People Development

With more than 30,000 students enrolled at its campus in Southern California, including 3,500 international students from more than 110 countries, Santa Monica College (SMC) is one of the most diverse associate’s institutions in the United States. Domestic and international students alike benefit from the college’s Global Citizenship Initiative, which provides a variety of international education opportunities across the SMC campus.

Launched by former college president Chui Tsang, PhD, in 2007, the initiative is a four-pronged strategy that promotes campus internationalization through study abroad, staff and faculty professional development, curriculum development, and international student services. Over the last decade, the initiative has led to the development of several faculty-led programs, an undergraduate research symposium, faculty and staff trips abroad, and a global citizenship requirement for all SMC associate’s degrees.

Global Citizenship Becomes an Institutional Mandate

Dean of International Education Kelley Brayton, who joined SMC in 2008, co-chairs the Global Citizenship Committee with a faculty leader. According to Brayton, “internationalization became a mandate for the institution” under Tsang’s leadership.

The college then convened a task force comprised of faculty and administrators to govern the initiative and to figure out how to make it sustainable beyond the initial funding period. In 2008 the SMC board of trustees adopted the initiative as a strategic priority and committed $200,000 a year for a three-year period. The task force eventually became a permanent standing committee, known as the Global Council, in the faculty senate.

Brayton says the program has been successful due to the support of senior administration, as well as the large amount of financial and human resources dedicated to the initiative. “I have never been at an institution where [internationalization] has had this level of support,” she says.

SMC has continued to provide funding for global citizenship activities, including earmarking $75,000 a year for study abroad scholarships. The college has also successfully pursued two Title VIA grants, which provide federal funding for foreign language, area, and international studies infrastructure-building at U.S. higher education institutions.

Kathryn E. Jeffery, PhD, who became president in 2016, remains committed to the initiative, even in the wake of a state budget crisis. “We are being very guarded around making sure that we continue to support the Global Citizenship Initiative to create opportunities for students. We don’t want that to fall off of the list of priorities,” she says.

Defining Global Citizenship

One of the first steps toward implementing the initiative was defining what “global citizenship” meant for SMC. “Dr. Tsang empowered the campus. He set the direction, but he left it up to us to figure out what exactly global citizenship would look like,” says Gordon Dossett, English professor and one of the original co-chairs of the global citizenship task force.

“Dr. Tsang saw the bigger picture and helped us realize that this was something we could work on as a faculty,” adds Janet Harclerode, chair of the English as a Second Language (ESL) department.

In 2008 SMC adopted its formal definition of global citizenship: “To be a global citizen, one is knowledgeable of peoples, customs and cultures in regions of the world beyond one’s own; understands the interdependence that holds both promise and peril for the future of the global community; and is committed to combining one’s learning with a dedication to foster a livable, sustainable world.”

According to Vice President of Academic Affairs Georgia Lorenz, PhD, the process of defining “global citizenship” eventually led to the adoption of global citizenship as an institutional learning outcome, which has had important implications for accreditation. “For something to become an institutional learning outcome is really significant. At the course and program levels, faculty will map their course outcomes to the competencies related to the institutional learning outcome” she explains.

Faculty-Led Programs Revitalize Study Abroad

When Santa Monica College student Ariana Kirsey traveled to South Africa last year, she couldn’t have imagined that sleeping in a tree house in Kruger National Park would be life changing.

Kirsey is one of 25 students who studied abroad through SMC’s faculty-led program to South Africa in January 2017. In addition to South Africa, SMC also runs annual trips to Belize and Guatemala through its Latin America Education program.

Each year, SMC sends more than 80 students abroad through its various study abroad programs, which range from one-week courses over spring break to six-week courses that are offered during winter or summer sessions.

Although SMC has offered study abroad programs since the 1980s, with the Global Citizenship Initiative the college made a conscious effort to switch from third-party providers to developing faculty-led programs that also allow SMC professors an opportunity to travel.

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Every year the college puts out a call for proposals to recruit faculty who are interested in leading trips abroad. Two professors travel with the students on each trip, and both part-time and full-time faculty are eligible to participate.

“We try to have a full-time lead faculty and then have a second faculty who may not have led study abroad before. They colead the first year, and then the second year the idea is that they would take on the lead. We wanted to rotate it so it wasn’t just a select few who could do it,” Brayton says.

SMC also offers a one-credit course, Field Studies Abroad, which launched in 2016. The program was developed specifically to target students who might not be able to travel for longer periods of time. Students travel with a faculty member for seven to 10 days over spring break.

The college approved a one-credit class called Global Studies 35 that can be customized depending on the destination. Brayton says that Field Studies courses have created opportunities for students and faculty alike because of their shorter duration.

Art history major Megan Dobbs says the Field Studies model was quite convenient in terms of time and affordability. She traveled to Denmark in March 2017 as part of a course titled Vikings, Socialism, and Sustainability: Copenhagen Past and Present.

“The trip took me out of my personal bubble and reminded me to think of the world on a much grander scale. This trip continues to remind me that I need to make an effort to step out of my comfort zone and have new experiences,” says Dobbs, who transferred to the University of California-Berkeley in fall 2017.

The college also strives to keep its study abroad programs affordable. “We really work hard on creating very low-cost study abroad. We have become an informal travel agent here at SMC and we work with in-country vendors,” Brayton explains.

The college provides $75,000 in study abroad scholarships every year, and more than half of all students going abroad receive $500 to $2,000 based on need. Many students are first-generation college students, and more than half of SMC’s study abroad participants are minorities. In addition, they are seeing an increased number of international students joining faculty-led programs.

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“A lot of our students have never left LA before. Study abroad is an experience that can really shift their perspectives on what it means to be a global citizen,” says Associate Dean of Student Life Nancy Grass, PhD, who led students to South Africa in 2008 and 2012.

Comprehensive Support for International Students

For the last five years, Santa Monica College has had the second largest international student population of any community college in the United States, according to the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors data. SMC attracts students from around the world largely because of its reputation as a top transfer school.

While some students pursue shorter academic certificates, the majority of its 3,500 international students seek admission to nearby four-year institutions such as the various campuses of the University of California (UC). International students receive academic and immigration advising, among other support services, through the International Education Center and the International Education Counseling Center.

Omar Bishr, an economics major from Egypt, plans to transfer to the University of California. “From the moment I applied, the international office responded to all of my concerns. When I came to SMC, I felt like I was really welcomed to the school and that my presence matters. I really liked that I was given a presentation by counselors explaining to me the system of the college and how to choose my classes in order to transfer,” he says.

One initiative that seeks to promote interaction between international and domestic students is a language and culture exchange program run jointly between the modern languages and ESL departments. International students are paired with domestic students studying their language.

“We create an online forum for them and have an orientation. They can meet on that day, but if they don’t then they can go into the forum and introduce themselves and find people for language exchange online,” says Liz Koening, an ESL faculty member.

Approximately 130 students participate per semester. Music major Nahalia Samuels says she took part in order to practice her language skills with a native speaker.

“For me, having a language partner for Korean 1 and Korean 2 made all the difference in my reading, writing and speaking skills. I also wished to learn more about the...culture of the language I’m studying and to offer help as a native English speaker towards my ESL partner. I feel the program helps foreign students to connect with the campus community and expose us domestic students to a seemingly hidden population on campus,” she says.

Professional Development Helps Internationalize the Curriculum

Early on, SMC recognized that it was necessary to internationalize the faculty in order to reach the long-term goal of campus internationalization, especially in the classroom. The Global Citizenship Initiative thus led to the creation of a number of professional development opportunities abroad for faculty and staff.

In 2007, the first group of SMC faculty and staff traveled to Austria to attend the Salzburg Global Seminar, where they learned about topics such as intercultural communication and social justice. Other cohorts have subsequently visited the Beijing Center for Chinese Studies in China and Bahcesehir University in Istanbul, Turkey, with the last group traveling in 2015. Over the past 10 years, more than 125 SMC faculty and staff participated in the professional development programs to Austria, China, and Turkey.

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Peggy Kravitz, international education counselor, traveled to Austria, China, and Turkey. “It was a fabulous way to learn about those cultures, which of course I deal with in my work with international students,” she says.

Grass, who traveled to China, adds that one of the greatest benefits of the programs is the fact it was open to all full-time employees on campus.

“It wasn’t just faculty or administrators who could go, but technicians and custodians could apply as well. They really took a cross-section of the college that allowed for people to really get to know each other in a whole new way,” she says.

Brayton says the idea was to help staff who are often on the front line of student services gain a greater appreciation for the international student experience at SMC. “Classified staff are the ones who have a lot of casual interactions with students every day. The more they understand some of the challenges of being abroad, the more they that can connect with our international student population,” she says.

Upon their return to campus, faculty members must develop modules for their courses, and staff are to participate in international activities on campus, such as International Education Week.

In addition to the trips abroad, faculty can apply for a number of Global Grants ranging from $3,000 to $10,000 that fund projects and events, such as speakers, film screenings, and field trips, throughout the year. Harclerode, for example, received a Global Grant to take her ESL classes to various sites around Los Angeles, including the Watts Towers and the Los Angeles River. “The idea was to take them to the parts of LA they might not get to on their own,” she says.

Promoting Global Citizenship Through Student Research

To weave the idea of global citizenship into the fabric of campus life, SMC chooses a theme for each academic year and encourages faculty to develop related course modules. The current theme—“Gender Equity: Is Equity Enough?”—has been running for two years. In 2017–2018, the campus is exploring the topic of “Promise and Peril of a Global Community.” Previous years’ themes have included water, food, poverty and wealth, and peace and security.

The campus also holds an annual research symposium, where students are invited to submit and present academic and creative projects related to the annual academic theme.

Grass, who chaired the first symposium in 2010, says the idea for a campuswide research symposium emerged from the need to better prepare students to transfer to four-year universities: “When students come from the community college, even if they are really well prepared academically, they’re not ready to jump into junior-level research projects. Having the symposium encouraged faculty to have students do original research around this idea of global citizenship.”

“When we put out the call for proposals, it allows students to put forward what global citizenship means to them in the context of their education,” adds Delphine Broccard, communications professor and current symposium chair. “We can really discuss what global citizenship means in the different disciplines.”

Students submit proposals for projects ranging from short films, persuasive speeches, and photography to responses to study abroad experiences and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) research. Students can win cash prizes for the best entries in different categories. In 2016, Kenta Tanaka, an international student from Japan, won the President’s Award and $500 for a design project that explored the theme of gender equity in fashion. “I mixed menswear and womenswear. In fashion, we call it gender blur,” he says.

Global Citizenship Spans the Curriculum

SMC has used funding from one of its two Title VIA grants to develop a global studies major. Global studies at Santa Monica is an interdisciplinary program designed to increase students’ knowledge and understanding of the processes of globalization and their impacts on societies, cultures, and environments around the world. Coursework includes world geography, international political economy, experiential learning, and foreign language.

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The Global Citizenship Initiative has also given impetus to the development of a global citizenship degree requirement for all students receiving an associate’s degree. Students can meet the requirement either by studying abroad or taking an approved global citizenship course.

“The reality is that not a lot of students can participate in study abroad. But where students are going to be the most impacted by global learning is in the classroom. Infusing global perspectives into the general education curriculum is where we can reach a lot of students. Hopefully, that exposure highlights some of the international opportunities for them, not just here at Santa Monica but beyond,” Brayton says.

In the canons of international education, one truth stands above all others: a college or university serious about educating students about the world must first educate its faculty. Few colleges have done this with more gusto than the University of Richmond, which since 1989 has used its own funds to send faculty on two- and three-week seminars to 26 countries on six continents, where typically they engage politicians, intellectuals, generals, artists, and ordinary folks in a whirlwind of visits to parliaments, campuses, museums, and other cultural sites.

“It really is a boot camp. We have a very strict schedule,” said Uliana F. Gabara, dean and Carole M. Weinstein Chair of International Education and impresario of the Faculty Seminars Abroad. “We spread our interest and exposure very broadly. We want to meet as many people as possible, not just academics, and to hear about all aspects of this place where we are.”

Going Beyond the Expected

Most seminars take Richmond faculty off the beaten track. In Turkey in 2005, they visited the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, but also held extended discussions with Turkish generals and university rectors about the role of the military and the place of Islam in the modern, secular Turkish state. When the Institute of International Education presented the first Andrew Heiskell Awards for Innovation in International Education in 2002, Richmond’s Faculty Seminar Abroad received a citation.

Gabara, a Russian literature scholar who was raised in Tashkent in the then–Soviet Union and in Poland, noted that several of the countries that she and her colleagues explored no longer exist, including Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia. [See table for full roster of seminars.]

“Some people have said, ‘Why can’t we go to France and Switzerland?’ My response has always been that these seminars go to places that are difficult to navigate on your own,” said Gabara, a Bennington graduate who came to Richmond to teach Russian in the mid-1980s and was quickly tapped to create and direct a new, centralized Office of International Education.

