Relationship Cultivation

New York University’s prodigious number of international students (7,200) and participation in education abroad (4,300) have long solidified its place among the most international U.S. universities. Now it has laid claim to the title of the world’s first “global network university,” with a new liberal arts college open in Abu Dhabi, a second in the works for Shanghai, and nearly a dozen other sites around the world where NYU students go to study. Most of its 43,000 students still throng the buildings with their signature violet flags that surround Washington Square. Amending the 1831 pronouncement by Albert Gallatin and other founders that they were creating a university “in and of the city,” President John Sexton describes today’s NYU as “in and of the world.” 

Sexton, seated in his office atop red sandstone Bobst Library with a red-tailed hawk nesting outside his window, said the concept of the global network university is still evolving, but like a Polaroid picture becoming clearer over time. It is not, he emphasized, merely a hub-and-spoke arrangement or set of affiliated branches. “We see the university as an organism, a circulatory system” for faculty and students to move between continents for learning and research, Sexton said. He recalled a conversation over breakfast at Chequers with then Chancellor of the Exchequer of Britain Gordon Brown, who remarked that NYU’s ambitious conception brought to mind the Italian Renaissance “and the way the talent class moved among Milan and Venice and Florence and Rome.” That captures in a nutshell “the world view in which we see ourselves operating,” said Sexton.

The peripatetic Sexton had just returned from a 12day journey to Abu Dhabi, Singapore, South Korea, and Abu Dhabi again. A Brooklyn native, Sexton was schooled by the Jesuits at Fordham University to be a professor of religion, then retooled at Harvard Law School as a legal scholar. He has played a multitude of parts—champion high school debate coach, clerk to the Chief Justice of the United States, law school dean, and chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He is wont to quote Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Buber, Diogenes (“I am a citizen of the world”), and Charley Winans, his mentor and faculty legend at Brooklyn Prep.

Seeking an Edge in Global Talent Competition

Sexton believes NYU has gained an edge in a global competition for talent, such as the prominent economist it landed by offering to let him teach every fourth year in Abu Dhabi, closer to his wife’s family in Pakistan. He can envision the future Shanghai campus luring a world-class mathematician with aging parents in China. Already Sexton and Alfred Bloom, vice chancellor for NYU Abu Dhabi, boast of creating “the world’s honors college” in the Middle East emirate. NYU and its Abu Dhabi patron flew several hundred high school seniors to the emirate for weekend visits before admitting the first class of 149, one-third American. The median SAT verbal and math scores were 1470. NYU Abu Dhabi in May awarded $16 million over five years for four joint-faculty research projects that will be based in Abu Dhabi and deal with climate modeling, computer security and privacy, cloud computing, and computational physics. Sexton has promised that all of NYU’s overseas operations will be self-sustaining and won’t siphon resources from Washington Square.

Vice Provost for Globalization and Multicultural Affairs Ulrich Baer presides over NYU’s 10 global academic centers for education abroad in Accra, Ghana; Berlin, Germany; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Florence, Italy; London, England; Madrid, Spain; Paris, France; Prague, Czech Republic; Shanghai, China, and Tel Aviv, Israel. Two sites are planned for Sydney, Australia, and Washington, D.C., and Sexton expects to open two more in South America and South Asia. With Abu Dhabi—Washington Square students will be able to spend a semester there—NYU’s global network will feature at least 16 sites by 2014.

Baer, who rowed crew at Harvard as an international student from Germany and did his PhD in comparative literature at Yale, has authored books on photography and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and edited a literary anthology about the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. Apart from providing academic and intellectual leadership for NYU’s global network, Baer’s duties now include negotiating long-term leases for more housing in London and Paris as well as explaining to NYU students why they can party in dorms in some parts of the world but not others. “The university is just starting to grasp what it means to operate globally like most corporations do,” he said. “You move people around. When you’re in Shanghai, do we pay for your dental insurance or not?” 

“I felt like I had died and gone to international education heaven.”

An Ethos of Education Abroad

Given the size of NYU’s education abroad program, it might be expected that this enterprise operates from a high visibility office with heavy foot traffic. That is not the case. Although NYU aspires to soon unify international operations in a single location, Baer and the Office of Global Programs currently occupy a suite on the eleventh floor of Bobst Library, while most education abroad staff work out of the lower level of a high-rise residence ten blocks away. They make education abroad pitches at innumerable orientation sessions but leave it to academic advisers within NYU’s 16 schools to close the sales. “Each college has a point person. By the time they get to us, they typically have decided,” said Associate Director Jaci Czarnecki. “We might meet with them to talk about which location makes the most sense and what they need to do to apply and be admitted and get there.” Education abroad is so ingrained in the NYU experience that most students don’t need a lot of convincing, she added. 

Some undergraduates are admitted to spend their first year at NYU centers in Florence, London, Paris, or Shanghai. Sophomore Mercedes Moya, U.S. born but raised in Paris, started at La Pietra, the Florence estate where students live and attend classes. “For me, New York is abroad,” said Moya, a politics and Italian major. “It was the city that drew me here. New York is definitely the capital of the world.”

Nearly 1,000 business majors study abroad each year, according to Susan Greenbaum, associate dean of the Stern School of Business. Over spring break last March, Stern flew 650 juniors in its international economics course to Budapest, Buenos Aires, or Singapore to visit businesses. An alumni benefactor supports the program. Stern also now offers a business and political economy degree in which students spend two semesters in London and a third in Shanghai. “We hope that we’ve lit them on fire” for work in the international arena, Greenbaum said.

Wanted: More International Undergraduates

The Office for International Students and Scholars (OISS) already occupies prime real estate a block from Washington Square. NYU enrolls more than 6,700 international students—one-third are undergraduates. The countries that send the most students to NYU are South Korea (1,400), China (almost 1,200), and India (more than 1,000). Most pursue master’s degrees or PhDs, but the 2,035 international undergraduates are double the number of five years ago. (Some 1,000 graduates are on Optional Practical Training.) OISS director David Austell said that when he arrived at NYU in 2007, “I felt like I had died and gone to international education heaven.”

Sexton aims to boost the number of international undergraduates from 9.1 to 20 percent. Freshman Hyun Seok Oh, a permanent resident of Hong Kong, chose NYU because he wanted to study in a metropolis like his hometown. Oh, an economics major, said, “A campus would have been nice and everything, but the advantages here outweigh the disadvantages. It’s a great place.” 

“I felt kind of lost, but then I got used to it and made a bunch of friends,” she said. Studio arts “is a small program within a huge school…(and) the advisee system is very good.”

While business is the biggest draw for international students, more than 800 are enrolled in NYU’s vibrant visual and performing arts programs. Young Eun “Grace” Lee, from Seoul, South Korea, is a studio arts major. At first NYU seemed bigger than she bargained for and “I felt kind of lost, but then I got used to it and made a bunch of friends,” she said. Studio arts “is a small program within a huge school…(and) the advisee system is very good.”

While international undergraduates live in NYU’s high rise residences, graduate students are dispersed. With sky-high rents in Greenwich Village and much of Manhattan, some find apartments across the East River in Brooklyn or across the Hudson River in Jersey City, Hoboken, and other areas linked to the city by rapid transit.

The plan is to eventually enroll 2,000 students at NYU Abu Dhabi and as many as 3,000 in Shanghai, which will start in 2013. Sexton enlisted May Lee, an NYU-trained lawyer and banker, to negotiate terms with the Chinese Ministry of Education, Shanghai’s municipal government, the government of the special Pudong district, and East China Normal University. Lee, associate vice chancellor for Asia and daughter of Chinese immigrants, said the idea of bringing American-style education to China and helping the Chinese build a bridge to Westerners “really struck a chord with me.”

Turning Students Into ‘Inspired’ Jazz Musicians in Europe

Faculty in this large, decentralized university continue to find ways to entice U.S. students to venture into the world. David Schroeder, director of jazz studies, has turned Florence and Prague into favored destinations for music majors. “Nobody wants to leave New York as a jazz musician,” said Schroeder, but while his students are treated as greenhorns in Manhattan, “in Europe they’re considered those young, inspired jazz musicians from New York City.”

Junior Zach Feldman, 20, a music business major, was a deejay at the Hard Rock Cafe Prague and arranged parties that drew hundreds to other clubs in fall 2010. “It was really cool, dealing with club owners who didn’t speak any English,” he said. “Literally half the sophomore class (of music business majors) is going to Prague next semester (fall 2011).”

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Some 4,349 undergraduates studied abroad in 2009–10. Among the three-quarters who had declared a major, only 52 were language majors. Some global centers require language study, but most courses are taught in English. Associate Professor of Sociology Tom Ertman began the Berlin program in 2005 with non-German speakers in mind. “You could (never) run a program out of here targeting German students because there weren’t enough of them,” said Ertman. But lots of students were intrigued by the German capital’s image as “a cool, young, happening place.” Some 140 students study there each year, including large numbers from NYU’s Steinhardt art programs.

What China Wants From Washington Square

Xudong Zhang, a comparative literature professor and chair of East Asian studies, said Chinese language enrollments have grown “at an explosive rate” and now top 1,000. Zhang helped launch the Shanghai education abroad center in 2006 and directs China House, one of the NYU language and culture centers. China House soon will move into a new home alongside La Maison Française and Deutsches Haus on charming Washington Mews, a gated block of converted nineteenth century stables.

Zhang grew up in Shanghai, the son of naval research engineers. East Asian studies, he said, will be “no more special than other departments” in the partnership with East China Normal University. “What leading Chinese universities want from us is not ethnic Chinese faculty like me; they want our best researchers in science, social sciences, and the arts.”

President Sexton knows what his partners want and what NYU wants, which is to become one of the two or three dozen premiere research universities in the world. Many rivals have greater space and more resources, Sexton averred, but they cannot match NYU’s “locational endowment”—New York City—and “attitudinal endowment”—its aggressive entrepreneurship.

The unwieldy name of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) recalls its 1969 birth as an institution combining the Indiana University School of Medicine and allied schools with the extension branch of the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology and sister components. There are twin faculties under a common dean, separate course numbering systems, and separate IU or Purdue diplomas depending on which school a student attends. Notwithstanding the vestiges of split identity, IUPUI has grown into an urban research university with 30,000 students and a distinctive emphasis on international education.

“Comprehensive programs of internationalization come neither easily nor naturally to institutions like IUPUI,” said former Associate Vice Chancellor for International Affairs Susan Buck Sutton. Its internationalization has “defied the odds not by replicating the historical modes of international education found elsewhere but by thinking through what new forms of internationalization might fit the new kind of institution.” For IUPUI, said William Plater, retired executive vice chancellor and dean, internationalization became “a way to unite the campus.”

After Sutton became the international affairs office first full-time director in 2003, she winnowed a bulging, cobwebbed pile of Memoranda of Understanding (MOU) that she inherited. “We had signed around 200 over the years, and with most, nothing (ever) happened,” said Sutton. “It seemed like a friendly thing to do but, after a nice dinner in Bangkok or in Paris or wherever, no one ever thought about what would be needed to sustain the MOU.” 

Strategic Partnerships: The International Fulcrum

IUPUI concentrated on developing close relationships with a limited number of universities. “Internationalization through institutional partnerships has become our defining feature,” said Sutton, an anthropologist who retired this past spring but is spending a year doing international work for Bryn Mawr College. “You collaborate not just in sending students back and forth but in curriculum development, teaching in each others’ classes, and joint research projects.” Such strategic partnerships draw in “faculty and students who previously would never have done anything international,” she added.

