Founded in 1845, the United States Naval Academy (USNA) has a long history of international engagement with allies and partners abroad. Students—known as midshipmen—gain global leadership and intercultural competence through semester-long exchanges, faculty-led programs, language study, and cocurricular activities focused on global issues. Serving 4,500 students at its campus in historic Annapolis, Maryland, the Naval Academy also hosts international officers as part of its faculty and international students from partner militaries around the world.

Before Lieutenant Commander Josh Duran enrolled at USNA in 2005, he had never had any international experience. The summer after his second year of college, he spent 4 weeks on a Japanese ship, where he lived and trained alongside newly commissioned Japanese naval officers. Thirteen years later, he is still in touch with several of the people he met on the ship.

The next summer, he spent 1 month in Kumamoto, Japan, learning more about the language and culture. “I don’t know that I completely understood how important both of those experiences were as a military officer,” Duran says. “I looked at them as fun and educational experiences, but I didn’t really have an understanding yet as to how they would impact me.”

Once midshipmen graduate from the Academy, they are commissioned as officers in the Navy or Marine Corps and sent to various locations around the world to enhance their global learning. Duran did his first tour of duty in South Korea. While he faced the challenge of learning yet another language, his previous opportunities to develop intercultural skills prepared him well. “I had a really good foundation for how to engage with my Korean partners who I needed to work with on a daily basis and also [understood] what sorts of things would be meaningful to do in order to establish lasting relationships with them,” he says.

After spending 8 years working as a naval intelligence officer, Duran was then appointed as an exchange officer at the Republic of Korea Naval Academy, where he teaches a diverse offering of English language courses to South Korean midshipmen. “The foundation for my career was built in Annapolis, and it has just been kind of an inimitable part of my career to date,” he says.

Centralizing International Programs

Since 2005, the International Programs Office (IPO) at USNA has created opportunities for midshipmen to excel in the global leadership and learning required for a career in the Navy or Marines. “They need to be ready from day one to be able to be a leader and work with others [who] have differing points of view,” says Tim Disher, MBA, director of international programs.

Disher, a former Navy officer, is also the product of the Naval Academy. Over the course of his military career, he served on a submarine during the Cold War and spent 4 years in Spain, where he acted as a liaison between the U.S. and Spanish Navies and advised senior Navy and State Department leadership. Disher’s experience in Spain paved the way for him to become the Naval Academy’s first senior international officer.

After returning to Annapolis in 2003, Disher helped establish the IPO in 2005 at the behest of Superintendent Vice Admiral Rodney Rempt. As the institution’s top leader, Rempt was interested in increasing midshipmen’s global engagement in response to the U.S. Department of Defense’s priorities to improve foreign language proficiency, regional understanding, and cultural appreciation for officers and enlisted personnel, following the tragedies associated with the attack of the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen in 2000 and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Disher continued as IPO director as a civilian after retiring from the military in 2007. “I knew that future generations of officers...are going to have to be engaged globally,” he says. “And I wanted to be involved with that.”

As of 2020, the office has eight staff members and manages international student services, study abroad, student exchange, and international visits and works with 10 international exchange officers from partner navies around the world.

The interdisciplinary Center for Regional Studies (CRS) was established at the same time as the IPO, with the mission of helping midshipmen understand regional and international dynamics across the world through regional speaker events focused on different geographic areas: Africa, Asia Pacific, Eurasia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Every year, CRS Director Ernest Tucker, PhD, a professor of Middle Eastern history, coordinates more than 20 international speakers who present to the student body. Altogether, these lectures reach thousands of students. Speakers include diplomats, scholars, musicians, poets, journalists, and representatives of foreign navies. The speaker events do not have an academic component, but many professors weave the presentation topics into their courses. “Talking across disciplines is a key responsibility of CRS,” Tucker says.

Building On A Legacy of Internationalization

Current Superintendent Vice Admiral Sean Buck, MA, says that he has been able to build on the robust international portfolio inherited from his predecessors, who rotate approximately every 4 years. He has helped make the case for internationalization based on his own recent experience as commander of all U.S. Naval forces that operate in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America.

Buck says exposure to diverse perspectives is even more important for midshipmen at the beginning of their military careers. “As we try to navigate them through their four-year journey here at the Naval Academy, we’ve come to realize that giving them exposure to other cultures is absolutely paramount so that they can make an impact from day one as leaders,” he says.

Beyond the cocurricular opportunities offered through the CRS and various summer and semester study abroad programs, midshipmen have opportunities for intercultural learning due to the presence of international students and faculty on campus. At any one time, around 60 international students are completing their four-year education at USNA, in addition to 25 semester exchange students from foreign naval academies.

To celebrate the international diversity of the faculty and midshipmen, USNA holds an International Ball every year. The superintendent hosts the event, which is attended by more than 2,800 people annually. It includes dances and events by the various cultural clubs as well as engagement with senior international officers and representatives from the Washington, D.C., embassies. The International Ball would have celebrated its 54th anniversary in 2020 if it had not been canceled amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Finally, midshipmen gain exposure to global topics through core courses that focus on regions such as Asia or the Middle East, and many electives and major program curricula also have global learning content. In addition to majoring in Arabic and Chinese, students can pursue minors in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. The institution is also in the process of establishing a first-of-its-kind regional studies major for the class of 2024.

Expanding Opportunity Through Education Abroad

Academic Dean and Provost Andrew Phillips, PhD, has been at the Academy for more than 20 years. Although USNA had always promoted international engagement, it was not until the creation of the IPO that education abroad became readily accessible for a large number of students, he says.

One of the obstacles to education abroad at USNA is that the federal law governing service academies specifies that students can only participate in such programs if they will still be able to graduate within 4 years. Phillips says that when he first became provost in 2009, faculty were reluctant to engage with internationalization. “There were some early adopters, but there were a lot of people saying it was too hard, until we showed people what could be done,” he says.

To help address the challenge, the Naval Academy has developed a robust portfolio of faculty-led summer programs as well as exchange opportunities with civilian and military institutions around the world. Now, all 25 majors offered at the Naval Academy boast at least one semester-length education abroad opportunity. Approximately 25 percent of each graduating class studies abroad. According to Disher, the goal is to eventually send 500 midshipmen abroad per year, which would be around 50 percent per class.

Training Leaders Through Experiential Learning

One of the reasons that Jake Lindow, a cyber operations major who graduated in May 2020, chose the Naval Academy was because of its education abroad programs. He wanted to attend a military academy but did not want to give up the experiential learning opportunities offered at civilian institutions. He spent the fall semester of his junior year at the German Naval Academy in Flensburg and the Bundeswehr University in Munich. “A common misconception is the Academy is just a military school where you march around in circles all day,” Lindow says. “That’s very much not the case, and I think the study abroad program is a testament to that.”

Opportunities for education abroad at USNA include semester-long exchanges at naval academies abroad and at civilian institutions for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) majors. But the primary vehicles for education abroad are the approximately 50 faculty-led opportunities known as Language, Regional Expertise and Culture (LREC) programs.

Most LREC programs are run in the summer by faculty members who lead small groups of four to six students abroad. Joseph Thomas, PhD, director of USNA’s Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership, has taken students to several places around the world, including Mongolia, Peru, South Africa, and, most recently, northern India.

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“I try to create a learning environment during both the planning and execution phases where students are required to take calculated risks,” he says. “When those risks result in failure, we scrupulously debrief the event and examine what could have been done better.”

In summer 2019, Colonel Maria Pallotta, PhD, director of the Center for Experiential Leadership Development, took a group of eight students to Vietnam for 16 days to study battlefields from the Vietnam War and experience other cultural immersion opportunities. The group visited the demilitarized zone, which divided North and South Vietnam until the war ended in 1975, as well as Hanoi and the Mekong Delta.

Justin Nguyen, who graduated in May 2020 as a quantitative economics major, had both a professional and personal interest in traveling to Vietnam, as his parents were refugees to the United States after the Vietnam War. He was also able to use some of his basic Vietnamese language skills to help the group get around. “I thought this was a really unique opportunity for me to learn about my family history from a different lens,” he says.

History major Elizabeth Fugit says the program to Vietnam helped her understand both sides of military conflicts. “The literature we consume here in America is very much from the American perspective,” she says. “We got to see [the Vietnamese] perspective and their museums and how they saw the conflict.”

Internationalizing STEM Through Language Learning

Internationalization was particularly challenging for the STEM disciplines, in which 65 percent of each graduating class of midshipmen must be enrolled. It was difficult to fit either education abroad or foreign language study into already jam-packed STEM schedules, which are “particularly lockstep in nature,” according to Phillips. The creation of summer immersion programs in Arabic, French, and Spanish was one way students in these disciplines have been able to fit both education abroad and language study into their schedule.

Arabic professor Hezi Brosh, PhD, takes 15 STEM majors to Israel every summer to study Arabic. Students complete 2 weeks of intensive language study in Annapolis before they travel to Israel for 1 month to take part in cultural excursions and study Arabic at the University of Haifa.

Fourth-year student Dallas Elliston first studied Arabic with Brosh in 2019. He had wanted to take a foreign language but was not sure if he would be able to work it into his mechanical engineering schedule.

He says knowing another language will be beneficial for his military career, but being able to understand multiple perspectives through deeper-level intercultural learning—such as various perspectives on the conflict between Israel and Palestine—is even more valuable.

“We have to be there and learn the culture,” Elliston says. “One of the biggest things I gained [was] learning what I see from a Western viewpoint isn’t enough to be able to jump in and give my opinion on how things should be done.”

Efforts to internationalize the sciences at USNA since 2013 have been so successful that a higher percentage of STEM majors than humanities and social science majors now study abroad. Many STEM students who participate in these programs find ways to fit in additional language study once they return to Annapolis.

Building Global Connections in Cybersecurity

The Naval Academy also has one of the first accredited cybersecurity programs in the United States. Captain Paul Tortora, director of the Center for Cyber Security Studies, says that his discipline is particularly conducive to international engagement. He started looking at options for international education opportunities in Estonia, which has become a major cyber defense hub after it faced one of the world’s first major cyberattacks in 2007.

