Founded in 1865 by railroad magnate and industrialist Asa Packer, Lehigh University has extended its reach from the Lehigh Valley in eastern Pennsylvania to locations around the globe over the past 150 years. Lehigh is a private research university located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a city of 75,000 residents. The university’s focus on interdisciplinary, experiential learning and collaboration across campus has helped it develop an approach to internationalization that cuts across the institution. Internships abroad, research opportunities, and partnerships with organizations such as the United Nations give Lehigh’s 7,000 students access to high-impact global experiences both in and out of the classroom.
Even though Zemichael Gebeyehu started college 7,000 miles away from his classmates in the middle of the global pandemic, he still felt welcomed into the campus community at Lehigh University. Gebeyehu, who is from Ethiopia, was one of more than 100 first-year international students who started their college careers at Lehigh from abroad. “I studied in the fall remotely because of COVID,” he says. “And the embassies were closed back in my home country, so I was not able to get a visa in time to come to Lehigh in person.”
Gebeyehu chose Lehigh because he was interested in studying mechanical engineering with a focus on aerospace engineering. “I was looking for an experiential, hands-on engineering program,” he says.
In fall 2020, Gebeyehu had a combination of synchronous and asynchronous classes and was able to schedule classes with meeting times in the early evening in Ethiopia. A summer class, the Virtual College Success Academy, prepared him for his first semester by teaching him about Lehigh’s history and campus culture and the learning management systems he would use. “I already knew what Lehigh is [when I arrived in January 2021], what extracurricular activities were available on campus, research opportunities, summer experiences, everything,” he says.
The Virtual College Success Academy is an example of how Lehigh adapted its programming to accommodate both international and domestic students during the coronavirus pandemic. Other international students in countries such as China started their freshman years studying in person at one of Lehigh’s partner universities abroad through the Lehigh in Residence program, while Lehigh leveraged other partnerships to create virtual international internships through its Iacocca International Internship Program.
“We have a history of having our faculty, our Office of International Affairs [OIA], our students, and alumni have relationships that span across the globe,” says Provost Nathan Urban, PhD. “And those relationships were not, largely speaking, disrupted by the pandemic. I think that one of the things that’s been sort of remarkable about the pandemic is the degree to which people have been willing and able to connect with each other and to engage with each other through technology.”
Lehigh’s response to the pandemic, utilizing existing partnerships both abroad and across campus in new ways, is in keeping with its larger approach to internationalization. “Our international goals are tied to both the history and culture of the institution,” says Cheryl Matherly, EdD, vice president and vice provost for international affairs. “We talk about it in terms of this kind of entrepreneurial mindset aimed at preparing graduates for real-world problem-solving.”
Lehigh has steadily grown its global presence since its first international students came from China in 1879. The university now hosts nearly 1,000 international students like Gebeyehu from around the world. Roughly 40 percent of its undergraduates participate in study, research, or internships abroad, and more than 60 students have received major international scholarships such as the Fulbright, Marshall, and Schwarzman since 2016, when the Office of Fellowship Advising was established as part of OIA.
The establishment of the Iacocca Institute in 1988 marked a turning point for Lehigh’s global engagement, Matherly says. Automobile executive and Lehigh alum Lee Iacocca, who worked for both Ford and Chrysler, partnered with Lehigh to found the institute with the goal of preparing students to be leaders in a global economy.
Iacocca realized that students need to be globally competent and aware in order to be leaders in a global economy, says Kira Mendez, MBA, director of the Iacocca Institute. That starting point evolved into a focus on cross-disciplinary and cross-border collaboration. In 1997, the Iacocca Institute launched its flagship program, the Global Village, which brings together approximately 75 young professionals and university students from around the world to Bethlehem for 5 weeks in the summer. During 2020 and 2021, the program was adapted to a yearlong virtual format.
Participants from different countries and backgrounds work together on consulting teams for external organizations. Between four and seven full scholarships are also reserved for Lehigh students, with funding from the Iacocca Institute, the Office of Student Access and Success, and individual donors. Other participants are recruited through a variety of global partner institutions and alumni referrals. The Global Village also invites former participants to serve as mentors.
Lehigh recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Global Village, which now boasts 2,250 alumni from 141 countries. The program has served as the springboard for other initiatives, such as the Iacocca International Internship program, which started in 2012 with a $10 million endowment from Iacocca. In 2017, the Iacocca Institute was selected to host a group of Mandela Washington Fellows for Young African Leaders based on its expertise running the Global Village program.
