Many liberal arts colleges and universities founded in colonial times and the century after U.S. independence jettisoned their founders’ religiosity, but not Earlham College. Earlham is the proud bearer of a Quaker heritage in Indiana that began after farmers who could no longer abide slavery migrated from North Carolina to the Northwest Territory in the early 1800s. Soon the Quaker population of Richmond, Indiana, rivaled Philadelphia’s. The Indiana Friends in 1847 established a boarding school that a dozen years later became Earlham College—named for the home of a prominent Quaker minister in England and pronounced with a silent h (like Durham).

Earlham is still imbued with Quakerism. The 100-member faculty makes decisions not by vote but by seeking consensus on issues small and large. Their biweekly meetings in unadorned Stout Meetinghouse are led not by the president or deans, but by a clerk of the faculty chosen by his or her peers. President Doug Bennett also presides over a Quaker seminary, the Earlham School of Religion. Upwards of a quarter of the faculty and 15 percent of the students are Quakers, although those are only estimates. Len Clark, provost and academic dean, once tried to count the Quakers on the faculty for the board of trustees. “But when you say, ‘Now, are you actually a Quaker?’ Quakers tend to answer not ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ but ‘Why would you want to know that?’” Clark said. “It’s sort of like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: The numbers change if you try to count them. I gave up.” 

A former president, Tom Jones, once described Earlham as “a cross between a Friends meeting and a scientific laboratory.” It sends graduates in large numbers on to Ph.D.s in biology, the life sciences, and sociology, as well as other fields. The number of languages it teaches is not extensive, but large numbers of students achieve proficiency in Spanish, French, German, or Japanese. It recently added classes in Arabic, and offers Latin and ancient Greek as well. Every student must demonstrate command of a second language as a prerequisite for graduation.

The newest major is Comparative Languages and Linguistics, requiring advanced study in at least two languages and study abroad. It is an institution engaged in what Bennett calls “a full court press on internationalization,” from the emphasis on study abroad to international material threaded throughout the curriculum. “It’s not just in the French department and the history department, it’s everywhere,” said Bennett.

Earlham boasts a daring array of semesterlong study abroad opportunities that entice most of the 1,200 undergraduates to other parts of the world. To this experience some students add a May term. Earlham offered a semester-long program in Jerusalem from 1982 to 2000, when strife in the Middle East and a State Department travel advisory forced it into hiatus; the college hopes to restart the program in Amman, Jordan. Civil unrest also forced Earlham to relocate a signature program from Kenya to Tanzania in 20032004. Other off-the-beaten-path study abroad choices include:

• Northern Ireland. An exploration of the long religious and social conflict in Northern Ireland. Students stay with families in Belfast and Derry and learn the history of “the Troubles” as well as the politics and culture of the six Ulster counties that remained under British rule when the Republic of Ireland gained independence in 1921.

• U.S.-Mexico Border. Students electing this program, located in the neighboring cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, are immersed in learning how such critical issues as immigration, free trade, human rights, and the environment play out in the border region. 

• South Asia. Launched in 2005, this ambitious program takes students to Chennai, India, and Kandy, Sri Lanka, to study economics, culture, and conflicts on the subcontinent. 

• Japan. Studies in Cross-Cultural Education (SICE) program sends students each fall to study Japanese at Iwate University in Morioka and assist in local middle and high school English classrooms. Upon graduation, many SICE students return to northern Japan as assistant English teachers. Earlham’s program served as a model for the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program. 

More than 70 percent of Earlham students study abroad. All must fulfill requirements in domestic and international diversity, and Earlham’s 45 majors and minors include more than a dozen interdisciplinary programs, from Peace and Global Studies to Latin American Studies to minors in Jewish Studies and in Quaker Studies.

Patricia Lamson, director of the International Programs Office, credits faculty curiosity with helping grow Earlham’s garden of international offerings. “They like to create and do with students, because we are a teaching college. Teaching is our priority,” said Lamson. A change in the academic calendar seven years ago left room for a mini-term in May. Faculty quickly realized they could take these classes overseas “and—boom!—just like that, it exploded,” she said. “They range from studying Papiamento in Curacao to weaving and arts in Turkey.” Her husband, Howard Lamson, a professor of Spanish, inaugurated Earlham’s semester-long study abroad program to Mexico back in 1972. Now the faculty couple take students each May to Cuautla, Mexico, for immersion classes at an Earlham-owned facility called Casa Sol. They also work with students who spend a semester there or in the border program.

Music professor Dan Graves was a junior faculty member when he showed up in Lamson’s office in 1987 and volunteered to lead the spring semester in London. “Patty laughed and said, ‘The waiting list is six years. But have a seat and tell me: If you could go anywhere in the world and lead a program, where would it be?’” recalled Graves. “I had never been out of the United States, but I’m a musician so I said, ‘I’d like to go to Vienna.’”

He led the first choral group to the Austrian capital in 1988 and has since taken Earlham’s sopranos, altos, and baritones half a dozen times to study German and sing in the city’s great cathedrals. “Why anybody would trust somebody who had spent the last 13 years teaching in a small high school in Connecticut to get something going in Vienna is beyond me. But there’s that kind of trust,” said Graves.

Earlham’s Kenya program was begun in 1978 by a couple in the biology department. Another faculty couple, Brent Smith—professor of biology—and Nancy Taylor—an assistant professor of art and reference librarian—inherited the mantle and have taken students to Kenya five times and to Tanzania once for full semesters. Smith also has led students to the Galapagos and Ecuador, and Taylor has taken a May class to Turkey to study weaving. Their two sons grew up accustomed to spending every third autumn in Africa. When the boys reached high school age, “I remember asking them, ‘Do you guys want to go back?’” Taylor said. “The answer was, ‘Oh, yeah. That’s what makes our family cool.’”

Sara Penhale, science librarian and associate professor of biology, is also a seasoned Africa hand, having led Earlham students to Kenya and Tanzania four times and organized multiple safaris for alumni and others. Her husband, Allan M. Winkler, a Distinguished Professor of History at Miami University in Ohio, chronicled in the March-April 2005 International Educator the experience of helping 11 Earlham students scale 19,340foot Mount Kilimanjaro in 2003. Penhale says that before embarking on her first Kenya trip, “I felt I could do it because Patty Lamson said, ‘Of  course you can do it.’… I love the way that office runs and their attitude. They are supportive and nonbureaucratic.”

Rajaram Krishnan, an associate professor of economics who specializes in development and the environment, signed up for a faculty development trip to Japan in 2001 funded by the Freeman Foundation. He recalls going to Chuck Yates (director of the Institute for Education on Japan) and expressing doubts that he would “do anything meaningful related to Japan in my professional life.’ And Chuck said, ‘Freeman has given us this grant to open people’s minds, so come along.’” Two years later, Krishnan put the experience to use in a new course on the political economy of South and Southeast Asia, and in 2005 inaugurated Earlham’s first study abroad semester to his native India.

Krishnan also directed the Kenya program in 2002. His interest in the environment made it a good fit, but the economist also felt like he was “following a template, because the Kenya program had been around for 25 years. There were things I would have done differently.” He once had counseled his wife Subha, a special education teacher, to stop talking about things she would do differently and become a principal herself. She did so with great success. “So the advice I gave my wife, I finally gave myself: If you think you’re all that bright, why don’t you put together a program of your own? It seemed to me the natural place to do that was South Asia,” the economist said.

Krishnan wanted his program open to all students. He also realized that to operate yearly, it could not depend on the availability or specialty of a single professor. “I wanted to make sure it was an Earlham program, and not a Rajaram program,” he said. He went through the course catalog and found 40 courses that could be taught at the women’s college in Chennai that serves as the program’s base, and he “roped in three colleagues willing to come along for the ride” and lead the program in subsequent years.

Bennett, a political philosopher, said the roots of Earlham’s internationalism stretch back more than a century, when Earlham graduates ventured out as teachers and missionaries to the Middle East and Japan. “We have been receiving students from the Friends School in Ramallah since the 19th century,” said Bennett. The college also has long ties to the Friends School in Tokyo. At the end of World War II, Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, who spent two years at Earlham before transferring to West Point, was serving as senior aide to General Douglas MacArthur. The story is told by Landrum Bolling, president emeritus of Earlham, that it was a conversation with the U.S. wife of the headmaster of the Friends School that convinced Fellers—and through him, MacArthur—that the United States should treat Emperor Hirohito with respect, not as a war criminal.

Earlham was one of several Midwest colleges that enrolled Japanese-American students during World War II who otherwise would have been interned with their families in camps in the Western United States. After the war, Earlham’s Quaker leaders “looked at one another and said, ‘Somebody has to start the work of reconciliation with Japan. Why shouldn’t it be Earlham?’” said Bennett. Its Japanese Studies program was built by the late Jackson H. Bailey, an alumnus and protégé of the famed Harvard scholar Edwin O. Reischauer. Reischauer journeyed monthly to Richmond to give a faculty seminar while Earlham set up its Asian studies program in the 1950s with support from the Ford Foundation. Earlham developed an exchange that still flourishes with Waseda University, a prestigious private institution in Tokyo.

