost the number of international undergraduates from 9.1 to 20 percent. Freshman Hyun Seok Oh, a permanent resident of Hong Kong, chose NYU because he wanted to study in a metropolis like his hometown. Oh, an economics major, said, “A campus would have been nice and everything, but the advantages here outweigh the disadvantages. It’s a great place.” 

“I felt kind of lost, but then I got used to it and made a bunch of friends,” she said. Studio arts “is a small program within a huge school…(and) the advisee system is very good.”

While business is the biggest draw for international students, more than 800 are enrolled in NYU’s vibrant visual and performing arts programs. Young Eun “Grace” Lee, from Seoul, South Korea, is a studio arts major. At first NYU seemed bigger than she bargained for and “I felt kind of lost, but then I got used to it and made a bunch of friends,” she said. Studio arts “is a small program within a huge school…(and) the advisee system is very good.”

While international undergraduates live in NYU’s high rise residences, graduate students are dispersed. With sky-high rents in Greenwich Village and much of Manhattan, some find apartments across the East River in Brooklyn or across the Hudson River in Jersey City, Hoboken, and other areas linked to the city by rapid transit.

The plan is to eventually enroll 2,000 students at NYU Abu Dhabi and as many as 3,000 in Shanghai, which will start in 2013. Sexton enlisted May Lee, an NYU-trained lawyer and banker, to negotiate terms with the Chinese Ministry of Education, Shanghai’s municipal government, the government of the special Pudong district, and East China Normal University. Lee, associate vice chancellor for Asia and daughter of Chinese immigrants, said the idea of bringing American-style education to China and helping the Chinese build a bridge to Westerners “really struck a chord with me.”

Turning Students Into ‘Inspired’ Jazz Musicians in Europe

Faculty in this large, decentralized university continue to find ways to entice U.S. students to venture into the world. David Schroeder, director of jazz studies, has turned Florence and Prague into favored destinations for music majors. “Nobody wants to leave New York as a jazz musician,” said Schroeder, but while his students are treated as greenhorns in Manhattan, “in Europe they’re considered those young, inspired jazz musicians from New York City.”

Junior Zach Feldman, 20, a music business major, was a deejay at the Hard Rock Cafe Prague and arranged parties that drew hundreds to other clubs in fall 2010. “It was really cool, dealing with club owners who didn’t speak any English,” he said. “Literally half the sophomore class (of music business majors) is going to Prague next semester (fall 2011).”

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Some 4,349 undergraduates studied abroad in 2009–10. Among the three-quarters who had declared a major, only 52 were language majors. Some global centers require language study, but most courses are taught in English. Associate Professor of Sociology Tom Ertman began the Berlin program in 2005 with non-German speakers in mind. “You could (never) run a program out of here targeting German students because there weren’t enough of them,” said Ertman. But lots of students were intrigued by the German capital’s image as “a cool, young, happening place.” Some 140 students study there each year, including large numbers from NYU’s Steinhardt art programs.

What China Wants From Washington Square

Xudong Zhang, a comparative literature professor and chair of East Asian studies, said Chinese language enrollments have grown “at an explosive rate” and now top 1,000. Zhang helped launch the Shanghai education abroad center in 2006 and directs China House, one of the NYU language and culture centers. China House soon will move into a new home alongside La Maison Française and Deutsches Haus on charming Washington Mews, a gated block of converted nineteenth century stables.

Zhang grew up in Shanghai, the son of naval research engineers. East Asian studies, he said, will be “no more special than other departments” in the partnership with East China Normal University. “What leading Chinese universities want from us is not ethnic Chinese faculty like me; they want our best researchers in science, social sciences, and the arts.”

President Sexton knows what his partners want and what NYU wants, which is to become one of the two or three dozen premiere research universities in the world. Many rivals have greater space and more resources, Sexton averred, but they cannot match NYU’s “locational endowment”—New York City—and “attitudinal endowment”—its aggressive entrepreneurship.

Kennesaw State University’s transformation from junior college to Georgia’s third largest university took only a few decades. It is still growing, adding its first doctoral degrees and building dorms so more than just 4,000 of its 22,000 students can live on the metropolitan Atlanta campus. With help from legendary University of Georgia coach Vince Dooley, it is preparing to field its first football team in 2014. But its academic ambitions are even grander and—as suggested by the 22-foot-high sculpture by Eino, Spaceship Earth, in the heart of campus—more global. “That’s Kennesaw State straddling the globe,” Ikechkwu Ukeje, a Nigerian-born professor and chair of elementary and early childhood education, said in jest.

But that artwork and a nearby colorful, 2.7-ton slab from the Berlin Wall both remind students and faculty every day of Kennesaw State’s international ambitions and achievements. One feather in its cap recently came in the form of a midterm report from its accreditor, the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges (SASC), which requires member institutions to single out an area for self-improvement when they seek reaccreditation. KSU intrepidly asked in 2007 to be held accountable for how much and how well it bolstered its international education programs.

SASC sent Susan Buck Sutton, then associate vice chancellor of Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (she is now at Bryn Mawr College), to take a look. “KSU is emerging as a national leader in international education,” Sutton wrote in evaluating the institution’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP). “It would be difficult to find another university where such a broad range of global learning initiatives, across all dimensions of the institution, is occurring.”

“We’ve made the Quality Enhancement Plan part of our DNA,” said Barry J. Morris, vice provost for global engagement and strategic initiatives and executive director of the Institute for Global Initiatives, who deflects credit to the faculty. Morris said KSU’s international thrust benefited from strong leadership from President Daniel Papp and his cabinet, but received legitimacy “because it was chosen from the bottom up. The faculty themselves raised the flag.” 

From Junior College to Comprehensive University

KSU opened in 1966 as Kennesaw Junior College, constructed on what once was farmland in Cobb County 20 miles northwest of Atlanta. It did not start offering bachelor’s and master’s degrees until the 1980s. Now it is preparing its first doctoral students. Today it has 20,000 undergraduates (average age 25) and 2,000 graduate students. Some 1,600 are international and nearly 900 students study abroad each year. Eighty-five percent live off campus or commute and half are nontraditional. KSU proudly describes itself as “a metropolitan university.” Former President Betty L. Siegel was a vigorous proponent of KSU’s international efforts during her quarter century at the helm, and KSU took part in the American Council on Education’s Global Learning for All project aimed at helping institutions expose adult, minority, and part-time students to international education. Daniel Papp, a Sovietologist and founder of the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech, picked up the international torch when he became president in 2006. 

The “Year Of” Program

A signature international activity is KSU’s “Year of Program” that spotlights a particular country, region, or international theme through a host of courses, lectures, exhibits, music, theater, and other activities that extend throughout an academic year. It started with Japan in 1984–85 and now has examined nearly two dozen countries as well as the Olympic movement and slave trade across the Atlantic. The Year of Romania was marked in 2010–11 with 33 lectures, a film festival, and other events that examined the treatment of the Roma (Gypsy) minority, persecution of Jews, post-communist religion and politics, and medieval painted monasteries. Some KSU students studied in Romania, and five faculty with Romanian roots made contributions as well. The Year of Program “is a lot of fun and a lot of work,” said Daniel Paracka, director of education abroad and manager of the Year of Program.

The 2006–07 Year of Kenya resonated with Atlanta’s sizeable Kenyan immigrant community. When the Kenyan ambassador spoke, he brought consular staff to process visas for Kenyan Americans to visit their homeland, and KSU has held follow-up conferences with support from Atlanta companies that do business in Africa. “We are still reaping the positive benefits. People now call us ‘Kenya-saw,’” said Vice Provost Morris, a Russian-speaking political scientist and former international banker.

[The Global Learning Coordination Council is] “the group that more than any other drives our internationalization efforts. This is the engine that ties the entire university together.”

Kennesaw State’s Coles College of Business recently became the new home of the India China America Institute, an economic think tank on economic and geopolitical issues involving the United States and the world’s largest emerging economies. The institute will help the business school and the university to “further engage in these countries while solidifying our position as a leader in global education,” said Ken Harmon, the business dean who is serving as interim provost and vice president for academic affairs. 

A New Institute for Global Initiatives

The Institute for Global Initiatives (IGI) was created under the provost’s office in 2003 to provide what history professor Akanmu G. Adebayo, the first executive director, describes as a “one stop shop” for faculty and student research and study. It replaced a smaller Office of International Programs housed in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Today a Global Learning Coordination Council (GLCC) of faculty, staff, and students oversees and coordinates KSU’s international activities (Professor Ukeje is a council member). The biweekly council developed a Global Engagement Certificate that students now can earn with their diplomas. Morris calls the council “the group that more than any other drives our internationalization efforts. This is the engine that ties the entire university together.”

