Leadership

In an era of tight budgets and diminished state support for higher education, there is a surprising optimism in the air at Colorado State University, perched in Fort Collins in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The faculty pulled in almost $300 million in research grants in 2007, up 11 percent in a year and up by almost half since Larry Edward Penley became president in 2003. CSU conducts extensive biomedical and energy research and is known for expertise on atmospheric science and water issues, not just for the citizens of Colorado but of the world. Across South Asia and the Middle East, government ministers in charge of water programs often have Colorado State diplomas on their walls.

That optimism is also due to the way that Penley, a former professor of management and business dean at Arizona State University, has gone about seeking new resources and opportunities for Colorado’s land grant university, which enrolled 24,000 students and had 1,450 faculty in 2006-07. As The Denver Post reported recently in a frontpage profile, Penley “is not often found at the state Capitol, beseeching legislators to provide more money.” Instead, he regularly turns up at business conferences on both coasts and at universities overseas, seeking to line up corporate investors and academic partners for Colorado State’s efforts to make and mine new discoveries in medicine, energy, and other fields. A clean, two-stroke engine developed by a Colorado State mechanical engineer has sharply cut pollution in three-wheeled Filipino taxis, and the technology is being used for clean cook stoves as well. The London-based Shell Foundation awarded a $25 million grant in 2007 to Envirofit International, a nonprofit spun off from Colorado State’s Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory, to design and market 10 million clean stoves to poor families in India and other developing countries.

Internationalization—A Key Part of the Plan

Penley, who earlier in his career taught in Mexico and Venezuela, has made internationalization a key part of Colorado State’s strategy to reinvent itself for the twenty-first century. The university and its board of governors adopted in February 2006 a 10-year plan, Setting the Standard for the 21st Century: Strategic Directions. One of its goals was to provide students “with distinctive international experiences and broaden their exposure to today’s global challenges.” It elaborated: “We must dramatically transform our international emphasis to prepare students for life in an increasingly interdependent world. This can be accomplished through an enhanced curriculum, international research and scholarship, institutional partnerships, the presence of more international scholars on campus, greater participation in study abroad programs, expanded area studies programs, and events with global themes.”

“Colorado State is developing research ‘superclusters’ that seek to speed breakthroughs from the academic world into the global marketplace.”

The strategic plan also set ambitious goals for increasing “research and discovery” and made the case that addressing “global problems” must be part of the mission for a land grant institution in this new century. It explained, “For more than 100 years, America’s public research universities have served as the engines of research and knowledge creation that addressed the great challenges facing society. It is almost impossible in today’s world to overstate the importance of the research enterprise to economic prosperity and the quality of life for Colorado, the nation, and the world. With one-third of its budget devoted to research, Colorado State values scholarly excellence, and strives to set the standard in research, scholarship, and creative artistry as it addresses global problems with the capacity of a model twenty-first century land grant institution.

The most obstinate problems, the plan noted, “are universal to humanity,” from poverty to disease to the fragility of the environment. In the true land-grant tradition, Colorado State is seeking not only new answers, but ways to bring solutions to market and into people’s everyday lives. In addition to promoting interdisciplinary work, Colorado State is developing research “superclusters” that seek to speed breakthroughs from the academic world into the global marketplace. It chose research on infectious diseases for the first supercluster, and made cancer research and clean energy its next two targets. The work of each supercluster is led not only by a chief scientist, but a business executive—a chief operating officer—tasked with finding ways to quickly bring breakthrough ideas to market. While technology transfer offices are ubiquitous at research universities, the supercluster approach weighs the market potential while the research is still going on. Colorado State also created for-profit businesses to capitalize on its work. 

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The strategic plan laid out benchmarks for further internationalization, including boosting the number of international students on campus by one-third to 1,100 by 2010 and expanding study abroad opportunities so that a quarter of all students by 2015 have an international learning experience. “New targets for international students will require strong international recruiting and base funding,” it said. “Greater participation by students will require connecting campus programs with complementary programs abroad and expanding number of destinations. . . . Possible needs include faculty hires, enhanced language offerings, enhanced library support, and support of university global events.” It also envisioned offering short courses, study trips, and other formats beyond semester credit programs.

The hiring of a prominent international educator from Harvard, James Cooney, as Colorado State’s associate provost for International Programs, also served notice of the university’s plans to raise its international profile and activities. At Harvard, Cooney was executive director of the Weather head Center for International Affairs and served as dean of international programs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. The political scientist also was the former chair of the Board of American Field Service Intercultural Programs, a former Fulbright scholar, and deputy director of the Aspen Institute Berlin. Cooney went to Austria as an AFS exchange student while attending high school in Indianapolis and after college taught English in Japan before getting his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In Colorado State he found an institution that not only shared his passion for international education, but was willing to put significant new resources behind the rhetoric. The strategic plan was all but complete when he arrived in January 2006. “The president said, ‘Jim, I want you to look at the final draft, and you’re one of the few who can still make changes,’” said Cooney. He made some additions, but found that Penley had already made certain that the final draft spoke to the importance of global issues in Colorado State’s work. “Then, as soon as the strategic plan was adopted, he said to me, ‘In the next six months I’d like to see a coherent internationalization plan from you.’”

A Distinctive International Niche

That led Cooney and his staff—the office staff increased from 20 to 26 since his arrival and the international affairs budget jumped 50 percent— to produce a 21-page CSU internationalization plan in October 2006 that mapped how Colorado State could carve a distinctive international niche. “Every major research university in the U.S. claims to be ‘internationalizing’ its campus, but few universities have a coherent approach to what this will involve,” the Cooney report said. It called for a more systematic approach to globalization and requested almost a half-million dollars in new funding to make that happen.

“In the twenty-first century,” it said, “land-grant universities operate in a global context, and they must evolve to serve as stewards for the well-being of the world’s population, reach out to all sectors of society at home and abroad, and make education an international experience.” It called for developing close partnerships with approximately 20 key universities, providing $80,000 in faculty development grants, and $50,000 for education abroad scholarships. It also envisioned establishing a steering committee for the internationalization plan composed of deans and vice provosts, and developing international studies into a formal major (225 students already concentrate in that area). 

The ambitious internationalization plan further galvanized faculty and senior administrators already excited about the possibilities in the strategic plan. Lou Swanson, vice provost for Outreach and Strategic Partnerships, said, “Jim has created great excitement with his internationalization plan. He’s got a terrific vision. He’s the right guy at the right time for our reengagement in international affairs.”

President Penley and Provost Tony Frank added $220,000 to the base budget of the Office for International Affairs (“that means you get to keep it,” said Cooney) and promised additional support for a campus-wide international colloquium in 2009. Some other items on the wish list, including a possible school of international affairs, may become part of a capital campaign.

Key Institutional Relationships and Partnerships

“What the president is trying to do is put Colorado State on the map as a university at the forefront of applied research (and) entrepreneurial approaches to utilizing our research,” said Cooney from his office in Laurel Hall, one of the nineteenth century buildings on Colorado State’s historic Oval.

Already things are moving fast. International field experiences—faculty-led, short-term trips— nearly tripled in the past year to 30 projects. The number of students participating has shot up to 250, several times that of previous levels. CSU already has forged partnerships with such institutions as the Nehru Advanced Research Center in India, China Agricultural University, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán in Mexico, University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and Saratov State University in Russia, and is exploring others. 

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“We are developing these thoughtfully,” Cooney explained. “A key institutional partner should represent an institution where we have at least three ongoing types of collaboration. So if we are working with the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, there will be some faculty working in biomedical engineering, some faculty in Antarctic research, since most of the expeditions get launched from there, and then some faculty in chemical engineering. It can build beyond that; there’s nothing restricted to three. But we’re trying to find connections where we can really say we are working at several different levels, and even if a certain professor retires or moves to a different institution, this partnership is likely to continue.”

These relationships are intended to go beyond the partnerships that exist on paper only. “Every campus suffers from this,” said Cooney. “You have faculty members who say, “I want to conclude an international memorandum of understanding with a researcher in Taiwan. I haven’t met him, but I had a good telephone conversation with him.’ Our job isn’t to say no, but we’re trying to set criteria for why some of the closer partners are more instrumental than others.” Cooney also convenes regular gatherings of faculty from widely varied fields to discuss their international projects and come up with ideas for novel collaborations, whether in the Netherlands or Saudi Arabia.

Global View of Land–Grant Mission

William Farland, vice president for research, arrived in Fort Collins in fall 2006 from a scientific career at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where he was the highest ranking career scientist and worked on numerous international health and environmental projects. When interviewing for the job, he recalls that he stressed “the importance of science for a purpose and the application of science for problem-solving. Now I feel like I was preaching to the choir because this place values these activities so highly.”

Reagan Waskom, director of the Colorado Water Institute, and his research team are thinking more and more globally these days. “The Colorado Water Institute is not just helping farmers grow beets in Colorado. We have a global view of what a land grant mission looks like,” he said.

“Colorado State is known worldwide for the application of water management in a stressed environment. In Colorado, we’re a storm or two away from drought every year. What we learn about water stress—whether it be irrigation management or urban water supply management or environmental services—is translatable to the other water-stressed environments of the world,” said Waskom. “We take Colorado issues and can apply them globally. And it’s a two-way process. We learn from them as well. We’re at the point in most of the world where the available fresh water resources have been developed. Now, rather than looking for new resources, we’re trying to figure out how to share existing ones.”

Internationalization at Colorado State University involves the integration of traditional goals of an international office with the research imperatives of a twenty-first century land-grant university. It has quickly become a priority both for the vice president for research and among faculty from a range of disciplines. “Stay tuned for the next phase of our plan. We are just getting started,” said Vice Provost Cooney.

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Colorado State University

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Preparing to celebrate its 150th anniversary in 2009, Valparaiso University can look back on three distinct epochs in an unusual history: its founding by Methodists in 1859 as Valparaiso Male and Female College, a pioneer of coeducation that lasted only a dozen years; revival as a teacher college and business school that billed itself as “the poor man’s Harvard,” and became one of the country’s largest universities before falling into bankruptcy after World War I; and its Phoenix-like rebirth in 1925 as an independent Lutheran university. The Rev. O.P. Kretzmann, president from 1940 to 1968, looms large over the university’s history. Kretzmann built the imposing Chapel of the Resurrection, more cathedral than chapel, with 98-foot-high stained glass windows that tower over the 320-acre campus. Valparaiso remains the thriving, faith-based institution that Kretzmann built, with nearly 3,000 undergraduates pursuing a mix of liberal arts and professional training in business, nursing, and engineering; 500 students attending the century-old School of Law; and 500 others pursuing graduate degrees.

Projects and Opportunities

Chroniclers may single out the past two decades as the start of another epoch, when Valparaiso faculty and students began venturing overseas on a scale like never before, especially to Asia. The Chinese government recently chose Valparaiso University as a home for one of the Confucius Institutes that promote and share Chinese language and culture with the world. Valparaiso, in a town of 31,000 near Chicago, is the only private, faith-based institution in the United States with a Confucius Institute. The others are located on the flagship campuses of major public universities or in major cities. “We wouldn’t have gotten to first base without phenomenal support from our Chinese friends in Hangzhou. They went to bat for us,” said outgoing President Alan F. Harre.

Early in Harre’s presidency, Valparaiso forged unusually strong ties with Hangzhou University (which later became part of Zhejiang University) and Zhejiang University of Technology in Hangzhou, the former dynastic capital. Over two decades Valpo has hosted more than 80 Chinese scholars, and sends Valpo students with a professor for a fall semester of study with other international students at Zhejiang University. A grant from the Freeman Foundation has enabled dozens of Valpo faculty members to learn first-hand about the dizzying changes China is experiencing and to develop courses across many disciplines on campus. Top students in the Chinese and Japanese Studies program do field research on a 10-day trip to Asia over spring break, then return to write a 25-page report as the capstone of the seminar. The students pay just $600—the program absorbs the rest of the costs. 

The Chinese and Japanese Studies program also arranges summer internships in China for Valpo undergraduates and graduate students, and the College of Business Administration conducts short summer trips to China for M.B.A. students. The new graduate programs of International Commerce and Policy, English Studies and Communication, and Information Technology are continuing to help boost Valparaiso’s international enrollments, which rose to 244 in 2008. A U.S. Department of Education grant helped Valpo launch annual summer advanced Chinese programs in China and offer a master of arts in Chinese Studies. By spending two summers in classes in Hangzhou and taking additional coursework in Indiana, even law students can earn the M.A.

Valparaiso’s vibrant music program has added traditional Chinese music to its repertoire. Dennis Friesen-Carper, the Redell Professor of Music and director of the Valparaiso University Symphony Orchestra, was resident conductor for the Zhejiang University Symphony during the fall 2005 semester he spent directing the VU Study Center in Hangzhou. His arrangement of “Confucian Ritual Music” based on an ancient melody was performed at the opening of Valparaiso’s Confucius Institute in February 2008. One colleague, Jeffrey Scott Doebler, director of music education and bands, recently led a northern Indiana band called Windiana on a two-week tour of China. A benefit concert in support of earthquake relief efforts in Sichuan Province attracted 15,000 spectators and was televised nationally. Another colleague, Jianyun Meng, former concert master for a provincial orchestra in China, was tapped to direct the new Confucius Institute.

“…it was the passion of individual faculty, not presidential directives, that drove things forward.”

There was serendipity to Valparaiso’s choice of partner institutions in China. Then-Indiana Gov. Robert Orr established a sister state relationship in 1987 with Zhejiang Province, and Valparaiso was invited to participate in the first state delegation. Hugh McGuigan, then-director of International Studies, went on that first state delegation in June 1988 and afterward urged Alan Harre, the new president, to go see the universities in Hangzhou for himself. Soon Chinese faculty were heading regularly to Indiana, Valpo students and professors were traveling the other way, and “things just began to multiply,” recalled Harre. And now there are partnerships with six more universities in China.

Still, it was the passion of individual faculty, not presidential directives, that drove things forward. East Asian historian Keith Schoppa successfully pushed for creation of the Chinese and Japanese Studies program. Political scientist Zhimin Lin came on board in 1990 and directed Valparaiso’s Hangzhou Study Center in 1994 and 1996. Lin, who now chairs the Chinese and Japanese Studies program and directs the Valparaiso University China Center, said, “We were one of the first to really start in China. We wanted to make it an integral part of our program and more than just trips.”

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Long Ties to Cambridge and Reutlingen

When the Valparaiso study centers in Cambridge, England, and Reutlingen, Germany, celebrated their 40th anniversaries in 2007, they calculated that more than 2,800 Valpo students had studied there over the years. A third Valpo study center in Puebla, Mexico, marked its silver anniversary that same year. 

“We’ve come a long way,” said Harre, an ordained Lutheran pastor who was, like Kretzmann, a formidable builder. The showcase Christopher Center for Library and Information Resources opened in 2004 at a cost of $33 million, and a new $74 million four-times-larger student union opens in 2009. In addition to a dining room, bookstore, 1,000-seat banquet hall, and space for more than 100 student organizations, it will have a suite for international and multicultural programs along what is certain to become one of the most heavily trafficked corridors on campus. The new union will bear Harre’s name. Mark A. Heckler, Valparaiso’s 18th president and Harre’s successor, has ties of his own to China. The former provost and vice chancellor of the University of Colorado-Denver once ran that institution’s dual-degree program with China Agricultural University in Beijing.