Bolling, president from 1957 to 1973, remembers a conversation with Reischauer about whether Earlham could offer Japanese studies without teaching the language. “He said, ‘If you’re serious about this program, you have to teach the language. Just do it.’” Reischauer, who later served as ambassador to Japan during the Kennedy administration, confessed an ulterior motive: his Harvard program was losing half its graduate students because they could not master Japanese. It would be better for Harvard—and for East Asian scholarship—if Earlham helped promising students get a head start on the language. Earlham today offers nearly two dozen courses in its Japanese Studies major, and 15 more in its Japanese Language and Linguistics minor. It also runs student exchanges between Waseda and the 26 campuses belonging to the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) and the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM).

Bolling, the 93-year-old president emeritus and director at large for Mercy Corps, the international humanitarian agency, has been deeply involved in the search for peace in the Middle East for decades. During the Carter administration, he served as a back channel of communications with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Yasser Arafat years before the United States recognized the PLO.

The Organic Growth of Earlham’s International Side

“A lot of things have grown here not by plan, but by kind of organic logic,” said Bennett, a Quaker.  “The same spirit of exploration and commitment that led us into Japan has led us into lots of other places; not everywhere. But the organic quality of the growth of our international commitment means it’s deeper and sturdier than it might have been if it had been top down in response to some grand plan.” As an example of Earlham’s “organic” growth, consider how its international enrollments grew from 3 percent in 1997 to 10 percent by 2004. It did not happen by chance, but it did not happen by decree, either. 

Under the leadership of Jeff Rickey, the dean of admissions and financial aid, the admissions office began actively recruiting more international students. Senior Associate Dean Musa Khalidi was given a budget to travel around the world and entrusted to award as many halftuition scholarships as he saw fit to deserving international students, in addition to two full scholarships. 

“Ninety-eight percent of the international students receive financial aid,” said Khalidi, who graduated from Bethlehem University in the West Bank before earning a master’s degree from the University of Notre Dame. He laughed when asked if applicants are surprised to find a Palestinian Muslim in a senior admissions post at a Quaker college in Indiana.

“It really does not come as a shock to many people. With the way Quakers approach their day-to-day life and education, it’s a very, very normal and natural thing,” he said. “Students and families sometimes find it exciting to hear a different accent and find a different cultural and religious background in Richmond, Indiana.”

Khalidi met his future wife, Kelley LawsonKhalidi, the associate director of Earlham’s international programs office, when the Earlham alumna was leading the Jerusalem program in 1991 and he was teaching her students. She speaks Arabic, French, and Spanish, advises international students, and works closely with international faculty.

Both believe that personal attention is one reason international students are drawn to Earlham in growing numbers. “Some schools think it’s a matter of creating a financial aid policy, and when you implement that, you are going to find (more) international students coming to your institution. It’s really not that easy,” said Khalidi. “Kelley and I are on the phone on a daily basis talking about international students. International families appreciate knowing that there is a person they can call and say, ‘Can you tell me what’s happening with my daughter? I can tell she is homesick; she’s not happy.’

“And when they hear that Kelley has already met with their daughter, they really love that,” he said. “It pays off because if a family is happy, they are going to spread the word. …When they send their son or daughter to a place like Earlham, they don’t have many worries.”

Khalidi, director of international student admissions, makes a half-dozen recruiting trips a year. When he made a presentation on international students at a faculty retreat in August 2005, he received an ovation. “The clapping and the joy and the happiness would energize anybody” to recruit even harder, he said.

Khalidi has recruited several students from the global network of United World Colleges (UWC). They receive $10,000 scholarships from philanthropist Shelby Davis to attend Earlham. The 10 UWC campuses—two-year residential schools offering the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum—annually attract hundreds of outstanding students with demonstrated leadership skills from dozens of countries. One of the most impressive of the Davis Scholars is Jawad Sepehri Joya, who overcame polio, poverty, and the repressive Taliban regime to make a new life for himself in his native Kabul, Afghanistan.

Joya, 21, a sociology and anthropology major, was taken under wing by an Italian physician when Joya’s family brought him to a Red Cross rehabilitation facility in Kabul seeking a replacement for a broken wheelchair. The doctor recognized a spark in the boy and arranged for tutoring. Joya mastered not only languages but computer skills, and the Red Cross soon hired the 13-year-old to help with interpretation and to keep its computers running. He wound up at the United World College in Trieste, Italy, before choosing Earlham over several scholarship offers. 

The charismatic Joya these days bounds around campus in a motorized wheelchair. He has represented Earlham at the annual Japan-America Student Conference. Two U.S. senators offered him internships last summer, although his first trip home to Afghanistan in nearly four years forced Joya to postpone taking up that opportunity. Joya does see a stint in Washington, DC, in his future and proudly calls himself “the model of a global citizen.”

Earlham attracts more than the usual share of students determined to save the world. Many wind up pursuing service-oriented careers. John Howell, a Harvard-educated professor of physics, said, “I remember going to my 25th reunion [at Harvard] and hearing former classmates talk about the money they made in their law firm and how successful they were in whatever. Two weeks later there was an Earlham reunion and I was hearing students talk about the work they’d done in improving agriculture in Mali and Teach for America. It was such a different orientation of what constitutes success.”

‘The Ethos of Quakerism’

Loren Pope, author of Colleges That Change Lives: Forty Schools You Should Know About, once wrote about Earlham: “If every college and university sharpened young minds and consciences as effectively as Earlham does, this country would approach Utopia.”

Robert Johnstone, a professor of political science, said Earlham’s Quakerism differs from other colleges’ religious affiliations. “This is not a Baptist school in the sense that Baylor University is, it’s not an Ohio Wesleyan. But the ethos of Quakerism pervades the place, the emphasis on social justice, on conflict resolution, on simplicity. In so many ways, the spirit of Quakerism abides here and always has” even though most of the faculty are not Quakers, said Johnstone.

Earlham offers a major in Peace and Global Studies and a minor in Quaker studies. The chair of Peace and Global Studies, Caroline Higgins, recently found herself on conservative academic gadfly David Horowitz’s list of “the 101 most dangerous academics in America,” along with Noam Chomsky, Derrick Bell, Angela Davis, Bernardine Dohrn, and others. Horowitz told the Palladium-Item, Richmond’s newspaper, that Earlham needs a professor of military science to balance what students are taught in Higgins’ classes.

The Quaker school has no professor of military science, of course. Higgins is a diminutive 66year-old who led students to Argentina in May 2006 to visit factories occupied and run by workers and to spend three weeks in Rosario, described in a class flyer as “a city characterized by radical participatory democracy and civic education.” InsideHigherEd.com, an online daily, featured Higgins in a story about Horowitz’s book. She told Scott Jaschik, the editor, that there were only a small number of campuses where pacifist views like hers are tolerated. “If I’m dangerous, it’s because education is dangerous,” she added.

In an interview in her office, dominated by a flaming orange-and-red mural of mythological scenes painted by a Mexican artist during a year at Earlham as a Fulbright scholar, Higgins said that in her classes, “We talk not only about conflict but solutions. We look for places where things are going well, and we try to hold up examples of where peace works and violence doesn’t.”

One of her colleagues, Plowshare Professor of Peace Saoud El Mawla, got stuck in his homeland of Lebanon when war erupted in July 2006 between Hezbollah militants and Israel. El Mawla, who encountered prolonged difficulties securing a U.S. visa when Earlham hired him three years ago, had gone home to Beirut to visit family and renew his visa.

The Islamic civilization scholar told InsideHigherEd’s Jaschik in an interview by email, “This is my first war as a peace studies professor, but not as an activist and militant for peace and justice. … The war brings us to real life and puts us before the human sufferings, hopes and tears. We have to stay firm in our convictions, to spread hope, to build networks of solidarity and action trying to stop the war and to make peace. It is very, very hard but we cannot do anything else.”

Aletha Stahl, associate professor of French and Francophone Studies, helped establish a semester-long program in Martinique andhas led students to Haiti several times on May terms. She led 18 students to France in fall 2005 on a program that starts with language classes in Nantes, the port city in Brittany, then moves to the Pyrenees where students spend two weeks living and working with artisans before finishing the semester in Paris. Stahl said Earlham typically graduates three to five French majors a year.

A growing number of students are majoring in Comparative Languages and Linguistics. “We’re all finding that it’s harder even to remember who are ‘our’ majors,” said Kathleen Taylor, professor of Spanish and Hispanic Studies. “With all kinds of students interested (in languages) across majors, we don’t necessarily call them ours anymore.”

Taylor has led students to Curaçao twice, taught Papiamento during the regular term, and is preparing an online textbook of the language. When she started learning Papiamento herself, “I had no idea I would have any use for it.  It’s turned out to have a lot more than I expected. The first time I taught it I had 16 in the class, and nine went with me to Curaçao on the May term. Last year I had 26 in the class and 13 went on the May term.”

“One of the things that keeps us alive intellectually is that we keep opening new doors and exploring new things,” said Taylor, who has led Earlham’s semester program to central Mexico five times. “We are expert learners and that’s a good model for our students.” Welling Hall, professor of politics and international studies, said international students are drawn in large numbers to her international studies classes. Earlham offers scholarships to students from Seeds of Peace, a camp in Maine for teens from conflicted regions of the world, including the Middle East, the Balkans and Cyprus, and Earlham students often work there as counselors.

Hall advises the Model United Nations Club, which hosts a major competition each spring for high school students from across Indiana. Hall was skeptical when two international students approached her a few years back with the idea of having the high schoolers deal with a scenario in which a meteor had wiped out much of North America, with survivors’ forced to seek refuge in the southern hemisphere. They recruited an Earlham physics professor to lecture on meteor strikes, and the science fiction scenario for a futuristic U.N. was a big success.

