For a regional public university in western Georgia that sends barely 200 students a year to study abroad, Columbus State University (CSU) has something that few other U.S. institutions can match: its own house in Oxford, England, and ties with the University of Oxford that allow fortunate Columbus State students and faculty to take classes and workshops there. Five hundred have done so since a retired banker named Kyle Spencer purchased a stately Edwardian home in 2002 and turned the deed over to his hometown university. Spencer House is “pivotal to our planting the flag globally,” said President Timothy Mescon.

Planting that flag is a principal way Columbus State is hoping to keep raising its standards and standing among colleges in the Georgia system. The strategic plan the university adopted in 2013 seeks to foster “a vibrant, globally connected campus culture” that empowers people “to contribute to the advancement of our local and global communities.” Columbus, the third largest city in Georgia after Atlanta and Augusta, is an old textile mill town on the banks of the Chattahoochee River. It lacked a college until civic leaders finally convinced the state to open a two-year institution in 1958; bachelor and master degrees were soon to follow.

Today it is the tenth largest of Georgia’s 31 public colleges and universities. Half the 7,000 undergraduates and 1,400 graduate students come from Muscogee County and other neighboring places along the Alabama border, but more than a third are drawn from elsewhere in Georgia and 1,600 hail from other states. It also enrolls 130 international students. In public higher education, “geography does matter. We are, at the end of the day, in a retail business,” said Mescon, former business dean at Kennesaw State University. He has stepped up recruiting in the metro Atlanta area, 100 miles away, because “that’s where the market is,” and recently added an international recruiter.

The biggest challenge Columbus State faces is not just finding students, but keeping them until they graduate. Only one in eight full-time freshmen who entered in 2007 graduated in four years and 30 percent in six years. A third of students attend college part-time and many are older than traditional age. Nearly half are ethnic or racial minorities. The international push at Columbus State is one of the principal ways the university is seeking to expand students’ horizons. CSU has strong business, computer science, and performing arts programs, the latter housed on a hip, new downtown campus alongside the Chattahoochee, which, thanks to the demolition of two old dams, features the world’s largest urban whitewater course. Some of the rafts bearing tourists and thrill-seekers over the rapids advertise the university logo.

A Strategic Plan and Student Fee Build Momentum for Internationalization

As Neal McCrillis heard the story, when a wealthy local benefactor offered in 1998 to endow a professorship to teach European history, she was told, “We’re not that big. We can’t have one person who just teaches British or French history. We need something broader.” So McCrillis, a British historian, was hired for the endowed professorship both to teach and create a Center for International Education (CIE). “I had a mandate to develop study abroad programs, but beyond that the administration was not really quite sure what the center should be,” he recalled. For years the center occupied a nondescript room in Howard Hall, a classroom building. Today it is in a small building of its own, the International House, in a central location, and while still teaching a few courses, McCrillis is kept busy as CIE’s full-time director.

The scope of international programs grew gradually, then picked up steam when the provost asked the faculty International Education Committee in 2011 to come up with the first comprehensive strategy for campus internationalization. They produced a detailed blueprint for ratcheting up study abroad offerings, curricular integration, faculty development, international student services, service learning, and other international activities.

The timing was right because another panel was already at work on a new strategic plan for the entire university, and several international goals were embraced and articulated in that broader document, including expanding study abroad enrollment by nearly half, tripling international enrollments, offering students the opportunity to earn an interdisciplinary International Studies Certificate, and widening the circle of students and faculty engaged in on-campus activities.

Equally crucial was a decision approved by students in 2011 to add a $14 per semester international education fee. “That gave Neal this recurring revenue source to fund scholarships for study abroad and underwrite faculty exploration in other countries. It’s a critical annuity in support of this globalization that benefits a huge number of students,” said Mescon, who became president in 2008.

CIE now awards upwards of $300,000 a year in grants and scholarships. Honors College students are guaranteed a $3,200 scholarship for study abroad in their junior or senior year. CIE offers “first-come, first-served” study abroad grants of $650 to $1,050 to all comers who commit to signing up for a program. “Our experience over the years is that the grants which cover a quarter or more of the cost make the programs accessible to many more students,” said McCrillis.

Drumming Up Enthusiasm for Study Abroad

Some 200 Cougars study abroad each year, twice as many as a decade ago. “You can’t just sit in the office and wait for students to show up, because that’s not going to happen,” McCrillis said.

“It’s hard work to drum up the number of students you need for a program,” said geography professor Amanda Rees, who has taught courses in Oxford and Belize. Kimberly Lawrence, the study abroad coordinator, deploys student ambassadors to make 200 presentations in classrooms each year, and Rees herself makes the rounds of colleagues’ classes to pitch her overseas courses. “You’re trying to get in front of 300 to 400 students to drum up a handful,” said the British-born professor.

Patrick McHenry, associate dean of the College of Letters and Sciences, said students need to be convinced that education abroad will pay off when they enter the job market. “The more we get that message out to them, the better. Our students are very practical minded,” said McHenry, a Milton and Renaissance scholar who has taught literature classes in Oxford and in Florence and Montepulciano in Italy. “We have to cajole them no matter what.”

Fast Track to an International Studies Certificate

The International Studies Certificate that the faculty envisioned became a reality in fall 2013. Theater professor Becky Becker was put in charge and given an office and assigned half-time to the Center for International Education. The requirements include study abroad or an international internship or service, at least 18 hours of coursework, and a capstone course or research project. Two students completed the requirements and received the certificate on their diplomas in May 2014, including Jason Todd Raley, Jr.

“I had unknowingly already taken all but one of the classes I needed for the certificate,” said the marketing major, who studied earlier in South Korea and Spain and right after graduation went to Costa Rica on a third, short-term CSU study program.

“I just took these courses because I really love internationally themed classes and activities. Being a marketing major, they could help me get in the door to have international ties to my career. I’ll have an edge on some people who may want the same thing, but have nothing else to back them up,” said Raley, the son of a state trooper and forensic accountant.

As a global ambassador for CIE, Raley also used his marketing skills to convince other Cougars to study abroad. “I love getting people to buy into things they normally wouldn’t buy into,” he said. “Every day, when somebody came in here and said, ‘I can’t afford it’ or ‘I’m afraid to fly,’ I’d look at them and say, ‘There are scholarships. You can pay for three-fourths of it with nothing out of your pocket if you do some research and do it right. And flying’s safer than driving.’”

Twenty-seven students so far have taken the required introductory course that Becker teaches; McCrillis credited her with making inroads with faculty in departments across the campus. “That’s really important,” McCrillis said, “so that when a biology student says, ‘I’d like to have the international certificate,’ they get a positive response from their adviser.” (The other certificate recipient was a theater major who researched Nigeria’s spirit culture.)

On top of study abroad and programming on campus, the certificate “provides an important missing piece. It ties all those things into the students’ majors,” said McCrillis, who chairs the USG System Council for International Education.

The Speed Dating Approach to International Conversations

A signature element of Columbus State’s global education efforts is the International Learning Community (ILC), which brings faculty together with students in large numbers to delve into an important issue over the course of a year through lectures, discussion groups, films, field trips, and other activities inside and outside the classroom. Faculty choose a theme each year—migrations in 2013–2014, revolutions and technology in 2012–2013, and “strangers in a strange land” in 2011–2012—and commit specific classes to be part of the ILC, which are marked in the course catalog as “I” classes. Many are classes freshman must take as part of their First Year Community experience, but some are upper division courses and they span a dozen or more disciplines, from art and business to environmental studies and theater. At least 700 students each year take part.

Sixteen evenings a year students come to the International House for snacks and “Global Dialogues,” which are small-group, student-tostudent conversations that Rees, who chairs the International Learning Community, likens to a form of “speed dating.” International students performing service in exchange for their in-state tuition waivers lead the 90-minute dialogues. Students sit at a half dozen tables and change tables every 15 minutes to hear even more viewpoints. “They share a lot and hear a lot. It’s really very intense and, when you read their writing afterwards, it gets very personal,” said Rees, who requires students in her “I” courses to attend three dialogues a semester. Other faculty use them as an opportunity for extra credit.

McCrillis said the dialogues give some students “their first chance to hear viewpoints and attitudes other than those expressed by their Georgia-born and -raised neighbors.”

“Students are genuinely interested. That makes me very happy,” said Vanessa Jackson, a Jamaican graduate assistant at the CIE who earned her bachelor’s degree in biology at CSU. “Columbus State has become much more internationalized since I came in 2009.”

Omovueme Emasealu, 26, a senior computer science major from Nigeria, seconds that. “I think (Columbus State) is becoming more international on a weekly basis,” said Emasealu. He chuckles about classmates’ misconceptions and stereotypes about Africa, but also appreciates how “very open and friendly” Americans are. He still remembers his surprise on his first plane ride to Atlanta when “a lady began telling me her life story. I was thinking, ‘Really? You can do that?’”

Alice Roxana Barno, 28, a pianist from Romania earning a second bachelor’s degree, relishes the mentoring from faculty. “Back home, if you wanted to talk to a professor, you’d better make an appointment three weeks before and do not look him in the eyes,” she said.

A Hands-On Faculty Committee Guides International Activities

With a three-person staff, McCrillis leans heavily on the Faculty Senate’s International Education and Exchange Committee to superintend the international enterprise. Twenty-two people serve on the committee and eight subcommittees that review study abroad programs, deal with scholarships, approve visiting scholars, and tend to other international matters.

John Finley, who teaches international business, said, “It sounds corny, but there’s a real esprit de corps with the international committee,” with people always willing to stay when meetings run long. English professor Dan Ross, the panel’s chair, agreed, saying, “More than any committee I’ve ever been on, that one works.” He credits McCrillis with making the advisory panel as effective as it is. Ross, a 25-year faculty veteran who has taken classes to Japan and England, said, “We just had nobody doing these things until Neal came along.”

One successful study abroad program begets another. Julie Ballenger, chair of the biology department, has been a role model for colleagues. The plant geneticist led her first tropical ecology class to the Bahamas in 1999. Since then she’s taught environmental classes in Africa (Botswana and Tanzania), Ecuador, Belize, Costa Rica, and Australia as well.

“After camping in the Kalahari Desert for two weeks with lions walking through our campsite, it was like every door opened. Nothing  was impossible. From that point on, it’s been the students pushing and driving all these new programs,” said Ballenger, who also did a stint as assistant director of CIE when study abroad offerings were just getting off the ground. “Many of our students haven’t left the state of Georgia or the Southeast. When you see them after they come back, they have a new confidence. They carry themselves differently.”

Kevin Burgess, a biology colleague, also takes students far afield, from Australia to Ecuador. Burgess had six job offers after a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto and “probably wouldn’t have come here if it wasn’t for the study abroad program. That’s what pushed me.”

A Philanthropist Pays His Oxford Experience Forward

Five hundred Columbus State students and faculty have studied at Oxford while living in the threestory, century-old home on Woodstock Road that Kyle Spencer purchased for CSU for $2 million in 2002. The retired 88-year-old banker never spent a night there himself because his late wife Sara “preferred the hotel,” he recalled with a smile. But the Spencers did stay in Oxford’s Gothic dorms in the 1980s while attending continuing education classes through the Oxford Berkeley Program.

