Program Development and Delivery

Living space is at a premium in the middle of New York City, even in the dorms at Barnard College. But every spring there were empty beds in those residences when Barnard students headed abroad for a semester. Wouldn’t it be nice, administrators thought, if international students could be brought to campus for four months to fill those spaces? Traditional exchanges wouldn’t work. There was no shortage of universities with students eager to study in Manhattan, but there was no guarantee that the Barnard women would want to spend a semester at those particular universities. There was also the disparity in tuition—$20,000 a semester at Barnard and nothing for students in Europe and some other countries. 

Then longtime Provost Elizabeth S. Boylan and Hillary Link, associate provost and dean for international programs, thought of something: Why not invite partners in Women’s Education Worldwide, an international network of women’s colleges, to send a small number of students who could take all the courses they wanted but not have to pay full tuition since they would not receive credit from Barnard? They called this the Visiting International Student Program (VISP) and started small in spring 2008 with five students from the University of Copenhagen and the Collegio Nuovo of the University of Pavia in Italy. It worked so well that they took in 41 students the next year from those and other universities in China and South Korea. This year 59 young women from seven countries—Italy, Denmark, China, South Korea, Australia, Ghana, and South Africa—spent the spring on Morningside Heights. The Gilder Foundation paid the way for the students from Ghana and South Africa.

“It’s a program born in part out of relative poverty,” said Barnard President Debora L. Spar, whose institution’s $186 million endowment is the smallest (three to seven times smaller) of the elite women’s colleges once known as the Seven Sisters. “This program works beautifully because it enables us to internationalize the campus in a way that’s not particularly expensive for us or the students.” There are 150 other international students at Barnard enrolled for four-year degrees; they pay full tuition.

Spar is a political scientist who came to Barnard from Harvard Business School. In her 2008 inaugural address, she expressed a determination to expose Barnard students “to the complex realities of the global economy” and do their part to solve the educational inequality that women face in much of the world.

Liberal Arts Classes and a Cultural Immersion

The VISP students arrive in January, go through orientation, and dive right into their academic and cultural immersion in the Big Apple, including trips to Broadway shows and the Metropolitan Opera and tours of the United Nations and the Cloisters. They live in the dorms on Barnard’s compact four-acre campus, across Broadway from Columbia University (Columbia, once all-male, is coed. Barnard and Columbia students attend classes interchangeably). The activities outside the classroom play an important role in helping the visiting students fit into campus life. “Our students struggle with the same things when they go abroad. Inevitably they say the hardest thing is to make friends with the local students,” said Link. 

Alberta Spreafico, among the five original VISP students, had no trouble finding her place at Barnard. Born in Milan and raised in England and Italy, Spreafico was so taken with Barnard and Columbia that she returned the next year to complete work on a master’s degree from the University of Pavia. She interned at the United Nations and is now working at Henry Ford Health Systems in Detroit on a telemedicine project to improve health care in poor countries. Barnard was “wonderful,” said Spreafico. “I was just thrilled by the liberal arts education and the broadness of the opportunities presented.”

Sunny Nam, 20, an English and political science major from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea, who studied at Barnard in spring 2011, said, “The semester in New York City was like a dream for me.” She learned “to set priorities that fit me, not by other people’s standards or the society’s standards. This has changed a lot of my education goals, and more broadly, my identity.” Barnard, Ewha, and the Collegio Nuovo all belong to the Women’s Education Worldwide, an organization that brings together presidents and deans from women’s colleges around the world to advocate for the education of women.

Professor of Economics Rajiv Sethi advised five VISP students and went to see Phantom of the  Opera with a dozen of them. Asked if one semester was sufficient for the visiting students to make their presence felt, Sethi replied, “In some respects the one-semester model is even better…. We get a much larger number of students’ cycling through the program than we would if they came for four years each. This results in contact with many more individuals, and a more rapid spread of information about us globally.”

Global Symposia on Women’s Issues

Indeed, raising Barnard’s international profile and attracting more applicants from other countries is an expressed goal. Spar is pursuing those ends on another front with an annual Global Symposium on women’s issues that she launched in Beijing, China, in 2009 and subsequently has staged in Dubai and Johannesburg, South Africa. The fourth will take place in Mumbai, India, in March 2012.

The first symposium came about fortuitously. Spar had been invited to participate on a panel at the opening of Columbia’s global center in Beijing. By coincidence, several Chinese-American applicants had mentioned in their essays Barnard’s first Asian student, Kang Tongbi of the Class of 1909, who returned to China and worked for women’s suffrage and against the practice of foot binding. Spar and Link put together the “Kang Tongbi Commemorative Symposium: Women Changing China” featuring a novelist, television host, filmmaker, and women’s rights advocate. It drew a full house of 175 alumnae, educators, and business leaders. “We launched that symposium on a prayer and a shoestring. Something just clicked. We realized that whereas in the United States you can go to dozens of conferences every day on (women’s issues)… they are much fewer and farther in between” in developing countries, Spar said. “In creating these forums we’ve carved out a space that’s kind of empty right now.”

The “Women in the Arab World Global Symposium” in Dubai in 2010 drew 300 people, and the 2011 symposium on “Women Changing Africa” drew nearly 400 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Spar took a half-dozen Barnard students and two faculty with her. The students held a workshop for girls at the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg on leadership and self-esteem. Spar hopes to bring even more students and faculty to India in March 2012. 

A Spurt in International Applications

One bonus of VISP and the symposia is that Barnard is seeing more applications from these countries, as well as more interest on the part of Barnard students in studying at the universities where they now have friends.

Spar, addressing the “Women Changing Africa” symposium, said her career switch from the predominantly male Harvard Business School to a college “totally dominated by women” has given her a new perspective on gender differences.

It is “not that women are better or that women necessarily make better leaders, but I think women lead differently than men,” Spar said. Barnard now is trying to “take what we were learning about women’s leadership and education and push it outside the gates of New York City and embrace the rest of the world.”

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Barnard College

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Macalester College’s determined global outlook can be seen and heard on even a short stroll around the 53-acre campus in a leafy St. Paul, Minnesota, neighborhood not far from where F. Scott Fitzgerald grew up. The flag of the United Nations flies overhead as it has every day for 61 years. Dozens of other banners line the balcony above Café Mac, the college dining room, and flags from the home countries of Macalester students are rotated on four other flagpoles throughout the year. Sitting conspicuously in the foyer of the new athletic and fitness center is a ping pong table dedicated to and autographed by Nobel Peace laureate and former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, a track star and champion ping pong player here half a century ago (he graduated in 1961). On warm spring afternoons, the rhythmic beat of drums reverberates across campus as the 40-member African Music Ensemble practices outdoors. 

These visible tokens all reflect what Macalester calls its “special emphasis on internationalism, multiculturalism, and service to society” and its determination, in the words of President Brian Rosenberg, to produce “socially responsible global citizens and leaders.” That commitment begins at home, where Macalester students are strongly encouraged to volunteer in the Twin Cities’ polyglot tapestry of immigrant communities—Hmong, Somali, and Hispanic among them—as well as to undertake service and learning abroad. Indeed, Rosenberg in 2006 combined the college’s three separate offices for community service, internships, and international education into a unified Institute for Global Citizenship (IGC) with the aim of making it “a catalyst for cutting-edge teaching, scholarship, and events fostering the education of citizen leaders for the interconnected world of the twenty-first century,” with Ahmed Samatar, professor of international studies and a leading scholar on the history and struggles of his native Somalia, at the helm as its first dean. Two of its conjoined parts, the International Center and the Civic Engagement Center, share quarters in the U.S. Green Building Council LEED platinum-certified  Markim Hall, where water circulating through radiant ceiling panels and flooring provides the “hydronic” heating and cooling. The internship office is next door in Kagin Commons along with the Office of International Student Programs.

Finding Stellar Students on a Fjord in Norway

Generous financial aid helps Macalester attract international students in large numbers. The private college actually provides aid to a higher percentage of international students (almost 90 percent) than the U.S. undergraduates (70 percent), and the average package covers two-thirds of the more than $50,000 annual cost of tuition, room, and board. Macalester has recruited top students from the United World Colleges (UWC) for years even before philanthropist Shelby Moore Cullom Davis gave it $13.5 million to provide $20,000-a-year scholarships for graduates of UWC, an international network of boarding schools offering international baccalaureate diplomas to students chosen for academic ability and leadership potential. Jimm Crowder, then-associate director of international admissions, made a dozen recruiting visits to the Red Cross Nordic UWC on a fjord in Norway, more than any other visitor, the headmaster told him, save Queen Sonja.

“Forty years ago, the religion department here would have been five Presbyterian clergymen teaching Bible. We’re still five, but three of us do Asian religions and Islam.”

The robust international studies (IS) program, founded in 1949, is the fifth most popular major, with four and one-half tenure-track positions of its own and allied faculty across the humanities, social studies, and even the sciences. Its chair, David Chioni Moore, calls it “the oldest, broadest, and deepest such program at any private liberal arts college.” Education abroad is mandatory in this program, as it is for language and anthropology majors and those from a handful of other disciplines. Macalester now offers interdisciplinary concentrations in global citizenship, community and global health, human rights, and humanitarianism. Overall, 60 percent of Macalester students study abroad, over half outside Western Europe.

Duties of World Citizenship

Macalester held its first classes in 1885, a nonsectarian institution affiliated with the Presbyterian Church. Classics scholar James Wallace saved it from bankruptcy as president at the turn of the twentieth century and was the lion of the faculty until the eve of World War II. His son, DeWitt Wallace, founder of Reader’s Digest, became a major benefactor. President Charles Turck raised the UN flag in 1950 and spoke of “the duties of world citizenship.” In recent decades Macalester has attracted a far more diverse and globally minded faculty to carry out that vision. “Forty years ago, the religion department here would have been five Presbyterian clergymen teaching Bible. We’re still five, but three of us do Asian religions and Islam,” said Professor of Religious Studies James Laine.