“Internationalization through institutional partnerships has become our defining feature....You collaborate not just in sending students back and forth but in curriculum development, teaching in each others’ classes, and joint research projects.”

After campus-wide discussions involving hundreds of faculty and administrators, IUPUI settled on Moi University in Eldoret, Kenya; Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China; and the Autonomous University of the State of Hidalgo (AUEH) in Pachuca, Mexico, as its three closest partners. IUPUI already had a strong base upon which to build its Kenyan ties: the Indiana University School of Medicine helped Moi build its school of medicine in the late 1980s and ever since has been sending a faculty physician for a full year and residents and students on rotations.

The IU-Kenya partnership took an extraordinary turn after Professor Joe Mamlin discovered in 2000 that a Moi medical student was among the AIDS patients dying with only palliative care in Moi’s hospital. Mamlin secured antiretroviral drugs for Daniel Ochieng, who recovered, and set about creating a community-based program called the Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare (AMPATH), which today provides AIDS medicines and primary health care to 120,000 Kenyans in dozens of clinics across western Kenya. Seven other U.S. medical schools have joined the effort, which has grown thanks to $60 million in funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development. Fran Quigley, associate director of AMPATH and a clinical professor at the IUPUI School of Law, told the AMPATH story in a 2009 book, Walking Together, Walking Far.

Reaching Across the Curriculum

The IUPUI partnership with Moi now extends well beyond this celebrated medical collaboration. Chancellor Charles Bantz and Moi Chancellor Bethwel A. Ogot in 2006 signed an agreement forging a strategic alliance that has led to joint projects in education, social work, informatics, engineering, business, and other fields.

A campus-wide faculty committee spent two years developing a dozen international learning goals that apply equally to the professional schools as well as the liberal arts. “It’s relatively easy for liberal arts folks, but what is international learning for students in the school of engineering? What about the school of nursing? What about tourism management?” asked Sutton. Understanding societies and cultures became a main objective for student learning.

IUPUI’s Department of Tourism, Conventions, and Event Management twice has sent faculty and students to a town in the Rift Valley where Lornah Kiplagat, a four-time world champion runner, operates the High Altitude Training Centre. They helped the center revamp its Web site and improve marketing aimed at sports teams and tourists from Europe. Kiplagat aspires to open a boarding school for girls at the facility, which is 8,000 feet above sea level. The IUPUI visitors gave advice to women in nearby villages about how to draw more tourists with arts and crafts. They also shared information on health and fitness because obesity is a growing problem, even in a land famed for its fleet runners, according to Assistant Professor of Physical Education Brian Culp.

Ian McIntosh, director of international partnerships, helped organize two reconciliation conferences in Kenya following postelection violence. He also brought Rwandans from both sides of that country’s 1990s civil war and genocide together for a reconciliation conference in Indianapolis. “If you can find ways for students, staff, or faculty to be meaningfully engaged and doing something important in their life, they’ll jump at it,” said McIntosh, an Australian and veteran of work with indigenous peoples.

Impact Overseas and in Indianapolis

The close relationships with Sun Yat-Sen and AUEH have rippled through IUPUI’s hometown. The partnership with Sun Yat-Sen helped IUPUI land a Confucius Institute, not unusual by itself—there are 68 Confucius Institutes across the United States and more than 300 worldwide that promote study of Chinese language and culture—but this was the third institute for Indiana. Only five states have three or more.

It is also the only one headed by a cell biologist. The “day” job for professor-physician-scientist Zao C. “Joe” Xu is running a National Institutes of Health-funded research lab that studies strokes. Xu was skeptical when Guangmei Yan, vice president of Sun Yat-Sen and a former colleague in China, asked him to add leadership of the Confucius Institute to his duties. “I’m not a Chinese studies expert or a language expert. What do you want me for?” he asked.

Yan replied that having attained such professional stature at IUPUI, Xu should make time to contribute to strengthening “the most important bilateral relationship in the world.” Chancellor Bantz and civic leaders play active roles on the institute’s advisory board. It helped mount the first Indianapolis Chinese Festival, subsidizes study abroad in Guangzhou, and runs a language-and-culture day camp for youngsters. “Of course we teach Chinese, but we do more than that,” said Xu. “People are turning to China now. Business is one thing, but the cultural ties…and people-to-people (relationships) will last forever.”

IUPUI and Sun Yat-Sen soon will offer 2+2 bachelor degrees in a half dozen fields, where students earn degrees from both universities after spending two years at each. IUPUI had a 2+2 program for undergraduate engineers with the University of Tehran in Iran until 2009 when they were unable to win U.S. Treasury Department approval for joint master’s degrees.

The partnership with AUEH “is an organic outgrowth of the increasing migratory ties between this heartland area of Mexico and the heartland state of Indiana,” Sutton said. One fruit is a $1 million research collaboration called the Binational Cross-Cultural Health Enhancement Center (BiCCHEC) that engages faculty from many disciplines to work on solutions to problems with oral health, nutrition, and diabetes in distant Mexican towns and immigrant communities in Indiana. Hospitals at IUPUI and AUEH exchange pediatric resident doctors, and medical, nursing and dental students perform service in Jalisco and other Mexican towns.

“IUPUI has doubled its international student numbers to nearly 1,400 over a decade, and Bantz, the chancellor, is eager for more. ‘Great international students are going to raise everybody’s performance.’”

Associate Professor of Dentistry Angeles Martinez-Mier, an expert on fluoride and decay prevention, leads BiCCHEC, which was designated one of IUPUI’s first Signature Centers of Excellence in 2006. Martinez-Mier, herself from Mexico, said they brought IUPUI anthropologists, historians, engineers, educators, and other faculty into the mix because “we soon realized you cannot deal with these health issues if you don’t tackle the social determinants of health.” The learning goes both ways. IU’s James Whitcomb Riley Hospital for Children made adjustments to its bereavement program after a faculty member witnessed how in Hidalgo a hospital for children with serious disabilities helped the parents to grieve.

Michael Snodgrass, associate professor of Latin American history, has studied how immigrants from western Mexico have revitalized run-down Indianapolis neighborhoods. Snodgrass now chairs the fast-growing international studies program.

Making Service a Centerpiece of International Education

IUPUI’s robust Center for Service and Learning has a 12-person staff headed by Bob Bringle, a psychology professor who consults with universities around the world on service learning. Bringle has hosted national workshops and coedited a book on international service learning. He argues that even short-term participation heightens students’ knowledge, ethical sensitivity, and interest in global issues. “A third of our study abroad courses have a service-learning component,” said Bringle, who once helped Sutton add a service component to the summer course on modern Greece she taught on the island of Paros. IUPUI Informatics students still perform service on Paros, such as producing videos at the mayor’s request to promote the island’s cultural heritage, said Stephanie Leslie, director of study abroad.

David Jan Cowan, director of the architectural technology program with the School of Engineering and Technology, has led IUPUI students to Thailand and Indonesia under the aegis of his Global Design Studio, a volunteer project that helps communities recovering from disasters or blight. Cowan, now an associate professor, said international activities “launched my career” at IUPUI. 

Backing International Ambitions With Resources

IUPUI’s global emphasis received a shot in the arm in 2005 when it joined the American Council on Education’s Internationalization Collaborative. The international affairs office, which Plater remembers as having a budget of $500 when it started in 1987, has matured into a $1.7 million operation with a staff of 30 and prime space in a heavily trafficked building in the heart of campus. 

IUPUI has doubled its international student numbers to nearly 1,400 over a decade, and Bantz, the chancellor, is eager for more. “Great international students are going to raise everybody’s performance,” he said. Among those students is Wenting Jiang, 24, a junior marketing major from Hangzhou, China. “We can say the entire downtown is our campus,” said Jiang. “Although we cannot work off campus, I personally get lots of chances to visit companies and do some networking.”
The emphasis at IUPUI on global health drew junior Pich Seekaew, 19, a premed biology major from Chang Rai, Thailand, who founded a chapter of the Timmy Foundation, which sends medical volunteers overseas. “We’re trying to increase the engagement between these amazing (health) schools on campus.”

Challenge of Internationalizing a Commuter Campus

Study abroad numbers at the predominantly commuter school are also up more than twofold to 410. More than 6,000 of the 22,000 undergraduates attend classes part-time. IUPUI was open admissions until a decade ago. The six-year graduation rate for freshmen who enrolled in fall 2004 was just 34 percent (This is an Indiana-wide problem; the manufacturing-heavy state ranks 42nd in percentage of adults with bachelor’s degrees). 

The freshman retention rate has jumped from 64 to 73 percent over the past five years and Executive Vice Chancellor Uday Sukhatme is seeking to further enrich the student experience with his RISE to the IUPUI Challenge initiative, which encourages all undergraduates to engage in Research, International, Service, and Experiential learning or RISE (the name Uday means rise in Hindi). Students who complete at least two of these activities get a special notation on their transcripts. The first to do all four was senior Cora Daniel, 22, a nursing major from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who worked in a Kenyan orphanage, studied in Strasbourg, France, and was headed after graduation to Benin as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Recognizing that not everyone can fit education abroad into their schedule, global dialogue courses allow students to talk over videoconference links with counterparts in classrooms in Mexico, Russia, and elsewhere. “We’ve had nursing classes, education classes, and others,” said Dawn Whitehead, director of curriculum internationalization. Freshmen are targeted because “we want them to have this international perspective as early as possible.”

Amid the woods, lakes, and prairies of Central Minnesota, the College of Saint Benedict (CSB) for women and Saint John’s University (SJU) for men provide a liberal arts education suffused with international experiences and coursework. Saint Benedict and Saint John’s ranked first among baccalaureate institutions in semester-long education abroad and 13th in international student enrollment in the 2011 Open Doors report. The biggest department—management—recently overhauled its curriculum and changed its name to the Department of Global Business Leadership. CSB and SJU have one of the most unusual coeducational arrangements in U.S. higher education: two campuses, four miles apart with two presidents but a single faculty and school buses that ferry students back and forth during half-hour breaks between 70-minute classes.

The separate campuses are bound by shared Benedictine values—monks founded Saint John’s in 1856 and nuns opened Saint Benedict in 1913. Saint John’s recently named its first lay president,  Michael Hemesath, an alumnus and Carlton College professor of economics, and shifted to lay control, as the sisters did half a century ago. Father Bob Koopmann, the last Benedictine president of Saint John’s, said the values won’t change. He expressed pride that the two schools have been able to partner since 1965 without one engulfing the other. “It hasn’t been easy over the years because Saint Ben’s was smaller—now they’re bigger—and within the Catholic Church men dominated and still do. But the fact that we could work it out is just wonderful,” said Koopmann, a concert pianist, music professor, and alumnus.

A More Seamless Approach to Internationalization

Sixty percent of the 2,000 “Bennies,” as the female students are known, and 45 percent of the 1,900 “Johnnies” study abroad, most on one of the colleges’ 17 semester-long programs on a half-dozen continents. Sixteen of these programs are led by faculty. In addition, the schools offer up to a dozen summer courses overseas and arrange service and internship opportunities from Belize to Bosnia to Hong Kong. 

It’s expensive to dispatch so many faculty around the world. “It has some challenging attributes,” said College of Saint Benedict President MaryAnn Baenninger, but this approach makes it easy for students to study abroad “with little detrimental challenge to their curriculum.” It is also “the only model that lets you change the international experience of your faculty in a wholesale way after they arrive.”

