Pacific Lutheran University’s mission statement fits this liberal arts institution as snugly as a glove: educating students “for lives of thoughtful inquiry, service, leadership, and care—for other persons, for their communities, and for the earth.” Fidelity to that call has led faculty and students on journeys far outside the wooded 146-acre campus in Tacoma, Washington, near the Puget Sound and Mount Rainier. Almost half its 3,350 undergraduates study abroad, many on three- and four-week courses during January. Twice Pacific Lutheran has pulled off the feat of holding classes simultaneously on all seven continents. 

That is thanks to one of the most popular “study away” courses—Pacific Lutheran’s preferred terminology—a sea voyage from Patagonia to Antarctica, tutored by Charles Bergman, an English professor with a passion for combining literary and environmental studies. He relishes being able to teach Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner while crossing “the Drake Passage as real albatrosses with 13-foot wingspans circle the boat.” For someone who has never seen an albatross, it may be hard to understand what’s at stake with killing one, Bergman said. “But when students are standing on deck in a storm, feeling awkward and ungainly and having to grab on because the waves are big and then an albatross for whom a hurricane is home cruises by gracefully and easily, their world gets realigned in a certain way.”

The course, called “Journey to the End of the Earth,” will be audited in January 2010 by President Loren Anderson, who will join two dozen students for part of the voyage. The course always maxes out on enrollment, despite the price tag of $9,600, double what most J-term courses cost. Other Lutes (what students call themselves) will be studying in Australia, China, Ecuador, England, Ireland, France, Germany, Greece, Martinique, Namibia, New Zealand, Norway, Tobago, Uganda, and the United Arab Emirates. Typically 400 students enroll in these J-term courses. In all, 43 percent of PLU students study abroad before graduating.

Many faculty have personal and professional ties to other lands. Almost two-thirds have lived, taught, or conducted research overseas, speak another language, or were born outside the United States. Provost Patricia O’Connell Killen says, “The opportunity to be involved in international education is a real recruitment tool. It’s part of what faculty like about coming to PLU.” 

Transformation From the Ground Up

Anderson, president since 1992, said, “PLU is a classic case of institutional transformation from the ground up,” starting with the creation of a Global Studies program in 1977. A $4 million gift from alumnus Peter Wang and Grace Wang allowed the university to open the Wang Center for International Programs, and a 2003 long-range plan called “PLU 2010” made international education a central focus.

Pacific Lutheran’s founders had roots in Norway. The institution is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Anderson believes his school’s religious message and mission resonate with the current generation of students. This year’s freshmen were “in fifth grade when 9/11 happened,” he said. “They’ve grown up and been shaped in a time when there’s an incredible sensitivity to the globe and to the fact that traditional borders and boundaries don’t mean much. They’re fearless about the world and ready to take it on.”

Gateway Sites

PLU operates semester-long education abroad programs at its “gateway” sites in China, Mexico, Norway, Trinidad & Tobago and an internship program in Namibia. Neal Sobania, executive director of the Wang Center, explained that a gateway “swings both ways. Our sense is that it’s not enough to send our students somewhere else. We want to have real interactions with people from these places and bring people from there back to our campus.” 

“... Our sense is that it’s not enough to send our students somewhere else. We want to have real interactions with people from these places and bring people from there back to our campus.”

It has done that most notably with Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, where it sends students each fall and has an on-site manager, Pang Lirong, who holds a master’s degree from PLU. Some 60 Sichuan faculty and staff have paid exchange visits to Tacoma over the past quarter century, and PLU has reciprocated by sending its faculty and students, including composers from its music department. After commencement last May, music Professor Greg Youtz led 64 students on a two-week concert tour that included performances at conservatories in Beijing, Xian, Shanghai, and Sichuan. A $700,000 grant from the Freeman Foundation to help bring Chinese language and studies into local schools helped PLU build this musical bridge to China. Youtz also has led study-tours to China for dozens of public school teachers. He and other faculty composers have had their music performed by orchestras in Sichuan, and PLU musicians have returned the favor by performing in Tacoma works by composers from Sichuan. “When I turned in my last passport, it had something like 19 Chinese visas,” said Youtz. His head “is constantly full of China.”

Ties with Trinidad & Tobago are such that Carnival, the pre-Lenten festival that is an important part of life across the Caribbean, is now a social and cultural highlight on the PLU campus. English Professor Barbara Temple-Thurston took the first students there in January 1993 and soon established a semester-long program with the University of the West Indies. Like PLU’s program in Chengdu, China, it draws students from other universities as well. Temple-Thurston, a native of South Africa, felt it was misleading for students to experience Trinidad only in the month of January when preparations for Carnival were at a fever pitch. “The students got this sense of this exotic place. They were leaving with a very skewed impression of the culture,” she said. A faculty committee already was looking for places to start a semester study away program, and  Temple-Thurston convinced them Trinidad &  Tobago was a perfect choice. She wanted students to “be there when things calm down to see what the culture is really like.” Several Trinidadian students now join the PLU students in their college classes, and the Ministry of Community Development, Culture, and Gender Affairs of Trinidad & Tobago and PLU split the costs of a full, four-year scholarship to bring a Trinidadian student to the Tacoma campus.

The first scholarship winner, Candice Hughes, set about launching PLU’s Carnival, majored in geosciences, spent a semester studying in Botswana, and wound up as class speaker at graduation in 2008. She now helps run PLU’s program in Trinidad until she begins graduate school. She told Scene, the university magazine, “I came in as a girl from Trinidad, and I’m leaving as a world citizen.” Kareen Ottley, a student following in her footsteps, said, “Traveling from Trinidad, this was such a far place to come. But I felt really comfortable here. People are very friendly, very welcoming. What I really liked is that at PLU the focus is beyond education. They want to create a well-rounded student interested in serving your community.”

Academic Ties to Namibia and Norway

Pacific Lutheran’s connections with Namibia run through Norway and their mutual interests in peace studies and work on democracy and development. Half of Namibia’s population is Lutheran, and Norway has long been a player on the world stage in peace and reconciliation efforts. Steinar Bryn, who helps promote interethnic dialogue in the Balkans, has taught at PLU and arranged for PLU students to intern in the Department of Dialogue and Peacebuilding at Nansenskolen (the Nansen Academy) in Lillehammer, Norway. 

Norway’s Hedmark University College, the University of Namibia, and Pacific Lutheran also exchange students and faculty and cooperate on peace and development projects. Pacific Lutheran, which enrolled 48 Norwegian students in 2008–09, sends students each fall to Hedmark for a semester, and places others in internships in Windhoek, Namibia, where they help patients with HIV/AIDS and tackle other projects. Sobania calls this “faith in action. The emphasis is on serving others and making a difference in the world.”

Weighing the Impact of Education Abroad

Pacific Lutheran has begun assessing the impact of its gateway programs by measuring changes in students’ knowledge of global issues, intercultural skills, cultural diversity, and commitment to citizenship. Sobania said the changes were significant among those who went on these programs. He next plans to study the impact of J-term courses on students’ attitudes and skills.

“I’m truly impressed by what you’re doing here. It is moving your ­students and our country in the direction we simply must go.”

There are other, less scientific ways to note these changes. Patricia Bieber, a program specialist at the Wang Center, said, “You see fewer white Tshirts with big writing on the front. They’ll come in wearing a new scarf or jacket, or something from an African nation or India. You watch them evolve.” Charry Bentson, assistant director of the Wang Center, recalling a student who was wary of leaving for a course in India, said, “We didn’t think we could get him on the plane.” He returned eager to undertake service work in India after graduation.

Returner Reflections Weave Strands Together

Pacific Lutheran alternates yearly between holding an international symposium on a major global topic and an event called World Conversations where faculty and students reflect on their experiences abroad. Former Vice President Walter Mondale, speaking at the first World Conversations in February 2007, said, “I’m truly impressed by what you’re doing here. It is moving your students and our country in the direction we simply must go.” The university also engages students in weekly discussion groups called Returner Reflections. Liz Pfaff, a junior majoring in Spanish and mathematics, who spent a J-term in Honduras and a semester in Oaxaca, Mexico, said the most important part of education abroad is “what you do when you get back.” Senior Troy Moore, a Spanish major who spent one semester in Granada, Spain, and a second in Chengdu, China, said, “I wouldn’t feel as much of a global citizen as I do now had I not come to this school” He signed up for AmeriCorps after graduation. Senior Zach Alger, a political science and Spanish major who did a J-term in South Africa and a semester in Granada, said, “You have to take the initiative to make it a valuable experience, to integrate it back into your life and make sure it wasn’t a fivemonth vacation.”

Krista Rajanen, who went to South Africa on a J-term and to Oaxaca for a full semester, signed on as a Sojourner Advocate after her return. That is one of four paid positions counseling peers about education abroad. Rajanen said, “I always tell students that the J-term experience can be equally as impactful as a semester. For me it certainly was, seeing the huge disparity and distance in South Africa between rich and poor.” Austin Goble, an economic major from Greeley, Colorado, who spent a semester in Ankara, Turkey, won a university grant to return there after graduation to research organic farming’s impact on rural village life. “When I came to PLU, global education wasn’t on my mind,” said Goble. “It was after my friends came back from studying abroad and I saw how they could tie things together with their class work that I really got an itch to go.”

Offering an ‘Engaged’ Experience

Many of Pacific Lutheran’s international students come to Tacoma on exchanges. Karl Stumo, vice president for admission and enrollment services, hopes to attract more for all four years. Half the international students in fall 2008 came from China and Norway. “We’d love to see that diversity increase,” said Stumo.

It is the combination of liberal arts and professional programs that draws both domestic and international students, said Stumo. “It’s a very engaged experience. We ask students to ask big questions: Who am I? What am I built to do? What are my God-given talents, and how can I apply them in the world?” The university launched an International Honors Program in 2007 that requires study of global issues from ancient to modern times on topics from war and peace to poverty to environmental sustainability.