Classics Professor Andrew Overman takes 25 Macalester students each summer to work on the excavation of a Roman temple complex at a site called Omrit in northern Galilee, near Israel’s border with Lebanon. They live on a kibbutz, publish with Overman in scholarly journals, and uncover finds that are on permanent display at the New Israel Museum in Jerusalem. It is “an incredibly transforming experience for everybody,” said Overman, who previously brought students to a Black Sea dig in Sevastopol, Ukraine.

Most Macalester students study abroad not with their professors but at some 70 recommended programs overseas bearing the International Center’s stamp of approval. Macalester runs a handful of semester-long programs, including one in Maastricht, Netherlands, and classes taught in German at the Goethe Institute in Berlin and the University of Vienna in Austria. Since 2003 Macalester, in a consortium with Pomona and Swarthmore colleges, has offered a program on globalization and the environment at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

A Preference for Foreign Programs and Local Faculty

Michael Monahan, former director of the International Center who recently became president of BCA Study Abroad, said Macalester approaches education abroad “in a very selective way. Our faculty primarily are in the classroom here. We like to see foreign faculty teaching our students abroad. So our motto has been to engage with foreign universities and program providers rather than running them ourselves.” Monahan said, “A distinctive feature of Macalester education abroad is it’s a match between each individual student and not just a program, but a course of study.” Even the education abroad brochures used to be grouped by major instead of by country or region. But that caused some confusion and was changed recently to make it easier for students to see all their options by country. 

Paul Nelson, an alumnus of the class of 1972, the new director of the International Center and former study abroad coordinator, and study abroad adviser Rachel Kamagne-Jones, a more recent alumna, class of 2007, structure their advising sessions around academic content, not location. They personally interview each applicant. “It’s rare to tell somebody no. Everything on campus is setup to make the answer yes,” said Nelson, an attorney and author who used to run a summer Spanish immersion program in Cuernavaca, Mexico. “It’s the ethos that students take it seriously.” 

“A distinctive feature of Macalester education abroad is it’s a match between each individual student and not just a program, but a course of study.”

An unusual spurt in enrollment with the class that entered in 2009 has produced a bumper crop of nearly 350 students studying abroad in 2011–12. Fourteen students were headed to China, a record, and 17 signed up for intensive Arabic programs in Morocco, Jordan, and England. Star quarterback Clark Bledsoe, a rising junior and anthropology major, will skip spring 2012 football practice to study in South Africa, one of eight football players’ bound for different parts of the world. “I savor the focus this school places on internationalism, as well as all the interesting people it attracts,” said the anthropology major.

Macalester’s geography department, with five professors, draws swarms of students to courses on geographic information systems (GIS), the environment, urban studies, and global issues. Senior Needham Hurst, an economics major, minored in geography and Chinese and applied his GIS skills while studying in China to research how people there were being evicted from ancestral homes for urban renewal. Hurst, who also spent a month studying in Bangladesh, said, “It was shocking how closely these patterns of land loss match those I mapped on American Indian reservations.”

Linguistics and Asian studies major Morgan Sleeper, 22, from Deland, Florida, studied Chinese in China, Maori in New Zealand, and Gaelic in Ireland during his four years at Macalester and won a $25,000 Watson Fellowship to travel the world for a year exploring how Celtic music is keeping Gaelic and other endangered languages alive.

Sarcasm 101 and Bus Tokens

For Macalester’s contingent of 227 international students (almost 12 percent of undergraduates), introduction to campus and U.S. life includes a course that International Student Programs Director Aaron Colhapp titled Sarcasm 101: An Introduction to Humor in America, which includes clips from a sardonic Saturday Night Live skit as well as other break-the-ice discussions and activities. Colhapp brings as guest lecturer an associate dean’s spouse who once taught improvisation at Second City. “Students love it,” he said.

The international office also sends U.S. and international students into Minneapolis and St. Paul with a bus token and instructions not to come back until they have found and interviewed several people with distinct characteristics, from eyeglasses to tattoos. “It’s a good way to get them out, learn the bus system, and get them used to not being afraid to talk to other people,” said Colhapp. 

Another program called Ametrica pairs students with mentors throughout the year for fortnightly discussions on politics, religion, social networking, and other topics. Marissa Leow, a biology major born in Singapore but raised in part in upstate New York, works in the international student office and signed on as a mentor. Her skepticism of the program shifted when she saw that new international students “value hearing each other’s perspectives and going through that [adjustment] process with each other.” 

Yulun Li, 18, a freshman from Chengdu, China, said, “There’s a lot of things to do here. I’m very busy, meeting new people, talking to new people. It’s kind of joyful.” Li was surprised to find how interested American students are in events outside their country. But first-year student Amy Janett from Vernon, New Jersey, who spent a year in Iceland as a high school exchange student and helps organize events for international students, was surprised to find that not everyone at Macalester was as internationally minded as she is.

President Rosenberg said, “Any time you get 2,000 students, you’re going to get different priorities and perspectives.” He believes student interest in global matters is greater at Macalester than at most schools, and he has even advised students’ who are weighing whether to accept the college’s offer of admission that if they aren’t seeking such an international emphasis, “this might not be the right college for you.”

International Journals and Its Own Student Council

The Institute for Global Citizenship, which has its own student council, brings scholars to campus each fall for a three-day International Roundtable devoted to globalization issues. Papers commissioned for the forum are published in the annual journal Macalester International.

Samatar, who recently stepped down as IGC dean, is also founder and editor-in-chief of Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies. “Working here (at the IGC) has been challenging and delightful and exhilarating, but I need to get back to full-time scholarship,” said Samatar, who at age 17 was chosen to be a news reader on the national news broadcast in his homeland and was a broadcaster for the BBC Somali Service in London before coming to the United States for college. “Internationalism as a spirit has been a part of Macalester’s life for decades,” said Samatar. “No (other) college in the United States has put together this kind of an internationalist academic program so early.”

A national search is on for Samatar’s successor as dean. Asked what advice he would give that person, Samatar said, “Excellence is a moving thing. It is not something that you discover once, pitch your tent, and just (relax). Others are pushing, too. New questions arise and old questions refuse to go away and require new methodologies. So excellence is a journey. You never really rest.”

Kennesaw State University’s transformation from junior college to Georgia’s third largest university took only a few decades. It is still growing, adding its first doctoral degrees and building dorms so more than just 4,000 of its 22,000 students can live on the metropolitan Atlanta campus. With help from legendary University of Georgia coach Vince Dooley, it is preparing to field its first football team in 2014. But its academic ambitions are even grander and—as suggested by the 22-foot-high sculpture by Eino, Spaceship Earth, in the heart of campus—more global. “That’s Kennesaw State straddling the globe,” Ikechkwu Ukeje, a Nigerian-born professor and chair of elementary and early childhood education, said in jest.

But that artwork and a nearby colorful, 2.7-ton slab from the Berlin Wall both remind students and faculty every day of Kennesaw State’s international ambitions and achievements. One feather in its cap recently came in the form of a midterm report from its accreditor, the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges (SASC), which requires member institutions to single out an area for self-improvement when they seek reaccreditation. KSU intrepidly asked in 2007 to be held accountable for how much and how well it bolstered its international education programs.

SASC sent Susan Buck Sutton, then associate vice chancellor of Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (she is now at Bryn Mawr College), to take a look. “KSU is emerging as a national leader in international education,” Sutton wrote in evaluating the institution’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP). “It would be difficult to find another university where such a broad range of global learning initiatives, across all dimensions of the institution, is occurring.”

“We’ve made the Quality Enhancement Plan part of our DNA,” said Barry J. Morris, vice provost for global engagement and strategic initiatives and executive director of the Institute for Global Initiatives, who deflects credit to the faculty. Morris said KSU’s international thrust benefited from strong leadership from President Daniel Papp and his cabinet, but received legitimacy “because it was chosen from the bottom up. The faculty themselves raised the flag.” 

From Junior College to Comprehensive University

KSU opened in 1966 as Kennesaw Junior College, constructed on what once was farmland in Cobb County 20 miles northwest of Atlanta. It did not start offering bachelor’s and master’s degrees until the 1980s. Now it is preparing its first doctoral students. Today it has 20,000 undergraduates (average age 25) and 2,000 graduate students. Some 1,600 are international and nearly 900 students study abroad each year. Eighty-five percent live off campus or commute and half are nontraditional. KSU proudly describes itself as “a metropolitan university.” Former President Betty L. Siegel was a vigorous proponent of KSU’s international efforts during her quarter century at the helm, and KSU took part in the American Council on Education’s Global Learning for All project aimed at helping institutions expose adult, minority, and part-time students to international education. Daniel Papp, a Sovietologist and founder of the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech, picked up the international torch when he became president in 2006. 

The “Year Of” Program

A signature international activity is KSU’s “Year of Program” that spotlights a particular country, region, or international theme through a host of courses, lectures, exhibits, music, theater, and other activities that extend throughout an academic year. It started with Japan in 1984–85 and now has examined nearly two dozen countries as well as the Olympic movement and slave trade across the Atlantic. The Year of Romania was marked in 2010–11 with 33 lectures, a film festival, and other events that examined the treatment of the Roma (Gypsy) minority, persecution of Jews, post-communist religion and politics, and medieval painted monasteries. Some KSU students studied in Romania, and five faculty with Romanian roots made contributions as well. The Year of Program “is a lot of fun and a lot of work,” said Daniel Paracka, director of education abroad and manager of the Year of Program.

The 2006–07 Year of Kenya resonated with Atlanta’s sizeable Kenyan immigrant community. When the Kenyan ambassador spoke, he brought consular staff to process visas for Kenyan Americans to visit their homeland, and KSU has held follow-up conferences with support from Atlanta companies that do business in Africa. “We are still reaping the positive benefits. People now call us ‘Kenya-saw,’” said Vice Provost Morris, a Russian-speaking political scientist and former international banker.

