Program Development and Delivery

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

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

Internationalization As A Tool For Local Success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Development Partner in Africa, Asia, and Latin America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leading in Study Abroad Among Public Universities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MSU CIBER’s global EDGE

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

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

Learning Fluid Dynamics in Volgograd

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

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

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

Area Studies Centers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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When U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings delivered the commencement speech at Miami Dade College in May 2008, she hailed the famous community college as “the largest and most diverse college in the nation—and probably in the world.” Miami Dade enrolled more than 58,000 students in fall 2007 and 32,000 other noncredit students. It awards more associate degrees than any other U .S . college and claims the largest enrollment of Hispanics and black students. It changed its name from Miami Dade Community College to Miami Dade College in 2003 when it began offering bachelor of education degrees.

Despite the switch, it remains primarily a community college. In 2007 it awarded 45 of those bachelor’s degrees—and 6,500 associate degrees. Spellings, who also received an honorary degree (as both President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush had before her), said in her address, “Everywhere I go, across our nation, and around the world, I meet people who are trying to achieve what this college has done and is doing. Last summer, your president Eduardo Padrón joined me on a delegation of university presidents to Latin America. We held up Miami Dade College as a model of how to help more people access a college education.” Padrón is a Miami Dade alumnus who emigrated from Cuba at the age of 15 in 1961, the year after Dade County Junior College opened on a World War II U.S. Naval air station north of Miami in quarters so modest that it earned the nickname “Chicken Coop College.” It was Florida’s first integrated community college and quickly grew to become the largest institution of higher education in the state.

Globally Themed Arts and Literature

Miami Dade says its mission “is to provide accessible, affordable, high quality education by keeping the learner’s needs at the center of decision-making and working in partnership with its dynamic, multicultural community.” It backs up those words with an array of activities that have both internationalized the curriculum and enriched the cultural life of perhaps the most international city in the United States. Padrón has personally played a large part in helping the institution fulfill this mission. He has been Miami Dade’s president since 1995 and before that led the downtown Wolfson campus for 15 years. At Wolfson, he played a pivotal role in the birth of the Miami Book Fair International, which brings hundreds of authors and attracts several hundred thousand visitors during its eight-day run each November, culminating with a colorful street fair on the Wolfson campus. More recently, Miami Dade became the principal sponsor of the Miami International Film Festival—11 days of film premieres, lectures, and red-carpet events that attract film directors and stars from Hollywood and around the world, with a special emphasis on the filmmakers of Spain and Latin America. It is the only major film festival affiliated with an institute of higher education.

Vivian Donnell Rodriguez, a veteran Miami arts administrator who became Miami Dade’s vice provost for Cultural Affairs in 2007, said, “It is second nature to all of us to create programs that are diverse, because that’s what our community is. They reflect the people that live here. These are our audiences. It’s a very natural result. You see it when you walk through the halls of our campuses and see the interchanges and hear the languages. This isn’t something that we have to go out of our way to do. It has to happen this way.”

Both the book fair and the film festival complement what the college calls its “living arts curriculum” of globally themed arts and literature programs, including master classes taught by visiting artists and opportunities for Miami Dade students to dance, sing, and perform on tours that in the last year alone took them to the Dominican Republic, Italy, Taiwan, and other distant stages. “We are very proud of our students, for they have demonstrated that higher education can be a model for international cooperation and understanding. Our academic excellence is rooted in our respect for the diverse origins and traditions of our students and faculty,” Padrón says. 

The Miami Book Fair International, which began as a two-day street fair in 1984 called “Books by the Bay,” has grown into the largest book fair in the country. Local booksellers and librarians conceived the fair as a way to convince publishers to send more authors on book tours to Miami. They approached Padrón and asked for his help. He liked the idea, having seen firsthand how book fairs had become “signature cultural events” in Barcelona, Spain, and Buenos Aires, Argentina. 

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Miami had nothing like it at the time. He agreed to put up $75,000 and host the book fair on the Wolfson campus. “It immediately touched a nerve in our community. Miami draws all kinds of events and conventions geared towards tourists, but this event was ‘for us, by us.’ The book fair is open to everyone and draws people from all walks of life, all united by the written word. People had been waiting for something like this,” said the president, an economist by training.

Today the book fair’s annual budget tops $1 million, with local governments, foundations, businesses, and other sponsors absorbing most costs, and 1,500 volunteers—mostly Miami Dade faculty, administrators, staff, and students—pitching in. Alina Interián, executive director of the college’s Florida Center for the Literary Arts and longtime book fair impresario, said, “We pride ourselves in having created a very successful formula that has been emulated by a number of communities around the United States.” Miami Dade runs ads for the event in Publisher’s Weekly and The New York Times Book Review. The literary lions who have read and lectured at Miami Dade during the fair include 11 Nobel Laureates (from Saul Bellow to Toni Morrison to Octavio Paz to Derek Walcott) and more than 50 Pulitzer Prize winners (from John Updike to Rita Dove to Miami’s own humorist, Dave Barry). While there is a modest admission charge ($5) to the colorful, three-day street fair at the end of the week-long celebration, all the author lectures are free. A parallel program in Spanish draws Ibero-American authors and poets from Latin America and Spain as well as Brazil, Portugal, and the Caribbean. “But the fair is hardly limited to these countries. Authors have traveled to the fair from Israel, Russia, Ireland, England, Italy, Canada, Nigeria, Congo, and more,” said Padrón. 

“Authors have traveled to the fair from Israel, Russia, Ireland, England, Italy, Canada, Nigeria, Congo, and more.”

Miami Dade stepped in to sponsor the glittering Miami International Film Festival (MIFF) in 2004 when Florida International University bowed out. The budget for the Miami International Film Festival tops $2 million, but the college has a gold-plated list of partners, American Airlines, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Miami Herald among them. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation also has put up three $25,000 prizes for the best films. Originally, the film festival was confined to the former Olympia Theater, a silent movie palace and vaudeville theater built in 1926 to look like a Moorish castle. Maurice Gusman, a business magnate and philanthropist, saved the theater from demolition and donated it to the city in 1975. It was restored and placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984 and has undergone further restorations in recent years as the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts. But MIFF has outgrown the Gusman. With 166 films from 54 countries, including 10 world premieres, movies were screened at seven venues around greater Miami and Miami Beach at the 10-day festival in March 2008. More than 75,000 people attended the screenings, talks, and related events in 2008. The film festival reflects the college’s commitment “to arts, to culture, and to the community,” said Vivian Donnell Rodriguez, the college’s vice provost for Cultural Affairs. “Obviously our mission is one of education, but we do that in a variety of ways, not only through classes and continuing education, but through all these cultural programs as well.”

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Extending Beyond the Campus

Miami Dade also imbues international arts into the curriculum through two complementary initiatives: the Cultura del Lobo Performance Series and the Center for Cultural Collaborations International. Cultura del Lobo, meaning Culture of the Wolf, was a play on the name of the downtown campus, Wolfson. It began in 1990 with the aim of bringing to campus “the newest, most-challenging performing art being created today with a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean and work that is reflective of our multi-ethnic community,” according to the college’s Cultural Affairs Department. The Center for Cultural Collaborations International was launched six years later to commission new works and support international artists who come to Miami for residencies during which they would create, perform, and teach master classes about their work, said Jennylin Duany, the center’s residency and education coordinator. An early grant from the Ford Foundation provided seed money for the center’s international initiatives. 

Each year more than 12,000 students and other Miami residents attend the more than 100 performances and master classes put on by the dancers, actors, and others artists that the college brings in. Latin and Caribbean arts and culture are richly represented, but so are other cultures and regions. Last season, among the featured artists were the Spanish Harlem Orchestra, the Urban Bush Women (from Brooklyn, New York) performing with Senegal’s all-male Compagnie Jant-Bi, and a dance troupe from Belgium, Compagnie Thor, making its American debut with a show called “D’Orient” choreographed by Thierry Smits that paid homage to the world of the Middle East. In all, 40 artists performed at venues across Dade County and held 150 master classes, taught both at Miami Dade College, its New World School of the Arts, and in local public schools. While the general public pays up to $52 for a seat at some of these concerts and performances, Miami Dade College students and staff pay only $5. Teatro Prometeo, founded in the early 1970s to preserve and promote Hispanic culture through theater, in 2006 became part of the Florida Center for the Literary Arts. It sent students to perform at Casa Teatro in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in December 2006. Miami Dade College students regularly perform on other international stages as well. In summer 2007 the Hard Bob Jazz Ensemble played at the Umbria Jazz Festival in Italy, while dancers from the New World School of the Arts performed in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

In recent years the college has been sending representatives of the Miami International Film Festival each summer to mount a four-day, abbreviated version of the festival in Latin America, drawing local filmmakers, professors, and students to the screenings and events. This year “MIFF Abroad,” as it is called, went to Mexico, and past programs have been held in Chile and Colombia.

Book Fair-Cum-Literary Festival

The 25th Miami Book Fair International, scheduled for the second week of November 2008, will be held on the Wolfson campus just in advance of International Education Week. Padrón sees the book fair as “an invaluable opportunity for our students. Many of the authors arrive prior to their presentation and stay afterward to attend classes and interact with students in an intimate setting. The book fair provides the authors’ books to the particular classes in advance, and the students prepare for their close encounter. The authors hold book signings, but you can also find them wandering around, enjoying the festival themselves. The whole campus and even the city becomes a classroom that week.”

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The president added, “Most of our students are the working poor, and they may not be aware of the reputations of many of the authors coming to the fair. But when an author visits their class, or when they attend a reading, their motivation skyrockets. Many students get involved as volunteers. Then there is the street fair, which is free for students, where they can bring their families and enjoy a relaxing day around the college. They get the sense that education is truly a lifelong process.”

Does Padrón see the literary festival as integral to Miami Dade’s educational mission or more as part of its civic duties? “Separating our civic and educational missions is a little difficult,” he replied. “We often talk about extending the classroom beyond the campus. We believe in the open door approach to education, and the book fair is an open invitation to everyone in the community to appreciate reading and writing. The book fair fits perfectly with our motto that ‘opportunity changes everything.’ We open the door to this opportunity.”

