Leadership

When Brazil launched its Ciência sem Fronteiras (Science Without Borders) initiative to send 100,000 students and researchers around the world, many prestigious institutions stepped forward to snap them up. Rice University went a step further, repurposing the resulting $100,000 from tuition paid by the Brazilian government to send Rice faculty to Brazil to jump start collaborations. It also arranged extra support for the small influx of Brazilians on the Houston campus as part of a broader initiative to build lasting links between Rice and Brazilian universities.

The Brasil@Rice initiative, directed by Adria Baker, associate vice provost for international education, reflects the determination to deepen Rice’s ties to Latin America, as the university has already done on a much wider scale with China. The initiative started in 2012 just as the university began offering a Latin American studies major that requires study abroad and competency in Spanish or Portuguese. 

Brazil had launched its science mobility program a year earlier. Then-Provost George McLendon made the decision to redirect the tuition revenues and championed Brasil@Rice. Houston, often called the energy capital of the world, is by itself Brazil’s sixth largest trading partner, and cultural, intellectual, and economic ties between Houston and Brazil “made this a natural for us,” said McLendon. “It’s also true that Texas is probably the Brazil of the U.S., a very friendly bunch of people with a can-do spirit.”

Spelling Brasil the Brazilian Way

The Brasil@Rice initiative—spelled with an ‘s’ as the Brazilians do—has created “a new way of looking at international on our campus,” said Baker. It also provides an extra level of attention for Brazilian students and scholars during their stay in Houston. The initiative is managed by Mayra Onuchic, who is, in McClendon’s words, “the mother figure for all the Brazilian students.” She and husband José Onuchic—both Brazilian by birth—are masters of one of Rice’s 11 residential colleges. He is a prominent physicist, member of the National Academy of Sciences, and codirector of Rice’s Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, which seeks to advance cancer research with breakthroughs in physics. Doctoral students and postdocs from Brazil regularly work in his National Science Foundation–funded lab. He is also a linchpin in a partnership with the University of São Paulo in which the two universities jointly administer and share use of an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. “We both use the supercomputer remotely,” said Onuchic. “For me it’s 10 miles, for them 4,000, but for the guys doing the job, that doesn’t make any difference. The research is synergized by our working together. I’d like to see this become the bedrock that connects our two universities.”

There are other components to the bedrock. Robert Vajtai, a nanotechnology researcher, is working with graduate students and Universidade Estadual de Campinas (University of Campinas or UNICAMP) in the state of São Paulo on novel ways to nanoengineer graphene, a two-dimensional form of carbon, to store energy. One advantage of working with the Brazilian researchers, he said, “is that they have much more freedom to select interesting projects. Here you need to submit proposals and follow whatever your grant contract says.” Vajtai had just received word from a sister journal of Nature that it was publishing the teams’ latest findings. “These guys are motivated, knowledgeable, and very diligent,” said Vajtai, who added that his department is open to the possibility of dual doctoral degrees.

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History Leads the Way

Most notably, the history departments at Rice and UNICAMP created a dual doctoral degree program in 2012. Brazilian graduate student Ludmila de Souza Maia was the first to avail herself of that opportunity, spending 2012–2013 at Rice and now, back in Brazil, finishing a dissertation that will earn her two doctorates in spring 2016. “I felt very special at Rice. I was very spoiled. I got a lot of attention and had the whole department helping me,” said Maia. Rice provided a travel grant for her research in Paris archives on nineteenthcentury Brazilian and French women writers, and sent her to Latin America studies conferences in Illinois and New Mexico. The first Rice doctoral student is now studying at UNICAMP, and each institution has approved second candidates.

The chair of Rice’s history department, Alida Metcalf, collaborated with UNICAM history professor Silvia Hunold Lara to create that dual degree, which Rice’s Faculty Senate approved in November 2012. They had strong support from the top. The presidents of the two universities had each visited the other’s campus and signed partnership agreements. Metcalf and Lara shared a common interest in the history of the Atlantic slave trade, a strength of both departments. Nonetheless, “it took a year and a half working with our lawyers and bureaucratic staff to put our ideas on paper. It’s not easy,” said Lara.

Doctoral candidates complete coursework at their home campus—including advanced study of Portuguese for the U.S. students—then spend a year at the other school before returning home to write a dissertation in their native language and a lengthy abstract in the other tongue, with Metcalf and Lara as coadvisers. “It’s complicated having two advisers on a dissertation,” said Metcalf, who spent part of her childhood in Latin America, but going down this path “exposes them at a much more sophisticated level to the way in which history is written in two different countries.” And the preparation will give newly minted historians distinct advantages in applying for professorships “in the global academic environment that we are living nowadays,” said Lara, who has been a visiting scholar at U.S. and French universities.

Rice’s enrollment is 6,500 while UNICAMP’s is 34,000. Nearly a quarter of Rice students are international. Brazilians comprise only a small percentage (22 graduate students and 15 visiting students in fall 2014), but their presence is readily felt, especially in events arranged by the Brasil@ Rice initiative.

“To really get a lot out of one year in another country, you have to be ready to hit the ground running,” said Metcalf, the history chair. Brasil@Rice “has been able to provide that for the Brazilian students to maximize their time here.” McClendon, who has returned to the faculty, said the Brazilians have contributed greatly to the cultural mix on campus. “It’s actually not that hard to get Brazilians to feel acculturated because they gravitate naturally to social events,” he added.

Connections Beyond the Campus

Brasil@Rice has ventured beyond the campus into the wider Brazilian business, consular, and cultural communities in Houston. A university representative serves on the board of the Brazilian-Texas Chamber of Commerce, and Rice hosted a delegation of government officials on a visit to Houston last fall. Onuchic was among the first winners of a Diaspora Prize that Brazil created in 2013 to honor the achievements of Brazilians abroad in science, technology, and innovation.

Baker said Brasil@Rice has “generated tremendous enthusiasm. We’ve got people from different fields across campus, from high-level professors to beginning faculty, talking with each other. We even have staff thinking Brazil.” While more Brazilian students are coming to Rice, the language barrier and costs have made it difficult to convince more Rice students to study in   Brazil, Baker said. The university this past summer sent its first students to a language immersion program in São Paolo and subsidized two internships in Brazil. Baker believes the success of Brasil@Rice provides “a template for internationalization” that Rice now can follow with other countries. 

It isn’t certain how long Brazil will continue its Scientific Mobility Program, but the Brasil@Rice office hopes to award $90,000 for further faculty travel and collaborations, including two-way visits. A decision is pending approval by a new provost.

Nonetheless, even with no guarantee of future revenues from the mobility program, “my guess is the strength of the ties we build will endure one way or another after that program no longer exists,” said McLendon.

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Rice University

Read more about Rice University

Thomas Jefferson was the prototype of what every university today professes students need to become: a global citizen. The polyglot president, diplomat, scientist, inventor, and educator was friend to the Marquis de Lafayette and Simon Bolivar. He voiced hope that the university he founded in the foothills of the Blue Ridge  Mountains in 1819 would stand as “the future bulwark of the human mind in this hemisphere.” He recruited five of eight original faculty from Great Britain. Most of the first 65 students journeyed to his “Academical Village” from outside Virginia.

But in modern times, it took until the end of the twentieth century for the University of Virginia (U.Va.) to take what Vice Provost for Global Affairs Jeffrey Legro called “a self-conscious turn to the world.” Building on its success as a top public research university, U.Va. made internationalization a central thrust of its two most recent strategic plans. Under former President John Casteen, it brought international students in far greater numbers to Charlottesville and appointed a vice provost for international affairs. On President Teresa Sullivan’s watch, it reorganized and expanded international programs, pushing students and faculty to venture far beyond the Blue Ridge and finding new ways to embed a culture of global awareness on the Grounds, as the 1,682-acre campus is called.

A Center for Global Health and an International Residential College, where 300 students (60 percent domestic, 40 percent international) live, were created after the 1999 strategic plan. But a faculty task force that looked across the Grounds in 2008 delivered the blunt assessment that while “the University of Virginia is by no means inactive internationally… neither is it a leader."

A Central Strategy and Shared Costs

Since then U.Va. has raised the international banner higher even while weathering diminished state support (but a swelling endowment, now $7 billion). In an institution with 11 independent schools—even separate business schools for undergraduate and graduate students—the president and provost found ways to pull academic  fiefdoms together on internationalization. “The best part is that this is not just in the expected places. Everybody has embraced it,” said Sullivan, a sociologist who became president in 2010. 

The opening of an office in Shanghai—U.Va.’s first overseas—in 2013 marked a milestone in the journey. Justin O’Jack, former China director for the Council on International Educational Exchange, was hired to run the China office with a mission of supporting research partnerships, academic programs, internships, admissions, alumni engagement, and career placement. The university sent a 20-person delegation, including a half-dozen senior leaders, to a two-day conference and ceremonial opening last March. More importantly, boasted former Executive Vice President and Provost John Simon, “I got all of the deans to contribute to the costs of the China office, so everyone has a stake.” Start-up costs were $150,000 and it costs $300,000 a year to operate.

Simon, departing after four years for the presidency of Lehigh University, said schools were accustomed to acting like “independent operators…that could do everything they want whenever they want.” Some had stellar overseas connections “but to me, the issues around global are a centralized strategy. I’m not saying the schools can’t do other things, but that’s not an institutional strategy.” He predicts U.Va. will plant its flag in half a dozen other locations within five years.

Location, Location, Location

Legro, a politics professor and vice provost for global affairs since 2012, chairs a Global Affairs Committee with representatives from all schools and major administrative units. A separate Global on Grounds Committee comprised of faculty, staff, and students is charged with developing new ways to integrate global content into the university experience.

A modest Center for International Studies made way for a more ambitious and deeper-pocketed Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation, which has been given prime space in a historic building in the shadow of Jefferson’s iconic Rotunda.

“It’s location, location, location,” said the center’s director, Brian Owensby, a Latin American historian. It shares space with a new Global Internship Program and a popular global studies major and can dispense $450,000 for research projects small and large. Two teams of environmental scientists split $100,000 awards last year. “Things are going gangbusters,” said Owensby.

The global internship director, Majida Bargach, placed 39 students in jobs in 2014 and 70 this summer. Bargach, a French lecturer who also leads a study abroad class to her native Morocco, said the interns gain the benefit of “a total immersion by themselves in the workplace.”

Student Demand for a Global Studies Major

The evolution of the global studies major attests to the strong voice and tradition of self-governance that students enjoy at U.Va., where they run the vaunted Honor System (exams are unproctored) and a galaxy of hundreds of organizations, many with an international focus.

Students on their own initiative began stumping in 2007 for a global development studies major, arguing in an 8,000-word white paper that U.Va. prepared too few students for careers fighting poverty. Richard Handler, a cultural anthropologist, stepped forward to direct the major in 2009. It’s now bundled into a larger global studies major with tracks on health, the environment, and security/justice.

“Universities these days are full of students who want to go around the world and do good work,” said Handler, who raised $1 million to hire a “professor of practice” to connect students with global development organizations.

Francesca Fiorani, a Renaissance art historian and associate dean, said the attraction of the major is not only for students but also for faculty. “We’re rethinking the traditional disciplines. It’s driving curriculum reform across the university.” Core courses range from economics to anthropology to sociology, all presented from a global perspective. “That’s what students want,” said Fiorani. ”They want to know how to operate with people from all over the world.”

The Center for Global Health has doubled to 55 the number of $5,000 awards to students to work in interdisciplinary teams on projects in developing countries. “In the past, people thought ‘global health’ was only for doctors and nurses, but it’s for the economists, educators, and engineers as well,” said Rebecca Dillingham, MD, the director.

Vanquishing the Fear of Missing Out

Two thousand students studied abroad in 2013– 2014. More might go but for a much-discussed malady known as FOMO, or the fear of missing out. U.Va. is a school rich with traditions, from secret societies to fall football to a spring steeplechase race. “We’re challenged to get more students to go abroad for a semester or year. That’s where a lot of our energy is going,” said Dudley Doane, director of the International Studies Office.

“They don’t want to miss any of their eight great semesters here. But it’s a bit of an urban myth. Nine of 10 who go abroad will tell you it was their most meaningful semester,” said Legro. McKenna Hughes, 22, an English and linguistics major and peer adviser in the International Studies Office, said, “The thing about traditions is they happen every year. We push them to realize they’ve got three other chances.”

Meg Gould, 22, spent a summer in Morocco and a full semester in Paris and was selected by peers for one of the coveted rooms for seniors behind the colonnade on the Lawn. She also represented students on the Board of Visitors. “U.Va. definitely opened the doors for me,” said the global studies and French major. “Amazing experiences can occur outside of Grounds.”