“Every time we went, they had a mixture of undergraduates, graduate students, and outsiders like us. We had a very impressive, very warm tutor who was a born educator. The thing that impressed us was that they wanted us foreigners and rebels to learn,” he said. The Spencers returned three times and then began paying for their children’s teachers and later faculty from Presbyterian College and Columbus State to attend the summer sessions.

Now, CSU faculty teach three, two-week courses there each summer and McCrillis takes faculty there for a workshop each autumn. In addition, Columbus State sends up to five students a year to spend a semester at an Oxford college and take tutorials with a don. Some Oxford undergraduates live in Spencer House with them. Spencer, the benefactor, donates an additional $150,000 a year to cover all the students’ costs above CSU’s regular tuition.

As a senior, Mark Sciuchetti spent a semester at Regents Park College. Now a history graduate student and aspiring professor, Sciuchetti said curious Oxford students sometimes asked if he was a Rhodes Scholar. “I just said, ‘No, I’m a Spencer scholar.’ But they were surprised a state university provides so much funding.”

The existence of Spencer House “made it impossible for us to drop the ball” on internationalization, said English professor Susan Hrach, who was recently honored by the Georgia Board of Regents for innovative teaching approaches, including enhancing global awareness and reducing culture shock in classes taught in England and Italy.

Mescon hopes one day to convert a carriage house on the Spencer property into classrooms and additional apartments. “We’d like to build a much bigger facility, whatever Oxford will allow,” the president said.

After Wake Forest University made preparing students to become global citizens the centerpiece of a 2006 Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) for reaccreditation, leaders decided a good place to start would be to work on improving instruction in 40 classes taught by its own faculty in other parts of the world each year. J. Kline Harrison, the associate provost for global affairs, canvassed faculty for ideas on how to improve study abroad programs and heard back that if “we’d had more intentional training to prepare for the experience, we’d have been even more effective.” The faculty wanted their own schooling or, to use the formal term, professional development. Nearly two-thirds of students study abroad, a participation rate topped in the 2014 Open Doors report only by the University of Denver and the University of San Diego (another 2015 Simon Award winner).

A steering committee led by Steven Duke, then director of international studies, was given the task of figuring out how to buttress preparation. Instead of sending professors elsewhere for training, the committee settled on an in-house solution and in 2009 put on the first Workshop on Intercultural Skills Enhancement (WISE). It invited not only Wake Forest faculty and study abroad professionals, but also counterparts from nearby colleges so they could share ideas and learn from each other.

One of the speakers was Penelope Pynes, associate provost for international programs at nearby UNC-Greensboro, who laid out her approach to providing “culture shock treatment” to faculty before departure. 

One Plan Leads to Another

The workshop’s popularity grew each year, drawing attendees from surrounding states and then farther afield. It expanded into a full-blown conference in 2013 for 135 people. Nearly twice that number came in 2015, including several dozen from the United Kingdom. “Our thinking was that if Wake faculty needed this, then people in other universities did, too,” said Duke. “We were learning as we were going the first few years, but by the fourth year felt we had something really potent for a lot of people.”

“There really wasn’t another conference exactly like this” to help faculty design courses in ways that facilitate mastery of intercultural competency, said Pynes, who became a fixture at WISE conferences and is one of two outside experts on its steering committee. “We started out very heavily as a workshop for faculty but then, of course, realized we needed staff, too, to make intercultural competency a critical part of study abroad programs as opposed to something added after the fact.” She sends 10 or more UNC-Greensboro colleagues to the conference each year and said WISE proved useful “in garnering support for our own internationalization plan. Over the years we’ve built a cadre of faculty who understand intercultural communication and when we got around to doing our own QEP in 2013, we got a lot of support” for making global engagement the focus of the exercise required as part of reaccreditation.

Instilling Confidence and Sharpening Eyes

For Terry Baker, an accounting professor who had just taught his first summer class in Europe, that inaugural 2009 workshop “gave me a lot of confidence and the network and resources to make my program better and meet the intercultural development goals set for my students.” Since then he’s taught managerial accounting abroad five more times, taking students inside the  factories of Land Rover, Cadbury Chocolates, Mercedes Benz, and other manufacturers. “If you do it right, it makes what we do on campus look dull and shallow,” said Baker. “The real payoff is developing the students’ intercultural awareness and global mindedness.” The decision to launch WISE “turned out to be a brilliant guess or a shrewd assessment of a niche market that wasn’t being served,” the accounting professor said.

Anthropology professor Steve Folmar had been taking Wake Forest students since 2001 to  Nepal, where he studies issues of identity and social justice for the Himalayan country’s Dalits or “untouchable” castes. He collaborated with Duke on writing the curriculum for a pre–study abroad course. Even Folmar, an anthropologist well versed in working in other cultures, found much to learn himself from the WISE conferences. “Getting involved in these ongoing conversations and hearing other people’s approaches makes you put a much more discriminating eye on what you’re doing yourself.” 

Learning the Basics or Novel Techniques

The seventh WISE conference featured 28 sessions and two keynote presentations on cross-cultural engagement, including several aimed at preparing Chinese and other international students for their sudden immersion in U.S. campus life, as well as helping domestic students break out of the American “bubble” during their studies overseas. With preconference workshops, it stretched over three days. 

What was once a small pamphlet has been replaced by a 40-page program, with four pages of recommended readings on study abroad, intercultural competence and learning, and cross-cultural crisis management. There were sessions on how to measure students’ intercultural competence, panels that offered inside looks at model programs for inbound and outbound students, and tips on how to use digital devices and social media to document intercultural learning. Faculty new to study abroad could hear the basics, but there was also grist for veterans such as Folmar. 

He picked up the idea of sending students on scavenger hunts for photographs and artifacts in the royal city of Bhaktapur, Nepal, giving them “specific tasks related to what I want them to learn, whereas before I would either let them encounter these things on their own or cover them in the classroom.”

In addition to Pynes, Michael Vande Berg, former vice president for academic affairs at the Council for International Education Exchange, serves on the WISE steering committee alongside Wake Forest faculty from numerous disciplines. 

Intercultural Learning “Takes a Campus”

Registration fees make the WISE conference selfsupporting. Fifty of the 260 attendees from the 2015 conference were Wake Forest participants whose fees were covered by the institution. “We’ve had folks from the Office of Multicultural Affairs, the Women’s Center, the LGBTQ Center, housing, student life, diversity and inclusion, as well as the academic advising dean and a variety of faculty,” Duke said. “Intercultural learning does depend on people in housing. It depends on effective people in academic advising and the bursar’s office and the registrar’s office. To do it well, it takes a campus.”

Duke, who recently left to become assistant vice president for global strategy and international initiatives at the University of Nebraska, believes the vast majority of the estimated 10,000 to 20,000 U.S. faculty who go abroad with students each year “received no training in their PhD programs on how to do intercultural learning effectively.” WISE started with a small idea, he said, and grew by focusing on the academic benefits that accrue for students when faculty and staff acquire these twenty-first-century skills for themselves. The dates for the 2016 WISE conference are set— February 3–5—with a veteran international educator, Leigh Hatchett Stanfield, director of global campus programs, now in charge.

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Wake Forest University

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Virginia Commonwealth University freshman Alex Eliades was moving out of a residence hall and scouting a new place to live when he made a final check of his mailbox and found a flyer offering rising sophomores an opportunity to pioneer a living-learning program called VCU Globe. They would move into apartments in a new dorm, take a series of one-credit classes on global issues, participate in extensive cocurricular activities, and serve as mentors and “culture brokers” for the university’s large and growing international student population. In short, they would get a fast introduction to becoming global citizens without leaving Richmond, Virginia. 

It was just the ticket for Eliades, a political science and history major whose family emigrated from Greece three generations back. He sees his future lying in the international realm, possibly as a diplomat. “I’ve been using every opportunity I can to find ways to interact with the international community at VCU and in the greater Richmond area,” said Eliades, now a 21-year-old junior. “It’s such a thrill. I wanted to make sure they met someone who could show them cool parts of Richmond and the different things they can do here, and, of course, learn about their countries and what to do if I ever end up in their end of the court.”

Nearly nine in 10 VCU Globe residents are U.S. students. Fifty signed up for VCU Globe the first year, 90 in 2014, and 100 in 2015. The program has given Globe students opportunities to travel to Mexico, Qatar (where VCU has a campus), and Japan. Eliades studied Spanish and tutored children in Zapotec villages in Oaxaca in 2014. Another group journeyed to Doha last March and to Japan this summer.

Parmida Enayati, 22, a junior from Canada, had just transferred to VCU when she was recruited for Globe. “When I was originally approached, I didn’t really understand what they were talking about and didn’t think I’d be interested, but I’m so happy I changed my mind.”

“It was an amazing place to live,” said Enayati, who was born in Tehran and raised in Vancouver, where her father owns an English language school and her mother is an immigration consultant. “I never imagined in a million years my best friends would be from Korea and other parts of the world.” She added that it made VCU, which enrolls 32,000 students, “so much smaller.” For three-quarters of those on the Qatar trip, the experience was their first time studying abroad. 

Quest for Distinction

VCU, located in the heart of Virginia’s capital, enrolls many first-generation college students and Pell Grant recipients, said McKenna Brown, executive director of the Global Education Office. 

Six hundred studied abroad in 2013–2014. Even with scholarships, the costs can be daunting for students who may need to “work 60 hours a week in the summer to save (for tuition) or take a course to stay on time to graduate,” Brown said.

The university made increasing global engagement of students, faculty, and staff a priority in a 2011 “Quest for Distinction” strategic plan. It built community engagement and service on and off campus into the VCU Globe’s requirements. Students tallied 1,750 hours of service on campus in 2014–2015 and nearly 1,300 hours more providing help in the community, such as volunteering in clinics, schools, and literacy centers in Richmond’s immigrant neighborhoods. Students must perform at least 10 hours of service each semester. Globe residents also hold workshops on American life and customs for VCU’s 1,500 international students, serve as conversation partners, and assist with orientation and adjustment to university life. 

“I could have used this when I did my graduate research at the Vatican library,” quipped Globe Director Jill Blondin, an art historian who previously ran a living-learning program at the University of Texas-Tyler. What makes VCU Globe different, Blondin said, is the strong curricular component. “It’s a six-semester commitment that goes way beyond taking a single credit class here or there.” Students must take a one-credit orientation class, five sequenced, one-credit global seminars, and a three-credit, upper-level elective. A global thrust also is added to their section of a research writing course that is mandatory for all undergraduates.

VCU Globe has attracted students from 30 majors, Blondin said, with biology the most popular (11 percent), followed by international studies (9 percent) and political science (8.5 percent).

New Residences Furnish New Opportunities

The Globe is the second living-learning  arrangement spawned by the Quest for  Distinction—Aspire, the first, stresses community engagement—and more are on the way. The university has opened two new residence halls and is building two more. Nearly 6,000 students now live on campus. In addition to the Globe students, there are 80 additional beds constantly occupied by students in short-term programs from other countries. Two groups of 40 students from the University of Guadalajara each stayed for a month, experiencing U.S. university life and exposing American students to their culture.