Nonetheless, the Saint Benedict president sees “a very big danger in equating internationalization with study abroad.” Especially since making internationalization one of three cornerstones of a 2010 strategic plan, the colleges have shifted emphasis from student mobility to a more comprehensive approach. “We’re developing more of a seamlessness on what it means to be global, but we’re not there yet,” said Baenninger, a psychologist. “We have to constantly poke ourselves and remind ourselves that just counting study abroad numbers isn’t what it’s all about. It’s what other activities students voluntarily choose to engage in and how they interpret difference and the ‘other.’” It is tempting for the 80 percent of students from Minnesota “to think that they and their culture are the norm,” she said. “You have to come at that in every which way.”

A Part for Everyone

Joseph Rogers, director of the Center for Global Education, echoed those sentiments. Internationalization “has to be embedded in all aspects of the college. It can’t reside just in study abroad or international student programming. Everyone has to feel they have a part to play in internationalization, from faculty who teach mathematics and the natural sciences to student development professionals in the residence halls,” he said. 

Rogers, an attorney and East Asia expert, led a semester program in China in 2006 for his alma mater, stayed on as director of education abroad, and was tapped to run the new Center for Global Education in 2010. Peggy Retka, his successor as director of education abroad, said, “We stick with our own programs because that allows us to build the academic offerings around our common curriculum, and so, almost every student can fit a semester abroad into their four-year plan. That’s good for our faculty and good for our students’ participation rate.” Each student on the faculty-led semester programs takes a four-credit study abroad seminar to fulfill an intercultural and experiential learning study requirement.

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In the years leading up to creation of the Center for Global Education, top administrators already were pushing to professionalize study abroad operations and make them less dependent on the proclivities of individual faculty. “Some faculty thought they were losing ownership of the programs,” said Vice Provost Joseph DesJardins. “There were some tough times but those conversations really matured the community.” DesJardins credited Rogers and Retka with allaying those concerns “by making decisions in a real collaborative way.” A 12-person advisory council composed of faculty and administrators now provides the vehicle for that collaboration. 

Growing Interest in China, Japan, and India

Rogers has moved to expand partnerships with institutions around the world and cement ties that began with those individual faculty contacts. One of the oldest and deepest partnerships is with Southwest University in Beibei, China, which stretches back to 1986. A faculty development trip to East Asia a decade later whetted chemistry professor Henry Jakubowski’s interest in Chinese medicine. He went on to lead the China semester program twice and teach an honors senior seminar, “Medicine: East Meets West.” He also had a hand in creating a summer exchange that allows 16 students from both countries to conduct research for six weeks in China and then six weeks in Minnesota. “It’s a fantastic way to build relationships,” said Jakubowski, who listens to Mandarin tapes through a speaker mounted on his bicycle as he pedals to work.

The colleges launched an Asian studies major in 2009 and expanded Chinese and Japanese language instruction with the help of a $140,000 U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant. A semester study program in Kolkata, India, was launched in 2011, thanks to the efforts of English department chair Madhu Mitra and other faculty with roots in that area. Mitra led the first group of students to Kolkata and even landed novelist Amitav Ghosh as a guest lecturer. It took three years and three faculty development trips to India to make that new program happen. “We did our homework,” said Provost Rita Knuesel. “I wanted to make sure I could look at two presidents and say, ‘We are ready to go.’” An economics professor, Sucharita Sinha Mukherjee, led the program in 2012, and Mitra will take the class to Kolkata again next spring. But Mitra said, “We’re really hoping that the next time (2014), a non-Indian faculty member will lead this course. It will be completely unsustainable if it’s just people from India.”

Junior Kia Marie Lor, 20, of St. Paul, the daughter of Hmong immigrants and recipient of a Gates Millennium Scholarship, jumped at the opportunity to study in Kolkata, but first had some convincing to do at home. “My mom was really upset. She was like, ‘Are you dropping out of college?’” the communication major related. “I told her, ‘No, I am just studying abroad.’ To a Hmong mother that is completely bizarre. In the Hmong language there is no word for study abroad.” But she won her mother over and later spent a second semester in China.

Since 1989 more than 1,200 Japanese high school students have attended a summer ESL program at CSB and SJU, which grew out of an enrichment program for U.S. high schoolers that history professor David Bennetts had organized. “That was the start of my venture into things international,” said Bennetts, who taught January courses in Japan seven times, started a semester exchange with Bunkyo Gakuin University in Tokyo, and created a U.S. history course for international students.

A Semester-Long Orientation Course

The colleges enrolled 252 international students in 2010–11, or six percent of enrollment. They are drawn by the availability of financial aid and scholarships that range from $4,000 to $19,000 a year. Vice Provost DesJardins said, “They are not visitors. It’s not ‘them.’ They’re us. If a kid is coming from Japan, they are going to be treated the same way for financial aid purposes as the kids coming from Chicago.” 

International students take a 12-week cultural academic orientation course in their first semester in addition to the standard three-day orientation that all new students attend.  Lisa Scott, the academic adviser who co-teaches the classes, said, “One of my very first lectures is about explaining the liberal arts and understanding why you’re here and what the liberal arts means to you.” For students interested only in business, “that’s a hard one to swallow at first so we come back to it again and again,” Scott said. “That ongoing orientation class is a real gift,” said Alex Schleper, director of the International Student Program Office and a onetime Saint John’s quarterback who shares the instructional duties.

“They are not visitors. It’s not ‘them.’ They’re us. If a kid is coming from Japan, they are going to be treated the same way for financial aid purposes as the kids coming from Chicago.”

The colleges tapped the brakes on recruitment in China after an outsized entering class—50 instead of the usual 25—encountered difficulties in 2009–10. “They weren’t as successful in their first year as we had hoped they would be,” said Baenninger. The number reverted to normal for 2010. The lesson, said Roger Young, the international admission director, was that “we need to diversify. We can’t rely on China and the Bahamas and Trinidad and not on other areas of the world.” The colleges traditionally have had a pipeline to Caribbean countries where the Benedictines have monasteries.

There are far more success stories than disappointments. Huaweilang (Clement) Dai, 23, of Shanghai, China, graduated with a Phi Beta Kappa key and landed an internship with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and its Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. Dai, who interned previously with the American Council on Renewable Energy, dreams of helping his homeland make greater use of clean energy even while it builds more coal plants. “We can’t abandon fossil fuel energy overnight,” said Dai, three of whose roommates studied or traveled in China.

Documenting Humanitarian Issues

The colleges offer students opportunities to volunteer in Tanzania, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. (Forty young people from Bosnia-Herzegovina attended the colleges on scholarships paid for by a trustee). Senior Trang Pham, 23, went to Bosnia for 20 days as part of a student group called Extending the Link that each year travels the world to produce a documentary on humanitarian issues. Hers was on recovery from the Balkan war. Earlier documentaries addressed the plight of orphans in Uganda and human trafficking in Nepal.

It was the fifth time the Vietnam-born Pham used her passport for college-sponsored study and service, after earlier stops in Japan (May 2009), Egypt and Israel (May 2010), Vietnam (summer 2010), and China and Hong Kong (winter 2010). She was one of the E-Scholars—“E” for entrepreneur—who are groomed to create socially conscious business ventures. 

Students can earn credit following El Camino de Santiago de Compostela (or Way of Saint James), the pilgrims’ route in Spain. The late Jose Antonio Fabres, a professor of Hispanic Studies, said that class provides “a very humbling” experience for college students: being on the receiving end of help. “In a lot of programs students do things for others. In this program others do things for them. They get help from strangers when their blisters become unbearable,” explained the Chilean-born Fabres in an interview weeks before his death from cancer.

Baenninger has launched a program that has taken dozens of Saint Benedict students to the Women as Global Leaders Conference in the United Arab Emirates, where the president serves on the board of trustees of American University of Sharjah.

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

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

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

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

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

In-State Tuition for International Students

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

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

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

Frank Diagnosis of Strengths and Weaknesses

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

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

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

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

Breaking Out of the Minnesota Bubble

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

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

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

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

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

Strategy and Serendipity

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

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

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

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

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

Finding Roots and Relatives in Laos

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

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

A Lesson From Nepal

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

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

An Internationalization Push Still in Infancy

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

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

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

Only nine community colleges across the United States enroll more international students than the 1,500 at Green River Community College, and those others are all much larger and in bigger places than Auburn, Washington, a suburb 20 miles south of Seattle. Green River enrolls 8,000 students on a wooded, hilltop campus and two branch campuses. This happened neither by accident nor overnight.

The story of how all these international students got there is a tale that starts a quarter century ago when the board of trustees approved then-President Rich Rutkowski’s plan to create an international programs division under the guiding hand of then-dean of students Mike McIntyre. “World peace through education was always part of my philosophy,” said McIntyre, now retired as executive vice president for instruction and student affairs. Rutkowski, a pragmatic former business manager, saw early on how internationalizing and “looking outward’ could redound to the benefit of the college and a community with a surging immigrant population and where many owe their livelihoods to exports. 

Their first big step was striking a deal to open a small campus in Kanuma, Japan, in 1990 bankrolled by a Japanese politician and magnate who had earlier built a branch for Edmonds Community College campus in Kobe. The arrangement with Green River fell apart in less than a year—Edmonds would close shop seven years later amid a financial scandal—but “it was a launch pad” for Green River’s international activities, said Rutkowski, who retired in 2010 after 27 years.

“The freedom in the early days was unbelievable. Anything was possible,” said McIntyre, who still keeps a hand in cultivating Green River’s international partnerships. Despite the branch’s brief existence, Green River’s name now was known in Japan— classes had been heavily advertised in the Tokyo Metro—and students began journeying to Green River for intensive English classes. When former ESL head and then-executive director of international programs Ross Jennings asked for $10,000 for an exploratory, three-month solo trip to China, McIntyre and Rutkowski said yes. Jennings, now vice president, made fast inroads, convincing dubious U.S. consular officers it wasn’t risky to issue visas for Chinese students to enroll in community colleges. McIntyre said, “We more or less opened China up for community colleges.”

A Running Start

Fast forward 15 years and today 559 of Green River’s 1,500 international students are from China, including teens as young as 16 finishing high school and working on an associate degree at the same time. They enter through a Washington State-authorized program that allows 11th and 12th graders—local or international—to earn both a high school diploma and a college degree. This has not been without controversy. Some faculty are at odds with President 

Eileen Ely over the youngest international students’ maturity, English skills, and readiness for college work. But college officials say the young students who advance out of ESL are earning the same stellar grades—3.5 GPA on average—as older international students. The top sending countries after China are Vietnam, South Korea, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan.

A track record of success in student transfers to universities and extensive support services are the principal reasons Green River draws international students in droves, college leaders said. Arrayed on pegs around the wall of Jennings’ office in the McIntyre International Village (four gray, one-story buildings including ESL classrooms) are colorful baseball hats from dozens of those schools, including Indiana University, University of Washington, University of California-Berkeley, Cornell, and Ohio State.

Home Stays and On-Campus Housing

The college issued bonds in 2003 and partnered with a private developer to build its first student apartments, something most community colleges lack. It is a strong selling point for parents nervous about sending their teens to a distant country. Some 340 local and international students dwell in the 87-unit Campus Corner Apartments, which has a lounge and other amenities but no cafeteria. Many others live with 400-plus host families, while some rent and share apartments and houses on their own.

For $650 a month, the host families provide meals and a room of the student’s own and drive them to campus if there is no bus route. Cyndi Rapier, director of international housing, tells townspeople that “if you’re doing it for the money, don’t do it. You have to value the international experience and value opening your home to these students.” The vast majority do. Deb Casey, vice president of student services, said the students she has hosted from France, Denmark, Egypt, and Afghanistan “have been amazing. It’s been a great experience for my daughter.” Rapier said some students she hosted came back to attend her sons’ weddings.