McGuigan, who retired this past summer after leading Valpo’s international efforts since 1986, calls the growth of international programs over this period “quite remarkable given the size of our school and our location. I think a lot of it is due to the quality of our services to the students, who really appreciate that family atmosphere, that personal touch. We can do recruiting trips, but students are the ones who spread the word. Word of mouth is golden.”

Lutheran Connections

For many years Valparaiso’s primary windows on the world came through its Lutheran connections, drawing faculty and students from afar to Indiana and producing graduates who headed off to do church work overseas. The theology department had an international cast through Lutheran ties to Germany. One professor was married to a niece of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor and theologian hanged by the Nazis for his part in the Resistance. The Chapel of the Resurrection, opened in 1959, prominently displays a “Cross of Nails” from England’s Coventry Cathedral and is part of a worldwide network that prays for peace. When the Luftwaffe leveled the medieval cathedral in 1940, Coventry’s pastor formed a makeshift cross from charred nails and wrote “Father forgive” on the walls of the ruined sanctuary. After the war the cathedral made crosses of nails for bombed churches in Dresden and other German cities.

The “real push for international programs” began in the past 20 years, said Humanities Professor Mel Piehl, dean of Christ College, the honors college. “The language departments made a quantum leap. The introduction of Chinese and Japanese served as a wider signal that we were reaching out beyond the cozy and comfortable.” Valparaiso draws students from 40 states, with the largest contingent from Indiana and surrounding Midwest states. Piehl, who was in the class of 1968, said “they have much greater sophistication, greater ambitions, wider world views” than the students of his era. Some things, however, have not changed. “Vocation and service are buzz words around here. We tend to get a lot of very bright students thinking of ways in which they can impact the world,” he added. Alumna Mary Burce Warlick, the top Russia expert on the National Security Council, was born in Papua, New Guinea to Lutheran missionaries. 

The university recently received its third FulbrightHays grant for an summer intensive language program in Hangzhou that draws students from across the United States. While Valpo students can study for a semester in Hangzhou with no prior knowledge of Mandarin, the summer students must already have mastered two years of the language. Zhimin Lin, a native of Shanghai, tells Valparaiso students that they can achieve fluency in Chinese as he did in English before coming to the United States for graduate studies at Princeton University and the University of Washington. “It’s not a question of skills. It’s not a question of ability. It’s a question of determination. That’s what we try to convince them,” he said.

One who showed that determination was Matt Cavin, of Roanoke, Virginia, who first visited China on a five-week summer study trip that Lin led in 2005. He switched majors to international business and economics and quickly mastered enough Chinese to spend a full semester at Zhejiang University. “That was a big jump for me,” said Cavin, the student body president in 2007-08 who expects to return to China some day as a business executive.

A Broader International Affairs Committee

Jon Kilpinen, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said much of the university’s international activities growth took place on an ad hoc basis. “We’re at a point now where it makes sense to take stock of what we’re doing,” he observed. It took an important step in that direction in 2007 when it reorganized the International Affairs Committee of faculty and administrators to ensure wider representation from Valparaiso’s other colleges. “For a long, long time, it was basically an arts and sciences committee,” said Kilpinen. 

Randa Duvick, an associate professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures who chairs the advisory panel, said, “There had been an international affairs committee forever, probably since the 1960s. But it had become clear that there were so many initiatives internationally (involving) so many different parts of the university that there needed to be” broader representation. The revitalized committee now includes faculty from each of the five undergraduate colleges— Arts and Sciences, Business Administration, Engineering, Nursing, and Christ College as well as Graduate Studies, School of Law, and Student Affairs.

The reorganization was precipitated by a growing realization that international activity was no longer confined to a few departments or programs on campus, said Kilpinen. “It’s not all China. We’ve got Engineers Without Borders (volunteering) in Africa and in Central America. We have a service learning project in Nicaragua and Costa Rica that’s engaged engineering and nursing, pre-med, international service, and education.” Valparaiso’s traditional two-week spring break allows professors and students to travel farther afield than a shorter break. “It’s not quite a mini-session, but it’s long enough that you can do something substantial,” he added.

Forty faculty and staff and four students traveled to India in March on a faculty development trip led by Associate Provost Renu Juneja and Moninder “Holly” Singh, director of International Students and Scholars. It was modeled after the Freeman Foundation-funded faculty development trips to China. The faculty prepared for the trip with monthly seminars and extensive readings that started in the fall. They met with Indian educators, alumni, parents, and prospective students. Provost Roy Austensen, who made the journey, said trips like this “pay off on several different levels. We were making connections with people in India. I’ve seen this happen with the China trips. You build into your own institution a cohort of people who have a significant knowledge of that country and that culture.”

The International Affairs Committee is considering “to what extent it makes sense to offer more short-term abroad experiences,” said Duvick, a professor of French. “We all know there are pros and cons. The pros are that you get some students to go who otherwise perhaps can’t fit it into their schedule or who have not found financial ways to (afford) a semester. The con is that it has to be more than just a glorified tour. It has to have some academic meat.”

The Valparaiso International Engineering Program (VIEP) produces graduates with both a bachelor of science degree in engineering and a major or minor in German. Taking five years instead of four, VIEP requires engineering majors to spend a full year in Germany, with one semester in Reutlingen followed by a salaried six-month coop placement at a German company or research laboratory. Students pay greatly reduced tuition during that final semester. The challenging program produced its first three graduates in 2007 and added three more in 2008. “We’re a fairly small College of Engineering. If we could get five students a year to do VIEP-German, we’d feel very successful,” said Eric Johnson, director of VIEP and an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. Valparaiso is expanding the VIEP model to France after Duvick recently finalized articulation agreements with a French engineering school as well as a business institution, allowing for two VIEP-French students in fall 2009. Johnson spent spring break in China, exploring the feasibility for a VIEP there.

When Thomas Boyt, a marketing expert with a degree in veterinary medicine, became dean of the College of Business Administration in 2004, he quickly heard from some of the first students enrolled in a new M.B.A. program that “the international focus wasn’t what it should be. We took a hard look and agreed with them.” They placed greater emphasis in the curriculum on international business, and Zhenhu Jin, a Shanghai-born finance professor on the faculty, led education tours and arranged summer internships in China for both M.B.A. students and undergraduate business majors. Now as many as 20 M.B.A. students head off to China each summer. “For some of our Indiana-born students, it is a life-changing experience,” said Boyt. “They see business in a different way. And because of Zhenhu Jin, we get in to see everything from the big American and Chinese firms to the little mom-and-pop businesses.”

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Language for Business Majors

Boyt also has internationalized the business curriculum even more strikingly by convincing the faculty to institute a language requirement for the 320 business majors. They now fulfill the same eight-credit language requirement as arts and science majors (Education and nursing do not require language classes). “There were lots of pressures not to do that, but I think it’s just critical,” said Boyt, who first proposed the unanimously endorsed change to the college’s Curriculum Committee. “From there, it went to the College of Business Administration faculty for a vote where it passed very easily. I then submitted it to the provost who approved it to be presented to the Educational Policy Committee, which is a university-wide committee. Once it passed there, it went to the Faculty Senate where it was also approved.” Now it is enshrined in Valparaiso’s general education requirements. More recently, Boyt won faculty approval to offer a “Business Spanish” certificate as an elective. Boyt said he constantly tells parents, “Don’t let your son or daughter graduate without an international experience or you’re setting them up for a competitive disadvantage.”

Associate Professor of Theology Nelly van DoornHarder, one of two world religion specialists on the faculty, is an authority on Islam. A Dutch national, she began her career directing a refugee agency in Cairo, Egypt, and later taught Islamic Studies at Duta Wacana Christian University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. A prolific scholar and popular lecturer, van Doorn-Harder said she always has waiting lists for her classes. 

“…as many as 20 M.B.A. students head off to China each summer. ‘For some of our Indiana-born students, it is a life-changing experience’…”

Townspeople, too, have exhibited a keen interest in learning from her about the Islamic world. Since September 11, “I think I’ve spoken in every church basement in Michiana,” she said, using the local portmanteau for the Indiana-Michigan border region. “The Kiwanis, the Rotary, the women’s clubs—everybody wanted to know about Islam. I found that very humbling because Americans try to understand even if they don’t understand at all. Most of these people have never traveled, have no idea about the rest of the world—but they try.”

Valparaiso is one of four U.S. campuses that houses an INTERLINK Language Center where international students can take Intensive English before matriculating. Freshman Polina Kogay, 19, of Almaty, Kazakhstan, followed that route. The Kazakh student won a national scholarship back home that pays the entire cost of her studies, including flights back and forth. “I choose the major and the country and they pick the school. They picked Valpo,” said Kogay, an electrical engineering major who arrived in Indiana in March 2007 and spent four months in INTERLINK classes. 

Another international student, Adam Rundh, 22, a native of Aalborg, Denmark, is a chiseled 240-pound defensive end on the Crusaders’ football team. Rundh is the only international player on the gridiron squad, but several Valparaiso basketball players are international. Rundh can always fall back on his education if he doesn’t make the NFL. The double-major in international business and finance has a 3.93 grade point average.

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The president of the Valparaiso International Student Association, senior Bala Srinivasan, was born in the United States, but grew up in Bangalore, India. Holly Singh met him on a recruiting trip, took an application on the spot, and soon was able to offer Srinivasan an academic scholarship. Srinivasan, 23, originally was drawn to Valparaiso by engineering but wound up as a computer science and business major. “Academically, it’s a great school. And they do a great job of getting people together and creating this kind of familytype atmosphere amongst international students and American students. There’s a lot of exchange of culture. You never feel alone here,” he said.

Valparaiso offers an unusual major called International Economics and Cultural Affairs (IECA) that marries language study with economics, history, geography, and political science. It was born in part from necessity in the early 1970s, when both economics and the language faculty were worried about declining enrollments, according to Professor of Political Science Albert Trost. “We’ve never had an international relations major. This took the place of that and stimulated a lot of interest,” said Trost, a 1963 alumnus who teaches courses on international relations and directed the Cambridge Study Center from 1975 to 1977. He also co-leads the week-long workshops for new faculty held in Cambridge at the end of their first year.

IECA is flourishing with 30 majors, who gathered one afternoon in March to prepare for a conflict resolution role-playing scenario led by George Lopez, a professor from the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Debra Ames, an associate professor who teaches Spanish and chairs IECA, said some of these majors likely will join the Peace Corps or enter other service professions after graduation. “We were real pioneers in linking the study of economics and foreign language,” she said.

The Valpo Core

Trost was instrumental a decade ago in the creation of the Valpo Core, an intense, interdisciplinary, twosemester, 10-credit course that all freshmen outside the honors college must take. The writing-intensive Valpo Core introduces freshmen to great writers of the world. “The reading list is multicultural and international because the world is multicultural and international,” the syllabus explains. Subtitled “The Human Experience,” the Core is organized thematically around the human life cycle and features units on Creation and Birth, Coming of Age, Citizenship, Work and Vocation, Love, and Loss and Death. Twenty students or fewer join with professors in exploring life’s big questions, reading important texts, writing personal narratives and essays, forging friendships, and attending cultural and other events outside of class. Despite skepticism at the start, the Core has proved an enduring hit and its director, English Professor John Ruff, even offers an elective version for seniors. 

To keep pace with growth in both international enrollments and its education abroad programs, Valparaiso recently named two alumni with deeply international backgrounds to share leadership of the Office of International Programs. Singh was promoted from associate director to director of International Students and Scholars, and Julie Maddox was named director of Study Abroad Programs. Maddox is returning to Valparaiso from Chicago. Maddox majored in French and International Economic and Cultural Affairs and spent semesters in Hangzhou and Reutlingen as an undergraduate. Her master’s degree is in international commerce and policy. 

Singh planned to become an engineer when he arrived at Valparaiso in 1991 as a freshman from India, but later switched to liberal studies and theology, then made a career working in international education alongside his former adviser, Hugh McGuigan. “My interest changed from just looking for a career to finding a meaning of life,” explained Singh.

That is the type of conversion that gladdens Alan Harre. “Our primary task, according to our mission statement, is to prepare our students for service to church and society,” said the retiring president. In his view, every U.S. university has an obligation to help citizens “become more globally responsive and sensitive. We’re not going to be able to function in the isolation we had many, many years ago.”

“And so when you take a place like this in the heart of the country, helping to try to provide that larger context, I see that as a tremendous blessing to not only northwest Indiana, but to the entire country,” he added.

If luck is the residue of design, it is no coincidence that Nebraska Wesleyan University has produced 21 Fulbright and one Rhodes Scholar since 2000. This “little college on the prairie,” as one professor calls it, does not leave these matters to chance. There is a national prestige scholarship adviser as well as a Fulbright program adviser who, along with a cadre of like-minded faculty colleagues, scout for talent in freshman seminars. They groom these students, ship them off to Washington for internships, and lead them on service and education abroad trips to Sri Lanka, Swaziland, and Panama—experiences that often provide fodder for the essays these young Nebraskans write for their Fulbright applications. Faculty help protégés polish those essays—one of the 2008 winners went through 20 drafts.

Nebraska Wesleyan pushes its faculty out into the world, too. It has a sabbatical policy that may be unique: faculty receive two-thirds salary on sabbaticals in the United States, but 100 percent if they spend that year in another country. “I know of no other place that does that,” said President Frederik Ohles.

Methodist leaders founded the liberal arts school a few miles from the state capital in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1887, envisioning that it might grow as did another Methodist institution, Northwestern University, outside Chicago. Within a year they had erected the imposing, Colorado red stone and brick landmark known as Old Main. But “Nebraska didn’t develop quite like Illinois did,” said President Emeritus John White. It remained a primarily undergraduate college on a 50-acre campus tucked into Lincoln’s quaint University Place neighborhood, across town from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, with almost as many international students (1,500) as NWU has undergraduates (1,600) in 2007. Nebraska Wesleyan, which remains affiliated with the United Methodist Church, also has 200 graduate students pursuing master’s degrees in nursing, forensic science, and historical studies. Though the college has gone through several mascots—the Sunflowers, Coyotes, Plainsmen, and now the Prairie Wolves—its brown and gold colors have remained constant. 

When it comes to internationalization, NWU is an overachiever. “I suppose we don’t have some of the bells and whistles and amenities that we might have if we were a wealthy college,” said Ohles. “We make terrifically good use of all the resources we have. The faculty here are very busy. They’re teaching four courses per semester... The Great Plains go-getit done  mentality is alive and well in Nebraska Wesleyan.” That mentality explains how political scientist Robert Oberst and a few colleagues won approval for an interdisciplinary Global Studies program in the early 1980s. Global Studies made it through only because “it didn’t cost any money. Everything had to be done by the seat of our pants,” said Oberst. He has led NWU students on numerous education abroad trips to South Asia and taught at both Peradeniya University in Sri Lanka as well as Cairo University, where he was a Fulbright lecturer. In its heyday Global Studies attracted 20 majors, although today it draws more minors than majors. Laura Reitel, an exchange student from the University of Tartu in Tallinn, Estonia, put Oberst at the top of her list of favorite professors. If possible, she said, “I would just stick him in my pocket and take him back home and show him to others. Our professors are not that amusing or anything like him.”