Applications to Earlham have climbed, but increased selectivity carries a price. Clark, the provost, said, “Increasingly we’re having to turn away students that we are pretty sure would succeed and flourish there. We are still thinking through how to adjust to that.” 

Bennett notes with pride that one-fifth of Earlham students qualify for federal Pell Grants (the average family income for those need-based awards is $15,000). “We’re a higher-need student body than most of our competitors. We love that. The value added we do for the world is huge,” said Bennett.

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Earlham College

Read more about Earlham College

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reaching Out to International

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Not Fly the Freshman Class to London?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The First Year Study Abroad Experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Italy Preview  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bioko Biodiversity Protection 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International Peace and Conflict Resolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Majors Abroad Program

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Arcadia University

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

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

International Journey Begins

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

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

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

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

Increasing Mobility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Financial Challenges and Sustainability

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

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

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

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

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When U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings delivered the commencement speech at Miami Dade College in May 2008, she hailed the famous community college as “the largest and most diverse college in the nation—and probably in the world.” Miami Dade enrolled more than 58,000 students in fall 2007 and 32,000 other noncredit students. It awards more associate degrees than any other U .S . college and claims the largest enrollment of Hispanics and black students. It changed its name from Miami Dade Community College to Miami Dade College in 2003 when it began offering bachelor of education degrees.

Despite the switch, it remains primarily a community college. In 2007 it awarded 45 of those bachelor’s degrees—and 6,500 associate degrees. Spellings, who also received an honorary degree (as both President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush had before her), said in her address, “Everywhere I go, across our nation, and around the world, I meet people who are trying to achieve what this college has done and is doing. Last summer, your president Eduardo Padrón joined me on a delegation of university presidents to Latin America. We held up Miami Dade College as a model of how to help more people access a college education.” Padrón is a Miami Dade alumnus who emigrated from Cuba at the age of 15 in 1961, the year after Dade County Junior College opened on a World War II U.S. Naval air station north of Miami in quarters so modest that it earned the nickname “Chicken Coop College.” It was Florida’s first integrated community college and quickly grew to become the largest institution of higher education in the state.

Globally Themed Arts and Literature

Miami Dade says its mission “is to provide accessible, affordable, high quality education by keeping the learner’s needs at the center of decision-making and working in partnership with its dynamic, multicultural community.” It backs up those words with an array of activities that have both internationalized the curriculum and enriched the cultural life of perhaps the most international city in the United States. Padrón has personally played a large part in helping the institution fulfill this mission. He has been Miami Dade’s president since 1995 and before that led the downtown Wolfson campus for 15 years. At Wolfson, he played a pivotal role in the birth of the Miami Book Fair International, which brings hundreds of authors and attracts several hundred thousand visitors during its eight-day run each November, culminating with a colorful street fair on the Wolfson campus. More recently, Miami Dade became the principal sponsor of the Miami International Film Festival—11 days of film premieres, lectures, and red-carpet events that attract film directors and stars from Hollywood and around the world, with a special emphasis on the filmmakers of Spain and Latin America. It is the only major film festival affiliated with an institute of higher education.

Vivian Donnell Rodriguez, a veteran Miami arts administrator who became Miami Dade’s vice provost for Cultural Affairs in 2007, said, “It is second nature to all of us to create programs that are diverse, because that’s what our community is. They reflect the people that live here. These are our audiences. It’s a very natural result. You see it when you walk through the halls of our campuses and see the interchanges and hear the languages. This isn’t something that we have to go out of our way to do. It has to happen this way.”

Both the book fair and the film festival complement what the college calls its “living arts curriculum” of globally themed arts and literature programs, including master classes taught by visiting artists and opportunities for Miami Dade students to dance, sing, and perform on tours that in the last year alone took them to the Dominican Republic, Italy, Taiwan, and other distant stages. “We are very proud of our students, for they have demonstrated that higher education can be a model for international cooperation and understanding. Our academic excellence is rooted in our respect for the diverse origins and traditions of our students and faculty,” Padrón says. 

The Miami Book Fair International, which began as a two-day street fair in 1984 called “Books by the Bay,” has grown into the largest book fair in the country. Local booksellers and librarians conceived the fair as a way to convince publishers to send more authors on book tours to Miami. They approached Padrón and asked for his help. He liked the idea, having seen firsthand how book fairs had become “signature cultural events” in Barcelona, Spain, and Buenos Aires, Argentina. 

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Miami had nothing like it at the time. He agreed to put up $75,000 and host the book fair on the Wolfson campus. “It immediately touched a nerve in our community. Miami draws all kinds of events and conventions geared towards tourists, but this event was ‘for us, by us.’ The book fair is open to everyone and draws people from all walks of life, all united by the written word. People had been waiting for something like this,” said the president, an economist by training.

Today the book fair’s annual budget tops $1 million, with local governments, foundations, businesses, and other sponsors absorbing most costs, and 1,500 volunteers—mostly Miami Dade faculty, administrators, staff, and students—pitching in. Alina Interián, executive director of the college’s Florida Center for the Literary Arts and longtime book fair impresario, said, “We pride ourselves in having created a very successful formula that has been emulated by a number of communities around the United States.” Miami Dade runs ads for the event in Publisher’s Weekly and The New York Times Book Review. The literary lions who have read and lectured at Miami Dade during the fair include 11 Nobel Laureates (from Saul Bellow to Toni Morrison to Octavio Paz to Derek Walcott) and more than 50 Pulitzer Prize winners (from John Updike to Rita Dove to Miami’s own humorist, Dave Barry). While there is a modest admission charge ($5) to the colorful, three-day street fair at the end of the week-long celebration, all the author lectures are free. A parallel program in Spanish draws Ibero-American authors and poets from Latin America and Spain as well as Brazil, Portugal, and the Caribbean. “But the fair is hardly limited to these countries. Authors have traveled to the fair from Israel, Russia, Ireland, England, Italy, Canada, Nigeria, Congo, and more,” said Padrón. 

“Authors have traveled to the fair from Israel, Russia, Ireland, England, Italy, Canada, Nigeria, Congo, and more.”

Miami Dade stepped in to sponsor the glittering Miami International Film Festival (MIFF) in 2004 when Florida International University bowed out. The budget for the Miami International Film Festival tops $2 million, but the college has a gold-plated list of partners, American Airlines, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Miami Herald among them. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation also has put up three $25,000 prizes for the best films. Originally, the film festival was confined to the former Olympia Theater, a silent movie palace and vaudeville theater built in 1926 to look like a Moorish castle. Maurice Gusman, a business magnate and philanthropist, saved the theater from demolition and donated it to the city in 1975. It was restored and placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984 and has undergone further restorations in recent years as the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts. But MIFF has outgrown the Gusman. With 166 films from 54 countries, including 10 world premieres, movies were screened at seven venues around greater Miami and Miami Beach at the 10-day festival in March 2008. More than 75,000 people attended the screenings, talks, and related events in 2008. The film festival reflects the college’s commitment “to arts, to culture, and to the community,” said Vivian Donnell Rodriguez, the college’s vice provost for Cultural Affairs. “Obviously our mission is one of education, but we do that in a variety of ways, not only through classes and continuing education, but through all these cultural programs as well.”

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Extending Beyond the Campus

Miami Dade also imbues international arts into the curriculum through two complementary initiatives: the Cultura del Lobo Performance Series and the Center for Cultural Collaborations International. Cultura del Lobo, meaning Culture of the Wolf, was a play on the name of the downtown campus, Wolfson. It began in 1990 with the aim of bringing to campus “the newest, most-challenging performing art being created today with a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean and work that is reflective of our multi-ethnic community,” according to the college’s Cultural Affairs Department. The Center for Cultural Collaborations International was launched six years later to commission new works and support international artists who come to Miami for residencies during which they would create, perform, and teach master classes about their work, said Jennylin Duany, the center’s residency and education coordinator. An early grant from the Ford Foundation provided seed money for the center’s international initiatives. 

Each year more than 12,000 students and other Miami residents attend the more than 100 performances and master classes put on by the dancers, actors, and others artists that the college brings in. Latin and Caribbean arts and culture are richly represented, but so are other cultures and regions. Last season, among the featured artists were the Spanish Harlem Orchestra, the Urban Bush Women (from Brooklyn, New York) performing with Senegal’s all-male Compagnie Jant-Bi, and a dance troupe from Belgium, Compagnie Thor, making its American debut with a show called “D’Orient” choreographed by Thierry Smits that paid homage to the world of the Middle East. In all, 40 artists performed at venues across Dade County and held 150 master classes, taught both at Miami Dade College, its New World School of the Arts, and in local public schools. While the general public pays up to $52 for a seat at some of these concerts and performances, Miami Dade College students and staff pay only $5. Teatro Prometeo, founded in the early 1970s to preserve and promote Hispanic culture through theater, in 2006 became part of the Florida Center for the Literary Arts. It sent students to perform at Casa Teatro in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in December 2006. Miami Dade College students regularly perform on other international stages as well. In summer 2007 the Hard Bob Jazz Ensemble played at the Umbria Jazz Festival in Italy, while dancers from the New World School of the Arts performed in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

In recent years the college has been sending representatives of the Miami International Film Festival each summer to mount a four-day, abbreviated version of the festival in Latin America, drawing local filmmakers, professors, and students to the screenings and events. This year “MIFF Abroad,” as it is called, went to Mexico, and past programs have been held in Chile and Colombia.