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“It’s a welcoming environment for international students,” said Brown. “It’s a markedly different experience for them. They’re having meaningful, sustained interaction with American students versus what too often happens—maybe a 15-minute awkward conversation at a happy hour without much follow-up.”

Rewarding a Passion

Each semester, Globe names several faculty fellows from an array of fields who emphasize global ramifications of their specialties. Joann Richardson, a kinesiology and health sciences professor, created a service-learning course on community health promotion in global environments.

“It’s been fantastic,” said Richardson. “Often you might get five or six students in a new course. We cross-listed it with my home department, set a 30-student maximum, and got 30 students right away.” Students worked with Vietnamese, Latino, and Filipino immigrants in ethnic enclaves around Virginia and some took a service trip to Jamaica that Richardson led over spring break. In two decades of teaching, it was the first such class she has taught overseas.

The fellows’ departments receive a $5,000 stipend they can use to support a course release or for professional development. Apart from that, Richardson said, “it’s a career reward to bring my discipline into the Globe and to have it take on that more international perspective. To be able to link what’s a passion for me professionally—promoting community health—to an (international) initiative here at the university was very satisfying.”

International Seminars and Research Grants

There are other inducements to get more faculty to think global. In summer 2013, borrowing an idea from its neighbor, the University of  Richmond, VCU held a faculty development seminar in Spain and Morocco to explore migration issues. It took a second group to South Africa in 2014 to examine public health issues; Richardson was among the participants. The Global Education Office’s Brown led a third group to China in June 2015. Faculty are also invited to apply for Quest Global Impact Awards of up to $20,000 for international projects.

Brown said VCU Globe, the seminars, and other international initiatives share a common purpose articulated in the Quest for Distinction: to further global engagement of students, faculty, and staff “to transform lives and communities.”

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Virginia Commonwealth University

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When Brazil launched its Ciência sem Fronteiras (Science Without Borders) initiative to send 100,000 students and researchers around the world, many prestigious institutions stepped forward to snap them up. Rice University went a step further, repurposing the resulting $100,000 from tuition paid by the Brazilian government to send Rice faculty to Brazil to jump start collaborations. It also arranged extra support for the small influx of Brazilians on the Houston campus as part of a broader initiative to build lasting links between Rice and Brazilian universities.

The Brasil@Rice initiative, directed by Adria Baker, associate vice provost for international education, reflects the determination to deepen Rice’s ties to Latin America, as the university has already done on a much wider scale with China. The initiative started in 2012 just as the university began offering a Latin American studies major that requires study abroad and competency in Spanish or Portuguese. 

Brazil had launched its science mobility program a year earlier. Then-Provost George McLendon made the decision to redirect the tuition revenues and championed Brasil@Rice. Houston, often called the energy capital of the world, is by itself Brazil’s sixth largest trading partner, and cultural, intellectual, and economic ties between Houston and Brazil “made this a natural for us,” said McLendon. “It’s also true that Texas is probably the Brazil of the U.S., a very friendly bunch of people with a can-do spirit.”

Spelling Brasil the Brazilian Way

The Brasil@Rice initiative—spelled with an ‘s’ as the Brazilians do—has created “a new way of looking at international on our campus,” said Baker. It also provides an extra level of attention for Brazilian students and scholars during their stay in Houston. The initiative is managed by Mayra Onuchic, who is, in McClendon’s words, “the mother figure for all the Brazilian students.” She and husband José Onuchic—both Brazilian by birth—are masters of one of Rice’s 11 residential colleges. He is a prominent physicist, member of the National Academy of Sciences, and codirector of Rice’s Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, which seeks to advance cancer research with breakthroughs in physics. Doctoral students and postdocs from Brazil regularly work in his National Science Foundation–funded lab. He is also a linchpin in a partnership with the University of São Paulo in which the two universities jointly administer and share use of an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. “We both use the supercomputer remotely,” said Onuchic. “For me it’s 10 miles, for them 4,000, but for the guys doing the job, that doesn’t make any difference. The research is synergized by our working together. I’d like to see this become the bedrock that connects our two universities.”

There are other components to the bedrock. Robert Vajtai, a nanotechnology researcher, is working with graduate students and Universidade Estadual de Campinas (University of Campinas or UNICAMP) in the state of São Paulo on novel ways to nanoengineer graphene, a two-dimensional form of carbon, to store energy. One advantage of working with the Brazilian researchers, he said, “is that they have much more freedom to select interesting projects. Here you need to submit proposals and follow whatever your grant contract says.” Vajtai had just received word from a sister journal of Nature that it was publishing the teams’ latest findings. “These guys are motivated, knowledgeable, and very diligent,” said Vajtai, who added that his department is open to the possibility of dual doctoral degrees.

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History Leads the Way

Most notably, the history departments at Rice and UNICAMP created a dual doctoral degree program in 2012. Brazilian graduate student Ludmila de Souza Maia was the first to avail herself of that opportunity, spending 2012–2013 at Rice and now, back in Brazil, finishing a dissertation that will earn her two doctorates in spring 2016. “I felt very special at Rice. I was very spoiled. I got a lot of attention and had the whole department helping me,” said Maia. Rice provided a travel grant for her research in Paris archives on nineteenthcentury Brazilian and French women writers, and sent her to Latin America studies conferences in Illinois and New Mexico. The first Rice doctoral student is now studying at UNICAMP, and each institution has approved second candidates.

The chair of Rice’s history department, Alida Metcalf, collaborated with UNICAM history professor Silvia Hunold Lara to create that dual degree, which Rice’s Faculty Senate approved in November 2012. They had strong support from the top. The presidents of the two universities had each visited the other’s campus and signed partnership agreements. Metcalf and Lara shared a common interest in the history of the Atlantic slave trade, a strength of both departments. Nonetheless, “it took a year and a half working with our lawyers and bureaucratic staff to put our ideas on paper. It’s not easy,” said Lara.

Doctoral candidates complete coursework at their home campus—including advanced study of Portuguese for the U.S. students—then spend a year at the other school before returning home to write a dissertation in their native language and a lengthy abstract in the other tongue, with Metcalf and Lara as coadvisers. “It’s complicated having two advisers on a dissertation,” said Metcalf, who spent part of her childhood in Latin America, but going down this path “exposes them at a much more sophisticated level to the way in which history is written in two different countries.” And the preparation will give newly minted historians distinct advantages in applying for professorships “in the global academic environment that we are living nowadays,” said Lara, who has been a visiting scholar at U.S. and French universities.

Rice’s enrollment is 6,500 while UNICAMP’s is 34,000. Nearly a quarter of Rice students are international. Brazilians comprise only a small percentage (22 graduate students and 15 visiting students in fall 2014), but their presence is readily felt, especially in events arranged by the Brasil@ Rice initiative.

“To really get a lot out of one year in another country, you have to be ready to hit the ground running,” said Metcalf, the history chair. Brasil@Rice “has been able to provide that for the Brazilian students to maximize their time here.” McClendon, who has returned to the faculty, said the Brazilians have contributed greatly to the cultural mix on campus. “It’s actually not that hard to get Brazilians to feel acculturated because they gravitate naturally to social events,” he added.

Connections Beyond the Campus

Brasil@Rice has ventured beyond the campus into the wider Brazilian business, consular, and cultural communities in Houston. A university representative serves on the board of the Brazilian-Texas Chamber of Commerce, and Rice hosted a delegation of government officials on a visit to Houston last fall. Onuchic was among the first winners of a Diaspora Prize that Brazil created in 2013 to honor the achievements of Brazilians abroad in science, technology, and innovation.

Baker said Brasil@Rice has “generated tremendous enthusiasm. We’ve got people from different fields across campus, from high-level professors to beginning faculty, talking with each other. We even have staff thinking Brazil.” While more Brazilian students are coming to Rice, the language barrier and costs have made it difficult to convince more Rice students to study in   Brazil, Baker said. The university this past summer sent its first students to a language immersion program in São Paolo and subsidized two internships in Brazil. Baker believes the success of Brasil@Rice provides “a template for internationalization” that Rice now can follow with other countries. 

It isn’t certain how long Brazil will continue its Scientific Mobility Program, but the Brasil@Rice office hopes to award $90,000 for further faculty travel and collaborations, including two-way visits. A decision is pending approval by a new provost.

Nonetheless, even with no guarantee of future revenues from the mobility program, “my guess is the strength of the ties we build will endure one way or another after that program no longer exists,” said McLendon.

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Rice University

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Thomas Jefferson was the prototype of what every university today professes students need to become: a global citizen. The polyglot president, diplomat, scientist, inventor, and educator was friend to the Marquis de Lafayette and Simon Bolivar. He voiced hope that the university he founded in the foothills of the Blue Ridge  Mountains in 1819 would stand as “the future bulwark of the human mind in this hemisphere.” He recruited five of eight original faculty from Great Britain. Most of the first 65 students journeyed to his “Academical Village” from outside Virginia.

But in modern times, it took until the end of the twentieth century for the University of Virginia (U.Va.) to take what Vice Provost for Global Affairs Jeffrey Legro called “a self-conscious turn to the world.” Building on its success as a top public research university, U.Va. made internationalization a central thrust of its two most recent strategic plans. Under former President John Casteen, it brought international students in far greater numbers to Charlottesville and appointed a vice provost for international affairs. On President Teresa Sullivan’s watch, it reorganized and expanded international programs, pushing students and faculty to venture far beyond the Blue Ridge and finding new ways to embed a culture of global awareness on the Grounds, as the 1,682-acre campus is called.

A Center for Global Health and an International Residential College, where 300 students (60 percent domestic, 40 percent international) live, were created after the 1999 strategic plan. But a faculty task force that looked across the Grounds in 2008 delivered the blunt assessment that while “the University of Virginia is by no means inactive internationally… neither is it a leader."

A Central Strategy and Shared Costs

Since then U.Va. has raised the international banner higher even while weathering diminished state support (but a swelling endowment, now $7 billion). In an institution with 11 independent schools—even separate business schools for undergraduate and graduate students—the president and provost found ways to pull academic  fiefdoms together on internationalization. “The best part is that this is not just in the expected places. Everybody has embraced it,” said Sullivan, a sociologist who became president in 2010. 

The opening of an office in Shanghai—U.Va.’s first overseas—in 2013 marked a milestone in the journey. Justin O’Jack, former China director for the Council on International Educational Exchange, was hired to run the China office with a mission of supporting research partnerships, academic programs, internships, admissions, alumni engagement, and career placement. The university sent a 20-person delegation, including a half-dozen senior leaders, to a two-day conference and ceremonial opening last March. More importantly, boasted former Executive Vice President and Provost John Simon, “I got all of the deans to contribute to the costs of the China office, so everyone has a stake.” Start-up costs were $150,000 and it costs $300,000 a year to operate.

Simon, departing after four years for the presidency of Lehigh University, said schools were accustomed to acting like “independent operators…that could do everything they want whenever they want.” Some had stellar overseas connections “but to me, the issues around global are a centralized strategy. I’m not saying the schools can’t do other things, but that’s not an institutional strategy.” He predicts U.Va. will plant its flag in half a dozen other locations within five years.