Fulbright Factory

If Nebraska Wesleyan has gained something of a reputation as a Fulbright factory, it is due to the efforts of such faculty as Oberst, Kelly Eaton, Gerise Herndon, and Elaine Kruse. Eaton, chair of the Department of Political Science and Nebraska’s Professor of the Year in 2003, said, “It is really the long-term nurturing and advising that produces the results in the end.” Eaton is the National Prestige Scholarship adviser. She worked closely with Xuan-Trang Thi Ho, who in 2006 won the second Rhodes Scholarship in NWU’s history. Eaton, who spent the past two years on sabbatical and then on leave teaching at the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies in China, said at first the efforts to groom national scholarship winners were the work of a handful of faculty, but now “we have faculty in many departments helping us to identify [prospects]. Personally, I begin to identify students as early as the freshman year, if possible. It is quite empowering for students to learn that their professors think they have so much potential. If you raise the bar and help the students to reach the bar, you can have great results.”

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The Fulbright numbers grew geometrically after Gerise Herndon, professor of English and director of the Gender Studies program, became that program’s adviser in 2000. Plaques in the lobby of the Smith-Curtis Classroom-Administration Building list the winners’ names down through the years—two Fulbrighters in both the 1970s and 1980s, a half-dozen in the 1990s, then 21 in this decade, including four in 2008. “It’s exciting to watch when you see the students come in from tiny towns or rural areas. They’re sheltered and kind of scared; they’re not big risk takers. Some of the parents are shy about the whole study abroad thing,” said Herndon. “Because this is a small school, you have the same students in several classes, and by the time they’re seniors, this amazing growth has taken place.” Herndon enlists “hard graders” to critique the students’ Fulbright applications. “Generally at our university we try to balance challenge and support, but we do not hold back on the Fulbright committee and some of the other scholarship committees,” she said. “We tell students, ‘Look, if you’re going to be competitive with the students from Duke and Johns Hopkins, you must do better than this.’ We probably scare them a little bit, but they rise to the occasion.”

Professor and Chair of the Department of History Elaine Kruse has also been a pioneer and pacesetter for international research and study. A scholar of French culture and mores in pre- and revolutionary France, Kruse just returned from her third sabbatical in Paris. She was the first professor to avail herself in 1992-93 of the then-newly adopted policy of keeping faculty on full salary if they took their sabbatical overseas. “What a difference this has made. Faculty members from disciplines as diverse as physics, business, and music opted to live abroad for a year, and when they returned they introduced international content into their courses.” When Kruse joined the faculty in 1985, “few students were studying abroad and even fewer faculty were taking sabbaticals abroad,” she said. The full-pay policy for sabbaticals abroad as well as the Global Studies program and a revised core curriculum called Preparing for Global Citizenship helped change the campus culture, she added. “It livens things up,” she said, and turns students “from small-town America [into] sophisticated global citizens.” In the early 1990s, about 14 students spent a semester or year abroad. In 2006-07, 51 students studied abroad for at least a semester, and dozens more took shorter trips with their professors in January or the summer.

“Faculty members from…physics, business, and music opted to live abroad for a year, and... introduced international content into their courses.”

Kruse always puts out the welcome mat during her Paris sabbaticals, becoming a “pied piper” for the international sabbatical program. “Initially people were reluctant to go to countries where they did not speak the language. But now we’ve got people coming back from Bulgaria, Turkey, and Thailand. One of our physics professors went to the Netherlands and got involved in an international project on using the bicycle to teach physics,” she said. 

When English Professor Rick Cypert visited Kruse in the City of Light, “she was having such a wonderful time I thought, ‘My gosh! This is what I’ve got to do.” Cypert, a Texan who specializes in language theory and the history of rhetoric, took his sabbatical in Athens, immersing himself in modern as well as ancient Greece. On returning, he created a popular course on modern Greek culture and life, taught a freshman seminar on Greek mythology, and now chairs Global Studies—and speaks Greek.

Grants to Develop International Courses

The push to make Nebraska Wesleyan more international began during John White’s two decades as president (1977-97). White was a former English professor and an inveterate traveler who led numerous alumni trips to Greece and one to China during his tenure. He also personally negotiated an exchange of faculty and students with Kwansei Gakuin University in Nishinomiya, Japan. More than 90 percent of NWU students come from Nebraska; it enrolled just 33 international students in 2007. “If you’re a school in the middle of the country, so far from salt water, the need for a broader perspective just jumps out at you,” the 74-year-old White explained in an interview. “That’s why I pushed the international perspective.” White was both a builder and successful fund-raiser; enrollment and the college’s prestige both grew on his watch. To pay for the international sabbaticals, White said, “We just built it into the budget.” An endowment set up in White’s honor upon his retirement continues to support the internationalization. In addition to providing funds for international programming on campus, including concerts, film festivals, and language immersion weekends, the White Endowment provides grants for faculty to travel abroad to develop new courses. Fifty-three such grants have been awarded, resulting in such courses as Tropical Biology of Belize, Introduction to the Culture of Thailand, and Contemporary India. The latter was the creation of Joyce Michaelis, an adventurous professor of Spanish, who spent one summer and semester in Hyderabad, India, after her daughter and son-in-law were transferred there by their employer, a U.S.-based multinational. Michaelis also turned earlier overseas trips into classes on the culture of Cuba and Spain. Teaching at NWU since 1966, she said, “The international aspect has added tremendous vitality to my curricula. It keeps me alive.”

The sabbatical policy was first recommended by a task force that began exploring in the late 1980s how to internationalize NWU. Then-Provost Janet Rasmussen, a Scandinavian literature specialist, was intent on finding ways to open the campus to the world. Initially there was little money to carry out their plans, but the blueprint was ready when the financial situation improved, said Georgianne Mastera, a longtime associate vice president for Academic Affairs who retired this spring after a stint as interim provost.

President Ohles called the international sabbatical policy “an important dynamo for what we’ve achieved with global perspective and global activity.” Ohles himself needed no convincing about the importance of international education when he was named in 2007 as Nebraska Wesleyan’s 16th president. A historian, he was senior vice president of the Council of Independent Colleges and once worked on the Fulbright Program for the Council for International Exchange of Scholars. As a graduate student, he spent two years researching the censorship of early nineteenth century Germany, living for much of that time on a pig farm outside Marburg. “I spent my days in archives reading dusty police documents from the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, and my evenings watching German sitcoms in Bavarian dialect with my farm hosts,” said Ohles, who still calls the family each Christmas. He met his wife, who is Malaysian, at the International House at the University of Melbourne in Australia, where she was an international student and he a visiting professor. “You can read all the newspapers and take all the courses you want; it really is the ambience, the surroundings, the people that make a difference... [and] open one’s mind to the differences in the world,” he said.

One of the tasks that Ohles sees before him is to raise new sources of revenue, in part to further such international ambitions as a Global Service Learning program that allows students to work on service projects helping the poor in places as distant as Vietnam and Swaziland. They spend part of their summer break building latrines in poor villages, volunteering in hospices, and working with AIDS orphans. The same group of 10 to 15 students— chosen from a wider pool of applicants—works on service projects in the Lincoln area throughout the year and travels over winter break to help in an impoverished U.S. community. “That whole activity is largely student driven. It’s very impressive,” said Ohles. “I’d like to see us find a way to invest more in Global Service Learning. I think it deserves more attention and more support by me and by friends of the university.”

The international Global Service Learning (GSL) trips can cost as much as $2,000 per student, but students pay just $600. They are funded largely by the university’s Wolf Fund for Diversity Education (up to $12,000 annually) and by the Student Affairs Senate funding generated by the student activity fee (from $6,500 to $10,000, depending on the cost of the trip); the White Endowment also kicks in $1,000 each year. Janelle Schutte Andreini, the interim director of the Career and Counseling Center, and Reverend Pauletta Lehn, campus minister, lead the trips and organize the “community conversations” when the students return from overseas projects. “It’s an intentional way to bring to the campus what we’ve learned,” said Andreini, an alumna. “Any time you do service somewhere, you take away more than you leave.” About 50 students apply each year for the GSL program, which accepts 3–5, depending on how many GSL members graduate. Students who are not selected are welcome to join the group on local service projects, and there is room for 18 students on the national service trip over winter break.

Director of International Education Inger Bull regards the addition of service learning as the “most exciting and most encouraging movement in study abroad,” not just at NWU but nationally. Bull and Joyce Michaelis, the Spanish professor, are mapping plans for a summer 2009 trip to Peru that will include two weeks of travel to the country’s major cultural sites and a third week devoted to service, helping villagers living in the steep hillsides outside Cusco and the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Trips like this ensure that even on short stays abroad, “students get the opportunity to see all levels of the society and to help out in some small way,” said Bull.

Unafraid of Learning Languages

Spanish is the main draw in the Department of Modern Languages, which offers majors in Spanish, French, and German, and a minor in Japanese. Students must take two semesters of language. Some students are inspired to sign up for a second language after returning from abroad, said Department Chair JoAnn Fuess. “They are not afraid of learning languages anymore.” Yuko Yamada, an assistant professor, had 45 students in three Japanese classes, and NWU sent four exchange students to Kwansei Gakuin University, its sister school. Education abroad veterans “are spreading the ‘gospel’ to their roommates and friends,” said Fuess, and those friends are “saying to themselves, ‘Maybe I’d like a little piece of that as well.’” Ninety-three students studied abroad in 2006-07, and 23 took noncredit trips led by university faculty and staff.

Amanda Godemann, 21, of Lincoln, a senior global studies major, spent spring 2007 at Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand, taking Thai language and classes taught in English to international students. She extended her stay through the summer to enroll in intensive Thai at a second university. She had visited both Thailand and India once before with an uncle “and fell in love with that part of the world.” Now her ambition is to work on development in Southeast Asia.

Senior Scott Lloyd, 22, of Lincoln, a political science major and Japanese minor, studied at Kwansei Gakuin University and also went on one of Oberst’s trips to India and Sri Lanka. NWU hammers home the education abroad message as soon as freshmen arrive, said Lloyd. “Everyone is aware of it.”

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Evan Knight, 22, of Lewellen, Nebraska, spent this past summer taking intensive Arabic courses in Tunisia after winning one of the U.S. State Department’s Critical Language Scholarships. He will graduate from NWU in December with majors in Spanish and history and a minor in French. Knight also studied in Spain for a semester and has a deep interest in the culture and history of Moorish Spain. Love for Spanish runs in the Knight family. One sister is a high school Spanish teacher, a second is a Spanish interpreter for a Nebraska health department, and his youngest sibling is an NWU freshman, double majoring in Spanish and French. Knight said his parents speak no other languages “and never pushed us. My sisters and I all just fell in love with languages in high school. Once we got to college, we began to realize what the ability to speak a second or third language meant, and this whole new world of opportunities opened to us.” 

“Education abroad veterans ‘are spreading the ‘gospel’ to their roommates and friends’…”

Professor of Library Information Technology Janet Lu, a native of Shanghai who grew up in Taiwan, has helped bring Chinese culture to campus and to Lincoln for nearly three decades. When Lu and her husband, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor of mechanical engineering, arrived in the Nebraska capital in 1979, “we were one of the very few Chinese families in town. In the old days, there were no soy beans or soy sauce in the grocery,” she said. They would order 100-pound bags of soybeans from San Francisco for five families to share. 

Lincoln became a resettlement community for Vietnamese refugees in the early 1990s; XuanTrang Thi Ho, the Rhodes Scholar, was one of those refugees. “Lincoln is becoming a more diversified city than ever before. Wesleyan has come a long way, too,” said Lu, a founder of the Lincoln Chinese Cultural Association who retired this spring. Today Lincoln has two schools where parents send their children to learn the language and culture on Saturdays.

Ho, who just completed a master of philosophy degree in Latin American studies at Oxford, was a political science and Spanish major at NWU who took part in several global service learning trips, studied in Argentina, and spent a semester in Washington in the university’s Capitol Hill Internship Program (CHIP), which places students in federal and international agencies. The experiences helped when it came time to apply for the Rhodes. “I was extremely fortunate to be surrounded by numerous professors and staff who were always available to help me,” she said by e-mail from Oxford. “For the Rhodes, I needed eight letters of recommendation and they happily agreed to write me very positive letters. Professors read and critiqued my essays/ statements many times, and Dr. Eaton set up two mock interviews with people who played devil’s advocates to ‘grill’ me before the Rhodes. They were an invaluable asset in the process.”

Junior Desereé Johnston this spring became the fourth Nebraska Wesleyan student to win a  Truman Scholarship for graduate school. The Truman Foundation selects students with strong leadership potential who intend to pursue careers in government or other public service. Johnston, who wants to work on international development, grew up on a 7,000-acre farm outside Orchard, Nebraska (pop. 391), but her upbringing was far from isolated. Her parents would pull her out of school each February—when the farm season allowed—and take her on two- and three-week trips to Europe, China, Russia, Egypt, and other destinations. School officials were miffed, “but you learn so much when you travel,” she said.

Support for International Students

Inger Bull has directed Nebraska Wesleyan’s international education office for the past decade. She also teaches the optional one-credit courses that help U.S. students prepare for education abroad and, afterward, write essays to make sense of their experiences (Professor of History Kruse customarily works with Bull on the latter). The university doubled the size of the office in 2005 by hiring Yoko Iwasaki-Zink, a 2000 alumna from Japan, as the international student adviser. Although only a few dozen international students are enrolled on campus each year, the ones who make it to Lincoln can count on strong support from Bull, Iwasaki-Zink, and faculty. “A lot of big schools lament the fact that they can never get their U.S. students to integrate with the internationals and vice versa. That’s easy for us because they see each other every day in our office. Many of our Nebraska students have studied abroad because of international students they have met,” Bull said. Most of the international students attending classes on the Lincoln campus are on one-semester or full-year exchanges from partner universities in the International Student Exchange Program (ISEP) network, or on bilateral exchanges from Kwansei Gakuin University, the University of Tartu in Estonia, or Tec de Monterrey in Querétaro, Mexico.

Iwasaki-Zink spent four years on campus earning her bachelor’s degree. She had already earned an associate’s degree and worked as an administrative assistant for a Japanese company before coming to Lincoln in 1996. Iwasaki-Zink understands what students from Europe, Japan, Korea, Azerbaijan, Vietnam, Mexico, Ecuador, and elsewhere go through in adjusting to life on a U.S. campus. “I think their experience is, in fact, the same experience I had. They’re very happy when they arrive; they’re very excited. One month later, they’re kind of overwhelmed by classes and homework. Some students struggle with homesickness,” she said. On that score, technology has made life easier because today’s students can easily keep in touch with family and friends by e-mail and Skype. “Technology has helped them a lot. When I was a student, there was no Facebook,” she said.

Thao Nguyen, 20, a junior from Hanoi, Vietnam, is one of the exceptions among the international students in that he will spend four years at Nebraska Wesleyan earning a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and economics. He attended an international high school in Vietnam, where instruction was entirely in English. Though he had visited the United States for an international student conference, he found NWU by searching online. “The Midwest sounded like something new, and Wesleyan gave me a good scholarship,” he said. The weather was colder than he expected, but Nguyen found the Americans “very friendly” and he welcomes the diversity of NWU’s small band of international students.

Georgianne Mastera, the now retired academic administrator, remembers two decades ago when there was no international education director or office, and an assistant provost with other responsibilities oversaw the institution’s few opportunities for education and research abroad. It is still “not a huge office, but when you compare the transition from that very fraction of an administrator to where we are now, it’s a dramatic change in a small institution,” she said.