The International Studies Office partners with the Department of Anthropology to offer CORE (Cultural Orientation, Reflection, and Engagement) seminars to prepare students for crossing cultures and demystify the experience. “It’s a wrap-around curriculum,” said coordinator Catarina Krizancic, an anthropologist. “It isn’t enough to put people in a different language or culture. You have to mentor and teach them through it.”

This academic year is the last in which U.Va. is sponsoring the Semester at Sea program. It has provided a dean and sent other faculty and staff on the voyages since 2006. 

Making Room for International Students

By law 70 percent of U.Va.’s 15,000 undergraduates must be Virginians. Nine hundred—5.5 percent—are international. It is twice as hard for out-of-staters to win admission, and even harder for international students. “The burgeoning of our reputation internationally” keeps driving up the number and quality of applications, said Richard Tanson, senior international student and scholar adviser.

International students can fall under the thrall of Charlottesville, too. “I cherish this U.Va. experience,” said “Grong” Yexiao Wang, a senior from Chengdu, China, majoring in math and political philosophy. Few friends at other campuses are “so fond of their schools.” Wang banded together with classmates to start a U.Va. China Fund that last February honored economics professor  Kenneth Elzinga for his steadfast support— including driving a visiting Chinese scholar and his wife to the hospital one icy night in time to deliver their baby. The award is named for U.Va.’s first graduate from China, educator and diplomat Weiching  Williams Yen, Class of 1900.

Sophomore Lexi Schubert, an economics and cognitive science major from Munich, Germany, leads a new organization called Global Greeters that helps students settle into college life. That was not a problem for Schubert, who speaks five languages and is learning Indonesian and Hungarian. “Studying in the U.S. was always a dream of mine.”

Rafat Khan, a senior from Dhaka, Bangladesh, cut a distinctive figure on campus with an upswept coif he calls “a faux-hawk.” He threw himself into a host of activities, including the Global on Grounds Committee, and worked to overcome the self-segregation of international students. “The ideal university environment is one where there’s a flowing, cross-cultural dialogue and people have friends from all over the world,” said the commerce major and philosophy minor. “U.Va. has done a good job, but there’s always room to grow.”

Humanities and Business in the Global Context

Befitting an institution whose founder once said that liberal education would help “guard the sacred deposit of [citizens’] rights and liberties,” U.Va. has partnered with other universities to uphold the place of the humanities in a globalized, business-minded world. The Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures works with Delhi University, Nanjing Univer sity,  Oxford University, and London’s School of Oriental and African Studies on a mission of connecting scholars “across conceptual, imaginative, and continental divides.” Two Mellon Foundation grants since 2011 topping $6 million are allowing the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to hire 20 new interdisciplinary faculty and providing research funds for dozens of faculty and graduate students. The latest $3.5 million grant focuses on the Global South, including new courses and research on the histories and cultures of Africa, Latin America, and South and East Asia.

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Fiorani, the associate dean, said U.Va. views itself as both an importer and exporter of humanities faculty. “All sorts of places across the globe have a strong interest in developing the liberal arts education for which the U.S. is uniquely famous.”

The bifurcated business schools, the Darden School of Business and McIntire School of Commerce, have stood in the vanguard of curriculum internationalization. Darden Dean Robert Bruner led a national task force that produced an encyclopedic report on The Globalization of  Management Education. It found business schools innovating rapidly to globalize but also forecast a high failure rate for their experiments, which Bruner said “is actually indispensable because only by that will we identify a sustainable path or paths forward.”

McIntire Dean Carl Zeithaml, a global management strategy expert, was taken aback by a “lack of international orientation” when he came to Charlottesville in 1997. “I really felt that most people thought that the boundaries of the world were consistent with the boundaries of Albemarle County.” After a visit to Asia with other deans, he proposed opening an office there. “I guess I wasn’t very good at it because it took another 17 years,” he said wryly. 

Back to the Future

Jefferson’s Rotunda was sheathed in scaffolding during the spring of 2015, undergoing renovations to make the old new again. The global offices in the Academical Village were also undergoing renovations to fit everything under one roof. 

The university’s reinvigorated internationalization is a type of reconstruction, too, as U.Va. seeks to reclaim the legacy of America’s earliest global thinker. “That is our goal, and though there are challenges, we are well on our way to realizing it,” Legro said.

With the University of San Diego’s (USD) Spanish Renaissance–style architecture, sunny climate, gardens in flower year round, and postcard view of Mission Bay, it might seem hopeless to convince students to tear themselves away to study abroad. But nearly three-quarters of the undergraduates do so and, befitting USD’s religious identity, many jump at opportunities to perform service in South Africa, Jamaica, Haiti, and elsewhere. “One of our distinguishing marks is that we take seriously the need to become global citizens,” said former President Mary Lyons. “As a Catholic university that belongs to a worldwide network that has global outreach, global presence, and pays attention to global concerns, it comes naturally to us.”

Today’s USD is the product of a 1972 union between colleges for women and men built after World War II on a hilltop called Alcalá Park that sits 22 miles from the border with Mexico. The founding Sacred Heart nuns modeled the women’s college after the University of Alcalá in Spain, professing a belief that those attracted by its beauty would also find truth and goodness. The college has been under lay control since the merger and only half the student body is Catholic. Undergraduates must take philosophy and two religious studies classes. Kuwaiti student Khaled Alaskar, a mechanical engineering major, initially regarded the requirement as a burden, “but I learned a lot about different religions. USD does a good job at addressing how religion is important in people’s lives without enforcing it.” 

Expanding the Global Footprint

Lyons, a former captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve and president of the College of Saint Benedict (a 2012 Simon Award winner) and the California Maritime Academy, has just retired. She drove two, multiyear strategic planning efforts during the past 12 years that both placed greater emphasis on international study and research. An International Center headed by an associate provost was created in 2007, bringing three separate study abroad offices under one roof. A 2011 strategic plan set a goal of “expanding USD’s global presence” and developing a “footprint” in major cities abroad to promote international partnerships, exchanges, and collaborations.

In August 2014 it opened a 10,000-square-foot USD Madrid Center with classrooms, meeting and study spaces, and facilities equipped with videoconferencing and high-speed connections to the home campus. The university spent $400,000 to open the center near Retiro Park and the Prado museum. Lyons said it represented the culmination of a decade of efforts “to graduate men and women who are truly global citizens.”

USD had already been sending 90 students to learn Spanish, live with host families, and take other courses each fall in the Spanish capital. The center now has two administrators and a large roster of local faculty teaching classes that run the gamut from art history to business to political science. It is also home to summer programs for the business and education graduate schools.

Denise Dimon, associate provost for international affairs, said the goal is to enroll 200 students each year at the USD Madrid Center—115 went in 2014–2015—and attract students from other U.S. colleges as well. While students studied in Madrid before, “the difference is we are now a recognized educational institution in Spain,” Dimon said.

Paula Cordeiro, former longtime dean of the School of Leadership and Education Sciences (SOLES), is considering designing a graduate course that would bring future school principals to Spain. To do that, she said, “I need to make connections with schools and professional organizations there. It will be much easier to do that if I have a base— our Madrid Campus—to work out of.”

Seeking to Make Peace and Social Innovation

Thanks to a $25 million gift and $50 million bequest from Joan Kroc, widow of the McDonald’s founder, USD is home to the Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice and the Kroc School of Peace Studies. The institute won a Simon Spotlight Award in 2011 for its Women PeaceMakers program, which provides several months’ respite for community activists from war-torn countries.

Mrs. Kroc gave instructions that the institute was to not just “talk about peace, but make peace.” Perhaps no school could adequately fulfill that lofty ambition, but USD’s leaders admit that Kroc has had, in Lyons’s words, “fits and starts.” Built in 2000, it began offering master’s degrees two years later, followed by a minor for undergraduates. The Kroc School, opened in 2007, has six faculty members and 33 graduate students. But a conference it organized in November 2014 on “Defying Extremism” drew 125 international policymakers, religious leaders, and peacebuilders from 30 countries. The institute followed that up with a February 2015 regional conference on extremism that drew participants from eight Asian countries to Manila and the conflicted island of Mindanao in the Philippines. Provost Andrew Allen said Kroc has the potential to become the hub for peacebuilding studies and actions that span the university.

It has already begun strengthening ties with USD’s other schools. Patricia Marquez, Kroc’s dean since 2014, came from the School of Business Administration, where she taught entrepreneurship for social change. While still at the business school, she spearheaded creation of a joint Center for Peace and Commerce with Kroc and launched a Social Innovation Challenge that has grown beyond the campus. Last spring the Challenge awarded $75,000 to eight teams of students from universities across San Diego for such ventures as building portable toilet seats for landmine victims in Uganda and opening a school in Ghana.

Marquez is a Venezuelan-born and University of California-Berkeley–educated anthropologist—her research was on street children in Caracas—who takes an iconoclastic approach to how Kroc should pursue its mission. “I’m not interested in the same old categories. If business is going to come up with solutions to social problems, we need to bring into the conversation people very different from us in their thinking,” said Marquez. “We do focus on peace, but we’re not training philosophers of peace. We’re training people who understand philosophy, sociology, anthropology, economics, and all these things to solve some of the most intractable problems in the twenty-first century.”

Her successor at the joint center, economics professor Stephen Conroy, said it occupies “a rare space that folks on either side quite frankly might be somewhat uncomfortable with. But for me, being a force for good and trying to improve standards of living is what business should be all about.” USD is also an Ashoka Foundation Changemaker Campus, part of a network of 30 universities seeking to incubate innovative approaches to solving global challenges. 

Priming the Pump for Study Abroad

Half the undergraduates who study abroad do so for a full semester. Students receive $170,000 in need-based aid and get a 30 percent tuition discount on credits earned in short-term programs. As many as 100 faculty teach short-term courses overseas during January intersession and summer terms.

“We have centralized support from the international center. Graduate schools do their own programming as well,” said Dimon. “We offer a variety of study abroad programs, research missions, and service-learning activities, packaging them in different ways for students’ different needs.”

The study abroad staff is lean—Director Kira Espiritu and Associate Director Jessica Calhoun work with four advisers and an operations manager, handling all logistical arrangements and student service support—which means schools and faculty must shoulder some marketing and administrative burdens. Chemistry professor James Bolender said there are fewer such burdens than when he pioneered a field study class for science majors on Mexico’s Baja Peninsula in 2001. He remembers “flying by the seat of my pants” back then. Bolender has led students back to Baja ever since and worked alongside them on a humanitarian water quality project in Mbarara, Uganda.

A Taste of International Education for Sophomores

USD’s lofty study abroad participation rate has also been helped by the Second Year Experience Abroad, part of a wider effort by the student affairs office to encourage freshmen to return for their second year. Students take a global studies seminar and travel in cohorts in January of their sophomore year to Florence, Italy, or Antigua, Guatemala. Courses offered run the gamut from language and art to chemistry and statistics. More than 10 percent of freshmen—150 students—sign up each year.

“I consider this a big retention strategy,” said Carmen Vazquez, vice president for student affairs. It’s also delivered striking results for the International Center. Espiritu said 85 percent of those sophomores wind up studying abroad again.

Piper Bloom transferred from a community college, so she missed that sophomore opportunity, but “immediately decided that I wanted to have some of that experience, even though I’m a little older than everyone else.” She chose a popular summer Shakespeare course in London. “You hear from friends who went and it just inspires you to go,” said the English major, who was headed to Japan after graduation to teach English.

Building International Experiences Into Graduate Curricula

International experiences are par for the course for many of USD’s graduate and professional schools. Dimon has a direct hand in that as she remains director of the Ahlers Center for International Business as well as associate provost. Ahlers has sent 150 MBA students to 13 countries to do international practicums, consulting directly for foreign companies or tackling projects in teams alongside MBA students from the local university. Notwithstanding that most are working professionals who are pursuing MBAs part time, a majority graduate with an international experience on their résumés, Dimon said.

Ahlers has forged close ties with EGADE Graduate Business School of the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico, whose retired dean, Jaime Alonso Gomez, is now a USD distinguished professor of strategy and international business. He teaches business students and executives that in additional to the proverbial three Ps—people, products, and profits—they need to treat peace and prosperity as equally important considerations for their bottom lines. “That is the true meaning of education: bringing not only material wealth, but building better communities, better neighbors, better everything,” Gomez said.

SOLES, the leadership and education graduate school, since 2008 has required every student to participate in an international experience. “We didn’t do it on a whim. We take it very seriously,” said Linda Dews, assistant dean of the School of Leadership and Education Sciences. “We’re seeing that it’s making a difference for the way students approach their professional career.”