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Miami Dade College

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Preparing to celebrate its 150th anniversary in 2009, Valparaiso University can look back on three distinct epochs in an unusual history: its founding by Methodists in 1859 as Valparaiso Male and Female College, a pioneer of coeducation that lasted only a dozen years; revival as a teacher college and business school that billed itself as “the poor man’s Harvard,” and became one of the country’s largest universities before falling into bankruptcy after World War I; and its Phoenix-like rebirth in 1925 as an independent Lutheran university. The Rev. O.P. Kretzmann, president from 1940 to 1968, looms large over the university’s history. Kretzmann built the imposing Chapel of the Resurrection, more cathedral than chapel, with 98-foot-high stained glass windows that tower over the 320-acre campus. Valparaiso remains the thriving, faith-based institution that Kretzmann built, with nearly 3,000 undergraduates pursuing a mix of liberal arts and professional training in business, nursing, and engineering; 500 students attending the century-old School of Law; and 500 others pursuing graduate degrees.

Projects and Opportunities

Chroniclers may single out the past two decades as the start of another epoch, when Valparaiso faculty and students began venturing overseas on a scale like never before, especially to Asia. The Chinese government recently chose Valparaiso University as a home for one of the Confucius Institutes that promote and share Chinese language and culture with the world. Valparaiso, in a town of 31,000 near Chicago, is the only private, faith-based institution in the United States with a Confucius Institute. The others are located on the flagship campuses of major public universities or in major cities. “We wouldn’t have gotten to first base without phenomenal support from our Chinese friends in Hangzhou. They went to bat for us,” said outgoing President Alan F. Harre.

Early in Harre’s presidency, Valparaiso forged unusually strong ties with Hangzhou University (which later became part of Zhejiang University) and Zhejiang University of Technology in Hangzhou, the former dynastic capital. Over two decades Valpo has hosted more than 80 Chinese scholars, and sends Valpo students with a professor for a fall semester of study with other international students at Zhejiang University. A grant from the Freeman Foundation has enabled dozens of Valpo faculty members to learn first-hand about the dizzying changes China is experiencing and to develop courses across many disciplines on campus. Top students in the Chinese and Japanese Studies program do field research on a 10-day trip to Asia over spring break, then return to write a 25-page report as the capstone of the seminar. The students pay just $600—the program absorbs the rest of the costs. 

The Chinese and Japanese Studies program also arranges summer internships in China for Valpo undergraduates and graduate students, and the College of Business Administration conducts short summer trips to China for M.B.A. students. The new graduate programs of International Commerce and Policy, English Studies and Communication, and Information Technology are continuing to help boost Valparaiso’s international enrollments, which rose to 244 in 2008. A U.S. Department of Education grant helped Valpo launch annual summer advanced Chinese programs in China and offer a master of arts in Chinese Studies. By spending two summers in classes in Hangzhou and taking additional coursework in Indiana, even law students can earn the M.A.

Valparaiso’s vibrant music program has added traditional Chinese music to its repertoire. Dennis Friesen-Carper, the Redell Professor of Music and director of the Valparaiso University Symphony Orchestra, was resident conductor for the Zhejiang University Symphony during the fall 2005 semester he spent directing the VU Study Center in Hangzhou. His arrangement of “Confucian Ritual Music” based on an ancient melody was performed at the opening of Valparaiso’s Confucius Institute in February 2008. One colleague, Jeffrey Scott Doebler, director of music education and bands, recently led a northern Indiana band called Windiana on a two-week tour of China. A benefit concert in support of earthquake relief efforts in Sichuan Province attracted 15,000 spectators and was televised nationally. Another colleague, Jianyun Meng, former concert master for a provincial orchestra in China, was tapped to direct the new Confucius Institute.

“…it was the passion of individual faculty, not presidential directives, that drove things forward.”

There was serendipity to Valparaiso’s choice of partner institutions in China. Then-Indiana Gov. Robert Orr established a sister state relationship in 1987 with Zhejiang Province, and Valparaiso was invited to participate in the first state delegation. Hugh McGuigan, then-director of International Studies, went on that first state delegation in June 1988 and afterward urged Alan Harre, the new president, to go see the universities in Hangzhou for himself. Soon Chinese faculty were heading regularly to Indiana, Valpo students and professors were traveling the other way, and “things just began to multiply,” recalled Harre. And now there are partnerships with six more universities in China.

Still, it was the passion of individual faculty, not presidential directives, that drove things forward. East Asian historian Keith Schoppa successfully pushed for creation of the Chinese and Japanese Studies program. Political scientist Zhimin Lin came on board in 1990 and directed Valparaiso’s Hangzhou Study Center in 1994 and 1996. Lin, who now chairs the Chinese and Japanese Studies program and directs the Valparaiso University China Center, said, “We were one of the first to really start in China. We wanted to make it an integral part of our program and more than just trips.”

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Long Ties to Cambridge and Reutlingen

When the Valparaiso study centers in Cambridge, England, and Reutlingen, Germany, celebrated their 40th anniversaries in 2007, they calculated that more than 2,800 Valpo students had studied there over the years. A third Valpo study center in Puebla, Mexico, marked its silver anniversary that same year. 

“We’ve come a long way,” said Harre, an ordained Lutheran pastor who was, like Kretzmann, a formidable builder. The showcase Christopher Center for Library and Information Resources opened in 2004 at a cost of $33 million, and a new $74 million four-times-larger student union opens in 2009. In addition to a dining room, bookstore, 1,000-seat banquet hall, and space for more than 100 student organizations, it will have a suite for international and multicultural programs along what is certain to become one of the most heavily trafficked corridors on campus. The new union will bear Harre’s name. Mark A. Heckler, Valparaiso’s 18th president and Harre’s successor, has ties of his own to China. The former provost and vice chancellor of the University of Colorado-Denver once ran that institution’s dual-degree program with China Agricultural University in Beijing.

McGuigan, who retired this past summer after leading Valpo’s international efforts since 1986, calls the growth of international programs over this period “quite remarkable given the size of our school and our location. I think a lot of it is due to the quality of our services to the students, who really appreciate that family atmosphere, that personal touch. We can do recruiting trips, but students are the ones who spread the word. Word of mouth is golden.”

Lutheran Connections

For many years Valparaiso’s primary windows on the world came through its Lutheran connections, drawing faculty and students from afar to Indiana and producing graduates who headed off to do church work overseas. The theology department had an international cast through Lutheran ties to Germany. One professor was married to a niece of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor and theologian hanged by the Nazis for his part in the Resistance. The Chapel of the Resurrection, opened in 1959, prominently displays a “Cross of Nails” from England’s Coventry Cathedral and is part of a worldwide network that prays for peace. When the Luftwaffe leveled the medieval cathedral in 1940, Coventry’s pastor formed a makeshift cross from charred nails and wrote “Father forgive” on the walls of the ruined sanctuary. After the war the cathedral made crosses of nails for bombed churches in Dresden and other German cities.

The “real push for international programs” began in the past 20 years, said Humanities Professor Mel Piehl, dean of Christ College, the honors college. “The language departments made a quantum leap. The introduction of Chinese and Japanese served as a wider signal that we were reaching out beyond the cozy and comfortable.” Valparaiso draws students from 40 states, with the largest contingent from Indiana and surrounding Midwest states. Piehl, who was in the class of 1968, said “they have much greater sophistication, greater ambitions, wider world views” than the students of his era. Some things, however, have not changed. “Vocation and service are buzz words around here. We tend to get a lot of very bright students thinking of ways in which they can impact the world,” he added. Alumna Mary Burce Warlick, the top Russia expert on the National Security Council, was born in Papua, New Guinea to Lutheran missionaries. 

The university recently received its third FulbrightHays grant for an summer intensive language program in Hangzhou that draws students from across the United States. While Valpo students can study for a semester in Hangzhou with no prior knowledge of Mandarin, the summer students must already have mastered two years of the language. Zhimin Lin, a native of Shanghai, tells Valparaiso students that they can achieve fluency in Chinese as he did in English before coming to the United States for graduate studies at Princeton University and the University of Washington. “It’s not a question of skills. It’s not a question of ability. It’s a question of determination. That’s what we try to convince them,” he said.

One who showed that determination was Matt Cavin, of Roanoke, Virginia, who first visited China on a five-week summer study trip that Lin led in 2005. He switched majors to international business and economics and quickly mastered enough Chinese to spend a full semester at Zhejiang University. “That was a big jump for me,” said Cavin, the student body president in 2007-08 who expects to return to China some day as a business executive.

A Broader International Affairs Committee

Jon Kilpinen, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said much of the university’s international activities growth took place on an ad hoc basis. “We’re at a point now where it makes sense to take stock of what we’re doing,” he observed. It took an important step in that direction in 2007 when it reorganized the International Affairs Committee of faculty and administrators to ensure wider representation from Valparaiso’s other colleges. “For a long, long time, it was basically an arts and sciences committee,” said Kilpinen. 

Randa Duvick, an associate professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures who chairs the advisory panel, said, “There had been an international affairs committee forever, probably since the 1960s. But it had become clear that there were so many initiatives internationally (involving) so many different parts of the university that there needed to be” broader representation. The revitalized committee now includes faculty from each of the five undergraduate colleges— Arts and Sciences, Business Administration, Engineering, Nursing, and Christ College as well as Graduate Studies, School of Law, and Student Affairs.

The reorganization was precipitated by a growing realization that international activity was no longer confined to a few departments or programs on campus, said Kilpinen. “It’s not all China. We’ve got Engineers Without Borders (volunteering) in Africa and in Central America. We have a service learning project in Nicaragua and Costa Rica that’s engaged engineering and nursing, pre-med, international service, and education.” Valparaiso’s traditional two-week spring break allows professors and students to travel farther afield than a shorter break. “It’s not quite a mini-session, but it’s long enough that you can do something substantial,” he added.

Forty faculty and staff and four students traveled to India in March on a faculty development trip led by Associate Provost Renu Juneja and Moninder “Holly” Singh, director of International Students and Scholars. It was modeled after the Freeman Foundation-funded faculty development trips to China. The faculty prepared for the trip with monthly seminars and extensive readings that started in the fall. They met with Indian educators, alumni, parents, and prospective students. Provost Roy Austensen, who made the journey, said trips like this “pay off on several different levels. We were making connections with people in India. I’ve seen this happen with the China trips. You build into your own institution a cohort of people who have a significant knowledge of that country and that culture.”

The International Affairs Committee is considering “to what extent it makes sense to offer more short-term abroad experiences,” said Duvick, a professor of French. “We all know there are pros and cons. The pros are that you get some students to go who otherwise perhaps can’t fit it into their schedule or who have not found financial ways to (afford) a semester. The con is that it has to be more than just a glorified tour. It has to have some academic meat.”