Ed Rugg, retired vice president for academic affairs and former chief academic officer, said the transformation from junior college to university in the 1980s left “open fields for us to run in. The undergraduate curriculum hadn’t been fleshed out…. If we had better ideas for doing something, people were willing to entertain them. Nobody was saying no.” KSU was the first public institution in the state to offer an international affairs major, and its faculty have led internationalization initiatives for the entire University System of Georgia. “Our visibility and perception as an international campus was not just mythic, but real,” said Adebayo, who is editor-in-chief of KSU’s peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary Journal of Global Initiatives.

Financing Study Abroad With Student Fees

Kennesaw State provides $1 million a year in funding for the IGI and $940,000 more for other global learning activities, said Assistant Vice President for Financial Services Ashok Roy, who is also an associate professor of Asian studies. Students voted to impose an additional $14-per-semester fee on themselves to provide Global Learning Scholarships of at least $500 for everyone who studies abroad or takes part in university-sponsored service trips overseas. Students receive as much as $2,000 if they perform service and study abroad for longer periods. The fee generates $750,000 annually, said Dawyn Dumas, director of Global Engagement Programs.

“Our philosophy is that leadership is a lifestyle. Once they’ve gone on their first trip, they are hungry to go all around the world.”

KSU has dramatically increased education abroad opportunities for math and science majors. Professor of Mathematics Jun Ji, the College of Science and Mathematics representative on the GLCC, said, “Four years ago we had one (education abroad) program with 10 students. Now we have eight programs in science and math, and we got 98 students last year.” A large poster outside Ji’s office shouts in bold letters, “YOU CAN GO TO CHINA FOR $2,100.” This includes a $750 Global Learning Scholarship plus an additional $400 per student from KSU’s Confucius Institute, one of the 68 such centers in the United States and 300 worldwide that receive support from China to encourage study of Chinese language and culture. 

KSU sends students on 40 different education abroad programs, mostly for two to three weeks in the summer. With Georgia Southern and Georgia State, it offers full-semester Italian culture courses in the Tuscan town of Montepulciano. KSU ranked tenth in the 2010 Open Doors report among master’s level institutions in education abroad. The School of Nursing sends students on two-week service-learning trips to Oaxaca, Mexico. Sociologist Ardith Peters leads students to Uganda in summer to work with an NGO on adaptive sports for blind children. 

‘Emerging Global Scholars’

KSU has added a President’s Emerging Global Scholars program to the mix of opportunities offered through its Center for Student Leadership (CSL). Fifty high achievers took 10-day service trips to Brazil or Mexico as freshmen and went to South Africa at the end of their sophomore year for further civic engagement activities. “Our philosophy is that leadership is a lifestyle,” said CSL Director Brian Wooten. “Once they’ve gone on their first trip, they are hungry to go all around the world.”

“Next year we’re going to India,” said sophomore Gina Perleoni. Classmate Zoe HoChoy, who grew up in Kennesaw, said never “in my wildest dreams” did she expect to have multiple education abroad experiences in college. Graduate student Punit Patel, born in Mumbai, India, but raised in the United States, said that “momentum is building year after year” on KSU’s international front. Patel, former student body president, and 21 classmates took part in the Asian International Model United Nations conference in Beijing, China, over spring break. All received Global Learning Scholarships to attend.

“One great thing about KSU is that international students are encouraged to become campus leaders,” said Dhanashree Thorat, 22, an English major from India. The university helped pay her way to give a paper at Oxford in England.

Moby-Dick in Morocco, Children’s Books in Benin

During the Year of Kenya, Karen Robinson, associate professor of theatre and performance studies, and lecturer Margaret Baldwin collected oral histories from Atlanta’s Kenyan community and mounted a play around them. Robinson, who visited Kenya with other faculty, later brought the Shangilia Youth Choir, a troupe of children rescued from the streets of Nairobi, to perform at KSU. Ten theater majors staged Melville’s Moby Dick at a collegiate festival in Casablanca, Morocco, in 2009, speaking their lines in English with selective narration in French and Arabic by students fluent in those languages.

While a graduate student, Assistant Professor of French Lucie Viakinnou-Brinson created a nonprofit called Seeds of Knowledge to provide textbooks for schools in her native Benin. Now she has students in her French classes, from beginners to advanced, write children’s books in French to donate to schools in Benin, and hopes to take students on her next trip there.

Recognition for Faculty, Student Global Engagement

Dawyn Dumas, the IGI’s director of Global Engagement Programs, spearheaded efforts to create a registry of KSU faculty and staff with international expertise. Scores of faculty have stepped forward to present credentials entitling them to be designated international education “specialists” or “contributors.” Dumas is also the point person for students seeking to earn the Global Engagement Certificate. They must have spent at least four weeks on education abroad, completed 12 credits in upper division global learning courses, and submitted a portfolio documenting service or activism on such issues as hunger or human rights. More than 100 students have earned the certificate since 2008.

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Donald L. Amoroso, executive director of the new International Center for Innovation in Technologies and former chair of the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, takes students with him twice a year to study and conduct research in Japan. “My heart is in it,” said Amoroso, an expert on advanced cell phone technology. The university spent more than $1 million converting a warehouse into high-tech classrooms and computer labs for Amoroso’s innovation center.

Though on the rise, an immediate goal for the university is to lift the graduation rate, which is still under 40 percent. Papp, Morris, and faculty leaders all believe KSU’s international thrust will help the institution keep more students on that path to a diploma. 

When Tori Haring-Smith was in seventh grade, her imagination was captured by a book the journalist and war correspondent John Sack wrote about his travels to the 13 smallest countries on the planet. Nine years later, with Swarthmore College diploma in hand, she set out to retrace his steps to Sark, Swat, Sikkim, and other off-the-beaten-track places. Her 12-month journey came courtesy of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, bestowed on a select group of liberal arts college students for a year of independent travel and study around the world. Watson fellows don’t have to take classes or do academic research. They just have to use their imaginations to explore the world, as 2,500 have done since 1969 with generous grants from the late IBM chairman’s foundation. 

Haring-Smith, like many Watson fellows, gravitated toward academe, teaching theater and writing at Brown University, serving as executive director of the Watson Fellowship, becoming a dean and vice president at Willamette University, and then in 2005 being named the twelfth president of Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania. Washington & Jefferson (W&J) now has its own version of the Watson: the Magellan Project, which helps students pursue global intellectual adventures during college summers. The college provides both extensive mentoring, including workshops on how to write compelling project proposals, and financial support to make the projects happen. Since 2008 it has green-lighted and funded 100 Magellan Projects, including some that did not require a passport but all of which “involve purposeful travel and exploration in new and unfamiliar surroundings.” The grants average $2,000.

The college has a one-stop referral location to help students through the application process. The projects are self-directed, but the Magellan Scholars painstakingly map their plans in advance with a faculty mentor. They also must convince a committee composed of an associate dean, the head of career services, and three professors that the project is feasible. Every scholar attends a writing workshop in February and commits to telling others (including prospective W&J students) about their journeys upon their return. It is all aimed at assisting students “in crafting and in telling compelling stories of curiosity and achievement that will be useful throughout their college years” and beyond, as explained on the Magellan Project Web site.

From Diagnosticians to Problem Solvers

The Magellan Project has quickly become a signature feature of the college. It has its own $1 million endowment and its laurels include a 2010 Andrew Heiskell Award for Innovation in International Education. Moreover, said Haring-Smith, it has effected a change in how students view poverty and other social inequities. “It’s taken them from a stance that essentially said, ‘There’s a problem; someone should solve it,’ to ‘There’s a problem and I am going to help solve it.’” 

The college, which traces its roots to three “log cabin colleges” established in the 1780s by Presbyterian ministers that merged in 1865, enrolls 1,450 students on a 60-acre campus in the town of Washington, 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. 

The college sends about 190 students on traditional education abroad programs each year, many on faculty-led three-week classes in January. But Haring–Smith was intent on finding new ways to thrust them into situations “where they would be on their own, independently solving problems… without anybody to fall back on.” The Magellan Project, she said, was in keeping with the college’s mission statement, which speaks of graduating men and women “prepared to contribute substantially to the world in which they live,” and with a 2007 strategic plan that set a goal of bringing “the world into W&J and W&J into the world.” 

A Layperson’s Guide for Cancer Patients

The projects can revolve around independent research, service, or internships, but formal classroom study is out of bounds. Projects have included studying Holocaust sites in Europe, examining the healthcare system in Cyprus, volunteering at medical clinics in the Dominican Republic and South Africa, and preparing a patients’ guide to granulosa cell tumor (GCT) research.

