There is no ice hockey team at basket-ball-crazed Valparaiso University, but the Indiana institution completed a hat trick this spring when for the third time in four years a trio of seniors was awarded Fulbright scholarships. They are bound for China, South Korea, and Germany. For a campus with 3,000 undergraduates, it was evidence how successful the 148-year-old independent Lutheran school has been in infusing the curriculum with international content and encouraging students to explore global issues. Valparaiso sends upwards of 200 students a year to study abroad, many to programs it operates in Cambridge, England; Reutlingen, Germany; Puebla, Mexico; and Hangzhou, China. It requires nearly all freshmen—including nearly 1,000 business, engineering, and nursing majors—to take a two-semester, interdisciplinary course that meets five hours a week to discuss texts from the East Asia and Afghanistan, from Plato and Sophocles, and from the Old and New Testaments of the Bible (the 80 freshman in the honors program, Christ College, read equally diverse and global texts).
One of the latest Fulbrighters, Carl Boschert, a Chinese and Japanese studies and history major from Jackson, Mississippi, spent a semester at Valparaiso’s Hangzhou Study Center and made two other research trips to China. Associate professor of history Charles Schaefer, who advises the Fulbright applicants, sees “a direct correlation between our students’ performance in winning Fulbright awards and our overseas study programs. Many of our students have studied overseas for a semester or an entire year and come back with an expanded world view and an interest in exploring international studies even further.” Schaefer himself as a Fulbright lecturer at Addis Ababa University in the 1990s.
Religious and classical music occupy an important place in the life of Valparaiso. A $1.5 million gift allowed it to open a Bach Institute in 2003, and the university chorale has toured Germany twice in recent years and performed as a resident choir in Leipzig at St. Thomas Church, where Johann Sebastian Bach was cantor for the last 27 years of his life and where he is buried.
“We provide a lot of opportunity within a small-size liberal arts college,” says Provost Roy Austensen. “We provide a liberal arts education for engineers and accountants and finance majors and nurses as well” as arts and science majors (Valparaiso’s law school, which dates back to 1879, enrolls 500 students; 400 other graduate students pursue degrees in arts and sciences, business and nursing). John R. Ruff, associate professor of English and director of the Valpo Core Course, describes it this way:
Since its inception in 1998 the Valpo Core has helped to broaden and internationalize Valparaiso University first-year students’ horizons. Almost every unit in this year-long course puts into dialogue texts from different eras and traditions: Gilgamesh with Genesis , Shusako Endo’s Silence with the Gospel of Mark, Lord Shang and Mencius with Plato and John Stuart Mill, The Bhagavad Gita with Martin Luther’s Christian Liberty . Laura Esquival’s Like Water for Chocolate transported us to Mexico during the Mexican Revolution; Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies took us to the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo era; Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families brought us to Rwanda after the genocide. Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner , set mostly in Afghanistan, has been one of our most successful texts; Il Postino and Cinema Paradiso , set in Italy, are among our most successful films. This past year Sonia Nazario’s Enrique’s Journey helped us put a human face on the undocumented worker traveling by train from Honduras into the United States, a harrowing and heartbreaking tale.
Gourevitch and Nazario have spoken on campus, and Elias Chacour, the Palestinian peace activist and priest whose autobiography Blood Brother was just added to the syllabus, has been invited.
Valparaiso draws a third of its students from Indiana and almost as many from Illinois and elsewhere in the Midwest. The campus is located an hour outside Chicago and 15 miles south of Lake Michigan and the 15,000-acre Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. International students numbered 118 in 2006. With a 13-to-1 ratio of students to faculty, Valparaiso prides itself on keeping classes small. To keep each of the 40 sections of the Valpo Core Course under 20 students, the university encourages every department except engineering to contribute faculty, and most do. “The beauty is that the core stimulates a conversation about major ideas and themes in human history among a wide variety of faculty members, some of whom haven’t touched texts like these since they were undergraduates themselves—if then,” says Austensen, whose field is modern European history. “It enlivens the intellectual climate of the campus.”
Before the Valpo Core, there was a required freshman seminar, but the topics and syllabi varied widely. Jon T. Kilpinen, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, says, “As a residential campus, we felt that building a common experience among the freshmen was important. It would assist with retention but also help build a sense of community and identity for each group of students.” The Valpo Core looks at themes of life, death, vocation, loss, and love through the lens of great works of literature and art. Many texts are ancient classics, but others explore modern dilemmas, such as Tracy Kidder’s gripping Mountains Beyond Mountains on Dr. Paul Farmer’s fight against poverty and infectious diseases in Haiti and globally.
Associate Provost Renu Juneja, who joined the faculty in 1978 after coming to the United States from India on a Fulbright scholarship, said teachers from different fields come together as cohorts to discuss the texts before teaching them to the students. “What has developed is a mathematician sitting with a nurse sitting with a historian sitting with an English professor sitting with a chemist, and the conversation that takes place among these people before they even go to teach has in some ways transformed the experience for our students,” says Juneja, a professor of English.