The Valparaiso International Engineering Program (VIEP) produces graduates with both a bachelor of science degree in engineering and a major or minor in German. Taking five years instead of four, VIEP requires engineering majors to spend a full year in Germany, with one semester in Reutlingen followed by a salaried six-month coop placement at a German company or research laboratory. Students pay greatly reduced tuition during that final semester. The challenging program produced its first three graduates in 2007 and added three more in 2008. “We’re a fairly small College of Engineering. If we could get five students a year to do VIEP-German, we’d feel very successful,” said Eric Johnson, director of VIEP and an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. Valparaiso is expanding the VIEP model to France after Duvick recently finalized articulation agreements with a French engineering school as well as a business institution, allowing for two VIEP-French students in fall 2009. Johnson spent spring break in China, exploring the feasibility for a VIEP there.

When Thomas Boyt, a marketing expert with a degree in veterinary medicine, became dean of the College of Business Administration in 2004, he quickly heard from some of the first students enrolled in a new M.B.A. program that “the international focus wasn’t what it should be. We took a hard look and agreed with them.” They placed greater emphasis in the curriculum on international business, and Zhenhu Jin, a Shanghai-born finance professor on the faculty, led education tours and arranged summer internships in China for both M.B.A. students and undergraduate business majors. Now as many as 20 M.B.A. students head off to China each summer. “For some of our Indiana-born students, it is a life-changing experience,” said Boyt. “They see business in a different way. And because of Zhenhu Jin, we get in to see everything from the big American and Chinese firms to the little mom-and-pop businesses.”

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Language for Business Majors

Boyt also has internationalized the business curriculum even more strikingly by convincing the faculty to institute a language requirement for the 320 business majors. They now fulfill the same eight-credit language requirement as arts and science majors (Education and nursing do not require language classes). “There were lots of pressures not to do that, but I think it’s just critical,” said Boyt, who first proposed the unanimously endorsed change to the college’s Curriculum Committee. “From there, it went to the College of Business Administration faculty for a vote where it passed very easily. I then submitted it to the provost who approved it to be presented to the Educational Policy Committee, which is a university-wide committee. Once it passed there, it went to the Faculty Senate where it was also approved.” Now it is enshrined in Valparaiso’s general education requirements. More recently, Boyt won faculty approval to offer a “Business Spanish” certificate as an elective. Boyt said he constantly tells parents, “Don’t let your son or daughter graduate without an international experience or you’re setting them up for a competitive disadvantage.”

Associate Professor of Theology Nelly van DoornHarder, one of two world religion specialists on the faculty, is an authority on Islam. A Dutch national, she began her career directing a refugee agency in Cairo, Egypt, and later taught Islamic Studies at Duta Wacana Christian University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. A prolific scholar and popular lecturer, van Doorn-Harder said she always has waiting lists for her classes. 

“…as many as 20 M.B.A. students head off to China each summer. ‘For some of our Indiana-born students, it is a life-changing experience’…”

Townspeople, too, have exhibited a keen interest in learning from her about the Islamic world. Since September 11, “I think I’ve spoken in every church basement in Michiana,” she said, using the local portmanteau for the Indiana-Michigan border region. “The Kiwanis, the Rotary, the women’s clubs—everybody wanted to know about Islam. I found that very humbling because Americans try to understand even if they don’t understand at all. Most of these people have never traveled, have no idea about the rest of the world—but they try.”

Valparaiso is one of four U.S. campuses that houses an INTERLINK Language Center where international students can take Intensive English before matriculating. Freshman Polina Kogay, 19, of Almaty, Kazakhstan, followed that route. The Kazakh student won a national scholarship back home that pays the entire cost of her studies, including flights back and forth. “I choose the major and the country and they pick the school. They picked Valpo,” said Kogay, an electrical engineering major who arrived in Indiana in March 2007 and spent four months in INTERLINK classes. 

Another international student, Adam Rundh, 22, a native of Aalborg, Denmark, is a chiseled 240-pound defensive end on the Crusaders’ football team. Rundh is the only international player on the gridiron squad, but several Valparaiso basketball players are international. Rundh can always fall back on his education if he doesn’t make the NFL. The double-major in international business and finance has a 3.93 grade point average.

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The president of the Valparaiso International Student Association, senior Bala Srinivasan, was born in the United States, but grew up in Bangalore, India. Holly Singh met him on a recruiting trip, took an application on the spot, and soon was able to offer Srinivasan an academic scholarship. Srinivasan, 23, originally was drawn to Valparaiso by engineering but wound up as a computer science and business major. “Academically, it’s a great school. And they do a great job of getting people together and creating this kind of familytype atmosphere amongst international students and American students. There’s a lot of exchange of culture. You never feel alone here,” he said.

Valparaiso offers an unusual major called International Economics and Cultural Affairs (IECA) that marries language study with economics, history, geography, and political science. It was born in part from necessity in the early 1970s, when both economics and the language faculty were worried about declining enrollments, according to Professor of Political Science Albert Trost. “We’ve never had an international relations major. This took the place of that and stimulated a lot of interest,” said Trost, a 1963 alumnus who teaches courses on international relations and directed the Cambridge Study Center from 1975 to 1977. He also co-leads the week-long workshops for new faculty held in Cambridge at the end of their first year.

IECA is flourishing with 30 majors, who gathered one afternoon in March to prepare for a conflict resolution role-playing scenario led by George Lopez, a professor from the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Debra Ames, an associate professor who teaches Spanish and chairs IECA, said some of these majors likely will join the Peace Corps or enter other service professions after graduation. “We were real pioneers in linking the study of economics and foreign language,” she said.

The Valpo Core

Trost was instrumental a decade ago in the creation of the Valpo Core, an intense, interdisciplinary, twosemester, 10-credit course that all freshmen outside the honors college must take. The writing-intensive Valpo Core introduces freshmen to great writers of the world. “The reading list is multicultural and international because the world is multicultural and international,” the syllabus explains. Subtitled “The Human Experience,” the Core is organized thematically around the human life cycle and features units on Creation and Birth, Coming of Age, Citizenship, Work and Vocation, Love, and Loss and Death. Twenty students or fewer join with professors in exploring life’s big questions, reading important texts, writing personal narratives and essays, forging friendships, and attending cultural and other events outside of class. Despite skepticism at the start, the Core has proved an enduring hit and its director, English Professor John Ruff, even offers an elective version for seniors. 

To keep pace with growth in both international enrollments and its education abroad programs, Valparaiso recently named two alumni with deeply international backgrounds to share leadership of the Office of International Programs. Singh was promoted from associate director to director of International Students and Scholars, and Julie Maddox was named director of Study Abroad Programs. Maddox is returning to Valparaiso from Chicago. Maddox majored in French and International Economic and Cultural Affairs and spent semesters in Hangzhou and Reutlingen as an undergraduate. Her master’s degree is in international commerce and policy. 

Singh planned to become an engineer when he arrived at Valparaiso in 1991 as a freshman from India, but later switched to liberal studies and theology, then made a career working in international education alongside his former adviser, Hugh McGuigan. “My interest changed from just looking for a career to finding a meaning of life,” explained Singh.

That is the type of conversion that gladdens Alan Harre. “Our primary task, according to our mission statement, is to prepare our students for service to church and society,” said the retiring president. In his view, every U.S. university has an obligation to help citizens “become more globally responsive and sensitive. We’re not going to be able to function in the isolation we had many, many years ago.”

“And so when you take a place like this in the heart of the country, helping to try to provide that larger context, I see that as a tremendous blessing to not only northwest Indiana, but to the entire country,” he added.

It was no accident that the nineteenth century founders of Pittsburg, Kansas, chose a name that called to mind the much bigger and grander Pittsburgh (with an ‘h’) in Pennsylvania’s coal mining precincts. Little Pittsburg in the sunflower state’s southeast corner was awash in coal that drew miners from Italy and the Balkans. The railroads came, too, to ferry the ore to zinc smelters in nearby Joplin, Missouri . The Kansas legislature established the Auxiliary Manual Training Normal School in Pittsburg in 1903 to prepare industrial arts teachers . Soon that mission broadened . It became Kansas State Teachers College in 1923 and Pittsburg State University in 1977 . Its graduates include Debra Dene Barnes, the 1968 Miss America, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Tate, and H . Lee Scott, president and CEO of Wal-Mart . Its football team, nicknamed the Gorillas, has won three national championships and amassed the most wins in NCAA Division II history.

More importantly, today Pittsburg State University boasts more than 7,000 students and a reputation as a strong regional university with deep and growing international ties from Paraguay to Korea to Kazakhstan. The student body includes 490 international students, many on exchanges from partner universities around the world. Pitt State sends teams of business majors to Russia to teach high school and university students about ethics in free enterprise, and automotive technology students to Korea to compete—and win—in a “mini-Baja” dune buggy competition. Education majors hone their teaching skills in classrooms in Paraguay and Russia, and enterprising faculty have won several federal Title VI grants for a host of international business and education projects. “This didn’t happen overnight. This has been a long history of this institution,” said President Tom W. Bryant, still jet lagged from a spring journey to visit partner universities and forge new relationships in Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Bryant said the region’s rich ethnic heritage “may be one of the things that made all this possible. This little community reaches out its hands to the international students, and maybe it’s because they remember their grandparents coming over on the ships.”

Faculty Behind the Wheel

At a ceremony celebrating the 2008 Senator Paul Simon Award for Campus Internationalization, Steven Scott, provost and vice president for Academic Affairs said, “We owe this to the faculty—the faculty who serve on the International Council, the faculty who’ve had a commitment and a passion for international travel, international engagement, internationalizing the curriculum.”

One such faculty member, John Tsan-Hsiang Chen, joined the Department of Engineering Technology in 1981 and soon bore the title of assistant to the president for Chinese Affairs. Over the past 25 years, Chen has recruited and mentored hundreds of students from his native Taiwan, and from China as well, and helped cement ties with two dozen universities. Now honored with a scholarship for international students that bears his name, Chen remembers with a smile that on one of his first trips on the university’s behalf back to Taiwan, his department chairman docked him vacation time. In fall 2007, 80 of Pitt State’s international students came on exchanges, half from partner universities in Taiwan and China.

“We have the diversity most schools would pray and dream about. We’re on the
right path…”

“Life has become much easier” for the international faculty who followed Chen, said Anil Lal, an associate professor of economics who leads education abroad trips to his native India and recruits for the Kansas campus. Pitt State enrolled a record 53 students from India this past spring, and a half-dozen others took classes in its Intensive English Program. Lal said some of the growth is driven by “the internet phenomenon,” with students themselves spreading the word on the Indian equivalent of Facebook. “The students here say good things about this place and then others come,” said Lal. Director of International Affairs Chuck Olcese agreed that word-of-mouth “is the greatest recruiter of international students. Now you add this whole social networking on the internet and we don’t even know where our name is going out anymore.”