In 2014, Tortora started taking students to Estonia to attend an annual cybersecurity conference, where they have the opportunity to engage with NATO officials and representatives of governments and militaries from around the world. “They can see the importance of cybersecurity from an international perspective,” he says.

The center has subsequently expanded education abroad and global learning opportunities for cybersecurity majors to other countries around the world, including Australia, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

Cyber operations major Dylan Larkin traveled to Estonia, Germany, and Poland with Tortora. One of the highlights for him was the week he spent in Tallinn, Estonia, attending the international cyber conference. He says he learned how different countries can collaborate and build partnerships in a constantly changing field. “The program itself really opened a lot of doors for me, just being able to network across the globe,” he says.

Learning Language and Culture Abroad

The Academy currently has reciprocal agreements for semester exchange programs with naval academies in 11 countries: Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, and Spain. The Academy sends and receives an average of 25 semester exchange students per year. Since 2006, 280 international military students have spent a semester in Annapolis, and the same number of midshipmen have studied at partner institutions abroad.

These engagements often include international students getting underway on a training ship and serving with their counterparts prior to the academic semester. In addition to the academic experience, the benefits of a semester at a reciprocal naval academy include a better understanding of professional and leadership development of an ally navy with which graduates will serve. These relationships add to the underpinnings of trust that enable the navies to be successful around the globe.

Cyber operations major Lara Malaver was studying at the Italian Naval Academy in Livorno when she was recalled to the United States as COVID-19 broke out in Italy. She began her experience abroad with 2 weeks on the Italian Navy Tall Ship Amerigo Vespucci, where she joined Italian naval students who were learning how to sail, before flying to Livorno.

In addition to gaining more fluency in Italian, Malaver says that her experience in Italy taught her adaptability. “Every day that I was there, there was a different challenge,” she says. “And I know that that’s very much like being an officer in the military.”

Gilad, an exchange student from Israel, faced a similar circumstance of being called home from Annapolis halfway through the semester due to COVID-19. Despite the shortened exchange experience, Gilad says that one of the benefits of studying at the Naval Academy was the opportunity to meet international midshipmen from around the world. “The USNA is like a melting pot of the world navies in one place,” he says.

He adds that he was also able to partake in different experiences than those that would be available at his institution in Israel. “American midshipmen spend their time investing in civilian spheres that we don’t really get to engage with,” he says.

Through the IPO, global learning opportunities have also expanded to include partnerships with civilian institutions abroad. Study abroad was not previously available for students studying Arabic, Chinese, or Russian because partnerships with naval institutions in the corresponding countries do not exist.

To close gaps in exchange programs where naval partnerships have not been established, midshipmen can spend a semester at a civilian institution abroad where they take their major courses in English and at least one intensive course in the local language. USNA now offers programs in 16 countries.

Juliet O’Brien, who graduated in May 2020 as a political science major, studied abroad at a civilian institution in Morocco in fall 2018. She gained firsthand experience with the Moroccan medical system when she had to have emergency surgery to remove her appendix. While she was frustrated at first, “it was actually one of the most interesting things to happen while I was there because I learned a lot about Moroccan hospitality…[and] some words about health insurance in French and Arabic, which I never expected to learn.”

Welcoming International Midshipmen

Since 1863, 544 international midshipmen from 74 countries have graduated from USNA. During the 2019–20 academic year, there were 59 international students from 30 countries on campus who studied alongside their U.S. peers.

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International students are fully integrated into the student body. Students are divided into different companies, mirroring the Navy’s command structure, and international students are intentionally divided among all the companies.

Many attachés and other embassy officials travel to Annapolis to celebrate the graduation of the international midshipmen. Phillips has made it a personal point of pride to learn how to pronounce the names of international midshipmen in order to give them special recognition during the ceremony. “So before we give the diplomas, one by one, I announce their names and have them stand to the applause of the stadium,” he says.

This year, graduation was held virtually due to COVID-19. Cyber operations major Nikoleta Georgieva, the first woman from Bulgaria to study at USNA, celebrated her graduation at the virtual commencement. Georgieva will be returning to complete her military education in Bulgaria. “I’ve met so many people from different backgrounds in the United States, as well as [people from] different countries, and I’ve met so many different military people with different military leadership styles,” she says. “That really helped me to just be more open-minded and more grounded.”

Hosting International Exchange Officers as Faculty

Midshipmen who do not have the opportunity to participate in education abroad can still expand their global learning by interacting with international exchange officers from around the world. The Naval Academy hosts 10 international officers from nine countries who are members of the faculty as part of the U.S. Navy’s Personnel Exchange Program. Duran, for instance, serves as the U.S. exchange officer to the Republic of Korea Navy.

The first exchange officer came through a partnership with Mexico in 1960, followed by officers from France, Germany, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Japan, Italy, South Korea, and Spain. Many exchange officers teach their native languages, but some instruct in other disciplines.

Commander Giovanni Neri, an exchange officer from Italy, teaches seamanship and navigation. He has also helped establish the exchange with the Italian Navy and takes midshipmen on LRECs to Italy.

“Italy and the United States both belong to NATO, so we have a lot of things in common,” Neri says. “We are allies and partners in a number of fields, so it comes natural to have such exchange.”

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Commander Ippo Maeyama, who teaches Japanese language, takes small groups of midshipmen to Japan, where they stay with host families, meet with other students at the reciprocal Naval Academy in Japan, and visit sites such as Hiroshima.

According to Disher, the relationship with Japan is important because around 50 midshipmen will be stationed on ships in Japan after graduation. Maeyama has been working with the Japanese Embassy and the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force to create a mentoring program that assigns USNA graduates to an officer in the Japanese Navy, deepening professional connections and intercultural understanding.

Neri says that the international officers benefit as much from the exchange as the students. “I am teaching midshipmen, but it’s a two-way communication,” he says. “I learn so much from them.”

From a Mandarin Chinese theater group in Boston to a fourteenth-century castle in the Netherlands, Emerson College’s creative and academic reach spans the globe. A robust portfolio of study abroad programs, global partnerships with arts institutions around the world, and a supportive environment for its growing international student population help the college bolster its goal of becoming a top institution of higher education for arts and communication.

“Internationalization is really essential to being a leader in arts and communication,” says Michaele Whelan, PhD, provost and vice president for academic affairs. “And it’s very pivotal for us to establish global networks of artists and professionals so that we can enhance our students’ capacity to learn and thrive in the world.”

Founded as a school of oratory and dramatic arts in 1880, Emerson College now offers nearly 40 degree and professional training programs in fields such as acting, business of creative enterprises, film, journalism, public relations, and stage production. Approximately 4,000 undergraduate and 600 graduate students study at its main campus on Boston Common in the heart of the city’s Theater District.

The college hosts more than 500 international undergraduate and 115 international graduate students from 71 countries and offers global bachelor’s degrees with partner institutions in France and Switzerland. Students can spend a semester taking classes and participating in internships at the college’s second U.S. campus in Los Angeles or study abroad at Kasteel Well, a medieval castle in the Netherlands.

When President Lee Pelton, PhD, came to Emerson in 2011, he identified internationalization and global engagement as one of five strategic priorities, along with academic excellence, civic engagement, innovation, and financial strength. “It’s clear that engaging with different cultures, heritages, backgrounds, and perspectives enlarges our intellectual horizons and connects us with life’s most enduring themes,” Pelton says.

Leading Internationalization at the Institutional Level

Pelton’s goal was for Emerson College to become a truly global institution. “In order to bring a big idea to life, you need three things: resources, strategy, and leadership,” he says.

In 2014, Anthony Pinder, PhD, was brought on as the associate vice president of internationalization and global engagement. “I arrived as the inaugural senior international officer [SIO] at Emerson,” Pinder says. “A lot of what was happening before I came was really random acts of internationalization.”

Pinder says that Pelton gave him free rein to develop his own vision for internationalization. Pinder has previously served as SIO at four other institutions and says, “Never have I been so empowered.”

One of the first things that Pinder did was conduct a needs assessment and convene various working groups and committees to produce reports that fed into a new strategic plan for internationalization. That led to the creation of a central unit that oversees education abroad, the Netherlands and Los Angeles campuses, and international student affairs.

“We began centralizing all of the international entities, departments, and initiatives under this new Office of Internationalization and Global Engagement [IGE],” Pinder says.

IGE has also appointed a chief diversity officer whose role it is to reach out to diverse and underrepresented students and seek to address any barriers they may face when considering education abroad.

David Griffin, MA, director of education abroad and domestic programs, has been a staff member at Emerson for 34 years. “The transformation has been somewhat breathtaking,” he says.

Previous administrations had been supportive of the Kasteel Well program in the Netherlands but had not been driving comprehensive internationalization. “Without institutional support from the top, [it is] very difficult to make dramatic change,” Griffin says. “President Pelton put it front and center, and everything has really flowed from that.”

Making Internationalization Relevant to the Arts

Whelan says that students who enroll at Emerson typically already know what they want to study, making targeted internationalization efforts particularly important. “For students who are very focused professionally, internationalization has to be relevant to them,” she says. “We are not a typical liberal arts institution in which students come and discover what their major is.”

Students choose Emerson because of the specialized professional curriculum and faculty the college offers. Therefore, it is often necessary to make a case for why internationalization matters in their careers as artists or communicators.

For instance, Emerson faced challenges in getting students in some disciplines, such as the visual arts, to participate in education abroad. To increase awareness of international opportunities, campus leaders invited student winners of Emerson’s film festival to submit entries to an international film festival hosted at Hong Kong Baptist University, which offers an exchange program in journalism and film. Students then traveled with faculty to take part in the festival in Hong Kong.

As a result of this experience, students began to realize the benefit of developing a network of artists from around the world. “All of a sudden, that’s relevant,” Whelan says.

