Relationship Cultivation

Elon University has  gone on an extra-ordinary journey in the past 15 years, transforming itself from a regional college into a comprehensive university with a national presence that receives far more applicants than it can accept from across the country. The beautiful 575-acre campus near Burlington, North Carolina, with dogwoods, magnolias, cherries, redbuds, and oaks—Elon means oak in Hebrew—is designated a botanical garden, and Elon has mastered the knack of building in a Georgian style that makes new dorms and classroom edifices look like they have been nestled in those trees for eons.

Adding to the curbside appeal is Elon’s reputation as an institution where students become deeply engaged in community service, and where a large majority studies abroad. So deeply is study abroad engrained in the culture at Elon that even the custodial and administrative staff has the opportunity to see London in January, when the flats reserved for Elon students in the fall and spring would otherwise be empty.

Elon provides each student—and, if they so request,  prospective employers and graduate schools—not only course grades, but a second, formal transcript on their participation in five “Elon Experiences,” namely: leadership, service, internships, study abroad, and undergraduate research.

Elon cemented its reputation for civic engagement by perennially emerging among the high scorers on the National Survey of Student Engagement. Elon also was one of the 10 original campuses that em-braced Project Pericles, a national effort to promote good citizenship under the aegis of philanthropist Eugene Lang and his foundation. Not only did 71 percent of the Class of 2007 study abroad, but 80 percent completed an internship and 91 percent engaged in volunteer service.

Elon engineered its rise with strong administrative and faculty leadership, a passion for strategic planning, and a knack for stretching limited dollars. (These gains have not gone unnoticed: a 2004 book authored by George Keller from Johns Hopkins University Press, Transforming a College: The Story of a Little-Known College’s Strategic Climb to National Distinction, examines Elon’s rise to a top regional university.) Elon is a place that prides itself on congeniality, down to the “College Coffee” on Tuesday mornings when classes and work stop for 40 minutes while students, faculty, and staff gather outside the main campus building for coffee, donuts, and conversation. Faculty have embraced study abroadwith gusto. Each year, more than 50 faculty memberslead study abroad programs, most on short-term courses offeredin the winter and summer. A Study Abroad Committee, a standing committee of faculty that includes two student members, passes judgment on each program, and faculty say their participation in study abroad, including not only course development and teaching but scholarship as well, is valued as a critical part of their professional development.

Clearly, international studies and global awareness have played a large role in the creation of this new Elon. “Two or three decades ago Elon served first-generation college students,” says President Leo M. Lambert. Today, 80 percent of the parents are college graduates and more than a third boast graduate degrees as well. “These parents are aware how small the world is getting and how important it is for their student to experience that world more broadly through their Elon education,” adds Lambert.

Lambert’s predecessor, J. Fred Young, president from 1973 through 1998, set the institution on this course and nurtured the study abroad programs. Young, a former school superintendent, created an organization that continues to place teachers from other countries in North Carolina public schools. He personally recruited one of those exchange teachers, Sylvia Muñoz of San Jose, Costa Rica, to come to Elon to open El Centro de Español—the Spanish Center—to provide Spanish language and cultural lessons in an informal setting to students, faculty, and staff alike. Now ensconced in remodeled Carlton Building next to the Isabella Cannon Centre for International Studies, El Centro bustles with activities day and night.

Isabella Cannon Shows the Way

At his 1999 installation, Lambert announced a landmark $1 million gift from Isabella Cannon, a 1924 Elon alumna, that gave international studies a showcase home at the heart of campus, overlooking Scott Plaza and Fonville Fountain. Cannon, born in Scotland in 1904, was a librarian, civic activist, and globe-trotter who in 1977, at age 73, campaigned as “a little old lady in tennis shoes” to unseat the mayor of Raleigh. A diplomat’s wife, she had lived in China, Iraq, and Liberia before concentrating her energy on opening parks and improving life in North Carolina’s capital. As commencement speaker in 2000, the diminutive Cannon reminded Elon graduates that collectively they had “a grand total of more than 50,000 years to make this a better world.” She made another major gift that allowed Elon to build the Isabella Cannon International Studies Pavilion, which houses 11 international and 11 U.S. students and is one of several living-learning communities in the university’s  Academic Village, modeled after Thomas Jefferson’s design for the University of Virginia. Cannon died in 2002 at age 97, six months before the dedication of the new Isabella Cannon Centre for International Studies, with Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan, as principal speaker.

Elon changed its name from Elon College to Elon University in 2001—the town that had grown up around the college had to change its name, too, from Elon College, North Carolina to plain Elon—and, underscoring that status, opened the Elon University School of Law in nearby Greensboro in August 2006. Elon already offered graduate degrees in business, education, and physical therapy. On Lambert’s watch, the full-time faculty has grown from 192 in 1999 to 291 in 2006.

Elon charges lower tuition than many of the universities with which it competes for students, but it does not discount that “sticker price” to woo students. Its endowment stands at $70 million, but Elon’s leaders hope to boost it by $100 million in a five-year campaign now underway.

Elon’s growth over the past decade was fueled by admitting more students, from 3,500 in 1995 to more than 5,200 today. “We’ve benefited tremendously from our location and being in this great mecca of higher education in North Carolina,” says Lambert, a former education professor and associate dean at Syracuse University who founded an innovative program there to hone the teaching skills of future professors. “Growth has fueled quality at Elon; there’s absolutely no doubt about it,” Lambert says. “But we can’t continue to growand still be the intimate kind of community Elon is right now.”

Studying Abroad in January

Elon has built its study abroad reputation largely around month-long winter-term courses offered in the middle of its 4-1-4 calendar. It began with a single January course in London in 1969. Elon now offers approximately 30 such winter-term study abroad courses. In 1985 Elon began sending students and a professor to London for a full semester; in 2006 the university added a faculty-led semester in San Jose, Costa Rica, that combines Spanish classes with courses taught in English in marketing, the politics of Central America, and environmental issues.

Elon also offers students opportunities to enroll in 32 affiliate and exchange programs as well as seven Elon summer study abroad courses. Increasingly, Elon also is placing students in international internships, co-ops and other educational experiences, and Laurence Basirico, dean of international programs, is scouting possibilities for new semester-long Elon programs in Europe and Asia. “We want to have one on each of the continents,” says Steven House, dean of Elon College, the College of Arts and Sciences.

These extensive off-campus programs are a costly undertaking for an institution on a tight budget. That they have grown so large is testament to the importance the university places in international education. “When you have 60 students studying abroad for a semester in Italy, Elon sends all of their tuition funds to the Italian school and loses use of these funds for the main campus. It’s a big expense,” says Provost Gerald Francis, who joined the faculty in 1974 after earning his Ph.D. in mathematics at Virginia Tech. Francis’s 24-year tenure as academic dean and provost spans the Young and Lambert eras. His role in Elon’s metamorphosis was pivotal.

From Custodians to Faculty, Everyone Gets a Chance to Go Abroad

Francis also has been a champion of finding creative ways to help faculty and staff experience travel abroad. Gerald Whittington, Elon’s vice president for business, finance, and technology, personally has led 300-plus Elon faculty and staff—from full professors to custodians—on more than a dozen London trips. Whittington sees a practical payoff to taking the staff to see the sights of London for themselves. “Our students are getting messages from above, below, and sideways that this is an important value of the institution and one that they ought to participate in. That’s why we do it,” says Whittington, who grew up in the great cities of Europe.

“Don’t think there is not self-interest in this. They are all part of the sales force,” agrees Francis. The provost even encourages Basirico to send a university staff member, when possible, with the faculty who lead the regular study abroad courses in January. If an Elon art historian takes students on a fast-paced program to Italy, “it really helps if you have somebody to help keep up with the busses and hotels,” reasons Francis. “Librarians, purchasing agents, the registrar, or people in student life can (do that) to help the program run smoothly. And that makes them part of the international campus here.”

Courses with Few Prerequisites

Last January, Elon faculty led students to Australia, Barbados, Brazil, China, Costa Rica, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Peru, the Philippines, and beyond.

While students typically pay from $2,800 to $5,500 for travel, lodging, and other expenses for the winter study abroad courses, they are charged no extra tuition; that is bundled into the fall semester tuition. Courses also are offered back on campus for students who cannot participate in the study abroad. Traditionally, most of the winter-term study abroad programs are 200-level courses with few prerequisites. That was done intentionally so students wouldn’t be precluded from signing up, says Basirico. Thomas K. Tiemann, an economics professor who holds an endowed chair, says, “There’s a big range of study abroad opportunities here, depending on the students’ experiences, attitudes and how brave they are.”