Faculty Development Increases International Perspectives

“It became clear that if one wanted to approach internationalization broadly across the disciplines, what we needed to do was start with the faculty,” the dean said. The seminars had a number of goals, including having faculty talk with each other across disciplines, take a fresh look at important world issues, and incorporate this new understanding into their teaching and research.

Richmond is a richly endowed private university with roots that date to 1830, when in its first incarnation it was a Baptist seminary for men. It became Richmond College in 1840. During the Civil War, Confederate soldiers used the college as a hospital, then federal troops turned the classrooms into a barracks. The college in 1914 found a spacious new home in the woods on Richmond’s West End on the site of an abandoned amusement park. Today 2,900 undergraduate and 550 graduate students attend classes on the picturesque, 350-acre campus. Some 542 students studied abroad in 2004-2005.

Even seasoned faculty travelers find that the seminars afford a special, intense opportunity to learn about other countries and cultures. Gabara, who has participated in 11 of the 13 seminars, said, “What I learn is just incomparable to what I or anyone would learn just by going to these places on our own.”

For Douglas A. Hicks, associate professor of leadership studies and religion and director of the Center for Civic Engagement, the opportunity to travel to India in 1999 after his first year on the faculty allowed him to realize a longtime ambition.

Hicks holds a divinity degree from Duke as well as a Ph.D. in religion, ethics, and economics from Harvard, where one of his doctoral advisers was Amartya Sen, the economist and Nobel Laureate noted for bringing ethical questions to the fore in policy debates about human development. Hicks’ research had taken him to several countries in Africa and Latin America, but never to his mentor’s homeland of India.

“I work on globalization and inequality and also religion and society. For all those issues, India is a major player,” said Hicks, who is also a Presbyterian minister. “I really needed to learn more about India on the ground, to take abstract ideas and make them real.”

“It was an overpowering experience. Indian culture in so many ways is the most colorful of any I’ve experienced,” said Hicks, a native of Indiana. “You had all the extremes: extreme wealth, extreme poverty, the smells, the colors, the rich cultural tradition, and the impoverished economic life. We saw everything from Calcutta streets flooded from sewage problems to the beauty of Darjeeling, Banaras, and the Taj Mahal.”

The trip directly influenced several courses Hicks teaches as well as a book he wrote on Religion and the Workplace. “I couldn’t possibly have written the section on India and religious diversity without this trip. My ‘Leadership and Religious Values’ course now has a section on India, and the ‘Ethics and Economics’ course I team teach had a special focus on India this semester,” Hicks said. “One of the student research projects was on prenatal sex selection,a terrible problem in India with the spread of cheap ultrasound technology and one of the pressing moral issues of our time.”

Sydney Watts, an associate professor of history and expert on eighteenth century France, knew when she came to Richmond in 1999 from Cornell University “that there was a lot of support here for research abroad, so I anticipated spending summers in the archives in France. But I didn’t learn of the faculty seminars until I started work.” Watts didn’t raise her hand for seminars in South Africa in 2000 or Australia and New Zealand in 2001, but she was ready when Gabara announced the 2002 seminar would go to Vietnam and Thailand.

Watts, who was born in Belgium (her parents worked for the U.S. Department of State) and spent several years living and working in France, said, “I felt I was pretty international when I arrived, but it wasn’t until traveling to Vietnam and Thailand that I realized how important it was for me to see a non-Western society, especially one with francophone roots and remnants of French culture, but very, very different” from France. Watts added, “That was my initial attraction to the seminar, to look at how French culture had influenced Vietnamese cuisine and identity.”

“I teach on the history of work,” said Watts, whose book, Meat Matters: Butchers, Politics and Market Culture in Eighteenth-Century Paris, came out in June 2006. “We talk a lot about industrialization and the effects on people when they see their world around them changing.” The journey to Vietnam gave the historian an opportunity to see this happening to a society “in real time.”

“I couldn’t substitute anything for that experience. It was such an instrumental part of my academic formation,” said Watts, who also got to ride an elephant with Gabara in Chiang Mai, Thailand, a city famed for its temples, silk, and handcrafts.

She and Gabara were surprised at how few French speakers they encountered in Vietnam, where French colonial rule ended half a century ago. “The markers in nonlinguistic terms were much stronger than the language because of the cuisine,” Gabara noted “The foods and architecture in Vietnam are still very strongly marked by (the French influence). It’s a complex way in which colonization survives even while the linguistic colonization disappears.”

“The fascinating thing for all 10 of us was that at no point did we encounter a moment of hostility or even crossed looks, even though this was (still) close to the end of the Vietnam war,” Gabara said.

The experience has left its mark on Watts both as a teacher and a mentor. Watts, who spent a year at Oxford while an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College, said, “Now when I advise students to go abroad I tend to push them away from studying at Oxford or St. Andrews and say, ‘Why don’t you think about someplace really different, where you are a minority, where you really are experiencing a totally different culture from your own?’”

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A third of the Richmond faculty has gone on these seminars; some have gone on multiple trips. Participants do preparatory work during the semester before departure, with each making a presentation on that country or region from his or her disciplinary perspective. Afterwards, they write reports that Gabara posts on the OIP Web site.

With other demands on faculty time, it works out that most who want to go are welcome. “We’ve turned away very few people,” said Gabara. “But there’s still a great need to discover new territories and devote time to this kind of general education for faculty.”

The next seminar tentatively is set for China, South Korea, and Malaysia in 2007. Gabara said, “Asia doesn’t have enough play on this campus. Like most (U.S.) institutions, we still have the drag of a Eurocentric and U.S.-centered approach.”

An Intense 24/7 Experience

Gabara, president of the Association of International Education Administrators, does not scout the countries in advance. Instead, she relies on her extensive network of local contacts—including counterparts at universities and Fulbright commissions—to arrange what amounts to an academically oriented VIP tour.

The itineraries include famous sights. “We don’t cut out what some would sneeringly call the tourist stops. When we go to India, we don’t ignore the Taj Mahal, but we want to see it in context, with highly skilled colleagues as our guides,” she said.

Faculty members do not receive a stipend for going on the seminar, but all of their expenses are covered. Gabara estimates the value of each trip to be $5,000. Families are not invited. “That’s an absolute no-no because these seminars really are, in the popular parlance, 24/7. It’s a very intense experience,” said Gabara, who earned her Ph.D. in Russian literature at the University of Virginia after a master’s at the University of Warsaw.

For faculty, the seminars are not just about learning the history and mores of other countries, but developing deeper bonds with each other.

The 10 faculty who set off on a two-week trip to Turkey and Cyprus in May 2005 journeyed along the Silk Road from the Aegean coast to Kayseri, saw the rock and cave formations in Cappadocia, and the Greco-Roman ruins of Pergamon, Ephesus, and Hierapolis. 

As they stood in awe inside the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Joseph J. Essid, director of Richmond’s Writing Center, was unconvinced when the group’s thoroughly westernized guide said, “Organized religion is over.  It is dying here.” His eyes turned to a group of men praying nearby. “A few are now glaring at us,” he wrote. “Do these men understand our guide’s English? Or are they staring at foreigners who gawk at the majesty of the Ottoman era, who snap photos in one of their most venerable houses of worship?”

At a university, they found that women students—but not staff—now can wear the hijab on campus, but not in class. “This shift in Turkish policy, and polity, may seem fragile, but it seems just the sort of compromise about deeply divisive moral issues that a healthy democracy should make,” Essid wrote. Later he added, “The more we travel in Turkey…the more I realize that despite 80 years of secular government, daily devotion to Allah remains a powerful part of life.”

For Nuray Luk Grove, director of ESL Services, the seminar marked a return to the homeland she left six years earlier. Eager to share the “real” Turkey with her colleagues, she led them to her uncle’s house in a poor Ankara neighborhood—an uncle she intensely disliked as a girl for his religious zealotry. “His daughters had to wear the burqa; black and ugly. He was a scary man,” she wrote.

But now she saw him as an “almost saint-like” old man with “a beautiful smile, sad eyes, (and) kind heart” who gave each of them prayer beads that he had carved himself.

Mike Spear, a journalism faculty member who has participated in several seminars, summed up the importance of faculty seminars. “I cannot emphasize enough its value to the university, to the faculty members who participate, and to me,” he said. “It is a chance to further knowledge and get a close look at an area that involves scholarship within individual disciplines,” he said. “The chance to get away from books and meet source people in another country is both invigorating and enlightening. Just as important, it gives faculty members, who are often too busy on campus to get to know each other, a chance to get acquainted and swap ideas.”

University of Richmond

Read more about University of Richmond

From the construction cranes that tower over the future Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering to the muddy terrain outside the Birck Nanotechnology Center—open but not yet landscaped—Purdue University has the hallmarks of an institution on the move. Purdue has embarked upon an audacious campaign to expand the Boilermakers’ already considerable presence in engineering, science, technology, and agriculture. The Nanotechnology Center, with a clean room behind its shimmering glass facade, is sprouting in Discovery Park, a $100 million endeavor designed to bring innovation through multidisciplinary action. Two hundred new faculty have been hired and 100 more soon will be unpacking books and occupying new labs on the West Lafayette campus.  The university is carrying out a strategic plan with the aim of “leading the world in the basic and applied sciences and engineering and improving society at home and abroad.” With such a lofty goal, improving Purdue’s international reach has been central to President Martin C. Jischke’s strategy.

Refusing to Settle for Less

As an engineering Mecca, Purdue long has had globe-trotting professors and an international roster of graduate students. But it did not create an Office of International Programs until the mid-1990s. It already enrolled 2,600 international students when Mike Brzezinski, director of the Office of International Students and Scholars, and Dean of Admissions Doug Christiansen proposed a three-year blueprint with a six-figure price tag to step up international recruiting. A senior administrator offered $40,000 for the first year’s expenses “until we see how it goes.” They turned down the $40,000.

The administrator “wasn’t very pleased. ‘What do you mean you’re not going to take it?’ I said, ‘I’m trying to be a good steward here. One year in and out of the market on the lower end won’t do it,’” Christiansen recalled.

“He called us back two or three days later and said nobody had ever turned down money before and we must clearly believe in what we were doing, so he funded all three years,” said Christiansen.

Over the next decade, Purdue boosted international enrollment to 4,831 and tripled the number of international undergraduates. In the 2005 Open Doors report by the Institute of International Education, it ranked No. 6 in international enrollment, trailing only the University of Southern California, the University of Illinois, the University of Texas, Columbia University, and New York University (Purdue ranked No. 3 among public universities).

“The reason international recruiting works at Purdue is because our two teams work together,” said Brzezinski. At other universities, said Christiansen, “there is often a huge divide between the two.” The two offices split international recruiting chores, taking a dozen or more two-week trips each year to tell Purdue’s story.

In fall 1993, there were 92 international students in Purdue’s freshman class; by fall 2005, that number had risen to 401. Brzezinski and Christiansen (who recently became  Vanderbilt University’s associate provost for enrollment and dean of admissions) have given workshops on how Purdue engineered this international growth spurt. Peers always are surprised to hear it was done by collaboration and not “administrative force,” said Christiansen.

Sometimes, even they are surprised at how far that word has gotten. When Brzezinski visited the University of Kuwait in 2005, the provost proudly showed him the screensaver photograph on his laptop computer: a scene of the Purdue campus in winter. “I was there. I took that,” said the provost. His son, unbeknownst to Brzezinski, was a Boilermaker. 

While international students can secure research and teaching assistantships to pay for graduate studies, the families who send sons and daughters from other countries to Purdue for bachelor degrees generally must bear the costs themselves. Tuition, room, and board now top $31,000 a year, versus $17,000 for in-state residents. President Jischke explains Purdue’s growing popularity this way: “Here we are in the middle of the country in a modest-sized community in an environment that is safe. We have a reputation of being a serious, hard-working institution; not a lot of frivolity here. It fits with what these families want for their kids.”

Building on Engineering, Agriculture, and Management Strengths

Jischke, a former president of Iowa State University, said, “The countries that enroll the largest number of international students here tend to be developing countries. And if you ask in a developing country, ‘What kind of education would best prepare you for the future?’ you’d describe Purdue to a T: agriculture to feed people; science and technology to grow and globalize that economy; modern management techniques of the sort we develop in the Krannert School of Management. These countries also need to grow their pharmaceutical industries. It all lines up with what Purdue is good at.”

Almost 6,300, or more than 20 percent, of Purdue’s 31,000 undergraduates are prospective engineers. Purdue was founded in 1869 as a land grant institution with the help of a $150,000 gift from local businessman John Purdue. The fledgling university honored its benefactor’s request to bury him on the lawn in front of University Hall.

Purdue soon became an agricultural powerhouse. The international programs office, in its first incarnation, was housed in the College of Agriculture, and it was from there that Purdue began a concerted effort to encourage study abroad.