Sophomore Haley Roberts wrote that guide after interning for GCT researchers at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Roberts, a student athlete and economics major, survived the cancer at age 16. “When I was diagnosed in 2009, I was frustrated that I didn’t fully understand GCT or treatment options or how cancer worked. Patients wanted to know about the science behind their disease to make better medical decisions and talk to their doctors intelligently,” she said, but the typical scientific medical article was indecipherable. As a result, she published The Genetics of Granulosa Cell Tumour, An Unofficial Guide for the Scientifically Illiterate, which has been downloaded hundreds of times from the Granulosa Cell Tumour Research Foundation’s Web site. Roberts, who remains in remission, now aspires to a career in public health.

Deciphering the Tax Code of Opportunities

Washington & Jefferson College had a panoply of student research and internship awards and opportunities before the Magellan, but “it was extremely confusing. It was like the tax code," said Haring-Smith. “We said, ‘Let’s call these all Magellans.’” 

Nick Tyger, a molecular biology major, is among a handful of students who snagged three Magellans over successive summers. The grants supported his work volunteering and recruiting other students to volunteer to set up health clinics in poor, mountain villages in the Dominican Republic near Haiti. He also travelled to Cusco, Peru, to scout other locations for clinics.

That didn’t pan out, but the club Tyger established, Presidents Without Borders (a nod to the college nickname), attracted 40 members and sent volunteers to Nicaragua in summer 2012. Tyger, who is headed to chiropractic college, said, “I have a new outlook on the global community. I thought before I left that these types of problems—hunger and poverty—were so much farther away than they actually are. Just a short plane ride and you’re in the midst of it.”

Not a Good Magellan Without Tears

Tiffani Gottschall, an economics professor who is the Magellan adviser for sophomores, said students typically have “a lot of nerves” as they embark on their projects. “They touch down in the airport in Turkey or Egypt and find themselves alone. Now what do they do?” she asked. James Sloat, associate dean for assessment and new initiatives, said, “In some sense, it’s not a good Magellan unless there are tears along the journey.” 

A third of W&J students are the first in their family to attend college and 20 percent qualify for need-based Pell Grants. They do not “have a sense of entitlement or superiority….They feel, ‘I’m just an average person,’” Haring-Smith said. It’s an enormous boost to their self-confidence when they extricate themselves from situations “where the last bus has gone up the mountain to the village where they are staying, and they have no money and no place to stay and no phone and no place to call even if they had a phone.”

Magellan Scholars are given ample opportunities to speak about their experiences, including recruiting pitches to freshmen before the new students sign a pledge at a matriculation ceremony to work toward becoming global citizens.

Educating Parents

Freshman, sophomores, and juniors with at least a 2.5 GPA can apply. The college awards about 25 Magellans each year. Haring-Smith would like to see many more. Increasing the number “actually has more to do with educating parents than educating students,” said the president, who has had to allay concerns of parents worried about sending their daughters or sons off to distant lands alone. She tells them: “You’ve raised a child who can do this.”

Carol Barno of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, was one of those anxious parents in 2010 when freshman daughter Erin set off to study architecture in Europe. The mathematics and art major has since done two more Magellan projects. “They’ve given her such confidence. She’s not that little 18-yearold girl I sent to W&J saying, ‘Oh, God, please take care of her,’” said Barno. Erin, a star field hockey player, concurs: “Traveling abroad on my own has made me fearless.”

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Washington & Jefferson College

Read more about Washington & Jefferson College

They were just brief remarks in the wee hours of the chill October 1960 night on the stone steps of the Michigan Union from a tired John F. Kennedy who had flown in after debating rival Richard Nixon in New York. But the future president threw out a challenge to the thousands of students who had waited in the drizzle to greet him. Speaking off the cuff, he asked, “How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the foreign service and spend your lives traveling around the world?”

The idea of an international volunteer corps of young Americans already had been percolating in Congress, but the Michigan students got the ball rolling, gathering hundreds of signatures on a petition expressing a willingness to serve in poor countries. Kennedy formally proposed a Peace Corps in a San Francisco speech a few days before winning one of the closest elections in U.S. history. On March 1, 1961, JFK signed an executive order creating the agency, which Congress later wrote into law. Among the first volunteers were Alan and Judy Guskin, the Michigan graduate students who organized the petition drive. Half a century later, no tour of the Michigan campus is complete without a stop to read the inscription on the marker on the Union steps: “Conception of Peace Corps First Mentioned on This Spot October 14, 1960.”

The Peace Corps connection is an indelible part of the identity of the University of Michigan, which enrolls nearly 6,000 international students and offers instruction in 65 languages, from Bamana and Bosnian to Tamil and Twi to Urdu and Uzbek. Founded almost two centuries ago, U-M (it prefers the hyphen and never tires of seeing its block letter M logo stamped on sweatshirts and signs) boasts the seventh largest endowment of any U.S. university ($7.8 billion), according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers, and conducts more research ($1 billion-plus) than any campus other than Johns Hopkins, according to the National Science Foundation. Constitutionally autonomous, it has weathered large cuts in state funding and still managed to hire dozens of new, tenure-track faculty, all while squeezing over a decade nearly a quarter-billion dollars in recurring costs from its $1.6 billion operating budget. “We have navigated this period well. We’ve remained on our upward trajectory and been able to do a lot of things we wanted to do, like increase the number of students who are studying abroad,” said Provost Philip Hanlon.

Ramping Up International Activities

From a campus with 27,000 undergraduates and 14,000 graduate students, the education abroad numbers have doubled since 2004–05 to nearly 2,000 in 2010–11, with 1,300 others heading abroad for service, internships, and other noncredit opportunities. President Mary Sue Coleman has made it her mission to, as she put it, “ramp up our international efforts,” in part by leading deans and faculty on carefully planned trips to Africa, China, and Brazil that have produced expanded research partnerships and other initiatives.

The 2008 trip to Ghana—on which she brought the Michigan Gospel Chorale—and to South Africa led to creation of an African Presidential Scholars Program that brings ten promising young scholars to Ann Arbor each year for residencies, as well as establishment of a new African Studies Center within the International Institute. Coleman has expanded a partnership with Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) in Shanghai, where a Michigan faculty member is dean of the UM-SJTU Joint Institute that confers dual degrees in engineering. The U-M Medical School has a $14 million research partnership with Peking University. At the same time, a top-level U-M task force ruled out opening a branch campus in China, as some universities have done. 

International Opportunities for Undergraduates

President Coleman also created in 2009 the Challenge for the Student Global Experience that has raised tens of millions of dollars for education abroad scholarships. She found internal funds to match $1 for every $2 of large donations, made the first gift herself, and later donated her 2011 salary increase as well. 

More than half of Michigan students (53 percent) now study outside Europe, compared with 38 percent eight years ago. The Center for Global and Intercultural Study within the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, operates the largest education abroad office on the decentralized campus. U-M faculty serve as resident directors of 40 of its 90 study abroad programs. The center also runs a service program called Global Intercultural Experience for Undergraduates (GIEU) that sends 200 students in small groups, each with a professor, to 15 to 20 places in need around the globe each summer. 

Senior Natalie Bisaro, a communications and comparative literature major, spent a month in Grenada working with young children. “Before going, I was kind of terrified of studying abroad, to be honest,” said Bisaro. “This was all pretty much life changing.” She later spent a semester in Switzerland and took a sports management class in Ann Arbor that included two weeks in London looking at preparations for the Summer Olympics. The latter was one of a dozen “Global Course Connections” classes with travel embedded. 

Lester Monts, senior vice provost for academic affairs, pushed for the creation in 2002 of the GIEU program. Monts, an ethnomusicologist and trumpeter who led the U-M Symphonic Band on a tour of China and helped bring to Ann Arbor the only Confucius Institute devoted solely to the arts, said, “One of the things that I’ve tried to do here is not let these big, grand, university initiatives go without some kind of undergraduate involvement,” he said.

Close Ties With Ghana

Fittingly, some of Michigan’s strongest international ties are to Ghana, the country that Kennedy singled out in his remarks on the Union steps. Through a partnership with the Ghanaian Ministry of Health, the University of Ghana, and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, dating to the 1980s, the U-M Medical School has trained most of the country’s obstetrician-gynecologists and helped reverse a “brain drain” of young physicians who used to leave the country for training. Other schools, including Engineering, Public Health, and Social Science, also send faculty to teach and conduct research in Ghana and bring Ghanaian faculty and students to Ann Arbor. 

