In the state that fired the first shot in the property tax revolt with Proposition 13 more than a quarter- century ago, what are the odds that voters in the South Bay of Los Angeles would approve a $394 million bond issue for their community college?
The odds might be long, but by a margin of 62–38, some 110,000 voters in this ethnically and economically diverse area of southern California did just that in November 2002 by passing “Measure E,” a capital improvement bond, for El Camino College. El Camino is an ambitious institution serving nine cities: El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach, Torrance, Lawndale, Hawthorne, Lennox, and Inglewood. It opened its doors in 1947 as El Camino Junior College, with 450 students attending classes in nine renovated barracks from Santa Ana Army Air Base. Today 25,000 students are enrolled on the campus, which offers 2,500 classes in 85 programs and boasts a 12,500-seat football stadium.
El Camino is also a standout in international education, enrolling nearly 700 students from other countries and sending more than 100 each summer to study in England, France, China, and New Zealand. Thanks to an aggressive pursuit of federal grants and exchange opportunities and a spirit of inquisitiveness among its faculty, El Camino College in the past five years has gotten involved in exchanges that took its faculty to Ukraine, Poland, Italy, and Lebanon. It was one of two community colleges chosen to participate in the State Department–sponsored Global Experience Through Technology (GETT) initiative that links classrooms in Europe and the Middle East with campuses in the United States.
“There was a time probably when some folks here thought, ‘Well, why are we doing this? We have the general education curriculum to address,’” said Gloria E. Miranda, the dean of Behavioral and Social Sciences and a historian on family life in Spanish and Mexican California. “But with the world today, and with the tragic series of events in the last several years, we really need to understand the multicultural world we live in. And since much of the world migrates to the United States, we must understand the people who come to this country, as well.”
Bozena (Bo) Morton, acting director of the Center for International Education and a prolific grant writer, said, “With international grants, we’ve been extremely lucky. We got almost everything we applied for with one exception.” The Polish-born Morton immigrated to the United States after a decade living in then-Czechoslovakia and teaching English at University of Silesia in Cieszyn, just over the border in Poland.
The lives and careers of several El Camino faculty have taken remarkable international turns thanks to Morton’s uncanny grantswomanship, none more so than that of Antoinette Phillips, a professor of childhood education.
Phillips is an El Camino success story. She earned her associate’s degree in 1976, then joined the faculty after completing a master’s degree in childhood education. “I was one of those late bloomers. I didn’t go to college until my children started school. I lived right down the street and rode my bike so I didn’t have to worry about parking,” she said. She excelled in the classroom, but was astonished one day when a mentor told her, “You know, you could do this. You could be a professor.”
Phillips volunteered to go to Ukraine for three months in 2001 to teach child development and American instructional techniques to Ukrainian professors and their students. El Camino had secured an $180,000 three-year grant under a State Department program that links U.S. colleges with universities in the newly independent states of East Europe. El Camino’s partner was Dniepropetrovsk National University (DNU) in Dniepropetrovsk, a city of 1 million people on the Dniepro River that was closed for military research during the Soviet era.
“At a faculty meeting Bo asked, ‘Who would like to go to Ukraine?’ and I raised my hand. That’s how it all started,” said Phillips.
While their project partners in DNU’s Educational Psychology Department spoke fluent English, most of the students and many of the professors with whom Phillips interacted in other places did not. She relied on students and the project’s co-director, Tatyana Vvedenska, to translate for her. Vvedenska, a dynamic English professor at DNU, wound up teaching ESL classes at El Camino on a faculty exchange in Spring 2004.
The polyglot Morton calls Phillips “the bravest person” for taking on the assignment. Her dean, Gloria Miranda, accompanied Phillips to Ukraine, but she returned shortly afterwards. “I was there by my lonesome for three months until Bo came over for the last two weeks,” said Phillips. In dozens of classrooms and academies, she demonstrated how classes could be taught in more creative ways than relying solely on lectures.
“I had to have an interpreter all the time. That was a little uncomfortable, because it takes away some of my spontaneity—I had to wait after each sentence for it to be translated—but we managed,” she said. “I visited a lot of schools from preschool up to universities, went to academies, and spoke to a lot of different classes about the American way of life and American education.”
She’d return to her apartment after a day of classes, and using a dial-up connection, teach two education classes online to her students back in California, sharing with them glimpses of life in Ukraine’s third largest city.
Apart from one trip to England, Phillips had not previously traveled outside North America. “It was such a transforming experience for her. What I find so fascinating is that you have faculty who really have never seen the world,” said Miranda. “Even though they are experts in a discipline—Antoinette is one of our distinguished faculty awardees—they have not tested how their teaching techniques would apply in a global setting.”
Phillips enjoyed the experience so much that she volunteered to do it again two years later when Morton landed a grant from the Fulbright Educational Partnership Program allowing El Camino to partner on teacher training with the Cieszyn branch of the University of Silesia in Poland, where Morton once taught. There Phillips found the classrooms filled with eager future teachers who spoke English fluently.
El Camino sent six faculty and administrators to DNU over four years, and an equal number from the Ukrainian university journeyed to California to visit El Camino’s landscaped campus a few miles south of Los Angeles International Airport. Most of these exchanges lasted two to three weeks. Phillips made a return visit in April 2003 with Elizabeth Shadish, an El Camino philosophy professor who is a skilled hand at distance education.
At home, El Camino’s distance education courses—both online via computer and through telecourses provided on videos—are especially popular with students who cannot fit regular class hours into their work or family schedule. “They may be working 40 hours a week or they’ve just had a baby or they have two or three children at home,” said Phillips.
In the Ukraine, the university students were traditional age—18 to 21—and technilogically savvy. However, most faculty were lacking in technological literacy, said Shadish, who earned her Ph.D. at Purdue University and taught at California State University at Northridge before joining the El Camino faculty a dozen years ago.
Like Phillips, Gloria Miranda is also a product of one of California’s many two-year colleges, Compton College. She earned her bachelor’s at Cal State University, Dominguez Hills, and her Ph.D. at the University of Southern California. She chaired the American Cultures and Chicano Studies programs at Los Angeles Valley College before taking the dean’s post at El Camino.
“The fact that Bo came with her unique background has really helped us and our faculty focus on what we can do to expose ourselves and our students to the world around us,” Miranda said.
“The faculty in my division who’ve participated have been almost re-energized by these opportunities.”
With the Ukrainian project, Morton said, “We found out that sending the same faculty members more than once is really a good practice. They are able to do so much more during their second visit because they don’t have this adjustment period.”
The success of the Ukrainian exchange convinced El Camino President Thomas M. Fallo to tap some of El Camino’s own resources to support the partnership with the University of Silesia in Cieszyn, Poland. It is a city and region with a turbulent and colorful past and a multicultural mix of identities and ethnicities.
In Poland, Phillips found teacher educators intrigued by her teaching methods, but loathe to give up their reliance on rote lectures. The Polish educators were struggling with how to meet a new mandate for more kindergarten teachers.
For it’s next international venture, El Camini was selected to participate in the State Department’s International World Cultures Project using the Global Experience Through Technology (GETT) model pioneered by East Carolina University. Recognizing that fewer than 2 percent of U.S. college students study abroad, this project is designed to expose students to new cultures through virtual classrooms shared with university students in other parts of the world.
This opportunity almost fell into El Camino’s lap.
“After Ukraine we got a good reputation. That project worked well and accomplished what it was supposed to accomplish,” said Morton. “One day I was sitting in my office and I got a call from a new person at the Department of State who told me she was putting together a virtual classroom project. She had heard about the distance education component to our work.”
El Camino partnered again with DNU in this new project, but it also needed to find two other institutions to work with, including one in the Arab world. “Sometimes it’s not easy to put a partnership together. Sometimes you just have to dig, you have to cold call,” said Morton. “I sent cold e-mails. That’s how I came up with the Italian partner. Somebody on our faculty said the University of Modena at Reggio Emilia was the best in Italy on early childhood education, and I thought, ‘If we are going to connect with somebody, why not the best?’”
El Camino sent Elizabeth Shadish, the professor of philosophy, and Joanna Medawar Nachef, a music professor and choir director, to Europe with bags bulging with videoconference equipment bound for three partner institutions: DNU in Ukraine, the University of Modena at Reggio Emilia, and the Lebanese University in Beirut, Lebanon. Nachef is an accomplished conductor and choir master who was born in Beirut but earned her degrees (including a doctorate from USC) in the United States. She speaks Arabic and still has extensive contacts in the Lebanese capital.
The two El Camino teachers set up a pilot world cultures course in which a single class of students from the four institutions rotated working with each other online for three to four weeks at a time.
“We had to create a schedule that involved coordinating across time lines, semesters starting at different times, and vacations and holidays happening at different times. You just put together a grid and get a schedule down so that nobody has off times, or at least not too many off times,” said Shadish. “At any point, two institutions were working with each other, ideally for three or four weeks. While we’re talking with Italy, Lebanon is talking with Ukraine. Next rotation we’re talking with Ukraine, while Italy and Lebanon are talking.”
For the pilot, Shadish and Nachef selected El Camino honors students from their own classes. They received no credit, “but they were there the whole semester at 8 in the morning. They saw the value in this,” said Shadish.
They had no trouble finding volunteers, agreed Nachef. “Even [at times] when there is no picture and they are only hearing them on the other end, the electricity in the room is fascinating,” she said. “These students went back to the choirs and my other classes, saying, ‘You can’t believe how exciting it is.’” Students were often disappointed when the allotted hour ran out. “They don’t want to leave the room. They look at their watches. We say we have to end the session and they say, ‘We don’t want to,’” Nachef said.
Nachef laughed as she recalled one incident of strained communication. One student asked a young man in Lebanon if they had rites of passage for special birthdays. She had in mind La Quinceañera, the Latin celebration for a girl’s fifteenth birthday.
The Lebanese student took umbrage, typing back, “Do you think we are barbarians? We dance around fires?”
The panicked American called out for help to her professor, saying, “Dr. Nachef, I don’t know what to say. He thinks we’re putting them down.”
Amity prevailed after the cultural reference was explained.
Shadish and Nachef plan to offer the cultural exchange course again and involve new countries and universities in GETT. “Where this program can go is so exciting,” Shadish said. “[GETT] is such a pioneer experience that nothing you do is wrong. We’re creating the standards. We’re very free to explore what works.”
El Camino also won Fulbright-Hayes funding from the U.S. Department of Education to send 15 teachers—Spanish language teachers and teacher educators from its own faculty and teachers from local elementary schools—on a four-week language and cultural study trip to Guadalajara and Oaxaca, Mexico.
Miranda said El Camino is developing a proposal to partner on an early childhood initiative with two other community colleges in different parts of the United States and three universities overseas.
The possibilities seem endless. “I have a part-time teacher whose father is retired from the University of Ghana,” said Miranda. “And Bo and I have been talking about a grant that includes China. We’re in such a key position here on the Pacific Coast, and we want to infuse our curriculum with more content that pertains to the Asian world.” El Camino has already won backing from the Council for International Exchange of Scholars for its request to have a Middle East scholar spend a semester at the campus as a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence.
The faculty and the administrators keep coming up with ideas and Bo Morton, as Miranda put it, “keeps hitting home runs for us.”
Even before getting a $394 million makeover courtesy of Measure E—it will take years to complete all the new projects and improvements—El Camino has established itself as a college on the move.
A few years back, The Chronicle of Higher Education asked college presidents to muse on what they’d do with a $1 billion gift with no strings attached. The University of Denver’s then-Chancellor Daniel L. Ritchie immediately responded: “Send every student abroad for study at no extra cost, including travel.”
But Ritchie wasn’t just wishing. He explained to the Chronicle that the University of Denver already had a plan in the works to send every undergraduate with grades of B or better to study abroad, and it was financing this out of pocket. A $1 billion windfall would just let Denver start doing this sooner.
The University of Denver launched its Cherrington Global Scholars program on schedule in September 2004, sending the first 347 students to spend the fall quarter at more than 60 sites overseas. Many were prominent universities with which DU has painstakingly forged bilateral agreements to ensure that the coursework is compatible with the majors of DU students from programs as diverse as music, engineering, business, and social work. “There simply is no better preparation for the challenges that lie ahead for our students,” said Ritchie, a former corporate CEO who retired as chancellor this past summer after executing a remarkable turnaround in the University of Denver’s fortunes over 16 years.
The Cherrington Global Scholars program—named for a former chancellor and prominent international educator [see box, The Cherrington and Korbel Connections]—has attracted curiosity in academic circles. “People ask all the time: ‘Who is this Cherrington that gave the money?’” said Carol Fairweather, director of the Study Abroad Office. “But it didn’t come that way. It didn’t come with an endowment. It’s written into the university budget.”
As Ritchie wrote in response to the Chronicle’s $1 billion question, “When students immerse themselves in study abroad and constantly use another language, it forever changes their worldview and their potential for growth. It’s even truer now than before September 11.”
The University of Denver long had been sending students to study in other countries, but not in the numbers that Ritchie, then-Provost and now Chancellor Robert Coombe, and legal scholar Ved Nanda, the vice provost for internationalization, had in mind. When Fairweather came on board nine years ago, she was the sole person in the study abroad office. “Now there are six of us,” she said in her Scottish burr. In 2001 the university enlisted George Boyd, a former dean of humanities and study abroad director for Trinity University, to serve as director of international site development, a position from which he traveled the world to forge more than 40 exchange agreements with leading universities. Boyd is now associate vice provost for internationalization.
The university enrolls 9,600 students, including 4,500 undergraduates, 55 percent from outside Colorado. Nearly 700 are international. With the launch of the Cherrington program, the university is aiming for 60 percent of its undergraduates to study abroad for at least a quarter. It’s not surprising why more students are taking DU up on the offer.
The students pay just a third of their tuition (roughly $9,000) plus a share of room and board, but the university picks up the rests of the costs of their studying abroad. “We pay all their travel expenses, not just the airfare,” said Fairweather. “If they are going to Aix-en-Provence, we pay the airfare to Paris, and then the train or flight down. It’s visas, entry permits, International Student ID card, medical insurance if that’s mandatory, and any additional expense.” Some students spend 15 weeks studying overseas, which is more like a semester than a quarter, but they are still charged only a third of tuition.
DU still sends students on other study abroad programs as well. All told, the number studying abroad jumped from 221 in fall 2003 to 405 in fall 2004.
The University of Denver invests heavily in the Cherrington program. Most of the tuition payments are passed on to the partner universities. The program’s costs topped $4 million in the first year, and was projected at more than $5 million for 2005–2006.
“How do we do it? The answer is that Chancellor Ritchie was and is a man of great aspirations for the university and high educational ideals, and he decided this was a very high priority,” said Boyd.
Eric Gould, an English professor and former vice provost who chairs the Cherrington Global Scholars Faculty Board, said, “It’s very much the will of the chancellor and the provost that this succeed, and it’s not just them. It’s the deans, the departments, and the faculty–we all believe in this as a very important educational exercise.”
The faculty are also deeply involved in making sure these study abroad experiences fit smoothly into students’ majors. “It’s very complicated to do it well,” said Ritchie. “You’ve got to get faculty from each of the disciplines involved. You’ve got to prepare students not only for the logistics of going, but in their studies and disciplines, and making sure that we can give credit for it.”
“It’s unusual for a school with so many professional programs, especially those offered at the undergraduate level, to integrate study abroad as easily as we have done,” said Gould. “Even some of the difficult majors like engineering, music, and art, which have very, very tight curricula, are making special efforts to ensure that their students travel.”
DU is among the largest private universities between Chicago and the West Coast. The study abroad numbers had been growing even before the Cherrington program. Based on the 2002–2003 numbers, it ranked seventh nationally among doctoral/research institutions in Open Doors 2004, the Institute of International Education (IIE) report, with fully half of undergraduates studying abroad by the time they graduated. However, most then were going on short study abroad trips, usually during the summer.
The university made meticulous preparations for the launch of the Cherrington program, canvassing almost every office on campus from housing to the registrar to financial aid that “might be caught in the ripple of Cherrington,” as Fairweather put it. It convened town hall-style meetings to discuss how to deal with the ripple effects.
“With the advising and the new opportunities available, we are seeing students move into destinations that were not popular before,” said Fairweather. “We’re seeing them spread out. We’ve got many more students interested in Japan and we have students going to India. We started a program with DIS in Denmark.”
While still provost, Coombe offered $30,000 in grants for departments to send faculty overseas to find suitable new academic partners for their majors, in addition to the many that Boyd found.