As recently as the late 1980s, only 30 Purdue students studied abroad each year. The number inched up to 222 in 1995 and topped 400 by 2000. Since then, the growth accelerated to 1,025 in 2004-2005. Thanks to an infusion of funds from President Jischke and Provost Sally Mason, more than a quarter of the students who studied abroad in 2005-2006 received scholarships averaging $550. 

Flexibility Has Increased  

Participation Two thirds of these students take courses taught overseas by Purdue faculty during the summer or “Maymester” or on shorter trips during spring break. The summer courses— more than 30 were offered in 2006—last six to eight weeks. “Longer is better than shorter, but something is better than nothing. If even a short-term program is done well, we think it can be the start of a transformation for the future,” said Brian Harley, director of the Office of Study Abroad. 

Dean of International Programs Riall W. Nolan makes no apologies for the profusion of summer programs. “You’ve got to face reality. A lot of these students have obligations. They have families, they have jobs, they have research projects, they have loans to pay off. To an increasing extent, students want less than a semester or full year abroad,” he said. 

Nolan, an anthropologist and onetime Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal who speaks Wolof, Bassari, Melanesian Pidgin, and French and has taught in Papua New Guinea, Tunisia, and Sri Lanka, said, “This is a controversial point, but I’m of a mind that the benefits of learning internationally can be accrued in as little as a week.” 

 “We took incoming freshman for five days up to Québec last summer and I would maintain we fundamentally changed their world view. They don’t see themselves in the same way,” said Nolan, who in addition to scholarly works such as Development Anthropology: Encounters in the Real World has written books for armchair adventurers and travelers such as Bushwalking in Papua New Guinea.

When Purdue began a University Honors Program in 2005, it offered the 74 freshman an opportunity to study abroad before setting foot inside a classroom in West Lafayette.

Thirty-eight boarded buses for the journey to Université Laval in Québec, where they attended seminars on U.S.-Canada relations, the Canadian health and welfare systems, and Native issues. 

Honors program director Christian Oseto said, “Very selfishly, what we’re trying to do (is produce) students who at the end of four years perhaps will receive a Fulbright, a Rhodes, a Marshall, a Truman, an Eisenhower, a Churchill (scholarship). We can’t do this at the end of their junior year or the start of their senior year. We’ve got to do this from day one.” 

Jischke, who pushed for the creation of the honors program, said today’s college students “are more at home in other parts of the world. They are more global in their outlook. It amazes me how readily students will pack up a suitcase, make sure they have a credit card, get on an airplane, and go anywhere in the world.”

Almost 10 percent of the Purdue Class of 2004 had studied abroad for credit. “I’d like to see 20 percent of our graduates have a study abroad experience,” said Harley, a sociologist who previously directed 11 study centers in West Europe, Asia, and Latin America for Brethren Colleges Abroad (BCA).

Harley had just returned from a frenetic trip to India where he visited 14 institutions in two weeks looking for more exchange partners. To keep Purdue’s study abroad enterprise growing, “we have to look at financial models that will make it sustainable and affordable for students. It does us no good to create new highpriced programs for students,” he said.

Men outnumber women at Purdue 3 to 2, but women outnumber men 3 to 2 among the study abroad contingent. Harley said some students shy away from studying abroad during the regular terms because of the steep demands in their majors. “Students are practical. They don’t want to risk not graduating on time,” he said. “That’s our goal, too. In the absence of flexibility—real or perceived—that’s why so many summer programs have been launched.”

Partnerships ensure that the courses Purdue students take at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia or at BOKU, the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria, count toward their majors.

Purdue also has streamlined the paperwork for studying abroad. IT Director William Snyder and Internet Applications Specialist Carleigh Vollbrecht Hwang ’01 find ways to help students make sense of the myriad of study abroad options and cut through red tape. The many features on a customized Web portal called My  Study  Abroad include student ratings of past Purdue programs.

My Study Abroad grew out of Hwang’s frustrations as an undergraduate. “I applied to study abroad, but found the process too difficult with all the hoops you had to jump through,” she recalled. “I couldn’t get any information on financial aid, I couldn’t find anything. It was just too hard. That’s why My Study Abroad blossomed as it did. 

Seedbeds for Internationalization

Andrew Gillespie, associate dean for international programs, was among the professors who made the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources a seedbed for Purdue’s internationalization. The forestry professor codirected a summer program on sustainable land use that alternates between Purdue and SLU: Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala, Sweden. 

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Forestry is a prime example of an industry that has globalized, said Gillespie. “Look at Brazil. The trees they grow in Brazil for paper are Loblolly pines from the Southeast United States. Our companies shipped down the species, and now Brazil is growing them faster than we can in the states. Brazil also is growing our soybeans at a very competitive rate.”

“Indiana ships logs out for processing to China, which returns them as furniture. The Chinese have the same species (of trees) we do. Once they figure out the physical properties, they’ll be using their own resources to make that furniture,” said Gillespie. “We’re part of a global society that includes resources, markets, food, energy. It’s critical that we get our students out to see what’s going on in these local markets to see how other people think about and deal with similar issues in different ways.”

The College of Agriculture and Natural Resources sends 150 to 170 students to study abroad each year. Linda Vallade, program leader for study abroad, said, “Even if these students don’t work abroad, a lot will work for global companies. They have to learn what other countries need.” The College of Agriculture offers semester-long programs in Australia, New Zealand, France, Ireland, Sweden, and Honduras.

Local Students Benefit from Internationalizing

Two-thirds of Purdue undergraduates hail from Indiana, and almost half its 380,000 alumni live in Indiana. Jischke said that underscores the importance of  “Hoosier kids having an international experience in order to get a first rate education.”

“Indiana is affected by these international forces as much as any state in the nation,” added Jischke. “We’re the most manufacturing intensive state in the nation, and the impact of China, India, and the other countries in Asia in particular on manufacturing has been substantial,” he said.

“For these students to get not just good jobs but be leaders in the Indiana economy, they need an international experience to equip them for the world,” he said.

Connecting to Asia

More than half of Purdue’s 4,831 international students in 2005 came from India (1,020), China (782), and South Korea (680); Taiwan, Indonesia, and Malaysia accounted for 600 more. “The Asian basin is a huge supplier of talent,” said Jischke. “With their booming economies, China and India are growing a middle class and upper middle class that has the capacity to send their children to the great universities of the world, including Purdue.” Jischke credits his predecessor, Steven Beering, with recognizing that early on.

Purdue has opened alumni clubs in India and China, looking to bolster its Asian connections through the loyalty of alumni, many in top posts in commerce and the academy. Jischke is spending $150,000 a year on an Asian Initiative that funds Purdue faculty to engage in joint research projects, such as a science education project with Peking University and a partnership with the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai on factoring community needs into climate change models. The coordinator of the Asian Initiative is Matthew Sikora, a former scheduler for Indiana’s governor who also worked on Asian trade missions for the state.

Part of his job, said Sikora, is simply to make sure that Purdue’s 1,800 faculty members are aware of what each other is doing in Asia, and to get them to consider how to collaborate. “I’m the matchmaker,” said the 30-year-old Sikora. “Our professors see each other in an airport in Beijing, not having known this other person was there. Not that we’re trying to stop it; faculty can do what they want, and we encourage that,” he said. “But when they go out there, we want them to connect with two or three alumni, host an event, or do something (extra).” 

Sikora accompanied Harley on the fast-paced trip over spring break to visit 14 institutions across India in search of more students and partners. “In one case they told us we were one of 250 overseas institutions that would visit them this year,” said Sikora. “Other universities were ready for us to sign on the dotted line because they don’t have much in the way of international collaboration going.”

At some stops, they discussed the possibilities of asymmetrical exchanges, such as Purdue’s sending 20 undergraduates to study in India for two weeks in the summer, with the host institution in return sending a graduate student to West Lafayette for a full semester.

Mike Brzezinski, who lived in China for seven years and speaks fluent Mandarin, accompanied Richard Cosier, dean of the Krannert School of Management, on his first trip to China. Cosier and other senior administrators made three more trips over the next 12 months to lay the groundwork for Krannert’s first study abroad programs in China. The business school now has exchanges with Tsinghua University in Beijing and Guanghua School of Management at Beijing University. Krannert also struck a cooperative agreement with Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, a provincial capital. 

Some 100 Purdue business students studied in China last May. Cosier said, “The interest level among our students is phenomenal; they are ready for a global experience. Now it’s up to us to provide the opportunities.”

The Krannert School also partners with the German International School of Management Administration in Hanover, Germany, to offer a Purdue MBA in 11 months. That program has produced 450 alumni in five years and served as “a great avenue to get our faculty over to Europe,” he said.

“The days of focusing on a domestic U.S. career for U.S. business school graduates are getting fewer and fewer,” said Cosier, a former planning engineer. “You could have someone graduate who might get an initial job in say, Flint, Michigan. But in a short period it’s very likely that person will be moved to an international location.”

Growing Internship Programs

Purdue students are keen on internships abroad as well. Mechanical engineers at Purdue have several pathways under an unusual program called Global Engineering Alliance for Research and Education (GEARE) that began as a partnership with Universität Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 2002 and now has expanded to Shanghai Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, China, the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, India, and Monterrey Tech (Tecnológico de Monterrey) in Mexico. 

Eckhard A. Groll, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of global initiatives and internships for the School of Mechanical Engineering, said GEARE combines a semester study abroad with a three-month international internship in engineering and participation over a full academic year in a multinational design team project. Students from the international universities come to Indiana to take classes, work on the design projects and do internships with such companies as Cummins, John Deere, Siemens, and Ford Motor Co.

The first half-dozen GEARE students studied in Germany in 2003. By 2005, there were 15 in Germany, China, and India, and Groll projects that 22 will study abroad in 2008. “For a Midwest university, it’s still a little bit of a hard sell, but we’re on the right track,” said the German-born Groll. Although all the engineering courses are taught in English, GEARE requires the Purdue students to complete three semesters of language before heading overseas.

Only one in eight mechanical engineering students at Purdue is female, but women comprise 30 percent of those taking part in GEARE. Groll speculated that they are drawn to the challenging program by the opportunity to experience teamwork and build leadership skills. (Overall, one-fifth of Purdue’s engineering majors are female.)

The College of Consumer and Family Sciences also offers its students internships around the world, especially through its top-rated School of Hospitality and Tourism Management. Alastair M. Morrison, associate dean for learning and director of international programs, said, “We’ve had a strong focus on study abroad since 1999.” Only 14 of the college’s 1,800 students studied abroad that year. Now, 6 percent to 7 percent of the 2,000 students head overseas each year.

Morrison, a Scotsman, is a globe-trotting consultant for the World Tourism Organization and other international organizations. He was among the experts that the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Tourism turned to for marketing advice in preparation for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. 

Instructor and Chef Carl A. Behnke has led future restaurant managers, nutrition majors, and other students on five study tours across Europe. Behnke’s students learn the hospitality trade in part by serving lunch in the John Purdue Room, a full service restaurant inside the college. Behnke, a Culinary Institute of America graduate, said, “If our students are going to be in the industry of lodging and restaurants and tourism, then they need to get out of the midwestern mindset and get a global approach.”

“Hospitality is global; tourism is global. We can’t restrict ourselves to one part of the world,” said Behnke, who visited China in July with nine other Purdue faculty members.

The college sends six to eight students each year on a five-month internship at the fivestar Jinling Hotel in Nanjing, China. They study Mandarin while rotating through three departments at the hotel. 

Sometimes, students or parents need convincing that an internship in Nanjing is essential to a successful future in the hospitality business. Dennis Savaiano, dean of the College of Consumer and Family Sciences, recalled that the mother of a student from northern Indiana did not want him to take the all-expenses-paid internship. “I talked with her for 30 minutes about China’s being a very safe place and how luxurious and comfortable was the hotel where he was going to be living,” said Savaiano. “But most of all we talked about Brad’s future in the hotel business, and how by spending five months immersed in the Chinese culture Brad would come to understand that not everyone sees hospitality the same way.”

Savaiano allayed the mother’s concerns; the young man went to Nanjing and after graduation landed a job as codirector of the international visitors desk at the Marriott in Chicago. “He never would have gotten that job without the internship in China,” said Savaiano. 

Savaiano said it’s equally important to bring international students to West Lafayette. “It provides an environment for our students second to none in terms of seeing and learning to work with people of different cultures,” he said. Study abroad cannot keep growing “at the same logarithmic rate,” he added, which makes international enrollments and exchanges even more important.

Senior Evan Kelsay, 22, of Indianapolis, parlayed a semester at City University of Hong Kong into an unforgettable internship with the Asia TV Network.

“I wanted to study abroad in some place none of my friends had been to,” said Kelsay, a management major. “A guy in the study abroad office who had studied in Japan said, ‘Why don’t you look through some of these Asia programs?’ I thought, ‘Hey, I’m a business major. It makes sense to study in China, because that’s exactly where everything is going.” He settled on Hong Kong, the former British crown colony.

