Teaching, Learning, and Facilitation

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

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

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

Leaders for an Interconnected Global World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Issues in the Developing World

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

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

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

Public and Social Policy Studies

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

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

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

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

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

Getting Students Out Into the World

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

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

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

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

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

Global Learning Institutes

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

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

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

Integrating Internationalization

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

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

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

Outreach Challenges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Serving International Students and Scholars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Integrating All Aspects of the UCLA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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University of California at Los Angeles

Read more about University of California at Los Angeles

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

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

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

A Long History of Placing Importance on International Education

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

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

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

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

Education Abroad Opportunities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laying Out the Welcome Mat

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

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

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

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

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

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

Business, Engineering, Architecture, Dance, and More

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ethnic, Cultural, and Language Studies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making Connections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KU Law School Prioritizes International Aspects

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

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

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

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

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

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

Internationalizing Scientific Research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Near the end of the faculty’s first meeting with Mary Ellen Duncan after she became president of Howard Community College in 1998, Spanish professor Cheryl Berman stood up and asked with unwonted diffidence, “Can I start study abroad programs here?” “You don’t have study abroad programs? Of course, you better start study abroad programs,” replied Duncan, a onetime high school Latin teacher who had previously expanded the horizons of SUNY’s College of Technology at Delhi during seven years at the helm of that school in New York’s Catskill Mountains.

Today Howard Community College regularly sends dozens of students on a Spanish immersion program in Cuernavaca, Mexico, each January, and it offers opportunities to study in China, Italy, Greece, Russia, and Costa Rica. It has student and faculty exchanges as well with institutions in Denmark and Turkey, awards scholarships for study abroad, and has partnerships with Dickinson College and the College of Notre Dame of Maryland that allow top Howard students entry to additional summer programs on several continents. 

A Very Internationally-Oriented Community College

Howard’s World Languages department—Cheryl Berman is the director—regularly teaches Arabic, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and through its Critical Languages program provides tutors and online resources for students to learn Chinese, Russian, Korean, and Greek. It has a thriving English Language Institute, as well as 174 international students among the 6,700 students seeking associate degrees. Howard faculty, administrators, and even its board of trustees are active in Community Colleges for International Development, Inc., a consortium of 90 community colleges involved in exchanges and development projects in more than 40 countries. Duncan chaired the consortium in 2005.

Howard is in the midst of a building boom, with work completed on a high-tech Instructional Laboratory Building, a performing arts complex well under way, and a $28 million student services building in the offing. Howard was born in 1970 with  advantages, sitting in the middle of one of the wealthiest counties in the United States, midway between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. Columbia, its hometown, is itself an experiment in living, a planned community created in the turbulent 1960s by developer James Rouse, known for revitalizing Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and breathing new life into Boston’s Faneuil Hall, as a place where all races and classes could live and work together, with parks and pathways and a small-town atmosphere. It has not worked out entirely as Rouse dreamed; most of Columbia’s 100,000 residents commute to jobs in Washington and Baltimore. 

Howard Community College is only the seventh largest of Maryland’s 16 community colleges, but enjoys an outsized reputation as a place that cultivates and rewards innovative thinking, from entrepreneurial workforce training programs to a much honored theater program that boasts the only professional Equity theater group in the country at a community college. The president and vice-president of the student government last year were from Germany and Syria respectively, and Howard has garnered several national awards for internationalizing its curriculum. Duncan said it is fitting for a place founded as a “little Shangri-La. We’re in a community that has people from all over the world.”

Faculty and Administration Work Together on Internationalization

The emphasis on the international spread throughout academic departments after business professor Rebecca Mihelcic became coordinator of international education in 1999. Vice President of Academic Affairs Ron Roberson, a former chair of the humanities division and fine arts professor, said, “When Beckie expressed an interest in really going after the development of an international education program, I was very excited.” Roberson, who spent a year as a Fulbright scholar painting and studying art history at the University of Louvain in Belgium after his graduation from Morgan State University, added, “Nothing happens in education unless you’ve got somebody on fire about an issue. Beckie had the conviction that this was a critical direction for the institution.” Mihelcic built on groundwork that Margaret M. Mohler laid as director of the International Business and Education Center from 1995 to 1999 at Howard. But Mihelcic cast the net wider, encouraging faculty in every program to take advantage of international travel and research opportunities and to incorporate international content into their classes.

Patti English, who 10 years ago started Howard’s cardiovascular technology program,  which trains technicians to work in cardiac cath labs in leading Baltimore and Washington hospitals, remembers getting a survey from Mihelcic five years ago encouraging faculty to think of ways to internationalize their courses. She sent it back with a note saying, “Beckie, I would love to, but I can’t foresee anything in my field being international.” When pressed, English recalled that some countries had approached her professional association for advice on setting up cardiac cath labs. “Patti, what do you think of that?” asked Mihelcic.

In January 2004, English and Jeanette Jeffrey, an assistant professor of health science who teaches nutrition and community health, took four students to Costa Rica for a comparative study of the country’s healthcare practices. They visited public and private hospitals and clinics, and will be returning with more students in 2006.

“Everyone is incredibly supportive of internationalizing Howard, from the president on down,” said Jeffrey, who also teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Last year Roberson gave her a professional development grant to do field research in Switzerland under the auspices of UMBC’s health administration policy program. 

“You have to get the faculty on board before you get the students,” said Mihelcic, who raised $6,000 last year for study abroad scholarships by renting to colleagues a rustic cabin she owns. “Once faculty start thinking in international terms and they start talking international, it becomes a natural thing. It’s not something  we’re adding to the curriculum. It’s something that’s part of our education.”

Offering Students Mirrors and Windows

Helen Buss Mitchell, a philosophy professor and director of women’s studies, always had been passionate about exposing philosophy students to the widest possible range of thought and beliefs about existence, not just the Western tradition. When she complained about the deletion of women’s voices from a popular philosophy textbook in the early 1990s, the publisher’s representatives asked Mitchell to write her own textbook. The result was Roots of Wisdom, now in its fourth edition and being translated into Chinese and Spanish. Mitchell also produced a television course, “For the Love of Wisdom,” distributed by PBS. “My life has taken quite a different turn and it’s been wonderful,” said Mitchell.