A Program Within a Program

A staff of more than 50 (including 30 full-time) works with international students. “We’ve become a destination point because of the way we treat our students,” said Ely. “We don’t have the sunshineall-the-time that California has, but we can almost guarantee that a student can get into a four-year institution.” Ely, a Seattle area native who previously headed a Nebraska college, added, “We get accused of handholding the student too much, but I don’t think you can handhold enough.”

Green River, like all 1,600 U.S. community colleges, is an open access institution that offers career and technical courses as well as academic classes. About half its students are on the college transfer track to which most international students aspire, and half of all first-time, full-time freshmen graduate or transfer within three years. Jennings said international students transfer at much higher rates. “What we’ve been able to do is create a program within a program. Our job is to put them on a transfer track and make sure we monitor that every step of the way.” He said 10 percent of students wash out during intensive English, but most transfer.

“I felt like something was missing. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone.”

“We’re not unmindful of the fact that they don’t really come to Green River to come to us. They come to get into USC, Washington, Indiana” and other universities, he added. 

Strong Returns on International Education

The main campus is literally in the woods a few miles from restaurants and shops in downtown Auburn, which can be a shock for students from metropolises with millions of people. Green River is considering adding student housing to a branch it has opened in nearby Kent in the middle of an “urban village” teeming with shops and restaurants and on a commuter rail stop. It already offers ESL classes there.

Green River’s investment in Kent has been made possible by the large returns the college has generated from its investments in educating international students. Vice President for Business Affairs Rick Brumfield said that since 1988 the Office of International Programs has generated more than $109 million in gross revenues that netted the college more than $53 million.

That money “has allowed Green River to maintain and expand classes, programming, services, and capital projects that support all students who study at Green River,” he said. “This has been particularly critical during difficult economic times and with the decline in state funding of public higher education.”

Teaching Service and Activism

The international students who come to Green River get not only grades on their transcripts but notations of how much community service they performed. Martha Koch, manager of international student activities, said there is never any shortage of volunteers for projects her office organizes. “They’re at the food bank, they’re planting trees, they might be removing invasive blackberries or helping at the Seattle marathon,” said Koch, jokingly adding, “We could be breaking rocks and they’re like, ‘Yeah! Let’s do it.’” She encourages students to keep a portfolio and show their service certificates to universities when they apply for admission and scholarships.

Yu Sato arrived from Tokyo in 2010 at age 18 for intensive English classes. At first she stuck to her studies and hung out with friends, but “I felt like something was missing. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone.” She threw herself into activities and wound up as vice president of student government. The diminutive Sato, who wants to become a research veterinarian, also got a Chihuahua that she carried everywhere, à la Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde. Now the 4.0 student is carting it around her new school, the University of California, Berkeley.

Koen Valks, 19, of Amsterdam, Netherlands, arrived at age 17 to do a gap year on a Fulbright-arranged program before starting at a Dutch university, but stayed for a second year and now has transferred to American University as an international relations major. He was one of Green River’s five “international student ambassadors.”

The son of a former diplomat, Valks aspires to follow in his father’s footsteps. He expressed gratitude to Green River for teaching him how to work with people from many different countries and cultures, a skill “I’m going to use the rest of my life.”

An aspiring electrical engineer, Ugo Nwachuku, 19, of Lagos, Nigeria, also came to Green River at 17. “I don’t think I would have had the right attitude and mental state to carry on and be a good student if I’d gone straight to university,” said Nwachuku, who won a scholarship to Drexel University. This “prepares you for a whole lot of situations in life.”

Studying in Japan and Australia

Education abroad is a tough sell at Green River, as it is at most community colleges due principally to financial reasons, but programs to Japan, Australia, and New Zealand are popular. Sixty-four students studied abroad in 2011–2012. Gary Oliveira, who teaches photography, led Green River’s own 10-week study program in Japan four times. “Many do it on financial aid and loans. A lot don’t get help from their parents,” said Oliveira. “I’ve had students who brought a lunch on every field trip and did whatever they could to cut costs.” 

Among the most popular and longest running is the 10-week education abroad program that history Professor Bruce Haulman, now emeritus, has led to Australia and New Zealand each winter since 2001. It draws 30 students, including some from other Washington community colleges. Haulman had to turn students away from a popular London program in the 1990s. He applauded the support he got from college leaders. “It’s an entrepreneurial model. If you want to do something and it’s not going to have a negative financial impact, why not try?” Haulman said.

Development Works Open a New Chapter

As vice president of international programs and extended learning, Edith Bannister, newly retired, cultivated partnerships with schools in Denmark, France, Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan, China, Finland, and Iceland.

Her spouse, Barry Bannister, director of international development, has opened a new international chapter for Green River by undertaking projects for the U.S. State Department. The Australian educator and management consultant has worked on international education projects across Asia and the Middle East for the World Bank and other clients.

Since 2007 Green River has won $1.5 million in U.S. State Department grants to host students from developing countries each summer. Green River is the only community college among four institutions offering the Study of the United States Institutes for Student Leaders (SUSI) program on women’s leadership. Female students from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan took classes in summer July 2013, and in the past students have come from the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India to study communications, human rights, the U.S. Constitution, and gender. Edith Bannister, who directs the project, said, “It’s helped internationalize the faculty.” 

“World history professor Michelle Marshman called it “an absolute gift” to have these students in her classes.”

World history professor Michelle Marshman called it “an absolute gift” to have these students in her classes. Barry Bannister, Marshman and sociology instructor Louise Hull led a workshop in Delhi, India, in December 2012 for 40 past SUSI participants. Marshman stays in touch with them by e-mail and Facebook and got firsthand accounts on the Arab Spring from students in Egypt. “Learning is a twoway street,” she said.

Green River, located in a valley that is a hub of the aviation industry, has provided classroom training for future pilots and air traffic controllers in partnership with institutions in China and Japan.

Soon after veterinary pathologist Tony Frank became vice president for research at Colorado State University in 2000, he was asked by the then-president to accompany him to South  Korea. “I wasn’t horribly enthused,” recalled Frank. “I’d been very focused on my own lab and had almost no connections to international activity. I really didn’t see what value I was going to add or how it was going to have a big impact.” But Frank returned from Seoul “an absolute convert,” won over to the idea that forging strategic partnerships with universities overseas could expand Colorado State’s reach and pay large dividends for its scholars, researchers, and students. “To be honest, I spent a lot of time kicking myself after that for having missed as many opportunities as I had over the years,” said Frank, who went on to become provost and, in 2008, president. He now has logged 12 international trips. 

The land-grant institution, established in 1870 when Colorado was still a territory, is working hard not to miss opportunities these days. It has close partnerships with 17 universities in 11 countries including a new Joint Research Institute with East China Normal University (ECNU) in Shanghai and a robust dual-degree program with the Foreign Trade University in Hanoi, Vietnam. It has stepped up recruitment of international students to the picturesque Fort Collins campus in the foothills of the Rockies. In 2008–2009 there were fewer than 900 international students. Today there are more than 1,650, including a recent influx of more than 400 in its new intensive English and academic preparatory program called INTO Colorado State University. 

CSU is following a script laid out in a 2007 internationalization strategy. Leaders speak of “building the brand” and improving lives “throughout Colorado and the world.” Tom Milligan, vice president for external relations, who spearheads the branding push, said, “Being a global institution is part of how we want to think and talk about ourselves and position ourselves. We’re different from other medium-to-large-size public institutions. The things that we’re good at, like water, biomedicine, and veterinary medicine, we’re as good as anybody in the world.”

Links Around the World

Vice Provost for International Affairs James Cooney said, “The heart of our internationalization strategy from the beginning has been to link specifically to institutions around the world, get our faculty involved with those institutions, and develop joint research.” The hiring of Cooney in 2007 to a new position with elevated stature was also part of that strategy. The political scientist was lured to Fort Collins from Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

One aspect of Colorado State’s story is familiar to public universities almost everywhere: steep state budget cuts, amounting to $36 million or 28 percent over three years before a $6 million bump up this year. Only federal stimulus funds spared Colorado’s universities steeper cuts. The National Science Foundation ranked Colorado last among research universities in state funding per student. Colorado State relies on state money for less than 10 percent of its $911 million budget. It conducted $376 million in research in 2012. 

"President Tony Frank came late to international work but now pursues it with a convert’s passion."

The $220,000 that Cooney’s office had been given to expand education abroad, strategic partnerships, and other activities was shaved by $40,000. But its budget and staff kept growing thanks to $330,000 in added revenues from the spurt in international enrollments and new partnerships in China and elsewhere. “We feel we have one of the best models for working with China,” said the vice provost. China pays for up to 30 faculty to travel to China for research collaborations and steers talented students from a dozen high schools to CSU. Colorado State, for its part, gives each an $8,000 scholarship. It opened a five-person recruiting office at East China Normal University and recently cut the ribbon on a Confucius Institute specializing in water issues. 

A New Pathway “Into” the University

Colorado State is one of four U.S. universities partnering with INTO, a for-profit British company that forms partnerships with universities in the United States, United Kingdom, and China to recruit students and place them in intensive English and “academic pathways” classes with extensive support that lead to regular undergraduate and graduate studies. Provost Rick Miranda said, “We’d like to have more students come from South America, from Europe, from Malaysia and Indonesia. We don’t want to skew things too much toward China.” INTO has moved into renovated Spruce Hall, CSU’s oldest building. Many students live with domestic students interested in world affairs on a floor of a dorm designated the Global Village.

Haotian “Stewart” Wu, a senior business administration major from Hefei, China, is a live-in mentor there. He transferred to CSU as a junior from Anhui Agricultural University on a 2+2 program. He spent summer 2012 as a paid INTO “ambassador” traveling around China marketing CSU at education abroad fairs. The outgoing Wu has friends on the football team and attends games. Football “is pretty boring, but actually I learn a lot” about U.S. culture, said Wu.

The Office of International Programs teams with the athletics and alumni offices to offer a “Football 101” class where international students learn the rules, try on helmets and shoulder pads, tailgate, and attend a game. “They get a real kick out of it,” said Mark Hallett, senior director of International Student and Scholar Services. As many as 200 turn out and “scream with excitement” at kickoff. 

Grooming Gilman and Fulbright Scholars

Colorado State has also stepped up its education abroad offerings and, by raising funds from colleges, departments, donors, and providers, tripled scholarships to $150,000. Director of Education Abroad Laura Thornes said more than 800 students took classes for credit, and 500 took part in noncredit experiences in 2012–2013. Most went to Western Europe, but 115 studied or worked in China and Japan, 25 went to Kenya, and 17 to South Africa. One in six students has studied abroad by graduation. “If we could get to 25 percent, that would be our ideal,” said Thornes.

A push to encourage Colorado State students to apply for Benjamin Gilman International Scholarships paid immediate dividends. Two dozen won Gilmans in 2012 and 2013, more than the previous four years combined. The awards of up to $5,000 go to students who receive need-based Pell Grants. “We worked with all the diversity offices on campus to make them more aware of the Gilman,” said Thornes. Faculty and staff volunteers read and critiqued students’ essays. Accounting major Sabiha Dubose said her Gilman to study in Antibes, France, was “truly a blessing.”

“We worked with all the diversity offices on campus to make them more aware of the Gilman.”

A similar push is underway for Fulbrights. Karen Gardenier, the Office of International Programs’ assistant director for academic programs, works with representatives from each of CSU’s eight colleges. Fewer than a dozen students applied in past years and only a handful won. “We’re hoping to get those numbers up and create more of a culture on campus for Fulbright,” said Gardenier. That effort includes small stipends for faculty to handpick and groom prospects. CSU also increased incoming Fulbrighters in the past five years from five to 35 annually.

