Inclusion and Equity

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

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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.

Four words encapsulated the theme of Randy Woodson’s installation in 2010 as the fourteenth chancellor of North Carolina State University: “Locally responsive. Globally engaged.” The message was woven throughout the “Pathway to the Future” strategic plan that was quickly produced on Woodson’s watch. More than a catchphrase, it has become a compass for colleges, deans, and faculty at the 127-year-old, land-grant institution.

It remains a source of pride that the university has extension offices in each of North Carolina’s 100 counties, but now it also touts strategic partnerships with 20 universities on four continents, culled from a roster of hundreds of memoranda of understanding (MOU). International enrollments have surged to more than 3,400, including hundreds of undergraduates, once few and far between. The Office of International Affairs (OIA) is growing, too, and working more closely with student life, housing, and other units to better serve the newcomers. In part by trimming administrative bloat and consolidating programs, Woodson and Provost Warwick Arden husbanded the resources for an $18 million Faculty Excellence Program to hire 48 interdisciplinary faculty to work in clusters to address “the global grand challenges of society.”

“There was a lot of pent up energy when I got here,” said Woodson, a former Purdue University provost who began his career as a horticulturist studying how Israel grew fruits and vegetables in the desert. NC State, like Purdue, is an engineering bastion. On a campus with 34,000 students, nearly 9,000 are pursuing engineering degrees, including half the international students. One thing that surprised the chancellor upon arrival in Raleigh was that only 10 percent of the student body was from outside North Carolina, far below the 18 percent cap enshrined in state law. “Why aren’t we at 18 percent?” Woodson immediately asked. The response was that the university did not get to keep any extra tuition revenue from enrolling more outsiders. “I said, ‘I don’t care. It’s important for the reputation of the university, it’s important for the experience of students from North Carolina to study side by side with kids from Korea, China, India, and Indiana.”

Shrey Satpathy, 19, a sophomore nuclear engineering major from New Delhi, India, quickly made his presence felt on campus, winning selection at the end of freshman year as a Caldwell Fellow, a leadership program, and also capturing a $50,000 prize in a statewide technology competition. He and a classmate proposed a way for new public school teachers in North Carolina to share and evaluate lesson plans online; the prize money is to make that a reality.

Satpathy sees nothing unusual in an international undergraduate’s immersing himself in the problems of U.S. public schools. “I don’t consider myself an outsider. I consider myself more of a global citizen,” he said, and besides, “when you start something, it has a ripple” effect that could help teachers far beyond North Carolina’s borders.

Bringing International Programs to the Fore

Bailian Li, vice provost for international affairs, said the new strategic plan and the buy-in from all 12 colleges has truly made his office “the center for global engagement. We play the leadership role.” When Li arrived in 2006, the Office of International Affairs had a 16-member staff. Now it numbers 40. Political scientist Heidi Hobbs, who directs a popular master of international studies program, said, “International used to be, ‘Oh yeah, that’s them over there and they’re doing something international.’ Now it’s moved from the periphery to the central mission of the university.”

Funding is one reason the Office of International Affairs cuts a larger figure. It has $120,000 to spend each year to fund joint faculty research and education initiatives with those 20 strategic partners. The sum includes $35,000 in seed grants to faculty to promote collaborations. Li said his office has funded more than 40 international projects since 2011 and more than half these faculty have gone on to win additional support for their work.

Veterinary professor Siddhartha “Sid” Thakur used his $5,000 seed grant for a pilot project to monitor food-borne pathogens in meat sold in two states in India, a country with no such monitoring system. He enlisted hospitals and veterinary colleges for the effort in his native land. “That seed grant gave me money to go to India, talk to these people, and then write a bigger grant,” he said, which came in the amount of $100,000 from the World Health Organization. Thakur, a former Food and Drug Administration scientist, said, “I cannot solve drug resistance issues in North Carolina alone. How quickly these pathogens move around the globe is amazing.” Two Indian agricultural ministry officials have visited NC State, and Chancellor Woodson paid a return visit last year.