[The Global Learning Coordination Council is] “the group that more than any other drives our internationalization efforts. This is the engine that ties the entire university together.”

Kennesaw State’s Coles College of Business recently became the new home of the India China America Institute, an economic think tank on economic and geopolitical issues involving the United States and the world’s largest emerging economies. The institute will help the business school and the university to “further engage in these countries while solidifying our position as a leader in global education,” said Ken Harmon, the business dean who is serving as interim provost and vice president for academic affairs. 

A New Institute for Global Initiatives

The Institute for Global Initiatives (IGI) was created under the provost’s office in 2003 to provide what history professor Akanmu G. Adebayo, the first executive director, describes as a “one stop shop” for faculty and student research and study. It replaced a smaller Office of International Programs housed in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Today a Global Learning Coordination Council (GLCC) of faculty, staff, and students oversees and coordinates KSU’s international activities (Professor Ukeje is a council member). The biweekly council developed a Global Engagement Certificate that students now can earn with their diplomas. Morris calls the council “the group that more than any other drives our internationalization efforts. This is the engine that ties the entire university together.”

Ed Rugg, retired vice president for academic affairs and former chief academic officer, said the transformation from junior college to university in the 1980s left “open fields for us to run in. The undergraduate curriculum hadn’t been fleshed out…. If we had better ideas for doing something, people were willing to entertain them. Nobody was saying no.” KSU was the first public institution in the state to offer an international affairs major, and its faculty have led internationalization initiatives for the entire University System of Georgia. “Our visibility and perception as an international campus was not just mythic, but real,” said Adebayo, who is editor-in-chief of KSU’s peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary Journal of Global Initiatives.

Financing Study Abroad With Student Fees

Kennesaw State provides $1 million a year in funding for the IGI and $940,000 more for other global learning activities, said Assistant Vice President for Financial Services Ashok Roy, who is also an associate professor of Asian studies. Students voted to impose an additional $14-per-semester fee on themselves to provide Global Learning Scholarships of at least $500 for everyone who studies abroad or takes part in university-sponsored service trips overseas. Students receive as much as $2,000 if they perform service and study abroad for longer periods. The fee generates $750,000 annually, said Dawyn Dumas, director of Global Engagement Programs.

“Our philosophy is that leadership is a lifestyle. Once they’ve gone on their first trip, they are hungry to go all around the world.”

KSU has dramatically increased education abroad opportunities for math and science majors. Professor of Mathematics Jun Ji, the College of Science and Mathematics representative on the GLCC, said, “Four years ago we had one (education abroad) program with 10 students. Now we have eight programs in science and math, and we got 98 students last year.” A large poster outside Ji’s office shouts in bold letters, “YOU CAN GO TO CHINA FOR $2,100.” This includes a $750 Global Learning Scholarship plus an additional $400 per student from KSU’s Confucius Institute, one of the 68 such centers in the United States and 300 worldwide that receive support from China to encourage study of Chinese language and culture. 

KSU sends students on 40 different education abroad programs, mostly for two to three weeks in the summer. With Georgia Southern and Georgia State, it offers full-semester Italian culture courses in the Tuscan town of Montepulciano. KSU ranked tenth in the 2010 Open Doors report among master’s level institutions in education abroad. The School of Nursing sends students on two-week service-learning trips to Oaxaca, Mexico. Sociologist Ardith Peters leads students to Uganda in summer to work with an NGO on adaptive sports for blind children. 

‘Emerging Global Scholars’

KSU has added a President’s Emerging Global Scholars program to the mix of opportunities offered through its Center for Student Leadership (CSL). Fifty high achievers took 10-day service trips to Brazil or Mexico as freshmen and went to South Africa at the end of their sophomore year for further civic engagement activities. “Our philosophy is that leadership is a lifestyle,” said CSL Director Brian Wooten. “Once they’ve gone on their first trip, they are hungry to go all around the world.”

“Next year we’re going to India,” said sophomore Gina Perleoni. Classmate Zoe HoChoy, who grew up in Kennesaw, said never “in my wildest dreams” did she expect to have multiple education abroad experiences in college. Graduate student Punit Patel, born in Mumbai, India, but raised in the United States, said that “momentum is building year after year” on KSU’s international front. Patel, former student body president, and 21 classmates took part in the Asian International Model United Nations conference in Beijing, China, over spring break. All received Global Learning Scholarships to attend.

“One great thing about KSU is that international students are encouraged to become campus leaders,” said Dhanashree Thorat, 22, an English major from India. The university helped pay her way to give a paper at Oxford in England.

Moby-Dick in Morocco, Children’s Books in Benin

During the Year of Kenya, Karen Robinson, associate professor of theatre and performance studies, and lecturer Margaret Baldwin collected oral histories from Atlanta’s Kenyan community and mounted a play around them. Robinson, who visited Kenya with other faculty, later brought the Shangilia Youth Choir, a troupe of children rescued from the streets of Nairobi, to perform at KSU. Ten theater majors staged Melville’s Moby Dick at a collegiate festival in Casablanca, Morocco, in 2009, speaking their lines in English with selective narration in French and Arabic by students fluent in those languages.

While a graduate student, Assistant Professor of French Lucie Viakinnou-Brinson created a nonprofit called Seeds of Knowledge to provide textbooks for schools in her native Benin. Now she has students in her French classes, from beginners to advanced, write children’s books in French to donate to schools in Benin, and hopes to take students on her next trip there.

Recognition for Faculty, Student Global Engagement

Dawyn Dumas, the IGI’s director of Global Engagement Programs, spearheaded efforts to create a registry of KSU faculty and staff with international expertise. Scores of faculty have stepped forward to present credentials entitling them to be designated international education “specialists” or “contributors.” Dumas is also the point person for students seeking to earn the Global Engagement Certificate. They must have spent at least four weeks on education abroad, completed 12 credits in upper division global learning courses, and submitted a portfolio documenting service or activism on such issues as hunger or human rights. More than 100 students have earned the certificate since 2008.

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Donald L. Amoroso, executive director of the new International Center for Innovation in Technologies and former chair of the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, takes students with him twice a year to study and conduct research in Japan. “My heart is in it,” said Amoroso, an expert on advanced cell phone technology. The university spent more than $1 million converting a warehouse into high-tech classrooms and computer labs for Amoroso’s innovation center.

Though on the rise, an immediate goal for the university is to lift the graduation rate, which is still under 40 percent. Papp, Morris, and faculty leaders all believe KSU’s international thrust will help the institution keep more students on that path to a diploma. 

When Tori Haring-Smith was in seventh grade, her imagination was captured by a book the journalist and war correspondent John Sack wrote about his travels to the 13 smallest countries on the planet. Nine years later, with Swarthmore College diploma in hand, she set out to retrace his steps to Sark, Swat, Sikkim, and other off-the-beaten-track places. Her 12-month journey came courtesy of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, bestowed on a select group of liberal arts college students for a year of independent travel and study around the world. Watson fellows don’t have to take classes or do academic research. They just have to use their imaginations to explore the world, as 2,500 have done since 1969 with generous grants from the late IBM chairman’s foundation. 

Haring-Smith, like many Watson fellows, gravitated toward academe, teaching theater and writing at Brown University, serving as executive director of the Watson Fellowship, becoming a dean and vice president at Willamette University, and then in 2005 being named the twelfth president of Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania. Washington & Jefferson (W&J) now has its own version of the Watson: the Magellan Project, which helps students pursue global intellectual adventures during college summers. The college provides both extensive mentoring, including workshops on how to write compelling project proposals, and financial support to make the projects happen. Since 2008 it has green-lighted and funded 100 Magellan Projects, including some that did not require a passport but all of which “involve purposeful travel and exploration in new and unfamiliar surroundings.” The grants average $2,000.

The college has a one-stop referral location to help students through the application process. The projects are self-directed, but the Magellan Scholars painstakingly map their plans in advance with a faculty mentor. They also must convince a committee composed of an associate dean, the head of career services, and three professors that the project is feasible. Every scholar attends a writing workshop in February and commits to telling others (including prospective W&J students) about their journeys upon their return. It is all aimed at assisting students “in crafting and in telling compelling stories of curiosity and achievement that will be useful throughout their college years” and beyond, as explained on the Magellan Project Web site.

From Diagnosticians to Problem Solvers

The Magellan Project has quickly become a signature feature of the college. It has its own $1 million endowment and its laurels include a 2010 Andrew Heiskell Award for Innovation in International Education. Moreover, said Haring-Smith, it has effected a change in how students view poverty and other social inequities. “It’s taken them from a stance that essentially said, ‘There’s a problem; someone should solve it,’ to ‘There’s a problem and I am going to help solve it.’” 

The college, which traces its roots to three “log cabin colleges” established in the 1780s by Presbyterian ministers that merged in 1865, enrolls 1,450 students on a 60-acre campus in the town of Washington, 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. 

The college sends about 190 students on traditional education abroad programs each year, many on faculty-led three-week classes in January. But Haring–Smith was intent on finding new ways to thrust them into situations “where they would be on their own, independently solving problems… without anybody to fall back on.” The Magellan Project, she said, was in keeping with the college’s mission statement, which speaks of graduating men and women “prepared to contribute substantially to the world in which they live,” and with a 2007 strategic plan that set a goal of bringing “the world into W&J and W&J into the world.” 

A Layperson’s Guide for Cancer Patients

The projects can revolve around independent research, service, or internships, but formal classroom study is out of bounds. Projects have included studying Holocaust sites in Europe, examining the healthcare system in Cyprus, volunteering at medical clinics in the Dominican Republic and South Africa, and preparing a patients’ guide to granulosa cell tumor (GCT) research.