Before departing for the Spring 2005 semester, Kelsay asked the Purdue career office if they could help him find a summer internship as well in Hong Kong. “I told them I’d work in any business, but I did have a concentration in journalism,” he said. They gave him the email address of an alumnus who owns the Asia Television Network.

“I e-mailed him and said, ‘I’m going to be in Hong Kong over the summer. Is there any way that I can help you, or do you have any suggestions on how to get an internship in Hong Kong?’ He replied right away: ‘How would you like to be an intern for our nightly English news program?’ My jaw dropped to the floor,” he recounted.

Even before classes were done, Kelsay volunteered to spend Thursday afternoons at the station.  “I thought I was going to be running coffee all summer and I was completely fine with that,” he said. But on his third Thursday, “I got a call that morning saying, ‘Evan, we need you to cover this press conference.’” They aired his story and for the next five months Kelsay contributed on- and off-air stories to the broadcast, sometimes two a night. His parents set their alarms for 6 a.m. to watch the show live on cable television 13 time zones away.

Jennifer Ramos, 21, of Frankfort, Indiana, a double major in Spanish and in hospitality and tourism management, spent summer 2004 on a Purdue study abroad program in Mazatlan, Mexico, and studied in Argentina this summer. She went to England last fall, spent time over the winter holiday in Germany, France, and the Netherlands, and crossed the pond again to spend spring break in Spain and England.

“All my friends think I’m crazy because I just save all my money and travel. They don’t really understand why I want to go places,” noted Ramos.

Provost Sally K. Mason said employers are eager to find students with resumes like those of Kelsay and Ramos. “Our corporate partners tell us they want students with an international perspective and world view,” said the biologist. But she stressed the importance of making the curriculum and atmosphere in West Lafayette as diverse and globally minded as possible. The strides made under Jischke and Mason—the creation of Discovery Park, the faculty expansion, and a $1.5 billion fundraising drive that is nearing completion—all are pushing Purdue in that direction.

Mason noted that more than a third of Purdue’s faculty has been hired in the past five years; within five more years, two-thirds will be new. The infusion of new blood already has brought an explosion in sponsored research on the campus and a proliferation of international research collaborations. “We have a lot of seeds planted,” said Mason.

There is also a place in this international picture for the humanists on the faculty. Associate Professor of Spanish and African American Studies Antonio Tillis has taken students to study in Martinique, Cuba, Brazil, Puerto Rico, and France. Tillis, who specializes in the literature of the Spanish-speaking African diaspora, said, “As my students engage in Brazil or Cuba, I am also engaging there.”

Before travel restrictions prevented a return to Havana, Tillis created a course with a political scientist and two agriculture professors that examined the sugar, tobacco, and tourism industries in postrevolutionary Cuba. “We’re fortunate to have lots of initiatives out of the Office of International Programs for faculty to write grants to get seed money to develop courses,” said Tillis. “That stretches us academically and also creates the best course selections for our students. … Whether you are studying rural sociology or medieval Spanish literature, there are global implications for all of those disciplines.”

Focused Thinking

President Jischke, asked what his advice would be for campuses just setting out to internationalize, replied, “Don’t try to boil the ocean.  Have a couple of strategic, focused initiatives with a very high promise of paying off, that play to the institution’s strengths.”

Riall Nolan, who previously ran international programs at two other universities, summed it up: “There’s no better time to be in international education.”

Purdue University

Read more about Purdue University

Many liberal arts colleges and universities founded in colonial times and the century after U.S. independence jettisoned their founders’ religiosity, but not Earlham College. Earlham is the proud bearer of a Quaker heritage in Indiana that began after farmers who could no longer abide slavery migrated from North Carolina to the Northwest Territory in the early 1800s. Soon the Quaker population of Richmond, Indiana, rivaled Philadelphia’s. The Indiana Friends in 1847 established a boarding school that a dozen years later became Earlham College—named for the home of a prominent Quaker minister in England and pronounced with a silent h (like Durham).

Earlham is still imbued with Quakerism. The 100-member faculty makes decisions not by vote but by seeking consensus on issues small and large. Their biweekly meetings in unadorned Stout Meetinghouse are led not by the president or deans, but by a clerk of the faculty chosen by his or her peers. President Doug Bennett also presides over a Quaker seminary, the Earlham School of Religion. Upwards of a quarter of the faculty and 15 percent of the students are Quakers, although those are only estimates. Len Clark, provost and academic dean, once tried to count the Quakers on the faculty for the board of trustees. “But when you say, ‘Now, are you actually a Quaker?’ Quakers tend to answer not ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ but ‘Why would you want to know that?’” Clark said. “It’s sort of like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: The numbers change if you try to count them. I gave up.” 

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A former president, Tom Jones, once described Earlham as “a cross between a Friends meeting and a scientific laboratory.” It sends graduates in large numbers on to Ph.D.s in biology, the life sciences, and sociology, as well as other fields. The number of languages it teaches is not extensive, but large numbers of students achieve proficiency in Spanish, French, German, or Japanese. It recently added classes in Arabic, and offers Latin and ancient Greek as well. Every student must demonstrate command of a second language as a prerequisite for graduation.

The newest major is Comparative Languages and Linguistics, requiring advanced study in at least two languages and study abroad. It is an institution engaged in what Bennett calls “a full court press on internationalization,” from the emphasis on study abroad to international material threaded throughout the curriculum. “It’s not just in the French department and the history department, it’s everywhere,” said Bennett.

Earlham boasts a daring array of semesterlong study abroad opportunities that entice most of the 1,200 undergraduates to other parts of the world. To this experience some students add a May term. Earlham offered a semester-long program in Jerusalem from 1982 to 2000, when strife in the Middle East and a State Department travel advisory forced it into hiatus; the college hopes to restart the program in Amman, Jordan. Civil unrest also forced Earlham to relocate a signature program from Kenya to Tanzania in 20032004. Other off-the-beaten-path study abroad choices include:

• Northern Ireland. An exploration of the long religious and social conflict in Northern Ireland. Students stay with families in Belfast and Derry and learn the history of “the Troubles” as well as the politics and culture of the six Ulster counties that remained under British rule when the Republic of Ireland gained independence in 1921.

• U.S.-Mexico Border. Students electing this program, located in the neighboring cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, are immersed in learning how such critical issues as immigration, free trade, human rights, and the environment play out in the border region. 

• South Asia. Launched in 2005, this ambitious program takes students to Chennai, India, and Kandy, Sri Lanka, to study economics, culture, and conflicts on the subcontinent. 

• Japan. Studies in Cross-Cultural Education (SICE) program sends students each fall to study Japanese at Iwate University in Morioka and assist in local middle and high school English classrooms. Upon graduation, many SICE students return to northern Japan as assistant English teachers. Earlham’s program served as a model for the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program. 

More than 70 percent of Earlham students study abroad. All must fulfill requirements in domestic and international diversity, and Earlham’s 45 majors and minors include more than a dozen interdisciplinary programs, from Peace and Global Studies to Latin American Studies to minors in Jewish Studies and in Quaker Studies.

Patricia Lamson, director of the International Programs Office, credits faculty curiosity with helping grow Earlham’s garden of international offerings. “They like to create and do with students, because we are a teaching college. Teaching is our priority,” said Lamson. A change in the academic calendar seven years ago left room for a mini-term in May. Faculty quickly realized they could take these classes overseas “and—boom!—just like that, it exploded,” she said. “They range from studying Papiamento in Curacao to weaving and arts in Turkey.” Her husband, Howard Lamson, a professor of Spanish, inaugurated Earlham’s semester-long study abroad program to Mexico back in 1972. Now the faculty couple take students each May to Cuautla, Mexico, for immersion classes at an Earlham-owned facility called Casa Sol. They also work with students who spend a semester there or in the border program.

Music professor Dan Graves was a junior faculty member when he showed up in Lamson’s office in 1987 and volunteered to lead the spring semester in London. “Patty laughed and said, ‘The waiting list is six years. But have a seat and tell me: If you could go anywhere in the world and lead a program, where would it be?’” recalled Graves. “I had never been out of the United States, but I’m a musician so I said, ‘I’d like to go to Vienna.’”

He led the first choral group to the Austrian capital in 1988 and has since taken Earlham’s sopranos, altos, and baritones half a dozen times to study German and sing in the city’s great cathedrals. “Why anybody would trust somebody who had spent the last 13 years teaching in a small high school in Connecticut to get something going in Vienna is beyond me. But there’s that kind of trust,” said Graves.

Earlham’s Kenya program was begun in 1978 by a couple in the biology department. Another faculty couple, Brent Smith—professor of biology—and Nancy Taylor—an assistant professor of art and reference librarian—inherited the mantle and have taken students to Kenya five times and to Tanzania once for full semesters. Smith also has led students to the Galapagos and Ecuador, and Taylor has taken a May class to Turkey to study weaving. Their two sons grew up accustomed to spending every third autumn in Africa. When the boys reached high school age, “I remember asking them, ‘Do you guys want to go back?’” Taylor said. “The answer was, ‘Oh, yeah. That’s what makes our family cool.’”

Sara Penhale, science librarian and associate professor of biology, is also a seasoned Africa hand, having led Earlham students to Kenya and Tanzania four times and organized multiple safaris for alumni and others. Her husband, Allan M. Winkler, a Distinguished Professor of History at Miami University in Ohio, chronicled in the March-April 2005 International Educator the experience of helping 11 Earlham students scale 19,340foot Mount Kilimanjaro in 2003. Penhale says that before embarking on her first Kenya trip, “I felt I could do it because Patty Lamson said, ‘Of  course you can do it.’… I love the way that office runs and their attitude. They are supportive and nonbureaucratic.”

Rajaram Krishnan, an associate professor of economics who specializes in development and the environment, signed up for a faculty development trip to Japan in 2001 funded by the Freeman Foundation. He recalls going to Chuck Yates (director of the Institute for Education on Japan) and expressing doubts that he would “do anything meaningful related to Japan in my professional life.’ And Chuck said, ‘Freeman has given us this grant to open people’s minds, so come along.’” Two years later, Krishnan put the experience to use in a new course on the political economy of South and Southeast Asia, and in 2005 inaugurated Earlham’s first study abroad semester to his native India.

Krishnan also directed the Kenya program in 2002. His interest in the environment made it a good fit, but the economist also felt like he was “following a template, because the Kenya program had been around for 25 years. There were things I would have done differently.” He once had counseled his wife Subha, a special education teacher, to stop talking about things she would do differently and become a principal herself. She did so with great success. “So the advice I gave my wife, I finally gave myself: If you think you’re all that bright, why don’t you put together a program of your own? It seemed to me the natural place to do that was South Asia,” the economist said.

Krishnan wanted his program open to all students. He also realized that to operate yearly, it could not depend on the availability or specialty of a single professor. “I wanted to make sure it was an Earlham program, and not a Rajaram program,” he said. He went through the course catalog and found 40 courses that could be taught at the women’s college in Chennai that serves as the program’s base, and he “roped in three colleagues willing to come along for the ride” and lead the program in subsequent years.

Bennett, a political philosopher, said the roots of Earlham’s internationalism stretch back more than a century, when Earlham graduates ventured out as teachers and missionaries to the Middle East and Japan. “We have been receiving students from the Friends School in Ramallah since the 19th century,” said Bennett. The college also has long ties to the Friends School in Tokyo. At the end of World War II, Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, who spent two years at Earlham before transferring to West Point, was serving as senior aide to General Douglas MacArthur. The story is told by Landrum Bolling, president emeritus of Earlham, that it was a conversation with the U.S. wife of the headmaster of the Friends School that convinced Fellers—and through him, MacArthur—that the United States should treat Emperor Hirohito with respect, not as a war criminal.

Earlham was one of several Midwest colleges that enrolled Japanese-American students during World War II who otherwise would have been interned with their families in camps in the Western United States. After the war, Earlham’s Quaker leaders “looked at one another and said, ‘Somebody has to start the work of reconciliation with Japan. Why shouldn’t it be Earlham?’” said Bennett. Its Japanese Studies program was built by the late Jackson H. Bailey, an alumnus and protégé of the famed Harvard scholar Edwin O. Reischauer. Reischauer journeyed monthly to Richmond to give a faculty seminar while Earlham set up its Asian studies program in the 1950s with support from the Ford Foundation. Earlham developed an exchange that still flourishes with Waseda University, a prestigious private institution in Tokyo.

Bolling, president from 1957 to 1973, remembers a conversation with Reischauer about whether Earlham could offer Japanese studies without teaching the language. “He said, ‘If you’re serious about this program, you have to teach the language. Just do it.’” Reischauer, who later served as ambassador to Japan during the Kennedy administration, confessed an ulterior motive: his Harvard program was losing half its graduate students because they could not master Japanese. It would be better for Harvard—and for East Asian scholarship—if Earlham helped promising students get a head start on the language. Earlham today offers nearly two dozen courses in its Japanese Studies major, and 15 more in its Japanese Language and Linguistics minor. It also runs student exchanges between Waseda and the 26 campuses belonging to the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) and the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM).