Location, Location, Location

Legro, a politics professor and vice provost for global affairs since 2012, chairs a Global Affairs Committee with representatives from all schools and major administrative units. A separate Global on Grounds Committee comprised of faculty, staff, and students is charged with developing new ways to integrate global content into the university experience.

A modest Center for International Studies made way for a more ambitious and deeper-pocketed Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation, which has been given prime space in a historic building in the shadow of Jefferson’s iconic Rotunda.

“It’s location, location, location,” said the center’s director, Brian Owensby, a Latin American historian. It shares space with a new Global Internship Program and a popular global studies major and can dispense $450,000 for research projects small and large. Two teams of environmental scientists split $100,000 awards last year. “Things are going gangbusters,” said Owensby.

The global internship director, Majida Bargach, placed 39 students in jobs in 2014 and 70 this summer. Bargach, a French lecturer who also leads a study abroad class to her native Morocco, said the interns gain the benefit of “a total immersion by themselves in the workplace.”

Student Demand for a Global Studies Major

The evolution of the global studies major attests to the strong voice and tradition of self-governance that students enjoy at U.Va., where they run the vaunted Honor System (exams are unproctored) and a galaxy of hundreds of organizations, many with an international focus.

Students on their own initiative began stumping in 2007 for a global development studies major, arguing in an 8,000-word white paper that U.Va. prepared too few students for careers fighting poverty. Richard Handler, a cultural anthropologist, stepped forward to direct the major in 2009. It’s now bundled into a larger global studies major with tracks on health, the environment, and security/justice.

“Universities these days are full of students who want to go around the world and do good work,” said Handler, who raised $1 million to hire a “professor of practice” to connect students with global development organizations.

Francesca Fiorani, a Renaissance art historian and associate dean, said the attraction of the major is not only for students but also for faculty. “We’re rethinking the traditional disciplines. It’s driving curriculum reform across the university.” Core courses range from economics to anthropology to sociology, all presented from a global perspective. “That’s what students want,” said Fiorani. ”They want to know how to operate with people from all over the world.”

The Center for Global Health has doubled to 55 the number of $5,000 awards to students to work in interdisciplinary teams on projects in developing countries. “In the past, people thought ‘global health’ was only for doctors and nurses, but it’s for the economists, educators, and engineers as well,” said Rebecca Dillingham, MD, the director.

Vanquishing the Fear of Missing Out

Two thousand students studied abroad in 2013– 2014. More might go but for a much-discussed malady known as FOMO, or the fear of missing out. U.Va. is a school rich with traditions, from secret societies to fall football to a spring steeplechase race. “We’re challenged to get more students to go abroad for a semester or year. That’s where a lot of our energy is going,” said Dudley Doane, director of the International Studies Office.

“They don’t want to miss any of their eight great semesters here. But it’s a bit of an urban myth. Nine of 10 who go abroad will tell you it was their most meaningful semester,” said Legro. McKenna Hughes, 22, an English and linguistics major and peer adviser in the International Studies Office, said, “The thing about traditions is they happen every year. We push them to realize they’ve got three other chances.”

Meg Gould, 22, spent a summer in Morocco and a full semester in Paris and was selected by peers for one of the coveted rooms for seniors behind the colonnade on the Lawn. She also represented students on the Board of Visitors. “U.Va. definitely opened the doors for me,” said the global studies and French major. “Amazing experiences can occur outside of Grounds.”

The International Studies Office partners with the Department of Anthropology to offer CORE (Cultural Orientation, Reflection, and Engagement) seminars to prepare students for crossing cultures and demystify the experience. “It’s a wrap-around curriculum,” said coordinator Catarina Krizancic, an anthropologist. “It isn’t enough to put people in a different language or culture. You have to mentor and teach them through it.”

This academic year is the last in which U.Va. is sponsoring the Semester at Sea program. It has provided a dean and sent other faculty and staff on the voyages since 2006. 

Making Room for International Students

By law 70 percent of U.Va.’s 15,000 undergraduates must be Virginians. Nine hundred—5.5 percent—are international. It is twice as hard for out-of-staters to win admission, and even harder for international students. “The burgeoning of our reputation internationally” keeps driving up the number and quality of applications, said Richard Tanson, senior international student and scholar adviser.

International students can fall under the thrall of Charlottesville, too. “I cherish this U.Va. experience,” said “Grong” Yexiao Wang, a senior from Chengdu, China, majoring in math and political philosophy. Few friends at other campuses are “so fond of their schools.” Wang banded together with classmates to start a U.Va. China Fund that last February honored economics professor  Kenneth Elzinga for his steadfast support— including driving a visiting Chinese scholar and his wife to the hospital one icy night in time to deliver their baby. The award is named for U.Va.’s first graduate from China, educator and diplomat Weiching  Williams Yen, Class of 1900.

Sophomore Lexi Schubert, an economics and cognitive science major from Munich, Germany, leads a new organization called Global Greeters that helps students settle into college life. That was not a problem for Schubert, who speaks five languages and is learning Indonesian and Hungarian. “Studying in the U.S. was always a dream of mine.”

Rafat Khan, a senior from Dhaka, Bangladesh, cut a distinctive figure on campus with an upswept coif he calls “a faux-hawk.” He threw himself into a host of activities, including the Global on Grounds Committee, and worked to overcome the self-segregation of international students. “The ideal university environment is one where there’s a flowing, cross-cultural dialogue and people have friends from all over the world,” said the commerce major and philosophy minor. “U.Va. has done a good job, but there’s always room to grow.”

Humanities and Business in the Global Context

Befitting an institution whose founder once said that liberal education would help “guard the sacred deposit of [citizens’] rights and liberties,” U.Va. has partnered with other universities to uphold the place of the humanities in a globalized, business-minded world. The Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures works with Delhi University, Nanjing Univer sity,  Oxford University, and London’s School of Oriental and African Studies on a mission of connecting scholars “across conceptual, imaginative, and continental divides.” Two Mellon Foundation grants since 2011 topping $6 million are allowing the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to hire 20 new interdisciplinary faculty and providing research funds for dozens of faculty and graduate students. The latest $3.5 million grant focuses on the Global South, including new courses and research on the histories and cultures of Africa, Latin America, and South and East Asia.

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Fiorani, the associate dean, said U.Va. views itself as both an importer and exporter of humanities faculty. “All sorts of places across the globe have a strong interest in developing the liberal arts education for which the U.S. is uniquely famous.”

The bifurcated business schools, the Darden School of Business and McIntire School of Commerce, have stood in the vanguard of curriculum internationalization. Darden Dean Robert Bruner led a national task force that produced an encyclopedic report on The Globalization of  Management Education. It found business schools innovating rapidly to globalize but also forecast a high failure rate for their experiments, which Bruner said “is actually indispensable because only by that will we identify a sustainable path or paths forward.”

McIntire Dean Carl Zeithaml, a global management strategy expert, was taken aback by a “lack of international orientation” when he came to Charlottesville in 1997. “I really felt that most people thought that the boundaries of the world were consistent with the boundaries of Albemarle County.” After a visit to Asia with other deans, he proposed opening an office there. “I guess I wasn’t very good at it because it took another 17 years,” he said wryly. 

Back to the Future

Jefferson’s Rotunda was sheathed in scaffolding during the spring of 2015, undergoing renovations to make the old new again. The global offices in the Academical Village were also undergoing renovations to fit everything under one roof. 

The university’s reinvigorated internationalization is a type of reconstruction, too, as U.Va. seeks to reclaim the legacy of America’s earliest global thinker. “That is our goal, and though there are challenges, we are well on our way to realizing it,” Legro said.

With the University of San Diego’s (USD) Spanish Renaissance–style architecture, sunny climate, gardens in flower year round, and postcard view of Mission Bay, it might seem hopeless to convince students to tear themselves away to study abroad. But nearly three-quarters of the undergraduates do so and, befitting USD’s religious identity, many jump at opportunities to perform service in South Africa, Jamaica, Haiti, and elsewhere. “One of our distinguishing marks is that we take seriously the need to become global citizens,” said former President Mary Lyons. “As a Catholic university that belongs to a worldwide network that has global outreach, global presence, and pays attention to global concerns, it comes naturally to us.”

Today’s USD is the product of a 1972 union between colleges for women and men built after World War II on a hilltop called Alcalá Park that sits 22 miles from the border with Mexico. The founding Sacred Heart nuns modeled the women’s college after the University of Alcalá in Spain, professing a belief that those attracted by its beauty would also find truth and goodness. The college has been under lay control since the merger and only half the student body is Catholic. Undergraduates must take philosophy and two religious studies classes. Kuwaiti student Khaled Alaskar, a mechanical engineering major, initially regarded the requirement as a burden, “but I learned a lot about different religions. USD does a good job at addressing how religion is important in people’s lives without enforcing it.” 

Expanding the Global Footprint

Lyons, a former captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve and president of the College of Saint Benedict (a 2012 Simon Award winner) and the California Maritime Academy, has just retired. She drove two, multiyear strategic planning efforts during the past 12 years that both placed greater emphasis on international study and research. An International Center headed by an associate provost was created in 2007, bringing three separate study abroad offices under one roof. A 2011 strategic plan set a goal of “expanding USD’s global presence” and developing a “footprint” in major cities abroad to promote international partnerships, exchanges, and collaborations.

In August 2014 it opened a 10,000-square-foot USD Madrid Center with classrooms, meeting and study spaces, and facilities equipped with videoconferencing and high-speed connections to the home campus. The university spent $400,000 to open the center near Retiro Park and the Prado museum. Lyons said it represented the culmination of a decade of efforts “to graduate men and women who are truly global citizens.”

USD had already been sending 90 students to learn Spanish, live with host families, and take other courses each fall in the Spanish capital. The center now has two administrators and a large roster of local faculty teaching classes that run the gamut from art history to business to political science. It is also home to summer programs for the business and education graduate schools.

Denise Dimon, associate provost for international affairs, said the goal is to enroll 200 students each year at the USD Madrid Center—115 went in 2014–2015—and attract students from other U.S. colleges as well. While students studied in Madrid before, “the difference is we are now a recognized educational institution in Spain,” Dimon said.

Paula Cordeiro, former longtime dean of the School of Leadership and Education Sciences (SOLES), is considering designing a graduate course that would bring future school principals to Spain. To do that, she said, “I need to make connections with schools and professional organizations there. It will be much easier to do that if I have a base— our Madrid Campus—to work out of.”

Seeking to Make Peace and Social Innovation

Thanks to a $25 million gift and $50 million bequest from Joan Kroc, widow of the McDonald’s founder, USD is home to the Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice and the Kroc School of Peace Studies. The institute won a Simon Spotlight Award in 2011 for its Women PeaceMakers program, which provides several months’ respite for community activists from war-torn countries.