Sophomore Haley Roberts wrote that guide after interning for GCT researchers at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Roberts, a student athlete and economics major, survived the cancer at age 16. “When I was diagnosed in 2009, I was frustrated that I didn’t fully understand GCT or treatment options or how cancer worked. Patients wanted to know about the science behind their disease to make better medical decisions and talk to their doctors intelligently,” she said, but the typical scientific medical article was indecipherable. As a result, she published The Genetics of Granulosa Cell Tumour, An Unofficial Guide for the Scientifically Illiterate, which has been downloaded hundreds of times from the Granulosa Cell Tumour Research Foundation’s Web site. Roberts, who remains in remission, now aspires to a career in public health.

Deciphering the Tax Code of Opportunities

Washington & Jefferson College had a panoply of student research and internship awards and opportunities before the Magellan, but “it was extremely confusing. It was like the tax code," said Haring-Smith. “We said, ‘Let’s call these all Magellans.’” 

Nick Tyger, a molecular biology major, is among a handful of students who snagged three Magellans over successive summers. The grants supported his work volunteering and recruiting other students to volunteer to set up health clinics in poor, mountain villages in the Dominican Republic near Haiti. He also travelled to Cusco, Peru, to scout other locations for clinics.

That didn’t pan out, but the club Tyger established, Presidents Without Borders (a nod to the college nickname), attracted 40 members and sent volunteers to Nicaragua in summer 2012. Tyger, who is headed to chiropractic college, said, “I have a new outlook on the global community. I thought before I left that these types of problems—hunger and poverty—were so much farther away than they actually are. Just a short plane ride and you’re in the midst of it.”

Not a Good Magellan Without Tears

Tiffani Gottschall, an economics professor who is the Magellan adviser for sophomores, said students typically have “a lot of nerves” as they embark on their projects. “They touch down in the airport in Turkey or Egypt and find themselves alone. Now what do they do?” she asked. James Sloat, associate dean for assessment and new initiatives, said, “In some sense, it’s not a good Magellan unless there are tears along the journey.” 

A third of W&J students are the first in their family to attend college and 20 percent qualify for need-based Pell Grants. They do not “have a sense of entitlement or superiority….They feel, ‘I’m just an average person,’” Haring-Smith said. It’s an enormous boost to their self-confidence when they extricate themselves from situations “where the last bus has gone up the mountain to the village where they are staying, and they have no money and no place to stay and no phone and no place to call even if they had a phone.”

Magellan Scholars are given ample opportunities to speak about their experiences, including recruiting pitches to freshmen before the new students sign a pledge at a matriculation ceremony to work toward becoming global citizens.

Educating Parents

Freshman, sophomores, and juniors with at least a 2.5 GPA can apply. The college awards about 25 Magellans each year. Haring-Smith would like to see many more. Increasing the number “actually has more to do with educating parents than educating students,” said the president, who has had to allay concerns of parents worried about sending their daughters or sons off to distant lands alone. She tells them: “You’ve raised a child who can do this.”

Carol Barno of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, was one of those anxious parents in 2010 when freshman daughter Erin set off to study architecture in Europe. The mathematics and art major has since done two more Magellan projects. “They’ve given her such confidence. She’s not that little 18-yearold girl I sent to W&J saying, ‘Oh, God, please take care of her,’” said Barno. Erin, a star field hockey player, concurs: “Traveling abroad on my own has made me fearless.”

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Washington & Jefferson College

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Educators and political leaders alike have worried for years that too few college students were taking the courses that would prepare them for becoming the nation’s future scientists and engineers, and there has been special concern about the numbers of women and minorities entering these fields. Back in the mid-1990s the Graduate College at the  University of Arizona (UA) launched a program that brings dozens of promising, underrepresented undergraduates to the Tucson campus each summer to work alongside mentors in research labs and help prepare them for graduate school. The National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the university itself provide support for these summer opportunities, which draw students not just from UA but other U.S. colleges and universities. 

The University of Arizona conducts more than $60 million a year in research—it was 30th in the National Science Foundation rankings for fiscal 2010—and awards more than 200 PhDs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields annually. Professors welcome these bright undergraduates to their labs and often can make room on the bench for an additional intern. When Maria Teresa Velez, associate dean of the Graduate College and director of the summer program, sat down with Sergio Arias, director of international relations at the Universidad de Guanajuato in Mexico, to discuss ways to deepen existing institutional ties, they saw how an expanded summer research program could benefit both universities and, indeed, both countries. The result was the Verano de Investigación or Summer of Research program, which gives students hands-on lab experience and grooms them for graduate school. Originally limited to students from Mexican universities, the program now is open to promising students from across Latin America.

The track record speaks for itself: more than a third of the 73 undergraduates from the program’s first six summers already are attending graduate schools in the United States, Latin America, and Europe.

All but one student (a Colombian) were Mexican but the program now is open to college students throughout Latin America. It is “a win-win situation” for both UA and its Latin American partners, said Francisco Marmolejo, UA assistant vice president for Western Hemispheric programs and executive director of the Consortium for North American Higher Education Collaboration (CONAHEC). 

Learning the Arc of the Research Process

Andrew Comrie, dean of the UA Graduate College and associate vice president for research, said apprenticeships like this are the best way to show students “how fascinating science is” so that “the bug bites.” It deepens their learning and boosts their motivation to tackle “all this tough stuff,” he said.

“It’s a classic model,” Comrie said. “You build the trajectory of the lab experience around framing a research question that intrigues the student, conducting experiments for 10 weeks to answer this question, while giving them all this other preparation and professional training. They learn the whole arc of the research process.” They present their findings on posters at a Graduate College symposium that wraps up the summer.

The program operates in tandem with the ongoing Summer Research Institute for 90 underrepresented U.S. students. The students live together on campus on dorms and, in addition to their lab work, take a 40-hour class to prepare for the Graduate Record Examination and to zero in on graduate programs that best match their research and career interests as well as skills. For the Latin American students, there is additional tutoring on English skills and seminars from current graduate students regarding the adjustment issues they are likely to face if they pursue degrees in the United States.

Support From Sponsoring States

The participating universities in Mexico and elsewhere customarily pay the students’ travel and living expenses with funds allocated by their federal or state governments. Families contribute as well. UA absorbs other costs, including the $3,500 it would normally charge for six credits of tuition. 

The program drew seven students in 2007, the first summer, 17 students the next, then dropped to 10 and 12 in 2009 and 2010 as the Arizona legislature was considering and enacting stricter immigration laws, but the number rebounded to 26 in both 2011 and in 2012. The Graduate College, at the behest and expense of Chile’s government, is planning to host Chilean undergraduates in research labs for 10 weeks in an Invierno de Investigación, or Winter Research Program. One Mexican student co-authored with his mentor an article in the Applied Thermal Engineering journal. Several UA professors have started collaborations with Mexican colleagues as a direct result of mentoring the visiting students.

A Faster Route to the PhD

Yissel Contreras, 23, of Mexico City, spent the summer of 2011 working with Anthony Muscat, a professor of chemical and environmental engineering, on new techniques for modifying silicon surfaces. Contreras was on the eve of graduating from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) with a bachelor’s degree in technology and was considering other research opportunities in Germany and the Netherlands when a classmate told her about the Arizona program.

“It’s definitely one of the best I’ve ever seen,” she said. “It really prepares students for graduate school. I have to admit my English really improved.” She had studied the language for years in school, “but it’s totally different from being in a place where you were using it all the time.” It also opened up for Contreras a possibility she did not know existed: going straight into a PhD program without first getting a master’s degree. She is now back in Tucson as one of her mentor’s doctoral students.

Ambitions to Be the “Northernmost” Latin American University

More than a tenth of the University of Arizona’s 2,700 international students are from Latin America, including 162 from Mexico, 24 from Brazil, 22 from Chile, and 14 from Colombia (total UA enrollment is 39,000). The border and the city of Nogales, Mexico, are just 68 miles south of UA’s palm tree-lined campus in the middle of downtown Tucson, ringed by mountains and the Sonoran Desert.

Marmolejo said the summer program dovetails with UA’s ambition to win recognition “as the northernmost Latin American university in the world,” a phrase borrowed from Michael Proctor, UA vice president for global initiatives. 

The program “internationalizes the university in such a way that underrepresented (American) students influence the Latin Americans, and the Latin American students influence the underrepresented students. The meshing … is very important,” said Velez, a clinical psychologist.

The students must have a GPA of 3.0 and a passing score of at least 500 on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). “We like for them to come for the summer between junior and senior year. By then they have the coursework to enable them to really engage in laboratory research. They’re more mature and know English better; that’s the ideal time also to consider if graduate school is for them,” said Velez. The students are asked beforehand which three to five professors they would like to work with and they are matched with one of them if possible. 

Swift Dividends

University partnerships across borders are commonplace, but “many times these initiatives become just ceremonial things,” said Marmolejo. “The Latin American Summer Research Institute engages faculty and students” and maximizes intercultural learning.

The payoff has been swift. Of those 73 undergraduates from the first six summers, 28 are now in graduate school, including 13 at Mexican universities, 11 at UA, and four in Europe. “This has been a great tool to move our connections with our partner universities in Latin America to the next level,” said Marmolejo.

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University of Arizona

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The largest international program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), has come a long way from its roots as what it calls “a self-supporting start-up on the fringes of MIT.” What really started three decades ago as a modest effort to send students to work in Japan for a semester or two, today is a juggernaut that sends upward of 550 MIT students and recent graduates each summer to 20 countries on all-expenses-paid internships. The hands-on work and research they do in labs and companies give them a real taste of what it is like to operate outside their country and culture, often in another language. MIT also sends 100 students overseas to teach science to high school and college students. It has been a seminal experience over the past generation for 5,600 students, including 800 who worked in China. 