Most students spend only brief periods abroad, but that does not tell the full picture, said Assefa Tessema, a doctoral student from Ethiopia who directs the school’s Global Center. “When people hear it’s a one-week or 10-day program, they may assume it’s superficial work. But it’s very intensive engagement for students and for faculty, who start planning a year in advance.”

An Emphasis on Service as Well as Learning

Many study abroad programs encourage students to perform service. Political science professor Mike Williams weaves that into the summer course he teaches in South Africa. “I’m a cheerleader and also an organizer,” he said, “trying to get more people to think about how we advance our social justice mission and how to do this in their classes.”

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A conversation with Williams convinced Jennifer Bradshaw to switch majors from business to international relations and to follow Williams to the village of Makuleke, where the group slept in huts, worked alongside community leaders, and mentored youth. “They were some of the most genuine, welcoming people I’ve ever met. That experience made me rethink my own life here in the U.S. I think about it every day,” said Bradshaw.

The Mulvaney Center for Community, Awareness and Social Action arranges service immersion trips to Jamaica, Guatemala, and other countries, but also guides students to assist immigrants, the homeless, and poor in San Diego’s Linda Vista section, Tijuana, and other border towns.

In a Jamaica program led by John Loggins, director of community-based learning, students learn the history of the Atlantic slave trade, tutor kids, and participate in activities from cooking classes to jam sessions in the town of Duncan near Montego Bay. “There’s all kinds of different ways they can learn,” said Loggins, an alumnus and former Peace Corps volunteer in Jamaica. “It’s really transformed the dynamic in that community.”

“We’re doing this international work because it’s good education,” said Chris Nayve, an assistant provost and the center’s director who has three USD degrees (BA, JD, and MBA). “It’s not just the content of the class. It’s about who are you becoming.”

The University of Delaware (UD) traces its roots to a colonial academy that produced three signers of the Declaration of Independence. It was chartered as a college in 1834 and selected as a land-grant institution after the Civil War. It has a rich tradition of study abroad, a robust intensive English institute, and a $200 million research enterprise. But when Patrick Harker became president in 2007, he was perturbed to learn that only 39 incoming freshmen—1 percent—came from other countries. No institution could reach the first tier of research universities with so few international students in its classrooms, he told the faculty. Today UD enrolls nearly 700 international undergraduates as well as 1,300 graduate students with 1,600 others learning English. “We turned that around. You can feel it on campus today. It just feels more diverse. But we’ve got more work to do,” said Harker, former dean of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Structural changes were necessary to accommodate the growth spurt. UD’s Office for International Students and Scholars (OISS), which once consisted of two people in tight quarters, now has a 10-person staff ensconced in a Georgian mansion at the heart of campus. “I feel like Cinderella,” said Frances O’Brien, the assistant director.

The relocation to the Wright House, formerly the faculty club, is “both metaphor and evidence of the university’s commitment to its international community,” said Nancy Guerra, former associate provost for international programs and director of the parent Institute for Global Studies (IGS), which provides grants to faculty, forges international partnerships, and oversees OISS and education abroad. Creating the institute was a key recommendation in a 2008 “Path to Prominence” strategic plan on how to elevate the stature of international programs and intensify global activity on all fronts.

“We made a small number of critical organizational changes that paid big dividends,” said Nancy Brickhouse, former deputy provost. Consolidating international programs provided “a much higher degree of visibility and access across campus” and enabled UD to attract faculty and professionals with deep experience in global education, said Brickhouse, now provost of Saint Louis University.

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Among them was OISS Director Ravi Ammigan, who brought a wealth of programming experience from Michigan State University in 2013. The international office ramped up activities and “now we are a center of cross-cultural engagement as well,” he said.

Placing Delaware on the Map

Delaware, the first state to ratify the Constitution, is second smallest by size and forty-fifth by population. “Our big challenge is how to increase our international visibility. We don’t yet have really good global recognition,” said Guerra, a psychologist who stepped down as associate provost and IGS head to return full time to teaching and research on stopping childhood violence. Chris Lucier, vice president for enrollment management, said, “The location actually appeals to students once they know how close we are to Philadelphia, Washington, and New York. The strength of our engineering and business programs are major selling points.”

Reeling in more talent from abroad makes academic and economic sense, because UD already must look outside Delaware’s borders for 60 percent of its 21,000 students. It describes itself as a “state-assisted” institution, not fully public, since it is governed by its own trustees (the governor is an ex officio member) and gets only 13 percent of the budget from state coffers. “People assume we’re a big public institution. The reality is we’re medium sized and a public-private hybrid,” said Amy Greenwald Foley, IGS’s associate director for global outreach. “We have smaller classes and offer amenities you’d expect to find at a private institution.” 

UD competes with larger flagship schools such as Penn State, Rutgers, and the University of Maryland. Among the attractions are the classic college-town feel of Newark (population 32,000) and a picture-book campus with stately elms shading Georgian buildings that line the Green.

Push for Global Engagement

Harker, a management expert trained as a civil and urban engineer, shook up UD’s budgeting and pushed colleges to eliminate low-demand programs. He believes the changes spurred departments to become more entrepreneurial and globally engaged. “It’s helped people be more creative about what kinds of programs we can offer and what types of grants we can go after,” said Harker, who stepped down in July to become president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

Since 2003 UD has hosted top students from the Middle East and North Africa for civic leadership training funded by the U.S. Department of State, and more recently it was selected as one of 20 universities providing coursework and mentoring for young leaders from across Africa. It launched a UD Africa initiative in 2013 to increase partnerships with African universities and send more faculty and students to the continent. “A host of faculty do research in Africa,” said Gretchen Bauer, chair of political science and international relations, who is headed to Ghana on a Fulbright in 2016.

Norma Gaines-Hanks, a human development and family services professor, has taken students to South Africa for study and service eight times. Enrollment is capped at 30. “If the kids had their way, we’d take 100,” she said.

Academic and Cultural Ties with China

UD has made its greatest progress in expanding academic ties in China. A close relationship with Xiamen University extends back to 2007, including a dual doctoral degree in oceanography. UD is one of the U.S. campuses where Xiamen is sending dozens of doctoral students being groomed as future faculty.

Xiamen helped UD land a Confucius Institute in 2010 and provides two Mandarin teachers on loan, and the two universities are partnering to open a State Department–funded American Cultural Center on the Xiamen campus, one of 24 such centers across China.

“There are so many Confucius Institutes around the country. We want to be different,” said Jianguo Chen, the director and a professor of Chinese literature. He wants to provide expertise for Chinese entrepreneurs who are seeking to break into U.S. markets and American firms looking to do business in China.

Engineering in the Forefront

The pacesetter in many of UD’s efforts to extend its global reach is the College of Engineering led by Dean Babatunde Ogunnaike, a former DuPont researcher and member of the National Academy of Engineering. A new global engineering program combining bachelor’s and master’s degrees in five years is on the drawing boards. “My tagline for students is, ‘Let’s go change the world together,’” said the Nigerian-born Ogunnaike. Engineering is the most international of UD’s colleges, with 627 students from other countries, including Ugochukwu Nsofor, who is studying electromagnetics and nanophotonics for his doctorate. Nsofor volunteers at orientations for international students, which have undergone “a huge improvement” since OISS expanded, he said.

The four dozen students in UD’s Engineers Without Borders (EWB) chapter are trying to change the world already. They designed and built a bridge connecting two remote villages in Guatemala, completed a clean water project in Cameroon, and have scouted projects in Malawi and the Philippines. Over winter break, senior Kelsey McWilliams traveled to India with a UD team on a Gates Foundation–funded project to improve latrines. That project was started by the late civil engineering professor Steve Dentel, who recently lost a battle with cancer. Dentel, the original EWB adviser, had been to Cameroon 11 times.

IGS and the College of Engineering split costs of a newly created associate director position to manage the college’s international programs and work across disciplines with other colleges.

Keeping Study Abroad Affordable

The junior year abroad originated at UD. The first students’ embarkation in 1923 on an ocean liner bound for France made front-page news in the New York Times. Now 1,300 students head abroad each year, mostly in classes taught by scores of UD faculty over the five week winter term. One-third study abroad before graduation.

But costs are a concern, said Lisa Chieffo, the associate director. Fees for some programs top $10,000 (including airfare and housing but not tuition). The university has doubled aid for study abroad to $1 million and launched a Delaware Diplomats program that allows freshmen to earn up to $1,500 for study or internships abroad by participating in global events on campus, including lectures and international coffee hours. Fifty students enlisted in the first corps.

Kerry Snyder, 22, a wildlife conservation major who works in the global studies office, put several scholarships together that paid for a service class in Cambodia and two research trips to Nicaragua. “I’d like to see programs that are more affordable, honestly, because that is a barrier. Students come in and they’re so excited, but they just don’t have the money,” said Snyder.

In 2014 the university launched a World Scholars Program that offers incoming freshmen the opportunity to spend their first semester at John Cabot University in Rome. Six signed up, including Daria Collins, a budding linguistics major now learning Japanese and planning to study abroad again. “I definitely feel like a world scholar,” she said. Thirty-eight freshmen started classes in Rome in fall 2015 and Foley began scouting for a second partner university in Madrid. 

Cynthia Schmidt-Cruz, professor of Spanish and interim director of the Center for Global and Area Studies, believes study abroad scholarships could entice more students to pursue a new minor in global studies that attracted 10 students last year.

A Fruitful Partnership on International Recruiting

UD’s English Language Institute (ELI) has grown so rapidly that its classrooms have spilled into seven buildings, including what was once the home of a Delaware paper mill magnate. Sixteen hundred students passed through its classrooms and labs in 2014–2015. More than a quarter came through a Conditional Admission Program (CAP) that guarantees entry to credit classes with no TOEFL required once they make the grade in language classes.

Once UD gave a green light for CAP in 2009, “we were off to the races,” said Director Scott Stevens, who won NAFSA’s 2015 Cassandra Pyle Award for Leadership and Collaboration for his efforts to raise standards for intensive English programs. 

The ELI and UD’s Admissions Office once worked apart on international recruitment, but “it’s a very integrated team now,” said Vice President for Enrollment Management Lucier. International applications shot up 50 percent in two years. The enrollment surge presented challenges for UD as some students struggled to adjust to campus and academic life. “The whole transition to the culture of academia is critical,” said Stevens. The institute now forms cohorts of five to eight CAP students, each with a U.S. student mentor. Residing in global living communities, they read books together, work on study skills, and learn respect for academic standards, but also go on scavenger hunts and a weekend retreat.

The campus wide collaborative culture is apparent in the Global Recruitment and Retention Group that includes academic advisers and representatives from residence life, career services, and the counseling center. It meets monthly to brainstorm not only how to attract international students, but also how to better support them once they arrive. 

Breaking the Ice with Facebook

Jill Neitzel and Patricia Sloane-White’s popular Anthropology 230 class on the lives of the “Young, Global, and Privileged” takes an innovative approach to breaking the ice between domestic and international students. Neitzel and Sloan-White assign readings and videos but the bulk of the work consists of student responses on a private Facebook page to a volley of questions on topics including inequality, race and gender, and pop culture and partying.

Students watched videos on racial tensions in Ferguson, Missouri, but also viewed a hilarious skit by the Fung Brothers, a duo of Chinese-American comedians, on “the Asian bubble” on U.S. campuses. They examined the huge gaps in both countries between the rich and working classes.

“It’s not all just ‘Let’s be friends,’” said Neitzel. “We approach this as a serious academic class, but rather than my standing up there lecturing, it’s participatory engagement in learning about other cultures anthropologically.”

The class drew raves. “I really wanted to have some Americans friends. Before this class, it did not work out,” said a Chinese student. “I even got to know Chinese culture better.” Using Facebook as a teaching tool was “absolutely brilliant,” said an American student.

The message is impossible to miss. One day each fall at North Central College dozens of senior administrators, faculty, and students don maroon T-shirts emblazoned with a three-word imperative: Please go away!

Students are heeding the study abroad pitch, not just because of the human billboards, but because the college has hired more advisers, made study overseas possible at no additional cost beyond airfare, and nearly tripled the number of semester offerings. North Central has come a long way since opening a small Office of International Programs two decades ago at a time when it enrolled fewer than 30 international students and sent only 23 abroad. Now 10 percent of the 3,000 students study in other countries each year. Recruiting efforts and copious financial aid now bring nearly 100 international students to the United Methodist–affiliated college in the suburbs of Chicago each year. At an institution where 90 percent of students are from Illinois, North  Central is progressing toward a goal of a 5 percent international student population.

The college was founded in 1861 by leaders of what is now the United Methodist Church to serve the families of German immigrants. The 65-acre campus sits in downtown Naperville, an upscale suburb 30 minutes from Chicago’s bustling Loop and lakefront. It changed its name from NorthWestern College in the 1920s to avoid confusion with much larger Northwestern  University. Early graduates served as missionaries in Japan and China. “Service and civic engagement are an important part of the culture of this campus,” said President Troy Hammond, who has a PhD in atomic physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but came to academe from the business world. 