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Rethinking Partnerships and Portals

When Pinder was hired in 2014, he began to review the college’s portfolio of partnerships with the goal of ensuring that all students have the same access to global opportunities. “I spent my first year being very diplomatic and pulling Emerson out of several relationships,” he says. “And then we spent a lot of time really thinking about what types of institutions added value to our academic operation.”

Pinder tries to find partners that have complementary but unique program offerings. “We’ve partnered with some of the leading institutions in the various disciplines related to arts and communications in the world,” Pinder says.

One example is a partnership with Blanquerna, a school within Universitat Ramon Llull in Barcelona, Spain, which has one of the top-ranked communications programs in the country. Emerson students can spend a semester in Barcelona studying international communication, international relations, journalism, advertising and public relations, cinema and television, and Spanish.

Emerson has also recently started developing relationships with other institutions abroad that allow it to expand its global footprint through joint-degree programs known as portals. “These are ways in which both Emerson students, but also international students, can receive an Emerson education whether they’re physically in Boston or not,” says Corey Blackmar, MA, associate director of internationalization initiatives.

Emerson has recently launched a portal program in collaboration with the Paris College of Art that culminates in a bachelor of fine arts in film arts. Students spend 2 academic years in France, 2 summers in Boston, and 1 summer at Kasteel Well in the Netherlands.

In another new portal program, students earn an international and political communications degree with Franklin University Switzerland in Lugano. Students can do a 2+2 program, in which they complete their first 2 years in Lugano and their second 2 years in the United States, or a 3+1 program, in which they spend their senior year at Emerson followed by a master’s degree.

In its strategic plan, IGE aims to have 60 percent of students participate in at least one education abroad experience during their time at Emerson.

Proposing International Curricula

Using money from the Presidential Fund for Curricular Innovation, Pinder oversees the Curriculum Internationalization Studio, which provides grants to faculty to infuse global content into an existing course or develop a new course with an international focus.

Faculty turn in grant proposals that are reviewed by a committee made up of three deans and the department chairs of the faculty submitting the proposal. Pinder says it has been an excellent way to involve academic leadership from across the institution in efforts to internationalize the curriculum. “Not only has the grant been a wonderful opportunity for the faculty, it’s also obviously been a wonderful opportunity for reaching these different academic departments,” he says.

The awardees receive a stipend and participate in a series of professional development workshops on topics such as aligning student learning outcomes. They also are awarded funding for travel or other external training that will enhance their curriculum design. Pelton has allocated a total of $40,000 to the Studio per year.

In total, more than 50 faculty have participated in the Studio, developing 27 new courses with significant international content. Faculty have revamped existing courses in Africana studies, global media, journalism, marketing communication, and other subjects. For example, two screenwriting courses (one production-based and one studies-based) were revised to be faculty-led programs in Patmos, Greece. Students workshop their scripts on site, infusing what they learn from being exposed to Greek culture. The students learn to alter scripts and ideas on the go and incorporate multiple perspectives in their work.

A welcome byproduct of the success of the Studio has been the rapidly growing portfolio of faculty-led education abroad programs—known as Global Pathways Programs—which has expanded from 1 in 2013 to 23 that would have run in 2019–20 if study abroad had not been suspended due to COVID-19. Faculty-led courses developed through the Studio include programs in Canada, Cuba, Ecuador, Ghana, Greece, Japan, the Netherlands, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.

Living And Learning at Kasteel Well

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Emerson’s flagship study abroad experience is the semester-long program that runs at Kasteel Well, a fourteenth-century castle in the Netherlands that the college purchased in 1988. “The opportunity to own this castle and be a part of refurbishing a national treasure became a dual civic engagement project and one of our signature education abroad programs,” Pinder says.

At the Kasteel Well campus, eight student affairs staff oversee student services, such as programming, housing, health and wellness, and counseling. They also take students on multiday field trips to Amsterdam and other European capitals. “We play the same role as a student affairs division on any campus in the United States,” says Tikesha Morgan, MA, senior student affairs officer.

Emerson aims to have students from every major represented on the Kasteel Well program, which can accommodate up to 90 students per semester. The program is designed for second-year students and taught by local Dutch and other European faculty. During the summer, the castle also hosts several faculty-led programs.

Dulcia Meijers, PhD, executive director of Kasteel Well, is a Dutch architectural historian. She was able to petition the Dutch government to declare Kasteel Well a national historic landmark, thus providing some government funding to assist with its upkeep.

Madison Wilson, a film and TV production major, studied at Kasteel Well in spring 2019. “It was such a surreal experience because most of the castle is still preserved in its original architecture,” she says.

Studying African American Literature in the Netherlands

The James Baldwin Writers’ Colony is one of the many faculty-led Global Pathways Programs hosted every summer at Kasteel Well.

Associate professor and cultural critic Jabari Asim developed the curriculum for a course focused on the writing of James Baldwin, an African American novelist who settled in Europe in 1948, and other expatriate writers. He worked with Pinder through the Curriculum Internationalization Studio to design the course.

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Asim says he was initially unsure how to lead a study abroad program focused on African American literature. “I hadn't expanded my imagination to see how my particular discipline would work in that context,” he says.

The program, which was first offered in 2018, consists of a combination of fiction and nonfiction writing workshops and lectures on the Black expatriate literary tradition. According to Asim, there is a long history of African American artists, musicians, and writers who traveled to Europe, predating the Civil War.

In addition to spending time in the Netherlands, the group travels to Paris and Amsterdam, where they visit sites and restaurants that were frequented by writers, such as Baldwin and Richard Wright.

“We get right into the craft of writing almost immediately, but because of the subject matter, it’s really necessary to immerse the students in the tradition,” Asim says. “Hopefully their idea of African American literature and culture is vastly expanded once they begin to see it as a global phenomenon.”

The program was created with the goal of attracting more students of color to education abroad. Half of the students on the program are recruited from five historically Black colleges and universities.

“[The program] was established as an intentional effort to underscore our college’s strategic priority of inclusive excellence,” Pinder says.

Jae Suk Lee, a journalism major from South Korea, was the only international student who joined the program in summer 2019. He was particularly captivated by Baldwin’s essay “A Stranger in the Village.” “He really described this idea of being exotic and being foreign,” Lee says. “That really helped me grasp how racism works in different countries, even to the point where it’s happening right now—even with the coronavirus and the Asian American community. That’s definitely helped me understand the depth of it and how racism is still there.”

He says the program has helped him understand the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, following the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis. “We learned how Black artists [and other artists of color] have fought for justice and have continued to do so,” he says. “I have felt from the bottom of my heart how empowering words can be and how literature and arts bring a call to action.”

Filmmaking in Prague

James Lane, PhD, senior scholar-in-residence and graduate program director of the low-residency master of fine arts in writing for film and television, developed Emerson’s first faculty-led summer program. He has taken film students to Prague, Czech Republic, to spend 4 weeks at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) every summer since 1996. Summer 2020 was the first time the program has not run since inception.

In addition to a class on the history of Czech and Slovak cinema taught by a local professor, Emerson students take Lane’s film production course. Two Emerson students work together to produce a five- to seven-minute movie set somewhere in Prague. They are partnered with a Czech student studying production at FAMU and cast local actors.

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“The city itself to some extent becomes the classroom,” Lane says. “We force [students] to find locations all over the city to shoot their films. When they get there, they’re going to be totally disoriented. And by the time they leave...the students really do get to know the city very well.”

During the program, Lane takes students to local theaters and Barrandov Studios, one of the largest film studios in Europe, where they are able to explore the costume and prop departments. They then spend a few days at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, held annually approximately 80 miles from Prague. Finally, students visit historical sites, such as Terezin, a Jewish ghetto and concentration camp established by the Nazis during World War II.

Alexis Brankovic is an aspiring film director and writer who graduated from Emerson in May 2020 with a bachelor of fine arts in visual and media arts. She studied in Prague in summer 2018. Together with her roommate, she produced a short film about a young painter who wanted to get out of his hometown to see the world.

“The Prague program was a perfect whirlwind of studying and exploring the city,” Brankovic says. “As a filmmaker, I realized the film industry is so much bigger than Hollywood.”

Supporting International Students

From 2010 to 2019, Emerson has more than tripled its international undergraduate population. The number has grown even more rapidly in recent years, with a 47 percent increase since 2017. Last year, international students made up 13 percent of incoming students.

Andrea Popa, MA, joined the IGE staff as director of the Office of International Student Affairs in December 2018. She came to Emerson shortly after the college had seen a huge upswing in international student enrollment. Popa’s team works closely with other units, such as the writing center, housing, student affairs, and the career center. Part of her job is to build a sense of community for the burgeoning international student population through academic support, campus integration, and career preparedness.

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“As somebody coming in new with the sort of surge of new international students we had, I really saw the college step up its game in a way that was significant,” Popa says. “I saw folks in all these other offices really come up with a strategy to be able to serve the international student community.”

For example, Jeremy Heflin, MA, associate director of English language learning (ELL) initiatives, has developed an English language assessment that helps place students who need extra support into ELL classes.

The support that Emerson provides its more than 600 international students continued as colleges around the country shut down their physical campuses due to COVID-19. Popa says that her office switched to remote advising when Emerson classes moved online in mid-March. The college kept dorms open for international students who were unable to travel and repurposed some funding to help with unexpected costs, such as plane tickets home or laptops for remote schoolwork.

Lee, the journalism major from South Korea, says that he has seen major changes in the composition of the student body since he first enrolled at Emerson in 2015. “I remember the feeling of being foreign and exotic when I first came here,” he says. “But now I see so many people that are international, and we’re moving forward with having more diversity in this institution.”

As the world’s oldest university specializing in aerospace and aviation, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU) traces its roots back to a pilot-training school founded in 1926. Today, the institution has residential campuses in Daytona Beach, Florida, and Prescott, Arizona, and an overseas campus headquartered in Singapore. A robust international student population, industry and academic partnerships around the world, and a strategic commitment to global engagement help Embry-Riddle achieve its mission to be a world leader in aviation and aerospace higher education.