Increasingly, these courses are gaining rigor. Some were challenging from the start, such as “Field Biology in Belize,” in which students learn about rainforest ecology and explore a coastal reef. The course is open to non science majors, but since it counts as a lab elective for the many biology majors who sign up, “I want it to be challenging,” says biology professor Nancy E. Harris.  “They may have had botany, zoology, and maybe even ecology, but when they get there, they are blown away. It’s truly an eye-opening experience.” Students start each day at a wildlife preserve in Belize’s Rio Bravo bird-watching at 6:30 a.m., followed by lectures and field observations. Students keep cultural and scientific journals, take exams and lab practicals. It’s a real science class but with a huge dose of cultural and biological reality. “The itinerary reflects the rigor. There’s very little free time,” says Harris, who also is associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, which is called Elon College. “There are howler monkeys overhead, jaguar in the forests, poisonous snakes under the decks, (and) bats in the bathroom. It’s cool.” At night students go out with flashlights, poke sticks in holes, and “play the game of who will let the tarantula walk over their head,” says Harris. During the marine biology half of the class, the students go snorkeling along the coral reefs in the azure Caribbean off Ambergris Caye, but even there they have lectures, tests, and field reports to complete. A USA Today reporter who accompanied the class in January 2004 noted, “One of their final exams, a ‘fish and coral practical,’ is conducted under water, using waterproof paper.”

“Study abroad has tentacles…”

Faculty new to Elon often are surprised at how quickly the opportunity arises to teach in another country. Vic Costello, associate professor of communications, says, “It seems like the whole institution buys into it. I’m living proof. Two years after I came in, I was leading a class to Europe.” Demand was strong for Costello’s course, Gutenberg, Reformation and Revolution: Media’s Impact on Western Society, which took students to Mainz, Germany, the birthplace of the printing press, and ended in Geneva, Switzerland, where the Internet was born at the CERN Institute. “Study abroad has tentacles that go throughout the campus. It is fully integrated with the culture of the school,” says Costello, who chairs the Study Abroad Committee.

Vice President G. Smith Jackson, the longtime dean of students and coordinator of the Elon Experiences, says, “Students come to Elon because of our active, engaged approach to learning, and study abroad is at the top of that.” Jackson describes the dynamic as a “collision of powerful factors: students and parents who want this type of education, an administration that supports it, and faculty who understand the power of that pedagogy.”

Elon awards $50,000 in scholarships for study abroad each year. Honors students and Elon Fellows automatically receive a $750 travel grant as part of their awards. “When we spend a dollar around here we like to say we are getting two or three things done,” says Lambert. “An example is the way we top off certain scholarships to emphasize the importance of internationalization and global citizenship.”

Good Timing for an International Plan

A decade ago, when winter study abroad started taking off, the international program was still operating out of a crowded ground-floor office in the Alamance Building. Bill Rich, then the dean, put together an ambitious blueprint for expanding the size, staff, and reach of the international programs office. A year later, when Isabella Cannon presented her $1 million gift, it became a reality. Rich, an emeritus professor of religious studies, retired in 2004, but still leads a winter-term trip to Athens and Thessalonica to study the art, architecture, mythology, and religion of ancient Greece. Some of these winter courses are so popular that students are left with a second or third choice. It’s a far cry from the early days when “we would stand in the cafeteria lines to recruit students for study abroad,” Rich says.

Education Internships in Costa Rica

Basirico, who is also a sociology professor, returned from a 2004 trip to Costa Rica and asked F. Gerald Dillashaw, dean of the School of Education, if he’d be interested in sending education majors to San Jose for a semester to intern in Costa Rican classrooms. The School of Education already was sending upward of 20 sophomores to assist in London schools each spring. In Costa Rica, of course, there would be the added complexity of working in Spanish. Immediately, “everyone on our advisory committee was in favor of the idea,” says Janice L. Richardson, an associate professor of mathematics who directs the North Carolina Teaching Fellows Program at Elon. The Teaching Fellows Program is a scholarship program jointly funded by the state and the university that provides $13,000-a-year scholarships for 25 students from North Carolina who agree to spend four years teaching in North Carolina schools. Both Dillashaw and Richardson traveled to Costa Rica to lay the groundwork, and seven education majors spent this past spring as teacher aides in San Jose, living with local families and also taking classes of their own. On a recent visit, one Elon sophomore told Richardson, “Now I know what it’s like to be a Spanish-speaking student walking into an English classroom and not understanding the language.”

Elon has another steady connection with Costa Rica. As a reward for faculty and staff who participate in the conversational Spanish classes and cultural activities at El Centro de Español, Sylvia Muñoz escorts a dozen or more faculty and staff to her homeland each May. Participants are charged just $400. And El Centro offers a travel perk for students, too, who show up faithfully for its conversations, cooking classes, rumba lessons, movie nights, and festivals like Día de los Muertos: Once they log 140 hours, “they get a free plane ticket to any Spanish-speaking country. A lot use it to study abroad,” says Muñoz. The ticket is funded through the provost’s office.

Freshman Seminar on ‘Global Experience’

The curriculum at Elon sends an early signal to freshmen about the importance the university places on internationalization. “Right off the bat we expose students to the idea that theirs is not the only world and that there are other places and people worth studying,” says Janet Warman, an English professor who directs the General Studies program. Freshmen must take a seminar on The Global Experience taught by faculty from every department that explores such issues as human rights abuses and environmental responsibility. With a limit of 25 students per section, the seminar dates back to a 1994 revision of the core curriculum. Warman, who received Elon’s top teaching award in 2004, says, “Early on, there was a lot of resistance. Students didn’t seem to understand why we were studying the things we were studying. Now they are much more receptive.” Two years ago, when former Sudanese slave Francis Bok lectured about his autobiography, Escape From Slavery, “the students flocked around him to hear more of his story and ask how they could take action,” Warman says. The General Studies program does not end with freshman year. As juniors or seniors, students must take advanced interdisciplinary seminars. Elon reinstated a language requirement three years ago, and already the language faculty want to raise it. “A two-semester requirement is really quite minimal,” says Ernest Lunsford, a professor of Spanish. “We also would like to have more study abroad that incorporates serious language study.” Elon offers majors in Spanish and French and minors in Italian and German studies. Classes are also taught in Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic.

The only major other than languages that requires study abroad is international studies, which has surged in popularity. Laura Roselle, a political science professor, says, “In 1997 we had 12 majors. Right now we have 173. Each time we raised the requirements, we thought, ‘Uh-oh. Enrollments might suffer.’ But it has not slowed at all.” International studies, she says, appeals to the service-oriented students drawn to Elon. “They are looking for a place where service opportunities and volunteer activities are valued, and they find that here,” says Roselle. “The to-do list for Elon is to deepen the connections between the academics and those experiences.”

Project Pericles and AIDS in Namibia

Project Pericles, a national civic engagement initiative that Elon signed onto in 2002, also has had a decidedly international cast to its character. The first 29 Periclean Scholars in the Class of 2006 focused on the problem of HIV/AIDS in Namibia. Over three years, under the direction of sociology professor Tom Arcaro, the group produced a four-part documentary series that aired on public television in the region. The project brought to campus speakers from Namibia, including Anita Isaacs, an activist for those living with HIV. Arcaro, who was North Carolina’s Professor of the Year in 2006, also led several students and a campus video producer to Namibia to meet with AIDS activists and tape footage for the documentary series. Students packed 70-pound suitcases with textbooks, toys, school supplies, and clothing that they distributed to Namibian school children. Lambert called Arcaro’s stewardship of the program “the single most powerful, sustained, and globally influential act of teaching and mentoring I have (ever) witnessed.” As seniors, 11 Elon students journeyed to southern Africa to join Namibian university students at a Future Leaders Summit on HIV/AIDS. The Periclean Scholars in the Class of 2007 tackled the problem of pediatric malnutrition in Honduras, and subsequent classes also have chosen an international focus for their work.

If there is any anomaly to this pervasive international culture, it is that fewer than 2 percent of Elon students are international. International enrollments have grown over the past decade from 40 to 89, and the university is eager to attract more. To date, its efforts to do so have been constrained by the limited availability of financial aid.

John Keegan, director of international admissions and associate director of admissions, travels the world recruiting students, and exchanges dozens of e-mails on a daily basis with prospects and their parents. “We would love to enroll 100 more international students,” says Keegan, a 1996 Elon alumnus. “Every day the international students on campus ask me, ‘Who else is coming from my country? Who else is coming from Panama? Who else is coming from Singapore?’ They are just as into it as we are.”

A Personal Touch

The personable Keegan is a persuasive salesman. Chae Kim, 20, a sophomore accounting major from Seoul, South Korea, and her parents got the full treatment when they pulled into Elon on a spring break trip after she spent a year in Jackson, Mississippi, as a high school exchange student. “He was very welcoming. He basically told my parents he would look after me while I was here,” said Kim. She found herself one of only two Korean students on campus that first semester, but that did not bother her. “I just feel obligated to step out more and represent who I am more because numbers-wise, there aren’t many of us,” said Kim, who interned for PricewaterhouseCoopers in Seoul this past summer.

