Program Development and Delivery

Through its global initiatives and community outreach efforts, the University of Iowa (UI), well-known for its Iowa Writers’ Workshop, has excelled in recent years in welcoming the world to its campus in Iowa City. The campus, situated on the former grounds of Iowa’s first state capital, is integrated into the heart of downtown. The UI’s 33,000 students—4,300 of whom are international—make up nearly half the town’s population.

Situated in a central location on campus, the UI International Programs (IP) office serves as the hub for international activity. In addition to study abroad and international student and scholar services, IP also offers grants and funding support to faculty and students and provides a number of intercultural training opportunities.

Senior Leadership Pushes the Internationalization Agenda

Internationalization at the UI has been more than 20 years in the making, according to Downing Thomas, PhD, associate provost and dean of international programs. “If you look back 20 years, international activities at the university were largely a boutique operation for students in humanities and social sciences. It’s taken some time to gain momentum, but I think that now we’re seeing that the success and the true value of internationalization occurs when it is riveted to the core missions of the institution,” says Thomas, who also serves as the UI’s senior international officer.

Thomas’s position as dean was created in the late 1990s, when former university president Mary Sue Coleman, PhD, recognized that the institution needed senior leadership to advance its internationalization agenda.

Former provost Barry Butler, PhD, who left the UI in March 2017, adds that Coleman and then-provost John Whitmore, PhD, also provided funding to each college and asked them to come up with creative ways to internationalize the curriculum.

At the time, Butler, associate dean of engineering, used the seed funding to start the Virtual International Project program, which drew on emerging industry practices for working in remote teams. Engineering students were able to collaborate with peers abroad to work on international design projects. Since the initial partnership with Aix-Marseille University in France, the program has expanded to include Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Current president Bruce Harreld plans to continue building on the legacy of his predecessors. “Moving forward we hope to be more purposeful in designing an international experience specifically augmenting each student’s on-campus work and career interests,” he says.

Community Outreach As a Cornerstone of Campus Internationalization

A key feature of the UI’s internationalization efforts is its community outreach initiatives. IP currently has seven full-time staff that work exclusively with communications efforts.

“The UI strives to serve not only its students but all citizens of the state. We need to do all we can to share with fellow Iowans the groundbreaking research that happens on our campus and in collaboration with international partners,” says Joan Kjaer, director of communications and relations for International Programs.

International Programs’s signature event is the annual Provost’s Global Forum, which brings together experts from a variety of disciplines to discuss international and global issues.

Full-time faculty are invited to submit a proposal for an award of up to $20,000 to bring speakers to campus. The 2016 Global Forum included an artistic exhibition, a multidisciplinary academic conference, and an undergraduate course on the redefinition of the nation-state in the twenty-first century. The 2017 forum focused on women’s health and the environment.

“It’s an opportunity to focus on a specific issue or topic and have experts from around the country and around the world engaging with our faculty and students,” Thomas says.

Another initiative is WorldCanvass, a monthly radio, television, and Internet program that Kjaer describes as “International Programs’s largest public outreach initiative.” Programs are recorded before a live audience and distributed over television, YouTube, iTunes, radio, and the IP website.

“WorldCanvass conversations are focused on themes that are international in scope. They’re thoughtful, reflective, and inspiring, and we tape the live programs for multiplatform distribution. Interested audience members anywhere in Iowa or the world can enjoy them in the comfort of their home, their office, or their car. We want to reach people where they are and not be limited by time or place,” says Kjaer, who also hosts WorldCanvass.

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IP also works with outreach to local K–12 schools. Through the International Classroom Journey program, teachers can enhance students’ understanding of unfamiliar parts of the world by bringing international guests into the classroom to talk about their home countries. For more than 15 years, International Programs and the College of Education have also partnered to present the Teacher’s Institute on Global Education with the goal of helping K–12 educators from around Iowa integrate global perspectives into their classrooms.

Exploring the World Through Writing

Another major outreach effort is the International Writing Program. Since 1967, more than 1,400 writers from more than 150 countries have been in residence at the University of Iowa through its International Writing Program (IWP). The IWP hosts 30–35 well-known authors, poets, and novelists every fall for a three-month residency. Notable alumni include Nobel literature laureates Mo Yan from China and Orhan Pamuk from Turkey.

The IWP, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2017, was founded during the Cold War with the goal of bringing together writers from around the world. “It was a place where writers from the Soviet Bloc could meet writers from the west and have free and frank exchanges of ideas,” says Christopher Merrill, IWP director.

Merrill says that since 9/11, there has been a shift at IWP toward a focus on the Islamic world. Because the majority of the IWP’s funding has come from the U.S. State Department and various embassies, much of the program is focused on public diplomacy and cultural exchange.

“After 9/11, we’ve been involved in conversations about the ways in which cultural diplomacy can be a part of the larger diplomatic strategy. And so we started to think of cultural diplomacy as a two-way exchange,” Merrill adds.

As a result, IWP has also started taking groups of U.S. students abroad, hosting symposia in countries such as Greece and Morocco.

To reach an even wider international audience, IWP eventually developed a robust distance-learning program. Since 2012, it has offered more than 30 distinct MOOCs, courses, exchanges, and events on different topics related to fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and plays. In addition, IWP runs a two-week summer writing program at the University of Iowa for young writers, ages 16-19, with workshops taught in English, Arabic, and Russian.

The IWP led the charge in gaining Iowa City’s designation as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) City of Literature in 2008. As a UNESCO City of Literature, Iowa City also has an obligation to mentor aspiring cities. Merrill subsequently worked with the Iraqi deputy minister of culture to help Baghdad become a City of Literature in 2015. The connection to Baghdad came out of the connections to the Iraqi literary community made possible through the IWP.

“We like to think we’re helping to jump-start a conversation about world literature,” says Merrill.

UI Creates a Welcoming Atmosphere for International Students

According to the UI, its international student population has nearly doubled over the last 10 years, from around 2,200 in 2006 to 4,300 in 2016. Most of the growth has occurred at the undergraduate level. The top three countries represented on the UI campus are China, India, and South Korea.

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To accommodate the growth, International Student and Scholar Services (ISSS) has implemented several programs to support its international population and to promote their integration into life on the UI campus in addition to its standard immigration advising.

One of the initial initiatives in 2008 was the creation of the International Student Committee, which was tasked with auditing existing services and programming for international students to ensure that adequate infrastructure was in place. The committee’s goals have subsequently expanded.

“It drives resources from all units across campus, from housing, public safety, counseling, the registrar’s office, and the colleges to try and make sure that [international students] have the best student experience they can,” says Doug Lee, assistant provost of international programs.

ISSS also runs a number of intercultural programs targeting the wider campus community. The Bridging Domestic and Global Diversity certificate is a leadership program designed to educate students to adapt to cultural differences. Approximately 25 domestic and international students participate in diversity and intercultural training every spring semester. Participants also plan the Bridge Open Forum, an intercultural event to educate the campus about intercultural issues.

The Building Our Global Community certificate is a professional development program that helps UI faculty and staff support international students and scholars. To earn the certificate, participants attend a series of sessions on topics such as helping international students with the cultural adjustment process and the basics of F-1 and J-1 immigration regulations.

The UI also offers individual and group mental health counseling services in English, Spanish, and Mandarin. Students first learn about the University Counseling Service (UCS) at their orientation, when one of the doctors presents about mental health and available counseling services.

“In efforts to meet the needs of students having mental health concerns, the UCS acknowledges that communicating about emotions, insight, and internal conflicts can be highly culturally based and varies greatly due to the construction of how we think about ourselves based on variances within language. As such, the UCS desires to remove as many barriers as possible by providing opportunities for students to communicate in the language that best represents their experience within UCS resource limits,” says UCS director Barry A. Schreier, PhD.

According to Lee Seedorff, ISSS senior associate director, support for using mental health services comes from the students. For example, a group of Chinese students interested in mental health has started a student organization called Heart Workshop, which helps other Chinese students become aware of the support available. Another group is Active Minds, which focuses on mental health awareness and support for both international and domestic students.

In the last few years, the UI has also used technology to reach out to prospective students and parents. According to Lee, it holds welcome sessions in Beijing and Shanghai for incoming Chinese students. To reach students from other countries, they are also creating orientation webinars that students can watch from anywhere in the world. They have also started broadcasting graduations online in Arabic, Korean, Mandarin, Farsi, and Spanish for families who are unable to travel to Iowa City for the ceremony.

The Tippie College of Business, one of the most internationalized schools on campus, has been at the forefront of efforts to integrate international students into life at UI. Around 15 percent of its undergraduates are international, compared with 10 percent on the campus as a whole. To support its large international population, Tippie has created opportunities outside of the classroom such as an international buddy program, which pairs domestic and international students and is open to students from across the campus.

Comprehensive Support for Education and Research Opportunities Abroad

According to the 2016 Open Doors report, the UI ranks in the top 50 U.S. institutions for study abroad, with 21 percent of all undergraduates going abroad. The UI also has several initiatives that create education abroad opportunities for underrepresented students. The total minority undergraduate population is 14 percent, and 16 percent of all undergraduate study abroad participants were students of color in the 2015–2016 academic year.

There are a number of awards available, including a $500 scholarship for traditionally underrepresented populations, such as first-generation students, students of color, LGBT students, and students with disabilities, to help finance study and research opportunities abroad.

IP also recently collaborated with the UI Center for Diversity Enrichment to host the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) Passport Caravan. IP and CIEE sponsored passports for 116 first-generation students and students of color who were first-time passport holders.

International Programs also receives support from the Stanley-University of Iowa Foundation Support Organization (SUIFSO) to fund research projects abroad. Both undergraduate and graduate students, including students who are not U.S. citizens, can apply for international research grants.

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In the past five years, 100 graduate students received a total of $250,000, and 26 undergraduates received a total of $59,000 to conduct international research.

“Every year we have a pool of money for students to do preliminary research, or a creative project. They must be abroad for a month and these are a wonderful starting point to apply for a Fulbright,” says Karen Wachsmuth, PhD, associate director for international fellowships and Fulbright adviser.

The UI has been recognized as a top producer of Fulbright awardees for the last two years. In the 2016–2017 academic year, 15 UI students were awarded grants to conduct research or serve as English teaching assistants abroad.

Wachsmuth sees her outreach and recruitment for Fulbright as a springboard to start more general conversations about opportunities abroad, especially early in a student’s academic career. “There are a lot of different programs going on to start conversations, and fellowships are a part of that because they also encourage students to put together their language training or just things that they’ve learned in their coursework and to apply it to an arena that eventually helps them develop their professional goals,” she says.

“The biggest compliment that I get from students is ‘Even if I don’t get this grant, I’ve learned so much about myself and about where I want to go from doing this,’” Wachsmuth says.

Douglas Baker, who graduated in 2015 with degrees in music and Japanese, spent a year in Japan as a Fulbright fellow. He was able to combine his two majors to investigate the work of a nineteenth-century Japanese composer.

He says that the UI’s position as a research institution gave him the resources he needed to prepare his proposal. “The university has many qualified people, from professors to librarians, who know the ins and outs of creating projects or grant writing or conducting research. Karen [Wachsmuth] and International Programs also provide so much assistance in the application process in terms of information sessions, writing workshops, [and] draft writing get-togethers,” he says.

UI Runs Largest U.S. Study Abroad Program to India

The UI’s single largest study abroad program is the India Winterim, an intensive, three-week field-based program held every January. Due to the program’s overwhelming popularity, no other U.S. college or university in the United States sends more students to India. In 2016–2017, 85 students participated in five different courses.

The program is the brainchild of founder Rangaswamy “Raj” Rajagopal, PhD, also a professor of geographical and sustainability sciences. Rajagopal started the program in 2006 and has subsequently sent more than 1,100 students and 60 faculty members to India.

Students are placed at nonprofits and academic institutions through a variety of faculty-led courses in various disciplines, ranging from engineering to art history. Courses have addressed issues such as water poverty, craft traditions, sustainable development, education, and nonprofit management. Students work with Indian partner organizations to learn about their approaches to addressing social issues.

Janice Cousins is a premed and psychology major who traveled to Kerala in South India this past winter break. She took a course titled Pain, Palliative Medicine, and Hospice Care: Learning from Each Other led by a faculty member from the school of medicine. She learned about end-of-life care in India by working with a physician who founded a community-based palliative care program.

“He started this program for people who cannot afford medicine and aren’t getting the correct care. He was really passionate in teaching us about palliative medicine, which considers everything about the disease, including the mental and spiritual aspects. This completely expanded my perspective on medicine. The things I learned in India, I’m not going to learn in medical school here,” Cousins says.

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Rajogopal spent six months working with the Indian physician to develop the palliative care course. He says that cultural comparison is one of the key aspects of the program. In the United States, hospice care in an institutional setting is most common, whereas in India, end-of-life care is provided in the patient’s home.

“The lesson learned is that there is no single right model of living life. What we are trying to teach is that America doesn’t necessarily know best. There are different models of evolution, culture, and history,” he says.

Rajagopal says that many students, like Cousins, have come back from India with a desire to go to medical school after participating in courses related to health care.

“All of these kids come back, and they’re renewed. They’re totally fearless. You see people living in extraordinary conditions and doing all these kind of things, and it changes you forever,” he adds.

Florida State University’s (FSU) Global and Multicultural Building, home of the Center for Global Engagement (CGE), is the on-campus embodiment of FSU’s more than 60-year commitment to international education. Bringing together academic and student affairs, the center serves as a hub for international and multicultural programming for all FSU students.

A Campus Home for International Programming

“I think the students named it the Globe the minute they moved in. They really embraced it as a home for themselves,” says Mary Coburn, EdD, vice president for student affairs.

Coburn facilitated the construction of the Globe, which opened in 2010, through state funding earmarked for student services facilities. “I think having a physical home really elevated everything that we were doing. From the Friday coffee hours and the Global Cafés to all of the lectures and student meetings that are hosted there, it just sends a message to our campus that internationalization is important,” she says.

CGE’s predecessor was known as the International Center, which primarily focused on immigration advising for international students. The construction of the Globe marked a campuswide shift in the visibility of intercultural and international programming, ­according to Cindy Green, EdD, director of the Center of Global Engagement.

Green was able to work with the Globe’s architect to customize the building’s design, which includes classrooms, a meditation room, an auditorium, and a ­commercial kitchen.

Four times a semester, student organizations sign up to cook cuisine from a featured country in the kitchen through the Global Café. The student groups are able to fundraise at $7 a plate. The Global Café has been an accessible way to increase awareness and appreciation of the cultural diversity at FSU.

“Food is often the first way we are exposed to other cultures. Not only can students from other countries keep their traditions while they’re here, they can introduce their friends and the rest of the university to those traditions,” Coburn says.