Book Fair-Cum-Literary Festival

The 25th Miami Book Fair International, scheduled for the second week of November 2008, will be held on the Wolfson campus just in advance of International Education Week. Padrón sees the book fair as “an invaluable opportunity for our students. Many of the authors arrive prior to their presentation and stay afterward to attend classes and interact with students in an intimate setting. The book fair provides the authors’ books to the particular classes in advance, and the students prepare for their close encounter. The authors hold book signings, but you can also find them wandering around, enjoying the festival themselves. The whole campus and even the city becomes a classroom that week.”

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The president added, “Most of our students are the working poor, and they may not be aware of the reputations of many of the authors coming to the fair. But when an author visits their class, or when they attend a reading, their motivation skyrockets. Many students get involved as volunteers. Then there is the street fair, which is free for students, where they can bring their families and enjoy a relaxing day around the college. They get the sense that education is truly a lifelong process.”

Does Padrón see the literary festival as integral to Miami Dade’s educational mission or more as part of its civic duties? “Separating our civic and educational missions is a little difficult,” he replied. “We often talk about extending the classroom beyond the campus. We believe in the open door approach to education, and the book fair is an open invitation to everyone in the community to appreciate reading and writing. The book fair fits perfectly with our motto that ‘opportunity changes everything.’ We open the door to this opportunity.”

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In an era of tight budgets and diminished state support for higher education, there is a surprising optimism in the air at Colorado State University, perched in Fort Collins in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The faculty pulled in almost $300 million in research grants in 2007, up 11 percent in a year and up by almost half since Larry Edward Penley became president in 2003. CSU conducts extensive biomedical and energy research and is known for expertise on atmospheric science and water issues, not just for the citizens of Colorado but of the world. Across South Asia and the Middle East, government ministers in charge of water programs often have Colorado State diplomas on their walls.

That optimism is also due to the way that Penley, a former professor of management and business dean at Arizona State University, has gone about seeking new resources and opportunities for Colorado’s land grant university, which enrolled 24,000 students and had 1,450 faculty in 2006-07. As The Denver Post reported recently in a frontpage profile, Penley “is not often found at the state Capitol, beseeching legislators to provide more money.” Instead, he regularly turns up at business conferences on both coasts and at universities overseas, seeking to line up corporate investors and academic partners for Colorado State’s efforts to make and mine new discoveries in medicine, energy, and other fields. A clean, two-stroke engine developed by a Colorado State mechanical engineer has sharply cut pollution in three-wheeled Filipino taxis, and the technology is being used for clean cook stoves as well. The London-based Shell Foundation awarded a $25 million grant in 2007 to Envirofit International, a nonprofit spun off from Colorado State’s Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory, to design and market 10 million clean stoves to poor families in India and other developing countries.

Internationalization—A Key Part of the Plan

Penley, who earlier in his career taught in Mexico and Venezuela, has made internationalization a key part of Colorado State’s strategy to reinvent itself for the twenty-first century. The university and its board of governors adopted in February 2006 a 10-year plan, Setting the Standard for the 21st Century: Strategic Directions. One of its goals was to provide students “with distinctive international experiences and broaden their exposure to today’s global challenges.” It elaborated: “We must dramatically transform our international emphasis to prepare students for life in an increasingly interdependent world. This can be accomplished through an enhanced curriculum, international research and scholarship, institutional partnerships, the presence of more international scholars on campus, greater participation in study abroad programs, expanded area studies programs, and events with global themes.”

“Colorado State is developing research ‘superclusters’ that seek to speed breakthroughs from the academic world into the global marketplace.”

The strategic plan also set ambitious goals for increasing “research and discovery” and made the case that addressing “global problems” must be part of the mission for a land grant institution in this new century. It explained, “For more than 100 years, America’s public research universities have served as the engines of research and knowledge creation that addressed the great challenges facing society. It is almost impossible in today’s world to overstate the importance of the research enterprise to economic prosperity and the quality of life for Colorado, the nation, and the world. With one-third of its budget devoted to research, Colorado State values scholarly excellence, and strives to set the standard in research, scholarship, and creative artistry as it addresses global problems with the capacity of a model twenty-first century land grant institution.

The most obstinate problems, the plan noted, “are universal to humanity,” from poverty to disease to the fragility of the environment. In the true land-grant tradition, Colorado State is seeking not only new answers, but ways to bring solutions to market and into people’s everyday lives. In addition to promoting interdisciplinary work, Colorado State is developing research “superclusters” that seek to speed breakthroughs from the academic world into the global marketplace. It chose research on infectious diseases for the first supercluster, and made cancer research and clean energy its next two targets. The work of each supercluster is led not only by a chief scientist, but a business executive—a chief operating officer—tasked with finding ways to quickly bring breakthrough ideas to market. While technology transfer offices are ubiquitous at research universities, the supercluster approach weighs the market potential while the research is still going on. Colorado State also created for-profit businesses to capitalize on its work. 

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The strategic plan laid out benchmarks for further internationalization, including boosting the number of international students on campus by one-third to 1,100 by 2010 and expanding study abroad opportunities so that a quarter of all students by 2015 have an international learning experience. “New targets for international students will require strong international recruiting and base funding,” it said. “Greater participation by students will require connecting campus programs with complementary programs abroad and expanding number of destinations. . . . Possible needs include faculty hires, enhanced language offerings, enhanced library support, and support of university global events.” It also envisioned offering short courses, study trips, and other formats beyond semester credit programs.

The hiring of a prominent international educator from Harvard, James Cooney, as Colorado State’s associate provost for International Programs, also served notice of the university’s plans to raise its international profile and activities. At Harvard, Cooney was executive director of the Weather head Center for International Affairs and served as dean of international programs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. The political scientist also was the former chair of the Board of American Field Service Intercultural Programs, a former Fulbright scholar, and deputy director of the Aspen Institute Berlin. Cooney went to Austria as an AFS exchange student while attending high school in Indianapolis and after college taught English in Japan before getting his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In Colorado State he found an institution that not only shared his passion for international education, but was willing to put significant new resources behind the rhetoric. The strategic plan was all but complete when he arrived in January 2006. “The president said, ‘Jim, I want you to look at the final draft, and you’re one of the few who can still make changes,’” said Cooney. He made some additions, but found that Penley had already made certain that the final draft spoke to the importance of global issues in Colorado State’s work. “Then, as soon as the strategic plan was adopted, he said to me, ‘In the next six months I’d like to see a coherent internationalization plan from you.’”

A Distinctive International Niche

That led Cooney and his staff—the office staff increased from 20 to 26 since his arrival and the international affairs budget jumped 50 percent— to produce a 21-page CSU internationalization plan in October 2006 that mapped how Colorado State could carve a distinctive international niche. “Every major research university in the U.S. claims to be ‘internationalizing’ its campus, but few universities have a coherent approach to what this will involve,” the Cooney report said. It called for a more systematic approach to globalization and requested almost a half-million dollars in new funding to make that happen.

“In the twenty-first century,” it said, “land-grant universities operate in a global context, and they must evolve to serve as stewards for the well-being of the world’s population, reach out to all sectors of society at home and abroad, and make education an international experience.” It called for developing close partnerships with approximately 20 key universities, providing $80,000 in faculty development grants, and $50,000 for education abroad scholarships. It also envisioned establishing a steering committee for the internationalization plan composed of deans and vice provosts, and developing international studies into a formal major (225 students already concentrate in that area). 

The ambitious internationalization plan further galvanized faculty and senior administrators already excited about the possibilities in the strategic plan. Lou Swanson, vice provost for Outreach and Strategic Partnerships, said, “Jim has created great excitement with his internationalization plan. He’s got a terrific vision. He’s the right guy at the right time for our reengagement in international affairs.”

President Penley and Provost Tony Frank added $220,000 to the base budget of the Office for International Affairs (“that means you get to keep it,” said Cooney) and promised additional support for a campus-wide international colloquium in 2009. Some other items on the wish list, including a possible school of international affairs, may become part of a capital campaign.

Key Institutional Relationships and Partnerships

“What the president is trying to do is put Colorado State on the map as a university at the forefront of applied research (and) entrepreneurial approaches to utilizing our research,” said Cooney from his office in Laurel Hall, one of the nineteenth century buildings on Colorado State’s historic Oval.

Already things are moving fast. International field experiences—faculty-led, short-term trips— nearly tripled in the past year to 30 projects. The number of students participating has shot up to 250, several times that of previous levels. CSU already has forged partnerships with such institutions as the Nehru Advanced Research Center in India, China Agricultural University, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán in Mexico, University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and Saratov State University in Russia, and is exploring others. 

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“We are developing these thoughtfully,” Cooney explained. “A key institutional partner should represent an institution where we have at least three ongoing types of collaboration. So if we are working with the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, there will be some faculty working in biomedical engineering, some faculty in Antarctic research, since most of the expeditions get launched from there, and then some faculty in chemical engineering. It can build beyond that; there’s nothing restricted to three. But we’re trying to find connections where we can really say we are working at several different levels, and even if a certain professor retires or moves to a different institution, this partnership is likely to continue.”