Susan C. Klopman, vice president of admissions and financial planning, says stories like Chae Kim’s are “what has made Elon admissions and enrollment successful. We have been fortunate enough to really make connections with so many of our students. It’s getting harder with the proliferation of applications, but a personal relationship is critical for international students. To whom are they entrusting this child? What’s the nature of this school and this place? When they meet John, the trust level just goes sky high. He represents the Elon community so well.”

Another international student, Kira Tippenhauer, 21, a sophomore originally from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, says Elon’s size was just right. “I did not want to go to a huge school where I would be just a number,” says Tippenhauer, who heard of Elon through a family friend in Michigan who knew John Keegan’s sister. “I love it here,” says Tippenhauer. “There are not that many international students, but still there are students from 45 different countries. That means 45 countries in the world know about Elon and have parents who decided to send their kids to Elon.”

Munoz, the El Centro director, says, “What’s nice about the numbers we have now is that we stand out. People notice us. They really take us as part of their families. My supervisor, Lela Faye Rich (associate dean for academic advising) is like a mother for all international faculty. If you want to be recognized or known, it’s very easy.”

They also don’t have to worry about getting to or from the airport, 45 minutes away. “We pick them up, we drop them off at the airport. That’s any time that they ask for it,” says François Masuka, director of International Student and Faculty Scholar Services. “We do things I don’t think many schools do. The environment is a friendly, brotherly, sisterly type of environment. We cultivate that. You’ve got to hold more hands here.” Masuka, who hails from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and earned a master’s degree at the School for International Studies in Vermont, worked at the University of Virginia and Texas Tech University previously.

Stepping Up Exchanges

Elon hopes to bring more international students to campus by stepping up exchanges. Monica Pagano, assistant dean of international programs, says, “When I got here (in 2003), there were two exchanges. Now we have 14. It’s exciting.” The Argentinian-born Pagano is an authority on service learning. She returned in spring 2007 from the Dominican Republic, where she’d gone to expand opportunities for students to volunteer over spring break. So pleased were the parents of one 2006 Elon graduate with the service-learning projects that took their daughter to Guatemala and Tibet, that they gave the university $250,000 to fund international service-learning scholarships.

Many students who come for short stays are placed in the Isabella Cannon International Studies Pavilion with the domestic and international students living there for the full year. “It’s great to constantly have that flow of culture coming through,” says Ayesha Delpish, an assistant professor of mathematics who is the resident faculty member. Elon is hosting 20 exchange students in fall 2007, more than ever before. Nancy Midgette, associate provost, observes, “Now it’s our job to encourage our (domestic) students to be the other half of these exchanges. They work best when you have people going in both directions.”

Both Lambert and Basirico believe that the university will need more staff and resources to move its international education programs to the next level. With so many faculty leading study abroad courses, Basirico says, “The next step for us is to become a leader in terms of quality of programs and a leader in research on the pedagogy of study abroad.”

Lambert says, “There are times when you can’t just keep moving along the same trajectory. You’ve got to make a leap in terms of the resources you commit to a particular program.” Elon’s infrastructure for managing international programs was “built like everything else at Elon––by bootstrapping it and making it incrementally better and better. But after a period of years, you need to regroup, reorganize, and make new investments to take the program to the next level.”

Elon University

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The Dutch immigrants who settled in western Michigan in the mid-nineteenth century brought not only their culture and Reformed Protestant faith, but a strong interest in establishing schools to impart their principles and religion to the next generation. “Onze school for onze kinderen (our school for our children) was the operating description of both the college and the Christian day schools that they established,” according to a history of Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Calvin, one of the largest and most academically rigorous Christian colleges, remains firmly in the Christian Reformed fold. But Calvin is no longer onze school for onze kinderen. Fewer than half Calvin’s 4,200 undergraduates belong to the Christian Reformed Church. Ten percent are minorities, and there are more than 320 international students from five dozen countries. The majority of international students receive more than $10,000 a year in financial aid.

As recently as the 1970s, 90 percent of the students came from Christian Reformed high schools in the Grand Rapids area and sister schools in midwestern suburbs, southern California, Canada, and other places where Christian Reformed families clustered. When Ellen B. Monsma came to Calvin to teach French in 1971, “if you looked around the fine arts auditorium, all you’d see was blonde heads.” But, says Monsma, director of Calvin’s Off-Campus Programs, “it’s very different now.”

Ninth in International Students, Fourth in Study Abroad

According to Open Doors 2006 data, compiled by the Institute of International Education, Calvin ranked ninth among baccalaureate institutions in attracting international students, and fourth in sending students to study abroad. Rather than catering to onze kinderen, Calvin has internationalized its faculty and curricula and aggressively expanded ties with scholars, theologians, and institutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In 2006 Calvin launched the Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity under former provost Joel A. Carpenter to better understand the growth of Christianity in the developing world. While buildings across campus attest to the college’s Dutch roots—with such names as the Spoelhof College Center, Hekman Library, and Noordewier-VanderWerp Residence Hall—and a chair recently was endowed in Dutch Language and Culture, students from Asia and Africa far outnumber those from the Netherlands and rest of Europe. Fully 74 students had citizenship or roots in South Korea, a country with a large number of Reformed or Presbyterian churches and a vigorous missionary tradition. Home for those Korean students means 17 different countries, from Fiji to India to Germany to the United States to Brazil. Calvin also has become a favored destination for “MKs” or missionary kids—U.S. citizens, Canadians, Filipinos, Koreans, and others raised overseas. Many MKs are supported by scholarships provided by Calvin alumnus Stanley van Reken and wife Harriet through their Christian Missionary Scholarship Foundation. It all adds to the international flavor of the 390-acre campus straddling the East Beltline on the outskirts of Grand Rapids.

Open Admissions but Lots of Merit Scholars

Calvin produces more future Ph.D.s than all but a few dozen liberal arts colleges, according to tallies kept by the National Science Foundation. Calvin enrolled 80 National Merit Scholars in 2006–07, including 29 in the freshman class. But it also admits virtually every applicant. “It’s a very unusual student body,” says President Gaylen J. Byker. Open admissions are “part of who we are.”

Calvin, borrowing language from the Book of Revelation, embarked in 1985 to attract those “from every tribe and language and people and nation.” At the time it had a single off-campus study program in a small town outside Valencia, Spain. Today it runs semester-long, off-campus study programs in Tegucigalpa, Honduras; Beijing, China; Budapest, Hungary; Accra, Ghana; York, England, and Grenoble, France, as well as Valencia. It has added majors in international development, international relations, and Asian studies as well as a minor in African and African diaspora studies. In a 2001 overhaul of the core curriculum, it specified that students must study a non-Western or pre-Renaissance subject to fulfill a global and historical studies requirement. “We call it ‘the long ago or far away requirement,’” Provost Claudia Beversluis says with a smile.

Leaders with Global Resumes

Two alumni with broad international backgrounds were brought in to lead the institution in the mid-1990s: current president Gaylen Byker and Joel Carpenter, provost from 1996-2006. President Byker is a former international lawyer and investment banker with a Ph.D. in international relations who dropped out of Calvin as a freshman in 1966, enlisted in the Army and served as an artillery officer in Vietnam. Byker, son of a Michigan state senator, returned home, wed, started a family and captained the wrestling team at Calvin while carving out an interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree. He earned both a law degree and master’s in world politics from the University of Michigan, clerked for a federal judge, and worked for a Philadelphia law firm before resuming graduate studies.

A mentor at the University of Pennsylvania coaxed him to head to Beirut to help rebuild Lebanon after its civil war. Byker landed on the faculty of the American University of Beirut while his wife Susan taught at an international school, which their 11- and 5-year-old daughters attended. But what was thought in 1982 to be the end of violence in Beirut was just a lull; from five miles away, the Bykers felt the force of the truck bomb that blew up the Marine barracks on Oct. 23, 1983, and killed 241 American and 60 French soldiers. Two months later, Byker was returning to the Middle East from co-teaching a January interim course at Calvin when he learned that Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut, had been assassinated. The Bykers were among the Americans evacuated by U.S. Marine helicopter crews from the Beirut beaches in February 1984. The family returned to Beirut in the spring, but Byker later had to be smuggled out of the country after militants began kidnapping male Westerners, including their friend, the Rev. Benjamin Weir, a Presbyterian missionary. Susan Byker, not wanting to disrupt further her Lebanese students’ education, waited until the end of the school year to depart with her daughters.

During those chaotic years in Beirut, Byker managed to complete a survey on the attitudes of Lebanese citizens toward their wildly fluctuating currency. It would be 1993 before Byker completed writing his dissertation. He spent those interim years jetting around the world as an investment banker for Chase Manhattan and Banque Paribas, helping governments and corporations hedge commodity price transactions. Then in 1995 he answered the call to serve as Calvin’s president.

