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INTERNATIONALIZING THE CAMPUS 2004
INTERNATIONALIZING
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Profiles of SUCCESS at
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Acknowledgements
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.
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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 recognition.
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Rebecca Dixon Associate Provost for University
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Stephen Dunnett Vice Provost, University at
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Enrollment, Northwestern University; Advisory
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Britta Baron Executive Director, DAAD
(German Academic Exchange Service)
Buffalo, State University of New York
Connie Perdreau Director, Office of Education Abroad,
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Ohio University
David Pierce President Emeritus, American
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Association of Community Colleges
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Their thoughtful deliberations were truly invaluable.
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This report was researched and written by Christopher
Connell. He also contributed many of the fine photographs used in the full-length profile articles. 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.
©
We also express our gratitude to the family of
Paul Simon for lending the former senator’s name
to the Senator Paul Simon Award for Campus
Internationalization, bestowed upon the five
institutions to receive campus-wide profiles in the
2004 report.
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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:
Finally, our deepest gratitude to our partners on this
project, ETS, Educational Testing Service, a NAFSA
Global Partner; and the Educational Information and
Resources Branch (ECA/A/S/A) of United States
Department of State’s Educational and Cultural Affairs
Bureau. We appreciate especially the contributions
made by our lead representatives from those partners,
Phillip R. Ives, Chief, Educational Information and
Resources, U.S. Department of State, and John Yopp,
vice president of the graduate and professional
education division of ETS, and a Senior Scholar in
Residence at the Council of Graduate Schools.
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.
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A Report from NAFSA: Association of International Educators
CONTENTS
INTERNATIONALIZING THE CAMPUS 2004
Profiles of Success at Colleges and Universities
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Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2
Advancing Global Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
2 0 0 4 S E N A T O R P A U L S I M O N A WA R D f o r C A M P U S I N T E R N A T I O N A L I Z A T I O N
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■ Bellevue Community College: Providing Opportunity, Promoting Diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7
■ Binghamton University: A Young Institution Develops a Global Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17
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■ Duke University: Realizing ‘Outrageous Ambitions’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27
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■ St. Norbert College: A Campus in Northeast Wisconsin with a Global Outlook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39
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■ University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Global Across the Campus, Across the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49
S P OT L I G H T P RO F I L E S : E I G H T 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
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■ University of Delaware: Education Abroad Pioneer Finds Winter the Perfect Time for Faculty, Students . . . . . . . . . . . .61
■ University of Florida: Florida Puts Its Internationalization on the Accreditation Spot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .67
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■ Juniata College: A College Sets Language in Motion in Heart of the Keystone State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73
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■ Lynn University: Every Freshman Needs a Passport at This Florida Campus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .77
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■ Missouri Southern State University: Bringing the World to Missouri’s Southwest Corner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .81
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■ University of Notre Dame: A New Tradition Leads Many Far Afield from South Bend . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .87
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■ University of Oregon: Innovative Scholarship Program Brings Oregon Some of Its Best Students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .93
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■ Suffolk University: Suffolk’s Campus Stretches from Boston’s Beacon Hill to Madrid and Dakar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .99
© Copyright 2004 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.
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This year, we have inaugurated a new and important
addition to this publication which brings added prestige to the profiled institutions and simultaneously
honors the career of an outstanding gentleman. The
five schools selected for overall excellence in their
internationalization efforts have been named as the
first recipients of NAFSA’s Senator Paul Simon Award
for Campus Internationalization. The late Senator
Simon of Illinois served his state and the nation as a
strong voice for civil rights, prison literacy, peace initiatives and international education. He was a strong
advocate throughout his career for international education, using his positions on various committees in the
Senate to advocate for exchange. His leadership in this
area was especially evident in his robust support, along
with Senator David Boren, for the creation of the
National Security Education Program, which addresses
critical national security deficiencies in language and
cultural expertise.
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In the months preceding his untimely death last fall,
Simon had been working diligently to persuade the
federal government to support a new initiative that
would create education abroad fellowships for U.S.
students because he placed a tremendous importance
on the ability of this country’s future leaders to know
and understand the broader world outside its borders.
Simon’s vision for this program was ambitious, with a
goal of sending 500,000 U.S. students to study abroad
each year for a semester or summer term. In his forward to NAFSA’s 2003 task force report on education
abroad Simon noted, “If we want to improve our
nation and the world, we must be willing to sacrifice a
little. This major national initiative and the recommendations of [NAFSA’s] Strategic Task Force on
Education Abroad can lift our vision and responsiveness to the rest of the world.” This fellowship effort
has survived him and is moving forward. A federal
commission intended to develop a plan for creating
the Lincoln Fellowships—as Simon dubbed them—
has been named and will begin its work this winter.
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Last year NAFSA published the first edition of this
report, Internationalizing the Campus 2003: Profiles of
Success at Colleges and Universities. That publication
was created with the assistance of the Educational
Information and Resources Branch of the Educational
and Cultural Affairs Bureau in the United States
Department of State (U.S. DOS) and Educational
Testing Services (ETS). Since that time, we have again
sought out exceptionally strong internationalization
efforts that could be profiled in the 2004 version of
this report, to serve as both an inspiration and a source
of examples of the best practices being employed at
U.S. colleges and universities. We are grateful, once
again to U.S. DOS and ETS for their generous support of this project.
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As was stated in the introduction to last year’s report,
NAFSA “recognize[s] that institutions are unique entities, that internationalization itself is complex and
multidimensional, and that success and accomplishment can be identified and assessed in diverse ways.”
Thus, we have continued to seek to hold up exemplary
practices, model approaches, and major trends as
demonstrated by the schools profiled through the
2004 edition of this report.
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The campus-wide internationalization has had
demonstrable results for students.
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The institution’s mission or planning documents
contain an explicit or implicit statement regarding
international education.
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The institution’s commitment to internationalization is reflected in the curriculum.
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The campus-wide internationalization has had
demonstrable results within the faculty.
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There is an international dimension in off-campus
programs and outreach.
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There is internationalization in research and/or
faculty exchange.
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The institution supports education abroad as well as
its international faculty, scholars, and students.
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There is evidence of genuine administrative or even
board-level support for internationalization.
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The campus has been widely internationalized across
schools, divisions, departments, and disciplines.
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The panel sought institutions that could demonstrate
some or all of these characteristics:
Among the winners this year are schools of widely
varying sizes and resources. In our inaugural report,
Duke University was one of the institutions that
received a spotlight profile for their effective approach
to internationalization across a decentralized university. This year, Duke has become the first school to
move from spotlight to a full-length profile. They are
being honored for their success in realizing an ambitious plan to internationalize the institution across the
entire spectrum of offerings. Duke’s nearby neighbor,
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
(UNC), has been honored for showing a vital commitment to internationalization during a period when
many public institutions of higher learning have been
feeling a fiscal pinch. UNC has recognized the vital
importance of having a global-ready workforce in the
state and has embarked upon a plan for growth that
includes adding a new $26.5 million Global Education
Center that will bring under one roof a wide variety of
international services, studies, and research programs.
Compared to well endowed Duke and state-supported
UNC, relatively tiny St. Norbert College, a regional
liberal arts college with 2,100 students might seem
outclassed at first blush, but their campus internationalization efforts are every bit as impressive. Like UNC
they saw the value in creating a central hub for their
campus-wide efforts. In 1995 they constructed the F.
K. Bemis International Center at a cost of nearly $10
million. But the center is merely the physical sign of
the global spirit of the institution which includes a
wide variety of efforts affecting all aspects of the college. Binghamton University, part of the young, vital
State University of New York system, is drawing large
numbers of students from across the globe and has
greatly expanded its education abroad programs.
Finally, Bellevue Community College’s outstanding
programs for international students, education abroad,
and English as a second language make it an exemplar
of what two year institutions can accomplish in
internationalization.
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The members of the 2004 advisory panel—their
names are listed on page ii—faced a difficult task.
NAFSA received many fine submissions from across
the nation, and each had to be given careful consideration. We believe this report speaks to both the seriousness with which they approached this task and the
high caliber of the schools who submitted their programs for consideration.
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Each of the five institutions that were chosen by our
expert advisory panel to receive the Senator Paul
Simon Award for Campus Internationalization has
been profiled in-depth here. Together they illustrate
amply one of the great strengths of U.S. higher education—they all demonstrate impressive levels of internationalization across their entire campus structure,
yet they have each achieved this level of excellence in
their own way.
In addition to the five schools that were chosen to
receive the Senator Paul Simon Award for Campus
Internationalization, eight other institutions are
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As the leading association for international educators
in the world today, NAFSA is firmly committed to the
notion that the world will be a more stable and more
prosperous place when all the citizens of the globe are
better able to understand each other through educational experiences that draw us all together. The future
leaders of the United States must be women and men
who have knowledge of the ways of other peoples,
their customs, and their worldviews. Likewise, offering
the opportunity to the next generation of leaders from
other nations to come to the United States to study
and enjoy a firsthand experience of our culture and
values will undoubtedly pay dividends as we all work
to share our ever shrinking globe.
NAFSA is hopeful that by recognizing the five Simon
Award winners and shining a spotlight upon the special achievements of eight additional institutions, we
will help to encourage at all institutions of higher
learning the kinds of innovative thinking and holistic
approaches that these schools have amply demonstrated in their attempts to look further beyond the horizon
to a world ever more integrated, peaceful, and tolerant.
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bring more international students to Oregon while
providing an invaluable outreach to the people of the
state. Missouri Southern State University, an ambitious
commuter institution with just 5,300 students, has
developed an excellent program of internationallythemed semesters that have helped to bring the world
to their doorstep.
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spotlighted here for their outstanding accomplishments in specific areas of internationalization. The
University of Notre Dame was selected for developing
a fine education abroad system that involves all parts
of the university and which continues to grow in scope
and size. Lynn University was included for their innovative curricular addition, Academic Adventure, an
education abroad experience incorporated into the
freshman year, which has increased demand for overseas program opportunities among a student population excited by their first year exploration of other cultures. Juniata College’s excellent Language in Motion
program has proven to be a wonderful way for the
school to provide their students with an unusual
opportunity to share their language skills and culture
with high school students in rural Pennsylvania. The
program has proven enriching to both the university
students and the local community. The University of
Delaware, which pioneered the junior year abroad
concept, has developed an extensive set of short-term
education abroad programs to broaden the opportunities for students. They have also been leaders in publishing research on the effectiveness of short-term programming. Boston’s Suffolk University has made
extensive use of their branch campuses in Dakar,
Senegal and Madrid, Spain to open the way for their
U.S.-based students to study abroad while also serving
as a feeder source for European and African students
to come to Suffolk’s New England campus. The
University of Florida showed unique initiative in internationalization when they asked the Southern
Association of Colleges and Schools for permission to
focus their accreditation self-study on this aspect of the
university. Florida’s experience in this effort is both
instructive and inspirational. The advisory panel was
impressed by the way that the University of Oregon
took up the challenge when state legislators came up
with the idea of providing scholarship assistance to
international students who agreed to serve as cultural
ambassadors in local schools and community organizations. The programs they developed have helped to
©
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John Greisberger
Marlene M. Johnson
Director, Office of International
Executive Director and CEO
Education, Ohio State University
NAFSA: Association of
President, NAFSA, 2004
International Educators
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Advancing Global Learning
make internationalizing their campuses part of
their core mission
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support international faculty, scholars, students
and research
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commit institutional dollars to creating a system for
documenting tangible results for students and faculty
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ETS, in collaboration
with NAFSA, also offers
the TOEFL Partners in
Excellence Award for U.S. colleges and universities.
The award recognizes a collaborative effort by international students and faculty, staff, or administrators
to develop or improve an international activity or
program on their campus.
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ETS is again proud to join the U.S. Department of
State as a sponsor of NAFSA’s Internationalizing The
Campus 2004: Profiles of Success at Colleges and
Universities. This publication showcases colleges and
universities large and small whose leaders exhibit innovation and commitment in internationalizing their
campuses. As you read this publication you will find
that the selected schools have made significant institutional commitments to support international education. The schools:
Future” grants to 400 U.S. Department of State centers worldwide. We also contribute to the ongoing
professional development of educational advisors
through support of their conferences abroad and their
training in the U.S. The annual ETS Partners in
Excellence Award recognizes and supports innovation
and service in advising.
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Nowhere are the benefits of international cooperation
in our global community better shown than in
America’s institutions of higher education.
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These actions contribute to advancing learning and
scholarship, building respect among different peoples,
and enhancing constructive leadership in our global
community. ETS proudly adds our voice in support of
this philosophy.
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For more than 50 years, ETS has played an instrumental
role in facilitating international educational exchange. In
the past 40 years, about 20 million students from more
than 180 countries have used TOEFL—the ETS Test of
English as a Foreign Language—as part of the process
that opens the doors to America’s institutions of higher
education. Each year 150,000 international students take
the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE). And some
108,000 international students begin their MBAs by
taking the Graduate Management Admission Council’s
GMAT test.
But perhaps most significant, after a decade of research
with English language experts and millions of dollars
in investment, ETS will introduce the next generation
of TOEFL testing in September 2005. When that
happens the world will finally have a test that provides
information about a student’s real-life ability to
integrate English speaking, listening, writing and
reading—the language skills essential to success at
institutions where English is the language of instruction.
This can only further facilitate scholarship without
borders and bring our global community even closer
to harmony.
ETS concurs with NAFSA’s conclusion from the 2003
edition of Internationalizing the Campus that, “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.”
Kurt M. Landgraf
ETS has also supported global educational exchange
outright by dedicating $750,000 in “Advising for the
President & CEO
Educational Testing Service
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Providing
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As the community college grew and became more
diverse, so has the surrounding community. After a
surge of immigration from Asia, Latin America, and
Eastern Europe, Bellevue now has more than 110,000
inhabitants, a quarter of them minorities and a quarter
born outside the United States. In a region that prides
itself on education—Seattle was No. 2 in a recent academic study that ranked the nation’s most literate cities
—Bellevue is the pacesetter, with 54 percent of adults
holding college degrees, twice the national average.
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When Rolling Stone magazine listed Bellevue
Community College (BCC) outside Seattle a few years
back among the nation’s best two-year colleges, longtime President B. Jean Floten had this to say: “I think
it’s way cool they recognized us.”
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“ investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”
—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
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Almost from the day it opened in 1966 in an affluent,
largely white, highly educated suburb of Seattle, BCC
has been a showcase campus. It sends thousands of
students each year on to four-year colleges and universities or into the workforce with coveted skills and credentials for jobs in nursing, nuclear medicine, radiologic therapy, criminal justice, information technology,
telecommunications, and other fields. Nestled between
Lakes Washington and Sammamish and framed by the
Cascade Mountains to the east and the Olympics to
the west, it has retained its Pacific Northwest beauty
while growing ever larger, more diverse, and distinctly
international. Another landmark sits a few miles up
the highway: the campus-like headquarters of
Microsoft Corporation. BCC’s own North Campus
occupies an unremarkable office building that was
home to the future software giant in its early days. The
modest space that was once Bill Gates’ office now
holds a dozen desktop PCs for continuing-education
computer classes.
Intercultural
communications
students Hsin-ning
Lin, Meron Emun
and Crystal
Matthews, and top
Izaak Williams,
Amidst this affluence and these accomplishments,
community colleges figure prominently in the higher
education aspirations for
Washington residents. With
only six
public
Chia-wei Yeh and
Nathan Lucrisia
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Tibetan educator Nawang Dorjee to campus in 20022003 as the college’s first international scholar-in-residence. Dorjee taught classes and lectured throughout
the Seattle area on Tibetan history and culture.