President Anderson summed it up. “My feeling is that we’re embarked on a global journey here that cannot be detoured…. When I hear the rhetoric about tightening up on world trade and (not) shipping jobs overseas, that just isn’t going to happen. We’ve crossed the border into a new global era from which we cannot step back.” 

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

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

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

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

Experiencing a New Culture Alone

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

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

Pipeline to Vietnam

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

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

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

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

Spring Break in St. Petersburg, Russia

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

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

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

Preparing Students for Global Lives

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mixing Food and Languages

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

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

Faculty Engagement in International Programs

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

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

Resources the Only Impediment

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

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

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

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

Boston University (BU) is impossible to miss, perched alongside the Charles River in the city that dubs itself the Athens of America. Dorms and lecture halls stand sentry on Commonwealth, and the Boston T trolley doubles as the campus shuttle. Kenmore Square, the iridescent CITGO sign, and Fenway Park sit in BU’s backyard; the Prudential Tower looms in the distance. In this vibrant cityscape, this one-time Methodist seminary has blossomed into the fourth largest U.S. private university, with 30,000 students and a phalanx of graduate and professional programs. It enrolled more than 5,000 international students from 135 countries in 2008–09, and it operates one of the premiere education abroad programs, sending 1,500 BU undergraduates and 700 from other U.S. campuses to destinations around the globe for work and study.

BU has embarked on a 10-year, $1.8 billion drive to move higher in the academic rankings, and its 2007 strategic plan, Choosing to Be Great (www.bu.edu/president/strategicplan/choosing.shtml), makes building on BU’s international strengths a cornerstone of that strategy. While pledging to continue “our long and proud tradition of service-based and professional learning,” it emphasized that “the landscape for our students and programs is more than Boston; it is the world.” Already the percentage of international students in the freshman class has jumped from 7 to 11 percent, and President Robert Brown is aiming for 14 percent, which he says would give BU “basically a global student body.” 

Strategic Growth in Languages

Another impact can be seen in BU’s language programs, already the beneficiary of several of the 100 new faculty positions planned. Eighteen languages from Arabic to Korean are regularly taught, and BU’s African Studies Center, a Title VI national resource center and one of the nation’s oldest, provides instruction in half a dozen more. 

“Deans nowadays are running languages together into huge departments with all kinds of crazy combinations; BU is walking in the other direction.”

James McCann, an environmental historian who studies the nexus between maize and malaria, said its broad reach allows students to write dissertations in fields “all the way from geography to anthropology in different parts of Africa.”

Not every BU student must learn another language, although the large College of Arts and Sciences requires proficiency. Even without a blanket requirement, 9,000 students are studying languages. Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Virginia Sapiro said, “I’ve been working to expand the number of lesser taught strategic languages.” Already she’s hired new, tenure-track faculty for Turkish and Arabic, and Persian is next.

BU bifurcated an omnibus language unit into separate Departments of Romance Studies (French, Italian, and Spanish) and Modern Languages and Comparative Literatures (German, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese). Christopher Maurer, chair of the Department of Romance Studies, said, “Deans nowadays are running languages together into huge departments with all kinds of crazy combinations; BU is walking in the other direction.” William Waters, chair of modern languages, said, “They don’t have armies of students studying those (strategic) languages… but what you see in Dean Sapiro’s moves there is strategic thinking” about bolstering BU’s intellectual capacity in such areas as Muslim studies. A professor of French, Elizabeth Goldsmith, was tapped in 2008 to become full-time director of academic affairs for all BU education abroad programs, and BU also has created a new position of director of language programs. 

Full Semesters and Internships Overseas

Most BU students who study abroad go for a full semester. Open Doors 2008 ranked BU fourth among doctoral institutions in that category. More than 40 percent of undergraduates study abroad and Brown is aiming for 50 percent at an institution that once was primarily a commuter college. Internships are a signature of BU education abroad. With 4,000 active internship sources worldwide, the Division of International Programs boasts that it can personalize placements in fields ranging from the arts and journalism to business and psychology. Faculty love this. “If the students know there is a study abroad program, that draws them in like a vacuum cleaner,” said James Iffland, a professor of Spanish. He credits Urbain “Ben” De Winter, associate provost and head of the Division of International Programs, with being “an absolute dynamo” in developing opportunities for study and internships abroad. Eugenio Menegon, a professor of Chinese history, said, “If you find the right opportunity and provide just a little bit of faculty support, it’s amazing what the students can do. They take off.” 

Stepping Into ‘This Engaging World’

One signpost of BU’s passion for global education is that international relations is the largest major in the College of Arts and Sciences, drawing 1,100 of the 16,000 undergraduates. The international relations faculty includes former ambassadors, Foreign Service and military officers, as well as scholar Husain Haqqani, now on leave as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States. Erik Goldstein, the department chair, said the curriculum “offers a special blend of the academic and the practical applications of international affairs,” with more courses on intelligence and security issues than any university outside the war colleges, as well as dozens on the environment and development. 

“It is a department that really values teaching and understands we have a strong obligation to our students,” said William Grimes, associate chair of international relations and director of a new Center for the Study of Asia. The Asia center “gives us a seat at the table when it comes to talking about how to expand our faculty and curriculum.”

The popularity of international relations is no surprise, said Brown. BU students chose a university “that is big and complicated and right in the middle of a city. The world looks interesting to them. They’ve already taken one step into this engaging world.”

Educating Engineers and Pre-Meds Abroad

A decade-long push to encourage engineering students to pursue part of their education in other countries has resulted in almost 20 percent of engineers spending a semester studying overseas. Most head to Technische Universität Dresden, where they can take engineering courses taught in English while also enrolling in German language and cultural classes. The Dresden model proved such a good fit that BU now sends engineers to universities in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Guadalajara, Mexico, as well. In all, 55 engineers studied abroad last year, said Associate Dean for Undergraduate Engineering Solomon Eisenberg. 

Science majors also study at the Dresden technical institute, taking organic chemistry in a class of 25 instead of 200 back in Boston. The Dresden science program recently branched out to Grenoble, France, where BU premeds can immerse themselves in French culture (although again, the science courses are taught in English). “The sophomore year is ideal for this. The later you wait, the harder it is,” said Mort Hoffman, an emeritus professor of chemistry who helped establish the partnership with the Dresden university. 

A Foothold in the Middle East

BU began offering postgraduate degrees for dentists in Dubai in July 2008, and the School of Medicine has explored opening a branch in the Middle East. Brown called the Dubai dental offerings part of “a grand experiment” to see which BU degrees can be offered at great distances. But he rules out trying to replicate its undergraduate program overseas. “BU is known as a very fine liberal arts general education with a diversity of majors at the undergraduate level overlaid with a really rich set of graduate programs. The question is, if you don’t replicate the graduate professional programs (and) the diversity of undergraduate programs, then is it BU?” asked Brown, former provost and engineering dean at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The School of Public Health is spearheading a Global Health Initiative that engages faculty from many fields in efforts to reduce health disparities between wealthier and financially strapped countries. Even Robert Pinsky, former U.S. poet laureate, has participated in its symposia. Associate Dean Gerald Keusch, former director of the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health, said, “If you believe as we do that global health touches on everything, then you need to connect across the whole of the university. Students have this great urge to do something meaningful. We’re playing into that.”

Jay Halfond, dean of Metropolitan College and Extended Education, who chairs the President’s Council for a Global University, said, “We’ve become very principled about how we choose to be involved internationally,” he said. BU looks for “true academic relationships and engagements that will enhance the reputation of the university,” not just business opportunities. Metropolitan College offers continuing education classes online and on military bases, as well as at a graduate center in Brussels, Belgium.

BU already has exchanges with Chinese universities in Shanghai and Beijing, and the provost and faculty members have paid exploratory visits to Indian institutions. Management professor Sushil Vachani said, “We’d like to be better known in those countries. The world’s center of gravity has shifted towards Asia.”

Weaving Education Abroad Into BU’s Fabric

Ben De Winter, associate provost for International Programs, has orchestrated the expansion of BU’s international activities since 1997. “My sense was that the greatest challenge here was to integrate study abroad into the fabric of the university, into the curriculum, to make it part and parcel of a BU education, not simply an experience that was somehow set apart,” said De Winter. He made the rounds of Boston University’s 17 schools and colleges, discussing with deans and faculty where their disciplines fit into an international context. Soon the College of Fine Arts was sending theater majors to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts for a semester, while music students went to the Royal College of Music, and art students headed to Venice. The Dresden program for engineers was inaugurated in 2001. “I’ve never really felt that there were serious obstacles to what we wanted to do. The difference today is that there is so much more explicit support for  everything that is international,” said the Antwerp, Belgium-born professor.

De Winter and his International Programs staff recently moved out of a cramped townhouse into spacious quarters in a new building on the west end of campus. The busy International Students and Scholars Office (ISSO), which had been blocks apart, now is under the same roof, next door to the busy Center for English Language and Orientation Programs, where 1,600 students take intensive English instruction each year. Befitting a university with so many international students and scholars, the ISSO has doubled in size since 1998, in part to meet the additional reporting required after the September 11 attacks. “We have undergone enormous change and institutionalized reporting to such a degree that I’m not sure the students realize how complicated our systems really are,” said Director Jeanne Kelley. De Winter said of the post-9/11 period, “We got everybody involved. The ISSO was spearheading it, but the information technology group was essential, the registrar helped, the admissions office helped, the provost’s office was there.” 

Brown, who in 2005 became BU’s 10th president, is a Texas-born chemical engineer who was deeply involved in MIT’s global education efforts during a long career at that campus on the other bank of the Charles River. Brown was instrumental in forging the Singapore-MIT Alliance and still chairs a scientific advisory board for the island nation, which made him an honorary citizen in 2006. 