Growing Support for Internationalization

Joining FSU in 2004, Green has witnessed growing support for internationalization across campus over the last decade. While there have always been pockets of international activity, comprehensive internationalization has faced challenges at FSU due to its decentralized structure as a public research university.

CGE’s portfolio currently includes international student and scholar services, a cocurricular certificate, international partnerships and direct exchanges, programs for non-degree-seeking international students, and international programming such as the Global Café.

Other units on campus, such as International Programs (IP) and the Center for Intensive English Studies (CIES), have also contributed to FSU’s internationalization efforts. IP oversees for-credit study abroad, while CIES offers intensive English language classes, a certificate in teaching English as a second language, English training for international teaching assistants, and accelerated language courses for incoming graduate students.

“The FSU campus provides so many opportunities for all of our students to be actively engaged with students from over 130 different countries as well as to take classes with an international focus. We offer a variety of international experiences, from short-term intercultural exchanges to year-long study abroad programs for those students that wish to engage internationally,” says FSU President John Thrasher.

Internationalization was included in FSU’s strategic plan for the first time in 2017 under the larger rubric of academic excellence, with the aim of “expanding [FSU’s] global footprint and fostering a culturally rich learning environment on campus.”

“We really pushed to make sure that internationalization was in the plan moving forward. Making sure that internationalization is part of the experience that all of our students have is an important part of academic excellence,” says Provost Sally E. McRorie, PhD.

Assistant Provost Joe O’Shea sees internationalization as one of the institution’s student success initiatives: “We know international education is a high-impact practice, which helps our students launch successfully from the university into graduate education or a career.”

Promoting International Graduate Student Recruitment

Part of the academic excellence priority also focuses on enhancing the quality of graduate education to become a leader in strategically important areas of research. This includes providing financial support to attract the best graduate students.

Associate Provost Bruce Locke says that the ­strategic plan has given FSU impetus to develop initiatives focused on international graduate student recruitment. FSU’s 1,500 international graduate students currently make up more than 75 percent of its international student population.

“One of our goals [as a university] is to become a top-25 public institution. In order to do that we have to really grow our graduate programs, which includes seeking out and recruiting talented international students,” Green says.

Green and Locke collaborated to develop a “3+1+1” program as a graduate recruitment pipeline. Students from 28 partners in China, India, and Thailand can enroll for two semesters at FSU as non-degree-seeking undergraduate students and then transfer their credits back to their home institutions to complete their bachelor’s degree.

Some of the upper-division credits they take will then count toward FSU master’s programs. Known as the Special Academic Program (SAP), the initiative helps better prepare participants for graduate school at FSU as well as other institutions in the United States. It also allows FSU faculty to identify highly qualified candidates for graduate programs. The majority of participants remain at FSU, with some even continuing into PhD programs.

“It’s been really great because the students have a full year to acclimate to the campus,  and faculty members can take a really close look at their work and their competence in English and can give [participants] extra assistance if they need it,” says Jocelyn Vaughn, PhD, program director for FSU international initiatives.

SAP participants pay a program fee that covers their tuition, room and board, and support services provided by CGE. The program was piloted in chemical engineering, and has subsequently expanded to other engineering disciplines as well as finance, marketing, communication, and public administration.

Yun Chen is a Chinese student who graduated from her home university in June 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in public administration. She spent her senior year at FSU as part of the SAP and will be able to transfer 12 credits into her FSU graduate program in public administration in fall 2017.

“The program staff gave us a lot of helpful suggestions and guidance about how to apply for our master’s program. When I was applying for my MPA program, [the director] not only provided a letter of recommendation but also contacted the admissions office to make sure my application was in process,” she says.

Nondegree Programs Increase Diversity and Promote Opportunities Abroad

Creating opportunities for non-degree-seeking students through SAP, as well as direct exchanges and other short-term programs, has also helped increase the diversity of FSU’s international population. CGE currently serves approximately 380 degree-seeking international undergraduates, the majority of whom are student athletes or transfer students from FSU’s branch campus in Panama.

FSU’s international undergraduates are relatively few due to its role as a state institution. Unlike many of its peer institutions in other states, FSU has not needed to pursue international undergraduate recruitment.

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“FSU’s mission is to serve the people of the state of Florida. We have around 42,000 applications for a freshman class of 6,400 for the 2017–2018 academic year. There are plenty of domestic students to fill the slots,” says Green.

Vaughn has instead focused on expanding the number of bilateral exchange programs, especially those that are open to students from any academic discipline. This allows domestic students to study abroad while paying in-state tuition, and enables FSU to bring in more international undergraduates.

“We’ve been trying to increase the number of university-wide exchanges, rather than department to department. We’re doing these in order to give opportunities to students who haven’t been served before by exchanges, in particular those in STEM,” Vaughn says.

For students who are unable to participate in a full-semester exchange, CGE has also developed a cultural exchange program, Beyond Borders. The program sends 12 students to Jamaica over spring break and 10 students to Germany in the summer. In addition to enrolling in a one-credit applied global experience class, participants also host international students from the two countries.

Casey Johnson, an FSU alumni who graduated in 2016 with a degree in biology, participated in Beyond Borders to Jamaica as a junior transfer student and to Germany as a senior. “I really didn’t have the intention of being this world traveler, but somehow it just fit with the timeline of my life at FSU. I know for a fact I would not be where I am now today had it not been for those experiences,” he says.

Johnson is currently studying for a master’s in radiation biology on a full scholarship to the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. “During my interview for Oxford, the main talking point was my international experiences and what I took away from them. I could really tell that the interview committee aligned with my desire to immerse myself in diversity and different cultures,” he explains.

Another short-term program serving international undergraduates is a summer program in hospitality management and intercultural communication. ­Students from partner institutions in Korea, Japan, Macau, Mexico, and Canada combine academic classes with an internship (academic training) at Walt Disney World® Resort. After participating in a 10-day intensive academic program on the FSU campus in Tallahassee, students complete a six-month internship at Disney in Orlando while taking classes with FSU professors, both online and face-to-face.

International Experiences for Domestic Students Through Service Abroad

Other units on campus, such as the Center for Leadership & Social Change and the Center for Undergraduate Research and Academic Engagement (CRE), also offer nontraditional opportunities for students to go abroad.

One of CRE’s flagship programs is Global Scholars, which places approximately 40 students in summer internships at nonprofits in Asia, South America, and Africa. Students participate in predeparture training and must complete a capstone research project on an issue facing the overseas community after completing their internship.

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Valeria Rigobon, a junior psychology major, spent the summer of 2016 working at an educational nonprofit in Lima, Peru. “I actually learned a little about this program at my orientation, before my first fall semester even started. I found it interesting because it didn’t seem like the standard study abroad experience. I was also looking for ways to continue my volunteer work that I had been very involved in throughout middle and high school...It didn’t hurt that I might have the opportunity to go somewhere I could improve my Spanish as well!” she says.

While in Peru, Rigobon worked as a music teacher, tutor, and leadership workshop facilitator. She says the Global Scholars program thoroughly prepared her: “[The program] prepares the students so well for what they will face and accomplish once they’re abroad. We are prepared to represent not only FSU, but the United States, when we go abroad.”

O’Shea says the Global Scholars program has been especially successful at creating opportunities for first-generation and low-income students. “We have made great strides through the Global Scholars program in opening up access, developing a model that is sustainable and accessible, but also works through peer support networks, and in other ways to help students overcome the barriers that they face so that they can successfully undertake a very transformative international education experience,” he says.

CRE also runs the FSU Gap Year Fellows program. Admitted freshmen are able to apply for the program and, if accepted, defer their admission for a year. A gap year—which might be spent traveling, volunteering, interning, or working—involves a break in formal education where students focus on cultivating self-awareness and exploring different career options. FSU provides up to $5,000 of support to GAP Year Fellows, who must have a substantial service element in their proposed gap year.

“We are the second public university in the United States to provide a deferment of matriculation and also to subsidize that. We think of this as a student success intervention. The data that we have in the U.S. and from overseas is that if you have a structured educational bridge year, you are more likely to succeed in college and have not only higher retention rates, but also to have higher academic performance,” O’Shea explains.

Developing a Certificate for Global Citizenship

One of the ways in which FSU attempted to streamline its various opportunities for international experience is through its academic and cocurricular Global Citizenship Certificate, run through the Center for Global Engagement. Opportunities such as Beyond Borders and the Global Scholars program fulfill one of the certificate’s main requirements, a sustained international experience. Students can also meet the requirement by completing at least 75 hours of an intercultural experience within the United States.

All students must also attend and submit reflections on at least eight intercultural events and take a pre- and postassessment of intercultural competence. In addition, students must enroll in two required classes, which include a capstone project, and take two approved electives with a cross-cultural theme.

Rayne Neunie, who finished her studies at FSU in family and child science in May 2017, was a Global Scholar who recently completed her Global Citizenship certificate. “The certificate allowed me to gain a better understanding of cross-cultural differences around the world, I learned a plethora about global issues affecting various societies, and I also engaged in a number of intercultural events that I never before knew existed on Florida State’s campus,” she says.

As a Global Scholar, she spent two months working on a maternal health project at a nonprofit in Kenya, which fulfilled her requirement for a sustained international experience. Neunie also received a Boren scholarship to study Swahili in Tanzania in summer and fall 2017.

“This experience deepened my passion for global health, influenced me to participate in FSU’s Global Citizenship certificate, and has made me confident to expand my global capacity by becoming a Boren scholarship recipient. Florida State University has taught me that my journey of achieving intercultural competence does not end here,” Neunie explains.

Sending Students Abroad to Overseas Study Centers

FSU is ranked 12th on the Institute of International Education’s (IIE) list of “Top 25 Institutions Awarding Credit for Study Abroad,” with 2,262 students studying abroad in 2014–2015. Approximately 25 percent of FSU’s undergraduates study abroad, according to the director of international programs, Jim Pitts.

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Much of FSU’s impressive study abroad figures are due to FSU’s large footprint abroad. Starting with a branch campus in Panama in 1957, FSU now has three additional study centers in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Spain. The Panama campus also hosts FSU faculty-led study abroad programs.

FSU-Panama offers bachelor’s degrees in subjects such as computer science and international affairs, but the majority of its students complete an associate’s degree and transfer to the main campus in Tallahassee. Approximately 100 students transfer from Panama every year.

“The Panama campus really serves as a hub for our outreach in Latin America. We have students from many different countries of the Latin American region that start their program with us in Panama,” Pitts says.

Students who are citizens of a Latin American or Caribbean country enrolled at FSU-Panama are also eligible for a scholarship program that allows them to pay in-state tuition for the last two years of their studies. FSU-Panama also maintains research affiliations with local universities, including Universidad de Panamá, Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá, and Universidad Católica Santa María La Antigua.

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Students can also participate in the First Year Abroad program, which allows freshmen to spend their first year at one or more of the four sites and complete general education requirements. “At the completion of the 12 months, they can have in-state tuition in Florida for the balance of their undergraduate degree,” Pitts says.

Recent graduate Lauren Romanzak, who majored in English literature and international affairs, spent her first academic year in London followed by a summer in Valencia.

“The opportunity to spend a year abroad was enough to sell me on the program, and the in-state tuition waiver to follow was enough to convince my accountant father,” she says.

“I’m thankful I got the opportunity to study abroad so early in my college career because it directed the remainder of it. Coming from a small town had not exposed me to much diversity, and studying in as huge of a global city as London, learning another language in Valencia, and traveling independently throughout Europe (and even Africa!) definitely changed that.”

A few years back, The Chronicle of Higher Education asked college presidents to muse on what they’d do with a $1 billion gift with no strings attached. The University of Denver’s then-Chancellor Daniel L. Ritchie immediately responded: “Send every student abroad for study at no extra cost, including travel.”

But Ritchie wasn’t just wishing. He explained to the Chronicle that the University of Denver already had a plan in the works to send every undergraduate with grades of B or better to study abroad, and it was financing this out of pocket. A $1 billion windfall would just let Denver start doing this sooner. 

Scholarship Program Takes Students Abroad

The University of Denver launched its Cherrington Global Scholars program on schedule in September 2004, sending the first 347 students to spend the fall quarter at more than 60 sites overseas. Many were prominent universities with which DU has painstakingly forged bilateral agreements to ensure that the coursework is compatible with the majors of DU students from programs as diverse as music, engineering, business, and social work. “There simply is no better preparation for the challenges that lie ahead for our students,” said Ritchie, a former corporate CEO who retired as chancellor this past summer after executing a remarkable turnaround in the University of Denver’s fortunes over 16 years.

The Cherrington Global Scholars program—named for a former chancellor and prominent international educator [see box, The Cherrington and Korbel Connections]—has attracted curiosity in academic circles. “People ask all the time: ‘Who is this Cherrington that gave the money?’” said Carol Fairweather, director of the Study Abroad Office. “But it didn’t come that way. It didn’t come with an endowment. It’s written into the university budget.”

As Ritchie wrote in response to the Chronicle’s $1 billion question, “When students immerse themselves in study abroad and constantly use another language, it forever changes their worldview and their potential for growth. It’s even truer now than before September 11.”

The University of Denver long had been sending students to study in other countries, but not in the numbers that Ritchie, then-Provost and now Chancellor Robert Coombe, and legal scholar Ved Nanda, the vice provost for internationalization, had in mind. When Fairweather came on board nine years ago, she was the sole person in the study abroad office. “Now there are six of us,” she said in her Scottish burr. In 2001 the university enlisted George Boyd, a former dean of humanities and study abroad director for Trinity University, to serve as director of international site development, a position from which he traveled the world to forge more than 40 exchange agreements with leading universities. Boyd is now associate vice provost for internationalization.

The university enrolls 9,600 students, including 4,500 undergraduates, 55 percent from outside Colorado. Nearly 700 are international. With the launch of the Cherrington program, the university is aiming for 60 percent of its undergraduates to study abroad for at least a quarter. It’s not surprising why more students are taking DU up on the offer. 

The students pay just a third of their tuition (roughly $9,000) plus a share of room and board, but the university picks up the rests of the costs of their studying abroad. “We pay all their travel expenses, not just the airfare,” said Fairweather. “If they are going to Aix-en-Provence, we pay the airfare to Paris, and then the train or flight down. It’s visas, entry permits, International Student ID card, medical insurance if that’s mandatory, and any additional expense.” Some students spend 15 weeks studying overseas, which is more like a semester than a quarter, but they are still charged only a third of tuition. 

DU still sends students on other study abroad programs as well. All told, the number studying abroad jumped from 221 in fall 2003 to 405 in fall 2004. 