International and Arabic studies major Brooke Lake is spending six months in Morocco and Jordan improving her Arabic before graduation. Lake, who volunteers as a cultural mentor to international students, did charity work in Egypt over an earlier summer, which “kick started my passion for the Middle East.” This all took her family by surprise. “They had no idea who their daughter was. My mom was like, ‘Who are you?’” recalled Lake, but now “she loves it.”

Making Music Together

There is a musical quality to CSU’s partnership with East China Normal University. After President Frank heard a concert in Shanghai, he set in motion a collaboration between the two universities’ musicians. East China’s opera director Cao Jin and Todd Queen, chair of music, theater, and dance, quickly “hit it off,” said Queen, a tenor who sang and taught master classes at the Shanghai institution. Twenty-five ECNU students and faculty came to Fort Collins in 2010 and with CSU’s orchestra and choir they performed Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, with its “Ode to Joy,” a universal anthem for freedom. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” said Queen.

Mezzo-soprano Carol Perry sang in Shanghai in 2011. The experience was invaluable, she told a college publication. “In the performance world, we have to adapt to other cultures quickly. Not every production or rehearsal will be in your language. You need to be present in the culture you’re in,” she said. Most recently, Chinese and Colorado State students performed The Yellow River Cantata in CSU’s concert hall.

It is not the arts alone bringing CSU and ECNU together. They created a Joint Research Institute for New Energy and the Environment in 2011, with each committing to spend $300,000 annually for three years on the search for clean alternatives to fossil fuels. Wei Gao, a professor of ecosystem science and sustainability who directs the CSU China Programs office and Confucius Institute, also leads this research institute, which works on land, water, air quality, and climate issues.

Playing Pachelbel and Parsing P&G Financials

Since 2008, 32 economics and business faculty have taught compressed, four-week courses at Foreign Trade University (FTU) in Hanoi, Vietnam, which is “trying to reform its curriculum to mimic ours,” said economics professor Robert Kling. “It has really contributed to the internationalization of our faculty and had the unanticipated effect of giving our department more of a sense of community.” Vietnam’s education ministry pays CSU $23,000 for each course taught.

Thirty Vietnamese students spend their senior year at CSU and earn dual degrees. One is Phong Nguyen, who could be found one afternoon in a theater lobby of Lory Student Center playing Pachelbel’s Canon in D on a grand piano. The dual-degree program “is considered the best in our university,” Nguyen said. Classes at CSU were “more practical and down to earth,” added Nguyen, who liked working in teams to analyze a Dell bond issue and a Procter & Gamble financial report. “We’re learning from each other and from doing the projects.”

FTU is a CSU strategic partner. Many of those partnerships have been forged in rapid succession since 2008. Chad Hoseth, director of international initiatives, said CSU is now assessing all 17 and considering changes. “This is a list that evolves to meet the needs of our faculty and students,” he said.

Protecting Tigers and People

Protecting natural resources is a passion at Colorado State and much of that work is conducted on an international scale. Nearly 90 Indian Forestry Service officers have trained at CSU. Social psychologist Michael Manfredo heads the Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources, which deals with finding ways for people to enjoy nature without trampling on it. Managing wildlife and natural resources “is 10 percent biology and 90 percent managing people,” said Manfredo, just back from working on an effort to reduce tiger-human conflicts in Dehadrun, India.

The department also offers a Conservation Leadership Through Learning master’s degree that involves a year of classes in Fort Collins and a second year of field work in Mexico. Seven of the first 21 students were international, and the program is expanding to Peru, New Zealand, and Kenya. In the field, Manfredo said, “everybody is a learner. The professors are learning new ways of thinking (just) as the students are.”

Manfredo said the elevated stature of the Office of International Programs helped get that program off the ground. “It sure makes it easier when you’ve got someone appreciative and supportive of what you’re doing,” he said.

Prairie Populism Writ Large

Robin Reid, director of the Center for Collaborative Conservation in the Warner College of Natural Resources, spent 20 years in East Africa conducting livestock research. Support from the top at CSU, she said, “is sparking connections all over the place. It’s causing this cross-campus set of energy and activities that is good for (everybody).” Research ecologist Paul Evangelista, who has worked in Ethiopia for 14 years, said CSU has long fostered his interdisciplinary work. 

Hoseth, the international initiatives director, said, “Our genetics are collaborative.” Case in point: when the College of Business hired its own study abroad coordinator, they placed her in Laurel Hall with the rest of the international program staff.

Hallett, the ISSS director, said, “There’s a bit of the prairie populist about this campus. It’s a land grant, outward-focused (institution) with a lot of idealism,” and now it’s doing extension work writ large on the international stage. 

Four words encapsulated the theme of Randy Woodson’s installation in 2010 as the fourteenth chancellor of North Carolina State University: “Locally responsive. Globally engaged.” The message was woven throughout the “Pathway to the Future” strategic plan that was quickly produced on Woodson’s watch. More than a catchphrase, it has become a compass for colleges, deans, and faculty at the 127-year-old, land-grant institution.

It remains a source of pride that the university has extension offices in each of North Carolina’s 100 counties, but now it also touts strategic partnerships with 20 universities on four continents, culled from a roster of hundreds of memoranda of understanding (MOU). International enrollments have surged to more than 3,400, including hundreds of undergraduates, once few and far between. The Office of International Affairs (OIA) is growing, too, and working more closely with student life, housing, and other units to better serve the newcomers. In part by trimming administrative bloat and consolidating programs, Woodson and Provost Warwick Arden husbanded the resources for an $18 million Faculty Excellence Program to hire 48 interdisciplinary faculty to work in clusters to address “the global grand challenges of society.”

“There was a lot of pent up energy when I got here,” said Woodson, a former Purdue University provost who began his career as a horticulturist studying how Israel grew fruits and vegetables in the desert. NC State, like Purdue, is an engineering bastion. On a campus with 34,000 students, nearly 9,000 are pursuing engineering degrees, including half the international students. One thing that surprised the chancellor upon arrival in Raleigh was that only 10 percent of the student body was from outside North Carolina, far below the 18 percent cap enshrined in state law. “Why aren’t we at 18 percent?” Woodson immediately asked. The response was that the university did not get to keep any extra tuition revenue from enrolling more outsiders. “I said, ‘I don’t care. It’s important for the reputation of the university, it’s important for the experience of students from North Carolina to study side by side with kids from Korea, China, India, and Indiana.”

Shrey Satpathy, 19, a sophomore nuclear engineering major from New Delhi, India, quickly made his presence felt on campus, winning selection at the end of freshman year as a Caldwell Fellow, a leadership program, and also capturing a $50,000 prize in a statewide technology competition. He and a classmate proposed a way for new public school teachers in North Carolina to share and evaluate lesson plans online; the prize money is to make that a reality.

Satpathy sees nothing unusual in an international undergraduate’s immersing himself in the problems of U.S. public schools. “I don’t consider myself an outsider. I consider myself more of a global citizen,” he said, and besides, “when you start something, it has a ripple” effect that could help teachers far beyond North Carolina’s borders.

Bringing International Programs to the Fore

Bailian Li, vice provost for international affairs, said the new strategic plan and the buy-in from all 12 colleges has truly made his office “the center for global engagement. We play the leadership role.” When Li arrived in 2006, the Office of International Affairs had a 16-member staff. Now it numbers 40. Political scientist Heidi Hobbs, who directs a popular master of international studies program, said, “International used to be, ‘Oh yeah, that’s them over there and they’re doing something international.’ Now it’s moved from the periphery to the central mission of the university.”

Funding is one reason the Office of International Affairs cuts a larger figure. It has $120,000 to spend each year to fund joint faculty research and education initiatives with those 20 strategic partners. The sum includes $35,000 in seed grants to faculty to promote collaborations. Li said his office has funded more than 40 international projects since 2011 and more than half these faculty have gone on to win additional support for their work.

Veterinary professor Siddhartha “Sid” Thakur used his $5,000 seed grant for a pilot project to monitor food-borne pathogens in meat sold in two states in India, a country with no such monitoring system. He enlisted hospitals and veterinary colleges for the effort in his native land. “That seed grant gave me money to go to India, talk to these people, and then write a bigger grant,” he said, which came in the amount of $100,000 from the World Health Organization. Thakur, a former Food and Drug Administration scientist, said, “I cannot solve drug resistance issues in North Carolina alone. How quickly these pathogens move around the globe is amazing.” Two Indian agricultural ministry officials have visited NC State, and Chancellor Woodson paid a return visit last year.

Tourism professor Duarte Morais, another seed grant recipient, has conducted research and worked with villagers in Tanzania, the Philippines, and Indonesia as well as with Native Americans on an extension project in North Carolina to help poor communities reap benefits from tourism. Morais, who is from Portugal, said, “When I applied to come here, I made a pledge to become an engaged scholar doing research and work here in North Carolina as a laboratory for other places in the world, and to teach classes that were engaged locally, but global in nature. That’s the walk I’m walking.”

Textile engineering professor Marian McCord was tapped to direct a new Global Health Initiative. McCord works on bringing affordable sanitary products to women in developing countries. “When your leadership puts global engagement at the forefront, you’re empowered and enabled to work on nonconventional types of research,” she said.

Among the 20 strategic partners are University of Surrey in the United Kingdom and Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil, which have a three-way relationship with NC State that they call the University Global Partnership Network. David Dixon, the international programs coordinator, said each institution committed $60,000 to promote joint research, exchange faculty and students, develop new academic programs, and fuel innovation, entrepreneurship, and technology transfer. In three years they’ve convened six conferences and a dozen workshops and funded 17 research collaborations.

Promoting Study Abroad with Scholarships and a Bus “Wrap”

Twenty percent of undergraduates study abroad, most on short-term, faculty-led programs, and Li and Ingrid Schmidt, associate vice provost and director of study abroad, are shooting for 30 percent. Not long ago only one student in eight studied abroad. “We know that study abroad is what we call a high-impact experience,” said Provost Warwick Arden. “It feeds directly into the success of our students. We’re trying to produce a student who’s prepared for a successful career in a global knowledge economy.”

NC State has made a concentrated push to encourage more low-income and minority students to sign up for overseas study. It mounted a “People Like Me” marketing campaign that featured scores of posters and even a campus bus wrapped with photos of smiling faces of education abroad veterans. The campaign was the handiwork of Schmidt and Joanne Woodard, vice provost for institutional equity and diversity, as part of NC State’s participation in the American Council on Education’s “At Home in the World” initiative. Wrapping the bus—something more commonly done to advertise Wolfpack athletic teams—cost $7,000 but “we got a lot of mileage out of that,” said Schmidt. Woodard said they discovered “a natural synergy” between the international and diversity offices. Schmidt agreed, saying, “We can greatly enrich each other.” Advertisements alone don’t do the job. Schmidt’s office dispensed $225,000 in study abroad scholarships in 2012–2013.

The Study Abroad Office began offering Global Perspectives Certificates in 2009 to students who complete a mix of study, service, research, or internships abroad, engage in international activities on campus, and make a final presentation on their experiences. Ninety have earned the certificate and 375 more are pursuing one. Those requirements were no problem for Janet Nguyen, a senior international studies major who studied in China and founded NC State’s first Asian-interest sorority. Nguyen, who envisions a career working on behalf of children, said new courses such as “Global Perspectives on Sustainable Development” provided her “with a very diverse and unique learning experience.”