Tourism professor Duarte Morais, another seed grant recipient, has conducted research and worked with villagers in Tanzania, the Philippines, and Indonesia as well as with Native Americans on an extension project in North Carolina to help poor communities reap benefits from tourism. Morais, who is from Portugal, said, “When I applied to come here, I made a pledge to become an engaged scholar doing research and work here in North Carolina as a laboratory for other places in the world, and to teach classes that were engaged locally, but global in nature. That’s the walk I’m walking.”

Textile engineering professor Marian McCord was tapped to direct a new Global Health Initiative. McCord works on bringing affordable sanitary products to women in developing countries. “When your leadership puts global engagement at the forefront, you’re empowered and enabled to work on nonconventional types of research,” she said.

Among the 20 strategic partners are University of Surrey in the United Kingdom and Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil, which have a three-way relationship with NC State that they call the University Global Partnership Network. David Dixon, the international programs coordinator, said each institution committed $60,000 to promote joint research, exchange faculty and students, develop new academic programs, and fuel innovation, entrepreneurship, and technology transfer. In three years they’ve convened six conferences and a dozen workshops and funded 17 research collaborations.

Promoting Study Abroad with Scholarships and a Bus “Wrap”

Twenty percent of undergraduates study abroad, most on short-term, faculty-led programs, and Li and Ingrid Schmidt, associate vice provost and director of study abroad, are shooting for 30 percent. Not long ago only one student in eight studied abroad. “We know that study abroad is what we call a high-impact experience,” said Provost Warwick Arden. “It feeds directly into the success of our students. We’re trying to produce a student who’s prepared for a successful career in a global knowledge economy.”

NC State has made a concentrated push to encourage more low-income and minority students to sign up for overseas study. It mounted a “People Like Me” marketing campaign that featured scores of posters and even a campus bus wrapped with photos of smiling faces of education abroad veterans. The campaign was the handiwork of Schmidt and Joanne Woodard, vice provost for institutional equity and diversity, as part of NC State’s participation in the American Council on Education’s “At Home in the World” initiative. Wrapping the bus—something more commonly done to advertise Wolfpack athletic teams—cost $7,000 but “we got a lot of mileage out of that,” said Schmidt. Woodard said they discovered “a natural synergy” between the international and diversity offices. Schmidt agreed, saying, “We can greatly enrich each other.” Advertisements alone don’t do the job. Schmidt’s office dispensed $225,000 in study abroad scholarships in 2012–2013.

The Study Abroad Office began offering Global Perspectives Certificates in 2009 to students who complete a mix of study, service, research, or internships abroad, engage in international activities on campus, and make a final presentation on their experiences. Ninety have earned the certificate and 375 more are pursuing one. Those requirements were no problem for Janet Nguyen, a senior international studies major who studied in China and founded NC State’s first Asian-interest sorority. Nguyen, who envisions a career working on behalf of children, said new courses such as “Global Perspectives on Sustainable Development” provided her “with a very diverse and unique learning experience.”

Seeking Allies to Serve International Students

Ten years ago, NC State enrolled fewer than 1,600 international students who constituted 5 percent of the student body. Now there are twice as many. While the OIA staff has grown, it is still a challenge to meet all the needs of the growing number of international students and scholars.

When Elizabeth James came on board as director of the Office of International Services (OIS) in 2012, “we were woefully outnumbered in terms of our student-to-adviser ratio. We were about 1,000-to-one … and most of our peers are running around 650 to 700,” she said.

Making a virtue of necessity, her office now works much more closely with academic advisers in NC State’s 10 colleges. It also improved its technological capability, making it easier for students to find answers on the OIS website, and it makes ample use of social media. “We had a bit of a paradigm shift. We were under no illusions that we were going to double or triple our size, so we strategically started working with a lot of the college advisers and our natural partners in the counseling center,” said Thomas Greene, the associate director. James said they recognized that “we can’t be everywhere. By collaborating, we don’t have to be a mini–student affairs division just for international students.”