The emphasis on imparting a global perspective to students’ education “has made a tremendous difference to our campus,” said Mastera, a former business administration professor. It shows that “when you set a kind of fertile environment in which people have the opportunity to have international experiences, to address international issues, to learn languages, to engage in broadening experiences, great things can happen.”

The boxer rebellion against foreign influence ended a century ago with Russian, Japanese, and western forces occupying beijing and forcing China’s imperial government to pay reparations. The United States was due a minor share for its supporting role in quashing the rebellion.

Edmund J . James, president of the University of Illinois, saw an opportunity to draw something positive for China out of the  bitter potion of defeat . He led the way in convincing President Theodore Roosevelt to use the compensation for an altruistic purpose: bringing Chinese students to the United States to pursue higher education .

Hundreds of those young scholars ultimately earned degrees on the Urbana-Champaign campus, and Britain also used its reparations for scholarships . The same funds were used to build a preparatory school in Beijing called Tsinghua College—forerunner to Tsinghua University, now one of the world’s greatest institutions of higher education with a campus modeled after Illinois’s famous Quad . Tsinghua weathered hard times during World War II and the Cultural Revolution, but when China reopened to the world, “we engaged quickly to rebuild that relationship,” said Jesse G . Delia, executive director of Illinois’s International Research Relations . Today, nearly 1,000 of the 5,685 international students on the Illinois campus hail from the People’s Republic of China . 

International roots run deep at Illinois’s flagship campus, which began operations in 1867—five years after the Morrill Act—as Illinois Industrial University. Its first president, John Milton Gregory, described it as “West Point for the working world.” By 1908 it became an early member of the Association of American Universities. Today it keeps an international profile that few institutions can match, with eight federally funded Title VI National Resource Centers: African Studies; European Union Studies; East Asian and Pacific Studies; South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies; Latin American and Caribbean Studies; Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies; Global Studies; and a CIBER (international business center) in the business school. Only the University of Washington and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have more. It ranks fourth among U.S. universities in international student enrollment (the only ones with more—the University of Southern California, Columbia University, and New York University—are private), and fifth in the number of students who study abroad—more than 2,000 each year. Chancellor Richard Herman hopes to double that number by 2012 as part of his dream of making the University of Illinois “the world’s preeminent institution in international education, research, and service.”

In some respects that ambition means going back to the future, for Illinois professors were deeply engaged in international education projects spanning the globe in the 1950s and 1960s when, with the help of the Marshall Plan and later with U.S. Agency for International Development grants, they helped design and build agricultural colleges and institutes of technology across Asia, Africa, and South America. Their credits include India’s first Institute of Technology in Kharagpur and the G.B. Pant Institute of Agriculture and Technology in Uttar Pradesh, as well as the College of Agricultural Engineering, Jabalpur, in Madhya Pradesh. Illinois faculty helped Pakistan open its first agricultural school at the University of Peshawar (now the autonomous Agricultural University, Peshawar), and were there at the creation of Egerton Agricultural College (now Egerton University) in Kenya.

“We weren’t alone, but that was all led by this institution,” said Herman, a mathematician who sits on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. “We have a rich international history and an enormous base on which to build.” On a 2007 visit to Brazil, Chancellor Herman was pleased to learn that a celebrated Illinois dean of agriculture, Eugene Davenport, played a role in establishing the Escola Superior de Agricultura or Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture (ESALQ) in Piracicaba in the 1890s. 

The Work of Many Colleges

The tapestry of international programs and activities at Illinois reflects the work of many faculty and colleges. Associate Provost for International Affairs William I. Brustein noted, “As with many U.S. universities, a centralized office for international programs and studies emerged relatively late. Consequently, much of the international activity was carried out by the colleges and schools within the university,” such as the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Science (ACES) and the College of Engineering. Many University of Illinois colleges operate their own study/education abroad offices in addition to the campus-wide office.

Brustein, a sociologist and authority on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, assumed the leadership of the office of International Programs and Studies (IPS) in 2007 after heading international studies at the University of Pittsburgh. The three-story International Studies Building, a short walk from the much-photographed Quad, houses most of Illinois’s area studies centers, as well as the IPS director’s office, the study abroad office, and services handling international visitors and institutional collaborations. Brustein, immediate past president of the Association of International Education Administrators (AIEA), observed, “The challenges for a central office in a decentralized environment are to reinforce the positive initiatives taking place within the colleges and schools, establish bridges or synergies among the colleges, internationalize those less engaged colleges, eliminate redundancies in the system, ensure compliance with campus and governmental policies, and bring to the campus new international education opportunities.” One of his first steps was to create a campus-wide International Advisory Council composed of the senior administrators from each college with responsibility for international programs. Brustein chairs the council, which advises him on college-level initiatives and serves as a sounding board for new ideas.

Illinois’s international reputation was bolstered over the years by breakthroughs in computer science and the natural sciences, as well by advances in the social sciences, such as anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s pioneering studies of poverty in Mexico.  Still, the agriculture faculty were among the most peripatetic. Forty-seven agriculture faculty spent extended periods living in India during those college-building days from 1954 to 1973. Hundreds of international students came to Urbana-Champaign for advanced agricultural degrees, and Illinois faculty were still winning multi-million-dollar contracts in the 1980s to build or expand institutions in Pakistan, Kenya, and Zambia before U.S. AID funding ended. “At the end of the Cold War, we went through kind of a drought in our international programs,” recalled Robert A. Easter, dean of ACES since 2001. The college’s office of International Agriculture was disbanded in a 1996 reorganization, although faculty such as Easter still made heavy use of their passports. Easter has lectured and consulted on swine nutrition in 27 countries, from Costa Rica to China. For a while it seemed that the institutional commitment to international activities was lagging.

That did not sit well with faculty there in the glory years of institution building. Finally a faculty committee put together a concept for what they called ACES Global Connect, a new office to coordinate and encourage agriculture faculty research and projects overseas. Since it started in 2002, “we’ve been gradually rebuilding our international engagement,” said Easter. Now, instead of leaving professors to their own devices when they head off to consult in Brazil or China, “we’re trying to be more systematic and strategic about forming alliances with other universities in different parts of the world.”

Global Connect, a small office with a modest budget (approximately $100,000 last year) provided largely by the college, is intent on helping a new generation of faculty pursue federal grants, partnerships, and other international opportunities. “We were fish out of water for a little period there. ACES Global Connect was our attempt to reinvigorate international programs in our college. We’re resource poor, but rich in passion,” said director Mary Ann Lila, a biology professor and vice president of the Global Institute for BioExploration (GIBEX).

“Even on a shoestring budget…Global Connect has become a role model for international engagement on campus...”

Global Connect launched in 2006 an Academy for Global Engagement that selects eight faculty fellows from different disciplines “for a year-long immersion in the international realm,” said Lila. They rub shoulders and exchange ideas in monthly seminars and hit the road to visit the headquarters of multinational corporations in Chicago and make the rounds of international health and development agencies in Washington. The capstone is an international trip at the end of the year where the faculty fellows collaborate on short-term research and education projects. The first group went to Mexico to explore the antidiabetic properties of certain plants. “The social scientist in the group was working on how to get Mexicans to stop drinking sodas and have more family meals together; the crop scientist was working on how to harvest these plants; and the horticulturist was making sure they don’t become invasive species,” said Lila. The fellows include someone from the University of Illinois Extension program, which now sends crop experts around the world in addition to working with farmers around the state. Illinois has 76,000 farms and is the country’s second biggest agricultural exporter. Even on a shoestring budget, Lila said, Global Connect has become a role model for international engagement on campus, and other state universities have expressed keen interest in replicating the Academy for Global Engagement fellows program. “Student and faculty exchanges, joint workshops, sabbatical leaves, and research visits as well as joint grantsmanship have sprung forth out of the (Global Connect) Academy connections,” said Lila, whose own research has taken her to Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan in search of plants that might lower cholesterol or confer other health benefits.

Growing New Interest

The international emphasis at the University of Illinois and the encouragement for education abroad produces students such as sophomore Lindsey Bruntjen, 20, of Illiopolis, Illinois, who studied in Istanbul, Turkey, on her first winter break and in Parana State in Brazil on her second. This past May, the ACES major was among 25 students in the International Business Immersion Program who went on a faculty-led class trip to see farms and factories in Belgium, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, France, and Germany. “I hadn’t expected to do all this. I didn’t realize how many doors would be open once I got to the university. There are so many opportunities and you just can’t say no,” said Bruntjen, whose parents grow corn and soybeans in central Illinois.

Senior Paul Kirbach, 23, of Jerseyville, Illinois, a double major in animal and crop sciences, spent a semester at Sweden’s 500-year-old Uppsala University. In a global crop production class with classmates from Eritrea, Germany, Czech Republic, and Sweden, “we were each other’s textbooks. We got into a few arguments—but we learned,” he said. Kirbach, as an editor of an  international journal for agriculture  students, also got to attend a conference in Athens, Greece.

“Farm students today appreciate the importance of the international more than some of the urban students. If their dads are listening to the daily market forecast, there’s usually a report on what’s going on with soybeans in Brazil,” said Dean Easter. Agribusinesses “tell us that they don’t want to hire somebody without international experience. If you go to work for a multinational grain trading company, you may be six months in Decatur, two years in Fargo, and then the next year in Montevideo (Uruguay) running an elevator. So you might as well just expect your career path is going to take you north and south.”

A Half-Century of Study Abroad

Agriculture isn’t the only college pushing education abroad. Eighty percent of the courses at Illinois with international content reside in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS), which enrolls almost half of Illinois’s 31,000 undergraduates, said Assistant Dean Barbara HancinBhatt, the LAS director of International Programs. “We have study abroad programs that are almost 50 years old.” The college’s Global Studies Initiative infuses global topics into general education courses for 1,200 to 1,500 freshmen. They are encouraged to take three-week Global Studies courses abroad on winter break (as Bruntjen did to Turkey and Brazil). Subsidies for LAS majors bring the cost of a trip to China or Singapore as low as $1,850. Other undergraduates can study in Paris, Rome, Barcelona, or Cape Town for $2,750 (LAS majors pay $400 less). Hancin-Bhatt and husband Rakesh Bhatt, an associate professor of linguistics, lead a “Discovery Course” to Singapore for freshmen over winter break. It examines how the city-state maintains a national identity while still bolstering the Chinese, Malay, and Indian strands of its culture and neighborhoods. “A tremendous amount of learning happens on these trips. The relationships built between students and faculty are extraordinary. We have students who come up at the end of the trip and give us hugs,” said Hancin-Bhatt, who is also a linguist. LAS majors comprise half of the 2,000plus students that Illinois sends overseas each year. Doubling those numbers will take “serious curricular integration of study abroad” and more resources, she said. Study abroad must “no longer be seen as enrichment but part of the core education we do.”

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Multiple Function Partnerships

Illinois enjoys a thriving partnership with the National University of Singapore (NUS). The two universities already grant dual degrees in chemical engineering, and now they are offering joint Ph.D. programs as well. In the 18-month master’s program, Singapore and Illinois students spend a semester on each other’s campuses, then do three-month internships in both places with major corporate sponsors. The dual-degree program has spin-off benefits for the rest of the campus, including opening the door for Illinois freshmen to stay in NUS dorms on that Discovery Course to Singapore each January.           

Delia, executive director of International Research Relations and former dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has made 14 trips to Singapore to further this relationship with NUS and with A*STAR, the government agency that funds research in Singapore. A*STAR already has built a biomedical research complex called the Biopolis and is completing the first phase of a Fusionopolis to house physical science institutes. Illinois will send engineering and computer science faculty and postdoctoral students there for extended periods to work on advanced digital technologies. It will be “as seamless a projection of activities on this campus as we can make it,” Delia said.

“For us, it presents an opportunity to globalize our brand and project our commitment to being an international research university, in a way that reinforces and adds to the strengths at home,” he said. Advances at Fusionopolis could push the frontiers of work at Illinois’s own research park south of campus, and that in turn could spur economic development in Illinois and elsewhere in the United States. “We think it’s a win-win possibility,” he said. The partnership will also prepare the next generation of Illinois scientists and business executives “for the world in which they’re going to live out their lives: one in which they will have to lead their companies and conduct their research in collaboration, negotiation, involvement with international partners.”

Relationships with China are “much more complicated,” Delia said. “The barriers to involvement and joint work are obviously higher,” including the barrier of language. Illinois has enjoyed a 20-year partnership with Tsinghua University, and recently launched a new program in which Tsinghua engineering students will come to Illinois for their fourth and fifth year of studies and graduate with both a bachelor of science and a master’s degree. Corporate partners are helping sponsor that program, too, in the belief that the graduates they hire will “support the competitiveness of our international and multinational corporations,” said Delia. The program pays the fees and provides stipends for students in exchange for a work commitment. “The next goal would be to build an American student counterpart to this,” said Delia. Illinois also provides executive leadership training for 300 to 500 Chinese business and government executives who come to Urbana-Champaign each year for short-term programs. Support from the Freeman Foundation brings up to a dozen Chinese academics and social scientists to pursue research on the Illinois campus for a year; and Illinois, home to one of the largest university libraries in the United States, runs a summer training program for Chinese librarians. All of these are “real spires of visible excellence,” said Delia.

Managing Enrollments

Eighty-seven percent of the university’s nearly 31,000 undergraduates hail from Illinois. Administrators sometimes find themselves answering questions from politicians about why the campus enrolls so many international students—5,378 in 2007, including 1,731 undergraduates. Chancellor Herman is proud that the undergraduate student body has become more international on his watch, going from 2.2 percent to 5.6 percent in 2007. “I certainly worked very hard to increase the numbers at the undergraduate level,” he said, adding that this has not come at the expense of Illinois students. Instead, the international share has grown largely by cutting back on the number of out-of-state domestic students. Keith A. Marshall, associate provost for Enrollment Management, said, “We do virtually no recruiting of international graduate students—our reputation, rankings, and excellent academic offerings do the work for us. At the undergraduate level our recruiting is modest compared with many, but has been growing each year in recent years.” Illinois gets 23,000 applications for the 7,000 places in its freshman class. Some 15,000 are offered admission and the rest turned away. Still, “we are the only state university in the Midwest still growing,” Marshall pointed out.

“Illinois students recently voted to tack $5 onto their fees each semester to raise $300,000 a year for education abroad scholarships.”

Illinois students recently voted to tack $5 onto their fees each semester to raise $300,000 a year for education abroad scholarships. Members of the Study Abroad Student Advisory Committee, with some support from the study abroad office, championed the referendum. First they went classroom by classroom, talking up the idea and soliciting signatures to put it on a referendum ballot. They also convinced the Student Senate to lower the number of signatures needed from 3,000 to 2,000.

Rory Polera, 22, a senior from Williamsburg, Virginia, said one student senator accused them of playing Robin Hood. “He told us, ‘You’re just these wealthy Chicago kids who want to go abroad and party it up. Why should everyone pay for you to go and have fun?’” he said. But the pro-fee students carried the day and the referendum passed overwhelmingly (6,347 to 2,992). The fee will sunset in three years unless students vote then to extend it. Those who object to it can get the $5 fee refunded. Much of the $900,000 generated in the meantime will go toward need-based scholarships and aid to encourage minorities to study abroad. “Students should be saluted for their generosity,” said Brustein. 

