INTERNATIONALIZING THE CAMPUS
PROFILES of SUCCESS
at Colleges and Universities
PROFILES
2003
INTERNATIONALIZING THE CAMPUS
PROFILES of SUCCESS
at Colleges and Universities
SUCCESS
© Copyright 2003 by NAFSA: Association of International Educators.
All rights reserved. Reproduction of NAFSA publications is strictly
prohibited without the written permission of the publisher.
Printed in the United States
III
Acknowledgments
A project of this magnitude is the work of many
people. The constraints of space prevent us from
listing everyone who contributed, but we do want to
single out several people for special acknowledgment.
First, NAFSA gratefully acknowledges the considerable
work of five volunteers who constituted the advisory
panel that selected the institutions that are profiled in
this report:
Rebecca Dixon Associate Provost for University
Enrollment, Northwestern University; advisory panel
chair
Britta Baron Executive Director, DAAD
(German Academic Exchange Service)
Alice Chandler President Emerita, State University of
New York at New Paltz; consultant in higher education
Louis W. Goodman Dean, American University School
of International Service
John Pearson Director, Bechtel International Center,
Stanford University
Their thoughtful deliberations were truly invaluable.
This report was reported and written by Christopher
Connell. Formerly the national education reporter for
The Associated Press, and later assistant chief of the AP
Washington Bureau, Mr. Connell is a freelance writer,
editor, and consultant who works with foundations,
nonprofit organizations, and government agencies.
Many thanks to the representatives of the colleges and
universities who participated in the project, including
all who submitted nominations. We especially thank
the institutions featured in this report for their assistance in helping us research and report their stories.
Among members of NAFSA’s volunteer leadership
who contributed to this project, we wish to acknowledge the thoughtful suggestions of Ivor Emmanuel,
who served as vice president for professional development during the report’s development. NAFSA’s
former senior director of publications, Stephen
Pelletier, was the project director.
Finally, our deepest gratitude to our partners on this
project, The Educational Information and Resources
Branch (ECA/A/S/A) of the United States Department
of State’s Educational and Cultural Affairs Bureau and
the Educational Testing Service (ETS). We appreciate
especially the contributions made by our lead representatives from those partners, Phillip R. Ives, chief of the
educational information and resources branch, ECA,
and John Yopp, vice president of the graduate and professional education division of ETS.
Thanks to these colleagues and many others, we are able
to present here a report that captures the breadth and
depth of accomplishment in international education at
colleges and universities—information that will be of
interest and, we trust, inspiration for many in the field.
A Report from NAFSA: Association of International Educators
CONTENTS
INTERNATIONALIZING THE CAMPUS 2003
Profiles of Success at Colleges and Universities
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1
CAMPUS PROFILES: SIX STORIES of INSTITUTIONAL SUCCESS
■ Community College of Philadelphia: A Two-year College That Found Its Place in the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
■ Dickinson College: From Street Signs to Foreign Dispatches, a Distinctive View of the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15
■ Eastern Mennonite University: From Bible School to ‘Global Village’ University . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25
■ Indiana University Bloomington: A Heartland Campus That Encompasses the Four Corners of the Globe . . . . . . . . . . .33
■ San Diego State University: A Pacific Rim Campus Finds the World at Its Front Door . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .45
■ Yale University: Looking Beyond the Ivy to Become a ‘World University’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .55
I N D I V I D UA L A C C O M P L I S H M E N T S i n I N T E R N AT I O N A L E D U C AT I O N
■ Cassandra Pyle: Leader and Friend . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .64
■ David L. Boren: The Vision Behind the NSEP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66
S P OT L I G H T P RO F I L E S : T E N N OT EWO RT H Y I N S T I T U T I O N A L P RO G R A M S
■ Duke University: Duke Bolsters Its ‘Global Reach and Influence’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .69
■ Kalamazoo College: A Kalamazoo Diploma Comes with a Well-traveled Resume . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73
■ Kapi’olani Community College: On the Slopes of Diamond Head, Kapi’olani Surveys the Pacific . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .77
■ Middlebury College: Taking ‘The Language Pledge’ in Vermont’s Champlain Valley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .81
■ Montclair State University: Showing Students the World, and Bringing the World Back to New Jersey . . . . . . . . . . . . . .85
■ Randolph-Macon Woman’s College: From Pearl Buck to the Bangla Anthem, a Global Outlook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .89
■ St. Olaf College: A Path to Teaching That Runs Through India, Korea, and Hong Kong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .93
■ Tufts—The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy: ‘Yesterday’s Mission Is Today’s Mission’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .97
■ University of Pittsburgh: Connecting a Region’s Schools and Teachers to the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .101
■ Worcester Polytechnic Institute: Teaching Engineers to Work Globally —and ‘Walk a Bit Taller’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .105
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INTERNATIONALIZING
THE CAMPUS 2003
Profiles of Success at Colleges and Universities
NAFSA believes that international education and
exchange encourages better relations and facilitates
communication among peoples of different cultures.
Fundamentally, international education advances
learning and scholarship, builds respect among
different peoples, and enhances constructive leadership
in a global community.
We find it encouraging that even in the face of today’s
tense geopolitical global realities, educational exchange
continues to grow. The Open Doors 2002 data from
the Institute of International Education (IIE) show
that the number of international students attending
colleges and universities in the United States increased
by 6.4 percent to a record level of nearly 600,000
students in the 2001-2002 academic year. The data
suggest that while enrollments from certain countries
were affected by the events of September 11, 2001,
overall numbers remained steady. Similarly, the
number of students from the United States studying
abroad increased 7.4 percent, reaching a record of
nearly 155,000 students. IIE’s data tell us that study
abroad is now more popular than ever among U.S.
students in the year since September 11, with 45 percent of campus professionals reporting increases in the
number of students studying abroad in the fall of
2002. It is clear that even in the face of pronounced
political friction worldwide, the demand can be great
for the exchange between countries of students and
scholars—and for the prodigious benefits that derive
from these exchanges.
Behind the data are compelling stories of the students
and scholars who have benefited from international
educational exchange. The institutions of higher
learning that support such exchanges have their own
fascinating stories to tell. Indeed, we are in an era
when many campuses across the country are determined to infuse internationalization throughout the
fabric of the institution, and in turn to reap the considerable benefits that internationalization can bring.
Finding these stories and putting them into a form to
share is the purpose of this report. In the pages that
follow you will find a series of captivating accounts
about international educational exchange from the
points of view of the people engaged in international
educational activities at 16 colleges and universities.
TTT
In the spring of 2002, NAFSA issued a call for nominations to all colleges and universities in the United
States. Our objective was to develop a report that
would profile institutions “where international education has been broadly infused across the fabric of the
institution.” We asked the institutions to sketch for us,
in just 1,500 words, a snapshot of their efforts to
“internationalize the campus.”
For the sake of this project, we elected to define
“internationalizing the campus” broadly. Scholarship
without boundaries encompasses many dimensions—
international linkages through connections among
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institutions; study abroad by U.S. students; teaching
and work abroad; study by international students and
scholars in the United States; faculty exchanges; curricular initiatives; cocurricular activities; international
visitors; foreign language training; corporate/university
partnerships; campus/community interaction; and international development projects. The list could go on.
In our call for nominations we said we intended to
document cases of institutions of various sizes and
types where “internationalizing the campus” is a part
of the culture, or well on the way toward becoming a
reality. We were looking for examples that exhibit
practices, structures, philosophies, and policies that
represent outstanding achievement in international
education, and that would be instructive for other
institutions. We said it was our intention to report
on institutional impacts, results, innovations,
and leadership.
NAFSA recognizes that each institution is unique, that
internationalization itself is complex and multidimensional, and that success and accomplishment can be
identified and assessed in diverse ways. In that context,
we said that we were looking to cite “exemplary practices, model approaches, and major trends” that would
help us present an overview of the current state of
international education in the United States. This
report is not intended to necessarily highlight the
“best” programs. Rather, it identifies programs that in
illustrative, often innovative, and perhaps inspirational
ways demonstrate institutional commitment to international education.
In the nomination process, we said that we wanted to
document institutions where internationalization is
not an isolated success but pervades the campus in
meaningful ways. We expected to find institutions that
have addressed challenges unique to their institutions
and locales. We anticipated that some institutions in
the selected pool might show evidence of a nascent
effort with considerable promise rather than a fully
realized program.
We decided that this report would profile in depth six
institutions that demonstrated internationalization
broadly across the campus, and would also include 10
shorter profiles of institutions with notable strengths
in specific programs.
NAFSA convened an expert advisory panel—their
names are listed on page iii—to review the nominations and select the 16 colleges and universities. The
panel sought institutions that could demonstrate some
or all of the following characteristics:
■
The institution’s mission or planning documents
contain an explicit or implicit statement regarding
international education.
■
There is evidence of genuine administrative or even
board-level support for internationalization.
■
The campus has been widely internationalized across
schools, divisions, departments, and disciplines.
■
The cross-campus internationalization has had
demonstrable results for students.
■
The institution’s commitment to internationalization
is reflected in the curriculum.
■
The cross-campus internationalization has had
demonstrable results within the faculty.
■
There is internationalization in research and/or
faculty exchange.
■
The institution supports its international faculty,
scholars, and students.
■
There is an international dimension in off-campus
programs and outreach.
During the screening process, we found that those
institutions that rose to the top of our list more often
than not exhibited strong institutional commitment to
internationalizing the campus at the cultural level.
These institutions exhibited a vision for internationalization, broadly shared and implemented by many
people at various levels of the institution. The effort at
these institutions was clearly central to the mission.
The motivation for the effort seemed rooted in expectations for improved global understanding as opposed,
for example, to simple pressure for tuition dollars.
The strongest nominations clearly showed a coherence
and campus-wide integration of the internationalization efforts. These campuses could document tangible
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results from their efforts. Often they had committed
institutional dollars and did not rely exclusively on
grant money. The faculty provided strong leadership
for the internationalization efforts, which were
integrated into the curriculum.
NAFSA received 117 nominations, the vast majority
of which were highly competitive for inclusion in this
report. Indeed, it was fascinating to note the variety of
approaches, the creativity, and the deep commitment
of institutions to internationalization. These 117 institutions represented the breadth of U.S. higher education—institutions large and small, public and private,
research universities and liberal arts colleges, religious
and secular.
In September 2002, the advisory panel met in
Washington, D.C., and selected the 16 institutions
profiled in this report. Thereafter, NAFSA sent an
experienced journalist to the campuses of the six institutions selected for major profiles. He spent several
intensive days on each campus, interviewing key staff,
faculty, and students, followed by further research and
reporting conducted by phone and mail. Reports of
the 10 additional campuses were developed from
phone interviews and additional research.
TTT
In the pages that follow you will read accounts of
efforts at 16 colleges and universities to “internationalize the campus.”
The six institutions that were chosen for in-depth profiles encapsulate the diversity of U.S. higher education.
Our report includes well-known leaders in the field of
international education, such as Indiana University
Bloomington, whose countless initiatives in international education continue to serve as models for other
institutions. We have selected Yale University, where
engagement beyond the United States dates from the
early 19th century, and where today virtually no area
has been untouched by internationalization. Two
smaller institutions, Dickinson College and Eastern
Mennonite University, reflect the depth by which
internationalization can pervade—and define—an
entire institution. San Diego State University, making
great strides toward fulfilling an ambitious goal to be a
“global university,” was selected in part because of the
commitment of top administrators to achieve that
ambition. A sixth institution, Community College of
Philadelphia, has developed innovative approaches in
internationalization that both fit well and help
advance its mission as an urban, nonresidential, openadmissions institution. There are remarkable stories at
each of these institutions.
There are also compelling stories of excellence in international education at each of the 10 institutions selected for “spotlight” profiles. At Duke University, for
example, we found an effective approach to internationalization across a decentralized university. The
report highlights Kalamazoo College’s outstanding
study abroad program, which attracts up to 85 percent
student participation. We recognize Kapi’olani
Community College’s excellence in regional studies
and Middlebury College’s celebrated approach to language instruction. Montclair State University demonstrates strong presidential leadership and involvement
in international studies. Randolph-Macon Woman’s
College is a leading example of the pervasiveness of
global education on a small campus. The report discusses St. Olaf College’s student teaching in India,
Hong Kong, and Korea, and its effective use of foreign
language across the curriculum. The Fletcher School at
Tufts University excels in its highly developed, multidisciplinary program for training future leaders in
international affairs. The University of Pittsburgh is
cited for its standout community outreach through
involvement of its Area Studies National Resource
Centers with teachers and students across a three-state
region. Worcester Polytechnic Institute is recognized
for the ambitious overseas component of its signature
cooperative training program for future engineers.
The report also includes brief profiles of two individuals who have made outstanding contributions to international educational exchange, the late Cassandra Pyle,
and former U.S. Senator David Boren, now president
of the University of Oklahoma.
TTT
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This report’s profiles highlight not only sound educational practice, but the value to society that derives
from effective international education. We release this
report, however, in the context of a global environment in 2003 that challenges the ability of international educators to build on and make the most of the
intrinsic connections between education and society.
It is unfortunate, we believe, that internationally
mobile students who seek to study in the United States
today face multiple impediments to getting here and
being able to study here successfully. Political situations abroad place unfortunate restrictions on the ability of students from this country to pursue education
in certain regions of the world. Under current circumstances, students and institutions worldwide suffer in
the short term.
The long-term ramifications will affect global society
as a whole. International education is part of the solution to world strife. Encouraging more Arabs and
Muslims, for example, to experience the United States
first-hand is part of the solution to building deeper
cross-cultural awareness. Robust efforts to increase
access to U.S. higher education for internationally
mobile students are an investment in greater global
understanding. In the context of today’s global state of
affairs, and in light of recent world history, it is imperative that international educators redouble our efforts
to communicate our belief in the importance of crosscultural learning and respect for cultures different
from our own.
In a provocative article on the occasion of the first
anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Sam
Tanenhaus wrote in the September 15, 2002,
Washington Post that the meaning of September 11 “is
unfixed. We can’t say today how future generations
will reflect on September 11, because, hard as this may
be to accept, September 11 isn’t really over. It lives on
through subsequent events whose outcome is as yet
unknown....Pivotal events are pivotal because they can
turn in almost any direction and often gain their
meanings from what follows, from the tug of history.”
We see that as a challenge to every citizen of the
world. If events today can turn in almost any direction, we believe it is incumbent on every citizen to
work to ensure that events pivot in the direction of
deeper cross-cultural understanding. If ever there was a
time when we need to do all that we can to renew
world commitment to international learning, understanding, and cooperation, that time is now.
This report documents the exceptional work being
done in this regard at 16 institutions of higher learning. We hope that their examples will inspire similar
efforts across higher education.
Mary Anne Grant
Marlene M. Johnson
Executive Director, International
Student Exchange Program
President, NAFSA: Association
of International Educators, 2003
Executive Director and CEO
NAFSA: Association of
International Educators
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A Two-year
College That
Found Its Place in
the World
COMMUNITY
COLLEGE OF
PHILADELPHIA
n
“ investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”
—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania — Benjamin
Franklin left a host of legacies in his adopted hometown of Philadelphia, where he helped organize the
young country’s first hospital, first volunteer fire company, and first subscription library. His philosophical
academy gave birth to the University of Pennsylvania,
which displays no fewer than three full-size statues of
Franklin on its campus. But for almost three centuries
the City of Brotherly Love had no public institution of
higher learning. That deficit was remedied in 1964,
the year the Community College of Philadelphia was
founded (and one year before Temple University
became a state-supported, public university). The new
two-year college opened its doors in 1965 in a former
department store. In 1971 the city found permanent
quarters for the community
college in an elegant but
surplus headquarters
on Spring Garden
Street that had
been the third
home of the
U.S. Mint.
With award-winning renovations and the construction
of several new buildings, the 14-acre urban campus
soon was bustling with thousands of students. Today
the enclosed walkways that span 17th Street carry
41,000 credit and noncredit students to classes. Nearly
half a million students have studied here since 1965.
The college also has three regional centers and offers
courses in dozens of schools, community centers, and
other sites around Philadelphia. With a full-time
equivalent enrollment of 14,000, Community College
of Philadelphia is a springboard for many to Temple
University and other four-year colleges, including a
dozen in the Philadelphia area alone. For others, the
Community associate degree is a direct passport into
nursing, the paralegal profession, or other fields.
Ninety-two percent of the nursing graduates passed
the state licensing exam in 2001—a rate higher than
any of Philadelphia’s four-year nursing schools.
Philadelphia missed out on the economic boom that
lifted the fortunes of New York and high-tech areas in
the 1980s and 1990s; its underfunded public schools
still suffer from neglect. But amid these difficulties,
Philadelphia has built a community college that would
make Franklin proud.
Under the
direction of
David C. Prejsnar,
coordinator for
international
education,
Community offers
study abroad
opportunities in
London and
Costa Rica.
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Liberal Studies, said the administration heard that
message clearly from faculty. “We had flyers, we had
forums, we had town meetings; you name it, we had
it. This was before e-mail, so we actually had to send
pieces of paper to people,” she said. “One of the things
that clearly came through was that we knew we were
preparing our students not only for their place in
Philadelphia but for their place in the global economy.” Thompson credits two faculty members in particular with lighting the fuse for internationalization:
David C. Prejsnar, a history and philosophy teacher
who now also serves as coordinator for international
education and studies, and Fay Beauchamp, a professor of English. Prejsnar and Beauchamp spearheaded
two Title VI grant projects to expand the curriculum
to introduce the study of non-Western cultures. They
made “this concept much more than just a belief or a
mission statement,” said Thompson.
Chandelier in the
Rotunda of the
Mint Building,
former home of
the U.S. Mint and
now the home of
Community.
Community College of Philadelphia even has its own
study abroad programs. Three summers ago the college
began sending a professor and students to study
English literature in London. This summer it is also
offering a study abroad program in Costa Rica with
courses in both Spanish and sociology. Each spring the
college sends students and faculty to study in Merida,
Mexico. So far only a few dozen students have taken
the college up on these international education opportunities. Across town, the University of Pennsylvania
sent 1,231 students abroad last year. But the existence
of Community College of Philadelphia’s study abroad
programs, coupled with the college opening its doors
in 1997 to international students (250 are now
enrolled), has had an outsized impact on the climate
at Community and on students and faculty alike.
At Community College of Philadelphia, as at many
other campuses, the push to internationalize the curriculum started with faculty who made this a personal
mission. A decade ago, gearing up for an accreditation
review, the college rewrote its mission statement to
embrace the goal of giving students “increased awareness and appreciation of a diverse world where all are
interdependent.” Sharon Thompson, then an assistant
to a vice president and now dean of the Division of
Prejsnar was widely schooled in Japanese Buddhism
when he joined the Community faculty 11 years ago.
He devotes half-time to the new position of coordinator for international education and studies and teaches
a humanities course in “Japanese Culture and
Civilization.” A graduate of Trinity College and
Temple University, Prejsnar is an indefatigable salesman for international studies. In class, he cajoles students to join him at a Japanese cultural event the next
evening at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (“We’ll
meet at the bottom of the staircase”). In hallways, he
reminds colleagues to send him students who might be
interested in studying in London or Costa Rica. From
experience, Prejsnar knows that he must speak with
400 students to find the 20 who actually will find the
time and wherewithal to go to London. “Some will go
almost to the end and decide they can’t swing it,” he
said. Prejsnar is also a networker par excellence. A few
years back Dean Thompson urged him to check out
the Pennsylvania Council for International Education.
Before long, Prejsnar was its president. He is also a
past president of the Mid-Atlantic Region Association
for Asian Studies.
Beauchamp joined the Community faculty 27 years
ago with a B.A. from Carleton College, a master’s from
the University of Chicago, and her Ph.D. in English
from the University of Pennsylvania. The humanities
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coordinator and former chair of the English department is constantly looking for ways to imbed international studies into the curriculum. She does this in her
own classes, whether an upper level humanities course
for students a few credits away from transferring to
Temple or a remedial writing class for young adults getting their first taste of college. A typical recent assignment in her remedial writing class involved learning
and writing about the situation in Iraq.
Dean of Liberal
Studies Sharon
Thompson credits
faculty with
making global
Beauchamp got her first taste of other countries and
cultures at an early age. As a child she lived first in
Japan while her father served in the postwar occupation, and later in European capitals while he led the
International Society for Rehabilitation of the
Handicapped. She spent eight years at Community
College of Philadelphia as a part-time professor and
helped organize a union drive that, after a strike in
1983, secured the first contract for adjuncts.
Beauchamp became a regular faculty member and
soon was devoting her energy to cooking up new
courses. “I didn’t want to keep teaching the same
thing—just medieval English, and Chaucer and
Shakespeare and Milton. Now I can compare The
Tempest with The Tale of Genji, and it’s incredible,”
said Beauchamp. “The college is quite different now.”
The faculty pursued and won several grants from
foundations and federal agencies to help build expertise and broaden the curriculum. Key support came
from the National Endowment for the Humanities
and from the U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI
funding for international education programs. The
Freeman Foundation, which supports Asian studies on
many U.S. campuses, paid for faculty to attend seminars at the East-West Center in Hawaii. With the help
of three-year Title VI grants won in 1996 and 1999,
the college held extended seminars in Philadelphia to
help faculty develop new courses. They brought in visiting scholars and expanded the library acquisition list
to purchase more international books and journals.
Now the college teaches Chinese and Japanese language classes as well as French, Spanish, Arabic, and
Italian. It offers a range of humanities courses that
expose students to the art, literature, religion, and politics of the Orient, Europe, Africa, and other parts of
studies a reality
at Community.
the world. Liberal arts students can pursue an associate
degree with an international studies emphasis that
includes two years of foreign language. Currently,
more than 50 students are majoring in international
studies. Students fill more than a dozen sections each
semester of the new “Humanities Cultural Traditions”
course, which meets Temple University requirements.
Many students drawn to these classes have Asian or
African roots. The classes also are popular with the
college’s growing number of international students.
In Richard Keiser’s “African Cultures and Civilization”
class, several students explained why they were there.
“I’m African American and I wanted to know about
my culture—and you need to take a humanities
course,” said Stacey Allen. Classmate Khalil Harris
Khabil said he was surprised to find it in the college’s
216-page catalog, titled Unlimited Possibilities. “When
you think of a community college, you think of remedial-type classes. Courses like this, you think of a big
college,” said Khabil.
Chigusa Tiungle, now an instructor of Japanese, was
once a Community College of Philadelphia student
herself. Her students, too, had deeply personal reasons
for their interest in the language. The class of six—five
men and a woman—bowed in unison to greet a visitor, then explained why they were taking intermediate
Japanese. One was a fan of Japanese soccer. Another
was a Japanese American youth hoping “to improve
my accent” and converse more readily with his mother.
Jesse Benton, 19, an aficionado of Japanese food and
culture, said, “I really like the Kanji characters.”
Classmate Lawrence Byrnes is a third-degree brown
belt who wants “to talk with my Japanese karate
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instructor.” Romance was the motivation for Wendy
Seiferheld, a continuing education student. “My
boyfriend is Japanese,” she said.
Most of the 11 students in Prejsnar’s “Japanese Culture
and Civilization” class also were drawn by personal
reasons. Brian Cooper and Ruth Phillips both practice
Nichiren Buddhism. Helene Williams, who works for
the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban
Development, was intrigued by the way Japan makes
the most of limited space for building houses. “When
I saw the flyer for this class, I had to have it,” said
Williams. “It wasn’t just history, but culture.”
Director of
Student Activities
David Watters and
English professor
Pairat Sethbhakdi
plan year-round
for the annual
International
Festival.
About 12,000 of the 41,000 students enrolled at
Community take courses not for credit. Community is
the first college that almost half these students have
ever attended. Some come directly from high school,
but many are juggling jobs and family. Almost twothirds are women. The median age is 25. Forty-five
percent of students are African American, 38 percent
white, 11 percent Hispanic, and 6 percent Asian. The
college awards 1,200 associate degrees and 200 certificates in career programs each year.
Retired postal service secretary Elaine Opher compiled
a 4.0 grade point average at Community before winning a $40,000 scholarship to Cheyney University. “I
told Community, ‘I love you—but I’ve got to roll,’”
THE BIRTH OF A
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‘NO ONE SHOULD
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Opher laughed. She aspires to teach adults. Opher
made the most of her semesters at Community, going
on both the first study abroad trip to London in summer 2001 and to Merida over spring break twice. She
wasn’t sure she could afford the London trip—the
month-long study trip now costs $3,399—but “my
daughter and friends said, ‘You’re crazy not to go.’”
“They were right,” said Opher. “People don’t realize
the money they spend on clothes and other things.
Then you look at the cost of something that will
always be in your memory bank, for all time.” She said
it was eye-opening for classmates “to experience prejudice against Americans. It’s not book learning or television. It’s your personal experience.” After seeing the
Mexican pyramids on the trips to Merida, she has
plans to visit the pyramids in Egypt this summer on a
Cheyney University trip.
Edward Forman, the English professor who leads
Community’s trips to London, said, “Our students
haven’t been many places before. It’s very valuable for
them. They gain confidence and more sophistication
in dealing with people and ideas.” It is one thing to
study Greek civilization in the classroom, “but when
we actually went to the British Museum and saw the
Elgin marbles, they couldn’t believe their eyes.” They
also made side trips to Oxford, Stratford upon Avon,
Canterbury, and other historic places.
PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania — The rich tradition of International
Festival Week at Community College of Philadelphia began in the
early 1980s when Pairat Sethbhakdi, who was teaching English as
a second language, noticed students lingering long after the last
class. They were mostly refugees from Southeast Asia who had no
place to go.
“They looked so sad,” said Sethbhakdi, an immigrant herself
from Thailand with a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “No one deserved to be that sad.”
These newcomers were mostly from Vietnam, Cambodia,
Laos, and Afghanistan. Most were women; husbands and fathers
had been lost in the wars. They were facing new struggles adjusting to life in Philadelphia tenements inhospitable to everyone.
“I talked to them and thought, ‘We should make them happy
at this place,’” said Sethbhakdi. She remembered joyous interna-
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“They were stimulated by London. The A students
and the C students talked the same way. They said,
‘This is the greatest thing. I want to go back,’” said
Forman, who has a Ph.D. from the University of
Wisconsin and has taught at Community for 33 years.
“I really believe in the democratic experience of trying
to bring higher education to a broader range of people
than ever tried by any society in the history of the
world. A lot of faculty are attracted to the college
because of that. I sent my children to elite colleges.
My goal is to have anyone who walks into my classroom get just as good an education as they got at
Cornell and Vassar.”
Community’s London and Costa Rica programs are
offered in partnership with the nonprofit Centers for
Academic Programs Abroad, which has classroom
facilities and student housing around the world. It
rents space and provides the logistics for dozens of
U.S. colleges and universities. “Their staff is there to
answer students’ questions, like, ‘Can you help me
get a ticket to Ireland this weekend?’ Of course, it
turns out the students ask faculty everything anyway,”
said Forman.
Earlier, sitting around a long conference table in the
faculty lounge, a dozen faculty and staff discussed how
the international education push has affected their
professional lives. Anthropology professor Frank
Bartell said, “Twenty years ago, when I started trying
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Former Community
student Elaine Opher
fretted about costs,
but a daughter told
her she could not
afford not to study
in London.
to get some international coverage in the courses, the
president at the time told us it wasn’t relevant to the
lives of our students here in Philadelphia.” The experience of recent years has proven that judgment wrong.
“A lot of students’ worlds began and ended with their
neighborhood,” said Bartell. “Only a small fraction of
students study abroad, but the very presence and
awareness of the program and students’ coming back
and talking about their experiences helps to broaden
perspectives.”
“For a number of us, it’s not even a big deal now to
totally change the syllabus and make it much more
international,” said Forman. A short fiction course
that used to concentrate solely on U.S. and British
short stories now covers fiction from around the
world. What does the Norton Anthology of Literature
look like these days? Forman just happened to have
tional festivals at the University of Illinois where students shared
A tradition was born. The next year it became the Annual
their crafts, cuisine, and culture. “Something clicked in my head
International Festival. Now the college plans year-round for the
and I said, ‘Why don’t we do that here?’” she said.
week-long festival with a $16,000 budget from the Office of Student
Sethbhakdi approached the head of the English department
Activities. Sethbhakdi and David Prejsnar are the academic coor-
and the director of student activities. “I told them that in an
dinators, working with David Watters, director of student activi-
interethnic and interracial community such as Philadelphia, peo-
ties, and Mitchell Furumoto, coordinator of international student
ple had to learn to laugh together, sing together, and eat together,”
services. Last spring 1,200 people attended two dozen
she said. They put up $200 to sponsor the college’s first Asian
International Festival events.
Festival in spring 1983, a day-long series of dance, music, and
other performances topped by a fashion show.
“We picked April because it’s the New Year time for Laos,
Cambodia, and Southeast Asia, as well as Easter, a time of rebirth
“It was the talk of the campus,” recalled Sethbhakdi. “It was
of life in Christianity. It’s a time that brings out happiness and hope
fascinating to see how proud and happy people were, and to see
for all people,” said Sethbhakdi. “We try at CCP to give students
the sparkle in their eyes. The food was delicious. These students
experiences they would remember for the rest of their lives.” ■
got up at three in the morning and got their Grandmas and Mas to
cook for them.”
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The journey to
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the Norton Anthology of World Literature at hand. “It’s
3,000 pages instead of 2,000 and it’s got pieces from
Asia, Africa, Latin America, and lesser-known
European literature,” he said.
Thompson. “It’s not that they didn’t have the
enthusiasm, the excitement. They just never saw
themselves there. Some of our students didn’t see
themselves in college.
Kathy Smith, chair of social studies, said international
elements have even infiltrated the paralegal training.
“Even in a program very focused on American
law, we’ve had students who once were lawyers in
Albania, Panama, Italy, Colombia. Every year we
have students make presentations about their
experiences in those legal systems. The American
students find it fascinating.”
“That’s one of the things that we’re very proud of at
the Community College of Philadelphia: giving students the opportunity to explore and be opened up
to this diverse world of possibilities,” she said.
All 3,500-plus Community students pursuing liberal
arts degrees must take two international studies
courses—one in humanities and one in social sciences.
A wide array of courses meets those requirements,
including literature, political science, and anthropology courses that touch on international themes. “Not
every student will be taking more specialized African
studies courses or Japanese 201,” said Prejsnar.
higher education
was a long one
for classmates
Ntokozo Mbhele
and Lynne-Marie
Sanders.
In creating the London study abroad program,
Community had to overcome not only students’ financial barriers but also “the cultural barrier of being able
to see themselves in another place and another environment. Many haven’t been out of their neighborhood. They haven’t been to New Jersey, much less
England. They haven’t been on a plane,” said Dean
TWO STUDENTS,
TWO JOURNEYS
FROM NEAR
AND AFAR
Thompson confessed that when the Chinese and
Japanese language courses were still in the planning
stage, “I wondered, ‘Is anybody going to take these
courses?’ But the enrollments have been fantastic.
Clearly there was a student interest, perhaps untapped.
The board of trustees changed its policy so now we
can have students from abroad studying here. Our students were ready for these cross-cultural exchanges.”
Community has its own foundation which awards
minigrants to faculty for professional growth or curricular innovation. “It’s always so wonderful to see those
proposals come through. They are invariably to enrich
themselves and transfer that into the classroom,” said
Thompson. That has allowed Community to infuse
global awareness in courses across the curriculum.
“That means we’re going to hit close to 40,000
students a year no matter what program they are in,
whether it’s paralegal studies or nursing,” said the
dean. “They’ve got to take English and psychology
PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania — Ntokozo C. Mbhele and LynneMarie Sanders both came a great distance to pursue an education
at Community College of Philadelphia.
For Mbhele, or Kozee as she tells everyone to call her, it was
a journey of more than 8,300 miles from Durban, South Africa.
Sanders’ hometown of York, Pennsylvania, is just 85 miles from center city Philadelphia, but for her, too, the journey was a long one.
At 22, Mbhele has already led a venturesome life, leaving
home in 10th grade to perform in Ghana with a troupe called Peace
Train. Later she worked as a receptionist for the South African
High Commission. She speaks five languages—Zulu, English,
Afrikaans, Xhosa, and Twi—and now is learning Spanish.
Sanders, 36, raised a daughter as a single mom and worked
as a financial analyst before enrolling in college and hopes to
teach junior high school.
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and sociology and history, and we’ve infused those
basic general education courses with diverse and
international material.”
“At the Dean’s Council, my job is to keep the liberal
studies agenda out there so that if anyone proposed to
shrink or limit the number of humanities or social science electives, I’m out there banging my fist, saying,
‘No, this paralegal is going to have to be able to have
good dinner conversation, and if they’ve never read a
book and don’t know anything and have no critical literacy, they’re not going to become the team leader. If
they don’t have good interpersonal skills, if they can’t
understand and appreciate world events, they’re not
going to be the one that the boss is going to feel
comfortable around or have good dinner conversation
or be a good schmoozer. Those skills, the soft skills,
are just as important,” said Thompson, a sociologist
by training.
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leap” for Community is to make smarter use of technology, to collaborate in creative ways with other
institutions, and to keep providing more opportunities for faculty to grow, including the possibility of
faculty exchanges.
One reason that Community now offers Chinese language instruction is the presence of Huizhen Ren on
its staff as coordinator of ESL/bilingual programs and
services. Her main responsibility is running a program
that teaches English as a second language (ESL) to
more than 900 immigrants and other non-English
speakers. As a sidelight, she wrote the curriculum for
the first Chinese courses and has worked with Drexel
University on its Chinese instruction.
Both are international studies majors at Community College of
Sanders is bound for Temple on a scholarship, while Mbhele
Philadelphia. At one point Sanders was in Community classes with
is applying to four-year colleges and universities. Her goal is to
her grown daughter, now in the National Guard.
return to South Africa and join her country’s diplomatic corps.
York is a gritty city still struggling to escape the shadow of
The morning of September 11, 2001, was nerve-wracking for
lethal race riots in 1969. Sanders traces her interest in internation-
both women. No one knew if terror might be visited upon down-
al studies to her experience growing up in an area rife with racial
town Philadelphia. The commuter trains stopped running. Sanders
intolerance. “A lot of places in this country are like York,” she said.
could not find her daughter.
Mbhele wandered downtown for three hours. Later, in an
English class, she encouraged classmates to take heart.
The outgoing Mbhele ran for student body president at the
“I said, ‘Yes, everybody’s sad and afraid, but let’s try to look
end of her first year. “I got my posters done. I put them up. I went
to something that’s going to give everybody strength,’” she
out there and met all the people. I got the video done. After two
recalled. “‘Look at what Nelson Mandela did when he came out of
days of elections, I was a mess. I was a nervous wreck, because I
prison. Think how his example can help us here in America.’”
didn’t know how it had gone,” said Mbhele. But she outpolled
three opponents.
Community was not
already offering
Chinese, Huizhen Ren,
coordinator of
wrote the curriculum
for the language
courses herself.
The challenge now for Community College of
Philadelphia is to undertake some things traditionally
left to four-year colleges. Thompson said the “next
learn that even though people are different, they are similar.”
Surprised that
ESL/bilingual programs,
Ren is a Chinese-born educator who was sent to the
countryside for reeducation during China’s Maoist
“Employers are recognizing that as well. They want
students who are trained liberally as well,” she said.
“Clearly, you want the nurse who can count and
calibrate your blood pressure correctly and knows
how to give you a shot and all that, but they are also
looking for literacy skills, teamwork skills, and critical
thinking skills.”
“Young children need to be exposed to other cultures. They need to
11
When the professor kept recalling those sentiments in subsequent weeks, Kozee knew that she had found the right words. ■
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Cultural Revolution. The graduate of Tianjin Normal
University eventually resumed teaching. She and her
husband both were at Temple University when authorities in China cracked down on democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989; the couple stayed
and became U.S. citizens, with Ren completing her
education doctorate at Temple. “It was hard mentally,”
said Ren. “Part of me is lost.”