“We have developed a lot of new programming through our institute. And that often becomes either the inspiration or the launching point for other things that happen throughout the university,” Mendez says.
Matherly says that the next phase of internationalization at Lehigh started in the mid-2000s when the Board of Trustees charged senior leadership to develop a global strategy for the university. As a result, global engagement became an institutional priority, and several programs across the university were brought together under a single vice president for international affairs who reported directly to the president.
Journalism and global studies professor Jack Lule, PhD, who co-chaired Lehigh’s internationalization strategic planning process, says that one of the reasons internationalization has been so successful at Lehigh is that “faculty were doing international things before the university caught up with us.”
“[Internationalization] is not something that’s imposed from the top down. It’s something that bubbled up because of the scholarly interest and teaching interest of its faculty,” Lule says.
All international programming was centralized under OIA, which now comprises 10 offices and programs, including education abroad, international student and scholar services, partnerships, English language and academic support, fellowship advising, and global leadership education. The OIA portfolio also includes Lehigh’s United Nations Partnership and the Iacocca Institute.
Another big step for internationalization at Lehigh occurred in 2016, when Matherly joined the institution as senior international officer. The university soon joined the American Council on Education’s Internationalization Laboratory. The result was Global Lehigh, a 2018 internationalization strategy that was closely aligned to the Path to Prominence plan launched in 2016 by John D. Simon, PhD, who stepped down from his role as president at the end of June 2021. The institutional plan includes increasing diversity of undergraduate and graduate enrollment, hiring new faculty, and launching a new College of Health, which began offering classes in population health in fall 2020.
“Global Lehigh is completely tied to the university’s plans around recruiting, new program development, and campus expansion,” Matherly says. “The work we did with developing this Global Lehigh plan was fully embedded in the university’s larger strategy.”
Global Lehigh has five priorities: (1) leverage excellent international programs to ensure Lehigh attracts the world’s best students; (2) invest in programs that support Lehigh’s vision statement, which challenges the institution to prepare graduates who “engage with the world and lead lives of meaning”; (3) strategically partner with institutions and industry to advance innovations in teaching, research, and service; (4) expand resources, services, and infrastructure to support Lehigh’s goals to recruit and retain world-class faculty and staff; and (5) develop multifaceted engagement in regions that align with the university’s mission, vision, and goals.
Lule says that the committee that drafted the Global Lehigh plan had broad outreach among faculty and the staff, which helped contribute to buy-in across campus.
Simon says that when the Global Lehigh plan was created, he wanted to make sure that it cut across everything the institution was doing rather than serve as its own pillar. “One of the things I wanted to do here was [ensure] that being global should be foundational,” he says. “There shouldn’t be any program at the institution, any activity at the institution, that isn’t also asking the question, ‘How can we connect globally?’ I was trying to take it from being its own pillar with its own strategy to being embedded in everything that we do.”
Internationalization at Lehigh has been much more than “a list of activities that come out of the Office of International Affairs,” Simon says. “It actually has to be a culture and an intentional strategy to expose your entire community, and especially the student body, to what it means to be globally aware.”
Matherly says that partnerships, both on and off campus, have been key components of Lehigh’s approach to internationalization. The university has a portfolio of signature experiential learning programs that include its UN Partnership; the Global Entrepreneurial Fellowship through Lehigh@NasdaqCenter; and the Mountaintop Summer Experience, which includes the Global Social Impact Fellowship, an interdisciplinary program that brings together undergraduate and graduate students to do projects focused on addressing sustainable development challenges in low-income countries.
In 2004, Lehigh became the sixth university in the world to gain nongovernmental organization status (NGO) with the United Nations. (There are now around 20 institutions that have NGO designation.) Each year, more than 1,500 Lehigh faculty, staff, and students attend conferences, high-level briefings, and private meetings with ambassadors and other UN representatives in New York City and on campus. During the pandemic, the partnership had an even greater reach as more members of the campus community were able to participate in events and meetings virtually.
Bill Hunter, EdD, directs the Office of Fellowship Advising and UN Programs. “Lehigh is in a rare group of universities that have this direct access to the United Nations,” he says. “Every university in the country teaches about the UN, but [for Lehigh], the United Nations has become our classroom.”
A group of Lehigh students were even invited to a private meeting with women’s education advocate and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Malala Yousafzai, as well as the Pakistani ambassador to the United States. “It is a moment I will never ever forget,” Hunter says. “And I’m sure the students won’t either.”