Now, expanding BU’s international reach is “a major part of what we’re doing,” said Brown. “Long before I arrived Boston University had a great connectivity to the world through international programs and as a destination for international students. What our strategic planning exercise did was roll that up and get the community to declare that this is one of the core competencies of the university.” 

Difficult economic times pose fresh challenges, but that will not deter BU from pursuing this international course, said Brown. “If you really have a set of priorities, you can’t let economics hold you back. Now, does it slow you down a bit? Yes, but it does not hold you back.
 

The old saw that no good deed goes unpunished tells in part the story of La Roche College and its Pacem in Terris Institute, which has provided several hundred scholarships for students escaping conflicts in countries torn by war from the Balkans to Burundi. The institute and its work brought renown to the small Catholic college in Pittsburgh. The queen of Jordan and first lady of Uganda served on the board of Pacem in Terris, founded in 1993 by the late Monsignor William Kerr soon after he became the college president.

The commitment to provide full tuition, room, and board to every Pacem in Terris student eventually put the college’s resources under heavy strain, especially as enrollment declined after 2002. The La Roche trustees finally decreed that no more Pacem in Terris students could be admitted unless the funds were in hand to pay for their four years of education. In June 2009 Inside Higher Education ran what amounted to an obituary for Pacem in Terris, reporting that the program was on hiatus after graduating its last four scholarship recipients. The college had invested $7 million of its own funds, $4 million in grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development, and $4 million in gifts from other donors in the program over the years, but never built an endowment or rainy day fund for Pacem. (The college’s own endowment is only $4 million).

A Rebirth

The hiatus, however, was brief. By fall 2009 Pacem in Terris enrolled two new scholarship recipients from Uganda and Burundi and now there are two more Pacem students from Rwanda and Equatorial Guinea. “We’ve had a bit of a resurgence,” said Kenneth Service, the outgoing vice president for institutional relations and executive director of Pacem in Terris. Some $120,000 has been raised for new scholarships, and the college is talking with donors about creating opportunities for students from Sri Lanka and Lebanon.

Moreover, the scholarship initiative has had a lasting effect on the college, which the Sisters of Divine Providence founded in 1963 to prepare young women entering their order; that was the same year that Pope John XXIII issued the celebrated Pacem in Terris encyclical on human rights. Later La Roche opened its doors wider, first to women and then to both sexes. Kerr, president from 1992 to 2004, was a friend to the powerful as well as the poor. Vice President Joseph Biden and Rwandan President Paul Kagame were among those paying tribute after the priest died of a stroke while celebrating Mass at the cathedral in Tallahassee, Florida, in 2009. Sister Candace Introcaso, the college president, also saluted Kerr, telling the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “Under his leadership, La Roche College was transformed from a regional coeducational, liberal arts college into a global community of learners with a burgeoning international presence.”

The Pacem in Terris story began with Kerr’s journey to a Croatian refugee camp in 1993 during the civil war in the Balkans. A Croatian-American businesswoman had offered to help provide scholarships. “Typically, he went over there to find 20 students and came back with 30,” said Service. Kerr had a larger purpose than just making a difference in the lives of a few individuals. He wanted to strike a blow against hatred and hostility among Muslims, Christians, and Jews. “Taught by the lessons of the Holocaust and now of ‘ethnic cleansing,’ young people from wartorn areas must be educated to break the cycles of resentment and revenge which have fueled the major conflicts of the twentieth century,” Kerr wrote.

Later, when Rwanda was convulsed by genocide, Kerr secured support from AID to bring scores of refugees to Pittsburgh for a college education. La Roche built a successful English as a Second Language program to accommodate the French-speaking newcomers. By 2009, when it looked like Pacem in Terris might fade into the past, the program had produced 451 graduates from trouble spots in the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East.

Fostering Global Citizenship

The college sold some underused property to bolster its finances, and the 2009–10 enrollment of 1,230 undergraduate and 126 graduate students included 139 international students, plus 46 more in the ESL program. Most of these international students are paying their own way. La Roche’s enrollment is down from a peak of almost 2,000 in 2002, but it rose in fall 2010. The college’s mission statement proudly states that La Roche “fosters global citizenship and creates a community of scholars from the region, the nation, and around the world” and seeks to “promote justice and peace in a constantly changing global society.”

Thomas Schaefer, who joined the college in 2002 as director of external relations for Pacem in Terris and now is associate vice president for academic affairs, said that this commitment to globalization is a direct legacy of Pacem in Terris. “It grew out of that sense that this is central to our mission. We’re now taking what Pacem initiated and making sure that every student has a global awareness.”

It also is making it possible for more students to experience education abroad. It launched a Study Abroad, Study USA program beginning with freshmen who entered in 2009 that includes in their regular tuition the cost of taking an education abroad course lasting one to three weeks or spending the same amount of time immersed in a domestic, multicultural experience, such as studying blues music in Harlem or volunteering on the recovery effort in New Orleans.

Service agreed that Pacem in Terris “encouraged the college to become much more international and to reach out and do more student recruitment internationally.” That emphasis also is seen in an annual conference on “Global Problems, Global Solutions” that La Roche inaugurated in 2004 and now holds jointly with Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Duquesne University. Even with Hurricane Ivan bearing down, 100 students and faculty turned out that first year to discuss the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. The joint conferences typically draw as many as 500 students, faculty, and townspeople for two days of lectures and workshops.

Paul Le Blanc, a history professor who studies working class politics and revolutionary movements, said Pacem in Terris “was transformative for all of us. In some ways we bit off more than we could chew, but then in dealing with the various issues and realities that came up, we evolved in ways that have been wonderful.”

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Think Big

What lessons should other colleges draw from the Pacem in Terris experience at La Roche? “You have to decide whether you’re on the ‘God will provide’ or the ‘God helps those who help themselves’ side of the ledger,” said Service. Raising scholarship funds became harder after September 11, 2001, Service said, and some promises of help never came through. But Service sees another message from the story of La Roche and Pacem in Terris.

“Don’t be afraid to think big; don’t be afraid to take some risks,” he said. “While the financial side of this was a problem, the other benefits that La Roche has received from this program are almost incalculable.” La Roche now provides students “a much higher quality education that prepares them to go out into a global society. While that wasn’t the initial intent, some of those ancillary benefits have more than paid for themselves. "

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La Roche College

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Henry Ford used to say that customers could buy his Model Ts in any color they wanted “so long as it is black.” The College of the Atlantic (COA), a small, alternative liberal arts school on the rugged coast of Maine, has similarly narrowed the choice of majors for its 355 students to one: human ecology, the study of humans’ relationships with each other and with the natural environment. The adventurous, environmentally conscious students drawn to this 35-acre campus on Mount Desert Island in Bar Harbor actually face far more choices than Ford’s customers of a century ago, for each is expected to customize this interdisciplinary major. “No two graduates will leave here with exactly the same course work and practical experiences,” said President David Hales.

But all share a passion for protecting the environment and mitigating the problems caused by the internal combustion engine and other sources of pollution. That explains why College of the Atlantic students and their professors can be found at the United Nations’ climate change meetings in such distant places as Montreal, Nairobi, Bali, Poznan, or Copenhagen. They have participated in other UN meetings in Bangalore, Johannesburg, Dubai, and Curitiba, Brazil, as well on topics from desertification to biodiversity to sustainable development. “The origins of this, like many things at the college, came as much from the students as it did from the faculty,” said Kenneth Cline, associate dean for faculty and professor of public policy and environmental law.

Preparing for International Talks

Cline, a lawyer by training who recently was named to hold a new David Rockefeller Family Chair in Ecosystem Management and Protection, leads an International Environmental Diplomacy Program that steels students for meaningful participation in these treaty talks. How is that possible or even plausible for a group of 18-to-22-year olds?

The College of the Atlantic, founded in 1969 by Bar Harbor residents and peace activists who wanted to bring a year-round enterprise to the tourist town that sits between Acadia National Park and Frenchman Bay (they originally thought of calling it Acadia Peace College), is well positioned for these international undertakings. It is one of the five campuses (along with Colby, Princeton, Middlebury, and Wellesley) chosen in 2000 to enroll United World College graduates on scholarships funded by philanthropist Shelby M.C. Davis. The United World Colleges are a global network of a dozen boarding schools offering the International Baccalaureate to top students from scores of countries identified as potential leaders. The Davis UWC Scholars program now helps UWC graduates at 91 U.S. colleges and universities. Starting with freshmen who entered in fall 2010, the program provides up to $20,000 per student each year for campuses with 40 or more UWC graduates, and $10,000 per student for the rest.

Thanks in part to these scholarships, one in six students at the College of the Atlantic is international. Among the 13 COA students at the climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December 2010 was junior Neil Oculi, who was part of the official seven-person delegation from his home country, St. Lucia. A capsule biography on the COA Web site said of Oculi: “In his spare time, he enjoys hanging out with his friends, cooking, and planning how to become the next prime minister of St. Lucia.” ‘

'You Should Be Ashamed’

Another COA student and UWC alumnus, Juan Carlos Soriano of Lima, Peru, became the sole representative of the 1,500 youth attending the Copenhagen conference permitted to address the final plenary session. It was a bittersweet two minutes. Clad in a neon orange T-shirt emblazoned with the words, “How Old Will You Be in 2050?” Soriano upbraided the delegates for failing to reach a binding agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions. “You should be ashamed,” said Soriano, who has seen the glaciers melting in the highlands of Peru.