Vice President for
Academic Affairs
Judith Gay:
The global
emphasis is
‘virtually
inescapable’ in
the Community
curriculum.
Now she is helping educate Americans and immigrants
about her native land, and trying to forge links
between Tianjin Normal University and the
Community College of Philadelphia. She was surprised and puzzled when she arrived at Community
and found Chinese was not taught. “I took it for
granted that such a large college in the inner city of
Philadelphia with so many students
should offer Chinese,” Ren said.
“I asked the chairman of foreign languages why, and he
said, ‘If you want to do
something, you can do it.’”
She did, writing the syllabi
for Chinese 101 and 102,
which Community began
offering in 1998. Twentyfive students—including
some Philadelphia business
people preparing to travel
CELEBRATING
INDEPENDENCE
DAY ON THE
THIRD OF JULY
to China—signed up, and soon intermediate Chinese
was in the course catalog as well. Now Community
has three instructors teaching four sections of introductory Chinese and one intermediate course. “It was
a gamble, because you don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Ren, “but I was pretty confident.”
Christopher DiCapua, a second-year Spanish teacher,
went to Merida last spring and will go with the students to Costa Rica this summer. DiCapua, who took
students to Costa Rica three times when he taught at a
prep school, said, “It’s wonderful to give our students
that same opportunity.”
Judith Gay, vice president for academic affairs, said the
array of international education activities at
Community “has an impact that you may not realize if
you’re just counting how many students take particular
classes or study abroad or go to the international film
festival. It’s the whole exposure of the students to the
idea of diversity and appreciation for difference at the
institution. That tone permeates the institution.”
“When I read community college publications, international education is not high up on the list of things
that colleges are talking about,” said Gay. At
Community, it is virtually inescapable.
Do some students consider these course requirements
just another obstacle?
PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania — The best way to understand the
special place of Community College of Philadelphia in this city
and this increasingly connected world, says Community President
Stephen M. Curtis, is to spend time inside its gymnasium on the
third of July.
A banner outside the multipurpose facility boasts that its
basketball team is the state champion. However, the activities
inside on that date have nothing to do with sports.
“A thousand people become naturalized citizens in our gym
every year,” said Curtis. “It’s one of the nicest moments for us. The
Immigration and Naturalization Service building is just down the
street and they always use our facility.”
A separate Independence Day celebration draws dignitaries
to the Liberty Bell the next morning on the Fourth of July. “But the
people are right here in our gym,” said Curtis. “It’s a marvelous
moment. It’s what we’re all about.” ■
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“I wouldn’t call it an obstacle,” said Gay, a psychologist. “Part of education is getting in the way of students in a good way; that is, not giving them necessarily what they think is optimal, but exposing them to all
the different possibilities of what it means to get a
quality education. When you challenge people’s thinking, expose them to new ideas, improve their ability to
think critically and communicate, then you’re doing
what education is supposed to do.”
Art professor
Madeline Cohen
turned the
creation of a
Buddhist sand
Gay, too, would like to see Community expand collaborations with other institutions, especially on the study
abroad front. “Everybody can’t do everything. If we
could play a big part in helping other institutions and
students be part of that experience, that’s important,”
she said. She would also like to see Community establish a Center for International Education that would
host conferences and workshops to bring people
together. “Wouldn’t that be something for a community college to have?” she asked rhetorically. When she
fielded a call recently from Mercer Community
College in New Jersey to inquire whether Community
students might be interested in Mercer’s aviation program, she replied, “‘Well, what about our study abroad
program? Do you have any interest in that?’”
Community’s faculty pulls in $6 million in grants each
year. “It’s one of our strengths,” said Susan Piergallini,
a former PriceWaterhouseCoopers consultant who is
Community’s executive director for institutional
advancement. The grants come from the National
Science Foundation as well as the U.S. Department of
Education and private foundations. “They add a big
margin of excellence to the college,” said Piergallini.
mandala into a
teaching opportunity.
“Without them, you wouldn’t have new equipment in
the physics lab and we wouldn’t be starting a nanofabrication program.”
Madeline Cohen, chair of the art department, recently
arranged for a former Tibetan monk to build a sand
mandala over several weeks in the Rotunda of the Mint
building. She organized classes and talks around the
project. “This is pretty sophisticated stuff for a community college. It happened because a friend of mine is a
member of the local Buddhist center,” said Cohen. “I
know absolutely nothing about Buddhism, but I recognized an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up.”
Community President Stephen M. Curtis said the college is “only at step one” on this journey. “I’m assuming we have many more steps to take down the road.”
The Bonnell Building
is the academic hub
of Community.
“We have a special mission and a special responsibility.
We are the largest single point of access for minorities
in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. If you look at
the economic slice of those students we serve, unless
we give them these kinds of opportunities, they won’t
have them. They simply won’t have them,” said Curtis.
President
Stephen M. Curtis:
International
“You’re trying to get people to understand what their
potential is, trying to get the reach to exceed the grasp.
That’s part of who we are and what we
need to provide to the residents of
this city,” he said. International
education “is no fad. It’s
absolutely integral to what
we’re all about.”
education ‘is no
fad. It is absolutely
integral to what
we’re all about.’
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From Street Signs to
Foreign Dispatches,
a Distinctive View
of the World
DICKINSON
COLLEGE
CARLISLE, Pennsylvania — In many respects no college is more internationally minded than Dickinson
College. A far-sighted leader of the American
Revolution founded the institution. It sends more students abroad than all but a handful of U.S. colleges.
It dispatches faculty with those students to five of
Dickinson’s 12 programs at universities on five continents. From the multilingual “No Parking” and
“Caution While Crossing Street” signs on campus to
the flags of the world that flutter from lampposts to
greet the latest international visitor to the clocks set
to five time zones in the library and student union,
everything about this picturesque campus says,
“We are here in central Pennsylvania—but also out
in the world.”
This is no facade. It is a state of mind that infuses
Dickinson, from administrators and staff who wake up
wondering if a calamity in a foreign capital has affected Dickinson’s voyagers, to students themselves who
know Málaga, Spain, Toulouse, France, and Yaoundé,
Cameroon, not just as exotic names but extensions of
their campus, places where they studied and where
friends are studying even now. The weekly campus
newspaper runs regular dispatches from “Dickinsonian
Foreign Correspondents.”
Dickinson has registered more success in teaching foreign languages and placing students overseas than in
bringing international students to Carlisle. Constricted
by the high costs of private tuition and with a modest
endowment and limited financial aid, Dickinson
enrolls only a few dozen international students. Until
recently, it also has struggled to achieve diversity
among the American students it attracts to this campus two hours from Philadelphia, Baltimore, and
Washington. Now, under the leadership of President
William G. Durden, a German scholar and alumnus
with a passion for both history and marketing, it is
moving to remedy those shortcomings and make
Dickinson as diverse and international at home as it is
abroad. Minorities, just 4 percent of last year’s graduating class, comprised 12 percent of entering freshmen. The class of 2006 includes 11 international students, or 2 percent of the student body. Dickinson is
aiming to achieve at least 15 percent minority and 5
percent international enrollment within three years.
Dickinson international students
Vlad Olievschi
from Bucharest,
Romania,
Guillaume Blain
from Toulouse
France, Christina
Barth from Bremen,
Germany, and
Athanasius Ako
from Yaoundé,
Cameroon.
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Durden said that Dickinson’s founder, Benjamin Rush,
was himself an ardent advocate of study abroad who
insisted that modern languages be taught as well as
Latin and Greek. Rush, as a young physician, patriot,
and author, signed the Declaration of Independence
and solicited funds from Thomas Jefferson and others
in support of the new college. It enrolled its first college students in 1783, days after the signing of the
Treaty of Paris. Modesty impelled Rush to name the
college for friend and colleague John Dickinson,
governor of Pennsylvania and author of the Articles
of Confederation.
Studying in
Germany as an
undergraduate
‘changed my life,’
says Dickinson
President William
G. Durden ‘71.
Durden himself studied at Freiburg University in
Germany in 1969 as a Dickinson junior. “It changed
my life. From that point everything I did had an international component. I spent my life connecting the
dots,” said Durden, who later returned to Europe on a
Fulbright scholarship. He ran the Center for Talented
Youth at Johns Hopkins University and was a senior
executive of Sylvan Learning Systems before accepting
his alma mater’s call in 1999.
Dean of Students
Joyce Bylander:
‘Once you open up
the world for
students, it’s hard
to close it.’
Dickinson’s West College building, or Old West, was
designed by Benjamin Latrobe, architect of the U.S.
Capitol, and dates to 1805. Once filled with classrooms, today it houses the office of the president and
other administrators. The main corridor is lined with
oil portraits of its leaders over the two centuries past.
Dickinson Dean
Joyce Bylander
Rush, who fought a yellow fever epidemic in
Philadelphia in 1793 and crusaded for humane treatment of the mentally ill, felt that “nothing profited
him more than his year studying medicine at
Edinburgh,” said Durden. “We had our course well set
from the beginning. Rush knew that we had to find
the best that the world had to offer and bring it back.”
He also insisted that the education offered at
Dickinson be useful to the building of the new nation.
“Not vocational, but ultimately useful,” said Durden.
The emphasis, however, was on the liberal arts. The
college only recently added an international business
and management major, which includes a stiff
language requirement—two courses beyond the
intermediate level.
Dickinson’s array of overseas programs began as a single center in Italy in the 1960s and mushroomed in
CARLISLE, Pennsylvania — When Joyce Bylander was a first generation college student at Cleveland State University in the 1970s,
her parents ignored her appeals to let her study abroad. They also
SELLING STUDENTS
AND PARENTS ON
STUDY ABROAD
said no when she wanted to join the Peace Corps after graduation.
Bylander became a VISTA volunteer instead.
Ever since, as an administrator at the College of Charleston,
Bucknell University, and now at Dickinson College, Bylander has
made it her mission to sell students and, if necessary, parents on
the wisdom of studying abroad. “When they say, ‘I know my parents won’t let me go,” I say, ‘Have them call me. I am really good
at convincing parents that this will be exactly what they wanted
you to do all along.’”
“International education clearly is one of our defining characteristics. It’s a main reason students come. The study abroad
numbers are as high as they are because we have learned so many
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the 1980s. It operates centers at universities in a dozen
countries: Bologna, Italy; Toulouse, France; Norwich,
England; Malaga, Spain; Yaoundé, Cameroon;
Bremen, Germany; Querétaro, Mexico; Moscow,
Russia; Beijing, China; Nagoya, Japan; Seoul, Korea;
and Madurai, India. In addition to semester- and yearlong programs at these sites, it sends students out with
professors on archaeology digs in ancient sites in
Scotland and Mycenae, Greece, or to explore the
Galapagos with biologists and Patagonia with sociologists and history professors. Dickinson has partnerships with universities in Australia, Costa Rica,
England, Israel, and Italy. With a coveted grant from
the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary
Education, Dickinson and two historically black institutions, Xavier University in New Orleans and
Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, began in 2001 a
“Crossing Borders” program that allows students from
the three schools to spend a month in Cameroon, the
fall semester at Dickinson, and the spring semester at
Xavier or Spelman.
With Dickinson’s 2,200 undergraduates and a faculty
of 175, it is a daunting proposition to maintain this
global educational enterprise. Not counting international airfare, Dickinson students can spend a semester
or full-year abroad and pay no more than the equivalent of the $33,000-plus for tuition, room, board, and
fees in Carlisle (the programs in Cameroon and China
actually cost less). Financial aid follows Dickinson students abroad.
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Dickinson students
Lauren Rogan of
Mountain Top, PA,
Heidi Murray of
Salem, VA,
Elaine Sergeyev of
Baltimore, MD,
Dickinson’s centers abroad are not the result of an
Old West master plan for globalization, but rather
the byproduct of curious, enterprising faculty who
followed their intellectual interests across oceans. It
opened its first center in Bologna in 1965, where a
Dickinson political scientist, K. Robert Nilsson,
sought to emulate the success that Johns Hopkins
University had with its satellite campus at the
University of Bologna. The late Nilsson was an authority on Italian politics and a passionate lover of Italian
art and culture who used to jokingly refer to Carlisle
as “Sleepy Hollow.” He shared his passions with generations of Dickinson students; the Dickinson center in
Bologna today bears his name. It offers history, politics, and art courses in English as well as Italian language instruction. A Dickinson faculty member serves
as resident director, and academics from Bologna teach
as adjuncts. Nilsson also was instrumental in the creation of an international studies major in 1969.
different ways to move students out of this place,” said Bylander.
Bylander said that students who study abroad come back
Bylander’s parents “were not able to see me outside the
with an increased capacity “for dissonance and discomfort. That
country. Their world was smaller than my world.” The couple, a
is such a critical life skill: to be uncomfortable and still be able to
laborer and a housewife, had moved to Cleveland from the South
function. The more they learn that skill, the more places they’ll be
in search of opportunity.
able to go in the world.”
Landing the College of Charleston job “was like my dream
“This campus will be visibly more diverse in five years,” she
come true. I got to go abroad through my students,” she said. “I
predicted. “I can only imagine where our next adventures will
sent students into the world, and brought the world to me.”
take us. The ways that we can imagine putting together exciting
“I knew my children would study abroad even before I had
children,” said Bylander. Her eldest, a graduate of William and
17
U C C E S S
curricular ideas and exciting opportunities to change students’
lives are limitless.”
Mary, spent a year in Senegal and now is at Columbia University
“As Americans we are coming to understand how very com-
pursuing a graduate degree in public health. A son at the
plex the world and the relationships between the people of the
University of Virginia went to Dickinson’s Querétaro, Mexico, cen-
world are,” she said. “The greatest problems are still human
ter, and her youngest is studying Italian at Johns Hopkins
problems. The more citizens we train who understand culture and
University in possible preparation for a semester in Bologna.
cultural dynamics, the better we are as a country.” ■
Aaron Pratt of
Southbury, CT, and
Eric Wiediger of
Doylestown, PA.
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I N T E R N AT I O N A L I Z I N G T H E C A M P U S 2 0 0 3
the program in Toulouse, other departments wanted
theirs.” When Dickinson created an East Asian studies
major in 1984, faculty and administrators debated
whether to start with Chinese or Japanese. They
added both.
Provost Neil
Two out of five Dickinson faculty have directed study
abroad programs. Many spent one or two years overseas as resident directors, and some have done multiple
stints. They bring those experiences in India, Italy,
England, Spain, France, Germany, and elsewhere back
to campus and it colors their research and coursework.
Brian Whalen, associate dean of the college and director of the Office of Global Education, estimated that
60 percent of the courses taught in Carlisle have international content and components.
Weissman:
Serendipity
and faculty
entrepreneurship
both helped
Dickinson expand
its programs
abroad.
Dickinson teamed with Gettysburg College and
Franklin & Marshall three decades ago to launch a
program in Medellin, Colombia, but shut it down in
1979 as that country began to be convulsed by drug
violence. The 1980s brought a successful series of
expansions in other parts of the world.
Nilsson was far from the only internationalist on the
faculty. When Neil Weissman arrived with a Ph.D. in
Russian history from Princeton, he was the sixth
Russian specialist on the faculty. Weissman became the
project director after Dickinson landed a three-year,
$275,000 grant from the National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH) to expand its Bologna program
and open a new center in Toulouse, a university town
and center of France’s aerospace industry in southwest
France. NEH next awarded Dickinson a $1 million
challenge grant to keep expanding its international
education program. The college used that $1 million
as seed money for what is now an $8 million Global
Education Endowment Fund.
After serving as director of international education and
heading the Clarke Center for the Interdisciplinary
Study of Contemporary Issues, Weissman became
Dickinson’s provost and dean of the college.
Dickinson’s outward march was led by faculty operating on their own, he said, “but serendipitously they
began to create something special: a complex and
impressive edifice in global education. Once we added
Todd Wronski, a theater professor who has directed
the program at the University of East Anglia in
Norwich, England, said the experience “has been
woven into the fabric of my professional life and the
institutional life.” He runs regularly in Carlisle into
colleagues from the University of East Anglia, visiting
on sabbatical or for conferences or other reasons.
Apart from intellectual curiosity, faculty were interested in creating Dickinson centers overseas so they could
exert more quality control over what students were
learning during their time abroad. “We really were dissatisfied with the way students were coming back to us
from (other) programs abroad,” said Nancy Mellerski,
a French professor at Dickinson. “We wanted to be
sure our majors had similar academic experiences
whether here or overseas.”
Dickinson has made it possible for premeds and science majors to study abroad, not just humanities, language, or international studies students. The impediments are not just language. While several of the
Dickinson centers are immersion programs, with
courses taught entirely in the target language, others
offer some or all instruction in English. Dickinson
sends a large contingent to the University of East
Anglia, and sends both a science and humanities professor with them. Bologna is another popular site, in
part because students customarily do internships as
well during their year there. Dickinson also offers a
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special summer program in Bremen, Germany, every
other summer for physics majors that is led by
German-born physics professor Hans Pfister.
Biology professor Thomas F. Brennan will get his first
taste of the overseas program at the University of East
Anglia, in fall 2003. “The college needed somebody to
do the job,” said Brennan, who is winding up a 25year teaching career in Carlisle this spring. “That’s one
of the advantages of the University of East Anglia.
Most students figure the science courses are hard
enough in English without worrying about a foreign
language.” Brennan remembers a time when “science
students just didn’t study abroad. It just wasn’t done
anywhere. I don’t think I knew an undergraduate science major at the University of Illinois [his alma
mater] who went abroad.”
Dickinson’s overall budget is $91 million. Whalen estimates that the college spends $28 million each year on
various aspects of its internationalization, including
foreign language instruction, faculty salaries, the overseas programming, and related efforts. Fifty people
work overseas for the Office of Global Education, half
as instructors and half as staff. The budget for study
abroad alone is $3 million.
Naturally, Dickinson’s extensive study abroad opportunities are a major draw for students. “For someone like
me interested in international relations, this is a perfect school,” said Elaine Sergeyev, 21, a senior from
Baltimore, Maryland, whose family emigrated from
Latvia a decade ago. She spent a semester in Malaga,
Spain, and speaks four languages.
Dickinson endured lean years in the 1990s when
applications fell by a third. Applications have rebounded sharply since Durden became president. The college
stopped deeply discounting tuition and stepped up
efforts to promote the study abroad programs. Last
spring it turned away almost half of applicants; only a
few dozen institutions in the entire country are as
choosy. It does not require students to submit SAT
scores; nevertheless, the average SAT score for the class
of 2006 was a quite respectable 1239.
Many Dickinson
professors have
directed study
abroad programs,
including Enrique
Martinez-Vidal
(Spain), Beverly D.
“There was never a moment when we wanted to walk
away from any of the global education program, even
when the institution was under some stress,” said
Weissman. “The entire campus has a sense of ownership. It is a big edifice, but we don’t feel under a great
strain sustaining it. It contributes far more energy to
the campus than it absorbs.”
Some 175 Dickinson students were overseas when terrorists struck the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon on September 11, 2001. After a flurry of
phone calls, not one student packed up and returned
home. Beverley D. Eddy, a professor of German,
recalled a colleague’s fielding a frantic call from the
parent of a Dickinson student in Moscow who
thought the college should bring all students home
immediately. The parent backed down when the professor politely asked, “Well, should they fly back to
New York or Washington?”
Enrique Martinez-Vidal, a newly retired professor of
Spanish and Portuguese, was in Malaga at the time.
“We spent that Tuesday working so hard to get the
students to call their families. When they finally
reached them, the parents would ask, ‘Are you safe?’
And the kids would say, ‘What are you talking about?
We’re calling you to see if you are safe,’” he said.
Dickinson has been touched by terror and tragedy
abroad, although not in its own study abroad programs. A Dickinson junior, John Buonocore III, 20,
was among five Americans slain in the Rome airport
massacre of December 27, 1985, when Palestinian terrorists sprayed machine gun fire and threw grenades at
a Trans World Airlines check-in counter. Buonocore
Eddy (Germany),
Todd A. Wronski
(England), Nancy
C. Mellerski
(France) and
Robert D. Ness
(Cameroon).
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Crossing Borders
students from
Dickinson, Xavier
University and
Spelman College
back in class in
Carlisle after a
summer in
Cameroon.
had participated in a Stanford classics program and
stayed behind to visit relatives in Italy. Benjamin
Blutstein, 25, a 2000 Dickinson graduate, was among
those killed in a terrorist blast inside a Hebrew
University cafeteria on July 31, 2002. Last spring,
Italian terrorists assassinated a popular professor who
taught at the Bologna center; the professor had been
working on national labor reforms.
“The world’s always been a dangerous place, but so is
the U.S. a dangerous place,” said Durden. “When you
come here, you come to a commitment to the world,
and everything the world involves and needs to solve
its issues.”
The provost said, “We’re there in the world. It’s not
just students; it’s faculty. In 1999 one of our librarians
was arrested while doing scholarly research in China
on the Cultural Revolution.” Dickinson mounted a
successful international campaign—including a Web
site and a blizzard of press releases—to win the release
of the Chinese-born librarian, Yongyi Song. That “was
a very visible example of what happens when you’re
engaged in the world,” said Weissman.
Dickinson is looking at new approaches to study
abroad, including expansion of a successful field study
program called the American Mosaic that originally
began close to Carlisle. Students on the home campus
devoted a full semester of study in 1996 delving into
the history, culture, and ethnography of hard-pressed
Steelton, Pennsylvania, and its displaced steel workers.
A second American Mosaic in 1998 involved students
spending four months exploring the lives of Latino
migrant workers in nearby Adams County,
Pennsylvania. Then in 2001 the American Mosaic
metamorphosed into the Global Mosaic. Under the
direction of sociology professor Susan Rose and history
professor Marcelo Borges, students did a comparative
study of Steelton and an oil company town in decline
in Patagonia, Argentina. Global Mosaic in 2003 will
take students back to Patagonia, and to follow the roots
of Adams County migrant workers to Peribán de
Ramos, Mexico, near Dickinson’s center in Querétaro.
Dickinson faculty are also looking at the possibility of a
Global Mosaic that would involve its students in both
Bremen, Germany, and Yaoundé, Cameroon, in a study
of how the transatlantic slave trade was conducted.
Students “step out of the box” when they sign up for a
Global Mosaic, said Lonna Malmsheimer, an
American studies professor who now directs
Dickinson’s Community Studies Center. “They get the
experience of cultural confusion that comes from
studying abroad. If they do field work, they also get
exposure to different strata of society. They see many
other aspects of the society. They cross boundaries and
meet people they otherwise would not meet.”
“Dickinson does a good job of establishing and maintaining programs in non-European sites,” said Dean of
Students Joyce Bylander. “It teaches them about crossing cultures in new and nuanced ways that are exciting. Once you open up the world for students, it’s
hard to close it back.”
“Crossing Borders” is the name of the unusual study
abroad/exchange program that took a group of
Dickinson, Xavier University, and Spelman College
students to Cameroon in each of the past two summers. The students then spent the fall semester studying at Dickinson, followed by a full load of courses in
the spring at either Xavier in New Orleans or Spelman
in Atlanta.
The program allows students to spend a month traveling and studying in Cameroon for just $500, a price
so modest that it “was almost like a gift,” said student
Susan Pierson.
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Pierson, 20, a Dickinson sophomore from Fort
Lauderdale, Florida, said, “The study abroad program
was the deciding factor in why I came to Dickinson. I
wanted to see different perspectives and have that full,
rounded experience. We’re kind of isolated here in
America. Whenever you hear about Africa, people say
how different it is. And yet I found so many similarities. That’s what I told everyone when I came back:
‘It’s not what you think it is. It was wonderful, the
community and the people that care about you. When
they talk to you they hold your hand the whole time
that you’re talking and look in your eyes and nod.’”
Valerie Harmon, 19, a Dickinson sophomore from the
Bronx, said, “Anyone can go to Europe; it’s not a big
deal. But Africa seemed so far away. You had to struggle to get there. There was no way I could have passed
up the opportunity.” She, too, was struck by the
Cameroonians’ strong sense of community. “It was just
great to be among people who, when you walk into
their room or their apartment, they cut off the television because they want to hear what it is you have to
say,” said Harmon.
Women outnumbered men in the “Crossing Borders”
group four to one. On average, throughout the U.S.,
almost twice as many women as men study abroad.
Robert Ness, a Dickinson English professor who
helped create the Cameroon center, offered his own
take on that phenomenon. “Women are more venturesome, more intellectually curious, and less inclined to
hang around here and bond with their fraternity buddies,” said Ness. He estimated that all but 10 of the
100 Dickinson students who have spent a semester in
Yaoundé over the past decade were women.
Two-thirds of the Dickinson class of 2002 studied
abroad. Since some students go to more than one
place, Dickinson shows up at 80 percent-plus in the
Open Doors ratings.
“We have big faculty buy-in,” said French professor
Catherine A. Beaudry, who has twice been the resident
director in Toulouse. Tullio Pagano, a professor of
Italian and chair of the French and Italian department,
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Archaeology
Professor
Christofilis
Maggidis leads
students on digs
in ancient
Mycenae, Greece.
went to Toulouse himself one summer as a student in
an immersion program for faculty. Like Dickinson students, Pagano lived with a host family. Dieter J.
Rollfinke, a longtime member of the German department faculty, said colleagues go the extra mile for
Dickinson’s study abroad programs because they know
“this is what distinguishes us from other schools.”
While Dickinson isn’t planning to expand its overseas
centers beyond the current dozen, it is always looking
for new opportunities to encourage students to get out
their passports. For nearly 20 summers, archaeology
majors have worked with R. Leon Fitts, chair of the
classical studies department, on excavations of Roman
ruins in East Lothian, Scotland. Now they can also go
on digs in the ruins of ancient Mycenae, Greece, under
the direction of Christofilis Maggidis, a Greek-born
archaeologist who accepted Dickinson’s offer of an
endowed chair in 2001. Maggidis is also the assistant
to the Greek archaeologist, Spyros Iakovidis, who oversees all the work in Mycenae. “We are the only undergraduate institution there now. That was a great honor
for the college,” said Maggidis. “Our students get the
best possible training with the best possible site.”
Maggidis, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of
Pennsylvania in 1994, said he had offers from larger
universities but chose Dickinson because “I was
searching for a very good, dynamic, small college that
would immediately realize the benefit of an undergraduate archaeology program and having such a major
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Dickinson Director
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I N T E R N AT I O N A L I Z I N G T H E C A M P U S 2 0 0 3
program abroad.
Dickinson’s
emphasis on international programs
played a big difference in my
decision.”
Despite her formidable command of the language,
Barth is still struggling with some American verbal
shorthand that substitutes for conversation. “I had real
big trouble with ‘What’s up?’ I say, ‘I’m good,’ and
they’re gone. In Germany, when you ask somebody,
‘How are you doing?’ you really want to know. You
want the whole story.”
Natalia Iarotskaya,
19, an exchange
student from
Moscow State
University, said the international community at
Dickinson “is small but strong. And Dickinson students are really hospitable for us.” She remembered
hearing complaints from Americans and other international students attending Moscow State “that they
don’t really have Russian friends and can’t practice
with native speakers. I have a lot of American friends
here.” Russians are intolerant of accents, while
Americans “are crazy about accents. They love them,”
she observed.
Likewise, Vlad Olievschi, 19, a sophomore, said that
when he tried saying “Hey” back home in Bucharest,
Romania, “I found that doesn’t work with my family.”
Olievschi learned about Dickinson on the Internet. He
was impressed by how much interest Robert J. Massa,
vice president for enrollment, student life, and college
relations, showed in his application. Massa personally
answered Olievschi’s letter and stayed in touch
throughout the application year.
Center for the
Interdisciplinary
Study of
Contempory Issues
Douglas T. Stuart.
Christina Barth, 23, a graduate student from the
University of Bremen, speaks English with a perfect
American accent, cultivated starting at age eight when
she spent a year in Logan, Utah, where her mother, a
high school English teacher, came for graduate training
(“After three months, my English was better than
hers,” she recalled). The University of Bremen requires
future English teachers to study in an English-speaking
country for at least one semester. “I didn’t want to go
to Great Britain because I’m afraid to lose my accent.
I work hard on it,” said Barth, who also worked in
Massachusetts for a year as an au pair.
“There’s another girl from my university here, and we
keep talking about how when you’re talking German,
people will stop and will say, ‘Hey, wasn’t that
German? I know some German,’ and then they tell
you they are freshmen, but maybe they want to go to
Bremen and what’s Bremen like, and then they tell
you where they live and give you their phone
number,” Barth said. “People here are so friendly.
It helps so much.”
Olievschi’s parents, both engineers, sent him to an
unlicensed kindergarten that taught pupils English
songs and poetry during the last days of the Ceausescu
regime. After the dictator was toppled in 1989,
English was taught in regular schools. “I started early
and I think that’s what makes the difference,” he said.
Olievschi wondered if a small American town would
be right for him, but now he’s glad he chose Carlisle.
“I really get a sense of living in a community,” he said.
“I don’t consider New York or Washington or Los
Angeles regular American life. Here I get the idea of
how America really is.”
Ana-Maria Vasilescu, 19, also from Bucharest, said
Dickinson students themselves are not very diverse,
but the college is very successful in convincing students “to get out and see other ways of life.” Judging
from other campuses she has visited, “Dickinson students are probably better informed” about world
affairs, Vasilescu said.
Athanasius Ako Ayuk, 25, a graduate student from the
University of Yaoundé, commended the Dickinson
Office of Global Education for seeking to enroll more
international students. “They are committed to internationalizing the college,” said Ayuk, who noted that Penn
State, a much larger university, recently shut down its
academic exchange with Cameroon. “Dickinson students are well known there,” Ayuk added.
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Ayuk had one complaint. He thought the pictures that
the “Crossing Borders” students brought back from
their month in Cameroon “didn’t do justice to the
country. Their pictures didn’t show the good places—
not even the beautiful quarter in which they were
living.” Ayuk said, “Every country has its slums, its
dirty backyards, but I’m particularly concerned about
Americans’ image of Africa. They see it as a continent
of disease, poverty, and starvation.” Ayuk predicted
that as Dickinson brings in more foreign students, it
will make the Carlisle campus a tighter knit place.
“People here seem naturally distant from each other.
The more international students come, the more
warmth they will bring to the campus,” he said.
Provost Weissman said that more than most U.S.
colleges and universities with study abroad programs,
Dickinson “takes responsibility for the overseas experience. If I were a prospective student and asked a
college about its biology department, I wouldn’t be
impressed if they said, ‘Well, we don’t actually have
our own biology department. We rely on other people
to teach biology, but they’re fine. We’ll send you off to
work with them.’ Yet lots of colleges and universities
are willing to do that vis-à-vis study abroad.
“While our approach may not be exportable to every
college, I’m a great believer that any college serious
about international education ought to be running at
least one program of its own,” the provost said.
Dickinson’s long-standing commitment to its overseas
centers puts the college in a strong position to weather
crises and minor turbulence, from unrest to currency
devaluations. Whalen’s office maintains a special $1 million fund to help tide its centers through emergencies.
Dickinson, both independently and in conjunction
with other universities, also is trying to gauge the
impact of study abroad on students after their return
to campus and after graduation. Whalen is personally
tracking hundreds of Dickinson alumni across time.
Dickinson also is part of a Title VI-funded study with
Georgetown University, Rice University, and the
University of Minnesota that will gather information
from thousands of students on what they learned
while studying abroad.
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Associate Dean
and Director of
Global Education
Brian J. Whalen
says the real
impact of study
abroad begins
“I always say study abroad begins when they come
back. It doesn’t happen in the experience. It’s too
painful. Ask them when they come back and you’ll
get poor answers. Ask a year or two later, and you get
very sophisticated answers,” said Whalen, who edits
Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad.
Whalen’s office is also the host site for Abroad View
magazine.
Durden said that Dickinson’s commitment to global
education goes “beyond mere study abroad. Americans
have a very good way of forgetting their junior year
abroad; they come back and it’s gone. We’re about a
lifestyle. We’re about internationalizing the campus.”
Durden, a one-time education consultant to the U.S.
State Department, said the late Emperor Hirohito
believed every emerging leader in postwar Japan
should have 15 close international friends. Hirohito
felt his generation’s insularity was one reason Japan
pursued its disastrous course into war.
Durden’s ambition for Dickinson graduates is similar.
“I want them to be able to get off a plane anywhere
in the world and immediately be comfortable—and
to have friends and colleagues in each place,” the
president said.
when students
return to campus.
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From Bible
School to
‘Global Village’
University
EASTERN
MENNONITE
UNIVERSITY
HARRISONBURG, Virginia — Remember Marshall
McLuhan and “the global village?*” At Eastern
Mennonite University (EMU) in the scenic
Shenandoah Valley, they never forgot the aphoristic
University of Toronto English professor who proclaimed in the 1960s that technology and communications were making the world smaller. McLuhan’s
notions meshed with the Mennonite view of the world.
They believe passionately in nonviolence and the
importance of service to others. Like the Quakers and
the Church of the Brethren, they are an historic
“peace” church. Mennonites share Anabaptist Christian
roots with the Amish, but no longer dress plainly. For
20 years EMU students have pursued a course of studies that EMU calls the global village curriculum.
As part of the global village curriculum—now being
revised—every EMU student must take part in
extended cross-cultural studies off campus. For at least
a third of the students, this means heading out with
professors for a semester of study in the Middle East,
Latin America,
Africa, or Europe. Some students work as interns with
nonprofit organizations in Washington or on a Navajo
reservation. Others spend up to a year on projects
overseas run by the Mennonite Central Committee,
the church’s relief and service arm. No one—not nursing majors or the prospective teachers and computer
scientists—emerges from EMU untouched by the
cross-cultural requirement.
EMU’s graduate program in conflict transformation
has attracted national and international attention. Its
Summer Peacebuilding Institute attracts dozens of
aspiring peacemakers from around the world. The
U.S. State Department chose Eastern Mennonite two
years ago as one of the campuses to which it sends
Fulbright scholars from developing countries. Eight to
10 young Fulbright scholars—the best and brightest of
their generation from countries in the strife-torn
Middle East, South Asia, and elsewhere—spend a full
year together in Harrisonburg, enrolled in conflict
transformation classes while living and working alongside students from lands with which their own countries may be at odds. The aim is to impart skills that
may help these scholars build a peaceful future back
home. Devanand Ramiah, 27, a Sri Lankan who has
worked for United Nations missions in East Timor
* McLuhan wrote in The Medium Is the Message: An Inventory of
Effects, “We now live in a global village...a simultaneous happening.... Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly
replaced by still newer information.”
EMU students
Frank Ameka of
Kenya, Ko Uehira
of Japan, Nelson
Okanya of Kenya,
Linda Mugambi
of Kenya, and
Bu-Won Choi of
South Korea.
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degrees in business administration, conflict transformation, counseling, and education as well as divinity.
It awarded its first M.B.A.s last spring. Enrollment
recently topped 1,500, including almost 1,000 undergraduates, 270 graduate students, 120 seminarians,
and 100 students in an adult degree-completion program. EMU also enrolls 22 international students—
mostly from Japan and Central America—in intensive
English classes. About 70 other international students
are enrolled as undergraduate and graduate students.
Ameet Dhakal of
Nepal, Manjri
Sewak of India and
Devanand Ramiah
of Sri Lanka were
among the first
Fulbright Scholars
drawn to EMU by
its conflict transformation program.
and Kosovo, said that when the Fulbright program
told him he was bound for Harrisonburg, “I was kind
of sad. I’d wanted to go to an Ivy League college.” But
Ramiah would not trade what he has learned about
how to build a sustainable peace, about restorative justice, and how to bring healing to victims of trauma.
“I’m so glad I came. I’m taking back so much,” said
Ramiah, a member of Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority who
is returning to work for the Centre for Policy
Alternatives in Colombo.
EMU started as a Bible academy that Mennonites
opened in 1917 in this town nestled between the Blue
Ridge and the Allegheny mountains. The school
became a junior college in 1930 and won accreditation
as a four-year college in 1959. In the 1960s its seminary began offering graduate degrees; the college began
offering master’s degrees in the 1990s. A university
since 1994, Eastern Mennonite now offers master’s
ARE THERE
LIONS IN YOUR
BACKYARD?