Nudging a Campus to Internationalize

Hammond’s long-serving predecessor, Harold Wilde, set the regional college on a course to internationalize in 1994 when he tapped English professor Jack Shindler to direct the fledgling international office, a job he still holds today. Shindler wrote a dissertation on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, but turned early in his career to directing the English as a second language program at Texas Southern University before joining the North Central faculty in 1981. When the international office started, it was just Shindler and a part-time secretary but he now runs a heavily trafficked, six-person shop with its own English Language Institute. Framed above the door to Shindler’s den-like office is a poster inspired by a salute from Wilde calling Shindler the campus “nudge” on all things international. “I nudged not just faculty but students out of the nest,” said Shindler, who as a Williams College student once convinced a chapel board to convert an empty fraternity house into a coffee house and gathering space. “I feel like we’re still doing that. This is a kind of coffee house in the best sense of the word where people come, share talents, talk to each other, network, and make this place more international.”

“We couldn’t have gotten where we are without him,” said Devadoss Pandian, the now retired vice president and dean of the faculty. Norval Bard, a professor of French, said Shindler “has a disarming way about him. He rarely says no. When you come to him with a new idea, he might say, ‘We’ll look into it,’ but he always leaves the door open to explore new ideas.” Francine Navakas, a humanities professor and associate dean who directs interdisciplinary studies, credited Shindler’s “magical planning” with helping land nearly $1 million in Title VI and foundation grants to build East Asian and Middle East/North African (MENA) studies. The college’s structure, with four academic divisions but no separate schools dividing liberal arts from business and science, helped, too, said Navakas. “We don’t have the big walls and barriers that some institutions do.”

Broadening Student and Faculty Horizons

North Central has marshaled resources to give students and faculty ample opportunities to learn and do research in other countries. The college provided grants to 33 faculty over the past five years for projects overseas. The  Office of International Programs arranges lectures, film screenings, and other events on campus focusing on global themes and works closely with faculty to incorporate these topics into courses. It once switched topics yearly, but now spends three years drilling deeper into a single global concern. The current cycle examines globalization and its ramifications. Islam, environmental change, and human rights have each been the focus in the past. The college provides stipends for faculty to join a summer reading and discussion group and sends them to a summer institute at the University of  Chicago’s Center for International Studies.

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Perry Hamalis, professor of religious studies and director of the College Scholars Honors Program, has taken part in nine of those seminars. His honors students are required to study abroad. “We’ve just redone the curriculum and added a new history of ideas minor,” said Hamalis. “The new curriculum now is truly global, pulling from the Indian subcontinent, Africa, Asia, South America, as well as European and North American sources. Previously, it should have been called history of Western ideas.”

The college distributes $40,000 to $50,000 each year in Richter Grants for undergraduate research anywhere in the world. These awards up to $5,000 date back to 1977 and for many years were funded by the Paul K. and Elizabeth Cook Richter Trusts, which provided similar opportunities at other colleges. Recently the college has supported the grants with its own funds. Miguel Purgimon Colell, a junior from El Salvador in the honors program, used his award to fly to Rio de Janeiro during the World Cup in 2014 to study the economic impact of the games on the lives of ordinary Brazilians. His economics professor, a Brazilian, put him in touch with academics and a government official in Rio, and he interviewed residents from all walks of life. He also managed to snag a ticket to the Brazil-Colombia match. “North Central has allowed me to do things I never would have imagined I could do,” said Colell, who is president of the International Club and is studying to become an actuary.

International Students’ Outsize Impact

North Central had just 51 international students when Jesús Velasco was hired as international student adviser in 2012. Two autumns later there were 94 from 40 countries. “Our exchanges from partner universities really boomed,” he said. But the college also stepped up recruiting to enroll more four-year students. It once took “an armchair approach,” said Marty Sauer, vice president for enrollment management. “We didn’t do much outreach or travel. It was simply a matter of accommodating international students who found us.” Now Megan Otermat, an assistant admissions director, recruits overseas and devotes full time to working with international applicants and advising those who enroll.

Otermat found Uyen Lam, 20, at a college fair at an international school in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Lam had spent a year at high schools in Florida and “had a long list of criteria that I wanted for college. North Central fit about 80 of them,” said the finance major. A $20,000-a-year scholarship clinched the deal.

Rosa Moraa received a full scholarship when she transferred from a sister school, United States International University, in Nairobi, Kenya. Now, with a bachelor’s in international business in hand, she is completing a master’s in leadership studies and overseeing student activities as a graduate assistant. Moraa, raised on a farm, said she was once “very introverted” but discovered “it was very easy to make friends. I’d recommend this school to anyone, even those who are scared to come, as I was.”

Exchange student Youssef Balti was among 80 young Tunisians chosen by the U.S. State Department for scholarships and sent to institutions across the United States for a year. “I’m here to learn about democracy and the American culture and take the best from it and bring it back to Tunisia,” said the 20-year-old finance student. A Thanksgiving feast with a friendship family “was a huge experience for me.”

A new pipeline opened with the launch of the English Language Institute in 2014. Applicants are conditionally admitted to the college and already four of the first 15 students have gone on to matriculate. “It will take a little time to measure how many stay and how many go, but the early signs have been very positive,” said Katherine Pope, the director.

Making Study Abroad Affordable

North Central has put study abroad within the reach of students by charging a flat $3,500 fee on top of tuition regardless of whether a program costs two to three times that much, as some do.

When Kimberly Larsson was hired in 2003 as the sole study abroad adviser (she also advised international students), North Central had only nine exchanges and a half-dozen direct enrollment programs. Now it has 17 and 31. It operates programs of its own—one in Costa Rica, one in England, and a third in which students study in both China and Japan. “Study abroad at North Central is very personal. It’s not an assembly line. When we started, we didn’t have a study abroad fair or even a brochure,” said Larsson, who herself studied and worked in Sweden and taught English in Japan. North Central has three 10-week terms with some classes in December. If students choose a fall program abroad that extends into December, they can earn 15 credits without paying an overload fee. Financial aid also carries over. “It can be a fantastic deal,” said Larsson.

The faculty-led December courses now are more “professionalized,” said William Muck, a political science professor who coordinates global studies. “It used to be the faculty would pitch an idea and say, ‘I’d like to take a group of students here.’ It was very loose in terms of organization. Now the faculty must propose courses a year in advance, submit syllabi, and go through a rigorous academic review process.” For long-term study abroad programs, students must take a two-credit seminar that meets weekly in the term before departure, write an essay while abroad, and upon return participate in reentry activities and write a capstone essay. 

Pushing Students Out of Comfort Zones

Kimberly Sluis, vice president for student affairs and dean of students, who coteaches a preparatory class, credits Shindler and Larsson with “busting open the possibilities” for study abroad. Sluis has twice taken students to Ghana, where she was once a Peace Corps volunteer.

International business professor Robert Moussetis has led hundreds of students on classes and cultural trips to more than a dozen countries, including Mongolia. “I tell them, ‘That will be the best and most wonderful learning experience you will ever have. You will survive. You will figure it out.’”

Three North Central students were in Nairobi, Kenya, when the Westgate shopping mall massacre occurred in September 2013. Two left, but Ben Redmond resisted entreaties to come home, and kept studying at United States International University and volunteering in an AIDS clinic. A biochemistry major who aspires to work for Médecins Sans Frontières, he credits North Central with “sparking my interests by pushing international experiences so much.”

Three seniors won Fulbright scholarships in 2014 and two more in 2015, including Heidi Nelson, 21, an education major who’ll teach English in Argentina. She studied in Costa Rica and Peru. “They’ll do anything to support us with our international goals,” she said. “When I had questions on my applications and on my Fulbright, I knew I could go in there any time and they’d stop what they were doing. It’s always an open door.” 

Marie Butnariu had a remarkably global upbringing in Tivoli, Italy, and Chicago. She got U.S. citizenship by virtue of being born on a New York–bound flight from Italy. She spent her first December term studying in France and the second in Israel and Palestine, then took a full semester at the University of Glasgow. The 20-year-old sees international work in her future. “You don’t just get an education here, you build character. It’s special.”

North Central’s enrollment has risen 20 percent over a decade. It opened a $30 million concert hall in 2008 and broke ground in May on a $60 million science center. When Hammond became president in 2013, he recalled a bit of wisdom he heard from his days as a business consultant in New Zealand: for that small, island nation to prosper in the global economy, it had to “punch above its weight.” That strategy is evident in North Central College’s international programs.

When Mary Lyon opened the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in western Massachusetts in 1837, the United States had 120 colleges for men and none for women. FDR’s path-breaking labor secretary Frances Perkins, obstetrical anesthesiologist Virginia Apgar, and playwright Wendy Wasserstein passed through its Gothic halls and strolled the campus landscaped by the son of Frederick Law Olmsted. Even 16-year-old Emily Dickinson, the poet and “Belle” of nearby Amherst, attended classes for a year.

Following in their footsteps today are more than 600 international students, over a quarter of the student body. “You walk through a mini-U.N. on campus,” said Eva Paus, director of the McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives. President Lynn Pasquerella calls it “a microcosm of the world.” It is the second largest concentration of international students at any four-year college. International and domestic students alike are drawn to the country’s oldest college for women with a longstanding commitment to admit young women of talent with little regard to their ability to pay.

Mount Holyoke is not a newcomer to internationalization. The first international student, a Canadian, arrived two years after Lyon opened the doors to a college offering advanced instruction in “science, literature, and refinement” for the good of “our country and for the world.” Mary Woolley, a storied successor and the only female U.S. delegate to a League of Nations disarmament conference in 1932, wrote, “Internationalism has been woven into the very warp and woof of this institution from the beginning.” Today’s mission statement speaks of providing “an intellectually adventurous education in the liberal arts and sciences” to prepare students “for lives of thoughtful, effective, and purposeful engagement in the world.”

Steering a Distinctly International Course

But it is in this century that Mount Holyoke has steered its distinctly international course. A 2003 strategic plan laid the groundwork for the McCulloch Center. By 2007 admiring accreditors were saying that “with little fanfare” Mount Holyoke had created “a veritable world college” in the Connecticut River Valley. While faculty and administrators across the campus share that responsibility, Paus and her five-person staff make it happen. The McCulloch Center has a $12 million endowment of its own and, all told, the college has raised $30 million in endowed funds supporting international studies, teaching, research, and other activities, with more than half generating scholarships for international students.

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The McCulloch Center runs study abroad, develops curated international internships, and provides international student services. It also serves as the fulcrum for activities such as bringing a global scholar to campus each fall (former Norwegian President Gro Harlem Brundtland and Liberia’s Leymah Gbowee, the 2011 Nobel Peace Laureate and parent of a Mount Holyoke student, among them) and organizing biennial Global Challenges Conferences. Paus, a development economist, said the center’s overriding purpose is “to bring greater cohesion and visibility to global learning and to deepen it through new cross-disciplinary initiatives.”

Prizing the Contributions of International Students

Faculty, a quarter of them foreign-born, relish the diversity in their classrooms. When Jon Western, a professor of international relations, needed assistants for a foundation-funded project tracking civilian deaths in Syria, three of the eight students he hired spoke Arabic. “If I talk in my human rights class about Islam, I’ll have Sunni and Shia students who can elaborate on distinctions,” he said.

Politics professor and alumna Kavita Khory, originally from Karachi, Pakistan, said international students often “are much more politically engaged and aware” than U.S. classmates, but the latter “love that we present ourselves as an international college in so many ways.”

“Mount Holyoke is a fantastic place to teach the history of global inequality,” said Holly Hanson, a Uganda expert who as a teen volunteered in Africa for a year on her mother’s advice to “do something useful for the human race” before starting college. “I had this very profound African experience. The classes that I’m teaching 40 years later are answering the question (about inequality) that was formulated for me as a teenager.”

Mount Holyoke relies on tuition for over half its budget. Nearly 80 percent of students receive aid, but the college also looks for students whose families can pay. “We have expensive values… but we have to bring in a class that we can afford,” said Sonya Stephens, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty.

Nearly two-thirds of international students come from China, India, Vietnam, Pakistan, and South Korea. Pasquerella said the college decided last year to recruit and admit more students from the Middle East, Africa, and South America because “if you want to be truly multicultural and international, it can’t be all Asian students.”

Paying for Internships at Home or Abroad

Although it might be assumed that a college with a $700 million endowment was well insulated from the financial pressures felt by other private liberal arts colleges, it is not. That made all the bolder the college’s decision in 2014 to fund with its own dollars summer internships for sophomores or juniors. They are guaranteed $3,000 if they land an unpaid U.S. internship or $3,600 to work internationally. 