Soriano and a third COA student, Lauren Nutter, are leaders of SustainUS, a nonprofit organization of young people that works for sustainable development and youth empowerment. Nutter has attended the last three climate change conferences (Bali, Poznan, and Copenhagen) as well as a preparatory meeting in Bangkok. “The college has been really good in supporting those of us who want to go,” said Nutter, 21, of Uxbridge, Massachusetts. “Usually I’ve had at least my plane ticket paid for and most if not all of the accommodations, which is usually a hostel. I always end up spending some money on food.”

The COA participants received accreditation but like many activists found themselves on the outside looking in at times at the overcrowded Copenhagen meeting. Cline and Doreen Stabinsky, a geneticist and environmental activist who teaches half-time at COA, also attended the conference. Cline estimated that it cost $26,000 to attend the meeting, with the college contributing $14000 and the rest “we raised ourselves.”

Going Beyond Observer Status

“In the past we had some small forays into the international realm,” said Cline, but now the International Environmental Diplomacy Program and other classes offer students ways to participate in these high-level policy meetings that go beyond mere observation. Gray Cox, who teaches social theory, political economics, and history, said, “they aren’t international relations majors’ practicing their political science skills. They are human ecologists” who are integrating theory and practice. Forty-five percent of the class of 2010 studied abroad. Some performed service in Mexico, Tobago, and other places.

“Our students have multiple experiences abroad,” said Cox, who has been involved with the college since it opened in 1972 and once was admissions director. The coursework, the internships, service projects and community organizing, and the international networking “are all feeding into one another…in a way that’s very distinctive of the COA experience.” The International Environmental Diplomacy Program, he added, “is the crown jewel.”

Nutter believes youth are making progress in voicing their concerns, even if their pleas for stronger action on climate change were ignored by elders at Copenhagen. At Bali, she recalled, representatives of the 200 youth in attendance got to speak “just by asking the chair nicely.” In Copenhagen, the 1,500 youth had official status and a right to the microphone, at least briefly.

Exposure to ‘World’s Best Thinkers’

Copenhagen drew 100 heads of state and their entourages. Such international gatherings are always “a three-ring circus,” said Cline. Outside the plenaries and closed-door negotiating sessions, “some of the preeminent experts of the world are there giving lectures and workshops. It’s a way for me to take students and expose them to some of the best thinkers in the world at the same time that they are actively involved in this process.”

“It’s a tremendous learning opportunity,” said Cline. “I would encourage any school that has an international program and any range of disciplines to think about this as a way of turning theory into practice.”

Nutter, who graduated in June, is spending 12 months traveling the world on a $25,000 Watson Fellowship. The Thomas J. Watson Foundation makes 40 such awards for independent study and travel outside the United States each year; graduates of 40 liberal arts colleges are eligible. Nutter is traveling to Turkey, India, Belgium, Netherlands, Peru, and Argentina, looking at how youth can be empowered in the environmental decisionmaking process.

Nutter was already an environmentalist before coming to the seaside campus in Maine to study human ecology. As she and other COA students have found, it is a place that encourages thinking globally.

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College of the Atlantic

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Steven Belluscio, associate professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC), came back from a Salzburg Global Seminar in summer 2005 fired up about spreading the message to other faculty about the importance of infusing international content into the curriculum. It was a natural fit for the sole community college in the borough of Manhattan and one of the larger components of the City University of New York (CUNY). The college, anchored in a four-block-long waterfront building shaped like a ship on 4-1/4 acres in lower Manhattan, enrolls more than 1,500 international students, placing it seventh among community colleges in the 2009 Open Doors report. Eighty-five percent of its 21,000 students are minorities, and it is one of the nation’s leading producers of African American, Hispanic, and Asian Americans with associate degrees.

Located blocks from the World Trade Center— debris from the collapse of 7 World Trade Center in the September 11, 2001, attacks caused irreparable damage to a large commercial building that had been donated to BMCC for a major expansion—the college sits near the canyons of Wall Street and is surrounded by the pricey condominiums and chic shops of Tribeca. Most BMCC students live elsewhere and commute on the 14 subway lines and buses, ferries, PATH rail, and other transit that converge in lower Manhattan. While 62 percent of students are enrolled full-time, many are holding down jobs and raising families in a city often called the capital of the world. They have seen how events on the other side of the globe can dramatically affect their city and their lives. The college’s 2008 strategic plan, “A Bridge to the Future,” stated the challenge:

The new millennium has ushered in a new world characterized by globalization and increasing cultural interaction. It is therefore imperative that the college develop students who are intellectually prepared to engage other cultures and understand the differing perspectives they offer. Our society is a global one, and our students must be able to work and interact effectively with people from diverse cultures Belluscio was among nearly 50 BMCC faculty and administrators the college sent to the Salzburg Global Seminar between 2004 and 2009. It sent more than 70 students as well to Austria to learn more about globalization and discover how other U.S. institutions were helping their students prepare for this shared future. Five other community colleges participated in the seminar that Belluscio, nine fellow faculty, and an administrator attended. “It was an intensive week,” said the English professor, who has taught literature and writing courses at BMCC since 2004. “It made us think realistically about what we should try to accomplish at BMCC with what we learned at the Salzburg Seminar. The one thing that kept coming up is the idea of best practices: How do we take all this lofty theory about internationalizing the curriculum and practically apply it to what we do at BMCC?”

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Global Pedagogy Handbook

A college committee on which Belluscio served set out to determine to what extent students were already being exposed to international issues in existing BMCC courses and to find ways to enrich that content. “We decided to put together a collection of potential lesson plans that we’d make available to all faculty in a handbook,” said Belluscio. They dispatched liaisons to attend faculty meetings in each department and solicit two-page lesson plans. The committee sifted through numerous contributions and settled on 35 lesson plans from a dozen of the 19 BMCC departments, then compiled them into a Global Pedagogy Handbook that was distributed electronically to the entire faculty in 2007.

The lesson plans covered courses from business management to mathematics to nursing to speech, communications, and theater. A math professor taught trigonometry students the evolution of the square root symbol from ancient Egypt to fifteenth century Germany and France, where it took the form used today. A nursing professor assigned advanced students the task of formulating a global strategy to combat tuberculosis. An English as a Second language instructor assigned essays on sub-Saharan Africa in an intensive writing class.

In a preface, the faculty committee said its purpose was “to demonstrate that bringing a global perspective to the courses we teach need not thoroughly disrupt the structure, content, and methods we currently employ but, on the contrary, can be as simple as following the directions” in the handbook’s lesson plans.

BMCC administrators do not know for certain what impact the handbook has had on course content and pedagogical approaches. Belluscio said he knows it has resonated with colleagues in the English Department.

Bringing Salzburg to BMCC

But Dean for Academic Programs and Instruction Erwin J. Wong believes the push is rippling through the faculty, especially among those who participated in the Salzburg Global Seminar. One such veteran, assistant professor of history Alex D’Erizans, introduced a global history course in fall 2010. “It’s primarily a grassroots effort. Those initially touched by Salzburg have become the major spokespeople,” Wong said. BMCC, for financial reasons, was unable to send faculty to the Salzburg seminar in 2010.

In its stead Wong is looking at how to incorporate global themes in the faculty development programs that BMCC faculty attend in New York. “If you can’t go to Salzburg, maybe you can bring the idea of Salzburg to the college,” he said.

Students’ Stake in Education Abroad

BMCC offers students several education abroad opportunities, including faculty-led summer courses in Ghana, Italy, Spain, France, Costa Rica, and China. Only a few dozen students sign up and go abroad, and courses in some of these countries are only offered in alternate years. BMCC students can participate in a CUNY exchange with the University of Paris.

But every student at BMCC has a stake in education abroad. Back in the early 1980s, students, by referendum, approved earmarking a portion of their student activity fee to subsidize education abroad. Each year a small portion of the $43.85-per-semester student activity fee generates $93,000 in revenues for education abroad scholarships. Those scholarships defray roughly 60 percent of the cost of the BMCC education abroad programs; everyone who goes benefits from this. The students’ remaining costs are reduced further if they qualify for Study-Travel Opportunities for CUNY Students (STOCS) grants. Those scholarships range from $1,000 to $1,650 and are awarded by need and by the program’s benefit to students’ studies and career plans.

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Michael Giammarella, a professor in the Student Life Department who coordinates education abroad and leads students to Italy each summer, said five of the dozen students who studied in Italy in summer 2010 received a STOCS grant. Giammarella said the education abroad program at BMCC accomplishes a great deal with limited resources. The lure of the summer offerings is that these courses run from two to four weeks, Most students take classes full-time; the median age is 22. a length of time that “is manageable” even for students’ working full-time jobs, he added.

Dean Wong believes that if BMCC somehow could subsidize the full costs of education abroad, “my guess would be that you’d have thousands of students’ applying.”

Many Expanding Horizons

BMCC’s horizons are growing as are enrollments at all six of CUNY’s community colleges, which now account for 85,000 of the system’s quarter-million students. CUNY plans to open a seventh community college in 2012. BMCC has been squeezed for space almost since it opened in 1964 on two floors of a commercial building in midtown; temporary trailers that line the old West Side Drive attest to the cramped conditions inside the main Chambers Street building.

But that will change dramatically in 2012 when the BMCC opens the new, 14-story Fiterman Hall after a $325 million remodeling and reconstruction. It will give the college 50 percent more space and room to enroll more students, both New Yorkers and international students. Wong and faculty leaders are determined that international education will be a growing part of the college’s future, too.

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Borough of Manhattan Community College

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Few campuses provide a view more dramatic than the panorama of the Pacific Ocean, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the San Francisco skyline afforded by the hilltop, upper campus of the University of San Francisco. Students who come to this Jesuit university can expect to be pushed hard to venture into far less privileged precincts, as near as the streets downtown where San Francisco’s homeless dwell or as far as remote hamlets in Malawi and Guatemala. Sitting in his office atop the Lone Mountain campus, President Stephen Privett, S.J., said, “For us…the global perspective is the realization that about 70 percent of the world lives in dire poverty. I always tell the kids that one person in 100 has a college education, so they’re 1 percent of the world. The ethical question for higher education, whether Catholic, private, public, for profit, not for profit, is: What are you doing for the 99 percent?”

