Teaching, Learning, and Facilitation

The motto that Old Dominion University adopted in 2002 fits this urban institution as smartly as a tailor-made suit: Portal to New Worlds.

Nestled between rivers in Norfolk, the university is a leader in distance education via satellite for students scattered across the Commonwealth of Virginia and sailors on U.S. ships at sea. It is the academic anchor of Hampton Roads, a historic seaway that pulses with activity. Jamestown, which celebrates its 400th anniversary in 2007, is a 35-mile sail up the James River. Norfolk is home to NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for the Atlantic as well as Naval Station Norfolk, the largest naval installation on the planet.

Old Dominion had modest beginnings as a two-year, evening branch of the College of William and Mary in 1930. It gained independence and a new name, Old Dominion College, in 1962 and achieved university status in 1969. Today it stands among the 100 largest public universities in the United States, with nearly three dozen doctoral programs and a research budget of more than $50 million a year in the sciences, engineering, education, business, health, and arts and letters.

Developing New Goals from Natural Strengths

Hampton Roads, a gateway to the world since the early 17th century, lends Old Dominion “its unique character” and cultural diversity, the university’s mission statement avers, and that in turn gives ODU “natural strengths” in international outreach.

President Roseann O. Runte and predecessor James V. Koch both have built upon those natural strengths, steering Old Dominion on a course to legitimize its claim to being Virginia’s “international university.” With minority students comprising one third of the enrollment of 21,000 and large numbers of undergraduates working their way through college, Old Dominion has infused internationalism into the curriculum on the 188-acre campus stretched between the Elizabeth and Lafayette rivers. Koch stepped up recruitment of international students in the 1990s and study abroad has climbed since Runte’s arrival in 2001. “We owe Dr. Koch a vote of thanks for his prescience in realizing the importance of internationalism in education,” said Runte, a poet and scholar of French literature.

“We had a campus consultation on a new motto and everybody picked ‘Portal to New Worlds.’ Portal reminds you of the sea, and Norfolk is always open to the winds of the world. Also, when you say ‘portal,’ it has that technological, IT (connotation). The new worlds could be the discovery of new ideas—scientific or creative—or new lands,” said Runte, a native of Kingston, New York, who became a dual citizen of Canada during two decades as a college president there. In 2004, three years after stepping down as president of  Victoria University of the University of Toronto, she was named one of Canada’s 100 Most Powerful Women by the Women’s Executive Network.

Old Dominion now convenes annual Global Forums on pressing world and regional issues. In 2005 the Club of Rome, a global think tank concerned about the environment and sustainability of the earth’s resources, convened on the Norfolk campus (Runte is a member). Earlier Global Forums focused on Japan and India.

Runte also demonstrates her commitment to internationalism by example, donating $20,000 from her salary each year to fund a Presidential Global Scholarship to prepare outstanding students for international careers. She recently gave an additional $15,000 for scholarships for two women from war-torn Afghanistan.

John D. Heyl, executive director of the Office of International Programs from 2000 to 2006, said, “Old Dominion is an urban, relatively young, highly diverse, historically commuter institution. That context has been decisive for all our efforts at internationalization.” “We were a kind of evening school that evolved into a university,” added Heyl. “We have many part-time students, but increasingly we’re becoming a residential campus with full-time students and a wide array of services. There’s a big transformation going on.”  

Heyl, a historian who previously directed international programs at the University of Missouri-Columbia and taught at Illinois Wesleyan, said that with nearly a quarter-million residents, Norfolk “is not your typical college town. It’s very energizing, highly diverse, and always evolving. Change is very much a feature of both the city and this institution.”

Internationalization at the Center of Old Dominion’s Blueprint

JoAnn S. McCarthy, now assistant provost for International Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania, was Heyl’s predecessor at Old Dominion before leaving in 1999 to head the University of South Florida’s international education efforts. “I was hired by President Koch in 1991 to head up a consolidated and revitalized Office of International Programs that would lead the internationalization of the campus.  I reported directly to the president in this undertaking, and his support was absolutely crucial in those early days,” she recalled. Jo Ann Gora, then ODU provost and now president of Ball State University, spearheaded a strategic planning effort that for the first time put internationalization at the center of Old Dominion’s roadmap for the future.

Operating in the shadow of the University of Virginia and The College of William and Mary, McCarthy said, “ODU needed to carve out a distinctive niche in public higher education in Virginia.” With its strategic location in the heart of a great seaport, this quest to become “Virginia’s international university struck a chord, and I soon began to hear others referring to this emerging identity on a consistent basis,” she recalled.

The international office, like Old Dominion itself, had humble roots.

“When I first arrived, I moved into a very depressing office with beat up, mismatched furniture, and my skeleton staff was scattered in other parts of the building. For the first year or so, we struggled to function with grossly inadequate space, not to mention with the subliminal message that these marginalized quarters sent to all internal and external visitors,” McCarthy said. 

That changed after Koch persuaded George and Marcus Dragas, two local real estate developers of Greek heritage, to become the benefactors of the Office of International Programs. A new International Center named in their honor opened in 1996 to serve the campus’s burgeoning international student population.

ODU was “a fertile place for innovation and progress,” said McCarthy. “Through small grants that supported faculty efforts, critical financial and organizational support from the president and provost, the generosity of donors, and partnerships with the community, the international dimensions of the university quickly began to take shape.”

“ODU faculty and administrators shared a vision of what a public university could be in the twenty-first century, and they were willing to focus effort and resources in very productive ways over a sustained period of time,” McCarthy said.

Old Dominion’s enrollment of nonimmigrant students peaked at 1,230 in fall 2001 but, like many campuses, dropped after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. It enrolled 1,031 international students in fall 2005. Hundreds of other students from overseas attend ODU’s English Language Center each year to prepare to matriculate.

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Reaching Out Across and Beyond the Campus

In playing the international card, another advantage that Old Dominion possesses was its early mastery of distance-education techniques. Its faculty created successful distance-learning courses back in the 1970s and regularly fashioned technological innovations. Today it boasts distance-learning centers at 14 military installations, 25 community colleges and a dozen other Commonwealth of Virginia sites, and at campuses and bases in Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, and Washington state as well as in the Bahamas. Forbes magazine once declared Old Dominion one of the “top 20 cyber schools” in the nation. A decade ago, sailors aboard the USS George Washington became the first to take live, interactive MBA courses over Old Dominion’s Teletechnet “Ships at Sea” program.  Now these classes are beamed from campus by satellite to ships worldwide.

Old Dominion’s health faculty and the Norfolkbased Physicians for Peace collaborate on health sciences education and training missions in developing countries. The College of Health Sciences partners with Physicians for Peace and Universidad Católica Santo Domingo to provide service and training in the Dominican Republic. Gail Grisetti, an associate professor of physical therapy, was honored with the 2005 Provost’s Award for Leadership in International Education for bringing graduate students to learn and teach in the Dominican Republic. The honor, begun in 2001, carries a $1,000 stipend. Nursing and dental hygiene faculty are also exploring linkages there.

The Darden College of Education in 2004 launched a popular master’s degree track in International Higher Education Leadership. With internationalization so firmly woven into the campus ethos, “we felt emboldened to actually train the next generation of professionals to enter the field of international education,” Heyl said. One graduate student interned this past summer at the Fulbright office in Delhi, India. Two others redesigned a signature ODU staff professional development course called the Global Certificate Program.

Sponsored jointly by International Student & Scholar Services (ISSS) and the Department of Human Resources, the Global Certificate Program runs workshops each year to help the university’s own staff better understand and serve international students and scholars. Sara Eser, assistant director of ISSS, said the impetus came in 1998 when international students indicated in a survey that they were having a hard time “being understood across campus in offices outside ours.”

The program has grown from three or four sessions per year to a dozen workshops on employment rules, intercultural communications, and exploring other countries and religions, Eser said. The workshops are also open to faculty and students, but primarily draw staff from the finance, housing, campus police, registrar, library, and other campus offices. Most who earned certificates last spring were African-American staff members. Heyl called it “a great dynamic” that so many minority staff members wanted to better understand ODU’s international students.

Old Dominion in the past 11 years has tripled the number of students studying abroad, largely by expanding short-term programs over spring break and summer. Steve Johnson, director of study abroad and a former Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic, said about 270 students each year now study in other countries. Sixty participated on study programs to Berlin, London, and Guadalajara over last spring break. 

At President Runte’s instigation, the faculty in 2004 required all freshmen to take an interdisciplinary course on the global environment, consisting of 75-minute lectures in the university’s Convocation Center along with two small group discussion sessions each week led by graduate students. The experimental course is called New Portal to Appreciating our Global Environment (NewPAGE). 

Runte, who gave one of the lectures on literature and the environment, said faculty from different disciplines produced a special textbook and even attended each other’s lectures alongside as many as 2,000 students. “They did all they could to make the course very exciting. It was very invigorating to hear and that’s what teaching is all about,” she said.

Some students chafed at the big lecture course. A faculty committee has produced a 300-page report on the three-year experiment, and changes may be in the offing, including the possibility of interdisciplinary courses on other global issues, as Runte contemplated in her original proposal.

Discovery of New Worlds

Six months after the trustees approved Portal to New Worlds as the university motto, Runte was strolling through an art fair in a park near campus when her eye fell on a canvas with two square panels: on the left side, a small, brown boat with large, white sails moves out of gouache mists; the right panel is simply an unbroken swatch of green. She immediately wrote a check for $1,200 for the painting, titled “Discovery of New Worlds,” and hung it in her office. The painting is also prominently pictured in the Portal to New Worlds brochure produced by Alicia L. Phillips, assistant director for communications in the Office of International Programs and Shara Weber, graphic designer in University Publications.

 “Some people look at it and say, ‘You spent your own money to buy this painting with a plain green panel? You could have done that yourself,’” Runte recounted. “I say it’s absolutely perfect because it’s like education. You embark on an adventure like the people did when they came to Jamestown. The green part that doesn’t have anything in it is your discovery; it’s whatever you make of it. And when you go to a university, the education that you get out is what you put in.”

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A dozen institutions of higher education across the United States bear the name Concordia, but if the subject is languages, one stands out: Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, sponsor of the storied Concordia Language Villages that immerse children and teens in a carnival of language each summer. The Villages, with Alpine lodges, Spanish plazas, and even a snug, glass-enclosed German “Biohaus”—an environmental learning center—marry Disney-like showmanship with the tradition of summer enrichment camps in sylvan settings where the chatter between kids and counselors takes place in Spanish, French, German, Korean, Chinese, Finnish, Russian, Swedish, and half a dozen other languages. When the Bush administration summoned a select group of college and university presidents to Washington, DC, for the launch of a National Security Languages Initiative in January 2006, the new president of Concordia College, Pamela Jolicoeur, was among the invitees. Two months earlier, Congress had earmarked $250,000 to help with the creation of Al-WāHa (“The Oasis”), the Arabic Language Village that opened in July 2006.

Language has been an integral part of Concordia College from its founding in 1891 as an academy to teach English to Norwegian immigrant farm families. The college is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a tie reflected in the succinct mission statement that Concordia adopted in 1962 and has not yet seen a need to embellish or revise: The purpose of Concordia College is to influence the affairs of the world by sending into society thoughtful and informed men and women dedicated to the Christian life.

The majority of Concordia’s 2,700 undergraduates are Minnesotans, many from small towns and farm communities stretched across the prairie. The Dakotas and Montana also are well represented, while other students hail from more than 30 other states and three dozen countries, drawn by Concordia’s reputation, relatively low tuition (under $21,000), and ample financial aid. Moorhead (pop. 32,000) and its “twin” city of Fargo, North Dakota (pop. 90,000), on the opposite bank of the Red River form a metropolis considerably livelier and hipper than fans of the Coen brothers’ movie Fargo and Garrison Keillor’s   “A Prairie Home Companion” radio show might imagine. Keillor borrowed the name of his program from the real-life Prairie Home Cemetery on 8th Street in Moorhead across from Concordia’s 120-acre campus. 

In addition to the Language Villages and an equally renowned music department— with four choirs, a full orchestra, and massive, colorful murals, the annual Concordia Christmas Concert is a Midwest cultural tradition that airs nationally on public radio—Concordia ranks among the leaders in study abroad. International students comprise 4 percent to 5 percent of enrollment. Jolicoeur and Mark Krejci, dean of the college and vice president for academic affairs, have quickened the pace of internationalism at Concordia and set a goal of boosting the study abroad numbers by half. Jolicoeur made Christine Schulze, the Language Villages’ executive director, vice president for international development and part of her cabinet and appointed Per Markus Anderson, former chair of the religion department, director of international education. Anderson has been a leader of Concordia’s most ambitious study abroad program, a semester in India where students from Concordia and Gustavus Adolphus College work with relief agencies on social justice, peace and development issues, and women’s rights. 

Anderson said Concordia has strived to “democratize” study abroad. “We exist to take sons and daughters of the prairie and get them an education and integrate them into the culture in the wider world,” he said.

Concordia grew its study abroad numbers by offering an enticing array of one-month courses each May in which professors travel the globe with students.  Some years nearly 10 percent of the student body signs up for these seminars. The 2006 offerings included a tour of ancient and modern theaters across Europe, a seminar on the historical roots of fascism in Germany and Italy, a review of the health care systems in England, Sweden, Finland, and Germany, a trek to the Galapagos, and drumming and dancing in Ghana.

Many of these seminars cap a semester-long course on campus. In addition, Concordia builds nine-day trips over spring break into the curriculum for courses from accounting to religion that give students an opportunity to see the places they are studying. The subsidized costs in 2006 ranged from $1,425 for a literary trip to Ireland to $1,700 for a journey to Jordan to explore the history and politics of the Middle East.

A generation ago the college leadership consciously restrained tuition increases so as not to price Concordia beyond the reach of Minnesota farm families. Concordia has learned to live with lean budgets. But because it adds a tuition fee to each May seminar, they wind up costing more than rival colleges typically charge for short study abroad trips. Most May seminars this year cost $7,000. Anderson and other faculty worry that with rising costs in favored European destinations, the sustainability of the May seminars could be in jeopardy. There is talk about “tweaking” the college calendar, as Dean Krejci put it, to allow study trips earlier in the year, perhaps in January. That would also open up the possibility of more study abroad in Southern Hemisphere countries, which bask in summer when Minnesota is snowbound. Another possibility is two four-week terms in January and February before an abbreviated spring semester. One goal would be to give Concordia students time to spend an intensive month at one of the Language Villages before heading off to spend the spring semester in a country where that language is spoken.

Historically, because farm families used to need students back from college as early as possible in the spring, the academic year currently ends in late April. Nowadays, that gives Concordia students—Cobbers, as they call themselves—an edge in pursuing summer jobs and internships.

Talk of changing the calendar is music to the ears of Mark Covey, a psychology professor who chairs the Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. Covey, who twice has led the semester-long program to India, said, “We’ve boxed ourselves in to the month of May. We forget that there’s an entire Southern Hemisphere whose seasons are 180 days off from ours.”

The India semester is considered the most daring of Concordia’s study abroad programs. The base of operations is a private complex 12 miles outside Bangalore owned and operated by a development NGO and academy called Visthar. The course brochure says the program takes “a Gandhian approach” to studying India’s environmental problems, the role of women, and “the sometimes negative influences of globalization.” Concordia and Gustavus Adolphus alternate sending a professor with students each fall.

Anderson said the students drawn to the India semester “tend to be the leadership of our social justice groups—or that’s who they are when they come back.”

Among the group that went in 2005 were sophomores Aandrea Ditton LaFavor, 19, of Maple Plains, Minnesota, and Jared Kellerman, 20, of Enderlin, North Dakota. LaFavor said, “It was a way for me to get out of the fish bowl of Minnesota and see what other situations are out there.” The experience helped her decide to concentrate on environmental studies and also changed her aversion to politics. “I absolutely hated political science before I went, but now I see the true power that politics has in this world,” she said.

Kellerman, a double major in global studies and Spanish, said it was the international education opportunities that drew him to Concordia. “Being on the other side of the world, I had to learn to be more self-reliant, physically and emotionally, and to discipline myself to do the work. It wasn’t a scheduled routine like classes here.” 

Concordia offers students 18 semester or year-long programs in 15 countries, including Tanzania, Costa Rica, Japan, Malta, Australia, India, and Greece. “Concordia is faculty development heaven,” said professor and chair of the history department Vincent Arnold, an expert on Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy.