“We make sure that every single internship opportunity is completely cost-free for the students,” said April Julich Perez, MISTI associate director. Their airfares and living expenses are covered mostly by companies, foundations, foreign governments, and donors. The 2012 budget for the internship program was $3.3 million, 85 percent from outside funding. MISTI awarded $2 million to 100 faculty in 2012 for international research and collaborations, many of which involve students. MIT itself kicks in $300,000 for the seed grants.

Entrepreneurs, Inventors, and a TV Host

MISTI has spawned entrepreneurs, academics, and venture capitalists who work on the global stage with language skills on top of advanced technological prowess. While on a MISTI internship in China after his freshman year, Scot Frank ’08, ventured on his own to the Himalayan plateau where he “met many people and began building friendships. I was curious about local culture, traditional innovation to survive on such a harsh environment.”

The engineering and computer science major became passionate about harnessing new technology and ideas to help people in the Himalayas meet their energy and water needs. The situation became dire in 2010 “when anti-wood felling laws were enforced and people had no other source of energy available.”

One Earth Designs, a nonprofit Frank co-founded, created a nonpolluting, solar-powered cooker now used by 4,000 rural inhabitants in place of polluting woodburning stoves.

Kirsten Sydney Hessler ’12, a materials science and engineering major, did a summer internship at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart and one at Osram Opto Semiconductors, a leading LED manufacturer in Regensburg. “The power of my MISTI experiences was that I immersed myself in German language and culture but also felt that I was challenging myself as an engineer and really contributing to my host,” said Hessler, now a graduate student in materials science at Stanford University.

Not every MISTI pathway leads to science and engineering. Janet Hsieh ’01, a Texan, went to Taiwan, her parents’ birthplace, to intern as a paramedic before applying to medical school. She wound up as a model and television personality who hosts “Fun Taiwan” and other travel shows for Discovery Travel and Living Channel. “Six months turned into eleven years and I’m still here in Asia,” she wrote in a recent MIT-China newsletter. “MISTI helped me open the door to this fantastic ride.”

Applied International Studies

The eagerness of companies, nonprofits, and other enterprises overseas to welcome MIT students into their workplaces reflects the stature of perhaps the world’s most famous science and technology training institution. But MISTI is also a testament to and product of the ingenuity and passion of individual faculty starting with Richard Samuels, a political scientist and director of the Center for International Studies who launched MIT-Japan in 1983.

MISTI pioneered what we call applied international studies,” said Samuels. It is very different from standard study abroad programs in which students travel in a group and take courses together. MISTI students head directly into workplaces instead of taking classes. “The idea was to create a cohort of (future) scientists and engineers who could operate effectively in Japan,” he said. Initially Samuels thought only a year’s stay would do for students “to really immerse themselves,” but later “it turned out a summer was not too short. They go over, come back, and go back again.”

Other faculty took note of the success of MIT-Japan and wanted similar opportunities for their students. MISTI was born in 1994 with a China program. Now it’s grown to Belgium, Brazil, Chile, China, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, and Switzerland, with pilot programs in Argentina, the Netherlands, and Turkey. 

Language, Culture Study, and Teamwork Required

While MIT doesn’t require all students to learn other languages, MISTI requires two years of language and a course on the politics and culture of the host country. With the exceptions of Singapore, India, and Israel, the students must be able to work in a language other than English, said Chappell Lawson, MISTI director.

Each country program has its own faculty director and program manager, with the professors’ ensuring the academic caliber and helping to raise funds while the managers match students with internships and travel to meet with the host companies and find new ones.

Suzanne Berger was MISTI’s founding director and served in that capacity until 2011, when she turned the reins over to Lawson, a fellow political scientist. The internships teach students how to work in teams with researchers who may approach a problem very differently than it’s done in MIT labs, said Berger, who still directs MIT-France.

When a biology graduate student returned from the Pasteur Institute in France, Berger asked how the four months had gone. The student replied, “Honestly after the first month I thought it was a big mistake. The equipment wasn’t as good and I thought nobody was working. People were drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and wandering around. But after one month, I saw that they had taken a major leap forward on the very same project that we’d been working on in our MIT lab. I didn’t see it coming.”

A Russian Revival and Expanded German Vocabulary

Berger said MISTI has grown carefully, adding countries only after ensuring it had the faculty and language courses to warrant sending students there. That meant teaching Portuguese for the first time for MIT-Brazil students and restoring Russian language classes that had been shut down.

MISTI has also been a boon for German and French enrollments, added Berger. “Now we send 90 students a year to Germany and 75 to France.” German instructors have added business and scientific vocabulary to their lessons.

Arnoldo Hax, professor emeritus of management and director of MIT-Chile, said the MISTI Global Seed Funds grants have had a major impact in Chile, his native country, with faculty from 16 MIT departments collaborating with counterparts at Chilean universities. “It’s a wonderful thing,” said Hax, who was recently given a medal by Chilean President Sebastián Piñera. For the interns, the international exposure “is serious stuff. It’s not just taking a plane and landing in Santiago.”

Hard to Replicate MISTI’s Scale

Lawson, an expert on Mexican politics who served as executive director of policy and planning for U.S. Customs and Border Protection in the Department of Homeland Security in 2009–2011, called MISTI “unique. Everyone is trying to do something like this. MIT has had more success partly because people are willing to pay the costs of having an MIT intern who may only be there for 10 weeks in the summer.” That would be hard for any other institution to replicate on this scale, he added.

MISTI considers itself an embodiment of the university’s Latin motto Mens et Manus, or Mind and Hand. Lawson foresees growing the fledgling program in South Korea and elsewhere and making more inroads in Latin America. Wherever MISTI goes, its aim will be the same: finding internships “that are practical, relevant for students, and on the frontier of what is possible in international education.”

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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The ties that bind both the international and the multicultural student services offices at St. Cloud State University (SCSU) are particularly strong, reflecting the conviction of campus leaders that it is incumbent upon them to prepare students for a world far more diverse than the central Minnesota communities where the overwhelming number of undergraduates grew up. The multicultural student services office is deeply involved in the arrangements for education abroad programs in South Africa, Laos, and Thailand that are aimed especially at students of color who trace their ethnicities to these parts of the globe.

President Earl Potter III said his institution is the leader among the 31 institutions in the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system—which is separate from the flagship University of Minnesota—“in developing curricular and co-curricular learning opportunities in support of multiculturalism and internationalism. We approach these two aspects of awareness as part of the same continuum, with distinctive characteristics but connected through the imperative of educating our students for life.” 

A partnership with Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU) in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, dates back to 1995, when Professor of Ethnic Studies Robert Johnson, History and African Studies Professor Peter Nayenga and Director of Multicultural Student Services Shahzad Ahmad began a semester-long program on comparative race relations. “It is a transformative personal experience,” said Johnson. Ahmad, a Pakistani-born SCSU alumnus, said, “It engages a very different set of students who typically have not participated in study abroad.” 

Now SCSU sends students to South Africa for two to three weeks over spring break as well. Junior Tashiana Osborne, 21, went as a freshman. Osborne, a leader in the National Society of Black Engineers, said it “was like a flashback” to the segregation era in the United States “even though I never witnessed that.”

SCSU also sends faculty and staff to South Africa for professional development, and nursing students for clinical practice. Nearly 600 students, faculty, and staff have made the journey since the partnership began. SCSU spends $500,000 a year making such international study and research opportunities possible.

In-State Tuition for International Students

Under the leadership of Potter, a no-nonsense former Coast Guard captain, Provost Devinder Malhotra, an Indian-born economist, and Associate Vice Provost for International Affairs Ann Bos Radwan, who directed the Fulbright Commission in Cairo for more than 20 years, SCSU is now seeking to make international study, research, and experiences an integral part of life for all 17,600 students and 900 faculty. This is taking place on the heels of wrenching budget cuts and a reorganization that eliminated 26 of 200 academic programs.

SCSU ranked 13th among master’s level institutions in Open Doors 2012, with 1,250 international students. The largest contingents come from Saudi Arabia (180) and China (170), but the campus also draws 131 students from Nepal and an equal number from African nations. One lure is that international students effectively pay in-state tuition simply by volunteering twice each semester at cultural events on campus or in the community. That shaves $6,000 off annual tuition and “makes us very competitive,” said Radwan, who calls it “a champagne education at beer prices.” 

Malhotra said that when he came to St. Cloud in 2009, he found “an institution in quest of an identity. Regional comprehensives are in an awkward position within the hierarchy of higher education. We are not RI (research) nor are we community colleges, but nobody tells us what we are,” he said. Still, that meant it was well poised to define a new identity.

Frank Diagnosis of Strengths and Weaknesses

Potter said there had been some strategic planning and talk about becoming “a global university” before his arrival in 2007, but it was merely “a stake in the ground with nothing underneath.” What was really needed, he decided, was “action planning.” Potter commissioned an International Vision Task Force composed of a dozen faculty, deans, administrators, and staff. The report they produced in 2011 contained some unsparing language: the past approach to internationalization had been “unsystematic”; education abroad programs were weak, with too many students going on island programs taught in English; domestic and international students stayed to themselves within “mono-cultural” groups; international activities were largely “decorative”; and partnerships with universities overseas were “idiosyncratic,” not strategic. The task force laid out a vision and strategy for SCSU “to be recognized as the most innovative comprehensive university for international education,” with faculty winning grants for international research and businesses vying to hire graduates because of their international understanding and experience. 

The university also pared a prolix mission statement to 13 words: “We prepare our students for life, work, and citizenship in the twenty-first century.” Potter said, “It was important to be clear and direct, and to anchor our future work.” Imparting global and cultural understanding is one of four pillars of what SCSU calls its learning commitments to students (the others are active and applied learning, community engagement, and sustainability).