Any weakness of the U.S. dollar will only make the education abroad challenge harder for administrators such as ACES Assistant Dean Andrea B. Bohn. Rising tuition is already pressuring family budgets, and even with study abroad scholarships students still need money for airfare and other expenses, she said. “This isn’t unique to the University of Illinois, but it’s a huge challenge that we face. I’m working very closely with our Office of Advancement to get more donor support.” Bohn, who once arranged education abroad for students at the University of Hohenheim in her native Germany, tries to convince ACES students to consider semester programs, which often cost about the same as a semester in UrbanaChampaign. “It may cost $2,000 more, but we can help with a $1,000 scholarship on that,” she said. If students chose an education abroad experience instead over winter break, “it’s going to be $2,400 that you didn’t have to spend.”

Deans From Nigeria, Australia

Many on Illinois’s faculty and several senior administrators are international. The dean of the College of Engineering, Ilesanmi Adesida, still feels a debt of gratitude to the Peace Corps teachers who taught math and science in his Nigerian high school. From Lagos he went to the University of California at Berkeley for three degrees in electrical engineering. Before becoming dean in 2006, he directed Illinois’s Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory and its Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, and made important discoveries on how to speed up semiconductors and microelectronics and circuits. Adesida, who became a U.S. citizen in 2002, said, “I always tell people to have an open mind, to welcome different types of people, and be open to any culture. People with open minds are magnanimous people—and you never know where you’ll end up.” It is essential for Illinois to maintain its international collaborations, he firmly believes. “There’s no way you can bottle up your knowledge,” said Adesida. “Our primary products are our students.” The path to continued U.S. prosperity is to train those “young minds to be adventurous and curious.”

Dean of Education Mary Kalantzis wasn’t looking to leave Australia when a recruiter came to Melbourne to woo her in 2006. Kalantzis, an expert on multi cultural education and literacy, said friends and colleagues told her, “You can’t go. With No Child Left Behind and all that stuff, why would you want to be an educator in America at this moment?” But a visit to UrbanaChampaign won her over. Illinois was a pacesetter in special education, including awarding the first Ph.D. in the field and the place where PLATO—one of the first computer-assisted teaching tools—was built. It also developed innovative techni ques for teaching reading and math. “It really is an extraordinary place,” said Kalantzis, who was born in Greece.

“My goal is to make sure that every single person who trains to be a teacher has some international experience,” preferably in a non-English-speaking country, she said. The experience of trying to catch a bus in an unfamiliar place or negotiating with someone who doesn’t speak English “will make them more sensitive to the differences they will face in the classroom.” She added, “The stereotypes of the narrowness and inwardness of Americans—and there are some stereotypes—have certainly been dispelled for me here living among people in this community and in this university,” she said.

Tolstoy, Gandhi Kin Connect in Urbana

For Chancellor Herman, it is imperative for Illinois to keep moving down this international road. Doubling the education abroad numbers will have the ancillary benefit of allowing Illinois to admit as many as 1,000 more transfer students, he said. “What we’re trying to do is use this globalization of our students to also serve the people in the state better.”

Recently a great, great grandson of Leo Tolstoy journeyed from Russia to speak at a campus event promoting a community-wide reading of Tolstoy’s novel, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. At the end of Vladimir Tolstoy’s talk, an Illinois professor came up to shake his hand and ask him to autograph one of his ancestor’s books. The professor was Rajmohan Gandhi—grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian pacifist and freedom crusader—who is a research professor in International Programs and Studies and directs the Global Crossroads Living-Learning Community. Herman loves the symmetry of that moment. “Imagine, the grandson of Gandhi meeting the great, great grandson of Tolstoy. Where else but at Illinois could this happen?” he asked.

Aviva Bergman’s worn yellow satchel doubles as a diary of her adventurous young life: almost every inch is covered with flag patches from the 45 countries where she has studied, volunteered, traveled, and taught.

That’s not counting Namibia, Botswana, and Korea, where the Goucher College senior spent a day or two—not long enough in her book to justify adding a patch to “my sacred bag .” The sociology major speaks Spanish, Portuguese, French, and some Bambara (picked up during a semester in Mali) . Goucher, a sylvan, 290-acre campus outside Baltimore, Maryland, is a place where Aviva found kindred spirits, and more in the making . Starting with the class of 2010, no one will graduate from Goucher without at least one stamp in their passport .

Goucher is the first traditional liberal arts college in the nation to require everyone to have an education abroad experience. President Sanford J. Ungar calls it “shameful” that more Americans don’t spend a portion of their college years studying outside the United States and says flatly, “It’s ridiculous to claim that students are educated if they have not had some international exposure.” Ungar feels he was hired in 2001 “at least in part to retrieve and enhance the college’s international character.” Goucher began in 1885 as the Woman’s College of Baltimore City and was renamed a quarter-century later for one of its founders and second president, the Reverend John Franklin Goucher, a globe-trotting educator and churchman who opened schools, colleges, missions, and hospitals across China, Japan, Korea, and India. He and his wife helped buy the land in Tokyo near the Emperor’s palace on which the Anglo-Japanese College—now Aoyama Gakuin University—was built in 1882, an early recognition “that education is necessarily a global pursuit,” as  Ungar said in a 2002 speech on the Tokyo campus.

Goucher went coed in 1986, a move that reversed declining enrollments. It was already trying to ramp up international activities in a 1995 strategic plan; a donor back then made a gift that funds study abroad scholarships for needy undergraduates. But former President Judy Mohraz, said, “Sandy’s just taken it miles farther. He’s made it a signature for the college.” Ungar arrived on campus two months before September 11, an event that convinced many American educators of the urgency of doing a better job of helping students understand the world and those opposed to Western ideals and freedoms.

Ungar admits frankly that he was also looking for something that would separate Goucher from other liberal arts colleges. “It needed something distinctive, and what better thing to distinguish it than this focus on international education?” said Ungar. He also convinced his board that it was the type of “big idea” that would attract both students and donors more than just replacing the campus library. Indeed, the mandate has been prominently featured in a major capital campaign that has allowed Goucher to build a $32 million facility called the Athenaeum that will house a café, fitness center, art gallery and performance spaces, as well as a superior library.

Building Support for the Study Abroad Mandate

The mandate—which requires students to spend at least three weeks in an approved study abroad program or internship in another country—was articulated in a sweeping 2002 strategic plan, Transcending Boundaries of the Map & the Mind. But first Ungar had to convince the faculty to actually make study abroad a requirement, and that took three full years. Some faculty were worried that the small college was rushing into this too fast and without sufficient support for the increased study abroad load. Goucher hired a fourth person for its Office of International Studies, but the burden of encouraging more students to study abroad would fall largely on the faculty. Many opt for three-week, faculty-led study trips overseas in January or the summer, and it takes a significant amount of time and planning to get both the logistics and curriculum right for such intensive courses. Still, the idea captured the fancy of the public and prospective students from the start, even before the mandate took effect for the freshmen who entered in fall 2006.

The faculty deliberated for three years before agreeing to include the education abroad requirement in a larger overhaul of Goucher’s general education requirements in 2005. And starting with the class of 2010, the college began giving every student a $1,200 voucher to partially offset the cost of studying abroad.

Robert Beachy, an associate professor of history, said, “I don’t know that anybody expected (the requirement) to come quite as soon as it did... There was a fair bit of concern about implementing this effectively.” But Beachy, whose field is German history and culture, said he’s been struck by the enthusiasm and creativity of faculty for  coming up with new education abroad offerings. “I’m impressed at the number that exists for a relatively small-size faculty. I guess if any school can do this, Goucher probably can because there really is this devoted sort of semi-selfless faculty.” Beachy, who advises eight freshmen and a dozen history majors, believes the college needs to devote more resources to faculty development and to the International Studies office. “Things need to be streamlined,” he said. “Right now it’s a little complicated sometimes figuring out how students get credits or what credits they get exactly. There aren’t enough clear policies in place.”

Some faculty questioned whether Goucher should be providing $1,200 vouchers for everybody, regardless of financial need. Eventually the college will spend almost a half-million dollars a year. But Ungar said more than three-quarters of Goucher’s financial aid is based on financial need. “We’ve cut way back on merit aid and reduced our (tuition) discount rate to 35 from 49.6 percent.” 

Ungar said that requiring study abroad was risky. “We were taking a very big plunge. What if students didn’t come? What if people didn’t like the idea?” he said. He needn’t have worried. A flood of applications has put those fears to rest. Four thousand students applied to Goucher for 2007-08, double the number seven years earlier. 

Goucher enrolled nearly 1500 undergraduates and more than 800 part-time graduate students in 2007. Goucher has rented nearby apartments to handle the overflow from campus housing. 

Even before the mandate, more than half of Goucher seniors had studied abroad by the time they graduated, and that number had  risen to 77 percent for the class of 2006 according to Open Doors figures. Some 132 members of the class of 2010 actually used their $1,200 vouchers as freshmen or sophomores. Most were expecting—and expected—to do so as juniors or seniors. Ungar said it will be several years before the results of this experiment are known.

Faculty Play a Critical Role

The most popular and common option for students to fulfill the requirement is to head off with a Goucher professor on one of the three-week intensive courses abroad that are offered during winter break and after the spring term ends. Some of these study abroad classes tied into longer coursework on campus before and/or after the overseas trip. In January and May, faculty lead students to Rio de Janeiro to learn the history of dance in Brazil; to Shanghai and Beijing to absorb Chinese history and philosophy; to Prague to explore the Czech capital’s twentieth-century journey from fascism to communism to capitalism; to Honduras where students dive in coral reefs while learning tropical marine biology; to Accra for an immersion in the arts and culture of Ghana and West Africa.

Still, a sizable minority of Goucher students study abroad for a full semester, an option that has been growing in popularity. And with support from a U.S. Department of Education grant, Goucher has developed several courses that are team taught by language and content experts for seven weeks in the fall, then three weeks overseas, and seven more weeks back on campus. They have ranged from peace studies in Spain, to theater in Paris, and to multicultural education in Costa Rica.

“Those last seven weeks were paradise for me,” said Isabel Moreno-Lopez, assistant professor of Spanish, who taught the 8-credit multicultural education class with Assistant Professor of Education Tami Smith. Moreno encountered resistance when she tried to teach entirely in Spanish before the trip to Costa Rica, but afterward “their attitude changed completely. It was a 100 percent shift. The students loved their experience there and loved the language,” she said. The students slept in tree houses at an environmental hostel in the middle of a rain forest and learned from Bribri Indians about their lives and culture. Back in Maryland, the students could not get enough Spanish. “They wanted more and more and more. They were sad when it ended and asked if they could still meet with me over coffee and discuss books. I still have some of these students coming,” said Moreno-Lopez. “The students you take abroad are students for life.” 

“They wanted more and more and more... The students you take abroad are students for life.”

Goucher students are accustomed to a lot of attention from professors, at home and abroad. “Most people that come here were looking for a small, liberal arts school,” said sophomore Royce DuBiner. “I mean, I lunch with my professors and talk with them all the time. After an exam you can walk into their office and they go over it with you right there.” DuBiner, from Atlanta, Georgia, cashed in his $1,200 voucher on a three-week trip to Vietnam last January led by Nicholas Brown, chair of Political Science and International Relations, who showed them the firebase where he served during the war, now a farmer’s field. They journeyed from Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) to Hanoi, learning about Vietnam’s history and its current social and economic reforms.

Goucher so far has implemented the education abroad mandate by hiring just one additional staff member for what is now a four-person Office of International Studies. Two education abroad advisers, an administrative staffer, and student workers round out the office (visas for Goucher’s international students are handled by the Admissions Office). “It is a small infrastructure,” said Provost Marc Roy, who came to Goucher in 2007. “The faculty is carrying a lot of the burden in terms of advising students. But the staff here is incredibly productive and so far they’ve been able to meet the challenge. I think time will tell us what’s necessary to do. But yes, faculty are carrying a lot of the load, both in terms of designing the intensive courses abroad and some of the logistical preparation for that. We need to find ways to make that less of a burden for faculty.

Political science professor Eric Singer spent eight years as associate dean of International Studies. “My main charge has been to think strategically and work with faculty and department to internationalize our curriculum and our academic programs,” said Singer, who has now relinquished those administrative duties and will resume teaching full-time after a sabbatical. Singer regularly proselytized fellow faculty to teach courses overseas and led several study abroad trips himself to South Africa. He put the arm on LaJerne Cornish, an assistant professor of education, one summer when Singer needed students to teach math in a South African township school. 

Cornish found two willing education majors and agreed to take an exploratory trip with Singer to South Africa. Cornish, a Goucher alumna and former assistant principal of a Baltimore middle school, had never been out of the country. “I grew up in Baltimore City and thought I had some conception of poverty, but nothing prepared me for what I saw in South Africa,” she said. For the past four summers, she has led groups of up to a dozen education majors to teach in an overcrowded school in rural Grahamstown, South Africa. She has also raised thousands of dollars to donate books to township schools. “This has really pushed me in unexpected ways,” said Cornish.

Exploring Global Issues

Service, whether in inner city Baltimore, hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, or the slums of Grahamstown, is part of the culture at Goucher. Sophomore Maura Roth-Gormley, 20, of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, first learned about Goucher in the book, Colleges That Change Lives, by Loren Pope. “I was interested because of Goucher’s international studies program and all the emphasis on service learning,” said the history major and ballet dancer who also teaches yoga. 

Roth-Gormley is also in Goucher’s International Scholars Program (ISP), which places students in special seminars exploring global issues during their first three semesters and requires them to take one language class beyond the intermediate level and to study abroad for at least a semester. The ISP students get $3,000 vouchers. RothGormley already has been to South Africa on a three-week course, and plans to return for a full semester on an exchange with Rhodes University in Grahamstown. “When I talk to people at other colleges, I’m always kind of shocked” how few plan to study abroad, she said. “When I say I’ve already studied abroad and plan to do so again, they say, ‘Well, that’s interesting. I’d love to do that—but I probably won’t.’” Still, the ISP, which started in 2005, isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, with prescribed courses and a long research paper. Forty students in the class of 2010 signed up for ISP as freshmen; half had left the program before the third semester’s end.

But others love it. The study abroad mandate “is why I came to Goucher,” said sophomore Debra Linik of Woodstown, New Jersey. Linik, a political science and international relations major, extolled a seminar in which her class explored how the Maryland crab industry has gone global. Phillips Seafood Company, which started on the boardwalk in Ocean City, now operates seafood canning plants in Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, India, Malaysia, Vietnam, and China, and relies on migrant labor from Mexico to staff its crab-packing houses on the Chesapeake Bay.

Steven DeCaroli, an associate professor of philosophy who has led classes to China and Greece, said that at Goucher, “You can pick up the phone and talk to the person in charge and get something done on a first-name basis. There’s not a lot of bureaucracy to go through.”

Antje Rauwerda, an assistant professor of English who was raised in Singapore where her Dutch father was a petroleum geologist, partnered with DeCaroli on that first China trip. Rauwerda said of the education abroad mandate, “As with any big change, there are little bumps; there are little parts of implementing this that are awkward. But I think it will change the feel of the campus community,” and once the students start “cross-pollinating” their experiences in China or Mali or Ireland, “it’s going to be really interesting.”

Lindsey Hendricks, 20, a junior biology major from Bar Harbor, Maine, said the study abroad mandate is attracting “a different crowd” to Goucher. “I can remember in my freshman year a lot of people didn’t want to study abroad or even do an offcampus  internship. You don’t hear that any more,” said Hendricks, who took a tropical marine biology class in Honduras and journeyed to London to study immigrant cultures in the East End. Hendricks is a leader of an agricultural co-op that tends large com posting bins around campus, harvesting leftover vegetables from the cafeteria daily.