The college used grants from the Consortium for the Advancement of Private Higher Education (CAPHE), the Ford Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, and the Knight Foundation to send faculty around the world and whet their interest in leading study abroad. Political science professor and former director of international education Peter Hovde was a relentless proselytizer. Covey remembers Hovde telling him, “Everybody’s discipline is germane on this planet. Go find a place you want to travel to and come up with a reason (for students) to study there.”

Eduardo Gargurevich, associate professor of Spanish and Hispanic Studies, said, “I wish we had more contacts with Africa, with Asia and even with Latin America. Somehow—and this is understandable, given the heritage of this college—somehow up to this moment a lot of emphasis has been put on Europe. But things are changing at Concordia. We’re expanding our area of operation.”

Two months before the language summit in Washington, Jolicoeur journeyed to Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai with the presidents of other Minnesota private colleges. She came back determined to send Concordia students there. “The Minnesota presidents made a pact on the spot that we would work together to develop a joint program,” she said.

Chinese has had a place in the Language Villages since 1984, but the language is not taught on the Concordia campus. Students can, however, take Chinese at Minnesota State University-Moorhead, part of the Tri-College University, a consortium that links Concordia, Minnesota State, and North Dakota State University across the Red River in Fargo. 

For Jolicoeur, the trips to China and the White House both left her “realizing that with international education and learning languages on the national radar screen, our day might have come.” Weekend language immersions already are offered at the Language Villages’ sites on Turtle River Lake outside Bemidji, Minnesota, for high school classes and increasingly for adults, families, and business groups as well.  Now “we’re asking ourselves: What can we do that will make Concordia College the go-to place for colleges to send their students for immersion study, or for people to come if they want to pursue careers or volunteer opportunities in (non–English-speaking) countries?” Jolicoeur said.

Reflecting its heritage, Concordia offers a major in Scandinavian Studies and a minor in Norwegian language and literature. Jolicoeur added, “We’re also thinking about ways in which we can get synergy between our emphasis on languages and the majors that are expressions of our global reach, such as global studies and international marketing.” 

Reaching Out to International

Students Concordia’s contingent of international students includes eight young women from the Maasai tribe in Tanzania who are graduates of the Maasai Girls Lutheran Secondary School, opened on a coffee plantation outside Arusha in 1994 by a Lutheran missionary and Concordia alumnus, David Simonson. The college has raised more than $1 million to endow scholarships for these young women. 

One afternoon last spring, two Maasai students, freshmen Rebecca Matinda and Nashipay Lepoo, arrived at the office of Amer Ahmed, the director of intercultural affairs, to inquire about summer lodging. Both were relieved to have weathered their first winter in Minnesota and their first year in college. “The professors are so nice to students. They really help a lot,” said Matinda.

Ahmed’s office deals with meeting the needs of both international students and domestic minority students on the Concordia campus. “Often at institutions these (multicultural) positions are fairly marginal, but here this office plays a significant role working across the college,” said Ahmed, whose parents emigrated from India. 

Don Buegel, director of international student recruiting and support, said international enrollments more than doubled between 1996 and 2003 to a high of 171. Tighter admission standards led to a drop in that number to 111 in 2005, but Concordia officials are working to engineer a rebound. 

The new director of admissions, Omar Correa, said Concordia needs to keep appealing “to our traditional markets” while broadening its appeal to U.S. minority students and international students. Correa, a native of Puerto Rico, tells prospective students from warm-weather countries that “experiencing the seasons” will be part of their international experience at Concordia, and “once you have graduated, you can go back as close to the equator as you need to be.”

Moorhead is 200 miles southwest of International Falls, Minnesota, which often earns the distinction of being the coldest place in the lower 48 states. “The cold actually keeps students indoors and studying. They talk about how they don’t have as many distractions here,” Ahmed said.

“I love the college curriculum over here and that’s why I came,” said music education major Kohei Kameda, 19, a sophomore from Japan. “I believe America is changing, slowly but definitely, and Americans are looking to learn and experience more outside their own country.”

Orgail Batsaikan, 19, of Ulan Bator, Mongolia, said, “I haven’t met anybody who knew what kind of country Mongolia is, but I didn’t expect them to know. Even our neighbors, the Chinese and the Russians, don’t know much about Mongolia. Americans have the willingness to learn, because they ask about the food, the culture, and especially the history because they have heard about the (Mongolian) empire.” Batsaikan also attended an international school in Ulan Bator and, like Kameda, his English is flawless.

Desiree Ruge, 24, of Jena, Germany, was an exchange student at Concordia from Friedrich Schiller Universitat in Jena. She spent many weekends as a counselor at Waldsee, the original and oldest of the Language Villages. Ruge, who aspires to teach English in Germany, wrote a column in the student newspaper about how much she loves Concordia.

But with a touch of sadness Ruge said that “interest in studying in the U.S. is decreasing where I come from.” She knew of no other classmate in Jena who applied for the U.S. exchange. The German students who wanted to study in an English-speaking country applied to universities in England and Australia, she said, mostly because “they disagree with U.S. politics. Of course, you can say politics and school systems and the people are something different, but they are just not as interested in the U.S. anymore.” 

Hundreds of Concordia students have gotten their first taste of international travel under the tutelage of English professor Gordon Lell. In 36 years on the faculty, Lell has led 24 May seminars and three Exploration seminars to England and elsewhere across Europe. “I’m the one who spent two years abroad during the month of May,” he said. Scrapbooks from each trip line the shelves in his office. 

When Lell began leading May Seminars, it was the rare student who already had traveled overseas. “Now I’d say half have been to Europe with their family or with their high school choir,” said Lell. 

In five years on the faculty, Gay Rawson, an assistant professor of French, has led three May seminars to France as well as a spring break “Exploration” seminar to Strasbourg. “When they hired me, there was an expectation that I’d be taking students abroad,” said Rawson. “I was kind of a believer in semester or summer (immersion) programs and still am, but when I went on the May semester for the first time in 2002, it was amazing. When we landed, the students were kind of potted around us, afraid to go anywhere on their own. By the end of our trip, they were independent, comfortable travelers in France. They knew what to do and how to get around, and they were able to do it—and that was in one month.” Four semesters of college French were required to take that trip.

Rawson encourages the French majors to work as counselors at Lac du Bois, the French Language Village, on weekends during the school year. She has meticulously tracked their progress and admitted, “I hate to say this, but their proficiency is equal to that of our students who have studied abroad.” 

Dawn Duncan, an associate professor of English and scholar of Irish literature, regularly leads May seminars to the British Isles, but said the shorter Exploration seminars are her favorites, since she gets to teach the full course herself.

During Concordia’s 2006 spring break—which starts in late February—Duncan led seven of the 11 students in her postcolonial literature class to Ireland, where they visited a famine museum and other historic sites in Dublin and Belfast. The entire class took part in creating a Web site about playwright Tom Murphy’s trilogy, Famine, The Patriot Game, and The Blue Macushla. Angela Pfeiffer, an all-America sprinter, missed the trip, but said, “it wasn’t horrible that I didn’t go. The others came back and filled us in. I worked on the Tom Murphy Web site; my group did the famine section.” Pfeiffer, who started dental school this fall, took four classes from Duncan, whom she calls “a dynamic teacher. She made us feel like we were scholars.”

Rebecca Moore, an associate professor of political science, spearheaded the creation of the new interdisciplinary major in Global Studies. “We think this is a terrific major both to meet the mission of the college and prepare our students to fulfill that mission,” Duncan said. “We previously had a traditional international relations major that was just a hodgepodge of courses.” The new three-track major is already attracting more students.

Moore, an expert on NATO, U.S. foreign policy, and human rights, said Concordia was uniquely positioned to help students examine global issues and problems through the lens of religion as well as political science and economics. “There has been a tendency in the past for folks on this campus to see international study as principally study abroad, sending our students off campus. I think we have a real opportunity to expand study of international affairs on campus and to make a connection between opportunities on campus, opportunities at the Language Villages, and study abroad,” Moore said.

Krejci, the dean of the college, said, “Students are coming to us more and more with an international, global perspective and they want that nourished. They want more opportunities abroad,” including internships and service experiences. 

Gargurevich, the chair of the Off Campus Committee, said, “We think education happens everywhere, even in the campus ministry” that sends students on breaks to toil in Habitat for Humanity projects in Mexico, Nicaragua, and other places.

Concordia prides itself on its friendliness and the collegiality of its 200-member faculty. Mona Ibrahim, an assistant professor of psychology, frequently fields requests from colleagues to speak to their classes about the Middle East and Islam. Ibrahim, a Muslim from Egypt, never says no. “I really enjoy talking about my culture. Some people might say, ‘Oh, that’s just extra work,’” said Ibrahim. “But I view it as very affirming, very welcoming, showing respect for my background.” 

Respect works both ways. A few years back, the chair of the psychology department was taken aback when he heard Ibrahim remark how glad she was that Eid ul-Fitr, the Islamic holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, was falling on a Saturday so she would not miss going to prayers with her children. The chair—Mark Krejci—counseled her, “Even if it was Friday, you should take the day off. How many years are your kids going to be with you? This is your chance to teach them about your faith.” When Ibrahim rejoined that she would feel bad canceling class, Krejci told her, “I can teach those classes for you or anybody can teach them for you.’” And, in subsequent years, that is what happened.

Concordia’s religion department by itself accounted for 44 of the students on Exploration seminars this past spring break, with Per Anderson leading 20 students on a fast-paced tour of Egypt where they saw Pope Shenouda III, the patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Church, visited St. Katherine’s Monastery, attended prayer services at a mosque in Cairo, and wandered amid the tombs of the Pharaohs. Michelle Lelwica introduced 10 students to the eternal city of Rome, and Roy Hammerling and Shawn Carruth escorted 14 students to Istanbul, where they had a private audience with Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, the highest ranking bishop in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Hammerling, a medievalist, is a Lutheran pastor and Carruth, a Biblical scholar, a Roman Catholic Benedictine nun.

Hammerling said that in lectures on the Moorhead campus, “you can talk about the Cora church or the iconostasis at the Patriarchate, or the magnificence of the Hagia Sophia, but there’s nothing like having the sense of awe walking into the building.” 

Concordia and Luther College team to offer a “Malta and the Mediterranean” semester each spring, with students living on the tiny island nation south of Sicily and using it as a springboard for travel throughout the region. When Carol Pratt, an associate professor of biology, led the program in 2002, she taught not one of her usual courses in biology and genetics, but an interdisciplinary class on the environment. “The flora are not unique, but Malta is a birdwatcher’s paradise during the migratory seasons,” said Pratt. By tradition, the Maltese are bird hunters, including birds protected in the rest of Europe. “There was a big to-do when some hunters killed two swans while we were there,” she recalled. It provided a teachable moment for Pratt on “the interface between culture and science.”

 Anderson, the international education director, said, “It’s hard to think of a department that isn’t interested in these things. Even our athletic department is coming up with interesting ideas to get our athletes involved” in international travel and competitions, much as the celebrated Concordia Choir directed by Rene Clausen regularly tours Europe.

Anderson said his passion as an ethicist is to help “develop institutions that allow us to live sustainably in this new, global world.” Concordia has always leaned in that direction, “but now, with Jolicoeur and Krejci, we really feel that this is our time,” he added.

 “We have this incredible mission that calls us to engage the world, and now we have  leadership pushing us and affirming this engagement of the world. It’s a very exciting time,” Anderson said.

A fortuitous name change from the risible (Beaver) to the sublime (Arcadia) is only one reason why folks at Arcadia University are smiling these days. 

Two decades ago Beaver College was in dire financial straits. Beaver’s Center for Education Abroad (CEA) ran a large and vaunted study abroad program, but only a handful of Beaver’s own students participated. With barely 1,000 students, faculty at the former women’s college were “afraid that if they let students study abroad, we wouldn’t have sufficient enrollment here to maintain their jobs,” recalled David C. Larsen, Arcadia’s vice president and director of the center. 

Today the dorms are bursting and Arcadia University has purchased apartment buildings to accommodate the 3,500 students on its picturesque campus, once the estate of a 19th century sugar magnate. Now 250 of the 3,000 students that the Center for Education Abroad places overseas each year are Arcadia’s own undergraduates.  Applications doubled after the 2001 name change and the university has repeatedly received laurels as a cynosure of internationalization.

Beaver began in 1853 as a seminary for women in a Beaver County river town west of Pittsburgh. It became a college in 1872 and half a century later moved across the Keystone State to Jenkintown, then later to Glenside in the Philadelphia suburbs.

Even when the college’s finances were precarious, the fortunes of the Center for Education Abroad were robust. The nonprofit center, opened in 1965, runs study abroad programs in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Greece, Australia, New Zealand, and Equatorial Guinea that attract students from hundreds of U.S. colleges and universities. With a staff of 120 and a $34 million budget, the nonprofit center still contributes to Arcadia’s endowment, but former President Bette Landman put a stop more than a decade ago to the practice of tapping its surpluses to cover Beaver’s operating expenses. “I said, ‘We’ve got to live within our means,’” recalled Landman, an anthropologist who sparked the college’s revival. Her successor, Jerry Greiner, a psychologist, has generated new excitement since his arrival in 2004 with ambitious plans to enroll international students by the hundreds instead of the dozens.

From its nadir in the 1980s, undergraduate enrollment has nearly tripled to just under 2,000, with more than 1,400 others pursuing master’s degrees in education, allied health, and such fields as international peace and conflict resolution, as well as MBAs in management with an international perspective and doctorates in physical therapy and education.

The college made internationalization the central thrust of Beaver’s mission back in 1991. Landman, president from 1985 to 2004, surrounded herself with strong deans and administrators, including Michael Berger, vice president for academic affairs and provost; the CEA’s Larsen; Dennis Nostrand, vice president for enrollment management; Norah Peters Shultz, dean of undergraduate studies; Jeff Shultz, associate dean for internationalization and professor of education; and Jan Finn, director of international services.

Why Not Fly the Freshman Class to London?

The turning point came at a summer planning meeting in Landman’s living room in 1993. Enrollments already were on the rebound, but Landman pressed her deans and faculty leaders on what to do next to ensure the college’s turnaround. Jeff Shultz, an MIT and Harvard trained educator, suggested, “Why don’t we put all the freshman on a plane and take them to London over spring break? We can call it our 747 Course.”  Everyone chuckled, but a few hours later they were talking about how to make it happen. The London Preview was born.

The following spring, 140 freshmen flew to London for spring break, accompanied by faculty and staff.   The CEA put them up in student hostels it hired for the purpose in the British capital. They visited the Tower of London, the British Museum, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and other sights, and went to the theater with Arcadia students spending the full semester in London. The fee that first year was $150; a dozen years later it is just $245. Arcadia subsidizes roughly $750 per student; freshmen in the Honors Program go for free. 

“More than anything else, it gives them confidence to study abroad,” said Jeff Shultz. “They get over the fear that they can’t do this. They know that they can.” On Graduation Day, fully a third of the class crosses the stage wearing colorful sashes signifying where they studied abroad after the Preview.

This year freshmen were offered Previews to London, Scotland, and Spain, and transfer students took a fast-paced cultural tour of Italy. Jan Walbert, vice president for student affairs, led the Spain Preview. Prominently displayed in her office is the bullfighting poster she brought home from Valencia, Spain, where she spent summer 1976 studying while an undergraduate at Juniata College. Walbert returned to Spain for the first time in May 2005 for a professional meeting. “I came back bitten by a Spanish bug and wanted to find a way to get our students to go there,” she related. “Jerry Greiner kept saying, ‘Try it; figure it out.’” Twenty-two freshmen eagerly signed up.

Walbert said the two-credit overseas learning experience “far exceeded my expectations in terms of how the institution responded and what students got out of it.” Now Arcadia is considering adding courses and credits to the London and Scotland Previews. 

The Previews cost Arcadia more than $400,000, but have become a powerful magnet for students. For years, Beaver drew 85 percent of students from Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Today, 55 percent of Arcadia students come from outside these two states. It has sharply increased scholarships for both domestic and international students, as well as faculty grants to develop international programs. All told, the budget for internationalization at Arcadia has rocketed from $47,000 in 19911992 to $917,000 in 2000-2001 to $2,239,000 in 2005-2006.