“We have to ask ourselves how do we create a curricular design and delivery (system) that recognizes the rapidly increasing globalized nature of our society and economy…and gives our graduates a sense of awareness and ability to operate in such a world.”

Malhotra said it isn’t just a question of sending more students abroad or boosting international enrollments. “We have to ask ourselves how do we create a curricular design and delivery (system) that recognizes the rapidly increasing globalized nature of our society and economy…and gives our graduates a sense of awareness and ability to operate in such a world.”

Breaking Out of the Minnesota Bubble

Eighty-eight percent of undergraduates are Minnesotans. About 400 students a year study overseas. By graduation, 13 percent have had an international experience. An added challenge in meeting the global citizenship goal is that many students are transfers who spend just two years at SCSU. Mikhail Blinnikov, a Moscow-born geography professor and director of the Global Studies program, said, “Our job is to catch them early.”

Seventy percent of Minnesotans trace their ancestry to the Scandinavian countries and Germany. But Minnesota is also a state with a welcome mat out for new immigrants and refugees, including Hmong who fled Laos after the Vietnam War and more recent arrivals from Somalia. “My classroom looked a whole lot more Scandinavian when I came in 1980,” said Professor of Communications Studies Roseanna Ross.

Still, Minnesotans “have a very strong affinity for their state,” said Professor of Geography Gareth John, who has known tourism majors to turn down great jobs that would have required them to relocate. 

“The presence of international students “really enriches the community in St. Cloud,” she said. Too many Minnesota students “stay in their safe little bubble. I think they are missing out.”

Graduate student Amy Lindquist came from small-town Spicer, Minnesota (population 1,167), and seized every opportunity at SCSU to internationalize her education. Lindquist taught intensive English classes filled with students from China and the Arab world, and won a Fulbright assistantship to teach English to high schoolers in Bulgaria. She spent another year studying at Universidad de Concepción in Chile and now is eyeing a career in international education. The presence of international students “really enriches the community in St. Cloud,” she said. Too many Minnesota students “stay in their safe little bubble. I think they are missing out.”

Strategy and Serendipity

Radwan, an economic historian, has drawn on her extensive experience in the Middle East to deepen the university’s existing international partnerships, forge new ones, and look for more opportunities overseas. “We’ve sorted the world into the areas that the State Department uses—Europe and Eurasia, South and Central Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific—because that’s where the funding usually is. We’re looking at each and asking, ‘What do we do in this area?’”

Potter stressed the need to think strategically about partnerships, but allowed there is “a bit of serendipity” in all of them. “Nepal for years has been one of the largest sources of international students on this campus. I can’t tell you how we got started, but the numbers become their own justification for relationships.” Potter has been a commencement speaker at Pokhara University in Nepal. In May 2013 SCSU sent five students and a professor to study social and environmental issues in Nepal’s mountain regions. “We’re beginning to do things in Nepal that we would not have chosen to do without this long-term pipeline of students,” the president said. 

Supporting China’s “Angel” on Mission to Improve Special Education

SCSU has had relationships of long standing in China, but Professor of Special Education Professor Kathryn Johnson opened a new chapter by enlisting the university’s support for Chunli “Angel” Zhao, who has overcome enormous odds to become a champion for disabled children in her homeland. She was born with brittle bone disease and dwarfism and raised in Yangshuo, a scenic fishing village that then-President Bill Clinton visited in 1998. Angel’s parents were told by local officials to keep the teenager out of sight. Later an American ex-pat, Chris Barkley, took Angel under his wing, taught her English, and hired her as receptionist for an eco-friendly mountain lodge he built in Yangshuo.

Johnson, once a UNICEF consultant in Beijing, met Angel there in 2011, brought her to St. Cloud as an intern in the Educational Leadership program, and made it her mission to arrange for Angel to meet Clinton at last. The costs of attending a Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York almost proved prohibitive, but Potter told Johnson he would pay for it. “We got there and it was magical,” said Johnson. The former president not only greeted Angel, but brought her up on stage and promised support for her efforts to build a model school and teacher training center in Yangshuo. Angel “could have been a victim of circumstance, but now she is the leading advocate for people with disabilities in China,” Clinton said.

Finding Roots and Relatives in Laos

SCSU has sent more than 250 students, most of them children of Hmong refugees, to Laos and Thailand over winter breaks. That program is led by Political Science Professor Shoua Yang, a refugee himself. Many Hmong youth in Minneapolis and elsewhere still struggle with adjusting to U.S. life. The high achievers who make it to college “don’t understand their heritage, culture, and how their parents just struggled in the past. It’s the missing piece of information in their past,” said Yang.

The winter 2012 class filled in that piece for Allen Yang, 21, a junior majoring in information systems, and his freshman brother who met their grandmother and uncle for the first time. “It was a really emotional experience,” said Yang, president of the Hmong Student Association. “It’s really about finding your identity, which is what every college student does.” Now Yang encourages as many Hmong-Americans as possible to visit Laos, including his parents, who are planning a homecoming 40 years after fleeing as newlyweds.

A Lesson From Nepal

Chemistry Department Chair Lakshmaiah (Ram) Sreerama taught biotechnology at Tribhuvan University in Kirtipur, Nepal, as a Fulbright Scholar in 2010–2011. He said only half-jokingly that he gets more respect from his students since winning the Fulbright. Sreerama grew up in Bangalore, India, and still recalls the impact on his life by a U.S. professor on a Fulbright who gave a science lecture at his high school. “He gave me all kinds of ideas. That was always lingering in the back of my mind,” said the biochemist.

Sreerama marveled at how much Tribhuvan’s graduate students achieve in rudimentary laboratories. That has allowed him to raise the bar for chemistry majors. “I tell them, ‘Look at all the resources and the technologies you have. How come we can’t accomplish that?’ I use that all the time—and they like it, they absolutely like it.”

An Internationalization Push Still in Infancy

SCSU also won a 2013 Andrew Heiskell Award for a wide-ranging partnership and student exchange program with Universidad de Concepción in Chile that was launched in 2001 by Robert Lavenda, professor of anthropology.

Notwithstanding all the laurels, administrators and faculty alike concede there is much to be done. Some but not all the dozens of recommendations in the visionary plan laid out in 2011 are being implemented, including adding more language study to education abroad programs and offering both homegrown and third-party opportunities. 

Business Dean Diana Lawson, a member of the International Vision Task Force, said the university now has “a manageable framework” for international activities, and once a governance structure is “cemented in the institution, it will be easier to expand the scope and scale of what we do.” Likewise, Radwan said, “Now that we have the basics down, we need to deepen them.” Dan Gregory, associate provost for research and dean of graduate education, said, “Our international agenda is in its infancy. We’re just starting. We’re going to be in a very different place in five years.” 

Amid dizzying growth in communities ringed around north Houston, the newest expansion of the 78,000-student Lone Star College System will add just 300 to 350 students—in Jakarta, Indonesia. It is a modest enterprise by Texas standards but is in keeping with other Lone Star efforts to internationalize the education it delivers at its six colleges to all students—2,000 of whom are international. 

The architect of this expansion is Chancellor Richard Carpenter, who as a foster child in Louisiana foresaw a future painting houses before a music scholarship to a community college altered his personal trajectory. He became at 29 the country’s youngest college president in a Kentucky community college and ran systems in Nevada and Wisconsin before becoming Lone Star’s chancellor in 2007. He is a veteran of several economic development missions abroad led by governors and has seen how much interest there is among foreign leaders in building U.S.-style community colleges of their own to expand opportunity. “They look at it like they discovered gold,” said Carpenter, who sits on the board of Community Colleges for International Development, Inc. “We are American ambassadors. We take the American dream and plant it around the world.”

Magnet for International Students

Lone Star, founded in 1972, was North Harris Montgomery Community College District before adopting its current name in 2007. Lone Star’s enrollment stood at 49,000 in 2007. Its growth surge was fueled by the recession that sent unemployed workers to community colleges to improve their job prospects. Local voters approved a $420 million bond issue for expansion in 2008, and in 2012 Lone Star opened a sixth campus, University Park, in office space that once was the headquarters of Compaq computers. But a half-billion dollar bond issue was rejected in May 2013, which may apply the brakes to future growth.

Houston, a global center for the oil and gas industry, remains a powerful magnet for international students. Houston Community College enrolls 5,800, more than any other two-year college. Lone Star was fourth in 2011–12 with 2,000 and has had as many as 2,500. They pay $5,000 a year in tuition, a quarter of what University of Houston charges. “What a gift to get a solid education here and transfer that to a four-year university,” said Nithyanantha J. Sevanthinathan, Lone Star’s chief international officer who heads strategic global partnerships, and “Nithy” to everyone. 

Internationalizing the Faculty

Lone Star committed itself to an international course when it established an International Programs and Services (IPS) office in 2004. Nithy, the first director, formulated the framework and implementation. In 2008 IPS began awarding $4,000 Faculty International Exploration (FIE) awards to encourage faculty to internationalize the content of their courses and create education abroad programs. Fifty-five faculty have shared $270,000 in awards. The first went to then-band director James Stubbs, who visited jazz festivals in Europe and returned the next summer with students who performed at the famed Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland and in Italy. “We felt like celebrities,” said Stubbs, now dean of arts and humanities at Lone Star-Kingwood.

Only 41 students studied abroad in 2011–2012, even with the college offering 15 scholarships up to $2,000. “Program cancellations due to low enrollments have been the biggest challenge,” said Malaysian-born Nithy. Six of ten courses offered for summer 2013 were cancelled. Lone Star-North Harris Art Professor Eric Sims has tried unsuccessfully to run an art appreciation program to Spain, but said, “I haven’t given up. Many of these students have never been out of Houston. This is a life-changing experience.”