“A couple of schools are on our list primarily because I was looking for an engineering fit. The Budapest Institute of Technology is the best example,” said Boyd. “We’re adding Monash University in Australia, partly for engineering and partly for art.”
“We know students will still want to go to Australia and certain places that have been popular for years. But George has filled in the holes in the wall where the music students and engineers need to go,” said Fairweather.
To ensure that music majors not only received instruction in their instrument, but also got opportunities to play in ensembles and found “just the right course in the music history sequence,” Boyd arranged exchanges with the Institute for the International Education of Students (IES) in Vienna and Milan. They also can enroll in a Brisbane, Australia, conservatory.
The engineering department reconfigured requirements to make it possible for majors to study abroad at the start of their senior year. “I thought it quite remarkable that a very technical department like engineering would adjust its curriculum to make a slot where study abroad would fit better,” said Gould.
Nanda, who holds two endowed chairs in addition to serving as vice provost for international programs, calls what has happened at the University of Denver “a miracle.” He continues, “Internationalization and international life and culture have become part of the mainstream of life on this campus. It’s wonderful that it happened, and very, very heartening.”
To understand how Columbus State Community College built its formidable array of international education connections, consider the baggage claim area at Port Columbus International Airport, a gateway to the Midwest that serves more than 6 million passengers each year. A few years back, Robert Queen, an administrator at the community college, noticed that next to the baggage claim area there was a room that served as the airport chapel, and inside that space was an even smaller office with a sign on the door that read, International Visitors Council.
Queen, the administrator of Columbus State’s International Initiatives and Community Outreach Program and a born networker, did what comes naturally: He knocked on the door and asked the person inside, “What do you all do?”
He learned that the small office belonged to a local nonprofit group that served as a liaison to dignitaries, educators, business executives, political leaders, artists, and others visiting Ohio’s state capital from overseas on trips arranged by the U.S. Department of State. Queen and his boss, Alphonso Simmons, vice president and head of the Office of Multicultural Affairs, wasted no time in suggesting that their busy campus on an 80-acre patch of green in downtown Columbus would make an excellent addition to international visitors’ itineraries. They not only got involved with the council, but Queen went on to become president. While Queen led that group, Simmons was president of the Columbus Compact Corp., an organization working to promote economic development and opportunity in central Columbus. Both men are active participants in the Columbus Council on World Affairs, Sister Cities International, and Columbus International Program, another nonprofit that brings professionals from other countries to central Ohio for a year working on exchange in local businesses and agencies
Columbus is home to The Ohio State University, the largest public university in America, with almost 51,000 students on its main campus. But Columbus State is also a force in the capital and in central Ohio, awarding more associate degrees than any of the state’s 22 other community colleges. Its enrollment grew by more than a third in the past decade, cresting at 23,000 in fall 2003. Last year it purchased a 108-acre site in fast-growing Delaware County that eventually will become a second main location, complementing nine suburban satellites.
Columbus State’s president, M. Valeriana Moeller, a scientist who was born in India and raised in Portugal, serves on the board of the American Council on Education’s (ACE) Commission on International Education. Columbus State was among eight U.S. colleges and universities selected by ACE for a research project examining the links between campus international education strategies and activities and student attitudes and participation in international programs. That study, Forging New Connections: A Study in Linking Internationalization Strategies and Student Learning, is forthcoming.
A sampling of Columbus State’s international activities illustrates why it is considered a paragon of internationalism:
Columbus State also has been honored by the American Council on International Intercultural Education for its success in internationalizing the curriculum and in opening an English language institute to serve international students, immigrants, and refugees, including some of the 30,000 Somalis who now make their home in the Ohio capital. It offers an array of summer study abroad opportunities for students to learn other languages and cultures.
It was the college’s array of international partnerships and aggressive outreach efforts that caught the eye of the NAFSA selection committee that chose the institutions for this Internationalizing the Campus report.
“We do have that reputation (for strong outreach and partnerships) and let me assure you, there is meat behind that reputation,” said Simmons, a former chair of the social services program who began teaching at Columbus State in 1974.
Queen’s connections to the college go back even further. He was in the first graduating class of what was then the Columbus Area Technician School, which had opened in a wing of Central High School in 1963. It was renamed the Columbus Technical Institute in 1967 and two decades later rechartered as Columbus State Community College. It offers more than 140 associate degree and certificate programs in business, health, social services, engineering technology, and other fields. It forged its first articulation agreement with Ohio State in 1989 and now has transfer pacts with Ohio University, Kent State University, the University of Cincinnati, Antioch College and a dozen other four-year campuses across the state.
The drive to internationalize Columbus State came soon after M. Valeriana Moeller, then the executive vice president and provost of Lansing Community College in Michigan, was named president in 1996. “She got us into a new age, a new era. She got us thinking about Internet education and internationalizing the curriculum,” said Simmons. Moeller also recognized a need to serve Columbus’s growing immigrant populations, including the refugees from Somalia and growing numbers of immigrants from Latin America.
Moeller restructured the college administration. As head of the new Office of Multicultural Affairs, Simmons also chaired a Global Initiatives Committee that drafted a strategic plan for internationalization. And Columbus State got into distance education in a large way. Some 8,300 students now take courses online, with a choice of more than 290 distance education courses and five online degrees offered through Columbus State’s Global Campus.
Queen—who had gone to work for Battelle Memorial Institute with his degree in mechanical engineering technology—had returned to the college to teach in 1985 and was chair of its engineering technologies program when asked to run the new Office of International Initiatives and Community Outreach.
“At the time we had very little experience with internationalization or globalization,” he recalled. “We had to define what it meant when you said you wanted to internationalize your curriculum. What does this umbrella look like? What are the components of the curriculum? We had to find out who the players were, who was working in this arena and who was doing what.”
“We became involved,” said Queen, “and anywhere there was an opportunity for us to gain some insight, we were there to learn about it and see how that might fit into our structure.”
“One of the ways we moved forward in this international work was we found [opportunities] where people were not working,” said Queen. “For example, we found that universities had been working for a long time with the State Department and U.S. AID [Agency for International Development] doing contract training, but community colleges were not really involved. The same was true with the World Bank on some of their programs.
“So we took the initiative to start finding out more about the World Bank, the Associate Liaison Office of AID, and also the National Council for International Visitors. We wanted to know, how do we bring dignitaries from other countries into the United States and more important, how do we get them on our campus?” Queen said.
Simmons, who moved to Ohio from Georgia in 1969 to earn his master’s degree and doctorate at Ohio State, said that once the college began reaching out and expanding its horizons, it found plenty of takers. “It turned out there were lots of people out there in central Ohio who truly wanted to become affiliated with the college in some way,” Simmons said. One connection led to another.
The educators maintain close ties with the city of Columbus’s Office of Community Relations, which works with the region’s immigrants and refugees. “The director has a program on cable television every week in which he talks about what’s going on in our community. He might be talking with groups that put on a huge Asian festival at one of the local parks each spring, and invariably in that conversation, our name may come up: ‘What about Columbus State? Have you talked with them?’ That’s how we keep becoming more and more involved in lots and lots of activities,” said Simmons.
Columbus State is very attuned to the needs of major employers in the region, and many companies have enlisted its help for English language classes and workforce training.
“We have a workforce development unit on campus that almost at the drop of a hat can develop programs and youth training for different groups in the community, and we also have a business and industry unit that’s also geared to [outside contract work,]” Simmons said. “We provide ESL courses, we provide training for police officers in different languages, we provide training for social service workers.”
“We work closely with Ohio State University. We’re fortunate to have them as our neighbor and good friends,” said Queen. Ohio State’s Center for Education, Training and Employment does contract training around the globe “and they look to us to provide the vocational, technical aspects of a curriculum.”
A willingness to take risks has also served Columbus State well. For example, Columbus State learned from the international liaison at the American Association of Community Colleges that it was having difficulty finding a college willing to provide curriculum development training for a World Bank project in Hungary.
“Well, we know curriculum development and workforce education very well. We decided to give it a try,” said Queen. FAS International, the subcontractor on the World Bank contract, brought three groups of 21 educators from Hungary to Columbus State for instruction on curriculum development and how to validate a curriculum with industry.
“We’ve done several more since,” said Queen. After figuring out how to provide such training in Columbus, Queen said, they realized they could also “take our faculty across the water to their place.”
With Tanzania, Columbus State first did a pilot distance education project, and then exchanged faculty members. When the American Association of Community Colleges arranged a match-making session with Chinese institutions in Beijing in 2004, Columbus State was there. It has since hosted a training session for Chinese business executives who needed to learn about the World Trade Organization.
“It’s all really about people-to-people,” said Queen.
Columbus State currently enrolls 465 international students. Helvi Itenge, a computer technology student from Windhoek, Namibia, marvels that the computer labs are open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily. Bola Jinadu of Lagos, Nigeria, said, “The environment, the teachers, the students, they make you feel welcome. They make you feel like they actually want you to be here and they are out there to listen to you and to help you in any way they can.”
Itenge, Jinadu and Sophie Metaferia from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, all serve as Student Ambassadors, a program that provides scholarships for top students to serve as goodwill emissaries for the college with prospective students and community groups.
Metaferia’s father was a physician who died when she was 3. She still remembers people back home talking about how much good he did. “This college has opened a lot of choices for me,” said Metaferia. “Now, I want to be a medical doctor… I want to do my part to help my people.”
In the higher education world, college and university rankings are a source of endless fascination and endless frustration for administrations and admissions officers. They come in all sizes and shapes, some with impressive imprimaturs (i.e., the National Research Council’s periodic ratings of graduate programs) and others that mix a scintilla of scientific precision with an overlay of academics’ opinions and impressions (i.e., U.S. News & World Report’s cottage industry of rankings). There is one common denominator that binds together most of America’s greatest research campuses, public and private: they belong to the Association of American Universities, an organization of 62 leading North American universities—60 in the United States and two in Canada—whose members award half the doctoral degrees and account for 55 percent of the research in the United States each year. Its roster is often regarded as a Who’s Who of North America’s greatest universities.
The University of California at Los Angeles won admission to AAU’s exclusive ranks in 1974 (74 years after the University of California at Berkeley, one of the founders), and UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale often makes the largely unassailable observation that his institution can lay claim to this title: the best comprehensive, public university in any of America’s largest cities. “If you stop and think about it, UCLA is quite unusual in that sense,” said Carnesale, a onetime nuclear engineer who redirected his career and scholarly passion into public policy work after participating in the original Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) talks 35 years ago. “It’s not New York. It’s not Boston. They have great universities, but they are not public. It’s not Chicago. It’s not San Francisco. Berkeley’s at Berkeley. You start going down the list, and they don’t have great public universities in the (big) cities.” There’s the University of Washington on the lakefront in Seattle, a city of 563,000, and the University of Texas at Austin, in the Texas capital, where 656,000 people dwell—but neither comes close to the population of the City of Angels (3.8 million). The handful of public universities with reputations as large or larger than UCLA’s are in smaller places, from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Charlottesville, Virginia, to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Madison, Wisconsin. (And, of course, in the aforementioned Berkeley, population 102,000.) This New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts, expatriate now has this to say about his adopted hometown: “Los Angeles is perhaps the most exciting, dynamic, global city anywhere, not just in the United States.”
College presidents and university chancellors everywhere are nothing if not super salespersons for the place they call home. The 69-year-old Carnesale is a proud, purposeful, and extraordinarily successful pitchman. Since moving west in 1997 after 23 years at Harvard University—where he was professor, dean of the Kennedy School of Government, and provost—Carnesale has helped UCLA raise upwards of $2.5 billion—more than any public university, and $3 billion is in sight before he steps down as chancellor in June 2006 to resume teaching. Carnesale marshals these arguments for a point: UCLA is a very international, interdisciplinary university that happens to sit in the middle of one of the most multicultural, polyglot cities in the world.
Now, “urban” isn’t the first word that comes to mind upon stepping foot on UCLA’s gorgeous Westwood campus, a few miles south of the HOLLYWOOD sign and a few miles east of the Santa Monica beaches. But “international” is. With five Nobel Laureates on the faculty, and four others among its 330,000 alumni—including Ralph Bunche ’26, the scholar-athlete who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for brokering a truce between Arabs and Jews in the Middle east—and with 38,000 students and a faculty of 3,300, UCLA is deeply involved in international education and research. As Carnesale wrote in an introduction to UCLA’s global programs and activities for UCLA Magazine (Winter 2004), “At UCLA, scholars from a wide range of disciplines prepare the next generation of leaders who will not only be outstanding scientists, teachers, artists and citizens, but who also will function effectively in an interconnected global world.”
Carrying the banner and providing the central administrative and intellectual focus for these activities is the UCLA International Institute, which occupies two upper floors of Ralph Bunche Hall on the compact campus (among the nine University of California institutions, UCLA has the curious distinction of having the largest enrollment and the smallest campus—419 acres). Under the purview of the International Institute are 15 research centers and separate programs on almost all regions of the globe, nine interdisciplinary degree programs, including a new, enormously poplar Global Studies major; language studies (UCLA regularly teaches more than 40 languages, including Afrikaans, Hausa, Quechua, Bashkir, Uzbek, and Catalan), study abroad, community outreach, and numerous global research initiatives. The Burkle Center for International Relations brings national and international leaders in business, government, education, and civic life to campus and holds forums addressing public policy conundrums.
Geoffrey Garrett, who served as vice provost and dean of the International Institute from 2001-2005, said, “It is very arguably the case that UCLA has more and higher quality faculty in international studies than anywhere else in the United States.” He acknowledged that some might argue that that distinction belongs to the University of Michigan or Berkeley, “but I would make the case that we’re bigger and better than both in international. And none of the privates with the possible exception of Harvard can match our scope.” (Garrett recently moved across town to assume the presidency of the Pacific Council on International Policy at the University of Southern California.)
The numbers bear out Garrett’s claim. In the 2004 Open Doors report, UCLA led all public institutions in the number of students’ studying abroad: 1,917 in 2003–2003 (only New York University sent more: 2,061). Many go through the Education Abroad Program Office which, working through the University of California System EAP office in Santa Barbara, places students at more than 140 institutions in 33 countries. A large and growing number head overseas each summer in travel study programs led by UCLA faculty. The Summer Sessions and Special Projects office enrolled a record 969 students in 29 programs around the world in summer 2005. And UCLA has a separate office that arranges internships and service opportunities and helps other students directly enroll in scores of universities overseas. The Anderson School of Management arranges exchanges each fall for 60 second-year MBA students, at the same time hosting as many from 47 international business schools.
“The exchange program is a big selling point for us in our recruiting for this school,” said Susan Corley, director of student services for the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
Not content with the existing cornucopia of study abroad offerings, UCLA launched in 2004 an intensive new summer model that sent 25 students to Tongji University in Shanghai to study Asia’s emerging economies for a month. In 2005 the International Institute expanded this new Global Learning Institute to offer summer classes at host universities in Hong Kong, Vienna, and Guanajuato, a colonial town in Mexico, and more are in the offing.
“We’re not trying to duplicate existing opportunities or denigrate the traditional model… but it’s time to expand opportunities,” said Garrett, an Australian-born political economist and authority on the globalization of markets.
Last spring more than 400 students signed up for UCLA’s first Global Studies class. Guest lecturers include Chancellor Carnesale—who regularly teaches and lectures at UCLA about disarmament and international relations—former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and former U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor.
Political Science Professor Steven L. Spiegel, the associate director of the Burkle Center and a Middle East expert, said all top universities have international relations centers, but UCLA’s has “a unique combination of breadth and depth.”
Spiegel joined the UCLA faculty in 1966 after completing graduate work at Harvard. “It’s a much bigger and much more complicated place today,” he said. “UCLA has very broad regional interests. It clearly has the top Middle East program west of Chicago.” It has Arabists, for instance, in anthropology, sociology, and political science as well as in language studies. Ironically, he said, decades ago when Berkeley and UCLA decided to divide the world for the purpose of area studies, Berkeley took Europe and Asia—then of foremost interest to the United States—while UCLA got the Middle East and Africa. “In a way, they were sops to the second rung school. Now the Middle East is the number 1 issue,” said Spiegel (both UC schools now cover all these areas).
Nearly 600 UCLA undergraduates and 150 graduate students are pursuing degrees in the International Institute’s degree programs, which include a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies.
“I’ve tried to create a two-dimensional intellectual architecture for the International Institute,” said Garrett. “One dimension, the pillars, is area studies the way we’ve always done it.” The second dimension “is where you wave these big global themes—global studies, migration studies, international development studies— among the area pillars.”