Lal was a civil servant in India and consultant for the World Bank before completing a doctorate in economics at Washington State University and joining Pitt State in 1995. He draws large audiences on Indian campuses by lecturing on development economics and offering general advice about studying in the United States. Only indirectly does he try to sell students on Pitt State. “If they feel I’m genuine and honest, they might come” or convince someone else to, he said. Lal’s personal connections have opened doors in India, and he hopes to develop those ties to the point that he can pass the recruiting duties on to someone else. “That’s my strategy,” he said. “One thing I learned in government is no one is indispensable.”

When University Professor of Finance Michael Muoghalu, the Nigerian-born director of the M.B.A. program at the Kelce College of Business, joined the faculty two decades ago, Pitt State enrolled more than 100 students from his home country. They came at government expense for degrees in Pitt State’s highly ranked technology program. Today only six Nigerian students attend Pitt State, but the M.B.A. program that Muoghalu runs draws students from around the world. “For some reason, I just fell in love with this place,” said the finance professor. “If you compare Pitt State to other schools this size, you can’t find one that is more international. It’s way ahead of the curve.” Half of the 140 students in Muoghalu’s M.B.A. program are international; they hail from 20 countries. “We have the diversity most schools would pray and dream about. We’re on the right path,” he said.

Professor of Management Choong Lee is a faculty dynamo who has helped forge deep ties with universities in his native Korea and, more recently, in central Asia. Having taught in Brazil, “Korea was not big enough for Choong,” said an admiring Peggy Snyder, dean of Continuing and Graduate Studies. Lee joined the faculty in 1989 after earning a B.S. in nuclear engineering at the prestigious Seoul National University in Korea, and completing two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. at the University of Iowa. Lee has won three consecutive Title VIb Business and International Education grants from the U.S. Department of Education—grants aimed at helping U.S. businesses become more globally competitive with university assistance—and is going for a fourth. He consults extensively in Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan and hopes to establish a Center for Central Asian Business and Research at Pitt State. “We developed the first sister-school relationship with the National University of Uzbekistan and also Kazakhstan,” said Lee, who said Pittsburg State is as well known as Harvard in parts of the region. Lee’s interest in central Asia was whetted by hearing U.S. officials emphasize the region’s strategic importance to world peace. 

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Multiple International Partnerships

Pitt State’s automotive technology program is ranked near the top nationally and its engineering technology graduates are prized by employers in the auto and aviation industries. The College of Technology, in a showcase, $28 million, 278,000-square foot Kansas Technology Center, is also one of the biggest draws for international students. Lee initiated a flourishing exchange of students and faculty with Gyeongsang National University (GNU) in Jinju, South Korea. In 2006 Pitt State sent three students for five months to GNU, where they tutored GNU students in English, then competed against teams from 80 Korean universities in a grueling “Mini-Baja” in a dune buggy-like vehicle they designed and built. Pitt State sent another team in 2007 for a month—returning with the championship trophy from the rugged race.

Cody Emmert, 22, of Seneca, Kansas, captained both teams. “If you told me when I was a freshman that I would be going to Korea for six months or be involved in an engineering competition internationally, I wouldn’t have believed it,” said Emmert. Students such as Emmert can command $60,000 starting salaries, said University Professor and Chairman of Technology Studies John Iley. Emmert is a car lover who expects his knowledge of Korea to be a major plus as he pursues a career in the increasingly international automotive industry.

Pittsburg State also has a rich relationship with Paraguay under a partnership inspired by President John F. Kennedy and his Alliance for Progress with Latin America. Kansas and Paraguay have collaborated on citizen exchanges since 1968, and the Kansas legislature allows Paraguayan students to pay in-state tuition. In 2007, Paraguayans comprised approximately 10 percent of the international students. “It’s a very good deal,” said Cecilia Crosa, 21, a junior from Asunción. Jazmin Ramirez, 24, a junior political science and international studies major, interrupted her six-year program in law at the National University in Asunción to obtain a Pittsburg State degree in political science and international studies. Ramirez, who interned for the United Nations office in her capital this past summer, believes the American education and degree will help her fulfill her goal of becoming an envoy for Paraguay.

Pitt State professors travel to that land-locked country to teach a series of four-week general education evening classes in English. In a year, students can earn 24 credits, transferable to Pitt State or other U.S. universities. University Professor of Social Science and Director of International Studies Paul Zagorski was one of several professors who traveled to South America in 1998 to see about expanding opportunities for study and research abroad. They got their warmest reception in Asunción, and that is where Pitt State planted its flag. The push in Paraguay was helped by the Title VI federal grants that Pittsburg State received to internationalize its faculty and curriculum. Alice Sagehorn, a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, was intrigued by the possibilities. She approached the dean of Arts and Sciences and said, “This is wonderful, but I noticed two things: there’s no one from the College of Education and no women on the committee.”

“He said, ‘You’re on the committee,’ and that’s how it started,” recalled the busy Sagehorn, who earned her master’s degree at Pitt State. After returning to join the faculty in 1992, it took the former elementary school teacher just seven semesters to complete a Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction at the University of Arkansas. Quickly Sagehorn became adept at securing large federal grants to expand the work of the College of Education, including one to train more Kansas teachers to teach English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) and another to bring teachers from China to teach Mandarin to children and teens in the Pittsburg public schools. She coordinated Pitt State’s education abroad activities for a year and became the founding director of the Pittsburg State University in Paraguay program in 2004. She has made 14 trips to Paraguay in the past eight years, including taking education majors every other summer to practice teach in an international school in Asunción. Sagehorn conceived the Pittsburg State in Paraguay program on a long flight home after overhearing a Paraguayan mother tell her college-age daughter that leaving home to study in the United States before turning 21 was out of the question. “I got to thinking: If we can’t bring the students to Pittsburg, how can we bring Pitt State to Paraguay?” Sagehorn said. The program attracts upwards of two dozen students each year, some of whom complete their undergraduate studies in Pittsburg like Cecilia Crosa and Jazmin Ramirez.

There is “very much a private college feel” to Pittsburg State, said Bruce Dallman, dean of the College of Technology. “The student-faculty interaction here is out of the ordinary, especially for a public institution.” Students, domestic and international, savor the attention. Ankit Jain, 22, a senior automotive engineering major from New Delhi, India, said it came as no surprise that Pitt State won the Senator Paul Simon Award. “They made a good choice. This is the second best in the whole U.S. for automotive engineering, and our university is improving day by day,” said Jain, president of the Indian Student Association.

Why Pitt State?

Semonti Sinharoy, 21, a senior from Calcutta, India, who double majored in plastics engineering and chemistry, said, “I came here for the plastics program. Basically, there are only three or four schools in the U.S. with a plastics program like this.” Coming from a city with 4.5 million people, Pittsburg (with 20,000) took some getting used to, Sinharoy said. But the town and the “continuous exchange of culture between the Americans and international students” grew on her. Sinharoy, headed next to Columbia University in New York for a master’s in engineering management, recently won an undergraduate research award from the Society of Plastics Engineers for helping recycle foams and plastics made from soybean oil.

Pittsburg State takes great pride in the Intensive English Program (IEP), staffed by seven full-time faculty…”

Sung Hwan Kim, 24, a junior accounting major from Seoul, Korea, first came to Pittsburg State on an exchange. “Now I’m paying tuition,” said Kim, who believes that finishing his degree in Kansas will provide a faster route into the accounting profession than if he had returned to a university back home. “I’m a little bit older than these [other students]. I served in the army for two years before coming here,” Kim said.

Xiao Wu, 22, who was born in Shanghai, China, but raised in Nagoya, Japan, first came to Pitt State for the noncredit Intensive English Program. He returned to enroll in electronics engineering technology, which involves extensive coursework in math and physics. Wu, the director of activities for the Chinese Student Association, said with a laugh that when he mentions his major, “people kind of want me to fix their computers. I can’t do that.” He expects to wind up in electronics, like his parents back in Nagoya.

A Variety of Program Opportunities

Pittsburg State takes great pride in the Intensive English Program (IEP), staffed by seven full-time faculty and directed by Christine Mekkaoui, a Peace Corps veteran fluent in Arabic, French, and Spanish. “Pitt State has been very supportive in keeping full-time faculty in the Intensive English Program. We don’t have graduate teaching assistants; we don’t have faculty wives. Everybody has a master’s degree in teaching English and is well qualified, and that makes a huge difference,” said Mekkaoui. The IEP had 77 students in fall 2007 and 68 for the spring semester. Traditionally most students have come from Asia, but Saudi Arabia has begun sending large contingents of late. Most stay at Pittsburg to pursue degrees, others use their English skills to win admission to other U.S. universities. “We’re able to take a personal interest in our students and help them with everything. We help them find places to live and, if they have a car accident, we’re dealing with the insurance company. We’re really here for them,” said Mekkaoui.

IEP occupies spacious offices in Whitesitt Hall, down the corridor from the flag-filled Office of International Programs & Services, where domestic students come to learn about study/ education abroad opportunities and international students come for academic advice as well as help with visas. Under Olcese, director of International Affairs since 1999, the office has been transformed into the hub for much of the international activities on campus. “Chuck has taken it to a different level,” said Mekkaoui. “He is more the international face, trying to involve the upper administration and the whole campus in making things international.” He heads a staff of six that includes a full-time study abroad coordinator—a position created in 2006 and held by Julia Helminiak. President Bryant observed, “We’ve got good leadership and staff over there.” He believes the next challenge for Pitt State is to convince more students to go abroad. More than 100 Pitt State students studied abroad in 2006-07—triple the number from seven years earlier—and others went overseas on service trips. Every student who studies abroad receives a university scholarship ranging from $200 to $1,000 to defray costs. In the past two years, 17 faculty have led students on 18 education abroad trips to 13 countries, including Korea, China, India, Paraguay and Brazil. 

Turkish-born Meltem Tugut entered Pitt State as a freshman in 2000, became president of the International Student Association, graduated summa cum laude, and later served as coordinator of international programs while completing the second of two master’s degrees in business. Tugut, who this fall started studying for a business doctorate at St. Louis University, said one of her favorite memories is International Recognition Night in October, when international students are honored by being called out onto the court during halftime of a women’s volleyball contest.