For a class project, biomedical engineering major Jack Hessburg and classmates spent weeks in Ghana accompanying obstetricians on their rounds in teaching hospitals, and back in Ann Arbor then designed a 17-inch plastic device to place a fabric sleeve around the baby’s head to aid midwives in deliveries. The device awaits approval by health authorities, but “the obstetricians and midwives we were working with were excited and cautiously optimistic,” said Hessburg. 

Sending Engineers and Artists Abroad

The College of Engineering has made a big push to encourage students to study and undertake projects abroad. “We’re broad minded. We talk about study abroad, research abroad, volunteer experiences abroad, engineering projects abroad,” including solar car competitions, said Associate Dean James Paul Holloway. “The goal is not study 
abroad. The goal is for students to get outside their comfort zone.”

The engineers are as much interested “in a challenging experience as they are in academic credit,” said Amy Conger, who directs the college’s international programs. “They want an experience that is engaging, professionally relevant, and that’s going to teach them something new. They want to tackle a problem.”

Bryan Rogers, retiring dean of the School of Art and Design, took an art class while completing a PhD in chemical engineering at University of California Berkeley and wound up reengineering himself into a sculptor and installation artist. The School of Art and Design is the smallest school at Michigan, and Rogers spent a couple of years selling the idea of education abroad to his faculty before convincing them to make international travel and study a requirement for the major. Rogers, who did postgraduate work at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, said, “Being somewhere else helped me better understand who I was. That’s what I want for our students and faculty…. The idea is not to go somewhere and get culture dust sprinkled on you, but to get away from the things that you’re familiar with and have an experience that helps you see where you came from.”

Global Scholars for Life

The university keeps expanding its international ambit in ways small and large. Three years ago it created a living-learning community it calls the Global Scholars Program in which U.S. and international students dwell together on the top two floors of a 10-story dorm and work on social justice projects. “When we advertise, we say we want students who are interested in making the world a better place,” said Jennifer Yim, the director. It quickly filled up with 35 students the first year, 70 the second, and the capacity of 130 the third year. “My students say ‘GSP for life,’” Yim said.

Xiaoxiao Liu, a senior from Beijing, served as a GSP resident adviser. He was also president of the student government’s international student affairs committee. Liu won math competitions as a schoolboy in China, but came to the United States for college because he wanted to learn more than the math and sciences emphasized in China’s universities. “Here you can speak whatever you want to say. People tend to have more diverse views of what’s going on. That’s something I really wanted to explore,” said Liu, who pulled off a rare triple major in actuarial math, statistics, and economics.

John Greisberger, director of the International Center, is heartened by the growing number of international undergraduates serving as resident advisers. “Four years ago, fewer than five of the 150 to 160 resident advisers were international students. Now it’s close to 40,” said Greisberger. “It’s a great job on campus. They get free housing and a meal plan. It really does build a multicultural environment within the residence halls.”

An Area Studies Powerhouse

Michigan is an area studies bastion, with six national resource centers among the International Institute’s 18 centers, plus a federally funded international business center. But that distinctive strength also means the Michigan centers were hard hit in 2011 when Congress cut Title VI funding for the national resource centers by 47 percent. Mark Tessler, vice provost for international affairs, said, “We’re better prepared than most. Some of these centers actually have endowments. I think the university will support us for a while.” But “the biggest unanswered question” is what happens in the long run to the dozens of less commonly taught languages, Tessler said. “If universities like us don’t offer them, then the U.S. just won’t have this capacity.” 

“We think it’s very important for a place like Michigan to keep the breadth and depth as much as possible because we know that many other institutions cannot.”

Kenneth Kollman, director of the International Institute, is looking to foundations to help fill in the $1.5 million, two-year funding gap. Although foreign language and area studies fellowships were not cut, Kollman said Michigan has had to cut back on summer language workshops and training for Michigan high school teachers. The university once calculated that it takes 29 students to pay for each section of a language course, but some of the centers’ languages— including Persian, Serbo-Croatian, Tamil, and Quechua—have as few as five students, he said.

Geography Lesson

The university in 2010 launched a “Global Michigan” Web site, globalportal.umich.edu, that pulls together resources and encourages students and faculty to conduct study and research abroad. “The world is today’s college campus. Never before have we had so much to learn from other nations and cultures,” Coleman says in a videotaped message that ends, “Go Blue—abroad!”

Coleman is unwilling to cede any of Michigan’s 65 languages as expendable.

“We think it’s very important for a place like Michigan to keep the breadth and depth as much as possible because we know that many other institutions cannot,” the president said. Cutting programs “is our last resort.”

“We had an experience back in the 1980s when we had one of these budget crunches and made the decision to close a couple of academic departments,” including geography, Coleman said. “Everybody thought there wasn’t any future in geography and then GPS [Global Positioning System] came along with all sorts of new things. Now it’s a very robust discipline. Anybody looking back now would think that decision was silly. So we are very careful; reducing languages for us would be a very serious decision.” 

It’s no surprise that San Francisco State University (SF State) is a magnet for international students. The green campus sits in a tranquil corner of one of the world’s most enticing  cities, with Muni trolleys running up to its door and the Pacific Ocean beckoning a mile away. It has ranked in the top five in international enrollments among master’s level institutions since 1996 and occupied first place three times according to the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors report. More surprising, this urban campus is second in the country in another category: participation in year-long study abroad. Most of these students, like the large majority of all 25,000 undergraduates, are racial or ethnic minorities. “We have this huge mix racially and ethnically, and that’s who we send,” said Provost Sue Rosser.

A significant number are from disadvantaged backgrounds. They win dozens of Gilman Scholarships each year—176 in the past five years— and three-quarters of the nearly 450 SF State study abroad students receive aid in some form. Yenbo Wu, associate vice president of international education, said, “We have proven that you can study abroad even if you’re not super rich.” David Wick, coordinator of study abroad services, said, “We’re doing some pretty unique things to make study abroad possible for very diverse, very low income, transfer, and older student populations.” The drive for diversity is a widely shared passion at SF State (both Wick and Marilyn Jackson, assistant director of international programs, wrote doctoral dissertations addressing education abroad issues for students of color). The campus is home to the nation’s first and only College of Ethnic Studies, created after a prolonged student strike during the antiwar and civil rights ferment of the late 1960s. The distinctive-looking student center, topped by tilted pyramids, is named for Cesar Chavez, the farm workers’ leader, and it faces Malcolm X Plaza. “We’ve gone beyond diversity. We are a campus for social justice and equity,” said Dean of Students Joseph Greenwell.

Senior Albert (A.J.) Burleson, who grew up in impoverished, historically black Hunter’s Point, started college years ago and even earned a track scholarship at Cal State University, Fresno, but left far short of a degree. He found much greater success at SF State where he completed a bachelor’s degree in sociology and international relations after spending a year at the University of Amsterdam on a Gilman Award. Burleson’s resume includes work on filmmaker Kevin Epps documentary Straight Outta Hunter’s Point. He became a peer mentor in the international programs office after returning from the Netherlands. “I received so much aid and support, and me coming from the inner city, I see it only fitting that I return the favor by helping others access study abroad,” said the 35-year-old. Another peer mentor, senior Jordan Brown, 26, a broadcasting and electronic media major who grew up in Sacramento, used his Gilman to study at the University of Tübingen and the Hochschule der Medien in Stuttgart, Germany, and headed to Ghana after graduation to complete a documentary. Brown successfully navigated art and media classes taught in German after one course in San Francisco and six weeks of language classes in Germany. “That was intense, but good,” said Brown, who is weighing a possible return to Germany for graduate school.

Thriving Despite Economic Challenges

SF State has moved forward with its internationalization efforts during a period of prolonged austerity and budget crises for California’s public institutions. When Yenbo Wu arrived in 2000 to take charge of the Office of International Programs, it had a 10-person staff. By 2007, when President Robert Corrigan, a stalwart supporter of internationalization, elevated Wu to the new position of associate vice president for international education, the staff had grown to 20. A hiring freeze subsequently cost the office two of those positions. A new international student adviser hired in spring 2012 was the first addition to the staff in two years. Corrigan, who retired in July 2012 at age 77 after 24 years, said he felt an obligation to ensure that the international students who enroll in such large numbers have a good experience during their years on the urban campus, including academic advice, mentoring, and opportunities to interact with faculty outside the classroom. Corrigan’s successor is Leslie Wong, former president of Northern Michigan University.