Building on that success, the college was selected by
the Council for International Exchange of Scholars to
host a visiting Fulbright scholar in 2003-2004, Stella
Williams, a professor of agricultural economics from
Nigeria. The ebullient Williams, a fisheries expert and
feminist who received her Ph.D. at Auburn University,
presided over a faculty seminar, taught a regular class
on the environment, and was part of an interdisciplinary team that taught a special course called “Size
Matters: Growth, Prosperity and Equity in the Global
Village” that counted for a full three-course load in the
spring quarter. More than 60 students signed up. BCC
this fall welcomed a second visiting Fulbright scholar,
Dr. Eduardo R. Gomes, a political scientist from Rio
de Janeiro, Brazil.
President
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four-year colleges and universities, the state relies
extensively on its 34 community and technical colleges
to prepare students for the workforce and for bachelor
degrees. In 2000, Washington ranked 33rd among the
states in the percentage of residents with bachelor
degrees, but 6th in the number of associate degrees,
according to the Higher Education Coordinating
Board. BCC, with more than 20,000 students enrolled
each quarter—half for credit and half for continuing
education classes—is the largest feeder school for the
flagship University of Washington and at times for
Washington State University as well.
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BCC set out in the 1990s to attract more international
students and better serve them. The sylvan campus
boasts academic space and facilities that a university
might envy, including a planetarium and extensive
computer labs, but nary a single dorm. It is a commuter college, with 85 percent of students living within 10 miles of campus. Some of the hundreds of international students who have discovered BCC live with
host families and ride public buses or fight traffic in
their own cars. Some come for intensive English
instruction or to participate in a one-year International
Business Professions Program that combines classroom
work with unpaid internships at major Seattle-area
employers. BCC’s Center for Liberal Arts brought
Floten, a former speech and communications professor
and longtime community college leader, said, “When
you sit on the Pacific Rim, your orientation needs to
be global. When you also are in the midst of corporations that are global, you understand the importance
of teaching our students to be good global citizens.”
The international students at BCC, like other out-ofstaters, pay roughly three times the in-state tuition of
$841 per quarter for 15 credits. Tight state budgets have
led BCC to restrain enrollment, but international students are not affected, since they pay the full cost of the
courses they take. “We add sections to make sure they
are not taking a Washington student’s spot,” said Floten.
“We enjoy a fabulous community here. The people are
highly educated and really have opened up their hearts
and homes to our international students,” said Floten.
“Families write me letters about how their lives have
been enriched due to international students living in
their homes.”
“Bellevue is not your grandfather’s community college,” said Kim Pollock, who has taught English and
ethnic studies classes at BCC for 11 years. Last year
Pollock, an African American with Creole roots who
was born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in Lafayette,
Pollock, who taught a class in hip-hop culture this
spring (“I’m only five seconds ahead of my students
most of the time, but that is probably the most interesting way to teach”), said, “Ten years ago most of our
students were white. Now I have people from all over
the world and every ethnic identification you can
think of in my classes.”
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Dean of
Student Services
Tika Esler
nections are,” said Tika Esler, dean of student services.
On occasion, U.S. students have complained to Esler
about something that an international student or
teacher said in class, often about religion. One student
took umbrage at a Muslim student’s defense of Islam’s
treatment of women. “People are very passionate about
religion,” said Esler. “In every case that I possibly can,
I try to use that as a teachable moment and ask the
student, ‘What did you get out of it? What did you
learn that you didn’t know before?’”
Enriching the Campus with
Diverse Perspectives
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ESL classes at BCC include local teenagers who need
remedial help and immigrants or refugees with
advanced degrees in their own countries who are starting life over again in the United States. “The diversity
by age and background provides a very rich classroom
environment,” said Pollock. “People who come to
BCC are very serious about their work. Most are paying for it themselves. They are often working full-time
jobs, going to school, and raising families.” To accommodate those busy schedules, BCC offers classes that
start at 6:30 a.m. and go as late as 10:00 p.m.
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Louisiana, got a green light to create a department of
ethnic and cultural studies, offering interdisciplinary
courses taught by faculty drawn from many departments. “There’s administrative support for experimental programs. When I asked people two years ago if I
could create a new department of ethnic and cultural
studies, I was told, ‘There’s no money for it—but if
you want to do the work, feel free.’” A half-dozen
courses already have been approved, and more are in
the works, including a Middle Eastern studies course
taught jointly by a history instructor and the world
languages staff from the college’s Continuing
Education division. A professor from India is developing a course that will examine Southeast Asia through
the lens of business and industry.
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Due to visa restrictions, most international students
can’t have outside jobs
so, Pollock says, “they are
here all day. They tend
to take over the cafeteria,
particularly in the afternoon, while the other
kids are at work.”
“This is home for them.
This is where their con-
“The international students bring a real global perspective to the college,” said Esler, who adds that
perspective herself. She is a Cuban native whose family
emigrated to the United States in 1962 when she was a
girl. A church relocation program brought them to
Seattle, where her father, an accountant in his homeland,
found work as a janitor in an aviation service company.
Esler is convinced that diversity enriches classroom
discussions. “The students’ point of view can be pretty
narrow if they all grew up in the same area, have the
same friends, have the same viewpoints, and even the
same religion,” she said. “When those who are not like
you enter a classroom, they bring a totally different
perspective to any issue, whether social, economic, or
political. That’s the piece I am most excited about
[regarding] this institution: we make a concerted effort
to ensure that we have that global perspective in our
classrooms and curriculum.”
Kim Pollock,
English and
ethnic studies
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body president when no one stepped forward to challenge her for the post. Their parents take ESL classes
at night. The mother, a lawyer in Bulgaria, now works
as a housekeeper, while the father, a former engineer,
drives a truck. “For my parents the transition is way
harder. They had their education and careers in
Bulgaria. We were pretty well off. Basically they abandoned that so my sister and I could have a better
chance,” the son said.
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An Internationalized Faculty
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Diane Douglas, director of the Center for Liberal Arts,
runs the International Scholar in Residence program
and was instrumental in getting the Fulbright board to
send Stella Williams and Eduardo R. Gomes to BCC.
She was recently appointed to serve a two-year term
on the Council for International Exchange of Scholars
that will review colleges’ applications to host visiting
scholars for 2005–06.
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International students dominate the student government and are actively involved in clubs at BCC,
including nearly a dozen ethnic student groups.
Angel Kelchev, 22, whose family emigrated from
Bulgaria after his mother won a green card through
the U.S. State Department diversity lottery program,
was elected student body president in May 2003.
“The whole environment here welcomes students
from all over the world. All the resources attract
ambitious students from throughout the world,” said
Kelchev, who compiled a 4.0 grade point average and
won a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Scholarship
worth $30,000 a year to complete his undergraduate
education at Stanford University, where he plans to
major in economics or business and eventually
pursue a career in international law.
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“We are lucky in where we are,” added Esler. “When
this college first started, Bellevue was an elite location
where all the rich people lived. That is no longer the
case. We’ve got a very multinational population. We
have a large Russian population, Hispanic population,
Asian population. The population around us has
changed, and the institution has risen to that occasion
and responded to that multiculturalism.”
Student Ljiljana
director, Center for
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and Diane Douglas,
He was not the only family member enrolled at BCC.
Younger sister Nikoleta Kelcheva began taking classes
at the community college while still in high school,
and last spring was elected to succeed him as student
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Ciric, editor-inchief, The Jibsheet,
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Liberal Arts
Both Douglas and Stella Williams are keen on making
the Fulbright exchanges a two-way street. Williams
hopes to convince the Fulbright program to pay for
BCC media specialists to visit her university, Obafemi
Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, to tutor faculty
in online and distance education technology. She also
plans to solicit U.S. businesses in Africa to provide
scholarships for BCC students to study in Nigeria.
Williams also has invited Cris Samia, assistant dean
and director of BCC’s International Student Programs,
A ‘PASSION FOR
WRITING’ LEADS
TO A JOB WITH
THE JIBSHEET
As a teenager growing up in Belgrade, Ljiljana Ciric loved to write
fiction and short stories. The daughter of two engineers, she
speaks Serbian, English, French, Russian, and Macedonian. “I had
a passion for writing back home. When I came here, it was a big
challenge to express myself in English as I would in my native language. So I just started writing and writing and writing,” said
Ciric.
At Bellevue Community College she found a new outlet for
writing: The Jibsheet, the weekly student newspaper. She applied
to The Jibsheet, got hired, and threw herself into reporting, covering arts and entertainment—interviewing photographer Annie
Leibovitz (“I took her picture, she didn’t take mine”) and the
Seattle Supersonics basketball team — as well as penning
columns about the war in Iraq. “It was a little bit of everything,”
to visit her campus to
counsel Nigerian students
on opportunities to study
in the United States.
“BCC has special internship programs that they
run with the Japanese
government. Cris could
come and visit Nigeria to
run workshops and market these programs to parents who want their kids to
do that,” said Williams. “Right now a lot of BCC
students go to Europe to study abroad. I’d like to get
them to come to Africa.”
“Sending faculty abroad is another deepening opportunity for us, another way to internationalize our curriculum,” said Douglas. “We will reap many, many
benefits when our faculty come back.”
Remaining Welcoming in Difficult Times
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said Ciric, who rose to become editor-in-chief. International students hold offices in many student organizations at the community
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college outside Seattle, but she was the first to run the newspaper.
Ciric said The Jibsheet provides extensive coverage of
events at the college. “That’s really our priority. We want to tie in
every story that we work on to have something to do with the (college) community, to bring it closer,” said Ciric. The editor-in-chief
job carried civic obligations as well. The Jibsheet cosponsored a
campus get-out-the-vote drive last spring, encouraging U.S. citizens to register to vote—and encouraging all students to be active
participants in democracy. ■
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national enrollments rebounded to 645 students from
58 countries—a 19 percent jump—this fall. With its
stature as a top community college and a track record
of making international students feel welcome, Samia
expects that number to keep growing. To make sure
that it does, Samia regularly shuttles to China, Europe
and Latin America on recruiting trips. “We are currently exploring other non-traditional sources of
international students, such as short-term programs
with specific universities overseas,” said Samia, who
was born and educated in the Philippines. His office
also has hired more multilingual advisors to help
students from admission to graduation.
Ludmila Beleva Viesse, 30, came to BCC in 1995
from her native Chisinau, Moldova, to take ESL
classes, then earned a two-year degree, followed by a
bachelor’s in business administration at Northwest
College. She became a Microsoft-certified systems
engineer, then returned to BCC to study for a certificate in program management and to work in the
Student Programs office. “BCC is not just international because we have a lot of international students.
It’s internationally friendly,” she said. “International
students aren’t treated differently than other students.
That’s what makes this place so attractive for people
from different countries. Everyone is treated as a
unique person, but no different from others. Everyone
has an opportunity. Everyone is provided with a
chance to do something if they want to.”
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In the decade after the college created its International
Student Services office, the enrollment trajectory was
straight upwards, peaking at 778 international students from 70 countries in fall 2001. In the aftermath
of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New
York and Washington, D.C., U.S. visa policies were
tightened. These changes were at least partially responsible for a drop to 646 from 64 countries in fall 2002
and to 541 from 57 countries in fall 2003. But inter-
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Scholar Stella
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I am very, very sensitive to. I promote cultural diversity as much as I possibly can. This place is Bellevue
Community Cultural Diversity College in a sense, it
really is.”
René Adel Smith, 25, a nursing major from
Emmanguti, South Africa, who also works in the
International Student Programs office, said, “Here the
frame of mind is you can do whatever you want to do
as long as you put your mind to it. Back home, you
could either do this or this. They’d tell you, ‘Because
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“It’s pretty amazing what we have here. Just look at the
student body,” he added. “I felt at home right away.
I’ve been nothing but welcomed here and treated with
the utmost respect. It’s a nice feeling.”
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Intercultural Communication
Filmmaker and
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BCC faculty member
Among the most popular faculty on campus is speech
professor Alan E. Yabui, Ed.D., who draws 300 students a year to his classes on intercultural communication. They are required for nursing majors. “The nurses themselves asked for it,” said Yabui, a retired U.S.
Air Force lieutenant colonel. The nursing program recognized that its students needed to improve their skills
in communicating with the diverse populations typically encountered in hospitals—and not just the
patients, but the health care workers themselves, from
physicians and pharmacists to the aides, kitchen staff
and custodians.
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of your grades, you can only do this. You would never
be good at that.’ Here you can reach for whatever goal
you want.”
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Programs staff and
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Peter Kirov and other
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Faculty, too, talk about this sense of inclusion as a
principal reason why they were drawn to teach at the
community college. Phil Lucas, a Choctaw Indian and
Emmy Award-winning filmmaker whose documentaries on Native Americans have aired on PBS and
Turner Broadcasting System, joined the faculty four
years ago. “What really convinced me was the openness here,” said Lucas, who was born and raised in
Phoenix, Arizona. “Cultural diversity is something that
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student leaders
Yabui grew up on Maui, Hawaii, during the territorial
era. His grandparents were immigrants from Japan.
Many newly arrived international students sign up for
his intercultural communication course, but so do
many American students. Yabui tries to get both to
understand that “people have different communication
styles, and students from different cultures think dif-
FAISAL JASWAL’S
STOCK IN TRADE:
SHARING BCC’S
‘POWERFUL
EXPERIENCE’
As student and as administrator, Faisal Jaswal has played a significant role for more than two decades in expanding opportunities
for international students at BCC. As a student from Pakistan in
1982, he was a founder of the International Club, the first such
association and still BCC’s largest student organization. It is now
called the International Student Association, and its International
Night dinner-dance each year is a highlight of the college’s social
scene. In 1992, the college hired him as its first International
Student Services coordinator. “That was something very close to
my heart,” said Jaswal, who also studied in England. “I felt that
this community had given me a lot and I wanted to give back.” The
college enrolled as many as six dozen international students from
17 countries when the International Student Services office
opened for business. “The first year we doubled that number with
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Izaak Williams, 22, of Seattle, expressed frustration
with the ethnic enclaves in the cafeteria and with
strangers who avert their eyes rather than saying hello
to someone they pass in the street. “I find that separation hard, and that’s why I’m taking this class,” said
Williams, who aspires to become a lawyer.
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Intercultural communications at BCC, Yabui said, are
“good, but can improve. International students are
part of the community and yet are separate.” The
international students who flock to the cafeteria every
morning and afternoon “are often isolated and socialize in ‘geographic country of origin’ groups,” he said,
just as African American students tend to sit by themselves and white students by themselves. “If the ideal is
a ‘global’ community, we are a long way from there,”
Yabui said.
At a roundtable, six students from Yabui’s class spoke
about what they were learning in the course. For all
but one, it was an elective.
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ferently than American students.” He stresses the
importance of learning to listen for “what is not
stated” and recognizing one’s own ethnocentrism
and prejudices.
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work in small, “culturally dissimilar” groups on
projects that require teamwork on trips to such destinations as Uwajimaya, Seattle’s Asian food market.
Although the name of the market is Japanese, there are
merchants there selling foods and fruits from
Thailand, the Philippines, China, and Korea as well
as Japan. He has the students interview vendors and
customers at the market and meld their quotes and
insights together in a group report. To accomplish
these tasks, the students are forced to overcome not
only language barriers, but also different perceptions
of time, responsibility, and the proper approach to
solving problems.