When Kaloki Nabutola, PhD, was attending high school in his native Kenya, he would tell people that he wanted to study aeronautical engineering. A family member asked if he was planning to attend Embry-Riddle. He had never heard of the institution, but his interest was piqued when a friend asked the same thing. “I looked it up and found it had the number one aerospace engineering program,” Nabutola says.

Twelve years later, Nabutola has earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from Embry-Riddle. In April 2020, he defended his dissertation in mechanical engineering—via Zoom due to COVID-19—with a focus on ground vehicle aerodynamics. “I’ve spent my entire adult life at Embry-Riddle,” he says.

Not only has Nabutola been a student at Embry-Riddle, he has also been at the front of the classroom as a graduate student instructor. He has been able to use examples from his own international experience when working with his students. “Being an international student has definitely diversified the way I think about engineering problems because I have seen them used in so many different ways,” he says.

Nabutola is one of more than 1,000 international undergraduate and graduate students who currently study on Embry-Riddle’s main campus in Daytona Beach.

Deepening an Early History of Global Engagement

Embry-Riddle’s history of global engagement began during World War II, when British pilots learned to fly alongside their U.S. counterparts. During the same period, the school also trained cadets from Latin America in aircraft maintenance at its site in Florida and established an aviation technical school in São Paulo, Brazil, in partnership with the Brazilian Air Ministry.

Now, the institution prepares its graduates for global careers in fields such as aerospace, applied sciences, business, cybersecurity, engineering, security, and space. “We’re an institution that has its history, soul, and mission all driven by aviation- and aerospace-related activities—not just airplanes, but anything that goes with the movement of people around the world,” President P. Barry Butler, PhD, says.

When Butler became president in 2017, it was clear to him that global engagement should be one of the institution’s five strategic priorities. He appointed a global strategy team focused on promoting global competencies among students, staff, and faculty; expanding Embry-Riddle’s global reach to new locations; and diversifying the university’s international student population. “A lot of our programs are built around knowing that every one of our students is going to be working in a truly global environment, whether that’s the airline industry, manufacturing, government, or being an astronaut,” Butler says.

Butler joined Embry-Riddle at a time when the institution was already in the process of consolidating its international initiatives under the International Programs division, which was established in 2016. “Until about 4 years ago, everything was decentralized from an international program perspective,” says Assistant Provost and Dean of International Programs Aaron Clevenger, EdD, who became Embry-Riddle’s first senior international officer in 2017.

International Programs currently manages international student and scholar services, international enrollment, international student programming, the Embry-Riddle Language Institute (ERLI), study abroad, and global engagement. International Programs also helps coordinate across the university’s two campuses in the United States, its campus in Asia, and more than 100 teaching sites on military bases through its worldwide campus.

The division has just finished its own strategic plan that integrates the objectives of the five pillars of the university’s strategic plan. “That was the critical piece….And tailoring what we are doing to the mission and vision of the institution meant that we’re all moving toward the advancement of the institution,” says Caroline Day, associate director of international experience and communication.

Creating the International Student Experience

In the past 10 years, Embry-Riddle has experienced a 57 percent growth in international students, who make up almost 17 percent of its student population and represent 110 countries. There are currently more than 1,000 international students at its main campus in Daytona Beach, and more than 200 at the Prescott campus. Daytona Beach also hosts students who come for flight training from the Singapore campus, which was established in 2011.

As the number of international students has grown, the university has focused efforts on helping members of this community integrate into campus life. Day coordinates international student orientation and cultural programming. She says her job is to make sure that international students are “safe, happy, and healthy and have what they need to be successful.”

In March 2020, Embry-Riddle moved all of its classes online in response to COVID-19. While some international students decided to return to their home country, many chose to remain on campus. The university kept a residence hall open for students who elected to stay, and International Programs staff reached out to all students who remained in the United States to make sure they were safe and had access to the services and support they needed. The office remained open and available to students, both virtually and with a physical presence throughout the pandemic; hosted monthly live info sessions about topics ranging from immigration to housing, COVID-19 safety precautions, and enrollment advisement; and designed a virtual engagement program.

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Championing Aviation English

ERLI offers an intensive English language program for students who eventually want to matriculate at the university. The program has four levels, each with a special topics course that introduces students to relevant vocabulary and concepts for careers in aviation and aerospace.

The institution has also developed an innovative test, the English for Flight Training Assessment, as a requirement for all students studying aeronautical science. The assessment measures the aviation vocabulary and usage of students who want to become commercial pilots, ensuring that they meet the standards required by the Federal Aviation Administration to communicate with air traffic controllers and other aircrafts.

To support those who need extra assistance with their English, ERLI runs an aviation English language course in collaboration with the College of Aviation to help prepare international students who are going to become pilots. “As you can imagine, being able to communicate in the air is a little bit different from academic English and being able to talk about your paper with your professor,” says Hannaliisa Savolainen, MA, ERLI’s director.

Assessing and Expanding Global Learning Outcomes

In addition to exposing all of its students to new cultures through a diverse international student population, Embry-Riddle has worked closely with its Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence (CTLE) to internationalize its curriculum. One initiative is the development of seven student learning outcomes focused on global competencies that will be used to assess academic international education offerings, including education abroad, research abroad, and international internships. The learning outcomes were launched as part of an International Programs assessment for the 2020–21 academic year.

The learning outcomes have initially been integrated into education abroad offerings, but they can be applied to any course. “They have also been incorporated into the campus annual assessment process, meaning that they can be adopted by any department or course that would like to assess their impact on internationalizing the campus or providing global competency skills to students,” Clevenger says.

The next focus is to assess courses that are approved as part of a new global competence certificate that Embry-Riddle will launch in 2021. The curriculum is currently being mapped to the global competencies to determine the courses that will be included in the certificate, which is undergoing review by the faculty senate.

International Programs has also worked with the CTLE as it developed an inclusive teaching certification that introduces faculty to tools for successfully working with international students and helps prepare all students for global careers. More than 137 faculty have participated since the certification launched in 2019. Participants take part in workshops on topics such as universal design, how to manage difficult dialogues in the classroom, and how to teach in globally diverse classrooms. The certificate, which is recognized in the promotion and tenure process, is advertised by both International Programs and the CTLE.

Lon Moeller, JD, senior vice president for academic affairs and provost, says that one of the driving factors behind Embry-Riddle’s commitment to comprehensive internationalization and global learning outcomes is its deep engagement with employers and industry around the world. “We’re a really niche school in terms of aviation and aerospace, and these are industries that require internationalization,” he says. “We hear from our employers that they want Embry-Riddle students for their technical expertise, but they also really need to have that kind of broad worldview to be successful in the workplace.”

Embry-Riddle’s long history in aviation studies has positioned it to become a leader in aerospace, with degree programs in areas such as aerospace engineering, aerospace safety, space physics, and spaceflight operations. Space, the next international frontier, requires immense transnational understanding and willingness to work together, says Karen Gaines, PhD, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Embry-Riddle faculty and students across the university have even partnered with the International Space Station (ISS) and NASA to send payloads to the ISS.

Gaining Real-World Experience Through Study Abroad

Approximately 250 Embry-Riddle students study abroad each year, the majority through faculty-led programs. That number has drastically increased since 2011–12, when around 20 students per year participated in exchanges with international partners. Embry-Riddle was planning to offer 16 programs abroad during summer 2020 before they were canceled amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many of Embry-Riddle’s education abroad programs focus on the professional application of skills and knowledge. Since 2012, William Coyne, EdD, a professor of air traffic management, has led a summer study abroad program to Europe focused on aircraft management. The group visits several air traffic control and related organizations, such as the regional International Civil Aviation Organization headquarters in Paris, the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation (EUROCONTROL) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Brussels, and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency in Cologne. “We want to introduce students to the aircraft management world and how globally harmonized we are with our partners [around the world],” Coyne says.

Another popular faculty-led option is the annual business program to the United Kingdom, led by professors John Ledgerwood, MSA, and Tamilla Curtis, DBA. Each summer, participants visit British Airways headquarters at Heathrow Airport, where they are able to meet with representatives of different departments. They also visit various airports around the country to learn about aviation and airport regulations.

Clevenger says that one of the distinguishing factors of Embry-Riddle’s faculty-led programs is the opportunity to complete real-world projects that tie back to students’ majors. Examples include a program in Kosovo where students photograph cultural heritage sites using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, and a unique partnership that allows students to spend a week at Aegean Airlines headquarters in Greece. “The programs incorporate those aspects of study abroad that we know really drive home for students the importance of this global future that they are going to have,” he says.

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Documenting Cultural Heritage in Kosovo

Embry-Riddle aeronautical science professors Kevin Adkins, PhD, and Dan Macchiarella, PhD, have taken students to the Balkans for a five-week summer program since 2016. Before this year’s program was canceled due to COVID-19, they had planned to take almost 30 students. At the start of this program, group members spend 1 week taking an upper-division social science class on Balkan history with a local professor while they tour Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. Then, they spend 4 weeks in Kosovo, using the American University of Kosovo in Pristina as a base. They collaborate with Cultural Heritage Without Borders, a nongovernmental organization with a mission to help countries preserve important cultural heritage sites. Using UAVs, the group helps document cultural heritage sites in Kosovo, which was part of the former Yugoslavia.

After the breakup of the USSR, conflict between ethnic Albanians and Serbians led to a protracted war throughout the 1990s that resulted in NATO’s intervention in 1999. “The history of war since 1990 really affected the region. So we have a huge role in helping them reestablish themselves under a national identity,” says Macchiarella.

Unmanned aircraft systems are ideal to document sites because of the aerial perspective for the photography. Macchiarella says they are also particularly conducive to undergraduate research because they need a team to fly them. As students become more advanced, they can pilot the aircraft.

“It is work that is easy to scaffold,” Adkins says. “It doesn’t really take much training for a student to help clear an area or visually observe the airspace.”