Bolling, the 93-year-old president emeritus and director at large for Mercy Corps, the international humanitarian agency, has been deeply involved in the search for peace in the Middle East for decades. During the Carter administration, he served as a back channel of communications with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Yasser Arafat years before the United States recognized the PLO.

The Organic Growth of Earlham’s International Side

“A lot of things have grown here not by plan, but by kind of organic logic,” said Bennett, a Quaker.  “The same spirit of exploration and commitment that led us into Japan has led us into lots of other places; not everywhere. But the organic quality of the growth of our international commitment means it’s deeper and sturdier than it might have been if it had been top down in response to some grand plan.” As an example of Earlham’s “organic” growth, consider how its international enrollments grew from 3 percent in 1997 to 10 percent by 2004. It did not happen by chance, but it did not happen by decree, either. 

Under the leadership of Jeff Rickey, the dean of admissions and financial aid, the admissions office began actively recruiting more international students. Senior Associate Dean Musa Khalidi was given a budget to travel around the world and entrusted to award as many halftuition scholarships as he saw fit to deserving international students, in addition to two full scholarships. 

“Ninety-eight percent of the international students receive financial aid,” said Khalidi, who graduated from Bethlehem University in the West Bank before earning a master’s degree from the University of Notre Dame. He laughed when asked if applicants are surprised to find a Palestinian Muslim in a senior admissions post at a Quaker college in Indiana.

“It really does not come as a shock to many people. With the way Quakers approach their day-to-day life and education, it’s a very, very normal and natural thing,” he said. “Students and families sometimes find it exciting to hear a different accent and find a different cultural and religious background in Richmond, Indiana.”

Khalidi met his future wife, Kelley LawsonKhalidi, the associate director of Earlham’s international programs office, when the Earlham alumna was leading the Jerusalem program in 1991 and he was teaching her students. She speaks Arabic, French, and Spanish, advises international students, and works closely with international faculty.

Both believe that personal attention is one reason international students are drawn to Earlham in growing numbers. “Some schools think it’s a matter of creating a financial aid policy, and when you implement that, you are going to find (more) international students coming to your institution. It’s really not that easy,” said Khalidi. “Kelley and I are on the phone on a daily basis talking about international students. International families appreciate knowing that there is a person they can call and say, ‘Can you tell me what’s happening with my daughter? I can tell she is homesick; she’s not happy.’

“And when they hear that Kelley has already met with their daughter, they really love that,” he said. “It pays off because if a family is happy, they are going to spread the word. …When they send their son or daughter to a place like Earlham, they don’t have many worries.”

Khalidi, director of international student admissions, makes a half-dozen recruiting trips a year. When he made a presentation on international students at a faculty retreat in August 2005, he received an ovation. “The clapping and the joy and the happiness would energize anybody” to recruit even harder, he said.

Khalidi has recruited several students from the global network of United World Colleges (UWC). They receive $10,000 scholarships from philanthropist Shelby Davis to attend Earlham. The 10 UWC campuses—two-year residential schools offering the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum—annually attract hundreds of outstanding students with demonstrated leadership skills from dozens of countries. One of the most impressive of the Davis Scholars is Jawad Sepehri Joya, who overcame polio, poverty, and the repressive Taliban regime to make a new life for himself in his native Kabul, Afghanistan.

Joya, 21, a sociology and anthropology major, was taken under wing by an Italian physician when Joya’s family brought him to a Red Cross rehabilitation facility in Kabul seeking a replacement for a broken wheelchair. The doctor recognized a spark in the boy and arranged for tutoring. Joya mastered not only languages but computer skills, and the Red Cross soon hired the 13-year-old to help with interpretation and to keep its computers running. He wound up at the United World College in Trieste, Italy, before choosing Earlham over several scholarship offers. 

The charismatic Joya these days bounds around campus in a motorized wheelchair. He has represented Earlham at the annual Japan-America Student Conference. Two U.S. senators offered him internships last summer, although his first trip home to Afghanistan in nearly four years forced Joya to postpone taking up that opportunity. Joya does see a stint in Washington, DC, in his future and proudly calls himself “the model of a global citizen.”

Earlham attracts more than the usual share of students determined to save the world. Many wind up pursuing service-oriented careers. John Howell, a Harvard-educated professor of physics, said, “I remember going to my 25th reunion [at Harvard] and hearing former classmates talk about the money they made in their law firm and how successful they were in whatever. Two weeks later there was an Earlham reunion and I was hearing students talk about the work they’d done in improving agriculture in Mali and Teach for America. It was such a different orientation of what constitutes success.”

‘The Ethos of Quakerism’

Loren Pope, author of Colleges That Change Lives: Forty Schools You Should Know About, once wrote about Earlham: “If every college and university sharpened young minds and consciences as effectively as Earlham does, this country would approach Utopia.”

Robert Johnstone, a professor of political science, said Earlham’s Quakerism differs from other colleges’ religious affiliations. “This is not a Baptist school in the sense that Baylor University is, it’s not an Ohio Wesleyan. But the ethos of Quakerism pervades the place, the emphasis on social justice, on conflict resolution, on simplicity. In so many ways, the spirit of Quakerism abides here and always has” even though most of the faculty are not Quakers, said Johnstone.

Earlham offers a major in Peace and Global Studies and a minor in Quaker studies. The chair of Peace and Global Studies, Caroline Higgins, recently found herself on conservative academic gadfly David Horowitz’s list of “the 101 most dangerous academics in America,” along with Noam Chomsky, Derrick Bell, Angela Davis, Bernardine Dohrn, and others. Horowitz told the Palladium-Item, Richmond’s newspaper, that Earlham needs a professor of military science to balance what students are taught in Higgins’ classes.

The Quaker school has no professor of military science, of course. Higgins is a diminutive 66year-old who led students to Argentina in May 2006 to visit factories occupied and run by workers and to spend three weeks in Rosario, described in a class flyer as “a city characterized by radical participatory democracy and civic education.” InsideHigherEd.com, an online daily, featured Higgins in a story about Horowitz’s book. She told Scott Jaschik, the editor, that there were only a small number of campuses where pacifist views like hers are tolerated. “If I’m dangerous, it’s because education is dangerous,” she added.

In an interview in her office, dominated by a flaming orange-and-red mural of mythological scenes painted by a Mexican artist during a year at Earlham as a Fulbright scholar, Higgins said that in her classes, “We talk not only about conflict but solutions. We look for places where things are going well, and we try to hold up examples of where peace works and violence doesn’t.”

One of her colleagues, Plowshare Professor of Peace Saoud El Mawla, got stuck in his homeland of Lebanon when war erupted in July 2006 between Hezbollah militants and Israel. El Mawla, who encountered prolonged difficulties securing a U.S. visa when Earlham hired him three years ago, had gone home to Beirut to visit family and renew his visa.

The Islamic civilization scholar told InsideHigherEd’s Jaschik in an interview by email, “This is my first war as a peace studies professor, but not as an activist and militant for peace and justice. … The war brings us to real life and puts us before the human sufferings, hopes and tears. We have to stay firm in our convictions, to spread hope, to build networks of solidarity and action trying to stop the war and to make peace. It is very, very hard but we cannot do anything else.”

Aletha Stahl, associate professor of French and Francophone Studies, helped establish a semester-long program in Martinique andhas led students to Haiti several times on May terms. She led 18 students to France in fall 2005 on a program that starts with language classes in Nantes, the port city in Brittany, then moves to the Pyrenees where students spend two weeks living and working with artisans before finishing the semester in Paris. Stahl said Earlham typically graduates three to five French majors a year.

A growing number of students are majoring in Comparative Languages and Linguistics. “We’re all finding that it’s harder even to remember who are ‘our’ majors,” said Kathleen Taylor, professor of Spanish and Hispanic Studies. “With all kinds of students interested (in languages) across majors, we don’t necessarily call them ours anymore.”

Taylor has led students to Curaçao twice, taught Papiamento during the regular term, and is preparing an online textbook of the language. When she started learning Papiamento herself, “I had no idea I would have any use for it.  It’s turned out to have a lot more than I expected. The first time I taught it I had 16 in the class, and nine went with me to Curaçao on the May term. Last year I had 26 in the class and 13 went on the May term.”

“One of the things that keeps us alive intellectually is that we keep opening new doors and exploring new things,” said Taylor, who has led Earlham’s semester program to central Mexico five times. “We are expert learners and that’s a good model for our students.” Welling Hall, professor of politics and international studies, said international students are drawn in large numbers to her international studies classes. Earlham offers scholarships to students from Seeds of Peace, a camp in Maine for teens from conflicted regions of the world, including the Middle East, the Balkans and Cyprus, and Earlham students often work there as counselors.

Hall advises the Model United Nations Club, which hosts a major competition each spring for high school students from across Indiana. Hall was skeptical when two international students approached her a few years back with the idea of having the high schoolers deal with a scenario in which a meteor had wiped out much of North America, with survivors’ forced to seek refuge in the southern hemisphere. They recruited an Earlham physics professor to lecture on meteor strikes, and the science fiction scenario for a futuristic U.N. was a big success.

Applications to Earlham have climbed, but increased selectivity carries a price. Clark, the provost, said, “Increasingly we’re having to turn away students that we are pretty sure would succeed and flourish there. We are still thinking through how to adjust to that.” 

Bennett notes with pride that one-fifth of Earlham students qualify for federal Pell Grants (the average family income for those need-based awards is $15,000). “We’re a higher-need student body than most of our competitors. We love that. The value added we do for the world is huge,” said Bennett.

Earlham College

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A fortuitous name change from the risible (Beaver) to the sublime (Arcadia) is only one reason why folks at Arcadia University are smiling these days. 

Two decades ago Beaver College was in dire financial straits. Beaver’s Center for Education Abroad (CEA) ran a large and vaunted study abroad program, but only a handful of Beaver’s own students participated. With barely 1,000 students, faculty at the former women’s college were “afraid that if they let students study abroad, we wouldn’t have sufficient enrollment here to maintain their jobs,” recalled David C. Larsen, Arcadia’s vice president and director of the center. 

Today the dorms are bursting and Arcadia University has purchased apartment buildings to accommodate the 3,500 students on its picturesque campus, once the estate of a 19th century sugar magnate. Now 250 of the 3,000 students that the Center for Education Abroad places overseas each year are Arcadia’s own undergraduates.  Applications doubled after the 2001 name change and the university has repeatedly received laurels as a cynosure of internationalization.

Beaver began in 1853 as a seminary for women in a Beaver County river town west of Pittsburgh. It became a college in 1872 and half a century later moved across the Keystone State to Jenkintown, then later to Glenside in the Philadelphia suburbs.

Even when the college’s finances were precarious, the fortunes of the Center for Education Abroad were robust. The nonprofit center, opened in 1965, runs study abroad programs in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Greece, Australia, New Zealand, and Equatorial Guinea that attract students from hundreds of U.S. colleges and universities. With a staff of 120 and a $34 million budget, the nonprofit center still contributes to Arcadia’s endowment, but former President Bette Landman put a stop more than a decade ago to the practice of tapping its surpluses to cover Beaver’s operating expenses. “I said, ‘We’ve got to live within our means,’” recalled Landman, an anthropologist who sparked the college’s revival. Her successor, Jerry Greiner, a psychologist, has generated new excitement since his arrival in 2004 with ambitious plans to enroll international students by the hundreds instead of the dozens.

From its nadir in the 1980s, undergraduate enrollment has nearly tripled to just under 2,000, with more than 1,400 others pursuing master’s degrees in education, allied health, and such fields as international peace and conflict resolution, as well as MBAs in management with an international perspective and doctorates in physical therapy and education.

The college made internationalization the central thrust of Beaver’s mission back in 1991. Landman, president from 1985 to 2004, surrounded herself with strong deans and administrators, including Michael Berger, vice president for academic affairs and provost; the CEA’s Larsen; Dennis Nostrand, vice president for enrollment management; Norah Peters Shultz, dean of undergraduate studies; Jeff Shultz, associate dean for internationalization and professor of education; and Jan Finn, director of international services.

Why Not Fly the Freshman Class to London?

The turning point came at a summer planning meeting in Landman’s living room in 1993. Enrollments already were on the rebound, but Landman pressed her deans and faculty leaders on what to do next to ensure the college’s turnaround. Jeff Shultz, an MIT and Harvard trained educator, suggested, “Why don’t we put all the freshman on a plane and take them to London over spring break? We can call it our 747 Course.”  Everyone chuckled, but a few hours later they were talking about how to make it happen. The London Preview was born.