Mitchell said Howard Community College’s internationalism is partly a product of “where we are, between Baltimore and Washington. We’ve got embassies 25 minutes away, and events of all kinds. We’re positioned in a place where the world comes to us, and we make a special effort to be, in Diogenes’s famous phrase, ‘citizens of the world.’”

“Twelve years ago, when I first started teaching ‘Religions of the World,’ most people in the class were Christians or a few Jews, that was it. Now every semester I’ve got Muslim students in the class and often Hindu students,” she said. “It makes for very interesting discussions.”

At Howard, Mitchell said, “We offer our students mirrors as well as windows. We want our students to see through the windows into whatever it is we want them to see. But we’re offering mirrors as well so that in my book and in a lot of things going on here, students see themselves reflected.”

World Languages Program

The college renamed its “foreign” language program “world” languages several years ago. “I love that,” said President Duncan, who took the Spanish immersion classes in Cuernavaca herself. “‘World’ languages sounds much more inviting.” The college celebrated World Languages Day last March with a day- and eveninglong series of 15 events ranging from skits and songs to lectures and a Chinese calligraphy demonstration (Cheryl Berman served as the impresario, wearing a peasant dress she brought back from Chiapas, Mexico). To accommodate day and evening students, the dancing, yodeling, mariachi music, and more went on from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and again from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. The language classes , draw students of all ages, from teenagers to octogenarians. “Cheryl is such a strong and joyful force, drawing people into the culture and languages,” said Jean Thiebaux, a retired mathematician for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who has taken Spanish classes here and in Cuernavaca. 

The immersion classes in Mexico are taught at Universidad Internacional in Cuernavaca, which arranges stays with host families for students from many U.S. colleges and universities. Jonathan Henry, who works in international promotions for the Mexican university, said, “To me, Howard seems like a regular university.”

Universidad Internacional sent faculty member Carlos Guzman on a one-semester teaching exchange to Howard in 2003. His courses were so popular that Howard asked him to stay for a second semester, and then for a second full year. “This will be my last [semester]. It’s time for other faculty to have the opportunity,” said Guzman.

Berman was a French major in college whose interest in Spanish was awakened when she and her husband adopted twin girls from Bogotá, Colombia. “I fell in love with everything Spanish, with the cultures, the whole thing,” she said.

Berman has a gift for picking up languages—and for convincing others to give it a go. “You just have to role model passion and energy and expectations and all those things, and they pick and choose what they take out of it,” said Berman.

When Berman set out to explore the first study abroad opportunity for Howard, a Spanish professor from a State University of New York campus shared a wealth of advice about finding immersion classes in Latin America. She also informed her about the myriad of details related to preparing students for the experience—everything from shots to release forms.

Partnerships with U.S and Danish Governments Bear Fruit

Howard’s critical language program grew in part out of Berman’s interest and involvement in the Interagency Language Roundtable (www.govtilr.org), a half-century-old network of federal agencies that share information and resources about teaching and learning languages. Howard hosted a Roundtable meeting in April that explored the roles of community colleges in delivering foreign language education in the United States, and the Roundtable also held its annual summer research showcase at Howard in July 2005.

The government has identified six languages as critical to U.S. national security—Korean, Chinese, Farsi, Russian, Spanish, and Arabic—and Howard now offers regular or special instruction in five of them. Berman believes that since these languages have been identified as a national priority, educators and schools at every level should do their part to teach them. The students in a Korean or Chinese critical language tutoring session at Howard may never end up at the Defense Language Institute’s Foreign Language Center in Monterey, California, but they could become part of a groundswell that produces more candidates for advanced training. “It’s like a [youth] soccer league, you know? One that has both travel teams and the neighborhood kids?” said Berman. “It’s like, ‘Everybody—high schools, community colleges, four-year colleges and universities—just put in your players, and somehow enough will emerge at the top.’” At Howard, she added, “we’re the neighborhood squad, and that’s how I like it.”

Howard got a Danish connection thanks to a State Departmentarranged visit by the Danish education minister. Roberson was invited to a conference in Denmark with other community college representatives. He and representatives from three Danish colleges eventually decided to develop an information technology  exchange program. “I thought that would be the easiest thing around which to develop an articulation. The skill sets and the software are the same, regardless of where you are; you’re still dealing with Microsoft and Apple,” he said.

“I proposed a tactical project that we could do ourselves, regardless of whether we got external funding,” said Roberson, whose office is filled with portraits he has painted in styles from that of Rembrandt to stark realism.

Faculty from the three Danish institutes—Neilsbrock Copenhagen Business College, Odense Technical College, and Tietgen Business College—visited Howard and jointly worked out the articulation agreement so that Danish students could spend their third semester in Howard and U.S. Information Technology (IT) majors could spend a semester in Denmark, where IT courses are routinely taught in English. 

What do the Danes have to teach U.S. students headed toward careers as programmers?

“It was really happenstance, in all honesty, that this partnership was with Denmark,” Roberson said. “The fact is, though, that the year that their minister of education visited our campus, their business and technical school system won the prize as the best in the European Union. I was very curious how it was [that] they were organizing their programs. We have learned quite a bit from our collaboration. They design programs very differently. They have a holistic design. We offer a menu list and students pick from that menu. Their holistic approach was very interesting to us, the fact that they taught business and marketing and entrepreneurship as part of their IT programs. What IT program in the United States does that?” 

Long-term internships were also built into the Danish regimen, so that after a year of classes, all students spent an entire semester working in industry before returning for another semester of coursework. “They really are very connected with the industry. They learn not only the abstractions of the education program, but they actually understand how it works in the real world,” said Roberson. 

“The fruits are really just beginning for us. We sent our first student over last fall; they have sent seven so far,” he said. The Howard student, with support from the community college, studied multimedia design in Odense—birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen, two hours by train from Copenhagen—and “had a wonderful experience.” The Danish exchange students, meanwhile, who had been taking English since elementary school, all placed into college-level English at Howard and excelled in their studies here. The community college, which has no dorms, rented an apartment for these exchange students.  “For the Danes, this is nothing special. They have many of these agreements with many different countries. The students have a lot of choices. We represent another choice for their students,” said Roberson.