Cuts in state aid have led to greater class sizes at SF State, especially in departments depleted by the loss of 100 faculty jobs to attrition. A university planning advisory council that Corrigan appointed to address the budget challenges expressed strong support for “the university’s commitment to internationalization and the benefits that international programs bring to our students.” It also applauded efforts by the Office of International Programs (OIP) “to maximize flexibility and efficiency” and took note of “the financial advantages associated with strategically recruiting international students.” International students bring their global perspective and the numbers needed to develop new programs. In the economics department, which had lost five of 14 faculty members, Sudip Chattopadhyay, the chair, spearheaded the creation of a dual-degree master’s program with Xiamen University that brings to campus a cohort of 30 Chinese students, fully funded by their government, and sends SF State faculty to teach at Xiamen in the summer. “We have to be very innovative as to how we offer the same curriculum with reduced resources,” Chattopadhyay said. 

A Stellar Faculty, a Welcoming Community

Since fewer than 400 domestic students come from outside California, the international contingent makes an outsize contribution to campus diversity. “We’re not Stanford or Berkeley, but this is a university that’s right for most students, not just in the United States but the world,” said Wu, a native of Beijing. The location and SF State’s mission also help attract a stellar faculty. Rosser, a zoologist and women’s studies scholar who previously was Georgia Tech’s first female dean, said, “We’re really quite fortunate in the caliber of faculty we’re able to attract.” 

“We’re not Stanford or Berkeley, but this is a university that’s right for most students, not just in the United States but the world.”

San Francisco, the city that gave birth to the United Nations, is home to a polyglot population. “We don’t have to do much of a marketing job for San Francisco,” said Jay Ward, the OIP associate director who has directed international student services since 1994, when there were 1,000 international students. Counting those on Optional Practical Training, SF State now has more than 2,400. With a third adviser now on board, Ward hopes to extend office hours and expand programming “to the way it was before.”

Koichiro Aoshima, the Japanese-born coordinator for international student services and outreach, recalled that on the day he first set foot on campus in 1998, “a guy came up to me and asked for directions. He thought I was from here. You just blend in.” 

Aoshima and Mei-Ling Wang, coordinator of international student advising, advise hundreds of international undergraduate and exchange students. When speaking with new arrivals, Wang always keeps in mind how she felt as an 18-yearold freshman at Drexel University in Philadelphia, fresh from Taiwan. “It isn’t easy. You struggle with the language. I was even afraid to go to grocery shop. I didn’t know how to order a sandwich. ‘Why do they have so many choices?’” she recalled. “You really have to be patient with these students.”

Incubating Student Leaders

There are 26 international clubs at SF State. The largest by far is the 1,800-member International Education Exchange Council (IEEC). It includes the hundreds of exchange students who come to SF State each year, droves of U.S. students preparing for or newly returned from study abroad, and other students drawn by dozens of weekly events including sports events, film nights, and language exchange partnerships. The council affords ample opportunities for leadership training with nearly 100 officer positions, including co-U.S. and international presidents.

Eric Ostlund, 24, a graduate student from Uppsala University, Sweden, studying law, economics, and criminal justice, said, “The IEEC is very different from anything you’re likely to find anywhere else, just in terms of sheer size and magnitude and all the different things we do. We’re one of the few environments where if you have an idea and you want to do it, you actually can.”

Ostlund was co-president with Linda Carter Nguyen of Alameda, California, whose Vietnamese immigrant parents named her after the actress who played Wonder Woman, from a television show they watched to learn English. Nguyen joined the IEEC to meet French students on campus before her semester in Paris. “I kind of corralled all the French people on campus and said, ‘Be my friend, take care of me.’ So when I went to Paris, that’s what they did. They picked me up in the airport. They introduced me to their friends,” she said. Flying back home, the liberal studies major resolved “to be more involved in the IEEC to keep this international dream alive.” 

IEEC students are a familiar sight on campus—staffing a study abroad table on the quad, distributing flyers, and organizing events and activities. They also raise funds for scholarships. Noah Kuchins, the IEEC adviser, works to connect all incoming students with buddies “before they set foot on campus.” He finds prospects when they inquire at the OIP about education abroad. His pitch: “You’re interested in studying in Japan and we’ve got 30 Japanese students coming next semester. Would you want to welcome one of them?”

Exchange Brings Opportunities

Students can choose among 115 study abroad programs in 28 countries. SF State has 55 bilateral exchanges of its own and offers 51 more through the California State University international programs office. Exchanges bring international opportunities to every department, including SF State’s undergraduate cinema major. Since 2010 Weimin Zhang, an associate professor and awardwinning documentary filmmaker, has led the International Documentary Workshop in Shanghai, China, each summer in partnership with Xiejin Film and Television College at Shanghai Normal University. She brought the first dozen SF State students to Shanghai in June 2010 to collaborate with a dozen Shanghai Normal students over three weeks to conceive, write, and film four 10-minute documentaries on unusual aspects of life in China, including the local hip hop scene, housing shortages, and migrant workers’ struggles. The students overcome language barriers. Zhang, a graduate of the Beijing Film Academy, said, “Even I was surprised they can make a film in a language they don’t even know.” President Corrigan, who visited the first workshop, marveled that students shared “a common language of film.” The Shanghai film school also sends several students to San Francisco for a semester each term. 

General Education Includes Global Perspectives

All undergraduates must fulfill a cultural, ethnic, or social diversity requirement. Some 300 courses already contain significant international content. Paul Sherwin, dean of the College of Liberal and Creative Arts and formerly dean of humanities, believes a forthcoming general education change will quadruple student enrollment to 4,000 in courses offering comparative study of global issues and regions. “The curriculum already has changed drastically in almost all majors,” even in his own field of English literature, said Sherwin, pointing to a recent hire who teaches a course on Shakespeare’s influence on India’s Bollywood.

“We’re creating global citizens,” said history professor Trevor Getz, an Africa specialist whose popular courses serve as a feeder to education abroad programs in Ghana and South Africa. “It’s not just important that we send our elite abroad. This country does a pretty good job of that. It’s equally important that the kinds of students that we have here are able to have that experience.” 

Political scientist Emil Nagengast was hired by Juniata College in 1996 to teach international politics, with Europe and the former East Germany—he’d studied at Karl Marx University in Leipzig shortly before the Berlin Wall fell—his special province. But in 2004, with a conscience pricked by complaints from two former, African-born students about the Eurocentricity of his course, he spent a sabbatical in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, examining the workings of the fledgling African Union. The next year, with guidance and help from a Washington & Jefferson College professor who had already begun taking students to The Gambia, Nagengast led four Juniata students to Senegal and The Gambia for three weeks. In 2008 Juniata and other colleges in Pennsylvania formed a Keystone Study Away Consortium to offer a full semester at the University of  The Gambia. Nagengast, or Nags as students call him, now has led eight summer trips to The Gambia and launched a winter class as well. He calculates that 135 Juniata students to date have studied in The Gambia over summer and 31 in spring semester. His Introduction to International Politics course now devotes as much time to the African Union as it does to the European Union (one week). Of his midcareer switch in interests, Nagengast recalls that when he broached the idea of education abroad in West Africa, administrators “just said, ‘Interesting. Go do it.’ They trusted me.” 

He is not alone in finding ready support for internationalizing courses and the entire experience at Juniata, a liberal arts college with 1,600 students tucked in the Appalachian mountains in the central Pennsylvania town of Huntingdon. Juniata was founded in 1876 as the first of a half dozen colleges associated with the pacifist Church of the Brethren. It is independent but still part of a network of Brethren colleges. Most past presidents were church ministers and a fraction of current faculty and students are members. The Brethren heritage is manifest most strongly in its peace and conflict studies program and in the meditative “Peace Chapel,” a circular ring of stones set on a nearby hilltop designed by architect Maya Lin. Traditionally its student body was drawn from within the borders of the Quaker State. But that is changing.

A Long International Journey

Juniata set out almost two decades ago to make itself a more globally minded campus. A 1993 strategic plan identified internationalization as a top priority and urged the recruitment of more international students. The next year it opened an Intensive English Program to help attract them to Huntingdon. Juniata in 2004 joined the American Council on Education (ACE) Internationalization Collaborative, and its 2008 strategic plan embraced a goal of raising international enrollments from 6 to 10 percent. It reached that mark swiftly, with 166 students on visas on campus in 2011–12, including 50 from China. President Thomas Kepple said he would gladly see that percentage double to 20 percent so long as Juniata’s overall enrollment keeps growing as it has on his watch, from 1,200 in 1998 to the current 1,600. Juniata’s out-of-state enrollment has doubled to 40 percent.

“It’s becoming a better place. It’s hard work in admissions, basically,” said Kepple, who will retire in May 2013. Students are drawn in part by Juniata’s generous financial aid for both domestic and international applicants. Dean of Admissions Michelle Bartol said, “We’re never coasting. Right now with China recruitment, everyone else is kind of catching up. We’ve got to stay one step ahead.” 