A service learning program called Students In Free Enterprise (SIFE) also turns Pitt State students into world travelers. SIFE, supported by a phalanx of U.S. and multinational corporations, sponsors competitions worldwide in which teams of students vie to demonstrate mastery of business skills and ethics. The 50-member SIFE chapter at Pitt State has traveled to Russia and Kazakhstan on several occasions. Rebecca Casey, interim chairperson of the Department of Accounting, has led three of those trips, including one in which her students brought along a video they made in Russian with Pitt State students’ role-playing a scenario about bribery in the workplace. The video ended with tax agents’ arresting the buyer and the business falling apart. “It really made them stop and think,” said Casey, an alumna. “I think we convinced a lot of them.” 

Both Bryant and Scott, the provost, are former deans of education who began their careers as high school teachers. Although their background was not in international education, “we value those experiences,” Scott said. Both have avidly supported the institution’s international undertakings and looked to create more opportunities for students, faculty, and administrators “to travel and learn about international issues,” said Scott. One of his first moves as provost was finding the resources that allowed the Office of International Programs to hire Helminiak as the campus’s first full-time study abroad coordinator. Scott recalled a meeting at the outset of the academic year where senior administrators and faculty discussed their international travel plans and agenda. “We didn’t have a globe, but it’s almost like you’ve got the whole world laid out in front of you,” said Scott. “We talked about India, China, Taiwan, Korea, Kazakhstan, Russia, and certainly about Paraguay, figuring out where we were going and who’s going to do this work. To think about a small community in southeast Kansas where that’s the perspective is pretty remarkable.”

The provost, an alumnus, believes one reason that Pitt State has carved out such a significant international profile is that the faculty aren’t territorial. “You’ve got these early adopters, these pioneers, that now have offspring taking their own trips. Somebody took Alice Sagehorn to Paraguay to begin with,” he said. “Part of our culture is this helping, helping, helping. It’s not about smugness or ‘I know more than you.’ It’s about, ‘If I know something and you’d like to know it or understand it, I’ll help you,’” said Scott. 

Pitt State also encourages the international interests of professors in a wide range of fields. Education Professor Dan Ferguson, whose field is recreational therapy, has led students to Romania to work in orphanages in the former communist country. Professor of Nursing Barbara McClaskey leads two trips over winter break to give nursing students an opportunity to volunteer in hospitals in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, across the Rio Grande River from El Paso, Texas. “It opens your eyes to see what they go through down there,” said senior Sarah Manthei, 22, of Shawnee, Kansas, who had a job waiting after graduation in the organ transplant unit at Saint Luke’s Hospital of Kansas City.

Raising Funds for More International Activities

The international office reports to Dean William Ivy, who oversees Enrollment Management and Student Success. Ivy came to Pitt State in 2007 from Oklahoma State University. “I kind of jumped on a moving train here,” Ivy said of Pitt State’s large international profile. He noted that at the annual international banquet, “six deans and three vice presidents show up for the dinner as well as the president. It’s quite impressive. The international students don’t have any questions that they’re important here and that people appreciate their being here.”

The lanky Bryant, a onetime college basketball player, will be retiring at the end of the 2008-09 after a decade as president. He completed one major fund-raising drive soon after becoming president and is nearing the finish line on a second that is seeking $120 million, including $2.5 million for international initiatives. That money would fund scholarships and incentives for faculty to internationalize their courses.

Five percent of undergraduates and 10 percent of graduate students are international. Bryant would gladly see that number increase. “We love the diversity. We need to do that for our students from here in the Midwest,” he said. Students from Crawford County and small towns “need to be able to compete in this global economy and be as marketable and as successful in that economy as we can make them. Why shouldn’t our kids have that opportunity?” 

Students in Jason Scorza’s introductory philosophy classes at Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU) learn how to grapple with life’s questions not only from their professor and textbooks, but from a retired Scotland Yard homicide detective and a veteran United Nations peacekeeper. The detective shows them how the theories of rationalism and empiricism play out in police work, and the U.N. manager explicates the difficulty of translating democratic theory into practice in war zones. 

They make these contributions to philosophy class discussions not in person, but online. They participate through FDU’s Global Virtual Faculty Program as part of a cadre of more than 70 professors and professionals who lend their expertise and field student questions via e-mail and over the university’s Blackboard® system. Scorza, associate provost for global learning and professor of philosophy and political science, said, “The ability to engage in an in-depth conversation online surpasses what you’re able to do in a classroom in an hour-long period.” 

Billy Futter, a pharmacy professor at Rhodes University in South Africa, has contributed to FDU’s interdisciplinary Global Challenge course—a requirement in the core curriculum—as well as health classes over five years and “enjoyed every minute.” By e-mail from Port Alfred, he wrote, “Keeping the discussion going is 90 percent of the success of (any) course.” Futter said he has sought to disabuse the American students of the notions “that all foreigners want to live in the U.S.A. and envy everything your citizens have,” and that Africans live “in a jungle surrounded by lions.” He’s also provided a South African perspective on thorny questions about AIDS, unwanted pregnancies, and human rights. When one student asked out of the blue if he’d ever surfed Cape Town’s famous beaches, Futter promptly sent back a link to a spectacular picture in USA Today showing his son riding a giant wave at Dungeons Reef off Cape Town’s Hout Bay.

The Global Virtual Faculty “enhance our core courses, our general education, and global topic courses, but they also partner with our faculty in courses within disciplines,” said Diana Cvitan, director of the Office of Global Learning.

An Internationally Minded Founder

Fairleigh Dickinson has had an international bent from its founding in 1942 by Peter Sammartino, who proclaimed the institution would be “of and for the world.” It grew to become New Jersey’s largest private university, with a majority of the 12,000 students enrolled on the Metropolitan campus in Teaneck, New Jersey and 3,500 at the College at Florham in Madison, New Jersey. In 1963 it acquired Wroxton College from Trinity College, Oxford University, a restored abbey where FDU students study abroad and the university holds faculty and staff retreats. In 2007 FDU opened a branch campus in Vancouver, British Columbia, in hopes of drawing international students from Pacific Rim countries.

Most at Florham are traditional college-age students attending full time and residing on campus; half those enrolled at the Metropolitan Campus are commuters taking classes part-time. FDU enrolls almost 1,000 international students, but sends just a few hundred domestic students to study abroad each year. Education abroad, said Scorza, “is next to impossible for the great majority of them, mostly for the reasons of affordability and the demographics of students we enroll.” That is all the more reason why FDU places such an emphasis on technology.

Fairleigh Dickinson requires every undergraduate to take at least one course a year online. Some are “blended” courses that combine online work with sporadic in-person sessions; others are entirely online. FDU uses interactive television (ITV) to link classrooms on its campuses in New Jersey and Canada, and for guest lectures from China, Germany, and elsewhere. “We’re the only university in New Jersey that has both Internet access and an overhead data projector in every classroom,” said Catherine Kelley, assistant provost in the Center for Teaching and Learning with Technology. “The five ITV classrooms are booked solid. The people in those classrooms can see and talk to each other on the television screens and interact as if they are in the same room.”

Pathway to the United Nations

FDU also uses high tech tools to share with schools and colleges events in its United Nations Pathways program, which brings ambassadors and foreign leaders to campus for lectures and interaction with faculty and students. The Metropolitan campus sits 15 miles from the headquarters of the United Nations overlooking the East River in Manhattan. It is a path that has been “well worn indeed to the benefit of both of us,” United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in September 2008 in accepting an honorary doctoral degree. He called the honor—his first from a U.S. university—“a sign of the very close relationship between the United Nations and Fairleigh Dickinson University, and the vision for global thinking of the university and its students.”

“Fairleigh Dickinson requires every undergraduate to take at least one course a year online. Some are “blended” courses that combine online work with sporadic in-person sessions; others are entirely online.”

FDU is accredited as a nongovernmental organization by the U.N. Department of Public Information and recently received consultative status from the United Nations Economic and Social Council in Geneva. Since 2002, when the United Nations Pathways program began, 70 ambassadors and heads of state have lectured at FDU. “No other university has so recognized and acknowledged its U.N. alignment as FDU,” says President J. Michael Adams, who is presidentelect of the International Association of University Presidents, an organization that his predecessor, Sammartino, helped found in the 1960s. FDU’s first president “embraced the idea and ideals of a world body, and he knew that having the U.N. headquarters nearby represented a rare opportunity to help students better understand the world,” said Adams.

Adams, interviewed by e-mail on a trip to London, said technology plays “an important role in our mission to prepare world citizens. Since the development of our online learning requirement and the creation of Global Virtual Faculty, our goal has been to use technology to introduce students to new perspectives and help them connect to other countries and cultures.” Technology, he added, helps “bring the world to our students…. The result is a more diverse and globally reflective campus community that well prepares students for the interconnected global village they soon will inherit.”

“Incorporating new technologies into the educational process is expensive. And certainly in challenging economic times, this can be even more difficult to accomplish,” Adams said. But “it is essential to prepare students to be facile with the tools of the modern age.”

Adams and the university’s communications director, Angelo Carfagna, coauthored a book in 2006 titled Coming of Age in a Globalized World: The Next Generation. Adams became president of Fairleigh Dickinson in 1999 after 15 years as dean of the Nesbitt College of Design Arts at Drexel University. “It was really his vision to put technology and global learning on the table at the same time. These two initiatives fused together and helped propel one another forward,” Scorza said.

At first some faculty were skeptical about the push. “Half said, ‘Why should we do this?’ The other half said, ‘We do this already. We have courses on international relations and world literature, so what really is the point of an internationalization initiative?’” recalled Scorza. But faculty support and enthusiasm grew quickly, especially as FDU garnered recognition as a pacesetter in harnessing technology to advance global education.

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Fairleigh Dickinson University

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From its classic, New England campus with the postcard view of New London’s steeples and Long Island Sound, Connecticut College has taken an interdisciplinary approach to ensuring that its 1,900 students learn to become “international citizens,” as President Leo I. Higdon Jr. puts it.

Some of the most worldly and widely traveled are the 30 admitted as sophomores each year into the Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts (CISLA), a certificate program with its own $7 million endowment that provides airfare and a $3,000 stipend for CISLA’s Global Scholars to do internships anywhere in the world. They must complete a research project as seniors upon their return./p>

David Urbaneja-Furelos, an international relations and East Asian Studies major from Burgos, Spain, interned for the United Nations Industrial and Development Organization in Beijing and Taiyuan, China. “I’ve always wanted to work for the United Nations, but the UN only offers unpaid internships that usually are reserved for master’s students. CISLA helped me to afford something that otherwise would never have happened.” Chinese language major George Fernandez interned for NBC during the Olympics and for a developer in Beijing.