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He does his part to foster communication across and
among these balkanized groups. He assigns students to
His cousin, Nathan Lucrisia, said it’s not the seating
arrangements in the cafeteria that have to change. “It’s
the understanding each person has to have with other
groups and with each other. You can’t expect everybody to accommodate to your way,” said the well-traveled Lucrisia, who is originally from Cleveland, Ohio,
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students from approximately 30 different countries,” he said. “We
were doing very little marketing, but people learned about us by
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word of mouth.”
in the U.S., overwhelmingly we find that these people are our
allies. These people understand; these people care.”
“There are many ways to bring the world together. In my per-
“We wanted to bring these students in and give them a very
sonal opinion, education is the best way,” he said. “You can’t
powerful experience,” said Jaswal, who after a decade left BCC
make people like each other. You can’t make them work together.
briefly for a job in the software industry then returned to the col-
But you can bring them together to respect their common values
lege. Now director for all student programs, he aspires to create
and create a construct, a framework, where we work together.” ■
an institute at BCC that will prepare students—both those who
grew up in King County and those who have traveled thousands of
miles to Bellevue—for positions of leadership in an increasingly
diverse and interdependent world. Jaswal, who is the adviser for
the Muslim Student Association, explained, “It’s very, very important what [international students] take back…If you look at the
heads of state all around the world that have had their education
Alan E. Yabui, Ed.D.,
speech and intercultural
communications
instructor
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and formerly lived in Kauai, Hawaii. He is part
Filipino and speaks Tagalog. “Somebody might be shy.
You shouldn’t assume that they didn’t want to
acknowledge you or speak with you just because they
didn’t look back. Perhaps they did when you weren’t
looking. We’ve just got to learn different ways to blend
in, adapt, or move around,” said Lucrisia, an international studies major.
Meron Emun, 23, an international student from Addis
Ababa, Ethiopia, said, “Back home you don’t look at
[strangers] or say ‘hi’ to people you don’t know. When
I came here at first I thought it was very strange that
people looked at you and smiled or said ‘hi’ even if
they didn’t know you. But after a while, it’s really
nice.” Emun, who was wearing a stylish shirt that said
ATTENTION GETTER and who speaks perfect
English, has switched majors from fashion merchandising to nursing.
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BCC attracts students young and old. The average age
of students taking courses for credit at BCC is 25. The
continuing education students push the average up to
30. A quarter of students are still in their teens, while
ten percent are 40 or older.
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Sayum Irey and
Iezzi is a personal trainer and group fitness instructor
who once taught aerobics on television in Nepal. “I
had my own business. It was hard for me to start all
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Leslie Lum
Among the latter are Salima Banu Iezzi, a Nepali citizen who moved to Redmond, Washington, with her
husband and daughter five years ago, and Kanize
Khaki, a native of Tanzania, East Africa, who moved
to this area 19 years ago with her husband, who is
Microsoft Corp.’s corporate vice president for
Windows networking. They signed up for classes after
getting one of the catalogues the college regularly
mails out to homes throughout Bellevue and the surrounding communities of Mercer Island, Issaquah,
Snoqualmie Valley, and Skykomish.
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Hsin-ning Lin, 24, of Magoun, Taiwan, who arrived
in Bellevue this spring to study graphic design, said in
her country, when students encounter each other, they
often ask as a conversation starter, “Have you had
lunch?” But, she added, it doesn’t mean they want you
to dine with them. “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s like
saying ‘How are you?’” she said. For “people who don’t
understand our culture,” that phrase may leave
them befuddled.
Student Diversity
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A DIVERSE PLACE
WORKS HARD TO
STAY THAT WAY
More than a quarter of the students at Bellevue Community
College are Asian or Pacific American, Latino, African American
or Native American, and more than 10 percent of the full-time faculty and professional staff are people of color.
But even in an institution that prides itself on its domestic and
international diversity, it can be difficult and unsettling for people
to talk frankly about issues of race and cultural differences.
The faculty and staff at BCC who belong to the Diversity
Caucus are doing their part to encourage what they call these
“Courageous Conversations.” Kim Pollock, English and Ethnic &
Cultural Studies instructor, and counselor Akemia Matsumoto
were the driving forces behind the program, and business professor Leslie Lum and academic reference librarian Sayumi Irey have
been active participants.
“The Diversity Caucus started as a grassroots movement …
over again,” said Iezzi, who is studying exercise physiology and teaches aerobics at several area sites, including to a women’s group at a Muslim academy. Both
Iezzi and Khaki are Muslim; Khaki was wearing a veil
as she ate the lunch she had brought from home.
“I could have gone to the University of Washington,
but I came here for the small classes and the convenience,” said Khaki. “I’ve been a stay-at-home mom.
I’ve always taken care of the family. I wanted my kids
to go to college. But now I have inspiration to do that
for myself. I would like to get a degree from here.”
With two children in college—at Carleton and
Whitman colleges—and a third finishing high school,
it’s possible she could receive a diploma at the same
time her children get theirs.
Both friends described BCC as a perfect fit. “This
community college is really good—very multinational,” said Iezzi, who was born in Kalimpong, India, in
the foothills of the Himalayas.
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international path that BCC has chosen. “Having this
diverse community—which means diverse thought,
diverse religions, diverse ethnicities—enriches our
classroom discussions and helps students gain a different perspective about the world,” said Floten. The
campus radio station, KBCS, a noncommercial station
run by a small professional staff and relying largely on
volunteers, plays its part, too. Its 8,000-watt signal,
serving up jazz, folk, and world music, along with
BBC and “Democracy Now!” news broadcasts, can be
heard across the Puget Sound. “I’m very proud of our
radio station. I can’t tell you how many events I go to
and people comment about the radio station and how
much they like the world music and the perspective
about democracy,” said Floten. The radio station,
which recently moved off campus to roomier quarters
in a shopping mall, raises $250,000 a year from listeners. “It’s a great model. It’s an outreach effort for the
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Floten, the college president, has a nephew enrolled at
BCC whom she spotted carrying a history of the
Persian Empire. It turned out he was reading the book
not for class, but from curiosity. “He’s made friends
here from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, and Armenia,
and he is interested in their history,” she said.
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Floten, whose office is appointed with artwork from
Asia, sees the entire community benefiting from the
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to make sure the curriculum reflected the multicultural nature of
countries and different parts of the United States and with diverse
points of view are comfortable in the classroom and participate
said Lum, who was born in Vancouver, Canada.
and learn,” she said.
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our college, of our students, of our community and of our world,”
The Diversity Caucus has arranged held two weekend
Irey also teaches ethnic and cultural studies. For some U.S.
retreats where up to 60 faculty, administrators and staff came
students, it comes as a shock to learn details about the internment
together for frank discussions about race and making room for
of Japanese Americans during World War II. “They may have
other cultures in the classroom and everyday campus life.
learned a little bit in high school in their history textbooks, but
Participants spoke about their own ethnic and racial identities
most were not challenged to think about it,” said Irey. “Many say
“and all kinds of things that people typically are uncomfortable
at the end of the class, `I wish somebody had told us.”’
talking about,” said Lum. The conversations were “intensive, very
personal, and very straight to the heart.”
The Diversity Caucus sponsors events and speakers on campus, but Lum believes the heart of its work is getting people to talk.
Irey, a University of Washington graduate who was born in
“It’s not event-driven. It’s not just eating the food. Usually the joke
Nagoya, Japan, said the purpose was not to enforce uniformity of
is, if you eat the food, then you’re multicultural, right?” she
thought, but to encourage everyone to make room for other cul-
laughed. “Something basic is happening here that’s going to make
tures at BCC. “We want to make sure that students from different
us truly a pluralistic community.” ■
Bellevue’s modern
campus is situated
in a beautiful Pacific
Northwest setting
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this community for product delivery. We’re seeing
more jobs moving offshore. We’re seeing corporations’
trying to manage that phenomenon. I certainly want
to make our [U.S.] students competitive, but I think
as we become more globalized, people need to understand how to work in the global community,” said
Floten. “Our students are studying telecommuting,
teleconferencing—things that make our world smaller
—with their challenges and opportunities.”
KBCS’s Steve
Ramsey and
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BCC also is eager to expand its capabilities in distance
education. Floten wants to bring more Chinese students to study on this campus. “Here we have this
sleeping giant of a country and right now they are trying to absorb how to do business and how to really
enter the world that we have,” she said. “I believe we
ought to be fostering those connections.” She is also
looking for partnerships with colleges and universities
in Australia and New Zealand “to expand the vision of
the Pacific rim to a deeper grasp.”
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college,” said Steve Ramsey, the general manager.
“We’re telling 45,000 people every week about
Bellevue Community College through what we offer
on the air.”
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While international enrollments at BCC dropped after
the terrible events of September 11, 2001, those
attacks also “made all of us profoundly aware of how
global we are, with all its negative connotations as well
as positive. There was a resurgence of interest in the
world outside of Bellevue from our students’ point of
view,” said Floten. “Students wanted to know more
about Islam, more about fanaticism. They wanted to
understand the world and to make a contribution…
I see students concerned about a society greater than
their own community.”
Looking Forward
BCC, like other public colleges in Washington and
across the nation, has had to deal with constricted
state funding. Against its nature, it has had to restrain
enrollment growth. It is looking at ways to keep growing and keep itself open to new ideas and directions.
“We’re developing a curriculum in telecommuting.
Now there are work teams that cross all time zones in
BCC has been blessed with a great location and excellent facilities. It houses the National Workforce Center
for Emerging Technologies, which is a National
Science Foundation Center for Excellence, bolstering
its strength in information technology. It retrains hundreds of workers and offers more continuing education
classes than any of the state’s 33 other community colleges. It has formed an alliance with Eastern
Washington University (EWU) that allows students to
earn an EWU bachelor’s degree without leaving the
BCC campus. BCC is, as the editors of Rolling Stone
judged six years ago, a model of what a community
college should be. Its international programs are an
important part of its distinction, and this has happened not by chance but by design.
Crystal Matthews, 22, a Bellevue native who aspires to
become a television news anchor, was unaware when
she started classes just how international her local
community college had become. “I’m really impressed.
Not only is it internationally recognized, but we’ve got
great teachers and good students,” said Matthews. “I
just feel really lucky that I got the chance to go here.”
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A Young Institution
Develops a Global
Identity
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education comparable to
elite private institutions but
charge a fraction of their
tuition. In all of U.S. higher
education, only a few dozen
colleges and universities turn
down more students than
they admit. Binghamton
University stands among
them. In 2003, it received
more than 19,000 applications for space in its freshman class and turned away
55 percent. The 2,291 who
enrolled in the class of 2007
had an average SAT score of
1,235, more than 200 points
above the national average. Many of the 10,500
undergraduates live in six residential colleges, designed
after the Oxford model with faculty masters and fellows. Binghamton boasts high retention (92 percent of
freshmen return) and graduation rates (78 percent
within five years). While most students are in the
Harpur College of Arts and Sciences, Binghamton has
four professional schools, with large enrollments in
business and engineering and smaller schools of education and nursing. Some 2,800 graduate students pursue related master’s and doctoral degrees.
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New York came late to the task of constructing a
statewide university system. But when the Empire
State embarked on that task after World War II, it
moved with astonishing rapidity to build new
campuses and expand modest colleges and professional
schools into a network of modern universities. In a
rustic, lightly industrialized region known as the
Southern Tier, that transformation took place at
Harpur College, which was an extension of Syracuse
University called Triple Cities College when it held its
first classes in a converted mansion and some Quonset
huts for returning GIs in 1946. Four years later the
college adopted the name Harpur (a Colonial-era
teacher) and threw in its lot with the fledgling State
University of New York system. It later relocated to its
present 887-acre site across the Susquehanna River
from Binghamton and was tapped in 1966 to become
one of the State University of New York’s (SUNY’s)
four university centers, which conduct research and
grant doctoral as well as bachelor degrees (The others
are Stony Brook University, the University at Buffalo,
and the University at Albany).
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BINGHAMTON
UNIVERSITY
Today SUNY, with 413,000 students enrolled at 64
institutions, comprises the largest comprehensive university system in the United States, while Binghamton
University enjoys unofficial status as one of what
college guides call “the public Ivies,” which deliver
The new clock
tower atop the
Binghamton
University Union
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DeFleur became impassioned about getting students
and faculty into the field. That value became her hallmark, first as director of a research center and later
dean of liberal arts at Washington State University,
then as provost of the University of MissouriColumbia, where she put the honors and international
programs under the same roof so they could cross-fertilize initiatives. She landed in Binghamton in 1990,
drawn not only by the caliber of students and faculty,
but by the institution’s age. “It’s not often that you are
able to come into a ‘young’ university and make an
impact,” she said.
In the year of DeFleur’s arrival, there were 550 international students at Binghamton, and 232 undergraduates studied abroad, mostly in Western Europe. In
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2003–04 Binghamton enrolled a record 1,165
international students from 87 countries, and 450
undergraduates studied abroad. Three-quarters went
for a semester or full year, and a third studied in
Australia, Latin America, Asia, or Africa.
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President Lois B. DeFleur did path-breaking work on
deviant behavior and juvenile delinquency as a young
sociologist in the barrios and jails of Cordoba,
Argentina’s colonial capital. The research put the
young sociologist and her assistants “in some pretty
difficult situations. My family was frantic, but I was
naïve enough to think, ‘Well, why not? I can do it,’”
recalled DeFleur, an avid pilot who has flown her
Comanche 260 from Alaska to Guatemala. “It changed
my life. It changed my way of thinking. It changed my
whole concept of myself, as being someone who could
handle extraordinarily difficult situations.”
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Lois B. DeFleur
Binghamton added luster in the 1990s to its reputation by transforming itself into a showcase for international education. It did this in part by doubling the
numbers of international students and undergraduates
studying abroad, and by requiring students to learn
about other cultures of the world. It won acclaim for a
novel Languages Across the Curriculum (LxC) program that encourages students, even those with modest proficiency, to apply their language skills in regular
courses, from history to the arts to anthropology. Its
performing arts center brings top orchestra, ballet, and
theater companies from around the world to
Binghamton. Perhaps most of all, Binghamton did it
with an adventurous president who believed in internationalization and knew how to move big academic
institutions in that direction.
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One reason that Binghamton attracts international
students is that the SUNY campuses remain a great
buy among public universities. Tuition for the full
2003–04 academic year was $4,350 in-state, and
$10,300 out-of-state, including international students
(living expenses and other fees push the price tag past
$15,000 and $21,000, respectively). Binghamton and
SUNY, like many public systems nationwide, have
grappled in recent years with state budget cuts even
amid soaring demand. Albany today provides 43 percent of Binghamton’s operating budget, 20 percentage
points less than its contribution of a decade ago.
Three percent of Binghamton’s 10,500 undergraduates
are international, and 3 percent come from the other
49 states. But even the state residents are a diverse lot.
“Yes, they are New Yorkers, but their backgrounds are
much broader,” said Mary Ann Swain, the provost and
vice president for academic affairs. “New York is still a
place that’s the American dream. One-third of our students are first generation college goers. One-third
comes from homes where English is not spoken.”
A visit to an international marketing class bears out
that observation. All but six of the 33 students in the
class were New York residents, but 11 were born outside the United States, from countries across Asia,
Latin America, and Eastern Europe. Others were the
children of immigrants from Africa and South
America. The class’s many heritage speakers of
Chinese, Korean, Spanish, and Russian were using
their language skills to lead student teams studying
how Procter & Gamble marketed Pantene shampoo in
different countries and markets around the world.
Joy Anakhu, a junior from Queens, New York, whose
parents were born in Nigeria, explained her interest in
international marketing. “A global management degree
allows you to keep up with the fact the entire world
has become smaller. We’re all actually a little closer,”
she said.