These relationships are intended to go beyond the partnerships that exist on paper only. “Every campus suffers from this,” said Cooney. “You have faculty members who say, “I want to conclude an international memorandum of understanding with a researcher in Taiwan. I haven’t met him, but I had a good telephone conversation with him.’ Our job isn’t to say no, but we’re trying to set criteria for why some of the closer partners are more instrumental than others.” Cooney also convenes regular gatherings of faculty from widely varied fields to discuss their international projects and come up with ideas for novel collaborations, whether in the Netherlands or Saudi Arabia.

Global View of Land–Grant Mission

William Farland, vice president for research, arrived in Fort Collins in fall 2006 from a scientific career at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where he was the highest ranking career scientist and worked on numerous international health and environmental projects. When interviewing for the job, he recalls that he stressed “the importance of science for a purpose and the application of science for problem-solving. Now I feel like I was preaching to the choir because this place values these activities so highly.”

Reagan Waskom, director of the Colorado Water Institute, and his research team are thinking more and more globally these days. “The Colorado Water Institute is not just helping farmers grow beets in Colorado. We have a global view of what a land grant mission looks like,” he said.

“Colorado State is known worldwide for the application of water management in a stressed environment. In Colorado, we’re a storm or two away from drought every year. What we learn about water stress—whether it be irrigation management or urban water supply management or environmental services—is translatable to the other water-stressed environments of the world,” said Waskom. “We take Colorado issues and can apply them globally. And it’s a two-way process. We learn from them as well. We’re at the point in most of the world where the available fresh water resources have been developed. Now, rather than looking for new resources, we’re trying to figure out how to share existing ones.”

Internationalization at Colorado State University involves the integration of traditional goals of an international office with the research imperatives of a twenty-first century land-grant university. It has quickly become a priority both for the vice president for research and among faculty from a range of disciplines. “Stay tuned for the next phase of our plan. We are just getting started,” said Vice Provost Cooney.

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Colorado State University

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Preparing to celebrate its 150th anniversary in 2009, Valparaiso University can look back on three distinct epochs in an unusual history: its founding by Methodists in 1859 as Valparaiso Male and Female College, a pioneer of coeducation that lasted only a dozen years; revival as a teacher college and business school that billed itself as “the poor man’s Harvard,” and became one of the country’s largest universities before falling into bankruptcy after World War I; and its Phoenix-like rebirth in 1925 as an independent Lutheran university. The Rev. O.P. Kretzmann, president from 1940 to 1968, looms large over the university’s history. Kretzmann built the imposing Chapel of the Resurrection, more cathedral than chapel, with 98-foot-high stained glass windows that tower over the 320-acre campus. Valparaiso remains the thriving, faith-based institution that Kretzmann built, with nearly 3,000 undergraduates pursuing a mix of liberal arts and professional training in business, nursing, and engineering; 500 students attending the century-old School of Law; and 500 others pursuing graduate degrees.

Projects and Opportunities

Chroniclers may single out the past two decades as the start of another epoch, when Valparaiso faculty and students began venturing overseas on a scale like never before, especially to Asia. The Chinese government recently chose Valparaiso University as a home for one of the Confucius Institutes that promote and share Chinese language and culture with the world. Valparaiso, in a town of 31,000 near Chicago, is the only private, faith-based institution in the United States with a Confucius Institute. The others are located on the flagship campuses of major public universities or in major cities. “We wouldn’t have gotten to first base without phenomenal support from our Chinese friends in Hangzhou. They went to bat for us,” said outgoing President Alan F. Harre.

Early in Harre’s presidency, Valparaiso forged unusually strong ties with Hangzhou University (which later became part of Zhejiang University) and Zhejiang University of Technology in Hangzhou, the former dynastic capital. Over two decades Valpo has hosted more than 80 Chinese scholars, and sends Valpo students with a professor for a fall semester of study with other international students at Zhejiang University. A grant from the Freeman Foundation has enabled dozens of Valpo faculty members to learn first-hand about the dizzying changes China is experiencing and to develop courses across many disciplines on campus. Top students in the Chinese and Japanese Studies program do field research on a 10-day trip to Asia over spring break, then return to write a 25-page report as the capstone of the seminar. The students pay just $600—the program absorbs the rest of the costs. 

The Chinese and Japanese Studies program also arranges summer internships in China for Valpo undergraduates and graduate students, and the College of Business Administration conducts short summer trips to China for M.B.A. students. The new graduate programs of International Commerce and Policy, English Studies and Communication, and Information Technology are continuing to help boost Valparaiso’s international enrollments, which rose to 244 in 2008. A U.S. Department of Education grant helped Valpo launch annual summer advanced Chinese programs in China and offer a master of arts in Chinese Studies. By spending two summers in classes in Hangzhou and taking additional coursework in Indiana, even law students can earn the M.A.

Valparaiso’s vibrant music program has added traditional Chinese music to its repertoire. Dennis Friesen-Carper, the Redell Professor of Music and director of the Valparaiso University Symphony Orchestra, was resident conductor for the Zhejiang University Symphony during the fall 2005 semester he spent directing the VU Study Center in Hangzhou. His arrangement of “Confucian Ritual Music” based on an ancient melody was performed at the opening of Valparaiso’s Confucius Institute in February 2008. One colleague, Jeffrey Scott Doebler, director of music education and bands, recently led a northern Indiana band called Windiana on a two-week tour of China. A benefit concert in support of earthquake relief efforts in Sichuan Province attracted 15,000 spectators and was televised nationally. Another colleague, Jianyun Meng, former concert master for a provincial orchestra in China, was tapped to direct the new Confucius Institute.

“…it was the passion of individual faculty, not presidential directives, that drove things forward.”

There was serendipity to Valparaiso’s choice of partner institutions in China. Then-Indiana Gov. Robert Orr established a sister state relationship in 1987 with Zhejiang Province, and Valparaiso was invited to participate in the first state delegation. Hugh McGuigan, then-director of International Studies, went on that first state delegation in June 1988 and afterward urged Alan Harre, the new president, to go see the universities in Hangzhou for himself. Soon Chinese faculty were heading regularly to Indiana, Valpo students and professors were traveling the other way, and “things just began to multiply,” recalled Harre. And now there are partnerships with six more universities in China.

Still, it was the passion of individual faculty, not presidential directives, that drove things forward. East Asian historian Keith Schoppa successfully pushed for creation of the Chinese and Japanese Studies program. Political scientist Zhimin Lin came on board in 1990 and directed Valparaiso’s Hangzhou Study Center in 1994 and 1996. Lin, who now chairs the Chinese and Japanese Studies program and directs the Valparaiso University China Center, said, “We were one of the first to really start in China. We wanted to make it an integral part of our program and more than just trips.”

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Long Ties to Cambridge and Reutlingen

When the Valparaiso study centers in Cambridge, England, and Reutlingen, Germany, celebrated their 40th anniversaries in 2007, they calculated that more than 2,800 Valpo students had studied there over the years. A third Valpo study center in Puebla, Mexico, marked its silver anniversary that same year. 

“We’ve come a long way,” said Harre, an ordained Lutheran pastor who was, like Kretzmann, a formidable builder. The showcase Christopher Center for Library and Information Resources opened in 2004 at a cost of $33 million, and a new $74 million four-times-larger student union opens in 2009. In addition to a dining room, bookstore, 1,000-seat banquet hall, and space for more than 100 student organizations, it will have a suite for international and multicultural programs along what is certain to become one of the most heavily trafficked corridors on campus. The new union will bear Harre’s name. Mark A. Heckler, Valparaiso’s 18th president and Harre’s successor, has ties of his own to China. The former provost and vice chancellor of the University of Colorado-Denver once ran that institution’s dual-degree program with China Agricultural University in Beijing.

McGuigan, who retired this past summer after leading Valpo’s international efforts since 1986, calls the growth of international programs over this period “quite remarkable given the size of our school and our location. I think a lot of it is due to the quality of our services to the students, who really appreciate that family atmosphere, that personal touch. We can do recruiting trips, but students are the ones who spread the word. Word of mouth is golden.”

Lutheran Connections

For many years Valparaiso’s primary windows on the world came through its Lutheran connections, drawing faculty and students from afar to Indiana and producing graduates who headed off to do church work overseas. The theology department had an international cast through Lutheran ties to Germany. One professor was married to a niece of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor and theologian hanged by the Nazis for his part in the Resistance. The Chapel of the Resurrection, opened in 1959, prominently displays a “Cross of Nails” from England’s Coventry Cathedral and is part of a worldwide network that prays for peace. When the Luftwaffe leveled the medieval cathedral in 1940, Coventry’s pastor formed a makeshift cross from charred nails and wrote “Father forgive” on the walls of the ruined sanctuary. After the war the cathedral made crosses of nails for bombed churches in Dresden and other German cities.

The “real push for international programs” began in the past 20 years, said Humanities Professor Mel Piehl, dean of Christ College, the honors college. “The language departments made a quantum leap. The introduction of Chinese and Japanese served as a wider signal that we were reaching out beyond the cozy and comfortable.” Valparaiso draws students from 40 states, with the largest contingent from Indiana and surrounding Midwest states. Piehl, who was in the class of 1968, said “they have much greater sophistication, greater ambitions, wider world views” than the students of his era. Some things, however, have not changed. “Vocation and service are buzz words around here. We tend to get a lot of very bright students thinking of ways in which they can impact the world,” he added. Alumna Mary Burce Warlick, the top Russia expert on the National Security Council, was born in Papua, New Guinea to Lutheran missionaries. 