Political scientist Ronald Rogowski, a son of Nebraska sharecroppers who is an authority on international trade and a champion of interdisciplinary work, is UCLA’s new interim vice provost and dean of the International Institute. He was already serving as the institute’s associate dean and had played a key role in bringing in its first class of Global Fellows—promising young scholars at early stages of their career who get to spend a year on the Westwood campus pursuing international research and teaching seminars— as well as reshaping its Islamic Studies program and opening a new Center for India and South Asia.
International Development Studies, which examines the problems and issues faced by the world’s poorest countries, attracted 25 majors when it started in the 1980s. Today it is a virtual behemoth with 350 majors. Its director, Michael Ross, an associate professor of Political Science, said, “It’s a great program for students who want to spend time in a developing country and learn that country’s language, and who are interested in real world political and economic issues.”
Ross, whose specialty is researching the protection and destruction of natural resources in such developing countries as Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, said the program’s majors are undaunted by rigorous requirements, including two years of language and a capstone senior seminar that requires significant research. “Most of our students spend from a summer to a year abroad. A lot, given the make-up of Los Angeles, will go to Latin America or Asia,” where they have family roots, he said.
“For what I do—the study of politics in the developing world— UCLA is the best place in the country,” said Ross, once a senior congressional aide to then-Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and the late Rep. Ted Weiss (D-New York).
A young faculty star, Amy Zegart, assistant professor of Policy Studies at the School of Public Policy and Social Research, has connections on the other side of the political fence in Washington. Amy Zegart is an expert on the CIA and national security issues; her thesis adviser at Stanford was Condoleezza Rice, now the secretary of state. Zegart was one of the “Young Turks” in academe that the Bush campaign drew on for foreign policy advice in the 2000 presidential race. Zegart’s 2000 book, Flawed By Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS and NSC, became required reading in Washington after 9/11.
Zegart, who spent three years as a McKinsey & Co. consultant before taking the UCLA job, said, “I joke that anything scary I’m naturally interested in. I’ve always been fascinated by politics, conflicts, foreign policy.”
The Harvard and Stanford graduate said, “One of the great joys coming here was the satisfaction of the mission of the public university. I have incredible students. One woman’s parents never finished high school in Mexico. She was in my seminar and now she’s in graduate study in international relations. It’s really exciting to teach kids from all these different backgrounds and to see them light up and to open doors for them.”
Zegart also savors the international flavor of UCLA and Los Angeles. “You can’t help but be acutely aware that we are part of a broader international community. I hear Spanish all over the place. My 5-year-old is learning Spanish,” she said. “The borders are porous and you sense that every day living in Los Angeles. There is an excitement about that, too.”
In six years on the faculty, she has witnessed a dramatic growth in student interest in foreign policy issues. Of course, she added, “in California, local issues are international issues, too: whether immigrants can get free medical care, whether they can go to public school, whether they can have a driver’s license. Students today are much more aware of the world than when I started college 20 years ago.”
Ninety percent of the undergraduates at UCLA are Californians (the same is true at Berkeley and other UC campuses); only 2 percent are international students. The graduate student population is far more international. In Fall 2002, 1,700 of UCLA’s 2,400 international students were pursuing graduate studies.
Chancellor Carnesale says that the 90 percent Californian statistic can be misleading. “A remarkably high proportion have at least one parent born offshore, and many of them were as well. They bring two cultures to the party,” he said.
Still, it explains why UCLA places such heavy emphasis on study abroad. “If it’s harder for us to get foreign students on campus, what we have to do is think really creatively about how to get our students out into the world,” said Garrett.
Garrett said it was his aim at UCLA to provide more options for students to study abroad, and to make it easier for them to apply credits earned abroad to their major. “We have two polar models at the moment. At one end of the spectrum is the classic [education abroad] immersion program where you pick up a student in Westwood and drop them down in the University of Beijing. They take courses with Chinese students taught by Chinese professors, and that’s great, and then they come back and they have to haggle with the Political Science department to see if they can get credit for that stuff toward their major. It takes a lot of time, a lot of individual counseling.”
At the other end of the spectrum, he said, is travel study, usually taking place over the summer, “A UCLA professor teaching a UCLA class takes students to Stratford-on-Avon and they teach Shakespeare,” said Garrett. They are guaranteed UCLA credit, but there is no guarantee that they will gain much international exposure during weeks spent on trains and in hotels with UCLA classmates.
That is why the International Institute has developed the Global Learning Institutes, which Garrett said offer “the best features of both models. We’re partnering with foreign universities to allow our students to take courses taught not only by UCLA faculty, but team taught with local faculty. The students will live in dormitories with local students and other foreign students who are there.”
“You have all these global themes in the world these days—markets, democratization, culture, and identity—[but] they play out very differently in different parts of the world,” said Garrett. Globalization looks very different in Shanghai, in the midst of the Chinese economic boom, than it does in Mexico, where “people are very dispirited… about how they were going to benefit from NAFTA and opening to the rest of the world. It’s very important for our students to understand that even if these things are a global phenomenon in some sense, the local realities are very different.”
Nick Steele ’05 of Long Beach, California, went on the inaugural Global Learning Initiative trip to Shanghai last summer. He got a scholarship from the International Institute, and it also helped him and three other students land August internships at a Shanghai consulting firm. “There’s so much going on at UCLA,” said Steele, 21, a leader of the Undergraduate International Relations Society. “I The UCLA International Institute excels at outreach—outreach to the citizens of Los Angeles, and outreach to scholars and ordinary people around the world. It has long been involved in providing seminars and training for K-12 teachers on international issues. In recent years it has supplemented the classroom sessions with superb, savvy, and resource-rich Web sitesnever would have been able to find that internship on my own.” After graduating in May, he headed to Hong Kong to teach English.
Throughout the Curriculum The International Institute boasts a $15 million budget and extensive connections with virtually every academic unit on the Westwood campus—not just the political scientists, economists, and anthropologists, but with professors from the School of Theater, Film and Television, the School of the Arts and Architecture, and many other disciplines. “People in the film school are very interested in China, and I’m working closely at the moment with people in Arts & Architecture about the Middle East. Our Public Health schools work all over Asia, Africa, and the Middle East,” said Garrett. “We have Music, Ethnomusicology, and Musicology here, three [separate] departments. We have Art and we have Art History. We don’t have a shortage of resources. It’s getting them all together.”
Before the creation of the International Institute, UCLA had an international arm called International Studies and Overseas Programs (ISOP). It has taken on much broader duties in its new incarnation. When former Chancellor Charles Young wanted to strengthen UCLA’s international work, he gave ISOP 20 new faculty positions, but they were just meted out to academic departments, since the ISOP had no educational programs of its own.
Now the International Institute is looking to build on its strengths with joint faculty appointments. “That’s a new phenomenon here,” said Garrett, who predicted that within five years, “these top two floors of Bunche Hall, instead of looking like an administrative unit, will start looking more and more like an intellectual unit, with lots of faculty permanently around, teaching more and more students.”
The UCLA International Institute excels at outreach—outreach to the citizens of Los Angeles, and outreach to scholars and ordinary people around the world. It has long been involved in providing seminars and training for K-12 teachers on international issues. In recent years it has supplemented the classroom sessions with superb, savvy, and resource-rich Web sites.
The Web sites are the handiwork of Jonathan Friedlander, who is both the outreach director for the International Institute and assistant director of the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies. Friedlander was born in Israel, came to the United States at age 12, spent his teenage years in Brooklyn, and earned a Ph.D. in Middle East history from UCLA. He speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, Spanish, and Portuguese.While finishing graduate school, he wrote a grant proposal to do an educational documentary on the life of Arabs in America. “It scored so high, UCLA kept me around writing proposals for the next 30 years,” he said with a laugh.
Teacher training materials that he helped develop for the Middle East Center became the model for all of UCLA’s Title VI-funded National Resource Centers (NRCs). His latest creation, funded by a $300,000 U.S. Department of Education grant, is Outreach World, a Web resource that posts hundreds of links to curricular materials and other resources from all 120 national resource centers. It is searchable and, thanks to Friedlander’s deft photography, easy on the eyes. “It showcases the K-12 outreach programs for all the NRCs in the United States. Before they were just talking to themselves,” he said.
For the Middle East center, he created a Web site that offers Turkish language lessons, including a digitized soap opera that students can watch online, slowing it down and repeating dialogue as necessary. Similar online courses are planned for Iraqi Arabic and Azeri. “It’s an incredible platform,” Friedlander said.
Val D. Rust, a professor of Social Sciences and Comparative Education in the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, wears several hats in the university’s large study abroad enterprise. He is the faculty director of the Education Abroad Program and associate director of the Center for International and Development Education, which carries out extensive research in conjunction with UNESCO, foreign education ministries, nongovernmental organizations, and other universities around the world. His doctoral students are researching such topics as the effectiveness of study abroad, the difficulties students face in securing credit for overseas work, and comparisons between U.S. and Japanese schools.
Earlier in his career, Rust spent two years in Germany as a country director for the University of California study abroad program. One thing that motivates Rust is UCLA’s annual survey of the attitudes of incoming college freshmen across the nation. That survey shows that up to half of students enter UCLA thinking that they will study abroad, but only a small percentage wind up doing so.
“To me it’s all a resource issue,” said Rust. “We could very easily double and triple the number of [UCLA] students going abroad if we had the kind of resources that would allow us to do extensive marketing and preparation for those students.” He laments that the EAP office skipped holding an annual recruiting fair “simply because we know from experience that we would be overwhelmed by students coming in to the office and wanting information.” As it stands, 4,000 students find their way into the EAP office in the basement of Murphy Hall each year. Many are greeted by some of the 25 volunteer peer advisors who wax enthusiastic about their own study abroad experiences.
“It’s just putting a human face on the experience,” said Zahra Bazmjow, 22, of Temecula, California, an English major and Spanish minor who studied abroad for a year in Spain. Her parents, immigrants from Afghanistan, were not keen on her studying abroad.
“Nobody in my family had ever done it and none of my friends had studied abroad. For me it was just kind of a leap into the unknown,” said Bazmjow. During orientation before departing UCLA, a student talked about his time studying in Spain “and I remembered every word he said. The little tidbits that he gave us were like gold.”
Mitra Jalali, 22, of Orinda, California, who just graduated with a degree in philosophy, said her parents tried to discourage her from studying in Cork, Ireland, even as they were driving her to the airport. Jalali, who was born in Iran, said, “I didn’t have anyone to push me to go or to tell me how wonderful it was.”
But both young women credited International Programs Counselor Sergio Broderick-Villa with convincing them to go after they started to get cold feet.
Gary Rhodes ran UCLA’s Education Abroad program in 2004-2005 before returning fulltime to Loyola Marymount University, where he directs the Center for Global Education, a Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE)-funded national resource center that has been a leader in raising awareness about health and safety issues in study abroad. Rhodes started the center in 1998 at the University of Southern California to help study abroad professionals share information about best practices and access government resources on safety issues. The center also works to promote diversity and encourage more minority students to study abroad.
UCLA operates a latticework of services to make international students feel welcome on campus, including the Dashew International Center—run by former Los Angeles controller Rick Tuttle— and the Office of International Students and Scholars, both in Tom Bradley International Hall (named after the former mayor who brought the Olympic Games to Los Angeles in 1984).
Lawrence A. Gower, the director of the Office of International Students and Scholars, is a 1964 alumnus who played on one of John Wooden’s NCAA championship teams, behind All-America guards Walt Hazzard and Gail Goodrich (“There was some distinction between their ability and mine; I only played when we were up by 102-36,” Gower quipped).
“We’re situated in the division of student affairs, which gives us a value-oriented approach to the students and scholars who come our way,” said Gower. “We have excellent relations with admissions and the registrar … and make sure their academic experience is the best that they can possibly have” while also helping them keep their visa status secure.
With the Dashew Center, the office also helps incoming international students make sense of the fact that, as Gower put it, “L.A. in reality is different than the L.A. shown on CNN and on ‘The Bold and the Beautiful.’”
Gower and his chief lieutenant, Jimmy D. White, a UCLA Law alumnus who is the office’s senior supervising counselor, said their experience with SEVIS (the U.S. government’s Student and Exchange and Visitor Information System) has generally been positive.
“The stakes are higher and the job is more intense after September 11,” said Gower. “A lot of people felt like we had all this new emphasis. What we had were responsibilities that we were taking care of on paper advance to an electronic reporting system, making what we do a lot more transparent immediately than it had been.”
The benefit of that transition, he said, is that his office is now able to aggregate the data more effectively and use it to show “what we’ve been saying for years, that we bring the best and brightest students here to complete their studies and make a difference when they return home.”
“While the method of getting there might have been less calibrated than we wanted, the outcome is that none of our students have been dramatically hurt by or set back through SEVIS,” said Gower.
White added, “Our campus culture allowed us to smoothly go through the process of putting in place the kind of robust technological and human service interfaces that we came up with. The technology we use and the SEVIS system itself require you to organize things a lot better and therefore solve problems—which is what we’re all about.”
Gower said the clichéd image of Los Angeles “is Ferraris, Hollywood, affluence—‘Let’s do lunch.’ The reality is that it is both more complex and accepting than they can imagine. The fact is, if they don’t want to be viewed as an international student, they don’t have to here. Nobody knows whether you’re Japanese American or Japanese.”
Mission Carnesale said that soon after he arrived, he began telling friends back in Cambridge that “one of the most difficult challenges of being chancellor of UCLA is everybody out here thinks they own the place—and by the way, they do. It’s also one of the most wonderful things. They have a stake in it and care about it and want it to be even better than it is now.”
Alumni are feverishly loyal, but most of the billions that UCLA has raised in recent years come from non-alumni who are proud of the university and who understand “that if it’s going to be a place of real excellence that competes with the finest universities anywhere, it cannot do that solely on state funding.”
It also helps, Carnesale said, that “we’re on the Pacific Rim, which runs not only East-West, but North-South. It’s Latin America and Canada as well as the other side of the Pacific.”
“And of course the action nowadays is the Pacific Rim. Do we have an advantage with Europe? No, the Eastern schools do. Do we have an advantage with Asia and Latin America? Yes, we do. If you just walk around our campus you can see it. If you talk to our faculty, you can see it,” he said.
Carnesale said he was heartened that sight unseen, 400 students signed up for Global Studies 1.
“They don’t know if this is a hard course, an easy course, a good course, a lousy course. All they know is it’s the first time it’s being offered and it really sounds like it’s interesting or important to them,” he said. “So the interest is there. The challenge that lies before us is as follows:
“One is to make sure that whatever we develop integrates all aspects of our mission. It’s got the research element, the teaching element, and the service element. Otherwise, it doesn’t belong at a research university. Our comparative advantage is not that we do all three, but that the same people do all three. That’s what makes a research university different.
“Secondly to make sure that any curricula we develop ensure that the student when they are finished will have experienced an education that has both depth and breadth—nontrivial requirements. It’s very easy to make it all breadth, a little of this, a little of that, and you never learn how to peel an onion. It’s important to learn how to peel an onion. You got to do both things. You got to learn how to peel an onion, and you’ve got to learn that there are different kinds of onions, and finally, that not everything is an onion. “A university education should have all three of those pieces, and whatever we do in global studies has to do that,” said the former SALT negotiator.
“Third, we’ve got to find a way to make sure this is well embedded in our faculty as it exists. We do not want to set up a separate institution someplace else that looks at the rest of the world. This is to be integrated into what we do so we get the benefits of this internationalization across the university; some of these are cultural changes.
“And finally I’d say we’ve got to develop the resources to make sure we do it right.”
Tree-lined Mount Oread is the centerpiece of a sylvan, 1,000-acre campus in one of America’s great college towns—Lawrence, Kansas—with Massachusetts (”Mass”) Street the main artery for an academic community of almost 30,000 students and 2,000 faculty. In a sense, the view from Mount Oread extends far beyond the plains of Kansas. In a university lab, an Indian-born engineer leads a team whose advances in radar imaging allow the world to know how fast the ice is melting in Antarctica. The dean of the Graduate School and International Programs is regularly consulted by nongovernmental organizations and the U.S. Department of State to advise fledgling democracies on setting up political debates. An East Asian historian has made surprising findings about how quickly Japan’s environment recovered from the atomic bomb and other wartime damage.