Providing Opportunities and Incentives
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The university launched its International Studies
Certificate Program in 1995. One hundred students
each year work toward adding this distinction to their
diplomas by taking courses in cross-cultural topics,
gaining proficiency in a second language, and studying
abroad or interning in an organization with an international focus. The university also offers a certificate
for students who complete a 40-credit Global Studies
Integrated Curriculum exploring such topics as human
rights, labor, and environmental issues.
That fillip of extra recognition has proved a strong
incentive. “Binghamton students are so ambitious.
They are always looking for what will set them apart,”
said DeFleur.
Faculty, too, respond to incentives. Rosmarie T.
Morewedge, chair of the German, Russian, and East
Asian Languages Department, has taught the language,
literature, and culture of her native Germany at
Binghamton since 1970. In those days Binghamton
had a large graduate program in German, but it is now
for undergraduates only. Morewedge sends 15–18
students each year to study in Graz, Austria, and
Leipzig, Germany. Binghamton’s German majors can
get dual degrees in engineering or management. With
support from the German Academic Exchange Service
(DAAD), Binghamton recently hired an assistant pro-
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DeFleur empanelled a strategic planning council to
think about the university’s future. It produced a blueprint in 1995 that made internationalization a top priority. It called for new courses, research opportunities,
and extracurricular programs to “prepare our students
to be leaders with a global vision.” It set a goal that
“25 percent of graduates will have a significant international experience as part of their education.” That
target has proved elusive, although the percentage of
students who studied or had internships abroad has
doubled to 18 percent.
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Since 1996, undergraduates have had to take a “Global
Interdependencies” course, which offers comparative
studies of Western and non-Western civilizations. The
so-called G courses have proved popular among students and faculty alike, with 83 courses now offered by
18 departments. Students typically take two G courses
before they graduate. The requirement has shaped faculty recruitment, said H. Stephen Straight, professor
of anthropology and linguistics and vice provost for
undergraduate education and international affairs, as
departments looked for academics who brought international perspectives to their specialties. “The history
department, for one, has miraculously changed itself,”
said Straight. “All the faculty hired in the past eight
years have had this in their quiver.”
Professor of
German Rosmarie
T. Morewedge
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other administrators on how Binghamton became such
a hospitable place for students from other lands.
By Summers’s count, more than three dozen administrators and staff from the University of Oslo have
made the trip to Binghamton to learn from its operations. “They want to be like us,” said Summers, who
has paid reciprocal visits to Norway.
holds a Welcome
sign written in 55
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Embracing a Global Commitment
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In decades past the international connections of
Binghamton professors were “more personal and kind
of haphazard; it wasn’t hidden, but it wasn’t highlighted,” said Straight, a University of Chicago-trained linguist who did his doctoral work among the Maya on
the Yucatan peninsula. “Now they are quite public and
highly valued and recognized in the campus conversation. It’s transformed the ethos of this campus. ‘Everybody’ is too big a word to use, but the predominant
number of faculty and, in time, even staff and students
have accepted and embraced this global commitment.”
director of the
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Katharine Krebs,
Office of
International
Education
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vice president for
fessor to teach technical German as part of a planned
Watson School/Harper’s College dual-degree program
for engineers with Study Abroad at the University of
Technology in Graz. Morewedge, who received the
university’s top honor in 2001 for excellence in international education, said, “I felt the internationalization
of the campus was a really important issue here. I’ve
tried to champion that as much as possible.”
OF
Rodger Summers,
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Binghamton literally hangs a huge Welcome banner in
55 languages across its main drive at the start of each
school year, and posters of the colorful banner are
framed in many offices around the campus. “We
wanted people to feel that they had a home here in
Binghamton,” said Summers. “I’ve had students tell
me it’s made them cry when they saw their home
country’s language.” A college diversity panel developed the poster idea with help from the AntiDefamation League of B’nai B’rith, and now other
colleges have copied Binghamton’s posters.
“We’ve all caught the fever,” agreed Rodger Summers,
the vice president for student affairs, the first senior
administrator DeFleur hired. “We don’t do this
because the president thinks we should be doing it.
We do it because we’ve seen the benefits in terms of
the relationships that develop.” Universities as far
afield as Norway, Russia, and Israel have enlisted the
expertise of Summers, Ellen Badger—director of
International Student and Scholars Services—and
“You walk around here and it’s just like a little United
Nations,” said Summers, who with the president and
provost hosts a luncheon for international students
each semester. “We always walk away feeling so humbled by these students because they are so grateful for
everything you do for them, every little experience.”
A Decade of Growth in Education Abroad
The hiring of Katherine Krebs, an experienced education abroad administrator, as director of the Office of
International Education in 1994 marked a turning
point. Under her guidance, the number of
Binghamton programs grew from six to 30, and its
offerings now include programs in Costa Rica,
Morocco, Senegal, Turkey, and China. “This campus
was hungry for international education. It was easy to
find faculty who had good ideas and were responsive
to ideas I had,” said Krebs,
who has a Ph.D. in
Spanish from Tulane.
At some U.S. campuses, it
is a struggle to secure credit for work done overseas.
“We’ve streamlined that
here,” said Krebs. “Once
you get the programs
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approved, the faculty has been good about not being
overly bureaucratic. They are so eager for the students
to get out and have these intercultural experiences
that the credit recognition has been really easy.”
Binghamton students also have access to more than
250 overseas education programs that SUNY offers
in 51 countries.
Professor
Jean Quataert
engages students
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international studies, said it changed her life. “It got
me started on making a documentary film about
Senegal. With the help of my professor I got an
internship and was able to stay on,” said Campbell.
“It’s a really confusing world out there. Senegal is 98
percent Muslim and very poor. You think you have
questions before you go and you might get answers.
I ended up with a hundred times more questions
coming back.”
Nancy Paul, director of the Career Development
Center, sees a difference in students coming through
her office after completing a stint abroad. “They can
articulate so much more about what they want.
It’s amazing what that experience does for their selfconfidence,” said Paul.
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DeFleur felt confident by the mid-1990s that the
internationalization effort was taking root. “First of all,
I got the right people, bringing in some changes. We
talked about it and even in tough times, we put
money into it,” DeFleur said. “With the provost and
people like Stephen [Straight], we worked on the curriculum. We began to work on the whole.”
in a human rights
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Binghamton also strives to keep education abroad
affordable. Igor Zamkovsky, 19, a junior from
Brooklyn, New York, found that the semester he spent
at the University of Nottingham in England cost no
more than if he had stayed in upstate New York. “Had
I not traveled all over Europe, I would have saved
money,” said Zamkovsky, whose family moved to the
United States from Moscow when he was eight.
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DeFleur helped spearhead the international efforts of a
SUNY planning group, and rose to chair the National
Association of State Universities and Land Grant
Colleges in 1996 and the American Council on
Education in 1998. In all these forums, she stressed
the importance of making international work central
to university life. “I kept saying the international work
can’t just be seen as over here, isolated. We’ve got to
pull it all together.”
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She begged to differ when she heard presidents extol
programs that sent small numbers of language majors
off to study in Bavarian castles. “I always talked about
the need to have a wide range of opportunities. A lot
of the presidents were saying, ‘Well, if you don’t live
there for at least a year, it isn’t truly an international
experience.’ I don’t believe that. In fact, research now
is showing that even short stays have an impact on the
attitudes and values of students,” said DeFleur.
The summer program in Senegal is only four weeks,
but Ann Campbell, 25, of Charlevoix, Michigan, who
graduated in May with a bachelor’s degree in art and
Students from Across the Globe
Traditionally international graduate students have
outnumbered international undergraduates 3-to-1 at
Binghamton. The ratio is now 70-30 and could narrow further with the influx of Turkish undergraduates,
who will spend at least three semesters on the U.S.
campus. The largest concentration of international
graduate students is in the Watson School of
Engineering (363), followed by Harpur College of Arts
and Sciences (294) and the School of Management
(129). Their ranks grow largely by word of mouth, not
by recruiting or advertising.
While the largest numbers of international students
come from India (314), China (171), and Korea
(157), Binghamton long has had ties with Turkey,
which sent 78 students last fall. Turkish academics in
the social sciences who trained at Binghamton in the
course
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“I have to give the faculty credit. All of these have gone
clear through our Faculty Senate. We could do many
more (dual-diploma degrees),” said DeFleur. “Even our
engineering college is involved, which is amazing.”
Student Perspectives on Binghamton
Mary Ann Swain,
Consider how Sandeep Advani, 24, of Pune, India,
found his way to this campus for a master’s degree in
computer science. His tale of academic detective work
speaks to both his diligence and the keen computer
skills he had already honed in India.
provost and
vice president for
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I got in touch with students who were already studying
out there. We have the [e-mail] directory of the school.
You can enter the first name or the last name and get
people’s e-mail addresses. At any university in the United
States, there are some very, very common Indian first and
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Pune, India, and
Priya Rajagopalan
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Sandeep Advani of
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Computer science
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1980s now regularly send top students there for their
Ph.D.s. That pipeline soon will be dramatically
widened to include as many as 360 undergraduates a
year from Turkey under an ambitious dual-diploma
program that SUNY has worked out with the Turkish
Council of Higher Education. Three other SUNY
campuses are also involved in the program, supported
by a grant from the U.S. Department of State, but
Binghamton is playing the principal role. The Turkish
students will spend at least three semesters at
Binghamton earning joint degrees in Information
Systems, Management and Global Affairs and
International Studies from Binghamton and from
Bosphorus University, Bilkent University, Middle East
Technical University, and Istanbul Technical University.
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After getting through those initial tests that make you eligible to get admission in any of the good colleges in the
United States—after doing my GRE and TOEFL
exams—looking at my scores, my experience, and my education, I went to these Web sites such as Gradschools.com
and Peterson’s that give you a listing of all the colleges. I
jotted down eight to 10 universities, went to each of their
Web sites and I did research. What are the courses the
college is offering? What is the ranking of the department?
What are the areas of specialization? What is the location? What are the tuition and fees? Considering all of
these important factors, it came down to eight colleges.
I applied to them online. I was offered admission to five.
WHAT DRAWS
THEM TO
BINGHAMTON?
How did Binghamton, New York, become a favored destination for
international students? It’s off the beaten track. Binghamton is a city
with 47,000 residents in mid-state, not far from the Pennsylvania
border. New York City and Philadelphia are both roughly 180 miles
away, and even Albany is a two-and-a-half-hour drive. As public
universities go, with an enrollment of 13,000, Binghamton is a midsize institution. But it has created a strong support structure for
international students, featuring dozens of cultural and fraternal
organizations, and enlists student volunteers to help newcomers
with their English, and local families to take them in for special
holidays and a taste of U.S. culture. Orientation for international
students even includes excursions to the local Wegman’s, an
upstate New York supermarket chain.
Priyadashini Rajagopalan, 23, a computer science graduate
student from Chennai, India, who goes by Priya Raj (“It’s easier for
last names. For example, you just type in “Priya” and
then we have all the Priyas in that college.
I sent everybody an e-mail saying, “I am a prospective
student out here and I have earned admission in so-andso major and I have this list of questions before I actually
decide to apply for my U.S. visa to this particular school.
I want to have as much knowledge as possible from all
the schools before I decide.” So I got their replies, learned
about the school, spoke to people. …Considering all these
factors I landed on Binghamton.
In India, Advani added, “Every student does that.”
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from a New Zealand university. When I was doing my
master’s at Egerton, one of my professors went to
Binghamton to study for his Ph.D. When he came back
to Kenya for holidays I asked, “Where’s this Binghamton?
How is it?” He gave me an application form and said,
“Fill out this paper. I’ll take it back.”
Kowenje not only was admitted but awarded a teaching
assistantship that paid full tuition and a living stipend.
He is among 15 Kenyans from Egerton currently
pursuing Ph.D.s in chemistry at Binghamton and now,
on trips home to see his wife and three children, he,
too, brings blank applications.
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Not so in Chrispin Ounga Kowenje’s home of Kenya,
where Internet access is less common, even for a college chemistry teacher with a master’s degree as he was.
It was a personal connection that led Kowenje to
upstate New York. That connection, explained the 34year-old Ph.D. candidate in materials chemistry, was
Egerton College—now Egerton University—in
Njoro, Kenya. Kowenje, who is president of the 46member Graduate African Student Organization at
Binghamton, tells the story:
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I taught inorganic chemistry at a university for two years.
I realized that age was catching up with me; most organizations will support you for a Ph.D. only when you are
below 30. I said, “OK, let me hurry up because the biological clock is ticking.” I went through initial interviews
with the Japanese government and actually had [an offer]
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everyone to say my name that way”), says Binghamton’s friendli-
Friendship Family program, and was their guest for Thanksgiving
dinner. “It was wonderful, the big feast of the turkey and the yams,
Indian Graduate Student Organization, said faculty and staff “are
learning how Thanksgiving started,” said Advani.
©
ness extends well beyond orientation. Rajagopalan, president of
with us for every event that we have. They all come and support us.
Chrispin Ounga Kowenje, 34, a doctoral student from Kenya,
It’s not just the international students’ office. They come, have fun,
was struck by the friendly tone of the letters from both the interna-
and try to learn what we are doing. This is something I haven’t
tional office and the chemistry department after he was admitted.
heard from my friends from India at other universities. They don’t
“To me they expressed, ‘Wow. These people value me.’ I was just
really get a chance to interact.
longing to see such faces. The first thing I did when I came was to
Sandeep Advani, 24, of Pune, India, also in computer science, concurred. “I have friends at colleges all over the United
walk into these offices to see the people who were writing to me
and say, ‘Hi, here I am, and thank you,’” he said.
States. They are fascinated when I talk about the events that we
“I came in January and it was cold and the trees had no
are having, like the International Festival, the student weekends,
leaves. But the staff and the international students were welcom-
the Friendship Family concept. Sometimes they say, ‘Wow. That’s
ing, the African fraternity is really strong, and the orientation
so cool,’” said Advani.
was so good I realized that I didn’t make a wrong choice,”
Advani went camping with a U.S. family through the
said Kowenje. ■
Chrispin Ounga
Kowenje of Kenya,
who is pursuing a
chemistry Ph.D.
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Badger, a Binghamton alumna who has spent her
career in admissions and international services.
Badger, the director of International Student and
Scholar Services, said, “we have quite a few Kenyans
now, and not all are in chemistry. They are scattered in
a number of places. But that Egerton College connection is how it started.” The stories of Advani and
Kowenje are typical of how international enrollments
at Binghamton have burgeoned, Badger said.
“Sometimes it’s a very entrepreneurial computer scientist who does a methodical search, and sometimes it’s
the pebble in the pond effect: one person then another, then a few more, and then a few more,” said
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At Binghamton and elsewhere, international festivals
and cultural events serve not only to bring a touch of
home to international students, but to bring a slice of
the world into the lives of U.S. students. New Yorkers
may fancy themselves a cosmopolitan lot, but their
view of the world sometimes runs perilously close to
the Saul Steinberg cartoon in The New Yorker, where
civilization recedes just beyond the Hudson River.
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Straight, the vice provost, said domestic students
“come with prejudices and ignorance that need to be
dispelled, particularly with regard to global problems,
international perspectives, multi-cultural differences,
and issues of respect.” If they are to acquire a global
vision, “that has to be inculcated and nurtured during
the college years,” he said.
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Binghamton has just stiffened its language requirement for undergraduates. Students will have to
demonstrate “meaningful” use of a second language
either by passing a third-semester college-level course
in one language or a second-semester course in two
languages or by study or internships abroad in another
language. Binghamton made it harder for students to
place out of language courses straight out of high
school. “This is our next step,” said Swain, “There’s
going to be a lot of fits and starts, but we’re going to
work on it.”