Stirring Imaginations

Still, Lone Star faculty have taken students to Italy, China, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Tanzania, and the FIE awards are a powerful stimulant for faculty imaginations. Lone Star-CyFair Psychology Professor Lori Richter and Adjunct Professor Davida Rogers took 16 students in June 2013 to Tanzania, where they studied orphans and children at risk, performed service, and took a safari in the Serengeti. Richter, a former Peace Corps volunteer in The Gambia who also lived in Kenya, said, “I just want our students to experience my experience. I want them to feel like the whole world is open to them.”

Christopher Garcia, 19, a business student and the sole male in the Tanzania group, saved money from several jobs to go. “I’ve been looking at study abroad since I got to Lone Star,” said Garcia, who helped organize a community service project last spring in Houston that drew more than 300 volunteers. Garcia aspires to become an international businessman and when he does, “I want to be culturally sensitive.

Like Richter, Lone Star-Montgomery Spanish Professor Norseman Hernandez, who grew up in poverty in Honduras, embodies a passion for education abroad. “I was one of the kids selling food to people on buses. It’s been a long way for me to be here,” said Hernandez, who’s led students to Mexico twice and Chile once.

“My classes aren’t just about uno, dos, tres, and Ola! Como está? They’re about the world,” said Norseman, who as a boy dreamed of being a pilot. He uses Google Earth in his classes and assigns students to make presentations on different parts of the world. “I also learn. It’s like I’m traveling and I’m there, too,” he said. “I’m not in a cockpit, but I get to go wherever I want now.” 

“I’ve been looking at study abroad since I got to Lone Star,” says Garcia, an aspiring businessman. “I want to be culturally sensitive.”

International Education Conferences

The pride of Lone Star’s international programming is the International Education Conference it has held each spring since 2004 where prominent speakers address global issues and Lone Star’s own professors give workshops on their international  explorations. The conference sprang from a Title VI international studies grant that the North Harris campus won in 2002. “Everything international comes from that grant,” said Anne Albarelli, dean of academic affairs at North Harris. She and Theresa McGinley, dean of instruction in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Business and Economics Division, spearheaded that effort and today serve on the conference planning committee and the IPS Council. 

Lone Star has spent $60,000 on the conferences over the years. The keynote speaker at the 10th conference in April 2013 was Middle East expert Mark Kimmitt, a retired brigadier general and U.S. State Department official. Lone Star has also piggybacked with the World Affairs Council of Houston to host such figures as Lech Walesa, the former Polish president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. McGinley, whose parents survived World War II in Poland, said she always brought international perspectives to her U.S. history courses. Today more than 70 Lone Star courses carry an international studies designation.

Nithy is the impresario of the conferences. He was an international student once who came to Minnesota to pursue opportunities largely unavailable to Malaysia’s Hindu minority. With Fulbright support, he earned a peace studies degree and two MAs while organizing bicycle treks across the United States, South America, and Africa that schoolchildren followed online. “My dream was to journey the whole world on a bicycle,” said Nithy, whose father was a shipyard laborer.

Saving Vietnamese Parents Money and Visiting Wall Street

The largest number of international students come from Mexico, Columbia, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Nepal. Some live with relatives in Houston and commute to Lone Star. The six campuses are more suburban than urban. “They look like (international students’) image of what an American college looks like,” said Melvin Anthony of Lone Star-CyFair, one of 14 international student advisers.

That is the route second year student Chi Cao, 20, followed, journeying from Danang, Vietnam, four years ago to live with an uncle in Houston while she completed high school and enrolled at Lone Star. “I decided to go to Lone Star to save my parents money,” she said. They are going to be saving a lot more. In April 2013 she won a $30,000-a-year scholarship that the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation awards to top community college students. Cao is headed to Texas A&M University and looking forward to buying textbooks for the first time instead of reading reference desk copies in Lone Star’s library.

Cao, a finance major who hopes to help Vietnam develop its financial system, revived a moribund international club at Lone Star, won class office, and was on a Model United Nations team that convened in New York. “As an international student, if you only have grades, it’s not going to help you get into a good school. You have to be involved in school and get this on your resume,” she said. Cao got to visit Wall Street on the New York trip. “It inspired me,” she said.

Naziat Khan, 24, was also on that Model UN team, which represented Bhutan, a Hindu country in the Himalayas. Born in Bangladesh and raised in Texas, Khan, who is Muslim and wears a hijab, said it was hard at first “to think like a Bhutanese.” Now she’s convinced that the best way to resolve problems is to “step into somebody else’s shoes.”

Expanding Overseas Without Taxpayer Dollars

Lone Star will offer dual degrees in Jakarta in a partnership with the Putera Sampoerna Foundation. Classes will be taught in English by Lone Star and local faculty. The venture came about after Nithy met a representative of the Foundation at a State Department-sponsored conference. Putera Sampoerna is an Indonesian industrialist whose foundation was looking for a four-year U.S. college to partner with its new Universitas Siswa Bangsa Internasional. Nithy convinced the foundation executive that Lone Star was worth a look. Sampoerna himself visited and liked what he saw.

Carpenter traveled to Jakarta three times and Nithy four times in advance of the opening. “We sat with the people in Jakarta and said, “We have a lot of expertise. We have the curriculum you need, we have instructional designers, we have technology and IT infrastructure, but we don’t take taxpayer money outside of our neighborhood,” said Carpenter. The foundation agreed to cover Lone Star’s costs up front, including salaries and expenses for two faculty and an administrator, with the expectation that Lone Star will repay that after the college starts generating profits.

Getting Used to Accents

Shah Ardalan is president of Lone Star’s sixth and newest campus, University Park. An electrical engineer who was born in Kurdistan, Ardalan was formerly the system vice chancellor and chief information officer. He has a patent pending on a digital career planning system that has won plaudits from the U.S. Department of Education. Ardalan wants to make University Park, which offers upper division classes in partnership with five Texas universities, “a model as the innovative college for the twentyfirst century.” 

Ardalan believes Lone Star should cast an even wider net for international students. “I want to be a reflection of what the real world is. It’s good for (international students) and good for my American students, too,” he said. When a Texas student complained about a professor’s accent, Ardalan told him to get used to it “because you’re going to hear more and more accents. When you pick up the phone, you cannot expect everybody to talk with the ‘nice’ accent you were raised with.” No one else had trouble understanding the professor, Ardalan noted. 

Dreaming in English

Ita Jervis spoke almost no English when she moved to Houston from Ecuador in 2001. She enrolled immediately in ESL classes, graduated summa cum laude from Lone Star and the University of Houston, and today advises international and ESL students at Lone Star-Kingwood. “What I love about Lone Star,” Jervis said, “is that we act. It’s not just words, it’s actions. We’re not waiting for tomorrow. Everyone works together as a team to do the best for our students.”

She often tells students what she told a classmate who addressed her in Spanish when both were ESL beginners: “Right now our mission is to speak English, so let’s practice speaking English within ourselves, because the faster we learn the language, the better we can achieve our goals.”

Her husband, who worked for an oil company and spoke English, told her that she’d know she was speaking the language, not just translating words, when she dreamed in English. The night that happened, she woke up and “just started jumping, I was so happy,” recalled Jervis.

“What I love about Lone Star,” Jervis said, “is that we act. It’s not just words, it’s actions. We’re not waiting for tomorrow. Everyone works together as a team to do the best for our students.”

She also counsels students to believe in themselves. “The first thing that happens when you come to a different country is that you lose your self-confidence, whether you are educated or not, poor, middle class, or rich. You feel stupid,” she said. One day, she assures them, they’ll be dreaming in English. 

The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) runs the country’s second largest study abroad operation, sending 2,800 students a year off to earn credits in other countries. It has found that those who study abroad are more likely to graduate. But it bumps up against the same barrier that confronts other institutions, large and small: students are more likely to study abroad if their families have the means to help them afford it. Eighteen percent of all UT Austin undergraduates study abroad, but only 8 percent of those are the first generation in their family to attend college.

To close that gap, the study abroad office launched a First Abroad Initiative in 2010 that has since changed its whole approach to convincing newcomers to college to include overseas study in their plans and helping them afford it. It began by creating a $4,000 study abroad scholarship that is promised to a select group of stellar first-generation students while they are still weighing admission offers to UT Austin. The prospective students are told the Hutchison International Scholarship will be there for them to use any time over the next four years.

The initiative provides more than money. Working with academic support programs, academic advisers, and colleges across the 52,000-student campus, the study abroad program also arranges close mentoring of the Hutchison students that starts even before they matriculate. Some 65 high school seniors are offered the $4,000 scholarships each year; about half accept the admissions offer and become eligible to use the money.

That was only phase one. The next step came in 2011 when UT Austin Study Abroad began awarding $3,000 First Abroad scholarships to another group of first-generation freshmen and sophomores interested in education abroad. Those awards, too, come with mentoring and other support, and the students are given two years to put them to use. Students cannot receive both a Hutchison and First Abroad award, but they are eligible for other scholarships, including $2,000 from the Coca Cola Foundation if they study in China.

Overall, as of January 2014, 248 students had received Hutchison or First Abroad awards and 48 had already used them, but many still have time. Two-thirds of the first cohort of Hutchison scholars and 80 percent of the initial group of First Abroad winners wound up studying abroad. And there’s evidence these first-generation students are persisting in college at higher than average rates.

Convincing Students Before They Can Say No

The scholarships and the mentoring are intended to get these first-generation students thinking early about education abroad and help them choose courses and chart an academic path that will allow them to graduate on time. The early planning also allows students to marshal additional resources and, in some cases, convince skeptical families that education abroad is affordable and makes sense for their daughter or son. The students receive “the most in-depth support we have ever given,” said Margaret Storm McCullers, the coordinator of curriculum integration and special projects.

Putting money on the table was paramount to opening first-generation students’ minds to study abroad. “We had this idea that if money was the thing stopping students from talking with us, then the scholarship was a way to get them to talk before they could say no,” said Heather Barclay Hamir, former director of study abroad. “It really has been a complete overhaul in our thinking.”