The University of Kansas—or KU, the transposed initials by which everyone in Kansas calls it—sends more than 1,000 students to study abroad each year and enrolls 1,600 international students at Lawrence. It ranked fourth among public research universities in the 2004 Open Doors report in terms of number of students studying abroad; fully one-quarter of KU graduates spent part of their undergraduate education overseas. Its dozens of study abroad programs attract hundreds of students from other U.S. colleges and universities, both for quality and cost-efficiency. KU has a rich history with the Fulbright program, as both an exporter and importer of Fulbright scholars. From its inception in 1951 and for a quarter-century afterward, scores of foreign Fulbrighters would descend on Lawrence each August for their introduction to the United States before dispersing to their host campuses. Typically two dozen Fulbright scholars are among the 1,600 international students pursuing degrees at KU, and nearly 400 KU students and some 270 faculty have received Fulbright fellowships for study and research in dozens of countries.
“This place is just international,” said Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor David Shulenburger. “Kansas sits here in the middle of the nation. It’s got a great potential to be completely insular in everything it does because of its location, but it’s got industries— aviation and agriculture—that absolutely depend upon the rest of the world. It’s critical to Kansas that we’re able to train students to be able to work in an international environment.”
This community on a hill, as KU thinks of itself, takes pride in its internationalism. In his first speech on campus a decade ago, Chancellor Robert Hemenway said that no university can aspire to greatness without being international, and it is a theme to which he frequently returns. “Ten years later, the imperative for internationalization of our educational institution at all levels is even more critical,” Hemenway said. KU is striving to advance into the ranks of the top 25 public universities and the emphasis on internationalization is very much a part of its strategy. Research spending is up sharply. And by convincing the Kansas Legislature to let it begin raising its traditionally low tuition, KU has created 100 new faculty positions and expanded scholarships. This campus first built its international reputation in the 1950s and 1960s on area studies and language departments. It won laurels from the Institute for International Education and Reader’s Digest in 1964.
“From the chancellor down to faculty and students, there’s a great thirst for knowledge about the rest of the world.” said Associate Professor of Political Science Erik S. Herron, director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies, a Title VI National Resource Center. “We are in the middle of the country, far from any border, but [everyone] recognizes that we can’t think of ourselves as isolated from the rest of the world.”
Such figures as former Chancellor Franklin D. Murphy (1951– 1960), former Dean of Arts & Sciences George Waggoner, and longtime professor of German John Anthony “Toni” Burzle all played roles in making KU a bastion of area studies. The Latin American, East Asian, and Russian studies programs have been Title VI National Resource Centers for four decades or longer. Schulenburger credits these individuals with turning the university’s focus to international matters far earlier than it occured at other institutions in the Midwest.
While Japan was still under U.S. military rule in the years after World War II, a generation of young scholars from both Japan and Korea was brought to KU for their Ph.D.s. Those connections helped KU build relationships with leading institutions in Asia.
Shulenburger, a labor economist, joined the faculty in 1964 and got involved in KU’s formidable study abroad program when he directed the undergraduate program for the School of Business. “I found myself working with several dozen students every semester to ensure that what they took in their semester or year abroad kept them on track for the business degree,” said Schulenburger, who will relinquish the executive vice chancellor and provost posts as the end of this academic year and return full-time to the School of Business.
Study abroad is as much a part of the culture at KU as basketball. (Keep in mind that Kansas’s first basketball coach was Dr. James Naismith, the game’s inventor, and its second was the legendary Forrest “Phog” Allen, after whom the 16,300-seat Allen Field House is named.)
“There’s kind of a buzz about study abroad on campus,” said Natalie Flanzer, a senior from St. Louis majoring in Spanish and journalism. “So many people have gone—and everyone else wishes they had.”
Meredith Vacek, 23, of Lawrence, graduated in 2004 with a degree in German. She initially had to overcome resistance from her family before studying in Germany, but the next summer her family accompanied her back in search of their German and Czech roots.
Melissa Hartnett, a graduate student in Latin American Studies, went on KU’s venerable exchange with the University of San Jose in Costa Rica, said to be the oldest such partnership in the Western Hemisphere. “Tuition is incredibly cheap. It’s one of the least expensive semesters you can spend abroad,” said Hartnett. When she returned to Costa Rica for a visit last Christmas, her host family welcomed her back into their home.
Kansas has the largest U.S. chapter of AIESEC, an international student organization that arranges internships around the world. One of the founders of AIESEC was a French businessman, Jean Choplin, who was KU’s first visiting Fulbright student half a century ago.
Last year Katie Naeve, a senior political science and Spanish major from Ames, Iowa, was among 35 U.S. students sent on internships to four Arab countries—Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates—as part of AIESEC’s new Salaam Initiative, which receives support from the U.S. Department of State. “I’d been to western Europe and Latin America and studied abroad in Spain a couple of times, but Morocco was incredibly different,” said Naeve. “My parents flipped out, big time, but now they are seeing all the opportunities I have because I had such a good experience.” The Salaam Initiative was expanded for 2005, and Naeve has changed the geographic focus of her interest in a human rights career from Latin America to the Middle East and North Africa.
KU’s Applied English Center celebrated its fortieth anniversary in fall 2004. It’s director, Chuck Seibel, a linguist, said the center offers intensive English classes at five levels that attract 200 students each semester. “We have a special program with a business school in Paris that sends 10 to 15 students over for the spring semester. There are always lots of tears at the closing ceremony. It amazes me to have these people weeping because they have to leave Lawrence and go back to Paris,” he said.
Lawrence lays out the welcome mat for international students. Many families—including dozens of KU faculty and staff—invite students home over Thanksgiving. Joe D. Potts, director of the Office of International Student and Scholar Services, said, “After 9/11 probably 50 families called me up and asked if they could take a student from the Middle East into their home temporarily if they felt uncomfortable. I let the students know. No one took me up on it, it was a great response.”
“KU is the home of internationalism. You can feel that,” said Ayele Gebretsadik of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, a Fulbright student who got a master’s degree in economics in May 2005. “When I first came there was a problem in my flight and I knew nobody here. One of the ‘International Friends’ [participants in the Lawrence Friendship Family Program] came to Kansas City to pick me up at the airport and took me to his home for four days until the start of orientation.” These friends donated household goods for international students to equip their apartment kitchens, “and if you need to move, somebody with a truck will come and move you from your apartment,” said the Ethiopian teacher.
William Tsutsui, an associate professor of history educated at Harvard and Princeton, said, “The thing that has struck me the most is that native Kansans are very open-minded. They realize that this is an isolated place and that you can’t just sit here and wait for things to come to you. You have to go out and get them. It’s served us well.”
Tsutsui, a former director of East Asian Studies, is an authority on the economic history of Japan—and an unabashed fan of that icon of Japanese culture, Godzilla. A pop cultural conference that he convened in October 2004 on the fiftieth birthday of the giant lizard drew scholars from Harvard, Columbia, and UCLA. Tsutsui, who was born in New York and raised in College Station, Texas, where his parents were professors at Texas A&M, finds it amusing that classmates from Harvard “can talk about restaurants they like in Tokyo, but none has had any experience with the Great Plains. I’m sort of this curiosity talking with them.”
“Kansas grows on you,” said Tsutsui, who is writing a book on how quickly Japan’s environment rebounded from the depredations of World War II, including its own military build-up and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Kansas industries, from agriculture to aviation to transportation, are highly internationalized. Melissa H. Birch, associate professor of business and director of the Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER), said students may not realize at first how dependent Kansas businesses are on international trade.
Even Hallmark manufactures and franchises around the world, Yellow Freight operates internationally, and “Kansas City Southern Railway is fond of saying they have just given Kansas a port on the Pacific through their Mexican rail link,” Birch said.
Birch, an expert on management of state-owned enterprises, once conducted dialect surveys in Guatemala while pursuing an interest in linguistics, and wrote her dissertation on Paraguay’s successful partnership with Brazil in constructing the Itaipu Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric facility. Last May she and another Portuguese-speaking colleague led a group of 10 MBA students to Brazil to study aircraft manufacturer Embraer for an intensive seminar called the Global Research Integrative Project. Dennis Karney, a distinguished professor at the business school and associate faculty director of the CIBER, said the purpose of such classes is not to teach students the insides of the aviation industry, but “how to accomplish a business task overseas.”
Professor of Civil Engineering Thomas E. Mulinazzi was embarrassed when he spent three years on KU’s Fulbright selection committee in the late 1980s, and not a single engineer applied for a Fulbright. When he became associate dean, he pushed an attitude adjustment across the school and personally traveled to Stuttgart, Germany, with Hodgie Bricke, the assistant dean for international programs, to arrange KU’s first study abroad program for engineers. Mulinazzi subsequently traveled to China, Denmark, and Australia to arrange other exchanges and secured study abroad scholarships. By 2001, the engineering school was sending 20 students a semester to study abroad.
The School of Architecture and Urban Design sends 10 percent of its majors—50 to 60 students—off each year to study in Edinburgh, Scotland, Siena and Spannocchia, Italy, Stuttgard and Dortmund, Germany, Barcelona and Madrid, Spain, and Copenhagen, Denmark. “Students do not think in terms of locality any more; they think global. The concept of an international view of architecture is rampant within the school,” said Associate Dean William J. Carswell.
For those who need convincing, the Office of International Programs is happy to provide information and a little push. “We make an effort to tell faculty that regardless of what discipline they are in, there is something international for you,” said Diana Carlin, dean of the Graduate School and International Programs.
Study Abroad Director Gronbeck-Tedesco said, “I went to the dance faculty. They all perform in various places in the world, but they hadn’t taken the time to figure out a way to put some curriculum together to take students.” Now a music therapy professor is taking students to Australia to see how music therapy is done there. The Department of Social Work sends majors to Costa Rica to study Spanish and work in San José social service agencies.
KU recently recruited scholar Jonathan Boyarin to head its Modern Jewish Studies. Even before taking up residence in Lawrence, Boyarin and Gronbeck-Tedesco traveled to Vilnius, Lithuania, to scout out a Yiddish institute as a study abroad site. “Going to Israel is very important for Jewish studies. He and I started looking for an alternative until we can get back in to Israel,” she said.
Diane R. Fourny, associate professor of French and Italian and Humanities & Western Civilization and director of KU’s Center for European Studies, said, “Any faculty person here… can form a program and get something going and the Study Abroad office will go out on a limb for a couple of years for us to see if that program will fly.”
The number of Spanish majors had more than tripled, from 100 in 1998 to 350 currently. Nine new faculty have been hired, said Danny J. Anderson, chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and “we’re still just barely keeping up. Most of the students are double majors. They see Spanish as a way of increasing their competitiveness for jobs.”
On the other hand, other language departments, such as Slavic Languages & Literatures (which teaches Russian, Polish, Ukranian, Bosnian/Croation/Serbian, and Slovenian) enroll significantly fewer students and would welcome an increase in enrollments. Nonetheless, these languages are “an important part of the intellectual offerings that make a good univeristy,” pointed out Slavic instructor Marta Pirnat-Greenberg.
The numbers are higher in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, which offers four years of Chinese and Japanese, three years of Korean, and introductory classes in Uyghur and Tibetan. KU also offers dozens of East Asian Studies classes each semester. Keith McMahon, the department chair, said, “To me the mission at KU is to speak to the Midwesterner—the Kansas City person, the Wichita person—and find out how to challenge them and make them interested in what we’re teaching.”
Carlin, who worked on international trade projects in the Kansas governor’s office before coming to KU as a faculty member in communication studies said, “We are expanding what we can do for graduate students in the way of international experiences as well.”
Carl Strikwerda, a former director of European Studies at KU who is now dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the College of William and Mary, said, “KU has accomplished remarkable things in the area of international studies, despite relatively low state funding and, until recently, quite low tuition rates.”
In a region with no other great public or private university within hundreds of miles, KU also has made the most of its location, including ties with the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where hundreds of outstanding U.S. and international military officers are trained each year.
In 2004, KU joined a network of colleges employing technology pioneered by East Carolina University and its virtual classroom project funded by the U.S. Department of State that links U.S. college students with classrooms in Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia. Herron, the associate professor of Political Science who directs the Center on Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, taught the seminar, which paired 15 KU freshmen honors students with peers in the three Asian countries. Using two-way video links, Herron shared the lecture duties with faculty at the Asian institutions. In addition to live lectures, the students exchanged e-mail and talked in chat rooms. “One of my students said he didn’t even know Azerbaijan existed before this semester. At the end, he and others were asking me how we could arrange a study abroad visit,” said Herron.
Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, a professor of history and director of Latin American Studies, was instrumental in helping KU land a Center for International Business Education and Research. Kuznesof has a knack for finding allies and expanding the ambit of Latin American Studies.
A longstanding partnership with the University of Costa Rica is one of KU’s proudest international connections. “If you go to Costa Rica, a large percentage of the legislature and several past presidents actually have KU degrees,” said Kuznesof.
The Kansas African Studies Center lost funding in 2003, when the U.S. Department of Education cut support for African studies from 15 to eight centers. The rejection still rankles in Lawrence, where geographer and urban planner Garth Myers, the associate director said, “We’re putting our ducks in a row for the next competition.”
“We’ve built a great African studies program, almost against all odds,” said Myers. “We teach Arabic, Kiswahili, Wolof, and Hausa here in the middle of Kansas. I think there’s four schools in America that teach Wolof,” he said, noting that Wolof is the national language of Senegal.
The center, directed by anthropologist John Janzen, has strong ties with universities in Senegal, Zambia, and Ghana. The Department of African and African-American Studies recently got a green light from the College of Arts and Sciences to launch a master’s degree program. Indeed, Myers said, the first thing that the committee on graduate studies asked was, “When are we going to see a Ph.D. program?”
Law school professor Raj Bhala is a relative newcomer to the KU campus, but he has rapidly established himself as one of KU’s leading internationalists.
The Toronto-born Bhala is an international trade scholar who graduated summa cum laude from Duke, studied at Oxford and the London School of Economics as a Marshall fellow, and cut his teeth on international trade issues at the Federal Reserve in New York City after earning a law degree at Harvard. He has taught law around the world, consulted widely in the Middle East and South Asia, and recently added Islamic law to his interests. Bhala was associate dean of the George Washington University School of Law in 2002 when he visited the KU School of Law for a symposium on globalization and sovereignty. He liked what he saw and the people he met in Lawrence.
As it happened, the law professor said he and his Malaysian-born wife “were thinking about moving off the East Coast and looking for [a better] quality of life.” With a young daughter, they didn’t want to worry about getting on waiting lists for preschool or dealing with Washington’s traffic snarls.
Bhala, the son of a Scottish-Canadian mother and a father from the Punjab who lived on the Pakistan side before partition, had grown up “learning—or being told anyway—bad things about Islam and Muslims” from relatives. He developed a scholarly interest in Islamic law (the Sharia) when two students in his international trade class at GW—one from Bangladesh, the other from Pakistan—“came to me and said, `This bad feeling on the subcontinent has got to end. We’ve got to trade and invest with one another, and cut this communalism out. It’s got to stop with our father’s generation.’”
“It became a real scholarly passion because it is such a different way of thinking,” said Bhala, who holds the Raymond F. Rice Distinguished Professorship.
Bhala has gotten KU to start a two-year international J.D. program that, unlike the traditional one-year L.L.M. program, allows lawyers who enter the program to practice in the United States as well as to pursue academic or business careers at home. The law school has summer study abroad programs in Istanbul, Turkey, Limerick, Ireland, and Cambridge, England; it also participates in a semester-long program in London. Bhala said that while most international programs at U.S. law schools focus on human rights and public international law, American lawyers are far more involved in commerce. “Most people don’t go hang out a shingle and saying, ‘I am a human rights lawyer’…. Most people are doing what I saw yesterday in the Gulf, they are doing construction contracts to build a world trade center in Bahrain or they are building a new port in Dubai. In other words, international work is business.”
In April 2005 the National Science Foundation awarded KU a grant worth $19 million to establish a Science and Technology Center for further study of the polar icecaps and the effect of melting on global climate change.
The lead scientist and principal investigator for the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets is Prasad Gogineni, who came to Lawrence from India in 1979 for his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and stayed to become a giant in the field. He is the Deane E. Ackers Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Following in the footsteps of his KU mentor, Professor Emeritus Richard Moore, Gogineni has made a series of advances over the past decade in radars capable of measuring the thickness of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica from aircraft and robotic rovers.
Forty scientists and other researchers will work in the center, including 25 in Lawrence and 15 at polar laboratories around the globe. KU is creating four new faculty positions for the work. One of the future objectives of Gogineni and his team is to mount their special radars on unmanned air vehicles that could continuously map the vast ice sheets.