Vice President for Finance Michael Coveney said, “Planning is the secret to financial success in regard to internationalization. As long as you’re planning for it, it works well, especially in regard to exporting students. But it’s scary if you haven’t planned for it.”

If a school replaces 100 students studying abroad with an equal number of new students, nothing is lost, Coveney said. And subsidizing the Previews is less expensive than increasing students’ financial aid packages, which many private colleges do to lure tuition-paying students. “It’s as good as (putting) an extra $1,000 or perhaps $2,000 in their aid package,” he said.

The First Year Study Abroad Experience

Arcadia has found other creative ways to bolster enrollment and enhance its international profile. 

The trophies in Dennis Nostrand’s office attest to his success as a high school and collegiate wrestling coach. Nostrand looks capable of executing a quick takedown himself, but it is his remarkable ability to land students that leaves Arcadia colleagues grasping for adjectives to describe their vice president for enrollment management. “He’s brilliant,” said Jeff Shultz. 

Nostrand has pulled several rabbits out of his hat since coming to Beaver in 1992 from the State University of New York, Morrisville. “From wrestling I knew how to recruit students and what seemed to get their attention,” he said modestly. For his master’s degree, Nostrand studied student demographics, what makes students leave college, and what encourages them to persist. 

After the name change to Arcadia, the number of entering freshman and transfers jumped by 100 students, leaving administrators wondering where to put them. Arcadia was always eager to find ways to encourage study abroad, so Nostrand had an idea: Why not let some students spend their first semester in London? Sixty jumped at the opportunity, and now Arcadia offers top incoming students the chance to start their education in Arcadia’s London Semester Program based at City University and the London College of Fashion or at the University of Stirling in Scotland.

That first class of “First Year Study Abroad Experience” (FYSAE) students—they call themselves ‘Fi-Sis’—included Katie Lomberk, a premed who liked it so much she pestered administrators until they let her spend her second semester at the University of Limerick in Ireland. In an e-mail written at 2 a.m. on the morning of her graduation from Arcadia last May—the chemistry and math double major graduated in three years with honors— Lomberk wrote that she loved the British and Irish approach to higher education.  “It was very independent: ‘Do the homework if you need to do it; we leave you in charge of yourself to study.’ That is how I learn best.”

She spent most of the next four semesters on the Glenside campus, where she founded a chapter of Rotaract, a community service club (the parent is Rotary International). But she also put her passport to frequent use, studying in Greece and traveling to Turkey in summer 2005 and spending last January at American University in Cairo, Egypt, learning about the Nile River’s history and ecosystem. She took off in late February to join Irish friends for “Rag Week,” a student tradition that combines charity and hi-jinks. Ten hours after returning home, she joined classmates on a spring break service trip to build houses in Mérida, Mexico. After two days in Glenside, she flew to Beijing with political science professor Robert Thompson and 20 classmates for Harvard University’s annual World Model United Nations assembly. Lomberk traveled across the United States after graduation with three Irish buddies, then planned to head to Australia and “probably visit New Zealand, Fiji, Vanuatu, and possibly Micronesia.” She’s seeking a research internship in Antarctica before heading to graduate school for a Ph.D. in chemistry, and after that medical school so she can fulfill her ultimate goal: joining Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).

Other FYSAE veterans waxed equally enthusiastic about their experiences. “FYSAE is the reason I applied here,” said Stefanie DeAngelo, 18, a freshman from Sheffield, Massachusetts. “I had all these fantastic ideas about not going to college right away, so my parents were really excited when I found an organized, safe way to study abroad.” 

Robbin Gebbie, 19, of Lansdale, Pennsylvania, spent her first semester in Scotland. “They sent us a brochure a couple of weeks after I was admitted. It kind of seemed like a ‘Why not?’ opportunity,” said Gebbie, who aspires to become a physician’s assistant. “You’d finished high school and hadn’t yet started college. You weren’t leaving behind anybody; you had no friends to worry about missing. It was just a good time for a new experience—and it’s as cheap as it gets.” 

Katie McCullough, 19, a second-year student from Cazenovia, New York, who plans to major in international business and math, said Scotland “felt like home.” She subsequently spent a semester as an exchange student in Seoul, South Korea, and was scheduled to spend Spring 2007 in New Zealand. 

Arcadia’s Pathways to Study Abroad Web page lays out road maps for students in any of Arcadia’s 37 majors to spend a semester abroad. Nikunj Shah, 19, a computer science major from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, said Arcadia makes study abroad “very easy. Every department on campus has gone through and made a little schedule: ‘If you want to go abroad, this is how you do it. These are classes you need to take in this order, and then you can go abroad in any of these semesters.’” 

The Italy Preview  

Nostrand, the enrollment management magician, topped himself in May 2005 when  fewer students than expected sent in deposits to secure their spaces in the Class of 2009. Arcadia had received a record number of applicants. Its SAT scores jumped 50 points, but the yield was lower than expected. On the Memorial Day weekend, Nostrand conceived the idea of making up the shortfall by luring more transfer students by offering a $450 travel and study experience in Italy over the 2006 spring break.

In three days, Arcadia officials hammered out the details, enlisted assistant professor of Italian José A. Marrero to lead the program, and readied posters, brochures, and postcards for the printer. Then the admissions staff fanned out to community colleges within a 200-mile radius to pitch the program to counselors. Arcadia landed 130 transfer students and “we ended up hitting the budgeted enrollment number within two students,” said Nostrand. 

“It made a huge impact,” agreed Greiner, who later accompanied 68 of those transfer students to Rome, Florence, and Siena. Looking back, it seems that every major step Arcadia has taken to reinvent itself—whether knitting the Center for Education Abroad into the life of the campus, launching the Previews and the First Year Study Abroad Experience, and dreaming up a new name (even the URL www.arcadia.edu was available)—has worked flawlessly. Berger, the provost, insisted this wasn’t serendipity. 

“We have been working for over a decade to establish internationalization as the defining characteristic of Arcadia,” said Berger, an automotive historian. “We’ve just plain gotten good at this. We have done things that work in the past so we have confidence in our ability to do new things based on our past success.” 

Arcadia has surmounted challenges. The Center for Education Abroad had to rebuild relationships with universities here and abroad after the Center’s founder and key staff members left to start the Institute for Study Abroad at Butler University in 1988. But after a momentary downturn in 1991 following the Gulf War, its growth has been uninterrupted, and now the center is partnering with Butler University’s Institute for Study Abroad to launch its first study abroad offering in China.

Arcadia is not yet as strong on the import side of international education. It enrolled only 42 international students in 2004-2005. It used to host a large branch of the American Language Academy (ALA), which would bring as many as 100 international students a semester to Glenside to learn English, but ALA went out of business. Arcadia is considering launching its own intensive English program.

During Greiner’s years as provost at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, Hamline aggressively recruited students from Latin America. Now he plans to do the same at Arcadia. “We need to have many, many more international students, and we are putting in place strategies to do that,” Greiner said. “We’ve got efforts going in South America, particularly Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru, and we’re also reaching out to Africa and China. We just established a relationship with the American Graduate School of International Relations and Diplomacy in Paris.”

Greiner’s office on the ground floor of Grey Towers Castle was once the library of sugar baron William Welsh Harrison, who modeled it after medieval Alnwick Castle in England.

Greiner said he wants students “to have not just a smattering of experiences or to study abroad once in their career, but to be constantly exposed in all sorts of ways to the international and the multicultural.”

“We want to take Arcadia much farther than it is now on internationalization. If we’re going to do this effectively, it costs money. We need more staff and advisers to help, and we need faculty development so they can internationalize their courses to the greatest extent possible,” Greiner said.

Flags of many nations flutter from poles along campus walkways, representing each nation where Arcadia students study abroad and the home countries of international students. That colorful symbolism is not enough for Greiner. “I’d like to see the campus buildings and other public spaces have more of an international flavor,” he said. “I’d like constant student activities that feature global kinds of experiences so that every week students would have multiple choices from a variety of things that would keep them more attuned to global issues.”

Bioko Biodiversity Protection 

Program Arcadia’s most acclaimed off-campus study program is the Bioko Biodiversity Protection Program in Equatorial Guinea, a small, Spanish-speaking country in West Africa. Biology professor Gail Hearn has been studying wildlife on Bioko since 1990 and in recent years has partnered with Wayne Morra, an economist, on a program to preserve Bioko Island’s monkeys, sea turtles, and other endangered wildlife.

While working with animals at the Philadelphia Zoo, Hearn, a Bryn Mawr graduate with a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Rockefeller University, became intrigued by the reproduction difficulties that an African monkey called the drill had in captivity. That led her to “the only place left on the planet where drills still lived relatively unmolested: Bioko Island,” 20 miles off the coast of Cameroon.

“By time I got there, it was clear they were even endangered there, so a lot of my work has not been to study the social behavior of drills, but to save the wildlife of Bioko Island,” she said. Five of the seven species of monkeys living on Bioko—the drill, the black colobus, red colobus, red-eared guenon, and Preuss’s monkey—are among Africa’s most endangered. Four species of sea turtles that nest on Bioko’s beaches also are endangered.

Morra, an associate professor of business, health administration, and economics, envied Hearn her annual trips to an unspoiled rainforest, the Gran Caldera Southern Highlands Scientific Reserve. “I asked if I could accompany her as a porter,” he said with a laugh. 

“He used to go past my office like this,” said Hearn, mimicking a porter with up thrust hand. “He’d walk past, back up into my range of view and say, ‘I’ll do anything.’”

What use is an economist in the Gran Caldera? Morra turned out to be of great use. He and Hearn collaborated on ways to give the people of Bioko incentives to stop selling endangered species as “bush meat” in a market in Malabo, the capital.

“Biologists are very stingy when they work. They do not follow good economic principles. They do not want to pay for information; they do not want to help local people,” she said. “Wayne pointed out that underpaying local people was not a way to achieve your conservation objectives. You have to show people that saving their wildlife will help them.” 

Now they preside over a year-round conservation project, with a permanent staff of four on Bioko. With foundation grants, they hire as many as 50 local workers to monitor the local market for bush meat—everything from squirrels to porcupines to duikers (forest antelope)—and conduct an annual wildlife census in the forests of Bioko. Each fall, through the Center for Education Abroad, students from Arcadia and other U.S. universities take classes there. Arcadia faculty rotate in, working with staff and students from Universidad Nacional de Guinea Ecuatorial (UNGE). They are creating a wildlife sanctuary and looking into ways to encourage ecotourism. “We’re a little cottage industry,” said Morra. 

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The pair involves other Arcadia professors and students in the exotic work on Bioko. Last fall, Ellen Skilton-Sylvester, an associate professor of education, trained the study abroad students there to teach English as a second language to UNGE students while they learned together about wildlife conservation. Upon returning to Glenside, her student teachers made presentations about Africa to children in five elementary schools. A Fulbright Hays grant helped cover the travel expenses for the 10 students who spent the fall 2005 semester in Equatorial Guinea.

International Peace and Conflict Resolution

In the International Peace and Conflict Resolution (IPCR) program, graduate students spend the entire second year studying and interning in another country. They also travel as a class to learn about the “troubles” in Northern Ireland and the challenges that development poses to indigenous people in Costa Rica. The director, political scientist Warren Haffar, this year expanded operations to Arusha, Tanzania, on the foot of Mt. Meru, where the peace accords were signed ending the Rwandan civil war in 1993 and where the United Nations is conducting its International Criminal Tribune for the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi. 

“Arusha offers an amazing learning opportunity for our students,” said Haffar, who has worked on conflict mediation in the Balkans. “We get students out of the classroom and into the field to learn how international law, sustainable development, and human rights all work together to make a healthy society or generate a sick one prone to conflict.”

The program attracts a score of new students each year, including returned Peace Corps volunteers. “Usually their story is the same: they want a job that has some meaning,” said Haffar. For the price of tuition, the IPCR program pays the students’ costs while studying abroad, from airfare to visas to tuition at the host university. Haffar said, “It’s a great opportunity to try things you might not ordinarily do—with a bit of a safety net.”

Graduate student Justin Losh, 28, became intrigued by the notion of working on conflict resolution after attending a lecture that film-maker Michael Moore gave in October 2003 at Butler University in Indianapolis. Moore’s appearance was sponsored by the Plowshares Collaborative, a peace studies initiative of Earlham, Goshen, and Manchester colleges. Losh, who majored in anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and spent a year working in one of Brazil’s poorest regions, said, “I started seeing possibilities for myself for the future.” He spent this past academic year at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.

Kaori Suzuki, 23, came to Arcadia from Nagoya, Japan, in 2005 to pursue the peace and conflict degree. Her ambition is to work for a nongovernmental organization to improve relationships between Japan and the Asian neighbors it invaded in World War II. “I think the people who really make change are those who work in the small parts, in invisible places, but do something important,” she said. “Japan and other countries in Asia are not in truly friendly relationship because of the past history of what Japan did to those other countries. Hopefully, I can be the bridge between those Asian nations—Korea, China, Indonesia, Philippines, Cambodia—and Japan.”

Another graduate student, Emily Spann, 26, of Washington, Missouri, said, “I’d like to work for a humanitarian aid organization and do trauma counseling in post-conflict situations and refugee camps.”

Arcadia encourages students in fields from education to physical therapy to do practice teaching outside the United States. The Physical Therapy department has sent dozens of students to Jamaica over the past decade to work at a clinic in impoverished St. Elizabeth Parish. Karen Sawyer, an assistant professor and academic coordinator of clinical education, secured grants from a family foundation in Philadelphia to establish the clinic, and Arcadia freed Sawyer from classroom duties for the project.

Villagers with disabilities couldn’t reach the clinic, so Sawyer and her students started going out to their homes. “That’s what the students mainly have done over the years, provide home care in a rural, Jamaican setting,” she said.

Two hurricanes hit Jamaica during the two weeks Dianne Azu worked at the clinic in July 2005. What did she learn in Jamaica that she could not have learned while doing charity work in Philadelphia?

“A lot—a whole lot,” said Azu, a native of Ghana who recently received her doctorate in physical therapy. “I learned to be more creative when you don’t have all this great, expensive equipment available that we have here in the U.S. I learned how to use paint cans and have the patient kneel on the bed and use the wall for balance instead of using a big physio-ball.”

Some Arcadia physical therapy students go to London for clinical practice, and Sawyer has arranged for others to work in Peru and Nicaragua; she hopes to place students in Ghana as well. 

In the Education Department, field placement coordinator Jane Duffy places several students each spring in schools in London and Canterbury, England.

Duffy said the student teachers who do this are “more adventuresome and not afraid to take some risks in life.”  School districts in and around Philadelphia want teachers “who have that broad perspective and are not ethnocentric,” she added. 

Majors Abroad Program

Mark Curchack, dean of the College of Graduate and Professional Studies, said Arcadia is playing “curricular catch-up” to internationalize more courses in Glenside. The next frontier will be launching what Arcadia is calling a Majors Abroad Program that will allow students to major in five new fields by taking core courses during a full year at partner universities overseas. “It’s the sort of thing that will get some of the faculty juiced,” said Curchack.

Norah Shultz, dean of the College of Undergraduate Studies, said, “We’re looking at doing this in media studies, creative writing, theater, anthropology, and tourism and hospitality. For instance, we don’t have a creative writing major now, but we do have basic writing courses.” Under the Majors Abroad Program, “you’d take your 100- and 200-level English courses here, go to the University of Greenwich for a slew of creative writing work in your third year, and then come back here for your senior year.”

William D. Biggs, professor of business, health administration, and economics, said Arcadia will be working with an Australian university to offer a tourism and hospitality major. He likened it to American University’s Washington Semester, a popular program that combines classes with internships in the nation’s capital. “There’s clearly an audience willing to do that. Whether there’s an audience for this, remains to be seen,” said Biggs.

Jeff Shultz, the associate dean for internationalization, said CEA’s Larsen whetted the interest of Arcadia faculty by sending them out to evaluate CEA programs around the world. “That’s how I got hooked,” said Shultz, recalling an evaluation trip he took to Cambridge and other British universities as chair of the education department. “It was a very clever strategy.” Norah Shultz said, “When someone says to you, ‘Do you think you can go to Athens for four days?’ it’s exciting. You’re not going to say no.”