With a $25 million budget and a modest $16 million
endowment, EMU is heavily dependent on its tuition
of $8,185 a semester. The tuition paid by the students
who study overseas goes mainly towards the costs
incurred abroad. “If you look at it purely from a business standpoint, those students could be in the residence hall, paying their tuition on campus,” said
Provost Beryl H. Brubaker. The college sends a twoperson team with each group, often a professor and
spouse. If those same students stayed in Harrisonburg,
they could be absorbed into existing courses at little
additional cost. Nevertheless, in recent revisions to the
global village curriculum, faculty and administrators
all agreed that the cross-cultural requirement was
sacrosanct. “Everything was turned upside down
except the cross-culturals,” said Don Clymer, who
directs the program. “It’s the core of what we do,”
said Delores Blough, director of international student
services and coordinator of diversity initiatives.
HARRISONBURG, Virginia — When newly-arrived freshman Frank
Ameka complained about the heat last August, classmates looked
at him quizzically. Wasn’t he accustomed to scorching heat in
Africa?
Not in the Kenyan countryside outside Nairobi where Ameka
lives. At 5,000 feet, the temperature there seldom gets into the 80s.
In Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, on the other hand, last summer
was one of the driest and hottest on record.
Ameka, 21, whose father, an EMU alumnus, is an accountant
and farm owner in Kenya, was bemused and perturbed by the misconceptions.
“They assume all of Africa is hot like the Sahara Desert and
that there are wild animals everywhere and that you open your
back door and you see a lion,” he related. “Everyone keeps asking,
‘Do you have lions in your farm? Do you have giraffes?’ When I tell
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Brubaker, a former chair of EMU’s nursing department, said the schedules for nursing students and others in career-oriented majors are often so crowded that
it is difficult for them to spend a semester away from
campus and still graduate in four years. The students
who go abroad do coursework and customarily get
credit for three courses. Many EMU students borrow
to pay for their education, and it is an added hardship
to go further in debt to spend a semester overseas. The
burden is especially heavy, said Registrar David
Detrow, because “very few of our people are going to
be making $50,000 in five years. They work in Africa
as teachers or as a nurse in Central America. That’s
their goal. They’re getting their loans deferred, but
that’s about it.”
As violence escalated in the Middle East last summer, a
number of U.S. colleges and universities cancelled
plans to send students to study in the region. Eastern
Mennonite went ahead with its three-month trip,
where students live on the West Bank with Palestinian
families and then in Israel, where they visit settlements
and a kibbutz and study at Jerusalem University
College. They also make stops in Egypt and Jordan.
“There’s also something special about the fact that
we’re in the Middle East and most other schools
aren’t,” said Brubaker.
It was not a decision the college came to lightly.
them we have cows and sheep, they are almost stunned.”
EMU’s 90 international students often find themselves serving as ambassadors from their countries and cultures.
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Carolyn Yoder
‘72 directs the
Seminars on
Trauma Awareness
& Recovery (STAR),
which train
pastoral and
Krista J. Martin, the assistant director of cross-cultural
programs, said, “We did a lot of thinking about
whether we were being foolish to send this group.”
Students and parents were given an opportunity to
withdraw without financial penalty. None did. “There
is some faith involved that things will go all right, but
it’s not blind faith,” said Martin. “We plan and are as
safe as we can be.”
Marie Morris, undergraduate academic dean, said that
student safety is enhanced by their living with families
during these stays overseas. “They aren’t there as
tourists. The host families really help look out for
them. I remember a student talking about their
Guatemala cross-cultural saying, ‘Yeah, my Mom
wouldn’t let me go out after seven o’clock.’ The host
families help the student learn the subtleties of the culture and look out for what’s safe and what’s not.”
Ko Uehira, 22, a junior college graduate from Sapporo,
Japan, said Americans “don’t really know about Japan. They have
an idea from comic books or something. They knew old
Denis Cela, 19, a sophomore from Lushnje, Albania, in a T-
Japan–like 200 years ago. They ask, ‘Are there still samurai?’ and
shirt and jeans and an EMU baseball cap worn backwards, said,
‘Can you use a sword?’” he said. Americans also stereotype
“They learn there’s another world out there and that we wear
Japanese as computer whizzes who all “wear glasses.”
clothes just like you.”
Linda Mugambi, 23, a senior international business major
Bu-won Choi, 19, a sophomore from Tae-jon, South Korea,
from Nairobi, said she has learned in America “that time is impor-
came to Harrisonburg five years ago when her father taught at the
tant. At home it’s not important at all.” Her father, who owns an
seminary. At Eastern Mennonite High School, she found it difficult
auto business, “doesn’t wear a watch. You can assume he’s
to make friends at first.
always late for his appointments, but it doesn’t bother anyone.”
“Mennonites are into culture and peace-making, and a lot
She also has learned “how individualistic this society is. At
were missionary kids. They think that they know other cultures
home we do everything as a community. We are raised not only by
and can accept a lot of things,” she said. “My being around helped
our parents, but the community. If I was doing something wrong,
them realize that was not true.”
continued
relief workers
on healing the
victims of terror.
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the better. “We still have some financial fragility
because we don’t have a big endowment, but we’re
doing a lot of right things and we have really good
people,” he said.
President Joseph
Lapp: Cross-cultural
studies changes
students’ lives.
Brubaker, the provost, added, “This is rooted in something deeper than EMU. It’s rooted in who we are as
Mennonites. We have many contacts in the area.
We can get a different picture of what is happening
there and how to be safe there than you can get from
the media.”
Joseph Lapp, president of Eastern Mennonite
University, and his wife Hannah led 35 students on
a Middle East cross-cultural trip in 1993. Lapp is
retiring after 16 years at the helm of EMU. He was
an attorney in private practice in Souderton,
Pennsylvania, and chair of the institution’s board when
fellow trustees prevailed upon him in 1986 to take the
presidency. It was “a low time” in the institution’s history, he recalled. “There weren’t too many people betting on its continued existence. We had lost a lot of
enrollment. We had severe financial tenuousness.” But
EMU’s fortunes and enrollment soon took a turn for
Seventy percent of EMU’s faculty and staff have lived
or studied abroad; some spent a decade or longer
overseas. Some were missionary kids, like Krista
Martin, who grew up in Nairobi and as an EMU
undergraduate returned to Africa on a cross-cultural
trip to the Ivory Coast. She felt that experience helped
bridge a gap between her and her classmates. “Our
relationship changed. They understood where I was
coming from,” said Martin. The eight weeks in
Abidjan “was eye-opening.”
More than half of EMU’s students and most faculty
members are Mennonites. A number of professors
were conscientious objectors who performed alternative service during the Vietnam War. Clymer, a
Spanish professor as well as director of the Office of
Cross-Cultural Programs, worked alongside Peace
Corps volunteers in Honduras from 1968 to 1970.
French professor Carroll D. Yoder (class of 1962)
taught English and history in the Congo from 1963 to
1965. Patricia Hostetter Martin, codirector of the
Summer Peacebuilding Institute, spent a decade running service projects for the Mennonite Central
Committee, including five years in Vietnam during
the war and three in Cambodia.
my auntie has the right to spank me.” When she needed help with
Cela, who translated sermons for several years for
tuition, the community pitched in to pay her bills, and she expects
Mennonite missionaries in Albania, said, “Back home, in my
to do the same for others.
neighborhood, people are outside from six in the morning to 12 at
“It’s a Harambee philosophy: you pull together your
resources for a common good,” she said.
Mugambi views American individualism as “both good and
bad. I don’t like the way children will put their parents in retirement homes and leave them lonely there. I would rather stay with
my parents until they go to the next world.”
Another Kenyan, Nelson Okanya, 30, a divinity student at EMU’s
seminary, said, “In my culture, people think community, people
think group. You cannot be an individual. You’re considered an
outcast, unfriendly, so you get leveled. This culture has something
that we can learn: You can be an individual and still remain connected to the entire family. There is something freeing about that.”
night. We know everybody.
“Here, you don’t even know how many kids your neighbor
has. Even if you’ve had a neighbor for 50 years, you might know
their last name, but that’s all,” Cela said.
What would these students tell friends if they asked about
studying in the United States? Ameka, an aspiring animator, said “I
would tell them they should come over as soon as possible. They’d
have fun here. They’d have a field day,” he said. ■
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Yoder said faculty are eager to give today’s students “a
taste of what we experienced.” Orval J. Gingerich, a
former director of EMU’s cross-cultural programs,
taught in Nigeria as a conscientious objector after
graduating from the University of Iowa in 1968. “I
was a farm boy. I thought everybody grew corn from
one row to the next. It created a relationship to the
rest of the world for me that continues to this day,”
said Gingerich, now associate dean for international
programs at Augsburg College in Minneapolis.
Gingerich later was honored along with emeriti professors Calvin Shenk and Albert Keim as pathsetters for
the cross-cultural study tradition. Shenk, a professor of
missions, led several trips to the Middle East. History
professor Keim led the first semester-long study/travel
seminar to Europe in 1972 and pushed for the global
village curriculum. The introduction of those curricular changes was assisted by a Title III grant for institutional development from the U.S. Department of
Education.
Gingerich was the featured speaker during a special
Friday chapel service in mid-October on the eve of
homecoming weekend and a celebration of the 30th
anniversary of the first cross-cultural trip. Chapel is
held three times a week inside Lehman Auditorium.
On stage a flowing banner trumpeted the university’s
mission statement (“EMU educates students to live in
a global context....and walk boldly in the way of nonviolence and peace”); the hall was festooned with pennants from the dozens of countries where EMU students have studied. Attendance at chapel is voluntary,
but most of the university community turned out,
many wearing costumes from the lands they had visited
—including President Lapp in a colorful kaffiyeh, the
banded headdress that Arab men wear. The service
began with students dancing down the aisles to the
stage, singing an African gospel hymn, “We are
Walking in the Light of God,” in various languages.
In an interview, Gingerich recalled that some faculty
back then worried that the study abroad program
would be too expensive, while others voiced concerns
that “even in a semester the students would really just
be tourists, that it would not be a true immersion.”
The first issue remains an ongoing challenge, but the
second has been put to rest.
“The global village implies that we are citizens of both
our local community and the global community. We
cannot escape the fact that the local and global are
bound together in a tight web of interdependence,”
Gingerich said. He read an excerpt from a student
report about her stay with a host family in Ghana:
When I said good-bye to Elizabeth and Kofi they
handed me 10,000 cedis [the equivalent of two days’
wages]. They said it was because they couldn’t
slaughter a chicken in my honor because I am a vegetarian. I wanted to cry, ‘Maame and Papa, do you
know what you have given me already? You gave me
a place to stay, my own room even. You fed me three
times a day, more than you yourselves ate.’
Lapp believes no other way of learning “creates more
of an impact. Some people think that experiential
learning doesn’t have a profound impact, that it’s all
fluff. People here would argue vehemently in opposition to that. They’ve seen how it changes lives.
Students come back and decide, ‘I want to go into
medicine because I want to deal with these diseases’ or
‘I’m going to study a language because I realize now
how important language is to working overseas.’”
After chapel, students and faculty repaired to a lounge
for a coffee hour and listened as veterans shared stories
from their cross-cultural studies. Several students told
tales of travel mishaps and adventures: a young man
who got by without a change of clothes after losing his
backpack on a boat from Haifa to Piraeus; another
who recalled the thrill of a camel stampede during a
rainstorm in the Negev desert.
Others reached deeper into their bags of memories. A
professor recalled being warned that Bogotá,
Colombia, was “a city of pickpockets.” When a passenger slipped in the back door of a crowded bus, he
assumed some were fare jumpers as well. Then he
watched as a large coin made its way forward, passed
hand to hand—and another, smaller coin made its way
back. “All of which gave us a different impression of
Bogotá,” he said.
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dents majored in French, Carroll Yoder replied, “I
blame myself that I’m not teaching them well
enough.” Such modesty is a lifelong habit, not an
affectation. Several international students said it was
what had impressed them most about their professors.
Fulbright scholar Ameet Dhakal, 31, a journalist for
The Kathmandu Post in Nepal, said, “The humility
that I experienced here has really impacted me. It is in
the air. You can feel that. Everyone you talk to is so
humble despite how much they know and how much
they can teach you. We come from a setting where we
often think we know much and we compete to show
that. Here, you don’t. You wait to listen to another
person. That means a lot.”
In Hebron on the
West Bank,
Jennifer Miller ‘03
(wearing an
embroidered
Egyptian gown)
found her hosts
did not want
visiting students
to feel unsafe.
Jennifer Miller, 21, a senior psychology major from
Milton, Pennsylvania, remembered a visit to the headquarters of a Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) in
Hebron on the West Bank. They were on the rooftop
when what sounded like a bomb went off nearby. A
host assured them it was just a sonic boom from a
passing jet. “We heard a lot of stories like that. If there
was gunfire, they’d say, ‘Oh, someone’s getting married. We fire guns for weddings,’” she related. “People
didn’t want us to worry while we were there. They
wanted us to feel like we were the safest people there.
You could see in their eyes that they were worried, but
they didn’t want us to be worried. They want to have
peace to offer people who come visit them.” Minutes
later Israeli soldiers in jeeps drove by announcing a
daytime curfew.
“It happens a lot on the West Bank. The CPT workers
assured us we could stay and walk back to our bus
whenever we wanted, but our driver and a second man
were Palestinians, and in solidarity we decided to
leave,” said Miller, wearing a black embroidered gown
and scarf that she brought home from Cairo. Soldiers
yelled at the Americans as they sprinted back to the
bus. “It was the first time the conflict became overly
real to us,” she said.
Mennonites believe not only in conflict avoidance, but
in keeping egos in check. When asked why so few stu-
Manjrika Sewak, 24, a Fulbright scholar from New
Delhi, India, said, “I also came from a very competitive
environment in Delhi where you need to prove yourself
and to prove your work. So it is a big shift for me to be
able to actually be comfortable in such an environment, to be able to actually listen to people.” She is
convinced that will stand her in good stead when she
returns to work for a branch of the Dalai Lama’s
Foundation for Universal Responsibility in India.
Dhakal said the professors at EMU “have a broader
view of the world. They’re not American-centric.” In
the Conflict Transformation Program (CTP), he said,
“Everyone knows Nepal. Everyone understands to
some extent the cultural context and even the political
context of South Asia. That says a lot about how they
see the outside world.”
Even the campus radio station, WEMC-FM, the first
public radio station in Virginia, takes a broader view
than most of the world. The 1,000 or so listeners in
this town of 40,000—also home to 15,000-student
James Madison University, a public university—are
treated to four-and-a-half hours of BBC world news
every day. The station switched from ABC Network
News during the Gulf War a decade ago because those
newscasts struck the Mennonites as “hawkish,” said
Phil Easley, general manager of WEMC.
“Even NPR [National Public Radio] is called
‘National,’” said Easley. “The BBC has a global perspective that fits the campus’s international focus really
well. We offer the kind of journalism that doesn’t just
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divide and celebrate conflict. On this campus there’s a
recognition that 24 out of 25 people in the world are
not U.S. citizens.”
The Conflict Transformation Program began in 1994
as a week-long summer seminar. Under the hand of
John Paul Lederach, it soon blossomed into a fullfledged graduate program. The Summer Peacebuilding
Institute last year drew 177 people from 50 countries
for an intensive four weeks of instruction in topics
such as globalization and conflict, rehabilitating children affected by war, and working with survivors of
capital crimes.
In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terror
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
Church World Services, an ecumenical relief group,
gave CTP a two-year, $1 million grant to train religious leaders on helping the victims of terror. The oneweek Seminars on Trauma Awareness & Recovery
(STAR) have drawn pastors and other relief workers
from New York and Washington as well as those working with victims of violence in Afghanistan, the
Middle East, Central America, and Africa. Director
Carolyn Yoder (no relation to Carroll Yoder), an experienced mental health counselor, said, “We look at
trauma as more than a medical model. We look at the
physical, psychological, social, and spiritual aspects of
trauma, and we always emphasize conflict resolution.”
They also emphasize restorative justice, focusing on
the needs of victims of crime or terror as well as the
responsibilities of the transgressors. One participant
brought a chaplain’s helmet from the World Trade
Center. A widow brought her husband’s glasses from
the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi.
Lederach’s writings and work on conflict transformation
are widely known. EMU today shares him with Notre
Dame University, where he is a professor of international
peacebuilding at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for
International Studies. Ruth Hoover Zimmerman,
codirector of CTP, said the master’s program, which
began with two students in 1995, now has 100 alumni
around the world, including Sam Gbayee Doe, a
Liberian who is executive director of the West Africa
Network for Peacebuilding in Accra, Ghana, which
works with peace and justice groups in 14 nations.
Sam Gbayee Doe,
executive director
of the West Africa
Network for
Peacebuilding
and alumnus of
the Conflict
Pat Hostetter Martin, codirector of the Summer
Peacebuilding Institute, said the program helps those
at EMU “to think outside your own little box. We can
bring in a rabbi and imams and other people and it
pierces the little bubble we have around ourselves. It’s
a microcosm of what the global village could be.”
Another program that brings the world to EMU and
Harrisonburg is the China Educational Exchange, sponsored by the Mennonite Central Committee and three
Mennonite mission boards. The program recruits
Americans and Canadians to teach English in China for
two years. Myrrl Byler directs the program and arranges
for Chinese deans and teachers to spend a semester at
Eastern Mennonite or Goshen College, a Mennonite
institution in Indiana. Byler, who taught in China from
1987 to 1989, said in Sichuan Province, “EMU and
Goshen College are better known than most other
American universities. They get here and discover we’re
really quite a small fish in a bigger pond.”
Seven Chinese educators spent last fall at Eastern
Mennonite. They jointly taught a weekly evening class
in Chinese civilization, and offered some Chinese language instruction. Byler also arranged weekly outings
to show the visitors different sides of American life,
from factory tours to a look at Harrisonburg’s small
police department. “It’s the experience of their lifetime. It changes a lot for them,” said Byler. “We
wouldn’t be putting money into it if we didn’t feel the
impact on their lives was considerable.”
The Mennonites once dressed plainly—black coats
for the men, black dresses and prayer caps for the
women—as the Amish still do. Now, said Carroll
Transformation
Program, meets
with Ruth Hoover
Zimmerman,
codirector of the
graduate program.
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relations, led the trip to the Middle East, as they had
the previous one in 2001. Both trips took place during
some of the tensest moments of the Palestinian intifada and Israeli military response. Stutzman said that
while many students go with sympathies predisposed
to the Palestinians’ homeland cause, they often return
realizing the situation is more complex than they had
realized. Writing about the experience, Stutzman said:
Krista Martin ‘96,
assistant director,
and Donald R.
Clymer, director of
the Cross-Cultural
Program. Martin
studied in the Ivory
Coast as an undergraduate, while
Clymer, a professor
Yoder, “we look like everybody else, but there are things
they don’t understand about us—the pacifism, for one.
We’re not as blunt, and therefore harder to read.”
of Spanish, did
alternative service
work in Honduras
during the
Vietnam war.
Lapp, the retiring president, said Mennonites sometimes consider themselves to be “resident aliens” like
the early Christians —part of society but also apart
from it. “In our religious tradition, we have been very
appreciative of being citizens of the United States, but
we also recognize a need to think and work for the
betterment of the larger world,” said Lapp. Eastern
Mennonite feels tugged between its religious identity
and its academic role. “I refer to it as a tension. A
place like this needs to declare its intention to be a
Christian university,” Lapp said. “We need to be connected to our church and have respect for the church.
At the same time, the church needs to respect what we
are doing as a university. We are a resource, we are
looking at big issues, and we ought to be able to ask
those questions and allow students to talk about
them.” That can cause heartburn for some, he added.
“Our church wonders whether we are going the way of
Princeton and Harvard and Yale and losing the faith.”
Faith, freedom, conflict resolutions, cross-cultural
understanding—these are just some of the issues that
Eastern Mennonite University is facing. Lapp believes
there is a lesson for other colleges in EMU’s decision
to send its students to the Middle East last fall.
“We have to be careful that we don’t become isolationists in this country. I hope universities as a whole have
enough influence and stamina to recognize we must be
global people,” he said.
Linford Stutzman, a professor of mission and culture,
and his wife Janet, the director of alumni and parent
By staying in Palestinian homes on the West Bank for
three weeks and then with Israelis on a kibbutz, the
students were deeply, sometimes painfully, exposed to
people and perspectives on both sides of the conflict.
In general, the students change from being clearly on
one side or the other to becoming convinced of several
things: the complexity of the situation, the lack of
easy solutions, the recognition of rights and wrongs on
both sides, the awareness of intense suffering on both
sides, appreciation of moderate voices and actions on
both sides, frustration with extremists on both sides,
awareness of an immense power imbalance in the
Middle East, and finally, the conviction that violence
on both sides is evil.
Senator J. William Fulbright once said that the purpose of the scholarship program bearing his name was
to “bring a little more knowledge, a little more reason,
and a little more compassion into world affairs and
thereby to increase the chance that nations will learn at
last to live in peace and friendship.” Since its inception
in 1946, a quarter-million Fulbrighters (94,000
Americans and 156,000 from other lands) have made
journeys of discovery to other countries.
Devanand Ramiah, the Fulbrighter from Sri Lanka,
said that back home the image of the United States is
based on its foreign policy, on distorted images from
soap operas such as “The Bold and the Beautiful,” and
on anti-U.S. propaganda that people hear.
“I’m glad that I came and lived in Harrisonburg, a
small, serene village, instead of New York. You see that
there’s more to the U.S. than fast cars and a big economy. There are strong family values. There are nice people,” he said. “Leaving the intellectual side out, that
personal experience gets inculcated in you. The image
of the U.S. that you take back is very positive and
greater than what you hear back at home. Unless I
come here, I would never, ever know that.”
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U C C E S S
A Heartland Campus
That Encompasses
the Four Corners
of the Globe
INDIANA
UNIVERSITY
BLOOMINGTON
BLOOMINGTON, Indiana — It is no small source
of pride to Hoosiers that the flagship campus of
Indiana University often turns up on lists of America’s
most beautiful colleges and universities. IU
Bloomington looks like what most folks picture a
college to be: gracefully aging buildings made of limestone quarried from nearby hillsides; rolling lawns and
gardens; a student union the size of a fortress; an art
museum designed by the firm of I.M. Pei; an imposing art deco auditorium with Thomas Hart Benton
murals that hosts Broadway shows and rock concerts; a
separate opera house with fabled acoustics. Even a
brook meanders through this leafy, 1,900-acre campus,
where in mid-October the maples put on a display of
orange and red that could turn heads in Vermont.
And, of course, there is that 17,500-seat arena,
Assembly Hall, which draws even the art and opera
lovers to cheer the Indiana basketball squad.
What is most remarkable, however, is not
Bloomington’s look but its feel: this is a major research
university engaged deeply and on many fronts with
the outside world—more so, in fact, than all but a
handful of peer institutions. It may be nestled amid
the cornfields and hills of Monroe County, but faculty
and students are engaged in work that takes them far
from southern Indiana. Much of this is due to the
foresight of the legendary Herman B Wells, who was
America’s youngest college president when he became
president of Indiana University in 1938 at age 36 and
its oldest chancellor when he died in March 2000 at
the age of 97. During a quarter-century as president
(Wells became chancellor in 1962) he steered Indiana
University through a dizzying ascent in stature and
enrollment. A gregarious former banker who never forgot a face or name, he knew Indiana and its citizenry
well. But he also saw with unshakable clarity that
Indiana’s interests stretched far beyond the Ohio and
Wabash rivers. Wells recruited eminent scholars fleeing the Nazi march across Europe.
He made short work of segregation in
Indiana’s dorms and dining halls. He
famously defended zoologist Alfred C.
Kinsey’s pioneering but immensely
controversial studies of sexuality.
With his gift for aphorism, Wells
put it succinctly: “We have large
faith in the values of knowledge,
Foster International
House is home for
180 international
and U.S. students,
including Ankit Jain
‘05, Graduate
Supervisor Elizabeth
Smiltneek, Michael
G. Kraios ‘04, Juhi
Verma ‘04 and
Joe Jensen ‘05.
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little faith in ignorance.” On loan to the U.S. State
Department, the peripatetic Wells was instrumental in
establishing the Free University of Berlin. He helped
Thailand revamp its teacher education program and
served a stint as delegate to the United Nations.
Wells was fond of saying “that the campus of Indiana
University is not just in Bloomington, or even the
state of Indiana; it encompasses the four corners
of the globe.”
Now that the University has 39,000 students and a
faculty of 1,700, the Wells legacy lives on in many
ways at IU Bloomington: in its formidable array of
foreign language and area studies programs; in its
world-class School of Music; in the large contingents
of international students in Bloomington (more than
3,300); and in Indiana University students studying
abroad (nearly 1,300 from this campus alone). While
business is the top choice for the growing numbers of
international students, music, theater, and the arts are
second, and more international students are enrolled
in arts programs than in computer science (there is
no engineering school in Bloomington; prospective
engineers go instead to a joint Indiana University
Indianapolis-Purdue University program in
Indianapolis).
What is Title VI?
Upwards of 40 languages are taught regularly on the
Bloomington campus. Alphabetically, the list starts
with Arabic and Barbara and ends at Yiddish and
Zulu. The titles of some of the dozens of journals published or edited in Bloomington hint at the breadth of
faculty interests: Africa Today, Eurasian Studies
Yearbook, Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, Israel
Studies, Journal of Arabic Literature, Journal of Slavic
Linguistics, Mongolian Studies and Taoist Resources.
The area studies tradition began in 1958 with the now
venerable Russian and East European Institute, which
draws upon 100 faculty from 18 departments and
teaches 14 languages. Today the campus boasts a
dozen centers devoted to understanding the languages,
peoples, politics, and mores of distant parts of the
globe. In Bloomington and beyond, funding from the
U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI program is a
clear marker of how seriously an institution approaches international education. Currently, five of
Bloomington’s area and international studies programs
are designated by the U.S. Department of Education
as national resource centers: the African Studies
Program, the Center for Latin American and
Caribbean Studies, the Center for the Study of Global
Change, the Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource
Center, and the Russian and East European Institute.
Another Title VI center at IU is the Center for
International Business Education and Research.
Recently the government gave $1.5 million to establish
a new Center for Languages of the Central Asian
The government helps millions of students pay college bills with
■
$12 million for Fulbright scholarships;
an array of grant, local, and work-study aid. The Pell Grant pro-
■
$10 million for 30 national centers for international business
■
$24.5 million for related purposes.
gram alone accounts for a quarter of the U.S. Department of
Education’s $50 billion-plus budget. A much smaller series of fed-
education;
eral programs that fall under Title VI of the Higher Education Act
has a huge impact on what those students learn about some of the
Title VI “has been in the forefront of funding for international
world’s remotest corners.
research and teaching, and it continues to have a major influence
Title VI is the federal lifeline for international education pro-
on national thinking about strategic world areas,” said Patrick
grams. Title VI pays for the national resource centers that study the
O’Meara, Indiana University’s dean for international programs.
languages and cultures of different parts of the world. It brings
With Howard D. Mehlinger, an emeritus education professor, and
Fulbright scholars from other parts of the globe to study on U.S.
Roxana Ma Newman, assistant dean for international programs,
campuses, and sends U.S. scholars on research missions overseas.
O’Meara recently edited a 418-page anthology, Changing
Congress allocated $98.5 million for Title VI programs last
Perspectives on International Education, that chronicles Title VI’s
year, including:
■
$27 million for 118 national resource centers;
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$25 million for Foreign Language Area Study graduate fellowships, worth up to $25,000 each;
accomplishments and examines challenges of the new century.
The book is available from Indiana University Press.
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Region as part of a post-September 11 push to better
understand the languages and cultures of that neglected but strategically important world region.
Acknowledging that grant, then-President Myles
Brand expressed pride in Indiana’s role “as a leader in
international and language studies. World events of the
past year have been a powerful reminder of the need
for international scholarship.”
When Washington belatedly recognized the urgency
for more language expertise on Central Asia and its
neighbor to the south, Afghanistan, it put out a call to
William Fierman, professor of Central Eurasian
Studies at Indiana University and director of the Inner
Asian and Uralic National Resource Center. Fierman,
an Indiana alumnus with a Harvard political science
Ph.D., speaks Uzbek, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz as well as
Russian. He is an authority not only on the languages
spoken in the former Soviet republics, but the complicated politics of how those languages developed into
written form under Moscow’s rule. Fierman and his
wife—both Americans—raised their child to be
bilingual and to this day the professor speaks only
Russian with his daughter, now grown.
Indiana’s Department of Central Eurasian Studies,
with support from the Inner Asian and Uralic center,
is the leading U.S. center for teaching and scholarship
about the region. The university’s library holds
100,000 volumes on Central Eurasia, including the
largest Tibetan collection of any U.S. university.
(Bloomington, a city with 69,000 residents, is home to
one of the largest Tibetan communities in the United
States, with a Tibetan Cultural Center and Monastery,
both founded by Thubten J. Norbu, older brother of
the Dalai Lama and associate professor emeritus of
Uralic and Altaic studies.) The Lilly Library is famed
for its collection of rare books and manuscripts,
including a Guttenberg New Testament and the four
Shakespeare Folios. When former Soviet President
Mikhail Gorbachev viewed some of the Slavic holdings
during a 1997 campus visit, he asked, “Why do you
people have this? Why isn’t this in Russia?”
Like the other national resource centers, IU’s Inner
Asian and Uralic center had been receiving about a
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quarter-million dollars each year in federal support,
along with a number of Foreign Language Area Study
fellowships to dispense. Fierman, accustomed to having five to eight fellowships at his disposal, now has
13. New funds were also forthcoming for Indiana’s
Summer Workshop on Slavic and East European
Languages, where for half a century students have
learned a year’s worth of Russian, Polish, or Czech in
eight weeks. Indiana began teaching Uzbek, Kazakh,
Turkmen, and Azeri as well in the summer of 1996.
With the creation of the Center for Languages of the
Central Asian Region, Indiana will be able to offer
Pashto (one of Afghanistan’s two major languages and
the language of the Taliban) and Uyghur (spoken by
the large Muslim minority in northwestern China) for
the first time this summer. Fierman is mapping plans
to offer advanced classes in Kazakh and Uzbek in
Almaty, Kazakhstan, and Samarkand, Uzbekistan,
this summer as well.
“It’s sort of like I had oil in my backyard and didn’t
know it,” Fierman quipped. “Suddenly it’s easy to get
funding for languages spoken in countries with Muslim
populations, and now students see jobs at the end of
these programs. A few years ago you’d have to be crazy
or wealthy to study Uzbek because there were no job
prospects.” Fierman’s excitement is tempered by concern
that funding could evanesce as quickly as it appeared.
“You cannot produce these specialists overnight,” he
said. “You don’t need a great many students to take
advanced Uzbek—but as a country you have to be
willing to pay someone to develop the teaching
materials and teach these small classes. It’s expensive.”
William Fierman,
director, Inner
Asian & Uralic
National Resource
Center: “I had oil in
my back yard and
didn’t know it.”
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colleague in Romanian studies was inspired to mount
a parallel show of posters from the Ceausescu era.
“Romania wasn’t a part of the world I thought about
before coming here, but it turns out there were periods
in the 1960s when Romania and China were the only
two places that were talking to each other,” he said.
IU Office of
International
Programs Dean
Patrick O’Meara;
Charles Reafsnyder,
associate dean,
International R & D;
Roxana Ma Newman,
assistant dean,
International
Programs; Lynn
Schoch, associate
director; Christopher
Viers, director, OIS;
and Jeffery
Wasserstrom,
director, East Asian
Studies Center.
By their nature area studies programs are interdisciplinary, drawing faculty from many departments and
inspiring scholars to work with colleagues outside their
discipline. When Indiana University was wooing
Jeffrey Wasserstrom in the mid-1990s to teach modern
Chinese history, he was drawn by the strong reputation of East Asian studies. “When people told me, ‘We
also have strengths in lots of other area studies programs,’ I thought, ‘Well, that’s fine, but it doesn’t
directly affect what I do.’ But since I’ve come here, it’s
actually affected me enormously,” said Wasserstrom,
director of the East Asian Studies Center and codirector of a faculty comparative study group that looks at
Russia and East Europe before and after the fall of
communism, as well as China and North Korea. “If I
were at a university without a strong Russian-East
European institute, I would have never been brought
into these conversations,” said Wasserstrom. When he
organized an exhibition of Chinese political posters, a
TWO BIOLOGISTS’
LONG JOURNEY
BACK TO
BLOOMINGTON
If Herman B Wells personified internationalism at
Indiana University for most of the 20th century,
Patrick O’Meara is now its avatar. Dean for international programs, O’Meara is a leading scholar on the
turbulent politics of southern Africa and coeditor of
Africa, a textbook assigned in courses on scores of U.S.
campuses. The South African-born political scientist
earned his Ph.D. at Indiana in 1970 and directed the
university’s African Studies program before taking his
current post a decade ago. He directs a staff of 45 that
includes four associate and two assistant deans, with
oversight of international education programs on all
eight Indiana University branches. He is not the only
prominent O’Meara in Indiana education circles. His
mathematician brother, Timothy O’Meara, was for
many years provost at the University of Notre Dame.
To help a visitor understand what the dean called “the
metaphysics of international education” on the
Bloomington campus, O’Meara offered a quick survey
of projects that Indiana professors and administrators
are pursuing. “We’re helping to build the South East
European University in Tetovo, Macedonia. We’re also
helping start what was until last week the American
BLOOMINGTON, Indiana — Faramarz and Shidokht Hosseinie
were determined not to miss the first International Homecoming
for Indiana University alumni last fall, even though it meant a journey of more than 7,000 miles.
The biology professors at Shiraz University in Iran received
Ph.D.s one year apart — she in 1965 and he in 1966 — and returned
to Bloomington three times for postdoctoral work and a sabbatical. They also had left a son in the United States whom they had
not seen in a quarter century. The United States cut diplomatic ties
with Iran during its Islamic revolution in 1979. To secure a visa, the
Hosseinies flew twice to neighboring Dubai. “There are lots of
troubles in getting visas, but we didn’t have any because we had
the invitation from IU,” said Faramarz Hosseinie.
But the couple was in for a shock when their transatlantic
flight landed in Minneapolis. Because they had not booked the
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University of Kyrgyzstan; now it’s the American
University in Central Asia. We’re involved with
Burmese refugees for future leadership in Burma. In
South Africa we’re training those who draft legislation
for regional parliaments, and we just got funding for a
project in Namibia,” said O’Meara.
37
Marlin G. Howard,
director of the
Indiana’s Center for International Education and
Development Assistance, a unit within the Office of
International Programs, has a strong track record in
winning grants for projects overseas from the government and nonprofit agencies. For nearly a decade,
Indiana led a Midwestern consortium that sent faculty
to Malaysia to prepare students to enter U.S. colleges.
The Office of International Programs manages the La
Caixa Graduate Fellowship Program, which brings 50
Spanish students for postgraduate studies at leading
American universities each year. The awards, sponsored by Spain’s largest bank, are presented by King
Juan Carlos of Spain each spring.
The Office of International Programs estimated that
more than a quarter of Bloomington’s faculty is
engaged in international studies research and instruction. “We don’t grant degrees. We coordinate a lot of
activities, and we administer three centers directly: the
Center for the Study of Global Change, the Polish
Studies Center, and Hungarian Chair Program,”
said O’Meara.
flight to Indianapolis in advance, they were told it would cost more
than $2000—more than they paid for the international travel.
The biologists considered taking a bus to Bloomington, but
worried they would not get there on time. Finally, they gave up and
flew to Phoenix—they had tickets for that leg—to see their son.
After welcoming his parents, Ramy Hosseinie, 43, a graphic
designer, got on his computer and made one final look. He spotted
a $200 roundtrip the next morning from Phoenix to Indianapolis
through Denver.