The following spring, 140 freshmen flew to London for spring break, accompanied by faculty and staff.   The CEA put them up in student hostels it hired for the purpose in the British capital. They visited the Tower of London, the British Museum, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and other sights, and went to the theater with Arcadia students spending the full semester in London. The fee that first year was $150; a dozen years later it is just $245. Arcadia subsidizes roughly $750 per student; freshmen in the Honors Program go for free. 

“More than anything else, it gives them confidence to study abroad,” said Jeff Shultz. “They get over the fear that they can’t do this. They know that they can.” On Graduation Day, fully a third of the class crosses the stage wearing colorful sashes signifying where they studied abroad after the Preview.

This year freshmen were offered Previews to London, Scotland, and Spain, and transfer students took a fast-paced cultural tour of Italy. Jan Walbert, vice president for student affairs, led the Spain Preview. Prominently displayed in her office is the bullfighting poster she brought home from Valencia, Spain, where she spent summer 1976 studying while an undergraduate at Juniata College. Walbert returned to Spain for the first time in May 2005 for a professional meeting. “I came back bitten by a Spanish bug and wanted to find a way to get our students to go there,” she related. “Jerry Greiner kept saying, ‘Try it; figure it out.’” Twenty-two freshmen eagerly signed up.

Walbert said the two-credit overseas learning experience “far exceeded my expectations in terms of how the institution responded and what students got out of it.” Now Arcadia is considering adding courses and credits to the London and Scotland Previews. 

The Previews cost Arcadia more than $400,000, but have become a powerful magnet for students. For years, Beaver drew 85 percent of students from Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Today, 55 percent of Arcadia students come from outside these two states. It has sharply increased scholarships for both domestic and international students, as well as faculty grants to develop international programs. All told, the budget for internationalization at Arcadia has rocketed from $47,000 in 19911992 to $917,000 in 2000-2001 to $2,239,000 in 2005-2006.

Vice President for Finance Michael Coveney said, “Planning is the secret to financial success in regard to internationalization. As long as you’re planning for it, it works well, especially in regard to exporting students. But it’s scary if you haven’t planned for it.”

If a school replaces 100 students studying abroad with an equal number of new students, nothing is lost, Coveney said. And subsidizing the Previews is less expensive than increasing students’ financial aid packages, which many private colleges do to lure tuition-paying students. “It’s as good as (putting) an extra $1,000 or perhaps $2,000 in their aid package,” he said.

The First Year Study Abroad Experience

Arcadia has found other creative ways to bolster enrollment and enhance its international profile. 

The trophies in Dennis Nostrand’s office attest to his success as a high school and collegiate wrestling coach. Nostrand looks capable of executing a quick takedown himself, but it is his remarkable ability to land students that leaves Arcadia colleagues grasping for adjectives to describe their vice president for enrollment management. “He’s brilliant,” said Jeff Shultz. 

Nostrand has pulled several rabbits out of his hat since coming to Beaver in 1992 from the State University of New York, Morrisville. “From wrestling I knew how to recruit students and what seemed to get their attention,” he said modestly. For his master’s degree, Nostrand studied student demographics, what makes students leave college, and what encourages them to persist. 

After the name change to Arcadia, the number of entering freshman and transfers jumped by 100 students, leaving administrators wondering where to put them. Arcadia was always eager to find ways to encourage study abroad, so Nostrand had an idea: Why not let some students spend their first semester in London? Sixty jumped at the opportunity, and now Arcadia offers top incoming students the chance to start their education in Arcadia’s London Semester Program based at City University and the London College of Fashion or at the University of Stirling in Scotland.

That first class of “First Year Study Abroad Experience” (FYSAE) students—they call themselves ‘Fi-Sis’—included Katie Lomberk, a premed who liked it so much she pestered administrators until they let her spend her second semester at the University of Limerick in Ireland. In an e-mail written at 2 a.m. on the morning of her graduation from Arcadia last May—the chemistry and math double major graduated in three years with honors— Lomberk wrote that she loved the British and Irish approach to higher education.  “It was very independent: ‘Do the homework if you need to do it; we leave you in charge of yourself to study.’ That is how I learn best.”

She spent most of the next four semesters on the Glenside campus, where she founded a chapter of Rotaract, a community service club (the parent is Rotary International). But she also put her passport to frequent use, studying in Greece and traveling to Turkey in summer 2005 and spending last January at American University in Cairo, Egypt, learning about the Nile River’s history and ecosystem. She took off in late February to join Irish friends for “Rag Week,” a student tradition that combines charity and hi-jinks. Ten hours after returning home, she joined classmates on a spring break service trip to build houses in Mérida, Mexico. After two days in Glenside, she flew to Beijing with political science professor Robert Thompson and 20 classmates for Harvard University’s annual World Model United Nations assembly. Lomberk traveled across the United States after graduation with three Irish buddies, then planned to head to Australia and “probably visit New Zealand, Fiji, Vanuatu, and possibly Micronesia.” She’s seeking a research internship in Antarctica before heading to graduate school for a Ph.D. in chemistry, and after that medical school so she can fulfill her ultimate goal: joining Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).

Other FYSAE veterans waxed equally enthusiastic about their experiences. “FYSAE is the reason I applied here,” said Stefanie DeAngelo, 18, a freshman from Sheffield, Massachusetts. “I had all these fantastic ideas about not going to college right away, so my parents were really excited when I found an organized, safe way to study abroad.” 

Robbin Gebbie, 19, of Lansdale, Pennsylvania, spent her first semester in Scotland. “They sent us a brochure a couple of weeks after I was admitted. It kind of seemed like a ‘Why not?’ opportunity,” said Gebbie, who aspires to become a physician’s assistant. “You’d finished high school and hadn’t yet started college. You weren’t leaving behind anybody; you had no friends to worry about missing. It was just a good time for a new experience—and it’s as cheap as it gets.” 

Katie McCullough, 19, a second-year student from Cazenovia, New York, who plans to major in international business and math, said Scotland “felt like home.” She subsequently spent a semester as an exchange student in Seoul, South Korea, and was scheduled to spend Spring 2007 in New Zealand. 

Arcadia’s Pathways to Study Abroad Web page lays out road maps for students in any of Arcadia’s 37 majors to spend a semester abroad. Nikunj Shah, 19, a computer science major from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, said Arcadia makes study abroad “very easy. Every department on campus has gone through and made a little schedule: ‘If you want to go abroad, this is how you do it. These are classes you need to take in this order, and then you can go abroad in any of these semesters.’” 

The Italy Preview  

Nostrand, the enrollment management magician, topped himself in May 2005 when  fewer students than expected sent in deposits to secure their spaces in the Class of 2009. Arcadia had received a record number of applicants. Its SAT scores jumped 50 points, but the yield was lower than expected. On the Memorial Day weekend, Nostrand conceived the idea of making up the shortfall by luring more transfer students by offering a $450 travel and study experience in Italy over the 2006 spring break.

In three days, Arcadia officials hammered out the details, enlisted assistant professor of Italian José A. Marrero to lead the program, and readied posters, brochures, and postcards for the printer. Then the admissions staff fanned out to community colleges within a 200-mile radius to pitch the program to counselors. Arcadia landed 130 transfer students and “we ended up hitting the budgeted enrollment number within two students,” said Nostrand. 

“It made a huge impact,” agreed Greiner, who later accompanied 68 of those transfer students to Rome, Florence, and Siena. Looking back, it seems that every major step Arcadia has taken to reinvent itself—whether knitting the Center for Education Abroad into the life of the campus, launching the Previews and the First Year Study Abroad Experience, and dreaming up a new name (even the URL www.arcadia.edu was available)—has worked flawlessly. Berger, the provost, insisted this wasn’t serendipity. 

“We have been working for over a decade to establish internationalization as the defining characteristic of Arcadia,” said Berger, an automotive historian. “We’ve just plain gotten good at this. We have done things that work in the past so we have confidence in our ability to do new things based on our past success.” 

Arcadia has surmounted challenges. The Center for Education Abroad had to rebuild relationships with universities here and abroad after the Center’s founder and key staff members left to start the Institute for Study Abroad at Butler University in 1988. But after a momentary downturn in 1991 following the Gulf War, its growth has been uninterrupted, and now the center is partnering with Butler University’s Institute for Study Abroad to launch its first study abroad offering in China.

Arcadia is not yet as strong on the import side of international education. It enrolled only 42 international students in 2004-2005. It used to host a large branch of the American Language Academy (ALA), which would bring as many as 100 international students a semester to Glenside to learn English, but ALA went out of business. Arcadia is considering launching its own intensive English program.

During Greiner’s years as provost at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, Hamline aggressively recruited students from Latin America. Now he plans to do the same at Arcadia. “We need to have many, many more international students, and we are putting in place strategies to do that,” Greiner said. “We’ve got efforts going in South America, particularly Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru, and we’re also reaching out to Africa and China. We just established a relationship with the American Graduate School of International Relations and Diplomacy in Paris.”

Greiner’s office on the ground floor of Grey Towers Castle was once the library of sugar baron William Welsh Harrison, who modeled it after medieval Alnwick Castle in England.

Greiner said he wants students “to have not just a smattering of experiences or to study abroad once in their career, but to be constantly exposed in all sorts of ways to the international and the multicultural.”

“We want to take Arcadia much farther than it is now on internationalization. If we’re going to do this effectively, it costs money. We need more staff and advisers to help, and we need faculty development so they can internationalize their courses to the greatest extent possible,” Greiner said.

Flags of many nations flutter from poles along campus walkways, representing each nation where Arcadia students study abroad and the home countries of international students. That colorful symbolism is not enough for Greiner. “I’d like to see the campus buildings and other public spaces have more of an international flavor,” he said. “I’d like constant student activities that feature global kinds of experiences so that every week students would have multiple choices from a variety of things that would keep them more attuned to global issues.”

Bioko Biodiversity Protection 

Program Arcadia’s most acclaimed off-campus study program is the Bioko Biodiversity Protection Program in Equatorial Guinea, a small, Spanish-speaking country in West Africa. Biology professor Gail Hearn has been studying wildlife on Bioko since 1990 and in recent years has partnered with Wayne Morra, an economist, on a program to preserve Bioko Island’s monkeys, sea turtles, and other endangered wildlife.

While working with animals at the Philadelphia Zoo, Hearn, a Bryn Mawr graduate with a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Rockefeller University, became intrigued by the reproduction difficulties that an African monkey called the drill had in captivity. That led her to “the only place left on the planet where drills still lived relatively unmolested: Bioko Island,” 20 miles off the coast of Cameroon.

“By time I got there, it was clear they were even endangered there, so a lot of my work has not been to study the social behavior of drills, but to save the wildlife of Bioko Island,” she said. Five of the seven species of monkeys living on Bioko—the drill, the black colobus, red colobus, red-eared guenon, and Preuss’s monkey—are among Africa’s most endangered. Four species of sea turtles that nest on Bioko’s beaches also are endangered.

Morra, an associate professor of business, health administration, and economics, envied Hearn her annual trips to an unspoiled rainforest, the Gran Caldera Southern Highlands Scientific Reserve. “I asked if I could accompany her as a porter,” he said with a laugh. 

“He used to go past my office like this,” said Hearn, mimicking a porter with up thrust hand. “He’d walk past, back up into my range of view and say, ‘I’ll do anything.’”

What use is an economist in the Gran Caldera? Morra turned out to be of great use. He and Hearn collaborated on ways to give the people of Bioko incentives to stop selling endangered species as “bush meat” in a market in Malabo, the capital.

“Biologists are very stingy when they work. They do not follow good economic principles. They do not want to pay for information; they do not want to help local people,” she said. “Wayne pointed out that underpaying local people was not a way to achieve your conservation objectives. You have to show people that saving their wildlife will help them.” 

Now they preside over a year-round conservation project, with a permanent staff of four on Bioko. With foundation grants, they hire as many as 50 local workers to monitor the local market for bush meat—everything from squirrels to porcupines to duikers (forest antelope)—and conduct an annual wildlife census in the forests of Bioko. Each fall, through the Center for Education Abroad, students from Arcadia and other U.S. universities take classes there. Arcadia faculty rotate in, working with staff and students from Universidad Nacional de Guinea Ecuatorial (UNGE). They are creating a wildlife sanctuary and looking into ways to encourage ecotourism. “We’re a little cottage industry,” said Morra. 

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The pair involves other Arcadia professors and students in the exotic work on Bioko. Last fall, Ellen Skilton-Sylvester, an associate professor of education, trained the study abroad students there to teach English as a second language to UNGE students while they learned together about wildlife conservation. Upon returning to Glenside, her student teachers made presentations about Africa to children in five elementary schools. A Fulbright Hays grant helped cover the travel expenses for the 10 students who spent the fall 2005 semester in Equatorial Guinea.