Consortium Teams with Turkish Technical Colleges

In consortium with Delaware Technical & Community College and Northampton College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Howard is now attempting to forge an extensive partnership with technical colleges across Turkey. Howard will be lending its expertise in preparing English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers as well as in teaching computer sciences, while Delaware Tech and Northampton will impart their expertise in other areas. Vice President of Student Services Kathleen Hetherington and ESL Director Jean Svacina made an exploratory trip to Greece and Turkey in 2002 under the auspices of Community Colleges for International Development. Rebecca Price, the ESL program administrator, was headed to Turkey this spring along with a team of Howard administrators to work out the details and to gauge whether the Turkish computer science students were ready for English-language instruction at Howard after a year of studies at their home institutions. Howard also was sending four students and a faculty member to study in Ankara in June 2005. 

The English skills of the Turkish students are not as advanced as those of the students in Denmark. Price, whose ESL program has won both state and national awards, said, “They may need to do a semester here in our language institute, or we may have to go train their teachers so that the instruction they get in English is better before they come here.”

“The Turkish government is totally committed to this. This is not just a couple of schools. If it works, this will be a program available to all two-year schools in Turkey,” she added. 

Working with Local Business and Industry

The Howard Division of Continuing Education & Workforce Development has a long history of responsiveness to the needs of Maryland businesses. Patricia M. Keeton, executive director of workforce development, said, “Many Howard County companies are trying to internationalize their business. We have a contract right now with a local company to train 25 Kuwaitis in fundamentals of electronics this summer in order to help that company then teach them how to use their equipment. We’re able to assist businesses in translation efforts, we’re able to help them train employees who speak English as a second language.” 

Minah Woo, a program counselor in the English Language Institute (ELI), said one reason its enrollments have grown is that “we have four levels of classes and a variety of classes at each level. We’ve established ELI custom class options. The student who won the scholarship to art school was taking nine credits of ELI and three credits of art class.” Some institute students bound for U.S. graduate or professional schools come to Howard’s ELI after  scoring over 600 on the Test of English as a Foreign Language.  

“Students come and say, ‘I have a real need in public speaking.’ Others say, “I can speak fine, but they don’t understand my pronunciation,’ or they come and say, ‘I need to do more professional writing.’ They can come here and take the classes they need, whereas other institutes basically have morning writing and grammar and afternoon reading and conversation.”

JoAnn D. Hawkins, associate vice president of the Division of Continuing Education & Workforce Development, said tool manufacturer Black & Decker is sending executives to Chinese classes at Howard so they can communicate with employees at a plant in Soochow, China. “They found that when they went over, even though they had translators with them” some of what they said was lost in translation. Her division also is set to help a company that trains firefighters for Malaysia produce the country’s first emergency medical technicians. That would involve sending two Howard instructors to Malaysia for five weeks over the summer, then hosting a dozen or more trainees here for five more weeks.

Hawkins, who used to lead study trips to Europe and Asia that the college organized for community members, said the spirit of cooperation between the credit and noncredit sides at Howard is unusual. “We don’t have silos. Whoever can do a program best does it,” she said.

Vladimir Marinich, a Howard history professor, and his wife Barbara Livieratos, the associate director of research, regularly take students and other community members on a study trip to Russia that is built around a cruise on the Volga between Moscow and St. Petersburg. They have devoted profits from the trip to a study abroad scholarship fund and have raised $40,000 on four trips since 2000. Kristy Herod, 25, won a $3,200 scholarship that paid for her trip to Russia. The Hawaiian-born Herod, now pursuing her bachelor’s degree at the University of Maryland, said, “There’s nothing better than actually being able to say, ‘Well, I read this in a book, but this is where it happened and here I am.”

Scholarship Students Are Looking for International Experience

The Rouse Scholars Program—named after the founder of Columbia—has long been a source of pride for Howard. Barbara Greenfeld, director of admissions and advising, said the selective admissions program “is unique among community colleges across the nation.” It was begun 13 years ago and its reach has been extended by a partnership with Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, that allows Rouse scholars to go on Dickinson summer study abroad programs. Dickinson, which was featured in the NAFSA’s Internationalizing the Campus 2003 report, runs 35 study abroad programs in 22 countries on six continents. Patrick Ginssinger, a 2003 Howard graduate, went on an archaeological dig in Scotland with students from Dickinson and the University of Durham. Hafsa Bora ’05, who went to Dickinson’s center in Bologna, Italy, in summer 2004, said, “I loved everything about my … summer study abroad experience. I learned so much and can hardly wait to return.” Other Rouse scholars have studied in London and Hong Kong, in some cases with tuition waivers or reductions. Howard also has formed a study abroad partnership with the College of Notre Dame of Maryland.

Greenfeld said Howard regularly asks its Rouse scholars what they were looking for in a college. In recent years, the answers were clear. “They want housing and they want an international travel experience, and they want to know how we’re going to provide that for them,” she said.

Providing the Encouragement and Support for International Programs

Howard is considering building its first dorms not just to keep attracting top caliber local students, but to make it even more  inviting for international students. The lack of dormitories has been an obstacle the college has had to overcome in forging partnerships, both with the Danish colleges and a new arrangement with Soochow University in Suzhou, China. But Howard hasn’t let that curb its momentum.

There’s a lesson in that for other colleges, said Kate Hetherington, who is herself a graduate of and former administrator at the Community College of Philadelphia (also featured in Internationalizing the Campus 2003). Obstacles can be overcome. “Opportunities do show up at your doorstep, and when they do, it’s a matter of saying, ‘Let’s give this a try,’ rather than, ‘No, we don’t have housing,’ rather than looking at all the nos,” said Hetherington. “There’s been a lot of freedom [at Howard] for people to explore ideas around the theme of global education….Essentially we’ve asked people to let their creative juices flow and given them the freedom and support to go ahead.”

Building Connections with China

Roberson traveled to China in 2004 in quest of new partners. When Duncan was president of SUNY Delhi, her hospitality program exchanged students and faculty each year with a partner in China. As the president said of her receptiveness to creating study abroad opportunities at Howard, “It’s hard working in China, but I couldn’t believe that this community wouldn’t want that experience for their children.”