Gili Ben-Yosef, a sociology major, interned in Argentina for a Jewish relief agency and wrote her senior paper on what it means to be Jewish in twenty-first century Buenos Aires. Nonprofits needn’t worry about whether they can afford an intern. “We basically have the whole world open to us and can choose the ideal internship,” she said. “It empowers us to go international after graduation.”

Experiencing a New Culture Alone

Jessamyn Cox found it lonely at times being on her own in Reutlingen, Germany, while interning at an art museum. “You’re outside your comfort zone and don’t have the support system of family and friends,” she said. But experiences like hers make the CISLA internships all the more formative. Mary Devins, associate director of CISLA, said, “This living by yourself without a friend down the hall is an enormous learning experience.” Added Robert Gay, CISLA director, “We push them.” Gay, a British-born ethnographer who studies crime and poverty in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, said the CISLA certification on a diploma means “that you went abroad and worked in a professional situation where you may be the only English speaker in an office. It’s a tremendous asset for your resume.” Robert Proctor, professor of Italian and a founder of the program, said, “Whatever we do here in the classroom, it’s nothing compared with the growth we see in these kids upon their return.”

The popularity of CISLA spawned three other interdisciplinary centers that offer certificates in conservation biology and environmental studies, arts and technology, community action and public policy. One in six undergraduates now works to the higher standards demanded by these centers.

Pipeline to Vietnam

CISLA was created two decades ago under former President Claire Gaudiani, who also had a hand in designing the college’s Study Away/Teach Away (SATA) program, in which one or two faculty and 10 to 20 students spend a semester in another land. Originally, said government Professor Alex Roberto Hybel, the intention was to study only in developing countries. But some of those destinations were a difficult fit for faculty whose research interests lay elsewhere, and eventually professors began leading students on SATAs to Rome and Prague as well as to China, India, Vietnam, and Peru. “Initially there was some reluctance, but as faculty members realized how much they could benefit,” more stepped up to lead SATAs, said the Argentine-born Hybel, who doubled as dean of international programs in the mid-1990s.

In 2008 there were SATAs to Mysore, India, to Hanoi, Vietnam, and to Rome, Italy. That was the eighth time for the program in Hanoi, where the Connecticut College contingent lives in a residence for international students and takes courses taught by their own professors and the faculty of Vietnam National University (VNU). To date 150 students and 14 faculty have gone to Hanoi, and 19 VNU faculty have paid reciprocal visits to New London. William Frasure, a professor of government instrumental in arranging these exchanges, in 2008 became the second American ever awarded an honorary doctorate by the Vietnamese university. 

“Several new courses that directly draw upon our Vietnam experience have been introduced into the college’s curriculum, and numerous ­existing courses have been enriched by it.”

Frasure said, “Several new courses that directly draw upon our Vietnam experience have been introduced into the college’s curriculum, and numerous existing courses have been enriched by it.” In addition to expanding students’ academic horizons, “the Vietnam project has really meant a whole new career direction” for some faculty, he added.

Spring Break in St. Petersburg, Russia

Connecticut College, a women’s college until 1969, also sends students abroad for shorter stretches on its Traveling Research and Immersion Program (TRIP). TRIPs take place between semesters, over spring break, and at the end of the academic year. Andrea Lanoux, chair of Slavic studies, took her beginning Russian students to Russia over spring break in 2008 and 2009. “I had 17 people last year sign up for Russian. I went from 6 to 17 overnight,” said Lanoux. Each student also received a loaner iPod filled with Russian pop music, folk songs, poetry, videos, cartoons, talk shows, nursery rhymes, and language exercises. A foundation grant paid for the iPods.

“When you hand these out in class and students who don’t know Russian turn them on and it’s all in Cyrillic, their eyes just light up. It’s a wonderful thing. I would never teach a class again without iPods. It’s the perfect tool for language learning,” said Lanoux. “Japanese and German [programs] are also doing it.”

In 1991, Judaic studies scholar Roger Brooks, now dean of the faculty, was one of the first professors to lead a TRIP. Showing students a slide of Robinson’s Arch, the remains of a once grand archway to the ancient Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, he instructed students to look for these remains “if you ever go to Jerusalem.” One student raised her hand and said, ‘Spring break is coming up. Why don’t we all go and you can show it to us.’ Four and a-half-weeks later, all 23 students were with me in Jerusalem,” he recalled. 

Preparing Students for Global Lives

Connecticut College’s revised mission statement wastes no time in emphasizing the international. The first sentence reads, “Connecticut College educates students to put the liberal arts into action as citizens in a global society.” The college emphasized a need to further internationalize when it launched a $200 million fund-raising drive in 2008: “We must ensure that all our students are prepared to thrive in this global society. We will bring international content to every course of study, and we will expand foreign language proficiency. We will create new ways for students to study abroad and new international experiences on campus.”

Students must take one semester of an intermediate language course or one year of a new language. Frances L. Hoffmann, a professor of sociology and women’s studies, said the college has tried “to shift the nature of foreign language instruction to encourage students to become verbally excellent as well as able to read.” For example, Paola Sica, associate professor of Italian, said, “Many students are interested in art history. We try to find the link between our upper level Italian courses and the courses they’re offering in the art history department. We’re trying to find new directions not enclosed in a little box.”

The college started offering Arabic in 2007, and an interdisciplinary program in Islamic World Civilizations is on the drawing boards. “We need more languages. We need more people. We need to broaden the scope of what we do. But it’s all just a matter of money we don’t have,” said Edward Brodkin, an Asian history specialist.

“Connecticut College educates students to put the liberal arts into ­action as citizens in a global society.”

Hoffmann, former dean of the faculty, led a drive to expand Knowlton, the international residence hall, to accommodate an “International Cultural Commons” that would be filled with satellite televisions’ broadcasting international news, sports, and cultural events. “I had this notion that when the World Cup was on, we’d show the games, have a dinner and music, and you’d have to speak the language of the teams that were playing, trying to marry the cocurricular life and academic life.” But the grand plans—which would have cost at least $11 million—ran into structural and financial roadblocks.

“We came together and made an adjustment around the balance between physical facilities and programs,” said President Higdon. “What we want to try to do is support curricular and faculty development around our international global immersion and objectives.” An anonymous $1 million gift is helping with what is now called the International Commons initiative.

Mixing Food and Languages

Last fall the college appointed its first Foreign Language Fellows, student peer counselors who are paid $1,200 a year to mount social and cultural events promoting nine languages. “It’s a challenge to actually make (other) students participate,” said Cinthia Isla Marin, a sophomore from Iquitos, Peru, who is the Spanish Foreign Language Fellow. “The United States is full of Spanish speakers. The students are like, ‘What’s the point of going to an activity? I can turn around and see a Spanish speaker if I want.’ For them, the activities have to be much sexier.” One of her hits was a Spanish karaoke night. She also found pen pals for her classmates among her former United World Colleges classmates. United World Colleges (UWC), a global educational NGO, selects students from across the globe regardless of their ability to pay for higher education opportunities. UWC has 13 colleges across five continents that aim to foster international understanding and peace.

Katherine Shabb, born in Texas but raised in Lebanon, was the Arabic Fellow. With the help of kitchen workers of Lebanese descent, the freshman redecorated the Knowlton dining room with Lebanese flags, served Middle Eastern food, and brought in a Middle Eastern singer for entertainment. “It was a much smoother transition for me coming from Lebanon, finding that there’s such a strong international commitment in the school,” said Shabb. 

Faculty Engagement in International Programs

Chemistry Professor Marc Zimmer three times has taken students to his native South Africa. He was named Connecticut’s Professor of the Year in 2007, in part for his success in mentoring minority students. His research on green fluorescent protein (which can tag cancer cells) is funded by both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. He came to Connecticut College in 1990 from a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University and “one reason I stayed was because I wanted to do more SATAs. It’s a great opportunity for me and my family.”

Brodkin, a historian of Asia, has led a half dozen semester programs in India. Brodkin, retiring at the end of 2009 after four decades on the faculty, remembers a time when half the required courses for history majors dealt with European history and a quarter were about the United States. “The implication was that Europe was twice as important as America and the rest of the world didn’t really matter at all,” he said. “That changed very quickly when we got people from the rest of the world. We now have an Africa historian and a Latin America historian.”

Resources the Only Impediment

Armando Ignacio Bengochea, dean of the College Community, said, “The only thing that 
stops Connecticut College from realizing any of its largest ambitions is simply resources. We have incredible ambitions and they’re only held in check by resources. We would certainly have many more international students if we could afford them.” Budget pressures led the college to cut back slightly on admission offers this year to international students who needed significant aid, and Martha Merrill, dean of admission and financial aid, is hoping to find more international students who can pay all or much of the comprehensive fee. “Those are the challenges for us as a small college without the name recognition (of) some other institutions,” she said.

Almost five percent of Connecticut College’s 1,900 students are international. Roughly the same percentage hold dual citizenship, and several dozen more are permanent residents or U.S. citizens who grew up overseas.

Finding the resources to meet Connecticut College’s ambitions rests principally on the shoulders of Higdon, who became president in 2006 after leading the College of Charleston and Babson College and serving as dean of the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. Higdon, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi, spent two decades as an investment banker on Wall Street before switching to academe.

“Our overarching vision is to be one of the very best liberal arts colleges in the land. We think we’re moving toward that goal” by emphasizing globalization and cross-cultural fluency for students and faculty, said Higdon. However the economic winds blow, Connecticut College is holding steady on that course.

Few campuses provide a view more dramatic than the panorama of the Pacific Ocean, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the San Francisco skyline afforded by the hilltop, upper campus of the University of San Francisco. Students who come to this Jesuit university can expect to be pushed hard to venture into far less privileged precincts, as near as the streets downtown where San Francisco’s homeless dwell or as far as remote hamlets in Malawi and Guatemala. Sitting in his office atop the Lone Mountain campus, President Stephen Privett, S.J., said, “For us…the global perspective is the realization that about 70 percent of the world lives in dire poverty. I always tell the kids that one person in 100 has a college education, so they’re 1 percent of the world. The ethical question for higher education, whether Catholic, private, public, for profit, not for profit, is: What are you doing for the 99 percent?”