The University of Denver invests heavily in the Cherrington program. Most of the tuition payments are passed on to the partner universities. The program’s costs topped $4 million in the first year, and was projected at more than $5 million for 2005–2006.

Leadership and Campus-Wide Support

“How do we do it? The answer is that Chancellor Ritchie was and is a man of great aspirations for the university and high educational ideals, and he decided this was a very high priority,” said Boyd.

Eric Gould, an English professor and former vice provost who chairs the Cherrington Global Scholars Faculty Board, said, “It’s very much the will of the chancellor and the provost that this  succeed, and it’s not just them. It’s the deans, the departments, and the faculty–we all believe in this as a very important educational exercise.”

The faculty are also deeply involved in making sure these study abroad experiences fit smoothly into students’ majors. “It’s very complicated to do it well,” said Ritchie. “You’ve got to get faculty from each of the disciplines involved. You’ve got to prepare students not only for the logistics of going, but in their studies and disciplines, and making sure that we can give credit for it.”

“It’s unusual for a school with so many professional programs, especially those offered at the undergraduate level, to integrate study abroad as easily as we have done,” said Gould. “Even some of the difficult majors like engineering, music, and art, which have very, very tight curricula, are making special efforts to ensure that their students travel.”

DU is among the largest private universities between Chicago and the West Coast. The study abroad numbers had been growing even before the Cherrington program. Based on the 2002–2003 numbers, it ranked seventh nationally among doctoral/research institutions in Open Doors 2004, the Institute of International Education (IIE) report, with fully half of undergraduates studying abroad by the time they graduated. However, most then were going on short study abroad trips, usually during the summer.

The university made meticulous preparations for the launch of the Cherrington program, canvassing almost every office on campus from housing to the registrar to financial aid that “might be caught in the ripple of Cherrington,” as Fairweather put it. It convened town hall-style meetings to discuss how to deal with the ripple effects.

 “With the advising and the new opportunities available, we are seeing students move into destinations that were not popular before,” said Fairweather. “We’re seeing them spread out. We’ve got many more students interested in Japan and we have students going to India. We started a program with DIS in Denmark.”

While still provost, Coombe offered $30,000 in grants for departments to send faculty overseas to find suitable new academic partners for their majors, in addition to the many that Boyd found.

 “A couple of schools are on our list primarily because I was looking for an engineering fit. The Budapest Institute of Technology is the best example,” said Boyd. “We’re adding Monash University in Australia, partly for engineering and partly for art.”

 “We know students will still want to go to Australia and certain places that have been popular for years. But George has filled in the holes in the wall where the music students and engineers need to go,” said Fairweather.

To ensure that music majors not only received instruction in their instrument, but also got opportunities to play in ensembles and found “just the right course in the music history sequence,” Boyd arranged exchanges with the Institute for the International Education of Students (IES) in Vienna and Milan. They also can enroll in a Brisbane, Australia, conservatory.

The engineering department reconfigured requirements to make it possible for majors to study abroad at the start of their senior year. “I thought it quite remarkable that a very technical department like engineering would adjust its curriculum to make a slot where study abroad would fit better,” said Gould.

Nanda, who holds two endowed chairs in addition to serving as vice provost for international programs, calls what has happened at the University of Denver “a miracle.” He continues, “Internationalization and international life and culture have become part of the mainstream of life on this campus. It’s wonderful that it happened, and very, very heartening.”

In the higher education world, college and university rankings are a source of endless fascination and endless frustration for administrations and admissions officers. They come in all sizes and shapes, some with impressive imprimaturs (i.e., the National Research Council’s periodic ratings of graduate programs) and others that mix a scintilla of scientific precision with an overlay of academics’ opinions and impressions (i.e., U.S. News & World Report’s cottage industry of rankings). There is one common denominator that binds together most of America’s greatest research campuses, public and private: they belong to the Association of American Universities, an organization of 62 leading North American universities—60 in the United States and two in Canada—whose members award half the doctoral degrees and account for 55 percent of the research in the United States each year. Its roster is often regarded as a Who’s Who of North America’s greatest universities. 

The University of California at Los Angeles won admission to AAU’s exclusive ranks in 1974 (74 years after the University of California at Berkeley, one of the founders), and UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale often makes the largely unassailable observation that his institution can lay claim to this title: the best comprehensive, public university in any of America’s largest cities. “If you stop and think about it, UCLA is quite unusual in that sense,” said Carnesale, a onetime nuclear engineer who redirected his career and scholarly passion into public policy work after participating in the original Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) talks 35 years ago. “It’s not New York. It’s not Boston. They have great universities, but they are not public. It’s not Chicago. It’s not San Francisco. Berkeley’s at Berkeley. You start going down the list, and they don’t have great public universities in the (big) cities.” There’s the University  of Washington on the lakefront in Seattle, a city of 563,000, and  the University of Texas at Austin, in the Texas capital, where 656,000 people dwell—but neither comes close to the population of the City of Angels (3.8 million). The handful of public universities with reputations as large or larger than UCLA’s are in smaller places, from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Charlottesville, Virginia, to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Madison, Wisconsin. (And, of course, in the aforementioned Berkeley, population 102,000.) This New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts, expatriate now has this to say about his adopted hometown: “Los Angeles is perhaps the most exciting, dynamic, global city anywhere, not just in the United States.” 

College presidents and university chancellors everywhere are nothing if not super salespersons for the place they call home. The 69-year-old Carnesale is a proud, purposeful, and extraordinarily successful pitchman. Since moving west in 1997 after 23 years at Harvard University—where he was professor, dean of the Kennedy School of Government, and provost—Carnesale has helped UCLA raise upwards of $2.5 billion—more than any public university, and $3 billion is in sight before he steps down as chancellor in June 2006 to resume teaching. Carnesale marshals these arguments for a point: UCLA is a very international, interdisciplinary university that happens to sit in the middle of one of the most multicultural, polyglot cities in the world.

Leaders for an Interconnected Global World

Now, “urban” isn’t the first word that comes to mind upon stepping foot on UCLA’s gorgeous Westwood campus, a few miles south of the HOLLYWOOD sign and a few miles east of the Santa Monica beaches. But “international” is. With five Nobel Laureates on the faculty, and four others among its 330,000 alumni—including Ralph Bunche ’26, the scholar-athlete who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for brokering a truce between Arabs and Jews in the Middle east—and with 38,000 students and a faculty of 3,300, UCLA is deeply involved in international education and research. As Carnesale wrote in an introduction to UCLA’s global programs and activities for UCLA Magazine (Winter 2004), “At UCLA, scholars from a wide range of disciplines prepare the next generation of leaders who will not only be outstanding scientists, teachers, artists and citizens, but who also will function effectively in an interconnected global world.”

Carrying the banner and providing the central administrative and intellectual focus for these activities is the UCLA International Institute, which occupies two upper floors of Ralph Bunche Hall on the compact campus (among the nine University of California institutions, UCLA has the curious distinction of having the largest enrollment and the smallest campus—419 acres). Under the purview of the International Institute are 15 research centers and separate programs on almost all regions of the globe, nine interdisciplinary degree programs, including a new, enormously poplar Global Studies major; language studies (UCLA regularly teaches more than 40 languages, including Afrikaans, Hausa, Quechua, Bashkir, Uzbek, and Catalan), study abroad, community outreach, and numerous global research initiatives. The Burkle Center for International Relations brings national and international leaders in business, government, education, and civic life to campus and holds forums addressing public policy conundrums.

Geoffrey Garrett, who served as vice provost and dean of the International Institute from 2001-2005, said, “It is very arguably the case that UCLA has more and higher quality faculty in international studies than anywhere else in the United States.” He acknowledged that some might argue that that distinction belongs to the University of Michigan or Berkeley, “but I would make the case that we’re bigger and better than both in international. And none of the privates with the possible exception of Harvard can match our scope.” (Garrett recently moved across town to assume the presidency of the Pacific Council on International Policy at the University of Southern California.)

The numbers bear out Garrett’s claim. In the 2004 Open Doors report, UCLA led all public institutions in the number of students’ studying abroad: 1,917 in 2003–2003 (only New York University sent more: 2,061). Many go through the Education Abroad Program Office which, working through the University of California System EAP office in Santa Barbara, places students at more than 140 institutions in 33 countries. A large and growing number head overseas each summer in travel study programs led by UCLA faculty. The Summer Sessions and Special Projects office enrolled a record 969 students in 29 programs around the world in summer 2005. And UCLA has a separate office that arranges internships and service opportunities and helps other students directly enroll in scores of universities overseas. The Anderson School of Management arranges exchanges each fall for 60 second-year MBA students, at the same time hosting as many from 47 international business schools.

“The exchange program is a big selling point for us in our recruiting for this school,” said Susan Corley, director of student services for the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Not content with the existing cornucopia of study abroad offerings, UCLA launched in 2004 an intensive new summer model that sent 25 students to Tongji University in Shanghai to study Asia’s emerging economies for a month. In 2005 the International Institute expanded this new Global Learning Institute to offer summer classes at host universities in Hong Kong, Vienna, and Guanajuato, a colonial town in Mexico, and more are in the offing. 

“We’re not trying to duplicate existing opportunities or denigrate the traditional model… but it’s time to expand opportunities,” said Garrett, an Australian-born political economist and authority on the globalization of markets.

Last spring more than 400 students signed up for UCLA’s first Global Studies class. Guest lecturers include Chancellor Carnesale—who regularly teaches and lectures at UCLA about disarmament and international relations—former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and former U.S. Trade Representative  Mickey Kantor.

Political Science Professor Steven L. Spiegel, the associate director of the Burkle Center and a Middle East expert, said all top universities have international relations centers, but UCLA’s has “a unique combination of breadth and depth.”

Spiegel joined the UCLA faculty in 1966 after completing graduate work at Harvard. “It’s a much bigger and much more complicated place today,” he said. “UCLA has very broad regional interests. It clearly has the top Middle East program west of Chicago.” It has Arabists, for instance, in anthropology, sociology, and political science as well as in language studies. Ironically, he said, decades ago when Berkeley and UCLA decided to divide the world for the purpose of area studies, Berkeley took Europe and Asia—then of foremost interest to the United States—while UCLA got the Middle East and Africa. “In a way, they were sops to the second rung school. Now the Middle East is the number 1 issue,” said Spiegel (both UC schools now cover all these areas).

Nearly 600 UCLA undergraduates and 150 graduate students are pursuing degrees in the International Institute’s degree programs, which include a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies.

“I’ve tried to create a two-dimensional intellectual architecture for the International Institute,” said Garrett. “One dimension, the pillars, is area studies the way we’ve always done it.” The second dimension “is where you wave these big global themes—global studies, migration studies, international development studies— among the area pillars.”

Political scientist Ronald Rogowski, a son of Nebraska sharecroppers who is an authority on international trade and a champion of interdisciplinary work, is UCLA’s new interim vice provost and dean of the International Institute. He was already serving as the institute’s associate dean and had played a key role in bringing in its first class of Global Fellows—promising young scholars at early stages of their career who get to spend a year on the Westwood campus pursuing international research and teaching seminars— as well as reshaping its Islamic Studies program and opening a new Center for India and South Asia.

Issues in the Developing World

International Development Studies, which examines the problems and issues faced by the world’s poorest countries, attracted 25 majors when it started in the 1980s. Today it is a virtual behemoth with 350 majors. Its director, Michael Ross, an associate professor of Political Science, said, “It’s a great program for students who want to spend time in a developing country and learn that country’s language, and who are interested in real world political and economic issues.”

Ross, whose specialty is researching the protection and destruction of natural resources in such developing countries as Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, said the program’s majors are undaunted by rigorous requirements, including two years of language and a capstone senior seminar that requires significant research. “Most of our students spend from a summer to a year abroad. A lot, given the make-up of Los Angeles, will go to Latin America or Asia,” where they have family roots, he said.

“For what I do—the study of politics in the developing world— UCLA is the best place in the country,” said Ross, once a senior congressional aide to then-Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and the late Rep. Ted Weiss (D-New York).  

Public and Social Policy Studies

A young faculty star, Amy Zegart, assistant professor of Policy  Studies at the School of Public Policy and Social Research, has connections on the other side of the political fence in Washington. Amy Zegart is an expert on the CIA and national security issues; her thesis adviser at Stanford was Condoleezza Rice, now the secretary of state. Zegart was one of the “Young Turks” in academe that the Bush campaign drew on for foreign policy advice in the 2000 presidential race. Zegart’s 2000 book, Flawed By Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS and NSC, became required reading in Washington after 9/11.

Zegart, who spent three years as a McKinsey & Co. consultant before taking the UCLA job, said, “I joke that anything scary I’m naturally interested in. I’ve always been fascinated by politics, conflicts, foreign policy.”

The Harvard and Stanford graduate said, “One of the great joys coming here was the satisfaction of the mission of the public university. I have incredible students. One woman’s parents never finished high school in Mexico. She was in my seminar and now she’s in graduate study in international relations. It’s really exciting to teach kids from all these different backgrounds and to see them light up and to open doors for them.”

Zegart also savors the international flavor of UCLA and Los Angeles. “You can’t help but be acutely aware that we are part of a broader international community. I hear Spanish all over the place. My 5-year-old is learning Spanish,” she said. “The borders are porous and you sense that every day living in Los Angeles. There is an excitement about that, too.”

In six years on the faculty, she has witnessed a dramatic growth  in student interest in foreign policy issues. Of course, she added, “in California, local issues are international issues, too: whether immigrants can get free medical care, whether they can go to  public school, whether they can have a driver’s license. Students today are much more aware of the world than when I started college 20 years ago.”

Getting Students Out Into the World

Ninety percent of the undergraduates at UCLA are Californians (the same is true at Berkeley and other UC campuses); only 2 percent are international students. The graduate student population is far more international. In Fall 2002, 1,700 of UCLA’s 2,400 international students were pursuing graduate studies.

Chancellor Carnesale says that the 90 percent Californian statistic can be misleading. “A remarkably high proportion have at least one parent born offshore, and many of them were as well. They bring two cultures to the party,” he said.

Still, it explains why UCLA places such heavy emphasis on study abroad. “If it’s harder for us to get foreign students on campus, what we have to do is think really creatively about how to get our students out into the world,” said Garrett.

Garrett said it was his aim at UCLA to provide more options for students to study abroad, and to make it easier for them to apply credits earned abroad to their major.  “We have two polar models at the moment. At one end of the spectrum is the classic [education abroad] immersion program where you pick up a student in Westwood and drop them down in the University of Beijing. They take courses with Chinese students taught by Chinese professors, and that’s great, and then they come back and they have to haggle with the Political Science department to see if they can get credit for that stuff toward their major. It takes a lot of time, a lot of individual counseling.”