To attract more international students, NC State launched an intensive English program in 2011. “The first semester we had eight students and two teachers,” recalled Jeong Powell, the admissions officer who started the program. By 2012, there were 161 students and 14 instructors, and to date nearly 120 students have matriculated into degree programs. The Korean-born Powell subsequently became the first full-time director of international admissions and established a pipeline from four top high schools in China and three in South Korea. Associate Vice Provost and Director of Admissions Tommy Griffin twice has flown in high school guidance counselors from Asia to see for themselves what NC State has to offer. “Our campus was ready” for this push, said Griffin. “We really have a lot of advocates in our colleges and all the other offices on campus. They all see a benefit.”

Branch Campus for a French Business School

SKEMA Business School opened a branch on the NC State campus in 2011. The French school brings 300 students a year in cohorts to Raleigh, where it rents a facility amidst not only the engineering school and other colleges, but dozens of high-tech businesses and nonprofits that have set up research shops on the new Centennial Campus. SKEMA, which has three campuses in France and another in Suzhou, China (all classes are in English), boasts that it is one of the few foreign schools with its own U.S. facility and the sole one vested with the authority to process U.S. visas. Most SKEMA graduate students stay for three months and return to France, but some study for a full year. Dean Jacques Verville envisions attracting North American undergraduates who could start in Raleigh “and then move to our campuses in Europe and China. When you have that flow, that’s SKEMA.”

NC State enrolls 220 international business students in its own Poole College of Management, something Dean Ira Weiss calls “phenomenal. They give our students an extra push for their money. They bring a hunger and energy to the table that energizes everybody around them.” Poole and SKEMA already offer dual master’s degrees in Global Luxury Management and more are planned.

The SKEMA students also benefit from an International Cultural Leadership Project (ICLP) that brings hundreds of international students together with NC State undergraduates for workshops, seminars, community service, and social gatherings, from volunteering at food banks to ball games and bowling nights. Volunteers logged more than 900 hours of service in 2013–2014.

The project is run through the Office of International Affairs’ Global Training Initiative, which provides fee-based programs and services for international universities, businesses, and other clients. “The vast majority of our programs are short term and we do a mix, half for professionals and half for students,” said Ilin Misaras, the assistant director. A four-week summer program gives Chinese undergraduates “a taste of graduate school,” Misaras said, and another partnership brings in students from Brazil. It also places international students in internships throughout the technology-rich Research Triangle area. It has given Chinese pharmaceutical executives a short course on FDA drug regulations.

“The challenge for us is to grow beyond just these short-term training programs,” said Misaras, a former broadcast journalist. “Part of our mandate is to help the North Carolina business community. We have connections in China. How can we help North Carolina businesses get there? I think that’s the next step.”

Expanding a Foothold in Prague

NC State explored accepting an invitation from the government of South Korea to open a branch at the new Songdo Global University alongside SUNY, George Mason University, and other foreign universities, but it ultimately declined. “The economy hit us,” said Chancellor Woodson.

Provost Arden said, “We prefer to develop strong relationships with partner institutions as opposed to planting the flag and setting up our own. We  feel that that gives us much more bang for the buck.”

But NC State is considering ways to expand the foothold its College of Design has in Prague, Czech Republic. It has been sending architecture majors to study in Prague during the summer for years and in 2005 that summer program evolved into the Prague Institute, with classes year-round in a thirteenth-century building in the middle of the history-rich city. It was the first overseas branch of any North Carolina university and “we actually had to get the signature of the governor of North Carolina to permit us to rent our own facility,” recalled Dean Marvin Malecha. Woodson calls the Prague Institute “one of our real success stories.” It now offers courses for a broad array of students, and the university is looking at ways to make it a center for faculty scholarship, not just short teaching stints.

For a regional public university in western Georgia that sends barely 200 students a year to study abroad, Columbus State University (CSU) has something that few other U.S. institutions can match: its own house in Oxford, England, and ties with the University of Oxford that allow fortunate Columbus State students and faculty to take classes and workshops there. Five hundred have done so since a retired banker named Kyle Spencer purchased a stately Edwardian home in 2002 and turned the deed over to his hometown university. Spencer House is “pivotal to our planting the flag globally,” said President Timothy Mescon.