USF became San Francisco’s first college in 1855, when Italian Jesuits opened St. Ignatius Academy after the gold rush. They were following the example of Saint Ignatius Loyola, the sixteenth century founder of the Society of Jesus. In San Francisco the Jesuits educated generations of sons and, later, daughters of immigrants. That heritage endures although today the roster of names is more diverse: not only O’Briens and Giordanos, but Nguyens, Aquinos, and Yangs. After USF’s buildings were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire, classes were held in a drab building dubbed the Shirt Factory, but in 1927 it relocated to the verdant site near Golden Gate Park and expanded in 1978 by acquiring Lone Mountain College, a Catholic women’s school with Spanish Gothic architecture and those priceless views. Today USF enrolls 5,700 undergraduate and 3,500 graduate students in arts and sciences, business, law, nursing, and education. Nearly 10 percent are international students. Located in the city where the United Nations was born, USF set out a decade ago to become “internationally recognized as a premier Jesuit Catholic, urban university with a global perspective that educates leaders who will fashion a more humane and just world.”

USF, once a basketball power (the Dons won back-to-back NCAA basketball championships with Bill Russell and K.C. Jones in the 1950s), now wins recognition for its community service requirement. The 200,000-plus volunteer hours logged by 3,000 students each year has won laurels from the Corporation for National and Community Service.

International Studies the Second Largest Major

The university created an Office of International Student and Scholar Services seven years ago and later opened a Center for Global Education to encourage students to study abroad and pursue professional and service internships overseas. The international studies major launched four years ago quickly became the second largest field of study in the liberal arts. “Students are going crazy for this,” said Jennifer Turpin, the new provost and former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. The major combines courses from the humanities, social sciences, arts and sciences; education abroad is strongly encouraged but not required. With new hires, USF has added programs in African studies, Middle East studies, and Asian studies. Turpin, a sociologist who studied the role of Russian media in the disintegration of the Soviet Union, said, “Year after year, as I’ve introduced the new faculty, people say it looks like the United Nations is walking in.”

Seniors Emily Saeger and Erica Ernst are two of those drawn to international studies. Saeger, from Washington, D.C., spent a summer teaching in Nicaragua and a semester interning for a nonprofit in Quito, Ecuador, on protecting the Amazon rainforest. Saeger, who double majored in Latin American studies, concentrated in environmental development and is considering a career in that arena. When Saeger enrolled she “didn’t realize how strong the whole social justice mission was at this school and I definitely didn’t imagine myself taking so much out of that. I’m not Catholic or very religious at all. But the thing I like the most about being in a Jesuit university is that commitment to social justice…. It’s felt and seen throughout the classes.”

Ernst went on a two-week USF service trip to Uganda, and then spent a semester studying and working with schoolchildren in the Francophone West African nation of Burkina Faso. She and other students studied digital photography, and then used their skills to make books in French for children about how to use the village library.

“The international studies major launched four years ago quickly became the second largest field of study in the liberal arts. Students are going crazy for this.”

The trip had its trepidations. “After three and one-half months in Burkina Faso, most of us got parasites, and two got malaria. That’s just the reality of going somewhere like that,” said Ernst. Her mother, a nurse back home in Bellevue, Washington, told her, “Just take the medicine. You’ll be fine.” Ernst was homesick at first and overwhelmed by classes taught only in French, but when she went to work in a village it was “almost living in a dream. It was just so beautiful, in the middle of nowhere with the sky and the green grass going on forever.”

Lois Lorentzen, a professor of social ethics in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies and codirector of the Center for Latino Studies in the Americas, has led students on service trips to Cambodia and South Africa. “We don’t send students to super dangerous places; we do semi-dangerous ones,” she said. Recently the university canceled a trip to Tijuana, Mexico, because of drug violence along the border.

A Scholarship for Study in Developing Countries

Education abroad is growing at USF, but remains at modest levels. Some 432 students studied abroad for credit in 2008–09. Sharon Li, director of the three-person Center for Global Education, said students can choose from more than 50 USFsponsored programs that allow them to apply their financial aid toward the expenses. Still, for students who may be working two jobs to pay tuition, education abroad remains a reach. “We’re struggling with that,” said Turpin.

USF awards Pedro Claver Scholarships (named for a seventeenth century Jesuit saint who ministered to slaves in Cartagena, Colombia) covering half the cost of tuition for those who study in countries such as Zambia and Nicaragua where they will be engaged with the poor. “You can’t take it to Paris or Madrid or Rome or London,” said Privett.

Privett has joined students on service journeys to South Africa, India, and Uganda. He did refugee work in El Salvador and knew the six Jesuits at Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) murdered with their cook and her teenage daughter by the Salvadoran army during the 1989 civil war. He later headed a social justice institute at Santa Clara University, where he was provost before becoming USF president in 2000.

Exposing Deans and Students to Poverty

Privett has taken deans and trustees on retreats to El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Judith Karshmer, dean of the School of Nursing, said, “I’ve been on countless university presidential retreats and the topics have always been capital campaign, more students, how to integrate core curriculum. This presidential retreat was ‘Let’s go to the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere so we can understand our jobs at San Francisco from a global perspective.” They met with subsistence farmers and children living in a dump.

Professor of Nursing Linda Walsh takes students to Guatemala to deliver prenatal care in Mayan villages alongside “comadronas”—traditional midwives who are also priestess-like figures. The students visit homes to conduct prenatal exams and provide vitamins and antibiotics. They encourage the comadronas to change gloves and wash hands frequently, but also say they learn much from these unschooled midwives. “They put their hands on the woman’s belly and they can just feel if the head is up or down and where the baby’s back is,” said senior Juliet Huntington.

“We’re helping them bring some Western teaching strategies and international standards for nursing practice without harming the Eastern approach to healthcare, which combines mind, body, and spirit.”

“Back home in San Francisco you push a button on a machine and get a result, whereas in Guatemala you have to use your hands, your eyes, your senses, and your knowledge to get results,” said Molly Zeldner. “That’s the root of what nursing is; it’s not about machines.”

The School of Nursing also has forged a partnership with two nursing schools in Hanoi, Vietnam, and is hoping to launch a master’s degree program there. Vietnamese nurses are taught under the USF curriculum for five semesters in Hanoi, then finish the degree with a sixth semester in San Francisco.

“We’re helping them bring some Western teaching strategies and international standards for nursing practice without harming the Eastern approach to healthcare, which combines mind, body, and spirit,” said Greg Crow, a USF alumnus and adjunct professor who spearheads the Vietnam Nurse Project. Associate Professor Gregory A. DeBourgh has made numerous trips to Vietnam with Crow to advance the partnership.

International Experiences for Law, Architecture Students

The School of Law, which has a Center for Law and Global Justice, has been in the vanguard of USF internationalization efforts. Students do human rights work with professors such as Dolores Donovan in Cambodia, Haiti, and elsewhere.

Dean Jeffrey Brand is Jewish, but twice has given talks from the pulpit in St. Ignatius Church at graduation masses. “My mother would have been shocked,” he said, but the Jesuit values and mission “speak to things that I believe in and that legal education should be about: academic rigor and excellence…and service to the poor and marginalized.” Donovan, who is Catholic, said, “The school does act on the values that I was taught as a child…. It melds nicely with my own commitment to international social justice.”

Seth Wachtel, director of the Architecture and Community Design Program, teaches a senior design studio course that gives students opportunities to design and construct projects for impoverished communities locally and far afield. His students have built a library in Zambia and constructed a community center in Nicaragua. “All the projects have either a social justice foundation element to them, or environmental justice, or historical preservation” or all three, he said.

Looking Toward Asia

Mike Duffy, dean of the School of Business and Professional Studies, has positioned his school as a source of expertise for Chinese companies with U.S. operations. He’s considering creating a special bilingual MBA program that would combine instruction in English and Mandarin, taught by such faculty as Associate Professor Xiaohua Yang, a Shanghai native. The business school, which enrolls nearly a third of USF students, in 2009 launched a joint master’s degree program in Global Entrepreneurship Management with Jesuit universities in Barcelona and Taipei. The first multinational cohort of 32 students spent four months in classes in Spain, four months in Taiwan, and four months in California.

International enrollments at USF began climbing after the university opened a recruiting office in Bangkok, Thailand, in 2003. That office now is relocating to Beijing. “China has become our No. 1 sending country,” said Lisa Kosiewicz, director of the Office of International Student and Scholar Services. In 2006 there were 60 students from China. In 2009 there were 273.

Recipe for Jesuit Education

Another challenge for Jesuit universities is how to maintain their religious character as the number of Jesuits on the faculty dwindles. Privett says 15 Jesuits now work at USF, down from as many as 40 three decades ago. (Another dozen Jesuits live in the university’s Jesuit community, but work elsewhere). Privett is confident USF will lose neither its mission nor identity.

“There’ll be fewer Jesuits, but you do not need to be a Jesuit to deliver a Jesuit education. You do need the vision, the value, and the core insights,” he said. “I tell kids it’s like Mexican food. If you have the recipe and the right ingredients, you get the product.”

“It’s an exciting time and the future is even more exciting as we look at different possibilities to making USF a truly international institution,” said Vice Provost Gerardo Marin. “We want to educate students to change the world.”

When the University of San Diego opened its Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice, its leaders wanted to not just teach about human rights but to make a genuine contribution to solving conflicts in strife-torn countries. They came up with the idea of offering a respite on the San Diego campus where often unsung peace activists could recharge their batteries, inspire students, and at the same time get professional help to craft a narrative of their struggles against violence back home. The Women PeaceMakers Program was born. 

Since 2003 some 32 women have spent eight weeks on the Catholic university’s campus overlooking Mission Bay, speaking to classes and community groups, learning about U.S. programs that help victims recover from trauma, and working with writers on their personal narratives. They visit social justice organizations working to alleviate poverty in this city near the Mexican border—and they go on excursions to the famous San Diego Zoo and to Disneyland in Anaheim.

Their travel to the United States is covered by the program, and the peacemakers, who share apartments on campus and cook together, receive a stipend of $4,000 for living expenses. The entire program is underwritten by the Fred J. Hansen Foundation, named for a benefactor who made a fortune in real estate and avocado farming. The foundation, led by trustee Tony Dimitroff, also supports the Hansen Institute for World Peace at San Diego State University, which has done extensive work in the Middle East.

“Like a Queen Walking on Air”

Christiana Thorpe, a former nun, school principal, and deputy minister of education in Sierra Leone, went home in 2004 and became Sierra Leone’s Chief Electoral Commissioner, presiding over the free and fair 2007 elections and now preparing for the 2012 balloting.