At the other end of the spectrum, he said, is travel study, usually taking place over the summer, “A UCLA professor teaching a UCLA class takes students to Stratford-on-Avon and they teach Shakespeare,” said Garrett. They are guaranteed UCLA credit, but there is no guarantee that they will gain much international exposure during weeks spent on trains and in hotels with UCLA classmates.

Global Learning Institutes

That is why the International Institute has developed the Global Learning Institutes, which Garrett said offer “the best features of both models. We’re partnering with foreign universities to allow our students to take courses taught not only by UCLA faculty, but team taught with local faculty. The students will live in dormitories with local students and other foreign students who are there.”

“You have all these global themes in the world these days—markets, democratization, culture, and identity—[but] they play out very differently in different parts of the world,” said Garrett. Globalization looks very different in Shanghai, in the midst of the Chinese economic boom, than it does in Mexico, where “people are very dispirited… about how they were going to benefit from NAFTA and opening to the rest of the world. It’s very important for our students to understand that even if these things are a global phenomenon in some sense, the local realities are very different.”

Nick Steele ’05 of Long Beach, California, went on the inaugural Global Learning Initiative trip to Shanghai last summer. He got a scholarship from the International Institute, and it also helped him and three other students land August internships at a Shanghai consulting firm. “There’s so much going on at UCLA,” said Steele, 21, a leader of the Undergraduate International Relations Society. “I The UCLA International Institute excels at outreach—outreach to the citizens of Los Angeles, and outreach to scholars and ordinary people around the world. It has long been involved in providing seminars and training for K-12 teachers on international issues. In recent years it has supplemented the classroom sessions with superb, savvy, and resource-rich Web sitesnever would have been able to find that internship on my own.” After graduating in May, he headed to Hong Kong to teach English.

Integrating Internationalization

Throughout the Curriculum The International Institute boasts a $15 million budget and extensive connections with virtually every academic unit on the Westwood campus—not just the political scientists, economists, and anthropologists, but with professors from the School of Theater, Film and Television, the School of the Arts and Architecture, and many other disciplines. “People in the film school are very interested in China, and I’m working closely at the moment with people in Arts & Architecture about the Middle East. Our Public Health schools work all over Asia, Africa, and the Middle East,” said Garrett. “We have Music, Ethnomusicology, and Musicology here, three [separate] departments. We have Art and we have Art History. We don’t have a shortage of resources. It’s getting them  all together.”

Before the creation of the International Institute, UCLA had an international arm called International Studies and Overseas Programs (ISOP). It has taken on much broader duties in its new incarnation. When former Chancellor Charles Young wanted to strengthen UCLA’s international work, he gave ISOP 20 new faculty positions, but they were just meted out to academic departments, since the ISOP had no educational programs of its own. 

Now the International Institute is looking to build on its strengths with joint faculty appointments. “That’s a new phenomenon here,” said Garrett, who predicted that within five years, “these top two floors of Bunche Hall, instead of looking like an administrative unit, will start looking more and more like an intellectual unit, with lots of faculty permanently around, teaching more and more students.”

Outreach Challenges

The UCLA International Institute excels at outreach—outreach to the citizens of Los Angeles, and outreach to scholars and ordinary people around the world. It has long been involved in providing seminars and training for K-12 teachers on international issues. In recent years it has supplemented the classroom sessions with superb, savvy, and resource-rich Web sites.

The Web sites are the handiwork of Jonathan Friedlander, who is both the outreach director for the International Institute and assistant director of the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies. Friedlander was born in Israel, came to the United States at age 12, spent his teenage years in Brooklyn, and earned a Ph.D. in Middle East history from UCLA. He speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, Spanish, and Portuguese.While finishing graduate school, he wrote a grant proposal to do an educational documentary on the life of Arabs in America. “It scored so high, UCLA kept me around writing proposals for the next 30 years,” he said with a laugh.

Teacher training materials that he helped develop for the Middle East Center became the model for all of UCLA’s Title VI-funded National Resource Centers (NRCs). His latest creation, funded by a $300,000 U.S. Department of Education grant, is Outreach World, a Web resource that posts hundreds of links to curricular materials and other resources from all 120 national resource centers. It is searchable and, thanks to Friedlander’s deft photography, easy on the eyes. “It showcases the K-12 outreach programs for all the NRCs in the United States. Before they were just talking to themselves,” he said.

For the Middle East center, he created a Web site that offers Turkish language lessons, including a digitized soap opera that students can watch online, slowing it down and repeating dialogue as necessary. Similar online courses are planned for Iraqi Arabic and Azeri. “It’s an incredible platform,” Friedlander said.

Val D. Rust, a professor of Social Sciences and Comparative Education in the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, wears several hats in the university’s large study abroad enterprise. He is the faculty director of the Education Abroad Program and associate director of the Center for International and Development Education, which carries out extensive research in conjunction with UNESCO, foreign education ministries, nongovernmental organizations, and other universities around the world. His doctoral students are researching such topics as the effectiveness of study abroad, the difficulties students face in securing credit for overseas work, and comparisons between U.S. and Japanese schools.

Earlier in his career, Rust spent two years in Germany as a country director for the University of California study abroad program. One thing that motivates Rust is UCLA’s annual survey of the attitudes of incoming college freshmen across the nation. That survey shows that up to half of students enter UCLA thinking that they will study abroad, but only a small percentage wind up doing so. 

“To me it’s all a resource issue,” said Rust. “We could very easily double and triple the number of  [UCLA] students going abroad if we had the kind of resources that would allow us to do extensive marketing and preparation for those students.” He laments that the EAP office skipped holding an annual recruiting fair “simply because we know from experience that we would be overwhelmed by students coming in to the office and wanting information.”  As it stands, 4,000 students find their way into the EAP office in the basement of Murphy Hall each year. Many are greeted by some of the 25 volunteer peer advisors who wax enthusiastic about their own study abroad experiences.

“It’s just putting a human face on the experience,” said Zahra  Bazmjow, 22, of Temecula, California, an English major and Spanish minor who studied abroad for a year in Spain.  Her parents, immigrants from Afghanistan, were not keen on her studying abroad.

“Nobody in my family had ever done it and none of my friends had studied abroad. For me it was just kind of a leap into the unknown,” said Bazmjow. During orientation before departing UCLA, a student talked about his time studying in Spain “and I remembered every word he said. The little tidbits that he gave us were like gold.”

Mitra Jalali, 22, of Orinda, California, who just graduated with a degree in philosophy, said her parents tried to discourage her from studying in Cork, Ireland, even as they were driving her to the airport. Jalali, who was born in Iran, said, “I didn’t have anyone to push me to go or to tell me how wonderful it was.”

But both young women credited International Programs Counselor Sergio Broderick-Villa with convincing them to go after they started to get cold feet.

Gary Rhodes ran UCLA’s Education Abroad program in 2004-2005 before returning fulltime to Loyola Marymount University, where he directs the Center for Global Education, a Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE)-funded national resource center that has been a leader in raising awareness about health and safety issues in study abroad. Rhodes started the center in 1998 at the University of Southern California to help study abroad professionals share information about best practices and access government resources on safety issues. The center also works to promote diversity and encourage more minority students to study abroad.

Serving International Students and Scholars

UCLA operates a latticework of services to make international students feel welcome on campus, including the Dashew International Center—run by former Los Angeles controller Rick Tuttle— and the Office of International Students and Scholars, both in Tom Bradley International Hall (named after the former mayor who brought the Olympic Games to Los Angeles in 1984).

Lawrence A. Gower, the director of the Office of International  Students and Scholars, is a 1964 alumnus who played on one of John Wooden’s NCAA championship teams, behind All-America guards Walt Hazzard and Gail Goodrich (“There was some distinction between their ability and mine; I only played when we were up by 102-36,” Gower quipped).

“We’re situated in the division of student affairs, which gives us a value-oriented approach to the students and scholars who come our way,” said Gower. “We have excellent relations with admissions and the registrar … and make sure their academic experience is the best that they can possibly have” while also helping them keep their visa status secure.

With the Dashew Center, the office also helps incoming international students make sense of the fact that, as Gower put it, “L.A. in reality is different than the L.A. shown on CNN and on ‘The Bold and the Beautiful.’”

Gower and his chief lieutenant, Jimmy D. White, a UCLA Law alumnus who is the office’s senior supervising counselor, said their experience with SEVIS (the U.S. government’s Student and Exchange and Visitor Information System) has generally been positive.

“The stakes are higher and the job is more intense after September 11,” said Gower. “A lot of people felt like we had all this new emphasis. What we had were responsibilities that we were taking care of on paper advance to an electronic reporting system, making what we do a lot more transparent immediately than it had been.”

The benefit of that transition, he said,  is that his office is now able to aggregate the data more effectively and use it to show “what we’ve been saying for years, that we bring the best and brightest students here to complete their studies and make a difference when they return home.”

“While the method of getting there might have been less calibrated than we wanted, the outcome is that none of our students have been dramatically hurt by or set back through SEVIS,” said Gower.

White added, “Our campus culture allowed us to smoothly go through the process of putting in place the kind of robust technological and human service interfaces that we came up with. The technology we use and the SEVIS system itself require you to organize things a lot better and therefore solve problems—which is what we’re all about.”

Gower said the clichéd image of Los Angeles “is Ferraris, Hollywood, affluence—‘Let’s do lunch.’ The reality is that it is both more complex and accepting than they can imagine. The fact is, if they don’t want to be viewed as an international student, they don’t have to here. Nobody knows whether you’re Japanese American  or Japanese.”

Integrating All Aspects of the UCLA

Mission Carnesale said that soon after he arrived, he began telling friends back in Cambridge that “one of the most difficult challenges of being chancellor of UCLA is everybody out here thinks they own the place—and by the way, they do. It’s also one of the most wonderful things. They have a stake in it and care about it and want it to be even better than it is now.”

Alumni are feverishly loyal, but most of the billions that UCLA has raised in recent years come from non-alumni who are proud of the university and who understand “that if it’s going to be a place of real excellence that competes with the finest universities anywhere, it cannot do that solely on state funding.”

It also helps, Carnesale said, that “we’re on the Pacific Rim, which runs not only East-West, but North-South. It’s Latin America and Canada as well as the other side of the Pacific.”

“And of course the action nowadays is the Pacific Rim. Do we have an advantage with Europe? No, the Eastern schools do. Do we have an advantage with Asia and Latin America? Yes, we do. If you just walk around our campus you can see it. If you talk to our faculty, you can see it,” he said.

Carnesale said he was heartened that sight unseen, 400 students signed up for Global Studies 1.

“They don’t know if this is a hard course, an easy course, a good course, a lousy course. All they know is it’s the first time it’s being offered and it really sounds like it’s interesting or important to them,” he said. “So the interest is there. The challenge that lies before us is as follows:

“One is to make sure that whatever we develop integrates all aspects of our mission. It’s got the research element, the teaching element, and the service element. Otherwise, it doesn’t belong at a research university. Our comparative advantage is not that we do all three, but that the same people do all three. That’s what makes a research university different.

“Secondly to make sure that any curricula we develop ensure that the student when they are finished will have experienced an education that has both depth and breadth—nontrivial requirements. It’s very easy to make it all breadth, a little of this, a little of that, and you never learn how to peel an onion. It’s important to learn how to peel an onion. You got to do both things. You got to learn how to peel an onion, and you’ve got to learn that there are different kinds of onions, and finally, that not everything is an onion. “A university education should have all three of those pieces, and whatever we do in global studies has to do that,” said the former SALT negotiator.

“Third, we’ve got to find a way to make sure this is well embedded in our faculty as it exists. We do not want to set up a separate institution someplace else that looks at the rest of the world. This is to be integrated into what we do so we get the benefits of this internationalization across the university; some of these are cultural changes.

“And finally I’d say we’ve got to develop the resources to make sure we do it right.” 

University of California at Los Angeles

Read more about University of California at Los Angeles

Tree-lined Mount Oread is the centerpiece of a sylvan, 1,000-acre campus in one of America’s great college towns—Lawrence, Kansas—with Massachusetts (”Mass”) Street the main artery for an academic community of almost 30,000 students and 2,000 faculty. In a sense, the view from Mount Oread extends far beyond the plains of Kansas. In a university lab, an Indian-born engineer leads a team whose advances in radar imaging allow the world to know how fast the ice is melting in Antarctica. The dean of the Graduate School and International Programs is regularly consulted by nongovernmental organizations and the U.S. Department of State to advise fledgling democracies on setting up political debates. An East Asian historian has made surprising findings about how quickly Japan’s environment recovered from the atomic bomb and other wartime damage.

The University of Kansas—or KU, the transposed initials by which everyone in Kansas calls it—sends more than 1,000 students to study abroad each year and enrolls 1,600 international students  at Lawrence. It ranked fourth among public research universities in the 2004 Open Doors report in terms of number of students studying abroad; fully one-quarter of KU graduates spent part of their undergraduate education overseas. Its dozens of study abroad programs attract hundreds of students from other U.S. colleges and universities, both for quality and cost-efficiency. KU has a rich history with the Fulbright program, as both an exporter and importer of Fulbright scholars. From its inception in 1951 and for a quarter-century afterward, scores of foreign Fulbrighters would descend on Lawrence each August for their introduction to the United States before dispersing to their host campuses. Typically two dozen Fulbright scholars are among the 1,600 international students pursuing degrees at KU, and nearly 400 KU students and some 270 faculty have received Fulbright fellowships for study and research in dozens of countries.

 “This place is just international,” said Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor David Shulenburger. “Kansas sits here in the middle of the nation. It’s got a great potential to be completely insular in everything it does because of its location, but it’s got industries— aviation and agriculture—that absolutely depend upon the rest of the world. It’s critical to Kansas that we’re able to train students to be able to work in an international environment.”

A Long History of Placing Importance on International Education

This community on a hill, as KU thinks of itself, takes pride in  its internationalism. In his first speech on campus a decade ago, Chancellor Robert Hemenway said that no university can aspire to greatness without being international, and it is a theme to which he frequently returns. “Ten years later, the imperative for internationalization of our educational institution at all levels is even more critical,” Hemenway said.  KU is striving to advance into the ranks of the top 25 public universities and the emphasis on internationalization is very much a part of its strategy. Research spending is up sharply. And by convincing the Kansas Legislature to let it begin raising its traditionally low tuition, KU has created 100 new faculty positions and expanded scholarships. This campus first built its international reputation in the 1950s and 1960s on area studies and language departments. It won laurels from the Institute for International Education and Reader’s Digest in 1964.