International Peace and Conflict Resolution

In the International Peace and Conflict Resolution (IPCR) program, graduate students spend the entire second year studying and interning in another country. They also travel as a class to learn about the “troubles” in Northern Ireland and the challenges that development poses to indigenous people in Costa Rica. The director, political scientist Warren Haffar, this year expanded operations to Arusha, Tanzania, on the foot of Mt. Meru, where the peace accords were signed ending the Rwandan civil war in 1993 and where the United Nations is conducting its International Criminal Tribune for the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi. 

“Arusha offers an amazing learning opportunity for our students,” said Haffar, who has worked on conflict mediation in the Balkans. “We get students out of the classroom and into the field to learn how international law, sustainable development, and human rights all work together to make a healthy society or generate a sick one prone to conflict.”

The program attracts a score of new students each year, including returned Peace Corps volunteers. “Usually their story is the same: they want a job that has some meaning,” said Haffar. For the price of tuition, the IPCR program pays the students’ costs while studying abroad, from airfare to visas to tuition at the host university. Haffar said, “It’s a great opportunity to try things you might not ordinarily do—with a bit of a safety net.”

Graduate student Justin Losh, 28, became intrigued by the notion of working on conflict resolution after attending a lecture that film-maker Michael Moore gave in October 2003 at Butler University in Indianapolis. Moore’s appearance was sponsored by the Plowshares Collaborative, a peace studies initiative of Earlham, Goshen, and Manchester colleges. Losh, who majored in anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and spent a year working in one of Brazil’s poorest regions, said, “I started seeing possibilities for myself for the future.” He spent this past academic year at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.

Kaori Suzuki, 23, came to Arcadia from Nagoya, Japan, in 2005 to pursue the peace and conflict degree. Her ambition is to work for a nongovernmental organization to improve relationships between Japan and the Asian neighbors it invaded in World War II. “I think the people who really make change are those who work in the small parts, in invisible places, but do something important,” she said. “Japan and other countries in Asia are not in truly friendly relationship because of the past history of what Japan did to those other countries. Hopefully, I can be the bridge between those Asian nations—Korea, China, Indonesia, Philippines, Cambodia—and Japan.”

Another graduate student, Emily Spann, 26, of Washington, Missouri, said, “I’d like to work for a humanitarian aid organization and do trauma counseling in post-conflict situations and refugee camps.”

Arcadia encourages students in fields from education to physical therapy to do practice teaching outside the United States. The Physical Therapy department has sent dozens of students to Jamaica over the past decade to work at a clinic in impoverished St. Elizabeth Parish. Karen Sawyer, an assistant professor and academic coordinator of clinical education, secured grants from a family foundation in Philadelphia to establish the clinic, and Arcadia freed Sawyer from classroom duties for the project.

Villagers with disabilities couldn’t reach the clinic, so Sawyer and her students started going out to their homes. “That’s what the students mainly have done over the years, provide home care in a rural, Jamaican setting,” she said.

Two hurricanes hit Jamaica during the two weeks Dianne Azu worked at the clinic in July 2005. What did she learn in Jamaica that she could not have learned while doing charity work in Philadelphia?

“A lot—a whole lot,” said Azu, a native of Ghana who recently received her doctorate in physical therapy. “I learned to be more creative when you don’t have all this great, expensive equipment available that we have here in the U.S. I learned how to use paint cans and have the patient kneel on the bed and use the wall for balance instead of using a big physio-ball.”

Some Arcadia physical therapy students go to London for clinical practice, and Sawyer has arranged for others to work in Peru and Nicaragua; she hopes to place students in Ghana as well. 

In the Education Department, field placement coordinator Jane Duffy places several students each spring in schools in London and Canterbury, England.

Duffy said the student teachers who do this are “more adventuresome and not afraid to take some risks in life.”  School districts in and around Philadelphia want teachers “who have that broad perspective and are not ethnocentric,” she added. 

Majors Abroad Program

Mark Curchack, dean of the College of Graduate and Professional Studies, said Arcadia is playing “curricular catch-up” to internationalize more courses in Glenside. The next frontier will be launching what Arcadia is calling a Majors Abroad Program that will allow students to major in five new fields by taking core courses during a full year at partner universities overseas. “It’s the sort of thing that will get some of the faculty juiced,” said Curchack.

Norah Shultz, dean of the College of Undergraduate Studies, said, “We’re looking at doing this in media studies, creative writing, theater, anthropology, and tourism and hospitality. For instance, we don’t have a creative writing major now, but we do have basic writing courses.” Under the Majors Abroad Program, “you’d take your 100- and 200-level English courses here, go to the University of Greenwich for a slew of creative writing work in your third year, and then come back here for your senior year.”

William D. Biggs, professor of business, health administration, and economics, said Arcadia will be working with an Australian university to offer a tourism and hospitality major. He likened it to American University’s Washington Semester, a popular program that combines classes with internships in the nation’s capital. “There’s clearly an audience willing to do that. Whether there’s an audience for this, remains to be seen,” said Biggs.

Jeff Shultz, the associate dean for internationalization, said CEA’s Larsen whetted the interest of Arcadia faculty by sending them out to evaluate CEA programs around the world. “That’s how I got hooked,” said Shultz, recalling an evaluation trip he took to Cambridge and other British universities as chair of the education department. “It was a very clever strategy.” Norah Shultz said, “When someone says to you, ‘Do you think you can go to Athens for four days?’ it’s exciting. You’re not going to say no.”

Berger, the provost, said the presence of the Center for Education Abroad gave Arcadia “an undeniable advantage” in its quest to internationalize, but “what needs to be stressed is that almost anyone can do this.”

“This is not a wealthy institution,” said Berger, “but faculty members can be very creative. If you give them a little seed money—precious little—it can make a big difference.”

Larsen, who taught in Greece when the country was ruled by a junta in the early 1970s and ran the Fulbright office in Athens after democracy was restored, said internationalization at Arcadia has been “a real team effort.”

 “It’s hard to describe the enormity of that shift over time. That’s what has made the difference: getting the community to think of themselves in a different way. We’re not there yet, but we’re well on the way,” said Larsen.

Arcadia University

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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.”

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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.”

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Pacific Lutheran University’s mission statement fits this liberal arts institution as snugly as a glove: educating students “for lives of thoughtful inquiry, service, leadership, and care—for other persons, for their communities, and for the earth.” Fidelity to that call has led faculty and students on journeys far outside the wooded 146-acre campus in Tacoma, Washington, near the Puget Sound and Mount Rainier. Almost half its 3,350 undergraduates study abroad, many on three- and four-week courses during January. Twice Pacific Lutheran has pulled off the feat of holding classes simultaneously on all seven continents. 

That is thanks to one of the most popular “study away” courses—Pacific Lutheran’s preferred terminology—a sea voyage from Patagonia to Antarctica, tutored by Charles Bergman, an English professor with a passion for combining literary and environmental studies. He relishes being able to teach Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner while crossing “the Drake Passage as real albatrosses with 13-foot wingspans circle the boat.” For someone who has never seen an albatross, it may be hard to understand what’s at stake with killing one, Bergman said. “But when students are standing on deck in a storm, feeling awkward and ungainly and having to grab on because the waves are big and then an albatross for whom a hurricane is home cruises by gracefully and easily, their world gets realigned in a certain way.”

The course, called “Journey to the End of the Earth,” will be audited in January 2010 by President Loren Anderson, who will join two dozen students for part of the voyage. The course always maxes out on enrollment, despite the price tag of $9,600, double what most J-term courses cost. Other Lutes (what students call themselves) will be studying in Australia, China, Ecuador, England, Ireland, France, Germany, Greece, Martinique, Namibia, New Zealand, Norway, Tobago, Uganda, and the United Arab Emirates. Typically 400 students enroll in these J-term courses. In all, 43 percent of PLU students study abroad before graduating.

Many faculty have personal and professional ties to other lands. Almost two-thirds have lived, taught, or conducted research overseas, speak another language, or were born outside the United States. Provost Patricia O’Connell Killen says, “The opportunity to be involved in international education is a real recruitment tool. It’s part of what faculty like about coming to PLU.” 

Transformation From the Ground Up

Anderson, president since 1992, said, “PLU is a classic case of institutional transformation from the ground up,” starting with the creation of a Global Studies program in 1977. A $4 million gift from alumnus Peter Wang and Grace Wang allowed the university to open the Wang Center for International Programs, and a 2003 long-range plan called “PLU 2010” made international education a central focus.

Pacific Lutheran’s founders had roots in Norway. The institution is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Anderson believes his school’s religious message and mission resonate with the current generation of students. This year’s freshmen were “in fifth grade when 9/11 happened,” he said. “They’ve grown up and been shaped in a time when there’s an incredible sensitivity to the globe and to the fact that traditional borders and boundaries don’t mean much. They’re fearless about the world and ready to take it on.”

Gateway Sites

PLU operates semester-long education abroad programs at its “gateway” sites in China, Mexico, Norway, Trinidad & Tobago and an internship program in Namibia. Neal Sobania, executive director of the Wang Center, explained that a gateway “swings both ways. Our sense is that it’s not enough to send our students somewhere else. We want to have real interactions with people from these places and bring people from there back to our campus.” 

“... Our sense is that it’s not enough to send our students somewhere else. We want to have real interactions with people from these places and bring people from there back to our campus.”

It has done that most notably with Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, where it sends students each fall and has an on-site manager, Pang Lirong, who holds a master’s degree from PLU. Some 60 Sichuan faculty and staff have paid exchange visits to Tacoma over the past quarter century, and PLU has reciprocated by sending its faculty and students, including composers from its music department. After commencement last May, music Professor Greg Youtz led 64 students on a two-week concert tour that included performances at conservatories in Beijing, Xian, Shanghai, and Sichuan. A $700,000 grant from the Freeman Foundation to help bring Chinese language and studies into local schools helped PLU build this musical bridge to China. Youtz also has led study-tours to China for dozens of public school teachers. He and other faculty composers have had their music performed by orchestras in Sichuan, and PLU musicians have returned the favor by performing in Tacoma works by composers from Sichuan. “When I turned in my last passport, it had something like 19 Chinese visas,” said Youtz. His head “is constantly full of China.”

Ties with Trinidad & Tobago are such that Carnival, the pre-Lenten festival that is an important part of life across the Caribbean, is now a social and cultural highlight on the PLU campus. English Professor Barbara Temple-Thurston took the first students there in January 1993 and soon established a semester-long program with the University of the West Indies. Like PLU’s program in Chengdu, China, it draws students from other universities as well. Temple-Thurston, a native of South Africa, felt it was misleading for students to experience Trinidad only in the month of January when preparations for Carnival were at a fever pitch. “The students got this sense of this exotic place. They were leaving with a very skewed impression of the culture,” she said. A faculty committee already was looking for places to start a semester study away program, and  Temple-Thurston convinced them Trinidad &  Tobago was a perfect choice. She wanted students to “be there when things calm down to see what the culture is really like.” Several Trinidadian students now join the PLU students in their college classes, and the Ministry of Community Development, Culture, and Gender Affairs of Trinidad & Tobago and PLU split the costs of a full, four-year scholarship to bring a Trinidadian student to the Tacoma campus.

The first scholarship winner, Candice Hughes, set about launching PLU’s Carnival, majored in geosciences, spent a semester studying in Botswana, and wound up as class speaker at graduation in 2008. She now helps run PLU’s program in Trinidad until she begins graduate school. She told Scene, the university magazine, “I came in as a girl from Trinidad, and I’m leaving as a world citizen.” Kareen Ottley, a student following in her footsteps, said, “Traveling from Trinidad, this was such a far place to come. But I felt really comfortable here. People are very friendly, very welcoming. What I really liked is that at PLU the focus is beyond education. They want to create a well-rounded student interested in serving your community.”

Academic Ties to Namibia and Norway

Pacific Lutheran’s connections with Namibia run through Norway and their mutual interests in peace studies and work on democracy and development. Half of Namibia’s population is Lutheran, and Norway has long been a player on the world stage in peace and reconciliation efforts. Steinar Bryn, who helps promote interethnic dialogue in the Balkans, has taught at PLU and arranged for PLU students to intern in the Department of Dialogue and Peacebuilding at Nansenskolen (the Nansen Academy) in Lillehammer, Norway. 

Norway’s Hedmark University College, the University of Namibia, and Pacific Lutheran also exchange students and faculty and cooperate on peace and development projects. Pacific Lutheran, which enrolled 48 Norwegian students in 2008–09, sends students each fall to Hedmark for a semester, and places others in internships in Windhoek, Namibia, where they help patients with HIV/AIDS and tackle other projects. Sobania calls this “faith in action. The emphasis is on serving others and making a difference in the world.”

Weighing the Impact of Education Abroad

Pacific Lutheran has begun assessing the impact of its gateway programs by measuring changes in students’ knowledge of global issues, intercultural skills, cultural diversity, and commitment to citizenship. Sobania said the changes were significant among those who went on these programs. He next plans to study the impact of J-term courses on students’ attitudes and skills.