“Part of the challenge here is to keep the very distinctively Christian and Calvinistic or Reformed characteristic of the college, while really opening it up to this global perspective,” says Byker. A tradition of respect for intellectual inquiry made this task easier, notwithstanding strict religious restrictions on who can belong to the faculty, he says. “We expose our students to everything. We bring everybody here to lecture,” says Byker. Rosemary MasonEtter, the international admissions director, puts it, “Calvin seeks to have conversations, not prevent conversations.” The college also hosts a celebrated January Series of lectures that it bills as “15 days of free liberal arts education,” that fills the Fine Arts Center Auditorium at lunchtime for 15 consecutive weekdays. Speakers have included Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life manager of Hotel Rwanda; Dr. Paul Farmer, the founder of Partners in Health; Egyptian scholar and dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim, and Scott Ritter, former U.N. weapons inspector.

Far From Fundamentalism

Calvin is far from fundamentalist. Kwabena Bediako, 20, a senior chemistry major from Mampong-Akuapem, Ghana, observes, “For the most part the college is not afraid of tackling or confronting issues that are seen as controversial in other Christian colleges. Nothing is too awkward or too controversial to be investigated or be discussed, especially in the sciences.” Bediako’s older brother is a 2004 graduate working on a Ph.D. in immunology and a master’s in public health at Northwestern University. Bediako, a chemistry major, says, “I’m going to have to confront some of these issues at some point in my career. We might as well start to think about them critically now rather than be caught off guard later in life.”

Bediako’s parents, Kwame and Gillian, founders of the Akrofi-Christaller Institute for Theology, Mission and Culture in Ghana, are working with Calvin’s Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity. The Nagel Institute recently received a $2 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to fund a three-year program of scholarship and lectures for Chinese scholars on the intersection of science, philosophy, and belief. The executive director for the project is Kelly J. Clark, a Calvin philosophy professor whose friendship with a Chinese professor he met on sabbatical in Scotland led him to become a student of Chinese philosophy. After an exchange of visits, Clark says he decided that “there were things we had to learn from them, so I devoted myself to the study of Chinese thought.”

Religion professor Diane B. Obenchain, a Harvard-trained expert on Confucianism, came to Calvin to teach world religions in 2005 after long stints at Kenyon College and visiting professorships at Peking University and other Asian institutions. Daniel H. Bays, an authority on the history of Christianity in China, came to Grand Rapids in 2002 after a long career at the University of Kansas, where he chaired the history department and directed the Center for East Asian Studies. Bays secured a $500,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that Calvin agreed to match 3-to-1 to create a $2 million endowment for Asian Studies. Political science professor Amy S. Patterson, a Peace Corps veteran who wrote her dissertation on grassroots democracy in Senegal, was attracted to Calvin both by its religiosity and the strong interest in international issues. She is the author of The Politics of AIDS in Africa and editor of a second compendium on the AIDS crisis.

President Byker likes to tell visitors that, “There were three Calvin colleges before Calvin College in this country. One was called Harvard, one was called Yale, and the other was called Princeton. They were all founded by Calvinists very much in the exact intellectual tradition within which we exist today.” Of the more than 200 Protestant Christian colleges founded before the Civil War, “zero are Christian today,” he adds. All jettisoned their religious identity and became secular, he states. Calvin began as a Christian Reformed seminary in 1876, opened a junior college in 1906, and became a baccalaureate college in 1921. It remains the principal educational institution of the Christian Reformed Church, which claims a quarter-million members in the United States and Canada.

Looking toward the Global South and East

Carpenter, a historian and authority on evangelical movements, directed the religion program of The Pew Charitable Trusts before he was hired as provost in 1996. Upon returning to his alma mater, Carpenter pushed the college to pay more attention to issues of “the global South and East.” Beversluis, the current provost, says, “he kept telling us, ‘Look, the church isn’t headquartered in Europe and the U.S. anymore. The growth areas, the edge, is in the global South and East, so Calvin College better know where it’s happening. We’d better be on top of things and not graduate students who think that west Michigan is somehow the center of the universe.’” Carpenter says he found a Calvin ready “to break out of its protective ethnic shell.”

Sociologist and Dean for Multicultural Affairs Michelle R. Loyd-Paige has both lived and helped drive change at Calvin, which was far more homogenous when she arrived on campus as a freshman 30 years ago. “We see ourselves as having this unique position of being a credible, Christian, and scholarly voice on these issues. We believe we have something to say to—and to hear from—a wider audience,” says Loyd-Paige, an ordained minister in her African-American church in Muskegon, Michigan.

Nana Yaa Dodi, 23, of Asamankese, Ghana, a business and international relations major, can attest to the attention she received when applying to the college. “I felt like the admissions counselors actually cared about my being able to make it here to Calvin. They were willing to work with me and my parents on finances. At various times, especially when I was receiving so much correspondence and replies to my e-mails, I wondered, ‘Am I the only student applying? These people get back to me really fast.’”

More than 700 Calvin students study abroad each year, 500 on three-week classes during the interim term and upwards of 200 on full-semester programs. Under the leadership of Frank Roberts, a former academic dean and director of Off-Campus Programs, and Monsma, the current director, “we really bootstrapped the semester programs abroad,” Carpenter says. Now the college is scrambling to keep up with the demand. The International Development Studies major requires students to study in a developing country, which explains why Monsma is exploring an arrangement with an institute in Thailand to supplement an existing development program in Honduras (Calvin also runs a language study program in Honduras).

Students can take their full financial aid to study at the Calvin-run programs in Britain, China, France, Ghana, Honduras, Hungary, and Spain, and also at five other Calvin-endorsed programs in Austria, Germany, Greece, Japan, and the Netherlands. They are eligible for half their financial aid if they choose from 16 other Calvin-approved semester programs.

Growing By Finding the International ‘Pioneers’

While Calvin has parlayed its religious interests and connections into a deeper involvement in study and research abroad, Carpenter believes there are lessons to be learned here for any institution seeking to internationalize.

“This sort of thing can bubble up. I’d be amazed to find a campus in the nation where the interest in internationalization is not there,” says the Nagel Institute director. “I’ve seen a lot of post-tenure faculty saying, ‘I’m getting a little bored with the thing that really excited me in graduate school; I’ve ridden this horse long enough. There are some new worlds to discover.’”

“In some ways that is how change happens in a lot of fields. You go with the pioneers first and see if their commitment and enthusiasm can excite the interest of others,” says Carpenter.

One of Calvin’s preeminent international “pioneers” is Roland Hoksbergen, professor of economics and business and the driving force behind the International Development Studies major, which in two years has attracted 85 students. Had such a major existed when Hoksbergen entered Calvin in1971, he might have completed his bachelor’s degree in four years instead of eight. But he dropped out, bought a van, and drove to Alaska. He wasn’t sure what he would do there, but he was intrigued to learn about far-away peoples and cultures. A few years later he wound up doing earthquake relief work in Guatemala and in the process met his wife and found his vocation. “I poked my head out and said, ‘Man, people are poor here. I wonder what’s going on and what can be done about it?’” That led him back to Calvin for a bachelor’s degree and a desire “to understand the economic part of life.” Calvin hired him even before he completed his Ph.D. in economic development at the University of Notre Dame. He took leave to spend three years in Costa Rica as director of the Latin American Studies Program for the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities and two years in Nicaragua running the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee’s efforts. He also led Calvin study abroad programs in Ghana in 2002 and in Honduras in 2005.

Another pioneer is Beryl Hugen, director of Calvin’s social work program, who has led several January interims to Russia and Mexico and spends a third of his time teaching at the Russian-American Christian University (RACU) in Moscow, a small liberal arts college affiliated with Calvin and other religious colleges. “It’s easy to get caught up in off-campus study,” says Hugen, a 1971 Calvin graduate. “It’s almost a rite of passage for our students now.”

A Last Minute Switch to Kenya

Calvin offers instruction in Chinese and Japanese as well as Spanish, French, German, and Dutch. Recently, with a $140,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to launch its minor in Africa and African Diaspora Studies, it began offering Kiswahili classes, and plans are in the works to teach Korean. Geography professor Johnathan Bascom helped start the African and African Diaspora Studies minor. He is writing a book about Eritrea and had planned to take an interim class there in January 2007 to study its geography. Eight weeks before departure, unrest made that impossible. Bascom quickly regrouped and took the same seven students to Kenya to work in a rural village with a German charity fighting trachoma, a blinding, bacterial eye disease spread by flies. The Calvin students also got to visit a game park and snorkel in the Indian Ocean, but only after spending several days and nights in a remote village of the Sumburu, an ethnic group related to the Maasai. Using handheld Global Position System devices, they mapped the village to help determine the best sites for digging new wells and latrines. Bascom, who has twice taught in Eritrea on Fulbright grants, said the trip was “a deep cultural dive” for his class. Says Sarah Holland, 21, a senior geography major from Grand Rapids, “It was dusty and dirty and fantastic.”