 “From the chancellor down to faculty and students, there’s a great thirst for knowledge about the rest of the world.” said Associate Professor of Political Science Erik S. Herron, director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies, a Title VI National Resource Center. “We are in the middle of the country, far from any border, but [everyone] recognizes that we can’t think of ourselves as isolated from the rest of the world.”

Such figures as former Chancellor Franklin D. Murphy (1951– 1960), former Dean of Arts & Sciences George Waggoner, and  longtime professor of German John Anthony “Toni” Burzle all played roles in making KU a bastion of area studies. The Latin American, East Asian, and Russian studies programs have been Title VI National Resource Centers for four decades or longer.  Schulenburger credits these individuals with turning the university’s focus to international matters far earlier than it occured at other institutions in the Midwest.

While Japan was still under U.S. military rule in the years after World War II, a generation of young scholars from both Japan and Korea was brought to KU for their Ph.D.s. Those connections helped KU build relationships with leading institutions in Asia.

Education Abroad Opportunities

Shulenburger, a labor economist, joined the faculty in 1964 and got involved in KU’s formidable study abroad program when he directed the undergraduate program for the School of Business. “I found myself working with several dozen students every semester to ensure that what they took in their semester or year abroad kept them on track for the business degree,” said Schulenburger, who will relinquish the executive vice chancellor and provost posts as the end of this academic year and return full-time to the School of Business.

Study abroad is as much a part of the culture at KU as basketball. (Keep in mind that Kansas’s first basketball coach was Dr. James Naismith, the game’s inventor, and its second was the legendary Forrest “Phog” Allen, after whom the 16,300-seat Allen Field House is named.) 

“There’s kind of a buzz about study abroad on campus,” said Natalie Flanzer, a senior from St. Louis majoring in Spanish and journalism. “So many people have gone—and everyone else wishes they had.”

Meredith Vacek, 23, of Lawrence, graduated in 2004 with a degree in German. She initially had to overcome resistance from her family before studying in Germany, but the next summer her family accompanied her back in search of their German and Czech roots. 

Melissa Hartnett, a graduate student in Latin American Studies, went on KU’s venerable exchange with the University of San Jose in Costa Rica, said to be the oldest such partnership in the Western Hemisphere. “Tuition is incredibly cheap. It’s one of the least expensive semesters you can spend abroad,” said Hartnett. When she returned to Costa Rica for a visit last Christmas, her host family welcomed her back into their home.

Kansas has the largest U.S. chapter of AIESEC, an international student organization that arranges internships around the world. One of the founders of AIESEC was a French businessman, Jean Choplin, who was KU’s first visiting Fulbright student half a century ago.

Last year Katie Naeve, a senior political science and Spanish major from Ames, Iowa, was among 35 U.S. students sent on internships to four Arab countries—Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates—as part of AIESEC’s new Salaam Initiative, which receives support from the U.S. Department of State. “I’d been to western Europe and Latin America and studied abroad in Spain a couple of times, but Morocco was incredibly different,” said Naeve. “My parents flipped out, big time, but now they are seeing all the opportunities I have because I had such a good experience.” The Salaam Initiative was expanded for 2005, and Naeve has changed the geographic focus of her  interest in a human rights career from Latin America to the Middle East and North Africa.

Laying Out the Welcome Mat

KU’s Applied English Center celebrated its fortieth anniversary  in fall 2004. It’s director, Chuck Seibel, a linguist,  said the center  offers intensive English classes at five levels that attract 200 students each semester. “We have a special program with a business school in Paris that sends 10 to 15 students over for the spring semester. There are always lots of tears at the closing ceremony. It amazes me to have these people weeping because they have to leave Lawrence and go back to Paris,” he said.

Lawrence lays out the welcome mat for international students. Many families—including dozens of KU faculty and staff—invite students home over Thanksgiving. Joe D. Potts, director of the Office of International Student and Scholar Services, said, “After 9/11 probably 50 families called me up and asked if they could take a student from the Middle East into their home temporarily if they felt uncomfortable. I let the students know. No one took me up on it, it was a great response.”

“KU is the home of internationalism. You can feel that,” said Ayele Gebretsadik of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, a Fulbright student who got a master’s degree in economics in May 2005. “When I first came there was a problem in my flight and I knew nobody here. One of the ‘International Friends’ [participants in the Lawrence Friendship Family Program] came to Kansas City to pick me up at the airport and took me to his home for four days until the start of orientation.” These friends donated household goods for international students to equip their apartment kitchens, “and if you need to move, somebody with a truck will come and move you from your apartment,” said the Ethiopian teacher. 

William Tsutsui, an associate professor of history educated at Harvard and Princeton, said, “The thing that has struck me the most is that native Kansans are very open-minded. They realize that this is an isolated place and that you can’t just sit here and wait for things to come to you. You have to go out and get them. It’s served us well.”

Tsutsui, a former director of East Asian Studies, is an authority on the economic history of Japan—and an unabashed fan of that icon of Japanese culture, Godzilla. A pop cultural conference that he convened in October 2004 on the fiftieth birthday of the giant lizard drew scholars from Harvard, Columbia, and UCLA. Tsutsui, who was born in New York and raised in College Station, Texas, where his parents were professors at Texas A&M, finds it amusing that classmates from Harvard “can talk about restaurants they like in Tokyo, but none has had any experience with the Great Plains. I’m sort of this curiosity talking with them.”

“Kansas grows on you,” said Tsutsui, who is writing a book on how quickly Japan’s environment rebounded from the depredations of World War II, including its own military build-up and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Business, Engineering, Architecture, Dance, and More

Kansas industries, from agriculture to aviation to transportation, are highly internationalized. Melissa H. Birch, associate professor of business and director of the Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER), said students may not realize at first how dependent Kansas businesses are on international trade. 

Even Hallmark manufactures and franchises around the world, Yellow Freight operates internationally, and “Kansas City Southern Railway is fond of saying they have just given Kansas a port on the Pacific through their Mexican rail link,” Birch said.

Birch, an expert on management of state-owned enterprises, once conducted dialect surveys in Guatemala while pursuing an interest in linguistics, and wrote her dissertation on Paraguay’s successful partnership with Brazil in constructing the Itaipu Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric facility. Last May she and another Portuguese-speaking colleague led a group of 10 MBA students to Brazil to study aircraft manufacturer Embraer for an intensive seminar called the Global Research Integrative Project. Dennis Karney, a distinguished professor at the business school and associate faculty director of the CIBER, said the purpose of such classes is not to teach students the insides of the aviation industry, but “how to accomplish a business task overseas.”

Professor of Civil Engineering Thomas E. Mulinazzi was embarrassed when he spent three years on KU’s Fulbright selection committee in the late 1980s, and not a single engineer applied for a Fulbright. When he became associate dean, he pushed an attitude adjustment across the school and personally traveled to Stuttgart, Germany, with Hodgie Bricke, the assistant dean for international programs, to arrange KU’s first study abroad program for engineers. Mulinazzi subsequently traveled to China, Denmark, and Australia to arrange other exchanges and secured study abroad scholarships. By 2001, the engineering school was sending 20 students a semester to study abroad.

The School of Architecture and Urban Design sends 10 percent of its majors—50 to 60 students—off each year to study in Edinburgh, Scotland, Siena and Spannocchia, Italy, Stuttgard and Dortmund, Germany,  Barcelona and Madrid, Spain, and Copenhagen, Denmark. “Students do not think in terms of locality any more; they think global. The concept of an international view of architecture is rampant within the school,” said Associate Dean William J. Carswell.

For those who need convincing, the Office of International Programs is happy to provide information and a little push. “We make an effort to tell faculty that regardless of what discipline they are in, there is something international for you,” said Diana Carlin, dean of the Graduate School and International Programs.

Study Abroad Director Gronbeck-Tedesco said, “I went to the dance faculty. They all perform in various places in the world, but they hadn’t taken the time to figure out a way to put some curriculum together to take students.” Now a music therapy professor is taking students to Australia to see how music therapy is done there. The Department of Social Work sends majors to Costa Rica to study Spanish and work in San José social service agencies.

Ethnic, Cultural, and Language Studies

KU recently recruited scholar Jonathan Boyarin to head its Modern Jewish Studies. Even before taking up residence in Lawrence, Boyarin and Gronbeck-Tedesco traveled to Vilnius, Lithuania, to scout out a Yiddish institute as a study abroad site. “Going to Israel is very important for Jewish studies. He and I started looking for an alternative until we can get back in to Israel,” she said.

Diane R. Fourny, associate professor of French and Italian and Humanities & Western Civilization and director of KU’s Center for European Studies, said, “Any faculty person here… can form a program and get something going and the Study Abroad office will go out on a limb for a couple of years for us to see if that program will fly.” 

The number of Spanish majors had more than tripled, from 100 in 1998 to 350 currently. Nine new faculty have been hired, said Danny J. Anderson, chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and “we’re still just barely keeping up. Most of the students are double majors. They see Spanish as a way of increasing their competitiveness for jobs.”

On the other hand, other language departments, such as Slavic Languages & Literatures (which teaches Russian, Polish, Ukranian, Bosnian/Croation/Serbian, and Slovenian) enroll significantly fewer students and would welcome an increase in enrollments. Nonetheless, these languages are “an important part of the intellectual offerings that make a good univeristy,” pointed out Slavic instructor Marta Pirnat-Greenberg.

The numbers are higher in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, which offers four years of Chinese and Japanese, three years of Korean, and introductory classes in Uyghur and Tibetan. KU also offers dozens of East Asian Studies classes each semester. Keith McMahon, the department chair, said, “To me the mission at KU is to speak to the Midwesterner—the Kansas City person, the Wichita person—and find out how to challenge them and make them interested in what we’re teaching.”

Carlin, who worked on international trade projects in the Kansas governor’s office before coming to KU as a faculty member in communication studies said, “We are expanding what we can do for graduate students in the way of international experiences as well.”

Carl Strikwerda, a former director of European Studies at KU who is now dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the College of William and Mary, said, “KU has accomplished remarkable things in the area of international studies, despite relatively low state funding and, until recently, quite low tuition rates.” 

Making Connections

In a region with no other great public or private university within hundreds of miles, KU also has made the most of its location, including ties with the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where hundreds of outstanding U.S. and international military officers are trained each year.

In 2004, KU joined a network of colleges employing technology pioneered by East Carolina University and its virtual classroom project funded by the U.S. Department of State that links U.S. college students with classrooms in Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia. Herron, the associate professor of Political Science who directs the Center on Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, taught the seminar, which paired 15 KU freshmen honors students with peers in the three Asian countries. Using two-way video links, Herron shared the lecture duties with faculty at the Asian institutions. In addition to live lectures, the students exchanged e-mail and talked in chat rooms. “One of my students said he didn’t even know Azerbaijan existed before this semester. At the end, he and others were asking me how we could arrange a study abroad visit,” said Herron.

Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, a professor of history and director of Latin American Studies, was instrumental in helping KU land a Center for International Business Education and Research. Kuznesof has a knack for finding allies and expanding the ambit of Latin American Studies. 

A longstanding partnership with the University of Costa Rica is one of KU’s proudest international connections.  “If you go to Costa Rica, a large percentage of the legislature and several past presidents actually have KU degrees,” said Kuznesof.

The Kansas African Studies Center lost funding in 2003, when the U.S. Department of Education cut support for African studies from 15 to eight centers. The rejection still rankles in Lawrence, where geographer and urban planner Garth Myers, the associate  director said, “We’re putting our ducks in a row for the next  competition.”

 “We’ve built a great African studies program, almost against all odds,” said Myers. “We teach Arabic, Kiswahili, Wolof, and Hausa here in the middle of Kansas. I think there’s four schools in America that teach Wolof,” he said, noting that Wolof is the national language of Senegal.

The center, directed by anthropologist John Janzen, has strong ties with universities in Senegal, Zambia, and Ghana. The Department of African and African-American Studies recently got a green light from the College of Arts and Sciences to launch a master’s degree program. Indeed, Myers said, the first thing that the committee on graduate studies asked was, “When are we going to see a Ph.D. program?”

KU Law School Prioritizes International Aspects

Law school professor Raj Bhala is a relative newcomer to the KU campus, but he has rapidly established himself as one of KU’s leading internationalists.

The Toronto-born Bhala is an international trade scholar who graduated summa cum laude from Duke, studied at Oxford and the London School of Economics as a Marshall fellow, and cut his teeth on international trade issues at the Federal Reserve in New York City after earning a law degree at Harvard. He has taught law around the world, consulted widely in the Middle East and South Asia, and recently added Islamic law to his interests. Bhala was associate dean of the George Washington University School of Law in 2002 when he visited the KU School of Law for a symposium on globalization and sovereignty. He liked what he saw and the people he met in Lawrence.

As it happened, the law professor said he and his Malaysian-born wife “were thinking about moving off the East Coast and looking for [a better] quality of life.” With a young daughter, they didn’t want to worry about getting on waiting lists for preschool or dealing with Washington’s traffic snarls.

Bhala, the son of a Scottish-Canadian mother and a father from the Punjab who lived on the Pakistan side before partition, had grown up “learning—or being told anyway—bad things about  Islam and Muslims” from relatives. He developed a scholarly interest in Islamic law (the Sharia) when two students in his international trade class at GW—one from Bangladesh, the other from Pakistan—“came to me and said, `This bad feeling on the subcontinent has got to end. We’ve got to trade and invest with one another, and cut this communalism out. It’s got to stop with our father’s generation.’”

“It became a real scholarly passion because it is such a different way of thinking,” said Bhala, who holds the Raymond F. Rice  Distinguished Professorship. 

Bhala has gotten KU to start a two-year international J.D. program that, unlike the traditional one-year L.L.M. program, allows lawyers who enter the program to practice in the United States as well as to pursue academic or business careers at home. The law school has summer study abroad programs in Istanbul, Turkey, Limerick, Ireland, and Cambridge, England; it also participates in a semester-long program in London. Bhala said that while most international programs at U.S. law schools focus on human rights and public international law, American lawyers are far more involved in commerce. “Most people don’t go hang out a shingle and saying, ‘I am a human rights lawyer’…. Most people are doing what I saw yesterday in the Gulf, they are doing construction contracts to build a world trade center in Bahrain or they are building a new port in Dubai. In other words, international work is business.”

Internationalizing Scientific Research

In April 2005 the National Science Foundation awarded KU a grant worth $19 million to establish a Science and Technology Center for further study of the polar icecaps and the effect of melting on global climate change.

The lead scientist and principal investigator for the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets is Prasad Gogineni, who came to Lawrence from India in 1979 for his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and stayed to become a giant in the field. He is the Deane E. Ackers Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. 

Following in the footsteps of his KU mentor, Professor Emeritus Richard Moore, Gogineni has made a series of advances over  the past decade in radars capable of measuring the thickness of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica from aircraft and robotic rovers.