Berger, the provost, said the presence of the Center for Education Abroad gave Arcadia “an undeniable advantage” in its quest to internationalize, but “what needs to be stressed is that almost anyone can do this.”

“This is not a wealthy institution,” said Berger, “but faculty members can be very creative. If you give them a little seed money—precious little—it can make a big difference.”

Larsen, who taught in Greece when the country was ruled by a junta in the early 1970s and ran the Fulbright office in Athens after democracy was restored, said internationalization at Arcadia has been “a real team effort.”

 “It’s hard to describe the enormity of that shift over time. That’s what has made the difference: getting the community to think of themselves in a different way. We’re not there yet, but we’re well on the way,” said Larsen.

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Arcadia University

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In the race to send more students abroad, some U.S. Universities can point with pride to facilities they own in the great cities of Europe, like Georgetown’s villa on a hill above Florence or Notre Dame’s building on London’s Trafalgar Square, or to Temple University’s campus in Tokyo. But none does it quite like Webster University, which runs branch campuses in Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Thailand, and China. “We truly have a distinctive international mission,” said President Neil J. George.

Webster was the first U.S. university to win approval for an American M.B.A. program in China; and recently the Netherlands-Flemish Accreditation Agency extended accreditation to Webster’s International Business & Management Studies bachelor’s degree program in Leiden, which like the rest of Webster’s overseas branches already held U.S. accreditation. George, a political scientist and longtime top academic officer at their suburban St. Louis, Missouri, campus, said the network that Webster has constructed over the past 30 years is not yet complete, “We will be in the Middle East. We will be in Africa. We will be more prominently focused in Latin America.” Webster has a long history of taking on big challenges. It began as Loretto College, founded by an order of Roman Catholic nuns in 1915 as one of the first colleges for women west of the Mississippi. The name was changed to Webster College (the campus is in suburban Webster Grove) in 1924, and men were admitted in the early 1960s. A few years later the Sisters of Loreto passed control of the college to a lay board. But the mission of “meeting unmet needs” stayed the same, George said. As Webster once provided for young women in the 1920s flapper era a pathway to break into male-dominated professions, it later found success in giving working adults opportunities to earn graduate degrees by taking classes at night.

International Journey Begins

The arc of Webster’s international journey starts just across the Mississippi River at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, where the university dispatched professors to teach evening classes to officers eager to earn master’s degrees. It worked so well that Webster to set up shop on other military bases across the United States. Today it offers courses at 30 military bases in a dozen states, as well as at 21 other Webster centers in nine states that cater to working adults. From the first classes at Scott AFB until today, the emphasis in these graduate programs has been on interdisciplinary, individualized M.A. degrees.

The success of that venture outside the home campus gave Webster the idea of opening its first international campus in 1978. The location it chose was Geneva, Switzerland, where “a considerable number of people were on short-term assignments with the United Nations agencies, and there was no opportunity for a working adult to study in English part-time,” said George. From Webster’s perspective, those international civil servants looked much like the military officers and civilians flocking to the classes it was offering across the United States. Some of those UN and other international agency employees also “wanted their sons and daughters to have the opportunity to have an American system of education,” George added. That led Webster to offer undergraduate as well as graduate courses in Geneva, and to recruit from international schools where English was the language of instruction. It won authorization from Geneva authorities and accreditation by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools (which would later accredit Webster’s other campuses as well). And today Geneva remains the flagship of the university’s European operations, with more than 500 students enrolled on a campus that celebrated its 30th anniversary this fall. “This is a much more traditional schedule than other pieces of the institution,” said Robert Spencer, the Geneva-based director of Webster’s European campuses. “We have morning and afternoon classes primarily for undergrads, and evening classes primarily for graduate students.”

From there Webster set its sights on Vienna, Austria, where the UN was expanding its  presence and OPEC was gearing up operations. There were special challenges because Austria then did not recognize private higher education, but Webster persevered and opened in Vienna in 1981. Today that campus also enrolls 500 students pursuing bachelor’s degrees in business, international relations, computer science and other disciplines, and master’s degrees as well. “Following Vienna, we thought, ‘This is working great; there are real needs. It’s not unlike responding to regional and local needs in the states. Where’s another large English-speaking international community?’” recalled George. Their first instinct was to try their model at the Hague in the Netherlands, but instead they landed in Leiden in 1983, where the mayor and Leiden University, the largest in Holland, wooed and welcomed the American-style business college. That campus, too, found many eager to take the classes that Webster offered. Webster opened a London campus in 1986 to offer American business degrees to busy London professionals through evening classes and also to give Webster’s students another option for study abroad. Webster shares the facilities of Regent’s College in London’s Regent’s Park with four other schools. It launched an M.B.A. program in China on the campus of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics in 1996 and opened a large campus in Cha-Am, Thailand in 1999.

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As Webster has grown—it enrolls more than 20,000 students, including 7,500 on the home campus in St. Louis, 9,500 across the United States, and 3,000 at its international campuses—it has encouraged students and faculty to travel and  avail themselves of the opportunities to study, teach, and absorb other cultures. While studying in England is far less of a culture shock for Americans than a semester in Thailand, George sees the London campus as an important first step into the world for those students wary of leaving home. “We thought we might begin to get a number of first generation, non-travel students to start in London, get their international legs, and then move on to places like Geneva and Thailand,” he said.

Increasing Mobility

To speed them on their way, the university’s Webster World Traveler Program pays for the roundtrip air ticket for students to make their first trip to another Webster international campus. If they are enrolled in St. Louis, they can go to Europe, China, or Thailand. The mostly international students in Thailand, Geneva, and the other campuses can study in London, St. Louis, or any other Webster outpost. To qualify, undergraduates first must complete nine credit hours at their home campus. Graduate students get plane tickets, too, after first finishing 15 credit hours and agreeing to complete an additional 30 hours (including the six credits they earn during an eight-week term abroad). The World Traveler Program picks up coach airfare for more than 100 students each year at a cost to the university of $200,000.

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“What we are trying to do is break down barriers for student mobility, faculty mobility, and staff mobility throughout the network,” said Grant Chapman, associate vice president for Academic Affairs and director of International Programs. “When a traditional university talks about study abroad, they’re usually talking about a U.S. student going abroad. With our mobility program, you could have a Russian student with a home campus in Geneva studying abroad in Thailand. They may never see the St. Louis campus, but that is every bit as encouraged as study abroad for the traditional U.S. student.” About 40 percent of the St. Louis undergraduates study abroad before they graduate, including 380 in 2006-07. That number has grown almost fivefold in the past decade.

With the exception of Webster’s offerings in China, which draw primarily Chinese students, these overseas campus students are highly international; only one in five is a U.S. resident. Some 100 nations are represented in the Geneva student body, and 40 nations are represented on the faculty. More than 600 international students spent a semester on the St. Louis campus in 2007-08. Only a quarter of the 200 students at the Cha’am campus is Thai. Vietnam, Burma, India, and Nepal send contingents to the Thai campus, along with a number from Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. Webster is trying to attract more Thai students to the 60-acre campus in Cha’am, which is three hours south of Bangkok.

In China, Webster’s offerings are primarily intensive, English language M.B.A. courses offered on weekends in Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Chengdu. The Chinese government recently decided to open a Confucius Institute on Webster’s St. Louis campus, with the university expanding a partnership with a Beijing university that specializes in Mandarin classes. 

Rick Forestell, the director of the China program, said from his office in Shanghai, “From the very first, we’ve had almost 100 percent Chinese locals attending our classes. Our M.B.A. program has had 1,100 graduates since 1997.” But in partnership with Shanghai University of Economics and Finance, and with the blessings of the Chinese Ministry of Education, Webster is expanding offerings for undergraduates, including a semesterlong Chinese studies program. Typically, a third of Webster’s courses in China are taught by its own faculty and the rest by adjuncts. Fortunately no Webster classes were in session in Chengdu in May 2008 when a deadly earthquake struck Sichuan Province.

Webster professors themselves are frequently on the move. Half the full-time faculty have taught overseas at least once. “When we recruit, we say they must be prepared to teach internationally,” said George. Webster also offers Faculty Mobility Fellowships to encourage professors to teach at an international site. The international campuses now offer undergraduate degrees in 17 fields, and 13 graduate degrees. “The majors we offer have the same learning outcomes throughout,” said Chapman. Electives vary and reflect the local and regional culture.

“We suppress the significance of geography for administrative (purposes) and emphasize it for the pedagogical value and the international perspectives…”

The common outcomes and degrees mean that “a student can sign up for the next term, indicate where they are going, take their coursework, and go. You’re accepted. It’s one university. We suppress the significance of geography for administrative (purposes) and emphasize it for the pedagogical value and the international perspectives,” said George. Webster even aims for diversity in its online offerings, “where our goal is to have the instructor from one culture, a small class of 15 students, and no more than two students representing the same culture, creating a virtual international community,” he said.

Financial Challenges and Sustainability

Tuition varies, based on the local economy. “Tuition in Geneva is higher than in Leiden because the cost of living is higher,” said Spencer. Students throughout the system pay their home campus tuition when they study abroad. Only recently has Webster begun to open its programs to other U.S. institutions as an option for their students to study abroad, but Grant now expects those affiliations to grow with their added housing capacity in Geneva and elsewhere.

At sites without Webster dorms, students rent apartments or rooms in the surrounding community, or live in other institutions’ student housing. The university encourages students to connect with the local culture and community through service and research projects, including participation in a community service day called “Webster Works Worldwide” held each fall since 1995. Chapman said students can earn an International Distinction designation on diplomas by volunteering or undertaking an off-campus research project.

Webster is a private, not-for-profit institution. “Our model is to make sure that these campuses have long-term sustainability, both academically and financially, university-wide,” said George, and in the aggregate, the international campuses cover their expenses, as do Webster’s extended U.S. classes and the home campus. Webster closed a program in Bermuda several years ago, and Thailand “has been a challenge,” George acknowledged. But Webster University Thailand “brings real significant contributions toward helping us achieve our global education goals.” Webster remains the only U.S.-accredited university in Southeast Asia.

And what does the Webster leader say to U.S. colleagues who may be considering their first major foray into the international arena? “They should pursue it, but you should enter it for the right motivation. If you have schools that are struggling or looking for a new vein of financial support, that’s the wrong motivation. If they are genuinely interested in promoting global perspectives for their students as part of their degree, many different approaches can be used,” said George. They don’t necessarily have to stand alone, as Webster did in Geneva and elsewhere. “Starting from scratch was challenging then, it’s even more challenging today,” he said. But “when you partner, make certain that you have joint interests and total control over the academic integrity of your degree program.”

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Webster University

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If luck is the residue of design, it is no coincidence that Nebraska Wesleyan University has produced 21 Fulbright and one Rhodes Scholar since 2000. This “little college on the prairie,” as one professor calls it, does not leave these matters to chance. There is a national prestige scholarship adviser as well as a Fulbright program adviser who, along with a cadre of like-minded faculty colleagues, scout for talent in freshman seminars. They groom these students, ship them off to Washington for internships, and lead them on service and education abroad trips to Sri Lanka, Swaziland, and Panama—experiences that often provide fodder for the essays these young Nebraskans write for their Fulbright applications. Faculty help protégés polish those essays—one of the 2008 winners went through 20 drafts.

Nebraska Wesleyan pushes its faculty out into the world, too. It has a sabbatical policy that may be unique: faculty receive two-thirds salary on sabbaticals in the United States, but 100 percent if they spend that year in another country. “I know of no other place that does that,” said President Frederik Ohles.

Methodist leaders founded the liberal arts school a few miles from the state capital in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1887, envisioning that it might grow as did another Methodist institution, Northwestern University, outside Chicago. Within a year they had erected the imposing, Colorado red stone and brick landmark known as Old Main. But “Nebraska didn’t develop quite like Illinois did,” said President Emeritus John White. It remained a primarily undergraduate college on a 50-acre campus tucked into Lincoln’s quaint University Place neighborhood, across town from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, with almost as many international students (1,500) as NWU has undergraduates (1,600) in 2007. Nebraska Wesleyan, which remains affiliated with the United Methodist Church, also has 200 graduate students pursuing master’s degrees in nursing, forensic science, and historical studies. Though the college has gone through several mascots—the Sunflowers, Coyotes, Plainsmen, and now the Prairie Wolves—its brown and gold colors have remained constant. 

When it comes to internationalization, NWU is an overachiever. “I suppose we don’t have some of the bells and whistles and amenities that we might have if we were a wealthy college,” said Ohles. “We make terrifically good use of all the resources we have. The faculty here are very busy. They’re teaching four courses per semester... The Great Plains go-getit done  mentality is alive and well in Nebraska Wesleyan.” That mentality explains how political scientist Robert Oberst and a few colleagues won approval for an interdisciplinary Global Studies program in the early 1980s. Global Studies made it through only because “it didn’t cost any money. Everything had to be done by the seat of our pants,” said Oberst. He has led NWU students on numerous education abroad trips to South Asia and taught at both Peradeniya University in Sri Lanka as well as Cairo University, where he was a Fulbright lecturer. In its heyday Global Studies attracted 20 majors, although today it draws more minors than majors. Laura Reitel, an exchange student from the University of Tartu in Tallinn, Estonia, put Oberst at the top of her list of favorite professors. If possible, she said, “I would just stick him in my pocket and take him back home and show him to others. Our professors are not that amusing or anything like him.”

Fulbright Factory

If Nebraska Wesleyan has gained something of a reputation as a Fulbright factory, it is due to the efforts of such faculty as Oberst, Kelly Eaton, Gerise Herndon, and Elaine Kruse. Eaton, chair of the Department of Political Science and Nebraska’s Professor of the Year in 2003, said, “It is really the long-term nurturing and advising that produces the results in the end.” Eaton is the National Prestige Scholarship adviser. She worked closely with Xuan-Trang Thi Ho, who in 2006 won the second Rhodes Scholarship in NWU’s history. Eaton, who spent the past two years on sabbatical and then on leave teaching at the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies in China, said at first the efforts to groom national scholarship winners were the work of a handful of faculty, but now “we have faculty in many departments helping us to identify [prospects]. Personally, I begin to identify students as early as the freshman year, if possible. It is quite empowering for students to learn that their professors think they have so much potential. If you raise the bar and help the students to reach the bar, you can have great results.”

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The Fulbright numbers grew geometrically after Gerise Herndon, professor of English and director of the Gender Studies program, became that program’s adviser in 2000. Plaques in the lobby of the Smith-Curtis Classroom-Administration Building list the winners’ names down through the years—two Fulbrighters in both the 1970s and 1980s, a half-dozen in the 1990s, then 21 in this decade, including four in 2008. “It’s exciting to watch when you see the students come in from tiny towns or rural areas. They’re sheltered and kind of scared; they’re not big risk takers. Some of the parents are shy about the whole study abroad thing,” said Herndon. “Because this is a small school, you have the same students in several classes, and by the time they’re seniors, this amazing growth has taken place.” Herndon enlists “hard graders” to critique the students’ Fulbright applications. “Generally at our university we try to balance challenge and support, but we do not hold back on the Fulbright committee and some of the other scholarship committees,” she said. “We tell students, ‘Look, if you’re going to be competitive with the students from Duke and Johns Hopkins, you must do better than this.’ We probably scare them a little bit, but they rise to the occasion.”

Professor and Chair of the Department of History Elaine Kruse has also been a pioneer and pacesetter for international research and study. A scholar of French culture and mores in pre- and revolutionary France, Kruse just returned from her third sabbatical in Paris. She was the first professor to avail herself in 1992-93 of the then-newly adopted policy of keeping faculty on full salary if they took their sabbatical overseas. “What a difference this has made. Faculty members from disciplines as diverse as physics, business, and music opted to live abroad for a year, and when they returned they introduced international content into their courses.” When Kruse joined the faculty in 1985, “few students were studying abroad and even fewer faculty were taking sabbaticals abroad,” she said. The full-pay policy for sabbaticals abroad as well as the Global Studies program and a revised core curriculum called Preparing for Global Citizenship helped change the campus culture, she added. “It livens things up,” she said, and turns students “from small-town America [into] sophisticated global citizens.” In the early 1990s, about 14 students spent a semester or year abroad. In 2006-07, 51 students studied abroad for at least a semester, and dozens more took shorter trips with their professors in January or the summer.