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class in Korean
LXC: BRINGING
LANGUAGE SKILLS
TO THE FORE IN
OTHER CLASSES
Stephen Straight added a wrinkle to the term paper assignments in
the late 1980s: the Binghamton University linguistics professor
insisted that students cite at least three sources in a language
other than English.
Straight didn’t think he was asking the impossible, since
Binghamton had a language requirement. “There was quite a bit of
kicking and screaming at first, but it worked. Gradually they
became less apprehensive,” he said.
“In the best cases, I had students’ bringing in materials in
Korean and Swedish—languages I didn’t know—and I helped
them make sense of it. We were always able to get something
worthwhile out of what they brought in,” said Straight, now vice
provost for undergraduate education and international affairs.
Straight mentioned to Ellen Badger, director of International
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Global Vision Through the Arts and
Campus Life
Stephen Straight, vice
provost for undergraduate
education and interna-
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This summer, the theater department’s Don Boros and
Qianghua Wang took nine students to study abroad
for a month in Beijing and Shanghai. The “Total Art
of Chinese Theater” was arranged through the connections of Wang, the theater department’s scenic artist
and a former artist and set designer for the Shanghai
Shaoxing Opera Company. Boros, an assistant professor, and Wang won an $8,000 SUNY Chancellor’s
award to subsidize the international trip, which they
hope to repeat every summer.
Binghamton is a place where any student, not just the
music and theater majors, stands a chance of landing a
seat in the symphonic wind ensemble or a role in a
play. It has moved up from NCAA Division III to
Division I athletics. It doesn’t field a football team, but
on a spring day it’s not uncommon to find Binghamton
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Another institution serves as a beacon for internationalism on campus and across the wider community:
The Anderson Center for the Arts, which draws more
than 100,000 concert and theater goers each year from
as far away as 100 miles to the 175 events on its three
stages. The center has twice hosted the New York
Philharmonic and regularly books orchestras, operas,
ballet companies, and theater groups from around the
world. It opened in 1986 with the Central Ballet of
China. It has staged month- and semester-long festivals that featured music, theater, dance, and exhibits
from Ireland, Scotland, and Greece, and it will mark
its twentieth anniversary in the upcoming season with
performances by the Luxembourg Philharmonic
Orchestra, the Virsky-Ukrainian National Dance
Company, the Prague Symphony Orchestra, and the
St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre. The impresario for all
these productions is Floyd Herzog, who came to the
Anderson Center as artistic director six months before
opening night and has run the whole show artistically
and administratively since 1990. “These festivals were
a key that unlocked bigger doors for the university and
its international exchange programs,” said Herzog. The
festivals yielded exchanges with the universities in
Scotland, Northern Ireland and Greece. The 1999
Hellenic festival featured a production of Electra
directed by Greek classical actress Lydia Koniordou,
who performed the title role alongside Binghamton
faculty and students.
20
Student and Scholar Services, that he wished he could convince
others to adopt the approach. “If more faculty were doing this, it
of State awarded through the NAFSA COOP program, they
launched a pilot project in 1991.
The pilot project blossomed and attracted a $200,000 grant
campus using their language skills in lots of different classes,” he
from the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement
reasoned.
of Postsecondary Education. Binghamton has been offering LxC
©
could grow and grow and grow and you’d have students across the
Badger asked, “Well, what about the international students?
Couldn’t they be of help?”
Then, as Straight puts it, “the light bulb went on over both of
our heads.” They devised a plan to hire international graduate stu-
sections in courses ever since. Over the years, some 3,300 students using 16 languages have taken LxC in 163 courses. The second language work is designed to be a substitute for, not an addition to, some regular course assignments.
dents as language resource specialists in regular courses whose
LxC attracts those who have reached the intermediate level
task would be to lead small group discussions in languages other
in a language in high school or at Binghamton; those who studied
than English. They dubbed it Languages Across the Curriculum
abroad or are preparing to; and especially the growing number of
(LxC), and with the help of comparative literature professor
Binghamton students who are heritage speakers of their parents’
Marilyn Gaddis Rose and a $5,000 grant from the U.S. Department
continued
from right) with visiting
Turkish educators
26
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 4
North Carolina, or Virginia. But its undergraduate
program is strong and growing stronger. Applications
keep rising.
RS
“We are not completely there in terms of the integration either before students go abroad or when they
return,” said DeFleur. “Even though we have the
highest proportion in the SUNY system of students
who have an international experience, I want more
students to have more experiences.”
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AL
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So what does the future hold for
Binghamton? It is never going to be
as large or have as many graduate
and professional programs as
the flagship universities
in California, Michigan,
“If you’re creative and committed to this, and you
understand your own institution, you can find ways to
do this,” said DeFleur. “You can do different things in
different ways. You need to think about the attributes
in your own institution. You need to find ways to
bring people together, to offer incentives, recognition,
and rewards, and generate enthusiasm. That’s what we
did. We had opportunities, and we took advantage
of them.”
ER
IN
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OF
Generating Enthusiasm
“It’s so exciting and so much fun to see all of this
develop,” added the president. DeFleur cautioned
against anyone’s attributing Binghamton’s success at
internationalization solely to its selectivity.
NA
the Curriculum
04
Languages Across
David Hagerbaumer, director of campus activities,
who first reported to work at the university in 1979,
said, “Our campus is a hundred percent different place
now. The institution has intentionally developed, as
much as we can in this little place in upstate New
York, a truly global type of social
structure. I think it’s served our
students well.”
native languages, including Korean, Russian, Chinese, Spanish,
20
acting director of
and French.
The program continues to receive honors, including a
2003–04 Andrew Heiskell Award for Innovation in International
“We’re demand driven,” said Suronda Gonzalez, the pro-
Education. But the approach is more honored than emulated as
gram’s acting director. She sees the discussion groups as espe-
yet. To Straight’s knowledge, no other U.S. college or university
cially helpful for the heritage speakers. “Often times they may
has copied the Binghamton LxC model. ■
©
Suronda Gonzalez,
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students—international students from South Asia,
immigrants, and an occasional U.S. student—playing
pick-up cricket games on the main lawn.
have a really good spoken Russian or Chinese, but to have a business conversation or talk about the gross domestic product, they
are lost,” said Gonzalez, who is completing a Ph.D. in history.
“They have this skill that they are not tapping into. They are
not bringing it up to a more professional level. They are not engaging it on a daily or weekly basis,” said Gonzalez, whose grandparents emigrated from Spain to work in zinc mines in West Virginia.
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U C C E S S
Ambitious Pursuits
OF
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The late Terry Sanford, a North Carolina governor and
senator as well as longtime president of Duke, memorably told the faculty in 1984 that there was nothing
wrong with a university’s possessing “outrageous ambitions.” Duke has never proved lacking in this category.
Over the past decade, under the adroit leadership of
President Nannerl Overholser Keohane, Duke’s outrageous ambitions included the methodical execution of
a plan to win recognition as one of the leading universities not just in the United States, but in the world.
Keohane stepped down this summer, six months after
the successful completion of an eight-year, $2.3 billion
fund-raising drive that added $750 million to Duke’s
endowment and fueled a campus construction boom.
After a year’s sabbatical, Keohane, a political scientist,
plans to resume teaching, while her successor, Richard
Brodhead, former dean of Yale College, prepares an
encore for this still young university.
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Weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the
United States, a half dozen Duke University students
sat in a modern Arabic literature and culture class trying to sort through the tormented history and politics
of the Middle East. Senior Danielle Squires turned to
the professor, Miriam Cooke, and suggested they go to
Beirut to find out more for themselves. “If you write
up a proposal, I’ll make it happen,” she replied.
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UNIVERSITY
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Realizing
‘Outrageous
Ambitions’
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The Arabic literature scholar wasn’t kidding. Within
weeks, the students and Cooke had secured $18,000
in university funding. Cooke and a colleague, Stephen
Sheehi, took nine students over spring break to
Lebanon, where they visited Palestinian refugee camps
and met with the prime minister. Victoria Hogan,
then a sophomore, accepted a family’s invitation to
stay the night at the Shatila camp. A few months later,
working as an intern for Save the Children, Hogan
found herself in another set of refugee camps, on
Kenya’s border with strife-torn Somalia.
That clinched a personal decision for Hogan. She had
arrived at Duke as a pre-med, a science fair winner
intent on becoming a physician and genetics
researcher. “But the international options that I had at
Duke completely changed my life,” said Hogan, who
graduated in May and now is on a Fulbright scholarship in Egypt. Her ambition now is not a medical
degree but finding ways to make life better for the
world’s 20 million refugees.
Keohane returned to her Allen Building
office one mid-April morning after delivering
a final “Blue Devil Days” welcoming talk to
high school seniors with admission offers in
hand to the Class of 2008. Outside her
windows, children clambered around the
bronze statue on the West Campus
green of tobacco tycoon and philanthropist James B. Duke, cigar in
one hand, cane in the other.
Nannerl Overholser
Keohane, Duke
University president
from July 1993
through June 2004
OF
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The number of international students who come to
pursue degrees in Durham nearly doubled on her
watch. Ten years ago, 777 international students were
enrolled; this past year there were 1,503. Some 304
were undergraduates, triple the number in 1993–94.
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Strategic Planning for Internationalization
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Duke made internationalization one of its paramount
goals in a 1994 strategic plan. In its rationale, a
university committee said, “We must, in short, internationalize Duke University and become a part of a
global community, sharing with the world the very
best that the university, its students and its faculty
The peripatetic Keohane actually ventured abroad
about twice a year, but each journey became a
marathon of stops and speeches. Duke had a handful
of alumni clubs overseas when Keohane began her
travels; now it has nearly 40. “It was something I
wanted to do,” said the former president of Wellesley
College, her alma mater. “There are certain countries—for example, Canada or Taiwan or Argentina—
where Duke is probably as well known as any institution in the United States. In Taiwan we have an
extremely important affiliation with a major cancer
center. In Argentina we have a lot of law alumni.
There are others where we are not as well known, but
we are determined to be.”
RS
Keohane, whose music-loving parents named her after
Mozart’s sister, said that the conspicuous internationalization of the past decade “has made Duke a better
place. Clearly there is much more that we can do.
Duke is still not nearly as well known in many parts of
the world as we think it should be and we still have
too few students who integrate their study abroad
experience with the rest of their Duke experience.”
04
Duke, tobacco
tycoon and founder
have to offer in return.”
It adopted precise goals
and steps to move the university down this path, and
even suggested that the
president make three official trips abroad each year.
“One of the points I made was that Duke had the
marvelous combination of being rooted in a specific
region and being very ambitious in reaching out to the
entire world; that it is a magnificent place to come and
study because they will have a sense of feeling at home
and a sense of community, but also a very strong sense
that the whole world is part of their educational
arena,” said Keohane.
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James Buchanan
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 4
©
28
Duke restored a language requirement for the 80 percent of undergraduates in arts and sciences and
required that they complete two courses involving
“cross-cultural inquiry.” (Engineering students are not
subject to those requirements.) Duke’s trustees decided
in 2001 to begin making financial aid to international
undergraduates on a limited basis. Last year, 50 international freshmen and sophomores received needbased aid averaging more than $32,000. The trustees
also pledged to make study abroad affordable “for all
our undergraduates regardless of economic circumstance.” On a campus with 6,000 undergraduates,
upwards of 800 study abroad each year and nearly half
have studied abroad by the time they graduate. One
peculiarity is that Duke students overwhelmingly prefer to study abroad in the fall rather than the spring—
the opposite of the predilection of most U.S. students.
Basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski and his Blue Devils,
with 19 NCAA tournament appearances and three
national titles in 24 years, are considered largely
responsible for that phenomenon.
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As the World Shrinks, Syllabi Broaden
Duke’s internationalization is part of a recognition by
many U.S. educational institutions that their syllabi
had to become broader even as the world became
smaller. “If we as a nation are going to become better
prepared to deal with an increasingly interdependent
world, then the front line has to be in our colleges and
universities where we prepare students to become leaders in global enterprises, to serve in the Foreign
Service, to be leaders of their communities who are
sensitive to international issues,” said Keohane. “Our
country would be much impoverished if we allowed
ourselves to fall back into isolationism and xenophobia. It will be particularly important for us in the years
ahead to have students who can speak a variety of languages and who know the cultures of many different
countries in order for our nation to take its place as
one of the leading countries in building a stronger…
and more peaceful world.”
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Gilbert A. Merkx
OF
Maintaining a Commitment to
European Studies
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Keohane said it was fitting that NAFSA’s selection
committee for Internationalizing the Campus 2004
had chosen to profile both Duke and the University of
North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC), which sit 12
miles apart. The fiercest of rivals on the basketball
court, they are the closest of partners on numerous
academic fronts. Said Keohane: “Our strength in international outreach has been greatly multiplied by our
collaboration with [UNC], partly through the Title VI
program, but also through a number of educational
activities on campus where students take courses in
one or the other place, or the Rotary International
Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution. It certainly
makes us much stronger together than we could ever
be alone. Since it’s a common goal, we have supported
each other in our international outreach and it even
transcends the basketball rivalry.” Her successor,
Brodhead, said this synergy between Duke and UNC
“takes a thousand unpredictable forms.” When the
new president expressed interest in seeing more details
about Duke-UNC partnerships, “somebody brought
me a 35-page document,” he said.
Vice Provost
Duke created the post of vice provost for international
affairs a decade ago at the outset of its push toward
greater emphasis on international study and research.
That, said Keohane, was “crucial to overcoming the
centrifugal forces of a decentralized institution. Unless
there’s someone for whom that is his or her job, it’s
too easy for other people even with vague goodwill not
to have the operational opportunities to make things
come together.” The first holder of this position, Peter
Lange, is now Duke’s provost. The current vice
provost, Gilbert A. Merkx, a sociologist and Latin
American scholar, has strengthened Duke’s already
robust international area studies programs. Duke is
home to a half-dozen Title VI national resource centers for foreign language and area studies: the Global
East Asia Study Center; the Center for Latin American
and Caribbean Studies; the Center for South Asia; the
Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies;
the Center for International Studies; and the Fuqua
School of Business’s Center for International Business
Education and Research. The South Asia, Russian and
Latin American center grants are in consortia with
other North Carolina universities.
30
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old ideas of national integrity and national culture.
Europe has gone from being a complacent, somewhat
boring part of the world to an arena of contested cultural and political issues and identities. Our center is
focusing on what’s actually happening on the ground.”
Moreover, at Duke area studies is not the sole province
of social scientists, Merkx said. “It’s the humanists who
are bringing in all this attention to the cultural conflict, to media and to art as areas of contention.
Cinema, for example, is a great ideological weapon.
This is an exciting place to be.”
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UNC and Duke had shared a national resource center
in West European studies for nearly a decade until
UNC decided to end the partnership. UNC and
Duke applied separately for Title VI funding for
West European centers in 2003; only UNC’s center
was funded.
Investment in an Intellectual Community
Diane Nelson,
AL
a professor in Latin
ON
American Studies;
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Edna Andrews,
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and Ralph Litzinger,
Asian/Pacific Studies
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European Studies,
When it was clear that the European Center marriage
with UNC was unraveling, Merkx approached Alberto
Moreiras, a professor of Latin American literature, and
asked if he would consider directing the center with a
distinctly new profile that would not be nation oriented or confined to Europe, but would use Europe to
reflect on interactions with other parts of the world.
What if the Duke center failed to secure federal funding, asked the Spanish-born professor. Merkx replied,
“This university can go on without Title VI money,
but this university cannot go on without a European
studies program. We will support European studies
whether we have outside funding or not.” Moreiras’s
center almost won a Title VI grant in 2003 and now
is gearing up for the 2006 competition. The vice
provost’s office now supports the European center,
which formerly received $110,000 a year in Title VI
funds, at a reduced but still “very generous” level,
according to Moreiras.