Planting that flag is a principal way Columbus State is hoping to keep raising its standards and standing among colleges in the Georgia system. The strategic plan the university adopted in 2013 seeks to foster “a vibrant, globally connected campus culture” that empowers people “to contribute to the advancement of our local and global communities.” Columbus, the third largest city in Georgia after Atlanta and Augusta, is an old textile mill town on the banks of the Chattahoochee River. It lacked a college until civic leaders finally convinced the state to open a two-year institution in 1958; bachelor and master degrees were soon to follow.

Today it is the tenth largest of Georgia’s 31 public colleges and universities. Half the 7,000 undergraduates and 1,400 graduate students come from Muscogee County and other neighboring places along the Alabama border, but more than a third are drawn from elsewhere in Georgia and 1,600 hail from other states. It also enrolls 130 international students. In public higher education, “geography does matter. We are, at the end of the day, in a retail business,” said Mescon, former business dean at Kennesaw State University. He has stepped up recruiting in the metro Atlanta area, 100 miles away, because “that’s where the market is,” and recently added an international recruiter.

The biggest challenge Columbus State faces is not just finding students, but keeping them until they graduate. Only one in eight full-time freshmen who entered in 2007 graduated in four years and 30 percent in six years. A third of students attend college part-time and many are older than traditional age. Nearly half are ethnic or racial minorities. The international push at Columbus State is one of the principal ways the university is seeking to expand students’ horizons. CSU has strong business, computer science, and performing arts programs, the latter housed on a hip, new downtown campus alongside the Chattahoochee, which, thanks to the demolition of two old dams, features the world’s largest urban whitewater course. Some of the rafts bearing tourists and thrill-seekers over the rapids advertise the university logo.

A Strategic Plan and Student Fee Build Momentum for Internationalization

As Neal McCrillis heard the story, when a wealthy local benefactor offered in 1998 to endow a professorship to teach European history, she was told, “We’re not that big. We can’t have one person who just teaches British or French history. We need something broader.” So McCrillis, a British historian, was hired for the endowed professorship both to teach and create a Center for International Education (CIE). “I had a mandate to develop study abroad programs, but beyond that the administration was not really quite sure what the center should be,” he recalled. For years the center occupied a nondescript room in Howard Hall, a classroom building. Today it is in a small building of its own, the International House, in a central location, and while still teaching a few courses, McCrillis is kept busy as CIE’s full-time director.

The scope of international programs grew gradually, then picked up steam when the provost asked the faculty International Education Committee in 2011 to come up with the first comprehensive strategy for campus internationalization. They produced a detailed blueprint for ratcheting up study abroad offerings, curricular integration, faculty development, international student services, service learning, and other international activities.

The timing was right because another panel was already at work on a new strategic plan for the entire university, and several international goals were embraced and articulated in that broader document, including expanding study abroad enrollment by nearly half, tripling international enrollments, offering students the opportunity to earn an interdisciplinary International Studies Certificate, and widening the circle of students and faculty engaged in on-campus activities.

Equally crucial was a decision approved by students in 2011 to add a $14 per semester international education fee. “That gave Neal this recurring revenue source to fund scholarships for study abroad and underwrite faculty exploration in other countries. It’s a critical annuity in support of this globalization that benefits a huge number of students,” said Mescon, who became president in 2008.

CIE now awards upwards of $300,000 a year in grants and scholarships. Honors College students are guaranteed a $3,200 scholarship for study abroad in their junior or senior year. CIE offers “first-come, first-served” study abroad grants of $650 to $1,050 to all comers who commit to signing up for a program. “Our experience over the years is that the grants which cover a quarter or more of the cost make the programs accessible to many more students,” said McCrillis.

Drumming Up Enthusiasm for Study Abroad

Some 200 Cougars study abroad each year, twice as many as a decade ago. “You can’t just sit in the office and wait for students to show up, because that’s not going to happen,” McCrillis said.

“It’s hard work to drum up the number of students you need for a program,” said geography professor Amanda Rees, who has taught courses in Oxford and Belize. Kimberly Lawrence, the study abroad coordinator, deploys student ambassadors to make 200 presentations in classrooms each year, and Rees herself makes the rounds of colleagues’ classes to pitch her overseas courses. “You’re trying to get in front of 300 to 400 students to drum up a handful,” said the British-born professor.