Mrs. Kroc gave instructions that the institute was to not just “talk about peace, but make peace.” Perhaps no school could adequately fulfill that lofty ambition, but USD’s leaders admit that Kroc has had, in Lyons’s words, “fits and starts.” Built in 2000, it began offering master’s degrees two years later, followed by a minor for undergraduates. The Kroc School, opened in 2007, has six faculty members and 33 graduate students. But a conference it organized in November 2014 on “Defying Extremism” drew 125 international policymakers, religious leaders, and peacebuilders from 30 countries. The institute followed that up with a February 2015 regional conference on extremism that drew participants from eight Asian countries to Manila and the conflicted island of Mindanao in the Philippines. Provost Andrew Allen said Kroc has the potential to become the hub for peacebuilding studies and actions that span the university.

It has already begun strengthening ties with USD’s other schools. Patricia Marquez, Kroc’s dean since 2014, came from the School of Business Administration, where she taught entrepreneurship for social change. While still at the business school, she spearheaded creation of a joint Center for Peace and Commerce with Kroc and launched a Social Innovation Challenge that has grown beyond the campus. Last spring the Challenge awarded $75,000 to eight teams of students from universities across San Diego for such ventures as building portable toilet seats for landmine victims in Uganda and opening a school in Ghana.

Marquez is a Venezuelan-born and University of California-Berkeley–educated anthropologist—her research was on street children in Caracas—who takes an iconoclastic approach to how Kroc should pursue its mission. “I’m not interested in the same old categories. If business is going to come up with solutions to social problems, we need to bring into the conversation people very different from us in their thinking,” said Marquez. “We do focus on peace, but we’re not training philosophers of peace. We’re training people who understand philosophy, sociology, anthropology, economics, and all these things to solve some of the most intractable problems in the twenty-first century.”

Her successor at the joint center, economics professor Stephen Conroy, said it occupies “a rare space that folks on either side quite frankly might be somewhat uncomfortable with. But for me, being a force for good and trying to improve standards of living is what business should be all about.” USD is also an Ashoka Foundation Changemaker Campus, part of a network of 30 universities seeking to incubate innovative approaches to solving global challenges. 

Priming the Pump for Study Abroad

Half the undergraduates who study abroad do so for a full semester. Students receive $170,000 in need-based aid and get a 30 percent tuition discount on credits earned in short-term programs. As many as 100 faculty teach short-term courses overseas during January intersession and summer terms.

“We have centralized support from the international center. Graduate schools do their own programming as well,” said Dimon. “We offer a variety of study abroad programs, research missions, and service-learning activities, packaging them in different ways for students’ different needs.”

The study abroad staff is lean—Director Kira Espiritu and Associate Director Jessica Calhoun work with four advisers and an operations manager, handling all logistical arrangements and student service support—which means schools and faculty must shoulder some marketing and administrative burdens. Chemistry professor James Bolender said there are fewer such burdens than when he pioneered a field study class for science majors on Mexico’s Baja Peninsula in 2001. He remembers “flying by the seat of my pants” back then. Bolender has led students back to Baja ever since and worked alongside them on a humanitarian water quality project in Mbarara, Uganda.

A Taste of International Education for Sophomores

USD’s lofty study abroad participation rate has also been helped by the Second Year Experience Abroad, part of a wider effort by the student affairs office to encourage freshmen to return for their second year. Students take a global studies seminar and travel in cohorts in January of their sophomore year to Florence, Italy, or Antigua, Guatemala. Courses offered run the gamut from language and art to chemistry and statistics. More than 10 percent of freshmen—150 students—sign up each year.

“I consider this a big retention strategy,” said Carmen Vazquez, vice president for student affairs. It’s also delivered striking results for the International Center. Espiritu said 85 percent of those sophomores wind up studying abroad again.

Piper Bloom transferred from a community college, so she missed that sophomore opportunity, but “immediately decided that I wanted to have some of that experience, even though I’m a little older than everyone else.” She chose a popular summer Shakespeare course in London. “You hear from friends who went and it just inspires you to go,” said the English major, who was headed to Japan after graduation to teach English.

Building International Experiences Into Graduate Curricula

International experiences are par for the course for many of USD’s graduate and professional schools. Dimon has a direct hand in that as she remains director of the Ahlers Center for International Business as well as associate provost. Ahlers has sent 150 MBA students to 13 countries to do international practicums, consulting directly for foreign companies or tackling projects in teams alongside MBA students from the local university. Notwithstanding that most are working professionals who are pursuing MBAs part time, a majority graduate with an international experience on their résumés, Dimon said.

Ahlers has forged close ties with EGADE Graduate Business School of the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico, whose retired dean, Jaime Alonso Gomez, is now a USD distinguished professor of strategy and international business. He teaches business students and executives that in additional to the proverbial three Ps—people, products, and profits—they need to treat peace and prosperity as equally important considerations for their bottom lines. “That is the true meaning of education: bringing not only material wealth, but building better communities, better neighbors, better everything,” Gomez said.

SOLES, the leadership and education graduate school, since 2008 has required every student to participate in an international experience. “We didn’t do it on a whim. We take it very seriously,” said Linda Dews, assistant dean of the School of Leadership and Education Sciences. “We’re seeing that it’s making a difference for the way students approach their professional career.”

Most students spend only brief periods abroad, but that does not tell the full picture, said Assefa Tessema, a doctoral student from Ethiopia who directs the school’s Global Center. “When people hear it’s a one-week or 10-day program, they may assume it’s superficial work. But it’s very intensive engagement for students and for faculty, who start planning a year in advance.”

An Emphasis on Service as Well as Learning

Many study abroad programs encourage students to perform service. Political science professor Mike Williams weaves that into the summer course he teaches in South Africa. “I’m a cheerleader and also an organizer,” he said, “trying to get more people to think about how we advance our social justice mission and how to do this in their classes.”

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A conversation with Williams convinced Jennifer Bradshaw to switch majors from business to international relations and to follow Williams to the village of Makuleke, where the group slept in huts, worked alongside community leaders, and mentored youth. “They were some of the most genuine, welcoming people I’ve ever met. That experience made me rethink my own life here in the U.S. I think about it every day,” said Bradshaw.

The Mulvaney Center for Community, Awareness and Social Action arranges service immersion trips to Jamaica, Guatemala, and other countries, but also guides students to assist immigrants, the homeless, and poor in San Diego’s Linda Vista section, Tijuana, and other border towns.

In a Jamaica program led by John Loggins, director of community-based learning, students learn the history of the Atlantic slave trade, tutor kids, and participate in activities from cooking classes to jam sessions in the town of Duncan near Montego Bay. “There’s all kinds of different ways they can learn,” said Loggins, an alumnus and former Peace Corps volunteer in Jamaica. “It’s really transformed the dynamic in that community.”

“We’re doing this international work because it’s good education,” said Chris Nayve, an assistant provost and the center’s director who has three USD degrees (BA, JD, and MBA). “It’s not just the content of the class. It’s about who are you becoming.”

The University of Delaware (UD) traces its roots to a colonial academy that produced three signers of the Declaration of Independence. It was chartered as a college in 1834 and selected as a land-grant institution after the Civil War. It has a rich tradition of study abroad, a robust intensive English institute, and a $200 million research enterprise. But when Patrick Harker became president in 2007, he was perturbed to learn that only 39 incoming freshmen—1 percent—came from other countries. No institution could reach the first tier of research universities with so few international students in its classrooms, he told the faculty. Today UD enrolls nearly 700 international undergraduates as well as 1,300 graduate students with 1,600 others learning English. “We turned that around. You can feel it on campus today. It just feels more diverse. But we’ve got more work to do,” said Harker, former dean of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Structural changes were necessary to accommodate the growth spurt. UD’s Office for International Students and Scholars (OISS), which once consisted of two people in tight quarters, now has a 10-person staff ensconced in a Georgian mansion at the heart of campus. “I feel like Cinderella,” said Frances O’Brien, the assistant director.

The relocation to the Wright House, formerly the faculty club, is “both metaphor and evidence of the university’s commitment to its international community,” said Nancy Guerra, former associate provost for international programs and director of the parent Institute for Global Studies (IGS), which provides grants to faculty, forges international partnerships, and oversees OISS and education abroad. Creating the institute was a key recommendation in a 2008 “Path to Prominence” strategic plan on how to elevate the stature of international programs and intensify global activity on all fronts.

“We made a small number of critical organizational changes that paid big dividends,” said Nancy Brickhouse, former deputy provost. Consolidating international programs provided “a much higher degree of visibility and access across campus” and enabled UD to attract faculty and professionals with deep experience in global education, said Brickhouse, now provost of Saint Louis University.

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Among them was OISS Director Ravi Ammigan, who brought a wealth of programming experience from Michigan State University in 2013. The international office ramped up activities and “now we are a center of cross-cultural engagement as well,” he said.

Placing Delaware on the Map

Delaware, the first state to ratify the Constitution, is second smallest by size and forty-fifth by population. “Our big challenge is how to increase our international visibility. We don’t yet have really good global recognition,” said Guerra, a psychologist who stepped down as associate provost and IGS head to return full time to teaching and research on stopping childhood violence. Chris Lucier, vice president for enrollment management, said, “The location actually appeals to students once they know how close we are to Philadelphia, Washington, and New York. The strength of our engineering and business programs are major selling points.”

Reeling in more talent from abroad makes academic and economic sense, because UD already must look outside Delaware’s borders for 60 percent of its 21,000 students. It describes itself as a “state-assisted” institution, not fully public, since it is governed by its own trustees (the governor is an ex officio member) and gets only 13 percent of the budget from state coffers. “People assume we’re a big public institution. The reality is we’re medium sized and a public-private hybrid,” said Amy Greenwald Foley, IGS’s associate director for global outreach. “We have smaller classes and offer amenities you’d expect to find at a private institution.” 

UD competes with larger flagship schools such as Penn State, Rutgers, and the University of Maryland. Among the attractions are the classic college-town feel of Newark (population 32,000) and a picture-book campus with stately elms shading Georgian buildings that line the Green.

Push for Global Engagement

Harker, a management expert trained as a civil and urban engineer, shook up UD’s budgeting and pushed colleges to eliminate low-demand programs. He believes the changes spurred departments to become more entrepreneurial and globally engaged. “It’s helped people be more creative about what kinds of programs we can offer and what types of grants we can go after,” said Harker, who stepped down in July to become president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

Since 2003 UD has hosted top students from the Middle East and North Africa for civic leadership training funded by the U.S. Department of State, and more recently it was selected as one of 20 universities providing coursework and mentoring for young leaders from across Africa. It launched a UD Africa initiative in 2013 to increase partnerships with African universities and send more faculty and students to the continent. “A host of faculty do research in Africa,” said Gretchen Bauer, chair of political science and international relations, who is headed to Ghana on a Fulbright in 2016.

Norma Gaines-Hanks, a human development and family services professor, has taken students to South Africa for study and service eight times. Enrollment is capped at 30. “If the kids had their way, we’d take 100,” she said.

Academic and Cultural Ties with China

UD has made its greatest progress in expanding academic ties in China. A close relationship with Xiamen University extends back to 2007, including a dual doctoral degree in oceanography. UD is one of the U.S. campuses where Xiamen is sending dozens of doctoral students being groomed as future faculty.

Xiamen helped UD land a Confucius Institute in 2010 and provides two Mandarin teachers on loan, and the two universities are partnering to open a State Department–funded American Cultural Center on the Xiamen campus, one of 24 such centers across China.