“The GPS work got us beyond merely providing a meaningful cross-cultural experience, which is what the interim is supposed to accomplish. I think we got to the edge of providing an actual contribution,” says Bascom. Pointing to the college’s 52-page blueprint for diversity, racial justice, reconciliation, and cross-cultural engagement, he adds, “I think that the African studies and diaspora minor is part and parcel of this college responding to our own self-subscribed mandate, From Every Nation.”

An Egyptian Student’s Legacy: Rangeela

One of the traditions at Calvin is an annual variety show called Rangeela—the word means “many colors” in Hindi—put on by international students. It was started by a young student from Egypt named Anne Zaki in her freshman year, 1995–96. Zaki, a pastor’s daughter from Cairo, Egypt, came from an international, all-scholarship boarding school for student leaders in Vancouver, Canada. Initially she found the Calvin campus too tame and homogenous for her liking. Her resident adviser and the college chaplain offered words of wisdom.

“They challenged me and said, ‘Look, if you don’t like it, change it. Don’t just up and go. Isn’t that what you learned in your school back (in Vancouver)? You’re supposed to be a leader,” Zaki relates. The 18-year-old conceived the idea for Rangeela, which was a big hit from the start. After graduation, Zaki returned to Cairo for a master’s degree and married a minister who was a graduate of Calvin Theological Seminary. The couple moved back to Grand Rapids, where the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship hired Zaki to give the institute a more global focus. Now she works part-time for the institute and is on the path toward a divinity degree at Calvin Theological Seminary. She takes pride in the growth of Rangeela, which has become such a hot ticket that seats are even sold to dress rehearsals. “I nudged Calvin in a good direction,” says Zaki. “International students are becoming more aware of their own culture. Korean students go back home over Christmas break, visit grandma in the village and ask, ‘Can you teach us a folk dance?’”

Reviewing the 2007 Rangeela, a reporter for the student newspaper, Chimes, griped that an emcee’s accent was “too thick to be understood.” The performers were stung, but perhaps no one was more upset than Linda Bosch, the international student adviser who works closely with students on the production and is revered by them. “She’s like a mother when we arrive,” says senior Jane Cha, 22, a psychology major born in Philadelphia and raised in Beijing by Korean missionary parents.

Bosch says aspects of the variety show were fair game for criticism—including its 2¼-hour length—but not the accent of the host, who hailed from an English-speaking country, Singapore. “Everyone should talk like we do here in Michigan—yeah, right,” she says acidly. But Bosch counseled restraint on those upset by the Chimes review. The following week the newspaper ran several tempered letters of complaint and a 1,300-word Q&A with Bosch—twice as long as the offending review—in which the adviser explained the anguish caused by the review, but also stressed the importance of more communication across cultures, not less. Her advice to future Chimes reviewers? Be more welcoming and hospitable to guests in our country—but don’t patronize them by limiting criticism.

Students at many campuses joke and sometimes fret about living in a “bubble,” and Calvin students are no exception. “I’m always struck by the activist inclination of the students,” says Bruce Berglund, a cultural historian and assistant professor of history. “I’ve had a number of students really eager to go out and save the world.” One of his students—now in graduate school in architecture—designed a community center for a small town in northern India on an internship, and another worked with AIDS orphans in Africa.

Before spending the fall semester in classes in Calvin’s program at Capital Normal University in Beijing, Christi Bylsma, 20, a junior from Holland, Michigan, spent the summer working in a private foster home in a Chinese village. Bylsma, an Asian Studies major, says, “You have to understand the world before you can address its issues. The best thing we can do to make the world a better place is to get out there and get educated. That’s what Calvin is trying to provide for us.”

Following a Study Abroad Class on the Web

When Matthew Kuperus Heun, an associate professor of engineering, and wife Tracy Kuperus, an international development instructor, led students on an interim to South Africa in January 2005, they also pioneered a “web log” that allowed parents, professors, and students back home to follow their progress on their journey across a country that has moved from apartheid to democracy. Heun, a 1989 Calvin alumnus, says, “If I was a parent sending these students halfway around the world, I’d want to know what was going on. The people in Calvin’s IT department thought that would be an interesting experiment, so we did it. We assigned one student for each day we were away to write an entry and upload their pictures. By the time we got home, we had 60 to 70 pages of student-generated content, both written and visual.”

In Calvin’s engineering program, professors such as J. Aubrey Sykes and Edward G. (Ned) Nielsen encourage students to engage with the world through projects and internships. In Sykes’ senior design class, one team of students designed a kit that could pop 50 pounds of amaranth an hour so that African villagers consume more of the puffed, nutritious grain instead of just grinding it into flour. Other teams worked on projects to make a low-cost water purification system, use a Stirling engine to convert solar energy to electricity, and cannibalize the motor and transmission from an old Toyota Tercel to build a rudimentary utility vehicle.

Breaking Taboos

Economics professor Adel S. Abadeer came to Calvin in 1999 after teaching at Tufts and Boston University. Abadeer, once a shot putter on the Egyptian national track team, says, “I’d never even heard of Grand Rapids or Calvin College. Calvin Klein came to mind before Calvin College or John Calvin.” But it has been a happy match for the economist. He welcomes Americans’ growing interest in other cultures. “Many taboos are being broken,” says Abadeer, who grew up in poverty. “We see the Chinese now differently from 50 years ago, not as very poor but as mathematicians. We see the Indians or Russians as chemists or software engineers. As we get to know more about them, we associate better attributes to foreigners.”

Abadeer tells students that people in Egypt and other African countries are no different from people in the United States. “We think, we hope, we fear, we love, we aspire the same as you, but our resource set and our cultural set is different,” he says. People in less developed countries want “your understanding before your second-hand clothes,” he tells them.

“Students are more interested now because there is some compatibility, some rivalry, and even some fear,” he says. “There’s fear of competition, but also hope and hunger to learn more. We used to have problems attracting students to go to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Now we have problems accommodating students who want to go to those parts of the world.”

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

A Campus Home for International Programming

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

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

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

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

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

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

Growing Support for Internationalization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Promoting International Graduate Student Recruitment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nondegree Programs Increase Diversity and Promote Opportunities Abroad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International Experiences for Domestic Students Through Service Abroad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Developing a Certificate for Global Citizenship

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

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

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

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

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

Sending Students Abroad to Overseas Study Centers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To understand how Columbus State Community College built its formidable array of international education connections, consider the baggage claim area at Port Columbus International Airport, a gateway to the Midwest that serves more than 6 million passengers each year. A few years back, Robert Queen, an administrator at the community college, noticed that next to the baggage claim area there was a room that served as the airport chapel, and inside that space was an even smaller office with a sign on the door that read, International Visitors Council.

Networking to Key Connections

Queen, the administrator of Columbus State’s International Initiatives and Community Outreach Program and a born networker, did what comes naturally: He knocked on the door and asked the person inside, “What do you all do?”

He learned that the small office belonged to a local nonprofit group that served as a liaison to dignitaries, educators, business executives, political leaders, artists, and others visiting Ohio’s state capital from overseas on trips arranged by the U.S. Department of State. Queen and his boss, Alphonso Simmons, vice president and head of the Office of Multicultural Affairs, wasted no time in suggesting that their busy campus on an 80-acre patch of green in downtown Columbus would make an excellent addition to international visitors’ itineraries. They not only got involved with the council, but Queen went on to become president. While Queen led that group, Simmons was president of the Columbus Compact Corp., an organization working to promote economic development and opportunity in central Columbus. Both men are active participants in the Columbus Council on World Affairs, Sister Cities International, and Columbus International Program, another nonprofit that brings professionals from other countries to central Ohio for a year working on exchange in local businesses and agencies

A Growing Reputation for Internationalization

Columbus is home to The Ohio State University, the largest public university in America, with almost 51,000 students on its main campus. But Columbus State is also a force in the capital and in central Ohio, awarding more associate degrees than any of the state’s 22 other community colleges. Its enrollment grew by more than a third in the past decade, cresting at 23,000 in fall 2003. Last year it purchased a 108-acre site in fast-growing Delaware County that eventually will become a second main location, complementing nine suburban satellites.

Columbus State’s president, M. Valeriana Moeller, a scientist who was born in India and raised in Portugal, serves on the board of the American Council on Education’s (ACE) Commission on International Education. Columbus State was among eight U.S. colleges and universities selected by ACE for a research project examining the links between campus international education strategies and activities and student attitudes and participation in international programs. That study, Forging New Connections: A Study in Linking Internationalization Strategies and Student Learning, is forthcoming.