Patrick McHenry, associate dean of the College of Letters and Sciences, said students need to be convinced that education abroad will pay off when they enter the job market. “The more we get that message out to them, the better. Our students are very practical minded,” said McHenry, a Milton and Renaissance scholar who has taught literature classes in Oxford and in Florence and Montepulciano in Italy. “We have to cajole them no matter what.”

Fast Track to an International Studies Certificate

The International Studies Certificate that the faculty envisioned became a reality in fall 2013. Theater professor Becky Becker was put in charge and given an office and assigned half-time to the Center for International Education. The requirements include study abroad or an international internship or service, at least 18 hours of coursework, and a capstone course or research project. Two students completed the requirements and received the certificate on their diplomas in May 2014, including Jason Todd Raley, Jr.

“I had unknowingly already taken all but one of the classes I needed for the certificate,” said the marketing major, who studied earlier in South Korea and Spain and right after graduation went to Costa Rica on a third, short-term CSU study program.

“I just took these courses because I really love internationally themed classes and activities. Being a marketing major, they could help me get in the door to have international ties to my career. I’ll have an edge on some people who may want the same thing, but have nothing else to back them up,” said Raley, the son of a state trooper and forensic accountant.

As a global ambassador for CIE, Raley also used his marketing skills to convince other Cougars to study abroad. “I love getting people to buy into things they normally wouldn’t buy into,” he said. “Every day, when somebody came in here and said, ‘I can’t afford it’ or ‘I’m afraid to fly,’ I’d look at them and say, ‘There are scholarships. You can pay for three-fourths of it with nothing out of your pocket if you do some research and do it right. And flying’s safer than driving.’”

Twenty-seven students so far have taken the required introductory course that Becker teaches; McCrillis credited her with making inroads with faculty in departments across the campus. “That’s really important,” McCrillis said, “so that when a biology student says, ‘I’d like to have the international certificate,’ they get a positive response from their adviser.” (The other certificate recipient was a theater major who researched Nigeria’s spirit culture.)

On top of study abroad and programming on campus, the certificate “provides an important missing piece. It ties all those things into the students’ majors,” said McCrillis, who chairs the USG System Council for International Education.

The Speed Dating Approach to International Conversations

A signature element of Columbus State’s global education efforts is the International Learning Community (ILC), which brings faculty together with students in large numbers to delve into an important issue over the course of a year through lectures, discussion groups, films, field trips, and other activities inside and outside the classroom. Faculty choose a theme each year—migrations in 2013–2014, revolutions and technology in 2012–2013, and “strangers in a strange land” in 2011–2012—and commit specific classes to be part of the ILC, which are marked in the course catalog as “I” classes. Many are classes freshman must take as part of their First Year Community experience, but some are upper division courses and they span a dozen or more disciplines, from art and business to environmental studies and theater. At least 700 students each year take part.

Sixteen evenings a year students come to the International House for snacks and “Global Dialogues,” which are small-group, student-tostudent conversations that Rees, who chairs the International Learning Community, likens to a form of “speed dating.” International students performing service in exchange for their in-state tuition waivers lead the 90-minute dialogues. Students sit at a half dozen tables and change tables every 15 minutes to hear even more viewpoints. “They share a lot and hear a lot. It’s really very intense and, when you read their writing afterwards, it gets very personal,” said Rees, who requires students in her “I” courses to attend three dialogues a semester. Other faculty use them as an opportunity for extra credit.

McCrillis said the dialogues give some students “their first chance to hear viewpoints and attitudes other than those expressed by their Georgia-born and -raised neighbors.”

“Students are genuinely interested. That makes me very happy,” said Vanessa Jackson, a Jamaican graduate assistant at the CIE who earned her bachelor’s degree in biology at CSU. “Columbus State has become much more internationalized since I came in 2009.”