“There are so many Confucius Institutes around the country. We want to be different,” said Jianguo Chen, the director and a professor of Chinese literature. He wants to provide expertise for Chinese entrepreneurs who are seeking to break into U.S. markets and American firms looking to do business in China.

Engineering in the Forefront

The pacesetter in many of UD’s efforts to extend its global reach is the College of Engineering led by Dean Babatunde Ogunnaike, a former DuPont researcher and member of the National Academy of Engineering. A new global engineering program combining bachelor’s and master’s degrees in five years is on the drawing boards. “My tagline for students is, ‘Let’s go change the world together,’” said the Nigerian-born Ogunnaike. Engineering is the most international of UD’s colleges, with 627 students from other countries, including Ugochukwu Nsofor, who is studying electromagnetics and nanophotonics for his doctorate. Nsofor volunteers at orientations for international students, which have undergone “a huge improvement” since OISS expanded, he said.

The four dozen students in UD’s Engineers Without Borders (EWB) chapter are trying to change the world already. They designed and built a bridge connecting two remote villages in Guatemala, completed a clean water project in Cameroon, and have scouted projects in Malawi and the Philippines. Over winter break, senior Kelsey McWilliams traveled to India with a UD team on a Gates Foundation–funded project to improve latrines. That project was started by the late civil engineering professor Steve Dentel, who recently lost a battle with cancer. Dentel, the original EWB adviser, had been to Cameroon 11 times.

IGS and the College of Engineering split costs of a newly created associate director position to manage the college’s international programs and work across disciplines with other colleges.

Keeping Study Abroad Affordable

The junior year abroad originated at UD. The first students’ embarkation in 1923 on an ocean liner bound for France made front-page news in the New York Times. Now 1,300 students head abroad each year, mostly in classes taught by scores of UD faculty over the five week winter term. One-third study abroad before graduation.

But costs are a concern, said Lisa Chieffo, the associate director. Fees for some programs top $10,000 (including airfare and housing but not tuition). The university has doubled aid for study abroad to $1 million and launched a Delaware Diplomats program that allows freshmen to earn up to $1,500 for study or internships abroad by participating in global events on campus, including lectures and international coffee hours. Fifty students enlisted in the first corps.

Kerry Snyder, 22, a wildlife conservation major who works in the global studies office, put several scholarships together that paid for a service class in Cambodia and two research trips to Nicaragua. “I’d like to see programs that are more affordable, honestly, because that is a barrier. Students come in and they’re so excited, but they just don’t have the money,” said Snyder.

In 2014 the university launched a World Scholars Program that offers incoming freshmen the opportunity to spend their first semester at John Cabot University in Rome. Six signed up, including Daria Collins, a budding linguistics major now learning Japanese and planning to study abroad again. “I definitely feel like a world scholar,” she said. Thirty-eight freshmen started classes in Rome in fall 2015 and Foley began scouting for a second partner university in Madrid. 

Cynthia Schmidt-Cruz, professor of Spanish and interim director of the Center for Global and Area Studies, believes study abroad scholarships could entice more students to pursue a new minor in global studies that attracted 10 students last year.

A Fruitful Partnership on International Recruiting

UD’s English Language Institute (ELI) has grown so rapidly that its classrooms have spilled into seven buildings, including what was once the home of a Delaware paper mill magnate. Sixteen hundred students passed through its classrooms and labs in 2014–2015. More than a quarter came through a Conditional Admission Program (CAP) that guarantees entry to credit classes with no TOEFL required once they make the grade in language classes.

Once UD gave a green light for CAP in 2009, “we were off to the races,” said Director Scott Stevens, who won NAFSA’s 2015 Cassandra Pyle Award for Leadership and Collaboration for his efforts to raise standards for intensive English programs. 

The ELI and UD’s Admissions Office once worked apart on international recruitment, but “it’s a very integrated team now,” said Vice President for Enrollment Management Lucier. International applications shot up 50 percent in two years. The enrollment surge presented challenges for UD as some students struggled to adjust to campus and academic life. “The whole transition to the culture of academia is critical,” said Stevens. The institute now forms cohorts of five to eight CAP students, each with a U.S. student mentor. Residing in global living communities, they read books together, work on study skills, and learn respect for academic standards, but also go on scavenger hunts and a weekend retreat.

The campus wide collaborative culture is apparent in the Global Recruitment and Retention Group that includes academic advisers and representatives from residence life, career services, and the counseling center. It meets monthly to brainstorm not only how to attract international students, but also how to better support them once they arrive. 

Breaking the Ice with Facebook

Jill Neitzel and Patricia Sloane-White’s popular Anthropology 230 class on the lives of the “Young, Global, and Privileged” takes an innovative approach to breaking the ice between domestic and international students. Neitzel and Sloan-White assign readings and videos but the bulk of the work consists of student responses on a private Facebook page to a volley of questions on topics including inequality, race and gender, and pop culture and partying.

Students watched videos on racial tensions in Ferguson, Missouri, but also viewed a hilarious skit by the Fung Brothers, a duo of Chinese-American comedians, on “the Asian bubble” on U.S. campuses. They examined the huge gaps in both countries between the rich and working classes.

“It’s not all just ‘Let’s be friends,’” said Neitzel. “We approach this as a serious academic class, but rather than my standing up there lecturing, it’s participatory engagement in learning about other cultures anthropologically.”

The class drew raves. “I really wanted to have some Americans friends. Before this class, it did not work out,” said a Chinese student. “I even got to know Chinese culture better.” Using Facebook as a teaching tool was “absolutely brilliant,” said an American student.

The message is impossible to miss. One day each fall at North Central College dozens of senior administrators, faculty, and students don maroon T-shirts emblazoned with a three-word imperative: Please go away!

Students are heeding the study abroad pitch, not just because of the human billboards, but because the college has hired more advisers, made study overseas possible at no additional cost beyond airfare, and nearly tripled the number of semester offerings. North Central has come a long way since opening a small Office of International Programs two decades ago at a time when it enrolled fewer than 30 international students and sent only 23 abroad. Now 10 percent of the 3,000 students study in other countries each year. Recruiting efforts and copious financial aid now bring nearly 100 international students to the United Methodist–affiliated college in the suburbs of Chicago each year. At an institution where 90 percent of students are from Illinois, North  Central is progressing toward a goal of a 5 percent international student population.

The college was founded in 1861 by leaders of what is now the United Methodist Church to serve the families of German immigrants. The 65-acre campus sits in downtown Naperville, an upscale suburb 30 minutes from Chicago’s bustling Loop and lakefront. It changed its name from NorthWestern College in the 1920s to avoid confusion with much larger Northwestern  University. Early graduates served as missionaries in Japan and China. “Service and civic engagement are an important part of the culture of this campus,” said President Troy Hammond, who has a PhD in atomic physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but came to academe from the business world. 

Nudging a Campus to Internationalize

Hammond’s long-serving predecessor, Harold Wilde, set the regional college on a course to internationalize in 1994 when he tapped English professor Jack Shindler to direct the fledgling international office, a job he still holds today. Shindler wrote a dissertation on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, but turned early in his career to directing the English as a second language program at Texas Southern University before joining the North Central faculty in 1981. When the international office started, it was just Shindler and a part-time secretary but he now runs a heavily trafficked, six-person shop with its own English Language Institute. Framed above the door to Shindler’s den-like office is a poster inspired by a salute from Wilde calling Shindler the campus “nudge” on all things international. “I nudged not just faculty but students out of the nest,” said Shindler, who as a Williams College student once convinced a chapel board to convert an empty fraternity house into a coffee house and gathering space. “I feel like we’re still doing that. This is a kind of coffee house in the best sense of the word where people come, share talents, talk to each other, network, and make this place more international.”

“We couldn’t have gotten where we are without him,” said Devadoss Pandian, the now retired vice president and dean of the faculty. Norval Bard, a professor of French, said Shindler “has a disarming way about him. He rarely says no. When you come to him with a new idea, he might say, ‘We’ll look into it,’ but he always leaves the door open to explore new ideas.” Francine Navakas, a humanities professor and associate dean who directs interdisciplinary studies, credited Shindler’s “magical planning” with helping land nearly $1 million in Title VI and foundation grants to build East Asian and Middle East/North African (MENA) studies. The college’s structure, with four academic divisions but no separate schools dividing liberal arts from business and science, helped, too, said Navakas. “We don’t have the big walls and barriers that some institutions do.”

Broadening Student and Faculty Horizons

North Central has marshaled resources to give students and faculty ample opportunities to learn and do research in other countries. The college provided grants to 33 faculty over the past five years for projects overseas. The  Office of International Programs arranges lectures, film screenings, and other events on campus focusing on global themes and works closely with faculty to incorporate these topics into courses. It once switched topics yearly, but now spends three years drilling deeper into a single global concern. The current cycle examines globalization and its ramifications. Islam, environmental change, and human rights have each been the focus in the past. The college provides stipends for faculty to join a summer reading and discussion group and sends them to a summer institute at the University of  Chicago’s Center for International Studies.

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Perry Hamalis, professor of religious studies and director of the College Scholars Honors Program, has taken part in nine of those seminars. His honors students are required to study abroad. “We’ve just redone the curriculum and added a new history of ideas minor,” said Hamalis. “The new curriculum now is truly global, pulling from the Indian subcontinent, Africa, Asia, South America, as well as European and North American sources. Previously, it should have been called history of Western ideas.”

The college distributes $40,000 to $50,000 each year in Richter Grants for undergraduate research anywhere in the world. These awards up to $5,000 date back to 1977 and for many years were funded by the Paul K. and Elizabeth Cook Richter Trusts, which provided similar opportunities at other colleges. Recently the college has supported the grants with its own funds. Miguel Purgimon Colell, a junior from El Salvador in the honors program, used his award to fly to Rio de Janeiro during the World Cup in 2014 to study the economic impact of the games on the lives of ordinary Brazilians. His economics professor, a Brazilian, put him in touch with academics and a government official in Rio, and he interviewed residents from all walks of life. He also managed to snag a ticket to the Brazil-Colombia match. “North Central has allowed me to do things I never would have imagined I could do,” said Colell, who is president of the International Club and is studying to become an actuary.

International Students’ Outsize Impact

North Central had just 51 international students when Jesús Velasco was hired as international student adviser in 2012. Two autumns later there were 94 from 40 countries. “Our exchanges from partner universities really boomed,” he said. But the college also stepped up recruiting to enroll more four-year students. It once took “an armchair approach,” said Marty Sauer, vice president for enrollment management. “We didn’t do much outreach or travel. It was simply a matter of accommodating international students who found us.” Now Megan Otermat, an assistant admissions director, recruits overseas and devotes full time to working with international applicants and advising those who enroll.

Otermat found Uyen Lam, 20, at a college fair at an international school in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Lam had spent a year at high schools in Florida and “had a long list of criteria that I wanted for college. North Central fit about 80 of them,” said the finance major. A $20,000-a-year scholarship clinched the deal.