The drones take thousands of pictures that can be processed and stitched together to make giant, highly detailed maps and 3D objects that can be manipulated. At the end of the program, the students give a project presentation that is attended by local officials, representatives from the Kosovo government, and U.S. embassy officials.

Ron White, who is majoring in unmanned aircraft system sciences, participated in the program in summer 2019. He says that being able to fly drone missions on weekends in several small towns was one of the highlights of the program. “This was an amazing opportunity to help local communities in the sense of documenting historic buildings, sites, and encroachment to these sites,” he says.

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Architect Sali Shoshi, Cultural Heritage Without Borders’s executive director, adds that collaborating with Embry-Riddle has allowed the organization to both speed up a process that used to be very time-consuming and expand its reach. Three-dimensional models of cultural heritage sites can even be uploaded to games and online applications so that children and adults can explore them on their phones.

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Collaborating With Aegean Airlines

Since 2016, Charles Westbrooks, MEd, associate professor of aeronautical science, and Mitch Geraci, MS, associate professor of aviation maintenance science, have taken students to Greece for a four-week summer program in collaboration with Aegean Airlines. They are also joined by faculty members in humanities and business.

A local travel agency, Get Lost, connected Embry-Riddle with executives at the airline who were interested in partnering with a U.S. institution. Get Lost Founder and CEO Angeliki Vaxevanaki designed a customized study abroad itinerary in which students sail in the Cycladic archipelago for 2 weeks, travel around mainland Greece for 1 week, and settle for 1 week in Athens, where they visit Aegean Airlines.

“Students get the chance to visit Greece, get to know the country on a deeper level, and understand its core values,” Vaxevanaki says. “Consequently, when meeting with Aegean executives, they are not only participating in workshops and providing solutions to issues supplied by Aegean, but [they get to] understand the company, its love for Greece, and its people.”

During the week spent in Athens, students receive briefings from key Aegean Airlines employees in charge of various parts of the company. Tours also include visits to Athens International Airport and a chance to fly on the flight deck of an Aegean A-320.

The students also work on projects developed through collaboration between the Aegean Airlines practitioners and ERAU faculty, Westbrooks says. Students have helped with projects such as developing a marketing plan targeted at Gen Z and designing the layout of a maintenance workshop.

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David Morgan, who graduated from Embry-Riddle in December 2019 with a degree in aeronautical science, says that the hands-on experience of working with one of the top European regional airlines was “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” He is currently a flight instructor, teaching U.S. Navy personnel how to fly in a general aviation aircraft.

While he was in Athens, Morgan gave a presentation to Aegean employees about how to divert an aircraft to another airport if an issue arose with the flight. “Interacting with the CEO of Aegean Airlines, watching Aegean’s flight operation control center, and seeing maintenance personnel fixing aircrafts in real time tied together everything I learned about airlines at Embry-Riddle,” Morgan says.

There is no ice hockey team at basket-ball-crazed Valparaiso University, but the Indiana institution completed a hat trick this spring when for the third time in four years a trio of seniors was awarded Fulbright scholarships. They are bound for China, South Korea, and Germany. For a campus with 3,000 undergraduates, it was evidence how successful the 148-year-old independent Lutheran school has been in infusing the curriculum with international content and encouraging students to explore global issues. Valparaiso sends upwards of 200 students a year to study abroad, many to programs it operates in Cambridge, England; Reutlingen, Germany; Puebla, Mexico; and Hangzhou, China. It requires nearly all freshmen—including nearly 1,000 business, engineering, and nursing majors—to take a two-semester, interdisciplinary course that meets five hours a week to discuss texts from the East Asia and Afghanistan, from Plato and Sophocles, and from the Old and New Testaments of the Bible (the 80 freshman in the honors program, Christ College, read equally diverse and global texts).

One of the latest Fulbrighters, Carl Boschert, a Chinese and Japanese studies and history major from Jackson, Mississippi, spent a semester at Valparaiso’s Hangzhou Study Center and made two other research trips to China. Associate professor of history Charles Schaefer, who advises the Fulbright applicants, sees “a direct correlation between our students’ performance in winning Fulbright awards and our overseas study programs. Many of our students have studied overseas for a semester or an entire year and come back with an expanded world view and an interest in exploring international studies even further.” Schaefer himself as a Fulbright lecturer at Addis Ababa University in the 1990s.

Religious and classical music occupy an important place in the life of Valparaiso. A $1.5 million gift allowed it to open a Bach Institute in 2003, and the university chorale has toured Germany twice in recent years and performed as a resident choir in Leipzig at St. Thomas Church, where Johann Sebastian Bach was cantor for the last 27 years of his life and where he is buried.

The Valpo Core Course Leads Internationalization

“We provide a lot of opportunity within a small-size liberal arts college,” says Provost Roy Austensen. “We provide a liberal arts education for engineers and accountants and finance majors and nurses as well” as arts and science majors (Valparaiso’s law school, which dates back to 1879, enrolls 500 students; 400 other graduate students pursue degrees in arts and sciences, business and nursing). John R. Ruff, associate professor of English and director of the Valpo Core Course, describes it this way:

Since its inception in 1998 the Valpo Core has helped to broaden and internationalize Valparaiso University first-year students’ horizons.  Almost every unit in this year-long course puts into dialogue texts from different eras and traditions: Gilgamesh with Genesis , Shusako Endo’s  Silence with the Gospel of Mark, Lord Shang and Mencius with Plato and John Stuart Mill, The Bhagavad Gita with Martin Luther’s  Christian  Liberty . Laura Esquival’s Like Water for Chocolate transported us to Mexico during the Mexican Revolution; Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies took us to the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo era; Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families brought us to Rwanda after the genocide. Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner , set mostly in Afghanistan, has been one of our most successful texts; Il Postino and Cinema Paradiso , set in Italy, are among our most successful films. This past year Sonia Nazario’s Enrique’s Journey helped us put a human face on the undocumented worker traveling by train from Honduras into the United States, a harrowing and heartbreaking tale.

Gourevitch and Nazario have spoken on campus, and Elias Chacour, the Palestinian peace activist and priest whose autobiography Blood Brother was just added to the syllabus, has been invited.

Valparaiso draws a third of its students from Indiana and almost as many from Illinois and elsewhere in the Midwest. The campus is located an hour outside Chicago and 15 miles south of Lake Michigan and the 15,000-acre Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. International students numbered 118 in 2006. With a 13-to-1 ratio of students to faculty, Valparaiso prides itself on keeping classes small. To keep each of the 40 sections of the Valpo Core Course under 20 students, the university encourages every department except engineering to contribute faculty, and most do. “The beauty is that the core stimulates a conversation about major ideas and themes in human history among a wide variety of faculty members, some of whom haven’t touched texts like these since they were undergraduates themselves—if then,” says Austensen, whose field is modern European history. “It enlivens the intellectual climate of the campus.”

Before the Valpo Core, there was a required freshman seminar, but the topics and syllabi varied widely. Jon T. Kilpinen, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, says, “As a residential campus, we felt that building a common experience among the freshmen was important. It would assist with retention but also help build a sense of community and identity for each group of students.” The Valpo Core looks at themes of life, death, vocation, loss, and love through the lens of great works of literature and art. Many texts are ancient classics, but others explore modern dilemmas, such as Tracy Kidder’s gripping Mountains Beyond Mountains on  Dr. Paul Farmer’s fight against poverty and infectious diseases in Haiti and globally.

Associate Provost Renu Juneja, who joined the faculty in 1978 after coming to the United States from India on a Fulbright scholarship, said teachers from different fields come together as cohorts to discuss the texts before teaching them to the students. “What has developed is a mathematician sitting with a nurse sitting with a historian sitting with an English professor sitting with a chemist, and the conversation that takes place among these people before they even go to teach has in some ways transformed the experience for our students,” says Juneja, a professor of English.

Hugh E. McGuigan, director of International Studies, is convinced the freshman Core whets student appetites for study abroad. Valparaiso is a founding member of the Associated New American Colleges (ANAC), formed in 1994 by a group of mid-sized, comprehensive universities that emphasize undergraduate education and offer master’s and professional degrees. Elon University, a 2007 winner of the Senator Paul Simon Award for Campus Internationalization, also belongs to the group of 22 institutions, which allows members to send students on each other’s study abroad programs at no additional cost. “We’ve got a student now studying in Morocco through Mercer University, and we had two in the fall through Butler’s program in Alcalá, Spain. We have another student in Puebla, Mexico, through Ithaca College. This ANAC consortium is giving us more study abroad opportunities in countries where we don’t have our own programs,” says McGuigan, who has been at Valparaiso since 1983.

The Fifth Hour—A Movable Feast

The most unusual feature of the 10-credit Valpo Core is the fifth hour each week that takes place outside the classroom. “In some ways it’s a moveable feast. A variety of activities take up that fifth hour. The residential life people on campus have become very involved with the Core,” says Dean Kilpinen. “Since our freshmen live together, the student affairs people do programming in the residence halls that matches the syllabus. Likewise, our art museum also follows the syllabus.” The museum displays works of art that relate to the topics under discussion in a special room.

The activities and the undertakings vary, and not everybody must do the same thing. “If there’s a German film festival on campus, that could be a core-approved activity, or a jazz festival, or our Martin Luther King Day celebration,” says Juneja. Students must write about their activities—the Valpo Core is a writing-intensive experience—but no one scans IDs at the door.

Mel W. Piehl, professor of humanities and history and dean of Christ College, notes the honors college has incorporated classic Chinese and Japanese texts and East Asian issues into its freshman curriculum. “Students regularly read Mencius, Chuang-Tzu, Hsun-Tzu, Lu Xun, and other classical and contemporary Chinese thinkers,” says Piehl, a 1968 alumnus. And the college provides “Albert Schweitzer Fellowships” for students to work as medical volunteers in mobile clinics in Costa Rican and Nicaraguan villages over Valparaiso’s two-week spring break.