The college, which boasts an alumnus with a Nobel Prize in physics (William Phillips ’70), is particularly strong in the sciences and sends dozens of graduates to medical and graduate schools. For international parents, “the sales pitch is they already know people who’ve sent their children here and they’ve done well,” said Kepple. “Ninety percent of our Chinese students graduate. That’s larger than our U.S. student number.”

Language Houses and a Global Village

Dean of International Education Jenifer Cushman and Rosalie Rodriguez, the college’s chief diversity officer, returned from an ACE Bridging the Gap Symposium in 2008 determined to find new ways to change the face of the college and encourage more students to encounter and reflect upon cultural differences. They came up with a Global Engagement Initiative that included the creation of a residential Global Village that features an intercultural floor for a mix of international and domestic students within a larger dorm. 

“This is a really good community. People are really nice and welcoming, the professors remember your name and their office is always open.”

Clarissa Diniz, a pre-med student from Recife, Brazil, said it was “really cool” living there as a freshman. She stayed on as a resident adviser for sophomore year. Diniz, daughter of two math professors, has a brother who graduated from UCLA, but was happy with her small town choice. “This is a really good community. People are really nice and welcoming, the professors remember your name and their office is always open.”

Also as part of the Global Village, several small houses on campuses are being turned into Spanish, French, and German houses where students live together to improve their language skills. Sophomore Rebekah Sheeler from Boyertown, Pennsylvania, was programming coordinator for the newly opened Spanish House in 2011–12. “The other students call me the Mom,” laughed Sheeler, who was drawn to Juniata to play field hockey but dropped the sport after a year in part to pursue international education interests. She combined classes and an internship in Orizaba, Mexico, in summer 2011, spent fall 2011 at a university in Quito, Ecuador, and will intern at a wildlife reserve in Peru in spring 2013.

A Thirst for Languages Without a Requirement

Juniata has no language requirement beyond two years in high school for admission. The college jettisoned a stronger requirement in the 1970s, and an effort in 1996 to reinstate it fell a few votes short. But Professor of Spanish Henry Thurston-Griswold said, “When I came in 1992, we averaged 50 students per semester taking Spanish. Now we have more than triple that number.” Juniata is home to the much-honored Language in Motion program, which deploys international students and study abroad returnees to local K–12 classrooms where they present language lessons and cultural activities. Language in Motion, led by Deborah Roney, has taken root at 13 other colleges and universities. 

Juniata offers French, German, and Russian as well as Spanish and two years of Chinese. “The difficulty with languages other than Spanish is we’re basically one-person programs,” said Michael Henderson, chair of world languages and associate professor of French. “Obviously offering an upper division course in French critical theory is not a good idea…. My main motivation is to get students in my classes to study abroad.”

In the 1980s Juniata exchanged as many as 20 science majors each year with the Catholic University of Lille in France and the University of Marburg in Germany. Chemistry Professor Ruth Reed, a former Fulbright scholar in Germany, championed the exchanges, which later dropped off. She saw one downside to sending so many Juniata students to Lille and Marburg. “If you send too many, then you defeat the purpose. You have this little clique that doesn’t integrate. We can be too successful,” said the retiring chemistry professor.

While Reed’s passion came early, Gerald Kruse, a professor of math and computer science, was farther along in his career when he had a serendipitous meeting with Thomas Weik, a computer science professor at Juniata partner Muenster University of Applied Sciences in Germany. They wound up swapping homes and classes for fall 2006. “It was just a fantastic experience. I went over as a passive supporter (of education abroad) and came back as a very active promoter,” said Kruse, who now serves on Juniata’s International Education Committee. 

An Engaged Faculty and Two Advisers

Almost half the class of 2011 studied abroad, many on the 20 education abroad courses led by Juniata professors. Juniata has exchange partners in 19 countries. “Our success at this didn’t start at the top,” said Provost James Lasko. “Faculty who had international contacts were largely responsible for this exchange model. Sometimes administrators just have to know when to get out of the way and give your people a little latitude to run with a good idea.” Cushman, the dean of international education and associate professor of German, said, “Faculty involvement and engagement really are the heart of our international programs. Faculty members go above and beyond. Every time my office takes a step, it’s in conjunction with faculty.” 

Juniata has 102 full-time and 48 part-time faculty, and each student has two academic advisers, one for their Program of Emphasis (POE)—Juniata’s interdisciplinary alternative to majors—and another from a second discipline to offer a different perspective. The advice includes strong encouragement to study abroad.

Most students choose straightforward business, science, and humanities concentrations, but three in 10 chart new pathways to their bachelor’s degrees. 

Brianne Rowan, 22, from Port Townsend, Washington, fashioned her POE around global health issues. She spent three summers doing volunteer work in Thailand with a humanitarian group from her hometown, spent junior year abroad in Lille, France, and twice went on two-week service trips with Juniata’s Habitat for Humanity chapter to build homes for the poor in Yerevan, Armenia, and in El Salvador. 

Megan Russell, 22, a senior from Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania, and a Habitat for Humanity leader, learned on Nagengast’s 2011 trip to The Gambia that “things do not always go as planned. Sometimes a pipe breaks in your room or scorpions are chasing you around, but it’s all part of the experience.” The aspiring physical therapist came back from Gambia and organized a fundraiser to buy solar panels for a rural hospital.

Growing Pains and Essays on the Radio

There have been growing pains with the rapid climb in international enrollments, especially the spurt in the number of students from China. History professor David Sowell, a former international education director, said, “Our big challenge now is how do we integrate them? We have the Global Village; we have lots and lots of student groups. How do we use programming and those groups to draw students into that intercultural exchange?”

Doug Stiffler, an associate professor of history and East Asia specialist, sees that already happening. When Stiffler and spouse Jingxia Yang, now the Chinese language instructor, came to Juniata in 2002, “there was one student from mainland China and a handful of ethnic Chinese students. It was a pretty homogenous place, albeit with a great commitment to international education,” said Stiffler. “Over five or six years, we saw that number change to 50 Chinese students. For us, it’s a wonderful thing.”

The influx has boosted enrollments in Juniata’s Intensive English Program. Instructor Gretchen Ketner, a National Public Radio fan, found an unusual way to help students hone writing skills and adjust to U.S. college life. She assigned them to write “This I Believe” essays for the Penn State public radio station, WPSU. Nearly a dozen have gotten on the air.

Separately, Stiffler did an on-air interview for that station’s “StoryCorps” broadcast with a freshman from Chengdu, China, who wrote in Ketner’s class about his admiration for Lin Zhao, a student leader in Beijing during the Hundred Flowers Movement in 1956 when Mao Zedong briefly encouraged citizens to speak freely. She was imprisoned in 1960, but wrote about freedom and democracy in her letters and diary—some in her own blood—until her execution in 1968. “She’s a real hero,” the business student told Stiffler. “Our government and our school never talk about this…. I want to learn something about America. I want to teach people what is liberty, what is freedom, what we can do in this special time.” 

Kati Csoman, assistant dean of international education, said that in addition to the regular orientation, all new international students can join the U.S. freshman in “Inbound” retreats built around such activities as backpacking, hiking, cooking, the arts and exploring spirituality, pop culture, and other topics. The students choose from more than 30 tracks. Two peer leaders assisted by faculty or staff shepherd the new students in groups of 10 through the three-day experience. “The idea is to bring together students across their interests, but then also help them make friendships and learn about the college,” said Csoman.

It took some families in a barrio of Managua, Nicaragua, by surprise when U.S. and  Nicaraguan college students showed up at their door asking what they knew about HIV/AIDS prevention. But soon the students were familiar faces. The nursing students from Fairfield University in Connecticut and the social work and Teaching English as a Second Language students from Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) were part of a project called Cuidemos Nuestra Salud (Take Care of Our Health). The project began in 2009 and now continues every year to improve the health of preschool children and their families in the impoverished Barrio Ayapal. 

Vilma Alvarez, UCA professor of social work, had connected with community leaders the year before when she sent her students to the barrio to perform service. At the time, UCA and Fairfield, both Jesuit institutions, were no strangers to one another. Fairfield faculty had research ties there that stretched back to the 1990s, and the university began sending Latin American and Caribbean studies students on short trips in 2000. In 2004 the universities signed a collaborative agreement that established a semester-long study abroad program at UCA and also provided a full scholarship for a UCA student to attend the sister school in Connecticut each semester.

In for the Long Haul

Lydia and Philip Greiner, nursing professors and spouses, decided the sister school partnership presented a perfect opportunity to enrich the learning experience for undergraduates in her public health class, students who usually do prevention work in low-income neighborhoods in Bridgeport, a few miles from the Fairfield campus. Now some would spend spring break in 2009 learning about and addressing the challenges and needs in Ayapal. 