Intensive English
Program, and
Susan E. Greer,
codirector, have
seen enrollments
Since the late 1970s the university has offered intensive English classes on campus to prepare non-English
speakers for higher education in the United States.
Enrollment in the Intensive English Program, a unit of
IU’s Center for English Language Training, peaked at
430 students with 70 instructors in the 1990s, but
now enrolls fewer than 200. Enrollments lagged when
the economies of the Asian “tigers” went bust, and
now, in the post-September 11 environment, students
in some parts of the world are finding it more difficult
to secure U.S. visas. “We face competition from
Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., and Canada. Not
only are their intensive English programs less expensive, but they don’t have as many hoops to jump
through,” said Susan Greer, the program’s codirector.
Director Marlin Howard said he heard on a recent
recruiting trip to Colombia that Colombians who
want to sign up for English classes in Australia “just
“IU is our second home,” said 67-year-old Faramarz
Hosseinie, an ecologist whose specialty is limnology, “and Jordan
Hall [home of the biology department] is our second house.”
Shidokht Hosseinie, 66, an expert on insects, said, “It was very
hard for us to come to the U.S. But we have good memories and we
lived here for six years. We encouraged our son, my sister, his brother, and his sister-in-law to come here. They all attended IU.”
More than 8,000 of Indiana’s 450,000 alumni are international,
and the university has alumni clubs in 17 countries: Canada, Egypt,
Although they had spent the past 24 hours in the air and air-
England, France, Georgia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan,
ports, the couple jumped at the opportunity. They reached
Korea, Malaysia, Nigeria, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan,
Bloomington in time to sit among the guests of honor at a pre-
Thailand, and Turkey.
None yet in Iran—but unquestionably two of the most loyal
Indiana alumni live in Shiraz. ■
homecoming dinner in the former home of Herman B Wells, now
the residence of IU Chancellor Sharon Brehm.
Why had they taken such pains to get there?
fluctuate due to
world events and
uncertainties.
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In a report for NAFSA: Association of International
Educators, Schoch and colleague Jason Baumgartner,
senior systems analyst, annually calculate how much
the 550,000 international students spend each year to
study at U.S. colleges and universities. Their estimate
for 2001—2002 was just under $12 billion. The
widely quoted figure is a conservative estimate based
on the published costs of tuition, housing, and meals,
without the multipliers often applied to purchasing
power estimates.
Indiana University
Auditorium.
mail their papers to the Australian embassy in Peru
and Chile and they mail the visa back to you. There’s
no interview.”
O’Meara, who first came to Indiana as an international student in the mid-1960s, feels strongly about the
obligation the university owes all 4,400 international
students enrolled throughout the Indiana University
eight-campus system. He speaks more in earnest than
in jest about the Office of International Services’ obligation to perform “the corporal works of mercy: to
visit the sick, to bury the dead, to visit the imprisoned,
to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked.” That office,
led by Christopher Viers, associate dean and director,
includes a raft of professionals who help international
students and scholars with visa and immigration
issues, as well as housing, healthcare, and the everyday
challenges of life in a new land. Viers’ staff prides itself
on the technological strides it has made in streamlining registration and orientation for newcomers to
Bloomington. But Dean O’Meara vowed, “We’re not
going to mechanize that office to a point where students do everything on a computer. I believe that if
you bring people thousands of miles away from home,
there’s a different need and a different kind of service
that has to be provided.”
Lynn Schoch, associate director for administration of
the Office of International Services, underscored the
importance of face-to-face contact. “A student comes
in to get a document signed for travel; that’s just busy
work. But while they’re there, they’ll say, ‘Oh, by the
way, my father died last week,’ or ‘My family’s business
is in trouble and I’m having financial problems,’” he
said. “Those ‘by the ways’ are the things we don’t
want to lose.”
Indiana decentralized authority and gave schools and
academic departments more budget autonomy a
decade ago. David Zaret, executive associate dean of
the College of Arts and Sciences, said that for a spell
“there was a trend toward setting up higher walls
between units. The different schools within the
university turned somewhat inward on themselves.
But now we’re finding interesting new ways across
those walls.” The Russian and East European Institute
has joint master’s degree programs with both the
Kelley School of Business and the School of Public
and Environmental Affairs, and both the business
school and the education school are exploring ways
to link their offerings with East Asian language and
cultural studies.
Zaret, a sociologist who has taught at IU since 1977,
said, “If you talk to area studies center directors
around the country, a common topic of concern is
that the social sciences have increasingly moved to
valuing generic models that can plug in data from any
country, and devaluing on the ground field research.”
One challenge for administrators is “to devise strategies
to encourage a department of sociology or political science to hire people with language skills and field experience in different parts of the world.” Currently several Indiana departments are collaborating on a search to
fill a new position for an East Asianist. The College of
Arts and Sciences can play an important role in brokering such deals, said Zaret, letting both the discipline-based departments and the area studies programs
know “we don’t want to inhibit either of your concerns
with excellence—but we want to be a counterweight
against a trend that would in the long run hurt international studies.”
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When Wells tapped Leo R. Dowling as Indiana
University’s first international student adviser in the
1940s, there were only 58 international students on
campus. When Dowling retired in 1972, there were
1,500. The 3,320 international students at
Bloomington today comprise 8.5 percent of total
enrollment. They hail from 123 countries, principally
South Korea (692), India (372), China (317), Taiwan
(200), Japan (194), and Indonesia (172).
On the social side, the university has converted a
Tudor-style former sorority house in the center of
campus into the Leo R. Dowling International Center,
a hub of activities for international students, scholars,
and their families. The center hosts coffee klatches and
cultural festivals, arranges outings and shopping trips,
and finds mentors and tutors for newcomers. It also
provides forums where Americans can practice
Japanese, Korean, or other languages with native
speakers. “We’re the party makers,” said Gonzalo
Isidro Bruno, the center coordinator and an assistant
director in the Office of International Services. “We
provide the cultural activities and social support.
You’re educating people in different ways.” Bruno, a
native of Mexico with two advanced degrees from
Indiana, likens the center to “a small embassy” that
smoothes the transition of international students to
Bloomington. “It happens in a matter of weeks. They
arrive, they become very attached to the center, and
then they’re on their way,” he said.
The export side of IU’s international education operation is also booming and ranks as one of the country’s
busiest. The Office of Overseas Study, directed by
Executive Associate Dean and Director Richard
Stryker, offers five-dozen programs in 30 countries and
16 languages. Last year, a record 1,276 IU
Bloomington students studied abroad for credit for a
summer, a semester, or a full year. Among the Big Ten,
only Michigan State and Illinois sent more students
overseas; nationally, Indiana ranked seventh among
research universities in the Open Doors 2002 report.
The 10-person staff holds weekly “Study Abroad 101”
classes to explain the opportunities to students, and
metes out $60,000 in need- and merit-based scholarships. The number of students going abroad has nearly
doubled in a decade, and one in six graduating seniors
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now has earned academic credits in another country.
The university also sends 20 faculty overseas each year
to direct or teach in programs it sponsors—a task less
alluring than it sounds, especially for those still climbing the tenure track. “It’s getting more and more difficult to find faculty willing to spend significant lengths
of time away from campus,” said Susan A. Carty, associate director of overseas education.
Indiana does not pressure students to study abroad,
but makes the opportunities enticing. “We try to make
it as affordable as possible,” said Judith Rice, assistant
dean for international programs. “Most staff costs are
borne by the university’s general fund, not by student
fees.” Several of the year-long overseas programs that
Indiana sponsors actually cost students less than if they
spent the same period in Bloomington.
Indiana is raising an $18 million endowment to provide grants to help all 2,400 undergraduates in its
Honor College study abroad during their academic
careers. Two hundred have received grants up to
$2,000 since the special International Experiences
Program was launched in 2000, and the goal is to send
600 honors students overseas each year. Indiana is not
quite as bullish about study abroad for other undergraduates. “We want the students who are qualified to
go abroad, who are not going on tours, who are going
to get substance at the other end. We want an experience that fits with the academic curriculum. We don’t
want the student to lose time,” said O’Meara. “This is
a very carefully articulated study abroad operation.”
Some adventuresome Hoosiers go abroad not just as
students but as student teachers under the
Department of Education’s Cultural
Immersion Program, which places students
just short of a degree in English-speaking
classrooms in Australia, Costa Rica,
England, Ireland, India, Kenya, New
Zealand, Scotland, Taiwan, or Wales. The
program, which also places student teachers on Navajo reservations in Arizona,
New Mexico, and Utah for a full semester,
began in the early 1970s. Laura L.
Stachowski did her student teaching in
Lancashire, England, in 1979 and still
Gonzalo Isidro
Bruno, coordinator
of the Leo R.
Dowling
International
Center, likens the
Tudor-style center
to “a small
embassy” for
international
students.
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Program alumna Stachowski makes the case that those
who do the Cultural Immersion practicum make better teachers. Stachowski tells those on the fence:
“You’re going as an educator and being treated as a
professional. You’ll be living with a host family. It’s
going to make a very good impression on principals
who’ll be interviewing you when you come home.”
The program in 2001 won a best practices award for
global education from the American Association of
Colleges for Teacher Education.
Laura L.
Stachowski ‘79,
director of
cultural immersion
programs for the
School of
Education, was a
student teacher
herself in England.
has vivid memories of those days, including free hours
spent barreling around country roads with her mentor
at the wheel of her Spitfire. Stachowski today is the
program’s director and its strongest advocate. Since
taking charge in 1995, she has added schools in India,
Taiwan, and Kenya to the program line-up. “I wanted
to branch out based on the English model,” she said.
Stachowski and several graduate students who assist
her worried that the events of September 11 might
discourage Indiana education majors from signing up.
Instead a record 86 went overseas last summer after
months of preparation. However, due to increased
tension between India and Pakistan, two students
originally slated to teach near Kashmir detoured to
Ireland. The students all must first complete two
months of practice teaching in Indiana. For some,
going overseas means delaying the start of their U.S.
teaching career by a year.
A WORLD
OF PROMISE
AND A WORLD
OF HATE
“These students are hard workers. It would be so easy
to do conventional student teaching in their hometown here in Indiana,” said Stachowski. “They go far
beyond what’s required for graduation and licensing.
They help fight the movie and MTV stereotypes of
what Americans are like. They’re young ambassadors.”
At an interest night last October, several dozen students turned up and stayed late into the evening to
hear about the program’s requirements, including
weekly written reports back to Bloomington on both
classroom experiences and their grasp of the country’s
politics and current events. Afterwards, several undergraduates explained why they had come.
“What sparked my interest was I went on a mission
trip to Kosovo over spring break last year. That gave
me more of a world vision,” said Janie Neal, 21, a senior from Paoli, Indiana, who aspires to student teach
BLOOMINGTON, Indiana — The worlds of Won-Joon Yoon and
Benjamin Smith collided on a Fourth of July Sunday morning here
outside the Korean United Methodist Church four summers ago.
Smith, a 21-year-old white supremacist, fired two rifle shots
that fatally struck Yoon in the back as the Korean graduate student
and friends were entering the church for Sunday services. Yoon had
just moved to Bloomington to begin doctoral studies in economics.
Smith ended his life that evening when police cornered him
in Illinois, where he had begun the racial shooting spree two
nights before, targeting Orthodox Jews, African Americans, and
Asians.
Smith was a doctor’s son from a wealthy Chicago suburb and
a graduate of New Trier High School. In college, first at the
University of Illinois and then at Indiana University Bloomington,
he distributed racist, anti-Semitic flyers.
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in Kenya or Australia. “Eventually I want to become a
principal. I know that this will give me more ideas.”
Junior Natalie Clark, 21, from Clayton, Indiana, was
certain that student teaching abroad would be “a good
learning experience and make me more marketable,”
but also had reservations about the added time and
costs. “Money’s a big factor. I’m strapped just to pay
tuition,” said Clark, who works until midnight several
nights a week in a Bloomington shop. “If I don’t do
this, I can start my life a year earlier.”
Christopher Viers,
associate dean
and director,
Office of
International
Services, with
downtown
Chemagne Doyen, 20, a junior English major from
Basking Ridge, New Jersey, said, “I came to Indiana
just so I could get away from New Jersey, to experience
something different.” A mentor back home who
taught in Germany and other teachers have told
Doyen “their experiences were beyond words and
explanation. Just to get a little piece of that makes it
worthwhile.”
Dean of Education Gerardo González, who came to
Bloomington from the University of Florida three
years ago, said the strength of IU’s international education traditions and culture is striking. “It is part of the
Herman B. Wells legacy,” said González, who emigrated from Cuba at age 12 with his parents and sister.
“There is a commitment to internationalization and a
tradition of valuing relationships across the world.”
His professors are involved in 11 international projects. Education majors face a longer list of required
His pamphleteering created stirs on both campuses. In
Bloomington in
the background.
courses than most undergraduates. “Education is a
highly regulated course of study. They have very few
elective courses,” said Margaret Sutton, a professor of
education leadership. To add a global dimension,
Sutton and her colleagues take pains to add international content and examples to the topics required for
state licensure and accreditation. In teaching about the
role of private K-12 education, for example, “there are
fascinating examples of privatization to talk about in
Chile, England, and the post-communist world, as a
contrast to what’s going on in the U.S.,” Sutton said.
everyone he met.”
Indiana, hundreds turned out for a march against hate in the fall of
U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno told twenty-five hundred
1998. Smith, by then a follower of Matthew Hale and his white
mourners at Yoon’s memorial, “We cannot let our grief overwhelm
supremacist World Church of the Creator, stood on a corner with a
our resolve to heal the bigotry.”
sign that read, “No Hate Speech Means No Free Speech.’’
The university admissions office now requires applicants to
Won-Joon Yoon was among 24 newly admitted doctoral stu-
disclose felony convictions, a disclosure that might have kept
dents in economics. Two months before he had completed a bach-
Smith out. The university bestows a $2,500 Won-Joon Yoon
elor’s degree in aviation management at Southern Illinois
Scholarship each year to a student who exemplifies racial and
University, where he was also active in the church and taught
religious tolerance and understanding.
Korean to children of local families from his homeland.
The Yoon family later joined gun control advocates in suing
After the slaying, his parents and sisters flew from Seoul to
the manufacturer of Smith’s gun, Bryco Arms Corporation, for neg-
Indiana, where his father, Shin Ho Yoon, said the family forgave
ligence. That lawsuit is moving slowly through the Illinois courts.
their only son’s “insane, full of racial hatred” killer. “With his
And Won-Joon Yoon’s father said that if he had another son, he
death, gone are the dreams, hopes, and happiness my family has
would send him to Indiana University Bloomington. ■
had with my son, Won Joon. He was kind, generous, and caring to
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I N T E R N AT I O N A L I Z I N G T H E C A M P U S 2 0 0 3
language master’s of business administration program
in Zadar on the Adriatic coast. “It’s wonderful for
Croatia and wonderful for our faculty. It’s a mindbroadening experience,” said Jaffee, who landed in
Bloomington after getting a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins
University in 1971. He has witnessed the campus and
the town become far more hospitable for international
students over the years and now sees growing interest
among both students and faculty in study and work
overseas. He cites an example: two middle-aged colleagues on the Kelley School of Business faculty, both
longtime professors of accounting, had never owned
passports. Now, in the past year, “they’ve been to the
Ukraine twice.”
Falls colors on
the Bloomington
campus.
Indiana’s internationalism can be measured in other
ways. Its graduate students won 20 Fulbright grants
and eight Fulbright-Hays grants to pursue studies
abroad in 2001-2002, an all-time high. Charles A. S.
Bankart, a Peace Corps alumnus who taught English
in Hungary and Japan and studied in Egypt and who
now advises IU students on the scholarships available
for international studies, said his experiences overseas
“were life-changing. You’re learning not only about
other cultures and languages, but about yourself. I
gained a lot of self-confidence and learned what it
means to be an American.”
Last December, Kathleen Tran, an IU senior majoring
in music, biochemistry, and biology, was named a
Rhodes scholar. She became the thirteenth Indiana
student and second woman to receive the honor. The
daughter of an IU math professor and systems analyst,
Tran is one of the school’s Wells scholars—one of
some two-dozen top students awarded full-ride scholarships to IU each year.
Bruce L. Jaffee, a professor of business economics and
public policy and associate dean of academics for the
Kelley School of Business, has taught in China,
Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, and currently directs a U.S. State Department-funded project
to help Croatia’s four universities launch an English
Last spring the Kelley School of Business hosted an
international conference on whistle-blowing, organized
by business law professor Terry Morehead Dworkin,
who also directs its Title VI-funded Center for
International Business Education and Research. When
Dworkin joined the business faculty two decades ago,
“there was virtually nothing [international]. A couple of
professors taught international law,” she said. But now
“students realize that in their work life they are probably going to be involved in international business.”
Another aspect of Bloomington’s cosmopolitanism is
visible in Foster International House, a residence hall
for 180 American and international students with a
special emphasis on international affairs. A third of the
occupants are from overseas, including many from
India. In the cafeteria there are tables where conversations are in languages other than English. Some
American students choose the dorm because it is near
the business school and fraternity row. “It was just
chance that I ended up here, but I found I really liked
the diversity,” said Joe Jansen, 19, a sophomore business major from Indianapolis.
A $100-per-student activity fee allows Foster
International House to organize a myriad of activities
and even publish a yearbook. A frank program on race
last year opened eyes on Jansen’s floor. “Guys said
afterwards they didn’t realize the prejudices they had,”
he said. “Living here really changed them. They think
about the world differently now. This Foster
International program has been changing minds like
that for 20 years. That says a lot about a university.”
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Michael G. Kraios, 19, a junior from Speedway,
Indiana, signed up for Foster hoping to room with
students who spoke Spanish. That arrangement did
not work out, but Kraios became one of Foster’s leaders and most active participants, whether in postSeptember 11 debates or competitions to determine
who could tolerate the most red-hot peppers.
Another Foster enthusiast, Juhi Verma, moved to
Bloomington in high school when her father, a former
superintendent of police in the Indian province of
Bihar, joined the IU criminal justice faculty. The 20year-old junior, who was born in Kampur, India, and
spent her childhood in Vancouver, British Columbia,
feels that IU is getting more international, “but it’s not
there yet. More education is needed for faculty and
students. You can’t be open to something that you
don’t know about.”
For those with longer memories, especially those who
experienced the Wells era and whose lives and work
are enriched by his legacy, the changes at Indiana
University already seem substantial and deep. Indiana,
like most states, has fallen on difficult economic times
since the stock market tumbled. The Indiana
University system has had to absorb more than $100
million in cuts in its $2 billion-plus budget over the
past two years. Tuition rose 9 percent last fall on the
Bloomington campus. The state provides one-fifth of
Bloomington’s $1 billion annual budget. Not all the
financial news, however, is gloomy. Indiana raised
$302 million in private support in fiscal year 2001,
more than any other public university, due in large
measure to a $105 million Lilly Endowment gift to
open a genomics institute.
No thought is being given to scaling back Indiana’s
international activities and commitments. Charles
Reafsnyder, associate dean for international research
and development, said that there have been ebbs and
flows in IU’s pursuit of external grants and overseas
projects, but “we’re beginning to be more active
again.” Some of that was due to the retirement of professors who had planted the Indiana flag in other
lands. Reafsnyder, also a Peace Corps alumnus and an
anthropologist who worked in Micronesia for three
years, has developed and managed more than a dozen
major international projects under grants from the
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Brian Winchester,
director of the
Center for the
Study of Global
Change, finds
demand strong
for international
Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S.
Department of State, the Agency for International
Development, host country governments, and foundations. These projects make internationalists of academics who previously may have paid little attention to
developments outside U.S. borders. “It’s very rare for
someone who goes over on one of these institutional
development projects to not want to go back again,”
said Reafsnyder.
Starting this fall Indiana students will be able to major
in international studies for the first time. They must
take either three years of a foreign language, or two
years of one language and two semesters of a second.
David Zaret said the College of Arts and Sciences
anticipates strong demand for the new major, including from undergraduates in career programs who will
make it part of a double major. “If experience at other
campuses is any guide, there will be a lot of student
interest and we’ll need to hire more faculty,” said Zaret.
That could give a lift to arts and sciences enrollments,
which have sagged here as at most U.S. campuses. A
decade ago a third of Indiana students majored in arts
and sciences; today the figure is one in five.
Students already have evinced strong interest in the
international studies minor that the Center for the
Study of Global Change helped establish in 1999. The
minor did not impose additional language requirements beyond the four semesters the College of Arts
and Sciences requires for all students. But center director Brian Winchester said many students wind up with
three or more years of language, “not because we
imposed it on them, but because the minor attracts
students for whom it’s a foregone conclusion that they
studies courses.
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The big question is “where we go from here? We face
major issues with technology,” said O’Meara. Indiana,
like 200 other U.S. universities, is engaged in the public-private push to develop a new, faster version of the
Internet. “What’s the nature of research in the
Internet2 world? How do you link with your colleagues?” asked O’Meara, who is no stranger to adapting technology to academic work. Twenty years ago, a
film on village life in Senegal that he produced was a
finalist at the New York Film Festival. More recently,
Brian Winchester and others published an interactive
CD-ROM companion to O’Meara’s Africa textbook.
A student walks
toward the
Indiana Memorial
Union, a landmark
at the heart
of campus.
need to speak the language to really be immersed in
another culture.” The initial cohort of international
studies minors was 17. Four years later, there are 130.
Observed Dean O’Meara: “We have a commitment
on many levels to internationalism. Why are we in
this business? We don’t make a lot of profit out of it.
We do it because of the intellectual opportunities
and the academic connections it offers our faculty
and students.”
“What can we do with technology now that’s different? How are you going to use it?” asked O’Meara. “Is
it the dramatic moment when we have a choir in
Stockholm being conducted by someone in
Bloomington, or is it something more? That is a major
issue for us.”
The next chapter of the international education story
at Indiana University is still unfolding. But if the past
is prologue, Bloomington will remain a campus
renowned not only for its beauty but also for its
curiosity about and connections to the world.
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A Pacific Rim
Campus Finds
the World at Its
Front Door
SAN DIEGO
STATE
UNIVERSITY
SAN DIEGO, California — As if 20 miles weren’t
close enough, San Diego State University will soon be
even closer to the border with Mexico, at least in travel
time. Last fall miners finished burrowing a 1,400-foot
tunnel wider than the Chunnel through this 283-acre
campus on the Montezuma Mesa off Interstate 8. In
two years the cheerful, red San Diego Trolley will be
picking up and dropping off 4,300 students, faculty,
and staff every day, ferrying some from the light rail
line’s terminus in San Ysidro, a few hundred yards
from Tijuana. The $431 million Mission Valley East
extension will complete the trolley’s 50-mile loop
around San Diego and perhaps alleviate the university’s
chronic parking problems. After enduring five years of
“life in a construction pit,” as Provost Nancy A.
Marlin put it, the campus community can hardly wait.
It is tempting to say that the reason San Diego State
has emerged as a leader in international education is
the same as the answer to the old saw about what gives
real estate its value: location, location, and location.
It does not hurt to be in the middle of one of the
most dramatic, diverse, and desirable cities in the
United States, 12 miles from Pacific beaches and a
short drive from the world’s busiest border crossing.
“We’re urban, we’re diverse, we’re high tech, we’re
Pacific Rim, and we’re Latin American. I submit those
are the ingredients of the 21st century, and they are
here. You couldn’t have a better sandbox to play in as
a university,” said President Stephen L. Weber.
However, location is far from the whole story at San
Diego State. When Weber became president in 1996,
his first step was to launch a community-wide “Shared
Vision” strategic planning process to redefine this large
public institution’s mission. One of the top goals that
emerged was establishing San Diego State as “a genuinely global university.” In 1998 the position of assistant vice president for international programs was created with a new, $275,000-a-year budget for faculty
travel and initiatives overseas. In short order, the number of San Diego State students who study abroad
climbed from 200 to 740. The number of international students, long stuck around 500, climbed past
1,400. San Diego State recently opened an international house, housing U.S. and international undergraduates together in the tradition that John D.
Rockefeller started at Columbia, Berkeley, and
San Diego State
international
students and
advisers.
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SDSU’s
James Gerber,
Chicago back in the 1920s. Only five universities
have received more grants from the Fund for the
Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) than
San Diego State; most of its seven grants were for innovative international efforts, including a celebrated dualdegree program with Mexican universities and a new
triple-degree program with both Mexico and Canada.
director, Center
for Latin American
Studies.
President
Stephen L. Weber
says universities
Almost everyone at San Diego State—an institution
with 34,000 students, 1,900 faculty, and a staff of
1,500—remarks on the personal force and leadership
that Weber, a philosopher by training, and Marlin, a
psychologist, have put behind the internationalization
efforts. The provost, with a formidable command of
Spanish and a relentless drive to encourage students and
faculty alike to think globally, has made it her signature.
The president, however, says that what they really are
doing is responding to demands, not creating them.
“This is not about San Diego, and it’s not about
leadership. In fact, it’s almost the opposite: it’s running
as fast as you can to keep up with your school and
your students,” said Weber. “This is about the
appetites and needs of students of the 21st century.
Internationalization may be more evident at a place
like San Diego than in the heartland of the country—
but it’s on the way.”
must ‘run fast’ just
to keep up with
student demand
for international
Marlin said, “I profoundly believe there is nothing
more powerful we can do educationally for our students than get them abroad. No matter how wonderful
the quality of the educational experience here,
there is just no substitute.” When San Diego
State’s Institute on
World Affairs—a
forum where international visitors
talk about world
events—celebrated its 60th
anniversary
last spring, the institute’s leaders framed Marlin’s words
as the centerpiece of a display in the library.
At some campuses, the principal challenge of internationalization is figuring out how to engage the faculty
to bring the world more fully into their courses. That
was not the case at San Diego State. The border has
always been “an unending source of academic interest
here,” said economics professor James B. Gerber, an
authority on the economy of the San Diego-Tijuana
region. San Diego State’s international business major,
created in 1989 and now enrolling upwards of 700
students, is the largest undergraduate program in the
country. Students vie for acceptance and normally take
five years to complete the degree. They must spend a
semester either studying or doing an internship outside the United States. Weber said the international
business major attracts “wonderful, adventurous students.” The campus is also home to a federally funded
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SE HABLA
ESPANOL?
SAN DIEGO, California — To Nancy A. Marlin’s self-critical ear,
describing her Spanish as fluent is “an overstatement.”
But to San Diego State University colleagues, the provost’s
elegant command of the language is widely noted and admired.
“She’s been a great, great asset to our university because of that,”
President Stephen L. Weber said.
Marlin learned most of her Spanish in mid-life, long after
completing her Ph.D. in psychology and while working as provost
of the University of Northern Iowa. Marlin picks up the story this
way: “I took Spanish in high school, then French in college, which
left me unable to speak either. Much later, despite my Ph.D. and
work as a faculty member and subsequently academic administrator, I felt I was not well educated because I could not function in
another language.”
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Center for International Business Education and
Research (CIBER). When it began in 1989 in conjunction with UCLA, San Diego State’s CIBER was
one of the first five; now there are 30.
Gerber, the new director of San Diego State’s Center
for Latin American Studies—which in cooperation
with the University of California, San Diego, receives
Title VI funding from the U.S. Department of
Education—said of the campus-wide push to internationalize, “The students are very excited. It’s really a
very sexy thing. The international business major is big
not because accounting is so interesting; it’s because
students see global education as the wave of the future.
They see opportunities for themselves.” The Center
for Latin American Studies recently began a summer
program in Oaxaca, Mexico, at the Universidad
Autónoma Benito Juarez Oaxaca offering instruction
in the Indian Mixtec language—a tongue that is the
sole language spoken by some of the migrants now
working in southern California.
out of their own strong, personal commitment, without institutional infrastructure and support.”
For Marlin, the challenge was not to convince San
Diego State faculty of the need to internationalize, but
to highlight the extensive work already going on and
to help them connect with one another and outside
partners. “The real strength we have in so many areas,
particularly border issues, wasn’t something that was
created by any plan. This was already in existence,” she
said. “Faculty members were doing incredible work
Paul Ganster, director of San Diego State’s Institute for
Regional Studies of the Californias, is an authority not
just on California’s neighbor to the south, but on
border regions around the world, from South Africa
and Ecuador to Central and East Europe. “Border
regions tend to share similar problems,” said Ganster,
who is also associate director of the Office of
International Programs.
Despite the demands of her job, Marlin worked her way
through the university’s Spanish courses.
Provost Nancy
Marlin has led a
successful push to
boost the number
of San Diego State
students who
study abroad.
President Weber’s Spanish is more rudimentary. “I can write
speeches in English and then deliver them in Spanish. If it’s a sim-
“I began taking the sequence of courses in the Spanish
ple speech, I can do the translation myself, but I can’t do it on my
major. At first faculty appeared apprehensive about the provost
feet,” Weber said. “My Spanish is really good in the car—but I
sitting in on their class—it seemed like some weird type of teach-
sing well in the shower, too. I joke with Spanish-language audi-
ing evaluation—but when I couldn’t use the subjunctive any better
ences sometimes that if I have a steering wheel in my hand, it’s
than the others, I quickly became one of the students.”
perfect.”
The Spanish was a definite plus in landing the San Diego
State job in 1998.
“The need for Spanish is real. The fact that I have not
mastered it is my shortcoming,” said Weber.
She still sits in on an occasional Spanish class “when
“It had been possible in the 20th century for folks like me to
possible” at San Diego State. “I can now ‘function’ in Spanish-
pursue a fruitful life and career without linquistic abilities. That’s
speaking countries, and am able to give formal academic presen-
not so in the 21st century.” ■
tations (with lots of prior preparation),” Marlin said.
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and passion for international education. He became
Marlin’s emissary to the deans of San Diego State’s
eight academic colleges to nudge more students to
get their passports and get packing.
A Ford Foundation
teaching fellowship in
Chile helped turn
physicist Al Sweedler
into a passionate
advocate for study
abroad. He now
serves as assistant
vice president
for international
programs.
Internationalization is on the radar screen of every
university these days. To write San Diego State’s
global vision larger, Marlin knew that she needed
“zealots.” Laughing at her choice of words, the provost
explained, “You need people really willing to work
because inevitably these programs are fraught with
problems. You need people who are going to work
with the students, who have the personal contacts,
who’ve been there and know who to call” to untangle
the snags.
A band of zealots already was at work in the
International Student Center, a mission-style building
that houses the offices of Ron Moffatt and his widely
traveled staff. Moffatt, who once taught school in
Kenya, has been San Diego State’s director of international student services since 1984. The center—now
being enlarged—was already a home away from home
for the growing contingent of international students at
San Diego State, welcoming them to campus, helping
with visas and legal issues, finding tutors, and in turn
dispatching them as ambassadors to local public schools.
Marlin found another zealot in physics professor Al
Sweedler, her choice to be assistant vice president for
international programs. Sweedler spent two years
teaching in Chile in the early 1970s as a Ford
Foundation fellow—and returned right after the 1973
military coup that toppled Salvador Allende to give a
public lecture at the request of Chilean colleagues who
thought that if he mentioned by name two students
then being held with Allende supporters in a soccer
stadium, it might help win their release. Sweedler
did—and they were. Sweedler never lost his interest
“Maybe ‘disarray’ is too extreme a word, but there was
no organized place for students to go if they wanted to
study abroad,” said Marlin. That became the responsibility of the International Student Center, which saw
both its staff and budget doubled as San Diego State
moved quickly to attract more international students
and to send more undergraduates to study in other
lands. Both numbers soon grew threefold or more.
Twelve percent of San Diego State students now spend
a summer, a semester, or a year studying outside the
United States. Some 639 undergraduates studied
abroad in 2000–2001 and 731 the following year.
Robert Carolin, the assistant director for education
abroad, expected this year’s figures to top that number.
Sweedler wants to boost the participation rate to 30
percent in five years. A few majors—principally international business, as well as international security and
conflict resolution, which has 100 students—already
mandate study abroad. “This is not a luxury or an addon,” said the physicist. “We see it as an integral part of
the university’s existence, that students spend time in
another country as part of their regular education.
We’re trying to make it a part of what it means to be
an educated person and get a degree from SDSU.”
More undergraduates may find this a requirement in the
future. “I don’t think we can any longer just say this is
an interesting option. We have many options. You can
do community service learning or research in a lab or
many things that are very valuable. But that’s why we
have all these boring curricular committee meetings to
argue about what is most essential in the curriculum for
this degree. I’m very much advocating that we make this
a degree requirement,” said Marlin. How, she asked, can
someone major in a foreign language or area studies “if
you’ve never been to that area or been where there are
native speakers of that language?”
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That battle is not yet won. Even some committed
internationalists on the San Diego State faculty are
worried about imposing a study abroad requirement
across the board on students who may be juggling
work, school, and family. The average undergraduate is
almost 23 years old and takes 12.8 credits a semester.
Many students transfer in after completing two years
at Southwestern College or another community college. San Diego State is part of the 23-campus
California State University system, which concentrates
on undergraduate and master’s level education. It is
the only one of those 23 campuses in the Carnegie
Foundation’s “doctoral/research university-intensive”
category. Forty-two of the record 9,165 degrees that
San Diego State awarded in May 2002 were Ph.D.s.
All Ph.D.s in California’s public universities are granted through the University of California (UC) system.
San Diego State must partner with other institutions
to award its doctorates. It now has 13 joint doctoral
degree programs and 59 of its own master’s programs.
San Diego State is outgrowing its label in other ways,
too. Its faculty pulled in $140 million in research and
educational grants and contracts in 2001–2002, more
than three of the nine UC campuses. The university
received 40,000 applications for the 7,100 spaces in
this year’s freshman class. Weber chafes at some of the
restrictions his university operates under. The master
plan “tried to make educational decisions based on the
label that you wear. What we call that normally is prejudice.” However, Weber added, “Switching labels
wouldn’t change the issues. We’re the institution that
makes sense, that blooms where it’s planted.”
One advantage that proximity to the border affords is
that students can experience another culture without
venturing far from home. Most freshmen are 18-yearolds straight from high school who typically “don’t
come with kids and jobs,” said Marlin. “For those who
are truly place-bound, we can work on programs that
involve doing things in Mexico. They can drive. They
can take the trolley. They can live in San Diego and
still have an international experience.”
When Marlin arrived here in 1998 from the
University of Northern Iowa, she discovered what she
called a paradox about the region: the closeness of the
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Ron Moffatt,
director of
international
student services
since 1984, with a
bust of Ghandi
over his shoulder
and pictures he
shot in East Africa
and South Asia in
the 1970s.
border actually made it harder to sell study abroad to
some students. “They’d tell me, ‘Well, I don’t need to
go abroad. San Diego is a very international community. I go down to Tijuana.’” It was an easier sell in
Cedar Falls, Iowa, or Columbia, Missouri, her previous academic stops. “Everybody in the Midwest realized there was a big world out there and they’d better
understand it if they were going to live and work in
it,” she said. “I didn’t have to sell the idea as much as I
did here initially.”
Five years into this crusade, Marlin believes that San
Diego State is approaching “the tipping point. Study
abroad is no longer viewed as an exotic thing to do.
The students say that themselves and hear it from
their friends. To a person what you hear is, ‘Not only
was this the best thing for me educationally, it’s the
best thing in my life to date.’”
San Diego State relies primarily on faculty to build the
bridges to institutions overseas. The Office of
International Programs seeds these efforts with faculty
travel grants. In the first four years, 278 faculty shared
more than $1.1 million. “In other words, we were
going from the tradition that the president goes and
has a nice signing ceremony and not much ever happens, to programs that are initiated at the faculty level
where there would be real follow-up,” said Marlin.
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International
Student Center’s
Jane Kalionzes,
Dawn Renze
Wood, Ron
Moffatt, Emily
Maxon and Robert
Carolin.