USF became San Francisco’s first college in 1855, when Italian Jesuits opened St. Ignatius Academy after the gold rush. They were following the example of Saint Ignatius Loyola, the sixteenth century founder of the Society of Jesus. In San Francisco the Jesuits educated generations of sons and, later, daughters of immigrants. That heritage endures although today the roster of names is more diverse: not only O’Briens and Giordanos, but Nguyens, Aquinos, and Yangs. After USF’s buildings were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire, classes were held in a drab building dubbed the Shirt Factory, but in 1927 it relocated to the verdant site near Golden Gate Park and expanded in 1978 by acquiring Lone Mountain College, a Catholic women’s school with Spanish Gothic architecture and those priceless views. Today USF enrolls 5,700 undergraduate and 3,500 graduate students in arts and sciences, business, law, nursing, and education. Nearly 10 percent are international students. Located in the city where the United Nations was born, USF set out a decade ago to become “internationally recognized as a premier Jesuit Catholic, urban university with a global perspective that educates leaders who will fashion a more humane and just world.”

USF, once a basketball power (the Dons won back-to-back NCAA basketball championships with Bill Russell and K.C. Jones in the 1950s), now wins recognition for its community service requirement. The 200,000-plus volunteer hours logged by 3,000 students each year has won laurels from the Corporation for National and Community Service.

International Studies the Second Largest Major

The university created an Office of International Student and Scholar Services seven years ago and later opened a Center for Global Education to encourage students to study abroad and pursue professional and service internships overseas. The international studies major launched four years ago quickly became the second largest field of study in the liberal arts. “Students are going crazy for this,” said Jennifer Turpin, the new provost and former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. The major combines courses from the humanities, social sciences, arts and sciences; education abroad is strongly encouraged but not required. With new hires, USF has added programs in African studies, Middle East studies, and Asian studies. Turpin, a sociologist who studied the role of Russian media in the disintegration of the Soviet Union, said, “Year after year, as I’ve introduced the new faculty, people say it looks like the United Nations is walking in.”

Seniors Emily Saeger and Erica Ernst are two of those drawn to international studies. Saeger, from Washington, D.C., spent a summer teaching in Nicaragua and a semester interning for a nonprofit in Quito, Ecuador, on protecting the Amazon rainforest. Saeger, who double majored in Latin American studies, concentrated in environmental development and is considering a career in that arena. When Saeger enrolled she “didn’t realize how strong the whole social justice mission was at this school and I definitely didn’t imagine myself taking so much out of that. I’m not Catholic or very religious at all. But the thing I like the most about being in a Jesuit university is that commitment to social justice…. It’s felt and seen throughout the classes.”

Ernst went on a two-week USF service trip to Uganda, and then spent a semester studying and working with schoolchildren in the Francophone West African nation of Burkina Faso. She and other students studied digital photography, and then used their skills to make books in French for children about how to use the village library.

“The international studies major launched four years ago quickly became the second largest field of study in the liberal arts. Students are going crazy for this.”

The trip had its trepidations. “After three and one-half months in Burkina Faso, most of us got parasites, and two got malaria. That’s just the reality of going somewhere like that,” said Ernst. Her mother, a nurse back home in Bellevue, Washington, told her, “Just take the medicine. You’ll be fine.” Ernst was homesick at first and overwhelmed by classes taught only in French, but when she went to work in a village it was “almost living in a dream. It was just so beautiful, in the middle of nowhere with the sky and the green grass going on forever.”

Lois Lorentzen, a professor of social ethics in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies and codirector of the Center for Latino Studies in the Americas, has led students on service trips to Cambodia and South Africa. “We don’t send students to super dangerous places; we do semi-dangerous ones,” she said. Recently the university canceled a trip to Tijuana, Mexico, because of drug violence along the border.

A Scholarship for Study in Developing Countries

Education abroad is growing at USF, but remains at modest levels. Some 432 students studied abroad for credit in 2008–09. Sharon Li, director of the three-person Center for Global Education, said students can choose from more than 50 USFsponsored programs that allow them to apply their financial aid toward the expenses. Still, for students who may be working two jobs to pay tuition, education abroad remains a reach. “We’re struggling with that,” said Turpin.

USF awards Pedro Claver Scholarships (named for a seventeenth century Jesuit saint who ministered to slaves in Cartagena, Colombia) covering half the cost of tuition for those who study in countries such as Zambia and Nicaragua where they will be engaged with the poor. “You can’t take it to Paris or Madrid or Rome or London,” said Privett.

Privett has joined students on service journeys to South Africa, India, and Uganda. He did refugee work in El Salvador and knew the six Jesuits at Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) murdered with their cook and her teenage daughter by the Salvadoran army during the 1989 civil war. He later headed a social justice institute at Santa Clara University, where he was provost before becoming USF president in 2000.

Exposing Deans and Students to Poverty

Privett has taken deans and trustees on retreats to El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Judith Karshmer, dean of the School of Nursing, said, “I’ve been on countless university presidential retreats and the topics have always been capital campaign, more students, how to integrate core curriculum. This presidential retreat was ‘Let’s go to the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere so we can understand our jobs at San Francisco from a global perspective.” They met with subsistence farmers and children living in a dump.

Professor of Nursing Linda Walsh takes students to Guatemala to deliver prenatal care in Mayan villages alongside “comadronas”—traditional midwives who are also priestess-like figures. The students visit homes to conduct prenatal exams and provide vitamins and antibiotics. They encourage the comadronas to change gloves and wash hands frequently, but also say they learn much from these unschooled midwives. “They put their hands on the woman’s belly and they can just feel if the head is up or down and where the baby’s back is,” said senior Juliet Huntington.

“We’re helping them bring some Western teaching strategies and international standards for nursing practice without harming the Eastern approach to healthcare, which combines mind, body, and spirit.”

“Back home in San Francisco you push a button on a machine and get a result, whereas in Guatemala you have to use your hands, your eyes, your senses, and your knowledge to get results,” said Molly Zeldner. “That’s the root of what nursing is; it’s not about machines.”

The School of Nursing also has forged a partnership with two nursing schools in Hanoi, Vietnam, and is hoping to launch a master’s degree program there. Vietnamese nurses are taught under the USF curriculum for five semesters in Hanoi, then finish the degree with a sixth semester in San Francisco.

“We’re helping them bring some Western teaching strategies and international standards for nursing practice without harming the Eastern approach to healthcare, which combines mind, body, and spirit,” said Greg Crow, a USF alumnus and adjunct professor who spearheads the Vietnam Nurse Project. Associate Professor Gregory A. DeBourgh has made numerous trips to Vietnam with Crow to advance the partnership.

International Experiences for Law, Architecture Students

The School of Law, which has a Center for Law and Global Justice, has been in the vanguard of USF internationalization efforts. Students do human rights work with professors such as Dolores Donovan in Cambodia, Haiti, and elsewhere.

Dean Jeffrey Brand is Jewish, but twice has given talks from the pulpit in St. Ignatius Church at graduation masses. “My mother would have been shocked,” he said, but the Jesuit values and mission “speak to things that I believe in and that legal education should be about: academic rigor and excellence…and service to the poor and marginalized.” Donovan, who is Catholic, said, “The school does act on the values that I was taught as a child…. It melds nicely with my own commitment to international social justice.”

Seth Wachtel, director of the Architecture and Community Design Program, teaches a senior design studio course that gives students opportunities to design and construct projects for impoverished communities locally and far afield. His students have built a library in Zambia and constructed a community center in Nicaragua. “All the projects have either a social justice foundation element to them, or environmental justice, or historical preservation” or all three, he said.

Looking Toward Asia

Mike Duffy, dean of the School of Business and Professional Studies, has positioned his school as a source of expertise for Chinese companies with U.S. operations. He’s considering creating a special bilingual MBA program that would combine instruction in English and Mandarin, taught by such faculty as Associate Professor Xiaohua Yang, a Shanghai native. The business school, which enrolls nearly a third of USF students, in 2009 launched a joint master’s degree program in Global Entrepreneurship Management with Jesuit universities in Barcelona and Taipei. The first multinational cohort of 32 students spent four months in classes in Spain, four months in Taiwan, and four months in California.

International enrollments at USF began climbing after the university opened a recruiting office in Bangkok, Thailand, in 2003. That office now is relocating to Beijing. “China has become our No. 1 sending country,” said Lisa Kosiewicz, director of the Office of International Student and Scholar Services. In 2006 there were 60 students from China. In 2009 there were 273.

Recipe for Jesuit Education

Another challenge for Jesuit universities is how to maintain their religious character as the number of Jesuits on the faculty dwindles. Privett says 15 Jesuits now work at USF, down from as many as 40 three decades ago. (Another dozen Jesuits live in the university’s Jesuit community, but work elsewhere). Privett is confident USF will lose neither its mission nor identity.

“There’ll be fewer Jesuits, but you do not need to be a Jesuit to deliver a Jesuit education. You do need the vision, the value, and the core insights,” he said. “I tell kids it’s like Mexican food. If you have the recipe and the right ingredients, you get the product.”

“It’s an exciting time and the future is even more exciting as we look at different possibilities to making USF a truly international institution,” said Vice Provost Gerardo Marin. “We want to educate students to change the world.”