“Faculty members from…physics, business, and music opted to live abroad for a year, and... introduced international content into their courses.”

Kruse always puts out the welcome mat during her Paris sabbaticals, becoming a “pied piper” for the international sabbatical program. “Initially people were reluctant to go to countries where they did not speak the language. But now we’ve got people coming back from Bulgaria, Turkey, and Thailand. One of our physics professors went to the Netherlands and got involved in an international project on using the bicycle to teach physics,” she said. 

When English Professor Rick Cypert visited Kruse in the City of Light, “she was having such a wonderful time I thought, ‘My gosh! This is what I’ve got to do.” Cypert, a Texan who specializes in language theory and the history of rhetoric, took his sabbatical in Athens, immersing himself in modern as well as ancient Greece. On returning, he created a popular course on modern Greek culture and life, taught a freshman seminar on Greek mythology, and now chairs Global Studies—and speaks Greek.

Grants to Develop International Courses

The push to make Nebraska Wesleyan more international began during John White’s two decades as president (1977-97). White was a former English professor and an inveterate traveler who led numerous alumni trips to Greece and one to China during his tenure. He also personally negotiated an exchange of faculty and students with Kwansei Gakuin University in Nishinomiya, Japan. More than 90 percent of NWU students come from Nebraska; it enrolled just 33 international students in 2007. “If you’re a school in the middle of the country, so far from salt water, the need for a broader perspective just jumps out at you,” the 74-year-old White explained in an interview. “That’s why I pushed the international perspective.” White was both a builder and successful fund-raiser; enrollment and the college’s prestige both grew on his watch. To pay for the international sabbaticals, White said, “We just built it into the budget.” An endowment set up in White’s honor upon his retirement continues to support the internationalization. In addition to providing funds for international programming on campus, including concerts, film festivals, and language immersion weekends, the White Endowment provides grants for faculty to travel abroad to develop new courses. Fifty-three such grants have been awarded, resulting in such courses as Tropical Biology of Belize, Introduction to the Culture of Thailand, and Contemporary India. The latter was the creation of Joyce Michaelis, an adventurous professor of Spanish, who spent one summer and semester in Hyderabad, India, after her daughter and son-in-law were transferred there by their employer, a U.S.-based multinational. Michaelis also turned earlier overseas trips into classes on the culture of Cuba and Spain. Teaching at NWU since 1966, she said, “The international aspect has added tremendous vitality to my curricula. It keeps me alive.”

The sabbatical policy was first recommended by a task force that began exploring in the late 1980s how to internationalize NWU. Then-Provost Janet Rasmussen, a Scandinavian literature specialist, was intent on finding ways to open the campus to the world. Initially there was little money to carry out their plans, but the blueprint was ready when the financial situation improved, said Georgianne Mastera, a longtime associate vice president for Academic Affairs who retired this spring after a stint as interim provost.

President Ohles called the international sabbatical policy “an important dynamo for what we’ve achieved with global perspective and global activity.” Ohles himself needed no convincing about the importance of international education when he was named in 2007 as Nebraska Wesleyan’s 16th president. A historian, he was senior vice president of the Council of Independent Colleges and once worked on the Fulbright Program for the Council for International Exchange of Scholars. As a graduate student, he spent two years researching the censorship of early nineteenth century Germany, living for much of that time on a pig farm outside Marburg. “I spent my days in archives reading dusty police documents from the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, and my evenings watching German sitcoms in Bavarian dialect with my farm hosts,” said Ohles, who still calls the family each Christmas. He met his wife, who is Malaysian, at the International House at the University of Melbourne in Australia, where she was an international student and he a visiting professor. “You can read all the newspapers and take all the courses you want; it really is the ambience, the surroundings, the people that make a difference... [and] open one’s mind to the differences in the world,” he said.

One of the tasks that Ohles sees before him is to raise new sources of revenue, in part to further such international ambitions as a Global Service Learning program that allows students to work on service projects helping the poor in places as distant as Vietnam and Swaziland. They spend part of their summer break building latrines in poor villages, volunteering in hospices, and working with AIDS orphans. The same group of 10 to 15 students— chosen from a wider pool of applicants—works on service projects in the Lincoln area throughout the year and travels over winter break to help in an impoverished U.S. community. “That whole activity is largely student driven. It’s very impressive,” said Ohles. “I’d like to see us find a way to invest more in Global Service Learning. I think it deserves more attention and more support by me and by friends of the university.”

The international Global Service Learning (GSL) trips can cost as much as $2,000 per student, but students pay just $600. They are funded largely by the university’s Wolf Fund for Diversity Education (up to $12,000 annually) and by the Student Affairs Senate funding generated by the student activity fee (from $6,500 to $10,000, depending on the cost of the trip); the White Endowment also kicks in $1,000 each year. Janelle Schutte Andreini, the interim director of the Career and Counseling Center, and Reverend Pauletta Lehn, campus minister, lead the trips and organize the “community conversations” when the students return from overseas projects. “It’s an intentional way to bring to the campus what we’ve learned,” said Andreini, an alumna. “Any time you do service somewhere, you take away more than you leave.” About 50 students apply each year for the GSL program, which accepts 3–5, depending on how many GSL members graduate. Students who are not selected are welcome to join the group on local service projects, and there is room for 18 students on the national service trip over winter break.

Director of International Education Inger Bull regards the addition of service learning as the “most exciting and most encouraging movement in study abroad,” not just at NWU but nationally. Bull and Joyce Michaelis, the Spanish professor, are mapping plans for a summer 2009 trip to Peru that will include two weeks of travel to the country’s major cultural sites and a third week devoted to service, helping villagers living in the steep hillsides outside Cusco and the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Trips like this ensure that even on short stays abroad, “students get the opportunity to see all levels of the society and to help out in some small way,” said Bull.

Unafraid of Learning Languages

Spanish is the main draw in the Department of Modern Languages, which offers majors in Spanish, French, and German, and a minor in Japanese. Students must take two semesters of language. Some students are inspired to sign up for a second language after returning from abroad, said Department Chair JoAnn Fuess. “They are not afraid of learning languages anymore.” Yuko Yamada, an assistant professor, had 45 students in three Japanese classes, and NWU sent four exchange students to Kwansei Gakuin University, its sister school. Education abroad veterans “are spreading the ‘gospel’ to their roommates and friends,” said Fuess, and those friends are “saying to themselves, ‘Maybe I’d like a little piece of that as well.’” Ninety-three students studied abroad in 2006-07, and 23 took noncredit trips led by university faculty and staff.

Amanda Godemann, 21, of Lincoln, a senior global studies major, spent spring 2007 at Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand, taking Thai language and classes taught in English to international students. She extended her stay through the summer to enroll in intensive Thai at a second university. She had visited both Thailand and India once before with an uncle “and fell in love with that part of the world.” Now her ambition is to work on development in Southeast Asia.

Senior Scott Lloyd, 22, of Lincoln, a political science major and Japanese minor, studied at Kwansei Gakuin University and also went on one of Oberst’s trips to India and Sri Lanka. NWU hammers home the education abroad message as soon as freshmen arrive, said Lloyd. “Everyone is aware of it.”

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Evan Knight, 22, of Lewellen, Nebraska, spent this past summer taking intensive Arabic courses in Tunisia after winning one of the U.S. State Department’s Critical Language Scholarships. He will graduate from NWU in December with majors in Spanish and history and a minor in French. Knight also studied in Spain for a semester and has a deep interest in the culture and history of Moorish Spain. Love for Spanish runs in the Knight family. One sister is a high school Spanish teacher, a second is a Spanish interpreter for a Nebraska health department, and his youngest sibling is an NWU freshman, double majoring in Spanish and French. Knight said his parents speak no other languages “and never pushed us. My sisters and I all just fell in love with languages in high school. Once we got to college, we began to realize what the ability to speak a second or third language meant, and this whole new world of opportunities opened to us.” 

“Education abroad veterans ‘are spreading the ‘gospel’ to their roommates and friends’…”

Professor of Library Information Technology Janet Lu, a native of Shanghai who grew up in Taiwan, has helped bring Chinese culture to campus and to Lincoln for nearly three decades. When Lu and her husband, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor of mechanical engineering, arrived in the Nebraska capital in 1979, “we were one of the very few Chinese families in town. In the old days, there were no soy beans or soy sauce in the grocery,” she said. They would order 100-pound bags of soybeans from San Francisco for five families to share. 

Lincoln became a resettlement community for Vietnamese refugees in the early 1990s; XuanTrang Thi Ho, the Rhodes Scholar, was one of those refugees. “Lincoln is becoming a more diversified city than ever before. Wesleyan has come a long way, too,” said Lu, a founder of the Lincoln Chinese Cultural Association who retired this spring. Today Lincoln has two schools where parents send their children to learn the language and culture on Saturdays.

Ho, who just completed a master of philosophy degree in Latin American studies at Oxford, was a political science and Spanish major at NWU who took part in several global service learning trips, studied in Argentina, and spent a semester in Washington in the university’s Capitol Hill Internship Program (CHIP), which places students in federal and international agencies. The experiences helped when it came time to apply for the Rhodes. “I was extremely fortunate to be surrounded by numerous professors and staff who were always available to help me,” she said by e-mail from Oxford. “For the Rhodes, I needed eight letters of recommendation and they happily agreed to write me very positive letters. Professors read and critiqued my essays/ statements many times, and Dr. Eaton set up two mock interviews with people who played devil’s advocates to ‘grill’ me before the Rhodes. They were an invaluable asset in the process.”

Junior Desereé Johnston this spring became the fourth Nebraska Wesleyan student to win a  Truman Scholarship for graduate school. The Truman Foundation selects students with strong leadership potential who intend to pursue careers in government or other public service. Johnston, who wants to work on international development, grew up on a 7,000-acre farm outside Orchard, Nebraska (pop. 391), but her upbringing was far from isolated. Her parents would pull her out of school each February—when the farm season allowed—and take her on two- and three-week trips to Europe, China, Russia, Egypt, and other destinations. School officials were miffed, “but you learn so much when you travel,” she said.

Support for International Students

Inger Bull has directed Nebraska Wesleyan’s international education office for the past decade. She also teaches the optional one-credit courses that help U.S. students prepare for education abroad and, afterward, write essays to make sense of their experiences (Professor of History Kruse customarily works with Bull on the latter). The university doubled the size of the office in 2005 by hiring Yoko Iwasaki-Zink, a 2000 alumna from Japan, as the international student adviser. Although only a few dozen international students are enrolled on campus each year, the ones who make it to Lincoln can count on strong support from Bull, Iwasaki-Zink, and faculty. “A lot of big schools lament the fact that they can never get their U.S. students to integrate with the internationals and vice versa. That’s easy for us because they see each other every day in our office. Many of our Nebraska students have studied abroad because of international students they have met,” Bull said. Most of the international students attending classes on the Lincoln campus are on one-semester or full-year exchanges from partner universities in the International Student Exchange Program (ISEP) network, or on bilateral exchanges from Kwansei Gakuin University, the University of Tartu in Estonia, or Tec de Monterrey in Querétaro, Mexico.

Iwasaki-Zink spent four years on campus earning her bachelor’s degree. She had already earned an associate’s degree and worked as an administrative assistant for a Japanese company before coming to Lincoln in 1996. Iwasaki-Zink understands what students from Europe, Japan, Korea, Azerbaijan, Vietnam, Mexico, Ecuador, and elsewhere go through in adjusting to life on a U.S. campus. “I think their experience is, in fact, the same experience I had. They’re very happy when they arrive; they’re very excited. One month later, they’re kind of overwhelmed by classes and homework. Some students struggle with homesickness,” she said. On that score, technology has made life easier because today’s students can easily keep in touch with family and friends by e-mail and Skype. “Technology has helped them a lot. When I was a student, there was no Facebook,” she said.

Thao Nguyen, 20, a junior from Hanoi, Vietnam, is one of the exceptions among the international students in that he will spend four years at Nebraska Wesleyan earning a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and economics. He attended an international high school in Vietnam, where instruction was entirely in English. Though he had visited the United States for an international student conference, he found NWU by searching online. “The Midwest sounded like something new, and Wesleyan gave me a good scholarship,” he said. The weather was colder than he expected, but Nguyen found the Americans “very friendly” and he welcomes the diversity of NWU’s small band of international students.

Georgianne Mastera, the now retired academic administrator, remembers two decades ago when there was no international education director or office, and an assistant provost with other responsibilities oversaw the institution’s few opportunities for education and research abroad. It is still “not a huge office, but when you compare the transition from that very fraction of an administrator to where we are now, it’s a dramatic change in a small institution,” she said.

The emphasis on imparting a global perspective to students’ education “has made a tremendous difference to our campus,” said Mastera, a former business administration professor. It shows that “when you set a kind of fertile environment in which people have the opportunity to have international experiences, to address international issues, to learn languages, to engage in broadening experiences, great things can happen.”

The boxer rebellion against foreign influence ended a century ago with Russian, Japanese, and western forces occupying beijing and forcing China’s imperial government to pay reparations. The United States was due a minor share for its supporting role in quashing the rebellion.

Edmund J . James, president of the University of Illinois, saw an opportunity to draw something positive for China out of the  bitter potion of defeat . He led the way in convincing President Theodore Roosevelt to use the compensation for an altruistic purpose: bringing Chinese students to the United States to pursue higher education .

Hundreds of those young scholars ultimately earned degrees on the Urbana-Champaign campus, and Britain also used its reparations for scholarships . The same funds were used to build a preparatory school in Beijing called Tsinghua College—forerunner to Tsinghua University, now one of the world’s greatest institutions of higher education with a campus modeled after Illinois’s famous Quad . Tsinghua weathered hard times during World War II and the Cultural Revolution, but when China reopened to the world, “we engaged quickly to rebuild that relationship,” said Jesse G . Delia, executive director of Illinois’s International Research Relations . Today, nearly 1,000 of the 5,685 international students on the Illinois campus hail from the People’s Republic of China . 

International roots run deep at Illinois’s flagship campus, which began operations in 1867—five years after the Morrill Act—as Illinois Industrial University. Its first president, John Milton Gregory, described it as “West Point for the working world.” By 1908 it became an early member of the Association of American Universities. Today it keeps an international profile that few institutions can match, with eight federally funded Title VI National Resource Centers: African Studies; European Union Studies; East Asian and Pacific Studies; South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies; Latin American and Caribbean Studies; Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies; Global Studies; and a CIBER (international business center) in the business school. Only the University of Washington and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have more. It ranks fourth among U.S. universities in international student enrollment (the only ones with more—the University of Southern California, Columbia University, and New York University—are private), and fifth in the number of students who study abroad—more than 2,000 each year. Chancellor Richard Herman hopes to double that number by 2012 as part of his dream of making the University of Illinois “the world’s preeminent institution in international education, research, and service.”

In some respects that ambition means going back to the future, for Illinois professors were deeply engaged in international education projects spanning the globe in the 1950s and 1960s when, with the help of the Marshall Plan and later with U.S. Agency for International Development grants, they helped design and build agricultural colleges and institutes of technology across Asia, Africa, and South America. Their credits include India’s first Institute of Technology in Kharagpur and the G.B. Pant Institute of Agriculture and Technology in Uttar Pradesh, as well as the College of Agricultural Engineering, Jabalpur, in Madhya Pradesh. Illinois faculty helped Pakistan open its first agricultural school at the University of Peshawar (now the autonomous Agricultural University, Peshawar), and were there at the creation of Egerton Agricultural College (now Egerton University) in Kenya.

“We weren’t alone, but that was all led by this institution,” said Herman, a mathematician who sits on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. “We have a rich international history and an enormous base on which to build.” On a 2007 visit to Brazil, Chancellor Herman was pleased to learn that a celebrated Illinois dean of agriculture, Eugene Davenport, played a role in establishing the Escola Superior de Agricultura or Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture (ESALQ) in Piracicaba in the 1890s. 

The Work of Many Colleges

The tapestry of international programs and activities at Illinois reflects the work of many faculty and colleges. Associate Provost for International Affairs William I. Brustein noted, “As with many U.S. universities, a centralized office for international programs and studies emerged relatively late. Consequently, much of the international activity was carried out by the colleges and schools within the university,” such as the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Science (ACES) and the College of Engineering. Many University of Illinois colleges operate their own study/education abroad offices in addition to the campus-wide office.