A sampling of Columbus State’s international activities illustrates why it is considered a paragon of internationalism:

• In cooperation with the U.S. Agency for International Development, Columbus State has partnered with Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology and Vicatel, a Tanzanian information services business, to provide IT training to Tanzanian business and government leaders.
• It is conducting a similar training program under the auspices of the World Bank for educators in Hungary.
• It has established several Sister College agreements and is working on more with colleges in Great Britain, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Kazakhstan, Australia, Italy, China, and Africa.
• Its connections with the International Visitors Council and the Columbus Council on World Affairs have brought more than 200 visitors from dozens of countries—Togo, Liberia, Ireland, Ukraine, and United Arab Emirates among them—to the Spring Street campus.

Columbus State also has been honored by the American Council on International Intercultural Education for its success in internationalizing the curriculum and in opening an English language institute to serve international students, immigrants, and refugees, including some of the 30,000 Somalis who now make their home in the Ohio capital. It offers an array of summer study abroad opportunities for students to learn other languages and cultures.

International Partnerships and Outreach

It was the college’s array of international partnerships and aggressive outreach efforts that caught the eye of the NAFSA selection committee that chose the institutions for this Internationalizing the Campus report.

“We do have that reputation (for strong outreach and partnerships) and let me assure you, there is meat behind that reputation,” said Simmons, a former chair of the social services program who began teaching at Columbus State in 1974.

Queen’s connections to the college go back even further. He was in the first graduating class of what was then the Columbus Area Technician School, which had opened in a wing of Central High School in 1963. It was renamed the Columbus Technical Institute in 1967 and two decades later rechartered as Columbus State Community College. It offers more than 140 associate degree  and certificate programs in business, health, social services,  engineering technology, and other fields. It forged its first articulation agreement with Ohio State in 1989 and now has transfer pacts with Ohio University, Kent State University, the University of Cincinnati, Antioch College and a dozen other four-year campuses across the state.

The drive to internationalize Columbus State came soon after M. Valeriana Moeller, then the executive vice president and provost of Lansing Community College in Michigan, was named president in 1996. “She got us into a new age, a new era. She got us thinking about Internet education and internationalizing the curriculum,” said Simmons. Moeller also recognized a need to serve Columbus’s growing immigrant populations, including the refugees from Somalia and growing numbers of immigrants from Latin America.

Moeller restructured the college administration. As head of the new Office of Multicultural Affairs, Simmons also chaired a Global Initiatives Committee that drafted a strategic plan for internationalization. And Columbus State got into distance education in a large way. Some 8,300 students now take courses online, with a choice of more than 290 distance education courses and five online degrees offered through Columbus State’s Global Campus.

Queen—who had gone to work for Battelle Memorial Institute with his degree in mechanical engineering technology—had returned to the college to teach in 1985 and was chair of its engineering technologies program when asked to run the new Office of International Initiatives and Community Outreach.

“At the time we had very little experience with internationalization or globalization,” he recalled. “We had to define what it meant when you said you wanted to internationalize your curriculum. What does this umbrella look like? What are the components of the curriculum? We had to find out who the players were, who was working in this arena and who was doing what.”

“We became involved,” said Queen, “and anywhere there was an opportunity for us to gain some insight, we were there to learn about it and see how that might fit into our structure.”

Finding Needs and Filling Them

“One of the ways we moved forward in this international work was we found [opportunities] where people were not working,” said Queen. “For example, we found that universities had been working for a long time with the State Department and U.S. AID [Agency for International Development] doing contract training, but community colleges were not really involved. The same was true with the World Bank on some of their programs.

“So we took the initiative to start finding out more about the  World Bank, the Associate Liaison Office of AID, and also the  National Council for International Visitors. We wanted to know, how do we bring dignitaries from other countries into the United States and more important, how do we get them on our campus?” Queen said. 

Simmons, who moved to Ohio from Georgia in 1969 to earn his master’s degree and doctorate at Ohio State, said that once the college began reaching out and expanding its horizons, it found plenty of takers. “It turned out there were lots of people out there in central Ohio who truly wanted to become affiliated with the college in some way,” Simmons said. One connection led to another.

The educators maintain close ties with the city of Columbus’s Office of Community Relations, which works with the region’s immigrants and refugees. “The director has a program on cable television every week in which he talks about what’s going on in our community.  He might be talking with groups that put on a huge Asian festival at one of the local parks each spring, and invariably in that conversation, our name may come up: ‘What about Columbus State? Have you talked with them?’ That’s how we keep becoming more and more involved in lots and lots of activities,” said Simmons.

Workforce Development

Columbus State is very attuned to the needs of major employers in the region, and many companies have enlisted its help for English language classes and workforce training.

“We have a workforce development unit on campus that almost at the drop of a hat can develop programs and youth training for different groups in the community, and we also have a business and industry unit that’s also geared to [outside contract work,]” Simmons said. “We provide ESL courses, we provide training for police officers in different languages, we provide training for social service workers.” 

“We work closely with Ohio State University. We’re fortunate to have them as our neighbor and good friends,” said Queen. Ohio State’s Center for Education, Training and Employment does  contract training around the globe “and they look to us to provide the vocational, technical aspects of a curriculum.” 

A Willingness to “Give It a Try”

A willingness to take risks has also served Columbus State well. For example, Columbus State learned from the international liaison at the American Association of Community Colleges that it was having difficulty finding a college willing to provide curriculum development training for a World Bank project in Hungary.

“Well, we know curriculum development and workforce education very well. We decided to give it a try,” said Queen. FAS International, the subcontractor on the World Bank contract, brought three groups of 21 educators from Hungary to Columbus State  for instruction on curriculum development and how to validate a curriculum with industry.

“We’ve done several more since,” said Queen. After figuring out how to provide such training in Columbus, Queen said, they realized they could also “take our faculty across the water to their place.”

With Tanzania, Columbus State first did a pilot distance education project, and then exchanged faculty members. When the American Association of Community Colleges arranged a match-making session with Chinese institutions in Beijing in 2004, Columbus State was there. It has since hosted a training session for Chinese business executives who needed to learn about the World Trade Organization.

“It’s all really about people-to-people,” said Queen.

Helping Students Find Opportunities

Columbus State currently enrolls 465 international students. Helvi Itenge, a computer technology student from Windhoek, Namibia, marvels that the computer labs are open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily. Bola Jinadu of Lagos, Nigeria, said, “The environment, the teachers, the students, they make you feel welcome. They make you feel like they actually want you to be here and they are out there to listen to you and to help you in any way they can.”

Itenge, Jinadu and Sophie Metaferia from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, all serve as Student Ambassadors, a program that provides scholarships for top students to serve as goodwill emissaries for the college with prospective students and community groups.

Metaferia’s father was a physician who died when she was 3. She still remembers people back home talking about how much good he did. “This college has opened a lot of choices for me,” said Metaferia. “Now, I want to be a medical doctor… I want to do my part to help my people.”

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

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

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

Leaders for an Interconnected Global World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Issues in the Developing World

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

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

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

Public and Social Policy Studies

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

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

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

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

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

Getting Students Out Into the World

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

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

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

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

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

Global Learning Institutes

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

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

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

Integrating Internationalization

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

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

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

Outreach Challenges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Serving International Students and Scholars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Integrating All Aspects of the UCLA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Long History of Placing Importance on International Education

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

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

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

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

Education Abroad Opportunities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laying Out the Welcome Mat

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

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

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

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

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

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

Business, Engineering, Architecture, Dance, and More

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ethnic, Cultural, and Language Studies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making Connections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KU Law School Prioritizes International Aspects

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

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

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

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

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

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

Internationalizing Scientific Research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is the stuff of dreams of college presidents and international educators everywhere: A wealthy and generous benefactor comes along, opens a checkbook and says, “You can enroll some of the brightest, most able and accomplished international students in the world. Send us the full bill.” 

This actually happened five years ago to Colby College and a handful of other top U.S. colleges and universities, and none moved with more alacrity to make the most of the opportunity than Colby. The standing offer from financier-philanthropist Shelby M.C. Davis and family has enabled the Maine college to attract scores of students from the network of United World Colleges (UWC). UWC is a federation of 10 boarding schools on five continents that provides two years of International Baccalaureate classes, service opportunities, and leadership training to high achievers from dozens of countries in hopes that they will make the world a better place.

Without question the Davis UWC scholars have made Colby a better place. The faculty cannot stop talking about them—about how they raise the level of intellectual discourse in classes from advanced calculus to international relations to religion. Dasan M. Thamattoor, an associate professor of chemistry, marveled, “They go beyond what we teach them. In my line of work we’re doing organic chemistry, but they talk about politics and art and music. The conversation with students has been just phenomenal.” Referring to Stanislav Presolski ’05 from Pleven, Bulgaria, he said, “I can talk with Stan about anything from Italian cooking to the opera. Stan actually spent some time in Italy.”