Sophomore Anndal Narayanan, 19, a French and history major from Delray Beach, Florida, is spending her junior fall semester at the Sorbonne in Paris. She, too, learned about Goucher from Colleges That Change Lives. “The international study requirement was really the clincher,” said Narayanan. The requirement “explains why the freshman class was the biggest that Goucher’s ever had,” said Narayanan, who recently received honors for her freshman ISP paper comparing the 1968 student takeover at Columbia University in New York to the riots at the Sorbonne.

Greater Student Engagement

J. Michael Curry, former vice president and academic dean, believes the study abroad mandate is bringing in students who are more “engaged, thoughtful, open to new experiences, (and) aware of the world.” And while some choose Goucher because of the safe, suburban campus, the mandate also serves notice that Goucher “will push them out of the comfort of the nest,” he said.

The responsibility for ensuring that a student goes abroad really rests with the students themselves, but the faculty “have a responsibility for getting the conversation started,” said Associate Dean Janine Bowen.

Laura Burns, an assistant professor of art who teaches photography, said this is “a big time of transition” for both faculty and students. “It is very new in terms of advising. It’s new in terms of figuring out who’s on campus and who’s not. It’s new in terms of figuring out how difficult it becomes for students to meet their requirements here and yet go abroad,” said Burns, who has led classes to study life on the border shared by El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

“I see a huge, huge change in international awareness and knowledge on the part of both students and faculty.”

“So far it seems to be working quite well,” Burns added. “The students I’ve been talking with are good planners. It’s making them plan a little bit more into the future, having to sort of sit down and say, ‘O.K., this class is available this semester; if I’m gone this semester, then I need to do X, Y, and Z.’ It means that people are tending to write out a four-year plan as opposed to a semester- bysemester plan.” 

Marianne Githens, professor of political science and one of the longest serving faculty members— she arrived in 1965 fresh from finishing her Ph.D. at the London School of Economics—believes Goucher “is going through a real renaissance.” Students in her “Women in Politics” class were more familiar with Ségolène Royal and her campaign for president of France than an earlier generation would have been. “That’s one of the wonderful products of internationalizing here at Goucher,” said Githens.

From Dance to Lacrosse—Integrating Study Abroad

Kaushik Bagchi, an associate professor of history, and Amanda Thom Woodson, professor of dance, have teamed to lead students on five trips to Ghana and one to India. “When I came here 15 years ago, mine was one of the few international voices on campus. I was an international specimen on campus. That is no longer the case. I see a huge, huge change in international awareness and knowledge on the part of both students and faculty,” said Bagchi, who is from Delhi.

“We do a lot of drumming and dancing” on the Ghana trip, said Bagchi. “Some people may think, ‘That’s not for me.’ But in the villages we visit, music and dance are completely integrated into everyday life and politics.” The students also learn the history of the slave trade and visit the forts and castles built by the Portuguese and Dutch traders.

Woodson also takes dance students to Brazil to study music and dance. Sometimes, she will hear from a student that her parents “will not pay for them to go on a dance  international exchange program because they are not ‘learning anything.’ I explain to the parents that this is not purely about dancing. It is a cultural experience.” Woodson, a native of Edinburgh, Scotland, grew up in a military family in Malta, Germany, and Singapore. 

Goucher’s dance program has never lost the luster it enjoyed when it was a women’s college. Goucher also has a strong equestrian program, with its own stable of horses. Its athletic teams compete in NCAA Division III, with no athletic scholarships. Thomas L. Till, swim coach and assistant athletic director, said coaches understand that at Goucher, academics comes before athletics even if that means a star athlete may miss a season while studying abroad. Women’s lacrosse was short three players last spring because several players were overseas. “As a coach, you deal with these—I don’t want to call them frustrations, but little setbacks. You can’t fault the kids because they’re getting these great experiences. And it’s neat to see the transformation when they come back,” said Till.

Comfortable Out on a Limb

Ungar grew up in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, the son of grocers who immigrated from Eastern Europe. He went to Harvard, wrote for the Crimson, and thought his future might be in the law and small town politics. But “the world just opened to me” after he won a Rotary Foundation Fellowship to the London School of Economics and became a foreign correspondent in Paris and Nairobi. 

He also spent a summer working for the English language Argus newspapers in Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town, seeing apartheid at its worst. Later he wrote books on Africa, the FBI, the new wave of immigrants, and other topics; hosted National Public Radio’s All Things Considered; became dean of the communications school at American University; and was director of the Voice of America from 1999 to 2001.

His vision for international education permeates all matters, large and small, at Goucher. When a Maryland community organization came by to solicit an institutional membership fee costing $7,200, Ungar instantly did the math in his head. “That’s six stipends for students to go overseas,” he said. “You have a high threshold to tell me that that’s more important than putting the money into sending six students overseas.”

The study abroad mandate has earned Goucher waves of publicity. A recent feature in The Chronicle of Higher Education took note of some grumbling among the  faculty, but gave Ungar the last word. “I’m comfortable being out on this limb,” he said.

Ungar amplified on those thoughts. “One of the challenges is to bring faculty along in all disciplines and help them see that the international component of things is not a luxury but a growing necessity. It’s understandable that some people would have reservations and concerns, especially because to them in some cases they feel, ‘If I’m going to make room for an international component…then what has to go? What is it going to replace?’” he said. “The answer in my view is that curriculum has always changed and will always change.”

To campuses thinking of following Goucher’s example, Ungar offered this advice: “Make sure that there are lots of new programs in the cooker, lots of new ideas for study abroad programs, both short- and long-term ones. I might urge that people do that a little bit sooner than we did.”

Institutions also need to collaborate more on the courses and classes they take overseas. “No doubt everybody wants to do something unique and have programs that reflect the character of each individual institution. There’s nothing wrong with that,” said Ungar. “But I think everybody needs to learn a little bit more about group play.”

With state support shrinking, the University of Minnesota did something that President Robert Bruininks concedes was counterintuitive: it slashed tuition for international students and other nonresidents. Instead of paying $6,000 more than Minnesotans pay each semester, they now pay just $2,000 more. The public university was able to do so without asking for the legislature’s permission because “we’re one of the few academic institutions in the country that has constitutional autonomy from the state,” said Robert Jones, senior vice president for academic administration. But university leaders are convinced the move will pay off for an institution that aspires to become one of the top three public research universities in the world in a decade. 

Minnesota already holds a position that most universities would envy: 28th in the world rankings by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and 9th among U.S. public institutions. With 51,000 students on the Twin Cities campus alone, including 3,700 from other countries, it is also one of the largest, and only three research universities send more students to study abroad. The Office of International Programs (OIP) has extended its reach and seen its budget burgeon since 2002 from $13 million to almost $23 million.

Another reason for the cut in out-of-state tuition is that Minnesota is girding for a projected drop in the number of students’ graduating from its high schools. “The University of Minnesota is a unique strength and comparative advantage for our state in a global economy. It’s a talent magnet,” said Bruininks. Pursuing “the international agenda of the university is not only the right thing to do to advance research and education… (but also) to advance the Minnesota economy as well.”

Transforming the U

The University of Minnesota already had a broad global footprint when the Board of Regents in 2005 endorsed a strategic blueprint that made further internationalization a top priority. Since launching this “Transforming the U” initiative, it has consolidated colleges, expanded the faculty, and made rapid progress on improving graduation and retention rates. It also has moved quickly and adroitly to attract more international undergraduates. International students now comprise 3 percent of undergraduate enrollment, up from 1 percent, and the goal of 5 percent is in sight, thanks in part to intense recruitment efforts, tuition changes, and a push by International Student & Scholar Services (ISSS) to streamline admissions paperwork and make the university more inviting. 

Former Associate Vice President for International Programs Gene Allen laid the groundwork for expanding Minnesota’s activities in China and elsewhere, including its signature “Minnesota Model” for integrating education abroad into the curriculum. The international profile has grown even further under his successor,  Meredith McQuaid, who was given a seat at the table with other deans when decisions are made about the university’s research and spending priorities. McQuaid, an attorney who formerly led international programs in the law school, is a Minnesota alumna who studied Mandarin in China as an undergraduate, taught English in Japan and once took a motorcycle trip around the world. She recently found spacious, new quarters for the Office of International Programs on the East Bank campus, closer to the Mall and main administration buildings. The University International Center also is home to a new Confucius Institute, the 30-year-old China Center, and the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition, Title VI national resource center. More strategically, McQuaid’s creation of an International Programs Council has led to renewed investment in internationalization efforts across the university system. 

“Transforming the U” initiative, the university awarded faculty ­$1 million in grants in 2007 and 2008 . . .”

The OIP was established in 1963 in an era when the university had an Office of International Agricultural Programs as well, coordinating dozens of faculty projects across the world, many under contract with the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID). Some 130 Moroccans—including students of Jones and Allen—earned doctorates and returned home to make the Institute Agronomique et Veterinaire Hassan II in Rabat one of Africa’s top agricultural universities. Exchanges were forged with universities in India, Nigeria, Uruguay, Norway, Hungary, Malaysia, Tanzania, and Tunisia. 

Faculty Grants for Global Scholarship

As part of the “Transforming the U” initiative, the university awarded faculty $1 million in grants in 2007 and 2008 “to promote a global network of scholarship and engagement and encourage interdisciplinary and transnational partnerships.” While the faculty grants were modest—in the $15,000 to $20,000 range—civil engineering Professor Efi Foufoula-Georgiou said they went a long way. “It’s unbelievable how much mileage I got for this grant,” said Foufoula-Georgiou, who directs the National Center for Earth Surface Dynamics at St. Anthony Falls Laboratory. The grant allowed graduate students to travel to conferences in Italy, and that in turn led to collaborations at the University of Genoa and University of Padua. Art Professor Tom Rose received a small grant for exchanges with the Beijing Film Academy, which led to the creation of a course on contemporary Chinese art. Now a department that “never really had much of an international presence is now becoming much more interested and engaged,” Rose said. 

OIP’s new Global Spotlight Initiative is focusing on Africa and global water issues. Carol Klee, chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, was named assistant vice president for international scholarship. Senior Vice President Jones and McQuaid visited Africa twice in 2008 to explore partnerships with sub-Saharan universities. Biologist Craig Packer, who has spent three decades studying lions in Tanzania, now is working with Minnesota colleagues on a broader “Whole Village Project” to address overpopulation and poverty, starting with an examination of how international aid impacts rural villages. 

No Longer Operating in a Vacuum

Following up on an academic task force’s blueprint for forging an international university, McQuaid appointed an International Working Group in 2007 to produce a five-year action plan. Its “Where in the World Are We Going?” report pinpointed gaps in the university’s efforts, including opportunities missed because faculty and schools had traditionally operated on their own in the international arena “The university lacks oversight of international efforts and knowledge of where in the world we are and what we are doing there,” the report said. The “plethora of MOUs [memoranda of understanding] signed with institutions around the globe is redundant, inefficient, and ineffective; the complete lack of oversight—legal and otherwise—is surely exposing the university to heightened risk.” Even within OIP, the staff of the Learning Abroad Center and that of ISSS worked apart. “That struck me as absurd,” said McQuaid. Changes to the structure and interaction of OIP units are being made under her leadership.

More than 2,000 students study abroad each year, and the University’s goal is to double that number, which would mean 50 percent would have an education abroad experience by the time they graduate. OIP combined separate education abroad offices and opened the Learning Abroad Center under the same roof with ISSS. The name “Learning Abroad” was chosen, Director Martha Johnson said, because “learning is a verb.” The 38-person staff arranges education abroad for 400 non-University of Minnesota students each year along with their own 2,000.

The so-called Minnesota Model of Curriculum Integration has won acclaim and foundation grants to knit education abroad into the curriculum. More than 800 faculty, administrators, and staff have attended OIP workshops on curricular education, and 90 recently returned for a refresher course led by director Gayle Woodruff. 

A Hospitable Place for Refugees

The university sits in what Brian Atwood, dean of the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, calls “an international city”—home to 19 Fortune 500 companies with global operations—in a state with a reputation for hospitality toward immigrants and refugees. The world headquarters of the American Refugee Committee and the Center for Victims of Torture are in Minneapolis. 

When Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf— the first democratically elected female head of state in Africa—came in April 2009 to receive an honorary degree, nearly 2,000 of the 4,800 people who filled Northrop Auditorium were her compatriots, part of the diaspora from Liberia’s brutal civil war. Large populations of Hmong from Cambodia, Somalis, and others who fled strife have started new lives in Minneapolis and St. Paul. 

“Some of our population,” quipped Atwood, former U.S. AID administrator, “is a result of failed U.S. foreign policy.” The university recently appointed its first postdoctoral and graduate fellows in Hmong Studies. Minnesota has had “an open, accommodating, accepting culture for a long, long time,” observed Bruininks, who has spent four decades at the U as education professor, dean, provost, and president. 

Researching the Impact of Education Abroad

Minnesota is also home to the federally funded Study Abroad for Global Engagement (SAGE) project, which examines how education abroad affected the attitudes of nearly 6,400 participants from 22 institutions dating back to 1960. One significant finding: the duration of education abroad had negligible impact on how involved they were in civic activities, volunteering, and other forms of “global engagement” in later life.

Minnesota’s Office of Institutional Research has conducted important research of its own on education abroad. It found that among freshmen who entered in 2000 and did not study abroad, the graduation rates were 30 percent within four years, 51 percent within five years, and 56 percent within six years. But the rates were sharply higher among those who did study abroad: 51 percent within four years, 84 percent within five years, and 91 percent within six years. The gap is even greater among the freshmen who entered in 2004: 40 percent within four years for those who did not study abroad versus 65 percent for those who did. This casts doubt on what the Learning Abroad Center’s Johnson calls “the misperception” that education abroad makes it harder for students to graduate on time.

ISSS Director Kay Thomas, an educational psychologist, stressed the importance of getting data like this “to back up what we’ve been saying” about the importance of international education. Her office has also been doing research on the critical experiences of international undergraduate students about to graduate, as well as studying the impact of administrative staff exchanges. Thomas is a past president of NAFSA, as were the two directors she worked for earlier in her 40 year career at the university, Forrest Moore and Josef Mestenhauser.

Blogging About Life in ‘Minne-snow-ta’

Thomas’s office enlisted nine international students in 2008 to blog about life on campus from the classroom to the cafeteria and to field questions from prospective students. Theerachai Chanyaswad of Thailand told of being stumped by his new classmates’ rapid-fire, idiomatic American English. His suggestion: “Calm down and try to fit in. You will succeed.” 

“The so-called Minnesota Model of Curriculum Integration has won acclaim and foundation grants to knit education abroad into the curriculum.”

Asa Widiastomo of Indonesia offered practical advice about what clothing to bring to “MinneSNOW-ta.” Asa, who is Muslim and wears a hijab, said in an interview, “it was really hard in the beginning. People just saw me for my appearance.” But the outgoing Widiastomo joined the University Women’s Chorus, became a leader of the Indonesian Student Association, and got involved in multicultural groups. 