Seeking Allies to Serve International Students

Ten years ago, NC State enrolled fewer than 1,600 international students who constituted 5 percent of the student body. Now there are twice as many. While the OIA staff has grown, it is still a challenge to meet all the needs of the growing number of international students and scholars.

When Elizabeth James came on board as director of the Office of International Services (OIS) in 2012, “we were woefully outnumbered in terms of our student-to-adviser ratio. We were about 1,000-to-one … and most of our peers are running around 650 to 700,” she said.

Making a virtue of necessity, her office now works much more closely with academic advisers in NC State’s 10 colleges. It also improved its technological capability, making it easier for students to find answers on the OIS website, and it makes ample use of social media. “We had a bit of a paradigm shift. We were under no illusions that we were going to double or triple our size, so we strategically started working with a lot of the college advisers and our natural partners in the counseling center,” said Thomas Greene, the associate director. James said they recognized that “we can’t be everywhere. By collaborating, we don’t have to be a mini–student affairs division just for international students.”

To attract more international students, NC State launched an intensive English program in 2011. “The first semester we had eight students and two teachers,” recalled Jeong Powell, the admissions officer who started the program. By 2012, there were 161 students and 14 instructors, and to date nearly 120 students have matriculated into degree programs. The Korean-born Powell subsequently became the first full-time director of international admissions and established a pipeline from four top high schools in China and three in South Korea. Associate Vice Provost and Director of Admissions Tommy Griffin twice has flown in high school guidance counselors from Asia to see for themselves what NC State has to offer. “Our campus was ready” for this push, said Griffin. “We really have a lot of advocates in our colleges and all the other offices on campus. They all see a benefit.”

Branch Campus for a French Business School

SKEMA Business School opened a branch on the NC State campus in 2011. The French school brings 300 students a year in cohorts to Raleigh, where it rents a facility amidst not only the engineering school and other colleges, but dozens of high-tech businesses and nonprofits that have set up research shops on the new Centennial Campus. SKEMA, which has three campuses in France and another in Suzhou, China (all classes are in English), boasts that it is one of the few foreign schools with its own U.S. facility and the sole one vested with the authority to process U.S. visas. Most SKEMA graduate students stay for three months and return to France, but some study for a full year. Dean Jacques Verville envisions attracting North American undergraduates who could start in Raleigh “and then move to our campuses in Europe and China. When you have that flow, that’s SKEMA.”

NC State enrolls 220 international business students in its own Poole College of Management, something Dean Ira Weiss calls “phenomenal. They give our students an extra push for their money. They bring a hunger and energy to the table that energizes everybody around them.” Poole and SKEMA already offer dual master’s degrees in Global Luxury Management and more are planned.

The SKEMA students also benefit from an International Cultural Leadership Project (ICLP) that brings hundreds of international students together with NC State undergraduates for workshops, seminars, community service, and social gatherings, from volunteering at food banks to ball games and bowling nights. Volunteers logged more than 900 hours of service in 2013–2014.

The project is run through the Office of International Affairs’ Global Training Initiative, which provides fee-based programs and services for international universities, businesses, and other clients. “The vast majority of our programs are short term and we do a mix, half for professionals and half for students,” said Ilin Misaras, the assistant director. A four-week summer program gives Chinese undergraduates “a taste of graduate school,” Misaras said, and another partnership brings in students from Brazil. It also places international students in internships throughout the technology-rich Research Triangle area. It has given Chinese pharmaceutical executives a short course on FDA drug regulations.

“The challenge for us is to grow beyond just these short-term training programs,” said Misaras, a former broadcast journalist. “Part of our mandate is to help the North Carolina business community. We have connections in China. How can we help North Carolina businesses get there? I think that’s the next step.”

Expanding a Foothold in Prague

NC State explored accepting an invitation from the government of South Korea to open a branch at the new Songdo Global University alongside SUNY, George Mason University, and other foreign universities, but it ultimately declined. “The economy hit us,” said Chancellor Woodson.

Provost Arden said, “We prefer to develop strong relationships with partner institutions as opposed to planting the flag and setting up our own. We  feel that that gives us much more bang for the buck.”

But NC State is considering ways to expand the foothold its College of Design has in Prague, Czech Republic. It has been sending architecture majors to study in Prague during the summer for years and in 2005 that summer program evolved into the Prague Institute, with classes year-round in a thirteenth-century building in the middle of the history-rich city. It was the first overseas branch of any North Carolina university and “we actually had to get the signature of the governor of North Carolina to permit us to rent our own facility,” recalled Dean Marvin Malecha. Woodson calls the Prague Institute “one of our real success stories.” It now offers courses for a broad array of students, and the university is looking at ways to make it a center for faculty scholarship, not just short teaching stints.

The University of Delaware (UD) traces its roots to a colonial academy that produced three signers of the Declaration of Independence. It was chartered as a college in 1834 and selected as a land-grant institution after the Civil War. It has a rich tradition of study abroad, a robust intensive English institute, and a $200 million research enterprise. But when Patrick Harker became president in 2007, he was perturbed to learn that only 39 incoming freshmen—1 percent—came from other countries. No institution could reach the first tier of research universities with so few international students in its classrooms, he told the faculty. Today UD enrolls nearly 700 international undergraduates as well as 1,300 graduate students with 1,600 others learning English. “We turned that around. You can feel it on campus today. It just feels more diverse. But we’ve got more work to do,” said Harker, former dean of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Structural changes were necessary to accommodate the growth spurt. UD’s Office for International Students and Scholars (OISS), which once consisted of two people in tight quarters, now has a 10-person staff ensconced in a Georgian mansion at the heart of campus. “I feel like Cinderella,” said Frances O’Brien, the assistant director.

The relocation to the Wright House, formerly the faculty club, is “both metaphor and evidence of the university’s commitment to its international community,” said Nancy Guerra, former associate provost for international programs and director of the parent Institute for Global Studies (IGS), which provides grants to faculty, forges international partnerships, and oversees OISS and education abroad. Creating the institute was a key recommendation in a 2008 “Path to Prominence” strategic plan on how to elevate the stature of international programs and intensify global activity on all fronts.

“We made a small number of critical organizational changes that paid big dividends,” said Nancy Brickhouse, former deputy provost. Consolidating international programs provided “a much higher degree of visibility and access across campus” and enabled UD to attract faculty and professionals with deep experience in global education, said Brickhouse, now provost of Saint Louis University.

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Among them was OISS Director Ravi Ammigan, who brought a wealth of programming experience from Michigan State University in 2013. The international office ramped up activities and “now we are a center of cross-cultural engagement as well,” he said.

Placing Delaware on the Map

Delaware, the first state to ratify the Constitution, is second smallest by size and forty-fifth by population. “Our big challenge is how to increase our international visibility. We don’t yet have really good global recognition,” said Guerra, a psychologist who stepped down as associate provost and IGS head to return full time to teaching and research on stopping childhood violence. Chris Lucier, vice president for enrollment management, said, “The location actually appeals to students once they know how close we are to Philadelphia, Washington, and New York. The strength of our engineering and business programs are major selling points.”

Reeling in more talent from abroad makes academic and economic sense, because UD already must look outside Delaware’s borders for 60 percent of its 21,000 students. It describes itself as a “state-assisted” institution, not fully public, since it is governed by its own trustees (the governor is an ex officio member) and gets only 13 percent of the budget from state coffers. “People assume we’re a big public institution. The reality is we’re medium sized and a public-private hybrid,” said Amy Greenwald Foley, IGS’s associate director for global outreach. “We have smaller classes and offer amenities you’d expect to find at a private institution.” 

UD competes with larger flagship schools such as Penn State, Rutgers, and the University of Maryland. Among the attractions are the classic college-town feel of Newark (population 32,000) and a picture-book campus with stately elms shading Georgian buildings that line the Green.

Push for Global Engagement

Harker, a management expert trained as a civil and urban engineer, shook up UD’s budgeting and pushed colleges to eliminate low-demand programs. He believes the changes spurred departments to become more entrepreneurial and globally engaged. “It’s helped people be more creative about what kinds of programs we can offer and what types of grants we can go after,” said Harker, who stepped down in July to become president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

Since 2003 UD has hosted top students from the Middle East and North Africa for civic leadership training funded by the U.S. Department of State, and more recently it was selected as one of 20 universities providing coursework and mentoring for young leaders from across Africa. It launched a UD Africa initiative in 2013 to increase partnerships with African universities and send more faculty and students to the continent. “A host of faculty do research in Africa,” said Gretchen Bauer, chair of political science and international relations, who is headed to Ghana on a Fulbright in 2016.

Norma Gaines-Hanks, a human development and family services professor, has taken students to South Africa for study and service eight times. Enrollment is capped at 30. “If the kids had their way, we’d take 100,” she said.

Academic and Cultural Ties with China

UD has made its greatest progress in expanding academic ties in China. A close relationship with Xiamen University extends back to 2007, including a dual doctoral degree in oceanography. UD is one of the U.S. campuses where Xiamen is sending dozens of doctoral students being groomed as future faculty.

Xiamen helped UD land a Confucius Institute in 2010 and provides two Mandarin teachers on loan, and the two universities are partnering to open a State Department–funded American Cultural Center on the Xiamen campus, one of 24 such centers across China.

“There are so many Confucius Institutes around the country. We want to be different,” said Jianguo Chen, the director and a professor of Chinese literature. He wants to provide expertise for Chinese entrepreneurs who are seeking to break into U.S. markets and American firms looking to do business in China.

Engineering in the Forefront

The pacesetter in many of UD’s efforts to extend its global reach is the College of Engineering led by Dean Babatunde Ogunnaike, a former DuPont researcher and member of the National Academy of Engineering. A new global engineering program combining bachelor’s and master’s degrees in five years is on the drawing boards. “My tagline for students is, ‘Let’s go change the world together,’” said the Nigerian-born Ogunnaike. Engineering is the most international of UD’s colleges, with 627 students from other countries, including Ugochukwu Nsofor, who is studying electromagnetics and nanophotonics for his doctorate. Nsofor volunteers at orientations for international students, which have undergone “a huge improvement” since OISS expanded, he said.

The four dozen students in UD’s Engineers Without Borders (EWB) chapter are trying to change the world already. They designed and built a bridge connecting two remote villages in Guatemala, completed a clean water project in Cameroon, and have scouted projects in Malawi and the Philippines. Over winter break, senior Kelsey McWilliams traveled to India with a UD team on a Gates Foundation–funded project to improve latrines. That project was started by the late civil engineering professor Steve Dentel, who recently lost a battle with cancer. Dentel, the original EWB adviser, had been to Cameroon 11 times.

IGS and the College of Engineering split costs of a newly created associate director position to manage the college’s international programs and work across disciplines with other colleges.

Keeping Study Abroad Affordable

The junior year abroad originated at UD. The first students’ embarkation in 1923 on an ocean liner bound for France made front-page news in the New York Times. Now 1,300 students head abroad each year, mostly in classes taught by scores of UD faculty over the five week winter term. One-third study abroad before graduation.

But costs are a concern, said Lisa Chieffo, the associate director. Fees for some programs top $10,000 (including airfare and housing but not tuition). The university has doubled aid for study abroad to $1 million and launched a Delaware Diplomats program that allows freshmen to earn up to $1,500 for study or internships abroad by participating in global events on campus, including lectures and international coffee hours. Fifty students enlisted in the first corps.

Kerry Snyder, 22, a wildlife conservation major who works in the global studies office, put several scholarships together that paid for a service class in Cambodia and two research trips to Nicaragua. “I’d like to see programs that are more affordable, honestly, because that is a barrier. Students come in and they’re so excited, but they just don’t have the money,” said Snyder.