Forty scientists and other researchers will work  in the center, including 25 in Lawrence and 15 at polar laboratories around the globe. KU is creating four new faculty positions for the work. One of the future objectives of Gogineni and his team is to mount their special radars on unmanned air vehicles that could continuously map the vast ice sheets. 

While polar ice caps are a long way from the plains of Kansas—or from India—global warming is a worldwide concern, and it is a special concern to some of the nation’s poorest lands with large populations living close to coastal waters, like those devastated by the December 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami and many residents of the the U.S. Gulf Coast hit by Hurricane Katrina in late August 2005. Rising sea levels could threaten more than 100 million people living on coastal areas, Gogineni says.

As Richard Moore mentored Prasad Gogineni, so has Gogineni mentored the next generation of research engineers at KU. Among his protégés is Pannirselvam Kanagaratnam, who came to Lawrence in 1990 for a bachelor of science degree, stayed for a master’s and Ph.D., and did path-breaking work on the radar systems now used to measure the ice caps. Gogineni, Kanagaratnam, and 16 colleagues, in a paper published in September 2004 in the journal Science, reported that the glaciers were discharging 60 percent more ice into the Amundsen Sea than they accumulated from snowfall. 

When Kanagaratnam came to KU, neither global warming nor the melting of the glacial ice was on his mind. “Dr. Gogineni developed this interest in me,” he said with a smile. While these problems now may seem far removed from the concerns of his homeland of Malaysia, he added, “If the climate keeps getting crazy, who knows?”

Fulbright graduate student Roque Gagliano of Montevideo, Uruguay, said he had originally hoped to study electrical engineering in Los Angeles. But after comparing notes with friends who studied in California and Pennsylvania, “I realize my experience here was much richer,” he said. The gregarious Gagliano threw himself into international clubs and activities, including joining 400 other non-Muslim students who fasted for a day during Ramadan—and he played water polo. 

His one complaint was that he wished more U.S. students availed themselves of the international cultural feast at KU. “You wish that all of them could spend a Saturday afternoon going to the Japanese festival and seeing Japanese theater. You hear students complain that they’ve never visited the ocean or been outside Kansas or Missouri. Well, you don’t need to visit the ocean. You just need to walk to the center two blocks away and you can taste the food and talk with the people. That’s something you can do right here, right now.”

Gebretsadik—who proudly arranged for a visitor to dine at a newly opened Addis Ababa Café in the heart of Mass Street—said, “KU is the home of internationalism. You can feel that.”  

The motto that Old Dominion University adopted in 2002 fits this urban institution as smartly as a tailor-made suit: Portal to New Worlds.

Nestled between rivers in Norfolk, the university is a leader in distance education via satellite for students scattered across the Commonwealth of Virginia and sailors on U.S. ships at sea. It is the academic anchor of Hampton Roads, a historic seaway that pulses with activity. Jamestown, which celebrates its 400th anniversary in 2007, is a 35-mile sail up the James River. Norfolk is home to NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for the Atlantic as well as Naval Station Norfolk, the largest naval installation on the planet.

Old Dominion had modest beginnings as a two-year, evening branch of the College of William and Mary in 1930. It gained independence and a new name, Old Dominion College, in 1962 and achieved university status in 1969. Today it stands among the 100 largest public universities in the United States, with nearly three dozen doctoral programs and a research budget of more than $50 million a year in the sciences, engineering, education, business, health, and arts and letters.

Developing New Goals from Natural Strengths

Hampton Roads, a gateway to the world since the early 17th century, lends Old Dominion “its unique character” and cultural diversity, the university’s mission statement avers, and that in turn gives ODU “natural strengths” in international outreach.

President Roseann O. Runte and predecessor James V. Koch both have built upon those natural strengths, steering Old Dominion on a course to legitimize its claim to being Virginia’s “international university.” With minority students comprising one third of the enrollment of 21,000 and large numbers of undergraduates working their way through college, Old Dominion has infused internationalism into the curriculum on the 188-acre campus stretched between the Elizabeth and Lafayette rivers. Koch stepped up recruitment of international students in the 1990s and study abroad has climbed since Runte’s arrival in 2001. “We owe Dr. Koch a vote of thanks for his prescience in realizing the importance of internationalism in education,” said Runte, a poet and scholar of French literature.

“We had a campus consultation on a new motto and everybody picked ‘Portal to New Worlds.’ Portal reminds you of the sea, and Norfolk is always open to the winds of the world. Also, when you say ‘portal,’ it has that technological, IT (connotation). The new worlds could be the discovery of new ideas—scientific or creative—or new lands,” said Runte, a native of Kingston, New York, who became a dual citizen of Canada during two decades as a college president there. In 2004, three years after stepping down as president of  Victoria University of the University of Toronto, she was named one of Canada’s 100 Most Powerful Women by the Women’s Executive Network.

Old Dominion now convenes annual Global Forums on pressing world and regional issues. In 2005 the Club of Rome, a global think tank concerned about the environment and sustainability of the earth’s resources, convened on the Norfolk campus (Runte is a member). Earlier Global Forums focused on Japan and India.

Runte also demonstrates her commitment to internationalism by example, donating $20,000 from her salary each year to fund a Presidential Global Scholarship to prepare outstanding students for international careers. She recently gave an additional $15,000 for scholarships for two women from war-torn Afghanistan.

John D. Heyl, executive director of the Office of International Programs from 2000 to 2006, said, “Old Dominion is an urban, relatively young, highly diverse, historically commuter institution. That context has been decisive for all our efforts at internationalization.” “We were a kind of evening school that evolved into a university,” added Heyl. “We have many part-time students, but increasingly we’re becoming a residential campus with full-time students and a wide array of services. There’s a big transformation going on.”  

Heyl, a historian who previously directed international programs at the University of Missouri-Columbia and taught at Illinois Wesleyan, said that with nearly a quarter-million residents, Norfolk “is not your typical college town. It’s very energizing, highly diverse, and always evolving. Change is very much a feature of both the city and this institution.”

Internationalization at the Center of Old Dominion’s Blueprint

JoAnn S. McCarthy, now assistant provost for International Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania, was Heyl’s predecessor at Old Dominion before leaving in 1999 to head the University of South Florida’s international education efforts. “I was hired by President Koch in 1991 to head up a consolidated and revitalized Office of International Programs that would lead the internationalization of the campus.  I reported directly to the president in this undertaking, and his support was absolutely crucial in those early days,” she recalled. Jo Ann Gora, then ODU provost and now president of Ball State University, spearheaded a strategic planning effort that for the first time put internationalization at the center of Old Dominion’s roadmap for the future.

Operating in the shadow of the University of Virginia and The College of William and Mary, McCarthy said, “ODU needed to carve out a distinctive niche in public higher education in Virginia.” With its strategic location in the heart of a great seaport, this quest to become “Virginia’s international university struck a chord, and I soon began to hear others referring to this emerging identity on a consistent basis,” she recalled.

The international office, like Old Dominion itself, had humble roots.

“When I first arrived, I moved into a very depressing office with beat up, mismatched furniture, and my skeleton staff was scattered in other parts of the building. For the first year or so, we struggled to function with grossly inadequate space, not to mention with the subliminal message that these marginalized quarters sent to all internal and external visitors,” McCarthy said. 

That changed after Koch persuaded George and Marcus Dragas, two local real estate developers of Greek heritage, to become the benefactors of the Office of International Programs. A new International Center named in their honor opened in 1996 to serve the campus’s burgeoning international student population.

ODU was “a fertile place for innovation and progress,” said McCarthy. “Through small grants that supported faculty efforts, critical financial and organizational support from the president and provost, the generosity of donors, and partnerships with the community, the international dimensions of the university quickly began to take shape.”

“ODU faculty and administrators shared a vision of what a public university could be in the twenty-first century, and they were willing to focus effort and resources in very productive ways over a sustained period of time,” McCarthy said.

Old Dominion’s enrollment of nonimmigrant students peaked at 1,230 in fall 2001 but, like many campuses, dropped after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. It enrolled 1,031 international students in fall 2005. Hundreds of other students from overseas attend ODU’s English Language Center each year to prepare to matriculate.

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Reaching Out Across and Beyond the Campus

In playing the international card, another advantage that Old Dominion possesses was its early mastery of distance-education techniques. Its faculty created successful distance-learning courses back in the 1970s and regularly fashioned technological innovations. Today it boasts distance-learning centers at 14 military installations, 25 community colleges and a dozen other Commonwealth of Virginia sites, and at campuses and bases in Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, and Washington state as well as in the Bahamas. Forbes magazine once declared Old Dominion one of the “top 20 cyber schools” in the nation. A decade ago, sailors aboard the USS George Washington became the first to take live, interactive MBA courses over Old Dominion’s Teletechnet “Ships at Sea” program.  Now these classes are beamed from campus by satellite to ships worldwide.

Old Dominion’s health faculty and the Norfolkbased Physicians for Peace collaborate on health sciences education and training missions in developing countries. The College of Health Sciences partners with Physicians for Peace and Universidad Católica Santo Domingo to provide service and training in the Dominican Republic. Gail Grisetti, an associate professor of physical therapy, was honored with the 2005 Provost’s Award for Leadership in International Education for bringing graduate students to learn and teach in the Dominican Republic. The honor, begun in 2001, carries a $1,000 stipend. Nursing and dental hygiene faculty are also exploring linkages there.

The Darden College of Education in 2004 launched a popular master’s degree track in International Higher Education Leadership. With internationalization so firmly woven into the campus ethos, “we felt emboldened to actually train the next generation of professionals to enter the field of international education,” Heyl said. One graduate student interned this past summer at the Fulbright office in Delhi, India. Two others redesigned a signature ODU staff professional development course called the Global Certificate Program.

Sponsored jointly by International Student & Scholar Services (ISSS) and the Department of Human Resources, the Global Certificate Program runs workshops each year to help the university’s own staff better understand and serve international students and scholars. Sara Eser, assistant director of ISSS, said the impetus came in 1998 when international students indicated in a survey that they were having a hard time “being understood across campus in offices outside ours.”

The program has grown from three or four sessions per year to a dozen workshops on employment rules, intercultural communications, and exploring other countries and religions, Eser said. The workshops are also open to faculty and students, but primarily draw staff from the finance, housing, campus police, registrar, library, and other campus offices. Most who earned certificates last spring were African-American staff members. Heyl called it “a great dynamic” that so many minority staff members wanted to better understand ODU’s international students.

Old Dominion in the past 11 years has tripled the number of students studying abroad, largely by expanding short-term programs over spring break and summer. Steve Johnson, director of study abroad and a former Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic, said about 270 students each year now study in other countries. Sixty participated on study programs to Berlin, London, and Guadalajara over last spring break. 

At President Runte’s instigation, the faculty in 2004 required all freshmen to take an interdisciplinary course on the global environment, consisting of 75-minute lectures in the university’s Convocation Center along with two small group discussion sessions each week led by graduate students. The experimental course is called New Portal to Appreciating our Global Environment (NewPAGE). 

Runte, who gave one of the lectures on literature and the environment, said faculty from different disciplines produced a special textbook and even attended each other’s lectures alongside as many as 2,000 students. “They did all they could to make the course very exciting. It was very invigorating to hear and that’s what teaching is all about,” she said.

Some students chafed at the big lecture course. A faculty committee has produced a 300-page report on the three-year experiment, and changes may be in the offing, including the possibility of interdisciplinary courses on other global issues, as Runte contemplated in her original proposal.

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Discovery of New Worlds

Six months after the trustees approved Portal to New Worlds as the university motto, Runte was strolling through an art fair in a park near campus when her eye fell on a canvas with two square panels: on the left side, a small, brown boat with large, white sails moves out of gouache mists; the right panel is simply an unbroken swatch of green. She immediately wrote a check for $1,200 for the painting, titled “Discovery of New Worlds,” and hung it in her office. The painting is also prominently pictured in the Portal to New Worlds brochure produced by Alicia L. Phillips, assistant director for communications in the Office of International Programs and Shara Weber, graphic designer in University Publications.

 “Some people look at it and say, ‘You spent your own money to buy this painting with a plain green panel? You could have done that yourself,’” Runte recounted. “I say it’s absolutely perfect because it’s like education. You embark on an adventure like the people did when they came to Jamestown. The green part that doesn’t have anything in it is your discovery; it’s whatever you make of it. And when you go to a university, the education that you get out is what you put in.”

Old Dominion University

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Economist and financial forecaster Roger Ward Babson boasted in his 1935 autobiography Actions and Reactions that Babson Institute in Wellesley, Massachusettes, was “perhaps the first (school) in the world” founded solely to teach business fundamentals to future executives. The eccentric Babson also confessed some disappointment with the institute’s performance in its early years. Instead of concentrating on those destined for the executive suite “by inheritance or other circumstances,” the school was admitting too many who weren’t in line to inherit the family business and stuffing their heads with the same liberal arts as other business schools, Babson lamented.

Babson, who famously foresaw the stock market crash of 1929, might take a more sanguine view today of his eponymous institution, for Babson College is recognized as a leader in preparing entrepreneurs. The founder, who traced his Massachusetts ancestry back 10 generations, also might be astonished at how much Babson’s reputation has grown and how international the college has become in an age when almost any business of consequence is or aspires to be global.

The original Babson Institute sought to prepare young men to run family businesses after a two-year regimen of courses limited to “practical economics and the handling of commodities; financial investments and the care of property; business psychology and the management of men (and) personal relations and the control of one’s self.”  Stenographers transcribed the exams that students dictated into Dictaphones. After World War II Babson adopted a more traditional four-year curriculum and in 1969—two years after the founder’s death— changed the name to Babson College.

A Continuing Focus on Business Education

Things aren’t done these days by Roger Babson’s book, but it is still a place where business-minded undergraduates get their careers off to a fast start. It is one of Babson’s strongest selling points and explains why international students from 60 countries comprise 18 percent of the 1,725 undergraduates. “Babson’s undergraduate degree is almost like an MBA,” said Jean-Pierre Jeannet, director of the William F. Glavin Center for Global Management.

Jeannet also holds a full professorship at IMD, the top business school in his native Switzerland, where he teaches each summer and during winter breaks. “For people all over the world an undergraduate business education in the United States today is far more prestigious than it was 25 years ago,” he said. That holds true as well for campuses with other elite programs for undergraduate business majors, such as the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, and the Darden School at the University of Virginia.

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“It’s the value of having a U.S. business education in general and the fact that you can go and get a good job from an undergraduate program” rather than taking the much longer route through graduate school, he explained. 

Babson, he added, “has always attracted sons and daughters of people with family businesses. They don’t have great patience for 10-year education tracks. They want their young people to get a good education, and then come back home to the family business.”