While polar ice caps are a long way from the plains of Kansas—or from India—global warming is a worldwide concern, and it is a special concern to some of the nation’s poorest lands with large populations living close to coastal waters, like those devastated by the December 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami and many residents of the the U.S. Gulf Coast hit by Hurricane Katrina in late August 2005. Rising sea levels could threaten more than 100 million people living on coastal areas, Gogineni says.
As Richard Moore mentored Prasad Gogineni, so has Gogineni mentored the next generation of research engineers at KU. Among his protégés is Pannirselvam Kanagaratnam, who came to Lawrence in 1990 for a bachelor of science degree, stayed for a master’s and Ph.D., and did path-breaking work on the radar systems now used to measure the ice caps. Gogineni, Kanagaratnam, and 16 colleagues, in a paper published in September 2004 in the journal Science, reported that the glaciers were discharging 60 percent more ice into the Amundsen Sea than they accumulated from snowfall.
When Kanagaratnam came to KU, neither global warming nor the melting of the glacial ice was on his mind. “Dr. Gogineni developed this interest in me,” he said with a smile. While these problems now may seem far removed from the concerns of his homeland of Malaysia, he added, “If the climate keeps getting crazy, who knows?”
Fulbright graduate student Roque Gagliano of Montevideo, Uruguay, said he had originally hoped to study electrical engineering in Los Angeles. But after comparing notes with friends who studied in California and Pennsylvania, “I realize my experience here was much richer,” he said. The gregarious Gagliano threw himself into international clubs and activities, including joining 400 other non-Muslim students who fasted for a day during Ramadan—and he played water polo.
His one complaint was that he wished more U.S. students availed themselves of the international cultural feast at KU. “You wish that all of them could spend a Saturday afternoon going to the Japanese festival and seeing Japanese theater. You hear students complain that they’ve never visited the ocean or been outside Kansas or Missouri. Well, you don’t need to visit the ocean. You just need to walk to the center two blocks away and you can taste the food and talk with the people. That’s something you can do right here, right now.”
Gebretsadik—who proudly arranged for a visitor to dine at a newly opened Addis Ababa Café in the heart of Mass Street—said, “KU is the home of internationalism. You can feel that.”
Near the end of the faculty’s first meeting with Mary Ellen Duncan after she became president of Howard Community College in 1998, Spanish professor Cheryl Berman stood up and asked with unwonted diffidence, “Can I start study abroad programs here?” “You don’t have study abroad programs? Of course, you better start study abroad programs,” replied Duncan, a onetime high school Latin teacher who had previously expanded the horizons of SUNY’s College of Technology at Delhi during seven years at the helm of that school in New York’s Catskill Mountains.
Today Howard Community College regularly sends dozens of students on a Spanish immersion program in Cuernavaca, Mexico, each January, and it offers opportunities to study in China, Italy, Greece, Russia, and Costa Rica. It has student and faculty exchanges as well with institutions in Denmark and Turkey, awards scholarships for study abroad, and has partnerships with Dickinson College and the College of Notre Dame of Maryland that allow top Howard students entry to additional summer programs on several continents.
Howard’s World Languages department—Cheryl Berman is the director—regularly teaches Arabic, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and through its Critical Languages program provides tutors and online resources for students to learn Chinese, Russian, Korean, and Greek. It has a thriving English Language Institute, as well as 174 international students among the 6,700 students seeking associate degrees. Howard faculty, administrators, and even its board of trustees are active in Community Colleges for International Development, Inc., a consortium of 90 community colleges involved in exchanges and development projects in more than 40 countries. Duncan chaired the consortium in 2005.
Howard is in the midst of a building boom, with work completed on a high-tech Instructional Laboratory Building, a performing arts complex well under way, and a $28 million student services building in the offing. Howard was born in 1970 with advantages, sitting in the middle of one of the wealthiest counties in the United States, midway between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. Columbia, its hometown, is itself an experiment in living, a planned community created in the turbulent 1960s by developer James Rouse, known for revitalizing Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and breathing new life into Boston’s Faneuil Hall, as a place where all races and classes could live and work together, with parks and pathways and a small-town atmosphere. It has not worked out entirely as Rouse dreamed; most of Columbia’s 100,000 residents commute to jobs in Washington and Baltimore.
Howard Community College is only the seventh largest of Maryland’s 16 community colleges, but enjoys an outsized reputation as a place that cultivates and rewards innovative thinking, from entrepreneurial workforce training programs to a much honored theater program that boasts the only professional Equity theater group in the country at a community college. The president and vice-president of the student government last year were from Germany and Syria respectively, and Howard has garnered several national awards for internationalizing its curriculum. Duncan said it is fitting for a place founded as a “little Shangri-La. We’re in a community that has people from all over the world.”
The emphasis on the international spread throughout academic departments after business professor Rebecca Mihelcic became coordinator of international education in 1999. Vice President of Academic Affairs Ron Roberson, a former chair of the humanities division and fine arts professor, said, “When Beckie expressed an interest in really going after the development of an international education program, I was very excited.” Roberson, who spent a year as a Fulbright scholar painting and studying art history at the University of Louvain in Belgium after his graduation from Morgan State University, added, “Nothing happens in education unless you’ve got somebody on fire about an issue. Beckie had the conviction that this was a critical direction for the institution.” Mihelcic built on groundwork that Margaret M. Mohler laid as director of the International Business and Education Center from 1995 to 1999 at Howard. But Mihelcic cast the net wider, encouraging faculty in every program to take advantage of international travel and research opportunities and to incorporate international content into their classes.
Patti English, who 10 years ago started Howard’s cardiovascular technology program, which trains technicians to work in cardiac cath labs in leading Baltimore and Washington hospitals, remembers getting a survey from Mihelcic five years ago encouraging faculty to think of ways to internationalize their courses. She sent it back with a note saying, “Beckie, I would love to, but I can’t foresee anything in my field being international.” When pressed, English recalled that some countries had approached her professional association for advice on setting up cardiac cath labs. “Patti, what do you think of that?” asked Mihelcic.
In January 2004, English and Jeanette Jeffrey, an assistant professor of health science who teaches nutrition and community health, took four students to Costa Rica for a comparative study of the country’s healthcare practices. They visited public and private hospitals and clinics, and will be returning with more students in 2006.
“Everyone is incredibly supportive of internationalizing Howard, from the president on down,” said Jeffrey, who also teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Last year Roberson gave her a professional development grant to do field research in Switzerland under the auspices of UMBC’s health administration policy program.
“You have to get the faculty on board before you get the students,” said Mihelcic, who raised $6,000 last year for study abroad scholarships by renting to colleagues a rustic cabin she owns. “Once faculty start thinking in international terms and they start talking international, it becomes a natural thing. It’s not something we’re adding to the curriculum. It’s something that’s part of our education.”
Helen Buss Mitchell, a philosophy professor and director of women’s studies, always had been passionate about exposing philosophy students to the widest possible range of thought and beliefs about existence, not just the Western tradition. When she complained about the deletion of women’s voices from a popular philosophy textbook in the early 1990s, the publisher’s representatives asked Mitchell to write her own textbook. The result was Roots of Wisdom, now in its fourth edition and being translated into Chinese and Spanish. Mitchell also produced a television course, “For the Love of Wisdom,” distributed by PBS. “My life has taken quite a different turn and it’s been wonderful,” said Mitchell.
Mitchell said Howard Community College’s internationalism is partly a product of “where we are, between Baltimore and Washington. We’ve got embassies 25 minutes away, and events of all kinds. We’re positioned in a place where the world comes to us, and we make a special effort to be, in Diogenes’s famous phrase, ‘citizens of the world.’”
“Twelve years ago, when I first started teaching ‘Religions of the World,’ most people in the class were Christians or a few Jews, that was it. Now every semester I’ve got Muslim students in the class and often Hindu students,” she said. “It makes for very interesting discussions.”
At Howard, Mitchell said, “We offer our students mirrors as well as windows. We want our students to see through the windows into whatever it is we want them to see. But we’re offering mirrors as well so that in my book and in a lot of things going on here, students see themselves reflected.”
The college renamed its “foreign” language program “world” languages several years ago. “I love that,” said President Duncan, who took the Spanish immersion classes in Cuernavaca herself. “‘World’ languages sounds much more inviting.” The college celebrated World Languages Day last March with a day- and eveninglong series of 15 events ranging from skits and songs to lectures and a Chinese calligraphy demonstration (Cheryl Berman served as the impresario, wearing a peasant dress she brought back from Chiapas, Mexico). To accommodate day and evening students, the dancing, yodeling, mariachi music, and more went on from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and again from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. The language classes , draw students of all ages, from teenagers to octogenarians. “Cheryl is such a strong and joyful force, drawing people into the culture and languages,” said Jean Thiebaux, a retired mathematician for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who has taken Spanish classes here and in Cuernavaca.
The immersion classes in Mexico are taught at Universidad Internacional in Cuernavaca, which arranges stays with host families for students from many U.S. colleges and universities. Jonathan Henry, who works in international promotions for the Mexican university, said, “To me, Howard seems like a regular university.”
Universidad Internacional sent faculty member Carlos Guzman on a one-semester teaching exchange to Howard in 2003. His courses were so popular that Howard asked him to stay for a second semester, and then for a second full year. “This will be my last [semester]. It’s time for other faculty to have the opportunity,” said Guzman.
Berman was a French major in college whose interest in Spanish was awakened when she and her husband adopted twin girls from Bogotá, Colombia. “I fell in love with everything Spanish, with the cultures, the whole thing,” she said.
Berman has a gift for picking up languages—and for convincing others to give it a go. “You just have to role model passion and energy and expectations and all those things, and they pick and choose what they take out of it,” said Berman.
When Berman set out to explore the first study abroad opportunity for Howard, a Spanish professor from a State University of New York campus shared a wealth of advice about finding immersion classes in Latin America. She also informed her about the myriad of details related to preparing students for the experience—everything from shots to release forms.
Howard’s critical language program grew in part out of Berman’s interest and involvement in the Interagency Language Roundtable (www.govtilr.org), a half-century-old network of federal agencies that share information and resources about teaching and learning languages. Howard hosted a Roundtable meeting in April that explored the roles of community colleges in delivering foreign language education in the United States, and the Roundtable also held its annual summer research showcase at Howard in July 2005.
The government has identified six languages as critical to U.S. national security—Korean, Chinese, Farsi, Russian, Spanish, and Arabic—and Howard now offers regular or special instruction in five of them. Berman believes that since these languages have been identified as a national priority, educators and schools at every level should do their part to teach them. The students in a Korean or Chinese critical language tutoring session at Howard may never end up at the Defense Language Institute’s Foreign Language Center in Monterey, California, but they could become part of a groundswell that produces more candidates for advanced training. “It’s like a [youth] soccer league, you know? One that has both travel teams and the neighborhood kids?” said Berman. “It’s like, ‘Everybody—high schools, community colleges, four-year colleges and universities—just put in your players, and somehow enough will emerge at the top.’” At Howard, she added, “we’re the neighborhood squad, and that’s how I like it.”
Howard got a Danish connection thanks to a State Departmentarranged visit by the Danish education minister. Roberson was invited to a conference in Denmark with other community college representatives. He and representatives from three Danish colleges eventually decided to develop an information technology exchange program. “I thought that would be the easiest thing around which to develop an articulation. The skill sets and the software are the same, regardless of where you are; you’re still dealing with Microsoft and Apple,” he said.
“I proposed a tactical project that we could do ourselves, regardless of whether we got external funding,” said Roberson, whose office is filled with portraits he has painted in styles from that of Rembrandt to stark realism.
Faculty from the three Danish institutes—Neilsbrock Copenhagen Business College, Odense Technical College, and Tietgen Business College—visited Howard and jointly worked out the articulation agreement so that Danish students could spend their third semester in Howard and U.S. Information Technology (IT) majors could spend a semester in Denmark, where IT courses are routinely taught in English.
What do the Danes have to teach U.S. students headed toward careers as programmers?
“It was really happenstance, in all honesty, that this partnership was with Denmark,” Roberson said. “The fact is, though, that the year that their minister of education visited our campus, their business and technical school system won the prize as the best in the European Union. I was very curious how it was [that] they were organizing their programs. We have learned quite a bit from our collaboration. They design programs very differently. They have a holistic design. We offer a menu list and students pick from that menu. Their holistic approach was very interesting to us, the fact that they taught business and marketing and entrepreneurship as part of their IT programs. What IT program in the United States does that?”
Long-term internships were also built into the Danish regimen, so that after a year of classes, all students spent an entire semester working in industry before returning for another semester of coursework. “They really are very connected with the industry. They learn not only the abstractions of the education program, but they actually understand how it works in the real world,” said Roberson.
“The fruits are really just beginning for us. We sent our first student over last fall; they have sent seven so far,” he said. The Howard student, with support from the community college, studied multimedia design in Odense—birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen, two hours by train from Copenhagen—and “had a wonderful experience.” The Danish exchange students, meanwhile, who had been taking English since elementary school, all placed into college-level English at Howard and excelled in their studies here. The community college, which has no dorms, rented an apartment for these exchange students. “For the Danes, this is nothing special. They have many of these agreements with many different countries. The students have a lot of choices. We represent another choice for their students,” said Roberson.
In consortium with Delaware Technical & Community College and Northampton College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Howard is now attempting to forge an extensive partnership with technical colleges across Turkey. Howard will be lending its expertise in preparing English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers as well as in teaching computer sciences, while Delaware Tech and Northampton will impart their expertise in other areas. Vice President of Student Services Kathleen Hetherington and ESL Director Jean Svacina made an exploratory trip to Greece and Turkey in 2002 under the auspices of Community Colleges for International Development. Rebecca Price, the ESL program administrator, was headed to Turkey this spring along with a team of Howard administrators to work out the details and to gauge whether the Turkish computer science students were ready for English-language instruction at Howard after a year of studies at their home institutions. Howard also was sending four students and a faculty member to study in Ankara in June 2005.
The English skills of the Turkish students are not as advanced as those of the students in Denmark. Price, whose ESL program has won both state and national awards, said, “They may need to do a semester here in our language institute, or we may have to go train their teachers so that the instruction they get in English is better before they come here.”
“The Turkish government is totally committed to this. This is not just a couple of schools. If it works, this will be a program available to all two-year schools in Turkey,” she added.
The Howard Division of Continuing Education & Workforce Development has a long history of responsiveness to the needs of Maryland businesses. Patricia M. Keeton, executive director of workforce development, said, “Many Howard County companies are trying to internationalize their business. We have a contract right now with a local company to train 25 Kuwaitis in fundamentals of electronics this summer in order to help that company then teach them how to use their equipment. We’re able to assist businesses in translation efforts, we’re able to help them train employees who speak English as a second language.”
Minah Woo, a program counselor in the English Language Institute (ELI), said one reason its enrollments have grown is that “we have four levels of classes and a variety of classes at each level. We’ve established ELI custom class options. The student who won the scholarship to art school was taking nine credits of ELI and three credits of art class.” Some institute students bound for U.S. graduate or professional schools come to Howard’s ELI after scoring over 600 on the Test of English as a Foreign Language.
“Students come and say, ‘I have a real need in public speaking.’ Others say, “I can speak fine, but they don’t understand my pronunciation,’ or they come and say, ‘I need to do more professional writing.’ They can come here and take the classes they need, whereas other institutes basically have morning writing and grammar and afternoon reading and conversation.”
JoAnn D. Hawkins, associate vice president of the Division of Continuing Education & Workforce Development, said tool manufacturer Black & Decker is sending executives to Chinese classes at Howard so they can communicate with employees at a plant in Soochow, China. “They found that when they went over, even though they had translators with them” some of what they said was lost in translation. Her division also is set to help a company that trains firefighters for Malaysia produce the country’s first emergency medical technicians. That would involve sending two Howard instructors to Malaysia for five weeks over the summer, then hosting a dozen or more trainees here for five more weeks.
Hawkins, who used to lead study trips to Europe and Asia that the college organized for community members, said the spirit of cooperation between the credit and noncredit sides at Howard is unusual. “We don’t have silos. Whoever can do a program best does it,” she said.
Vladimir Marinich, a Howard history professor, and his wife Barbara Livieratos, the associate director of research, regularly take students and other community members on a study trip to Russia that is built around a cruise on the Volga between Moscow and St. Petersburg. They have devoted profits from the trip to a study abroad scholarship fund and have raised $40,000 on four trips since 2000. Kristy Herod, 25, won a $3,200 scholarship that paid for her trip to Russia. The Hawaiian-born Herod, now pursuing her bachelor’s degree at the University of Maryland, said, “There’s nothing better than actually being able to say, ‘Well, I read this in a book, but this is where it happened and here I am.”