Two dozen young scholars visiting the United States on Fulbright exchanges were in the middle of an afternoon of workshops at Northeastern University in Boston when President Joseph Aoun dropped by to offer greetings and a short lesson on U.S. higher education. The linguistics scholar called it “the only truly open system in the world.” When there is a faculty opening, no one checks where the applicants’ passports are from, he said. Instead, “we seek the best brains wherever they are.” Public and private universities compete fiercely for faculty, students, and research grants; promotion is based on merit; and professors share in profits from their inventions. The government provides support but does not dictate what or how colleges and universities teach. “We don’t believe in onesize-fits-all,” Aoun said. India and other countries in Asia and Latin America are looking to adapt this model and open up their systems of higher education, Aoun said. “It’s going to happen. Competition is going to intensify at the worldwide level,” he predicted, then added with a smile, “That’s why you’re here. You’re making our life more difficult.”

The Fulbrighters laughed and applauded, appreciating that their host was a personification of how the U.S. system works. Born in Beirut, Labanon, Aoun was educated there, in Paris, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a PhD in linguistics and philosophy. He was a professor and dean at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles before returning to Boston in 2006 to become the seventh president of Northeastern University.

Northeastern, a private research university in the heart of Boston, is a recognized leader in experiential or cooperative education. The tradition started in 1909, a decade after the university’s founding, when four engineering students rode trolleys after class to part-time jobs around the city. Today, thousands of Northeastern students alternate semesters in the classroom with sixmonth stints in the working world. Those jobs, once confined to Boston, now take them from coast to coast and, increasingly, to London, Paris, Singapore, and beyond. Aoun created a Presidential Global Scholars initiative with a $1 million annual budget that awards students grants up to $6,000 to cover the added expense and, in some cases, lost income when they do co-ops abroad. Northeastern students typically earn $15,000 on co-ops in the United States—a far cry from the 10 cents an hour those four engineering students made a century ago. Many do two or three co-ops before graduation.

“Aoun wants to double the number of students’ choosing international co-ops and ‘give every student the opportunity to have an international experience.’”

So far only a small fraction—about 300—of the 6,000 co-ops that Northeastern students go on each year are international. The difficulty of securing visas and work permits means that some placements are unpaid internships or volunteer positions with charities.

Aoun wants to double the number of students’ choosing international co-ops and “give every student the opportunity to have an international experience.” Aoun expressed delight that at Northeastern he found a university with “a predisposition to embrace the world.” He quickly set in motion the drafting of a new strategic plan for “building a global university” and preparing students to become “engaged citizens of the world.”

Dialogue of Civilizations Propel Education Abroad

Northeastern’s education abroad programs are burgeoning. Nearly 1,700 students studied abroad for credit in 2009–10, a 240 percent increase from barely 700 in 2006–07, and the Office of International Study Programs under new Director William Hyndman III has expanded its staff.

Much of this growth is due to the rapid proliferation in recent years of Dialogue of Civilizations courses in which faculty lead cohorts of students to other countries for intensive courses over several weeks in the summer. The Dialogue courses were pioneered by Denis Sullivan, who directs the International Affairs Program as well as Northeastern’s Middle East Center for Peace, Culture, and Development. He first offered a Middle East studies course in Cairo more than a decade ago, borrowing the “Dialogue of Civilization” name from a term popularized by then-Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, who suggested it as a riposte to the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington’s prediction of a “Clash of Civilizations.”

“Then the United Nations started using the term (Dialogue of Civilization). I thought, ‘That’s what I’m doing. I’m bringing students to Egypt to have a dialogue.’ I started calling my program the Dialogue of Civilizations,” recalled Sullivan. A handful of colleagues followed his example, teaching summer courses in China, Greece, and Mexico. In 2006 then-provost Ahmed Abdelal decided to allow students to apply tuition dollars to cover most of the costs. By summer 2010 some 960 undergraduates took 50 Dialogue programs taught in 37 countries by nearly five dozen faculty. Hyndman, the study abroad director, said for some it is less expensive to study overseas than to stay in Boston and take classes there. “They pay for their eight credits and maybe an additional fee of a few hundred dollars, but that’s it. It’s quite a good deal,” said Hyndman.

In five years at Northeastern, Denise Horn, an assistant professor of international affairs, has led students twice to both South Africa and Thailand and once to Brazil, Dominican Republic, India, and Indonesia either for Dialogue courses or for an international service-learning experience called the NU Global Corps. She teamed with Lori Gardinier, a lecturer and director of the human services program, on a course that took students to India for fall 2009 to work with the Deshpande Foundation on helping poor farmers improve their lives and livelihoods (the human services program is an interdisciplinary major that imparts the skills needed for political advocacy, community development, and social service, at home and abroad). In India, the Northeastern students purchased seeds and encouraged farmers to plant home gardens to feed their families. They also created a sewing workshop for women and taught English to preschoolers. “I had one goal and that was to get out in the world and see what I could find,” said junior Rosie Pagerey. “I consider myself a global citizen now."

“We have a lot of flexibility, a lot of resources, and a culture that’s academic but also business-minded, all of which enables us to move a little faster than other people.”

A New Home and New Interest in Languages

Northeastern moved most of its language classes in 2007 out of the Department of Modern Languages into a World Languages Center housed in the College of Professional Studies. That entrepreneurial college, which once catered primarily to evening and continuing education students, hired 25 new instructors to meet the increased demand from undergraduates. “This has been phenomenal for us,” said Dennis Cokely, chair of modern languages. “Five years ago, we had 800 students per semester studying seven languages. Today we have 13 languages and nearly 1,700 students.” The popularity of international business and international affairs majors also whets students’ appetites for languages. The center teaches 13 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, and Swahili.

Christopher Hopey, the outgoing vice president and dean of the College of Professional Studies, said, “We have a lot of flexibility, a lot of resources, and a culture that’s academic but also business-minded, all of which enables us to move a little faster than other people.” Hopey, recently named president of Merrimack College, retooled the College of Professional Studies in other ways, offering more courses online and off-site at partner institutions in Turkey and Australia. He started the successful NUIn program, which allows Northeastern to admit 200 additional freshmen each year who are sent to London or Thessalonica, Greece, for their first semester of classes. Northeastern forged a partnership with the education company Kaplan Inc. to bring hundreds of students from China and a dozen other countries to Boston and groom them for college-level work. Four hundred such students were enrolled in the Global Pathways program in 2009–10 plus 300 others in English as a Second Language courses.

Online MBAs

The College of Business Administration launched an online MBA in 2006 that now enrolls 1,000 overseas students each year. Typically these online students perform as well or better than those in regular MBA classes in Boston, said Dean Tom Moore, who created the program in response to a request from IBM, which sought to retain promising managers in India by offering them a route to the professional degree.

Many of the business school’s top undergraduates gravitate toward an international business major that requires six months of classes abroad followed by a six-month co-op in the same country. “They are quite cosmopolitan by the time they return,” the dean said. Northeastern also receives 100 exchange students from partner business programs in Europe and Mexico, which “helps internationalize our campus here,” he said.

Drawing International Students With Co-Ops and Carnevale

International enrollments at Northeastern surged in recent years to 3,313 in fall 2009, with students from China and India accounting for almost half. Scott Quint, then-associate dean for International Student and Scholar Services and Intercultural Programs, said many are drawn to business and computer science and to the School of Allied Health Professions. The city of Boston is a big draw; so are the opportunities to do coops, said Quint. The 12-member International Student and Scholar Institute (ISSI) includes a full-time specialist who works to arrange co-ops for international students.

Quint, who stepped down last April after more than a quarter century working with the university’s international students, was also the impresario of Northeastern’s Carnevale, a twomonth-long international festival of music, art, dance, poetry, lectures, food, song, and fashion. It started in 1996 with one event: an ice-carving contest. International students are still carving Shinto shrines and icons such as the Sydney Opera House from ice with chainsaws each winter, but that is only one of the host of attractions. There were 48 events over eight weeks last February and March.

Twin Cities on a Global Scale

Northeastern’s expanding international profile also can be glimpsed in the creation of a World Class Cities Partnership by the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, which is building ties among municipal, business, and cultural leaders from 10 cities that girdle the globe from Boston to Barcelona to Haifa to Hangzhou to Kyoto to Vancouver. None of these cities is their country’s largest or the capital, but many are on the cutting edge of technology and culture, said Dean Barry Bluestone.

Bluestone sees this global partnership as emblematic of the “incredible trajectory” that Northeastern has been on since weathering a financial crisis that forced it to downsize in the early 1990s. “It’s cutting its own wake, really figuring out new ways of engaging with the community and developing extraordinary new international programs,” he said. “There’s a sense of academic entrepreneurship here: ‘Let’s try something new. Let’s see if it works. Let’s put some real effort into it and see what we can build.’”

Next Steps on the International Journey

Robert Lowndes, vice provost for International Affairs, said the pace of Northeastern’s internationalization has accelerated since the adoption of the new academic plan in 2007. “We’re getting more people out into the world,” said Lowndes, a physicist. Just as Northeastern built an infrastructure that includes more than 60 cooperative counselors and coordinators that makes it possible for 90 percent of undergraduates to gain that work experience, the university now is building the capacity to deliver on the 2007 academic plan’s goal of seeing that all students gain international experience. This will become Northeastern’s “second signature experiential effort,” Lowndes predicted.

The next step, said Aoun, is “to get more students to take advantage of the global opportunities” and to start thinking of Northeastern as an institution not confined to the physical campus in Boston. The president envisions some students’ spending two years in Singapore or Australia before coming to Boston, or starting on some other yet-to-be-built satellite campus. “What we are seeking to do is have students completely at ease with the world—and not only one part of the world,” said Aoun.

When a greater than expected number of students signed up to study abroad in 2009, Loyola University Maryland faced a dilemma. Tuition dollars follow the students and in a troubled economy, the redirection of resources was “more than we had budgeted for,” said Loyola President Brian Linnane, S.J. The university considered telling some students to forego the opportunity, “but in the end, we thought, ‘How could we do this? International education and the opportunity to study abroad is what we sell. It would have had a chilling effect.’” Loyola found other ways to economize.