Hugh E. McGuigan, director of International Studies, is convinced the freshman Core whets student appetites for study abroad. Valparaiso is a founding member of the Associated New American Colleges (ANAC), formed in 1994 by a group of mid-sized, comprehensive universities that emphasize undergraduate education and offer master’s and professional degrees. Elon University, a 2007 winner of the Senator Paul Simon Award for Campus Internationalization, also belongs to the group of 22 institutions, which allows members to send students on each other’s study abroad programs at no additional cost. “We’ve got a student now studying in Morocco through Mercer University, and we had two in the fall through Butler’s program in Alcalá, Spain. We have another student in Puebla, Mexico, through Ithaca College. This ANAC consortium is giving us more study abroad opportunities in countries where we don’t have our own programs,” says McGuigan, who has been at Valparaiso since 1983.
The most unusual feature of the 10-credit Valpo Core is the fifth hour each week that takes place outside the classroom. “In some ways it’s a moveable feast. A variety of activities take up that fifth hour. The residential life people on campus have become very involved with the Core,” says Dean Kilpinen. “Since our freshmen live together, the student affairs people do programming in the residence halls that matches the syllabus. Likewise, our art museum also follows the syllabus.” The museum displays works of art that relate to the topics under discussion in a special room.
The activities and the undertakings vary, and not everybody must do the same thing. “If there’s a German film festival on campus, that could be a core-approved activity, or a jazz festival, or our Martin Luther King Day celebration,” says Juneja. Students must write about their activities—the Valpo Core is a writing-intensive experience—but no one scans IDs at the door.
Mel W. Piehl, professor of humanities and history and dean of Christ College, notes the honors college has incorporated classic Chinese and Japanese texts and East Asian issues into its freshman curriculum. “Students regularly read Mencius, Chuang-Tzu, Hsun-Tzu, Lu Xun, and other classical and contemporary Chinese thinkers,” says Piehl, a 1968 alumnus. And the college provides “Albert Schweitzer Fellowships” for students to work as medical volunteers in mobile clinics in Costa Rican and Nicaraguan villages over Valparaiso’s two-week spring break.
Valparaiso also sends new faculty after their first year off to Cambridge, England, for a week-long retreat. They live in apartments that Valparaiso students occupy in the fall and spring, see shows on London’s West End and visit the usual sights, but they also learn firsthand just how much importance Valparaiso places on international education. “Part is acculturating them to the special mission of this university and part is helping them bond with each other as a cohort so they are not in their silos. But part is also to widen their horizons,” says Juneja. “However much we say that England is like America, it’s really another strange country for most Americans.” In summer 2006, the entire Christ College faculty traveled to Berlin, Leipzig, Wittenberg, and Erfurt, Germany, for 10 days; other faculty have traveled as a group to China.
When Juneja and her husband, political scientist James L. Kingsland, joined the faculty in 1978, she found herself one of the few international professors on campus and one of only a handful of people from India in the community. Now, almost two dozen of Valparaiso’s 254 full-time faculty is international. “It’s changed so much,” she says. “I remember when there were only four or five Indian families in the surrounding area, and now we can’t find a hall to accommodate us all. We built a cultural center 15 miles from here and this is happening in other communities as well. I am a Sikh and we built our own temple. I just find the whole situation has changed dramatically.”
International enrollments actually peaked in the late 1990s before Asian enrollments dropped after a currency crisis, and fewer students from the Middle East came after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. “But the trend now is going back up,” says McGuigan, especially with the government of Saudi Arabia funding scholarships for its nationals to study in the United States.
“We are going about this much more deliberately,” says Juneja. “When I came there was no concerted effort made to recruit students internationally. It was personal contacts and church connections that brought us students. It’s only in the last 15 years that we’ve actually done international recruiting.” At first Valparaiso was content to send a representative on tours to college fairs in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Now it is lining up exchanges with partner universities in China and elsewhere. Holly Singh, assistant director of international programs, also has made several recruiting trips to India, his homeland.
“We have partnerships now with five Chinese universities. They send us students … and we host their faculty for professional development. Many Chinese faculty have come here for a semester,” says Juneja. Almost five dozen professors from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou—where VU’s own study center is located—and other universities in China have been visiting scholars at Valparaiso. Using its religious connections, Valparaiso also hosts young faculty from overseas who are sent to the Indiana campus for four months of mentoring by the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia. Eighteen professors early in their careers have made that journey over the past four years from institutions in China, India, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. McGuigan said that one participant, a professor of English from Nanjing University, “just fell in love with Valpo” and immediately recruited four students to come to Valparaiso for master’s degrees in international commerce and policy, as well as English and communications.
A former president, O.P. Kretzmann, once defined religious universities such as Valparaiso as places “where Athens and Jerusalem meet.” Nowadays, Valparaiso is adding other cities across Europe, Asia, and Latin America to that mix, and Valpo’s students are the better for it.