Sometimes a little goes a long way. Political scientist
Brian Loveman has attracted support from major foundations for his work on human rights and military rule
in Latin America. “It’s amazing how little money it
takes to make a difference. A program that we started
four years ago with $15,000 on the history of political
reconciliation in Chile now receives $1 million in
grants,” said Loveman, who holds the Fred J. Hansen
Institute for World Peace Endowed Chair. He has
cajoled numerous colleagues to work with him in
Chile, from the public health department to political
science to the International Security and Conflict
Resolution program. He instigated an essay contest in
which three Chilean schoolteachers won trips to San
Diego for developing classroom materials on human
rights; three San Diego high school teachers will head
the other way this summer. On a larger scale, San
Diego State’s Title VI-funded Language Acquisition
Research Center (LARC)—one of just 14 national language resource centers—has posted on its Web site
extensive materials about human rights, including
video interviews with Argentine survivors of that country’s “dirty war.” “We asked LARC, ‘Can you combine
language acquisition with content that we’re interested
in?’” said Loveman. “They’re using authentic materials
to teach higher level language skills, and students are
learning about human rights at the same time.”
“You can’t turn nothing into something. It’s not possible if you don’t have faculty interest,” said Loveman.
But attention from the top “has made a huge difference. The administration is making all this stuff possible, and encouraging more of it.”
San Diego State has other resources that embellish its
international reputation. Its College of Extended
Studies operates one of the largest, university-based
English as a second language programs, drawing 2,000
students a year from 70 countries. It provides distance
learning for more than 40,000 adults worldwide,
including teachers in the Department of Defense and
international schools overseas. William Byxbee, who
became dean of extended studies in 2001, said, “What
I see at San Diego State is a commitment across the
board. It’s not just coming from the president or the
provost’s office. Every dean is committed to having
some portion of their programming offered overseas
and to increasing the number of people from overseas
coming here. We’re opening ourselves up to the outside world.”
San Diego State also helps local teachers open their
classrooms to the world. The International Studies
Education Project of San Diego (ISTEP), another
joint effort with UC San Diego, holds workshops and
furnishes curriculum guides to 43 school districts
across San Diego County. It ran the human rights curriculum contest for teachers from San Diego and their
counterparts in Chile. Director Elsie Begler said,
“Teachers will come to us and say, ‘Oh, my gosh. We
just got a bunch of kids from Eritrea and we don’t
even know where Eritrea is on the map much less
what they speak.’” ISTEP tries to furnish not only
materials but also give teachers ideas about what to ask
to understand a new student’s culture. “You never
know who’s going to show up in your classroom,”
Begler said.
The International Student Center began sending international students as “intercultural ambassadors” to
public schools in 1986. While students on nonimmigrant visas generally cannot work off-campus for pay
in the United States, the program also places a dozen
or more international students as interns each year at
nonprofit groups, including the United Nations
Association, the International Visitors Council, and
the World Trade Association. Instead of a paycheck,
they get a scholarship in the form of a one-course
tuition waiver. “They love it,” said Emily M. Maxon,
program coordinator for the International Student
Center and a walking advertisement for study abroad.
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She went to Kazakhstan and Costa Rica as an
exchange student in high school, taught English in
Japan after getting a summa cum laude B.A. in
Russian studies at UC San Diego in 1995, and, as a
Yale graduate student, did internships at the U.S.
embassy in Moscow and in Buenos Aires. “We really
try to cultivate a spirit of volunteerism here, too, to get
the international students to realize they should give
back—not only to help the new people along, but also
to help with the Peace Village and be part of the internationalization of the campus.” The week-long Peace
Village is San Diego State’s version of an international
festival, where students share cuisine, music, dance,
and more.
Dawn Renze Wood, assistant director of the
International Student Center, who grew up on an
Iowa farm, was bit by the travel bug at the University
of Northern Iowa after spending a semester as an
exchange student at New Mexico State University.
After getting her degree, Wood studied in Denmark,
taught English in the Czech Republic, and got a master’s degree at The School for International Training in
Brattleboro, Vermont. Wood used her technical and
database skills to make San Diego State’s Web site
friendlier for international students, and to help the
university better track them. “What’s easy about it is
marketing San Diego. People want to come to San
Diego,” she said.
Robert Carolin, the assistant director for education
abroad, and colleagues made 67 classroom presentations on study abroad to freshmen and others this fall,
on top of the regular, twice-a-week information sessions at the International Student Center. Carolin, too,
can draw on personal experience to convince students
to study abroad. An international studies graduate
from American University with a master’s from The
School for International Training, Carolin also taught
in Japan and spent a year in Montevideo, Uruguay, on
a U.S. State Department internship. During college he
also took a Spanish immersion course in Cuernavaca,
Mexico, and still remembers his astonishment at the
airport saying goodbye to his host family “when my
Mexican mom confessed—in perfect English—that
she’d lived in Chicago for 12 years and been a deejay
on the radio there. She used to chase me around the
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Teresa CisnerosDonahue, a native
of Mexico City, is
an honors graduate
of San Diego State’s
International
Business program
house with a piggy bank making me put in a coin any
time I said a word in English.” Carolin said, “My two
big selling points for study abroad are: One, it’s the
economy, stupid. They’re going to be more marketable
with an international experience. And two, it’s often
less expensive to study abroad than if they stay here
on campus.”
For most, the only sticking points are the cost and
whether they can fit it into already crowded schedules.
Doing internships, as most international business
majors do, makes study abroad even more attractive.
“We’re very aggressive about international internships,”
said Sweedler. “Quite a few programs—nursing,
education, business, public administration—require
students to do a practicum. Well, students can do that
in another country. They can work at a hospital in
Mexico, or in an engineering company in Switzerland,
at a school in Argentina, or at a maquiladora just over
the border. Students are finding that those with experience outside the United States are getting better jobs.”
The international program that has stirred the most
excitement and drawn the most national attention at
San Diego State is the bilingual, dual-degree program
with Mexican universities known as MexUS. Michael
Hergert, who cofounded the international business
program, has said MexUS’s aim was to produce “truly
international managers.” It was launched in 1993 with
the help of a FIPSE grant and the cooperation of four
institutions in two countries within a 15-mile radius:
San Diego State, Southwestern College, the Centro de
Enseñanza Técnica y Superior and the Universidad
Autónoma de Baja California. Students signed up to
spend two years on the U.S. campuses and two at the
who now directs
its celebrated
International
Business Exchanges
and Multiple
Degree Programs.
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Steven Loughrin-Sacco,
chair of SDSU
International Business
program; Beatriz
Schultz, associate
director, study abroad
programs, SDSU
International Business
program; Catherine-Ann
Blackburn, professor
from the Université du
Québec à Chicoutimi;
Rector Michel Belley,
Université du Québec à
Chicoutimi, Stephen
Weber, president, San
Diego State University;
Teresa CisnerosDonahue, director of
study abroad programs,
SDSU International
Business program;
former rector Victor
Everardo Bertran of the
Universidad Autûnoma
de Baja California; and
Marianna Berrelleza,
coordinator at
Universidad
Autûnoma de Baja
Mexican universities. Seventy students—mostly
Hispanics who already spoke Spanish—now have
received dual bachelor degrees, and the program has
been hailed by leaders of the United States and Mexico
as a model of bilateral cooperation. In October 2002,
Weber and deans from the Universidad Autónoma de
Baja California in Tijuana, Mexico, and the Université
du Québec à Chicoutimi in Canada signed a compact
formalizing the first transnational, triple degree called
CaMexUS for business students who achieve fluency
in English, Spanish, and French. The program requires
a year of study in Tijuana and a year in Quebec after
two years or more in San Diego. One international
business major has already completed the requirements
and several more are signed up. San Diego State has
built on the MexUS experience to develop dual-degree
business programs with universities in Brazil, Chile,
and elsewhere; more are on the drawing boards.
California
Ten years ago, MexUS “was a brand-new concept in
education. It was scary, but we did it,” said Teresa
Cisneros-Donahue, director of international business
exchanges and multiple-degree programs. CisnerosDonahue was born in Mexico City to a Cuban mother
and a Tarascan Indian father from Morelia,
Michoacán. She emigrated to California as an adult
and wound up graduating with honors from San
Diego State’s international business program.
“Education changed my life so much, that’s the reason
I am so passionate. Many of our students are first generation going to college,” she said.
Marua B. Hernandez, 24, who once picked fruit with
her family, got her dual MexUS degrees in 2002. It
took an extra year, “but it’s worth it because you are
worth double,” said the Tijuana-born Hernandez.
“The lingua franca for business may be English, but if
you’re going international, you must know the culture.” MexUS taught her “the know-how of doing
business” on both sides of the border, she said. “You
could be the best company here in the United States,
but if you don’t have excellent representation abroad,
you won’t have any business at all.”
Jessie Rich-Greer, 20, a junior from Fremont,
California, is one of the first entrants into the
CaMexUS program. He already studied in Spain for a
semester while attending Southwestern College, and
spent last summer in French immersion studies in
Chicoutimi in Quebec. Rich-Greer, who also works at
Costco, the warehouse chain that was started here by a
San Diego State alumnus, has taken four years to get
to this point of his education (including two-and-ahalf years in community college) and figures it will
take him three more—one in Mexico, one in Canada,
and a final year back here.
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How does Rich-Greer manage a job and a demanding
academic schedule? “Basically you have no life,” he
said, laughing. “I love to travel and experience new
things. This program is just perfect for that. It offers
everything that I want.” Once he gets his three bachelor degrees and follows that with a master’s, RichGreer envisions working for an international corporation and then starting his own company. “One day
I want to be head of something,” he said.
Not every student can devote as long to an undergraduate education as Rich-Greer. Weber predicted that
the CaMexUS program would grow, just as MexUS
did. MexUS “has not been a boutique program. It’s a
solid, real option,” the president said. “Given [the
North American Free Trade Agreement], given the
regionalization of the world economy, [CaMexUS] is
going to be an equally attractive credential, worth the
time it will take to get it.... It takes a different perspective. It takes a longer range, more sophisticated economic perspective to understand the opportunities
that this will open up.”
Like campuses elsewhere, San Diego State is stepping
up efforts to offer courses in commercial Spanish and
other practical uses of foreign languages. Weber
applauds this. “I’m all for it,” said the former philosophy professor. “You just have to handle the ability to
communicate in another place and another culture.
If you acquire it because of the commercial emphasis
and you work that vocabulary more than anything
else, I don’t care at all.... It’s not inherently superior
or inferior. It’s a window into the language. If that’s
what you’re interested in, open up the window and
go on in.”
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American audiences (filmmaker Ingmar Bergman was
a fellow honoree), said, “On this campus you find
many people who come from varied backgroundsmany more than we realized. For so long we were all
trying to look American, sound American, be
American. Now we try to celebrate the diversity of our
background and to bring it into our teaching.”
Of the internationalization of San Diego State, Harvey
said, “It’s about time. It is great. The excitement on
the faculty level has never been higher.”
The Brooklyn-born Sweedler said San Diego State is a
testing ground for America’s future. “Here we have a
very international and eclectic community, people
from all over the world. We have this international
boundary, but it is very complicated and fluid,” the
physicist said. “How do we work it out so that we can
provide a decent life and opportunities for people of
different languages and backgrounds and cultures?
That’s the future of this country.”
The International Student Center has clocks set to
time zones around the world. Large, laminated maps
of different continents and countries line the hallways.
However, there is no more vivid display of globalization inside the center than all the tchotchkes on the
shelves of Associate Director Jane Kalionzes—
Pathbreakers:
Jessie Rich-Greer
‘05, who is pursuing a CaMexUS
triple degree, and
The winds of change have led longtime theatre professor Anne-Charlotte Harvey to change the way she
thinks about the soft, charming trace of a Swedish
accent still left in her vowels. “For a long time the
accent embarrassed me,” she confessed. Harvey, who
received a medal from the king of Sweden, Carl XVI
Gustav, in 1998 for introducing Swedish culture to
Marua B.
Hernandez ‘02, a
graduate of the
MexUS dual
degree program.
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pyramids, fans, dragon masks, snow globes, and other
foreign souvenirs accumulated during 15 years of
advising thousands of international students.
“They keep bringing me new ones,” she said. “They
say, ‘There’s nothing from my country here.’ They are
intent on having their country respected.”
Jane Kalionzes,
associate director
for international
student services,
holding a dragon
mask. International
students ‘intent on
having their country
respected’ often
bring her mementoes from their
homelands.
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Looking
Beyond the Ivy
to Become a
‘World University’
YALE
UNIVERSITY
NEW HAVEN, Connecticut — Richard C. Levin
made his reputation as an economist in understanding
the impact of changes in technology. When he was
installed as 22nd president of Yale University in
October 1993, Levin spoke of the need for Yale to
change to meet the needs of a changing world as the
third oldest U.S. institution of higher education prepared to enter its fourth century. In a speech entitled
“Beyond the Ivy Walls: Our University in the Wider
World,” Levin gave this charge to Yale’s faculty, students, and supporters:
Yale’s early 18th century mandate was to educate
leaders and citizens for a small New England colony.
By the mid-19th century, our compass had become
the whole nation. As we enter the 21st century, we
must aspire to educate leaders for the whole world.
Our curriculum increasingly reflects those forces that
have integrated the world’s economy and must ultimately, if we are to survive the dual threats of war
and environmental degradation, integrate the world’s
polity. We must focus even more on global issues if
our students are to be well prepared for world leadership, if we are to be a world university.
A world university. This was a loftier goal than the
perennial rivalry with Harvard University (which was
65 years old when a group of Congregational ministers
opened the “Collegiate School” in 1701) or upstarts
such as Princeton or Stanford (Levin’s undergraduate
alma mater). Loftier, too, than merely growing Yale’s
formidable endowment—although that has trebled
on Levin’s watch to $10.5 billion—or expanding the
10 million volumes in Sterling Memorial and its sister
libraries. Yale has prided itself on producing leaders—
captains of industry, academe, and politics. The current president, George W. Bush (class of 1968), and
three of his five immediate predecessors hold degrees
from Yale. The campus has long been a stopover for
world leaders and other important figures to give
speeches and engage eager students at seminars. Over
one 10-day stretch last fall, visitors included United
Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan; author and
Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel; Mary Robinson,
the former president of Ireland and former United
Nations high commissioner for human rights; Peter
Yale Center for
International and
Area Studies
Director Gustav
Ranis, flanked by
Associate
Directors Nancy
Ruther and
Richard Kane,
with portrait of
Henry Luce behind
them in Luce Hall.
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Brabeck-Letmathe, the chief executive officer of Nestlé
S.A.; and Ehud Barak, former prime minister of Israel.
In the 19th century Yale was the first U.S. college to
enroll undergraduates from Latin America and China.
It dispatched medical missionaries to China and established a medical school there. Yale’s shield with the
Hebrew inscription (conveniently translated at the
bottom into the Latin Lux et Veritas) hints at a worldview dating back to the 1700s.
■
A decade ago, only 64 Yale juniors spent a semester
or a full year abroad. In 2000, the number peaked
at 149. Despite strong encouragement, deans
acknowledge they still have trouble convincing some
Yale students to forsake a semester in New Haven.
They try to overcome this reluctance with generous
subsidies for international travel, research, and
internships, especially during the four-month summer break.
■
The Yale Center for International and Area Studies
(YCIAS), Yale’s principal gateway to the world, has
benefited from major increases in funding and
stature, with its own handsome quarters, the Henry
R. Luce Hall, in the heart of the campus, an $11
million budget, and the creation of three new international, interdisciplinary professorships.
■
Yale landed Ernesto Zedillo, the former president of
Mexico, as head of its new Center for the Study of
Globalization. The first director, Strobe Talbott, former deputy U.S. secretary of state, left to run the
Brookings Institution after the center’s first year.
Zedillo, an economist, earned both his master’s
degree and Ph.D. at Yale.
■
It created a new “Yale and The World” Web page
that pulled together links to all of the university’s
international activities, including a plethora of
information on courses, faculty research, and opportunities for current and prospective students.
Still, in the past decade, Yale has taken dramatic steps
to endow its curriculum, research endeavors, and student body with a more international cast. Consider
these developments:
■
■
Yale Fox Fellows
from Mexico,
Germany and Russia
with Larisa Satara,
coordinator,
International students now comprise 8 percent of
the 5,200 undergraduates in Yale College, up from
4 percent previously. Counting graduate and professional school enrollments, 16 percent of all Yale students are international. Apart from Canada, which
has always sent students in significant numbers to
New Haven, the percentage of international students in the freshman class has jumped from 2 percent to more than 7 percent.
To attract more diverse students from abroad, Yale
now covers the full financial needs of international
undergraduates. In the class of 2004, only one in
four international students received assistance from
Yale. Twelve months later, three in five of the new
international freshmen received aid.
in foreground.
FOX FELLOWS:
A LIVING LEGACY
AT YALE AND
AROUND
THE WORLD
NEW HAVEN, Connecticut — No library, dorm, or arena bears the
name of retired investment banker Joseph Carrère Fox, one of
Yale’s most loyal alumni. But his legacy—legacies actually—can
be spotted on Yale’s campus and in its classrooms.
They are the Fox International Fellows, a dozen graduate students from seven elite universities in other countries, who are
given the run of Yale’s classes for a full year, courtesy of the more
than $10 million that Fox and wife Alison Barbour Fox have donated to the exchange program.
At the same time, a dozen Yale students, newly graduated or
embarked on graduate or professional studies, spend eight months
at those sister schools: Moscow State University, Cambridge
University, the Free University of Berlin, Fudan University in
Shanghai, China, the University of Tokyo, El Colegio de Mexico in
Mexico, and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris in France.
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Yale welcomed its first class of World Fellows—17
midcareer scholars, business executives, journalists,
and other professionals brought to New Haven for
an intensive semester of seminars with Yale faculty.
Yale received 500 applications for these spots. The
goal is to build a network of emerging leaders with
bonds as strong as those that connect Oxford’s
Rhodes scholars.
■
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T O R I E S
Thanks to the generosity of alumnus Joseph C. Fox
(class of 1938), Yale has also grown the Fox
International Fellowship Program into a truly global
student exchange. Started in the late 1980s as a simple exchange of graduate students with Moscow
State University, Yale now exchanges a dozen postbaccalaureate and Ph.D. students each year with
leading universities in England, Germany, China,
Japan, Mexico, France, and Russia. (See box: Fox
Fellows: A Living Legacy.)
■
The university upgraded its Office of International
Students and Scholars and hired a new assistant
dean to promote study abroad and the plethora of
fellowships for postgraduate study, including the
Rhodes, Marshall, Fulbright, Goldwater, Mitchell,
Luce, Fox, and other Yale-only scholarships.
■
Yale boosted support for international graduate students, who comprise 35 percent of the 2,200 students in the Graduate School of Arts and Science.
The McDougal Graduate Student Center, including
a Gothic club room, provides services from career
From modest beginnings in 1989 as an exchange between
Yale and Moscow State, the Fox fellowships have blossomed into
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Yale Center for
International and
Area Studies
Communications Director
Marilyn Wilkes.
guidance and wellness to social events and cultural
activities, not to mention a cafeteria.
■
Yale appointed a language director and outfitted a
high-tech home for the Center for Language Study,
with the mission of bringing coherence to how the
49 languages listed in Yale’s Blue Book (a course
guide) are taught. The center’s mission includes providing more support for the nontenured lectors who
teach languages, tapping into digital technology and
the Web, and helping professional students hungry
for language skills but unable to fit five-day-a-week
classes into their schedules.
■
Yale reinvigorated old ties with China and added a
major new enterprise: the China Law Center. Led
by Yale Law School’s Paul Gewirtz, the New Havenbased institute provides ideas and resources for
Chinese lawyers engaged in the difficult work of
reforming China’s legal system and judiciary.
tions, universities in Germany, China, France, Mexico, and Japan
were added to the list.
something like Oxford’s Rhodes scholarships in miniature. And
The fellowships are intended to identify and develop future
while it is certainly a stretch to mention the Fox fellowships in the
leaders who can help make the world a safer place. Fellows are
same breath with the Nobel Prizes, both were motivated from a
chosen “on the basis of character, intellect, and demonstrated
desire to further world peace.
leadership. Students must demonstrate a personal commitment to
Joseph Fox—Yale class of 1938—is a former partner of
being a ‘citizen ambassador.’”
Kidder, Peabody & Co. He approached Yale with the idea that
The program is run through the Yale Center for International
exchanging graduate students with Moscow might thaw the
and Area Studies (YCIAS). Fox hosts lunches and dinners for the
lingering chill in relations between the world’s superpowers.
fellows, takes them to football games and buses them up to a home
“The Cold War was still going on and relations seemed to be
in Connecticut’s northwest woods to see the fall foliage.
deteriorating,” said the 86-year-old financier. “I knew from my own
Fox, who recently was made a Fellow Commoner of Sidney
experience that an exchange of this sort would be very worthwhile.”
Sussex College at Cambridge University, came early to his belief
Soon Cambridge University became part of the exchange and
in the importance of exposing students to other cultures and
later with help from the Max Kade and William Bingham founda-
continued
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The most significant changes were driven by faculty
who, like Paul Gewirtz, looked at developments on the
world stage and sought ways to contribute through
their own work and scholarship. Like the bright, distinctive patches of a quilt, they form a larger fabric
that illustrates vividly how Yale has set out to fulfill
this mission of becoming a world university.
Gustav Ranis was immersed in international studies
half a century ago when he came to Yale to study economics, and it has remained his passion, first as a
graduate student, then as a professor of economics and
head of Yale’s Economic Growth Center and, since
1996, as director of YCIAS. The center’s fortunes have
grown in recent years with the upsurge in interest at
Yale in internationalization. The center, from its home
in Henry R. Luce Hall, sponsors 500 events a year,
from brown-bag lunches with faculty and visiting
scholars to workshops, lectures, and major conferences
on international topics.
The German-born Ranis has devoted a career to shedding light on the often testy relationships between the
world’s rich and poor countries. He has been a critic of
the austerity measures imposed by the International
Monetary Fund on countries in financial straits. Under
his hand, YCIAS, successor to a more modest enterprise
called the Yale Concilium on International and Area
Studies that dated back to 1961, has grown rapidly.
“We got the building, which made a big difference.
We also got a president who made the internationalization of Yale one of the things he wanted to be
remembered for,” said Ranis. “We ramped up both the
quality and quantity of our work.” Under the YCIAS
aegis are nine councils that study regions of the world
and more than a dozen other programs and initiatives,
including a center for the study of slavery, a center on
genocide, and a think tank that scrutinizes the United
Nations. YCIAS also runs an outreach effort called
PIER (Programs in International Educational
Resources) that offers summer institutes and curriculum help for K-12 teachers and tutors Connecticut
high school students in languages from Arabic to
Chinese to Kiswahili.
Some 250 students are enrolled in YCIAS’s six undergraduate majors and four master’s degree programs,
including 90 juniors and seniors in the flagship international studies major. There likely would be more
international studies majors were enrollments not limited. It is an especially popular choice among Yale’s
many double majors. The language requirement is
stricter than the general requirement for Yale undergraduates, which is competency at the intermediate
level (i.e., two years of five-days-a-week classes). The
international studies students must achieve mastery
(i.e., advanced level coursework) in one modern language, or competency in two.
languages. While at Yale, he spent two summers abroad, the first
Alexandra Delano, a graduate of El Colegio de Mexico, was
with a family in Bogotá, Colombia, to build up his Spanish, and
surprised how much Yale undergraduates contributed to the
then with a French-speaking family in Switzerland. He studied at
discussion in a class on migration and refugees.
Cambridge in 1939 as Europe faced war.
“All of them have a story about when they went to a refugee
A decade ago Fox learned to speak Russian with the help of
camp in Azerbaijan or Ghana. They are so young and they have
tutors and by spending a summer at Middlebury College’s famed
done so much,” she said. Outside class, American students have
language institute.
sought her advice about El Colegio de Mexico, should they win a
Stormy-Annika Mildner, working toward a Ph.D. in econom-
fellowship.
ics at the Free University in Berlin, said, “I’m surprised at the
Fox welcomes his alma mater’s transformation into what he
really warm welcome by all the professors. You don’t have to wait
calls “a real international university—not just a name that’s
for two months to see a professor.”
known all over the world, but a real player.”
At the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, said Marion
“This is a whole new world that you and I are living in,” said
Marmorat, who is pursuing a doctorate in international relations,
Fox. Globalization and the high-tech revolution are transforming
“it’s very hard to borrow a book. It’s not open stack. Everything
the world for the better, he said, and “the outlook for stability and
is restricted.”
lasting peace is very favorable.” ■
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Ranis dreams of YCIAS eventually becoming a fullfledged School of International Studies, with broader
faculty appointment powers, more courses of its own,
and students pursuing doctorates in international studies. “We’re a hybrid now between a department and a
school. It’s better than a concilium. We’re moving in
the right direction,” Ranis observed.
59
James Raymond
Vreeland, assistant
professor of
The 150 Yale faculty who work with YCIAS’s various
councils bring “a problem orientation” to comparative
studies of different regions, comparing development
and environment difficulties in Central Africa with
those of South Asia, or looking at migration issues in
East Europe through the lens of similar movements
around in the world, Ranis said. They worry about the
erosion of local languages, culture, and literature.
What is driving so many universities to pay more
attention to international education?
“There’s a general recognition that we can’t afford to
be fortress America. The fact that even a large, inwardlooking country like the U.S. has become a major
importer/exporter and depends on international trade
[shows] that no country is an island,” said Ranis.
“Frontiers are permeable, both from the economic and
political point of view. They don’t hold up any more.”
Eighty percent of Yale undergraduates wind up taking
five or more courses in international studies—the
equivalent of a minor. This is no fad, said Ranis. “The
reality is we have to be in this world and the better we
know it, the more advantage to ourselves and to those
we deal with. Both in our national self-interest and the
university’s self interest, opening up is the way to go.”
James Vreeland, an associate professor of political
science and director of undergraduate international
studies, advises every international studies major.
When he clicks on the YCIAS Web page that lists
nearly two dozen programs that pay for study and
travel abroad, “students’ eyes light up,” said Vreeland,
an expert on the International Monetary Fund.
“The only way you’re going to learn a foreign language
is to be immersed in another country,” said Vreeland,
who speaks French, Spanish, and Creole. “It’s just not
going to happen in the classroom.”
political science
and director of
undergraduate
international
Sometimes students seeking travel grants will ask
Vreeland what they should do if the internship abroad
falls through or they encounter other roadblocks. He
tells them not to worry. “The best-laid plans are
bound to go awry. What we’re looking for is the student with the intellectual curiosity to dedicate themselves to doing work and not just touring,” he said.
Of the push to internationalize Yale, Vreeland said, “I
really feel it. The powers that be are making it worthwhile for the faculty by offering them incentives, such
as research money and opportunities. They are putting
money where their mouth is. Otherwise, you just
have rhetoric.”
Among Yale’s firsts was its creation of the country’s
first academic program in public health in 1915.
Today the Department of Epidemiology and Public
Health is part of the Yale School of Medicine. Dr.
Curtis Patton, professor and director of international
medical studies, has sent more than 400 public health
students overseas during 36 years at Yale to learn how
to deal with malaria and other scourges—including
diseases once rare in the United States, but now turning up with regularity in urban emergency rooms.
Typically, the Yale public health students go out for
three months to work in poor countries across Latin
America, Africa, and Asia.
“They are getting skills they need and looking at
problems that they only see in textbooks back here in
New Haven. These problems are better seen up
close.... They come back far more inspired and far
more willing to spend the extra two hours in the lab
to understand the problem,” said Patton.
studies, personally
encourages every
international
studies major to
study abroad.
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The Center for Language Study counts 49 languages,
from Arabic to Zulu, taught at Yale. Typically half are
offered in a given term. However, even that has proved
insufficient. Every year Yale arranges for students to
learn a dozen other languages independently, working
with native speakers recruited from among the ranks of
international graduate students. At year’s end they take
tests administered by professors from other colleges
where these languages are taught in regular classes.
Typically, the Yale independent students score just as
well as those who took regular instruction. The languages that students were studying independently last
year included Bulgarian, Haitian Creole, Igbo,
Khmer/Cambodian, Tamil, Thai, and Turkish. The two
students learning Bulgarian were preparing for a concert tour to East Europe with the Yale Slavic Chorus.
Yale created a new
Center for Language
Study and hired
Nina Garrett, an
expert in the acquisition of second
languages, as its
first director.
She posed by a
computer server
in the center’s
newly refurbished
building.
In recent years some of these exotic problems have
come closer to home. Patton, an authority on malaria,
was called upon 12 times last summer to confirm cases
of the disease in New Haven. “We might have solved
the problem of malaria decades ago if we had more
people who had suffered from malaria or whose relatives had suffered from it,” he said. “The industrial
revolution has done wonders for infectious diseasesbut we still have the mosquitoes.”
Patton encourages the 15 students who head out into
the world each summer to share their experiences with
classmates and faculty at a symposium each October.
Patton prods them to prepare their presentations and
posters “right off the plane. We want that breathless,
‘This is what I saw and this is what I did and this is
the trouble I ran into.’”
Apart from helping people in need, these medical,
nursing, microbiology, and other students are learning
how to be front-line public health defenders, acquiring
expertise that can be brought into play in U.S. emergency rooms. Sometimes, Americans seem to forget
that threats to public health respect no boundaries.
When Patton and his students organized a symposium
on bioterrorism four years ago, “many of my colleagues asked, ‘Why are you doing this?’” he recalled.
Yale created its language center in 1998. Director Nina
Garrett is an expert in the acquisition of second languages. The center’s new home on Temple Street features three multimedia classrooms/laboratories, and six
“smart” classrooms. Everything is digitized, so students
can do homework or drills from dorm rooms as well as
the language center.
Yale created the center (funded in part by the Mellon
Foundation) to remedy what Richard H. Brodhead,
dean of the college, called “a Tower of Babel” among
Yale departments with different approaches to teaching
language. “Language was all taught with the idea that
you will read literature. Well, that’s not the point any
more,” said Haynie Wheeler, associate director of the
Center for the Study of Globalization and a former
YCIAS administrator. “Those making the decisions
about these (classes) were people who did medieval
Italian literature, and the people at the School of
Management were going, ‘Wait a minute. We want
business Chinese.’”
Yale’s language lectors—a nontenured corps of language instructors—now get support for professional
development and attention from Garrett’s center. With
the help of computers and digitized materials, a busy
medical intern or resident can squeeze in a lesson at 3
a.m. Garrett said that most disciplines “recognize that
having the foreign language string to your bow is
something that really strengthens the student.” English
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may be the universal language for routine business, but
negotiating in depth requires an understanding of the
local culture and language, she said. Even on international projects that are conducted in English, like the
work that Yale forestry students do in the Amazon rain
forest, she said, “they don’t need to know all the words
for forestry in Portuguese—but they need to know
enough to live in the Amazon for months on end.”
Dean of the
College Richard
Brodhead ‘68:
‘The very idea of
On every campus making strides in international education, there is someone that people across a range of
disciplines point to as leading the way. At Yale that
person is Richard H. Brodhead, dean of the college
and the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English and
American studies. Brodhead matriculated as a freshman in September 1964 and has been in New Haven
ever since. He takes a long view of the internationalization of Yale. In his day, few Yale students studied
abroad and the class—all men—was largely American,
with a sprinkling of Canadians and a few Europeans,
Latin Americans, and Asians. But that makes it sound
less diverse than it actually was, he suggested.
“It’s easy, in the more internationalized college world
of the present, to forget that there was always some
international dimension to the American college
experience,” said Brodhead, speaking softly in his
wood-paneled office. “You could look at my freshman
[dorm] room and say, ‘Four Americans’—but one was
the son of a Hungarian refugee, and another was a
Japanese-American from Hawaii whose grandparents
scarcely spoke English. There’s always been mobility
and cross-cultural contact.”
“Remember, the very idea of a university is international. The first was created in Italy. They were
quickly imported into France, then England and the
Netherlands,” Brodhead said. “Universities have always
been gathering places for certain kinds of cosmopolitanism, for the exchange of ideas across cultural
boundaries. It was a rare university that wasn’t paying
attention to international affairs.”
Even in American literature, faculty interests are “circuited through all kinds of international connections,”
said Brodhead. “If you teach novels, you’re always
going to have an interest in Russian literature, English
a university is
international.’
literature, Italian fiction, and now the works of Salman
Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul.”
Yale’s comparative literature department introduced a
new course on world literatures in 1999–2000 that
initially brought faculty from nearly all of Yale’s language and literature departments to lecture on the
prose and poetry of their part of the world. It drew
60 students at first and half that many the second year.
“The team-taught style was too diffuse. The students
needed more continuity,” said Vilashini Cooppan, an
assistant professor of comparative literature. She now
teaches the world literatures course by herself, with an
occasional guest lecturer.
“I still draw on my colleagues in all kinds of ways,
teaching their editions of texts, citing their critical
work, referring to them as extra resources. But I now
try to provide more of the guiding narrative of how
this course fits together,” said Cooppan. The reading
list included such familiar classics as The Odyssey and
The Song of Roland as well as works on Folk Wisdom &
Traditional Narrative in Ancient India, Japanese
Buddhist Tales, The Aesthetics of Sanskrit Drama, and
The Early Islamic Love Lyric.
Cooppan, who is also deeply involved with a Ford
Foundation-funded initiative seeking to broaden curricula at 17 universities across the country, said, “Yale
students are receptive to this kind of work. Our challenge is to find ways to make global perspectives integral to the foundational knowledge of distinct departments and disciplines, not just a single add-on course
that you take towards the end of your college career.”
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Jones said she assures students, “You’re not going to
miss Spring Fling. You’re not going to miss the
Harvard-Yale game.” They also hear that from other
students. “This will slowly erode the ‘we don’t leave
Yale’ culture,” she said.
Barbara Rowe,
assistant dean and
director, international
education & fellowship programs, with
Kelly C. McLaughlin
and Karyn A. Jones,
associate directors.
The number of Yale students studying abroad shot
up from 64 in 1993-1994 to 149 two years ago.
The number slipped to 123 in 2000-2001. “Many
students come here intending to study abroad and
don’t,” said Brodhead. “We can’t have it [as our
mission] to try to induce mass unhappiness by way
of forcing students abroad. We’ve tried to put it in
a far more positive light.”
Barbara Rowe, who came to Yale from Bucknell
University as assistant dean and director of the Office
of International Education, said the official number
understates how many Yale students go abroad for serious study and work during their college years. “The
reality is that 30 to 40 percent of our students have a
significant international experience. There is so much
money for students to do summer projects abroad, or
they come in with so much credit they take a year off
and go on their own,” she said. “If we were able to
count them all, our numbers would be phenomenal.”
One opportunity is the R. U. Light Fellowship, named
after an aviator and pioneering neurosurgeon from the
class of 1924, which pays for intensive language study
in China, Japan, and Korea.
Rowe and her colleagues use a dozen peer advisers—
students who have studied abroad themselves—to aid
the cause. They sense that attitudes are changing.
Associate Director Karyn Jones said that at “Bulldog
Days” (events each April to encourage high school seniors to say yes to Yale’s offer of admission) prospective
students “are no longer saying, ‘I hear you can’t study
abroad at Yale.’ Now they are saying, ‘I want to study
abroad. What can you do for me?’”
Mark Dinner was determined to do more than just see
the world while at Yale. The economics and history
major took a leave of absence to volunteer on a World
Bank project in Ghana. A Yale professor helped him
make that connection. Later, with a Yale travel fellowship, he spent a summer working as a financial services
intern in Bulgaria. Dinner studied Twi in Accra and
continued to learn the language through Yale’s
Directed Independent Language Study program.
Despite his absence from campus, the 21-year-old
senior from Cleveland, Ohio, will graduate on time
with the class of 2003.
“Over the weekend, I had e-mails from Ghana,
Bulgaria, Bangladesh, and South Africa—all from
people Yale has put me in touch with through my
experiences or through my professors,” said Dinner,
who aspires to do economic development work.
Linda Shi, 20, a junior environmental studies major,
recounted an incredible array of international travel,
internships, and opportunities that she and her roommates have experienced. Her first-year suite “was composed of Joy, a Singaporean; April, a Navy brat;
Madeleine, who is French-American; and me, a
Chinese-born Chinese American,” she said. “After
freshman year, I spent the summer working in Peru,
and Joy taught English in Cambodia for a month.”