The Greiners had laid the groundwork in an earlier visit where they met Alvarez and Marisol Morales Vega, the community leader and director of a preschool, Amigos por Siempre, for the barrio’s three-to-five-year-old children. Morales “was really clear. She said, ‘You’re not just coming once. That’s been done before. People have come, they promise, and they leave. I’m not interested in that.’ We made a commitment that we were in for the long haul,” Lydia said.

Listening First

They also committed to listening to the community first before deciding what to do. A dozen Fairfield nursing students were paired with UCA social work students and a student who could translate, and they went door-to-door asking families about their most pressing health concerns. Later Morales called a meeting with parents active in the preschool to discuss the results. The answer was clear: HIV/AIDS education was what people wanted most.

“They felt people were very stigmatized and there was a lot of misinformation. They asked us to produce a homegrown DVD that people could watch in the privacy of their homes because Marisol said they would not come to an event about HIV/AIDS,” said Greiner. The Fairfield contingent returned home but continued to collaborate with the UCA students by e-mail and Facebook. They also enlisted help from other Fairfield students with video-making skills. They produced a four-minute video with images from Nicaragua and a draft script that was translated into Spanish and vetted by Morales and some of her school parents. A UCA student at Fairfield narrated the final version.

Lydia Greiner returned in 2010 with a dozen more students and, with the same UCA students, distributed 400 copies of the DVD to families throughout the barrio. Subsequently Fairfield has sent students and faculty to Nicaragua twice a year, fulfilling their public health nursing requirements while working on priorities such as cardiovascular health problems and promoting hygiene in a barrio that floods easily and does not always have running tap water.

Finding the Link Between the Barrio and Bridgeport

Greiner and other faculty take both traditional college-age nursing students and older adult students who are switching careers. Greiner said she has seen some students who had a passing interest in public health nursing “become passionate about it,” including Colleen Grady, now an emergency room nurse in Boulder, Colorado, who went on that first trip in 2009.

“My Spanish skills were terrible. It was such a blessing to have the UCA students there to help translate,” said Grady. “One thing that I will always remember is when one of the UCA students told me how sad she was to see how people in the barrio were living. She lived nearby, but was unaware of the hardships in the barrio. It made me think about how easily we can become disconnected to people in our own cities and neighborhoods.”

“After this trip I knew that I wanted to volunteer as a nurse internationally, but I also felt the importance of taking care of people in my own community,” said the 31-year-old Grady, who has subsequently volunteered with a nonprofit called Blanca’s House in El Salvador and Liberia.

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Professor Jessica Planas, who has made three of the trips, said she impresses upon her students the similarity of challenges facing the poor whether in Managua or Bridgeport. “Many of the families that we work with in Ayapal deal with the same issues that my patients back home deal with,” including lack of money to buy medicine and low literacy levels, she said. “And these 
issues will be encountered by all my students, regardless where they choose to practice nursing.”

Internationalizing the UCA Students’ Education

Speaking through an interpreter, Professor Alvarez said, “What we have in common is the community work.” While the Fairfield contingent comes for just a week, the work “is continuous,” with her students and the community leaders continuing to promote preventive health measures year-round. The added value for her students “is the intercultural experience and the interdisciplinary approach.”

UCA psychology student Maria Christina Aguirre, who spent the fall 2012 semester at Fairfield, said working in Ayapal “was a beautiful experience. The people were very thankful.” 

UCA has 8,000 students, most on government-funded scholarships to the Catholic institution. Laurie Cordua, UCA’s director of academic cooperation and internationalization, said, “Having this relationship with Fairfield is very important for us. Our students don’t have the means to have a study abroad experience. This gives them the opportunity of having an intercultural experience, of sharing, of working in teams with students from the United States that otherwise they wouldn’t have. It’s really an internationalization experience at home, locally.”

Mirroring the University Mission

Sixty percent of Fairfield’s 5,000 students study abroad for a semester, year, or shorter periods, or perform service in five countries. The university’s strategic plan speaks about producing young men and women “committed to diversity and the promotion of justice” and “prepared to engage with the world around them as competent and informed global citizens.”

President Jeffrey von Arx, S.J., said, “It is no longer sufficient to measure globalization by the numbers of students getting on a plane.” The partnership with UCA and Ayapal crosses “language and cultural divides to effect real and lasting change,” he said, and stands as “an exemplar of how the university lives out its mission.”

Fairfield, which enrolls students from other U.S. universities in its semester-long program at UCA, has also invited nursing faculty and students from other schools to join the work in Ayapal, and it is planning to send its own nurse practitioner graduate students to work in a rural health clinic in January 2014 in Santa Maura, Nicaragua, a mountain region where coffee is grown. January is the harvesting season when the clinic nurse has her hands full treating an influx of 3,000 migrant workers. 

So the partnership is growing despite challenges that include the paucity of bilingual nursing students and faculty at Fairfield’s end as well as the time constraints of academic requirements in both institutions. Despite those impediments, both sides regard their collaboration as a model for communitybased work. Neither has the complete answer, but by working together they are making a difference in people’s health in barrio Ayapal.

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Fairfield University

Read more about Fairfield University

The Ohio State University (OSU) is imposing by any dimension. Its 64,000 students make it the third largest higher education institution in the United States. The research budget is closing in on $1 billion. Recently it generated nearly a half-billion dollars for its endowment by leasing to an Australian firm the concession to operate the campus parking garages for 50 years. When it piloted an undergraduate mentorship program that came with a $2,000 carrot that could be used for education abroad, it started with 1,000 students. “We don’t do anything small in Ohio State,” said Dolan Evanovich, vice president for strategic enrollment planning.

But five years ago its president, provost, and faculty decided that Ohio State was not sufficiently international. They set out to remedy that in a hurry. Today Ohio State has what it calls Global Gateway offices in Shanghai, China, Mumbai, India, and São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, and it’s eyeing which continent will be next. International enrollments have rocketed from 4,000 to 6,000, mostly due to a large influx of Chinese undergraduates, who now comprise two-thirds of all 3,600 students the world’s largest country sends off to Columbus. Education abroad enrollments have spiked from 1,716 to 2,255, thanks to a switch from quarters to semesters and the introduction of May session courses. Deans of the 14 colleges have embraced the strategy, recognizing internationalization is vital to their mission, not to mention their job evaluation.

Even colleges deeply engaged for years in overseas research and partnerships now see new doors opening. Bruce McPheron, dean of the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences, said, “This gateway strategy provides an opportunity not only to build lasting partnerships with other scholars, but with the private and public sectors, just like we do here as a land-grant university.”

What’s taking place, said Vice Provost for Global Strategies and International Affairs William Brustein, is that internationalization has become rooted in “the campus community’s DNA.”

Sherri Geldin, director of Ohio State’s showcase Wexner Center for the Arts, which just mounted an exhibition on the work of contemporary Brazilian artists and filmmakers, observed, “It’s nothing we even have to think about very consciously. It just happens.”

New Leadership and Status for International Affairs

Ohio State wooed Brustein from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009 by elevating the position of senior international officer to the rank of vice provost and including him in the Council of Deans. Brustein also was promised “that he would have the attention of not only the provost, but also the president. Symbolically that’s critical,” said Joseph Alutto, provost at the time and later interim president after E. Gordon Gee stepped down in 2013 (it was the globally minded Gee who set a goal of making Ohio State “the landgrant university to the world).”

“This university was punching under its weight when it came to comprehensive internationalization,” said Brustein, who also was given an office in Bricker Hall on the Oval amidst the rest of the university’s leadership. “A lot was going on in the colleges, but in terms of having signature university programs and an institutional strategy, those didn’t exist.” Kelechi Kalu, a professor of African American and African Studies, was tapped in 2012 for associate provost, overseeing day-to-day operations of the Office of International Affairs (OIA) in century-old Oxley Hall.

A President’s and Provost’s Council on Strategic Internationalization prepared a detailed blueprint for engaging more faculty and students in global learning, teaching, and research. Undergirding the strategy were what the council called its six “pillars”: recruiting more international faculty and students, promoting scholarship on global issues, creating dual-degree programs, developing an international physical presence, increasing international experiences for students, and collaborating with alumni and Ohio business ventures.

Ohio State has embarked on a 10-year, $400 million initiative to hire 500 new, interdisciplinary faculty to pursue breakthroughs on the “grand challenges of the twenty-first century” in three realms: energy and environment, food production and safety, and health and wellness. These Discovery Themes, as Ohio State calls them, all have deep international dimensions.