For families running their own businesses, “it’s very important that these young people come back at age 22 rather than 30,” said Jeannet.

The Babson mission statement reflects the college’s international emphasis: Babson College educates men and women to be entrepreneurial leaders in a rapidly changing world. … Our students appreciate that leadership requires technical knowledge as well as a sophisticated understanding of societies, cultures, institutions, and the self. 

The Glavin Center, named after former Babson President William F. Glavin, houses regional institutes for Asia, Europe, and Latin America and serves as the fulcrum for all of Babson’s international activities, from research and exchange partnerships with universities on other continents to study abroad and internship programs to an extensive executive education apparatus. The U.S. Navy recently sent a group of admirals to Babson for four days of classes to hone their problem-solving skills.

A Distinctive Competence

Babson also sponsors an ambitious consulting program in which undergraduates from Babson and a partner institution overseas team up to provide real-world consultations to international businesses that pay for the advice. The 2½-month-long projects in the JointManagement Consulting Field Experience (J-MCFE) Program entail overseas travel for both sets of students, visits to the companies, research on both campuses in person and via the Internet, and a wrap-up presentation to company executives at Babson. The college has conducted these projects for four years running with the University of St. Galen in Switzerland, and in fall 2006 will have projects in Sweden, Costa Rica, and Chile. 

Marilyn Snyder, deputy director of the Glavin Center and director of its Global Program Services, said no other U.S. business school offers undergraduates an international opportunity quite like these overseas consulting projects. “That’s our distinctive competence,” said Snyder, a 1980 Babson alumna.

Babson offered its first international MBA in 1976. It began arranging global internships and offering offshore courses for both undergraduates and graduate students in 1979.

When Babson faculty take students overseas, “we do some typical things, but because we are a business school, we also do these offshore courses a little bit differently,” said Snyder. The classes—especially the MBA students—visit a lot of companies, where they get a chance to question executives about how they do business in China or where they see business trends going in the European Union.

Babson draws 17 percent of its nearly 1,500 graduate students from outside the United States. Counting the graduate students, more than 70 countries are represented on campus.

Expanding Education Abroad

Back in 1998, approximately 30 undergraduates studied abroad each year. Now the number approaches 300 and the college has embraced the goal of providing every qualified undergraduate with a global experience by 2009. The college already requires all students in its two-year MBA program to participate in an international experience. 

All told, 263 Babson students studied abroad in 2004-2005.

“We have a few staff that work for us in China, but we don’t have any facilities of our own overseas,” said Stacia Zukroff, the director of Education Abroad Programs. “Most of our programs run through our partner schools,” which include the University of St. Gallen in St. Gallen, Switzerland; ESADE in Barcelona, Spain; Università Bocconi in Milan, Italy; Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland; Universidad Adolfo Ibañez in Viña del Mar, Chile; Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires, Argentina; HEC Paris in France; Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration in Vienna, Austria; and RSM at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Netherlands. 

In addition to the dozens of study abroad programs at partner institutions, Babson is currently drawing up blueprints for the first semester-abroad program of its own, slated to start in 2007-2008 and be open to international business majors and minors from other U.S. colleges and universities as well as Babson. Babson already sends its own faculty with students on short courses offered at such institutions as the London School of Economics, the University of Antwerp in Belgium, Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico, and the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa.

While it is not uncommon for U.S. colleges to send students off on winter and spring breaks to build homes and do other service projects in impoverished lands, Babson sends volunteers to South Africa to teach young people there how to become entrepreneurs. One such volunteer, Julian C. Simcock, who worked with counterparts from the University of Stellenbosch in South African high schools, in 2005 became the first Babson student to win a Fulbright scholarship. With that award, Simcock returned to South Africa to study the entrepreneurial resources available to young adults in the Western Cape.

While Babson does have a Habitat for Humanity chapter that sends students off to Mexico each spring to build houses, some of its business majors traveled to Sri Lanka in 2005 after the tsunami to help struggling small businesses draw up recovery plans.

When Roger Babson opened his institute in 1919, it was for men only. He opened a separate institution in Florida—Webber College— to prepare women for business careers. Now Webber University International, that school went coed in 1971. Like many single-sex colleges, Babson College also went coed in that era, although men still outnumber women, 60-40, which is almost the reverse of how the sexes break down at most U.S. campuses.

Jean-Pierre Jeannet joined the Babson faculty in 1974, fresh from receiving his MBA and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The Zurich native had planned to return to industry after the MBA, but his advisers convinced him to stay, first to get his doctorate and then to teach at Babson for a year while completing some research. “It was that first year of experience teaching at Babson that convinced me to stay on an academic pathway,” said Jeannet, speaking by cell phone from Lausanne. Babson’s faculty had just approved the addition of several international courses to the curriculum, but had no one to teach them. In the job interview, the then–vice president of academic affairs told Jeannet that would be his responsibility.

“In some ways, it was just the right match at the right moment,” said Jeannet, an expert on global strategy and marketing who holds the F. W. Olin Distinguished Professorship of Global Business at Babson. “I didn’t have to battle anything. They had readied themselves for complete internationalization before I even arrived. Nobody pressured them. They just saw this as the way to go.”

Making the Most of Available Resources

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“When our first group of students went on international internships in 1979, there wasn’t anything like that anywhere else,” he said. “We did our first offshore program, with our own faculty taking students overseas, in Europe in 1992 and today we’re going to all four corners of the world.”

“We were not only far ahead of the pack, but we did it with far less resources than most other people (had). We had to be much more frugal,” said Jeannet. Babson’s $130 million endowment is less than a third that of the Wharton School, the nation’s oldest collegiate school of business.

Some business schools possess the wherewithal to “just put everybody on a plane and off they go. We can’t do that,” said Jeannet. “Basically, our students have to pay it themselves. We try to make the experience as low cost as possible.” One of Babson’s tacks is to barter with partner institutions, exchanging seats in its regular terms for summer programs for groups of Babson students.

Undergrads Get MBA-like Opportunities Jeannet said today’s undergraduates are far more internationally minded than students a generation back. “That’s the biggest change. It’s a far more international place,” he said. “We are able to motivate them far more easily than we did 25 years ago when we didn’t even have a study abroad program.” Babson began providing undergraduates with some of the same international opportunities it had already built into its MBA programs.

Jeannet deals only with graduates at IMD, but at Babson by choice he teaches undergraduates as well. “They are an exceptionally well recruited group. They don’t apply themselves as rigorously from a work ethic point of view as the MBAs, who can just be like machines for two years straight, but they bring a freshness of experience,” said the Swiss professor. “And that student comes to Babson at age 18 having heard 18 years of business talk at the dinner table. That is an incredible asset.”

Successful Alumni and a Symbol for the Future

Babson’s alumni include Arthur M. Blank, the cofounder of Home Depot; Roger Enrico, former PepsiCo CEO; Stephen Spinelli, Jr., founder of Jiffy Lube and Babson’s vice provost for entrepreneurship and global management; and Ernesto Bertarelli, the Italian-Swiss biotech magnate whose yacht Alinghi captured the America’s Cup in 2003. Babson professors have published a case study analyzing the success of that syndicate from a business perspective.

Babson is known not only for its business programs, but for the colorful, rotating, 28-foot tall outdoor globe, another legacy from its founding father, who had it built at a cost of $200,000 in 1955. The 25-ton globe fell into rust and disrepair in the 1980s, but it was refurbished in 1993 after students and faculty objected to plans to tear it down. The Babson World Globe no longer rotates, but it still stands tall, a fitting landmark for an institution with a colorful history and a keen interest in the world’s business.

Babson College

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How international is Michigan State University? Many U.S. campuses have close ties with a myriad of academic institutions in other lands.  Michigan State  University (MSU) actually helped build universities in Brazil, Colombia, Japan, Nigeria, and Pakistan. Almost every U.S. college and university today sends students to study abroad. No public university sends greater numbers than Michigan State—2,385 in 2004-2005. MSU students can choose from more than 200 programs in 60 countries and on every continent, including Antarctica. By graduation, 28 percent of the students have studied abroad.  Today, it is not uncommon to find a dean or vice provost for international programs at major research universities. Michigan State created an Office of International Programs and appointed the first dean in 1956.

The nation’s land-grant pioneer—founded in 1855 as the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan, it was the model for the Morrill Act of 1862—now aspires to become what President Lou Anna Kimsey Simon calls the first “world grant” research university serving not only residents of Michigan’s 83 counties but people around the globe.

Internationalization As A Tool For Local Success

Michigan State’s passion for the international is all the more noteworthy considering the economic struggles that Michigan has endured with the decline of the U.S. auto industry. The percentage of the university’s revenues coming from taxpayers dropped from 52 percent in 1997 to 37 percent in 2006. With nearly 45,000 students and a deep commitment to affordability and accessibility, Michigan State has kept a tighter lid on tuition than any Big Ten campus.  It absorbed $66 million in cuts in the past five years, although it is close to the finish line of a $1.2 billion fundraising drive that boosted endowment and created five dozen new faculty positions.  Its tenure stream faculty remains below a peak in the 1980’s, but MSU’s leaders stress that the numbers now are growing once again. 

Michigan State’s stature is inextricably bound to its international activities, beginning with development work across Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s. Under legendary President John A. Hannah (1941–1969), it embraced a global mission even as its size and reputation burgeoned. It was the Michigan State College of Agriculture and Applied Sciences when Hannah succeeded his father-in-law as president; the red brick chimney of a furnace next to Spartan Stadium still bears the letters MSC. But it achieved university status in 1955 and became Michigan State University in 1964. Hannah led Michigan State into both the Big Ten and the Association of American Universities, the alliance of top research campuses. Later he ran the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). On the watch of Peter McPherson, Michigan State president from 1993 to 2004 and a former USAID administrator himself, the number of students studying abroad nearly tripled.  McPherson, a banker and one-time Peace Corps volunteer who chaired the Commission on the Abraham Lincoln Study Abroad Fellowship Program and is currently president of the National Association of State Universities and LandGrant Colleges, aspired for 40 percent to study abroad.

Simon said that as she travels people often ask, “Aren’t you running into a lot of resistance in your state?”

“Quite the contrary,” she tells them. Surveys show that “the people of Michigan do understand the value of study abroad. They understand that we have to compete in a global economy, and Michigan State University must play an important role in that.” Michigan State has a special obligation as a public institution to translate advances in knowledge into improvements in people’s lives so they see the globalized economy not as “an instrument of despair,” Simon said, but as a path toward a brighter future. 

At a sesquicentennial celebration on Sept. 8, 2005, Simon unveiled a strategic plan called “Boldness by Design” that set the goal of winning recognition as the world’s leading landgrant research university for the 21st  century by 2012, the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Act.  The university installed a 7-foot statue of Hannah outside the Administration Building that already bore his name, and a model of the Hannah statue is kept in the president’s conference room. 

Simon designated Michigan State’s internationalization as the special focus of a self-study the university did for the 2005 reaccreditation review by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. A faculty team produced a 268-page report analyzing the university’s international strengths and weaknesses. “In the 20th century, MSU built its international reputation, in part, through its involvement in the creation of new universities and colleges around the globe and its development work, and most recently on our expansive study abroad programs,” the self study said. “MSU’s international engagement in the 21st century will be based on equal, transparent, and reciprocal partnerships with host-country institutions.”

The bottom line, said Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs Kim A. Wilcox, is that “we have to be more purposeful about this.” Too often, added Wilcox, a  developmental speech acoustics scientist, Michigan State’s international ties rested on “the whim of the faculty. If somebody resigns or retires or leaves, the research program goes away because it was just them and their buddy in Rwanda. That’s not a sustainable presence.”

MSU’s leaders say they won’t squelch faculty curiosity or entrepreneurship, but want to concentrate energy and resources on such institutional strengths as food, health and security, and environmental studies. “I understand how this fits and how to do it,” said Simon, whose Ph.D. is in higher education administration.

She wants to forge a closer bond between Michigan State’s area studies centers and international institutes that concentrate on thematic issues, from business and development to education, health, and agriculture. The university recently opened an office in Beijing to coordinate projects and activities and to serve as its eyes and ears in that part of the world, much as it has an office in Washington, DC.

Development Partner in Africa, Asia, and Latin America

Michigan State is no longer in the bricks-andmortar business of building universities overseas as it did with the University of the Ryukus in Okinawa, Japan, in 1951 or the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 1960. But it is still deeply involved in development work across Africa, Asia, and Latin America through such programs as the Partnership for Food Industry Development (PFID) and the Partnership to Enhance Agriculture in Rwanda through Linkages (PEARL).

Following in the footsteps of botanist William J. Beal, who in the 1870s created the first hybrid corn, MSU scientists are helping small farmers from Nicaragua to Mozambique learn modern techniques to bring fresh fruits and vegetables to big city markets. PEARL has helped Rwandan farmers turn their finest Arabica coffee beans into a brew sold in Starbucks and other upscale java shops. In China, MSU runs a joint degree program in turfgrass management—and hopes that Beijing will install Michigan State turfgrass in its Olympic stadium as Athens did for the 2004 Games. “With our turfgrass,” said College of Agriculture and Natural Resources Dean Jeffrey D. Armstrong, “the opening ceremony activities can go on above and below ground level, and 36 hours later you can have a real sod playing field in place.”

The Rwandan project—also nurtured by USAID dollars— “started with just one coffee washing station. Now there are nearly 50,” said Dan Clay, the director of the Institute of International Agriculture. “We can’t even come close to the demand.” Agronomist Tim Schilling of Texas A&M University is the incountry director of the work in Rwanda, and Michigan State and Texas A&M both have trained faculty from the Université Nationale du Rwanda and the Institut des Sciences Agronomiques du Rwanda. Clay was in Rwanda directing an earlier MSU food security project when the civil war erupted in 1994. He and his family were safely evacuated, but 800,000 Rwandans—mostly Tutsis and moderate Hutus—were slain by Hutu militias during the four-month bloodbath.

The staff of the Institute of International Agriculture has doubled in size to 40 and its external funding has quadrupled to $10 million a year since Clay became director in 2000. “At MSU, the definition of what a university does is broad enough to include the Rwanda PEARL coffee,” he said.

Putting knowledge to practical use is what land-grant colleges do best. Scores of faculty in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources conduct research overseas, and 21 percent of  its students study overseas.

Jeffrey M. Riedinger, acting dean of International Studies and Programs and director of the Center for Advanced Study of International Development, said, “Michigan farmers say, ‘Hey, the Chinese are wiping out our apple juice market. Why are you over there helping them?’ And what we’ve done is take groups of Michigan farmers and the Farm Bureau to China or Chile and other countries and show them, no, we’re learning as much from them about advanced techniques and technologies and varieties as any information we’re communicating to them. Some of this is going to come back to the state in more resistant tree stock, new varieties, or improved practices.”