The university recently received its third FulbrightHays grant for an summer intensive language program in Hangzhou that draws students from across the United States. While Valpo students can study for a semester in Hangzhou with no prior knowledge of Mandarin, the summer students must already have mastered two years of the language. Zhimin Lin, a native of Shanghai, tells Valparaiso students that they can achieve fluency in Chinese as he did in English before coming to the United States for graduate studies at Princeton University and the University of Washington. “It’s not a question of skills. It’s not a question of ability. It’s a question of determination. That’s what we try to convince them,” he said.

One who showed that determination was Matt Cavin, of Roanoke, Virginia, who first visited China on a five-week summer study trip that Lin led in 2005. He switched majors to international business and economics and quickly mastered enough Chinese to spend a full semester at Zhejiang University. “That was a big jump for me,” said Cavin, the student body president in 2007-08 who expects to return to China some day as a business executive.

A Broader International Affairs Committee

Jon Kilpinen, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said much of the university’s international activities growth took place on an ad hoc basis. “We’re at a point now where it makes sense to take stock of what we’re doing,” he observed. It took an important step in that direction in 2007 when it reorganized the International Affairs Committee of faculty and administrators to ensure wider representation from Valparaiso’s other colleges. “For a long, long time, it was basically an arts and sciences committee,” said Kilpinen. 

Randa Duvick, an associate professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures who chairs the advisory panel, said, “There had been an international affairs committee forever, probably since the 1960s. But it had become clear that there were so many initiatives internationally (involving) so many different parts of the university that there needed to be” broader representation. The revitalized committee now includes faculty from each of the five undergraduate colleges— Arts and Sciences, Business Administration, Engineering, Nursing, and Christ College as well as Graduate Studies, School of Law, and Student Affairs.

The reorganization was precipitated by a growing realization that international activity was no longer confined to a few departments or programs on campus, said Kilpinen. “It’s not all China. We’ve got Engineers Without Borders (volunteering) in Africa and in Central America. We have a service learning project in Nicaragua and Costa Rica that’s engaged engineering and nursing, pre-med, international service, and education.” Valparaiso’s traditional two-week spring break allows professors and students to travel farther afield than a shorter break. “It’s not quite a mini-session, but it’s long enough that you can do something substantial,” he added.

Forty faculty and staff and four students traveled to India in March on a faculty development trip led by Associate Provost Renu Juneja and Moninder “Holly” Singh, director of International Students and Scholars. It was modeled after the Freeman Foundation-funded faculty development trips to China. The faculty prepared for the trip with monthly seminars and extensive readings that started in the fall. They met with Indian educators, alumni, parents, and prospective students. Provost Roy Austensen, who made the journey, said trips like this “pay off on several different levels. We were making connections with people in India. I’ve seen this happen with the China trips. You build into your own institution a cohort of people who have a significant knowledge of that country and that culture.”

The International Affairs Committee is considering “to what extent it makes sense to offer more short-term abroad experiences,” said Duvick, a professor of French. “We all know there are pros and cons. The pros are that you get some students to go who otherwise perhaps can’t fit it into their schedule or who have not found financial ways to (afford) a semester. The con is that it has to be more than just a glorified tour. It has to have some academic meat.”

The Valparaiso International Engineering Program (VIEP) produces graduates with both a bachelor of science degree in engineering and a major or minor in German. Taking five years instead of four, VIEP requires engineering majors to spend a full year in Germany, with one semester in Reutlingen followed by a salaried six-month coop placement at a German company or research laboratory. Students pay greatly reduced tuition during that final semester. The challenging program produced its first three graduates in 2007 and added three more in 2008. “We’re a fairly small College of Engineering. If we could get five students a year to do VIEP-German, we’d feel very successful,” said Eric Johnson, director of VIEP and an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. Valparaiso is expanding the VIEP model to France after Duvick recently finalized articulation agreements with a French engineering school as well as a business institution, allowing for two VIEP-French students in fall 2009. Johnson spent spring break in China, exploring the feasibility for a VIEP there.

When Thomas Boyt, a marketing expert with a degree in veterinary medicine, became dean of the College of Business Administration in 2004, he quickly heard from some of the first students enrolled in a new M.B.A. program that “the international focus wasn’t what it should be. We took a hard look and agreed with them.” They placed greater emphasis in the curriculum on international business, and Zhenhu Jin, a Shanghai-born finance professor on the faculty, led education tours and arranged summer internships in China for both M.B.A. students and undergraduate business majors. Now as many as 20 M.B.A. students head off to China each summer. “For some of our Indiana-born students, it is a life-changing experience,” said Boyt. “They see business in a different way. And because of Zhenhu Jin, we get in to see everything from the big American and Chinese firms to the little mom-and-pop businesses.”

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Language for Business Majors

Boyt also has internationalized the business curriculum even more strikingly by convincing the faculty to institute a language requirement for the 320 business majors. They now fulfill the same eight-credit language requirement as arts and science majors (Education and nursing do not require language classes). “There were lots of pressures not to do that, but I think it’s just critical,” said Boyt, who first proposed the unanimously endorsed change to the college’s Curriculum Committee. “From there, it went to the College of Business Administration faculty for a vote where it passed very easily. I then submitted it to the provost who approved it to be presented to the Educational Policy Committee, which is a university-wide committee. Once it passed there, it went to the Faculty Senate where it was also approved.” Now it is enshrined in Valparaiso’s general education requirements. More recently, Boyt won faculty approval to offer a “Business Spanish” certificate as an elective. Boyt said he constantly tells parents, “Don’t let your son or daughter graduate without an international experience or you’re setting them up for a competitive disadvantage.”

Associate Professor of Theology Nelly van DoornHarder, one of two world religion specialists on the faculty, is an authority on Islam. A Dutch national, she began her career directing a refugee agency in Cairo, Egypt, and later taught Islamic Studies at Duta Wacana Christian University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. A prolific scholar and popular lecturer, van Doorn-Harder said she always has waiting lists for her classes. 

“…as many as 20 M.B.A. students head off to China each summer. ‘For some of our Indiana-born students, it is a life-changing experience’…”

Townspeople, too, have exhibited a keen interest in learning from her about the Islamic world. Since September 11, “I think I’ve spoken in every church basement in Michiana,” she said, using the local portmanteau for the Indiana-Michigan border region. “The Kiwanis, the Rotary, the women’s clubs—everybody wanted to know about Islam. I found that very humbling because Americans try to understand even if they don’t understand at all. Most of these people have never traveled, have no idea about the rest of the world—but they try.”

Valparaiso is one of four U.S. campuses that houses an INTERLINK Language Center where international students can take Intensive English before matriculating. Freshman Polina Kogay, 19, of Almaty, Kazakhstan, followed that route. The Kazakh student won a national scholarship back home that pays the entire cost of her studies, including flights back and forth. “I choose the major and the country and they pick the school. They picked Valpo,” said Kogay, an electrical engineering major who arrived in Indiana in March 2007 and spent four months in INTERLINK classes. 

Another international student, Adam Rundh, 22, a native of Aalborg, Denmark, is a chiseled 240-pound defensive end on the Crusaders’ football team. Rundh is the only international player on the gridiron squad, but several Valparaiso basketball players are international. Rundh can always fall back on his education if he doesn’t make the NFL. The double-major in international business and finance has a 3.93 grade point average.

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The president of the Valparaiso International Student Association, senior Bala Srinivasan, was born in the United States, but grew up in Bangalore, India. Holly Singh met him on a recruiting trip, took an application on the spot, and soon was able to offer Srinivasan an academic scholarship. Srinivasan, 23, originally was drawn to Valparaiso by engineering but wound up as a computer science and business major. “Academically, it’s a great school. And they do a great job of getting people together and creating this kind of familytype atmosphere amongst international students and American students. There’s a lot of exchange of culture. You never feel alone here,” he said.

Valparaiso offers an unusual major called International Economics and Cultural Affairs (IECA) that marries language study with economics, history, geography, and political science. It was born in part from necessity in the early 1970s, when both economics and the language faculty were worried about declining enrollments, according to Professor of Political Science Albert Trost. “We’ve never had an international relations major. This took the place of that and stimulated a lot of interest,” said Trost, a 1963 alumnus who teaches courses on international relations and directed the Cambridge Study Center from 1975 to 1977. He also co-leads the week-long workshops for new faculty held in Cambridge at the end of their first year.

IECA is flourishing with 30 majors, who gathered one afternoon in March to prepare for a conflict resolution role-playing scenario led by George Lopez, a professor from the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Debra Ames, an associate professor who teaches Spanish and chairs IECA, said some of these majors likely will join the Peace Corps or enter other service professions after graduation. “We were real pioneers in linking the study of economics and foreign language,” she said.

The Valpo Core

Trost was instrumental a decade ago in the creation of the Valpo Core, an intense, interdisciplinary, twosemester, 10-credit course that all freshmen outside the honors college must take. The writing-intensive Valpo Core introduces freshmen to great writers of the world. “The reading list is multicultural and international because the world is multicultural and international,” the syllabus explains. Subtitled “The Human Experience,” the Core is organized thematically around the human life cycle and features units on Creation and Birth, Coming of Age, Citizenship, Work and Vocation, Love, and Loss and Death. Twenty students or fewer join with professors in exploring life’s big questions, reading important texts, writing personal narratives and essays, forging friendships, and attending cultural and other events outside of class. Despite skepticism at the start, the Core has proved an enduring hit and its director, English Professor John Ruff, even offers an elective version for seniors. 