Understanding the Worth of Global Gateways

Ohio State leaders originally thought the gateway offices could largely cover their $250,000-a-year costs by generating revenues from executive training, which would subsidize recruiting and academic activities. Professors would fly in from Columbus to provide executive training in short bursts. But “the price points for delivering executive-type education in China and India are not what they are here in the U.S.,” said Christopher Carey, a West Point graduate who is Global Gateways director.

The original business model, Brustein said, “was overly ambitious” and undervalued the academic benefits accruing from these overseas outposts.

“We said, ‘Let’s look at what the gateways are doing in terms of assisting the quantity and quality of the students who are coming here, particularly from China, and let’s monetize that. Let’s look at (how) they’re facilitating faculty teaching and research collaborations. Let’s look at the monetary value of the new internships and study abroad programs that we’ve created,’” he recalled. That reasoning carried the day.

New dual-degree programs have sprouted with Shanghai Jiao Tong University and other institutions. The gateways energized local Buckeye alumni, one of whom donated prime office space in Mumbai. With a half-million living alumni, Buckeyes are everywhere. “We just started our own alumni club in Shanghai,” boasted David Williams, dean of the College of Engineering. “We’re building the same kind of network for engineers we have here in this country.” The gateway also gives Ohio State an edge in recruiting “fabulous” Shanghai Jiao Tong students for graduate school, he added.

“None of this is cheap, but if you’re going to do it, you have to do it well,” said Alutto, the former longtime dean of the Fisher College of Business, who returned to the faculty after Ohio State’s new president, Michael Drake, took office this summer.

Ramping Up Student Services and Friendship

As recently as a quarter century ago, Ohio State had open admissions and nearly nine in 10 students were from Ohio. As it raised standards, it attracted more out-of-staters and international students, who together now make up nearly a third of the student body. Engineering and business are the biggest draws for the 6,000 international students.

The emphasis now is not on driving that number higher, but diversifying the pool and improving the experience when they reach Columbus. “We’re concentrating on making sure that our students are well taken care of, feel welcome, and integrate well into the fabric of Ohio State,” said Gifty Ako-Adounvo, international student and scholar services director.

Improved services come at a price. Ohio State in 2012 added a $500 per-term fee to tuition for new international undergraduates to expand academic support and extracurricular programs, provide more English proficiency instruction, and offer more housing options. It also underwrote the $175,000 cost of flying a 10-person team from admissions, international affairs, and student life to China to hold full-blown preorientation sessions for hundreds of incoming students and their parents.

The raft of extracurricular programming includes weekly “Global Engagement Nights” that bring dozens of U.S. and international students together. Xin Ni Au, 21, a nutrition major from Johor, Malaysia, attended nearly every one, became a volunteer Global Ambassador, and exuberantly greeted new arrivals at an OIA booth at the Columbus airport.

Au, a junior, transferred to Ohio State just nine months earlier, but with help from two Malaysian students she found on Facebook, she threw herself into campus life. She’s still surprised “how friendly people are. People smile and say, ‘Hi. How are you?’ and everything. Frankly, you don’t get that in Malaysia.”

Tianxia “Mark” Gu, 22, a senior from Shanghai, also became a Global Ambassador. The gregarious Gu said he was “pretty shy” before coming to Columbus, but now counts more than 50 students as close friends. A self-described “super sports fan,” he “learned the Buckeye pride before I came here.” He credits his American accent to watching reruns of the sitcom Friends back in Shanghai and considers Monica, the perfectionist, a role model. The finance and math major wants to return to China and develop job search software to help people “build their dream.”

Tackling Rabies and Cervical Cancer in Ethiopia

Wide-ranging partnerships in Ethiopia with universities, government agencies, and NGOs testify to the breadth of resources Ohio State can summon to address endemic health problems. Its “One Health” initiative musters administrators, faculty, and students from all seven OSU health science colleges, as well as the business college and others. Already the collaboration has laid the groundwork for a mass campaign to vaccinate dogs against rabies and introduce cervical cancer screening in places where that has never been done.

Spearheading the One Health work in Ethiopia is Wondwossen Gebreyes, a veterinary molecular epidemiologist. “We’ve been teaching courses there every summer since 2009,” said Gebreyes. “For the past two years we’ve adopted the One Health model and expanded the disciplines.” For him, One Health is a way to pay back the poor farmers whose cattle Gebreyes once treated after earning a veterinary degree at Addis Ababa University (he also has a PhD from North Carolina State). “I got all my education in Ethiopia for free on their shoulders,” he said.

Usha Menon, vice dean of the College of Nursing, has journeyed to Addis Ababa four times to teach and prepare a pilot cervical cancer screening program in the Amhara region. A half-dozen nursing students accompanied her on the last trip. Nearly 90 percent of cervical cancer occurs in the developing world, where four of five women have never been screened, said Menon, who came to Ohio State in 2012. “I’ve never seen this level of collaboration at other schools among the health sciences.” Menon encountered fewer bureaucratic hurdles for her screening since Gebreyes already had secured permission from the Ethiopian government for the larger One Health project. “That’s the joy of Ohio State for me. Cross-collaboration makes these things much easier to do. I don’t have to start from scratch,” she said.

“I’ve never seen this level of collaboration at other schools among the health sciences....That’s the joy of Ohio State for me.”

Tom Gregoire, dean of the College of Social Work, made his first visit to Ethiopia with the One Health team and will return to teach a graduate course. Did the College of Social Work need a kick to internationalize? No, Gregoire said, but the strategic plan “sent a signal from the top and created more enthusiasm around it. It’s more sanctioned. There’s a zillion things one can do around here and a good plan helps you choose.”

Teaching Critical Languages

Ohio State has six Title VI national resource centers, including the National East Asian Languages Resource Center. The Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures offers more than 160 language courses and in 2012 received a threeyear, nearly $10 million grant to administer the U.S. State Department’s Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program to establish intensive summer language institutes at partner universities in China, Japan, and Korea.

Professor Galal Walker underscored the difficulty the United States faces in producing enough graduates fluent in these languages. “There are 200,000 Chinese studying in the United States and about 15,000 Americans studying in China, most in very low-level, short-term classes, sometimes with no language at all,” he said. While Mandarin course enrollments have grown to 60,000 at U.S. campuses, 50,000 are at beginner levels, said Walker.

Walker is doing his part. He runs a two-year master’s program that prepares Americans to work in China-related careers. They do internships in China and spend the second year taking regular classes at a Chinese university. “The idea is to provide our students a basis for having sophisticated interactions with Chinese counterparts, the kind of educated people you meet in large companies and corporations,” said Walker.

Briun Greene, one of those graduate students, first learned Mandarin as a linguist for the Army. Recently he was tapped to serve as the interpreter for a visiting Chinese business delegation at a big trade show in Las Vegas. (The company flew in several of Walker’s students as its guests.)

“You have to be really fast on your feet to do that. He did a great job,” said the professor. The problem is that “very few get up to Briun’s level, which takes 2,500 hours of instruction—more than it takes to earn a law degree.” Greene sees his future as an entrepreneur in China. “I love living in Asia. I felt the most alive there,” he said.

Preparing Stem Faculty for India

When the U.S. Department of State announced in June 2013 that Ohio State had won a prestigious Obama-Singh 21st Century Knowledge Initiative award to expand India’s pipeline for producing science and engineering faculty, astrophysicist Anil Pradhan received accolades as the driving force behind the effort. Two OSU colleagues and a professor at partner Aligarh Muslim University are codirectors.

But Pradhan said “20 to 30 busy people” at OSU and an equal number at the Uttar Pradesh, India, university helped prepare the complex proposal. Ohio State also matched his $150,000 grant and will provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in fellowships to allow future Indian faculty to conduct PhD research, receive mentoring, and earn a master’s degree in teaching in Columbus.

“The idea is to train STEM faculty at the worldclass level,” said Pradhan. “Thousands upon thousands of universities and colleges have opened up in India with practically no (such) faculty.” He hopes to speed up the 10 years of training customarily required.

“Other universities in India are watching this project. It has huge potential,” said Pradhan, who taught radiation physics in India last spring as a Fulbright scholar, one of 14 Ohio State faculty so honored in 2013–2014. Pradhan, who emigrated from India as a teen, had never before ventured outside his laboratory on a project like this, but felt emboldened by OSU’s internationalization efforts. The big U.S. land-grant universities “have the most experience in providing higher education to masses of people,” said Pradhan, and Ohio State can “lead the pack.”

Pradhan is not alone in that belief. “There’s a certain hunger for helping this university realize its goal of global eminence. It’s become everybody’s narrative,” said Kalu.