The Rouse Scholars Program—named after the founder of Columbia—has long been a source of pride for Howard. Barbara Greenfeld, director of admissions and advising, said the selective admissions program “is unique among community colleges across the nation.” It was begun 13 years ago and its reach has been extended by a partnership with Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, that allows Rouse scholars to go on Dickinson summer study abroad programs. Dickinson, which was featured in the NAFSA’s Internationalizing the Campus 2003 report, runs 35 study abroad programs in 22 countries on six continents. Patrick Ginssinger, a 2003 Howard graduate, went on an archaeological dig in Scotland with students from Dickinson and the University of Durham. Hafsa Bora ’05, who went to Dickinson’s center in Bologna, Italy, in summer 2004, said, “I loved everything about my … summer study abroad experience. I learned so much and can hardly wait to return.” Other Rouse scholars have studied in London and Hong Kong, in some cases with tuition waivers or reductions. Howard also has formed a study abroad partnership with the College of Notre Dame of Maryland.
Greenfeld said Howard regularly asks its Rouse scholars what they were looking for in a college. In recent years, the answers were clear. “They want housing and they want an international travel experience, and they want to know how we’re going to provide that for them,” she said.
Howard is considering building its first dorms not just to keep attracting top caliber local students, but to make it even more inviting for international students. The lack of dormitories has been an obstacle the college has had to overcome in forging partnerships, both with the Danish colleges and a new arrangement with Soochow University in Suzhou, China. But Howard hasn’t let that curb its momentum.
There’s a lesson in that for other colleges, said Kate Hetherington, who is herself a graduate of and former administrator at the Community College of Philadelphia (also featured in Internationalizing the Campus 2003). Obstacles can be overcome. “Opportunities do show up at your doorstep, and when they do, it’s a matter of saying, ‘Let’s give this a try,’ rather than, ‘No, we don’t have housing,’ rather than looking at all the nos,” said Hetherington. “There’s been a lot of freedom [at Howard] for people to explore ideas around the theme of global education….Essentially we’ve asked people to let their creative juices flow and given them the freedom and support to go ahead.”
Roberson traveled to China in 2004 in quest of new partners. When Duncan was president of SUNY Delhi, her hospitality program exchanged students and faculty each year with a partner in China. As the president said of her receptiveness to creating study abroad opportunities at Howard, “It’s hard working in China, but I couldn’t believe that this community wouldn’t want that experience for their children.”
Qing Qing Li, a professor of English at Tianjin University of Commerce in China, spent a year at SUNY Delhi teaching Chinese culture classes a decade ago, and President Duncan invited her to reprise that role at Howard this past year. Li, whose education was disrupted by the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s, said she has gained insights at Howard that will help her students back in Tianjin. She is auditing Helen Mitchell’s “Religions of the World” course and deepening her knowledge of Western culture.
“I grew up in the ’60s and 70s in a kind of culture vacuum. I did not really know much about my own culture,” said Li, who demonstrated the art of Chinese calligraphy as part of Howard’s World Languages Day. “My education was like everyone else’s. We didn’t study the normal courses; we were doing the political things. We spent a lot of time in the countryside and in the factory to be reformed.” It was only “after I learned English [that] I realized that Chinese, my own culture, was just as important. So this coming to America to teach about Chinese culture is really my journey to return to my roots,” Li said.
Roberson has arranged to send a group of Chinese language students to a summer immersion program at Soochow University in Suzhou, China, in 2006. That partnership grew out of an American Association of Community Colleges conference that he attended in 2004, where he made contact with three institutions interested in opening their doors to U.S. students. Soochow offered the best deal—tuition and room and board for a month for just $750—and Roberson returned to China this spring to finalize the arrangement. A new community college in Shanghai is hoping to form a partnership with Howard’s English Language Institute and develop an international business and marketing course that Howard could cosponsor in Shanghai. Again, as he did in Denmark, Roberson looked for ties that were practical and that two institutions 7,400 miles apart could manage on their own. “You don’t want to go to China without knowing what you’re doing because you can do a lot of toasting and bowing and come back with nothing,” he said.
Howard’s English Language Institute has grown in the past four years even as similar programs on many U.S. campuses have seen enrollments slump due to visa restrictions and increased competition from other English-speaking countries. The English Language Institute started with six students in 2001; this year it enrolled 90, including 77 international students on F-1 visas and 13 permanent residents. The intensive instruction—typically 18–20 hours per week—is geared for those interested in boosting their English proficiency as rapidly as possible. The institute can custom-tailor courses to a student’s particular interests and needs, as it did for June Eun Song, an aspiring artist from Korea, who after three semesters at the institute won a $30,000 scholarship to the Cleveland Institute of Art.
The institute is just one part of Howard’s large, robust English as a Second Language program, which enrolls 1,400 non-native speakers—mostly permanent residents of Howard County who are part of a growing population of immigrants from Korea, Latin America, and other parts of the world—in noncredit courses, and 400 others taking the same classes for academic credit. The noncredit and credit work closely together with a wide range of students who need better English skills, from professionals with advanced degrees to blue-collar workers. Some students are readying themselves to matriculate at Howard or four-year colleges; others already possess a college degree but are preparing for graduate school at Johns Hopkins University and other top institutions.
Howard Community College’s internationalization proceeds apace on multiple fronts: a rapidly growing English Language Institute; more opportunities for students to study abroad and more teacher exchanges; support for faculty to deepen or develop international expertise; and an entrepreneurial continuing education division that casts a wide net for training opportunities. Its journey is far from complete. It is just beginning to consider how to implement the charge it received from a citizen’s Commission on the Future “to make a clear and visible strategic commitment to international/intercultural competence.” A Multicultural Plan Committee headed by Kate Hetherington has produced a blueprint that includes stepping up international requirements, more faculty exchanges, and, if and when dorms are built, expanding the Multicultural Center and opening a “world café” for people to meet, eat, and exchange ideas and experiences. With Beckie Mihelcic phasing into retirement—she handled the international duties parttime in addition to teaching—Howard has hired as the first full-time director of international education George Barlos, an attorny who formerly directed international programming and study abroad at the University of Dayton and Tulane University. It also hired a fulltime assistant, Christele Cain, who holds twin degrees from Howard in graphic design and mass media web production.
The origins of Colgate University’s elaborate array of off-campus study programs can be traced not to London or Paris or Venice but to Washington, D.C., where the liberal arts college dispatched a professor and handful of students during the Depression to see for themselves how President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal were reshaping the executive branch. The trip became a regular feature of Colgate’s political science program: while the Hamilton, New York, campus was still deep in winter’s grip, a faculty member would lead a contingent of juniors or seniors south to deepen their understanding of the U.S. system of government, often with Cabinet secretaries, leaders of Congress, and other senior officials serving as docents.
Colgate earned the distinction of becoming the first of many U.S. colleges and universities to offer a semester in Washington; the program observed its seventieth anniversary in 2005. The private undergraduate institution sitting squarely in the rural middle of New York State saw that this model of sending a professor and students away for 12 weeks to teach, study, and learn together could be applied equally well in more distant parts of the world. In the 1950s, a study group headed off to Argentina. Later came study groups to Europe and Asia. Today this modest-sized institution (enrollment: 2,750) offers up to a dozen Off-Campus Study Groups each semester around the globe, from London and Madrid to Chennai, India, and Wollongong, Australia.
Ten percent of the 267-member Colgate faculty venture off campus each year with Study Groups or on briefer Extended Study Groups, which allow students to see the places they studied in Hamilton, from the back alleys and markets of modern Beijing to excavations in Rome and Pompeii. A Colgate professor teaches one or two courses to the study group, typically 14 students, and the students take two or three more at local universities or from scholars that Colgate engages locally. By the time they carry flaming torches around Taylor Lake on the night before graduation, upwards of 70 percent of Colgate’s seniors have had one or more international study experiences. The emphasis on the international is engrained deeply today in Colgate’s character.
The off-campus study groups represent “an incredible commitment by the faculty,” said President Rebecca Chopp, a religion and American culture scholar who has led Colgate since 2002. One hallmark of this type of liberal arts education is close faculty-student engagement, she said, “and there is no greater place for that than a study abroad program.”
“So many students come back intellectually alive in a way we have never seen,” said the former provost at Emory University and dean of Yale Divinity School. Chopp knew before arriving in Hamilton that Colgate students studied abroad in large numbers, but had not realized “that so many went on Colgate’s own programs—and that so many faculty went with them.”
“After spending my whole career in bigger places, I’m amazed at the kind of education students get here, the opportunities for interaction with faculty, and the way faculty think about the students all the time,” said Chopp. It demonstrates that “our faculty really understand that for the twenty-first century, we simply have to find ways to ensure that each student understands the world.
The Colgate approach also affords faculty many opportunities to become “truly global scholars,” she said. “I have long thought that getting faculty to live abroad is as important as getting students to live abroad.”
Nearly 250 Colgate students—mostly juniors—spent a semester abroad in 2004–2005, and almost half that number ventured out in January or after the end of regular classes in May, to destinations that ranged from Mayan Mexico to Zambia to Hiroshima. One hundered others studied abroad on non-Colgate programs. A glance at the organizational chart for the Office of Study Groups/International Programs underscores how much Colgate relies on faculty for the success and breadth of its study abroad programs. The small office is led by Director of International Programs Kenneth J. Lewandoski, and Assistant Director Jennifer Durgin, who taught in Toulon, France, as a Fulbright scholar after graduating from Colgate in 2000. A study abroad adviser and a secretary round out the four-person Off-Campus Study staff.
Faculty members bear extensive responsibility for making these far-flung programs work, not only while abroad with the students, but also during preparations beforehand and follow-up afterwards with students they mentored. With the exception of language instructors, most Colgate faculty who lead study groups are tenured; some are veterans of a half-dozen or more study groups, and there is usually no shortage of volunteers. Faculty invariably describe the experience as physically exhausting but intellectually invigorating, and students and alumni say that the bonds formed with professors and classmates while studying abroad were by far the strongest from their days at Colgate.
Mary Acoymo, 20, a junior from Redondo Beach, California, who went on the London Study Group in Fall 2004, said, “We all became like a family abroad, although at the same time we definitely did grow independently. That was really nice—to feel taken care of, but also unleashed.”
Chopp said that when she visits alumni and asks with whom they stay connected at Colgate, they’ll respond, ‘Well, my four best friends are people I studied abroad with.’ Some more recent grads will say, ‘I married (someone) from my trip.’”
Match-making isn’t one of the purposes of Colgate’s Off-Campus Study, but study abroad is an integral part of the Colgate experience. Early in Chopp’s tenure the administration, faculty, and trustees mapped a strategic plan with three main goals:
Colgate received 8,000 applications—easily a record—for the Class of 2009; it had to turn down almost three-quarters of them. Chopp believes the study abroad programs fueled the 22 percent spike in applications. “For many parents and students, the notion that you can actually go study with a Colgate professor in a way that will contribute to your major is very attractive,” she said.
More than 1,000 of those applications came from international students recruited by Colgate from around the globe through the generous provision of financial aid and scholarships. The contingent of international students on the Hamilton campus numbers more than 150; these students comprise 5 percent of enrollment, a 50 percent increase in five years. With room, board, and tuition at Colgate topping $41,000 a year and with a finite amount of financial aid, the competition among international students for a place in the freshman class is intense.
“They are incredible students and they are heavily invested in campus life,” said Senior Assistant Dean of Admissions Gregory B. Williams, who has made recruiting trips across Asia and other continents. The valedictorian and the salutatorian of the Class of 2004 were from Shanghai, China, and Sofia, Bulgaria, respectively. Kayoko Wakamatsu, an assistant dean of the college who advises international students, said, “We have an amazing number of students from Bangladesh and Bulgaria, and several from Nepal. We have students here who you might not suspect would want to come to farmland in the middle of New York.” The international students welcome the individualized attention they receive from faculty and administrators. “Students tell me repeatedly that they have opportunities here that they cannot imagine having elsewhere,” said the Japanese-born Wakamatsu, who was raised and educated in the United States.
Core Curriculum If a sense of remoteness provided early impetus for the pioneers of Colgate’s study groups, the faculty now is motivated more by a recognition of what Mary Ann Calo, associate dean of the faculty and professor of art, calls “the responsibility of educators to engage with the world.”
“We are in a somewhat isolated location, but we are definitely not a provincial faculty. It’s a very worldly group,” said Calo. “This enters our curriculum in ways that don’t necessarily require students to leave campus. We are encouraging them to think about the world here. We obviously encourage study abroad and have great participation, but we are also dealing here with a very dynamic curriculum intent on engaging with the world in a lot of ways, on a lot of levels.” Even those without a passport will “get at least some sense of culture, social systems, religion, and art outside the West,” Calo said.
The core curriculum, which dates back to 1928, is another signature feature of a Colgate education. It not only requires study of Western and non-Western civilization, but encourages interdisciplinary studies—an aspect that has made the faculty more international both in its research and its mien. Students can choose from nearly two dozen core courses in non-Western culture, from Core Mexico and Core Japan to the Black Diaspora to the Iroquois. (The core also requires several courses on Western civilization, the roots of modernity, and scientific perspective.) “It’s one of the most elegant and elaborate cores in the country,” said Jane Pinchin, former provost and dean of the faculty and professor of English since 1969. The emphasis on interdisciplinary study allows smaller departments from anthropology to classics to physics to hire more faculty than if their professors were teaching only in their field. “You can maintain goodly numbers who are teaching not only in their specialties but also in the core. It really develops a very international faculty,” said Pinchin, who served as interim president in 2001–2002.
“We talk about the Colgate DNA, that we have a real kind of personality,” said Chopp. “It takes different shapes, forms, and sizes and colors”, but there is a kind of extroverted, robust, [and] very, very curious personality. We have an incredible campus life built by the students largely, not by the staff. We attract lots of people who are athletic. It’s hard to walk on this [hilly] campus if you’re not into fitness. Some of that is the Division I [sports] program, which most of our peers do not have; some is an enormous outdoor education program and every club sport you could imagine. We just started a cricket team.”
“We’re very good at building community,” said the president, who added with a smile, “In a rural context, students learn that skill whether they like it or not, because there is nothing else to do.” But Colgate takes community-building seriously, and the results can be seen clearly in Hamilton. The university engineered a $15 million redevelopment that breathed new life into the village a few years back. Colgate even moved its bookstore a mile off campus to anchor a cluster of shops thriving inside refurbished, red brick storefronts, overlooking the tangle of roads that converge on the quaint Village Green.
As a young sociology professor, Adam S. Weinberg, played an active role in the redevelopment process and in getting hundreds of students involved in service learning projects in Hamilton, across Madison County and beyond, including Utica, home to more than 10,000 Bosnian refugees. He helped students launch nonprofit organizations and microenterprises. “It was a fantastic time for somebody like me to be here,” he said. In 2001, Weinberg, now vice president and dean of the college, and three student activists formed the Center for Outreach, Volunteers and Education (COVE) to provide a permanent base of operations for Colgate’s service learning activities.
“We don’t do community service at Colgate. COVE is our center for social entrepreneurship,” said Weinberg, who is responsible for all of the education and activities that take place outside the classroom. We’re interested in teams of students coming together and partnering with other people to solve problems, to make the world a better place.” The university gave COVE prime space and a fulltime staff on the first floor of East Hall, one of the oldest dormitories on campus. Weinberg also helped Adonal Foyle (the center for the Golden State Warriors of the National Basketball Association and a 1998 magna cum laude Colgate graduate) launch Democracy Matters, a national nonpartisan group that encourages young people to work to limit the influence of big money on politics.
Weinberg called Colgate, “a model for how you blur the lines between academics and student affairs.” Weinberg and his staff encourage students to talk “across difference” and work out disputes democratically, whether debating the volume of a roomate’s stereo or how to run one of the 130 student organizations on campus. They teach strategic planning to students in the Colgate’s themed housing units. The university also has purchased the houses of fraternities on campus with an eye toward exerting greater influence on that side of residential life. It was built spacious townhouses for groups of 12 to 16 students and gave room bid priority to those with a special theme or purpose for living together, including those coming back from study abroad. “We’ve purposely built the townhouses big enough so they can have parties and introduce other students to the music and culture” that became part of their lives, the dean said. “It’s our hope they will continue the conversations.”