In 2014 the university launched a World Scholars Program that offers incoming freshmen the opportunity to spend their first semester at John Cabot University in Rome. Six signed up, including Daria Collins, a budding linguistics major now learning Japanese and planning to study abroad again. “I definitely feel like a world scholar,” she said. Thirty-eight freshmen started classes in Rome in fall 2015 and Foley began scouting for a second partner university in Madrid. 

Cynthia Schmidt-Cruz, professor of Spanish and interim director of the Center for Global and Area Studies, believes study abroad scholarships could entice more students to pursue a new minor in global studies that attracted 10 students last year.

A Fruitful Partnership on International Recruiting

UD’s English Language Institute (ELI) has grown so rapidly that its classrooms have spilled into seven buildings, including what was once the home of a Delaware paper mill magnate. Sixteen hundred students passed through its classrooms and labs in 2014–2015. More than a quarter came through a Conditional Admission Program (CAP) that guarantees entry to credit classes with no TOEFL required once they make the grade in language classes.

Once UD gave a green light for CAP in 2009, “we were off to the races,” said Director Scott Stevens, who won NAFSA’s 2015 Cassandra Pyle Award for Leadership and Collaboration for his efforts to raise standards for intensive English programs. 

The ELI and UD’s Admissions Office once worked apart on international recruitment, but “it’s a very integrated team now,” said Vice President for Enrollment Management Lucier. International applications shot up 50 percent in two years. The enrollment surge presented challenges for UD as some students struggled to adjust to campus and academic life. “The whole transition to the culture of academia is critical,” said Stevens. The institute now forms cohorts of five to eight CAP students, each with a U.S. student mentor. Residing in global living communities, they read books together, work on study skills, and learn respect for academic standards, but also go on scavenger hunts and a weekend retreat.

The campus wide collaborative culture is apparent in the Global Recruitment and Retention Group that includes academic advisers and representatives from residence life, career services, and the counseling center. It meets monthly to brainstorm not only how to attract international students, but also how to better support them once they arrive. 

Breaking the Ice with Facebook

Jill Neitzel and Patricia Sloane-White’s popular Anthropology 230 class on the lives of the “Young, Global, and Privileged” takes an innovative approach to breaking the ice between domestic and international students. Neitzel and Sloan-White assign readings and videos but the bulk of the work consists of student responses on a private Facebook page to a volley of questions on topics including inequality, race and gender, and pop culture and partying.

Students watched videos on racial tensions in Ferguson, Missouri, but also viewed a hilarious skit by the Fung Brothers, a duo of Chinese-American comedians, on “the Asian bubble” on U.S. campuses. They examined the huge gaps in both countries between the rich and working classes.

“It’s not all just ‘Let’s be friends,’” said Neitzel. “We approach this as a serious academic class, but rather than my standing up there lecturing, it’s participatory engagement in learning about other cultures anthropologically.”

The class drew raves. “I really wanted to have some Americans friends. Before this class, it did not work out,” said a Chinese student. “I even got to know Chinese culture better.” Using Facebook as a teaching tool was “absolutely brilliant,” said an American student.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s (UNC-Chapel Hill) relationship with the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) in Ecuador started in an Amazonian jungle. Biology Professor Stephen Walsh first met Carlos Mena, who would become his PhD student and then later join USFQ as a professor, during a research trip to Ecuador in the late 1990s. Their personal relationship paved the way for a comprehensive partnership between their two institutions that culminated in the establishment of the Galápagos Science Center in 2011. UNC-Chapel Hill’s relationship with USFQ has subsequently expanded to include interdisciplinary research, student and faculty exchange, and community engagement, much of it focused on developing local capacity in the Galápagos Islands.

Building Strategic Partnerships

UNC-Chapel Hill’s collaboration with USFQ is characteristic of its larger approach to internationalization. According to Katie Bowler Young, director of global relations, UNC-Chapel Hill has chosen to focus on creating deep relationships that span multiple disciplines and ultimately result in engagement with local communities.

“Our key partnerships were established through faculty-to-faculty connections. Partnerships grow to include additional faculty, departments, and areas of study. Our team from UNC-Chapel Hill Global then helps develop partnerships, trying to extend them into new areas,” she says.

UNC-Chapel Hill’s long-term engagement in Ecuador was born out of Walsh’s and Mena’s joint research in the Galápagos, which Walsh first visited in 2006 as part of a project with the Galápagos National Park and the Nature Conservancy. “I continued to go back and forth to the Galápagos trying to understand their local needs, but to also begin to develop a UNC vision of what a long-term commitment in the Galápagos might look like,” Walsh says.

USFQ was interested in trying to identify a partner in the Galápagos to expand from undergraduate teaching to a more comprehensive research mission. “For us, we needed to make our presence in [the] Galápagos stronger. We needed an ally for that,” Mena says.

Infrastructure as Key to Sustainable Research

According to Walsh, the two institutions jointly identified infrastructure development as key to creating a sustainable research program in the Galápagos, which he says often suffers from a “one-and-done mentality where people go, gather data, write papers, and go home.”

“What we wanted to do is break this traditional approach to research and create something that is more connected to the needs of the Galápagos. Usually, research is done by foreign scientists who come to the Galápagos, and take their results with them when they leave. We wanted to change from that to something that is growing up from the community,” Mena adds.

In addition to discussing student mobility, they decided that there was a need to build a physical structure as the core of the collaboration between the two institutions.

“If we could build the Galápagos Science Center (GSC) and equip it with needed laboratories, providing unique capacity for science and education in the Galápagos, that would be the basis for an important increase into understanding the social, terrestrial, and marine subsystems in the Galápagos,” Walsh says.

It took almost five years from the time when UNCChapel Hill and USFQ first signed a general memorandum of understanding in 2007 to when the center opened its doors in 2011. Although UNC-Chapel Hill cannot legally own property in the Galápagos due to Ecuadorian law, the funding and construction were equally shared between the two institutions. More than 50 faculty members have subsequently been involved in the partnership.

Having a local base has made research easier for visiting faculty. Diego Riveros-Iregui is a physical geographer in the emerging field of ecohydrology—  “where life and water intersect,” as he puts it. He has spent time at the Galápagos Science Center studying the relationship between water, plants, and soils in tropical regions.

“I have been working in the tropics for several years and have run into many of the same challenges that everyone faces: customs, permits, maintenance of equipment, data collection, sample preservation, etc. When the opportunity to work in the Galápagos came up, working with the staff at the GSC facilitated many of the aforementioned challenges, giving me time to focus on research,” Riveros-Iregui says.

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Human and Ecological Systems Meet in the Galápagos

Mena says that scientific research in the Galápagos has traditionally been focused on hard science in areas such as botany, zoology, and evolution. From the beginning, they wanted to position the Galápagos Science Center as an interdisciplinary hub.

“The Galápagos are oftentimes thought of as Darwin’s paradise. But when you’re there, you can’t help but understand that the environment is changing and interacting with people, and shaping their behaviors,” Walsh says.

He adds that it was evident they needed to involve social sciences: “Two hundred twenty-five thousand tourists came to the Galápagos in 2015. About 30,000 residents live in the Galápagos Islands on four populated islands. It’s clear that it’s not just about ecology. It’s about the connection of people and ecology.”

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Maya Weinberg is a Latin American studies and political science major who took a gap year from UNC-Chapel Hill to do an internship at the GSC. She worked with Walsh on a project using global information software (GIS) to map out human development on San Cristóbal. She was involved with mapping buildings and putting together a report on infrastructure development.

She says that the interdisciplinary nature of the work at the GSC—and the opportunity to be involved in multiple projects in multiple fields—allowed her to make connections she wouldn’t otherwise have made: “With my experience working with human development, conservation, as well as geography I have become increasingly interested in policy and politics, as these are the disciplines that connect all three.”

The Importance of Engaging with the Local Community

Mena says that they built the center with the goal of providing more information to local communities and politicians to make informed decisions on issues such as health, tourism, infrastructure, and economic development.

He says that members of the local community are included in the research process. They work with a community board that keeps the GSC informed of local interests, and have close partnerships with Galápagos National Park and the local government council in order to find better ways to protect the islands.

UNC-Chapel Hill is currently engaging the community in the area of health. A new hospital was recently built on San Cristóbal, and representatives of both UNC and USFQ met with the director of the hospital and the ministry of health for the Galápagos. In 2016 the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Nursing sent a delegation to USFQ in Quito and to the Galápagos to visit the new hospital.

GSC also keeps the community informed about the results of its ongoing research. Kelly Houck is a biological anthropologist and UNC PhD candidate who studies human health. As part of her fieldwork on San Cristóbal, she collected samples of tap water to test for contamination as well as took blood, urine, and fecal samples from local residents to measure different health impacts.

“The water samples needed to be tested within 24 hours of collection and because of GSC infrastructure, we were able to give the results back immediately to the households and provide suggestions for treating contaminated water, such as boiling or using bottled water for drinking,” she says.

“In addition, we were able to provide them with preliminary results from their blood and urine test for indicators of infections, and advise them to seek further free testing at the hospital on San Cristóbal,” she adds.

Young adds that it is not only the local community in the Galápagos that benefits from the partnership. UNC-Chapel Hill’s undergraduate students have also been able to participate in opportunities through the partnership. In addition to semester or year-long exchanges to USFQ, undergraduates can also take advantage of faculty-led summer programs.

Billy Gerhard graduated in 2014 with a bachelor’s in biology and then earned a master’s of science in public health in environmental sciences and engineering. As an undergraduate, he did a summer program at the GSC in 2012. The next summer he returned as a winner of the Vimy award, a grant of up to $15,000 given annually to an interdisciplinary team of students working collaboratively to pursue research or service projects outside the United States. He is currently pursuing a PhD in environmental engineering at Duke University.

“The project definitely impacted my career trajectory. Working abroad required me to plan ahead, anticipate problems, organize contingencies, and communicate effectively. These skills are useful in any career and the opportunity to practice them was invaluable,” he says.

“I am currently writing the results of my research on drinking water in San Cristobal for publication,” he adds.

UNC has also sent local K–12 and community college educators to the Galápagos through its World View program, which strives to help teachers give their own students global competency. “We’ve seen this partnership benefit those beyond our campus as well,” she says.

Young says that having faculty members who are deeply committed to the local community has been key from a partnership development standpoint.

“It couldn’t have happened without two institutions that wanted it to happen, and two leaders, Carlos and I, who saw a vision, transmitted it to other faculty and students, and moved forward with a program that would be committed to community outreach, education, and research at a marvelous place,” Walsh adds.

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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Read more about University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

On January 31, 1891, the Tampa Bay Hotel, the pet project of railroad magnate Henry B. Plant, opened its doors with 500-plus rooms and quarter-mile long corridors. More than 125 years later, Plant Hall, as it’s known today, serves as the main administrative and academic building of the University of Tampa (UT), which moved into the iconic building in 1933. Just as tourists flocked to the Tampa Bay Hotel at the dawn of the twentieth century, the University of Tampa itself has become a destination for more than 8,000 students from 50 states and 140 countries.

Ronald L. Vaughn, who became president in 1995, says that UT began internationalizing in the early 1990s. “Early on we invested heavily in exposing our faculty to the world and different cultures. That definitely helped to speed along our development,” he says.

Early international initiatives paved the way for comprehensive internationalization, culminating with a 2005 accreditation review by the Southern Association of College and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC). UT chose to create and implement a quality enhancement plan (QEP), Building International Competence, as part of the accreditation process.