Qing Qing Li, a professor of English at Tianjin University of Commerce in China, spent a year at SUNY Delhi teaching Chinese culture classes a decade ago, and President Duncan invited her to reprise that role at Howard this past year. Li, whose education was disrupted by the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s, said she has gained insights at Howard that will help her students back in Tianjin. She is auditing Helen Mitchell’s “Religions of the World” course and deepening her knowledge of  Western culture.

“I grew up in the ’60s and 70s in a kind of culture vacuum. I did not really know much about my own culture,” said Li, who demonstrated the art of Chinese calligraphy as part of Howard’s World Languages Day. “My education was like everyone else’s. We didn’t study the normal courses; we were doing the political things. We spent a lot of time in the countryside and in the factory to be reformed.” It was only “after I learned English [that] I realized that Chinese, my own culture, was just as important. So this coming to America to teach about Chinese culture is really my journey to return to my roots,” Li said.

Roberson has arranged to send a group of Chinese language students to a summer immersion program at Soochow University in Suzhou, China, in 2006. That partnership grew out of an American Association of Community Colleges conference that he attended in 2004, where he made contact with three institutions interested in opening their doors to U.S. students. Soochow offered the best deal—tuition and room and board for a month for just $750—and Roberson returned to China this spring to finalize the arrangement. A new community college in Shanghai is hoping to form a partnership with Howard’s English Language Institute and develop an international business and marketing course that Howard could cosponsor in Shanghai. Again, as he did in Denmark, Roberson looked for ties that were practical and that two institutions 7,400 miles apart could manage on their own. “You don’t want to go to China without knowing what you’re doing because you can do a lot of toasting and bowing and come back with nothing,”  he said.

Countering Trends: Growth in ESL

Howard’s English Language Institute has grown in the past four years even as similar programs on many U.S. campuses have seen enrollments slump due to visa restrictions and increased competition from other English-speaking countries. The English Language Institute started with six students in 2001; this year it enrolled 90, including 77 international students on F-1 visas and 13 permanent residents. The intensive instruction—typically 18–20 hours per week—is geared for those interested in boosting their English proficiency as rapidly as possible. The institute can custom-tailor courses to a student’s particular interests and needs, as it did for June Eun Song, an aspiring artist from Korea, who after three semesters at the institute won a $30,000 scholarship to the Cleveland Institute of Art.

The institute is just one part of Howard’s large, robust English as a Second Language program, which enrolls 1,400 non-native speakers—mostly permanent residents of Howard County who are part of a growing population of immigrants from Korea, Latin America, and other parts of the world—in noncredit courses, and 400 others taking the same classes for academic credit. The noncredit and credit work closely together with a wide range of students who need better English skills, from professionals with advanced degrees to blue-collar workers. Some students are readying themselves to matriculate at Howard or four-year colleges; others already possess a college degree but are preparing for graduate school at Johns Hopkins University and other top institutions. 

An Action Plan for Continued Growth

Howard Community College’s internationalization proceeds apace on multiple fronts: a rapidly growing English Language Institute; more opportunities for students to study abroad and more teacher exchanges; support for faculty to deepen or develop international expertise; and an entrepreneurial continuing education division that casts a wide net for training opportunities. Its journey is far from complete. It is just beginning to consider how to implement the charge it received from a citizen’s Commission on the Future “to make a clear and visible strategic commitment to international/intercultural competence.” A Multicultural Plan Committee headed by Kate Hetherington has produced a blueprint that includes stepping up international requirements, more faculty exchanges, and, if and when dorms are built, expanding the Multicultural Center and opening a “world café” for people to  meet, eat, and exchange ideas and experiences. With Beckie Mihelcic phasing into retirement—she handled the international duties parttime in addition to teaching—Howard has hired as the first full-time director of international education George Barlos, an attorny who formerly directed international programming and study abroad at the University of Dayton and Tulane University. It also hired a fulltime assistant, Christele Cain, who holds twin degrees from Howard in graphic design and mass media  web production.

The origins of Colgate University’s elaborate array of off-campus study programs can be traced not to London or Paris or Venice but to Washington, D.C., where the liberal arts college dispatched a professor and handful of students during the Depression to see for themselves how President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal were reshaping the executive branch. The trip became a regular feature of Colgate’s political science program: while the Hamilton, New York, campus was still deep in winter’s grip, a faculty member would lead a contingent of juniors or seniors south to deepen their understanding of the U.S. system of government, often with Cabinet secretaries, leaders of Congress, and other senior officials serving as docents.

Education Abroad is Part of Colgate’s Character

Colgate  earned the distinction of becoming the first of many U.S. colleges and universities to offer a semester in Washington; the program observed its seventieth anniversary in 2005. The private undergraduate institution sitting squarely in the rural middle of New York State saw that this model of sending a professor and students away for 12 weeks to teach, study, and learn together could be applied equally well in more distant parts of the world. In the 1950s, a study group headed off to Argentina. Later came study groups to Europe and Asia. Today this modest-sized institution (enrollment: 2,750) offers up to a dozen Off-Campus Study Groups each semester around the globe, from London and Madrid to Chennai, India, and Wollongong, Australia. 

Ten percent of the 267-member Colgate faculty venture off campus each year with Study Groups or on briefer Extended Study Groups, which allow students to see the places they studied in Hamilton, from the back alleys and markets of modern Beijing to excavations in Rome and Pompeii. A Colgate professor teaches one or two courses to the study group, typically 14 students, and the students take two or three more at local universities or from scholars that Colgate engages locally. By the time they carry flaming torches around Taylor Lake on the night before graduation, upwards of 70 percent of Colgate’s seniors have had one or more international study experiences. The emphasis on the international is engrained deeply today in Colgate’s character.

The off-campus study groups represent “an incredible commitment by the faculty,” said President Rebecca Chopp, a religion and American culture scholar who has led Colgate since 2002. One hallmark of this type of liberal arts education is close faculty-student engagement, she said, “and there is no greater place for that than a study abroad program.”