These new scholarships were funded largely by a spurt of revenue from an endowment. The College of Liberal Arts and McCombs School of Business added scholarships of their own for first-generation students. The initiative made an extra $220,000 a year available on top of other scholarships for study abroad. All told, UT Austin awarded nearly $1 million for education abroad in 2012–2013.

The infusion of extra scholarship money from endowment funds will be spent by 2017. After that, the International Office expects to have at least $130,000 a year and it is raising funds to supplement that. The goal is to keep awarding 50 to 65 Hutchison and First Abroad scholarships a year.

Lessons Outside the Classroom

Ngan Nguyen, 22, a senior from Houston, “always thought it would be too expensive to study abroad.” But when the nutritional sciences major got an e-mail about the First Abroad scholarship, she changed her mind and signed up for a semester at Seoul National University in South Korea. Nguyen, whose family emigrated from Vietnam when she was a toddler, had been a fan of Korean television dramas since high school and studied the language in college.

In Seoul Nguyen took classes taught in English with Korean and other international students. Apart from the course content, the aspiring pharmacist said she learned a valuable lesson in “how to balance my schedule with working hard in school and then also going out and exploring the country,” including skiing and singing karaoke. “I came back thinking I should keep that (balance) up and this semester I got my first ever 4.0.”

Senior Lorena Watson, 22, became a study abroad peer adviser after returning from a faculty-led program in Santander, Spain. She remembers in high school pitching all the study abroad brochures colleges sent with recruitment letters. “I really didn’t know what study abroad was” before the offer of a Hutchison scholarship came in the mail. “My thing was, ‘Well, if I’m going to this school, why would I want to leave and go somewhere else?’ I didn’t grasp the value of it until I was awarded the scholarship.”

Watson, an education major from Dallas, learned to “be completely myself … and to slow down” while living with a host family that summer in Santander. “My host mother said, ‘You’re so young and pretty and intelligent, you should just enjoy life.’ It’s not the thing we hear in America. What we hear is … to use those attributes until you make it to the top.”

Convergence of Diversity and International Interests

The First Abroad Initiative fostered or deepened partnerships between study abroad and other academic and support offices on campus, especially the Longhorn Center for Academic Excellence, part of the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement. One of the fruits of that partnership was a four-week course in May 2013 in Beijing on social entrepreneurship led by Longhorn’s Leonard Moore and Ge Chen. Three-quarters of the 38 students who went were African American, Asian American, or Hispanic and nearly threefifths were first generation.

“Our interests converged,” said Moore, an associate vice president and history professor who teaches a popular course on the Black Power movement. “While we were thinking of ways to help black and Latino kids become competitive globally, the study abroad office was working on these access programs to diversify their programs.” More than half the class received Coca-Cola Foundation scholarships. “We had remarkable support,” said Moore.

This spring, without the lure of extra scholarship money from Coca-Cola Foundation, Moore and Longhorn Center colleague Darren Kelly took 43 students to Cape Town to learn about urban economic development in South Africa and work with children in poor townships. Moore said Beijing and Cape Town were chosen over more traditional destinations to give first-generation students “a truly transformative experience” and “a competitive advantage over their peers.” He’ll take another class to Beijing in May 2015.

Joshua Rosales, a sophomore accounting major from San Antonio, blogged, “I always thought that I had it rough while struggling with school and finding a way to afford it,” but after this experience I realized “how privileged I am compared to the rest of the world.”

“We’ve learned a lot about working with very high-need students,” said Barclay Hamir, who recently became Boston University’s executive director of study abroad. “If money is their biggest worry, this gives us enough time to figure out how they can stay on track academically, do something that captures their interest, and make it work financially.”

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University of Texas at Austin

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Hundreds of U.S. cities have sister places around the world, with their interchanges usually centering on trade, tourism, and education. The custom took hold after U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower convened a White House conference in 1956 to promote citizen diplomacy. The partnership between Albion, Michigan, a small town in the middle of Michigan, and Noisy-le-Roi, a similar sized community not far from Versailles, France, fit that mold. It began in the late 1990s and was built on the personal connection between an Albion businesswoman who had once lived in the Paris suburb and a Frenchman who’d been a high school exchange student in Michigan. The partnership, called a jumelage in French, flourished, with the customary visits by civic delegations, youths, and senior citizens, with home stays, concerts, and sports competitions. The mayor of Noisy-le-Roi became a regular at Albion’s annual Festival of the Forks, a community celebration alongside the Kalamazoo River. Faculty and staff from Albion College took part on their own, and French professor Dianne Guenin-Lelle began taking freshmen to the suburb on class trips to Paris.

When the college got new leadership in 2008, it set about turning the bilateral relationship into a tripartite one. Today Albion College has a joint program in sustainability studies with the Université de Versailles at Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ) and its students work with counterparts from two French business schools on projects that include reciprocal visits. Several UVSQ students attend classes and serve as teaching assistants at Albion, and Albion education majors practice teach in the middle school in Noisy-le-Roi.

Provost Susan Conner, whose field is eighteenth and nineteenth century French history, believes this is a model for internationalization that other small colleges might want to follow. “A lot of our success has been through personal relationships that came through the sister city partnership,” she said. That’s something that happens all the time “in a small community at a small college where people see each other, talk with each other, and build programs together.”

From the City of Lights to the American Heartland

Noisy-le-Roi (literally “the King’s Walnut Grove”) and neighboring Bailly (a later addition to the jumelage) are 15 miles from the Eiffel Tower and one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. Albion, out in the Michigan woods 95 miles from Detroit, holds its own attraction for the visitors from France. “For them this is very exotic. This is part of l’Amerique profonde, the heartland of America. It is absolutely a place of wonder, the green space, the natural beauty, the way people are very friendly,” said Guenin-Lelle.

Albion, after a sharp enrollment drop during the economic downturn, enrolls 1,300 students and sends 50 to 60 on education abroad programs each year. It has relationships with more than a dozen universities overseas, some through the Great Lakes College Association, but nothing before like the ambitious partnership with UVSQ, a two-decade-old public university with 19,000 students. It was Noisy Mayor Michel Colin, a retired international businessman, who opened that door.

“He and his wife were staying with us and we were talking in the kitchen about all sorts of things. He knew about our sustainability studies program and said, ‘When you come I’ll introduce you to the president of the University of Versailles because they have a sustainability program, too,’” recalled Conner.

Meeting on the Common Ground of Sustainability

Despite huge differences in size and mission, the two institutions found a congruity between Albion’s Center for Sustainability and the Environment and UVSQ’s master’s degree program and research on développement durable. The joint program includes team-taught international courses, video or online guest lectures, co-op and field research, and study abroad opportunities. Albion elevated sustainability studies in 2013 to a stand-alone major. Albion students now can receive a UVSQ certificate along with their college degree and, if they wish, cross the ocean to earn a UVSQ master’s degree in half the time.

Sara Sample was among the first two sustainability majors. She was a natural fit to study at USVQ since she is also double majoring in French. “I was kind of the guinea pig for the program,” said the 21-year-old junior from Sterling Heights, Michigan, who spent fall 2013 at UVSQ’s Rambouillet campus. Sample, who manages the Albion student farm, took a week of classes at the Bergerie Nationale, a historic sheepfold created in 1784 by King Louis XVI and now the university’s experimental farm. “It was really cool,” said Sample, who wants to return to France after college to teach or pursue research.

While the USVQ sustainability classes are supposed to be taught in English, some professors reverted to French since they knew how well Sample could handle the language. The only culture shock she experienced was when she returned home. “It was a bit difficult not to be able to say, ‘Oh, I can go to Paris right now. It will only take a half-hour by train,’” she allowed.

A Dearth of French Speakers

While Albion welcomes up to five exchange students from UVSQ each year, only two so far have spent a semester at UVSQ and Debra Peterson, director of the Center for International Education, said, “It will be challenging to find students who have the level of French to make it there.” The students from Albion’s Gerstacker Institute for Business and Management do their projects with students from the École Supérieure de Vente (SdV) in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in English. Caitlin McClorey, 21, a junior and captain of the volleyball team, skipped games against two rivals to make the trip to SdV for a week last fall. Her coach was understanding and McClorey called it “one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.” Seven SdV students paid a return visit in April and got to make a presentation on their project, marketing and designing a fitness device, at Albion’s annual undergraduate research symposium.

Albion sent students to practice teach in Costa Rica for the first time in 2013, and Conner said it was the success of students doing their practicum in Noisy that led to the start of that initiative. “We are seeing comparable aspects of a sister city relationship develop (in Costa Rica) as well,” said Conner, who recently retired.

Seeking More Structure, Less Serendipity

Conner’s hope for the future is that the college will become an even greater participant in the sister city partnership. “We’re the latecomer into this relationship. I’d like to see it become part of the fabric so that people plan things a year in advance, that things are absolutely on the college calendar, and that relationships have been so cemented that we don’t need to rely on serendipity to make things happen,” the retiring provost said.

Noisy and Bailly have taxpayer dollars to spend on the jumelage. “We have no budget,” said Guenin-Lelle, although it is not hard to convince Michiganders to go to Paris. All told, 600 people have journeyed across the Atlantic since the sister city partnership began.

“So many activities have grown out of this relationship” that pay dividends for Albion students even if they never “set foot off campus,” said Peterson. But the partnership “requires a lot of tending and a lot of involvement from all sides. It’s been very organic and grassroots, not top down. You never know quite where it’s going except that it’s developing and doing wonderful things for people on both sides.”

Guenin-Lelle, who has taught at Albion for 27 years, said, “This should not be happening by some measures. You look at the different places and ask, ‘What is going on? How can this be?’” What has made it work was that the college “simply said yes to opportunities and understood it’s really people-to-people, not place to place.”

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Albion College

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