Before the pandemic, Hunter’s team took groups of students, faculty, and staff to New York City for various UN briefings, conferences, and meetings. “We’re at the point now where we can guarantee every person within the Lehigh community, whether they’re faculty, staff, or students, can have a significant, tangible, meaningful interaction with the United Nations during their time at Lehigh,” he says.
Hunter often works with faculty to align their course curricula and syllabi with UN objectives, and many faculty design courses around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For example, professors in the College of Business developed an MBA course in which students identify best practices for how companies can invest resources in support of the SDGs. The students ultimately produced a series of case studies for the president of the UN General Assembly.
Emma Santini, a senior studying international relations and economics, interned with the UN Partnership program the summer after her first year of college. She is now a UN Youth Representative for Caring and Living as Neighbors, an Australian NGO that works on behalf of children affected by chronic illnesses.
“It almost gives you a little bit of a sense of imposter syndrome [when] you’re sitting in a big UN conference hall with global leaders,” Santini says. “That’s just something really unique to Lehigh, as [the institution] puts students in super-experiential opportunities.”
Beyond the high-impact practices Lehigh offers on campus and with partners in the United States, more than 40 percent of its undergraduates participate in study, research, or internships abroad. For instance, the Global Citizenship Program is an international certificate program with a cohort model that includes six academic courses, two international experiences, and project work.
Santini, who participated in the Global Citizenship Program, says, “It’s essentially a three-year program where you learn about what global citizenship is, how to practice it in the world, and what sort of local and global components interconnect.”
William Peracchio, MS, who completed his undergraduate degree at Lehigh in computer science and business, also participated in the Global Citizenship Program. He says that because the trip abroad is fully funded— originally through a Mellon Foundation grant and then by the university to maintain the program—students have to apply and be admitted before they know where they are going: “You get accepted, and then maybe a week or two later, you get a notification saying, ‘By the way, you’re going to country X in the winter.’”
OIA has partnered with the Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (ODIE) to make overseas experiences more accessible to first-generation students, low-income students, and other underrepresented student populations. One program that has come out of this partnership is Passport to Success.
In 2017, Lehigh launched the Passport to Success program after a donor gave money to cover the cost of passports for students. “We began to think about how we could leverage that gift to be about more than just about the passport itself, but also developing an international global experience,” says Donald Outing, PhD, vice president of equity and community.
Katie Radande, MEd, director of study abroad, says that while the first iteration of the program focused exclusively on study abroad, it has since expanded to include other high-impact experiences, such as a fully funded trip to Montreal, Canada, for students to use their new passports. The program has monthly lunch meetings to introduce students to global experiences, explain the value of such programs, and help students with logistics, such as filling out passport applications. The monthly programming is funded by the ODIE, and alumni donations cover the costs of passports and travel scholarships. The application process for travel scholarships is similar to the one for the Gilman Scholarship program so that students can practice applying for a competitive scholarship and working with fellowship advisers.
Around 75 to 100 students participate each year, with a total of 330 participants over the past 4 years. One participant, Amaya Apolinario, a junior English and Japanese major, says, “I joined Passport for Success, and they teach you about all the different opportunities Lehigh has and kind of hold your hand, guiding you through the different processes.”
Radande says OIA would not have been able to do the same kind of targeted outreach without its partnerships with ODIE because the latter already has working relationships built on trust with the students.
In fall 2020, Lehigh opened its new College of Health, a goal that was outlined in former President Simon’s Path to Prominence plan. It is the university’s first new college in 50 years and offers undergraduate, graduate, and executive degrees in population health, with the first group of undergraduates slated to graduate in 2024.
In fall 2021, the College of Health will also offer a bachelor of arts in community and global health, with a focus on the determinants of health, qualitative and quantitative research methods, and cultural diversity. In January 2022, the college will also launch graduate certificates in global health and population health, which will be applicable toward the full master’s programs.
The new College of Health is another example of how internationalization is embedded across the campus. Beth Dolan, PhD, interim dean, says that OIA has been involved from the very beginning in the planning for the college, with a particular focus on creating experiential learning opportunities for health students. “We want our students who are doing that global health work to have experiences out in the broader world, and OIA has been absolutely instrumental in helping us plan and execute those opportunities,” Dolan says. The college is now hiring for a new faculty position to focus on developing international learning experiences and engagement with the United Nations in cooperation with OIA