A third of the 400 students who took the college up on the offer in 2014 landed international placements in 52 countries. Their contributions ranged from participating in community outreach for an archaeological project on Easter Island to advising Fulbright applicants in Brussels to teaching poor farmers in India to become beekeepers.

Alumnae abroad help the students find openings and often directly super vise and mentor them. “Mentorship is really important because we see the internship not just as a preprofessional experience, but a cocurricular experience,” said Kirk Lange, director of international experiential learning. Students must show how the internships fit their learning goals “and both the host organization and the student’s faculty adviser must sign off on them.” 

Maggie Jacobi, a senior majoring in economics, worked as an AIDS educator in Gulu, Uganda, and said she “only had to pay $10 out of pocket for the entire summer. This is a good environment to have really big dreams.”

Schuyler Cowan, an Italian and politics major from Lake Placid, New York, spent her internship in Venice translating documents for the website of Ca’ Foscari University. She believes it helped her win a Fulbright, as four other seniors did this year. Cowan will teach English in Germany.

When Jenny Watermill was hired by the Career Development Center in 2008 to coordinate internships, two others did similar work. Now there are four full-time staff and a dozen others who also spend time on internships.

“The wonderful thing is students are no longer evaluated for internship (grants); if you’re a student, you get it. What we evaluate are the quality of the internships,” said Eleanor Townsley, associate dean of the faculty. 

The guaranteed funding for an internship is part of the college’s Lynk Initiative to connect academic work with practical applications of the liberal arts. The college emphasizes course work and skill-building in preparation for the summer intern ships and research. Back on campus afterwards, many make presentations at a student showcase on their experiences.

Supplementing, Not Supplanting, Study Abroad

The internships are intended to supplement, not supplant, study abroad. “The most important thing for us, actually, is the blend of international internships and study abroad opportunities,” said Stephens. Students who enroll in classes abroad pay the tuition and fees charged by the program or host university.

Students who are on financial aid receive Laurel Fellowships to help pay for Mount Holyoke’s own study abroad programs in Montpellier, France; Shanghai, China; and Monteverde, Costa Rica, or other preferred programs and exchanges. When Sinafik Gebru, a biology major from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, told her father she had won a Laurel Fellowship to study environmental challenges in Costa Rica, he asked, “Aren’t you already studying abroad?” International students cannot use Laurel Fellowships to study in their home country.

Students’ past preference for spring study abroad “created difficulties on campus. We had overcrowding in the fall and empty beds in the spring,” said Joanne Picard, dean of international studies. It righted the imbalance by waiving a $900 administrative fee for studying abroad in the fall.

Bringing International Experts to Class Remotely

Most faculty research grants in recent years have supported work done in other countries or with global partners. Many collaborations cross disciplines. International relations professor Western and Spanish professor Rogelio Miñana team-teach a course that combines human rights law and new media in Latin America. The students’ main assignment is to build a bilingual website for a mock human rights organization and to mount a media campaign aimed at local Latino communities. “Students love the connection between the foreign and local aspects,” said Miñana, an authority on Cervantes’ Don Quixote and the seventeenth century character’s enduring cultural impacts.  

With guidance from a nine-member Faculty Advisory Board, the McCulloch Center keeps a hand in numerous projects aimed at internationalizing the curriculum. In 2011, working with Library, Information and Technology Services, it induced faculty to bring expert voices from around the world into their classes. 

A dozen faculty took a seminar on the pedagogy, techniques, and logistics of videoconferencing, from simply using Skype and Adobe Connect to relying on high-end equipment in designated classrooms. More than 50 faculty have participated and the project, dubbed VP-50, won an award in 2014 from the American Council on Education and the SUNY Center for Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL).

The McCulloch Center offered a carrot to encourage faculty and their international guests to participate in the hook-ups. Faculty members get $150 the first time they arrange an international speaker, and the guest receives a $100 stipend. “It’s just a little gesture, but videoconferencing is a wonderful, economical way of bringing in international perspectives,” said Paus.

Language professors connected classes with universities in France, Italy, and Russia, and an Asian studies class on Chinese opera heard from a renowned performer of traditional Yue opera in Beijing.

Making the Case for Women’s Colleges

Senior Jelena Jezdimirovic from Uzice, Serbia, researched the history of international students at Mount Holyoke while working in the college’s Archives and Special Collections. The economics and critical social thought major catalogued 5,000 alumnae from other countries, including the first from the Balkans nine decades ago. “I couldn’t believe it. People still wonder how I found Mount Holyoke. How did someone in 1924 find out about it?” she asked.

Graduates include the first female editor of the Bombay edition of the Times of India, a spokeswoman for the government of Ethiopia, novelists, and diplomats. “It’s important for students to see that there’s a legacy. Tradition is very important to Mount Holyoke. We’ve always done some things that other schools haven’t done,”  Jezdimirovic said

Half a century ago there were 200 U.S. colleges for women. Today there are barely 40. “In the landscape of higher education, being a women’s college is not the norm. That’s OK with us. Mount Holyoke was an anomaly in 1837, and we have remained a women’s college by choice,” the Mount Holyoke website says. “We know that women thrive in an environment where all the resources are designed for and dedicated to them.”

Professors attest to that. Western, who also teaches international relations at the other members of the Five College Consortium— Amherst, Smith, Hampshire, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (students have reciprocal rights to take classes at the other campuses)— calls the classroom atmosphere at Mount Holyoke “profoundly different.” Paus said that in coed settings, male students often speak out “whether or not they have something to say while women wait to have the perfect answer.”

“The cooperativeness of the way the students interact in classes is really striking,” said Darby Dyar, an astronomy professor who conducts lunar and solar system research for NASA and the National Science Foundation. Dyar is an alumna of Wellesley College, another of the Seven Sister schools.

At a time of great financial pressure on private colleges, staying single-sex comes at the price of cutting off half the potential pool of applicants. “It’s a question that we’ve asked ourselves,” Pasquerella said. “We looked in our most recent strategic plan at coeducation and reaffirmed our commitment to women’s education, believing that it is more important than ever before. It’s a tough sell, but we have so much to offer.” Referring to the attempted assassination of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenage advocate for girls’ education, Pasquerella said, “If women are still dying around the world to get an education, then Mary Lyon’s historic mission hasn’t been fulfilled.”

Khory, the politics professor, said faculty share a conviction that Mount Holyoke is doing the right thing in making internationalization its calling card. “That’s really what we see as our past, present, and future.”

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s (UNC-Chapel Hill) relationship with the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) in Ecuador started in an Amazonian jungle. Biology Professor Stephen Walsh first met Carlos Mena, who would become his PhD student and then later join USFQ as a professor, during a research trip to Ecuador in the late 1990s. Their personal relationship paved the way for a comprehensive partnership between their two institutions that culminated in the establishment of the Galápagos Science Center in 2011. UNC-Chapel Hill’s relationship with USFQ has subsequently expanded to include interdisciplinary research, student and faculty exchange, and community engagement, much of it focused on developing local capacity in the Galápagos Islands.

Building Strategic Partnerships

UNC-Chapel Hill’s collaboration with USFQ is characteristic of its larger approach to internationalization. According to Katie Bowler Young, director of global relations, UNC-Chapel Hill has chosen to focus on creating deep relationships that span multiple disciplines and ultimately result in engagement with local communities.

“Our key partnerships were established through faculty-to-faculty connections. Partnerships grow to include additional faculty, departments, and areas of study. Our team from UNC-Chapel Hill Global then helps develop partnerships, trying to extend them into new areas,” she says.

UNC-Chapel Hill’s long-term engagement in Ecuador was born out of Walsh’s and Mena’s joint research in the Galápagos, which Walsh first visited in 2006 as part of a project with the Galápagos National Park and the Nature Conservancy. “I continued to go back and forth to the Galápagos trying to understand their local needs, but to also begin to develop a UNC vision of what a long-term commitment in the Galápagos might look like,” Walsh says.

USFQ was interested in trying to identify a partner in the Galápagos to expand from undergraduate teaching to a more comprehensive research mission. “For us, we needed to make our presence in [the] Galápagos stronger. We needed an ally for that,” Mena says.

Infrastructure as Key to Sustainable Research

According to Walsh, the two institutions jointly identified infrastructure development as key to creating a sustainable research program in the Galápagos, which he says often suffers from a “one-and-done mentality where people go, gather data, write papers, and go home.”

“What we wanted to do is break this traditional approach to research and create something that is more connected to the needs of the Galápagos. Usually, research is done by foreign scientists who come to the Galápagos, and take their results with them when they leave. We wanted to change from that to something that is growing up from the community,” Mena adds.

In addition to discussing student mobility, they decided that there was a need to build a physical structure as the core of the collaboration between the two institutions.

“If we could build the Galápagos Science Center (GSC) and equip it with needed laboratories, providing unique capacity for science and education in the Galápagos, that would be the basis for an important increase into understanding the social, terrestrial, and marine subsystems in the Galápagos,” Walsh says.

It took almost five years from the time when UNCChapel Hill and USFQ first signed a general memorandum of understanding in 2007 to when the center opened its doors in 2011. Although UNC-Chapel Hill cannot legally own property in the Galápagos due to Ecuadorian law, the funding and construction were equally shared between the two institutions. More than 50 faculty members have subsequently been involved in the partnership.

Having a local base has made research easier for visiting faculty. Diego Riveros-Iregui is a physical geographer in the emerging field of ecohydrology—  “where life and water intersect,” as he puts it. He has spent time at the Galápagos Science Center studying the relationship between water, plants, and soils in tropical regions.

“I have been working in the tropics for several years and have run into many of the same challenges that everyone faces: customs, permits, maintenance of equipment, data collection, sample preservation, etc. When the opportunity to work in the Galápagos came up, working with the staff at the GSC facilitated many of the aforementioned challenges, giving me time to focus on research,” Riveros-Iregui says.

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Human and Ecological Systems Meet in the Galápagos

Mena says that scientific research in the Galápagos has traditionally been focused on hard science in areas such as botany, zoology, and evolution. From the beginning, they wanted to position the Galápagos Science Center as an interdisciplinary hub.

“The Galápagos are oftentimes thought of as Darwin’s paradise. But when you’re there, you can’t help but understand that the environment is changing and interacting with people, and shaping their behaviors,” Walsh says.

He adds that it was evident they needed to involve social sciences: “Two hundred twenty-five thousand tourists came to the Galápagos in 2015. About 30,000 residents live in the Galápagos Islands on four populated islands. It’s clear that it’s not just about ecology. It’s about the connection of people and ecology.”

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Maya Weinberg is a Latin American studies and political science major who took a gap year from UNC-Chapel Hill to do an internship at the GSC. She worked with Walsh on a project using global information software (GIS) to map out human development on San Cristóbal. She was involved with mapping buildings and putting together a report on infrastructure development.

She says that the interdisciplinary nature of the work at the GSC—and the opportunity to be involved in multiple projects in multiple fields—allowed her to make connections she wouldn’t otherwise have made: “With my experience working with human development, conservation, as well as geography I have become increasingly interested in policy and politics, as these are the disciplines that connect all three.”

The Importance of Engaging with the Local Community

Mena says that they built the center with the goal of providing more information to local communities and politicians to make informed decisions on issues such as health, tourism, infrastructure, and economic development.

He says that members of the local community are included in the research process. They work with a community board that keeps the GSC informed of local interests, and have close partnerships with Galápagos National Park and the local government council in order to find better ways to protect the islands.

UNC-Chapel Hill is currently engaging the community in the area of health. A new hospital was recently built on San Cristóbal, and representatives of both UNC and USFQ met with the director of the hospital and the ministry of health for the Galápagos. In 2016 the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Nursing sent a delegation to USFQ in Quito and to the Galápagos to visit the new hospital.

GSC also keeps the community informed about the results of its ongoing research. Kelly Houck is a biological anthropologist and UNC PhD candidate who studies human health. As part of her fieldwork on San Cristóbal, she collected samples of tap water to test for contamination as well as took blood, urine, and fecal samples from local residents to measure different health impacts.

“The water samples needed to be tested within 24 hours of collection and because of GSC infrastructure, we were able to give the results back immediately to the households and provide suggestions for treating contaminated water, such as boiling or using bottled water for drinking,” she says.

“In addition, we were able to provide them with preliminary results from their blood and urine test for indicators of infections, and advise them to seek further free testing at the hospital on San Cristóbal,” she adds.

Young adds that it is not only the local community in the Galápagos that benefits from the partnership. UNC-Chapel Hill’s undergraduate students have also been able to participate in opportunities through the partnership. In addition to semester or year-long exchanges to USFQ, undergraduates can also take advantage of faculty-led summer programs.