©
Alberto Moreiras,
ER
Slavic, Eurasian and East
European Studies;
The field of area studies is struggling to keep its relevancy in a world where people, goods and ideas cross
borders at a speed and to an extent unimaginable
when these programs were launched in the heyday of
the Cold War. Duke, with 12,800 students and nearly
2,500 faculty, is half the size of major public universities that boast as many or more Title VI centers. This
is both a drawback and a strength—while there are
fewer people available to teach or take certain neglected
languages, Duke sees itself as more flexible and nimble
than the typical research university.
ED
Area Studies directors
For his part, Merkx said, “What’s really exciting in
Europe is not the latest step in trade integration or
currency or what powers the new European constitution, but massive migration from peripheral regions,
like North Africa and the Middle East. You have all
these separatist movements coming back and the resurgence of the right wing nationalists trying to cling to
Ralph Litzinger, an anthropologist who studies ethnic
minorities in China and directs the Asian/Pacific
Studies Institute, said, “If Duke wants to imagine itself
as a different kind of research institution as well as a
school that’s focused on internationalization, this is
happening through the centers. The centers are allowing those intellectual boundaries to break down, not
only between disciplines but also between undergraduates and graduate students.” Litzinger, who first
learned Chinese as a relief worker in refugee camps on
the Thai-Cambodian border two decades ago, said the
presence of Duke’s centers “is incredibly important for
disrupting the idea that it’s just the West, just the
Euro-American context that speaks for the rest of the
world. We have a massive visiting scholars program;
every year we are bringing scholars, policymakers,
diplomats and business people from East Asia who
come here and teach classes or team up with a faculty
member to teach classes. Students are getting exposed
to different viewpoints, different historical backgrounds, different experiences.”
“There is a notion that the word ‘area studies’ is passé,
that it’s potentially anti-intellectual,” said Edna
Andrews, a linguistics and cultural anthropology professor who directs the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and
East European Studies. The Duke centers are adept at
framing academic questions that look across cultural
boundaries while still allowing scholars and students to
gain and share deep knowledge of a region, she said.
For instance, a new course is exploring multiculturalism and multinationalism by focusing on how Islamic,
Judaic and Christian religions were practiced in the former Soviet Union. “It is team taught. That’s another
piece of this puzzle,” said Andrews. “A lot of the things
we need to do we cannot do alone. Duke has been very
good about helping us work with each other. We’re able
to cross departmental and disciplinary boundaries.
You’re not locked in a department any more.”
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U C C E S S
Pioneering New Models in Business
The Fuqua School of Business, the Sanford Institute
of Public Policy and the Duke School of Law play
leading roles in international education at Duke. The
Fuqua School, named after the Georgia industrialist J.
B. Fuqua, incorporated international business studies
into its basic MBA curriculum in the late 1980s.
That meant faculty had to broaden their research and
develop new case studies. “We basically pioneered the
model that has become the standard,” said Arie Y.
Lewin, director of Fuqua’s Center for International
Business Education and Research. “The decision to
internationalize was a recognition that to compete in
the very competitive world of business schools, you
have to develop an international presence and reputation.” Fuqua, which awarded its first MBAs in 1972,
enrolls 800 graduate students in its flagship program
in Durham, as well as several hundred more in weekend Executive MBA classes on campus and in its
Global Executive and Cross Continent MBA programs. The Global Executive program allows seasoned
executives to earn the degree in 19 months, working
primarily online and in five intensive, two-week
sessions at Duke and locations in Asia, Europe and
South America. Fuqua is launching a dual degree
executive MBA program with Frankfurt University’s
Goethe Business School.
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The John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary
and International Studies provides a forum for many
of these conversations. The center is named for the
emeritus Duke historian, civil rights activist and Medal
of Freedom winner who at age 89 is still an active participant in Duke’s intellectual life. The Franklin
Center hosts conferences on topics ranging from race
and race relations to immigration and ethnicity to the
implications of accelerated globalization. More than a
score of Duke centers, institutes and programs operate
under the Franklin Center umbrella. It also houses the
American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, a new
scholarly organization that Duke and more than two
dozen other U.S. universities set up last year with support from the State Department to revive scholarship
on Afghanistan and help rebuild the country’s academic institutions. Its president is Duke history professor
John Richards, a South Asia specialist who has published extensively on the history of Mughal India.
Merkx’s special assistant, Katie Joyce, doubles as the
institute’s administrative director.
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Leading in Public Policy
The Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, named
after the former governor, senator and Duke
University president, is home to one of the largest
undergraduate public policy majors in the United
States. Many Sanford faculty regularly consult with
international agencies and in emerging democracies
and in strife-torn regions of the world. The school
sponsors an array of scholarly and service programs
that send both undergraduates and graduate students
off to far corners of the world. Led by Bruce Jentleson,
a political scientist who specializes on the Middle East,
the Sanford Institute awarded 174 bachelor’s and 48
master’s degrees in public policy in 2004. The twoyear master’s degree is the highest offered. Enrollment
in Sanford’s Program in International Development
Policy has doubled in recent years to 70 students from
35 countries; most are mid-career professionals who
work in government, universities or the nonprofit sec-
Study abroad veterans
Sarah Carpenter,
Doriannicole Haynes,
Tori Hogan, Sara
Hudson, Sam Prevatt,
Dinah Hannaford, and
Linda Arnada
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The Sanford Institute’s DeWitt Wallace Center for
Communications and Journalism brings 50 international journalists to Durham each year to study public
policy, international affairs, new media technologies
and other topics. Many of these journalists come from
countries in transition to free markets and democracy.
Duke will host its first visiting media fellows from
China in 2005 in a program exploring press freedom
and the relationship between media and public policy
in China.
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Expanding Perspectives in Law
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and faculty
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Sanford Institute of
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Duke Law School attracts international students to a
one-year master’s degree program in U.S. law for those
with law degrees earned overseas. Last semester it
enrolled 79 such students from 34 countries. Some
will return to law firms with international practices;
others hold positions in government, the judicial system, academe and business. “We always have a few
prosecutors and judges in the program,” said Judy
Horowitz, the law school’s associate dean of international relations. A small number who aspire to become
law professors pursue a Ph.D.-equivalent degree called
a doctor of juridical science. Twenty-eight of the 700
students in the regular three-year law program are
international; generally, these are students who earned
their bachelor’s degrees in the United States as well.
International studies are infused in the curriculum, not
only in courses on international and comparative law,
but classes on commercial and corporate law, family
law, environmental law and other fields that cross
national boundaries. Jennifer D’Arcy Maher, assistant
dean of international relations, said, “Law has globalized just as business has globalized. There are no
longer clean divisions in practice. My friends practicing in North Carolina have Japanese clients and they
have American clients investing overseas and exporting. They need to know about international treaties
and contracts.”
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The Duke Center for International Development
draws on a team of international public finance specialists for its executive education and training programs. Jonathan Abels, the center’s program director,
said some of the demand for their consulting services
comes from graduates such as Yerbol Orynbayev, who
not long after earning his master’s degree in 2002
became Kazakhstan’s economic vice minister.
Orynbayev summoned Duke sociologist Gary Gereffi,
an expert on organizations and global markets, to offer
advice on Kazakhstan’s new economic path and to
teach Kazak officials an abbreviated version of his
Organizations and Global Competitiveness course,
which shows how to analyze global industries using
Web techniques. The center also helps run the joint
Rotary Center for International Studies in Peace and
Conflict Resolution that Duke shares with UNC, one
of two in the United States and seven in the world. Up
to 10 Rotary World Peace Scholars enroll each year to
pursue master’s degrees with an emphasis on international negotiations, resolving conflicts and laying the
groundwork for democracy in conflicted societies.
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tor in their home countries. “Our objective is to train
leaders who will be promoting more sustainable development for their country and the world,” said Francis
Lethem, a Belgian-born, Swiss-educated economist
and former World Bank executive who directs the program’s graduate studies. “We think not only about economics and good governance, (but also) social and
environmental concerns and lately we have added conflict prevention.”
The law school also runs institutes each summer in
Geneva and in Asia that “draw students from all over
the world,” said Maher. The law school and Fuqua
jointly operate the Duke Global Capital Markets
Center, which provides an interdisciplinary approach
for students and practitioners in international
business and law to examine capital markets and
corporate governance.
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Crossing Cultures in Medicine
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Dennis A. Clements is the Medical Center’s representative on the provost’s 35-member International Affairs
Committee. Clements is a professor of pediatrics and
an infectious disease specialist who also teaches epidemiology at the University of North Carolina School
of Public Health, where in mid-career he earned a
Ph.D. in public health. Each spring he leads a team of
volunteer Duke physicians and medical and nursing
students on a medical mission to Honduras. The students first take Clements’s 10-week course on
Exploring Medicine: Cross-Cultural Challenges to
Medicine in the 21st Century. Clements stresses the
importance of learning as much as possible beforehand
about the Honduran people and the country’s politics,
history, religions and environment before trying to
cure their ills. “A lot of helping somebody is understanding where they are and who they are,” said
Clements. Fourteen students made the trip to
Honduras last spring with Clements and colleagues.
The group spent four of those days seeing patients at a
make-shift clinic in a mountain village with no electricity or indoor plumbing. They slept in sleeping bags
on the floor.
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Traditionally, medical schools stand apart from the
activities of other professional schools and the rest of
academic life at major research universities. At Duke,
efforts are underway to bridge that gap. The renowned
Duke University Medical Center carries out its biomedical research on a global scale. As President
Brodhead noted in his September 18, 2004 inaugural
address, “Duke medical researchers are already active
from Tanzania to Singapore to Honduras and back to
the Carolinas and are working on virtually every
health challenge a growingly populous, growingly
interdependent world will face.” Investigators with the
Duke Clinical Research Institute have conducted studies at more than 3,100 sites in 59 countries. Twelve
percent of Duke’s 444 medical students are enrolled in
a dual M.D.-Ph.D. program to become medical scientists. Duke’s new chancellor for health affairs, Victor J.
Dzau, is a Shanghai-born cardiovascular physicianresearcher from Harvard Medical School and Brigham
and Women’s Hospital in Boston who got his medical
education at McGill University in Montreal.
“The town takes us in as their guests. We do the best
we can medically to serve them. We can’t take care of
diabetes or hypertension, but we can diagnose those
things and send them to the appropriate place,” he
said. “We deal with a lot of skin problems, a lot of
pain, a lot of arthritis. These people are manual laborers. They are hearty people. A 66-year-old woman
drops her 100 pound bag of potatoes at the front door,
comes in, complains about her backache, then picks
the bag up and walks on down the road.”
“The students get to experience what’s going on in
these people’s lives and really have a conversation with
the patients,” said Clements. “All physicians want to
spend more time with their patients. Down there they
have that luxury and they are all moved by it.”
Dennis A.
Clements, M.D.
professor of pediatrics and leader
of an annual
medical mission
to Honduras
34
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 4
A Nexus of Academics and Service
you are there,’” said Bridget Booher, assistant director
of the Hart Leadership Program. That is an unfamiliar
and unsettling experience for these high achievers who
have known little but success in their lives. “They need
to start making sense of it and that’s when the real
leadership development takes place,” added Booher.
The Hart Leadership Program also provides a nexus
between academics and service. Named after a benefactor who was president of Electronic Data Systems,
the program is aimed at helping Duke students
“become engaged citizens in a democratic society”
through service-learning courses, seminars and community-based research in Duke’s backyard, in inner
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Sarah Chasnovitz, who coordinated the program last
year, was a Hart Fellow in South Africa in 2001–02,
working with a foundation that sought to involve poor
parents in their children’s education. Chasnovitz produced a weekly radio talk show on parenting and, back
in the United States, mounted an audiovisual exhibit
on her work among families on the Cape Flats. “You
may have studied these issues in books at Duke, but
now you’re dealing with them face-to-face, and here
you are, new to this, trying to work your way through
it when everyone has their own agenda and priorities,”
said Chasnovitz.
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Duke Law
School’s Jennifer
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D’Arcy Maher,
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assistant dean of
international
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relations and
Judy Horowitz,
associate dean
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of international
relations
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cities across the United States and in impoverished
countries. Every spring it selects several Hart Fellows
from the graduating senior class and sends each off to
spend 10 months overseas working with local and
national non-governmental organizations on humanitarian problems. Since the program’s inception in
1995, 57 Hart Fellows have worked in 28 countries,
sharing their struggles and insights in letters home
posted on the Hart Leadership Program web site
(www.pubpol.duke.edu/centers/hlp/programs/fellows).
This year’s Hart Fellows are at work in Nairobi,
Kenya; Moshi, Tanzania; Bangalore, India; Sarajevo,
Bosnia, and in the Bahai region of Brazil.
“We tell them, ‘You’re going to be in over your head.
You’re going to feel lost. You’re going to question why
Sara Hudson, 21, learned Yucatec Maya through a
summer program run by the Latin American Studies
Center at UNC. It is a living language for a million
Mayans living on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula and in
northern Belize. Hudson, a bibliophile from Boerne,
Texas, returned to the Yucatan for a second summer to
collect tales from boys and girls in the Mayan village
of Xocen, which she hopes to publish in a trilingual
book with the children’s illustrations. “I came here
wanting to save the world and wanting to do something with books and I’m leaving here feeling the same
way,” said Hudson, a Latino studies major who graduated summa cum laude.
Senior Dorianniccole Haynes did volunteer work in
schools in Madrid as well as in London while studying and traveling abroad during her years at Duke.
Witnessing the “phenomenal” progress that Spanish
children made in reading “totally changed my perspective on things. I wanted to be a lawyer. Now I
want to start my own bilingual school,” said Haynes,
a Baltimore resident who grew up on U.S. military
bases around the world (her late father was a U.S.
Army colonel).
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the Duke curriculum. As a research university known
for its interdisciplinary work and, increasingly, for its
global perspective, “it only makes sense to have that
undergraduate experience take on the strength of the
institution,” said Thompson.
Margaret Riley,
director, Office of
Study Abroad
OF
Margaret Riley, director of the Office of Study
Abroad—which occupies its own brick home next to
International House—shares Thompson’s passion for
making study abroad more intellectually meaningful.
“Our job is not to sell study abroad. Forty-one percent
of freshman come in saying they want to go,” said
Riley. “We’re focused on how does this complement
the rest of your years at Duke.”
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Duke has overhauled its comparative area studies
major, now called International Comparative Studies.
Jehanne Gheith, who directs the program with Marcy
Litle, said comparative studies is no longer confined to
studying two countries or even two regions. “The
world isn’t thought about just in terms of geographical
areas anymore,” said Gheith, a professor of Russian literature and culture and of women’s studies. Students
may concentrate in a particular region and on issues
that cut across boundaries, such as terrorism, environmental change and the global flow of people and cultures. “Lots of our students study abroad. One wrote a
thesis last year on wearing the veil in France and
Algeria,” said Gheith. It takes nine pages in the Duke
catalog to list the comparative courses taught by more
than 130 Duke faculty from 14 departments.
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Thompson spent 20 years as head of the medical
school’s Division of Medical Psychology, working
closely with families of chronically ill children and
researching how young patients and their parents
coped with sickle cell, cystic fibrosis and other chronic
diseases. He said that background helps explain why
he proselytizes for study abroad. “As a psychologist
interested in coping and adaptation, you get impressed
with the need to be flexible, the ability to adjust,” said
Thompson. Study abroad involves “taking yourself out
of a very comfortable environment and putting yourself in a completely new one. That really gives you the
ability to develop those adaptive skills. To have that
sense that you can navigate and perform in a new
environment is an incredible affirming experience
for one’s identity.”