To keep pace with growth in both international enrollments and its education abroad programs, Valparaiso recently named two alumni with deeply international backgrounds to share leadership of the Office of International Programs. Singh was promoted from associate director to director of International Students and Scholars, and Julie Maddox was named director of Study Abroad Programs. Maddox is returning to Valparaiso from Chicago. Maddox majored in French and International Economic and Cultural Affairs and spent semesters in Hangzhou and Reutlingen as an undergraduate. Her master’s degree is in international commerce and policy. 

Singh planned to become an engineer when he arrived at Valparaiso in 1991 as a freshman from India, but later switched to liberal studies and theology, then made a career working in international education alongside his former adviser, Hugh McGuigan. “My interest changed from just looking for a career to finding a meaning of life,” explained Singh.

That is the type of conversion that gladdens Alan Harre. “Our primary task, according to our mission statement, is to prepare our students for service to church and society,” said the retiring president. In his view, every U.S. university has an obligation to help citizens “become more globally responsive and sensitive. We’re not going to be able to function in the isolation we had many, many years ago.”

“And so when you take a place like this in the heart of the country, helping to try to provide that larger context, I see that as a tremendous blessing to not only northwest Indiana, but to the entire country,” he added.

It was no accident that the nineteenth century founders of Pittsburg, Kansas, chose a name that called to mind the much bigger and grander Pittsburgh (with an ‘h’) in Pennsylvania’s coal mining precincts. Little Pittsburg in the sunflower state’s southeast corner was awash in coal that drew miners from Italy and the Balkans. The railroads came, too, to ferry the ore to zinc smelters in nearby Joplin, Missouri . The Kansas legislature established the Auxiliary Manual Training Normal School in Pittsburg in 1903 to prepare industrial arts teachers . Soon that mission broadened . It became Kansas State Teachers College in 1923 and Pittsburg State University in 1977 . Its graduates include Debra Dene Barnes, the 1968 Miss America, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Tate, and H . Lee Scott, president and CEO of Wal-Mart . Its football team, nicknamed the Gorillas, has won three national championships and amassed the most wins in NCAA Division II history.

More importantly, today Pittsburg State University boasts more than 7,000 students and a reputation as a strong regional university with deep and growing international ties from Paraguay to Korea to Kazakhstan. The student body includes 490 international students, many on exchanges from partner universities around the world. Pitt State sends teams of business majors to Russia to teach high school and university students about ethics in free enterprise, and automotive technology students to Korea to compete—and win—in a “mini-Baja” dune buggy competition. Education majors hone their teaching skills in classrooms in Paraguay and Russia, and enterprising faculty have won several federal Title VI grants for a host of international business and education projects. “This didn’t happen overnight. This has been a long history of this institution,” said President Tom W. Bryant, still jet lagged from a spring journey to visit partner universities and forge new relationships in Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Bryant said the region’s rich ethnic heritage “may be one of the things that made all this possible. This little community reaches out its hands to the international students, and maybe it’s because they remember their grandparents coming over on the ships.”

Faculty Behind the Wheel

At a ceremony celebrating the 2008 Senator Paul Simon Award for Campus Internationalization, Steven Scott, provost and vice president for Academic Affairs said, “We owe this to the faculty—the faculty who serve on the International Council, the faculty who’ve had a commitment and a passion for international travel, international engagement, internationalizing the curriculum.”

One such faculty member, John Tsan-Hsiang Chen, joined the Department of Engineering Technology in 1981 and soon bore the title of assistant to the president for Chinese Affairs. Over the past 25 years, Chen has recruited and mentored hundreds of students from his native Taiwan, and from China as well, and helped cement ties with two dozen universities. Now honored with a scholarship for international students that bears his name, Chen remembers with a smile that on one of his first trips on the university’s behalf back to Taiwan, his department chairman docked him vacation time. In fall 2007, 80 of Pitt State’s international students came on exchanges, half from partner universities in Taiwan and China.

“We have the diversity most schools would pray and dream about. We’re on the
right path…”

“Life has become much easier” for the international faculty who followed Chen, said Anil Lal, an associate professor of economics who leads education abroad trips to his native India and recruits for the Kansas campus. Pitt State enrolled a record 53 students from India this past spring, and a half-dozen others took classes in its Intensive English Program. Lal said some of the growth is driven by “the internet phenomenon,” with students themselves spreading the word on the Indian equivalent of Facebook. “The students here say good things about this place and then others come,” said Lal. Director of International Affairs Chuck Olcese agreed that word-of-mouth “is the greatest recruiter of international students. Now you add this whole social networking on the internet and we don’t even know where our name is going out anymore.”

Lal was a civil servant in India and consultant for the World Bank before completing a doctorate in economics at Washington State University and joining Pitt State in 1995. He draws large audiences on Indian campuses by lecturing on development economics and offering general advice about studying in the United States. Only indirectly does he try to sell students on Pitt State. “If they feel I’m genuine and honest, they might come” or convince someone else to, he said. Lal’s personal connections have opened doors in India, and he hopes to develop those ties to the point that he can pass the recruiting duties on to someone else. “That’s my strategy,” he said. “One thing I learned in government is no one is indispensable.”

When University Professor of Finance Michael Muoghalu, the Nigerian-born director of the M.B.A. program at the Kelce College of Business, joined the faculty two decades ago, Pitt State enrolled more than 100 students from his home country. They came at government expense for degrees in Pitt State’s highly ranked technology program. Today only six Nigerian students attend Pitt State, but the M.B.A. program that Muoghalu runs draws students from around the world. “For some reason, I just fell in love with this place,” said the finance professor. “If you compare Pitt State to other schools this size, you can’t find one that is more international. It’s way ahead of the curve.” Half of the 140 students in Muoghalu’s M.B.A. program are international; they hail from 20 countries. “We have the diversity most schools would pray and dream about. We’re on the right path,” he said.

Professor of Management Choong Lee is a faculty dynamo who has helped forge deep ties with universities in his native Korea and, more recently, in central Asia. Having taught in Brazil, “Korea was not big enough for Choong,” said an admiring Peggy Snyder, dean of Continuing and Graduate Studies. Lee joined the faculty in 1989 after earning a B.S. in nuclear engineering at the prestigious Seoul National University in Korea, and completing two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. at the University of Iowa. Lee has won three consecutive Title VIb Business and International Education grants from the U.S. Department of Education—grants aimed at helping U.S. businesses become more globally competitive with university assistance—and is going for a fourth. He consults extensively in Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan and hopes to establish a Center for Central Asian Business and Research at Pitt State. “We developed the first sister-school relationship with the National University of Uzbekistan and also Kazakhstan,” said Lee, who said Pittsburg State is as well known as Harvard in parts of the region. Lee’s interest in central Asia was whetted by hearing U.S. officials emphasize the region’s strategic importance to world peace. 

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Multiple International Partnerships

Pitt State’s automotive technology program is ranked near the top nationally and its engineering technology graduates are prized by employers in the auto and aviation industries. The College of Technology, in a showcase, $28 million, 278,000-square foot Kansas Technology Center, is also one of the biggest draws for international students. Lee initiated a flourishing exchange of students and faculty with Gyeongsang National University (GNU) in Jinju, South Korea. In 2006 Pitt State sent three students for five months to GNU, where they tutored GNU students in English, then competed against teams from 80 Korean universities in a grueling “Mini-Baja” in a dune buggy-like vehicle they designed and built. Pitt State sent another team in 2007 for a month—returning with the championship trophy from the rugged race.

Cody Emmert, 22, of Seneca, Kansas, captained both teams. “If you told me when I was a freshman that I would be going to Korea for six months or be involved in an engineering competition internationally, I wouldn’t have believed it,” said Emmert. Students such as Emmert can command $60,000 starting salaries, said University Professor and Chairman of Technology Studies John Iley. Emmert is a car lover who expects his knowledge of Korea to be a major plus as he pursues a career in the increasingly international automotive industry.

Pittsburg State also has a rich relationship with Paraguay under a partnership inspired by President John F. Kennedy and his Alliance for Progress with Latin America. Kansas and Paraguay have collaborated on citizen exchanges since 1968, and the Kansas legislature allows Paraguayan students to pay in-state tuition. In 2007, Paraguayans comprised approximately 10 percent of the international students. “It’s a very good deal,” said Cecilia Crosa, 21, a junior from Asunción. Jazmin Ramirez, 24, a junior political science and international studies major, interrupted her six-year program in law at the National University in Asunción to obtain a Pittsburg State degree in political science and international studies. Ramirez, who interned for the United Nations office in her capital this past summer, believes the American education and degree will help her fulfill her goal of becoming an envoy for Paraguay.

Pitt State professors travel to that land-locked country to teach a series of four-week general education evening classes in English. In a year, students can earn 24 credits, transferable to Pitt State or other U.S. universities. University Professor of Social Science and Director of International Studies Paul Zagorski was one of several professors who traveled to South America in 1998 to see about expanding opportunities for study and research abroad. They got their warmest reception in Asunción, and that is where Pitt State planted its flag. The push in Paraguay was helped by the Title VI federal grants that Pittsburg State received to internationalize its faculty and curriculum. Alice Sagehorn, a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, was intrigued by the possibilities. She approached the dean of Arts and Sciences and said, “This is wonderful, but I noticed two things: there’s no one from the College of Education and no women on the committee.”