Rosa Moraa received a full scholarship when she transferred from a sister school, United States International University, in Nairobi, Kenya. Now, with a bachelor’s in international business in hand, she is completing a master’s in leadership studies and overseeing student activities as a graduate assistant. Moraa, raised on a farm, said she was once “very introverted” but discovered “it was very easy to make friends. I’d recommend this school to anyone, even those who are scared to come, as I was.”

Exchange student Youssef Balti was among 80 young Tunisians chosen by the U.S. State Department for scholarships and sent to institutions across the United States for a year. “I’m here to learn about democracy and the American culture and take the best from it and bring it back to Tunisia,” said the 20-year-old finance student. A Thanksgiving feast with a friendship family “was a huge experience for me.”

A new pipeline opened with the launch of the English Language Institute in 2014. Applicants are conditionally admitted to the college and already four of the first 15 students have gone on to matriculate. “It will take a little time to measure how many stay and how many go, but the early signs have been very positive,” said Katherine Pope, the director.

Making Study Abroad Affordable

North Central has put study abroad within the reach of students by charging a flat $3,500 fee on top of tuition regardless of whether a program costs two to three times that much, as some do.

When Kimberly Larsson was hired in 2003 as the sole study abroad adviser (she also advised international students), North Central had only nine exchanges and a half-dozen direct enrollment programs. Now it has 17 and 31. It operates programs of its own—one in Costa Rica, one in England, and a third in which students study in both China and Japan. “Study abroad at North Central is very personal. It’s not an assembly line. When we started, we didn’t have a study abroad fair or even a brochure,” said Larsson, who herself studied and worked in Sweden and taught English in Japan. North Central has three 10-week terms with some classes in December. If students choose a fall program abroad that extends into December, they can earn 15 credits without paying an overload fee. Financial aid also carries over. “It can be a fantastic deal,” said Larsson.

The faculty-led December courses now are more “professionalized,” said William Muck, a political science professor who coordinates global studies. “It used to be the faculty would pitch an idea and say, ‘I’d like to take a group of students here.’ It was very loose in terms of organization. Now the faculty must propose courses a year in advance, submit syllabi, and go through a rigorous academic review process.” For long-term study abroad programs, students must take a two-credit seminar that meets weekly in the term before departure, write an essay while abroad, and upon return participate in reentry activities and write a capstone essay. 

Pushing Students Out of Comfort Zones

Kimberly Sluis, vice president for student affairs and dean of students, who coteaches a preparatory class, credits Shindler and Larsson with “busting open the possibilities” for study abroad. Sluis has twice taken students to Ghana, where she was once a Peace Corps volunteer.

International business professor Robert Moussetis has led hundreds of students on classes and cultural trips to more than a dozen countries, including Mongolia. “I tell them, ‘That will be the best and most wonderful learning experience you will ever have. You will survive. You will figure it out.’”

Three North Central students were in Nairobi, Kenya, when the Westgate shopping mall massacre occurred in September 2013. Two left, but Ben Redmond resisted entreaties to come home, and kept studying at United States International University and volunteering in an AIDS clinic. A biochemistry major who aspires to work for Médecins Sans Frontières, he credits North Central with “sparking my interests by pushing international experiences so much.”

Three seniors won Fulbright scholarships in 2014 and two more in 2015, including Heidi Nelson, 21, an education major who’ll teach English in Argentina. She studied in Costa Rica and Peru. “They’ll do anything to support us with our international goals,” she said. “When I had questions on my applications and on my Fulbright, I knew I could go in there any time and they’d stop what they were doing. It’s always an open door.” 

Marie Butnariu had a remarkably global upbringing in Tivoli, Italy, and Chicago. She got U.S. citizenship by virtue of being born on a New York–bound flight from Italy. She spent her first December term studying in France and the second in Israel and Palestine, then took a full semester at the University of Glasgow. The 20-year-old sees international work in her future. “You don’t just get an education here, you build character. It’s special.”

North Central’s enrollment has risen 20 percent over a decade. It opened a $30 million concert hall in 2008 and broke ground in May on a $60 million science center. When Hammond became president in 2013, he recalled a bit of wisdom he heard from his days as a business consultant in New Zealand: for that small, island nation to prosper in the global economy, it had to “punch above its weight.” That strategy is evident in North Central College’s international programs.

When Mary Lyon opened the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in western Massachusetts in 1837, the United States had 120 colleges for men and none for women. FDR’s path-breaking labor secretary Frances Perkins, obstetrical anesthesiologist Virginia Apgar, and playwright Wendy Wasserstein passed through its Gothic halls and strolled the campus landscaped by the son of Frederick Law Olmsted. Even 16-year-old Emily Dickinson, the poet and “Belle” of nearby Amherst, attended classes for a year.

Following in their footsteps today are more than 600 international students, over a quarter of the student body. “You walk through a mini-U.N. on campus,” said Eva Paus, director of the McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives. President Lynn Pasquerella calls it “a microcosm of the world.” It is the second largest concentration of international students at any four-year college. International and domestic students alike are drawn to the country’s oldest college for women with a longstanding commitment to admit young women of talent with little regard to their ability to pay.

Mount Holyoke is not a newcomer to internationalization. The first international student, a Canadian, arrived two years after Lyon opened the doors to a college offering advanced instruction in “science, literature, and refinement” for the good of “our country and for the world.” Mary Woolley, a storied successor and the only female U.S. delegate to a League of Nations disarmament conference in 1932, wrote, “Internationalism has been woven into the very warp and woof of this institution from the beginning.” Today’s mission statement speaks of providing “an intellectually adventurous education in the liberal arts and sciences” to prepare students “for lives of thoughtful, effective, and purposeful engagement in the world.”

Steering a Distinctly International Course

But it is in this century that Mount Holyoke has steered its distinctly international course. A 2003 strategic plan laid the groundwork for the McCulloch Center. By 2007 admiring accreditors were saying that “with little fanfare” Mount Holyoke had created “a veritable world college” in the Connecticut River Valley. While faculty and administrators across the campus share that responsibility, Paus and her five-person staff make it happen. The McCulloch Center has a $12 million endowment of its own and, all told, the college has raised $30 million in endowed funds supporting international studies, teaching, research, and other activities, with more than half generating scholarships for international students.

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The McCulloch Center runs study abroad, develops curated international internships, and provides international student services. It also serves as the fulcrum for activities such as bringing a global scholar to campus each fall (former Norwegian President Gro Harlem Brundtland and Liberia’s Leymah Gbowee, the 2011 Nobel Peace Laureate and parent of a Mount Holyoke student, among them) and organizing biennial Global Challenges Conferences. Paus, a development economist, said the center’s overriding purpose is “to bring greater cohesion and visibility to global learning and to deepen it through new cross-disciplinary initiatives.”

Prizing the Contributions of International Students

Faculty, a quarter of them foreign-born, relish the diversity in their classrooms. When Jon Western, a professor of international relations, needed assistants for a foundation-funded project tracking civilian deaths in Syria, three of the eight students he hired spoke Arabic. “If I talk in my human rights class about Islam, I’ll have Sunni and Shia students who can elaborate on distinctions,” he said.

Politics professor and alumna Kavita Khory, originally from Karachi, Pakistan, said international students often “are much more politically engaged and aware” than U.S. classmates, but the latter “love that we present ourselves as an international college in so many ways.”

“Mount Holyoke is a fantastic place to teach the history of global inequality,” said Holly Hanson, a Uganda expert who as a teen volunteered in Africa for a year on her mother’s advice to “do something useful for the human race” before starting college. “I had this very profound African experience. The classes that I’m teaching 40 years later are answering the question (about inequality) that was formulated for me as a teenager.”

Mount Holyoke relies on tuition for over half its budget. Nearly 80 percent of students receive aid, but the college also looks for students whose families can pay. “We have expensive values… but we have to bring in a class that we can afford,” said Sonya Stephens, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty.

Nearly two-thirds of international students come from China, India, Vietnam, Pakistan, and South Korea. Pasquerella said the college decided last year to recruit and admit more students from the Middle East, Africa, and South America because “if you want to be truly multicultural and international, it can’t be all Asian students.”

Paying for Internships at Home or Abroad

Although it might be assumed that a college with a $700 million endowment was well insulated from the financial pressures felt by other private liberal arts colleges, it is not. That made all the bolder the college’s decision in 2014 to fund with its own dollars summer internships for sophomores or juniors. They are guaranteed $3,000 if they land an unpaid U.S. internship or $3,600 to work internationally. 

A third of the 400 students who took the college up on the offer in 2014 landed international placements in 52 countries. Their contributions ranged from participating in community outreach for an archaeological project on Easter Island to advising Fulbright applicants in Brussels to teaching poor farmers in India to become beekeepers.

Alumnae abroad help the students find openings and often directly super vise and mentor them. “Mentorship is really important because we see the internship not just as a preprofessional experience, but a cocurricular experience,” said Kirk Lange, director of international experiential learning. Students must show how the internships fit their learning goals “and both the host organization and the student’s faculty adviser must sign off on them.” 

Maggie Jacobi, a senior majoring in economics, worked as an AIDS educator in Gulu, Uganda, and said she “only had to pay $10 out of pocket for the entire summer. This is a good environment to have really big dreams.”

Schuyler Cowan, an Italian and politics major from Lake Placid, New York, spent her internship in Venice translating documents for the website of Ca’ Foscari University. She believes it helped her win a Fulbright, as four other seniors did this year. Cowan will teach English in Germany.

When Jenny Watermill was hired by the Career Development Center in 2008 to coordinate internships, two others did similar work. Now there are four full-time staff and a dozen others who also spend time on internships.

“The wonderful thing is students are no longer evaluated for internship (grants); if you’re a student, you get it. What we evaluate are the quality of the internships,” said Eleanor Townsley, associate dean of the faculty. 

The guaranteed funding for an internship is part of the college’s Lynk Initiative to connect academic work with practical applications of the liberal arts. The college emphasizes course work and skill-building in preparation for the summer intern ships and research. Back on campus afterwards, many make presentations at a student showcase on their experiences.

Supplementing, Not Supplanting, Study Abroad

The internships are intended to supplement, not supplant, study abroad. “The most important thing for us, actually, is the blend of international internships and study abroad opportunities,” said Stephens. Students who enroll in classes abroad pay the tuition and fees charged by the program or host university.

Students who are on financial aid receive Laurel Fellowships to help pay for Mount Holyoke’s own study abroad programs in Montpellier, France; Shanghai, China; and Monteverde, Costa Rica, or other preferred programs and exchanges. When Sinafik Gebru, a biology major from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, told her father she had won a Laurel Fellowship to study environmental challenges in Costa Rica, he asked, “Aren’t you already studying abroad?” International students cannot use Laurel Fellowships to study in their home country.

Students’ past preference for spring study abroad “created difficulties on campus. We had overcrowding in the fall and empty beds in the spring,” said Joanne Picard, dean of international studies. It righted the imbalance by waiving a $900 administrative fee for studying abroad in the fall.