Sending New Faculty Abroad

Valparaiso also sends new faculty after their first year off to Cambridge, England, for a week-long retreat. They live in apartments that Valparaiso students occupy in the fall and spring, see shows on London’s West End and visit the usual sights, but they also learn firsthand just how much importance Valparaiso places on international education. “Part is acculturating them to the special mission of this university and part is helping them bond with each other as a cohort so they are not in their silos. But part is also to widen their horizons,” says Juneja. “However much we say that England is like America, it’s really another strange country for most Americans.” In summer 2006, the entire Christ College faculty traveled to Berlin, Leipzig, Wittenberg, and Erfurt, Germany, for 10 days; other faculty have traveled as a group to China.

International Presence on Campus

When Juneja and her husband, political scientist James L. Kingsland, joined the faculty in 1978, she found herself one of the few international professors on campus and one of only a handful of people from India in the community. Now, almost two dozen of Valparaiso’s 254 full-time faculty is international. “It’s changed so much,” she says. “I remember when there were only four or five Indian families in the surrounding area, and now we can’t find a hall to accommodate us all. We built a cultural center 15 miles from here and this is happening in other communities as well. I am a Sikh and we built our own temple. I just find the whole situation has changed dramatically.”

International enrollments actually peaked in the late 1990s before Asian enrollments dropped after a currency crisis, and fewer students from the Middle East came after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. “But the trend now is going back up,” says McGuigan, especially with the government of Saudi Arabia funding scholarships for its nationals to study in the United States.

“We are going about this much more deliberately,” says Juneja. “When I came there was no concerted effort made to recruit students internationally. It was personal contacts and church connections that brought us students. It’s only in the last 15 years that we’ve actually done international recruiting.” At first Valparaiso was content to send a representative on tours to college fairs in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Now it is lining up exchanges with partner universities in China and elsewhere. Holly Singh, assistant director of international programs, also has made several recruiting trips to India, his homeland.

“We have partnerships now with five Chinese universities. They send us students … and we host their faculty for professional development. Many Chinese faculty have come here for a semester,” says Juneja. Almost five dozen professors from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou—where VU’s own study center is located—and other universities in China have been visiting scholars at Valparaiso. Using its religious connections, Valparaiso also hosts young faculty from overseas who are sent to the Indiana campus for four months of mentoring by the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia. Eighteen professors early in their careers have made that journey over the past four years from institutions in China, India, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. McGuigan said that one participant, a professor of English from Nanjing University, “just fell in love with Valpo” and immediately recruited four students to come to Valparaiso for master’s degrees in international commerce and policy, as well as English and communications.

A former president, O.P. Kretzmann, once defined religious universities such as Valparaiso as places “where Athens and Jerusalem meet.” Nowadays, Valparaiso is adding other cities across Europe, Asia, and Latin America to that mix, and Valpo’s students are the better for it.

Valparaiso University

Read more about Valparaiso University

When Shoreline Community College was built in a Seattle suburb 10 miles from the Space Needle in 1964, the wooded, 83-acre campus was designed to look like a Japanese botanical garden. The student union, the PUB, was an acronym for Pagoda Union Building, and until the 1990s its sports teams competed as the Shoreline Samurai. That nickname was abandoned after student leaders decided it was demeaning, and today Shoreline athletes take the field as the Dolphins.

But Shoreline itself is more international than ever, with a record 643 international students enrolled in 2006-07 and scores of students along with faculty studying overseas each summer. Many of these ambitious programs were spawned by an initiative the college took in 2001 when it created an International Programs Advisory Committee (IPAC) with an annual purse of $20,000 to disburse grants to faculty to develop short-term study and service abroad projects. That next summer, faculty led dozens of students on three-week study trips to Antigua, Guatemala; Monterrey, Mexico; and London, England. Every summer since then, 45 to 70 Shoreline students have headed off to earn credit in China, Japan, Ireland, Greece, Turkey, Namibia, South Africa, Thailand, Honduras, Peru, Argentina, Iceland, and elsewhere.

Through Shoreline’s membership in the Washington Community College Consortium for Study Abroad, students also can take classes during the fall, winter, and spring in London, Florence, Paris, Salamanca, and San Jose, Costa Rica. From 1999 through 2006, 120 Shoreline students studied abroad through the consortium, and three Shoreline professors taught classes overseas.

In a region replete with excellent community colleges, Shoreline must scramble for students, despite its excellent track record in sending graduates to the University of Washington for four-year degrees. The commuter college, two miles inland from Puget Sound, is the tenth largest of Washington’s 34 community colleges. In addition to awarding associate degrees in arts and sciences, it prepares students for careers in health, technology, and computers and has an award-winning automotive training center. Most of the international students who make their way to Shoreline seek to transfer to universities, says Thalia Saplad, executive director of the Office of International Programs. “For international students, business is number 1. Our engineering, health occupation, and nursing programs are also draws, as well as biotechnology.” Many international students come from Asia, with the largest numbers from Indonesia, Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan.

After two presidents departed in four years, Shoreline found stability when civil rights attorney Lee D. Lambert was promoted in 2005 to interim president and later given the job on a permanent basis. Through it all, support from the top for Shoreline’s internationalization was unwavering. The commuter campus earmarked $85,000 in 2005–06 and another $85,000 in 2006–07 toward internationalization projects, including grants for faculty development, study abroad scholarships as well as improved services for international students. “The administration is very supportive of building programs and curricula that prepare our students to be global citizens,” says Saplad.

Praise from Accreditors

The Northwest Association of Schools and Colleges and Universities commended Shoreline in 2002 for “its excellent international studies program.” The visitors left “impressed by the exemplary and creative efforts to recruit and accommodate international students and to use resources from the success of that program to encourage faculty and students to travel and study abroad.”

A 10-person staff works on international programs and advises the growing ranks of students from around the world. “We’ve made a concerted effort in the past several years to integrate our international education programs and our international students with the rest of the campus,” says Saplad. “More and more international students have taken leadership positions in our student government. They hold eight of the 12 executive offices this year.”

International Peer Mentors

Mari Kosin, assistant director of international student services, laid the groundwork for the emergence of international students into leadership positions with a program she started five years ago called International Peer Mentors (IPM). Five students are selected annually for these paid positions, in which mentors help newcomers to the United States adjust to life at Shoreline and in the Seattle area. The mentors take diversity training alongside full-time college staff and help shape both educational and extracurricular activities for their peers.

“They play a major role in our orientation for international students,” says Saplad. “They’ve helped get more international students to partake in activities and to get more involved in their education. They undergo professional development with my staff and we send them to conferences around the state. It’s the first time in years where international students have really seen themselves as part of the institution.”

Colleen Ferguson, assistant director of international education, said the first international students to run for campus-wide office were veterans of the International Peer Mentors program. “They learned a lot about the institution and how it worked. They had the confidence to apply for posts in student government because they had held these IPM leadership jobs for a year,” she says.

An Exploration of Irish Literature and Culture

The International Programs Advisory Committee, which includes two Shoreline students, two staff members, and a broad representation of faculty, sifts through faculty proposals for summer study abroad courses and decides which ones to fund. Gary A. Parks, a professor of English literature and creative writing, received a green light from IPAC to take creative writing students to Ireland in August 2006 to explore the sources of inspiration for W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and other authors and to craft stories of their own. In addition to viewing the Book of Kells in Trinity College in Dublin and standing before the majestic Cliffs of Moher jutting into the Atlantic off County Clare, they attended a poetry slam at a pub in Galway and worked up sketches about life in nineteenth century, famine-stricken Ireland while visiting Inishmore, birthplace of novelist and activist Liam O’Flaherty.

“The driving query of the class was that I wanted people to explore the question of why such a small nation has produced so much great literature,” says Parks, who has taught at Shoreline for 16 years. Six men and two women, all 21 or younger, signed up for the course, which cost $2,400 plus $600 for meals. Given a choice of taking an introduction to Irish literature or a short story writing class, all opted for the latter, “which simplified things for me and made it a bit more fun,” he says.

He had students read excerpts from Mackin’s 1955 novel, Rain on the Wind. “We did the Yeats pilgrimage to Sligo, and visited Inishmore, an island in the Gaeltacht off the west coast of Ireland,” he says. “A lot of native speakers there still speak Irish. Liam Flaherty’s stories get mystical in places, and when you read them on Inishmore you can really understand how this place would give rise to these stories.”

“It was a great experience,” says Parks. When the students came home, half signed up for an Irish literature course that he inaugurated at Shoreline that fall. “That class filled up with 27 students. It was a nice follow-up in terms of internationalizing the campus,” he says.

Service Learning in Jamaica

One of the most frequent fliers on Shoreline’s faculty is psychology professor Robert B. Thompson, who regularly leads students on a 16-day summer service learning trip to the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, where they volunteer in the schools of a rustic village. Thompson worked as a psychologist alongside the Peace Corps in that same village two decades ago and has returned with students ever since, first while teaching at Rollins College and over the past 13 years at Shoreline.

“It’s a village without electricity only 25 miles from downtown Kingston, but very difficult to get to. We have to go up the mountain by four-wheel-drive truck,” he says. “The students live at the houses of two coffee farmers and work within the community, primarily tutoring in two elementary schools.” Thompson twice has spent six-month sabbaticals in the Blue Mountains and returned to campus in 2006 determined to help the Jamaican farmers secure a niche and better prices in Seattle’s food markets for their rich coffee beans.

“I recruit the students out of my psychology classes,” says Thompson. “They are very diverse. On this summer’s trip, 75 percent have never before traveled outside the Northwest. It’s a unique opportunity for them. I have three students over age 50, several in their 30s and 40s, and students who are 18, 19 years of age.”

Both Thompson and the students find the readjustment upon return to Seattle challenging. “You’re bombarded with the technologies, the lights, noises. Everybody’s in a hurry. Once you get accustomed to a certain rhythm, it’s very difficult to come back and be thrown into another culture,” he says. “The students see their culture and their surroundings in a different way.” Some, he adds, change career paths so they can deal directly with the poverty they saw in the Blue Mountains.