At United World College of the Adriatic outside of Trieste, Italy, to be specific. As he readied to receive his diploma summa cum laude and move on to graduate work in biochemistry at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California, the engaging Presolski said Colby needs “to improve on their propaganda—I use the word in the good sense” to recruit even more international students to central Maine. “Maine sounds pretty cold by definition, and Waterville sounds like—well, where is it. Many international students don’t realize the excellent opportunities they are given at Colby,” said Presolski, who spent his junior year at Oxford.

Presolski, 22, the son of a gynecologist and a surgeon, once described to Colby magazine an epiphany he had in a freshman English composition class, writing about the treatment of gypsies in Bulgaria. “Back home, when I was reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I would say, ‘Wow, see how Americans are so cruel in their treatment of black people.’ But I had never questioned myself or considered that I had the same kind of bad opinion of the gypsies,” the magazine quoted him in a Fall 2002 article.

Director of Admissions Steve Thomas and  colleagues regularly make recruiting visits to the UWC colleges located in Hong Kong, India, Italy, Norway, Singapore, and Wales as well as Lester B. Pearson UWC of the Pacific in Victoria, British Columbia, and Armand Hammer UWC of the American West in Montezuma, New Mexico (There are also UWCs in Swaziland and Venezuela). Thomas said no one at Colby fully appreciated the impact these students would have on their U.S. classmates. “They’re seeing these kids doing this in a third or fourth language and they end up striving for more as a result,” said Thomas. “To really appreciate what these kids are doing, you have to ask yourself, ‘Could I do this in Romanian or Czech?’”

Thomas said the ability to admit UWC graduates without regard to need “has been absolutely amazing. If we had unlimited funding for the non–UWC kids, and you admitted the top kids, we’d admit at least 200, 300 more kids out of the international pool.” 

Financial Aid Helps Campus Internationalize

With 1,800 students and a faculty that combines a passion for scholarship with a love of teaching, Colby long has drawn students from almost every state and scores of countries. Only one student in nine calls Maine home (although many Maine students, like the UWC students, can be found clustered near the top of class rankings). But with tuition and room and board topping $41,000, Colby would be out of reach of a lot of students, U.S. and international, without extensive financial aid. Although not need blind, Colby provides aid to two-thirds of students, and those packages average more than $26,000.

The Davis scholarships are even more generous, covering the full need of UWC graduates up to $40,000. Until recently, the scholarships were limited to students who were admitted and chose to attend Colby, Princeton, Middlebury, Wellesley, or the College of the Atlantic. Recently the Davis family has made up to 50 more top U.S. campuses eligible for scholarships for UWC graduates. But Colby still attracted 27 for the Class of 2009. (The Davis UWC Scholars program is now run out of Middlebury College.) 

“They absolutely raise the intellectual level and make our American kids think in terms they’d never thought of,” said Sandy Maisel, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government and co-director of Colby’s new Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement.

“They are superb students,” agreed President William “Bro” Adams. “They are a little older, and at this time of life, a year can mean a lot. They have also had this IB [international baccalaureate] experience at UWC campuses. It’s a rigorous, tough, traditional curriculum. The third thing is they are hungry—emotionally, intellectually hungry. They get into the middle of this kind of education we provide—close quarters involvement with faculty—and they just take off.”

UWC Students Serve as Catalysts

The valedictorian and marshal of the Class of 2005 was Mark Chapman, a citizen of Zimbabwe who spent his junior year in Beijing and did a senior honors project on the reintegration of Muslims in China’s southwest corner into the Islamic world. The curly-haired Chapman, 22, double-majored in international studies and religious studies, with a minor in Chinese. He was returning to China after graduation for more language study and aspires to get a Ph.D. and “work on facilitating Chinese-African relations.” These are still turbulent times in Zimbabwe. His educator parents recently relocated to Aberdeen, Scotland. Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia and once a British colony, has been independent since 1980. Seizure of white-owned farms by the government has led to an exodus of whites and left the country’s economy in disrepair.

Chapman, a devout Anglican who was active in Christian fellowship activities, said, “It’s a difficult time for all Zimbabweans. White Zimbabweans find it difficult to imagine going back home.” His closest friends in Zimbabwe—including a goddaughter—are black. When he first enrolled in the UWC College of the Pacific in Victoria, British Columbia, “I found it strange to be around so many white people.”

“I definitely have a very strong attachment to Africa. I would like to live there in the long run. But I’m much more an Africanist than a nationalist,” he said. Asked if he felt the UWC alumni were both educators and students at Colby, Chapman said, “To a degree. I certainly don’t represent all of Zimbabwe or Africa. But one thing that a lot of international students bring is a confidence in the classroom. You’re more comfortable sharing your own  experiences.” That in turn makes the Americans more willing to talk about their experiences, he said. “In that sense we can serve as a catalyst for discussion. That’s beneficial. It’s not so much knowledge that we bring, but rather a different perspective.”

Perspectives on Issues Unlike Those From Inside the United States

Kenneth A. Rodman, the William R. Cotter Distinguished Teaching Professor of Government and director of Colby’s Oak Institute for the Study of International Human Rights, said the perspectives from students from outside the United States “create debates that American conservatives and American liberals wouldn’t have with each other. That enriches what goes on in the classroom.”

He offered two examples. “I had a Brazilian student in a class on business and American foreign policy. We were talking about oil disputes in Latin America, controversies over governments expropriating or changing contracts for multinationals. This Brazilian student was very pro-business, but when one U.S. student referred to it as ‘our oil,’ the Brazilian student said, ‘Our oil?’ He made the class confront questions of nationalism,” said Rodman. “On the other side of the spectrum, a student from the United States gave a presentation in one of my classes on female genital mutilation. Her viewpoint was very idealistic and feminist. A student from Angola, a feminist herself, asked, ‘Well, what are you going to do? Are you going to go into these villages to just liberate people? Do you understand the culture?’

“In those two cases, the American students expressed a point of view and were challenged by foreign students who may agree with much of their basic orientation, but confronted them with arguments they wouldn’t hear from other American students,” said Rodman. “It’s a way of challenging your ethnocentrism. It’s eye-opening. It forces us to get out of the Crossfire or Fox News mentality where you’re basically grafting onto other parts of the world our own idiocies.”

Rodman was the first director of Colby’s 15-year-old international studies program and is the founding director of the Oak Institute for the Study of International Human Rights. Every year since 1999 Colby has invited a human rights activist to spend a semester as an Oak Fellow on the Maine campus, lecturing, conducting research, and often resting up for further battles ahead back home. The arrival of the first fellow, Zafaryab Ahmed of Pakistan, was delayed for six months when the Pakistani government refused to let him leave the country.

Colby also provides Oak scholarships to international students whose families or homelands have been victims of torture and others rights abuses.

All of these activities, said Rodman, help make Colby students smarter, more culturally aware and less likely to view the rest of the world “as an extension of the United States.”

“Whether you’re an American business person in Latin America, or a human rights activist in Africa, you have to be at least cognizant of the cultures that create those situations and have a degree of humility in pushing forward a human rights agenda,” he said. 

Cotter Initiates the Move Toward Internationalization

Rodman’s colleagues in Colby’s government department include Cal Mackenzie, a leading scholar on the presidency and the executive branch, and Maisel, an authority on political parties and elections. Maisel joined the faculty in 1971 after getting degrees at Harvard and Columbia. “I came for the good weather,” quipped the native of Buffalo, New York. In those days Colby “wasn’t international at all and it wasn’t very national; it was very New England–oriented.” Former President William R. Cotter (1979–2000) was an internationalist who had served as the Ford Foundation’s representative for Colombia and Venezuela and worked as an assistant attorney general in northern Nigeria. It was on his watch that two-thirds of Colby students began studying abroad for at least one semester. In the 2004 Open Doors, Colby ranked seventh among liberal arts colleges in study abr/oad, with an 82 percent participation rate by its 2003 graduates (including summer and January-term experiences). Cotter, who was president of the African-American Institute before taking the Colby post, became president of the Oak Foundation after he left Mayflower Hill. Oak is an international philanthropy that works to protect human rights, curb abuse, and safeguard the environment.

“Bill Cotter had never worked on a campus before, but he had a vision of internationalizing both the student body and the curriculum. That made a huge difference,” said Maisel. The students who study abroad “come back to a campus where international issues are really quite prominent in both the curriculum and extracurricular activities.” Colby was among the first U.S. campuses to institute a January term. To deal with enrollment imbalances, it also allows some incoming freshman to begin their careers studying at Colby programs in France and Spain, then matriculate on the Waterville campus in the winter.

William Adams, a social philosopher who had been a senior administrator at Wesleyan University and president at Bucknell University, engaged the entire college community in a year-long exercise to develop a strategic plan for Colby soon after his inauguration as Colby’s president in 2000, and the college now is preparing a major fundraising drive to carry out those ambitious plans.