“So many students come back intellectually alive in a way we have never seen,” said the  former provost at Emory University and dean of Yale Divinity School. Chopp knew before arriving in Hamilton that Colgate students studied abroad in large numbers, but had not realized “that so many went on Colgate’s own programs—and that so many faculty went with them.”

A Very Involved Faculty

“After spending my whole career in bigger places, I’m amazed at the kind of education students get here, the opportunities for interaction with faculty, and the way faculty think about the  students all the time,” said Chopp. It demonstrates that “our  faculty really understand that for the twenty-first century, we simply have to find ways to ensure that each student understands the world.

The Colgate approach also affords faculty many opportunities to become “truly global scholars,” she said. “I have long thought that getting faculty to live abroad is as important as getting students to live abroad.”

Nearly 250 Colgate students—mostly juniors—spent a semester abroad in 2004–2005, and almost half that number ventured out  in January or after the end of regular classes in May, to destinations that ranged from Mayan Mexico to Zambia to Hiroshima. One hundered others studied abroad on non-Colgate programs. A glance at the organizational chart for the Office of Study Groups/International Programs underscores how much Colgate relies on faculty for the success and breadth of its study abroad programs. The small office is led by Director of International Programs Kenneth J. Lewandoski, and Assistant Director Jennifer Durgin, who taught in Toulon, France, as a Fulbright scholar after graduating from Colgate in 2000. A study abroad adviser and a secretary round out the four-person Off-Campus Study staff.

Faculty members bear extensive responsibility for making these far-flung programs work, not only while abroad with the students, but also during preparations beforehand and follow-up afterwards with  students they mentored. With the exception of language instructors, most Colgate faculty who lead study groups are tenured; some are veterans of a half-dozen or more study groups, and there is usually no shortage of volunteers. Faculty invariably describe the experience as physically exhausting but intellectually invigorating, and students and alumni say that the bonds formed with professors and classmates while studying abroad were by far the strongest from their days at Colgate. 

Mary Acoymo, 20, a junior from Redondo Beach, California, who went on the London Study Group in Fall 2004, said, “We all became like a family abroad, although at the same time we definitely did grow independently. That was really nice—to feel taken care of, but also unleashed.”

Chopp said that when she visits alumni and asks with whom they stay connected at Colgate, they’ll respond, ‘Well, my four best friends are people I studied abroad with.’ Some more recent grads will say, ‘I married (someone) from my trip.’”

Strategic Thinking Yields Results

Match-making isn’t one of the purposes of Colgate’s Off-Campus Study, but study abroad is an integral part of the Colgate experience. Early in Chopp’s tenure the administration, faculty, and trustees mapped a strategic plan with three main goals:

•   To impart the classic liberal arts skills of communication and critical thinking in ways that reflect 21st-century challenges and opportunities; 
•  To multiply connections between faculty and students especially in joint research and scholarship; and 
•  To instill civic character building on Colgate’s strong sense of community, locally and globally.

Colgate received 8,000 applications—easily a record—for the  Class of 2009; it had to turn down almost three-quarters of them. Chopp believes the study abroad programs fueled the 22 percent spike in applications. “For many parents and students, the notion that you can actually go study with a Colgate professor in a way that will contribute to your major is very attractive,” she said.

International Student Population is Growing

More than 1,000 of those applications came from international students recruited by Colgate from around the globe through the generous provision of financial aid and scholarships. The contingent of international students on the Hamilton campus numbers more than 150; these students comprise 5 percent of enrollment, a 50 percent increase in five years. With room, board, and tuition at Colgate topping $41,000 a year and with a finite amount of financial aid, the competition among international students for a place in the freshman class is intense. 

 “They are incredible students and they are heavily invested in campus life,” said Senior Assistant Dean of Admissions Gregory B. Williams, who has made recruiting trips across Asia and other continents. The valedictorian and the salutatorian of the Class of 2004 were from Shanghai, China, and Sofia, Bulgaria, respectively. Kayoko Wakamatsu, an assistant dean of the college who advises international students, said, “We have an amazing number of students from Bangladesh and Bulgaria, and several from Nepal. We have students here who you might not suspect would want to come to farmland in the middle of New York.” The international students welcome the individualized attention they receive from faculty and administrators. “Students tell me repeatedly that they have opportunities here that they cannot imagine having elsewhere,” said the Japanese-born Wakamatsu, who was raised and educated in the United States.

An ‘Elegant and Elaborate’

Core Curriculum If a sense of remoteness provided early impetus for the pioneers of Colgate’s study groups, the faculty now is motivated more by a recognition of what Mary Ann Calo, associate dean of the faculty and professor of art, calls “the responsibility of educators to engage with the world.”

“We are in a somewhat isolated location, but we are definitely not a provincial faculty. It’s a very worldly group,” said Calo. “This enters our curriculum in ways that don’t necessarily require students to leave campus. We are encouraging them to think about the world here. We obviously encourage study abroad and have great participation, but we are also dealing here with a very dynamic curriculum intent on engaging with the world in a lot of ways, on a lot of levels.” Even those without a passport will “get at least some sense of culture, social systems, religion, and art outside the West,” Calo said.

The core curriculum, which dates back to 1928, is another signature feature of a Colgate education. It not only requires study of Western and non-Western civilization, but encourages interdisciplinary studies—an aspect that has made the faculty more international both in its research and its mien. Students can choose from nearly two dozen core courses in non-Western culture, from Core Mexico and Core Japan to the Black Diaspora to the Iroquois. (The core also requires several courses on Western civilization, the roots of modernity, and scientific perspective.) “It’s one of the most elegant and elaborate cores in the country,” said Jane Pinchin, former provost and dean of the faculty and professor of English since 1969. The emphasis on interdisciplinary study allows smaller departments from anthropology to classics to physics to hire more faculty than if their professors were teaching only in their field. “You can maintain goodly numbers who are teaching not only in their specialties but also in the core. It really develops a very international faculty,” said Pinchin, who served as interim president in 2001–2002.

A Campus with Personality Makes a Good Neighbor

“We talk about the Colgate DNA, that we have a real kind of personality,” said Chopp. “It  takes different shapes, forms, and sizes and colors”, but there is a kind of extroverted, robust, [and] very, very curious personality. We have an incredible campus life built by the students largely, not by the staff. We attract lots of people who are athletic. It’s hard to walk on this [hilly] campus if you’re not into fitness. Some of that is the Division I [sports] program, which most of our peers do not have; some is an enormous outdoor education program and every club sport you could imagine. We just started a cricket team.”