Too often “students come back and study abroad is
(just) a memory,” said Riley. “These students are so
bright. Many are already so worldly. The challenge is
getting them to realize this is something that will
enhance what they are trying to achieve at Duke and,
in turn, enhance Duke.”
Education Abroad: Enhancing the
Duke Experience
Robert Thompson, dean of Trinity College of Arts and
Sciences and vice provost for undergraduate education,
has been a forceful advocate in encouraging deans and
department chairs to send more students abroad and
to knit the experience more closely in with the rest of
Washington Duke
statue in the East
Campus
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 4
Perspectives from the International House
Harvard, the ever-smiling director of International
House. She has been dispensing Southern hospitality
to Duke’s international students since 1986. The
Columbia, South Carolina, native was herself an
exchange student in Denmark during high school and
later lived in Switzerland for a year. She has also visited
the former Soviet Union 15 times in the past 20 summers on people-to-people peacemaking journeys sponsored by the National Council of Churches. She had
arranged for five international students to talk over
pizza and sodas about their experiences at Duke. The
group included two freshmen, Depak Bastkakoty of
Katmandu, Nepal, and Gabit Bokakhmetov of
Burabay, Kazakhstan, who are the first Duke undergraduates from those two countries. Bastkakoty was a
University Scholar on a full academic scholarship;
Bokakhmetov received need-based aid.
The last stop on a whirlwind visit to Duke was at
International House, the gabled, Cotswold cottagestyle brick home where international students, scholars
and their families come to get their bearings in
Durham and in the United States. International
House, which celebrated its fortieth anniversary this
fall, hosts orientation for the newcomers and sponsors
social activities throughout the year. It arranges language tutors to help newcomers improve their English
and sends a van on regular trips to shopping malls, the
state motor vehicle department and the Social Security
Administration office. “Without a Social Security
number, a visiting scholar can’t get paid,” said Carlisle
"This was the second year Duke has had undergraduate financial aid for international students. That has
made a tremendous change, a very positive change in
my mind. Prior to that, we had some wonderful
undergraduate international students, but their countries were limited to those whose governments provided scholarships” or whose families could afford to pay
the full Duke tuition, she said. “We now have some
marvelous young people from Tanzania, from Nepal,
from Kazakhstan, from mainland China—kids who
could never have considered doing their undergraduate
work at Duke prior to the availability of financial aid.”
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Xin Huang of China
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Kazakhstan, Katy Yung
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Japan, Depak
Bastkakoty of Nepal,
WHEN IN ROME…
HOW DO YOU SAY KRZYZEWSKIVILLE
IN MANDARIN?
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Sugandhi Chugani of
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International students
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They do this for weeks on end not just to secure seats—undergraduates are admitted free—but to get the best seats in the student section, closest to the floor and the television cameras. While
the official queue starts at midnight before most Atlantic Coast
Conference contests, the “Cameron Crazies” pitch tents and camp
out for weeks to secure the best seats for games against archrivals Maryland and North Carolina.
Graduate students run a shorter gauntlet, camping out for a
If they weren’t rabid basketball fans before coming to Duke, inter-
weekend before their ticket lottery. “Graduate students get a much
national students quickly learn to appreciate the special place
better deal,” said Xin Huang, 26, a biomedical engineering gradu-
that Coach Mike Krzyzewski and his Blue Devils basketball squad
ate student from Shenyang, China. “Before I came here I wasn’t a
hold in the hearts of the Duke student body. More than 1,500 take
basketball fan. But everybody here on campus is talking about
turns camping out in the mud and cold outside Cameron Indoor
basketball. Now I’m a fan. I camped out for two nights and three
Stadium the arena in the dead of winter, a bizarre tradition that
days. It was pretty cold. Some people can fall asleep, but I could
started in the late 1980s, several years into the Krzyzewski era.
not. It was too cold.”
Also munching pizza on this Friday afternoon at
International House were seniors Sugandhi Chugani,
an Indian citizen born and raised in Yokohama, Japan,
and Katy Yung from Hong Kong, as well as Xin
Huang, a graduate of Beijing University and a thirdyear graduate student in biomedical engineering. All
welcomed the increased diversity of Duke’s recent
entering classes.
“When I was a freshman I was pretty much the only
international student on the floor of my dorm,” said
Yung, a former president of the International Council,
an advocacy group for international students. “My
brother is a freshman. There are 10 international students in his dorm just on his level.”
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foreigners there, so why do I need to interact with
people here?’” Chugani, whose first language is
English—she speaks Japanese, Hindi and Spanish as
well—said, “It’s sometimes hard to talk about how
diversity is important and talk about how because of
globalization people are going to need to interact with
people from around the world to survive. They are
going to need to be culturally sensitive, culturally
aware; you’re going to need to watch what you say
around people that you’re with, because you don’t
know their background. You don’t know where they
are from. You can’t assume that everyone is American
even if they sound American,” she said.
Huang, the graduate
student, concurred. “It’s
hard to convince people
why it’s important to
have a diverse campus.
People think that if you
have different racial
groups, then you’re
doing justice to the
world, but you’re really
not. You have to have
people from a lot of different countries,” he said. “Gabit’s one of the first people we have from Kazakhstan. You would think a
school like Duke would have good representation”
from all over the world.
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Chugani, who was president of the International
Association, which organizes social events, has a brother who graduated from Duke in 2000. She and Yung
recruited international classmates to serve as mentors
for the new arrivals during orientation. “For a lot of
kids, it’s their first step into the United States. It’s really, really welcoming to have upperclassmen who know
their way around who can comfort you and the parents as well. That has been huge,” she said.
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But Chugani, who majored in literary theory, said, “A
lot of people still don’t know why it’s important to
have international students here. They think, ‘Oh, I’m
going to study abroad for a semester and meet all these
20
Did he tell his parents about this particular aspect of Duke
Another freshman, Gabit Bokakhmetov, 19, the first from
Kazakhstan, prefers to watch the games on television. “Even if you
I told them it’s part of the Duke life. Then they understand. It’s a
don’t go, you feel what’s going on around you. Randomly choose
new life and they feel very happy for me,” he said.
any two people, and you can say a significant part of their speech
©
life? “They always want to know what’s happening in my life here.
Depak Bastkakoty, a 19-year-old freshman engineering stu-
was about basketball,” he said.
dent from Katmandu, Nepal, said, “I love it. It’s something that
“I’m not a big fan, but when Duke lost to U-Conn I was very
unites Duke people. You go to basketball games and just feel the
upset, not because I personally felt very bad, but because of my
spirit coming in. All of a sudden you’re part of this huge organism.
friends. I could see their grief,” said Bokakhmetov, who hails from
It feels awesome.”
Burabay, a scenic, lakeside town in eastern Kazakhstan.
Bastkakoty caught a fever and had to curtail his own camp-
In his Duke baseball cap, Bokakhmetov fits right in. “The
ing, but remained part of a larger group that secured prime seats.
pine trees remind me of home,” he said. “In winter back home it’s
The students take turns occupying their tents in Krzyzewskiville,
minus 35 degrees Celsius cold, snow, whistling storms. Here, it’s
but risk losing their place if no one is there when student monitors
sunny, I’m walking in shorts. It’s such a warm place. I’m really
blow the bullhorn for middle-of-the-night checks.
happy I ended up at Duke.”
The West Campus at
Duke is characterized
by its Gothic-style
architecture
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 4
New President Looks to Build on Duke’s
International Strengths
goes abroad and who doesn’t,” said Brodhead. “The
first phase project was to have a lot of quality programs all around the world. The second stage venture
is to figure out how we can further tailor those things”
to accommodate engineering and science majors who
“have not fully shared in the opening of studies to
the world.”
Richard Brodhead, the ninth president in Duke
University’s history, said that Duke’s strength in international studies and its emphasis on interdisciplinary
work were “two of the great attractions” that drew him
to Durham after four decades at Yale. The former dean
of Yale College was a beloved figure in New Haven,
respected by faculty and revered by students. “When
the news broke that I was leaving, not everyone took it
well. A student I knew put her dismay this way: ‘It
was like Dean Brodhead was married to Yale—and
now we learn that he’s leaving us for someone younger
and more athletic,’” he related during his inaugural
speech in the Duke Chapel. “To this I could only
reply, ’Well, these things happen.’”
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“We’ve only recently begun to offer financial aid to
international students. We would like to expand the
number of international students even more and that
means we’ll need even more aid,” the president said.
“It’s probably the single most powerful way to
deprovincialize the experience of undergraduates.”
04
When half the students study abroad, “one begins to
be more and more attentive to the question of who
20
Duke’s ninth president
©
Richard Brodhead,
It was Brodhead who led a curricular review that convinced Yale that it must teach undergraduates more
about the world and “use all available means” to get
them to study abroad. He faces a new challenge in
Durham, a campus brimming with international study
centers. “It’s a different to-do list now than it would
have been five years ago. It wasn’t so long ago that
Duke had the fewest of the Title VI institutes of any
major private university; now it has the most,” he said.
“The more students you have going abroad, the more
important it is to have good advising when they come
home to help them make brilliant curricular choices to
build on the things they saw and learned,” said the
nineteenth century American literature scholar.
Photo by Chris Hildreth, Duke Photography
38
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OF
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Pennings modeled his college
on the splendid schools that
his order, the Canons Regular
of Prémontré, or Premonstratensians or Norbertines, built at
monasteries across Europe. The
St. Norbert students long since
have moved into residence halls, and Main Hall now
houses offices for Hynes and senior administrators,
but a few classes still meet under its roof.
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The architecture on college campuses often conveys a
sense of the institutions’ history and aspirations. Few
tell their story with more force than the oldest and
newest structures on the elegant campus of St. Norbert
College perched alongside the Fox River in De Pere, a
few miles south of Green Bay, Wisconsin.
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Pride of place belongs to red stone Main Hall, an
imposing Romanesque structure that doubled for years
as dormitory and dining hall as well as classroom
building. The grand hall was built in 1902 by Abbott
Bernard Pennings, a Dutch priest who four years earlier had begun instructing local youths in Latin around
the rectory’s kitchen table to prepare them for the
priesthood. Pennings soon decided that northeast
Wisconsin needed a college as well to prepare young
men for “the Christian exercise of commerce,” and he
presided over that college until his death in 1955 at
age 93. President William J. Hynes believes that
The newest structure on campus is no less audacious:
the four-story F. K. Bemis International Center, with
flags from two dozen nations fluttering above its brick
portico. Built in 1995 at a cost of nearly $10 million
—the federal government was the major contributor—
the 45,000-square foot Bemis Center would not seem
out of place on the campuses of the nation’s largest
and most richly endowed universities. But here it
stands as the frontispiece at St. Norbert College, a
regional liberal arts college with 2,100 students and a
modest endowment. Like Main Hall, the Bemis
Center is multipurpose, with a high-tech conference
center and catering facilities occupying the first two
floors. St. Norbert’s international programs occupy
most of the upper two stories, with left over space
housing faculty offices. But the name carved in
stone— F. K. Bemis International Center —is hardly a
misnomer. With a student body drawn principally
from Wisconsin, St. Norbert enjoys a reputation as a
college with an international outlook.
(above) F.K. Bemis
International Center
(below, left)
Main Hall
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Rosemary Sands,
Director of Study
Szymanski, who aspires
to a career in diplomacy
or development work in
Africa, said study abroad
“motivates you. You see
how many problems
need to be addressed and
how much needs to be
done in the world, and
think, ‘Well, I can be
part of doing that.’”
Enrollment surged after World War II and grew again
when St. Norbert admitted women in 1952. The picturesque campus also hosts the Green Bay Packers’
training camp every summer. The college is known for
strong academics and athletics; almost a quarter of the
students play Division III varsity sports.
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“I looked at colleges all over the country. I came here
for the study abroad and the international business
program,” said senior Elizabeth Knox, 22, of
Lancaster, Wisconsin, an international business major
and Spanish minor who spent a semester in Toledo,
Spain. “Everyone really works with you to study
abroad. They help you plan it, and once you’re abroad,
they send you e-mails: ‘Hey, how is study abroad
going? Do you need anything?’ It’s a community that
wants you to get out there, but doesn’t let you fall
apart once you get there.”
Mindy Accola ventured on her own to Chile. The 22year-old senior communications and speech major
from Vesper, Wisconsin, attended classes at two top
Chilean universities. “I was in Santiago, the capital,
which was huge for me, because I’m from a town of
600 and that was a city of 6 million,” said Accola. “I
was really scared but really glad I [studied there].”
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Elizabeth Knox ‘04
(Spain) and Lynsey
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Veterans Mike
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Study Abroad
“They make it really easy to study abroad, but they
also give you enough freedom to take ownership of the
activity,” said Mike Szymanski, 21, a junior from
Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, who has gotten 11
stamps in his passport since coming to St. Norbert.
The business administration and psychology major
backpacked in England, France, India, Thailand, New
Zealand, and Fiji on his way to and from a semester at
Bond University in Queensland on Australia’s Gold
Coast. In Mumbai, India, two Norbertine monks met
him at the airport at midnight and put him up in the
abbey. He’s also traveled to Zambia on a St. Norbert
service project.
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Only three majors—international business and language area studies, international studies, and the language majors of Spanish, French, German, and
Japanese—require study abroad, and there is no foreign language requirement, although the college is
considering one. But 127 undergraduates studied
abroad this past year, and 18 percent of the seniors
who crossed the stage to receive diplomas in May
had taken classes overseas.
Rosemary Sands, the director of study abroad, does a
little extra worrying about those like Accola whom she
calls her “lonely onlies.”
“I have a gal now in Japan by herself, one in Ecuador,
and one in Sicily,” said Sands, who also has taught
Italian and Spanish at the college. “Typically our students are there with other St. Norbert students.
There’s 10 in Toledo and nine in Florence. Bond
University is hugely popular since it’s on the same
academic schedule as ours. But you get to the saturation point. We don’t want it to be a mini-St. Norbert
ghetto at Bond.”
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Associate Dean for
International Education
Joseph Tullbane with
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Sang Ik Jung, Taegu,
South Korea; Mattias
Glatting, Oberkochen,
Germany; Griselda
Madinabeitia, Torreon,
Coahuila, Mexico; Trang
Nguyen and Quan Hoang,
both Hanoi, Vietnam;
A Commitment to ESL
Alex Doroshenko,
Hynes said that when he looked inside the Bemis
International Center on his arrival in De Pere in 2000,
“I didn’t find the infrastructure that you would expect
when you see such a building.” But that quickly
changed under the leadership of Joseph D. Tullbane,
who had recently been hired as the college’s first associate dean for international studies and director of the
Center for International Education. Tullbane is a
trilingual, retired Army colonel with a Ph.D. from
Georgetown University in Russian area studies. An
expert on the Russian military, Tullbane spent half his
life overseas, including high school in Madrid.
St. Norbert’s English as a Second Language Institute,
launched in 1993, prepares international students to
matriculate at St. Norbert and at other U.S. colleges
and universities. Some students come from Japan and
Korea in the middle of their higher education for two
semesters of intensive work on spoken and written
English, then return home to complete their degrees.
The ESL students live in the dorms, sometimes in
rooms or suites vacated temporarily by U.S. students
studying abroad, and can play club sports and join
other student activities. The program’s director, Richard
Porior, says the ESL students “are treated exactly like
any other St. Norbert student, which is special.”