The creation of biofuels is one area where individuals from the United States can learn from other countries, said Riedinger, who has worked with peasants in the Philippines and China on land rights issues. “Our faculty coming back from Brazil and India and China say colleagues there are way ahead of us in some key areas in biofuels. Our foreign colleagues think it’s madness that we would grow corn—a food crop—to produce fuels.”  

Sherman Garnett, dean of James Madison College, Michigan State’s school for public policy majors, led the reaccreditation self-study on internationalization. He said, “Like any good place, we do a lot with little.” Garnett agrees that Michigan State must “be more strategic.” 

In African studies, for instance, Michigan State faculty are involved in dozens of important projects across the continent. That is appropriate for individual faculty, said Garnett, but as an institution “we can’t have dozens of windows in a region and give them equal emphasis, time, and support.”

The African Studies Center, founded in 1960, offers instruction in up to 30 African languages, several rarely taught anywhere else in the United States. With 165 Africanists on the faculty, Michigan State produces more Ph.D.s on Africa than any other institution. No other university offers more study abroad opportunities in Africa (18).  Michigan State, under then-President Clifton Wharton, in 1978 became the first U.S. university to divest holdings in companies with investments in South Africa in protest of apartheid. “We’re known as a pro-African place,” said David Wiley, director of the African Studies Center since 1977. 

At Michigan State it is possible to “go to no less than 14 different departments across this campus and get briefed on food safety,” said Mary Anne Walker, managing director of the Office of International Development, an office created in 2000 to secure more funding for global research and service projects.

Michigan State not only has microbiologists and toxicologists working on food safety, but sociologists and behavioral specialists as well seeking better ways to communicate about risks. Walker, who previously managed USAID civil society projects in Croatia, said Michigan State has 112 collaborative projects in 55 developing countries, with offices in 11 countries.

It was this practical, applied side of knowledge that attracted Yong Zhao to the faculty. Zhao, born in a farm village in China’s Sichuan Province, is a University Distinguished Professor of Educational Psychology and founding director of the Center of Teaching & Technology and the U.S.-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence. Training to become an English teacher, he devoured psychology textbooks left behind at his college by American professors. He came to the United States for graduate work, mastered Web technology and online education, and sped through a Ph.D. program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in two years. He has won several multi  million grants from federal agencies for research on technology in the classroom, as well as pilot experiments trying to bridge the best of Western and Eastern approaches to education. He helped set up computer club houses in middle schools across Michigan, and is overseeing bilingual classrooms in China and Michigan. “I believe in the idea of connecting to the needs of the people in education. A good scientist should be in the service of the community of the people,” said Zhao, who thinks the U.S. school reform movement worries too much about math and science scores and doesn’t appreciate how well U.S. schools foster creativity. 

Zhao, who recently became an U.S. citizen, said, “The whole state of Michigan needs to open up. Globalization and internationalization are here to stay. …We have to change. Kids from Michigan are in competition with kids from India and China as much as they are with kids from New York or the state next door.”

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Leading in Study Abroad Among Public Universities

Michigan State has made it possible for students in almost any major to study abroad. But Garnett, who spearheaded the MSU selfstudy on internationalization, said, “If you look at the map of where our students go and you look at the map of where our research and development work is, they don’t overlap as much as we’d like. We want to bring those closer together.”

June Pierce Youatt, senior associate provost for undergraduate education and dean of undergraduate studies, said, “We work hard to integrate study abroad into our academic programs so that there’s a convenient way to do it. It doesn’t impede their progress toward a degree; it doesn’t make them stay a semester longer to graduate.” The bulk of Michigan State students study abroad during the summer on short-term programs, many led by MSU faculty and most taught in English. While the university recommends that entering freshman have taken at least two years of another language, Michigan State has no university-wide language requirement for graduation. The College of Arts and Letters and some programs, including a new Global and Area Studies major, do require language study.

Kathleen Fairfax, director of the Office of Study Abroad, said that at professional meetings, she sometimes senses a chill in the air when talking with counterparts from other universities. “They complain to me, ‘We don’t want to do study abroad the way you’re doing it. We don’t believe in short-term programs,’” Fairfax said. 

“They consider (summer programs) a lower level of study abroad.”

But then she encounters colleagues from other campuses “that want to be like us” and climb the Open Doors rankings, Fairfax added. Only New York University ranked ahead of Michigan State in the 2005 report produced by the Institute of International Education.

“We really feel the land-grant mission here at MSU. It permeates everything, including study abroad,” said Fairfax. “We want to make study abroad as accessible and affordable and open to as many students as possible, and we think everybody qualified to go should go.” 

Fairfax said the growth of study abroad at MSU reflects “a real partnership” between her office and staff of 23 and the colleges and academic departments that sponsor the programs. “Basically we have two levels of marketing going on. My office does the university-wide marketing—we publish the catalog, place ads in the student newspaper, put on study abroad fairs, and provide information at freshman orientation. But the colleges do the actual recruiting for specific programs,” Fairfax said. “Sometimes we hit them first, and then they hear it in class from their college. Eventually they hear it from somebody—and they go.”

In 2003, Fairfax’s office inaugurated Freshman Seminars Abroad, a two-week program open to all new students. They take place over two weeks in late July and early August, and take students in groups with MSU professors to such destinations as Québec City, Canada; Cork and Dublin, Ireland; Cape Town, South Africa; and Hikone, Japan. There was also a spring break seminar to Mérida, Mexico, in March 2006. The students receive two credits. The costs ranged from $1,000 for the Mexico and Québec trips to $2,900 for South Africa.

Rebecca Kapler of South Lyon, Michigan, who went on the Ireland seminar, said, “It was an experience to do it before you got on campus. I wasn’t even 18.” She is certain that she’ll study abroad again during her years at MSU.

Half the students in MSU’s Honors College study abroad, lured in part by $70,000 worth of scholarships that the college awards in $500 and $1,000 increments. Ronald C. Fisher, dean of the Honors College  and a professor of economics, said, “You can’t overestimate how important that experience is, even to honors students. We still have a lot of first-generation college students whose international experience (before coming to Michigan State) is often limited to Canada.”

Brian Forest, 21, a senior from Clinton Township, Michigan, double majoring in political science and Asian studies, used his nearly fluent Japanese as a guide at the 2005 World Exposition in Aichi, Japan, on an internship arranged through the Japan Center for Michigan Universities.

Forest, who switched to Japanese in high school after “running out of French classes,” said, “They do a really good job here of making it almost impossible not to study abroad. It’s hard to escape even if you wanted to. I got e-mails all the time from both the colleges I’m in promoting study abroad.” 

Michigan State’s Office for International Students and Scholars (OISS) attends to the welfare of 3,300 international students, more than half from Korea, China, India, Taiwan, and Japan, and 1,200 visiting scholars. The 2,200 international graduate students comprise 40 percent of MSU’s graduate population, while the 1,000 international undergraduates are 3.3 percent of undergraduate enrollment. The Colleges of Business (638), Natural Science (574), Engineering (519), and Arts and Letters (418) enrolled the largest number of international students in fall 2005. 

The OISS was an early adopter of new technology to speed the processing of student visas and forms for the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS).

Peter Briggs, director of OISS, called his office “a poster child for change. The technology allowed us to become so efficient we’ve been able to collapse a position and refocus on our connection to the community and our educational mission.”

Michigan State saw an overall decrease of 22 international students—0.7 percent—in fall 2005. Some had feared a much larger drop when the number of applications fell. Karen Klomparens, associate provost for graduate education and dean of the Graduate School, said, “I told my colleagues, ‘You need to look at who’s dropping off the application pool. It’s the bottom 25 percent, not the top.’”

The speed with which Briggs’ shop handled the paperwork for visas also helped, said Klomparens, a botanist and product of MSU. “We have the reputation of getting our paperwork out the door very quickly. We FedEx lots of stuff all over the globe to make sure it gets to international students. We’ve had students tell us that sometimes they decided to go to the first place that got them the forms they needed to apply for their visa because it showed that (the university) cared,” said Klomparens.

MSU CIBER’s global EDGE

Tomas M. Hult, director of Michigan State’s Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER), deploys half of his staff of 30 on a single, monumental task: updating the thousands of links on Michigan State’s encyclopedic international business portal to the Web called globalEDGE™ at http://globaledge.msu.edu/ibrd. “If you type in ‘international business’ on any search engine, we will come up No. 1,” boasted Hult. The site gets 3.7 million page hits a month and offers resources from the complete CIA World Factbook to 45 online course modules about export regulations and licensing rules to up-to-the-minute news from around the world. “We’re one-stop shopping for everything you want to know about international business,” said Hult, a native of Sweden who earned his Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Memphis.

His office also hosts the Web hub for all 30 of the nation’s Title VI B-funded CIBERs. Hult and Irem Kiyak, associate director, even trot out a roulette wheel with flags from dozens of countries for prizes at study abroad fairs. The MSU CIBER was founded in 1990 by S. Tamer Cavusgil, a global international marketing scholar from Turkey who holds an endowed chair at the MSU Eli Broad School of Business and retains the title of executive director of the CIBER.

Learning Fluid Dynamics in Volgograd

The MSU College of Engineering sends 70 students for five weeks each summer to study in Volgograd, Russia; it is MSU’s largest study abroad program. The college also sends students on exchanges and other programs to England, France, Italy, Germany, and Australia. The classes in the non–English-speaking countries are taught by MSU faculty or local professors of engineering who speak English. “We wouldn’t have a market for courses not taught in English for our students. There’s just not enough language strength,” said Thomas F. Wolff, associate dean for undergraduate studies. “Inside the classroom, once you close the door, dynamics is dynamics. It’s the same all over the world,” he added.

Spartan engineers learn early how international their future profession has become. “Engineering probably has the most international faculty in the university. We have large numbers of professors from all over the world—India, China, Korea, and Eastern and Western Europe,” said Wolff, a civil engineer. “They are collaborating every day with colleagues all over the world.” With the United States producing 65,000 engineers a year and countries in Asia on a path to produce 1 million, the students understand that they will be operating in a world with intense competition.

“Routine, well-defined engineering work, such as doing stress analysis on a valve with three-D computer models, can easily be done by good engineers for a third of the price on the other side of the world and be back the next day,” said Wolff. “What the U.S. has been good at is integration and innovation. If you’re going to outsource a large part of your work, there have to be bright people at the top figuring out what to outsource, what to do with the results, and how you’re going to put all that together.”

Area Studies Centers

In addition to African Studies, Michigan State has area studies centers that concentrate on Asia, Canada, Latin America, Europe, and Russia.  It operates several thematic institutes that work across regions and focus on agriculture, business, education, health, international development, and development issues that affect women. Even before the reaccreditation review, the university was seeking better coordination of their activities. 

Michael Lewis, director of the Asian Studies Center, said MSU teaches a full range of Asian languages, including three years of Korean and two years of Hindi and Vietnamese. It offered instruction in Khmer, the language of Cambodia, in fall 2006 for the first time. “We’re growing like crazy in language and other center initiatives,” said Lewis, an East Asian historian. 

Michigan State’s national resource centers secured a federal grant and funding from thenProvost Simon in 2002 to launch the “e-LCTL Initiative” under which Title VI centers in 120 universities work together to coordinate which less commonly taught languages they teach. 

“It’s a boom period for the Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL),” said David K. Prestel, chair of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages. Margo Glew, coordinator of the LCTL Program, said, “We’ve nearly doubled the number of languages available for instruction at MSU.” 

Still, champions of international education at Michigan State want to see the university do more on this front. Jenny Bond, acting assistant dean of international studies and programs and an emerita professor of human nutrition, said the next frontier for MSU“is more foreign language” and finding ways to further internationalize the education of students who do not study abroad. It is a task made easier by an unusual spirit of collaboration on the East Lansing campus, said Bond. “That’s the real secret (to MSU’s internationalization). There are just no boundaries.”

Dawn Pysarchik, associate dean of international studies and programs, said the provost had provided $100,000 to revitalize a program called Internationalizing Student Life. The program dates back to 1990, but had flagged in recent years because “it was not connected to the academic side of the institution,” said Pysarchik, a professor in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences.  “It was food, fun, and festivals. We discovered it couldn’t be just that. It has to have roots in the academic part of students’ careers as well as their cocurricular lives.”

MSU’s emphasis on international activities is strongly supported by the eight-member, elected Board of Trustees. Board chairman David Porteous said that in President Hannah’s day, “I’m sure many people felt he was pushing the envelope too far, but he turned a small, regional school into a great research university, and the international dimension was a critical component of that.”

Porteous, an attorney from Reed City, Michigan, credits McPherson and Simon with building on Hannah’s legacy. “I’m very proud that with all the challenges we have economically here in the state of Michigan—some of the toughest in the history of the state—our university is not turning inward and putting walls up; we’re doing just the opposite,” said Porteous, who sang in the Russian choir during his college days. 

Michigan State elevated John K. Hudzik, dean of international studies and programs from 1995 to 2004, to vice president for global engagement and strategic projects. Provost Wilcox described Hudzik’s job as “masterminding intellectual capital on thinking about the world in the same way we thought about” plant science and veterinary medicine in the past.

Hudzik, a political scientist, said, “We need collaborators and partners. We can’t afford to do everything on our own.” Hudzik and Wilcox led an MSU delegation to leading Thai universities last January. “Our partners abroad are world-class institutions. There was a time when some did not think of them in that way, but they certainly are now,” said Hudzik.Wilcox said that in meeting with Thai academics, he was struck by the similarity of the challenges they face, including improving higher education, meeting environmental challenges, and responding to the threat of avian influenza.

“Thailand does not need from us people who’ve studied Thailand their whole lives. They’ve got lots of people who understand Thailand already,” said Wilcox, who is also a product of MSU’s Honors College. Likewise, “our Chinese partners aren’t looking for Chinese culture experts from us. They want engineers, they want physicians, they want plant scientists and water scientists.”

In a February 2005 speech marking Michigan State’s sesquicentennial, President Simon asked rhetorically, “Who would have imagined 150 years ago that an experiment that began with a tiny class in a rough-hewn building carved out of a forest … would become the global prototype of a genuinely American brand of higher education—one that is an engine of the economy, a force for the democratization of public learning, the model for engagement with the world beyond the campus, and a catalyst for improving the quality of life in Michigan and around the world?”

Simon added, “Just as the establishment of the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan gave impetus to the work of Justin Morrill to create the land-grant system to prepare for the 20th century, let us work together to create … the next bold experiment: the land-grant university for the world.”

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