 “We’re very good at building community,” said the president, who added with a smile, “In a rural context, students learn that skill whether they like it or not, because there is nothing else to do.” But Colgate takes community-building seriously, and the results can be seen clearly in Hamilton. The university engineered a $15 million redevelopment that breathed new life into the village a few years back. Colgate even moved its bookstore a mile off campus to anchor a cluster of shops thriving inside refurbished, red brick storefronts, overlooking the tangle of roads that converge on the quaint Village Green.

As a young sociology professor, Adam S. Weinberg, played an active role in the redevelopment process and in getting hundreds of students involved in service learning projects in Hamilton, across Madison County and beyond, including Utica, home to more than 10,000 Bosnian refugees. He helped students launch nonprofit organizations and microenterprises. “It was a fantastic time for somebody like me to be here,” he said. In 2001, Weinberg, now vice president and dean of the college, and three student activists formed the Center for Outreach, Volunteers and Education (COVE) to provide a permanent base of operations for Colgate’s service learning activities. 

“We don’t do community service at Colgate. COVE is our center for social entrepreneurship,” said Weinberg, who is responsible for all of the education and activities that take place outside the classroom. We’re interested in teams of students coming together and partnering with other people to solve problems, to make the world a better place.” The university gave COVE prime space and a fulltime staff on the first floor of East Hall, one of the oldest dormitories on campus. Weinberg also helped Adonal Foyle (the center for the Golden State Warriors of the National Basketball Association and a 1998 magna cum laude Colgate graduate) launch Democracy Matters, a national nonpartisan group that encourages young people to work to limit the influence of big money on politics.

Weinberg called Colgate, “a model for how you blur the lines between academics and student affairs.” Weinberg and his staff encourage students to talk “across difference” and work out disputes democratically, whether debating the volume of a roomate’s stereo or how to run one of the 130 student organizations on campus. They teach strategic planning to students in the Colgate’s themed housing units. The university also has purchased the houses of fraternities on campus with an eye toward exerting greater influence on that side of residential life. It was built spacious townhouses for groups of 12 to 16 students and gave room bid priority to those with a special theme or purpose for living together, including those coming back from study abroad. “We’ve purposely built the townhouses big enough so they can have parties and introduce other students to the music and culture” that became part of their lives, the dean said. “It’s our hope they will continue the conversations.”

 “A study group that comes back from India comes back fundamentally transformed. Those students come back thinking differently about themselves, about the liberal arts, about their relationship to the world around them. How do we capture all that energy and enthusiasm back on campus?” said the dean. “What happens on too many campuses is those kids come back changed, and then they isolate themselves and just wait until they graduate. We’ve worked very hard to make sure that doesn’t happen at Colgate,” Weinberg said. 

The COVE has helped returning students continue community service projects they began while on Extended Study trips to South Africa and the former Soviet republic of Georgia, and it arranges summer internships with nongovernmental organizations in developing nations. The debate team went to Malaysia last December to compete in the world championships, and the rugby team has toured Ireland and England. 

The COVE Model, “is important because it takes our intellectual capital as well as civic responsibility outside the classroom and the campus. Education was founded with three missions: research, teaching, and serving the public good. The COVE combines all three in a powerful way, “ Chopp said.

And that cricket team the president mentioned? It was started in large measure thanks to the passion for the sport that Christopher Burns ’05 of Silver Spring, Maryland, acquired while on a 2003 study group in Chennai, formerly known as Madras. Burns donated 200 pounds of cricket bats, balls, pads, and other gear to the university. Last summer Colgate built its first cricket pitch.

Looking Forward

A campus committee is exploring how to reach the 2003 strategic plan’s ambitious goals for further internationalization. No thought is being given to retrenchment. Dean of the College and Provost Lyle D. Roelofs, a physics professor who came to Hamilton in 2004 after two decades at Haverford College, said, “For this experience to have the maximum impact on Colgate students, we are constantly mindful of increasing the opportunities in the less well traveled parts of the world, not to the exclusion of the popular places to go.”

Roelofs notes that in his view, “an experience in London or even in Freiburg, Dijon, or  Venice doesn’t broaden the student as much as going to Zambia or Indonesia or some destination that has more of a Third World character.”

The major limitation on expanding the study groups, he said, “is the effort that it takes to get another really good experience up and running. We recently did this with a new environmental studies program at Wollongong University in Australia. It really takes a multi-year process before the faculty get it all figured out in such a way that they are comfortable doing it for the first time.” The real barrier, he said, is not money, but “the investment of faculty time—multiple trips back and forth, much conversation. We reject as many ideas as eventually work out.”

One strong possibility is that Colgate will create an Office of  International Affairs to bring its international programs and  activities under one roof and give them even higher prominence and support. “I think we are feeling stretched. We do think we ought to take some of the work [of the Off-Campus Study Groups] off the faculty,” said President Chopp. A unified Office of International Affairs also would help provide even more support for international students.

Colgate is also preparing to launch a major drive to raise several hundred million dollars to help meet its goals and keep providing the intensive educational experience that students, parents, and alumni have come to expect. “We’re a very ambitious school. The last building built cost $12 million, and we have $90 million worth of projects underway right now,” said Chopp.

The biggest project is a new library that will enhance Colgate’s capacity for distance education and connecting students and faculty with counterparts across the globe. Last spring, the debate coach arranged a debate between students in a German class in Hamilton and German students at the University of Freiburg. It was conducted live by video conferencing over the Internet.

Lewandoski, who has directed off-campus study and international programs since 1994, said that what distinguishes the Colgate study abroad programs is “their curricular fit.” But Colgate is open to exploring new models, especially to accommodate the growing student interest in internships and service opportunities overseas. It will explore having resident directors in some countries instead of rotating faculty in and out, and of making greater use of technology for distance education. While the semester-long study groups are the crown jewel of Colgate’s international programs, some of the recent extended study trips have stirred great interest and excitement, and attracted more diverse groups of students. “The trips to South Africa and Zimbabwe appeal to African-American students because it is an exploration of heritage,” said Lewandoski. “For all students, it’s a way to get their toe in the water. They may not want to go out of the country for four or five months, but they figure, ‘I can do anything for three to five weeks.’”