April spent the fall 2001 semester in London, while
Linda and Joy moved in with two new roommates,
Marina, a Ukrainian-born Russian American, and
Stephanie, a Romanian. “This past summer, Joy
toured Africa, then worked in Thailand. Madeleine
worked on ecotourism in Madagascar. Marina was
working at an eye clinic in Nepal. Stef worked at an
investment company in Istanbul. April was in Italy.
And I had an internship in southwest China,” she said.
The saga does not stop there.
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“Joy is currently studying abroad in Prague, and
Madeleine is taking a year off to study in France and
then teach English in Indonesia. For all our activities
abroad, we received Yale fellowships and funding,” she
said. “Many of the opportunities we found not
through a set program but through our own sleuthing.
We’ve had incredible international activities here at
Yale. There’s always money for anyone who wants to
do anything abroad. It’s like, ‘I want to get there? OK,
Yale will help.’”
Not everyone at Yale is as footloose as Mark Dinner
and Linda Shi.
Catherine Pitt, 20, a junior from New York City
majoring in international studies and economics, spent
her junior year in high school in France and came to
New Haven fully intending to spend another year
abroad. She took intermediate Spanish “but finally
decided I liked Yale so much I didn’t want to miss a
semester here.” She did get to Argentina on a Yale
study grant for six weeks last summer. Pitt is president
of the Polo Club and was loath to pass up that opportunity. “I have my whole life to go abroad. Why miss a
semester here?” she asked.
(Dean Brodhead said extracurriculars are “bizarrely
overdeveloped” at Yale, but conceded, “If you’re going
to edit the Yale Daily News, you’ve got to be here.”)
Yoonseok Lee, 19, a Korean student with roots in both
Seoul and Jakarta, Indonesia, has applied for a leave of
absence to study in China. “I didn’t want to sacrifice
one of my Yale semesters,” said Lee.
The international students are proud of the Yale
Corporation’s commitment to admit all students,
not just Americans, on a need-blind basis.
“There’s been a sea change since my freshman year,”
said Manique Sanjeevani Wijewardena, 23, a senior
from Colombo, Sri Lanka, majoring in political science and international studies. “I would like to see
Yale identified not so much as an American university
but as a world university. We are really producing
people for the world.”
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A language lab
in Yale’s new
Center for
Language Study.
Michelle Nadika de Saram, 19, a sophomore from
Sri Lanka, said the incoming freshmen are “much
more diverse. It’s really good to see Yale extending
the opportunity to people who otherwise would not
be able to come to America much less Yale.”
And that bodes well for the future, said de Saram.
International students as a group “are really idealistic.
They want to be president of their country. They want
to change the way the world works.”
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CASSANDRA PYLE
Leader and Friend
A colleague once described the late Cassandra Pyle as
“the pebble thrown in a pond that creates widening
ripples in all directions.” In our time, Cassie Pyle—
and she was always “Cassie”—rates a place on anyone’s
short list of the most influential practitioners of international exchange and education. She was well-known
worldwide as a champion of international relations
and for her work in many contexts to foster better
international understanding. Insightful, witty, passionate, resolute, and successful, Cassie was the consummate leader. As a visionary who pushed others to
broaden their own thinking, she inspired her colleagues to stretch their expectations and strive for
higher goals. She had the rare ability to draw seamlessly
on her wealth of connections and experiences to
bring added value to whatever task was before her.
She was, moreover, a friend
and mentor to countless individuals.
The field of international exchange is inestimably richer by virtue of her more than 25 years of leadership.
Cassie’s career included many distinguished positions.
She served more than 10 years as executive director of
the Council for International Exchange of Scholars
(CIES), the organization that administers the
Fulbright Program for Faculty and Professionals. In
the early 1980s, she was vice president for international education at the American Council on Education.
Before that, she served the Institute of International
Education as area director for South America and as
vice president. She started her career serving for 13
years as director of international admissions and international programs at the University of Chicago.
A born leader, Cassie focused on a mission of helping
people around the world find peace and understanding
through the exchange of ideas and experiences.
Persuasively enthusiastic, she invited those
around her into a community dedicated to championing
international exchange.
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In countless discussions Cassie exhibited a unique gift
for being able to synthesize varying points of view into
a cogent whole, and for helping people with differing
views find common ground and consensus. Unafraid
to challenge positions she disagreed with, she often
pushed and prodded to drive debates to new levels of
thinking. She shared her well-thought-through perspectives with a charismatic conviction. Using these
innate leadership skills, Cassie successfully sparked the
field of international exchange to define and then
advance an agenda for global understanding more
ambitious than we might otherwise have imagined.
One of the characteristics that made Cassie exceptional
was the way she served volunteer boards. She didn’t
just occupy a chair, but rather married the sum of
experiences from her “day” jobs with solid preparation
and a great deal of enthusiasm to make memorable
contributions to virtually every board discussion.
Countless boards benefited from Cassie’s expertise. She
was the president of NAFSA: Association of
International Educators in 1978–79, and also chaired
the Alliance for International Educational and
Cultural Exchange. Among many other positions, she
served on the Council on Foreign Relations, the U.S.
National Commission for the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO), and on the boards of directors of the
National Council for International Visitors, the World
Affairs Council of Washington, D.C., LASPAU:
Academic and Professional Programs for the Americas,
the Fulbright Association, and the Hariri Foundation.
At the time of her death, Cassie held positions on the
boards of directors of the Academy for Educational
Development, the U.S.-Canada Fulbright
Commission, the Council on International
Educational Exchange, and the Colorado Endowment
for the Humanities.
Just as she was the consummate professional, she was
also the ultimate personal friend. A colleague described
Cassie as “a unique blend of wisdom, elegance, superb
judgment, and genuine concern for the well-being of
others.” Cassie always made time to listen to individual concerns. She generously gave of herself as a men-
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tor and friend, and urged others to do the same.
Patient, perceptive, and compassionate, she had an
uncanny ability to give the right advice at the right
time, whether the issue was professional or personal.
She was also highly capable of nudging someone
strongly in a particular direction when such action was
called for. Many people who knew Cassie in this way
have said that her advice continues to resonate with
them to this day.
After retiring from CIES in 1992, she returned to
her hometown of Boulder, Colorado. Continuing her
volunteer leadership in education, she had been serving since 1999 as the chair of the board of directors of
the University of Colorado Foundation, Inc. A rare
case of meningococcal disease claimed her life on
November 5, 2000.
For her many contributions to international education,
she was honored with distinguished service awards
from the Council for International Educational
Exchange, the Japan Fulbright Alumni, and NAFSA:
Association of International Educators. She was also
honored by the Fulbright Board of Foreign Scholarship
for her contributions to the Fulbright program.
As a colleague, friend, mentor, and leader, Cassandra
Pyle was a true epicenter in international exchange and
education. Her legacy lives today in her countless
important contributions to individuals, institutions,
and, indeed, the field of international exchange as a
whole. We continue to feel the ripples from this great
woman’s life’s work—and will likely do so for many
years to come. ■
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DAVID L. BOREN
The Vision Behind the NSEP
In a speech in 1992, then-U.S. Senator David L.
Boren argued against American isolationism. “We cannot shut ourselves off from the rest of the world any
more than we can build a wall around our
homes....The world and the problems of others cannot
be shut out,” he said. “We need a new common-sense
internationalism, one that helps us rebuild America’s
strength at home and at the same time reaches out to
help others around the world.”
To meet those goals, Boren proposed several reforms:
changes in the tax code to enhance U.S. competition
abroad, enhanced U.S. sensitivity to the global environment, an expanded Peace Corps, and reformation
of the Foreign Service. Then, importantly, he added
this statement: “It is also critical that we internationalize our educational system.”
When he made the speech, Boren had already contributed significantly to that last goal. It was Boren’s
vision that had resulted in the landmark legislation
that created the National Security Education Program
(NSEP), established in the National Security
Education Act of 1991. By authoring that act, and
having the political wherewithal to see it enacted into
law, David L. Boren made one of the most significant
and lasting contributions of our time to international
educational exchange.
Designed to help undergraduates from the United
States acquire skills and experiences in areas of the
world critical to the future security of our country,
NSEP helps educate U.S. citizens to understand other
cultures, strengthen U.S. economic competitiveness,
and enhance international cooperation and security.
The program has four specific objectives: increase
understanding of less-commonly taught languages and
cultures; build a base of future leaders with international experience; develop a cadre of professionals with
deep understanding of foreign languages and cultures
who can make sound decisions about U.S. security;
and enhance the capacity of colleges and universities
and their faculty to educate U.S. citizens toward
achieving these goals.
A graduate of Yale University, David Boren had a lifetransforming international experience of his own when
he was selected as a Rhodes scholar and earned a master’s degree in politics, philosophy, and economics
from Oxford University. He later earned a law degree
at the University of Oklahoma.
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Boren would go on to a distinguished career in public
service. He served in the Oklahoma house of representatives from 1967 to 1975, when he was elected as
Oklahoma’s governor. In 1978, he was elected to the
U.S. Senate, where he served until 1994. After leaving
the Senate, he was appointed to his current post as the
13th president of the University of Oklahoma.
Boren’s interest in education dates to his service as a
state legislator, when he coauthored legislation to create a state system of vocational technical schools. Later,
as governor, he oversaw the creation of programs in
arts education and funding for gifted and talented students, among other important initiatives that have had
a lasting impact in Oklahoma. It was a logical extension of his long-term interest in education that in the
Senate he would set the wheels in motion to ensure
creation of NSEP.
NSEP today has three components: undergraduate
scholarships for study abroad, graduate student fellowships, and institutional grants.
NSEP is the force, for example, that enabled a student
majoring in public health at the University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign to study Swahili in Kenya for a
year. It allowed an international relations major from
The American University in Washington, D.C., to
study Arabic in Egypt. And it helped send a student in
Dillard University’s international business program to
study Japanese in Japan for a semester.
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Similarly, examples of NSEP institutional grants
include one to help Beloit College establish the Liberal
Arts Colleges Consortium for International Exchange,
and one that aided Oregon State University in implementing an international degree program for undergraduates. In yet another example, NSEP support
helped Tidewater Community College and seven partner community colleges in the mid-Atlantic region to
develop expertise about Vietnam, and build faculty
competencies for teaching about the third world.
Countless individuals and institutions have benefited
directly from NSEP. Through its scholarships and
institutional grants, the program has had a deep and
significant impact on international educational
exchange. The far-sighted vision and leadership of
David L. Boren has made and continues to make a
difference in improving global understanding. ■
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Duke Bolsters Its
‘Global Reach
and Influence’
DUKE
UNIVERSITY
Duke University is among the youngest of America’s
great universities, a private institution created in 1924
in Durham, North Carolina, by tobacco magnate
James Buchanan Duke as a memorial to his father.
The Duke family had been generous supporters of an
antecedent school, Trinity College, with roots that
went back to 1838. But it was The Duke Endowment
that allowed the small college to grow almost
overnight into a major university. The founder
instructed the new institution to provide “real leadership” and pursue research that would “most help to
develop our resources, increase our wisdom, and promote human happiness.” Today, with 6,300 undergraduate and 4,500 graduate students representing
almost every state and 75 countries, Duke is still pursuing those ends and more, including an explicit goal
embraced by its trustees to “extend our global reach
and influence.”
Almost half of Duke University undergraduates now
study abroad. International students comprise 5 percent of undergraduates and their ranks are growing
rapidly. Duke, which long has admitted U.S. citizens
on a need-blind basis, now provides financial aid to
international undergraduates as well. One-sixth of
Duke’s faculty are international scholars. Duke operates five Title VI national resource centers in distant
regions of the world (two alone and three in partnerships with other North Carolina universities). The
handful of institutions with more national resource
centers all are public universities at least three times
Duke’s size.
Under the
Duke has done on a broad scale what many institutions with fewer resources are attempting on a smaller
canvas. Its endowment was nearly $3 billion at the end
of fiscal year 2002 and the university is nearing the
finish line of a multiyear drive to raise $2 billion (the
goal was raised in midcampaign from $1.5 billion to
help pay for new undertakings, including more help
for students to study abroad). But it is not these numbers that sets Duke’s story apart. What is remarkable
about the growth of Duke’s commitment to international education is how it has taken hold across a
sprawling institution with graduate and professional
schools long accustomed to charting their own destiny.
What Duke’s president, trustees, and deans have done
watchful eye of
benefactor J.B.
Duke, students
chatting at bus
stop outside Duke
University Chapel.
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Since English is the dominant language of international scholarship—a dominance reinforced by the
fact that it is also becoming the lingua franca of the
Internet—there is little incentive for American
scholars to learn other languages.
Stepping through
After a faculty call for action to internationalize the
Duke student body and curriculum, the trustees
adopted a strategic plan in 1994 that not only declared
Duke’s determination to globalize, but committed
resources to make it happen. They created a new
senior position, vice provost for academic affairs and
international education, and put up a substantial
amount of money to support international activities
on campus. The first occupant of that office, Peter
Lange, is now Duke’s provost.
the archway
to Crowell
quadrangle
after classes.
shows how change can be effectively managed even in
a complex academic environment where authority is
intentionally diffuse and decentralized.
The push to internationalize began soon after Duke’s
trustees selected Nannerl Overholser Keohane in 1993
as the institution’s eighth president. Keohane, a political scientist whose interests run from the
Enlightenment to feminist theory, had been president
of Wellesley College, her alma mater. A Marshall
scholar, she earned a first honors degree at Oxford
before getting a Ph.D. at Yale. In a 1998 lecture on
“The Idea of A University,” Keohane described the
paradox of U.S. higher education, at once highly international and highly insular:
American higher education today is spectacularly
successful in attracting students from around the
world.… Many of our students and faculty members
also study and do research abroad, and quite a few
institutions have taken serious steps to make our curricula more truly international in their focus.
Nonetheless, just as citizens of the United States have
a recurrent tendency to isolationism and xenophobia,
American higher education is in some ways quite
parochial. Our students and faculty members are
often ignorant of what is happening in other countries, compared to our counterparts in other systems.
“The university put real money into this,” said Gilbert
Merkx, the current vice provost for international
affairs. The vice provost’s office acted like an internal
foundation inside Duke’s walls. While encouraging
faculty to pursue research projects overseas, Duke also
expanded its study abroad office and its services and
support for international students. Duke’s enticing
study abroad catalog offers an array of programs on
four continents, including 14 Duke-administered
programs in such locales as La Paz, Bolivia; Berlin,
Germany; Rome, Italy; St. Petersburg, Russia; Tunis,
Tunisia; and Beijing and Hangzhou, China. Duke
students can also choose from more than 100 other
U.S. study abroad programs, or enroll as visiting
students at 30 universities across Australia, the United
Kingdom, New Zealand, South Africa, and Mexico.
Duke sends faculty abroad with students only on
summer programs. Typically, there are as many as
20 study abroad programs each summer, with Duke
professors teaching one or two courses over four to six
weeks. Margaret Riley, director of the Office of Study
Abroad and an assistant dean of the college, and her
staff make regular site visits overseas to check on the
study abroad programs.
The percentage of international undergraduates in
Duke’s two divisions, Trinity College and Pratt School
of Engineering, more than doubled in the past decade
to 5 percent, and Duke is aiming to double it again
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over a decade. The percentage of undergraduates
studying abroad has climbed from 33 to 47 percent.
International students comprise almost two-fifths of
Duke’s graduate students. Their enrollment ranges
from more than half the engineering graduate students
to a third in the Fuqua School of Business to nearly
one in six of the law students.
The Quad, with
Duke Medical
School in the
When Duke’s trustees revised the university’s strategic
plan in 2001, they made commitments both to start
offering financial aid to international undergraduates
and to make it possible for all undergraduates to study
abroad “regardless of economic circumstance.” They
also urged that more be done to encourage science and
engineering majors to study abroad, and that libraries
devote more space to international collections. Toward
all these internationalization ends, they set a fundraising goal of $20 million. A strategic planning report
explained the rationale:
In the new international environment of the postCold War world, those who want to survive and
thrive need to understand that they are no longer
merely citizens of nation states, but members of an
interdependent world where nations are no longer
masters of their own fate and individuals are part of
an increasingly global community. The implications
of these changes for institutions like Duke that are
responsible for education is that students need greater
interaction with different peoples and cultures....
It is through the window of international exchanges,
built on the acquisition of languages and the experiences gained abroad, that students can compare
themselves with others, examine the extent to which
they are culture-bound, and explore the insights of
those from other cultures who see the world through
different lenses. Such insights can help them recognize that who they are and the context within which
they live in the United States, while a product in
part of the world they know, is as much a product of
our interdependence with other regions and cultures
about which they know almost nothing. This recognition is an important prerequisite to accepting
membership in and responsibility for citizenship in
the global community.
distance.
Much of the Duke faculty scholarship in the international arena occurs in its area studies centers: African
& African American Studies; Asian/Pacific Studies
Institute; Comparative Area Studies; European Studies;
Latin American & Caribbean Studies; North American
Studies; Slavic, Eurasian & East European Studies; and
South Asian Studies. Its Center for International
Studies, which Gilbert Merkx directs, is a U.S.
Department of Education–designated national
resource center. The Center for North American
Studies was the first national resource center designated by the U.S. Department of Education to study this
region. Latin American & Caribbean Studies is a
national resource center in collaboration with the
Institute for Latin American Studies at the University
of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. South Asian
Studies is part of a four-university consortium in the
Research Triangle area designated as a national
resource center.
The Fuqua School of Business, one of the country’s
top-ranked business schools, offers a Global Executive
master’s of business administration program in
addition to its regular on-campus paths to the MBA.
The Global Executive program, which costs $100,000,
allows executives living anywhere in the world to
obtain an MBA in 19 months, doing most of the
course work over the Internet but also spending a
total of 11 weeks in residential education offered on
four continents. Duke Law School has partnerships
with the Institute of Transnational Law in Geneva
and the Asia-American Institute in Transnational Law
in Hong Kong.
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see Duke add national resource centers for the
handful of areas that its current centers do not
cover. How do you make that happen within Duke’s
decentralized structure?
“By lots of administrative attention, cajoling, and
support,” said the vice provost. “You have to recruit
people when you lose them and keep building these
programs. That requires constant influencing of the
hiring process.” The provost and the dean of arts and
sciences, William H. Chafe, are strong allies.
Outside Perkins
Library, the center
of campus.
Keohane told alumni in Taiwan in 1998 that Duke
was “capitalizing upon the entrepreneurial and innovative spirit of our faculty” to prepare new graduates for
the increasingly diverse world economy. “We intend
to be a world leader in higher education in the new
millennium,” she said.
Only a handful of top private universities now admit
international students to their undergraduate college
on a need-blind basis. Starting with the class of 2006,
Duke promised to meet the full financial needs of 20
to 25 new international students and more in later
years. It created a separate applicant pool for those
who need scholarships to afford Duke, which charges
$38,000 for tuition, fees, room, and board. For now,
most international students admitted will still come
from the ranks of those not requesting help.
The trustees recently instructed Merkx and the campus-wide International Affairs Committee to come
back in a year with suggestions on what Duke should
do next. “We are talking about what internationalization means at the next level. What should our targets
be for international students as part of the mix? What
should our study abroad goals be? What does the
curriculum look like?” the vice provost explained.
The university has already revamped the curriculum
to require both foreign language and cross-cultural
inquiry. For most, the latter means taking international
studies courses.
Merkx, a sociologist who cochairs the national Council
of Directors of Title VI National Resource Centers
for Foreign Language and Area Studies, also aspires to
Merkx, who came to Duke in 2001 from the
University of New Mexico, knows from personal experience how complicated these global journeys can be.
The future Latin American expert was born in
Maracaibo, Venezuela, to Dutch parents. His father
directed tanker traffic there for the Dutch Royal Shell
oil company. The Merkx family moved to Oklahoma
when Merkx was 11. Educated at Harvard and Yale,
he was a Fulbright scholar in Peru, did research in
Argentina, and taught in Sweden and at Yale before
decamping to Albuquerque. His boyhood Dutch was
wiped out when he learned Swedish in Stockholm.
Merkx is wondering what more Duke can do to turn
students “into more competent global citizens? How
do we internationalize the entire curriculum in a way
that affects every undergraduate, regardless of major?”
Duke’s faculty tried to address those questions during
the last round of curricular reforms by strengthening
the language requirement and adding cultural studies.
“Is that the same as really understanding the geopolitics of a globalized world? I’m not sure,” Merkx said.
“We don’t have the answers here, and I don’t think
anybody else has them—but at least we’re thinking
about them.”
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A Kalamazoo Diploma
Comes with a
Well-traveled Resume
KALAMAZOO
COLLEGE
Every college has a plan, but Kalamazoo College has
the plan—the K Plan, as everyone on the Michigan
campus calls it. The students at this liberal arts college
follow a path to the bachelor’s degree that mixes traditional classroom work with internships and off-campus
study. Seniors also must cap their work by writing a
thesis. Kalamazoo boasts that its students graduate
with not just a diploma but a resume, thanks to the
K Plan’s blending the theoretical with the practical
through internships, study abroad, and individual
projects.
Study abroad has been woven into the K Plan since
the college embarked on this curricular approach in
1961. Study abroad is not mandatory but “it’s so
much a part of what we do and who we are that it’s
almost unavoidable,” said Joseph Brockington, associate provost for international programs.
Not that many students want to avoid it. By the college’s count, 85 percent of each graduating class has
studied abroad. However, since some go more than
once on Kalamazoo’s quarter system, the college’s participation rate stood at a lofty 106 percent in the latest
Open Doors report, which tallied 299 Kalamazoo graduates and 317 study abroad students in 2000-2001.
Kalamazoo recently was ranked as the number one
campus for study abroad by U.S. News & World
Report, based on academics’ responses to a survey of
which programs offer the richest academic experience
and most interaction with other cultures. Kalamazoo
has burnished that reputation by sending almost
10,000 students over the past four decades to study in
Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and Latin America.
Although the number of international students
enrolled on this campus in southwest Michigan is
small—typically no more than two dozen of the 1,300
students—one in 10 professors is international, and
Kalamazoo is the smallest college in the country
with a Title VI national resource center of its
own (Western European studies).
Many students head off to college with
study abroad on their to-do list. Half
the incoming freshman surveyed by
UCLA and the American Council
on Education express interest in
studying outside the United
Tracking wildlife
on the Tiputini
River in the
Amazon.
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Kalamazoo students pay no more to study abroad—
including airfare—than they do to spend a quarter,
term, or year on campus. The college is in the home
stretch of a drive to boost the endowment for study
abroad from $5 million to $13 million. It has already
received $5 million from the Arcus Foundation, which
architect Jon L. Stryker, an alumnus and trustee, established to promote the values of tolerance, diversity,
and respect.
Kate Nichols ’99
pitched in with a
local fire brigade
during her studies
in Clermont-
“For Kalamazoo students it costs no more to earn the
same number of credits abroad than it does to live on
campus, eat in the cafeteria, and take courses here,”
said Brockington.
Ferrand, France.
States, but only a small fraction—no more than 1
percent a year—actually wind up going. Kalamazoo, a
private college in the medium-size city of the same
name in southwest Michigan, does far better than
most in convincing students to live up to those
good intentions.
“Student interest alone is not enough,” said
Brockington. “They won’t go unless they have the
support of their professors, their department, their
coaches, their fellow students, their families, their
clubs and organizations. They also need support from
the business office and, most importantly, the financial aid office.”
Associate Provost
for International
Programs Joseph
Brockington.
“Each represents a hurdle,” said Brockington, an
associate professor of German who has
taught at Kalamazoo for 24 years and
directed the Center for
International Programs for the
past six. “The more hurdles students have to jump over, the
more tired they get. Pretty soon
they say, ‘Oh, the heck with it.
I’ll just stay home.’”
“Two hundred forty students go off each year. We’ll
get 75 percent of the athletes, 70 to 80 percent of the
chemistry majors. The hardest are the double majors,
because their schedules are so tight,” said Brockington.
“We don’t have to convince the faculty. They are committed. Even the coaches are committed.”
Is the soccer coach happy when he hears a star striker
may be headed off to Senegal?
“That’s an interesting question,” replied Brockington.
“Hardy Fuchs, the men’s soccer coach, is a professor of
German language and literature who first came to
Kalamazoo as an exchange student—and he’s been on
our case that we’re not sending enough students to
Germany.”
Brockington knows from personal experience the
impact of studying abroad. His mother, volunteer
coordinator in their small Michigan town for the highschool exchange program Youth for Understanding,
“boxed me up at age 16 and mailed me off to West
Berlin,” he related. The immersion for a year in a
German gymnasium took. Brockington became a
German major at Michigan State and later returned
to Germany as a Fulbright scholar.
Kalamazoo College’s immersion in internationalization
began in the summer of 1958 when, at the urging of a
trustee, the college paid for 25 students to travel by
ocean liner to Europe to study German, French, and
Spanish in those countries. These pioneers received no
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credit, but faculty members were pleased with the
results and more students were sent the next year. A
trust fund left by S. Rudolph Light provided each a
$500 scholarship.
Is there a downside to so many students regularly leaving campus for months at a time?
Kalamazoo
students in Perth,
Australia, with
In a close-knit community such as Kalamazoo, “there’s
an opportunity cost,” said Brockington. “Some
Kalamazoo students do not know all the members of
their class or the group behind them because of the
on-campus, off-campus pattern. On the other hand,
they’ve had wonderful experiences abroad.”
Those experiences are celebrated in campus publications, including Passage, an annual compilation of
photographs, poetry, and essays by students. “Danish
is the most ridiculous language in the world.... I could
be here 20 years and still not understand Danish,”
groused one student studying in Copenhagen. From
Quito, Ecuador, another marveled at how people “wait
for one another patiently, arriving at least 20 minutes
late to everything; right now is 10 minutes from now.
They do not think of this as waiting. Time is not razor
sharp; rather it slips easily through open fingers.”
Kalamazoo sponsors programs in 18 countries and
regularly sends students to programs run by other
U.S. colleges and universities as well. It does not send
Kalamazoo professors with students during the regular
school year. “We have long-standing relationships with
partner universities and institutions. Occasionally
we hire people in-country to serve as the primary
contact or academic director for our students,” said
Brockington. “But we want them as much as possible
to be enrolled in local programs.” Some of these relationships date back to the mid-1960s. The relationships are not one-way streets. “We also have students
coming to Kalamazoo from a number of our partners.
We exchange faculty and we’re doing some joint
projects,” he said.
The study abroad experience often is different from
what students expected. “Part of our predeparture orientation focuses on the fact that folks elsewhere in the
world accumulate and transmit knowledge differently
children from
the Laverton
Aboriginal
community.
than we do in the West,” said Brockington. “A student’s notion of education and learning are really
challenged when confronted with a tutorial in Britain
or Australia or in Germany where the students are
expected to rise to the level of the professor, and not
that the professor is expected to bend down and lift
the students up.”
Brockington and his colleagues in the Center for
International Programs visit each Kalamazoo-sponsored program once a year. Ten-week programs run
from the end of March to June. Fall programs last 14
to 17 weeks. Others run for a full academic year.
The college, with an annual budget of $25 million,
spends $3.5 million on study abroad. It extends more
than $1 million in institutional aid to students who
are studying abroad.
Some colleges charge students thousands of dollars
more than full tuition for their study abroad programs.
Kalamazoo does not. “We’re breaking even,” said
Brockington.
What would happen if a lot of students decided to go
abroad on their own? “The social compact that holds
the program together at Kalamazoo College would fall
apart,” said Brockington. “Eventually we would lose
the critical mass that allows us to offer the program at
the same price of courses on campus, and we’d lose the
variety of offerings.”
The home telephone numbers of Brockington and his
colleagues are in the study abroad handbook that every
student and parent receives. “I also carry a pager and a
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Phil Mather ’99 (r.)
and an Ecuadoran
man with their
hand-made guitars
in Quito, Ecuador.
cell phone that’s good in 90 countries,” said
Brockington. “Any one of my [overseas] partners can
call me day or night, and I know that I can call them.”
Sixty percent of Kalamazoo students study in settings
where the instruction is in a language other than
English. The remaining programs operate either in
English or a mix of English and the target language.
Brockington said that as a language teacher, he favors
students’ knowing enough of the target language to
enroll in courses with local students. “But as a study
abroad director, I think foreign language is the beginning of the program, not the end. There are all kinds
of goals, including developing the ability to move from
one culture to the other and work with local people,”
he added.
Kalamazoo students who go to Thailand study the
Thai language, but also take courses in English on sustainable development. They do the same at universities
in Hungary, Turkey, Denmark, Italy, and, for some,
Japan. (Some students do all their work in Japan in
Japanese). Others are totally immersed in Spain,
France, Germany, Chile, Mexico, Ecuador, and other
countries. The students in Dakar, Senegal, study in
French and also learn Walla, an indigenous language.
“That may be a hallmark of our success. We offer
programs that fit a wide variety of students with
different academic and intercultural interests and
goals, and who are at various places in their own
personal development,” said Brockington. The college
needs a minimum of five students to offer a program
in a particular country.
What happens if too many students want to go to one
place? “It’s not unlike the situation on campus where
the registrar sets an enrollment limit in a class. We’ve
had to move a few students around,” he said. “This is
life as it really is. No script, no guarantees. We make it
up as we go along.” He won’t send students anywhere
unless the college can be “reasonably assured the student will be reasonably safe and secure—provided
the student behaves reasonably.” Kalamazoo pulled a
student back from Israel in mid-2001. It also has
suspended operations in Zimbabwe. In 1994 the college evacuated students from Sierra Leone after the
U.S. embassy warned about rising civil strife; they
finished their studies in Kenya.
Emily Crawford, who spent six months at the
University of Nairobi in 1998, wrote a haunting series
of essays on her experiences for the Kalamazoo alumni
magazine. In a passage titled “The Lion,” Crawford
captured what many have felt about study abroad:
Culture shock occurs when new sights, sounds, and
smells drill through your ideas of what is normal
and natural. Out of your home culture you feel
defenseless, open to any predatory creature in the
area. A friend of mine joked that he was so scared on
the walk to his home-stay, located on the outskirts of
the city, that he was sure the lions in the Nairobi
City Park could smell his adrenaline. With senses on
alert and antennae overextended, instincts are at
their sharpest. Like the gazelle in the open savanna,
there is no stopping once the race is on. You run as
fast as you can and hope the lion tires before you do.
The lion is not the foreign culture, but your own self
with its prejudices, history, experiences, religion, race,
gender and heritage chasing you. No matter how
many defenses are built to protect the ego, they are
useless against the assault another culture makes on
who you are.
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On the Slopes of
Diamond Head,
Kapi’olani
Surveys the
Pacific
KAPI’OLANI
COMMUNITY
COLLEGE
Few colleges are better situated geographically to survey their region and world than Kapi’olani
Community College, perched on the slopes of
Diamond Head crater overlooking the Pacific,
Waikiki, and downtown Honolulu. Kapi’olani, part of
the 10-campus University of Hawaii system, calls itself
“an island college with a global reach” and has won
plaudits for infusing Asia-Pacific studies into its curriculum. It has a student body of 7,300 enrolled in a
wide array of two-year liberal arts and professional
programs, and offers noncredit, lifelong learning
courses to thousands more. It has reached out to universities far across the Pacific—in Japan, Korea, China,
Sri Lanka, New Zealand, and elsewhere as well as on
the U.S. mainland—to form partnerships and alliances
to teach languages and share the rich culture and history of the islands and countries of the Pacific. It has
long been a national model for community colleges
seeking to internationalize their offerings.
Its fortunes are hostage to the strength of the state’s
tourist-dependent economy. State support failed to
grow as rapidly as enrollments over the past 15 years,
and the Hawaiian economy has felt the pain of downturns, first in the economic woes that befell Asia and
California, and then in the collapse of tourism after
the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York
and Washington. Two years ago Hawaii’s college professors joined public school teachers in a strike for better pay. The University of Hawaii system—three universities and seven community colleges—now is in a
rebuilding mode, buoyed by the arrival of a new president, Evan S. Dobelle, who has reminded the state’s
citizens and legislators how vital education is to
Hawaii’s future. Dobelle, who began his career at a
community college in Massachusetts, has assured
leaders of Kapi’olani and Hawaii’s other community
colleges that they will be “truly equal partners” in the
system’s future. Subsequently, the State Board of
Regents gave Kapi’olani and two other community
colleges a green light to each offer a single four-year
degree. Kapi’olani’s first baccalaureate program will
be in culinary arts. The university, in recognition of
the college’s expanded role, proposed this spring
changing its name to Kapi’olani College, University
of Hawaii System.
Waiting to march
in the Parade of
Cultures are
students Anh
Pham from
Vietnam, Sonoe
Nakasone from
Mali, and Saima
Huma from
Pakistan, as well
as local resident
Vlasta Smrz,
(2nd from right) in
her native Czech
costume.
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(French, Spanish, Japanese, and Hawaiian) added five:
Chinese, Korean, Russian, Tagalog, and Samoan. To
earn a two-year degree, students must take at least one
year of a foreign language or Hawaiian. The growth of
languages at Kapi’olani increased the community college’s attractiveness for students intent on securing a
baccalaureate degree at the University of Hawaii at
Manoa, which has a two-year language requirement.
With the new offerings, language enrollments at
Kapi’olani doubled in three years from 500 to 1,000.
The college also teaches American Sign Language.
Student Mizue
Hasegawa
displays her
prowess at the
Japanese martial
art Kyudo or
“The Way of
the Bow.”
That is fitting for an institution that began life when
Hawaii was still a territory as the Kapi’olani Technical
School. The first courses offered there were in food
services. Later the school added nursing, dental, and
business courses and in 1965 it became part of the
University of Hawaii system. In the 1970s it relocated
from downtown to a lush 44-acre campus on the
slopes of Diamond Head that once was part of the
U.S. Army’s Fort Ruger. Students pursue two-year
degrees, certificates, or transfer credits in business,
health, hospitality, legal studies, and liberal arts.
“We have sought to create an environment here that
is international in outlook and scope,” said Leon
Richards, director of international education and
senior academic dean. Kapi’olani’s enrollment mirrors
the diversity that the institution endeavors to teach.
Two-thirds of students are of Asian or Pacific Island
heritage (including 10 percent who are Hawaiian or
part-Hawaiian). Twenty percent are of mixed ethnic
heritage and 12 percent are Caucasian. Five hundred
students are from other countries. The college’s very
name speaks to Hawaii’s heritage. Its namesake is
Queen Julia Kapi’olani, who reigned with her husband, King David Kalakaua, the next-to-last monarch
in the late 19th century. The queen was known for her
concern about the health and welfare of the people.
The college has adopted her motto: Kulia i ka Nu’u,
or “Strive for the Highest.”
The college’s signature Kapi’olani Asia Pacific
Emphasis (KAPE)—a curricular innovation—began in
1986 and moved forward with the help of a Title VI
grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The
college, which had been teaching four languages
Now, 160 students each year complete intermediatelevel Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Filipino, and Spanish
courses, said Bob Franco, acting director of planning
and institutional research and professor of anthropology. “We also have a large number of heritage speakers
of those languages on campus.” Kapi’olani awards 600
degrees each year. Those who transfer to Manoa typically earn higher grades than those who spend all four
years there.
The Kapi’olani Asia Pacific Emphasis remains embedded in the campus curriculum and culture. Several
coordinators have advanced into the college leadership.
Its strongest legacy is on the faculty, but it also struck
a chord among students in this diverse, multicultural
state. The college has sought to use the Asian-Pacific
emphasis to attract and keep students drawn to these
studies by their own ethnic heritage. “Retention is a
big issue for community colleges. A lot of our students
trace their heritage back to Pacific Islands and Asia.
We knew that KAPE would help with retention if our
students—a Japanese-American student or a ChineseAmerican student or a Samoan student—could see
themselves and those cultures in the curriculum,”
said Franco.