A Rebirth of ESL

Following a post-September 11 slump in enrollment in intensive English classes, the College of Liberal Arts shut down in 2004 an ESL program that had existed for decades. One student pointedly asked, “How can we be a world-class university if we don’t invite the world?” With encouragement by OIP, the university reopened the intensive English program (IEP) a year later within the College of Continuing Education. Enrollment is growing and Michael Anderson, director of the Minnesota English Language Program, said, “The closing and rebirth of the IEP has helped internationalize the university and also bring attention to the functions that it serves on campus.”

In harsh economic times, budgets remain tight. Bruininks and Jones both expressed a determination not to stint on the U’s expanded international thrust. “If anything, those areas will be strongly protected,” said the president. Jones was even more emphatic. Cuts “will be the last thing I do because I think we’re on the cusp of creating something here that’s going to position the university for the next 50 years.”

The motto of Portland State University in Oregon is emblazoned on a sky bridge that spans Broadway, Portland’s main thoroughfare: Let Knowledge Serve The City. “We’d like to change it now to Let Knowledge Serve the Globe,” quips Kevin Kecskes, associate vice provost for engagement. Portland State, already known for deep community partnerships, today works on a broader canvass seeking sustainable solutions to economic, environmental, and social challenges that confront cities everywhere. 

This urban university practices what it preaches. In a city crisscrossed by light rail and streetcars, most students, faculty, and staff walk, ride bicycles, or take public transportation to the compact, 49-acre campus. The new president, Wim Wiewel, an expert on urban affairs, rode a bicycle to work on his first day in August 2008. Most of the 26,000 students commute; the dorms abutting Broadway house only 2,000 of them, although plans are on the drawing boards for several thousand more.

The city itself is a powerful draw for the 1,700 international students. “Typically international students want to come to an urban environment. The living environment is more supportive culturally and more diverse than in a university town like Corvallis or to an extent Eugene,” said Gil Latz, vice provost for international affairs and a professor of geography. Portland’s lures also make faculty recruiting easier. “A lot of people want to live in the Pacific Northwest,” said Ronald Tammen, director of the Mark Hatfield School of Government. Wiewel, who came from Chicago, said his new hometown “is such an easy city to sell. It’s a great brand.”

Wiewel is building on momentum created over a decade at Portland State. His predecessor, Daniel Bernstine, doubled enrollment and won the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges’ (now the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, A·P·L·U) Michael Malone International Leadership Award in 2005 for his efforts to internationalize Portland State. 

Broadening the Experience of ‘New Majority’ Students

The new president, a native of Amsterdam, views attracting more international and out-of-state students as a strategic way of broadening the educational experience for Oregon students. The student body typifies what some call “the new majority” in American higher education: older and often part-time. Most of these collegians “can’t park their family and their job for six months to go study in Berlin,” said Duncan Carter, associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Fretting over that reality would be pointless, said Provost Roy Koch, so instead Portland State has concentrated on offering short, faculty-led education abroad opportunities, often over spring break as part of longer courses. The number who study abroad is still modest (541 in 2007–08) but it has been climbing. Ron Witczak, assistant vice provost and director of education abroad, said, “We started in 2001 with three or four faculty-led programs and roughly 30 students. Now we’re up to 27 with close to 250 students.” Last year a full-time coordinator was hired. “There’s no place-bound student who can’t figure out a way to go abroad for two weeks if they want to,” said Wiewel. Both the length and cost—typically $2,500 to $3,500—make the short-term programs attractive, and partial scholarships are available for those in need.

“There’s no place-bound student who can’t figure out a way to go abroad for two weeks if they want to.”

Jill Scantlan, who quit school, earned a GED at age 16, and became a licensed massage therapist, spent nine months studying in Hyderabad, India. The 25-year-old international studies major aims to earn a master’s degree and return to India to do public health work. Helen Johnson returned to college for a master’s in teaching English as a second language after two decades as a homemaker. The two summers she spent practice teaching in South Korea were “the experience of a lifetime,” said Johnson, 47, a native of Greece who aspires to teach English to immigrants. “Now I’m back to what I really want to do.”

Emphases on Sustainability and Community Learning

Sustainability was the watchword at Portland State, even before it received a 10-year, $25 million matching grant in 2008 from the Miller Foundation—the largest gift in the institution’s history—to make the university an exemplar of sustainability, from the curriculum to campus life to community partnerships. Wiewel said, “You can’t be known across the world for everything unless you are Princeton or Harvard or some place like that. We’ve got to pick our strengths, and sustainability is one of those. It’s not just green wash; it’s real. People are doing it.” Portland State is working with Hokkaido University in Japan and Tongji University in China on ways to foster sustainability, and the issue drives the curriculum for the Hatfield School’s executive leadership and training programs for hundreds of government managers and business executives from Vietnam, Japan, and South Korea. 

Portland State’s long-standing relationship with Waseda University in Tokyo also focuses in part on sustainability. The campus houses the Waseda Oregon Office, which brings dozens of Waseda students to Portland each year and sends 60 students from across the United States to Tokyo each summer for intensive Japanese classes. Latz, who studied at Waseda as an Occidental College undergraduate, is looking for a third partner elsewhere in Asia for a three-way exchange around the global sustainability theme. “We have to move away from thinking only in terms of two dimensions to a problem,” the geographer said. “If this third country were Korea, for example, the students would learn that the Korean approach to sustainability would be very different from the Japanese approach and the Portland approach.”

Community-based learning is also a key to the curriculum at Portland State, where all undergraduates are obliged to perform service. Eight thousand students work in teams to identify and address community problems each year, and “we are incorporating this service element into our study abroad programs,” said Latz.

Kecskes, who directs the community partnerships, eschews the “service learning” term. “Community-based learning is a much larger umbrella. ‘Service’ can connote a one-way street,” he said. One course that Kecskes helped design takes students to Tucson, Arizona, and Nogales, Mexico, to study immigration policy and pollution from global factories south of the border. Instructor Celine Fitzmaurice’s students spend a night in a migrant shelter and live with families who work in those factories. Often, she said, there is at least one student whose parents entered the U.S. without documentation. Kecskes designed another course in which students meet with leaders of Portland’s Oaxacan immigrant community before heading to Oaxaca, Mexico, to see conditions there for themselves.

Portland State is also the new home of the International Partnership for Service Learning & Leadership, a not-for-profit that runs programs for undergraduates’ combining study abroad with volunteer service. It will offer a master’s degree in international development and service that includes six months of courses at Portland State and six months’ service in Kingston, Jamaica, or Guadalajara, Mexico. 

Surprises in Studying Impact of Education Abroad

Portland State participated in the Global Learning for All project of the American Council on Education (ACE), which looked at how institutions with large numbers of nontraditional undergraduates—adults, minorities, and parttime students—incorporated international content and activities into their curricula and campus life. Portland State also shared a Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education grant with five other institutions to measure the impact of international learning on students’ attitudes.

“It was as though the (Russian) language had disappeared,” said Freels, but now enrollments have rebounded partly with the help of a $1 million National Security Education Program grant.”

Carter, associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Latz, and Patricia Thornton, an associate professor of international studies, helped pilot a test that examined what students took away from their education abroad experiences. “We got some surprises,” said Carter. “Students who had traveled frequently abroad or indicated several short trips abroad outside of an academic context actually scored lower on the attitude section than students who’d never left the country.” He added, “We call this the Club Med experience and hypothesize that this may actually do more harm than good.” 

The faculty senate, after lively debates over the wisdom of expanding the list of core objectives for a Portland State education, recently adopted an international learning outcome as part of a broader revamping of curricular requirements. The new goal reads: “Students will understand the richness and challenge of world culture, the effects of globalization, and develop the skills and attitudes to function as ‘global citizens.’” Provost Koch said, “It was implied before, but now it’s very explicit.” The challenge is figuring out how to accomplish it for engineers as well as history and international studies majors. “We don’t want to just create another course or set of courses. We want to make it an integral part of students’ existing coursework,” he said. 

Luring Students to Russian Language Classes

Four thousand Portland State students took foreign language courses in fall 2008. “We are the largest unit in the university,” said Sandra G. Freels, chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and professor of Russian, one of 20 languages taught. When the Soviet Union collapsed, “it was as though the (Russian) language had disappeared,” said Freels, but now enrollments have rebounded partly with the help of a $1 million National Security Education Program grant. 

That grant allowed Portland State to offer 22 Russian-speaking freshmen and sophomores the opportunity last fall to add an extra, two-credit class taught in Russian to the standard, six-credit Inquiry course, one of the university’s requirements. These students were encouraged to live on the Russian immersion floor of a dorm and later might spend a full year at St. Petersburg State University. The purpose, said professor Patricia Wetzel, “is not aimed at producing Russian majors. It’s producing chemistry, business, and history majors who can use their language professionally.” The students, many of them heritage speakers of Russian, often “had no idea what their language skills are worth,” said Freels.

Raising the Research and Global Profile

In bringing Wiewel to Portland, the State Board of Higher Education chose a president whose most recent book was Global Universities and Urban Development. Wiewel first came to the United States from Holland on an American Field Service high school exchange. After earning a doctorate in sociology at Northwestern University, he directed the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and was provost of the University of Baltimore in Maryland. His goal is to double the externally funded research budget to $80 million in five or so years. Research “by definition nowadays is global…. The more you raise the research profile, the more it allows you to go beyond your local focus,” Wiewel said.

The Hatfield School of Government has taken an entrepreneurial approach to growing its international profile. “We have tentacles that stretch throughout the local community, the state, the nation, and the world,” said Tammen, the director. “We grow not on public money, but on money that we generate ourselves by training government officials in the United States and abroad and by doing contract work for a lot of different folks.” 

Marcus Ingle, director of the school’s International Public Service & Fellows program, regularly takes Portland State students to Vietnam and recently won two grants from the Ford Foundation to establish a program on state leadership for sustainable development at the Ho Chi Minh Political Academy in Hanoi. He also had a hand in arranging a $2 million Intel Corp. initiative that has brought 28 Vietnamese engineering students to Portland for two years to finish their studies and earn a Portland State degree.

“We grow not on public money, but on money that we generate ourselves by training government officials in the United States and abroad and by doing contract work for a lot of different folks. ”

Political scientist Birol Yesilada, chair of contemporary Turkish studies, and Harry Anastasiou, a professor of conflict resolution, take students to Cyprus for two weeks each year to study life on both sides of the Green Line that divides the Greek and Turkish communities. Yesilada said Portland State is still “a young campus. It does not have entrenched rules. It doesn’t have the financial means of a Harvard, but if you have a good idea, you’ll get support to do it. They are not going to stand in your way.”

From its classic, New England campus with the postcard view of New London’s steeples and Long Island Sound, Connecticut College has taken an interdisciplinary approach to ensuring that its 1,900 students learn to become “international citizens,” as President Leo I. Higdon Jr. puts it.

Some of the most worldly and widely traveled are the 30 admitted as sophomores each year into the Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts (CISLA), a certificate program with its own $7 million endowment that provides airfare and a $3,000 stipend for CISLA’s Global Scholars to do internships anywhere in the world. They must complete a research project as seniors upon their return./p>

David Urbaneja-Furelos, an international relations and East Asian Studies major from Burgos, Spain, interned for the United Nations Industrial and Development Organization in Beijing and Taiyuan, China. “I’ve always wanted to work for the United Nations, but the UN only offers unpaid internships that usually are reserved for master’s students. CISLA helped me to afford something that otherwise would never have happened.” Chinese language major George Fernandez interned for NBC during the Olympics and for a developer in Beijing.

Gili Ben-Yosef, a sociology major, interned in Argentina for a Jewish relief agency and wrote her senior paper on what it means to be Jewish in twenty-first century Buenos Aires. Nonprofits needn’t worry about whether they can afford an intern. “We basically have the whole world open to us and can choose the ideal internship,” she said. “It empowers us to go international after graduation.”

Experiencing a New Culture Alone

Jessamyn Cox found it lonely at times being on her own in Reutlingen, Germany, while interning at an art museum. “You’re outside your comfort zone and don’t have the support system of family and friends,” she said. But experiences like hers make the CISLA internships all the more formative. Mary Devins, associate director of CISLA, said, “This living by yourself without a friend down the hall is an enormous learning experience.” Added Robert Gay, CISLA director, “We push them.” Gay, a British-born ethnographer who studies crime and poverty in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, said the CISLA certification on a diploma means “that you went abroad and worked in a professional situation where you may be the only English speaker in an office. It’s a tremendous asset for your resume.” Robert Proctor, professor of Italian and a founder of the program, said, “Whatever we do here in the classroom, it’s nothing compared with the growth we see in these kids upon their return.”

The popularity of CISLA spawned three other interdisciplinary centers that offer certificates in conservation biology and environmental studies, arts and technology, community action and public policy. One in six undergraduates now works to the higher standards demanded by these centers.

Pipeline to Vietnam

CISLA was created two decades ago under former President Claire Gaudiani, who also had a hand in designing the college’s Study Away/Teach Away (SATA) program, in which one or two faculty and 10 to 20 students spend a semester in another land. Originally, said government Professor Alex Roberto Hybel, the intention was to study only in developing countries. But some of those destinations were a difficult fit for faculty whose research interests lay elsewhere, and eventually professors began leading students on SATAs to Rome and Prague as well as to China, India, Vietnam, and Peru. “Initially there was some reluctance, but as faculty members realized how much they could benefit,” more stepped up to lead SATAs, said the Argentine-born Hybel, who doubled as dean of international programs in the mid-1990s.

In 2008 there were SATAs to Mysore, India, to Hanoi, Vietnam, and to Rome, Italy. That was the eighth time for the program in Hanoi, where the Connecticut College contingent lives in a residence for international students and takes courses taught by their own professors and the faculty of Vietnam National University (VNU). To date 150 students and 14 faculty have gone to Hanoi, and 19 VNU faculty have paid reciprocal visits to New London. William Frasure, a professor of government instrumental in arranging these exchanges, in 2008 became the second American ever awarded an honorary doctorate by the Vietnamese university. 

“Several new courses that directly draw upon our Vietnam experience have been introduced into the college’s curriculum, and numerous ­existing courses have been enriched by it.”

Frasure said, “Several new courses that directly draw upon our Vietnam experience have been introduced into the college’s curriculum, and numerous existing courses have been enriched by it.” In addition to expanding students’ academic horizons, “the Vietnam project has really meant a whole new career direction” for some faculty, he added.

Spring Break in St. Petersburg, Russia

Connecticut College, a women’s college until 1969, also sends students abroad for shorter stretches on its Traveling Research and Immersion Program (TRIP). TRIPs take place between semesters, over spring break, and at the end of the academic year. Andrea Lanoux, chair of Slavic studies, took her beginning Russian students to Russia over spring break in 2008 and 2009. “I had 17 people last year sign up for Russian. I went from 6 to 17 overnight,” said Lanoux. Each student also received a loaner iPod filled with Russian pop music, folk songs, poetry, videos, cartoons, talk shows, nursery rhymes, and language exercises. A foundation grant paid for the iPods.

“When you hand these out in class and students who don’t know Russian turn them on and it’s all in Cyrillic, their eyes just light up. It’s a wonderful thing. I would never teach a class again without iPods. It’s the perfect tool for language learning,” said Lanoux. “Japanese and German [programs] are also doing it.”

In 1991, Judaic studies scholar Roger Brooks, now dean of the faculty, was one of the first professors to lead a TRIP. Showing students a slide of Robinson’s Arch, the remains of a once grand archway to the ancient Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, he instructed students to look for these remains “if you ever go to Jerusalem.” One student raised her hand and said, ‘Spring break is coming up. Why don’t we all go and you can show it to us.’ Four and a-half-weeks later, all 23 students were with me in Jerusalem,” he recalled. 