“A study group that comes back from India comes back fundamentally transformed. Those students come back thinking differently about themselves, about the liberal arts, about their relationship to the world around them. How do we capture all that energy and enthusiasm back on campus?” said the dean. “What happens on too many campuses is those kids come back changed, and then they isolate themselves and just wait until they graduate. We’ve worked very hard to make sure that doesn’t happen at Colgate,” Weinberg said.
The COVE has helped returning students continue community service projects they began while on Extended Study trips to South Africa and the former Soviet republic of Georgia, and it arranges summer internships with nongovernmental organizations in developing nations. The debate team went to Malaysia last December to compete in the world championships, and the rugby team has toured Ireland and England.
The COVE Model, “is important because it takes our intellectual capital as well as civic responsibility outside the classroom and the campus. Education was founded with three missions: research, teaching, and serving the public good. The COVE combines all three in a powerful way, “ Chopp said.
And that cricket team the president mentioned? It was started in large measure thanks to the passion for the sport that Christopher Burns ’05 of Silver Spring, Maryland, acquired while on a 2003 study group in Chennai, formerly known as Madras. Burns donated 200 pounds of cricket bats, balls, pads, and other gear to the university. Last summer Colgate built its first cricket pitch.
A campus committee is exploring how to reach the 2003 strategic plan’s ambitious goals for further internationalization. No thought is being given to retrenchment. Dean of the College and Provost Lyle D. Roelofs, a physics professor who came to Hamilton in 2004 after two decades at Haverford College, said, “For this experience to have the maximum impact on Colgate students, we are constantly mindful of increasing the opportunities in the less well traveled parts of the world, not to the exclusion of the popular places to go.”
Roelofs notes that in his view, “an experience in London or even in Freiburg, Dijon, or Venice doesn’t broaden the student as much as going to Zambia or Indonesia or some destination that has more of a Third World character.”
The major limitation on expanding the study groups, he said, “is the effort that it takes to get another really good experience up and running. We recently did this with a new environmental studies program at Wollongong University in Australia. It really takes a multi-year process before the faculty get it all figured out in such a way that they are comfortable doing it for the first time.” The real barrier, he said, is not money, but “the investment of faculty time—multiple trips back and forth, much conversation. We reject as many ideas as eventually work out.”
One strong possibility is that Colgate will create an Office of International Affairs to bring its international programs and activities under one roof and give them even higher prominence and support. “I think we are feeling stretched. We do think we ought to take some of the work [of the Off-Campus Study Groups] off the faculty,” said President Chopp. A unified Office of International Affairs also would help provide even more support for international students.
Colgate is also preparing to launch a major drive to raise several hundred million dollars to help meet its goals and keep providing the intensive educational experience that students, parents, and alumni have come to expect. “We’re a very ambitious school. The last building built cost $12 million, and we have $90 million worth of projects underway right now,” said Chopp.
The biggest project is a new library that will enhance Colgate’s capacity for distance education and connecting students and faculty with counterparts across the globe. Last spring, the debate coach arranged a debate between students in a German class in Hamilton and German students at the University of Freiburg. It was conducted live by video conferencing over the Internet.
Lewandoski, who has directed off-campus study and international programs since 1994, said that what distinguishes the Colgate study abroad programs is “their curricular fit.” But Colgate is open to exploring new models, especially to accommodate the growing student interest in internships and service opportunities overseas. It will explore having resident directors in some countries instead of rotating faculty in and out, and of making greater use of technology for distance education. While the semester-long study groups are the crown jewel of Colgate’s international programs, some of the recent extended study trips have stirred great interest and excitement, and attracted more diverse groups of students. “The trips to South Africa and Zimbabwe appeal to African-American students because it is an exploration of heritage,” said Lewandoski. “For all students, it’s a way to get their toe in the water. They may not want to go out of the country for four or five months, but they figure, ‘I can do anything for three to five weeks.’”
When John Crespi, an assistant professor of Chinese, took his “Chinese City: Living Beijing” class to the Chinese capital in May 2004, the university also sent a staff expert on multimedia technology, Ray Nardelli, who gave each of the 19 students video cameras, still cameras, and sound equipment to document their research projects on Beijing’s markets, traffic, fashion, cuisine, churches, and Tiananmen Square. They produced videos that may still be viewed on Colgate’s Web site. George Hudson, an English professor and student of Japanese culture who has led many study groups to London and Kyoto, teamed with Karen Harpp, assistant professor of geology, on an Extended Study trip to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 2003 for their interdisciplinary course on “The Advent of the Atomic Bomb.” Calo, the associate dean who chairs the panel that is examining ways to make Colgate even more international, said, “We have a newly invigorated peace studies program that is now going to be called Peace and Conflict Studies. The new director has a very broad vision of the importance of studying peace and conflict in the areas of the world where this conflict is actually taking place.”
Chopp said she never hears complaints from faculty about the burden of off-campus study, but they often ask, “Are these programs rigorous and are the students prepared enough? Are we going to the right places?”
So Colgate keeps pushing outward. Calo summed it up: “We are already in a great position in terms of internationalization. But this is not an institution that accepts the status quo. The question is always: What else can we do? What are we not doing? How can we do this better?”
It is the stuff of dreams of college presidents and international educators everywhere: A wealthy and generous benefactor comes along, opens a checkbook and says, “You can enroll some of the brightest, most able and accomplished international students in the world. Send us the full bill.”
This actually happened five years ago to Colby College and a handful of other top U.S. colleges and universities, and none moved with more alacrity to make the most of the opportunity than Colby. The standing offer from financier-philanthropist Shelby M.C. Davis and family has enabled the Maine college to attract scores of students from the network of United World Colleges (UWC). UWC is a federation of 10 boarding schools on five continents that provides two years of International Baccalaureate classes, service opportunities, and leadership training to high achievers from dozens of countries in hopes that they will make the world a better place.
Without question the Davis UWC scholars have made Colby a better place. The faculty cannot stop talking about them—about how they raise the level of intellectual discourse in classes from advanced calculus to international relations to religion. Dasan M. Thamattoor, an associate professor of chemistry, marveled, “They go beyond what we teach them. In my line of work we’re doing organic chemistry, but they talk about politics and art and music. The conversation with students has been just phenomenal.” Referring to Stanislav Presolski ’05 from Pleven, Bulgaria, he said, “I can talk with Stan about anything from Italian cooking to the opera. Stan actually spent some time in Italy.”
At United World College of the Adriatic outside of Trieste, Italy, to be specific. As he readied to receive his diploma summa cum laude and move on to graduate work in biochemistry at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California, the engaging Presolski said Colby needs “to improve on their propaganda—I use the word in the good sense” to recruit even more international students to central Maine. “Maine sounds pretty cold by definition, and Waterville sounds like—well, where is it. Many international students don’t realize the excellent opportunities they are given at Colby,” said Presolski, who spent his junior year at Oxford.
Presolski, 22, the son of a gynecologist and a surgeon, once described to Colby magazine an epiphany he had in a freshman English composition class, writing about the treatment of gypsies in Bulgaria. “Back home, when I was reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I would say, ‘Wow, see how Americans are so cruel in their treatment of black people.’ But I had never questioned myself or considered that I had the same kind of bad opinion of the gypsies,” the magazine quoted him in a Fall 2002 article.
Director of Admissions Steve Thomas and colleagues regularly make recruiting visits to the UWC colleges located in Hong Kong, India, Italy, Norway, Singapore, and Wales as well as Lester B. Pearson UWC of the Pacific in Victoria, British Columbia, and Armand Hammer UWC of the American West in Montezuma, New Mexico (There are also UWCs in Swaziland and Venezuela). Thomas said no one at Colby fully appreciated the impact these students would have on their U.S. classmates. “They’re seeing these kids doing this in a third or fourth language and they end up striving for more as a result,” said Thomas. “To really appreciate what these kids are doing, you have to ask yourself, ‘Could I do this in Romanian or Czech?’”
Thomas said the ability to admit UWC graduates without regard to need “has been absolutely amazing. If we had unlimited funding for the non–UWC kids, and you admitted the top kids, we’d admit at least 200, 300 more kids out of the international pool.”
With 1,800 students and a faculty that combines a passion for scholarship with a love of teaching, Colby long has drawn students from almost every state and scores of countries. Only one student in nine calls Maine home (although many Maine students, like the UWC students, can be found clustered near the top of class rankings). But with tuition and room and board topping $41,000, Colby would be out of reach of a lot of students, U.S. and international, without extensive financial aid. Although not need blind, Colby provides aid to two-thirds of students, and those packages average more than $26,000.
The Davis scholarships are even more generous, covering the full need of UWC graduates up to $40,000. Until recently, the scholarships were limited to students who were admitted and chose to attend Colby, Princeton, Middlebury, Wellesley, or the College of the Atlantic. Recently the Davis family has made up to 50 more top U.S. campuses eligible for scholarships for UWC graduates. But Colby still attracted 27 for the Class of 2009. (The Davis UWC Scholars program is now run out of Middlebury College.)
“They absolutely raise the intellectual level and make our American kids think in terms they’d never thought of,” said Sandy Maisel, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government and co-director of Colby’s new Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement.
“They are superb students,” agreed President William “Bro” Adams. “They are a little older, and at this time of life, a year can mean a lot. They have also had this IB [international baccalaureate] experience at UWC campuses. It’s a rigorous, tough, traditional curriculum. The third thing is they are hungry—emotionally, intellectually hungry. They get into the middle of this kind of education we provide—close quarters involvement with faculty—and they just take off.”
The valedictorian and marshal of the Class of 2005 was Mark Chapman, a citizen of Zimbabwe who spent his junior year in Beijing and did a senior honors project on the reintegration of Muslims in China’s southwest corner into the Islamic world. The curly-haired Chapman, 22, double-majored in international studies and religious studies, with a minor in Chinese. He was returning to China after graduation for more language study and aspires to get a Ph.D. and “work on facilitating Chinese-African relations.” These are still turbulent times in Zimbabwe. His educator parents recently relocated to Aberdeen, Scotland. Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia and once a British colony, has been independent since 1980. Seizure of white-owned farms by the government has led to an exodus of whites and left the country’s economy in disrepair.
Chapman, a devout Anglican who was active in Christian fellowship activities, said, “It’s a difficult time for all Zimbabweans. White Zimbabweans find it difficult to imagine going back home.” His closest friends in Zimbabwe—including a goddaughter—are black. When he first enrolled in the UWC College of the Pacific in Victoria, British Columbia, “I found it strange to be around so many white people.”
“I definitely have a very strong attachment to Africa. I would like to live there in the long run. But I’m much more an Africanist than a nationalist,” he said. Asked if he felt the UWC alumni were both educators and students at Colby, Chapman said, “To a degree. I certainly don’t represent all of Zimbabwe or Africa. But one thing that a lot of international students bring is a confidence in the classroom. You’re more comfortable sharing your own experiences.” That in turn makes the Americans more willing to talk about their experiences, he said. “In that sense we can serve as a catalyst for discussion. That’s beneficial. It’s not so much knowledge that we bring, but rather a different perspective.”
Kenneth A. Rodman, the William R. Cotter Distinguished Teaching Professor of Government and director of Colby’s Oak Institute for the Study of International Human Rights, said the perspectives from students from outside the United States “create debates that American conservatives and American liberals wouldn’t have with each other. That enriches what goes on in the classroom.”
He offered two examples. “I had a Brazilian student in a class on business and American foreign policy. We were talking about oil disputes in Latin America, controversies over governments expropriating or changing contracts for multinationals. This Brazilian student was very pro-business, but when one U.S. student referred to it as ‘our oil,’ the Brazilian student said, ‘Our oil?’ He made the class confront questions of nationalism,” said Rodman. “On the other side of the spectrum, a student from the United States gave a presentation in one of my classes on female genital mutilation. Her viewpoint was very idealistic and feminist. A student from Angola, a feminist herself, asked, ‘Well, what are you going to do? Are you going to go into these villages to just liberate people? Do you understand the culture?’
“In those two cases, the American students expressed a point of view and were challenged by foreign students who may agree with much of their basic orientation, but confronted them with arguments they wouldn’t hear from other American students,” said Rodman. “It’s a way of challenging your ethnocentrism. It’s eye-opening. It forces us to get out of the Crossfire or Fox News mentality where you’re basically grafting onto other parts of the world our own idiocies.”
Rodman was the first director of Colby’s 15-year-old international studies program and is the founding director of the Oak Institute for the Study of International Human Rights. Every year since 1999 Colby has invited a human rights activist to spend a semester as an Oak Fellow on the Maine campus, lecturing, conducting research, and often resting up for further battles ahead back home. The arrival of the first fellow, Zafaryab Ahmed of Pakistan, was delayed for six months when the Pakistani government refused to let him leave the country.
Colby also provides Oak scholarships to international students whose families or homelands have been victims of torture and others rights abuses.
All of these activities, said Rodman, help make Colby students smarter, more culturally aware and less likely to view the rest of the world “as an extension of the United States.”
“Whether you’re an American business person in Latin America, or a human rights activist in Africa, you have to be at least cognizant of the cultures that create those situations and have a degree of humility in pushing forward a human rights agenda,” he said.
Rodman’s colleagues in Colby’s government department include Cal Mackenzie, a leading scholar on the presidency and the executive branch, and Maisel, an authority on political parties and elections. Maisel joined the faculty in 1971 after getting degrees at Harvard and Columbia. “I came for the good weather,” quipped the native of Buffalo, New York. In those days Colby “wasn’t international at all and it wasn’t very national; it was very New England–oriented.” Former President William R. Cotter (1979–2000) was an internationalist who had served as the Ford Foundation’s representative for Colombia and Venezuela and worked as an assistant attorney general in northern Nigeria. It was on his watch that two-thirds of Colby students began studying abroad for at least one semester. In the 2004 Open Doors, Colby ranked seventh among liberal arts colleges in study abr/oad, with an 82 percent participation rate by its 2003 graduates (including summer and January-term experiences). Cotter, who was president of the African-American Institute before taking the Colby post, became president of the Oak Foundation after he left Mayflower Hill. Oak is an international philanthropy that works to protect human rights, curb abuse, and safeguard the environment.
“Bill Cotter had never worked on a campus before, but he had a vision of internationalizing both the student body and the curriculum. That made a huge difference,” said Maisel. The students who study abroad “come back to a campus where international issues are really quite prominent in both the curriculum and extracurricular activities.” Colby was among the first U.S. campuses to institute a January term. To deal with enrollment imbalances, it also allows some incoming freshman to begin their careers studying at Colby programs in France and Spain, then matriculate on the Waterville campus in the winter.
William Adams, a social philosopher who had been a senior administrator at Wesleyan University and president at Bucknell University, engaged the entire college community in a year-long exercise to develop a strategic plan for Colby soon after his inauguration as Colby’s president in 2000, and the college now is preparing a major fundraising drive to carry out those ambitious plans.
The creation of the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement was one of the first and most visible fruits of the new blueprint for Colby’s future. Maisel and his colleague, James W. Meehan Jr., the Herbert E. Wadsworth Professor of Economics, both made the case that the college needed a highly visible public affairs center to galvanize a host of interdisciplinary efforts on issues of national and international importance. The college found a sympathetic ear in investor, trustee, and benefactor William Goldfarb ’68. The Goldfarb Center has hosted lectures and conferences in its first two years on topics ranging from terrorism and civil liberties to AIDS and public health issues in Russia. In 2006-07 it will move into the new Diamond Building at the foot of Mayflower Hill where many of Colby’s social science departments and interdisciplinary programs will reside.
“Students are involved in everything we do,” said Maisel. “They chose the films for our conference on fighting terrorism and are putting on a play. And when Philip Heymann visits [noted Harvard Law School authority on terrorism and liberty], 20 of the 35 people invited to have dinner with him will be students.”
The internationalization of the curriculum has been “a very real change on the Colby campus,” added the government professor. “I’m an Americanist and it is really easy for me to Americanize any program. But I have set as a goal of mine to internationalize the Goldfarb Center program as much as we can.” He envisions the Goldfarb Center’s enlisting help from alumni to land international internships for students—from London to Capetown to Singapore. It is already helping pay for students to conduct research overseas. After a fall 2004 seminar on corporate social responsibility, five seniors received help from the Goldfarb Center to spend January 2005 in Chile working for Vincular, a nonprofit organization whose goal is encouraging businesses across Latin America to be good employers and good citizens.
The five students—Melissa Landau of Pound Ridge, New York, Jonah Waxman of Piedmont, California, Alan Ashbaugh of Needham, Massachusetts, Shannon Emerson of West Friendship, Maryland, and Caitlin McCusker of Lakewood, Colorado—all were fluent Spanish speakers. Some had previously studied in Latin America. They visited Chilean fruit exporters as well as a Spanish-owned electrical company trying to convince customers of the need for higher rates to improve the safety and reliability of service.