Billy Gerhard graduated in 2014 with a bachelor’s in biology and then earned a master’s of science in public health in environmental sciences and engineering. As an undergraduate, he did a summer program at the GSC in 2012. The next summer he returned as a winner of the Vimy award, a grant of up to $15,000 given annually to an interdisciplinary team of students working collaboratively to pursue research or service projects outside the United States. He is currently pursuing a PhD in environmental engineering at Duke University.

“The project definitely impacted my career trajectory. Working abroad required me to plan ahead, anticipate problems, organize contingencies, and communicate effectively. These skills are useful in any career and the opportunity to practice them was invaluable,” he says.

“I am currently writing the results of my research on drinking water in San Cristobal for publication,” he adds.

UNC has also sent local K–12 and community college educators to the Galápagos through its World View program, which strives to help teachers give their own students global competency. “We’ve seen this partnership benefit those beyond our campus as well,” she says.

Young says that having faculty members who are deeply committed to the local community has been key from a partnership development standpoint.

“It couldn’t have happened without two institutions that wanted it to happen, and two leaders, Carlos and I, who saw a vision, transmitted it to other faculty and students, and moved forward with a program that would be committed to community outreach, education, and research at a marvelous place,” Walsh adds.

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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Read more about University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

As Boston’s only public research institution, University of Massachusetts Boston (UMass Boston) sets itself apart in a number of ways, including the composition of its student body. The diversity of UMass Boston, with minority students making up 48 percent of its more than 17,000-student population, means that the global truly starts at home.

Chancellor J. Keith Motley says the university’s current mission goes far beyond its original mandate from 1974: “While we are an institution that began as one that was born to serve the citizens of Boston, we realized that in doing that we also serve the citizens of the world because this campus has transformed into one with over 90 different languages spoken on campus and 150 different countries represented.”

Designated as an Asian American Native American Pacific Islander-serving institution (AANAPISI), UMass Boston is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as a minority-serving institution. Many students are first-generation college students who come from immigrant backgrounds.

Senior anthropology major Michelle Chouinard says she has benefitted from opportunities to travel abroad as well as the global composition of the student population: “Our student population is so diverse. As someone who grew up in suburbia, it’s altered the way that I look at my own backyard.”

Embracing the Urban Context

Chancellor Motley and Provost Winston E. Langley view UMass Boston’s profile as an urban public research institution as central to its global vision. The university’s mission statement, which was revised in 2010 as part of its strategic plan, explicitly links the urban and the global: “The University of Massachusetts Boston is a public research university with a dynamic culture of teaching and learning, and a special commitment to urban and global engagement.”

According to Langley, the goal is to make UMass Boston the most cosmopolitan public urban research university in the United States. “By cosmopolitan, we mean that our students upon graduating should be able to live, thrive, and establish their social wellbeing any place on earth and do so with cultural ease. If our students are going to be citizens, not just occupants, of that society, they must be actively engaged and must be capable of crossing cultural cleavages and borders with facility,” he says.

A Systems Approach to Internationalization

One of the first things Langley did when he became provost in 2009, after more than two decades serving UMass Boston in a variety of other academic and administrative positions, was to establish the Office of Global Programs. Global Programs currently manages all internationalization efforts at UMass Boston under the leadership of Schuyler S. Korban, who came on board in 2013.

The Office of Global Programs has become the campus’s internationalization hub under Korban’s leadership as vice provost. Global Programs oversees a wide portfolio, including international student and scholar services, education abroad, exchange partnerships, an international visiting scholar academy, international internships, and a Confucius Institute, among others.

Robyn Hannigan, dean of the School for the Environment, has seen a huge change in terms of internationalization at UMass Boston in the seven years she’s been at the institution: “Since Schuyler has come on board, there has been a culture shift where what the faculty are doing (with international opportunities) is not only appreciated, but it’s expected and it’s merited. Our provost and our chancellor are fully aware when we’ve travelled abroad.”

Korban says he draws on his academic background as a molecular biologist in his approach to internationalization. “We think in terms of systems, so I look at internationalization as a system. I’m interested in expanding our network and along with the expansion of that network, identifying nodes of strength in terms of our partnerships overseas,” he explains.

One example of a “node of strength” is the Center for Governance and Sustainability (CGS). Under the leadership of Robyn Hannigan and Maria Ivanova, codirector of CGS, UMass Boston has received an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) grant from the National Science Foundation for its transdisciplinary program, Coasts and Communities. This grant, focusing on international research in the Horn of Africa, has helped shape internal campus development by promoting collaborations among the McCormack Graduate School for Policy and Global Studies, the College of Science and Mathematics, the School for the Environment, the College of Management, and the College of Liberal Arts.

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Ivanova approached Korban about offering a short course in Ethiopia. “I said, ‘Think about it in the bigger context. Let’s think about it as an opportunity to create something sustainable,’” Korban says.

He gave Ivanova funding to establish a regional environmental diplomacy institute that brought together representatives of the Ethiopian ministries of foreign affairs and environment with parliamentarians, academics, and nongovernmental organizations. “We shared our research findings about how countries are implementing their obligations under international environmental conventions,” Ivanova says.

Seed Funding to Increase International Engagement

One of Korban’s first initiatives as vice provost of global programs was to launch a competitive seed grant program that supports internationalization of teaching, research, and outreach. In total, the Office of Global Programs has dedicated $150,000 to the initiative.

“The idea is to support faculty who are interested in internationalizing education, research, and service. As a result, our faculty-led programs have increased. Then, in turn, they develop these new courses that end up impacting our study abroad programs,” Korban says.

Last year, Felicia L. Wilczenski, associate dean of the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development, received a $5,000 seed grant to bring in representatives from John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin in Poland for an international conference, Building Inclusive Communities, in December 2015. She also used the funding to help take a group of UMass students to Poland for a course and study tour titled Focus on Inclusive Policy, Practice, and Educational Reforms in Poland.

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“The funds helped me to enact parts of the MOU that UMass Boston previously executed with the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (KUL) in Poland. These two activities helped to deepen the partnership between our two institutions. We also have a joint research collaboration in the planning stages,” Wilczenski says.

Since 2014 the Office of Global Programs has also committed $50,000 annually to incentivize faculty to internationalize their curricula for both undergraduate and graduate programs. Faculty and teaching staff can receive up to $1,500 for curricular enhancements, the creation of online modules, or travel abroad.

Student Mobility Through Exchange and Short-Term Programs

The Office of Global Programs has focused on developing short-term and exchange programs, largely due to the makeup of the student body. “With the demographics that we have, we have been focusing on short term as opposed to semester or year-long programs,” Korban says.

Over the last five years, the number of UMass Boston students studying abroad has increased from 75 students in 2009–10 to 466 in 2014–15, according to Ksenija Borojevic, assistant director for study abroad.

The Office of Global Programs has also focused on the development of reciprocal exchange agreements. UMass Boston currently offers its students more than 35 exchange options, which also help boost the number of international students on campus. In 2014–2015, 78 exchange students enrolled at UMass Boston.

Natalia Pisklak, a senior biology major, spent last summer at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. She worked one-on-one with a professor to study neurophysiology.

“It made me gain confidence in talking with professors about science. I was always scared of talking about a field that they know so much about, but now I am so much more comfortable,” she says.

Lurlene Van Buren, coordinator of student exchange, says that undergraduate exchange programs also serve as a recruiting tool to attract international students to UMass Boston graduate programs. Marco Bellin, an Italian MBA student, was such an exchange student in 2009–2010.

“I felt from my exchange program here seven years ago that this was a place I could call home. I saw UMass Boston as a good value for money option where I could get a top notch MBA at the fraction of a cost of other institutions,” Bellin says.

UMass Boston also offers 25 faculty-led programs, which have helped contribute to significant increases in students studying abroad. The number of students participating in these programs jumped from 132 in 2011–12 to 219 in 2014–15.

The Honors College offers one such program, a year-long seminar called International Epidemics. In between the two semesters, students participate in a 12-day field experience over winter break to South Africa led by Rajini Srikanth, dean of the Honors College, and Louise Penner, associate professor in English. Last year, Srikanth and Penner also took students to India for the first time.

Penner says that the discussion in the classroom is much richer the second semester after students have returned from their field experience. “The spring semester is very gratifying in some ways, because students make complex associations and analyses, and conversations become very far ranging. That’s why we are both always surprised at the kind of impact that 12 days has on them,” she says.

An Entrepreneurial College Working Across the University

Most of UMass Boston’s faculty-led programs are run through the College of Advancing and Professional Studies (CAPS), which collaborates with all academic departments and the Office of Global Programs. In addition to administering faculty-led programs, CAPS oversees an English as a Second Language (ESL) program, online learning, and a number of certificate and degree programs.

Dean Philip DiSalvio describes CAPS as “the entrepreneurial arm of the university.” However, he stresses that the aim of CAPS, as a self-sustaining unit, is not to generate profit but to contribute to the intellectual life of the campus. DiSalvio’s team works hard to make study abroad affordable to as many students as possible, with programs generally operating at cost.

CAPS often builds on relationships that professors bring with them to UMass Boston. One recent program was Conflict Transformation Across Borders in Quito, Ecuador.

Building on his affiliation as a Fulbright fellow to the Department of International Studies and Communication at FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) Ecuador, Assistant Professor Jeff Pugh wanted to continue running study abroad programs in Ecuador when he joined UMass Boston. During the three-week summer course, students learn about conflict resolution, and acquire skills such as negotiation and proposal writing. They also visit indigenous communities along the border between Ecuador and Colombia. “We talked about how the refugee issue has been affecting their identity as a border community where a lot of people have family on both sides of the border,” says Pugh.

Abdul Aziz, a master’s student in conflict resolution and Fulbright scholar, was one of 14 participants in the program. He was able to find parallels to his own experiences in his native Indonesia. “I didn’t expect to be able to relate my own stories with those of the refugees that I met. It feels very similar with what happens at home in Indonesia with all the identitybased conflict,” he says.

International Exposure for First-Year Students

Within the College of Science and Math, Dean Andrew Grosovsky has helped establish the Scotland Exchange Program in partnership with Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU), an urban university in Scotland. UMass Boston freshmen majoring in science and mathematics engage in the exchange as part of their participation in a freshman success community.

Since 2011 UMass Boston and GCU each send six freshmen to the other institution for a week-long exchange. At UMass Boston, each of three freshman success communities within the College of Science and Math nominate two student ambassadors to travel to Glasgow for a week during the fall semester. Other members of the freshman success communities are responsible for hosting the visiting Scottish students.

Grosovsky says that the larger goal of the exchange is to strengthen and better integrate the three freshman learning communities, which are made up of around 70 students in total. They benefit from working together to host the Scottish students, and at the same time, gain exposure to another culture.

“Sometimes people say that six students for one week doesn’t sound like a lot, but we have had more than 10 times that number who are participating. They are all interacting closely with the Scottish students and are experiencing the value of the exchange,” Grosovsky says.

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Megan Fung is a freshman biochemistry major who traveled to Glasgow as an ambassador. “There’s a lot more to the exchange than people understand. A lot of it is about networking and developing relationships not only with the Glasgow Caledonian students, but also with each other,” she says.

The School for the Environment also offers its freshmen an early international experience. In fact it is the only academic unit on campus that requires students to have an international experience before graduation. As part of the freshman seminar for environmental science, 15 freshmen traveled to the Azores islands in Portugal to learn about geology, ecology, and land-use practices.

Erika Welch, a sophomore environmental science major, said that having an international experience so early in her college career made her want to study abroad again. During summer 2016, she spent three weeks in Brazil in another program piloted through the School for the Environment.

Global Engagement Outside the Classroom

Kim Montoni, director of international education, organizes a number of programs geared toward engaging the larger campus community in global affairs. Her flagship initiative is Global Ambassadors, a leadership program that requires students to commit to working with international programming for an academic year.

Five to 10 students are selected each year to serve as global ambassadors. Throughout the year, they participate in workshops and professional development opportunities. They are also responsible for organizing activities for international students on campus, and they assist Montoni with international student orientation and with the U.S. Department of State’s International Education Week.

“Our job as global student ambassadors is not only to be a bridge, but also to create a very strong community,” says Aroma Kazmi, a psychology major from India.

The students traveled with Montoni to New York City, where they visited the United Nations (UN) headquarters. Last year, global ambassadors also attended the NAFSA 2015 Annual Conference & Expo in Boston.

Montoni collaborates with other offices on campus, offering predeparture orientations and health and safety support for non-credit-bearing servicelearning trips offered through the Office of Student Leadership and Community Engagement. She also works closely with the Division of Student Affairs, whose activities often dovetail with those of the global ambassadors.