Brustein, a sociologist and authority on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, assumed the leadership of the office of International Programs and Studies (IPS) in 2007 after heading international studies at the University of Pittsburgh. The three-story International Studies Building, a short walk from the much-photographed Quad, houses most of Illinois’s area studies centers, as well as the IPS director’s office, the study abroad office, and services handling international visitors and institutional collaborations. Brustein, immediate past president of the Association of International Education Administrators (AIEA), observed, “The challenges for a central office in a decentralized environment are to reinforce the positive initiatives taking place within the colleges and schools, establish bridges or synergies among the colleges, internationalize those less engaged colleges, eliminate redundancies in the system, ensure compliance with campus and governmental policies, and bring to the campus new international education opportunities.” One of his first steps was to create a campus-wide International Advisory Council composed of the senior administrators from each college with responsibility for international programs. Brustein chairs the council, which advises him on college-level initiatives and serves as a sounding board for new ideas.

Illinois’s international reputation was bolstered over the years by breakthroughs in computer science and the natural sciences, as well by advances in the social sciences, such as anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s pioneering studies of poverty in Mexico.  Still, the agriculture faculty were among the most peripatetic. Forty-seven agriculture faculty spent extended periods living in India during those college-building days from 1954 to 1973. Hundreds of international students came to Urbana-Champaign for advanced agricultural degrees, and Illinois faculty were still winning multi-million-dollar contracts in the 1980s to build or expand institutions in Pakistan, Kenya, and Zambia before U.S. AID funding ended. “At the end of the Cold War, we went through kind of a drought in our international programs,” recalled Robert A. Easter, dean of ACES since 2001. The college’s office of International Agriculture was disbanded in a 1996 reorganization, although faculty such as Easter still made heavy use of their passports. Easter has lectured and consulted on swine nutrition in 27 countries, from Costa Rica to China. For a while it seemed that the institutional commitment to international activities was lagging.

That did not sit well with faculty there in the glory years of institution building. Finally a faculty committee put together a concept for what they called ACES Global Connect, a new office to coordinate and encourage agriculture faculty research and projects overseas. Since it started in 2002, “we’ve been gradually rebuilding our international engagement,” said Easter. Now, instead of leaving professors to their own devices when they head off to consult in Brazil or China, “we’re trying to be more systematic and strategic about forming alliances with other universities in different parts of the world.”

Global Connect, a small office with a modest budget (approximately $100,000 last year) provided largely by the college, is intent on helping a new generation of faculty pursue federal grants, partnerships, and other international opportunities. “We were fish out of water for a little period there. ACES Global Connect was our attempt to reinvigorate international programs in our college. We’re resource poor, but rich in passion,” said director Mary Ann Lila, a biology professor and vice president of the Global Institute for BioExploration (GIBEX).

“Even on a shoestring budget…Global Connect has become a role model for international engagement on campus...”

Global Connect launched in 2006 an Academy for Global Engagement that selects eight faculty fellows from different disciplines “for a year-long immersion in the international realm,” said Lila. They rub shoulders and exchange ideas in monthly seminars and hit the road to visit the headquarters of multinational corporations in Chicago and make the rounds of international health and development agencies in Washington. The capstone is an international trip at the end of the year where the faculty fellows collaborate on short-term research and education projects. The first group went to Mexico to explore the antidiabetic properties of certain plants. “The social scientist in the group was working on how to get Mexicans to stop drinking sodas and have more family meals together; the crop scientist was working on how to harvest these plants; and the horticulturist was making sure they don’t become invasive species,” said Lila. The fellows include someone from the University of Illinois Extension program, which now sends crop experts around the world in addition to working with farmers around the state. Illinois has 76,000 farms and is the country’s second biggest agricultural exporter. Even on a shoestring budget, Lila said, Global Connect has become a role model for international engagement on campus, and other state universities have expressed keen interest in replicating the Academy for Global Engagement fellows program. “Student and faculty exchanges, joint workshops, sabbatical leaves, and research visits as well as joint grantsmanship have sprung forth out of the (Global Connect) Academy connections,” said Lila, whose own research has taken her to Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan in search of plants that might lower cholesterol or confer other health benefits.

Growing New Interest

The international emphasis at the University of Illinois and the encouragement for education abroad produces students such as sophomore Lindsey Bruntjen, 20, of Illiopolis, Illinois, who studied in Istanbul, Turkey, on her first winter break and in Parana State in Brazil on her second. This past May, the ACES major was among 25 students in the International Business Immersion Program who went on a faculty-led class trip to see farms and factories in Belgium, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, France, and Germany. “I hadn’t expected to do all this. I didn’t realize how many doors would be open once I got to the university. There are so many opportunities and you just can’t say no,” said Bruntjen, whose parents grow corn and soybeans in central Illinois.

Senior Paul Kirbach, 23, of Jerseyville, Illinois, a double major in animal and crop sciences, spent a semester at Sweden’s 500-year-old Uppsala University. In a global crop production class with classmates from Eritrea, Germany, Czech Republic, and Sweden, “we were each other’s textbooks. We got into a few arguments—but we learned,” he said. Kirbach, as an editor of an  international journal for agriculture  students, also got to attend a conference in Athens, Greece.

“Farm students today appreciate the importance of the international more than some of the urban students. If their dads are listening to the daily market forecast, there’s usually a report on what’s going on with soybeans in Brazil,” said Dean Easter. Agribusinesses “tell us that they don’t want to hire somebody without international experience. If you go to work for a multinational grain trading company, you may be six months in Decatur, two years in Fargo, and then the next year in Montevideo (Uruguay) running an elevator. So you might as well just expect your career path is going to take you north and south.”

A Half-Century of Study Abroad

Agriculture isn’t the only college pushing education abroad. Eighty percent of the courses at Illinois with international content reside in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS), which enrolls almost half of Illinois’s 31,000 undergraduates, said Assistant Dean Barbara HancinBhatt, the LAS director of International Programs. “We have study abroad programs that are almost 50 years old.” The college’s Global Studies Initiative infuses global topics into general education courses for 1,200 to 1,500 freshmen. They are encouraged to take three-week Global Studies courses abroad on winter break (as Bruntjen did to Turkey and Brazil). Subsidies for LAS majors bring the cost of a trip to China or Singapore as low as $1,850. Other undergraduates can study in Paris, Rome, Barcelona, or Cape Town for $2,750 (LAS majors pay $400 less). Hancin-Bhatt and husband Rakesh Bhatt, an associate professor of linguistics, lead a “Discovery Course” to Singapore for freshmen over winter break. It examines how the city-state maintains a national identity while still bolstering the Chinese, Malay, and Indian strands of its culture and neighborhoods. “A tremendous amount of learning happens on these trips. The relationships built between students and faculty are extraordinary. We have students who come up at the end of the trip and give us hugs,” said Hancin-Bhatt, who is also a linguist. LAS majors comprise half of the 2,000plus students that Illinois sends overseas each year. Doubling those numbers will take “serious curricular integration of study abroad” and more resources, she said. Study abroad must “no longer be seen as enrichment but part of the core education we do.”

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Multiple Function Partnerships

Illinois enjoys a thriving partnership with the National University of Singapore (NUS). The two universities already grant dual degrees in chemical engineering, and now they are offering joint Ph.D. programs as well. In the 18-month master’s program, Singapore and Illinois students spend a semester on each other’s campuses, then do three-month internships in both places with major corporate sponsors. The dual-degree program has spin-off benefits for the rest of the campus, including opening the door for Illinois freshmen to stay in NUS dorms on that Discovery Course to Singapore each January.           

Delia, executive director of International Research Relations and former dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has made 14 trips to Singapore to further this relationship with NUS and with A*STAR, the government agency that funds research in Singapore. A*STAR already has built a biomedical research complex called the Biopolis and is completing the first phase of a Fusionopolis to house physical science institutes. Illinois will send engineering and computer science faculty and postdoctoral students there for extended periods to work on advanced digital technologies. It will be “as seamless a projection of activities on this campus as we can make it,” Delia said.

“For us, it presents an opportunity to globalize our brand and project our commitment to being an international research university, in a way that reinforces and adds to the strengths at home,” he said. Advances at Fusionopolis could push the frontiers of work at Illinois’s own research park south of campus, and that in turn could spur economic development in Illinois and elsewhere in the United States. “We think it’s a win-win possibility,” he said. The partnership will also prepare the next generation of Illinois scientists and business executives “for the world in which they’re going to live out their lives: one in which they will have to lead their companies and conduct their research in collaboration, negotiation, involvement with international partners.”

Relationships with China are “much more complicated,” Delia said. “The barriers to involvement and joint work are obviously higher,” including the barrier of language. Illinois has enjoyed a 20-year partnership with Tsinghua University, and recently launched a new program in which Tsinghua engineering students will come to Illinois for their fourth and fifth year of studies and graduate with both a bachelor of science and a master’s degree. Corporate partners are helping sponsor that program, too, in the belief that the graduates they hire will “support the competitiveness of our international and multinational corporations,” said Delia. The program pays the fees and provides stipends for students in exchange for a work commitment. “The next goal would be to build an American student counterpart to this,” said Delia. Illinois also provides executive leadership training for 300 to 500 Chinese business and government executives who come to Urbana-Champaign each year for short-term programs. Support from the Freeman Foundation brings up to a dozen Chinese academics and social scientists to pursue research on the Illinois campus for a year; and Illinois, home to one of the largest university libraries in the United States, runs a summer training program for Chinese librarians. All of these are “real spires of visible excellence,” said Delia.

Managing Enrollments

Eighty-seven percent of the university’s nearly 31,000 undergraduates hail from Illinois. Administrators sometimes find themselves answering questions from politicians about why the campus enrolls so many international students—5,378 in 2007, including 1,731 undergraduates. Chancellor Herman is proud that the undergraduate student body has become more international on his watch, going from 2.2 percent to 5.6 percent in 2007. “I certainly worked very hard to increase the numbers at the undergraduate level,” he said, adding that this has not come at the expense of Illinois students. Instead, the international share has grown largely by cutting back on the number of out-of-state domestic students. Keith A. Marshall, associate provost for Enrollment Management, said, “We do virtually no recruiting of international graduate students—our reputation, rankings, and excellent academic offerings do the work for us. At the undergraduate level our recruiting is modest compared with many, but has been growing each year in recent years.” Illinois gets 23,000 applications for the 7,000 places in its freshman class. Some 15,000 are offered admission and the rest turned away. Still, “we are the only state university in the Midwest still growing,” Marshall pointed out.

“Illinois students recently voted to tack $5 onto their fees each semester to raise $300,000 a year for education abroad scholarships.”

Illinois students recently voted to tack $5 onto their fees each semester to raise $300,000 a year for education abroad scholarships. Members of the Study Abroad Student Advisory Committee, with some support from the study abroad office, championed the referendum. First they went classroom by classroom, talking up the idea and soliciting signatures to put it on a referendum ballot. They also convinced the Student Senate to lower the number of signatures needed from 3,000 to 2,000.

Rory Polera, 22, a senior from Williamsburg, Virginia, said one student senator accused them of playing Robin Hood. “He told us, ‘You’re just these wealthy Chicago kids who want to go abroad and party it up. Why should everyone pay for you to go and have fun?’” he said. But the pro-fee students carried the day and the referendum passed overwhelmingly (6,347 to 2,992). The fee will sunset in three years unless students vote then to extend it. Those who object to it can get the $5 fee refunded. Much of the $900,000 generated in the meantime will go toward need-based scholarships and aid to encourage minorities to study abroad. “Students should be saluted for their generosity,” said Brustein. 

Any weakness of the U.S. dollar will only make the education abroad challenge harder for administrators such as ACES Assistant Dean Andrea B. Bohn. Rising tuition is already pressuring family budgets, and even with study abroad scholarships students still need money for airfare and other expenses, she said. “This isn’t unique to the University of Illinois, but it’s a huge challenge that we face. I’m working very closely with our Office of Advancement to get more donor support.” Bohn, who once arranged education abroad for students at the University of Hohenheim in her native Germany, tries to convince ACES students to consider semester programs, which often cost about the same as a semester in UrbanaChampaign. “It may cost $2,000 more, but we can help with a $1,000 scholarship on that,” she said. If students chose an education abroad experience instead over winter break, “it’s going to be $2,400 that you didn’t have to spend.”

Deans From Nigeria, Australia

Many on Illinois’s faculty and several senior administrators are international. The dean of the College of Engineering, Ilesanmi Adesida, still feels a debt of gratitude to the Peace Corps teachers who taught math and science in his Nigerian high school. From Lagos he went to the University of California at Berkeley for three degrees in electrical engineering. Before becoming dean in 2006, he directed Illinois’s Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory and its Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, and made important discoveries on how to speed up semiconductors and microelectronics and circuits. Adesida, who became a U.S. citizen in 2002, said, “I always tell people to have an open mind, to welcome different types of people, and be open to any culture. People with open minds are magnanimous people—and you never know where you’ll end up.” It is essential for Illinois to maintain its international collaborations, he firmly believes. “There’s no way you can bottle up your knowledge,” said Adesida. “Our primary products are our students.” The path to continued U.S. prosperity is to train those “young minds to be adventurous and curious.”

Dean of Education Mary Kalantzis wasn’t looking to leave Australia when a recruiter came to Melbourne to woo her in 2006. Kalantzis, an expert on multi cultural education and literacy, said friends and colleagues told her, “You can’t go. With No Child Left Behind and all that stuff, why would you want to be an educator in America at this moment?” But a visit to UrbanaChampaign won her over. Illinois was a pacesetter in special education, including awarding the first Ph.D. in the field and the place where PLATO—one of the first computer-assisted teaching tools—was built. It also developed innovative techni ques for teaching reading and math. “It really is an extraordinary place,” said Kalantzis, who was born in Greece.

“My goal is to make sure that every single person who trains to be a teacher has some international experience,” preferably in a non-English-speaking country, she said. The experience of trying to catch a bus in an unfamiliar place or negotiating with someone who doesn’t speak English “will make them more sensitive to the differences they will face in the classroom.” She added, “The stereotypes of the narrowness and inwardness of Americans—and there are some stereotypes—have certainly been dispelled for me here living among people in this community and in this university,” she said.

Tolstoy, Gandhi Kin Connect in Urbana

For Chancellor Herman, it is imperative for Illinois to keep moving down this international road. Doubling the education abroad numbers will have the ancillary benefit of allowing Illinois to admit as many as 1,000 more transfer students, he said. “What we’re trying to do is use this globalization of our students to also serve the people in the state better.”

Recently a great, great grandson of Leo Tolstoy journeyed from Russia to speak at a campus event promoting a community-wide reading of Tolstoy’s novel, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. At the end of Vladimir Tolstoy’s talk, an Illinois professor came up to shake his hand and ask him to autograph one of his ancestor’s books. The professor was Rajmohan Gandhi—grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian pacifist and freedom crusader—who is a research professor in International Programs and Studies and directs the Global Crossroads Living-Learning Community. Herman loves the symmetry of that moment. “Imagine, the grandson of Gandhi meeting the great, great grandson of Tolstoy. Where else but at Illinois could this happen?” he asked.

Aviva Bergman’s worn yellow satchel doubles as a diary of her adventurous young life: almost every inch is covered with flag patches from the 45 countries where she has studied, volunteered, traveled, and taught.

That’s not counting Namibia, Botswana, and Korea, where the Goucher College senior spent a day or two—not long enough in her book to justify adding a patch to “my sacred bag .” The sociology major speaks Spanish, Portuguese, French, and some Bambara (picked up during a semester in Mali) . Goucher, a sylvan, 290-acre campus outside Baltimore, Maryland, is a place where Aviva found kindred spirits, and more in the making . Starting with the class of 2010, no one will graduate from Goucher without at least one stamp in their passport .