“He said, ‘You’re on the committee,’ and that’s how it started,” recalled the busy Sagehorn, who earned her master’s degree at Pitt State. After returning to join the faculty in 1992, it took the former elementary school teacher just seven semesters to complete a Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction at the University of Arkansas. Quickly Sagehorn became adept at securing large federal grants to expand the work of the College of Education, including one to train more Kansas teachers to teach English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) and another to bring teachers from China to teach Mandarin to children and teens in the Pittsburg public schools. She coordinated Pitt State’s education abroad activities for a year and became the founding director of the Pittsburg State University in Paraguay program in 2004. She has made 14 trips to Paraguay in the past eight years, including taking education majors every other summer to practice teach in an international school in Asunción. Sagehorn conceived the Pittsburg State in Paraguay program on a long flight home after overhearing a Paraguayan mother tell her college-age daughter that leaving home to study in the United States before turning 21 was out of the question. “I got to thinking: If we can’t bring the students to Pittsburg, how can we bring Pitt State to Paraguay?” Sagehorn said. The program attracts upwards of two dozen students each year, some of whom complete their undergraduate studies in Pittsburg like Cecilia Crosa and Jazmin Ramirez.

There is “very much a private college feel” to Pittsburg State, said Bruce Dallman, dean of the College of Technology. “The student-faculty interaction here is out of the ordinary, especially for a public institution.” Students, domestic and international, savor the attention. Ankit Jain, 22, a senior automotive engineering major from New Delhi, India, said it came as no surprise that Pitt State won the Senator Paul Simon Award. “They made a good choice. This is the second best in the whole U.S. for automotive engineering, and our university is improving day by day,” said Jain, president of the Indian Student Association.

Why Pitt State?

Semonti Sinharoy, 21, a senior from Calcutta, India, who double majored in plastics engineering and chemistry, said, “I came here for the plastics program. Basically, there are only three or four schools in the U.S. with a plastics program like this.” Coming from a city with 4.5 million people, Pittsburg (with 20,000) took some getting used to, Sinharoy said. But the town and the “continuous exchange of culture between the Americans and international students” grew on her. Sinharoy, headed next to Columbia University in New York for a master’s in engineering management, recently won an undergraduate research award from the Society of Plastics Engineers for helping recycle foams and plastics made from soybean oil.

Pittsburg State takes great pride in the Intensive English Program (IEP), staffed by seven full-time faculty…”

Sung Hwan Kim, 24, a junior accounting major from Seoul, Korea, first came to Pittsburg State on an exchange. “Now I’m paying tuition,” said Kim, who believes that finishing his degree in Kansas will provide a faster route into the accounting profession than if he had returned to a university back home. “I’m a little bit older than these [other students]. I served in the army for two years before coming here,” Kim said.

Xiao Wu, 22, who was born in Shanghai, China, but raised in Nagoya, Japan, first came to Pitt State for the noncredit Intensive English Program. He returned to enroll in electronics engineering technology, which involves extensive coursework in math and physics. Wu, the director of activities for the Chinese Student Association, said with a laugh that when he mentions his major, “people kind of want me to fix their computers. I can’t do that.” He expects to wind up in electronics, like his parents back in Nagoya.

A Variety of Program Opportunities

Pittsburg State takes great pride in the Intensive English Program (IEP), staffed by seven full-time faculty and directed by Christine Mekkaoui, a Peace Corps veteran fluent in Arabic, French, and Spanish. “Pitt State has been very supportive in keeping full-time faculty in the Intensive English Program. We don’t have graduate teaching assistants; we don’t have faculty wives. Everybody has a master’s degree in teaching English and is well qualified, and that makes a huge difference,” said Mekkaoui. The IEP had 77 students in fall 2007 and 68 for the spring semester. Traditionally most students have come from Asia, but Saudi Arabia has begun sending large contingents of late. Most stay at Pittsburg to pursue degrees, others use their English skills to win admission to other U.S. universities. “We’re able to take a personal interest in our students and help them with everything. We help them find places to live and, if they have a car accident, we’re dealing with the insurance company. We’re really here for them,” said Mekkaoui.

IEP occupies spacious offices in Whitesitt Hall, down the corridor from the flag-filled Office of International Programs & Services, where domestic students come to learn about study/ education abroad opportunities and international students come for academic advice as well as help with visas. Under Olcese, director of International Affairs since 1999, the office has been transformed into the hub for much of the international activities on campus. “Chuck has taken it to a different level,” said Mekkaoui. “He is more the international face, trying to involve the upper administration and the whole campus in making things international.” He heads a staff of six that includes a full-time study abroad coordinator—a position created in 2006 and held by Julia Helminiak. President Bryant observed, “We’ve got good leadership and staff over there.” He believes the next challenge for Pitt State is to convince more students to go abroad. More than 100 Pitt State students studied abroad in 2006-07—triple the number from seven years earlier—and others went overseas on service trips. Every student who studies abroad receives a university scholarship ranging from $200 to $1,000 to defray costs. In the past two years, 17 faculty have led students on 18 education abroad trips to 13 countries, including Korea, China, India, Paraguay and Brazil. 

Turkish-born Meltem Tugut entered Pitt State as a freshman in 2000, became president of the International Student Association, graduated summa cum laude, and later served as coordinator of international programs while completing the second of two master’s degrees in business. Tugut, who this fall started studying for a business doctorate at St. Louis University, said one of her favorite memories is International Recognition Night in October, when international students are honored by being called out onto the court during halftime of a women’s volleyball contest.

A service learning program called Students In Free Enterprise (SIFE) also turns Pitt State students into world travelers. SIFE, supported by a phalanx of U.S. and multinational corporations, sponsors competitions worldwide in which teams of students vie to demonstrate mastery of business skills and ethics. The 50-member SIFE chapter at Pitt State has traveled to Russia and Kazakhstan on several occasions. Rebecca Casey, interim chairperson of the Department of Accounting, has led three of those trips, including one in which her students brought along a video they made in Russian with Pitt State students’ role-playing a scenario about bribery in the workplace. The video ended with tax agents’ arresting the buyer and the business falling apart. “It really made them stop and think,” said Casey, an alumna. “I think we convinced a lot of them.” 

Both Bryant and Scott, the provost, are former deans of education who began their careers as high school teachers. Although their background was not in international education, “we value those experiences,” Scott said. Both have avidly supported the institution’s international undertakings and looked to create more opportunities for students, faculty, and administrators “to travel and learn about international issues,” said Scott. One of his first moves as provost was finding the resources that allowed the Office of International Programs to hire Helminiak as the campus’s first full-time study abroad coordinator. Scott recalled a meeting at the outset of the academic year where senior administrators and faculty discussed their international travel plans and agenda. “We didn’t have a globe, but it’s almost like you’ve got the whole world laid out in front of you,” said Scott. “We talked about India, China, Taiwan, Korea, Kazakhstan, Russia, and certainly about Paraguay, figuring out where we were going and who’s going to do this work. To think about a small community in southeast Kansas where that’s the perspective is pretty remarkable.”

The provost, an alumnus, believes one reason that Pitt State has carved out such a significant international profile is that the faculty aren’t territorial. “You’ve got these early adopters, these pioneers, that now have offspring taking their own trips. Somebody took Alice Sagehorn to Paraguay to begin with,” he said. “Part of our culture is this helping, helping, helping. It’s not about smugness or ‘I know more than you.’ It’s about, ‘If I know something and you’d like to know it or understand it, I’ll help you,’” said Scott. 

Pitt State also encourages the international interests of professors in a wide range of fields. Education Professor Dan Ferguson, whose field is recreational therapy, has led students to Romania to work in orphanages in the former communist country. Professor of Nursing Barbara McClaskey leads two trips over winter break to give nursing students an opportunity to volunteer in hospitals in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, across the Rio Grande River from El Paso, Texas. “It opens your eyes to see what they go through down there,” said senior Sarah Manthei, 22, of Shawnee, Kansas, who had a job waiting after graduation in the organ transplant unit at Saint Luke’s Hospital of Kansas City.

Raising Funds for More International Activities

The international office reports to Dean William Ivy, who oversees Enrollment Management and Student Success. Ivy came to Pitt State in 2007 from Oklahoma State University. “I kind of jumped on a moving train here,” Ivy said of Pitt State’s large international profile. He noted that at the annual international banquet, “six deans and three vice presidents show up for the dinner as well as the president. It’s quite impressive. The international students don’t have any questions that they’re important here and that people appreciate their being here.”

The lanky Bryant, a onetime college basketball player, will be retiring at the end of the 2008-09 after a decade as president. He completed one major fund-raising drive soon after becoming president and is nearing the finish line on a second that is seeking $120 million, including $2.5 million for international initiatives. That money would fund scholarships and incentives for faculty to internationalize their courses.

Five percent of undergraduates and 10 percent of graduate students are international. Bryant would gladly see that number increase. “We love the diversity. We need to do that for our students from here in the Midwest,” he said. Students from Crawford County and small towns “need to be able to compete in this global economy and be as marketable and as successful in that economy as we can make them. Why shouldn’t our kids have that opportunity?” 

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

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

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

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

Fulbright Factory

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grants to Develop International Courses

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unafraid of Learning Languages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Support for International Students

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Work of Many Colleges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Growing New Interest

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

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

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

A Half-Century of Study Abroad

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

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Multiple Function Partnerships

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

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

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

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

Managing Enrollments

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

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

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

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

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

Deans From Nigeria, Australia

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

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

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

Tolstoy, Gandhi Kin Connect in Urbana

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

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