A Commitment to Multicultural and Global Awareness

Thompson, who served on the IPAC for four years, says Shoreline “definitely is an unusual community college. A lot of four-year schools don’t support the type of unique (study abroad and international service) programs we have.”

Parks said the emphasis on the international at Shoreline fits in with its “tradition of being a strong academic transfer school. It’s just part of our history and culture here. We have a commitment to multicultural awareness and global awareness.”

Shoreline’s summer study abroad programs are open to all students and members of the community, although traditionally they have drawn primarily those on track to transfer to a four-year institution. The Office of International Programs now is stepping up efforts to interest more of the students who are seeking technical and professional degrees in study abroad. Two new exchange partnerships have already borne fruit. Last winter, six Danish business students from Erhvervs Akademi Vest (Business Academy West) in Esbjerg, Denmark, came to Shoreline for classes and internships with local businesses, and Shoreline and the Danish institute exchanged business and marketing professors for two weeks. Shoreline has won awards for its automotive technology offerings and this past summer 20 students from Ajou Motor College in Boryeong, South Korea, spent two weeks at Shoreline to kick off a reciprocal student exchange program. Ajou’s program is regarded as one of the finest in its country.

President Lambert, who is Korean-American, summed it up last fall in his first “State of the College” address. “One of the great challenges before us is how we prepare our students, community, and workforce to compete in a global world,” Lambert said. Stressing the importance of the liberal arts to the development of the whole person, he added, “Whether it’s the nineteenth century or the twenty-first century, there are certain skills and talents that are universal from one generation to the next. I am proud to be part of a campus that grapples with these issues as we debate ways to ensure that all of our students receive a world-class educational experience.”

Shoreline Community College

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A stranger visiting the University of Oklahoma’s graceful campus in Norman, Oklahoma, who drives down David L. Boren Boulevard, or strolls into the David L. Boren Honors College, or spies the statue of David Boren in a cornice on Evans Hall might assume that Boren led the university during its glory days.

He did—and still does. For the University of Oklahoma, these past 13 years since David L. Boren relinquished a powerful seat in the U.S. Senate to lead his alma mater are the glory days. In writing a new chapter in a life of public service, Boren has presided over a period of dramatic growth and growing confidence for the University of Oklahoma. Sooners have always taken kindly to Boren, the former Rhodes Scholar and politician. They elected him governor at age 33 in a near landslide in 1974, and he won his last Senate race in 1990 with 83 percent of the vote. On his watch OU has quadrupled the number of endowed professor chairs, raised more than $1 billion, and erected dozens of new academic facilities. Even the powerful football team has added a seventh national championship to its trophy case. (A predecessor, George Lynn Cross, once quipped that he wanted to build a university of which the football team could be proud.)

Befitting a former chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and a man for whom a federal study abroad scholarship is named, Boren has given international education pride of place in OU’s curriculum and activities and made the Norman campus a regular stop for world leaders from Margaret Thatcher to Mikhail Gorbachev. Soon after taking office in 2006 as Africa’s first elected female head of state, Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf visited at the invitation of Boren and Ambassador Edward J. Perkins, OU’s senior vice provost for international programs and former U.S. ambassador to Liberia, South Africa, and Australia.

Spurt in International Studies

Oklahoma has boosted study abroad by providing $250,000 in international travel grants and fellowships for students and faculty; three-quarters goes to students. OU has added 15 faculty positions in Chinese and Arabic languages, Asian philosophy, history and politics, the economics of development, European security and integration, international business management, and other disciplines. The School of International and Area Studies, launched in 2001, has grown from three dozen to 350 majors. “It is a hard-charging group,” said political scientist Robert H. Cox, the founding director. “We require them to study abroad for at least a semester and take at least two years of a language.” Suzette Grillot, an associate professor of political science, says the myriad of international events held on the Norman campus “gets students energized. They learn something about the world here, and that energizes them to go out and actually see that part of the world or study the issue.” Perkins, who was ambassador to South Africa during the final tumultuous years of apartheid, says, “When we first started this, we heard from some professors, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Anybody who wants to study international relations is going to go to some place back East to study.’ Well that’s not true at all.”

Of the 23,000 students enrolled on the Norman campus, 1,551 are international students. Oklahoma has forged exchange agreements with 173 partner universities in 60 countries and each year hosts approximately 750 visiting students while sending an equal number off to study at those institutions. Millie C. Audas, director of Education Abroad and International Student Services, notes that in addition to enriching the education of thousands of students, the exchanges also have produced at least 89 marriages. The ebullient Audas, a Bolivian-born former language professor with an OU doctorate in higher education administration, received a second doctorate in honoris causa from Université Blaise Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, France—OU’s oldest partner—in 2005 for building Oklahoma’s exchange enterprise over nearly three decades.  “I was honored not for any research, not for any academic advancement, but for the human relations and the human attachments between the people of France and the people of the United States. That was glorious for me,” said Audas, whose husband, William Audas, is a retired OU director of career services and founding director of the J.C. Penney Leadership Center at Price College of Business, in which numerous international students participate.

Audas first came to Norman as a language instructor in 1978. When she became the first full-time director of Education Abroad and International Student Services in 1986, she quickly found kindred spirits across the faculty, including cell biologist Paul B. Bell, Jr., who had done extensive research in Sweden and shared her enthusiasm for study abroad and partnering with institutions overseas. “By having all these exchanges, we have significantly increased the diversity of international students at OU,” says Bell, now vice provost for instruction and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Audas still travels the world to oversee existing exchanges and strike new compacts. “It’s labor intensive to make all these collaborations and agreements live. They are not just on paper. But we’ve had incredible momentum, rhetoric, and funding from President Boren,” she says.

Boren’s Days At Balliol

President Boren recalls with a smile that on his first visit to campus as president-elect, “Millie Audas intercepted me on the sidewalk and said, ‘Can I walk with you? I’ve been waiting all my career for someone like you to become president of OU.” Boren immediately proclaimed her his “soul mate.” Boren needed no convincing about international education. A congressman’s son, he was elected president of the Yale Political Union and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford after graduation in 1963. He was at Balliol College when word came that President John F. Kennedy had been shot; he was still there 14 months later when Britain bade farewell to its great wartime leader, Winston Churchill. “I learned so much about my own country by being outside it,” says Boren.

During Oxford’s long reading periods, he trekked to more than 30 countries across Europe and the Middle East. Boren also volunteered with the speaker’s bureau at the U.S. Embassy in London, speaking before ladies’ garden clubs in little towns across England. It left him convinced of the importance of being a good listener and seeing the world through others’ eyes. Boren believes it crucial for OU students to explore the world beyond the Red River. “Oklahoma is in the middle of the country. We have one of the lowest percentages of any states of first-generation Americans and the highest percentage of people born in this country,” he says.

OU Cousins

Soon after their arrival, Boren and wife Molly Shi Boren, a former teacher and judge, got into a conversation with a student from Malaysia who helped cater an event at the president’s house. “I said to him, ‘How many American students have you gotten to know really well while you’ve been here?’ and he said, ‘Not very many. We international students tend to stay together,’” Boren recalls. The young man expressed regret that he had not gotten to visit an American farm nor seen any “real cowboys.”  The Borens’ offer to escort him to a friend’s ranch came too late; he was flying back to Malaysia in two days. “We felt terrible,” the president said. They decided to see to it that other international students would not miss such opportunities.

And so OU Cousins was born, a volunteer organization that matches U.S. and international students and arranges social outings and activities capped by a springtime barbeque with country music and line dancing in a big barn on a ranch outside Norman. “We tell everybody to dress up like cowboys and cowgirls. The international students really look like the part,” said Boren. The program, which started with 300 participants, now draws up to 1,000 each year. After the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, when Boren exhorted the campus community to make OU international students feel welcome, 1,600 students signed up. Other universities have borrowed the concept and even the Cousins name from OU’s friendship experiment, according to Kristen Partridge, assistant director of student life, who still corresponds with her “cousin,” a Singapore engineer she befriended as a sophomore in 1996.

Like many major universities with sizeable international student contingents, Oklahoma has a host family program called Friends to International Students that arranges for local families to invite students into their homes, take them grocery shopping and make sure they have a place to spend Thanksgiving and the winter holidays. Susan and Lyndal Caddell, Norman school teachers, have hosted students from more than a dozen countries on three continents, often several at once.

They’ve taken them to rodeos and the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, but the international students’ favorite outing is when the Caddells bring them to big family cookouts. “A lot go, ‘Wow! You have aunts and uncles and everyone else here, just like home,’” said Caddell. “It’s a lot different from the image of America they get from TV and movies.”

Getting Outside the Comfort Zone

In welcoming freshman, Boren always reminds them about the importance of “getting outside their comfort zone” and befriending OU’s international students. “Don’t ever let it be said that (a future prime minister) was in your class at Oklahoma and you didn’t know them,” he says. At every major academic convocation, a phalanx of international students bearing their countries’ flags marches behind bagpipers and the Kiowa Blacklegging Society, a group of Native Indians in feathered headdresses.

It takes an effort, too, for international students to breach their comfort zones. When twins James and John Akingbola of Lagos, Nigeria, enrolled as freshmen in 2003, they hung out at first only with Nigerians. When their older brother—who went to college in Britain and later earned a MBA at Purdue University—came to visit, “he wasn’t happy. He told us, ‘You’re not really maximizing your time here. Why don’t you just break out of your bubble and see what’s out there for you?” That was all the push they needed. James Akingbola, 21, became involved with the 150-member African Students Association and moved up the ranks of OU’s International Advisory Committee (IAC), which coordinates the activities of more than two dozen international student organizations. Akingbola, a chemical engineering major, was IAC president in 2006-07 while former IAC President Kenah Nyanat, a petroleum engineering student from Borneo, Malaysia, was elected president of OU’s student government. “I used to be very shy. I couldn’t speak to anybody alone. I depended on my twin to do the talking,” said Akingbola. “It’s so great to know different sets of people.”