The Goldfarb Center

The creation of the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement was one of the first and most visible fruits of the new blueprint for Colby’s future. Maisel and his colleague, James W. Meehan Jr., the Herbert E. Wadsworth Professor of Economics, both made the case that the college needed a highly visible public affairs center to galvanize a host of interdisciplinary efforts on issues of national and international importance. The college found a sympathetic ear in investor, trustee, and benefactor William Goldfarb ’68. The Goldfarb Center has hosted lectures and conferences in its first two years on topics ranging from terrorism and civil liberties to AIDS and public health issues in Russia. In 2006-07 it will move into the new Diamond Building at the foot of Mayflower Hill where many of Colby’s social science departments and interdisciplinary programs will reside.

“Students are involved in everything we do,” said Maisel. “They chose the films for our conference on fighting terrorism and are putting on a play. And when Philip Heymann visits [noted Harvard Law School authority on terrorism and liberty], 20 of the 35 people invited to have dinner with him will be students.”

The internationalization of the curriculum has been “a very real change on the Colby campus,” added the government professor. “I’m an Americanist and it is really easy for me to Americanize any program. But I have set as a goal of mine to internationalize the Goldfarb Center program as much as we can.” He envisions the Goldfarb Center’s enlisting help from alumni to land international internships for students—from London to Capetown to Singapore. It is already helping pay for students to conduct research overseas. After a fall 2004 seminar on corporate social responsibility, five seniors received help from the Goldfarb Center to spend January 2005 in Chile working for Vincular, a nonprofit organization whose goal is encouraging businesses across Latin America to be good employers and good citizens.

The five students—Melissa Landau of Pound Ridge, New York, Jonah Waxman of Piedmont, California, Alan Ashbaugh of Needham, Massachusetts, Shannon Emerson of  West Friendship, Maryland, and Caitlin McCusker of Lakewood, Colorado—all were fluent Spanish speakers. Some had previously studied in Latin America. They visited Chilean fruit exporters as well as a Spanish-owned electrical company trying to convince customers of the need for higher rates to improve the safety and reliability of service.

Ashbaugh said it also became obvious to the students that “we became good publicity” for the companies to show off their corporate social responsibility programs. There were stories in the local media about the student interns, and the utility, Chilectrica, “actually put us on a poster.”

Channeling Enthusiasm in Education Abroad

Colby runs a small number of its own study abroad programs, but it is careful about which programs students can go on for credit. “Our job is not to talk them into it, but to channel the enthusiasm into the appropriate venues, make sure they’ve thought about what they want to do and why, and how it relates to what they’ve done at Colby and what they want to do afterwards,” said Martha Denney, associate dean of faculty and director of Off-Campus Study.

Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin are dissolving a consortium that sent students and faculty to Quito, Ecuador, Capetown, South Africa, and London. “It was much more difficult and financially challenging than anyone had anticipated,” she said, and harder to convince students from the three colleges that this was where they should study abroad.

Colby still runs its own programs in Salamanca, Spain, Dijon, France, and Cork, Ireland, as well as one in St. Petersburg for  Russian majors.

International Studies Benefits from Addition of More International Students

Associate Dean of Students Sue McDougal advises international students; her office is practically their clubhouse. She is in charge of their orientation, and she takes newcomers on shopping trips for winter coats and boots at the L.L. Bean outlet store in Freeport. One January she went to Bulgaria and visited the families of the large Bulgarian contingent on the Waterville campus.

“We had a big gathering at a tea house in Sofia. I was so excited to get back here to tell each of the students that I’d met their moms or dads and brothers and sisters and what we talked about,” she said. “But by the time I got back, it was old news. Every single one of them had e-mailed home and all the kids knew all the conversations. I felt like I had nothing to share."

Associate Professor of Government and International Studies Jennifer Yoder, a specialist on the transition from communism in eastern Germany and other former Soviet bloc states, says the rise of international studies at Colby and elsewhere has tracked the move toward globalization, increased international openness, growth in study abroad, and “more awareness that what happens in the United States is affected by what’s going on internationally.”

International studies majors “tend to be much more adventurous than a typical American traveler, more interested in visiting developing countries, going to places where they can use their language skills and not fall back on English,” said Yoder.

The arrival of UWC graduates in large numbers has “changed the classroom—my classroom, my colleagues’ classrooms. The level of intellectual discourse has been raised,” Yoder said.

“It happens all the time. Last semester, in a course on political ideologies of Europe, I was talking about communist ideology. Most of the American students have this conventional idea about communism being so deeply flawed and the cause of so much death and destruction in the world. There was a Hungarian student who said, ‘OK, I understand that, but let me tell you what attracted my grandparents to communism,’” she related.

Emilia Tjernstrom ’06, a native of Stockholm, Sweden, and graduate of the Red Cross Nordic UWC in Norway, worked with street children during the semester she studied in Morocco. An economics and math major, she is an activist in the Movement for Social Justice, a member of the Woodsmen’s Team, and manager of the annual springtime International Extravaganza. She spent the summer doing field research in Mongolia.

Tjernstrom, sporting ribbons opposing violence against women and supporting gay rights and wearing a keffiyeh scarf for Palestinian statehood around her neck, said she has learned much from her U.S. classmates. “Colby focuses a lot on the visible diversity, the things we can notice. There’s a lot of diversity within the Americans also, a lot I can learn from them. I’m from a socialist country. I take so many things for granted, being from Sweden. I just assume people are willing to give up [some] of their own consumption to make sure that the rest of society can have medical care. Here people have a very different perspective.”

French Department Expands Focus

Colby’s French Department has made the transition from focusing exclusively on the literature and culture of France to that of the wider French-speaking world. Professor Suellen Diaconoff, on the verge of retirement, switched her research interest from eighteenth century France to the writings of the modern Scheherazades of Morocco. “We call ourselves French studies right now. We have a very strong Francophone identity, which means that it’s all the countries where French is spoken. We run Jan [January] Plans to Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, where they speak French like in Paris but also Creole,” she said. “I also ran a Jan Plan to Morocco in 2001. We went out to Rabat, Casablanca, Fez to study women’s NGOs.”

The ranks of French majors have swelled to 50.

A Diversity of Experience on a Small Campus

Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, the Crawford Family Professor of Religion, teaches the religions of Asia including her own, Sikhism. Dressed in a bright silk sari, she said with a laugh, “In America I became more Indian. I had never worn a sari in my life” before leaving a convent school in India to attend Stuart Hall in Virginia and later Wellesley College. Her father was a Sikh writer and scholar.

Last year Singh was surprised and moved to come across a troupe of students dancing to Punjabi folk melodies she remembered from girlhood. The performance—mixing the classical Indian dance Bharat Natyam with modern dance—was choreographed by Julia Hutchinson ’07 after she returned from studying in India. 

Paul Josephson, associate professor of history and director of the Science, Technology and Society Program, is a Sovietologist and Russian expert who did his Ph.D. at MIT on the history of Soviet physics. The lanky Josephson, a marathon runner who trains 50 miles a week in sun, rain, or snow, is a zealot about the need for students to master the languages of the regions they study.

“I’m trying to learn Bulgarian myself. I’ve given up on Hungarian, but I can read Ukrainian, and I’m also teaching myself to read Polish,” said Josephson, who is fluent in Russian and German. “I explain to my students the importance of learning foreign languages as a ticket abroad, as a gateway to other cultures.”

Erica Hill ’05 from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, was an international studies and economics major who took every opportunity to internationalize her Colby education. Hill, who headed off to Peru a month after graduation for Peace Corps training, spent a semester in Thailand studying at Chiang Mai University and spent January 2005 in Guatemala researching her honors thesis on village banking systems. She also did an internship one summer in Japan.

“Colby has given me so many opportunities to do international things. I kind of think that’s how every college is now with globalization, but I realize it’s not,” said Hill.

Classmate Rodney Yeoh ’05, a UWC scholar from Itoh, Malaysia, was a finalist for Malaysia’s lone Rhodes Scholarship. He had to fly home to Kuala Lumpur over Thanksgiving 2004 for the interview.

Yeoh, whose father runs a hardware business, came to Colby with plans for medical school, but got captivated instead by religious studies. He studied Aboriginal religions in Australia for a semester as a junior, and now is pursuing a doctoral degree at Harvard Divinity School. His ambition? To become a documentary filmmaker exploring the connections between religions and violence.

President Adams said Colby is still figuring out how to draw its increasingly diverse student body—both the international students and U.S. minority students—fully into campus life and activities. 

That happens naturally in the classroom, “but in the broader zone of campus life we’re still trying to find out how you maximize the impact and the educational efficacy of having these interesting students with you. The melting pot doesn’t melt perfectly spontaneously.”
 

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

Refusing to Settle for Less

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building on Engineering, Agriculture, and Management Strengths

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

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

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

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

Flexibility Has Increased  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seedbeds for Internationalization

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

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

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

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

Local Students Benefit from Internationalizing

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

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

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

Connecting to Asia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Growing Internship Programs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Focused Thinking

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

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

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