This emphasis can be found not just in the language
courses or courses on the history and politics of Asia
and the Pacific Islands, but in the culinary and hospitality curriculum, as well as in business and nursing
classes. “Hospitality is more than just food. It’s service
also,” pointed out Richards. “How does one serve different ethnic groups, whether it’s a Chinese family or
Japanese family? How do you show them respect? It’s
different from culture to culture. We try to infuse cer-
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tain Asia-Pacific values into the career programs as well
as the liberal arts programs.”
The emphasis on other countries and cultures is manifested each spring during the college’s International
Festival, a colorful four-day extravaganza of cuisine,
cultural performances, lectures, and other special
events. The festival has been a tradition for 15 years at
Kapi’olani. International festivals are popular, colorful
events at hundreds of campuses throughout the United
States. In Hawaii, where hospitality is practically a religion and sharing native cultures a passion, Kapi’olani’s
festival is a feast for the eye, mind, and senses. Carl
Hefner, cocoordinator of KAPE and assistant professor
of anthropology, said the festival “provides real value
added to the education that students get here.”
The Kapi’olani Asia Pacific Emphasis is evident in
Hefner’s Anthropology 200 course, which all nursing
students must take. Some come in wondering what an
introductory anthropology class has to do with the
healing arts. “Nursing students are very fact-oriented,
the-knee-bone-is-connected-to-the-leg-bone types,”
said Franco, who is also an anthropologist. “We
explain that they are going to be taking their own
cultural baggage into the nursing profession, and they
are going to be working with people of very different
cultural backgrounds. They need to understand the
unique perspectives and approaches different groups
have to sickness and illness.”
For example, Franco, an expert on Samoan life, said,
“If you talk with health professionals in Hawaii,
typically they immediately ask, ‘Why is it that when
we have a Samoan patient, there’s 30 or 40 family
members in the hospital room all the time?’” Franco
explained that this “incredible family response is part
of how the Samoan patient is going to get better. For
the nurse, that means they are going to have to negotiate their way between that Samoan patient and the
Samoan family members. They need to understand
how important the value of respect is to Samoans.”
While relatively few Kapi’olani students study abroad,
the college is actively seeking to increase those numbers. It also is looking for ways to send more faculty to
Korean students
and families
wearing the
traditional hanbok.
international conferences and to pursue research in
other countries. It has 22 exchange agreements with
institutions in Japan, Korea, the Marshall Islands, Sri
Lanka, China, New Zealand, Australia, and elsewhere
in the Western Pacific. It is working with Peking
University to automate the posting of Chinese language and cultural materials on the Web. The college
is also collaborating with Christchurch Polytechnic in
New Zealand and Jumbunna Aboriginal Institute at
the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, on
a comparative curriculum to understand indigenous
peoples and cultures. At home in Hawaii, Kapi’olani
also has regular dealings with the Pacific and Asian
Affairs Council, Center for Asia Pacific Education
(CAPE), the East-West Center, and the Center for
Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii
at Manoa.
Franco directed the Beacon Project, a collaboration by
10 community colleges across the United States that
produced in 1992 a four-volume guide called “Beyond
the Classroom: International Education and the
Community College.” Under the project, funded by
the Kellogg Foundation and the American Association
of Community Colleges, two-year institutions in
Hawaii, California, and Michigan shared insights on
how they developed international programs and partnerships more commonly found on four-year campuses. Ten papers in the first volume tell in detail how
Kapi’olani faculty infused Asia-Pacific studies across
their curriculum, from humanities to the culinary arts.
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a second language program that prepares non-English
speakers for regular college study in Hawaii or on the
mainland. It also operates a Gaullaudet University
Regional Center, affiliated with the federally funded
university in Washington, D.C., for the deaf.
A Kapi’olani
student outside
Hosenji Temple in
Futumata, Japan,
during a service
learning trip.
Kapi’olani’s service learning program—another one of
its curricular-wide emphases—recently was selected
as a model of civic engagement by the Carnegie
Corporation of New York and the Campus Compact,
a national network that promotes service-based
learning. “We’re very cognizant about bridging across
generations. We have students here who are first and
second generation Chinese,” said Franco. We use the
ethnic communities that surround the college as a
resource and as part of the learning environment.
We don’t just exploit that resource, but use our servicelearning program to provide real services to those
communities.” An example is Project Shine, in which
Kapi’olani students guide Chinese immigrants on the
path to citizenship.
While KAPE is of older vintage, Kapi’olani now is
trying to do more on the international education and
globalization fronts, said Richards, who served as
acting provost in 2002. Promoting local, regional,
and global learning is a key plank in the college’s new
strategic plan. It is also committed to recruiting and
retaining more native Hawaiian students, who are
underrepresented in the ranks of students, faculty, and
administrators. The college is bolstering support for
international students. It renamed the campus building housing international programs the Honda
International Center, in honor of Paul S. Honda, a
community leader, internationalist, and college benefactor who was born in Manchuria, grew up in Tokyo,
and emigrated to the United States, where he became a
successful businessman. The center also serves international students at the University of Hawaii’s six other
community colleges. The college has a large English as
Down the road, Richards envisions Kapi’olani using
technology to offer Japanese or Korean language classes to distant audiences. “Many campuses here as well
as on the mainland can sustain first-year classes, but in
the second year enrollment really decreases,” said
Richards. “We could partner with institutions on the
mainland in terms of that second year.”
Kapi’olani also has put together a digital library of
Asia-Pacific resource materials. “We are preparing for
the next leap forward, which is to be able to offer a
complete degree online,” said Hefner, who already
offers the Anthropology 200 course online to students
on other Hawaiian islands.
Hawaii’s leaders envision their island state’s becoming
the Geneva of the Pacific, a crossroads for international commerce, diplomacy, and academic work, as well
as for tourism. If that happens, Kapi’olani Community
College stands ready to help.
As Bob Franco put it, “Instead of looking at ourselves
as an isolated island 2,300 miles out in the middle of
the Pacific, we’ve chosen to see ourselves as a bridge
between Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas.”
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Taking ‘The Language
Pledge’ in Vermont’s
Champlain Valley
MIDDLEBURY
COLLEGE
Middlebury College has trademarked the phrase “The
Language Pledge,” and why not? Its summer language
schools are famous for their immersion methods and
the requirement that students speak only the language
they are studying. No one has yet thought to trademark “Middlebury,” but the college name itself has
become as synonymous with language acquisition as
Babel is with confusion.
At the Middlebury College Language Schools, students squeeze a year’s worth of Arabic, Chinese,
French, German, Japanese, Russian, Italian, Spanish,
or Portuguese into an intense seven to nine weeks.
They pledge to speak only that language in classes,
dining halls, dormitories, on the soccer field, or in the
swimming pool. They cannot listen to news broadcasts
or read newspapers in English. They can revert to
English if they call or send e-mail back home, but
are asked to keep that “to the absolute minimum.”
The Language Schools—there will be nine this summer when Portuguese is added to the roster for the
first time—started in 1915 when a Vassar professor of
German, Lilian L. Stroebe, settled on Middlebury as a
congenial mountain setting for her summer classes.
She had offered instruction in Connecticut and
Pennsylvania in previous summers. In a prospectus,
Stroebe promised that students would “hear and speak
German from 8 in the morning until 10 in the
Gaia Capecchi
teaching a
summer Italian
School class on
the lawn in front
of Old Chapel.
evening.” Her offerings drew 47 takers and a tradition
was born. The French School was added in 1916,
Spanish in 1917, Italian in 1932, Russian in 1946,
Chinese in 1970, Arabic in 1982, and now
Portuguese. The Language Schools draw 1,200 students each summer from across the country and
around the world. They include college students
(including 100 Middlebury undergraduates), graduate
students, and the occasional senior citizen. Some are
teachers themselves pursuing a master’s degree. The
(Bob Handelman Images,
New York, NY)
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saga of the Language Schools is told in The
Middlebury College Language Schools: The Story of a
Unique Idea, a 408-page history by the late Stephen A.
Freeman, who taught French at Middlebury for four
decades and directed the Language Schools for a
quarter-century.
But the Language Schools are only part of the story
about how language study gained such a prominent
place at Middlebury. When the college opened its
doors in 1800 to train young men from Vermont and
environs for the ministry and other learned professions, the only languages taught were Latin and Greek.
By the time Alexander Twilight (class of 1823) became
the first African American to earn a college degree in
the United States, German was taught, and other
modern languages soon followed.
Michael R. Katz,
dean of the
Language Schools
and Schools
Abroad, is a
Russian scholar
Middlebury does not require every student to study a
foreign language. A general academic requirement
comes close: all undergraduates must take at least one
course in seven of eight broad categories. But if a student arrives more terrified of French than say, physics
or philosophy or math, he or she can depart eight
semesters later without having conjugated a single
verb. A blanket requirement might be superfluous. As
the Vatican does not need to compel tourists to visit
the Sistine Chapel, Middlebury does not have to twist
arms to get students into language courses. Two-thirds
of freshmen enroll in language courses and more than
40 percent reach advanced levels. “Our students are so
self-motivated that they take languages anyway,” said
Michael Geisler, associate dean of the faculty for arts,
humanities, and languages and former chair of the
German department. “They come with a global outlook and an interest in foreign cultures.”
Michael R. Katz, dean of Language Schools and C. V.
Starr-Middlebury Schools Abroad, is on the college
faculty as a professor of Russian. But he hires outside
directors for each Language School, who in turn
recruit non-Middlebury instructors—200 in all—for
the summer programs. A Middlebury professor or two
sometimes teach in the Language Schools as well.
Some Middlebury undergraduates use the Language
Schools as a springboard for study abroad at a School
Abroad or to move into advanced classes on campus
during the regular year. Katz called them “three separate but equal operations”—the Language Schools, the
Schools Abroad, and the language courses taught at
Middlebury during the regular year. “For Middlebury’s
purpose, separate is equal,” said Katz.
The summer program “probably is the most
immersed, even though it’s not abroad, because we
make the rules and enforce the rules and we bully people,” he added. Overseas “there are all sorts of opportunities and temptations to speak English with foreign
students, with other American students, with tourists.
They may go to a bar, read The Herald Tribune, see
CNN. And of course, when they’re in Middlebury in
the academic year, they are taking three other courses
and involved in all sorts of cocurricular activities,
keeping them in English.”
Sixty percent of Middlebury juniors spend a semester
or their full year abroad. Two-fifths enroll in the C. V.
Starr-Middlebury Schools Abroad operated at universities in 16 cities across Europe and South America.
Other U.S. colleges and universities also send students
to the Schools Abroad, which also follow an immersion model and require students to sign a modified
language pledge. They are located in France, Spain,
Germany, Russia, Italy, Argentina, and Uruguay.
and collector
of matryoshka,
or Russian
nesting dolls.
(Melanie Stetson Freeman,
Christian Science Monitor)
The 350-acre campus sits in the town of Middlebury
(population 8,138) in Vermont’s Champlain Valley,
nestled between the Green Mountains and the
Adirondacks, 158 miles from Boston and 234 miles
from New York. “We attract many faculty who otherwise would not go to a small town, however beautiful,
because of the atmosphere that we have here,” said
Geisler, a native of Mannheim, Germany. Colleagues
elsewhere kid him that teaching German at
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Middlebury is a breeze.
“Quite frankly,” said Geisler,
who previously taught at the
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, “I think it is.”
Students in the
The emphasis on the international has gained momentum
at Middlebury over the past
decade. In a 1994 speech,
Middlebury President John M.
McCardell, Jr., said, “We envision . . . that this college will
become singularly known as a
place that insists upon, and
teaches, a global understanding
that radiates from a core linguistic and cultural competency.” Since then, the college has added almost 20 faculty positions related to
international education. The popular international
studies major requires both study abroad and mastery
of a language to advanced levels. International studies
is taking majors away from the language departments,
although upwards of 15 percent of students are still
language majors, usually as part of a double major.
More than half the 84 language majors in the class of
2003 were studying Spanish or French.
With international studies, “we want them not only to
master the language but also the culture,” said Geisler.
“We want them to know something about the art, the
politics, the literature, the social system in those countries. We can teach all of that here, but that’s not the
same as sending them abroad, which is why this is the
only major with a study abroad requirement.”
It was only in the last generation that language programs in the United States began to stress speaking
skills over reading and grammar. While actually using
the language has always been a hallmark of the
Middlebury Language Schools, that emphasis is now
in its regular classrooms as well. “Students are encouraged to speak much earlier and to take more risks with
the language,” said Geisler. “They’ll make more mistakes, but they’ll also learn faster.” Under the old
grammar-drill method, it might take a year and a half
before beginning German students “were really
Spanish School
perform in the
pasacalle, a
stop-and-go
parade that is
a tradition in
Latin countries.
(Robert J. Keren,
Middlebury, VT)
allowed to speak and express themselves in any kind
of free way. Nowadays, students do that after three or
four sessions. Their sentences are rudimentary—but
they are their own sentences,” said Geisler. “It is by
experimenting with language, based on your own creativity, thoughts, and ideas that you start learning more.”
Students are required to sit at language tables for
lunch at least once a week, where faculty take turns
joining them. Middlebury also has language houses.
The college is gearing up to add Arabic instruction
during the regular year for the first time, which will
mean all the languages taught in the summer schools
will also be available at the college. Interest in the language has picked up on many U.S. campuses since the
terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Geisler expects
20 to 30 students to sign up for Arabic 101 and says
the college will follow with intermediate- and
advanced-level courses as well. “We’re also hiring
[Arabists] in political science and eventually in history,
and we already have somebody in Islamic studies and
religion. So we’ll have four Arabists. We’ll have the
nucleus of a Middle Eastern studies program if we
want to develop such a program in the future.”
Middlebury’s language programs, and those at campuses
throughout the New England and mid-Atlantic region,
have benefited from the work of the Middlebury-based
Center for Educational Technology, which holds work-
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The Chinese
School offers
tai chi among its
co-curricular
activities.
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I N T E R N AT I O N A L I Z I N G T H E C A M P U S 2 0 0 3
shops, creates curriculum “modules to go,” and provides other ideas and materials to spark improvements
in the ways languages are taught at dozens of liberal
arts colleges. The Mellon Foundation has funded this
center and two others at the University of Michigan
in Ann Arbor and Southwestern University in
Georgetown, Texas.
Middlebury encourages interdisciplinary collaboration
and the Foreign Languages Across the Curriculum
(FLAC) approach, in which foreign language components are added to courses customarily taught only in
English. Middlebury professors have taught FLAC
courses on subjects ranging from Latin American
politics to German and French cinema.
“Like everybody else, we use the World Wide Web in
classrooms. That’s not a breakthrough any more,” said
Geisler. But with help from the Center for Education
Technology, Geisler has German majors creating interactive hypertext links on authentic materials that in
turn are used by students in Middlebury’s beginning
and intermediate German classes.
“We have Foreign Language Across the Curriculum in
an informal way in many venues here,” said Geisler.
“We have team-taught courses between language and
culture experts and people in other disciplines, including the capstone senior seminars. There is a constant
give-and-take, a constant conversation going on
between different parts of the curriculum. That is
part of Middlebury’s unique atmosphere.”
For the summer Language Schools, Katz views small
class size as more important than any advances in
technology. “The strength of the summer schools is
still the traditional one: an instructor in a small class,
anywhere from five to ten students, with intensive
drill work, four hours a day in class, then four to six
hours outside class. Some of that time is spent in
either an old-fashioned language lab or a more modern, computerized lab. But the reason for coming to
Middlebury is that intensive immersion and contact.”
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R O G R A M S
Showing Students
the World, and
Bringing the
World Back to
New Jersey
MONTCLAIR
STATE
UNIVERSITY
In the past decade Montclair State University has
made strides in bringing a global perspective to the
education of the nearly 15,000 students at this suburban campus nine miles north of Newark and 14 miles
east of New York City. Both President Susan A. Cole
and her predecessor, Irvin D. Reid, now the president
of Wayne State University, have made it their mission
to prepare those students to be “citizens of the world,”
as Cole put it. Montclair State long has ranked second
only to Rutgers as the state’s largest university and is
now in the midst of a building boom that will boost
enrollment to 18,000 within five years. Construction
cranes have sprouted all over the suburban 247-acre
campus in Upper Montclair, New Jersey. The projects
include new residence halls, an academic center, theater, parking garages, and even a New Jersey Transit
train station. Montclair State, which began its existence as a teachers college in 1908, now offers the
nation’s only doctorate in pedagogy as well as a Ph.D.
in environmental management. The School of
Business has held annual global business conferences
in China, India, Slovakia, and Thailand and is headed
soon to Mexico.
President Cole has personally attended all those conferences and other events convened overseas by
Montclair State. She delivered the keynote at a conference on “Democracy and Education” at Kirovograd
State Pedagogical University in Kiev, Ukraine, on
June 1, 2001. The U.S. State Department Bureau of
Educational and Cultural Exchange provided a partnership grant to Montclair State and Kirovograd State
for the conference, which drew 150 scholars, deans,
and leaders from 30 institutions across Central
and Eastern Europe and the United States.
Cole traced the dramatic growth in
opportunities to pursue higher education in the United States. When
the 20th century began, only one
high school graduate in 25 went
on to college or a university.
Now seven in ten go on to college, “and that figure is projected to rise quickly to 80
percent,” Cole said. Some in
Montclair State
University
science class.
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Cole read in Ukrainian and English the lines of Taras
Shevchenko, the 19th century poet, patriot, and bard
of Ukraine.
In the transformed world
There will be no enemy.
Montclair State
University
President
Susan A. Cole.
the United States argued that higher education was
not necessary for so many, she said. “But the American
people have never accepted that view because, quite
simply, that is not what they want for their own children.... For democracy to function, the great majority
of the people must be educated.”
Then, with a flair for the dramatic—she won a playwriting fellowship in graduate school—Cole finished on
a personal note that caught the audience by surprise.
My father grew up here in Kiev during a time when
there were enemies everywhere and life was extremely
hard.... His parents worked and saved to send their
seven children to America where they hoped for a
better life. My father was 14 when he traveled with
his 16-year-old sister and an eight-year-old nephew
from Kiev to Rotterdam and from there by ship to
America. The journey that my father made, leaving
behind his mother and father, his country and his
language, could not have seemed like a greater distance had he been required to leave this planet and
travel to another solar system.
Were he still alive today, he would be astonished to
know that I am here, in the city of his birth, that
parts of the world that were so distant when he was
a boy had grown so close together, not just in the ease
and short time of travel, but intellectually and culturally, and in the friendships that are forged by collaborations such as the one occurring here....Soon
technology will enable students from Kirovograd and
Montclair to share the same classrooms and learn
together even without leaving home. These possibilities are the small miracles of our time.
Some in the audience were moved to tears. For Cole
and for Montclair State, it was a memorable moment
on a long journey. Montclair State is still primarily a
commuter college, with most students pursuing bachelor or master’s degrees. But it has been a comprehensive university since the mid-1960s. A growing number of international students are finding their way
here. Almost 5 percent of undergraduates and more
than 4 percent of the 3,700 graduate students are from
other countries. Business administration is the leading
draw for both. Montclair State offers 250 majors and
minors in the arts, sciences, and humanities. After
business administration, teaching and counseling are
the largest graduate programs. Its Institute for the
Advancement of Philosophy for Children is the home
of an international movement that encourages the
teaching of philosophy to pupils in elementary school.
Cole grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and attended
Erasmus Hall High School and Barnard College at
Columbia University before getting a Ph.D. in English
literature at Brandeis University. Her immigrant
parents, who owned an art store, never spoke Russian
at home, speaking only English to Cole and her
brother, who became a mathematics professor. “They
refused to speak anything but English in the house
because their job was to make sure we grew up
American,” said Cole. Like many academics of her
generation, she added, “I learned and forgot several
languages several times.”
She acquired a resolve to push the boundaries of
higher education, a belief she carried with her as an
English professor at the City University of New York
(CUNY) and later as an administrator at Antioch
University, Rutgers, back at CUNY, and then as
president at Metropolitan State University in
Minneapolis-St. Paul from 1993 to 1998 before
coming to Upper Montclair.
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“We once were a teachers’ college, but we’re a very
large, comprehensive public university now.
Humanities and Social Science is our largest college.
We are a center of excellence in the arts,” said Cole.
Most undergraduates are traditional college age. Some
2,300 now live on campus, but that number soon will
top 4,000.
Montclair State
University
campus.
“A lot of students come to us having grown up within
a relatively limited frame of reference. Our job is to
broaden that frame of reference,” said Cole. “There’s
no question that in today’s world, science, art, knowledge, the economy, no longer exist within national
boundaries, let alone state boundaries. If our students
are going to participate constructively and fully in
those fields, they must be citizens of the world.”
“Parochial views about life or society will lead to dismal failures, whether it is failures of the economy or
failures of the culture,” said Cole. “Everything we do
has to help both our faculty and our students avoid
parochialism and open perspectives and understanding
as broadly as possible.”
Montclair State’s Global Education Center, opened in
1996, coordinates international programs on campus,
serves visiting scholars and students from other countries, and encourages students to study abroad over the
summer or for a semester. It dispenses $100,000 in
grants each year to faculty to conduct research abroad
and attend international conferences. It especially
encourages collaborations with the six foreign universities with which Montclair State has close ties:
Kirovograd in Kiev; East China Normal University in
Shanghai; Kerala University in India; the Moscow
Conservatory in Russia; Universidad del Valle de
Atemajac (UNIVA) in Guadalajara, Mexico; and
Wonkwang University in South Korea. Forty-nine of
Montclair State’s 470 faculty members received grants
last year for projects in 26 countries.
“All of our [international education] programs have
increased steadily, but the main thing is the faculty
involvement,” said Marina Cunningham, the center’s
director. Cunningham also brings a steady stream of
international visitors to campus for lectures and faculty
forums, dubbed “Tea and Talk” sessions. Recent visi-
tors included Svetlana Broz, a physician and granddaughter of the late Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito,
and Pakistani playwright Shahid Nadeem. Whether
coming for an evening or a semester, the visitors usually stay at the university’s International Guest House.
“Our next goal is to increase the numbers of students
going abroad,” said Cunningham, who was born in
Shanghai to Russian parents and grew up in China
and Ecuador. She holds a doctorate in Slavic languages
and literature from Northwestern University.
“Traveling overseas culturally is a new concept for
many of them. They prefer to go in summer programs,
traveling with a Montclair State professor and also
taking courses with faculty at different universities.”
Montclair State charges non-New Jersey residents
(including international students) just one-third more
than in-state tuition rates. In some hardship cases it
charges international students in-state rates. “It’s good
for our students to be exposed to international students. Academically, they are very well prepared,” said
Cunningham. Three-fifths of Montclair State students
are women, and the setting is a plus for female international students. “We’re so close to New York and on
a very pleasant suburban campus. Young women from
countries like Japan feel very safe here,” she noted.
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Cunningham and Cole visited Thailand and Vietnam
in January in conjunction with the School of
Business’s seventh international conference, cosponsored by the Asian Institute of Technology. “The
events of September 11 and their aftermath make evident that lack of knowledge and understanding about
‘the other’ is not just an American deficit,” Cole said
in her speech. She added that it falls largely to the universities of the world “to provide the education and
training that can enable people to have sufficient
understanding of others” to work together and sustain
economic growth and stability. Cole brought two
Montclair State undergraduates—the president of the
student body and the managing editor of the weekly
student paper—on the trip, which included stops at
four universities in Thailand and one in Vietnam.
Inbal Kahanov wrote a 2,100-word account for The
Montclarion, telling how an English major in Saigon
told the students over pho that she loved Eminem,
Britney Spears, the Harry Potter movies, and Tom
Hanks. They also heard from a U.S. embassy official
about how much a relationship with Montclair State
could mean for Vietnamese college students. Cole has
taken students on other international trips.
“It has been critical both for my predecessor and for
me to be personally engaged in articulating the value
of global education to the university community,”
Cole said in an interview. It is that articulation that
makes “those values real for the university community.”
How receptive are Montclair State students to this
message about globalization?
“In many ways global awareness is not something that
students recognize they need,” Cole replied. “That
goes back to many students’ limited frames of reference as they enter universities. I don’t think they
necessarily understand yet the significance of having a
deep global understanding—although after September
11, I think they understand it better.”
The path ahead for Montclair State includes building
closer electronic links to sister institutions around the
world. Already, Montclair State art students have created joint art projects over the Internet with students at
East China Normal University. The Montclair State
Symphonic Band, 30 students strong, has performed
in Moscow and St. Petersburg with the Russian Armed
Forces Band. Two hundred sixty students studied
abroad last year, mostly during the summer.
“I know that it will always be a minority of our students who actually engage in foreign travel during
their college career. So how do we deepen international understanding when we can’t necessarily transport
the student to the Far East or Eastern Europe or South
America?” Cole asked. “The answer we have—the
miracle of our century—is technology.”
“I am very interested in getting to the place where our
students can sit in a classroom in Montclair State and
at the same time be in a classroom at East China
Normal University or Comenius University in Slovakia
or Kirovograd State University in Ukraine so we have
students there, students here, faculty there, faculty
here, jointly studying together. That will be a reality
soon. The potential is enormous. For an institution
such as mine where many of the students are not
privileged, and many have to work,...we can bring the
world to them through technology,” said Cole.
Her advice for institutions just setting out on this road
to internationalization?
“Begin in the classroom. Bring in some exciting speakers and get the faculty engaged in the intellectual
excitement of internationalizing their curricula.
Provide incentives and support for faculty who take
up that initiative,” Cole said. “It doesn’t take a lot of
money. Sometimes just a little grant to work over the
summer or participate in international conferences.
Begin with faculty excitement because that’s where
the front line is.”
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RANDOLPHMACON
WOMAN’S
COLLEGE
From Pearl Buck
to the Bangla Anthem,
a Global Outlook
On the eve of her 1994 interview for the presidency of
Randolph-Macon Woman’s College (R-MWC),
Kathleen Gill Bowman noticed a picture of Pearl Buck
in a publication marking the college centennial three
years before. But there was no explanation of why the
Nobel Prize-winning author was there. The next
morning, Bowman asked the search committee, “Is
Pearl Buck by any chance an alumna of this college?”
Fast forward to April 2000. Sheikh Hasina, then prime
minister of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, was
on campus to receive the college’s second Pearl S. Buck
Award—named for the famed class of 1914 alumna
who grew up in China and returned there to write the
novels that won her the Nobel Prize for literature in
1938. Hasina was honored as a peacemaker and for
her work on behalf of impoverished women and children in South Asia and around the world. Hasina told
a hushed audience, “If women can be protected from
injuries and harm, they can create, through their
contributions, a world full of love, affection, amity,
and dreams.” At the program’s close, the college
chorale sang the Bangladesh national anthem. The
Bangladeshi embassy in Washington, D.C. had provided the score, and Adeela Panni, a Randolph-Macon
junior from Bangladesh, had tutored her classmates
on the correct pronunciation.
The event captured the symbolism of just how international this small college at the foot of the Blue
Ridge mountains has become in the space of a few
years. Since Bowman became president, international
enrollments have grown from 3 percent to 13 percent
of the 764 students. Once affiliated with RandolphMacon College in Ashland, Virginia, a men’s college,
Randolph-Macon Woman’s College became independent in 1952. Today it is one of approximately 80
women’s colleges; 200 others closed or merged in the
intervening decades. Many of the women’s colleges
that survived have seen enrollments rebound in recent
years, in part because of their success in sending
women in large numbers on to graduate and professional schools. Bowman said that a higher percentage
of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College graduates earn
Ph.D.s than any other institution in Virginia except
the University of Virginia and the College of William
Sheikh Hasina,
then-prime
minister of
Bangladesh, on
campus to receive
the Pearl S. Buck
Award in
April 2000.
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students from other lands. In colorful brochures and
on its Web site, the college makes clear the welcome
mat is out for international students.
The move also has been popular with alumnae and
other benefactors. R-MWC has tripled spending on
international education programs and raised a $2.3
million endowment for international programs. It
awards $1.4 million in financial aid to international
students, who now come from 47 countries. The
college created the William F. Quillian Jr. Visiting
International Professorship in 1997, which has drawn
scholars from India, Croatia, Nigeria, China, Guyana,
and Egypt. Some of those professors in turn have
held seminars for R-MWC faculty back in their
home countries.
Assistant Professor
of Art James
Muehlemann
confers with a
student about
her work.
and Mary. “We produce a lot of academics. We’re not
sending many to Goldman Sachs,” said Bowman.
She describes the R-MWC approach to internationalization as “getting it into the drinking water. You really
can’t avoid it. It’s part of your daily diet.” That applies
to faculty as well as students. “It’s crucial that the faculty understand the dimensions of the 21st century
and the extent to which we’re living in a global village,” she said. “Not all faculty come that way. You
may have a biologist or a chemist or an English professor who’s never been outside the country. We’ve made
sizable investments to ensure that our faculty have significant international experience, can place their own
area of expertise in an international context, and are
eager and sensitive in communicating with their international students.”
“The most important way to do that is with faculty
you already have,” she added. “You can make strategic
new hires, but you’re never going to be able to hire
enough new faculty to take care of internationalization.”
The international focus has struck a chord with
prospective students. “The American students increasingly talk about its being a factor in choosing this
college,” the president said. The college now has an
admissions officer who works full-time recruiting
Bowman signaled this approach in her October 1994
inaugural address, titled, “Crossing Borders, Opening
Doors: Educating Women for the Twenty-First
Century.” She told the college community then that
R-MWC must prepare students for a world where, in
Vaclav Havel’s phrase, “everything is possible and
nothing is certain.” Bowman went on:
If our students are to live...and contribute to such a
world, they must transcend conventional boundaries,
they must see things whole, they must forge relationships, they must be undaunted in the face of complexity. They must cross borders and open doors to
new understanding.... They must grasp the fundamental connectedness of things, they must feel part of
a community that is preoccupied by these questions,
and they must know how to create and sustain
community within the context of a rapidly
changing world.
Almost half of R-MWC students study or work
abroad during their college careers, and most go for a
full academic year. During their time abroad, students
have observed the Milosevic trial at The Hague and
regularly joined an archaeology professor on a dig in
Carthage, Tunisia. With support from the college,
faculty have led students on summer seminars to four
continents over the past five years. R-MWC exchanges
students with universities in Spain and France and
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three colleges in Japan, as well as with Nanjing
University in China, where Pearl Buck once taught.
There is no mistaking now who is the college’s most
illustrious graduate. Corazon Aquino, former president
of the Philippines, had received the college’s first Pearl
S. Buck Award in 1999, and Egypt’s Jehan Sadat later
received the honor, which carries a $10,000 honorarium. The award ceremonies have attracted national and
international publicity.
A further word about the award’s namesake. She was
born Pearl Sydenstricker in West Virginia in 1892.
Her Presbyterian missionary parents brought her to
China as an infant and raised her there. She was a
stranger in a strange land when she showed up in
Lynchburg wearing a linen dress made by a Chinese
tailor. A classmate and lifelong friend, Emma
Edmunds, later recalled how sophisticated other freshmen looked, except for the one who “looked even
more countrified than me.” The missionaries’ daughter
soon abandoned her Chinese wardrobe and fell into
the life of the college. She majored in philosophy, and
became president of her junior class and editor of The
Tattler, the college literary magazine. She returned to
China after graduation and soon was famous, first for
magazine articles and then for her 1931 novel, The
Good Earth. The name Buck was from her first husband. Her works were out of favor in Maoist China,
but this is changing, in part due to the scholarly work
of Haiping Liu, a literature professor and Buck scholar
at Nanjing University. Liu was a Quillian professor at
R-MWC in 1999–2000.
Bowman came to R-MWC from the University of
Oregon, where she had been vice provost for international affairs and before that associate vice president
for research. A R-MWC alumna who worked with
Bowman there put her name forward for the vacancy.
Bowman, who holds a Ph.D. in English education
from the University of Minnesota, earlier had directed
special programs and graduate studies at Reed College.
Her interest in international education was whetted in
the 1980s when her 13-year-old daughter went to
Japan on a short exchange visit as a Portland middleschool student and later returned for her junior year
of high school.
Students carry
flags of their
home nations
during R-MWC
processions.
“It’s a wonderful example of how your children can
greatly expand your horizons,” recalled Bowman.
The entire Bowman family went to Japan to spend
Christmas vacation with their daughter that year “and
the experience took,” she recalled. She became very
involved with Sister Cities International. Portland and
Sapporo, Japan, have had a sister city relationship
since 1959.
Later, as a University of Oregon administrator, “my
charge was to raise money for faculty research, specifically for those who were not in big science. When
you’re in a situation like that, you look for the live
wires, and at Oregon, a lot of what was exciting was
happening in international areas,” she states. As a
result, Bowman helped build strong programs in
Southeast Asian and Asian and Pacific studies.
Bowman was drawn to Randolph-Macon Woman’s
College by the opportunity to “create something of a
microcosm of the world. You can have a very large
impact in a small community of students, faculty,
staff, and trustees.”
Globalization has come naturally to Pearl Buck’s alma
mater, but it is no surprise to Kathleen Bowman that
so many U.S. colleges and universities are moving in
the same direction. “Every college graduate going forward is going to be handicapped if he or she can’t
operate in a global context,” she said. “No matter what
that person’s profession or major, they are going to be
working either physically in a work setting or virtually
through electronic communication and travel with
teams of people who may look quite different by race,
by ethnicity, by language, by religion.
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Studying in the
shadow of the
Blue Ridge.
“I remember the days when you had to try to persuade
somebody on a campus that this globalization was
important. There was a lot of skepticism about it,”
she said. “Well, it’s self-evident now to any American
reading the newspaper or who’s moderately aware.
We’re in a very different place now. Globalization is
an imperative.”
Pearl Buck delivered the commencement address at her
alma mater in 1964, 50 years after her own graduation
and nine years before her death. In an address titled
“You and Your Miracle,” she told those young women:
The whole purpose of education is first to prepare
you with essential knowledge for the next stage in
your life and then to persuade, coerce and convince
you to use that knowledge in the hope that you will
not, because of ignorance, be a destructive force to
yourself and to others. Of course you will forget
details and facts, but all these years of learning in
the areas of human knowledge will compel you
nevertheless to remember at least where essential
knowledge is to be found, or even rediscovered
when you need it.
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St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, proudly
embraces both the educational and religious missions
that its Norwegian immigrant founders had in mind
back in the 1874. This four-year college of the
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America seeks to provide “an education committed to the liberal arts, rooted in the Christian Gospel, and incorporating a global
perspective.” It was first among four-year colleges in
Open Doors 2002 for the total number of study abroad
students; its 660 just edged two partner Minnesota
colleges, the College of St. Benedict and Saint John’s
University, which had 657. Nearly two-thirds of each
graduating class has studied abroad. St. Olaf is a leading producer of volunteers for the Peace Corps. With
3,000 undergraduates, it has produced numerous
Fulbright scholars—eight last year and six in 2001—
and many future Ph.D.s. The daily college schedule
includes a 20-minute chapel service each morning.
Attendance is voluntary; fewer than half the students
are Lutheran.
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A Path to Teaching
that Runs Through
India, Korea, and
Hong Kong
Outside the
Nanjing Massacre
Museum in
Nanjing, China.
(Photo by Teal Smith ‘04)
St. Olaf may be the only college with a fight song set
to a waltz. St. Olaf engenders strong loyalty. It just
completed a five-year campaign that topped its lofty
$125 million target by $17 million. One purpose for
which the money was raised was to add $10 million to
an existing $1 million endowment for study abroad.
St. Olaf’s International
and Off-Campus
Studies staff, FRONT
ROW (Left to Right)
For the past quarter century St. Olaf has sent a select
group of seniors off to student teach in English-speaking schools in India, South Korea, and Hong Kong.
Some 175 students have gone this route since 1977.