The University of Oklahoma Alumni Association has gone international, too, recently adding clubs in Venezuela and Colombia to others across Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Jim “Tripp” Hall III, vice president for alumni affairs, calls the growth “astonishing.” In Moscow, alumni gather in the middle of the night to watch satellite feeds of OU football games, especially the annual showdown against the University of Texas. But in Brazil, OU alumni are more excited about the burgeoning international activities, Hall says.

Home of the Neustadt Prize

The University of Oklahoma is home to the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature, a biennial, $50,000 prize bestowed by the university and its 80-year-old literary magazine, World Literature Today. The magazine also brings famous writers to campus for the Puterbaugh Conference on World Literature. Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize a week after his 2006 visit. Between the Puterbaugh Conferences and the Neustadt Prizes, Norman regularly draws such literary lions as South Africa’s J.M. Coetzee, Japan’s Kenzaburo Oe, Poland’s Czeslaw Milosz, Mexico’s Octavio Paz, and Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez—all Nobel laureates.

Robert Con Davis-Undiano, an English professor who is dean of the Honors College and executive director of World Literature Today, says, “We’ve democratized the Neustadt program. It used to be a kind of ivory tower process, where the great writers of the world would come to campus and meet a few faculty.” Now, through classes, symposiums, meals and receptions, “upwards of 1,000 to 1,500 students are involved each time. We’ve really opened it up.” Davis-Undiano, an authority on Mexican-American literature, says, “When we brought in Kenzaburo Oe, for example, the Japanese students on campus were dumbfounded. They said, ‘In Japan, we’d get to wave at him in a parade. Here we get to have lunch with him.’”

Growing Connections with China

In 2006 the People’s Republic of China chose OU as the site for a new Confucius Institute, part of a worldwide network that encourages the teaching of Mandarin language and Chinese culture in schools and colleges. It will offer credit and non-credit courses to college students, business people and travelers as well as local school children, taught by OU instructors and teachers on loan from Beijing Normal University.

Boren took a personal interest in shaping an ambitious summer study abroad program called “Journey to China” in which students travel to Kunming, Shanghai, Xi’an, and Beijing for four weeks of classes on Chinese language, civilization, economics and politics. When Ming Chao Gui accepted a faculty position in 1994, there were just 14 students and he was the only instructor. “I was a one-man army,” he laughs. Gui was following in the footsteps of his late father, Cankun Gui, who taught at OU until his wife’s illness led the couple to return to China. In 2006–07, Chinese language courses drew 215 students and OU offered both a major and minor in Chinese.

Gui helped woo Sinologist Peter Hays Gries to Norman as the founding director of the Institute for U.S.-China Issues and as the holder of an endowed chair. The 39-year-old political scientist was born in Singapore and grew up in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Beijing; his father was a U.S. diplomat. In fourth grade in a public school in the Chinese capital, he came in fourth in a citywide competition throwing hand grenades. “Of course, they were unarmed,” says Gries. “I guess because I grew up throwing baseballs and softballs, I had a knack for it that most of my Chinese classmates didn’t.” Gries speaks Mandarin with a Beijing accent. “It gives me a real advantage because people feel more comfortable with someone who speaks with an at-home accent,” he says. “It’s like a foreigner speaking with a Texas drawl.”

Gries has established a program to bring mid-level Chinese diplomats and their counterparts from the State Department to Norman each fall for an informal weekend retreat “to get to know one another outside the tense atmospheres in Washington and Beijing.” He explains, “crisis management is a huge problem in U.S.-China relations as recent history has demonstrated with the Belgrade bombing incident in 1999 and the spy plane collision in 2001. There just wasn’t enough familiarity between individuals in the two diplomatic services for them to be able to cut through the red tape and manage these crises in a productive way.”

Internationalizing the Community

Ambassador Perkins, who had led the Foreign Service and served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in addition to tackling some of the most difficult diplomatic assignments, says that when Boren wooed him to come to Norman, “he asked me to participate with him in bringing an international sphere” not only to the campus but also to the wider Oklahoma community. Like Boren speaking to garden clubs across England in the mid-1960s, Perkins found himself traveling around Oklahoma for speeches to Rotary Clubs and other civic organizations. “Community leaders in small towns throughout Oklahoma, whether it’s business or ecumenical or the YMCA or whatever, know about the International Programs Center,” he says. “They don’t know quite what it is, except to say, ‘They do bring some famous people here to Oklahoma—and they talk to us.’ I’m proud of that.” This spring, at age 79, Perkins stepped down as vice provost and director of the International Programs Center, but he will still teach one course a semester in the School of International and Area Studies. His successor as vice provost and holder of the Crowe chair is Zach P. Messitte, a political scientist from St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

Other OU leaders echo Perkins’ sentiments about the importance of educating not only the students but the local community about international affairs. Provost Nancy L. Mergler says, “The president really feels passionately about this ideal of creating the next generation of informed citizen who can sustain and build a community.” Seventy percent of OU students are from Oklahoma, and for undergraduates not bound for graduate school, “this is our opportunity to demonstrate to them how you learn about diverse ideas and come together and learn how to craft compromises. If you don’t have those skills, there really is not much hope for the future,” says Mergler, a psychologist.

Australian student Andrew Ballinger first came to OU in 2002–03 on an undergraduate exchange from Monash University in Melbourne to study meteorology. Ballinger originally intended to study at a British university, when a professor returned from a job interview and told him, “Do you know there’s a university in the middle of America’s Tornado Alley?” Ballinger adds, “I’d heard about the tornado hunters. For meteorology, that was sort of the dream.”

Ballinger, now 25, initially passed up college to get a commercial pilot’s license after secondary school. “I had a passion for flying, I was just flying anything in the air. And then I was teaching it and decided that I really loved the science behind it, especially the meteorology,” he says. “As a pilot, you’ve got to continually make decisions about the weather.” Ballinger, the son of dairy farmers, returned to OU in 2005 after graduating from Monash and now, with master’s degree from OU in hand, is off to Princeton University for a Ph.D. in atmospheric science and applied math. Norman, he says, “is an ideal base for an international student. I’ve been to 40 states so far as well as 30 countries after first coming here.” He’s interested in both the science and politics of climate change.

Intensive Arabic and a Blog About Syria

Another exchange program sends OU students to the Hashemite University in Zarqa, Jordan, for six weeks of intensive Arabic lessons each summer. Peter Wiruth, 22, of Tulsa, who graduated with honors in international studies in May 2007, says, “I gained as much in the six weeks as I had in the three semesters of classes here.” Wiruth was active in the Arab Student Association on campus, for which one of his mentors, Joshua M. Landis, assistant professor of Middle Eastern Studies and codirector of the Center for Peace Studies, serves as faculty adviser.

Landis, who was raised in the Middle East by parents who were academics, writes a blog on Syria that is must-reading for politicians, diplomats, and academics. It draws several thousand hits a day and is widely quoted by the news media. Its success shows “how much globalization and all the technology that goes along with it are globalizing universities,” says Landis. “I’ve been able to become part of the debate on Syrian policy.”

In addition to two-way exchanges, OU increasingly is sending small groups of students to study abroad with their professors during the summer. A Journey to Italy already has been added alongside the Journey to China—the president and his wife have attended portions of both programs—and summer Journeys to the Aegean (Turkey and Greece) and South America (Chile and Ecuador) are in the works. “My goal,” says Boren, “is to double and triple the number of students who have study abroad experiences.” Boren still serves on the U.S. selection committee for Rhodes Scholarships. Of the 42 applications he read last winter, 39 had studied abroad. “That just revved me up all the more,” he says.

‘A Totally Different Place’

Craig Lavoie, 23, of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, who graduated this spring with a degree in letters and political science and was a Rhodes Scholarship finalist in 2006, speaks admiringly of the way Boren uses the fundraising skills he honed during his political campaigns to raise millions now “for scholarships, endowed professorships,  and new buildings and gardens. He’s going to leave an unbelievable legacy here.” Adds Lavoie, “I don’t even think I get the full scope of it. You talk to anyone who was here before he came in 1994, it’s just a totally different place.”

Joe S. Foote returned to his alma mater in 2005 and became dean of the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communications. Once a broadcaster and press secretary to then-House Speaker Carl Albert, Foote was the founding dean of the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University. He played a role in convincing former senator Paul Simon to come to the Carbondale, Illinois, campus in 1997 to launch a public policy institute that now bears his name. Foote, who has worked on journalism projects in Bangladesh as a Fulbright senior scholar and recently organized the first global congress of journalism educators, says it has been exciting “to return to a university so focused on the rest of the world.  It’s much more challenging to become an international university in a land-locked state with no tradition of international dynamism.”

Kenah Nyanat, 22, the student body president, is a petroleum engineering student from the town of Miri on the island of Borneo in Malaysia. The eldest son of a Shell Oil Co. geologist who was one of the first from his village and tribe to attend college, Nyanat was a champion debater in high school and as a freshman emceed the Eve of Nations, the university’s annual celebration of international culture. He comes from a family of high achievers: sister Rami, 21, a sophomore studying geology, and her American OU “cousin” were named OU Cousins of the Year this spring for creating a multimedia scrapbook chronicling program activities. Both spent this past summer studying in China.

Nyanat has interned with energy companies in Houston and elsewhere and down the road envisions getting both a master’s degree in petroleum engineering and a MBA. “I really think President Boren has a plan on driving OU to the point where it is on the same level as perhaps an Ivy League institution, but maintain the same level of affordability that it has (now),” says Nyanat.

The end of OU’s international journey and David Boren’s tenure is not in sight. “We have so much more we want to do,” says the 66-year-old president. “I started a religious studies program so our students could learn about other religions and better understand what’s happening in the Middle East and other parts of the world. I’m looking to start an institute on the philosophical and cultural roots of the American Constitution.”

When he left the Senate, some colleagues were mystified, Boren says. Now, “a lot are jealous, frankly. This is where the action is, I tell them. I’m following my dreams.”