Omovueme Emasealu, 26, a senior computer science major from Nigeria, seconds that. “I think (Columbus State) is becoming more international on a weekly basis,” said Emasealu. He chuckles about classmates’ misconceptions and stereotypes about Africa, but also appreciates how “very open and friendly” Americans are. He still remembers his surprise on his first plane ride to Atlanta when “a lady began telling me her life story. I was thinking, ‘Really? You can do that?’”

Alice Roxana Barno, 28, a pianist from Romania earning a second bachelor’s degree, relishes the mentoring from faculty. “Back home, if you wanted to talk to a professor, you’d better make an appointment three weeks before and do not look him in the eyes,” she said.

A Hands-On Faculty Committee Guides International Activities

With a three-person staff, McCrillis leans heavily on the Faculty Senate’s International Education and Exchange Committee to superintend the international enterprise. Twenty-two people serve on the committee and eight subcommittees that review study abroad programs, deal with scholarships, approve visiting scholars, and tend to other international matters.

John Finley, who teaches international business, said, “It sounds corny, but there’s a real esprit de corps with the international committee,” with people always willing to stay when meetings run long. English professor Dan Ross, the panel’s chair, agreed, saying, “More than any committee I’ve ever been on, that one works.” He credits McCrillis with making the advisory panel as effective as it is. Ross, a 25-year faculty veteran who has taken classes to Japan and England, said, “We just had nobody doing these things until Neal came along.”

One successful study abroad program begets another. Julie Ballenger, chair of the biology department, has been a role model for colleagues. The plant geneticist led her first tropical ecology class to the Bahamas in 1999. Since then she’s taught environmental classes in Africa (Botswana and Tanzania), Ecuador, Belize, Costa Rica, and Australia as well.

“After camping in the Kalahari Desert for two weeks with lions walking through our campsite, it was like every door opened. Nothing  was impossible. From that point on, it’s been the students pushing and driving all these new programs,” said Ballenger, who also did a stint as assistant director of CIE when study abroad offerings were just getting off the ground. “Many of our students haven’t left the state of Georgia or the Southeast. When you see them after they come back, they have a new confidence. They carry themselves differently.”

Kevin Burgess, a biology colleague, also takes students far afield, from Australia to Ecuador. Burgess had six job offers after a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto and “probably wouldn’t have come here if it wasn’t for the study abroad program. That’s what pushed me.”

A Philanthropist Pays His Oxford Experience Forward

Five hundred Columbus State students and faculty have studied at Oxford while living in the threestory, century-old home on Woodstock Road that Kyle Spencer purchased for CSU for $2 million in 2002. The retired 88-year-old banker never spent a night there himself because his late wife Sara “preferred the hotel,” he recalled with a smile. But the Spencers did stay in Oxford’s Gothic dorms in the 1980s while attending continuing education classes through the Oxford Berkeley Program.

“Every time we went, they had a mixture of undergraduates, graduate students, and outsiders like us. We had a very impressive, very warm tutor who was a born educator. The thing that impressed us was that they wanted us foreigners and rebels to learn,” he said. The Spencers returned three times and then began paying for their children’s teachers and later faculty from Presbyterian College and Columbus State to attend the summer sessions.

Now, CSU faculty teach three, two-week courses there each summer and McCrillis takes faculty there for a workshop each autumn. In addition, Columbus State sends up to five students a year to spend a semester at an Oxford college and take tutorials with a don. Some Oxford undergraduates live in Spencer House with them. Spencer, the benefactor, donates an additional $150,000 a year to cover all the students’ costs above CSU’s regular tuition.

As a senior, Mark Sciuchetti spent a semester at Regents Park College. Now a history graduate student and aspiring professor, Sciuchetti said curious Oxford students sometimes asked if he was a Rhodes Scholar. “I just said, ‘No, I’m a Spencer scholar.’ But they were surprised a state university provides so much funding.”

The existence of Spencer House “made it impossible for us to drop the ball” on internationalization, said English professor Susan Hrach, who was recently honored by the Georgia Board of Regents for innovative teaching approaches, including enhancing global awareness and reducing culture shock in classes taught in England and Italy.

Mescon hopes one day to convert a carriage house on the Spencer property into classrooms and additional apartments. “We’d like to build a much bigger facility, whatever Oxford will allow,” the president said.