“When I look at us now, compared to where we were several years ago, we really have opened up the world of opportunities for our students and faculty. We’ve built a broad portfolio that everyone can take advantage of,” Vaughn says.

Leveraging Accreditation to Push Internationalization

The current structure of UT’s international programming has been in development since the mid-1990s, when under President Vaughn’s leadership, the university made internationalization a strategic priority. By 2005 those early efforts became the foundation for UT’s QEP, according to Marca Marie Bear, PhD, associate dean of the International Programs Office (IPO) and associate professor of management and international business at the Sykes College of Business.

“We were able to leverage the QEP and build internationalization into the vision that President Vaughn had for the university,” she says.

As the center for international programs of all kinds, the IPO oversees education abroad, international student and scholar services, and on-campus global programming. A sampling of its portfolio includes semester abroad, travel courses, international internships, service learning, research and athletics abroad, immigration advising, and advising for postgraduate opportunities abroad.

The office provides comprehensive support for any university-sponsored activity abroad, ranging from predeparture orientations to assistance with logistics and health insurance. The IPO also sponsors more than 50 international events each academic year, including its Global Scholar Speakers Series, and publishes World View, an annual magazine showcasing the institution’s international initiatives.

A number of other initiatives came out of the first QEP, including funding for faculty to explore international issues. Annually, the Office of International Programs sponsors five to six faculty members to participate in International Faculty Development Seminars (IFDS) organized by the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE).

Celebrating Global Competence with a Certificate of International Studies

Another achievement of the QEP was the development of UT’s Certificate of International Studies (CIS). According to Bear, approximately 40–50 students are working toward the certificate at any given time.

Students must obtain intermediate foreign language proficiency, participate in education abroad, and complete five global engagement projects. Students are also required to take 12–16 credits in non-Western and global awareness courses and complete a capstone course. Students are recognized at graduation with a cord of distinction.

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Victoria Tully, a 2016 graduate, majored in international and cultural studies and completed the CIS. “The certificate allowed me to get involved on campus. You do internationally based projects and events,” says Tully, who studied abroad in both Spain and Brazil and is currently serving in the Peace Corps.

One of the ways the Office of International Programs encourages students completing the CIS is to get involved with Spartans Abroad Ambassadors, which helps build awareness of education abroad options throughout campus. “As a Spartans Abroad ambassador, I have been able to help other students in going abroad by sharing my experience,” Tully says.

Creating a Study Abroad Pipeline Through Early Global Experiences

In 2016 UT launched a new QEP, Learning by Doing, which focuses on experiential learning. Bear says the new QEP will have increased focus on international internships and service learning. Provost David Stern adds that it will also create an impetus to develop opportunities for undergraduate research abroad.

One recent initiative that bridges the two QEPs is the creation of a four-year study abroad pipeline beginning with opportunities for freshmen to go abroad during—or even before—their first year. Two groups of first-year students will have the opportunity to spend the second semester of their freshman year in Ireland or Spain. In August 2016 UT will also launch Spartans Academy Abroad, a summer pre-enrollment program in Costa Rica aimed at incoming freshmen.

Working through the admissions office, UT has leveraged the programs to attract highly qualified incoming freshmen that they expect to become “repeat participants,” as Stern puts it, when it comes to international engagement. The idea is to expose students to international experiences early in their college careers in order to maximize impact.

For the Costa Rica program, UT has partnered with the Monteverde Institute to offer eight credits in biology and social science to approximately 20 students. Biologist Mason Meers and political scientist Kevin Fridy will teach a two-week multidisciplinary course that focuses on environmental politics, conservation, sustainability, and biological diversity. Upon return, the students will study 
together in a freshman learning community for the rest of the year.

Fridy says that the program will also give students a chance to engage with research early on in their college careers. “We hope we can encourage them to become not only more international, but also more scholarly,” he says.

Exploration Through Inspiration in the Honors Program

Recruiting for Spartans Academy Abroad has been done in close collaboration with the UT Honors Program. According to Director Gary Luter, some 1,300 students are enrolled in the honors program, which requires a 3.5 GPA.

“One of the pillars of our mission statement is to prepare honors students to be global citizens,” Luter says.

To achieve this goal, UT offers a number of honors travel courses with a research element. It also provides travel scholarships of approximately $1,000 to 20 honors students each year to help them go abroad. One student a year is also awarded $2,500 through the Timothy M. Smith Inspiration Through Exploration Award.

“This is a unique experience where students create their own itinerary. They have their own objectives and we underwrite the cost,” Luter says.

The UT Honors Program also sends three students per semester to study at Oxford University in the United Kingdom, covering the cost of tuition and housing.

Last year Selene San Felice, a junior journalism major, took part in the program, which is run on a tutorial system where students work one-on-one with a professor. She says it gave her a chance to study underground rap and hip hop and the history of sexuality in the twentieth century.

“I got to do really intense academic work. I wrote between 10 and 12 research papers during the eight weeks I was there. It’s not the typical study abroad, but it was really rewarding,” she says.

Promoting Sportsmanship Abroad

UT tries to make international opportunities available for all students, regardless of major. For student athletes, fitting study abroad into training schedules can be a particular challenge.

“Athletes don’t get the opportunity to study abroad like most students do because they can’t leave for the entire semester. We think it’s important that the coaches take them abroad and expose them to other cultures,” says Larry Marfise, UT athletic director.

The UT Spartans play in Division II for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) with eight men’s and 11 women’s varsity sports. The NCAA allows teams to go on international trips every four years, an opportunity of which Marfise tries to take full advantage.

Marfise adds that increased cultural awareness is not the only benefit of sending his teams abroad. “Every single team that has gone has not only come back with a better appreciation for what goes on in this world, but they also come back as better teammates,” he says.

In recent years, he sent the UT volleyball team to Sweden and both men’s and women’s soccer teams to Germany. In January 2014 they also sent the UT baseball team to Cuba, where they participated in cultural exchange activities and played—and won—three exhibition games with minor league Cuban teams.

Fostering Cultural Connections with Cuba

The baseball team playing in Havana isn’t the only recent connection between the University of Tampa and Cuba. For more than five years, UT has participated in a number of educational, cultural, and artistic exchanges with various Cuban institutions. In March 2016, for example, UT’s Scarfone Hartley Gallery hosted an exhibition of contemporary Cuban art that was visited by more than 2,000 community members.

UT has also participated in two different educational delegations to Cuba in the last year. In October 2015 UT was part of a group of 12 U.S. higher education institutions selected to travel to Cuba as part of an Institute of International Education (IIE) initiative to increase the number of partnerships between the United States and Cuba.

Through its Global Access Partnership, coordinated through the Sykes College of Business, UT also ran its own travel program in March 2016 designed to provide a platform for university faculty and community partners to understand business opportunities in Cuba. President Vaughn led the delegation.

In addition, UT has been deepening its own partnerships with Cuban institutions. In April, UT and the University of South Florida (USF) hosted the first UT-USF International Conference on José Martí, a nineteenth-century political activist and man of letters who was instrumental in the Cuban fight for independence from Spain.

During the conference, UT was inaugurated as the first U.S. affiliate of the Center for José Martí Studies (Centro de Estudios Martianos), a research institution in Havana that promotes Martí’s work.

Professors Denis Rey and James Lopez have taken the lead in establishing the academic partnership between the two institutions. They have been leading travel courses to Cuba since 2009, when U.S. President Barack Obama lifted restrictions for educational travel.

Rey and Lopez currently offer an honors course, Cuba and the U.S.: Then and Now, which examines U.S.-Cuba relations throughout the twentieth century. Rey says that his students have the opportunity to visit the Center for José Martí Studies. “What’s unique about our course is it’s one of very limited opportunities that U.S. students have to hear the Cuban perspective,” he explains.

Rey adds that the relationship with the Center for José Martí Studies has been instrumental in closely linking UT with a wider network of Cuban institutions. “In regards to the University of Havana, there exists mutual interest in fostering greater ties between the two institutions,” he says.

Senior Benjamin White traveled to Cuba with Rey and Lopez in January 2013. “Cuba is a nation that not many Americans have had the opportunity of visiting. It was a very good experience to have another perspective. It adds a layer to your thinking and analysis, and an understanding of the complexity of the negotiations that are occurring right now,” he says.

Academic Excellence Abroad Through Travel Courses

UT’s education abroad portfolio promotes opportunities for approximately 500 UT participants per year. One of the main ways that UT has sought to expand its education abroad portfolio is through the development of travel courses, which include an on-campus component followed by a faculty-led experience abroad. UT currently offers 17–20 travel courses to approximately 19 countries in a variety of disciplines.

Faculty members are provided with a stipend on top of their teaching salary. “It is a symbol that we recognize the value that they’re adding,” Stern says.

French Professor James Aubry leads a travel course to France every year. His course, Paris, Study of a City Throughout its History, explores the history of the French capital with a focus on lesser known landmarks.

Students who participate in the course are required to take at least two semesters of French prior to traveling. “When it comes to the language, I make them participate in everything from purchasing subway tickets for the group to ordering meals in French,” he says.

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Aubry appreciates that UT allows him to run the program with a small group of five to six students. “The students get more out of the experience,” he says.

Professor Tressa Pedroff leads a travel course to Costa Rica for nursing and public health students. The course, Transcultural Healthcare in Latin America, covers concepts such as community health promotion and disease prevention.

Pedroff says the course is an opportunity for future health care providers to understand their own medical system in a comparative context: “It’s a way of becoming much more culturally aware. It makes them have a new appreciation for other cultures and the resources that they have here in the United States.”

The Sykes College of Business also offers a range of travel courses for both undergraduate and graduate students. Business Professor Julia Pennington leads a travel course in qualitative market research to Swaziland in Africa. Her students visit game parks and interview local residents about their views on rhino conservation. “What I found out in my teaching is that qualitative research in study abroad is fantastic because you really have to connect with the locals,” she says.

Sykes also offers travel courses that look at international markets for graduate students. Amy Beekman, director of graduate business programs, says that it’s harder for graduate students to spend a semester away, so travel courses are an attractive option.

“Our international travel courses are a combination of business programs and cultural excursions, and they do projects for companies that we visit,” she says.

For their executive MBA program, Beekman recently led a 10-day trip to Ireland where students consulted for high-tech companies at a business incubator in Dublin. The students spent a few days on site with the company and then worked virtually after returning home.

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“Particularly in the executive MBA program, it’s all about the application. Our students already have a lot of professional experience. It’s a great learning experience for our students to be able to take everything they’ve learned in the program and to be able to apply it. Then you have the cultural dimension on top of it,” Beekman says.

Using Diversity as a Recruitment Tool

Over the last decade, the University of Tampa has increased not only its total enrollment but also the share of international students on campus. Total enrollment has increased from around 5,000 students in 2005 to nearly 8,000 in 2015, with the percentage of international students growing from approximately 9 percent to 20 percent during the same period.

When Vice President for Enrollment Dennis Nostrand came on board eight years ago, he couldn’t help but notice just how internationalized the campus had become. “I felt that it was something from a marketing standpoint that I really needed to take advantage of, and make sure that students that were going to come to the University of Tampa realized how internationally diverse the student body was,” he says.

To help attract international students, Nostrand created a bridge program with an English as a Second Language (ESL) provider. It is unique because it only enrolls students who plan to matriculate into UT once they achieve English proficiency, thus building a strong enrollment pipeline.

UT’s success in internationalization has also become one of its major selling points. “We want to make sure that students really understand the advantages of having an international campus,” he says.