Bringing International Experts to Class Remotely

Most faculty research grants in recent years have supported work done in other countries or with global partners. Many collaborations cross disciplines. International relations professor Western and Spanish professor Rogelio Miñana team-teach a course that combines human rights law and new media in Latin America. The students’ main assignment is to build a bilingual website for a mock human rights organization and to mount a media campaign aimed at local Latino communities. “Students love the connection between the foreign and local aspects,” said Miñana, an authority on Cervantes’ Don Quixote and the seventeenth century character’s enduring cultural impacts.  

With guidance from a nine-member Faculty Advisory Board, the McCulloch Center keeps a hand in numerous projects aimed at internationalizing the curriculum. In 2011, working with Library, Information and Technology Services, it induced faculty to bring expert voices from around the world into their classes. 

A dozen faculty took a seminar on the pedagogy, techniques, and logistics of videoconferencing, from simply using Skype and Adobe Connect to relying on high-end equipment in designated classrooms. More than 50 faculty have participated and the project, dubbed VP-50, won an award in 2014 from the American Council on Education and the SUNY Center for Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL).

The McCulloch Center offered a carrot to encourage faculty and their international guests to participate in the hook-ups. Faculty members get $150 the first time they arrange an international speaker, and the guest receives a $100 stipend. “It’s just a little gesture, but videoconferencing is a wonderful, economical way of bringing in international perspectives,” said Paus.

Language professors connected classes with universities in France, Italy, and Russia, and an Asian studies class on Chinese opera heard from a renowned performer of traditional Yue opera in Beijing.

Making the Case for Women’s Colleges

Senior Jelena Jezdimirovic from Uzice, Serbia, researched the history of international students at Mount Holyoke while working in the college’s Archives and Special Collections. The economics and critical social thought major catalogued 5,000 alumnae from other countries, including the first from the Balkans nine decades ago. “I couldn’t believe it. People still wonder how I found Mount Holyoke. How did someone in 1924 find out about it?” she asked.

Graduates include the first female editor of the Bombay edition of the Times of India, a spokeswoman for the government of Ethiopia, novelists, and diplomats. “It’s important for students to see that there’s a legacy. Tradition is very important to Mount Holyoke. We’ve always done some things that other schools haven’t done,”  Jezdimirovic said

Half a century ago there were 200 U.S. colleges for women. Today there are barely 40. “In the landscape of higher education, being a women’s college is not the norm. That’s OK with us. Mount Holyoke was an anomaly in 1837, and we have remained a women’s college by choice,” the Mount Holyoke website says. “We know that women thrive in an environment where all the resources are designed for and dedicated to them.”

Professors attest to that. Western, who also teaches international relations at the other members of the Five College Consortium— Amherst, Smith, Hampshire, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (students have reciprocal rights to take classes at the other campuses)— calls the classroom atmosphere at Mount Holyoke “profoundly different.” Paus said that in coed settings, male students often speak out “whether or not they have something to say while women wait to have the perfect answer.”

“The cooperativeness of the way the students interact in classes is really striking,” said Darby Dyar, an astronomy professor who conducts lunar and solar system research for NASA and the National Science Foundation. Dyar is an alumna of Wellesley College, another of the Seven Sister schools.

At a time of great financial pressure on private colleges, staying single-sex comes at the price of cutting off half the potential pool of applicants. “It’s a question that we’ve asked ourselves,” Pasquerella said. “We looked in our most recent strategic plan at coeducation and reaffirmed our commitment to women’s education, believing that it is more important than ever before. It’s a tough sell, but we have so much to offer.” Referring to the attempted assassination of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenage advocate for girls’ education, Pasquerella said, “If women are still dying around the world to get an education, then Mary Lyon’s historic mission hasn’t been fulfilled.”

Khory, the politics professor, said faculty share a conviction that Mount Holyoke is doing the right thing in making internationalization its calling card. “That’s really what we see as our past, present, and future.”

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s (UNC-Chapel Hill) relationship with the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) in Ecuador started in an Amazonian jungle. Biology Professor Stephen Walsh first met Carlos Mena, who would become his PhD student and then later join USFQ as a professor, during a research trip to Ecuador in the late 1990s. Their personal relationship paved the way for a comprehensive partnership between their two institutions that culminated in the establishment of the Galápagos Science Center in 2011. UNC-Chapel Hill’s relationship with USFQ has subsequently expanded to include interdisciplinary research, student and faculty exchange, and community engagement, much of it focused on developing local capacity in the Galápagos Islands.

Building Strategic Partnerships

UNC-Chapel Hill’s collaboration with USFQ is characteristic of its larger approach to internationalization. According to Katie Bowler Young, director of global relations, UNC-Chapel Hill has chosen to focus on creating deep relationships that span multiple disciplines and ultimately result in engagement with local communities.

“Our key partnerships were established through faculty-to-faculty connections. Partnerships grow to include additional faculty, departments, and areas of study. Our team from UNC-Chapel Hill Global then helps develop partnerships, trying to extend them into new areas,” she says.

UNC-Chapel Hill’s long-term engagement in Ecuador was born out of Walsh’s and Mena’s joint research in the Galápagos, which Walsh first visited in 2006 as part of a project with the Galápagos National Park and the Nature Conservancy. “I continued to go back and forth to the Galápagos trying to understand their local needs, but to also begin to develop a UNC vision of what a long-term commitment in the Galápagos might look like,” Walsh says.

USFQ was interested in trying to identify a partner in the Galápagos to expand from undergraduate teaching to a more comprehensive research mission. “For us, we needed to make our presence in [the] Galápagos stronger. We needed an ally for that,” Mena says.

Infrastructure as Key to Sustainable Research

According to Walsh, the two institutions jointly identified infrastructure development as key to creating a sustainable research program in the Galápagos, which he says often suffers from a “one-and-done mentality where people go, gather data, write papers, and go home.”

“What we wanted to do is break this traditional approach to research and create something that is more connected to the needs of the Galápagos. Usually, research is done by foreign scientists who come to the Galápagos, and take their results with them when they leave. We wanted to change from that to something that is growing up from the community,” Mena adds.

In addition to discussing student mobility, they decided that there was a need to build a physical structure as the core of the collaboration between the two institutions.

“If we could build the Galápagos Science Center (GSC) and equip it with needed laboratories, providing unique capacity for science and education in the Galápagos, that would be the basis for an important increase into understanding the social, terrestrial, and marine subsystems in the Galápagos,” Walsh says.

It took almost five years from the time when UNCChapel Hill and USFQ first signed a general memorandum of understanding in 2007 to when the center opened its doors in 2011. Although UNC-Chapel Hill cannot legally own property in the Galápagos due to Ecuadorian law, the funding and construction were equally shared between the two institutions. More than 50 faculty members have subsequently been involved in the partnership.

Having a local base has made research easier for visiting faculty. Diego Riveros-Iregui is a physical geographer in the emerging field of ecohydrology—  “where life and water intersect,” as he puts it. He has spent time at the Galápagos Science Center studying the relationship between water, plants, and soils in tropical regions.

“I have been working in the tropics for several years and have run into many of the same challenges that everyone faces: customs, permits, maintenance of equipment, data collection, sample preservation, etc. When the opportunity to work in the Galápagos came up, working with the staff at the GSC facilitated many of the aforementioned challenges, giving me time to focus on research,” Riveros-Iregui says.

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Human and Ecological Systems Meet in the Galápagos

Mena says that scientific research in the Galápagos has traditionally been focused on hard science in areas such as botany, zoology, and evolution. From the beginning, they wanted to position the Galápagos Science Center as an interdisciplinary hub.

“The Galápagos are oftentimes thought of as Darwin’s paradise. But when you’re there, you can’t help but understand that the environment is changing and interacting with people, and shaping their behaviors,” Walsh says.

He adds that it was evident they needed to involve social sciences: “Two hundred twenty-five thousand tourists came to the Galápagos in 2015. About 30,000 residents live in the Galápagos Islands on four populated islands. It’s clear that it’s not just about ecology. It’s about the connection of people and ecology.”

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Maya Weinberg is a Latin American studies and political science major who took a gap year from UNC-Chapel Hill to do an internship at the GSC. She worked with Walsh on a project using global information software (GIS) to map out human development on San Cristóbal. She was involved with mapping buildings and putting together a report on infrastructure development.

She says that the interdisciplinary nature of the work at the GSC—and the opportunity to be involved in multiple projects in multiple fields—allowed her to make connections she wouldn’t otherwise have made: “With my experience working with human development, conservation, as well as geography I have become increasingly interested in policy and politics, as these are the disciplines that connect all three.”

The Importance of Engaging with the Local Community

Mena says that they built the center with the goal of providing more information to local communities and politicians to make informed decisions on issues such as health, tourism, infrastructure, and economic development.

He says that members of the local community are included in the research process. They work with a community board that keeps the GSC informed of local interests, and have close partnerships with Galápagos National Park and the local government council in order to find better ways to protect the islands.

UNC-Chapel Hill is currently engaging the community in the area of health. A new hospital was recently built on San Cristóbal, and representatives of both UNC and USFQ met with the director of the hospital and the ministry of health for the Galápagos. In 2016 the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Nursing sent a delegation to USFQ in Quito and to the Galápagos to visit the new hospital.

GSC also keeps the community informed about the results of its ongoing research. Kelly Houck is a biological anthropologist and UNC PhD candidate who studies human health. As part of her fieldwork on San Cristóbal, she collected samples of tap water to test for contamination as well as took blood, urine, and fecal samples from local residents to measure different health impacts.

“The water samples needed to be tested within 24 hours of collection and because of GSC infrastructure, we were able to give the results back immediately to the households and provide suggestions for treating contaminated water, such as boiling or using bottled water for drinking,” she says.

“In addition, we were able to provide them with preliminary results from their blood and urine test for indicators of infections, and advise them to seek further free testing at the hospital on San Cristóbal,” she adds.

Young adds that it is not only the local community in the Galápagos that benefits from the partnership. UNC-Chapel Hill’s undergraduate students have also been able to participate in opportunities through the partnership. In addition to semester or year-long exchanges to USFQ, undergraduates can also take advantage of faculty-led summer programs.

Billy Gerhard graduated in 2014 with a bachelor’s in biology and then earned a master’s of science in public health in environmental sciences and engineering. As an undergraduate, he did a summer program at the GSC in 2012. The next summer he returned as a winner of the Vimy award, a grant of up to $15,000 given annually to an interdisciplinary team of students working collaboratively to pursue research or service projects outside the United States. He is currently pursuing a PhD in environmental engineering at Duke University.

“The project definitely impacted my career trajectory. Working abroad required me to plan ahead, anticipate problems, organize contingencies, and communicate effectively. These skills are useful in any career and the opportunity to practice them was invaluable,” he says.

“I am currently writing the results of my research on drinking water in San Cristobal for publication,” he adds.

UNC has also sent local K–12 and community college educators to the Galápagos through its World View program, which strives to help teachers give their own students global competency. “We’ve seen this partnership benefit those beyond our campus as well,” she says.

Young says that having faculty members who are deeply committed to the local community has been key from a partnership development standpoint.

“It couldn’t have happened without two institutions that wanted it to happen, and two leaders, Carlos and I, who saw a vision, transmitted it to other faculty and students, and moved forward with a program that would be committed to community outreach, education, and research at a marvelous place,” Walsh adds.

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