Goucher is the first traditional liberal arts college in the nation to require everyone to have an education abroad experience. President Sanford J. Ungar calls it “shameful” that more Americans don’t spend a portion of their college years studying outside the United States and says flatly, “It’s ridiculous to claim that students are educated if they have not had some international exposure.” Ungar feels he was hired in 2001 “at least in part to retrieve and enhance the college’s international character.” Goucher began in 1885 as the Woman’s College of Baltimore City and was renamed a quarter-century later for one of its founders and second president, the Reverend John Franklin Goucher, a globe-trotting educator and churchman who opened schools, colleges, missions, and hospitals across China, Japan, Korea, and India. He and his wife helped buy the land in Tokyo near the Emperor’s palace on which the Anglo-Japanese College—now Aoyama Gakuin University—was built in 1882, an early recognition “that education is necessarily a global pursuit,” as  Ungar said in a 2002 speech on the Tokyo campus.

Goucher went coed in 1986, a move that reversed declining enrollments. It was already trying to ramp up international activities in a 1995 strategic plan; a donor back then made a gift that funds study abroad scholarships for needy undergraduates. But former President Judy Mohraz, said, “Sandy’s just taken it miles farther. He’s made it a signature for the college.” Ungar arrived on campus two months before September 11, an event that convinced many American educators of the urgency of doing a better job of helping students understand the world and those opposed to Western ideals and freedoms.

Ungar admits frankly that he was also looking for something that would separate Goucher from other liberal arts colleges. “It needed something distinctive, and what better thing to distinguish it than this focus on international education?” said Ungar. He also convinced his board that it was the type of “big idea” that would attract both students and donors more than just replacing the campus library. Indeed, the mandate has been prominently featured in a major capital campaign that has allowed Goucher to build a $32 million facility called the Athenaeum that will house a café, fitness center, art gallery and performance spaces, as well as a superior library.

Building Support for the Study Abroad Mandate

The mandate—which requires students to spend at least three weeks in an approved study abroad program or internship in another country—was articulated in a sweeping 2002 strategic plan, Transcending Boundaries of the Map & the Mind. But first Ungar had to convince the faculty to actually make study abroad a requirement, and that took three full years. Some faculty were worried that the small college was rushing into this too fast and without sufficient support for the increased study abroad load. Goucher hired a fourth person for its Office of International Studies, but the burden of encouraging more students to study abroad would fall largely on the faculty. Many opt for three-week, faculty-led study trips overseas in January or the summer, and it takes a significant amount of time and planning to get both the logistics and curriculum right for such intensive courses. Still, the idea captured the fancy of the public and prospective students from the start, even before the mandate took effect for the freshmen who entered in fall 2006.

The faculty deliberated for three years before agreeing to include the education abroad requirement in a larger overhaul of Goucher’s general education requirements in 2005. And starting with the class of 2010, the college began giving every student a $1,200 voucher to partially offset the cost of studying abroad.

Robert Beachy, an associate professor of history, said, “I don’t know that anybody expected (the requirement) to come quite as soon as it did... There was a fair bit of concern about implementing this effectively.” But Beachy, whose field is German history and culture, said he’s been struck by the enthusiasm and creativity of faculty for  coming up with new education abroad offerings. “I’m impressed at the number that exists for a relatively small-size faculty. I guess if any school can do this, Goucher probably can because there really is this devoted sort of semi-selfless faculty.” Beachy, who advises eight freshmen and a dozen history majors, believes the college needs to devote more resources to faculty development and to the International Studies office. “Things need to be streamlined,” he said. “Right now it’s a little complicated sometimes figuring out how students get credits or what credits they get exactly. There aren’t enough clear policies in place.”

Some faculty questioned whether Goucher should be providing $1,200 vouchers for everybody, regardless of financial need. Eventually the college will spend almost a half-million dollars a year. But Ungar said more than three-quarters of Goucher’s financial aid is based on financial need. “We’ve cut way back on merit aid and reduced our (tuition) discount rate to 35 from 49.6 percent.” 

Ungar said that requiring study abroad was risky. “We were taking a very big plunge. What if students didn’t come? What if people didn’t like the idea?” he said. He needn’t have worried. A flood of applications has put those fears to rest. Four thousand students applied to Goucher for 2007-08, double the number seven years earlier. 

Goucher enrolled nearly 1500 undergraduates and more than 800 part-time graduate students in 2007. Goucher has rented nearby apartments to handle the overflow from campus housing. 

Even before the mandate, more than half of Goucher seniors had studied abroad by the time they graduated, and that number had  risen to 77 percent for the class of 2006 according to Open Doors figures. Some 132 members of the class of 2010 actually used their $1,200 vouchers as freshmen or sophomores. Most were expecting—and expected—to do so as juniors or seniors. Ungar said it will be several years before the results of this experiment are known.

Faculty Play a Critical Role

The most popular and common option for students to fulfill the requirement is to head off with a Goucher professor on one of the three-week intensive courses abroad that are offered during winter break and after the spring term ends. Some of these study abroad classes tied into longer coursework on campus before and/or after the overseas trip. In January and May, faculty lead students to Rio de Janeiro to learn the history of dance in Brazil; to Shanghai and Beijing to absorb Chinese history and philosophy; to Prague to explore the Czech capital’s twentieth-century journey from fascism to communism to capitalism; to Honduras where students dive in coral reefs while learning tropical marine biology; to Accra for an immersion in the arts and culture of Ghana and West Africa.

Still, a sizable minority of Goucher students study abroad for a full semester, an option that has been growing in popularity. And with support from a U.S. Department of Education grant, Goucher has developed several courses that are team taught by language and content experts for seven weeks in the fall, then three weeks overseas, and seven more weeks back on campus. They have ranged from peace studies in Spain, to theater in Paris, and to multicultural education in Costa Rica.

“Those last seven weeks were paradise for me,” said Isabel Moreno-Lopez, assistant professor of Spanish, who taught the 8-credit multicultural education class with Assistant Professor of Education Tami Smith. Moreno encountered resistance when she tried to teach entirely in Spanish before the trip to Costa Rica, but afterward “their attitude changed completely. It was a 100 percent shift. The students loved their experience there and loved the language,” she said. The students slept in tree houses at an environmental hostel in the middle of a rain forest and learned from Bribri Indians about their lives and culture. Back in Maryland, the students could not get enough Spanish. “They wanted more and more and more. They were sad when it ended and asked if they could still meet with me over coffee and discuss books. I still have some of these students coming,” said Moreno-Lopez. “The students you take abroad are students for life.” 

“They wanted more and more and more... The students you take abroad are students for life.”

Goucher students are accustomed to a lot of attention from professors, at home and abroad. “Most people that come here were looking for a small, liberal arts school,” said sophomore Royce DuBiner. “I mean, I lunch with my professors and talk with them all the time. After an exam you can walk into their office and they go over it with you right there.” DuBiner, from Atlanta, Georgia, cashed in his $1,200 voucher on a three-week trip to Vietnam last January led by Nicholas Brown, chair of Political Science and International Relations, who showed them the firebase where he served during the war, now a farmer’s field. They journeyed from Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) to Hanoi, learning about Vietnam’s history and its current social and economic reforms.

Goucher so far has implemented the education abroad mandate by hiring just one additional staff member for what is now a four-person Office of International Studies. Two education abroad advisers, an administrative staffer, and student workers round out the office (visas for Goucher’s international students are handled by the Admissions Office). “It is a small infrastructure,” said Provost Marc Roy, who came to Goucher in 2007. “The faculty is carrying a lot of the burden in terms of advising students. But the staff here is incredibly productive and so far they’ve been able to meet the challenge. I think time will tell us what’s necessary to do. But yes, faculty are carrying a lot of the load, both in terms of designing the intensive courses abroad and some of the logistical preparation for that. We need to find ways to make that less of a burden for faculty.

Political science professor Eric Singer spent eight years as associate dean of International Studies. “My main charge has been to think strategically and work with faculty and department to internationalize our curriculum and our academic programs,” said Singer, who has now relinquished those administrative duties and will resume teaching full-time after a sabbatical. Singer regularly proselytized fellow faculty to teach courses overseas and led several study abroad trips himself to South Africa. He put the arm on LaJerne Cornish, an assistant professor of education, one summer when Singer needed students to teach math in a South African township school. 

Cornish found two willing education majors and agreed to take an exploratory trip with Singer to South Africa. Cornish, a Goucher alumna and former assistant principal of a Baltimore middle school, had never been out of the country. “I grew up in Baltimore City and thought I had some conception of poverty, but nothing prepared me for what I saw in South Africa,” she said. For the past four summers, she has led groups of up to a dozen education majors to teach in an overcrowded school in rural Grahamstown, South Africa. She has also raised thousands of dollars to donate books to township schools. “This has really pushed me in unexpected ways,” said Cornish.

Exploring Global Issues

Service, whether in inner city Baltimore, hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, or the slums of Grahamstown, is part of the culture at Goucher. Sophomore Maura Roth-Gormley, 20, of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, first learned about Goucher in the book, Colleges That Change Lives, by Loren Pope. “I was interested because of Goucher’s international studies program and all the emphasis on service learning,” said the history major and ballet dancer who also teaches yoga. 

Roth-Gormley is also in Goucher’s International Scholars Program (ISP), which places students in special seminars exploring global issues during their first three semesters and requires them to take one language class beyond the intermediate level and to study abroad for at least a semester. The ISP students get $3,000 vouchers. RothGormley already has been to South Africa on a three-week course, and plans to return for a full semester on an exchange with Rhodes University in Grahamstown. “When I talk to people at other colleges, I’m always kind of shocked” how few plan to study abroad, she said. “When I say I’ve already studied abroad and plan to do so again, they say, ‘Well, that’s interesting. I’d love to do that—but I probably won’t.’” Still, the ISP, which started in 2005, isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, with prescribed courses and a long research paper. Forty students in the class of 2010 signed up for ISP as freshmen; half had left the program before the third semester’s end.

But others love it. The study abroad mandate “is why I came to Goucher,” said sophomore Debra Linik of Woodstown, New Jersey. Linik, a political science and international relations major, extolled a seminar in which her class explored how the Maryland crab industry has gone global. Phillips Seafood Company, which started on the boardwalk in Ocean City, now operates seafood canning plants in Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, India, Malaysia, Vietnam, and China, and relies on migrant labor from Mexico to staff its crab-packing houses on the Chesapeake Bay.

Steven DeCaroli, an associate professor of philosophy who has led classes to China and Greece, said that at Goucher, “You can pick up the phone and talk to the person in charge and get something done on a first-name basis. There’s not a lot of bureaucracy to go through.”

Antje Rauwerda, an assistant professor of English who was raised in Singapore where her Dutch father was a petroleum geologist, partnered with DeCaroli on that first China trip. Rauwerda said of the education abroad mandate, “As with any big change, there are little bumps; there are little parts of implementing this that are awkward. But I think it will change the feel of the campus community,” and once the students start “cross-pollinating” their experiences in China or Mali or Ireland, “it’s going to be really interesting.”

Lindsey Hendricks, 20, a junior biology major from Bar Harbor, Maine, said the study abroad mandate is attracting “a different crowd” to Goucher. “I can remember in my freshman year a lot of people didn’t want to study abroad or even do an offcampus  internship. You don’t hear that any more,” said Hendricks, who took a tropical marine biology class in Honduras and journeyed to London to study immigrant cultures in the East End. Hendricks is a leader of an agricultural co-op that tends large com posting bins around campus, harvesting leftover vegetables from the cafeteria daily.

Sophomore Anndal Narayanan, 19, a French and history major from Delray Beach, Florida, is spending her junior fall semester at the Sorbonne in Paris. She, too, learned about Goucher from Colleges That Change Lives. “The international study requirement was really the clincher,” said Narayanan. The requirement “explains why the freshman class was the biggest that Goucher’s ever had,” said Narayanan, who recently received honors for her freshman ISP paper comparing the 1968 student takeover at Columbia University in New York to the riots at the Sorbonne.

Greater Student Engagement

J. Michael Curry, former vice president and academic dean, believes the study abroad mandate is bringing in students who are more “engaged, thoughtful, open to new experiences, (and) aware of the world.” And while some choose Goucher because of the safe, suburban campus, the mandate also serves notice that Goucher “will push them out of the comfort of the nest,” he said.

The responsibility for ensuring that a student goes abroad really rests with the students themselves, but the faculty “have a responsibility for getting the conversation started,” said Associate Dean Janine Bowen.

Laura Burns, an assistant professor of art who teaches photography, said this is “a big time of transition” for both faculty and students. “It is very new in terms of advising. It’s new in terms of figuring out who’s on campus and who’s not. It’s new in terms of figuring out how difficult it becomes for students to meet their requirements here and yet go abroad,” said Burns, who has led classes to study life on the border shared by El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

“I see a huge, huge change in international awareness and knowledge on the part of both students and faculty.”

“So far it seems to be working quite well,” Burns added. “The students I’ve been talking with are good planners. It’s making them plan a little bit more into the future, having to sort of sit down and say, ‘O.K., this class is available this semester; if I’m gone this semester, then I need to do X, Y, and Z.’ It means that people are tending to write out a four-year plan as opposed to a semester- bysemester plan.” 

Marianne Githens, professor of political science and one of the longest serving faculty members— she arrived in 1965 fresh from finishing her Ph.D. at the London School of Economics—believes Goucher “is going through a real renaissance.” Students in her “Women in Politics” class were more familiar with Ségolène Royal and her campaign for president of France than an earlier generation would have been. “That’s one of the wonderful products of internationalizing here at Goucher,” said Githens.

From Dance to Lacrosse—Integrating Study Abroad

Kaushik Bagchi, an associate professor of history, and Amanda Thom Woodson, professor of dance, have teamed to lead students on five trips to Ghana and one to India. “When I came here 15 years ago, mine was one of the few international voices on campus. I was an international specimen on campus. That is no longer the case. I see a huge, huge change in international awareness and knowledge on the part of both students and faculty,” said Bagchi, who is from Delhi.

“We do a lot of drumming and dancing” on the Ghana trip, said Bagchi. “Some people may think, ‘That’s not for me.’ But in the villages we visit, music and dance are completely integrated into everyday life and politics.” The students also learn the history of the slave trade and visit the forts and castles built by the Portuguese and Dutch traders.

Woodson also takes dance students to Brazil to study music and dance. Sometimes, she will hear from a student that her parents “will not pay for them to go on a dance  international exchange program because they are not ‘learning anything.’ I explain to the parents that this is not purely about dancing. It is a cultural experience.” Woodson, a native of Edinburgh, Scotland, grew up in a military family in Malta, Germany, and Singapore. 

Goucher’s dance program has never lost the luster it enjoyed when it was a women’s college. Goucher also has a strong equestrian program, with its own stable of horses. Its athletic teams compete in NCAA Division III, with no athletic scholarships. Thomas L. Till, swim coach and assistant athletic director, said coaches understand that at Goucher, academics comes before athletics even if that means a star athlete may miss a season while studying abroad. Women’s lacrosse was short three players last spring because several players were overseas. “As a coach, you deal with these—I don’t want to call them frustrations, but little setbacks. You can’t fault the kids because they’re getting these great experiences. And it’s neat to see the transformation when they come back,” said Till.

Comfortable Out on a Limb

Ungar grew up in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, the son of grocers who immigrated from Eastern Europe. He went to Harvard, wrote for the Crimson, and thought his future might be in the law and small town politics. But “the world just opened to me” after he won a Rotary Foundation Fellowship to the London School of Economics and became a foreign correspondent in Paris and Nairobi. 

He also spent a summer working for the English language Argus newspapers in Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town, seeing apartheid at its worst. Later he wrote books on Africa, the FBI, the new wave of immigrants, and other topics; hosted National Public Radio’s All Things Considered; became dean of the communications school at American University; and was director of the Voice of America from 1999 to 2001.

His vision for international education permeates all matters, large and small, at Goucher. When a Maryland community organization came by to solicit an institutional membership fee costing $7,200, Ungar instantly did the math in his head. “That’s six stipends for students to go overseas,” he said. “You have a high threshold to tell me that that’s more important than putting the money into sending six students overseas.”

The study abroad mandate has earned Goucher waves of publicity. A recent feature in The Chronicle of Higher Education took note of some grumbling among the  faculty, but gave Ungar the last word. “I’m comfortable being out on this limb,” he said.

Ungar amplified on those thoughts. “One of the challenges is to bring faculty along in all disciplines and help them see that the international component of things is not a luxury but a growing necessity. It’s understandable that some people would have reservations and concerns, especially because to them in some cases they feel, ‘If I’m going to make room for an international component…then what has to go? What is it going to replace?’” he said. “The answer in my view is that curriculum has always changed and will always change.”