Growth Through Strategic Recruitment

The last five years have seen a remarkable increase in the number of international students on the UMass Boston campus, from 675 in 2009–10 to nearly 2,500 in 2015–16, currently making up approximately 12 percent of the entire student body. The boost in international student enrollment has largely been a combination of an active recruitment strategy abroad and pathway programs such as the Navitas at UMass Boston Undergraduate Pathway Program. UMass Boston has focused on the development of pathway programs that allow students to work on language skills prior to pursuing a bachelor’s degree.

According to Michael Todorsky, manager of international partnerships, UMass Boston’s first pathway program began 14 years ago with four students from one program with Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Since then, it has expanded to Vietnam and South Korea. UMass Boston has also established a residential ESL program at the Massachusetts International Academy in Marlborough that currently serves around 300 students.

Lisa Johnson, vice chancellor for enrollment management, would like to increase the share of international students from its current 12 percent. However, the challenge lies in continued growth in domestic enrollment.

The freshman class of fall 2015 was the largest in the history of UMass Boston, with nearly 3,400 new students—and even more growth is projected in upcoming years. To accommodate the expected growth, the campus has been under construction with two new buildings completed in 2015 and 2016, with an investment of more than $700 million. In 2018 the university will open its first residence hall to provide housing for 1,000 students.

Johnson is excited about the prospect of on-campus housing to boost international student enrollment: “We just opened these two academic buildings. We’re building another. The residence halls are going to be beautiful. When all of these dirt piles are gone, you can get back to driving around this peninsula. Who would not want to come here from another country?”
 

With seven campuses in four countries, New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) gives “global” an entirely new meaning. In addition to its presence around the world, NYIT boasts an exceptionally diverse student body, with nearly 20 percent of its students coming from more than 100 countries. The global perspective, as President Edward Guiliano is fond of saying, is infused into the institutional DNA.

NYIT’s high-tech environment also means that its global campuses in Nanjing, Beijing, Vancouver, and Abu Dhabi are just a few clicks away through state-of-the-art video conferencing that allows students to create and collaborate with their counterparts on the other NYIT campuses.

Developing a Global Network

Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Rahmat Shoureshi describes NYIT as a high-tech global network. “We have live connections in all of these places, and our students, as well as faculty, can benefit from all of the expertise we have distributed around our network,” he says.

Eschewing the branch campus model, NYIT campuses worldwide follow the same curriculum and are held to the same academic standards. All admissions decisions also go through the Old Westbury campus on Long Island. As Guiliano puts it, “We are one university and offer one curriculum and one degree.”

NYIT also encourages student and faculty mobility between campuses. Students from NYIT-Nanjing, for example, spend their senior year in New York. Shoureshi’s office will also provide travel scholarships for any NYIT student who wants to spend a semester at one of the global campuses. Faculty who propose research that requires collaboration with other campuses receive priority in allocation of research grants.

The first NYIT global program began in China in 1998; the oldest global campus, NYIT-Abu Dhabi, was founded in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 2005 as the first licensed and accredited American university in the UAE capital. NYIT-Nanjing opened its doors two years later, followed by NYIT-Vancouver in 2009. Most recently, NYIT opened a second campus in China in collaboration with the Communication University of China (CUC) in Beijing. NYIT has also just opened a new medical school campus on the grounds of Arkansas State University, in a region of the United States where many people lack access to healthcare.

NYIT also offers a number of dual-degree bachelor’s and master’s programs. With Centro Universitário da FEI in São Paulo, Brazilian students in engineering spend two and a half years at FEI, then come to New York for one and a half years, and then return to Brazil for their final year. NYIT also has degree partnerships with more than half a dozen Chinese universities, as well as with institutions in Brazil, France, India, Mexico, Taiwan, and Turkey.

Creating a Positive Experience for International Students

The presence of more than 2,500 international students on the main New York campuses in Manhattan and at Old Westbury on Long Island helps bring the world to NYIT.

Amanjeet Singh, an engineering major from India, feels like NYIT effectively bridges the gap between domestic and international students. He has done his part to help international students integrate into life at NYIT as an international student ambassador, a program managed by the Office of International Education.

“I take care of the freshmen students that come from India or other parts of the world. We have different events and programs so that people can get involved,” he says.

To ensure a positive experience for all international students, the institution convened an international student task force consisting of around 30 faculty and staff in Manhattan and Long Island in 2014–2015. They explored four areas: education, housing and food, jobs and career services, and customer service.

As a result, NYIT created workshops to help faculty and staff understand the challenges international students face, added a range of cultural foods in the dining halls, created on-campus job opportunities, and worked with units across the institution to improve customer service to international students.

The Office of Campus Life also collaborates with the counseling and wellness services offices. For example, it invited in therapists who spoke other languages to help international students understand what counseling entailed, and subsequently saw an uptick in the number of international students seeking counseling services.

Student service, according to Ann Marie Klotz, dean of campus life for Manhattan, is the heart of the NYIT experience. “If I can’t help you, I’m literally going to walk with you to the next office and make sure you have what you need. I think that is the difference maker for a lot of our students,” she explains.

“This is a very special kind of place if you allow yourself to get immersed in the life of students. It doesn’t feel overwhelming. It feels like an overwhelming privilege.”

Preparing Global Professionals

One of the core elements of an NYIT education is to prepare students to enter the job market upon graduation. President Guiliano says that NYIT fosters global competency by providing students with real-world experience and exposure to industry as well as opportunities to work with teams around the world. “Global competency means that work experience, connectivity, and collaboration are really part of what we do in the curriculum.”

Under the rubric of career services, Amy Bravo, assistant dean, oversees experiential education, internships, and service learning. Her office also coordinates job fairs and organizes mock interviews and networking opportunities.

They take special care to ensure that international students are also able to take advantage of opportunities to gain professional skills while still complying with immigration requirements.

Bravo created a number of alternative opportunities for international students to get practical experience. One such initiative is Consultants for the Public Good, which allows all students to work together on projects such as designing a multimedia art gallery for a school cafeteria.

“The idea is to get students to work in teams on community-based projects as opposed to signing up for a volunteer opportunity one time,” Bravo says.

Her office also oversees on-campus employment for both New York campuses. A few years ago, it created a job lottery for student employment, and several positions were earmarked specifically to international students, she says.

Localizing a Global Curriculum

The curriculum remains the same at each campus, but the content of courses can be adapted to the local context. “If students are taking a course in finance in New York, maybe the examples or the case studies are more focused on the types of investments, stocks, and so forth. The same class in Abu Dhabi follows the same curriculum. But the case studies will be on Islamic finance rather than on the stock market,” Shoureshi says.

Harriet Arnone, vice president for planning and assessment, explains it in terms of learning outcomes: “We have to guarantee consistency in learning outcomes across campuses....However, to be relevant to different cultures, particularly as we are so career-oriented, we allow faculty at different locations to add learning outcomes to courses… that reflect the environment...in which graduates will be working.”

NYIT is in the process of developing an occupational therapy program in Vancouver, British Columbia, which must be approved by the Canadian National Organization of Occupational Therapists. Jerry Balentine, DO, vice president for medical affairs and global health, says that as a result, students in the occupational health program in New York will be exposed to more information about the Canadian health care system.

Boosting Student Mobility

Education abroad at NYIT is housed in the Center for Global Academic Exchange, headed by Julie Fratrik. In addition to coordinating services for inbound international students coming to New York from exchanges or other NYIT campuses, her office also offers education abroad advising for outbound domestic students. In 2014–2015, 183 NYIT students participated in education abroad.

Kayla Ho, an American electrical and computer engineering major, spent spring 2015 at NYIT-Nanjing. Her family roots are in China, and she says the experience allowed her to learn more about her heritage as well as about her field of study.

“The chance to go to Nanjing was incredible.... Since it opened its doors, China has been developing technology at an astounding rate; there are new technologies and technology companies being created every day,” she says.

Eriana Burdan, a junior communication arts major, attended one of NYIT’s summer programs with its partner in Paris, École des Nouveaux Métiers de la Communication (EFAP). She took a course in documentary filmmaking that gave her a new perspective on her future media career.

She says it made her think about other career options in her field: “It made me realize that I was pigeonholing myself. There are so many more opportunities in and outside of the United States. It expanded the scope of what I could do with my major.”

Creating Alternative Opportunities to Travel the World

Beyond traditional study abroad, NYIT offers a number of noncredit opportunities for students to travel. Since 2014, President Guiliano has spearheaded Presidential Global Fellowships, which offers awards for NYIT students to engage in research projects, attend global conferences and symposiums, study abroad at another university, or do an internship at international nonprofit organizations.

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Guiliano says the goal is to help students have “transformational experiences” at least 200 miles from students’ home campuses. Since the program’s inception, more than 50 students have received awards.

Usman Aslam is a second-year medical student who received a Presidential Global Fellowship in 2015 to travel to Guayaquil, Ecuador, to spend a week working at a mobile cataract surgery clinic, where he was part of a team that performed 128 cataract surgeries. He received $2,500 to cover the cost of his airfare and lodging.

Aslam says that the fellowship was instrumental in his ability to travel. “A grant like this allows us to expand our training, our experiences, and helps mold our understanding of what we want to go into. The fellowship provided me with funding to broaden my perspective on medicine,” he says.

In addition to providing funding for students to create their own “transformative experiences,” NYIT also offers a number of service-learning opportunities abroad. For example, the Office of Career Services organizes an alternative spring break that enabled junior Anthony Holloway to travel to Rivas, Nicaragua, with nine other students to work on a project aimed at improving water quality in the community.

“I had never left the country before,” says Holloway, an interdisciplinary studies major.

Internationalizing the Disciplines

At its New York campuses, NYIT has seven schools and colleges with more than 90 undergraduate, graduate, and professional degree programs. Schools have a variety of faculty-led programs abroad, opportunities to engage with international issues in the classroom, and programs for international students.

The School of Management, for instance, offers four study abroad programs to Costa Rica, India, the Netherlands, and Germany. Students can also do summer internships at destinations around the world.

Every summer, Associate Dean Robert Koenig runs a 27-day business program in New York for 20 students from Hallym University in South Korea. Students take English language and business leadership courses in the morning, and spend afternoons touring business and cultural sites in New York City.

Koenig received the 2015 President’s Award for Student Engagement in Global Education, given to faculty and staff who have made major contributions in the area of global education. His Korea program has been so successful that the School of Management will be launching a similar program next summer with the Tourism College of Zhejiang in Hangzhou, China.

The School of Architecture and Design also has a wide variety of study abroad options for its students. It runs three to four short-term study abroad programs every year, usually in the summer. Approximately 24–40 students participate in these programs per year.

Assistant Professor Farzana Gandhi has worked with a group of students to redesign beach architecture in Puerto Rico and led a program to India that examined the need for affordable mass housing. Many of her courses are focused on social impact design and seek socially and environmentally conscious solutions to global problems such as mass migration, disaster relief, and climate change.

Gandhi says that study abroad has helped her students see their professional practice in a new light: “They have an appreciation for the end user in a much more thorough way.”

From 2012–2014, Gandhi’s students were involved in the Home2O Project, research that led to the development of a roofing system made of recycled plastic bottles and shipping pallets, which has subsequently been patented. Starting with locations like Haiti, they were seeking to develop a kit-of-parts system that could be deployed very quickly at disaster sites in subtropical climates.

NYIT has also provided support for faculty to pursue international research. School of Architecture and Design Associate Professor Charles Matz, who is also director of NYIT’s Center for Data Visualization, received an institutional grant that allowed him to work with the Ethiopian government and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to laser scan heritage sites.

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He has also worked on a number of joint programs with international partners in countries such as Egypt, the United Kingdom, and Iceland. Matz says that international programs allow students to understand the global standard for the architecture profession.

“Students realize that what they’re doing here is exactly what other people in their situation are dealing with abroad. Their work and its seriousness ramps up because they realize they’re dealing with global issues,” he says.

As vice president for medical affairs and global health, Balentine directs NYIT’s Center for Global Health. “The Center for Global Health really teaches our students about other countries and health care needs there and how to deliver it,” he says.

Through the Center for Global Health, medical students and students in the health professions can pursue a global health certificate. In addition to core courses, students do global health fieldwork, a 2–4 week program where students deliver health care services in countries such as Haiti and Ghana. They also complete an independent research project on global health under faculty supervision.

Balentine says the goal of the certificate is much broader than just getting students to go abroad. “From a teacher’s point of view, the real value is that even if these students never again leave the U.S. to practice medicine, the experience, the difference in health care that they see, the difference in living, the difference in cultures that they see, makes them better physicians back home,” he explains.

NYIT’s College of Osteopathic Medicine also offers a unique Émigré Physicians Program, which each year enrolls approximately 30 students who were trained physicians in their home countries. It’s one of the few programs of its kind in the United States.