Thorpe, who founded an NGO to educate girls displaced by civil war, said in an interview via Skype from Freetown about the Women PeaceMakers Program, “When I came back after that experience, I was ready to take on anything or anybody else in the world. I was really empowered.” 

“Back home it was a very lonely experience, a very lonely journey, dealing with women and girls who are traumatized and trying to get them reconciled either with their communities or their family members,” she said. “Eventually, you yourself are almost traumatized. You don’t look for thanks in this kind of work, but when you get the odd thanks, it makes you feel like a queen walking on air.” 

Working with a professional writer to put her story on paper also “was a big eye-opener for me. I didn’t realize I had so much to offer. If it were not for the Women PeaceMakers Program, I would not have realized the extent of work I had been doing toward peacebuilding within my country,” said Thorpe.

Absent From the Negotiating Table and From History

Dee Aker, the Kroc Institute’s deputy director, helped design and still directs the program. Aker, a psychological anthropologist by training, is a former journalist who has worked on four continents in education and on helping people make the transition from conflicts. “We realized that no one was recognizing what we were seeing on the ground, how women were…making powerful decisions and having a major impact on averting or ending conflicts,” Aker said. “Women never got invited to the negotiation table. They are just behind the scenes.”

The Kroc Institute has special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. The Women PeaceMakers Program hosts biennial conferences in support of efforts to improve the status of women and girls. The 2010 conference produced a report on the 10th anniversary of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, a landmark that stressed the importance of women’s “equal participation and full involvement in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security.” Among the speakers were Monica McWilliams, who helped end Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence, and Luz Méndez, one of only two women who participated in the negotiations that ended Guatemala’s civil war in 1996.

Méndez, vice president of the National Union of Guatemalan Women and a 2004 Woman PeaceMaker, spoke of organizing “courts of conscience” where women could speak out for the first time about the sexual violence inflicted on them in Guatemala’s decades-long civil war. “It was so liberating for them,” she said, and also secured their place in the historical record. In Guatemala “as in many countries,” she said, women often “are (left) out of history.”

No Shortage of Candidates

“We’ve had lawyers, government officials, a chief of police for a tribal area, a woman who took on the blasphemy law in Pakistan” and other activists as Women PeaceMakers, said Aker. The institute worried at first about getting word out about the program, but with the UN connection that has not been a problem, and it receives hundreds of applications each year.

The peacemakers have come from two dozen countries in the midst or not-long-removed from conflicts. On a couple of occasions, things were so unsettled that the prospective woman peacemaker could not leave and the institute had to choose someone else, said program officer Jen Freeman, formerly one of the “peacewriters.”

Aker and Freeman have journeyed to Nepal and the Philippines to hold regional conferences for alumnae and others involved in conflict resolution.

Combination of Art and Science

Merlie “Milet” Mendoza, a humanitarian worker in the Philippines, came to San Diego in fall 2010 two years after she was kidnapped and held for two months by militants in the Sulu archipelago, where she had been helping poor Muslim communities. Mendoza is a former official in the Corazon Aquino administration who moved from government to grassroots organizing in 1989 and led a peace coalition in troubled Mindanao.

In her PeaceMaker narrative, Mendoza said, “Peacemaking and conflict management go beyond the rational. They touch on the sacred and the divine. It is a combination of art and a science. It is about goodness.”

Another 2010 PeaceMakers Program participant was the Liberian peace activist and social worker Vaiba Kebeh Flomo, who helped organize the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace that brought pressure on the government of Charles Taylor and rebel forces to sign an accord in 2003. She later mobilized women to register and vote in the 2005 elections that made Ellen JohnsonSirleaf Africa’s first elected female president. 

A Need to Do More

Flomo helped unite Christian and Muslim women’s groups, who at one point, like the Greek women seeking to stop the Peloponnesian War in Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, withheld sex to pressure men to end the violence. Flomo was among the Liberian women featured in the 2008 documentary, Pray the Devil Back to Hell. 

In reaching out to Muslim women, Flomo, who worked for the Lutheran Church of Liberia’s Trauma Healing and Reconciliation Program, repeated one message: “In time of war, women and children suffer most. The bullet cannot pick and choose. Once it is in the air it is not looking for a Christian, it is not looking for a Muslim. It comes to anyone.”

Flomo, now back at work in Monrovia, said via Skype that her stay in San Diego “helped my self-esteem. After I told my story and I saw myself—‘Oh, this is where I came from and this is where I am’—it brought me to another level in my work. It made me think that if I came this far, I need to do more.”

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University of San Diego

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Kafka scholar John Grandin could see the writing on the wall midway through his four decade career as a professor of German at the University of Rhode Island (URI): enrollments in language classes were shrinking and so were positions on the faculty.  Their emphasis on literature assumed that most majors envisioned themselves becoming teachers to share their love of the language with the next generation. But “interest in German and some other languages was waning because of this one-sided assumption,” said Grandin. “We had to reach out to other disciplines to make language learning more relevant to a broader spectrum of students.”

Grandin looked across the Kingston campus to the College of Engineering where a new dean named Hermann Viets had arrived in 1987. “I thought, `Hermann with two n’s—he must have a German background,’” recalled Grandin. Indeed Viets did and soon the pair mustered support from the faculty and a grant from the federal Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) to launch the International Engineering Program (IEP), which would allow students to earn dual degrees in engineering and German in five years. An entire year would be spent studying and working in Germany. “Students went for it right away,” recalled Grandin, now director emeritus after 23 years as IEP director and four decades on the faculty.

Today a quarter of URI’s 1,100 engineers graduate with a bachelor of science in engineering and a bachelor of arts in German, Spanish, French or, starting this fall, Mandarin. 

In-State Tuition During Education Abroad

German is still the biggest draw. At least 80 eighty percent of URI’s 125 German majors are engineers. Grandin and Viets enhanced the program’s appeal by allowing all, even out-of-state students, to pay in-state tuition during the semester at a German university followed by  a six-month paid internship at a company in Germany. Some URI students may have begun language classes in high school, but others start from scratch as freshmen in Kingston. Regardless, by year four they are learning engineering and other difficult courses in German, Spanish, French, or Chinese. It works because the language faculty “understand that the students sitting in front of them in these classes are largely engineering or business students,” said Dean of Engineering Raymond Wright. “It never would have worked if you had three or four engineers sitting in a class filled with German, French, or Spanish majors there for the linguistic side of things.” URI offers such courses as German for Engineers, Spanish for Business, and Advanced Technical Chinese.

“It’s been a terrific partnership,” said Dean of Arts and Sciences Winifred Brownell. With twin degrees, “they are among the most marketable of the graduates we send out into the world.” Brownell said colleagues have jokingly called her and Wright “the odd couple” at national conferences where they have spread the gospel about URI’s marriage of humanities and engineering.

A Model for Other Universities

The IEP program continues to garner strong corporate, government, and foundation support. The National Science Foundation funds a partnership between URI and Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany that includes research, student exchanges, and dual master and doctoral degrees. Seventy-five URI and exchange students from several countries live in two former fraternities converted into language houses. 

Several universities, including Valparaiso University, University of Connecticut, Northern Arizona State University, and others, have built programs modeled in whole or in part after the IEP. But Grandin, who is writing a book examining how fluency in a second language has furthered the careers of IEP graduates, expressed disappointment that the IEP model has not spread farther among U.S. engineering schools. “Our doing it in Rhode Island is not enough,” he said. “I was invited many times to visit other campuses. Generally people will say, ‘This is a wonderful idea; we’ve got to do it, too.’ But then they don’t follow through.” He suspects the reasons for that are lingering resistance among language faculty and an attitude among “a whole lot of engineers who think the whole world speaks English.”

Hot Ticket in the Job Market

IEP graduates are a hot commodity in the job market, said Sigrid Berka, who succeeded Grandin as director in 2010. A survey of German IEP alumni found two-thirds working for companies that operate in the international arena. One in six is employed overseas. The roster of German companies that hire URI students includes BMW, Bayer, Siemens, Volkswagen, and ZF Friedrichshafen.. The fifth-year students regularly get offers from such U.S. giants as Boeing, Johnson & Johnson, General Electric, General Dynamics, and Sensata Technologies (formerly Texas Instruments).

The Chinese major was added partly in response to a growing demand from New England companies, such as Hasbro, Pratt & Whitney, and Sensata, that are eager to hire Mandarin-speaking engineers for their manufacturing sites in China who can navigate two cultures and engineering cultures, Berka said.

Matthew Zimmerman, a 2001 graduate in ocean engineering, French, and German, spent a semester at the Université d’Orléans in France, then worked for the software company SAP in Karlsruhe, Germany, for six months. He is cofounder and vice president of FarSounder, Inc., a Warwick, Rhode Island, company that makes 3-D sonar systems for ships. “We have customers worldwide so I use my intercultural communications skills daily,” Zimmerman said. “Shipyards and boat captains really appreciate being able to communicate with you in their native language.”

While studying in Braunschweig, Alex Reeb, a doctoral student in civil engineering at Virginia Tech, got to see the world’s longest rail tunnel being built under the Alps in the Gotthard Pass in Switzerland. He then worked for Züblin AG in Stuttgart, Germany, for six months and still managed to graduate six months early upon return to Rhode Island. “Even now at industry conferences, potential employers have been excited to hear about my time in Germany,” he said.

Sara Manteiga was raised speaking English and Spanish—her parents teach Spanish at URI—and decided to take French in high school and pursue dual degrees in chemical engineering and French. She studied at Université de Technologie de Compiègne in France, then researched the effect of carbon dioxide on ecosystems during an internship with the oil company TOTAL in the town of Pau in the Pyrenees. “My year abroad was hands down the best experience of my undergraduate career,” said Manteiga, a summa cum laude graduate now studying chemical and biomedical engineering at Tufts University. 

Sonia Gaitan, the daughter of parents from Colombia, combined chemical engineering and Spanish at URI and learned Portuguese as well. She studied in Spain for a semester, then did an internship in Sao Paulo, Brazil, with Johnson & Johnson, which hired her after graduation. Now a senior quality assurance engineer, Gaitan credits the IEP experience with helping her work effectively with people “from all parts of the world and all walks of life.” 

Grandin will be honored at the Modern Language Association’s 2012 meeting for his contributions to international education. “To me,” he said, “the IEP is still kind of a miracle.” Engineers are required to take only one course in foreign language and cross cultural competence (other URI undergraduates must take two semesters). Nevertheless, with only that modest requirement, “we’ve got 25 percent of (engineering) students not only taking language, but getting a degree in it.”

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University of Rhode Island

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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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