“I’m truly impressed by what you’re doing here. It is moving your ­students and our country in the direction we simply must go.”

There are other, less scientific ways to note these changes. Patricia Bieber, a program specialist at the Wang Center, said, “You see fewer white Tshirts with big writing on the front. They’ll come in wearing a new scarf or jacket, or something from an African nation or India. You watch them evolve.” Charry Bentson, assistant director of the Wang Center, recalling a student who was wary of leaving for a course in India, said, “We didn’t think we could get him on the plane.” He returned eager to undertake service work in India after graduation.

Returner Reflections Weave Strands Together

Pacific Lutheran alternates yearly between holding an international symposium on a major global topic and an event called World Conversations where faculty and students reflect on their experiences abroad. Former Vice President Walter Mondale, speaking at the first World Conversations in February 2007, said, “I’m truly impressed by what you’re doing here. It is moving your students and our country in the direction we simply must go.” The university also engages students in weekly discussion groups called Returner Reflections. Liz Pfaff, a junior majoring in Spanish and mathematics, who spent a J-term in Honduras and a semester in Oaxaca, Mexico, said the most important part of education abroad is “what you do when you get back.” Senior Troy Moore, a Spanish major who spent one semester in Granada, Spain, and a second in Chengdu, China, said, “I wouldn’t feel as much of a global citizen as I do now had I not come to this school” He signed up for AmeriCorps after graduation. Senior Zach Alger, a political science and Spanish major who did a J-term in South Africa and a semester in Granada, said, “You have to take the initiative to make it a valuable experience, to integrate it back into your life and make sure it wasn’t a fivemonth vacation.”

Krista Rajanen, who went to South Africa on a J-term and to Oaxaca for a full semester, signed on as a Sojourner Advocate after her return. That is one of four paid positions counseling peers about education abroad. Rajanen said, “I always tell students that the J-term experience can be equally as impactful as a semester. For me it certainly was, seeing the huge disparity and distance in South Africa between rich and poor.” Austin Goble, an economic major from Greeley, Colorado, who spent a semester in Ankara, Turkey, won a university grant to return there after graduation to research organic farming’s impact on rural village life. “When I came to PLU, global education wasn’t on my mind,” said Goble. “It was after my friends came back from studying abroad and I saw how they could tie things together with their class work that I really got an itch to go.”

Offering an ‘Engaged’ Experience

Many of Pacific Lutheran’s international students come to Tacoma on exchanges. Karl Stumo, vice president for admission and enrollment services, hopes to attract more for all four years. Half the international students in fall 2008 came from China and Norway. “We’d love to see that diversity increase,” said Stumo.

It is the combination of liberal arts and professional programs that draws both domestic and international students, said Stumo. “It’s a very engaged experience. We ask students to ask big questions: Who am I? What am I built to do? What are my God-given talents, and how can I apply them in the world?” The university launched an International Honors Program in 2007 that requires study of global issues from ancient to modern times on topics from war and peace to poverty to environmental sustainability.

President Anderson summed it up. “My feeling is that we’re embarked on a global journey here that cannot be detoured…. When I hear the rhetoric about tightening up on world trade and (not) shipping jobs overseas, that just isn’t going to happen. We’ve crossed the border into a new global era from which we cannot step back.” 

Boston University (BU) is impossible to miss, perched alongside the Charles River in the city that dubs itself the Athens of America. Dorms and lecture halls stand sentry on Commonwealth, and the Boston T trolley doubles as the campus shuttle. Kenmore Square, the iridescent CITGO sign, and Fenway Park sit in BU’s backyard; the Prudential Tower looms in the distance. In this vibrant cityscape, this one-time Methodist seminary has blossomed into the fourth largest U.S. private university, with 30,000 students and a phalanx of graduate and professional programs. It enrolled more than 5,000 international students from 135 countries in 2008–09, and it operates one of the premiere education abroad programs, sending 1,500 BU undergraduates and 700 from other U.S. campuses to destinations around the globe for work and study.

BU has embarked on a 10-year, $1.8 billion drive to move higher in the academic rankings, and its 2007 strategic plan, Choosing to Be Great (www.bu.edu/president/strategicplan/choosing.shtml), makes building on BU’s international strengths a cornerstone of that strategy. While pledging to continue “our long and proud tradition of service-based and professional learning,” it emphasized that “the landscape for our students and programs is more than Boston; it is the world.” Already the percentage of international students in the freshman class has jumped from 7 to 11 percent, and President Robert Brown is aiming for 14 percent, which he says would give BU “basically a global student body.” 

Strategic Growth in Languages

Another impact can be seen in BU’s language programs, already the beneficiary of several of the 100 new faculty positions planned. Eighteen languages from Arabic to Korean are regularly taught, and BU’s African Studies Center, a Title VI national resource center and one of the nation’s oldest, provides instruction in half a dozen more. 

“Deans nowadays are running languages together into huge departments with all kinds of crazy combinations; BU is walking in the other direction.”

James McCann, an environmental historian who studies the nexus between maize and malaria, said its broad reach allows students to write dissertations in fields “all the way from geography to anthropology in different parts of Africa.”

Not every BU student must learn another language, although the large College of Arts and Sciences requires proficiency. Even without a blanket requirement, 9,000 students are studying languages. Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Virginia Sapiro said, “I’ve been working to expand the number of lesser taught strategic languages.” Already she’s hired new, tenure-track faculty for Turkish and Arabic, and Persian is next.

BU bifurcated an omnibus language unit into separate Departments of Romance Studies (French, Italian, and Spanish) and Modern Languages and Comparative Literatures (German, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese). Christopher Maurer, chair of the Department of Romance Studies, said, “Deans nowadays are running languages together into huge departments with all kinds of crazy combinations; BU is walking in the other direction.” William Waters, chair of modern languages, said, “They don’t have armies of students studying those (strategic) languages… but what you see in Dean Sapiro’s moves there is strategic thinking” about bolstering BU’s intellectual capacity in such areas as Muslim studies. A professor of French, Elizabeth Goldsmith, was tapped in 2008 to become full-time director of academic affairs for all BU education abroad programs, and BU also has created a new position of director of language programs. 

Full Semesters and Internships Overseas

Most BU students who study abroad go for a full semester. Open Doors 2008 ranked BU fourth among doctoral institutions in that category. More than 40 percent of undergraduates study abroad and Brown is aiming for 50 percent at an institution that once was primarily a commuter college. Internships are a signature of BU education abroad. With 4,000 active internship sources worldwide, the Division of International Programs boasts that it can personalize placements in fields ranging from the arts and journalism to business and psychology. Faculty love this. “If the students know there is a study abroad program, that draws them in like a vacuum cleaner,” said James Iffland, a professor of Spanish. He credits Urbain “Ben” De Winter, associate provost and head of the Division of International Programs, with being “an absolute dynamo” in developing opportunities for study and internships abroad. Eugenio Menegon, a professor of Chinese history, said, “If you find the right opportunity and provide just a little bit of faculty support, it’s amazing what the students can do. They take off.” 

Stepping Into ‘This Engaging World’

One signpost of BU’s passion for global education is that international relations is the largest major in the College of Arts and Sciences, drawing 1,100 of the 16,000 undergraduates. The international relations faculty includes former ambassadors, Foreign Service and military officers, as well as scholar Husain Haqqani, now on leave as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States. Erik Goldstein, the department chair, said the curriculum “offers a special blend of the academic and the practical applications of international affairs,” with more courses on intelligence and security issues than any university outside the war colleges, as well as dozens on the environment and development. 

“It is a department that really values teaching and understands we have a strong obligation to our students,” said William Grimes, associate chair of international relations and director of a new Center for the Study of Asia. The Asia center “gives us a seat at the table when it comes to talking about how to expand our faculty and curriculum.”

The popularity of international relations is no surprise, said Brown. BU students chose a university “that is big and complicated and right in the middle of a city. The world looks interesting to them. They’ve already taken one step into this engaging world.”

Educating Engineers and Pre-Meds Abroad

A decade-long push to encourage engineering students to pursue part of their education in other countries has resulted in almost 20 percent of engineers spending a semester studying overseas. Most head to Technische Universität Dresden, where they can take engineering courses taught in English while also enrolling in German language and cultural classes. The Dresden model proved such a good fit that BU now sends engineers to universities in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Guadalajara, Mexico, as well. In all, 55 engineers studied abroad last year, said Associate Dean for Undergraduate Engineering Solomon Eisenberg. 

Science majors also study at the Dresden technical institute, taking organic chemistry in a class of 25 instead of 200 back in Boston. The Dresden science program recently branched out to Grenoble, France, where BU premeds can immerse themselves in French culture (although again, the science courses are taught in English). “The sophomore year is ideal for this. The later you wait, the harder it is,” said Mort Hoffman, an emeritus professor of chemistry who helped establish the partnership with the Dresden university. 

A Foothold in the Middle East

BU began offering postgraduate degrees for dentists in Dubai in July 2008, and the School of Medicine has explored opening a branch in the Middle East. Brown called the Dubai dental offerings part of “a grand experiment” to see which BU degrees can be offered at great distances. But he rules out trying to replicate its undergraduate program overseas. “BU is known as a very fine liberal arts general education with a diversity of majors at the undergraduate level overlaid with a really rich set of graduate programs. The question is, if you don’t replicate the graduate professional programs (and) the diversity of undergraduate programs, then is it BU?” asked Brown, former provost and engineering dean at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The School of Public Health is spearheading a Global Health Initiative that engages faculty from many fields in efforts to reduce health disparities between wealthier and financially strapped countries. Even Robert Pinsky, former U.S. poet laureate, has participated in its symposia. Associate Dean Gerald Keusch, former director of the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health, said, “If you believe as we do that global health touches on everything, then you need to connect across the whole of the university. Students have this great urge to do something meaningful. We’re playing into that.”

Jay Halfond, dean of Metropolitan College and Extended Education, who chairs the President’s Council for a Global University, said, “We’ve become very principled about how we choose to be involved internationally,” he said. BU looks for “true academic relationships and engagements that will enhance the reputation of the university,” not just business opportunities. Metropolitan College offers continuing education classes online and on military bases, as well as at a graduate center in Brussels, Belgium.

BU already has exchanges with Chinese universities in Shanghai and Beijing, and the provost and faculty members have paid exploratory visits to Indian institutions. Management professor Sushil Vachani said, “We’d like to be better known in those countries. The world’s center of gravity has shifted towards Asia.”

Weaving Education Abroad Into BU’s Fabric

Ben De Winter, associate provost for International Programs, has orchestrated the expansion of BU’s international activities since 1997. “My sense was that the greatest challenge here was to integrate study abroad into the fabric of the university, into the curriculum, to make it part and parcel of a BU education, not simply an experience that was somehow set apart,” said De Winter. He made the rounds of Boston University’s 17 schools and colleges, discussing with deans and faculty where their disciplines fit into an international context. Soon the College of Fine Arts was sending theater majors to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts for a semester, while music students went to the Royal College of Music, and art students headed to Venice. The Dresden program for engineers was inaugurated in 2001. “I’ve never really felt that there were serious obstacles to what we wanted to do. The difference today is that there is so much more explicit support for  everything that is international,” said the Antwerp, Belgium-born professor.

De Winter and his International Programs staff recently moved out of a cramped townhouse into spacious quarters in a new building on the west end of campus. The busy International Students and Scholars Office (ISSO), which had been blocks apart, now is under the same roof, next door to the busy Center for English Language and Orientation Programs, where 1,600 students take intensive English instruction each year. Befitting a university with so many international students and scholars, the ISSO has doubled in size since 1998, in part to meet the additional reporting required after the September 11 attacks. “We have undergone enormous change and institutionalized reporting to such a degree that I’m not sure the students realize how complicated our systems really are,” said Director Jeanne Kelley. De Winter said of the post-9/11 period, “We got everybody involved. The ISSO was spearheading it, but the information technology group was essential, the registrar helped, the admissions office helped, the provost’s office was there.” 

Brown, who in 2005 became BU’s 10th president, is a Texas-born chemical engineer who was deeply involved in MIT’s global education efforts during a long career at that campus on the other bank of the Charles River. Brown was instrumental in forging the Singapore-MIT Alliance and still chairs a scientific advisory board for the island nation, which made him an honorary citizen in 2006. 

Now, expanding BU’s international reach is “a major part of what we’re doing,” said Brown. “Long before I arrived Boston University had a great connectivity to the world through international programs and as a destination for international students. What our strategic planning exercise did was roll that up and get the community to declare that this is one of the core competencies of the university.” 

Difficult economic times pose fresh challenges, but that will not deter BU from pursuing this international course, said Brown. “If you really have a set of priorities, you can’t let economics hold you back. Now, does it slow you down a bit? Yes, but it does not hold you back.