Preparing Students for Global Lives

Connecticut College’s revised mission statement wastes no time in emphasizing the international. The first sentence reads, “Connecticut College educates students to put the liberal arts into action as citizens in a global society.” The college emphasized a need to further internationalize when it launched a $200 million fund-raising drive in 2008: “We must ensure that all our students are prepared to thrive in this global society. We will bring international content to every course of study, and we will expand foreign language proficiency. We will create new ways for students to study abroad and new international experiences on campus.”

Students must take one semester of an intermediate language course or one year of a new language. Frances L. Hoffmann, a professor of sociology and women’s studies, said the college has tried “to shift the nature of foreign language instruction to encourage students to become verbally excellent as well as able to read.” For example, Paola Sica, associate professor of Italian, said, “Many students are interested in art history. We try to find the link between our upper level Italian courses and the courses they’re offering in the art history department. We’re trying to find new directions not enclosed in a little box.”

The college started offering Arabic in 2007, and an interdisciplinary program in Islamic World Civilizations is on the drawing boards. “We need more languages. We need more people. We need to broaden the scope of what we do. But it’s all just a matter of money we don’t have,” said Edward Brodkin, an Asian history specialist.

“Connecticut College educates students to put the liberal arts into ­action as citizens in a global society.”

Hoffmann, former dean of the faculty, led a drive to expand Knowlton, the international residence hall, to accommodate an “International Cultural Commons” that would be filled with satellite televisions’ broadcasting international news, sports, and cultural events. “I had this notion that when the World Cup was on, we’d show the games, have a dinner and music, and you’d have to speak the language of the teams that were playing, trying to marry the cocurricular life and academic life.” But the grand plans—which would have cost at least $11 million—ran into structural and financial roadblocks.

“We came together and made an adjustment around the balance between physical facilities and programs,” said President Higdon. “What we want to try to do is support curricular and faculty development around our international global immersion and objectives.” An anonymous $1 million gift is helping with what is now called the International Commons initiative.

Mixing Food and Languages

Last fall the college appointed its first Foreign Language Fellows, student peer counselors who are paid $1,200 a year to mount social and cultural events promoting nine languages. “It’s a challenge to actually make (other) students participate,” said Cinthia Isla Marin, a sophomore from Iquitos, Peru, who is the Spanish Foreign Language Fellow. “The United States is full of Spanish speakers. The students are like, ‘What’s the point of going to an activity? I can turn around and see a Spanish speaker if I want.’ For them, the activities have to be much sexier.” One of her hits was a Spanish karaoke night. She also found pen pals for her classmates among her former United World Colleges classmates. United World Colleges (UWC), a global educational NGO, selects students from across the globe regardless of their ability to pay for higher education opportunities. UWC has 13 colleges across five continents that aim to foster international understanding and peace.

Katherine Shabb, born in Texas but raised in Lebanon, was the Arabic Fellow. With the help of kitchen workers of Lebanese descent, the freshman redecorated the Knowlton dining room with Lebanese flags, served Middle Eastern food, and brought in a Middle Eastern singer for entertainment. “It was a much smoother transition for me coming from Lebanon, finding that there’s such a strong international commitment in the school,” said Shabb. 

Faculty Engagement in International Programs

Chemistry Professor Marc Zimmer three times has taken students to his native South Africa. He was named Connecticut’s Professor of the Year in 2007, in part for his success in mentoring minority students. His research on green fluorescent protein (which can tag cancer cells) is funded by both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. He came to Connecticut College in 1990 from a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University and “one reason I stayed was because I wanted to do more SATAs. It’s a great opportunity for me and my family.”

Brodkin, a historian of Asia, has led a half dozen semester programs in India. Brodkin, retiring at the end of 2009 after four decades on the faculty, remembers a time when half the required courses for history majors dealt with European history and a quarter were about the United States. “The implication was that Europe was twice as important as America and the rest of the world didn’t really matter at all,” he said. “That changed very quickly when we got people from the rest of the world. We now have an Africa historian and a Latin America historian.”

Resources the Only Impediment

Armando Ignacio Bengochea, dean of the College Community, said, “The only thing that 
stops Connecticut College from realizing any of its largest ambitions is simply resources. We have incredible ambitions and they’re only held in check by resources. We would certainly have many more international students if we could afford them.” Budget pressures led the college to cut back slightly on admission offers this year to international students who needed significant aid, and Martha Merrill, dean of admission and financial aid, is hoping to find more international students who can pay all or much of the comprehensive fee. “Those are the challenges for us as a small college without the name recognition (of) some other institutions,” she said.

Almost five percent of Connecticut College’s 1,900 students are international. Roughly the same percentage hold dual citizenship, and several dozen more are permanent residents or U.S. citizens who grew up overseas.

Finding the resources to meet Connecticut College’s ambitions rests principally on the shoulders of Higdon, who became president in 2006 after leading the College of Charleston and Babson College and serving as dean of the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. Higdon, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi, spent two decades as an investment banker on Wall Street before switching to academe.

“Our overarching vision is to be one of the very best liberal arts colleges in the land. We think we’re moving toward that goal” by emphasizing globalization and cross-cultural fluency for students and faculty, said Higdon. However the economic winds blow, Connecticut College is holding steady on that course.

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

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

Coupling Study Abroad and Service

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

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

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

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

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

Roadblocks to Volunteering Overseas

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

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

Seeking More International Students

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

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

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

Learning Diversity in the Classroom

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

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

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

Teaching in Thailand

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

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

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

Success of Global Studies Major

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

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

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

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

Bursting the Loyola ‘Bubble’

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

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

Looking After the President in Bangkok

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

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

The Importance of Asia

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

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

Dozens of Hobart and William Smith Colleges (HWS) students occupied every seat and nearly every square inch of floor. Others crowded the doorway and spilled into the hall. It was late on a sunny spring afternoon—no time to be indoors—but the colleges’ annual Global Visions celebration of student photography and research projects exerted a powerful attraction. The promise of sushi afterward helped, as did the door prize: a $500 digital camera for the best photograph of the year (you had to be present to win). Still, the turnout testified to how well the colleges’ Center for Global Education does what many colleges aspire to: weaving education abroad into campus life and crafting thoughtful ways for students to relive and rethink experiences upon return home.

Hobart and William Smith Colleges offer photography and journal writing workshops and give small grants to encourage students to delve into the life of the communities where they live and study. On return, their stories and photographs may be published in The Aleph: A Journal of Global Perspectives, a full-color publication produced with Union College, or Abroad View magazine, which several colleges sponsor. Photography serves as a “gateway into the culture” of the countries where HWS students study, said Doug Reilly, programming coordinator for the Center for Global Education. The Center for Global Education also stages an open mic night called “the Away Café” in the campus pub for students to share stories from overseas.

Founded as separate colleges for men (Hobart) and women (William Smith) in 1822 and 1908 respectively, Hobart and William Smith are now closely coordinated with the same classes, faculty, and president but retain separate traditions, diplomas, deans, and athletic nicknames (Statesmen and Herons). From its 195-acre campus overlooking Seneca Lake in Geneva, N.Y., HWS send hundreds of students annually on more than 40 semester-long programs in 32 countries, nearly two-thirds outside Western Europe. 

“We made a commitment that no matter what happened to the economy, we were going to hold steady the percentage of our students who studied abroad.”

Finding a Leader at the Peace Corps

The selection of then-Peace Corps Director Mark Gearan as president in 1999 underscored the emphasis at HWS on internationalization. Gearan directed the Peace Corps during President Bill Clinton’s second term after serving as a senior White House official during the first. Gearan, an attorney and high school principal’s son, sent the first Peace Corps volunteers to South Africa, Jordan, Bangladesh, and Mozambique and created the Crisis Corps, which deploys returned volunteers for short stints to places dealing with disasters.

Gearan, a graduate of Harvard College and Georgetown Law School, said he was drawn by the colleges’ approach to global education. “When you have so many faculty members who have lived and led programs around the world, it really internationalizes the campus.”

The percentage of students’ studying abroad has risen to roughly 60 percent. That is “a great statistic and point of pride,” said Gearan, but he is also concerned about internationalizing the education of those who “are parked here in zip code 14456.”

Gearan has concerns, too, that education abroad not be just “a one-off” experience for the students who do go overseas.

Safeguarding Education Abroad

Gearan and Provost Teresa Amott protected the education abroad program from budget cuts that most academic departments had to absorb last spring. “We made a commitment that no matter what happened to the economy, we were going to hold steady the percentage of our students who studied abroad,” said Amott.

Education abroad, said Gearan, “is mission central, in our judgment, if you really want to prepare well-educated, twenty-first century citizens.” Gearan does not denigrate study in London, Paris, Rome, and the other capitals of Europe, but he emphasizes the added value of sending students to Vietnam, Senegal, South Africa, Peru, China, Brazil, and other “very twenty-first century places.”

A strategic plan drafted upon Gearan’s arrival led to the creation of a Center for Global schools’ progreEducation. The ss down this path was accelerated by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that underwrote a formal Partnership for Global Education with Union College in Schenectady, New York. Both institutions ramped up predeparture and reentry programming. Political scientist Thomas D’Agostino has led the partnership and directed the HWS Center for Global Education since it opened. He is now associate dean for global education.

Unfinished Business: Attracting International Students

An unfinished objective at HWS is attracting more international students, Gearan said. HWS enrolled 77 international students in 2009–10, or 4 percent. A first step has been to resuscitate exchange agreements that had gathered dust. Amy Teel, the Center for Global Education’s program manager, said, “We went from no exchange students in 2005 to about 35 a year coming in now.”

Felix Spira, 22, a German exchange student from Maastricht University in the Netherlands, came for the spring 2010 semester. “My home university has seven different partner universities in the United States. I chose Hobart and William Smith because it’s a small college where you have a high chance to get closer interactions with your teachers. I’m on a first-name basis with two of my professors,” said Spira.

Languages Encouraged but Not Required

HWS offer majors in Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese, and the classics; German is offered only as a minor. Eric Klaus, the sole tenure-track faculty member in German, recently scouted locations in Leipzig and Berlin for the Center for Global Education where science majors could study in English and “get a taste of German culture.” With such a small program, Klaus said, “you have to make yourself indispensable and recognizable on campus.”

There is no language requirement at HWS. “The culture of this institution is anti-requirement; we’re not an institution that requires students to do things. But we have goals,” said Amott, the provost. Students must demonstrate “a critical knowledge of the multiplicity of world cultures.” They can do this in a myriad of ways, including courses in language, history, literature, religion, economics, and the arts. Still, Amott, an economist born in Bolivia to a U.S. Foreign Service officer and Brazilian mother, added, “I wish we had more students’ achieving competency in a second language.” The Self-Instructional Language Program allows students to study Arabic, Vietnamese, and Hindi independently, with biweekly tutorials from a native speaker. Sometimes Polish, Korean, and Portuguese are supported in this way as well.

Patrick McGuire, a professor of economics who has led semester programs in London, Galway, Ireland, and Central Europe (where the students visit Germany, Romania, and Hungary), agreed that learning another language is important, but argued that it should not be a deterrent to students’ gaining rich experiences in courses taught overseas in English.

Fellow Professor of Economics Scott McKinney regularly leads students to Ecuador and Peru to study development economics and pre-Columbian history and culture. McKinney was born and raised in Lima, Peru, to American parents who worked in the airline and shipping business. McKinney speaks Spanish fluently—he even does home-stays himself with Ecuadorian families when he takes students to Quito—but he, too, believes there should be no language bar to education abroad. For HWS students who may pursue careers in banking or finance, it is paramount to see poverty firsthand, he said. “What we’ve really emphasized here is that everybody should go. You shouldn’t have to study three years of Spanish to go abroad to a Spanishspeaking country.”

Returns to India and Turkey

Lisa Philippone, 20, a junior anthropology major, spent a semester in India and returned there in summer 2010 to live on an organic farm in the desert state of Rajastan, teach, and work on an honors project examining how Hindus reconcile their beliefs in the purifying aspects of water in places where water is scarce or polluted. She won one of three $15,000 summer travel awards supported by alumnus Charles Salisbury, who also helped underwrite the renovation of historic Trinity Hall, where the Center for Global Education is housed.

Philippone said that her choosing to study in India was “a big deal” to neighbors and friends back home in Rochester, New York. “People just talked about it. They see India as a Third World country and wanted to know why I’d go there, why I’m studying India’s culture, and where that’s going to take me,” said the budding anthropologist. It reaffirmed her judgment that HWS was the right place for her. “It may sound corny, but it allows me to study what I love. I’m going to leave here with a sense of clarity on what I want for my future.”

Alexandra Hallowell, 22, a senior international relations and French major from Duxbury, Massachusetts, was studying at Maastricht University in the Netherlands when she won two HWS grants totaling $1,000 to spend a fortnight in Istanbul, Turkey, interviewing Islamic women about politics, religion, and culture. She self-published a small magazine about the project that helped her win a Fulbright scholarship to return to Turkey as an English teaching assistant and to interview more women about how they balance religious and cultural norms in a secular society.

“It may sound corny, but it allows me to study what I love. I’m going to leave here with a sense of clarity on what I want for my future.”

Emphasizing Global Citizenship for Town and Gown

HWS help to internationalize the community of Geneva as well. Last winter the colleges mounted a community-wide campaign to get the 13,000 residents of Geneva as well as faculty and students to read Three Cups of Tea, the best-selling account of mountain climber Greg Mortenson’s ongoing crusade to build schools for girls across Pakistan and Afghanistan.

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Posters went up around town showing high school coaches, Gearan, and other civic leaders engrossed in Three Cups of Tea, and school children raised thousands of dollars for Mortenson’s “Pennies for Peace” campaign to build more schools. Students, faculty, and townspeople filled the local opera house when Mortenson’s coauthor, journalist David Oliver Relin, came to speak. The Center for Global Education’s Amy Teel and Doug Reilly also use Three Cups of Tea in a workshop they teach on the global aspects of leadership.

The Vietnam Connection

HWS’ education abroad program in Hanoi, Vietnam, started 15 years ago when Marie-France Etienne, a professor of French who was born in colonial Vietnam, led students there. The program gained a champion in Professor of Sociology Jack Dash Harris, who was first exposed to Vietnam while teaching in the Semester-at-Sea program. He is now an authority on changing roles of men and women in Vietnamese society. HWS and Union College began sending students to Hanoi for a full semester in fall 2000.

Harris chairs the faculty Committee on Global Education, which provides strong oversight for the education abroad programs. He and D’Agostino co-directed a federally funded project that produced study guides to help prepare students for their immersion in Vietnam. The In Focus: Vietnam project enlisted the expertise of HWS and Union faculty and students as well as outside experts to make short films on Vietnamese history, culture, economy, and contemporary life, each accompanied by a list of suggested readings.

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Science faculty, too, weave global education into their curricula. Paleontologist Nan Crystal Arens, a Harvard-educated associate professor of geoscience, is spending the fall 2010 semester with HWS students in Queensland, Australia. It is the third time she has led that program. “We can talk about tectonic plates until we’re blue in the face, but it’s really a different experience to go and stand in the fault zone or in the volcano,” she said. “It brings the material alive in ways that we can’t do in a classroom, no matter how good we are as teachers.”