Paving the Way to the Future

In 2015 the institution launched a new long-term strategic plan, known as NYIT 2030 version 2.0. According to Arnone, “When the plan was first published in 2006 the emphasis was on NYIT’s footprint and its additional locations overseas. In the revised plan, the language of the relevant goal now focuses on the global impact of an NYIT education; correspondingly, the priority initiative in support of this goal focuses on increasing opportunities for deep engagement across cultures.”
 

The College of William & Mary (W&M) in Williamsburg, Virginia, carries on an educational tradition that traces back more than three centuries. As the second-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, William & Mary was founded by King William III and Queen Mary II of England. As current President Taylor Reveley puts it, “We were born global in 1693.”

William & Mary sponsored its first study abroad programs in 1924, and today the university boasts the highest percentage of undergraduates participating in study abroad programs among all public universities in the United States. As of 2016, more than 50 percent of William & Mary undergraduates study abroad before graduation;1 according to Reveley, W&M aims to increase that number to 60 percent by 2018.

Drawing on its historical commitment to innovative teaching and learning, today William & Mary has emerged as a leader in international education with opportunities such as undergraduate research on crucial global problems and a strong ethos of public service. For example, W&M is currently one of the top producers of Peace Corps volunteers among institutions of its size.

“The students who come here want to come to a university that not only has study abroad opportunities, but that also gives them the tools to involve themselves in tackling problems in the developing world or global issues ranging from climate change to health,“ says Stephen Hanson, vice provost for international affairs.

Creating a University-Wide Internationalization Hub

At the forefront of all things international at William & Mary is the Reves Center for International Studies, established in 1989 with a mission “to support and promote the internationalization of learning, teaching, research and community involvement at William & Mary.”

The Reves Center provides support for international initiatives at W&M’s five academic schools—the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Raymond A. Mason School of Business, the School of Education, the School of Law, and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS). In addition to managing study abroad, offering support for international students and scholars, and providing travel safety advice, the Reves Center promotes and supports international research and organizes on-campus events for the wider campus—and Williamsburg—community.

Since Hanson became director in 2011, he has broken down institutional barriers and worked with offices and academic units across the campus. “We just made it really clear that this is a universitywide internationalization hub,” he says.

Global Engagement Through Outreach and Assessment

The Reves Center is divided into three offices: Global Education; International Students, Scholars, and Programs; and Global Engagement. During his tenure at the Reves Center, Hanson has very intentionally built out the global engagement team, which works with internationalization more generally.

Kate Hoving, public relations manager, oversees the Reves Center’s outreach efforts. She says her job is important to building an internationally minded community. “It’s important to nurture a sense of connection with students and faculty who have come through Reves—whether through study abroad or as international students, scholars, and families,” she says.

Another recent addition to the global engagement team is Nick Vasquez, international travel and security manager. Vasquez, who previously worked for the U.S. State Department, assesses risk for students, faculty, and staff who go abroad on university-sponsored travel. Vasquez, who is a member of the university’s Emergency Management Team, says that being aware of the potential risks associated with international travel is an important aspect of running a safe program. In that capacity, Reves serves as a clearinghouse for the entire campus.

Growing Education Abroad with University-Wide Support

The first stop for the more than 800 W&M students who go abroad each year is the Global Education Office, overseen by director Sylvia Mitterndorfer. In addition to the resources available through financial aid, W&M provides more than $400,000 a year in education abroad scholarships. Students can choose from among W&M’s 45 faculty-led programs, 17 semester-long exchange programs, or options through third-party providers.

One of the newest faculty-led programs is an interdisciplinary course, affectionately dubbed “Rock Music Oman,” developed by geologist Chuck Bailey and ethnomusicologist Anne Rasmussen. Students spent two weeks in January 2016 exploring the natural landscape and geological formations of the Omani desert and coastal regions and the vibrant arts scene in the capital of Muscat.

William & Mary also strives to create programs, many with a research component, that make study abroad available to all majors. Senior Alpha Mansaray, a double major in public health and kinesiology, participated in a summer program in Antigua.

“For science majors, it’s hard to fit study abroad into your curriculum. When I heard about this program, I got so excited because I didn’t think I could study abroad. As part of the trip, we also visited hospitals and learned about a different medical system,” Mansaray says.

Comprehensive Services for International Students, Scholars, and Their Families

In addition to sending 800 undergraduates abroad each year, William & Mary also hosts nearly the same number of international students and scholars. Stephen Sechrist is the resident expert on immigration regulation as the director of the International Students, Scholars, and Programs Office (ISSP). According to Sechrist, ISSP operates in three core areas: immigration and visa services; programming, advocacy, and outreach; and English language programs.

Sechrist and his staff try to build relationships with students and their families before they even set foot on campus. Recently, they have partnered with the Dean of Students Office to offer admitted students days abroad, starting in Beijing and expanding to Seoul, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo. “For a lot of our international students abroad, it’s just not feasible to fly over for a one day event,” Sechrist says.

W&M will be launching its first intensive English program this summer. Students will start online in their home countries and then do a residential week at W&M prior to the regular international student orientation.

Staff also find other ways to help new international students connect to the W&M community before they arrive on campus. Through the virtual conversation partner program, which was designed by W&M School of Education alumna Jingzhu Zhang to help international students feel connected to campus and practice their English, April Yuezhong Zheng, a senior history major from China, was paired with a U.S. student. “I started talking with my partner Connor over Skype. We started in late May and then we basically did it at least two to three times a month until I arrived. He even picked me up at the airport,” she says.

In addition to serving international students, ISSP also tries to provide support to the families of its approximately 100 international scholars.

Ettore Vitali is a postdoc from Italy who studies theoretical environmental physics. His wife, Gabriella Lettini, accompanied him to Williamsburg. She has been able to take English classes as well as find ways to get involved in the community through volunteering at a local animal shelter. “It is very helpful for me to improve my English and also to meet other people,” she says.

“We have a very thriving international family network to support the families of our international students, scholars, and faculty,” Sechrist adds.

At the graduate level, the law and business schools have more active recruitment strategies for their LLM and MBA programs. Amanda Barth, director of MBA admissions for the Mason School of Business, says that approximately 40 percent of the 110 students in each MBA cohort are international.

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Deep Connections Abroad with International Partners

Since 2011 W&M has offered a unique joint degree program with the University of St Andrews in Scotland that grew out of a 25-year study abroad and exchange relationship. The program currently has four tracks: economics, English, history, and international relations; new tracks in classics and film studies have also just been approved.

According to Associate Professor and Program Director Colleen Kennedy, the program recruits approximately five students in each major at each school, for a total of 40 students per cohort, the first of which graduated in 2015. In total, students complete two years at each institution.

History major Jui Kothare says one of the reasons she chose the program was the history of the two institutions. She began her freshman year at St Andrews before moving to W&M her sophomore year. “The second year is really tough just because you have to be a freshman again and make the same connections all over again,” she explains.

To help students make the transition, Kennedy created a peer advising program. “Our job is basically to help the first and second years come over here, and integrate into the community,” says economics major Cooper Nelson.

Nelson says the program’s uniqueness helped him secure a position at a consulting firm in Washington, D.C., after he graduates: “The program provides such a great talking point. It’s provided an easy way to connect with employers. They have to question: ‘why did you go to two different schools at the exact same time?’”

Bringing International Partnerships to Campus

Established in 2011, the William & Mary Confucius Institute (WMCI) is a joint program with Beijing Normal University in China, sponsored by Hanban, a nonprofit organization under the Chinese Ministry of Education. “Our mission here is to promote Chinese language learning and Chinese language culture, on campus and also in the neighboring community,” says Lei Ma, Chinese director.

Ma says the institute has collaborated with various departments, including the Chinese Studies department, to organize events and lectures. It also assists the Reves Center in predeparture orientations for study abroad to China and helps host a summer program for 40 undergraduate students from Beijing Normal University.

“We also do quite a bit of community outreach here. For example, we collaborate with local K–12 schools,” adds Ying Liu, WMCI assistant director.

Another flagship program overseen by the Reves Center is the William & Mary Cross-Cultural Collaboration with Keio University in Japan. Each summer, W&M hosts 40 Japanese students for a three-week program that allows them to study U.S. culture and society alongside William & Mary students.

William & Mary also participates in the Presidential Precinct, a nonprofit organization operated in collaboration with the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, James Madison’s Montpelier, James Monroe’s Highland, and William Short’s Morven. The consortium hosts 25 young African fellows through the Mandela Washington Fellowship, the flagship program of President Obama’s Young African Leaders Initiative, for a six-week program every summer. 

A Longstanding Commitment to Undergraduate Research

William & Mary has been described by Dan Cristol, a biology professor, as having “the heart of a liberal arts college with the brains of a research university.” Nowhere is this more evident than in the university’s commitment to undergraduate research opportunities.

“What makes undergraduate education here great is the way the faculty teach. A lot of them increasingly teach through research. I publish articles with my students,” says Sue Peterson, government professor and director of the international relations program.

In fact, approximately 70 percent of William & Mary undergraduates participate in mentored research with a faculty member or take a course in which research is a primary component.

Senior Hispanic studies major Stephanie Heredia participated in a five-week summer study abroad program to Cádiz, Spain, where she researched Spanish pop culture as part of her capstone project: “At the end of the project, we had to do a 15-page paper and a presentation all in Spanish. This experience really helped me get acquainted with the culture and field research practices.”

W&M offers incentives for faculty to collaborate with students on research projects. Through its faculty fellows program, Reves offers grants of $5,000–$10,000 for “projects that involve students either through student-faculty collaborations on an international research project, or that involve research, teaching, and learning through community-based engagement.”

In 2012 Francis Tanglao-Aguas, professor of dance and theater, received a $10,000 grant to travel to Bali, Indonesia, with a fellow faculty member and five students. As a result of the trip, he produced the Sitayana (Sita’s Journey), an original dance theater epic inspired by the story of the wife of a Hindu poet. The five students who traveled with him assisted with training the other students who took part in the production.

“The fellowship led to the creation of an original piece. It was a major component of my body of work with students. I took five students, but when you count the more than 150 students who were part of that project afterwards and the 1,000 students who saw the show, it was a worthy investment,” Tanglao-Aguas says.

A Campus Hub for Student-Faculty Collaboration on Policy-Relevant Research

A hub for interdisciplinary undergraduate research on campus is the Institute for the Theory & Practice of International Relations (ITPIR), headed by Director Michael Tierney.

ITPIR’s mission is “to produce innovative and policyrelevant research; to provide students with research skills and experiences; and to make a difference in the world.” There are currently more than 20 faculty and 250 undergraduates involved with ITPIR in various ways.

ITPIR has projects on topics ranging from the impact of cell phone technology on women’s empowerment and development in Africa to using computer algorithms to forecast political violence. Other programs include an undergraduate think tank in international peace and security and a summer program in Bosnia during which W&M students run an English immersion camp for kids.

AidData is a W&M research and innovation lab affiliated with ITPIR that focuses on international development finance. According to Carey Glenn, junior program manager, around 120 student researchers work on aid tracking programs. AidData sends 15–20 of these student researchers abroad for 10 weeks through its summer fellows program.

Breanna Cattelino, a senior public policy major, spent last summer in Uganda to train local organizations in global information systems (GIS). “It was a lot of actual on-the-ground work,” she says.

Curriculum Reform to Provide International Experiences for Everyone

According to Provost Michael Halleran, William & Mary’s goals in the next several years are to “become even more international, interdisciplinary, and engaged with student research in the coming years.” A big step toward achieving these aims is the implementation of a new undergraduate general education curriculum in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences this year.

The new curriculum replaces the previous “breadth requirements” with an integrated series of courses. Freshmen take courses that introduce them to “big ideas,” followed by courses rooted in natural science, social science, and humanities that nevertheless take an interdisciplinary approach their sophomore year. Their junior year, students take “COLL 300,” which requires a global or cross-cultural experience. Students then complete a capstone project during their final year.

“One of the things that we are trying to do in the new curriculum is put a greater emphasis on things international and global and be sure that everybody one way or another gets involved,” says President Reveley.

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Hanson says COLL 300 is the “internationalization pillar” of the new curriculum. Most students will meet the COLL 300 requirement through study abroad. Students can also meet the cross-cultural requirement through study away in the United States or through specific on-campus courses with a global focus.

Halleran adds that COLL 300 was designed from a perspective of “opportunities more than requirements. I’m very pleased with how the faculty addressed a broader international piece in the curriculum,” he says.

Faculty members are equally as pleased with the new curriculum. “All the initiatives with COLL 300 are really to institutionalize what a lot of us have already been doing,” says ethnomusicologist Anne Rasmussen.