Loyola University Maryland had a mission to uphold, namely to “inspire students to learn, lead, and serve in a diverse and changing world.” Loyola—one of four Jesuit universities in the U.S. that bear the name—encourages students to go beyond the leafy campus confines, whether that be to grittier parts of Baltimore or to Bangkok, Thailand. More than two-thirds of Loyola’s 3,700 undergraduates study abroad, do internships, or perform service overseas. They choose from 34 semester- or year-long education abroad opportunities in 26 countries.

Coupling Study Abroad and Service

Increasingly Loyola students are encouraged to perform community service while living and learning in another country. “This is a big part of the identity of Loyola,” said André Colombat, dean of International Programs and professor of French, whose staff collaborates with the campus’ large Center for Community Service and Justice (CCSJ) on twinning academics and volunteering overseas. That center, which has a staff of 14, also runs international immersion trips to El Salvador and Mexico in which students perform volunteer work but don’t receive academic credit for it.

Several other service-learning programs carry credit, including a summer course taught in Guadeloupe, the French archipelago in the Caribbean, and semester programs in El Salvador and Chile, where Loyola has an exchange agreement with Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago.

French Professor Catherine Savell-Hebb takes students each summer to Marie-Galante in Guadeloupe, where they study French literature, hike through tropical forests to a volcano, and live with families in the beachfront town of Capesterre. They helped clean up after Hurricane Dean and, during more placid summers, taught computer skills to local children. The host stays are of particular importance to the professor who wants students to “be sensitive to what it means for the local families to host an American. They think nothing they have is good enough for us,” said Savell-Hebb.

“Often, later in life, little time bombs will go off, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, now I understand….Now it makes sense.’”

Andrea Goicochea, the CCSJ’s assistant director for International Immersion Programs and Justice Education, said, “I don’t know if their parents are thrilled with us because they may decide to go from studying law to (signing up) with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. Their lives in some ways have been turned upside down.” Goicochea, a former Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic who spent 15 years as a lay missioner for the Maryknoll Fathers, said the impact of seeing poverty first hand sometimes hits long after their return. “Often, later in life, little time bombs will go off, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, now I understand….Now it makes sense,’” she said.

Roadblocks to Volunteering Overseas

Arranging service learning outside the United States poses extra challenges. The Center for Community Service and Justice’s Robin Crews and Christina Harrison both have encountered roadblocks. In Spain, where Loyola sends students for a semester at the University of Alcalá, the Spanish organizations wanted a six-month commitment from prospective volunteers, said Harrison, associate director of Immersion Programs and Education, but “our students are only there for four months.”

In Newcastle, England, the obstacle was a criminal background check required before student volunteers can work with children. British students at the University of Newcastle “usually wait at least a semester” before they start, said Crews. “That eliminates any possibility of volunteering if your student is there for just one semester.” They are trying to work out such wrinkles. “It’s definitely a learning curve,” said Harrison.

Seeking More International Students

The university is seeking to attract more international students. Only 1 percent of undergraduates and 3 percent of all students are international. Most of the 170 international students take classes not on the Evergreen campus but in graduate programs 10 to 15 miles away that offer advanced degrees in pastoral counseling, Montessori education, computer science, and other fields. Forty percent of Loyola’s 6,000 students are enrolled in graduate programs.

Martha Wharton, assistant vice president for Academic Affairs and Diversity, said that Loyola is looking to bring more international students in on exchanges, especially while Loyola juniors study abroad. The first exchange students from a technological university in Singapore arrived this fall. Loyola also offers two-year scholarships and a joint Loyola degree to qualified graduates of St. John’s College, a junior college in Belize.

While the international enrollment is sparse, Loyola draws 85 percent of its students from outside Maryland. Many come from the nearby states of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania and from New England.

Learning Diversity in the Classroom

Conscious of the need to expose students to people and viewpoints outside their comfort zones, Loyola requires all undergraduates to complete a diversity course before graduation. Faculty and administrators spent two years discussing and shaping the requirement before the Academic Senate approved it in March 2004 after vigorous debate. It took effect with the class that entered in 2006. Students can meet this requirement by taking a course with “a substantial focus”—more than 50 percent—on one of three issues: global diversity, domestic diversity, or social justice.

Several of history Professor Elizabeth Schmidt’s courses fulfill the requirement. Schmidt specializes in African history. “I have many courses with few history majors, but lots of business and global studies majors,” said Schmidt. One of her courses has a service-learning component. Her students not only learn in the classroom about strife in Africa, but also tutor African refugee children in downtown Baltimore. “I can’t tell you how many business majors I’ve had who (do this) a bit grudgingly, and then they get into it and keep tutoring after they leave my class,” she said.

Senior Meg Young shared the professor’s passion for African studies. Young, a global studies and French major from Greensboro, North Carolina, signed up with the Peace Corps after graduation to work in a small village in South Africa. Young spent one semester studying in Ghana and a second in Montpellier, France. Young, a star swimmer in high school, even got to help coach the Ghanaian national swim team while in Accra. “Everyone was so welcoming in Ghana,” said Young. “People ask me, ‘What did you learn? What was the biggest difference?’ I say what I learned was that there weren’t that many differences.”

Teaching in Thailand

Two other global studies majors, Chelsea Catsam of Pomfret, Connecticut, and Paulina Stachnik of Carmel, New York, packed their bags after graduation to spend a year in Thailand teaching English to children in Catholic schools. They are part of a corps of 30 graduates that Loyola selects and sends to Bangkok each year. Catsam, who aspires to become an international lawyer, spent her junior year in France and traveled across much of Europe, but was intent on broadening her horizons after college. “Asia is just so exciting for me,” she said.

“People ask me, ‘What did you learn? What was the biggest difference?’ I say what I learned was that there weren’t that many differences.”

Stachnik is a native of Krakow, Poland, whose family emigrated to the United States when she was 6. She spent a semester in Bangkok, took a Loyola study tour to India, and spent a summer studying in Prague, Czech Republic. “I came to Loyola largely because their study abroad programs were so highly emphasized,” said Stachnik. “I’m in good company here. The best thing about Jesuit education is that it opens the world up to you and once you open that, it’s hard to close.”

Success of Global Studies Major

Global studies is a recent creation at Loyola, launched in 2006 as an interdisciplinary amalgam of history, economics, political science, and sociology courses. Students have voted for the major with their feet: the first eight majors graduated in 2009, 18 in 2010, and 40 are on tap to graduate in 2011.

Sociologist Michael Burton, the first chair of global studies, said there had been discussions among the faculty for years about offering an international studies major. It finally took hold despite worries that it might siphon off majors from the four contributing departments. Those faculty concerns have been mitigated by the fact that many students have double majors.

Economics professor Marianne Ward, current chair of global studies, said the program’s name was deliberately chosen over the more common “international studies” because “we felt that ‘international studies’ had an implicit focus on the notion of the nation state…. Many issues in the current world environment transcend national boundaries. We wanted to capture that notion.”

Students must take macro and microeconomics, along with a modern Western civilization course that focuses on arts and culture. Comparative politics and statistics courses also are required, along with a senior seminar. The language requirement is the same as that for all undergraduates: two years. The global studies majors must either study abroad or do an internship with a company or NGO doing international work, domestically or overseas.

Bursting the Loyola ‘Bubble’

Senior Lauren Brown of Wellesley, Massachusetts, who spent her junior year in Beijing and Buenos Aires, said, “There’s a definite Loyola ‘bubble.’ We might just be a small group who is very internationally aware. (But) I think we’re moving in the right direction of breaking this bubble.” President Linnane and Vice President for Academic Affairs Timothy Law Snyder both are intent on bursting those bubbles, for students and faculty alike. “Even some that study abroad retain that bubble about themselves because they seek not to venture out and take risks,” said Snyder. He stressed the importance of increasing the diversity across the institution. “We are saying that the more diverse our student body, our faculty, our curriculum, our administration, our leadership, and our approaches can be, the healthier we will be,” said Snyder, a mathematician.

Snyder noted that when Loyola produced the first draft of a new strategic plan in 2008, students came forward and pressed the case for expanding the global studies program. Loyola is doing just that, with plans to hire six additional faculty in the field.

Looking After the President in Bangkok

Linnane and Snyder visited Loyola’s semester program at Assumption University in Bangkok in 2007; each blogged about the experience. More recently Linnane visited a Jesuit center for scholarship in Beijing. His snapshot of the Great Wall of China wound up on the back cover of the April 2010 Loyola magazine.

In Bangkok, students led Linnane and another Jesuit visitor to an “enormous open air market” for lunch one Sunday. Afterward, when the priests decided to make their own way back to the hotel, the students tried to talk them out of it. The two Jesuits did make the trip back unescorted, but what Linnane took away was that these Loyola students felt “they had come to own Bangkok—and they did.”

The Importance of Asia

Linnane believes it is especially important for Loyola to expose students to Asia and other cultures outside “the rich intellectual tradition of the Christian West where our roots are as a Jesuit, Catholic institution.” Karyl Leggio, dean of Loyola’s Sellinger School of Business and Management, is also looking to the East for internships and study tours for her students. “We’re good with European experiences; we do okay with South America. We’re not doing nearly enough with Asia,” said Leggio, a professor of finance who is an authority on China’s largely unregulated stock markets. “If you’re coming out of business school and not thinking of studying in Asia, you’re making a mistake.”

Leggio, who came to Loyola from the University of Missouri at Kansas City, wondered beforehand about the relevance of religious-based education for MBA students. “Once I got here I realized it was absolutely the wrong concern,” said Leggio. “The Jesuits are about social justice and giving back to the poor and helping in the community. That is precisely the way you do business education if you want to do it well, I believe.