Ashbaugh said it also became obvious to the students that “we became good publicity” for the companies to show off their corporate social responsibility programs. There were stories in the local media about the student interns, and the utility, Chilectrica, “actually put us on a poster.”
Colby runs a small number of its own study abroad programs, but it is careful about which programs students can go on for credit. “Our job is not to talk them into it, but to channel the enthusiasm into the appropriate venues, make sure they’ve thought about what they want to do and why, and how it relates to what they’ve done at Colby and what they want to do afterwards,” said Martha Denney, associate dean of faculty and director of Off-Campus Study.
Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin are dissolving a consortium that sent students and faculty to Quito, Ecuador, Capetown, South Africa, and London. “It was much more difficult and financially challenging than anyone had anticipated,” she said, and harder to convince students from the three colleges that this was where they should study abroad.
Colby still runs its own programs in Salamanca, Spain, Dijon, France, and Cork, Ireland, as well as one in St. Petersburg for Russian majors.
Associate Dean of Students Sue McDougal advises international students; her office is practically their clubhouse. She is in charge of their orientation, and she takes newcomers on shopping trips for winter coats and boots at the L.L. Bean outlet store in Freeport. One January she went to Bulgaria and visited the families of the large Bulgarian contingent on the Waterville campus.
“We had a big gathering at a tea house in Sofia. I was so excited to get back here to tell each of the students that I’d met their moms or dads and brothers and sisters and what we talked about,” she said. “But by the time I got back, it was old news. Every single one of them had e-mailed home and all the kids knew all the conversations. I felt like I had nothing to share."
Associate Professor of Government and International Studies Jennifer Yoder, a specialist on the transition from communism in eastern Germany and other former Soviet bloc states, says the rise of international studies at Colby and elsewhere has tracked the move toward globalization, increased international openness, growth in study abroad, and “more awareness that what happens in the United States is affected by what’s going on internationally.”
International studies majors “tend to be much more adventurous than a typical American traveler, more interested in visiting developing countries, going to places where they can use their language skills and not fall back on English,” said Yoder.
The arrival of UWC graduates in large numbers has “changed the classroom—my classroom, my colleagues’ classrooms. The level of intellectual discourse has been raised,” Yoder said.
“It happens all the time. Last semester, in a course on political ideologies of Europe, I was talking about communist ideology. Most of the American students have this conventional idea about communism being so deeply flawed and the cause of so much death and destruction in the world. There was a Hungarian student who said, ‘OK, I understand that, but let me tell you what attracted my grandparents to communism,’” she related.
Emilia Tjernstrom ’06, a native of Stockholm, Sweden, and graduate of the Red Cross Nordic UWC in Norway, worked with street children during the semester she studied in Morocco. An economics and math major, she is an activist in the Movement for Social Justice, a member of the Woodsmen’s Team, and manager of the annual springtime International Extravaganza. She spent the summer doing field research in Mongolia.
Tjernstrom, sporting ribbons opposing violence against women and supporting gay rights and wearing a keffiyeh scarf for Palestinian statehood around her neck, said she has learned much from her U.S. classmates. “Colby focuses a lot on the visible diversity, the things we can notice. There’s a lot of diversity within the Americans also, a lot I can learn from them. I’m from a socialist country. I take so many things for granted, being from Sweden. I just assume people are willing to give up [some] of their own consumption to make sure that the rest of society can have medical care. Here people have a very different perspective.”
Colby’s French Department has made the transition from focusing exclusively on the literature and culture of France to that of the wider French-speaking world. Professor Suellen Diaconoff, on the verge of retirement, switched her research interest from eighteenth century France to the writings of the modern Scheherazades of Morocco. “We call ourselves French studies right now. We have a very strong Francophone identity, which means that it’s all the countries where French is spoken. We run Jan [January] Plans to Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, where they speak French like in Paris but also Creole,” she said. “I also ran a Jan Plan to Morocco in 2001. We went out to Rabat, Casablanca, Fez to study women’s NGOs.”
The ranks of French majors have swelled to 50.
Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, the Crawford Family Professor of Religion, teaches the religions of Asia including her own, Sikhism. Dressed in a bright silk sari, she said with a laugh, “In America I became more Indian. I had never worn a sari in my life” before leaving a convent school in India to attend Stuart Hall in Virginia and later Wellesley College. Her father was a Sikh writer and scholar.
Last year Singh was surprised and moved to come across a troupe of students dancing to Punjabi folk melodies she remembered from girlhood. The performance—mixing the classical Indian dance Bharat Natyam with modern dance—was choreographed by Julia Hutchinson ’07 after she returned from studying in India.
Paul Josephson, associate professor of history and director of the Science, Technology and Society Program, is a Sovietologist and Russian expert who did his Ph.D. at MIT on the history of Soviet physics. The lanky Josephson, a marathon runner who trains 50 miles a week in sun, rain, or snow, is a zealot about the need for students to master the languages of the regions they study.
“I’m trying to learn Bulgarian myself. I’ve given up on Hungarian, but I can read Ukrainian, and I’m also teaching myself to read Polish,” said Josephson, who is fluent in Russian and German. “I explain to my students the importance of learning foreign languages as a ticket abroad, as a gateway to other cultures.”
Erica Hill ’05 from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, was an international studies and economics major who took every opportunity to internationalize her Colby education. Hill, who headed off to Peru a month after graduation for Peace Corps training, spent a semester in Thailand studying at Chiang Mai University and spent January 2005 in Guatemala researching her honors thesis on village banking systems. She also did an internship one summer in Japan.
“Colby has given me so many opportunities to do international things. I kind of think that’s how every college is now with globalization, but I realize it’s not,” said Hill.
Classmate Rodney Yeoh ’05, a UWC scholar from Itoh, Malaysia, was a finalist for Malaysia’s lone Rhodes Scholarship. He had to fly home to Kuala Lumpur over Thanksgiving 2004 for the interview.
Yeoh, whose father runs a hardware business, came to Colby with plans for medical school, but got captivated instead by religious studies. He studied Aboriginal religions in Australia for a semester as a junior, and now is pursuing a doctoral degree at Harvard Divinity School. His ambition? To become a documentary filmmaker exploring the connections between religions and violence.
President Adams said Colby is still figuring out how to draw its increasingly diverse student body—both the international students and U.S. minority students—fully into campus life and activities.
That happens naturally in the classroom, “but in the broader zone of campus life we’re still trying to find out how you maximize the impact and the educational efficacy of having these interesting students with you. The melting pot doesn’t melt perfectly spontaneously.”
In the canons of international education, one truth stands above all others: a college or university serious about educating students about the world must first educate its faculty. Few colleges have done this with more gusto than the University of Richmond, which since 1989 has used its own funds to send faculty on two- and three-week seminars to 26 countries on six continents, where typically they engage politicians, intellectuals, generals, artists, and ordinary folks in a whirlwind of visits to parliaments, campuses, museums, and other cultural sites.
“It really is a boot camp. We have a very strict schedule,” said Uliana F. Gabara, dean and Carole M. Weinstein Chair of International Education and impresario of the Faculty Seminars Abroad. “We spread our interest and exposure very broadly. We want to meet as many people as possible, not just academics, and to hear about all aspects of this place where we are.”
Most seminars take Richmond faculty off the beaten track. In Turkey in 2005, they visited the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, but also held extended discussions with Turkish generals and university rectors about the role of the military and the place of Islam in the modern, secular Turkish state. When the Institute of International Education presented the first Andrew Heiskell Awards for Innovation in International Education in 2002, Richmond’s Faculty Seminar Abroad received a citation.
Gabara, a Russian literature scholar who was raised in Tashkent in the then–Soviet Union and in Poland, noted that several of the countries that she and her colleagues explored no longer exist, including Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia. [See table for full roster of seminars.]
“Some people have said, ‘Why can’t we go to France and Switzerland?’ My response has always been that these seminars go to places that are difficult to navigate on your own,” said Gabara, a Bennington graduate who came to Richmond to teach Russian in the mid-1980s and was quickly tapped to create and direct a new, centralized Office of International Education.
“It became clear that if one wanted to approach internationalization broadly across the disciplines, what we needed to do was start with the faculty,” the dean said. The seminars had a number of goals, including having faculty talk with each other across disciplines, take a fresh look at important world issues, and incorporate this new understanding into their teaching and research.
Richmond is a richly endowed private university with roots that date to 1830, when in its first incarnation it was a Baptist seminary for men. It became Richmond College in 1840. During the Civil War, Confederate soldiers used the college as a hospital, then federal troops turned the classrooms into a barracks. The college in 1914 found a spacious new home in the woods on Richmond’s West End on the site of an abandoned amusement park. Today 2,900 undergraduate and 550 graduate students attend classes on the picturesque, 350-acre campus. Some 542 students studied abroad in 2004-2005.
Even seasoned faculty travelers find that the seminars afford a special, intense opportunity to learn about other countries and cultures. Gabara, who has participated in 11 of the 13 seminars, said, “What I learn is just incomparable to what I or anyone would learn just by going to these places on our own.”
For Douglas A. Hicks, associate professor of leadership studies and religion and director of the Center for Civic Engagement, the opportunity to travel to India in 1999 after his first year on the faculty allowed him to realize a longtime ambition.
Hicks holds a divinity degree from Duke as well as a Ph.D. in religion, ethics, and economics from Harvard, where one of his doctoral advisers was Amartya Sen, the economist and Nobel Laureate noted for bringing ethical questions to the fore in policy debates about human development. Hicks’ research had taken him to several countries in Africa and Latin America, but never to his mentor’s homeland of India.
“I work on globalization and inequality and also religion and society. For all those issues, India is a major player,” said Hicks, who is also a Presbyterian minister. “I really needed to learn more about India on the ground, to take abstract ideas and make them real.”
“It was an overpowering experience. Indian culture in so many ways is the most colorful of any I’ve experienced,” said Hicks, a native of Indiana. “You had all the extremes: extreme wealth, extreme poverty, the smells, the colors, the rich cultural tradition, and the impoverished economic life. We saw everything from Calcutta streets flooded from sewage problems to the beauty of Darjeeling, Banaras, and the Taj Mahal.”
The trip directly influenced several courses Hicks teaches as well as a book he wrote on Religion and the Workplace. “I couldn’t possibly have written the section on India and religious diversity without this trip. My ‘Leadership and Religious Values’ course now has a section on India, and the ‘Ethics and Economics’ course I team teach had a special focus on India this semester,” Hicks said. “One of the student research projects was on prenatal sex selection,a terrible problem in India with the spread of cheap ultrasound technology and one of the pressing moral issues of our time.”
Sydney Watts, an associate professor of history and expert on eighteenth century France, knew when she came to Richmond in 1999 from Cornell University “that there was a lot of support here for research abroad, so I anticipated spending summers in the archives in France. But I didn’t learn of the faculty seminars until I started work.” Watts didn’t raise her hand for seminars in South Africa in 2000 or Australia and New Zealand in 2001, but she was ready when Gabara announced the 2002 seminar would go to Vietnam and Thailand.
Watts, who was born in Belgium (her parents worked for the U.S. Department of State) and spent several years living and working in France, said, “I felt I was pretty international when I arrived, but it wasn’t until traveling to Vietnam and Thailand that I realized how important it was for me to see a non-Western society, especially one with francophone roots and remnants of French culture, but very, very different” from France. Watts added, “That was my initial attraction to the seminar, to look at how French culture had influenced Vietnamese cuisine and identity.”
“I teach on the history of work,” said Watts, whose book, Meat Matters: Butchers, Politics and Market Culture in Eighteenth-Century Paris, came out in June 2006. “We talk a lot about industrialization and the effects on people when they see their world around them changing.” The journey to Vietnam gave the historian an opportunity to see this happening to a society “in real time.”
“I couldn’t substitute anything for that experience. It was such an instrumental part of my academic formation,” said Watts, who also got to ride an elephant with Gabara in Chiang Mai, Thailand, a city famed for its temples, silk, and handcrafts.
She and Gabara were surprised at how few French speakers they encountered in Vietnam, where French colonial rule ended half a century ago. “The markers in nonlinguistic terms were much stronger than the language because of the cuisine,” Gabara noted “The foods and architecture in Vietnam are still very strongly marked by (the French influence). It’s a complex way in which colonization survives even while the linguistic colonization disappears.”
“The fascinating thing for all 10 of us was that at no point did we encounter a moment of hostility or even crossed looks, even though this was (still) close to the end of the Vietnam war,” Gabara said.
The experience has left its mark on Watts both as a teacher and a mentor. Watts, who spent a year at Oxford while an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College, said, “Now when I advise students to go abroad I tend to push them away from studying at Oxford or St. Andrews and say, ‘Why don’t you think about someplace really different, where you are a minority, where you really are experiencing a totally different culture from your own?’”
A third of the Richmond faculty has gone on these seminars; some have gone on multiple trips. Participants do preparatory work during the semester before departure, with each making a presentation on that country or region from his or her disciplinary perspective. Afterwards, they write reports that Gabara posts on the OIP Web site.
With other demands on faculty time, it works out that most who want to go are welcome. “We’ve turned away very few people,” said Gabara. “But there’s still a great need to discover new territories and devote time to this kind of general education for faculty.”
The next seminar tentatively is set for China, South Korea, and Malaysia in 2007. Gabara said, “Asia doesn’t have enough play on this campus. Like most (U.S.) institutions, we still have the drag of a Eurocentric and U.S.-centered approach.”
Gabara, president of the Association of International Education Administrators, does not scout the countries in advance. Instead, she relies on her extensive network of local contacts—including counterparts at universities and Fulbright commissions—to arrange what amounts to an academically oriented VIP tour.
The itineraries include famous sights. “We don’t cut out what some would sneeringly call the tourist stops. When we go to India, we don’t ignore the Taj Mahal, but we want to see it in context, with highly skilled colleagues as our guides,” she said.
Faculty members do not receive a stipend for going on the seminar, but all of their expenses are covered. Gabara estimates the value of each trip to be $5,000. Families are not invited. “That’s an absolute no-no because these seminars really are, in the popular parlance, 24/7. It’s a very intense experience,” said Gabara, who earned her Ph.D. in Russian literature at the University of Virginia after a master’s at the University of Warsaw.
For faculty, the seminars are not just about learning the history and mores of other countries, but developing deeper bonds with each other.
The 10 faculty who set off on a two-week trip to Turkey and Cyprus in May 2005 journeyed along the Silk Road from the Aegean coast to Kayseri, saw the rock and cave formations in Cappadocia, and the Greco-Roman ruins of Pergamon, Ephesus, and Hierapolis.
As they stood in awe inside the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Joseph J. Essid, director of Richmond’s Writing Center, was unconvinced when the group’s thoroughly westernized guide said, “Organized religion is over. It is dying here.” His eyes turned to a group of men praying nearby. “A few are now glaring at us,” he wrote. “Do these men understand our guide’s English? Or are they staring at foreigners who gawk at the majesty of the Ottoman era, who snap photos in one of their most venerable houses of worship?”
At a university, they found that women students—but not staff—now can wear the hijab on campus, but not in class. “This shift in Turkish policy, and polity, may seem fragile, but it seems just the sort of compromise about deeply divisive moral issues that a healthy democracy should make,” Essid wrote. Later he added, “The more we travel in Turkey…the more I realize that despite 80 years of secular government, daily devotion to Allah remains a powerful part of life.”
For Nuray Luk Grove, director of ESL Services, the seminar marked a return to the homeland she left six years earlier. Eager to share the “real” Turkey with her colleagues, she led them to her uncle’s house in a poor Ankara neighborhood—an uncle she intensely disliked as a girl for his religious zealotry. “His daughters had to wear the burqa; black and ugly. He was a scary man,” she wrote.
But now she saw him as an “almost saint-like” old man with “a beautiful smile, sad eyes, (and) kind heart” who gave each of them prayer beads that he had carved himself.
Mike Spear, a journalism faculty member who has participated in several seminars, summed up the importance of faculty seminars. “I cannot emphasize enough its value to the university, to the faculty members who participate, and to me,” he said. “It is a chance to further knowledge and get a close look at an area that involves scholarship within individual disciplines,” he said. “The chance to get away from books and meet source people in another country is both invigorating and enlightening. Just as important, it gives faculty members, who are often too busy on campus to get to know each other, a chance to get acquainted and swap ideas.”