When John Crespi, an assistant professor of Chinese, took his “Chinese City: Living Beijing” class to the Chinese capital in May 2004, the university also sent a staff expert on multimedia technology, Ray Nardelli, who gave each of the 19 students video cameras, still cameras, and sound equipment to document their research projects on Beijing’s markets, traffic, fashion, cuisine, churches, and Tiananmen Square. They produced videos that may still be viewed on Colgate’s Web site. George Hudson, an English professor and student of Japanese culture who has led many study groups to London and Kyoto, teamed with Karen Harpp, assistant professor of geology, on an Extended Study trip to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 2003 for their interdisciplinary course on “The Advent of the Atomic Bomb.” Calo, the associate dean who chairs the panel that is examining ways to make Colgate even more international, said, “We have a newly invigorated peace studies program that is now going to be called Peace and Conflict Studies. The new director has a very broad vision of the importance of studying peace and conflict in the areas of the world where this conflict is actually taking place.”

Chopp said she never hears complaints from faculty about the burden of off-campus study, but they often ask, “Are these programs rigorous and are the students prepared enough? Are we going to the right places?”

So Colgate keeps pushing outward. Calo summed it up:  “We are already in a great position in terms of internationalization. But this is not an institution that accepts the status quo. The question is always: What else can we do? What are we not doing? How can we do this better?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Financial Aid Helps Campus Internationalize

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

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

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

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

UWC Students Serve as Catalysts

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

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

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

Perspectives on Issues Unlike Those From Inside the United States

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cotter Initiates the Move Toward Internationalization

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

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

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

The Goldfarb Center

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

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

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

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

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

Channeling Enthusiasm in Education Abroad

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

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

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

International Studies Benefits from Addition of More International Students

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

French Department Expands Focus

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

The ranks of French majors have swelled to 50.

A Diversity of Experience on a Small Campus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the canons of international education, one truth stands above all others: a college or university serious about educating students about the world must first educate its faculty. Few colleges have done this with more gusto than the University of Richmond, which since 1989 has used its own funds to send faculty on two- and three-week seminars to 26 countries on six continents, where typically they engage politicians, intellectuals, generals, artists, and ordinary folks in a whirlwind of visits to parliaments, campuses, museums, and other cultural sites.

“It really is a boot camp. We have a very strict schedule,” said Uliana F. Gabara, dean and Carole M. Weinstein Chair of International Education and impresario of the Faculty Seminars Abroad. “We spread our interest and exposure very broadly. We want to meet as many people as possible, not just academics, and to hear about all aspects of this place where we are.”

Going Beyond the Expected

Most seminars take Richmond faculty off the beaten track. In Turkey in 2005, they visited the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, but also held extended discussions with Turkish generals and university rectors about the role of the military and the place of Islam in the modern, secular Turkish state. When the Institute of International Education presented the first Andrew Heiskell Awards for Innovation in International Education in 2002, Richmond’s Faculty Seminar Abroad received a citation.

Gabara, a Russian literature scholar who was raised in Tashkent in the then–Soviet Union and in Poland, noted that several of the countries that she and her colleagues explored no longer exist, including Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia. [See table for full roster of seminars.]

“Some people have said, ‘Why can’t we go to France and Switzerland?’ My response has always been that these seminars go to places that are difficult to navigate on your own,” said Gabara, a Bennington graduate who came to Richmond to teach Russian in the mid-1980s and was quickly tapped to create and direct a new, centralized Office of International Education.

Faculty Development Increases International Perspectives

“It became clear that if one wanted to approach internationalization broadly across the disciplines, what we needed to do was start with the faculty,” the dean said. The seminars had a number of goals, including having faculty talk with each other across disciplines, take a fresh look at important world issues, and incorporate this new understanding into their teaching and research.

Richmond is a richly endowed private university with roots that date to 1830, when in its first incarnation it was a Baptist seminary for men. It became Richmond College in 1840. During the Civil War, Confederate soldiers used the college as a hospital, then federal troops turned the classrooms into a barracks. The college in 1914 found a spacious new home in the woods on Richmond’s West End on the site of an abandoned amusement park. Today 2,900 undergraduate and 550 graduate students attend classes on the picturesque, 350-acre campus. Some 542 students studied abroad in 2004-2005.

Even seasoned faculty travelers find that the seminars afford a special, intense opportunity to learn about other countries and cultures. Gabara, who has participated in 11 of the 13 seminars, said, “What I learn is just incomparable to what I or anyone would learn just by going to these places on our own.”

For Douglas A. Hicks, associate professor of leadership studies and religion and director of the Center for Civic Engagement, the opportunity to travel to India in 1999 after his first year on the faculty allowed him to realize a longtime ambition.

Hicks holds a divinity degree from Duke as well as a Ph.D. in religion, ethics, and economics from Harvard, where one of his doctoral advisers was Amartya Sen, the economist and Nobel Laureate noted for bringing ethical questions to the fore in policy debates about human development. Hicks’ research had taken him to several countries in Africa and Latin America, but never to his mentor’s homeland of India.

“I work on globalization and inequality and also religion and society. For all those issues, India is a major player,” said Hicks, who is also a Presbyterian minister. “I really needed to learn more about India on the ground, to take abstract ideas and make them real.”

“It was an overpowering experience. Indian culture in so many ways is the most colorful of any I’ve experienced,” said Hicks, a native of Indiana. “You had all the extremes: extreme wealth, extreme poverty, the smells, the colors, the rich cultural tradition, and the impoverished economic life. We saw everything from Calcutta streets flooded from sewage problems to the beauty of Darjeeling, Banaras, and the Taj Mahal.”

The trip directly influenced several courses Hicks teaches as well as a book he wrote on Religion and the Workplace. “I couldn’t possibly have written the section on India and religious diversity without this trip. My ‘Leadership and Religious Values’ course now has a section on India, and the ‘Ethics and Economics’ course I team teach had a special focus on India this semester,” Hicks said. “One of the student research projects was on prenatal sex selection,a terrible problem in India with the spread of cheap ultrasound technology and one of the pressing moral issues of our time.”