Dozens of Hobart and William Smith Colleges (HWS) students occupied every seat and nearly every square inch of floor. Others crowded the doorway and spilled into the hall. It was late on a sunny spring afternoon—no time to be indoors—but the colleges’ annual Global Visions celebration of student photography and research projects exerted a powerful attraction. The promise of sushi afterward helped, as did the door prize: a $500 digital camera for the best photograph of the year (you had to be present to win). Still, the turnout testified to how well the colleges’ Center for Global Education does what many colleges aspire to: weaving education abroad into campus life and crafting thoughtful ways for students to relive and rethink experiences upon return home.

Hobart and William Smith Colleges offer photography and journal writing workshops and give small grants to encourage students to delve into the life of the communities where they live and study. On return, their stories and photographs may be published in The Aleph: A Journal of Global Perspectives, a full-color publication produced with Union College, or Abroad View magazine, which several colleges sponsor. Photography serves as a “gateway into the culture” of the countries where HWS students study, said Doug Reilly, programming coordinator for the Center for Global Education. The Center for Global Education also stages an open mic night called “the Away Café” in the campus pub for students to share stories from overseas.

Founded as separate colleges for men (Hobart) and women (William Smith) in 1822 and 1908 respectively, Hobart and William Smith are now closely coordinated with the same classes, faculty, and president but retain separate traditions, diplomas, deans, and athletic nicknames (Statesmen and Herons). From its 195-acre campus overlooking Seneca Lake in Geneva, N.Y., HWS send hundreds of students annually on more than 40 semester-long programs in 32 countries, nearly two-thirds outside Western Europe. 

“We made a commitment that no matter what happened to the economy, we were going to hold steady the percentage of our students who studied abroad.”

Finding a Leader at the Peace Corps

The selection of then-Peace Corps Director Mark Gearan as president in 1999 underscored the emphasis at HWS on internationalization. Gearan directed the Peace Corps during President Bill Clinton’s second term after serving as a senior White House official during the first. Gearan, an attorney and high school principal’s son, sent the first Peace Corps volunteers to South Africa, Jordan, Bangladesh, and Mozambique and created the Crisis Corps, which deploys returned volunteers for short stints to places dealing with disasters.

Gearan, a graduate of Harvard College and Georgetown Law School, said he was drawn by the colleges’ approach to global education. “When you have so many faculty members who have lived and led programs around the world, it really internationalizes the campus.”

The percentage of students’ studying abroad has risen to roughly 60 percent. That is “a great statistic and point of pride,” said Gearan, but he is also concerned about internationalizing the education of those who “are parked here in zip code 14456.”

Gearan has concerns, too, that education abroad not be just “a one-off” experience for the students who do go overseas.

Safeguarding Education Abroad

Gearan and Provost Teresa Amott protected the education abroad program from budget cuts that most academic departments had to absorb last spring. “We made a commitment that no matter what happened to the economy, we were going to hold steady the percentage of our students who studied abroad,” said Amott.

Education abroad, said Gearan, “is mission central, in our judgment, if you really want to prepare well-educated, twenty-first century citizens.” Gearan does not denigrate study in London, Paris, Rome, and the other capitals of Europe, but he emphasizes the added value of sending students to Vietnam, Senegal, South Africa, Peru, China, Brazil, and other “very twenty-first century places.”

A strategic plan drafted upon Gearan’s arrival led to the creation of a Center for Global schools’ progreEducation. The ss down this path was accelerated by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that underwrote a formal Partnership for Global Education with Union College in Schenectady, New York. Both institutions ramped up predeparture and reentry programming. Political scientist Thomas D’Agostino has led the partnership and directed the HWS Center for Global Education since it opened. He is now associate dean for global education.

Unfinished Business: Attracting International Students

An unfinished objective at HWS is attracting more international students, Gearan said. HWS enrolled 77 international students in 2009–10, or 4 percent. A first step has been to resuscitate exchange agreements that had gathered dust. Amy Teel, the Center for Global Education’s program manager, said, “We went from no exchange students in 2005 to about 35 a year coming in now.”

Felix Spira, 22, a German exchange student from Maastricht University in the Netherlands, came for the spring 2010 semester. “My home university has seven different partner universities in the United States. I chose Hobart and William Smith because it’s a small college where you have a high chance to get closer interactions with your teachers. I’m on a first-name basis with two of my professors,” said Spira.

Languages Encouraged but Not Required

HWS offer majors in Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese, and the classics; German is offered only as a minor. Eric Klaus, the sole tenure-track faculty member in German, recently scouted locations in Leipzig and Berlin for the Center for Global Education where science majors could study in English and “get a taste of German culture.” With such a small program, Klaus said, “you have to make yourself indispensable and recognizable on campus.”

There is no language requirement at HWS. “The culture of this institution is anti-requirement; we’re not an institution that requires students to do things. But we have goals,” said Amott, the provost. Students must demonstrate “a critical knowledge of the multiplicity of world cultures.” They can do this in a myriad of ways, including courses in language, history, literature, religion, economics, and the arts. Still, Amott, an economist born in Bolivia to a U.S. Foreign Service officer and Brazilian mother, added, “I wish we had more students’ achieving competency in a second language.” The Self-Instructional Language Program allows students to study Arabic, Vietnamese, and Hindi independently, with biweekly tutorials from a native speaker. Sometimes Polish, Korean, and Portuguese are supported in this way as well.

Patrick McGuire, a professor of economics who has led semester programs in London, Galway, Ireland, and Central Europe (where the students visit Germany, Romania, and Hungary), agreed that learning another language is important, but argued that it should not be a deterrent to students’ gaining rich experiences in courses taught overseas in English.

Fellow Professor of Economics Scott McKinney regularly leads students to Ecuador and Peru to study development economics and pre-Columbian history and culture. McKinney was born and raised in Lima, Peru, to American parents who worked in the airline and shipping business. McKinney speaks Spanish fluently—he even does home-stays himself with Ecuadorian families when he takes students to Quito—but he, too, believes there should be no language bar to education abroad. For HWS students who may pursue careers in banking or finance, it is paramount to see poverty firsthand, he said. “What we’ve really emphasized here is that everybody should go. You shouldn’t have to study three years of Spanish to go abroad to a Spanishspeaking country.”

Returns to India and Turkey

Lisa Philippone, 20, a junior anthropology major, spent a semester in India and returned there in summer 2010 to live on an organic farm in the desert state of Rajastan, teach, and work on an honors project examining how Hindus reconcile their beliefs in the purifying aspects of water in places where water is scarce or polluted. She won one of three $15,000 summer travel awards supported by alumnus Charles Salisbury, who also helped underwrite the renovation of historic Trinity Hall, where the Center for Global Education is housed.

Philippone said that her choosing to study in India was “a big deal” to neighbors and friends back home in Rochester, New York. “People just talked about it. They see India as a Third World country and wanted to know why I’d go there, why I’m studying India’s culture, and where that’s going to take me,” said the budding anthropologist. It reaffirmed her judgment that HWS was the right place for her. “It may sound corny, but it allows me to study what I love. I’m going to leave here with a sense of clarity on what I want for my future.”

Alexandra Hallowell, 22, a senior international relations and French major from Duxbury, Massachusetts, was studying at Maastricht University in the Netherlands when she won two HWS grants totaling $1,000 to spend a fortnight in Istanbul, Turkey, interviewing Islamic women about politics, religion, and culture. She self-published a small magazine about the project that helped her win a Fulbright scholarship to return to Turkey as an English teaching assistant and to interview more women about how they balance religious and cultural norms in a secular society.

“It may sound corny, but it allows me to study what I love. I’m going to leave here with a sense of clarity on what I want for my future.”

Emphasizing Global Citizenship for Town and Gown

HWS help to internationalize the community of Geneva as well. Last winter the colleges mounted a community-wide campaign to get the 13,000 residents of Geneva as well as faculty and students to read Three Cups of Tea, the best-selling account of mountain climber Greg Mortenson’s ongoing crusade to build schools for girls across Pakistan and Afghanistan.

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Posters went up around town showing high school coaches, Gearan, and other civic leaders engrossed in Three Cups of Tea, and school children raised thousands of dollars for Mortenson’s “Pennies for Peace” campaign to build more schools. Students, faculty, and townspeople filled the local opera house when Mortenson’s coauthor, journalist David Oliver Relin, came to speak. The Center for Global Education’s Amy Teel and Doug Reilly also use Three Cups of Tea in a workshop they teach on the global aspects of leadership.

The Vietnam Connection

HWS’ education abroad program in Hanoi, Vietnam, started 15 years ago when Marie-France Etienne, a professor of French who was born in colonial Vietnam, led students there. The program gained a champion in Professor of Sociology Jack Dash Harris, who was first exposed to Vietnam while teaching in the Semester-at-Sea program. He is now an authority on changing roles of men and women in Vietnamese society. HWS and Union College began sending students to Hanoi for a full semester in fall 2000.

Harris chairs the faculty Committee on Global Education, which provides strong oversight for the education abroad programs. He and D’Agostino co-directed a federally funded project that produced study guides to help prepare students for their immersion in Vietnam. The In Focus: Vietnam project enlisted the expertise of HWS and Union faculty and students as well as outside experts to make short films on Vietnamese history, culture, economy, and contemporary life, each accompanied by a list of suggested readings.

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Science faculty, too, weave global education into their curricula. Paleontologist Nan Crystal Arens, a Harvard-educated associate professor of geoscience, is spending the fall 2010 semester with HWS students in Queensland, Australia. It is the third time she has led that program. “We can talk about tectonic plates until we’re blue in the face, but it’s really a different experience to go and stand in the fault zone or in the volcano,” she said. “It brings the material alive in ways that we can’t do in a classroom, no matter how good we are as teachers.”