No one majors in education at St. Olaf, but the college has an approved teacher education program and
offers the education courses required for licensure in
Minnesota. “Their plate is full,” said Myron Solid, a
St. Olaf professor of education who coordinates the
licensure program. Many students now postpone their
student teaching until the fall after they graduate. “We
call it the ninth semester,” said Solid. This is the case
whether the students plan to practice teach in inner
city Minneapolis or suburban Edina, or whether their
passport is stamped for India or Hong Kong.
Roseanne Galegher,
coordinator of
student services,
Helen Stellmaker,
coordinator of
program advising and
student, activities,
BACK ROW
Jane Weis, office
manager, Kathy Tuma,
associate director,
Patrick Quade,
director, Barbara
Walters, coordinator
of budgets and
project assistant.
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Jenia traveled through northern India after completing
her teaching and saw poverty “so desperate it made me
nauseous.” She came back determined to share those
experiences with her future students.
“Enlightened Feet”
in a Buddhist
temple in India.
(Photo by Stefanie Graen ‘03)
“We don’t just send them anywhere,” said Solid, who
joined the St. Olaf faculty in 1971. The college purposely has kept the overseas internship program small,
placing students in a select number of schools with
which it keeps close ties. “When a student comes in
and says, ‘Can I student teach in London?’ we say,
‘No, not through us,’” explained Solid. The schools are
Kodaikanal International School in the mountains of
southern India; Woodstock International School north
of Delhi in the foothills of the Himalayas; the Hong
Kong International School; the Seoul Foreign School,
and, formerly, the Taipai American School in Taiwan.
From both sides’ standpoint, the continuity is invaluable. “There’s good communication. We establish a
site coordinator at every institution,” he said.
What do students get from teaching in North India
that they wouldn’t get in Northfield? Justin, who
taught at Kodaikanal, described the experience this
way in a student teaching log:
I taught in as diversity-rich a setting as I will ever
see. My students came from a multitude of backgrounds and...many different religions—Christianity,
Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, and Islam.
I was unsure at first how I would be able to teach
effectively. However, I found that my students were
eager to share.... It gave me not only the opportunity
to learn from my students, but also challenged me to
think along new avenues, be flexible, and show sensitivity in my teaching.
For some St. Olaf students, these practicums allow
them to fulfill a dream of studying abroad that they
were unable to find time for earlier in their college
careers. For others, it might be the second or even
third overseas experience. St. Olaf follows a 4-1-4
schedule, with professors teaching courses in dozens of
destinations across the United States and the world
each January; this year’s offerings include courses in
China, Japan, Bangladesh, Greece, Italy, Ecuador, and
the Bahamas.
Solid said students often ask beforehand, “If I do my
student teaching in India, will I be prepared to teach
in North Minneapolis?” He assures them the answer is
yes. “The setting and the students are different, but
the curriculum and schools are similar,” the professor
said. “We’re talking about an international student
body, not necessarily all Americans. These are private
schools, all started by Christian missionaries in the old
days. The schools in Hong Kong and Seoul enroll a lot
of students whose parents are Americans working
there. Most of the faculty is American.” In India, both
the students and faculty are “much more international.” But in all these schools, the young teachers are facing students bound for college.
St. Olaf leaves it up to students whether to seek the
opportunity to teach abroad, but Solid and his colleagues make sure that those who go “are academically
strong and high potential teacher candidates.” Each
student works with a mentor overseas and often lives
in that teacher’s home. The St. Olaf students arrive in
early August, attend new teacher workshops, and then
teach until Thanksgiving. American principals generally regard the experience as a feather in the student’s
cap. Other St. Olaf students who are not planning on
a teaching career nonetheless sign up after graduation
to teach English for a year in Japan or China. St. Olaf
has an exchange program with East China Normal
University in Shanghai. Others teach in the Peace
Corps or in the Lutheran Volunteer Corps.
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Foreign Languages Across the Curriculum at St. Olaf
St. Olaf College has set an example for colleges eager to try
At St. Olaf, faculty members have added FLAC compo-
Foreign Languages Across the Curriculum (FLAC). The con-
nents in Chinese, French, German, Norwegian, Russian, and
cept is straightforward: the college has redesigned a number
Spanish to courses in history, religion, science, and other
of courses to allow students and faculty to do some work in
subjects. Since its inception, more than 350 students from a
Chinese, French, German, Norwegian, Russian, or Spanish.
variety of majors have taken a course with the FLAC compo-
These are not language courses but regular history, religion,
nent. If they take two such courses—as one in four students
political science, and economic classes that are normally
does—they earn an Applied Foreign Language Certificate.
taught only in English.
The FLAC program at St. Olaf is supported by an endow-
Thanks to the cooperation of St. Olaf’s humanities and
ment of its own that generates $40,000 a year. Four courses
social science faculty with its language professors, the FLAC
were offered last fall, two over the January interim and
component allows students to do extra work in the language
seven this spring. They included courses on imperial Russia,
of the country they are studying. They read primary materials
modern France, Chinese civilization, Lutheran heritage,
in that language and spend an extra hour in class each week
chemistry (with a German component), contemporary Latin
with a faculty member who speaks the language. For their
America, and modern Scandinavia.
efforts, they receive a separate grade and extra credit—and
the faculty get extra pay.
The target of these FLAC courses is not the language
major already taking advanced literature and history cours-
Jolene Barjasteh, an assistant professor of French, regularly teams with history professor Dolores Peters to teach a
course on modern France. A third of students customarily
sign up for the FLAC component.
es in French, Spanish, German, or another language, but
Barjasteh said an hour a week isn’t enough to make a
those who have just completed the intermediate level of a
significant difference in the students’ proficiency, but it
language (which usually takes four semesters). The college
whets their appetite for the language and gives them a leg up
advertises these courses as “an ideal way to prepare before
in the rest of the course. “They feel much more confident.
you go abroad or to apply what you’ve learned abroad when
They tend to do better on their papers and in the English-
you return to campus.”
language classroom discussions,” said Barjasteh. ■
St. Olaf was a pioneer in the FLAC movement, launching its program in 1989 with support from the National
Endowment for the Humanities. It later received additional
recognition and seed money from the Fund for the
Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, part of the U.S.
Department of Education.
The fishing village
of Staithes, England.
(Photo by Jessica Mott ‘03)
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Tea plantation
workers in
Munnar, Kerala,
India.
For a role model, St. Olaf students can look to their
president, Christopher Thomforde, an ordained
Lutheran minister and scholar who with teammate
Gary Walters made the cover of Sports Illustrated in
February 1967 during their days as basketball stars at
Princeton University. Thomforde passed up a shot at
professional basketball to study Chinese at Middlebury
College, then spent two years teaching at a university
in Taiwan.
(Photo by Julia Jackson ‘03)
St. Olaf, said Thomforde, is a place that seeks to
nourish “a sense of commitment and service not only
within the United States but throughout the world.”
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‘Yesterday’s
Mission Is
Today’s Mission’
TUFTS
THE FLETCHER
SCHOOL OF LAW
AND DIPLOMACY
Despite the brave words of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
first inaugural (“the only thing we have to fear is fear
itself ”) and the flurry of activity during FDR’s first
hundred days, the United States in 1933 was mired
deep in a depression that would run for years. The
economy and the news were even bleaker overseas. In
Berlin, an Austrian-born former painter named Adolf
Hitler became chancellor and started Germany down a
path that would engulf Europe and the world again in
war. For the United States, isolationist views—always
present—were never stronger or more widely shared.
Yet Tufts University went against the tenor of the
times by opening on its Medford, Massachusetts, campus The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, the
nation’s first graduate school of international affairs. It
was named for the late Austin Barclay Fletcher, a Tufts
trustee who had left $1 million for this purpose a
decade before. It originally was thought the bequest
would be enough to erect new quarters for this graduate school, but in the uncertainty of the Depression,
the university decided to set up Fletcher’s shop in an
old gymnasium. The catalog described the school’s
mission as training students “in those fundamental
aspects of international relations best calculated to
provide a clear understanding of the nature and
functioning of the present world order.”
Today the famed Fletcher School is educating more
than 400 students, most pursuing master’s degrees in
international affairs. The average age is 27, and more
than two in five are from countries other than the
United States. Fletcher graduates become diplomats
and work for international organizations. They also
pursue careers in journalism, academe, the military,
civil service, and, increasingly, the private
sector, including investment banking,
trade, and consulting. Fletcher
currently has 350 full-time
master’s students, 40 more
in a new global master’s
program that is taught
primarily over the
Web, and 90 others
pursuing Ph.D.s.
Students Susan
Banki, Sebastian
Knoke, Lindsay
Workman and
David Abraham in
Fletcher’s Hall
of Flags.
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International Studies at Johns Hopkins, the Kennedy
School at Harvard, the Wilson School at Princeton,
the Maxwell School at Syracuse, the Ford School at
the University of Michigan, American University’s
School of International Service, the Yale Center for
International and Area Studies, and Columbia’s School
of International and Public Affairs.
Dean Stephen W.
Bosworth, a
former ambassador
to Korea, Tunisia
and the Philippines,
says Fletcher
prepares students
‘to live an
international life.’
“Yesterday’s mission is today’s mission,” said Fletcher
Dean Stephen W. Bosworth, a career diplomat and
former ambassador to Korea, Tunisia, and the
Philippines. That mission has become all the more
essential in the aftermath of September 11, 2001,
when terror attacks brought home to millions of
Americans the futility of ignoring the world beyond
U.S. borders.
“The essence of a Fletcher education is precisely what
the world needs in large quantity,” Dean Bosworth
wrote in a recent welcome to new students. “At
Fletcher you will acquire the intellectual capital
and the human insights needed if we are to create
a modern world that is safer and more just, a
community of nations and peoples committed to
responsible internationalism.”
Fletcher is no longer a lone voice. However bold and
unorthodox the idea of a school of international affairs
in the 1930s, today there are kindred institutions at a
score of the nation’s top universities. Many of the
country’s leading authorities on international affairs—
the voices often heard on the Op-Ed pages of newspapers and called before international affairs panels in
Washington for advice—come from these prestigious
schools, including Fletcher, the School of Advanced
In recent years, especially during the technology boom
of the 1990s when many bright, eager U.S. students
were inclined to bypass graduate school and jump
directly into the business world, international students
have claimed a growing proportion of seats at Fletcher
and its rivals. More than half those who entered
Fletcher in September 2000 were international students hailing from 43 countries. However, applications
from U.S. citizens surged after September 11, as more
young Americans asked how they could serve their
country and how they might best acquire skills to
enhance their capacity to serve.
Fletcher logged a record 1,833 applications last year,
with applications from American citizens up 93 percent and applications overall up by more than half.
Other schools of international affairs also saw a surge
in applications, but none as great as Fletcher’s. This
was not due to patriotism alone; the sluggish U.S.
economy and fewer offers from the corporate world
also made graduate school a more attractive destination for many college graduates. Americans still
comprise a majority of Fletcher’s enrollment, but
70 nations are represented in the student body.
Fletcher’s distinctive name is actually something of a
misnomer. It is neither a law school, nor simply a
training academy for future diplomats. Few Fletcher
graduates actually become lawyers (although it offers
joint degrees with Harvard Law School and with the
Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of
California, Berkeley) and more go into the private
sector than into the Foreign Service. Fletcher's most
illustrious graduate did become a diplomat as well as
senator and scholar: the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
who received a bachelor’s degree from Tufts and both
his master’s and Ph.D. from Fletcher.
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“The name is not terribly revealing of what we really
are,” said Bosworth. “We keep the name because it
gives us a certain distinction. That was in large measure
the purpose for which we were created back in the early
1930s: to produce professionals, largely Americans,
who would give us competency as a country in international affairs. But we don’t produce lawyers and we
don’t really teach anything that would be called diplomacy, although we do teach a lot of things that would
be very useful for diplomats. A more accurate name
would be a School of International Affairs.
“We are primarily a professional school. We are not
training academics, although some of our graduates
do get Ph.D.s here or elsewhere. We are trying to give
people knowledge, experience, and skills that will
serve them well as they try to live an international
life,” he added.
Living the international life is what Bosworth himself
did after his graduation in 1961 from Dartmouth
College, where he majored in international affairs. “I
had no idea what I was going to become. I was accepted at law school and accepted into the Foreign Service.
Since no law school was willing to pay me a salary and
the State Department was, the choice was fairly easy,”
he recalled.
Bosworth’s Foreign Service career included postings in
Paris, Madrid, and Panama City. He was U.S. ambassador to Tunisia at the close of the Carter administration (1979-1981), to the Philippines under President
Ronald Reagan (1984-1987), and was called back into
service by President Bill Clinton to serve as ambassador to South Korea from 1997 to 2000. He also
taught at Columbia and at Hamilton College. He
holds an honorary Ph.D. from Dartmouth. Bosworth
led the U.S.-Japan Foundation and the Korean
Peninsula Energy Development Organization before
the Clinton administration enlisted him to be envoy
to Seoul.
Fletcher also offers a one-year master of arts degree for
mid-career professionals from governments, international organizations, and private institutions. It recently has created an innovative Global Master of Arts
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Professor Andrew
Hess teaching a
class in diplomacy
to Armenian
foreign service
officers.
Program (GMAP) that “is aimed at educating the new
diplomat,” in the words of Deborah W. Nutter, senior
associate dean and program director. The program is
designed for mid- and high-level international professionals. It brings them together three times for intensive two-week sessions, twice in Medford and once
overseas, while the balance of the work is done at a
distance, with students' taking online courses for 33
weeks. Nutter said that some students are choosing the
degree instead of a master of business administration,
while others who sign up already have MBAs.
In addition to its joint law degree arrangements with
Harvard and Berkeley (which require four years of
study), Fletcher offers joint degrees with the Tuck
School of Business Administration at Dartmouth,
Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, HEC
School of Management in Paris, and several of Tufts’
professional schools, including the medical school,
engineering, urban and environmental policy, and
nutrition science and policy. One example is a oneyear master’s in humanitarian assistance offered by
Fletcher and Tufts’ famed nutrition school (the late
Jean Mayer, one of the world’s most prominent nutritionists, was president of Tufts from 1976 to 1992).
Fletcher students choose from more than 150 courses
offered in three divisions: international law and
organization; diplomacy, history, and politics; and
economics and international business.
For the two-year master’s degree, students must take
16 courses and complete two fields of study. The 20
fields offered range from international negotiation and
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aiming to double the school’s $65 million endowment,
which would allow it to reduce its reliance on tuition.
Fletcher’s Center for Human Rights & Conflict
Resolution provides training and conducts research on
topics of pressing interest to human rights activists and
peacemakers. It is directed by Hurst Hannum, professor of international law, and Eileen F. Babbitt, assistant
professor of international politics and a former senior
executive of the U.S. Institute for Peace. The Fletcher
School also cosponsors seminars with the
Massachusetts Global Education Program to train
teachers on international issues, brings in more than
100 guest lecturers from around the world each year,
and sponsors a dozen other centers and institutes that
explore issues including forced migration and international security.
Ian Johnstone,
assistant
professor of
international law
professor and
former aide to
Kofi Annan,
lectures on
peace-keeping.
conflict resolution to Southwest Asia and Islamic civilization. They also must write a master’s thesis and
pass oral and written language exams. Fletcher does
not teach languages. About 70 percent of students
meet the language requirement before enrolling. The
rest enroll in language classes at Tufts or elsewhere.
The Murrow Center
houses the
papers of
Edward R. Murrow.
The faculty of the Fletcher School is growing rapidly.
The school has searches underway for a half-dozen
professors—three positions are new—and Bosworth
hopes to expand the current 22-member faculty to 30
or more within three years. Fletcher is heavily dependent on its tuition of $25,477 a year. Bosworth is also
For Bosworth, who began his duties in Medford in
February 2001, the events of September 11 confirmed
for him that he had made the right choice in moving
to academe, just as “it reconfirmed for our students
their decision to get a Fletcher education.”
“Our task isn’t to train a lot of specialists in foreign
affairs,” said the dean. “The broader challenge for us
as a country is to develop a public that is much more
aware of what is going on in the world outside of our
own borders. As September 11 has demonstrated, we
are not invulnerable to what happens around us.”
Bosworth added, “That is this country’s greatest weakness: our lack of understanding about what’s happening in the world and how other people may view us.”
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Connecting a
Region’s Schools
and Teachers
to the World
UNIVERSITY OF
PITTSBURGH
Located at the strategic fork where the Allegheny and
Monongahela rivers form the Ohio, Pittsburgh was a
natural spot for a settlement in an early westward push
while America was still a colony. A young officer from
Virginia named George Washington surveyed the
region, and French and British armies battled there in
the 1750s. In 1787 the Pittsburgh Academy held its
first classes in a log cabin. A few decades later the
frontier school became the Western University of
Pennsylvania, which metamorphosed into the
University of Pittsburgh in 1908. Once private, it
became state-related in 1966 and today has 34,000
students and 3,800 faculty in 18 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools.
With its landmark 42-story Cathedral of Learning,
Pitt is a major center for academic research, with a $1
billion endowment and an even greater operating
budget. It operates four Title VI Area Studies National
Resource Centers (East Asian, Latin American,
Russian and East European, and West European) as
well as a national Center for International Business
Education and Research (CIBER). The West European
center does double duty as a European Union-sponsored study center as well, one of just 15 in the United
States. More than three dozen languages are taught on
campus, including Mongolian and Quechua. Pitt is
The landmark
Cathedral of
Learning is the
second tallest
education building
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the administrative home port of the Semester at Sea
program. Pitt provides the academic supervision of the
Institute for Shipboard Education, which annually
takes hundreds of students across oceans and around
the world while they take shipboard classes.
Like any university its size and scope, Pitt plays a large
role in the intellectual and economic life of the
Pittsburgh region. That impact is magnified in the
field of international studies thanks to its profusion of
national resource centers. Pitts’ primary international
programs are under the banner of the University
Center for International Studies (UCIS), which
then-Chancellor Wesley Posvar created in 1968 to
encourage study across disciplines and discourage
academic isolation.
The Frick Fine Arts
Library houses
research collections for the
history of art and
architecture and
the fine arts.
Outreach is part of the essential mission of every Title
VI national research center. Pitt’s centers stand out for
both the extent and effectiveness of their efforts to
carry out that charge. They work with other colleges in
western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and eastern
Ohio. They hold dozens of training workshops for elementary and secondary school teachers in the region.
They even hold classes to teach students languages not
usually available in high school. They build on each
other’s strengths. When Pitt cosponsored the annual
fall Japanese Film Festival at the Carnegie Museum of
Art last September, the Asian Studies Center sent out
invitations to a screening and follow-up discussion by
experts on Japanese cinema and literature on how best
to use period films in the classroom. “We see outreach
as one of our most important functions,” said William
I. Brustein, director of UCIS.
“Our area study centers work together so we’re not
competing with each other for teachers’ attention,”
said Rosalind Eannarino, outreach coordinator of the
Center for Latin American Studies. When classroom
teachers are invited to a workshop at Pitt, all four centers may contribute to the program. For instance, at a
professional development seminar on “Exploring
Cultural Diversity Through the Arts,” elementary and
middle-school art teachers first learned how to make
Ukrainian “pyansky,” or decorated Easter eggs, then
studied the use of art as propaganda in Nazi Germany.
Subsequent sessions dealt with the Asian arts of Tai
Chi Ch’uan and calligraphy, and Latin American
storytelling and festival masks. The art teachers also
learned how to create PowerPoint slide shows of
classroom projects.
Pitt offers more than 500 courses with international
content. While UCIS does not house any majors, it
does award certificates to both undergraduate and
graduate students. Nearly 1,000 students were working
towards certificates last year. Typically, to receive certification, an undergraduate must take five courses
(15 credits) and complete two years of language study.
“It’s close to a minor,” said Brustein. The center also
offers programs in African studies and global studies.
The Pitt campus is home to the Governor’s School for
International Studies, where some of Pennsylvania’s
brightest high school students come each summer, as
well as the Model United Nations program which each
fall draws more than 400 students from Pennsylvania
to West Virginia.
In the past, the centers’ principal contact with schools
was when the schools asked the university to send a
speaker for a Cinco de Mayo celebration or other event.
Pitt’s centers still furnish speakers for such occasions,
but they have sought to become more strategic about
helping teachers and schools across the region. “We
felt that school visits were not the most productive use
of our time,” said Diana Wood, assistant director of
the Asian Studies Center. “Out of that came the collaborative effort to develop teacher workshops. If we
can inspire teachers to improve what they do in the
classroom, the impact is much bigger.” Wood is also a
mid-Atlantic regional coordinator for the National
Consortium for Teaching about Asia, a Freeman
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Foundation-sponsored program that holds seminars
and provides classroom materials to encourage teachers
to teach about Asia in geography, world history, social
studies, and literature classes.
UCIS and the area studies programs each year invite
African American high school students to a career
symposium on “International Connections: Planning
for Your Future.” Seventy students and 20 classroom
teachers turned out at the last conference to hear
young African American Pitt alumni talk about their
careers overseas and how they acquired the requisite
language and cultural skills. Among the panelists were
a former Hong Kong correspondent for Newsweek, an
investment banker who also worked in Hong Kong,
and a program officer for the U.S. State Department’s
Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. “They
talked about what it was like to be an African
American in international studies, working or studying
in Hong Kong or Germany or the Middle East,” said
Brenda Jordan, assistant director of the Asian Studies
Center. “Some of the students in the audience came
from all-black schools, or they were the only black
student in all-white classes. Often they’re concerned
about prejudice. Many of the panelists said they experienced less racial prejudice abroad. The students—
once they woke up, being high school students—often
find by the end of the day they’ve got new mentors.”
Pittsburgh, the former steel city, is an area with deep
ethnic roots. One-quarter of the 2.3 million people in
metropolitan Pittsburgh are immigrants or the children of immigrants, and one in three came from East
or Central Europe or the former Soviet Union-the
countries that Russian and East European studies
explores. UCIS also houses the Pennsylvania Ethnic
Heritage Studies Center, which in partnership with
the Pennsylvania Department of Education promotes
cultural diversity in western Pennsylvania classrooms.
Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning makes its own unique
contribution to the celebration and appreciation of
diversity. When the academic skyscraper was built in
the 1920s, Chancellor John G. Bowman invited
groups representing Irish, Italian, Polish, and other
ethnic groups to sponsor and decorate Nationality
Rooms within the tower. They sprang to the idea, rais-
A student captures
the Frick Fine Arts
Building on her
canvas.
ing funds and soliciting art and materials from their
homelands. The lavishly and lovingly decorated rooms
draw as many as 40,000 visitors each year. Some serve
as regular classrooms. With wood carvings, sculptures,
stained glass, tapestries, and more, these Nationality
Rooms recreate scenes from ancient Athens, an Asante
temple courtyard in Ghana, a palace hall in Beijing’s
Forbidden City, a sixth century oratory from Ireland,
and verdant Czech and Slovak valleys filled with flowers. The rooms now stand at 28, with more planned to
celebrate the cultures of Denmark, the Philippines,
Switzerland, and Latin American countries.
Encouraging undergraduates to be active in the community, UCIS arranges for native speakers or advanced
learners of French, German, Spanish, and Japanese to
tutor children at Pittsburgh’s Frick International
Academy, a public magnet school for grades six to
eight that teaches those languages. The Center for
Latin American Studies holds Saturday morning or
evening immersion seminars for K-12 teachers where
they get an opportunity to learn more about the countries whose languages and cultures they teach. The
center also publishes a newsletter, LAS Noticias, to
help Spanish language and social studies teachers
incorporate Latin American content into classroom
lessons. The newsletter reaches 385 teachers and is
posted online. In another project, the center captured
the imaginations of children in a school in one of
Pittsburgh’s poorest neighborhoods by teaching them
Capoeira, a Brazilian martial art and dance form created 400 years ago by African slaves preparing to fight
Portuguese masters.
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UCIS publishes a glossy, full-color magazine called
Int’l. Each center and program has its own home page
and resources on the Web. “We see our Internet-based
resources as outreach not only to the K-16 community, but basically to the world,” said Wolfgang Schloer,
associate director of UCIS. The Center for Russian
and East European Studies sponsored one of the first
virtual libraries and “it is still one of the most widely
used,” Schloer said.
William Brustein,
director,
University Center
for International
Studies.
Pitt recently helped create a consortium on Islamic
studies for 20 colleges and universities in southwest
Pennsylvania. “We realized after September 11 that we
were not really very strong on the Middle East and the
Islamic world, and that was an area we truly needed to
educate our students about as well as the community,”
said Brustein, a sociologist and authority on Nazi
Germany. “None of the schools had the capability to
launch a full-fledged Islamic studies program on its
own, but collectively we can.” The consortium will
bring in speakers and hold joint conferences and workshops. It may also offer a certificate program much
like those available though the Pitt area studies programs. “As we envision this program, a student from
any of the participating schools could take the courses
and end up earning the Southwestern Pennsylvania
Islamic studies certificate,” he said. UCIS recently
made it possible for students in the Semester at Sea
program to earn Pitt’s global studies certificate. As
many as 200 students on each voyage are expected to
take Pitt up on that opportunity.
From its perch above the Three Rivers—long since
reclaimed from the environmental indignities suffered
during Pittsburgh’s heyday as a coal-mining and steelproducing metropolis—the city is within a few hours’
drive of several major cities, but it is also relatively isolated. Today the airport is more vital to the region’s
commerce than the rivers or highways. Thanks to Pitt,
the city already boasts one of the country’s leading
academic medical centers, and Pitt and Carnegie
Mellon University are working together on
biotechnology projects.
Brustein, who serves on a civic panel that seeks to prepare Pittsburgh and its economy to meet these international challenges, said, “We feel we’re truly preparing
the next generation of students...and the larger community to be global citizens and be able to maneuver
in this new, globally interdependent world. We want
to connect this community to the world.”
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Teaching Engineers to
Work Globally—and
‘Walk a Bit Taller’
WORCESTER
POLYTECHNIC
INSTITUTE
For those who think engineering majors are too busy
to study abroad, consider Worcester Polytechnic
Institute (WPI) and its signature Global Perspective
Program. Each year WPI sends 300 science and engineering students overseas to work in teams under a
professor’s guidance on real-world problems in such
places as Venice, Italy; Bangkok, Thailand; and
Windhoek, Namibia. Another 150 students tackle
projects in New York, Washington, D.C., California,
Connecticut, and sites closer to campus. Among U.S.
institutions that award Ph.D.s, only Dartmouth sends
a larger proportion of students to study abroad.
leaflets showing subsistence farmers how to raise fish
in a simple pond. Other WPI students are now
adapting the same techniques to help poor farmers
in Namibia.
The WPI students go to Venice not just to ride the
gondolas or read Thomas Mann, but to help the
watery Italian city solve the serious traffic jams in its
canals and lagoons. In Thailand, students devoted two
months to documenting the impact of relocation on
small villages forced to make way for utility plant
expansions. In Costa Rica, they prepared bilingual
Founded by two New England industrialists as
America emerged from the Civil War, WPI is the third
oldest school of technology in the United States and,
with 2,600 undergraduates and 1,000 graduate students, among the largest. The curriculum has changed
several times over the decades, but never more dramatically than in 1970 when the faculty threw out a
rigidly prescribed course of study for engineers and
replaced it with a project- and problem-oriented
approach. To graduate, all students must complete
the following requirements:
These are not typical study abroad experiences. With
the exception of those in WPI’s small overseas humanities program, “there is absolutely nothing that even
vaguely resembles a [classroom] course going on when
the students are away,” said Paul W. Davis, dean of
interdisciplinary and global studies. “The students are
working in teams, full time, on these projects.”
■
An extended humanities project such as writing a
critical essay or an arts composition or performance.
Washburn Shops
Academic
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the notion that the best way to learn is by doing.
Indeed, combining theory and practice was the intent
of founders John Boynton and Ichabod Washburn,
who had made their respective fortunes in tinware and
wire. When the Worcester County Free Institute of
Industrial Science opened its doors in 1868, two turreted buildings stood side by side: Boynton Hall,
where students attended classes, and Washburn Shops,
where they made products for sale. The name was
changed to Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1887.
Richard F. Vaz,
associate dean,
Natalie A. Mello,
director of global
operations, and
Paul W. Davis,
dean of
interdisciplinary
and global studies.
The students first must complete five thematically
related courses. At WPI they call this requirement
the “Sufficiency.”
■
■
An interdisciplinary project. Students from different
majors work in teams of two to four under a faculty
adviser for two months on a real-world problem.
Most elect to do these projects overseas at WPI project centers around the globe, including Hong Kong,
China; Bangkok, Thailand; Melbourne, Australia;
San Jose, Costa Rica; London, England; Windhoek,
Namibia; Zurich, Switzerland; Venice, Italy; and
Copenhagen, Denmark. WPI also has project centers in three U.S. cities and one in San Juan, Puerto
Rico. This requirement is called the “Interactive
Qualifying Project.”
A “Major Qualifying Project,” again conducted in
small teams of seniors under the eye of faculty.
Typically, students design, develop, or test a device
or software to solve a technological problem. Some
tackle problems posed by industrial sponsors.
Twenty percent of these projects also are done
off-campus, at six sites that range from NASA’s
Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland (Robert
Goddard, the father of modern rocketry, was WPI
class of 1908) to Silicon Valley to Wall Street.
WPI pays the passport fee for its students to help
nudge them out the door. Its approach is premised on
The WPI plan was billed as a revolution and took 10
years to implement. It continues to evolve. Under
pressure from accreditors, the faculty in 1984 allowed
departments to reinstate distribution requirements,
and students’ transcripts once again showed majors,
minors, and concentrations. Comprehensive finals
were scrapped in 1986. Some faculty worried initially
about finding enough worthwhile projects for students. But WPI and its sponsors have met that challenge. At a time when enrollment has sagged at other
technology campuses in the region, WPI’s has held
steady. It was among 16 institutions honored by the
Association of American Colleges and Universities in
December 2000 for “visionary campus-wide innovations in undergraduate education.”
Faculty buy-in remains strong. Thirty of WPI’s 210
faculty members pack up and head out with students
for two months each year, and nearly half the faculty
have done it at least once. “To get that kind of involvement, there’s got to be a real payoff,” said Davis, a professor of mathematical sciences who has overseen student teams in London, Washington, and Zurich.
“They are seeing the transformation. They are seeing
something happen that makes it worth the effort.”
Richard F. Vaz, associate professor of electrical and
computer engineering and associate dean of the
Interdisciplinary and Global Studies Division, said,
“For an electrical engineer to get to work on sustainable development and alternative energy sources and
how to improve the lives of children in a slum is really
exciting, compared to the usual stuff I do.”
“These are such profound experiences for the students,” said Vaz, who has led projects in England,
Ireland, the Netherlands (twice), and Thailand, as well
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as in Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. “They are
really pushing the envelope with respect to what they
are capable of doing.”
Vaz headed back to Bangkok in early 2003 with a colleague and 24 students to design a playground for a
slum and work on authenticating a world heritage site
for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Those are not
topics “they taught me in graduate school, but I am
able to guide the students in doing the background
research, coming up with valid methods to collect and
analyze data, and developing a useful solution for the
sponsor,” said Vaz. “The faculty, along with the students, are being brought out of their intellectual cages.”
Davis called it “the most challenging form of teaching.
When I’m advising a program off campus, I don’t
know the answer any better than the students.”
“The main asset I bring as a faculty member is expertise as a problem solver. But it’s not expertise that I can
hand to the students by picking up their book and
pencil and saying, ‘Here, let me do that for you.’ It’s
coaching, it’s responding to their challenges, it’s letting
them go where their instincts direct them, but nudging them back on a more productive path without
your hand steering them by the back of the neck,” the
dean said. “You watch them grow on the spot.”
Other universities strive to find internships for students during their terms studying abroad. The opportunities that beckon WPI students go well beyond the
ordinary internship, Davis said. “They don’t go to
answer the phones. They go in with a very specific
task, such as improving the document tracking system
for the U.S. Patent Office, and they research these
problems for months before leaving Worcester,” he
said. A recent WPI group worked with a London borough to develop sustainable housing practices and canvass residents about their desires for green space.
“We consider ourselves a university of technology,”
said Vaz, himself a member of the class of 1979. “The
direct, personal supervision of our faculty is what really makes this different from an internship.” Each professor oversees four or five project teams.
Teaching children
in Bangkok
about recycling.
WPI provides extra help to those on financial aid so
they are not discouraged by costs from doing their
projects abroad. Since students must do an off-campus
project anyway, said Natalie Mello, director of global
operations, “why not do it in London or Bangkok
or Venice or Costa Rica or Puerto Rico or Namibia
as opposed to plugging away on campus? That’s the
key to our being able to send so many students to
study abroad.”
WPI established its first project center in Washington,
D.C., in 1974 and branched out to London a decade
later. In recent years the list has expanded in size and
variety, with programs on both coasts and five continents. The overseas projects are “far and away” the
most popular.
Males outnumber females almost three to one among
all WPI students, but women comprise almost twofifths of those who sign up for projects in other countries. Expressing a common perception, Vaz said, “Our
female students are less risk averse than the male students, particularly for students in science and engineering.” WPI’s own international students also are
more adventurous. They comprise 7 percent of undergraduates, but 15 percent of those who participate in
the Global Perspective Program.
The two-month duration of the off-campus projects—
half a semester—also helps explain their popularity. It
is long enough away from Worcester for students to
feel immersed in another culture, but not so long that
they feel cut off from friends and activities at home.
“Students can stand going away for two months,” said
Vaz. “If they’re an athlete, they can sometimes time it
so they don’t miss their sports season. Organizations
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than they might otherwise,” said Vaz. “Sixty to 70 percent get well-deserved grades of A. Twenty percent get
B, which represents solid work.” The rest get either a
C or no credit—for projects that may still have been
a good learning experience, said Vaz, but “fell short
of expectations.”
Teamwork in
Venice.
To defray costs, the institute collects project fees from
some sponsors where possible. Davis said a Wall Street
firm may pay thousands of dollars, while a redevelopment project in Bangkok typically pays nothing. The
city of Worcester has committed to using WPI student
teams regularly in its planning. Still, it remains an
expensive proposition for WPI to run these projects.
across campus have gotten used to the fact that leaders
go away for two months.”
Mello said the first question that industry recruiters
nowadays ask WPI seniors is not “What was your
project?” but “Where was your project?” She added,
“The word has gotten out.”
WPI has exchange programs with technical
universities in Darmstadt and Munich, Germany;
Zurich, Switzerland; Monterrey, Mexico; Stockholm,
Sweden; and Montreal, Canada. Most are taught in
English. A Spanish humanities program is offered
in Madrid, Spain.
What challenges lie ahead for WPI and this ambitious
Global Perspective Program? As far ahead of the curve
as this program is, said Davis, one weakness “is a lack
of formal closure when students return. I’d be very
anxious to have in place more ways to help students
process the experience—and frankly more ways to help
us faculty process the experience, too.” Davis has
personally directed projects in London.
For the students, these projects have stakes higher than
grades. “For once they are being given real things to
do. The result is they perform at a much higher level
But Vaz noted that student projects would require
considerable faculty time and resources even if all were
undertaken on campus. “When you consider the value
added that’s associated with an international experience, it’s not that hard to justify investing in this,” he
said. Davis, the mathematician, has calculated that the
costs of the Global Perspective Program actually are
the same or maybe even a bit less than for WPI’s
entire academic program.
“Just like the Department of Electrical Engineering or
mathematics or humanities and the arts, we cost the
college money,” said Davis, who oversees a $1.4 million budget for the WPI centers. “Running this global
program with faculty members full-time overseas costs
about the same as the program as a whole, which
ranges from teaching calculus to ‘Introduction to
Shakespeare,’ which are cheap, to intensive laboratory
courses that are expensive. We’re in the middle.”
Davis added that it helps to have “a very supporting
administration.”
Mello, a former Peace Corps volunteer, was part of
the team that supervised the last round of projects in
Venice. “The most rewarding thing is not the A project but the student on a B project who just blossoms,”
she said. “Sometimes it’s during their final presentation; sometimes it’s a little before or afterwards. But
you can almost see it dawn on them: they did it.
They are the expert. They walk a little bit taller.”
Project Partners
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