To campuses thinking of following Goucher’s example, Ungar offered this advice: “Make sure that there are lots of new programs in the cooker, lots of new ideas for study abroad programs, both short- and long-term ones. I might urge that people do that a little bit sooner than we did.”

Institutions also need to collaborate more on the courses and classes they take overseas. “No doubt everybody wants to do something unique and have programs that reflect the character of each individual institution. There’s nothing wrong with that,” said Ungar. “But I think everybody needs to learn a little bit more about group play.”

Berklee College of Music is teeming with aspiring rock, jazz, R&B, and hip-hop musicians as well as songwriters, sound engineers, and others determined to make careers in contemporary music. They come not only from across the country, but around the world: almost a quarter of Berklee’s 4,000 students are international. Berklee sends faculty out to hold auditions on six continents. Working in pairs, they hit 45 cities in 21 countries on Berklee’s “World Scholarship Tour.”

Why go to such lengths? “We think there is great talent out in the world and it’s our job to find them, not wait for them to find us,” said Berklee President Roger Brown. And when they bring their musical traditions and materials into Berklee’s classrooms, all benefit. “If I’m in class with a young man from Ghana and someone from Indonesia and someone from Finland, I’m learning a lot more than if I were just with people who had the same background that I had,” said Brown.

In just the past two years Michael Shaver, assistant director of admissions, has been to “every continent except for Antarctica. I’ve been to Australia, Malaysia, Japan, Italy, Thailand, Finland, Ghana, South Africa, France, Brazil, Ecuador, and Canada.” Berklee conducted 1,250 live auditions overseas in 2008–09. Half the 6,400 auditions were held in Boston, and the rest in locations across the United States.

Alto saxophonist Jim Ogdren, academic assistant to the dean of the performing division, gave clinics and conducted auditions in Panama City during the Panama Jazz Festival, the brainchild of Panamanian jazz pianist and Berklee alumnus Danilo Perez. “We try to get them to play the style and music they know best,” said Ogdren. “They often try to play what they think (we) want to hear and stop being themselves. They think we want to hear jazz. We’ll see a great shredder guitarist or a drummer come in and they’re trying to play swing.”

A Strong Draw From Asia

Almost half of Berklee’s 1,000 international students come from Japan, South Korea, and other countries in Asia. Sung Ho Cho, 29, from Seoul already holds a bachelor’s degree in physics but is retooling himself as a jazz guitarist. How did he hear about Berklee?

“Actually in Korea, Berklee is famous among the music students,” he said. “When they think about going abroad and studying, the first choice is Berklee. Lots of students want to come here.” His idols include Pat Metheny and Berklee’s own Mick Goodrick, a faculty member the students admiringly call Mr. Goodchord.

Classmate Seung Hun Lee, 28, also from Seoul, earned a classical music degree back home, playing saxophone in a symphony orchestra. Now he hopes to chart a new path as an alto saxophonist. “I never played jazz before. I really wanted to learn,” said Lee, whose favorite player, Walter Beasley, graduated from Berklee.

Berklee was founded as a jazz school called Schillinger House of Music in 1945. Founder Lawrence Berk later combined his name and his son’s first name to come up with Berklee. It has had an international cast for decades. The first international student was Toshiko Akiyoshi, who arrived from Tokyo in 1956 after Berk sent her a plane ticket and offered a full scholarship. “She went on to become one of Japan’s most preeminent big band leaders and really helped create the tradition of jazz in Japan,” said Brown. “The school has a long and great tradition of finding talent all over the world and giving those young people opportunities they wouldn’t have had otherwise.” 

Arif Mardin, the legendary music producer from Turkey who produced hits for Aretha Franklin, the Bee Gees, and Norah Jones, attended Berklee on a scholarship paid for by Quincy Jones, who spent a year at Berklee before heading off to make his name in the music world. Canadian jazz great Diana Krall won a scholarship at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival that paid her way to Berklee.

Teaching Master Classes Around the World

The institution’s own international musical journey began in earnest in 1985 when faculty members traveled to Japan to give clinics. Now faculty musicians regularly head out to perform and give master classes at 14 schools in the Berklee International Network in Nancy, France; São Paulo, Brazil; Barcelona, Spain; Quito, Ecuador; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Freiburg, Germany; Tokyo and Kobe, Japan; Helsinki, Finland; Dublin, Ireland; Athens, Greece; Ramat HaSharon, Israel; and Seoul, South Korea. The college also mounts jazz festivals in Perugia, Italy, and San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Berklee’s tuition and fees top $15,000 per semester. Four of the nine full-ride scholarships the college offers are reserved for international students, including ones reserved for African and Canadian musicians. In 2008 Berklee launched an Africa Scholars Program with auditions in Accra, Ghana, and Durban, South Africa, where it offered $1.4 million in scholarships to 25 musicians. Brown, the president, once taught school in Kenya before getting an M.B.A. and founding a successful child-care company, Bright Horizons.

“The school has a long and great tradition of finding talent all over the world and giving those young people opportunities they wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

“Obviously, we could give a thousand of those scholarships to gifted African musicians, so it will not make a dent in allowing the talent of Africa to come to Berklee. But it will certainly deepen our connection to the continent,” the president said. “We also find that a lot of students who come to the auditions and get to know the college find a way here through other scholarships they are able to get.”

An ‘Outlier’ Among Music Schools and Conservatories

Jay Kennedy, associate vice president for academic affairs, said that among U.S. music schools and conservatories, “Berklee is essentially an outlier. There are aspects (of the curriculum) that are similar in other schools, but not in the concentration that we have them…. We are the most progressive in terms of how we align with what the music business and industry is doing today.”

A decade ago, many international students would come for just two to four semesters, said Jason Camelio, director of international education operations. Now “more are wanting to stay and complete that degree because they see value to it.” Berklee offers diplomas and certificates as well as bachelor degrees. 

Berklee will raise its international profile even higher in 2011 when it opens a satellite campus in Valencia, Spain. Berklee Valencia will be a joint venture with Spain’s Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE) in a new arts complex called ARTeria Valencia. The Spanish campus will accommodate 1,000 students, including 200 that Berklee hopes to send from Boston each year, said Sharon Glennon, former director of international programs and now planning director for the Valencia branch. And that means Berklee students will be getting even broader exposure to the wide world of music. 

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Berklee College of Music

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The motto of Portland State University in Oregon is emblazoned on a sky bridge that spans Broadway, Portland’s main thoroughfare: Let Knowledge Serve The City. “We’d like to change it now to Let Knowledge Serve the Globe,” quips Kevin Kecskes, associate vice provost for engagement. Portland State, already known for deep community partnerships, today works on a broader canvass seeking sustainable solutions to economic, environmental, and social challenges that confront cities everywhere. 

This urban university practices what it preaches. In a city crisscrossed by light rail and streetcars, most students, faculty, and staff walk, ride bicycles, or take public transportation to the compact, 49-acre campus. The new president, Wim Wiewel, an expert on urban affairs, rode a bicycle to work on his first day in August 2008. Most of the 26,000 students commute; the dorms abutting Broadway house only 2,000 of them, although plans are on the drawing boards for several thousand more.

The city itself is a powerful draw for the 1,700 international students. “Typically international students want to come to an urban environment. The living environment is more supportive culturally and more diverse than in a university town like Corvallis or to an extent Eugene,” said Gil Latz, vice provost for international affairs and a professor of geography. Portland’s lures also make faculty recruiting easier. “A lot of people want to live in the Pacific Northwest,” said Ronald Tammen, director of the Mark Hatfield School of Government. Wiewel, who came from Chicago, said his new hometown “is such an easy city to sell. It’s a great brand.”

Wiewel is building on momentum created over a decade at Portland State. His predecessor, Daniel Bernstine, doubled enrollment and won the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges’ (now the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, A·P·L·U) Michael Malone International Leadership Award in 2005 for his efforts to internationalize Portland State. 

Broadening the Experience of ‘New Majority’ Students

The new president, a native of Amsterdam, views attracting more international and out-of-state students as a strategic way of broadening the educational experience for Oregon students. The student body typifies what some call “the new majority” in American higher education: older and often part-time. Most of these collegians “can’t park their family and their job for six months to go study in Berlin,” said Duncan Carter, associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Fretting over that reality would be pointless, said Provost Roy Koch, so instead Portland State has concentrated on offering short, faculty-led education abroad opportunities, often over spring break as part of longer courses. The number who study abroad is still modest (541 in 2007–08) but it has been climbing. Ron Witczak, assistant vice provost and director of education abroad, said, “We started in 2001 with three or four faculty-led programs and roughly 30 students. Now we’re up to 27 with close to 250 students.” Last year a full-time coordinator was hired. “There’s no place-bound student who can’t figure out a way to go abroad for two weeks if they want to,” said Wiewel. Both the length and cost—typically $2,500 to $3,500—make the short-term programs attractive, and partial scholarships are available for those in need.

“There’s no place-bound student who can’t figure out a way to go abroad for two weeks if they want to.”

Jill Scantlan, who quit school, earned a GED at age 16, and became a licensed massage therapist, spent nine months studying in Hyderabad, India. The 25-year-old international studies major aims to earn a master’s degree and return to India to do public health work. Helen Johnson returned to college for a master’s in teaching English as a second language after two decades as a homemaker. The two summers she spent practice teaching in South Korea were “the experience of a lifetime,” said Johnson, 47, a native of Greece who aspires to teach English to immigrants. “Now I’m back to what I really want to do.”

Emphases on Sustainability and Community Learning

Sustainability was the watchword at Portland State, even before it received a 10-year, $25 million matching grant in 2008 from the Miller Foundation—the largest gift in the institution’s history—to make the university an exemplar of sustainability, from the curriculum to campus life to community partnerships. Wiewel said, “You can’t be known across the world for everything unless you are Princeton or Harvard or some place like that. We’ve got to pick our strengths, and sustainability is one of those. It’s not just green wash; it’s real. People are doing it.” Portland State is working with Hokkaido University in Japan and Tongji University in China on ways to foster sustainability, and the issue drives the curriculum for the Hatfield School’s executive leadership and training programs for hundreds of government managers and business executives from Vietnam, Japan, and South Korea. 

Portland State’s long-standing relationship with Waseda University in Tokyo also focuses in part on sustainability. The campus houses the Waseda Oregon Office, which brings dozens of Waseda students to Portland each year and sends 60 students from across the United States to Tokyo each summer for intensive Japanese classes. Latz, who studied at Waseda as an Occidental College undergraduate, is looking for a third partner elsewhere in Asia for a three-way exchange around the global sustainability theme. “We have to move away from thinking only in terms of two dimensions to a problem,” the geographer said. “If this third country were Korea, for example, the students would learn that the Korean approach to sustainability would be very different from the Japanese approach and the Portland approach.”

Community-based learning is also a key to the curriculum at Portland State, where all undergraduates are obliged to perform service. Eight thousand students work in teams to identify and address community problems each year, and “we are incorporating this service element into our study abroad programs,” said Latz.

Kecskes, who directs the community partnerships, eschews the “service learning” term. “Community-based learning is a much larger umbrella. ‘Service’ can connote a one-way street,” he said. One course that Kecskes helped design takes students to Tucson, Arizona, and Nogales, Mexico, to study immigration policy and pollution from global factories south of the border. Instructor Celine Fitzmaurice’s students spend a night in a migrant shelter and live with families who work in those factories. Often, she said, there is at least one student whose parents entered the U.S. without documentation. Kecskes designed another course in which students meet with leaders of Portland’s Oaxacan immigrant community before heading to Oaxaca, Mexico, to see conditions there for themselves.

Portland State is also the new home of the International Partnership for Service Learning & Leadership, a not-for-profit that runs programs for undergraduates’ combining study abroad with volunteer service. It will offer a master’s degree in international development and service that includes six months of courses at Portland State and six months’ service in Kingston, Jamaica, or Guadalajara, Mexico. 

Surprises in Studying Impact of Education Abroad

Portland State participated in the Global Learning for All project of the American Council on Education (ACE), which looked at how institutions with large numbers of nontraditional undergraduates—adults, minorities, and parttime students—incorporated international content and activities into their curricula and campus life. Portland State also shared a Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education grant with five other institutions to measure the impact of international learning on students’ attitudes.

“It was as though the (Russian) language had disappeared,” said Freels, but now enrollments have rebounded partly with the help of a $1 million National Security Education Program grant.”

Carter, associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Latz, and Patricia Thornton, an associate professor of international studies, helped pilot a test that examined what students took away from their education abroad experiences. “We got some surprises,” said Carter. “Students who had traveled frequently abroad or indicated several short trips abroad outside of an academic context actually scored lower on the attitude section than students who’d never left the country.” He added, “We call this the Club Med experience and hypothesize that this may actually do more harm than good.” 

The faculty senate, after lively debates over the wisdom of expanding the list of core objectives for a Portland State education, recently adopted an international learning outcome as part of a broader revamping of curricular requirements. The new goal reads: “Students will understand the richness and challenge of world culture, the effects of globalization, and develop the skills and attitudes to function as ‘global citizens.’” Provost Koch said, “It was implied before, but now it’s very explicit.” The challenge is figuring out how to accomplish it for engineers as well as history and international studies majors. “We don’t want to just create another course or set of courses. We want to make it an integral part of students’ existing coursework,” he said. 

Luring Students to Russian Language Classes

Four thousand Portland State students took foreign language courses in fall 2008. “We are the largest unit in the university,” said Sandra G. Freels, chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and professor of Russian, one of 20 languages taught. When the Soviet Union collapsed, “it was as though the (Russian) language had disappeared,” said Freels, but now enrollments have rebounded partly with the help of a $1 million National Security Education Program grant. 

That grant allowed Portland State to offer 22 Russian-speaking freshmen and sophomores the opportunity last fall to add an extra, two-credit class taught in Russian to the standard, six-credit Inquiry course, one of the university’s requirements. These students were encouraged to live on the Russian immersion floor of a dorm and later might spend a full year at St. Petersburg State University. The purpose, said professor Patricia Wetzel, “is not aimed at producing Russian majors. It’s producing chemistry, business, and history majors who can use their language professionally.” The students, many of them heritage speakers of Russian, often “had no idea what their language skills are worth,” said Freels.

Raising the Research and Global Profile

In bringing Wiewel to Portland, the State Board of Higher Education chose a president whose most recent book was Global Universities and Urban Development. Wiewel first came to the United States from Holland on an American Field Service high school exchange. After earning a doctorate in sociology at Northwestern University, he directed the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and was provost of the University of Baltimore in Maryland. His goal is to double the externally funded research budget to $80 million in five or so years. Research “by definition nowadays is global…. The more you raise the research profile, the more it allows you to go beyond your local focus,” Wiewel said.

The Hatfield School of Government has taken an entrepreneurial approach to growing its international profile. “We have tentacles that stretch throughout the local community, the state, the nation, and the world,” said Tammen, the director. “We grow not on public money, but on money that we generate ourselves by training government officials in the United States and abroad and by doing contract work for a lot of different folks.” 

Marcus Ingle, director of the school’s International Public Service & Fellows program, regularly takes Portland State students to Vietnam and recently won two grants from the Ford Foundation to establish a program on state leadership for sustainable development at the Ho Chi Minh Political Academy in Hanoi. He also had a hand in arranging a $2 million Intel Corp. initiative that has brought 28 Vietnamese engineering students to Portland for two years to finish their studies and earn a Portland State degree.

“We grow not on public money, but on money that we generate ourselves by training government officials in the United States and abroad and by doing contract work for a lot of different folks. ”

Political scientist Birol Yesilada, chair of contemporary Turkish studies, and Harry Anastasiou, a professor of conflict resolution, take students to Cyprus for two weeks each year to study life on both sides of the Green Line that divides the Greek and Turkish communities. Yesilada said Portland State is still “a young campus. It does not have entrenched rules. It doesn’t have the financial means of a Harvard, but if you have a good idea, you’ll get support to do it. They are not going to stand in your way.”

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

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

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

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

Experiencing a New Culture Alone

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

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

Pipeline to Vietnam

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

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

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

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

Spring Break in St. Petersburg, Russia

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

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

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

Preparing Students for Global Lives

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mixing Food and Languages

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

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

Faculty Engagement in International Programs

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

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

Resources the Only Impediment

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

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

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

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