Sydney Watts, an associate professor of history and expert on eighteenth century France, knew when she came to Richmond in 1999 from Cornell University “that there was a lot of support here for research abroad, so I anticipated spending summers in the archives in France. But I didn’t learn of the faculty seminars until I started work.” Watts didn’t raise her hand for seminars in South Africa in 2000 or Australia and New Zealand in 2001, but she was ready when Gabara announced the 2002 seminar would go to Vietnam and Thailand.

Watts, who was born in Belgium (her parents worked for the U.S. Department of State) and spent several years living and working in France, said, “I felt I was pretty international when I arrived, but it wasn’t until traveling to Vietnam and Thailand that I realized how important it was for me to see a non-Western society, especially one with francophone roots and remnants of French culture, but very, very different” from France. Watts added, “That was my initial attraction to the seminar, to look at how French culture had influenced Vietnamese cuisine and identity.”

“I teach on the history of work,” said Watts, whose book, Meat Matters: Butchers, Politics and Market Culture in Eighteenth-Century Paris, came out in June 2006. “We talk a lot about industrialization and the effects on people when they see their world around them changing.” The journey to Vietnam gave the historian an opportunity to see this happening to a society “in real time.”

“I couldn’t substitute anything for that experience. It was such an instrumental part of my academic formation,” said Watts, who also got to ride an elephant with Gabara in Chiang Mai, Thailand, a city famed for its temples, silk, and handcrafts.

She and Gabara were surprised at how few French speakers they encountered in Vietnam, where French colonial rule ended half a century ago. “The markers in nonlinguistic terms were much stronger than the language because of the cuisine,” Gabara noted “The foods and architecture in Vietnam are still very strongly marked by (the French influence). It’s a complex way in which colonization survives even while the linguistic colonization disappears.”

“The fascinating thing for all 10 of us was that at no point did we encounter a moment of hostility or even crossed looks, even though this was (still) close to the end of the Vietnam war,” Gabara said.

The experience has left its mark on Watts both as a teacher and a mentor. Watts, who spent a year at Oxford while an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College, said, “Now when I advise students to go abroad I tend to push them away from studying at Oxford or St. Andrews and say, ‘Why don’t you think about someplace really different, where you are a minority, where you really are experiencing a totally different culture from your own?’”

A third of the Richmond faculty has gone on these seminars; some have gone on multiple trips. Participants do preparatory work during the semester before departure, with each making a presentation on that country or region from his or her disciplinary perspective. Afterwards, they write reports that Gabara posts on the OIP Web site.

With other demands on faculty time, it works out that most who want to go are welcome. “We’ve turned away very few people,” said Gabara. “But there’s still a great need to discover new territories and devote time to this kind of general education for faculty.”

The next seminar tentatively is set for China, South Korea, and Malaysia in 2007. Gabara said, “Asia doesn’t have enough play on this campus. Like most (U.S.) institutions, we still have the drag of a Eurocentric and U.S.-centered approach.”

An Intense 24/7 Experience

Gabara, president of the Association of International Education Administrators, does not scout the countries in advance. Instead, she relies on her extensive network of local contacts—including counterparts at universities and Fulbright commissions—to arrange what amounts to an academically oriented VIP tour.

The itineraries include famous sights. “We don’t cut out what some would sneeringly call the tourist stops. When we go to India, we don’t ignore the Taj Mahal, but we want to see it in context, with highly skilled colleagues as our guides,” she said.

Faculty members do not receive a stipend for going on the seminar, but all of their expenses are covered. Gabara estimates the value of each trip to be $5,000. Families are not invited. “That’s an absolute no-no because these seminars really are, in the popular parlance, 24/7. It’s a very intense experience,” said Gabara, who earned her Ph.D. in Russian literature at the University of Virginia after a master’s at the University of Warsaw.

For faculty, the seminars are not just about learning the history and mores of other countries, but developing deeper bonds with each other.

The 10 faculty who set off on a two-week trip to Turkey and Cyprus in May 2005 journeyed along the Silk Road from the Aegean coast to Kayseri, saw the rock and cave formations in Cappadocia, and the Greco-Roman ruins of Pergamon, Ephesus, and Hierapolis. 

As they stood in awe inside the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Joseph J. Essid, director of Richmond’s Writing Center, was unconvinced when the group’s thoroughly westernized guide said, “Organized religion is over.  It is dying here.” His eyes turned to a group of men praying nearby. “A few are now glaring at us,” he wrote. “Do these men understand our guide’s English? Or are they staring at foreigners who gawk at the majesty of the Ottoman era, who snap photos in one of their most venerable houses of worship?”

At a university, they found that women students—but not staff—now can wear the hijab on campus, but not in class. “This shift in Turkish policy, and polity, may seem fragile, but it seems just the sort of compromise about deeply divisive moral issues that a healthy democracy should make,” Essid wrote. Later he added, “The more we travel in Turkey…the more I realize that despite 80 years of secular government, daily devotion to Allah remains a powerful part of life.”

For Nuray Luk Grove, director of ESL Services, the seminar marked a return to the homeland she left six years earlier. Eager to share the “real” Turkey with her colleagues, she led them to her uncle’s house in a poor Ankara neighborhood—an uncle she intensely disliked as a girl for his religious zealotry. “His daughters had to wear the burqa; black and ugly. He was a scary man,” she wrote.

But now she saw him as an “almost saint-like” old man with “a beautiful smile, sad eyes, (and) kind heart” who gave each of them prayer beads that he had carved himself.

Mike Spear, a journalism faculty member who has participated in several seminars, summed up the importance of faculty seminars. “I cannot emphasize enough its value to the university, to the faculty members who participate, and to me,” he said. “It is a chance to further knowledge and get a close look at an area that involves scholarship within individual disciplines,” he said. “The chance to get away from books and meet source people in another country is both invigorating and enlightening. Just as important, it gives faculty members, who are often too busy on campus to get to know each other, a chance to get acquainted and swap ideas.”

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University of Richmond

Read more about University of Richmond

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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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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