Moscow, Russia, and
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Today the Center for International Education has
ambitious programs that match the grandeur of its
surroundings. Its staff of 10 includes two study abroad
specialists and a separate director of international student and scholar services, Sarah Griffiths, an alumna
with a law degree who specializes in the vagaries of
immigration law.
The college enrolls 50 international undergraduates.
Under a strategic plan spearheaded by Michael
Marsden, the new dean and vice president of academic
affairs, St. Norbert has set a lofty goal of enrolling 200
international student—10 percent of the student
body—by 2009. It also aims to boost the percentage
of students who study abroad for a full semester to 50
percent, and to boost U.S. minority enrollment to 10
percent of each entering class as well.
Last summer, Quan Hoang, 24, from Hanoi,
Vietnam, finished the ESL program and headed east to
enroll in a large, private university. Two days later, he
hopped a Greyhound bus back to Wisconsin and
enrolled as a communication major at St. Norbert.
“This is a very, very good place to study. It’s a very
quiet and good environment,” said Hoang, a diplomat’s son who holds a philosophy degree from Hanoi
National University. “When I saw the Vietnamese flag
hanging here, I was so impressed. I said, ‘Wow! They
respect me and my country.’”
Alexander Doroshenko, 25, of Moscow first came to
St. Norbert in 1997 to learn English and returned
after completing an undergraduate degree program in
Volodymyr (Vova)
Vasyuta, Lviv, Ukraine
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Trang Nguyen, 18, of Hanoi, Vietnam, spotted the
college while traveling in the United States with her
mother, a pediatrician who was getting a master’s
degree in public health at Tulane. The thoroughly
Americanized Nguyen, who graduated from a New
Orleans high school, said, “This is a beautiful city. De
Pere reminds me a lot of Vietnam, small old houses
next to each other classic style. I love that. I love to
walk around.”
St. Norbert College
President William J.
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Hynes, Ph.D.
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“The other day I found a copy of Alexander Dumas,
my favorite author, in a used book store. That’s very
cool,” said the prospective international business and
French major. “Up here it’s less diverse than New
Orleans in color, but after getting to know the people
I can say it’s just as diverse in personality, talent wise,
and activity wise. I find gothic people, I find people
who listen to hot metal or to country [music] all the
time, people who can draw and write. So the culture is
just as rich if you take the time and effort to find it.”
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business law and serving in the army. The son of a
Moscow attorney, Doroshenko is pursuing a degree in
business administration and wants to work in financial
management. “With the Russian system of law, it’s
impossible to be a lawyer because the government
changes the law every single month,” he said.
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The gregarious Doroshenko, at a roundtable with
other international students, drew laughter and nods
with a backhanded but sincere compliment for St.
Norbert: “When I come back to my country I will tell
everybody that Green Bay or De Pere is the best place
to study. Here there’s nothing to do but study.”
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Milwaukee is just 90 minutes away, and Chicago is a
three-and-a-half-hour drive to the south. Matthias
Glatting, 18, of Oberkochen, Germany, learned of St.
Norbert while an exchange student at a high school in
Denmark, Wisconsin. His parents took some convincing to let him stay in the United States for college.
“My mom didn’t really like it at first, but my dad was
supportive,” said the freshman. His father, a physician,
was reassured when he examined the college Web site
and saw that St. Norbert was ranked third among liberal arts colleges in the Midwest by U.S. News &
World Report.
Family ties draw many students to St. Norbert. As
many as half of the incoming freshmen have relatives
who attended St. Norbert. Hope Pavich, 21, an international studies major from the Chicago suburb of
Lynwood, Illinois, followed in the footsteps of two siblings. “I always said, ‘I’m not going to go here, I’m not
going to go here.’ I really wanted to pave my own
path. But every time I came up I just felt right,” said
Pavich, who also minored in German and spent a
semester in Salzburg, Austria.
Annual tuition at St. Norbert is roughly $20,000, but
the college offers most international students meritbased scholarships that run from $1,000 to $8,500 a
year. Most U.S. students also qualify for aid.
St. Norbert draws international students more by word
of mouth than by recruiting or advertising overseas.
St. Norbert “produces very well rounded people—
people who can do what they put their minds to.
They are strong,” she said.
Erin Wood, 22, whose parents both teach middle
school in Green Bay, chose St. Norbert over the flagship state university, University of Wisconsin-Madison,
despite a considerable difference in tuition and fees.
She received a scholarship, but the family still borrowed more than $50,000 to pay for her St. Norbert
education. “I don’t think they quite realized at the
time the full economic consequences,” quipped Wood,
who double majored in international studies and
Spanish and was a varsity swimmer. Still, the family is
sending Erin’s sister to St. Norbert this fall.
Sarah Krause, 22, an international business and
Spanish major from Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, also
turned down Madison. She said the real gap in tuition
is narrowed “because there’s no way I would have
graduated from there in four years with an international business major. I know a fifth year senior at
Madison who still has not been able to get all her
classes because she studied abroad. Here they guarantee us graduation in four years, or they’ll pay for it.”
Krause was among nine seniors who completed the
demanding international business and language area
studies (IBLAS) major. Joy Pahl, the IBLAS director,
describes that as “a super-duper business major. You
get everything a business major does, plus a whole lot
more. They take certain political science, economics,
and international trade courses, and they are required
to study abroad.”
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my mind I wanted to be associated with a valuecentered institution with a real commitment to social
justice and service to community. What I found here
was all of that.”
Marsden founded a
Canadian studies
center at Bowling
Green; one of his
favorite articles compared the mythology
and traditions of the
Canadian Mounties
with those of the
Texas Rangers. When Tullbane came to the dean’s
office with ambitious goals for quadrupling the number of international students and doubling the study
abroad numbers, Marsden requested only one change.
“He asked could he write and implement the strategic
plan for internationalization with me,” Tullbane said.
Education Abroad: Spreading by
Contagion, Not Dictate
This past academic year St. Norbert sent 57 students
to study abroad for a full semester in the fall and 72 in
the spring—an all-time high. The three majors that
mandate it—IBLAS, international studies, and the
foreign language majors—account for a quarter of the
study abroad students.
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Hynes, the president, said that St. Norbert competes
with two large universities, UW-Madison and
Marquette University, for top students. “If they visit
here, 95 percent of the time they come. This campus
is a winner. There’s tremendous curb appeal. It’s what
a college is supposed to look like,” said Hynes, a
University of Chicago-trained religious studies scholar.
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“People feel the community here. There is a leveling in
which people are treated equally. Most students have
been in their professors’ homes. They form a lifetime
relationship,” said Hynes, who was instrumental in
starting a weekly common prayer service. For 50 minutes on Wednesday mornings work and classes stop,
and all—from the students and faculty to cooks and
the janitorial staff—are invited to a nondenominational
service in Old St. Joseph Church, which sits on the
spot where a French missionary established a mission in
1676. The church underwent a $3-million renovation
in 1998 that replaced pews with straight-back chairs,
lending it the ambience of a Quaker meeting house.
Marsden, the dean and vice president of academics,
came to St. Norbert in 2003 after a long career at large
public universities, including Bowling Green,
Northern Michigan, and Eastern Kentucky, where he
served as provost. A popular culture expert who once
doubled as Motor Trend magazine’s columnist on automobile culture, Marsden said, “Always in the back of
“The growth over the past five years is phenomenal,”
said Sands, the study abroad director. “We’re getting
the word out that we can find a program for any
major at any point in their career. We’re seeing a lot
more nontraditional students going abroad—the science majors, computer science majors, math majors,
religious studies majors. We’re picking them off from
all areas.”
Joyce Tullbane coordinates study abroad for the
majority of St. Norbert students who enroll in
English-language programs overseas. Sands handles
those who study in another language.
“We do a predeparture survey and a reentry survey.
One thing that keeps coming to the top is students
come out much more self-reliant and feeling they can
Michael Marsden, Ph.D.,
dean and vice president
of academics
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Rankin tells the parents of freshman that study abroad
is “the most important investment you can make in
your student’s future. Look at the projections at how
diverse the United States will be by 2020 or 2050. You
can’t say that we’re all going to be in De Pere,
Wisconsin, for the rest of our lives in a society that’s
95 percent white. The world is different. It’s crucial
that the kids understand that they have to continuously
learn about other cultures and other people.”
handle adversity. They are problem solvers. Of course,
those are skills we’re trying to build here as undergraduates as well. But it gets honed when they are abroad,”
said Sands.
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The Norbertines are a service-minded order and the
college is a service-minded place. A visitor encountered
students framing a garage outside the student union
one afternoon for Habitat for Humanity. They were
not only hammering together the garage, but recruiting classmates to work on Habitat for Humanity projects in Appalachia. The college has 27 service clubs
and regularly sends students during breaks to perform
service in St. Lucia, Dominican Republic, and
Cuernavaca, Mexico.
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When Richard C. Rankin arrived on the St. Norbert
campus as a legacy and 6-foot-4 basketball recruit
from Appleton in 1961, it was a far more homogeneous place. Ninety-eight percent of the students were
Roman Catholic, versus about 60 percent today. The
only international students were a dozen Japanese students from Sofia University in Tokyo, with which the
Norbertines had an exchange agreement. The students
worked in the priory and took classes in the college.
“The only option that students had (for international
experiences) when I was here was to go to Vietnam,”
said Rankin. He returned to his alma mater in 1978 as
dean of students after getting a Ph.D. in counseling
and today is vice president of student life.
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Traditionally, those who study abroad get better grades
and graduate with more honors (the minimum GPA
to study abroad is 2.5, or a C+ average). One of the
challenges that St. Norbert faces in pushing its goal of
50 percent studying abroad is that it will have to reach
deeper into the class ranks. It will also push summer
study trips, and it is lengthening the mid-semester
break in January with an eye toward more faculty-led
short study trips.
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Sarah Griffiths,
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director, international
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alumna of St. Norbert’s
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student services is an
On the academic side, student teachers practice teaching in New Zealand, Australia, England, and Ireland, as
well as Germany, Spain, and France. One of Rankin’s
advisees did her student teaching in England last year.
“That really defined her education. It rounded it out. It
gave it all the frosting,” he said. “It’s one thing to read
about Shakespeare; it’s another to go to England,
attend the plays, and visit Shakespeare’s house.”
Hynes, a native Iowan, says he “got hooked on international education” in 1965–66 as a graduate student
at the Institute for Ecumenical Studies in Geneva.
“My classmates were from all over the world,” he
recalled. “It was founded at the end of World War II
by the Germans, the French, and the Dutch to try to
create a new generation of leaders who could overcome the prejudices between the countries over the
wars. It was fascinating and totally enlightening for a
guy raised mostly in Des Moines.” During a decade as
academic vice president at St. Mary’s College in
Oakland, California, he helped launch exchanges with
universities in Capetown, South Africa, and
Cuernavaca, Mexico.
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Hynes said education abroad “is spreading by contagion, not by dictate. It’s spreading by word of mouth,
student to student. We’ve made it not a requirement,
but a very palatable opportunity. We package financial
aid so it follows the student to the country. We try to
minimize the costs because we’re quite conscious that
even if everything else were neutral, they still are leaving jobs behind.”
Sandy Odorzynski,
professor of
economics,
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in 1990, the Office of International Education occupied “one little office in the priory. But even back then
they told me they were going to create this international center. There already was momentum.”
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Fulbright faculty grants played a part in St. Norbert’s
internationalization. Holder led a dozen colleagues on
a five-week study trip to the Philippines, Malaysia,
and Singapore a decade ago. It had a lasting impact
on economics professor Sandy Odorzynski. “I had
never really thought about extending my scholarship
internationally, but that trip made me realize there
were programs, grants, and opportunities for travel
like that,” said Odorzynski, who regularly travels to
Eastern Europe to train teachers. She spent two weeks
in March in Belarus teaching economics to teacher
educators from across the former Soviet Union.
The trips are sponsored by the National Council
on Economic Education with funding from the
U.S. Department of State.
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Faculty with research interests and passions in far corners of the world played a key role in St. Norbert’s
internationalization. Art professor Charles R. Peterson
has photographed cave paintings by Aboriginal people
on tribal lands in Australia’s outback. Historian Wayne
K. Patterson is an authority on Korea. Philosophy professor John Holder organized the college’s flourishing
Philippines study program, and biologist James R.
Hodgson leads regular exotic field trips to tropical rain
forests in Costa Rica and Panama. Humanities professor Frank Wood, now retired, launched a program
called Discoveries International in 1978 for IBLAS
majors that continues to this day; seniors run a store
on campus, staffed daily throughout the school year,
selling arts and crafts from developing countries and
investing profits back into charities that help people
in those lands.
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“We want our students to be international citizens.
You go out and study in Liles or Toledo and when you
come back, your friends are all over the world, and
you’re in constant contact with them by Internet. You
may work there after college,” he said.
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Hynes hopes to hire more faculty with deep international connections that “demonstrate in an exemplary
way what we want our students to do.” One such professor is Bolivian-born political scientist Gratzia
Villarroel, who is serving her second stint as St.
Norbert’s director of international studies. “Anybody
who has a great idea can accomplish it here at St.
Norbert College,” said Villarroel, who teaches a popular course on the United Nations and other international organizations, and each June takes students to
New York for two weeks to meet with UN officials
and diplomats. She remembers that when she arrived
Crossing Language and Culture Barriers
Although St. Norbert teaches only four languages—
it dropped Russian and Italian in recent years —enrollments in Spanish, French, German, and Japanese have
climbed 40 percent during the past decade. The largest
classes are in the upper division courses. “Our 101s are
withering, which is an exciting thing. People are placing
in higher level courses,” said Linda Beane Katner, a
professor of French.
“We added another tenure-track position in Spanish
two years ago,” said Kristee K. Boehm, one of four
professors of Spanish. “Students want to graduate with
something very practical. They figure that if they are
trip to Latvia to
teach economics to
teacher trainers
from former Soviet
Republics
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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 4
thinking, ‘Why not try
to get an internship
somewhere else and then
come back?’ I’d like to
learn French and about
other cultures. I have
more options,” said the
teaching assistant.
going into business or medicine or social work
and they also are bilingual in Spanish, they will be
more marketable.”
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Beane Katner is also the college’s director of language
services, running a program that teaches adult language classes, provides translations for businesses, and
offers after-school language classes for elementary
school children in the Green Bay area. The latter has
reached more than 1,000 children in grades 1 through
6. The teachers often are St. Norbert language majors,
who not only get to practice their teaching skills but
get paid well. The modern language department also
Sang Ik Jung, 26, of Taegu, South Korea, decided to
get a college degree after doing information technology
work for Samsung for six years. He researched 100 to
200 U.S. colleges on the Web and chose St. Norbert
because it only had a handful of Korean students.
“That was the most important thing for me,” said
Jung, a sophomore sporting a Green Bay Packers jacket. “If there were a lot of Korean students here, and
they had some problems, we’d work together to try to
solve them. That’s good—but on the other hand, I’m
here to learn English, not Korean.”
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sophomore from
Taegu, South Korea
The faculty in the Division of Humanities and fine
arts in 1998 voted down a proposal to require all
humanities and arts majors to master a second language. The concern at the time was that a language
requirement might drive students away from humanities majors. But the college, under its leadership, now
is revisiting that proposal.
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Sang Ik Jung,
IBLAS/Discoveries
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International senior
team Sarah Krause,
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Elizabeth Knox,
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Dianne Gerber,
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makes use of teaching assistants from partner universities in Spain, France, Mexico, and Japan. “Those folks
are fabulous. They offer a native speaking model for
our students and for us, and serve as lightning rods for
the culture on campus,” said Beane Katner.
One of Beane Katner’s “lightning rods” is Griselda
Madinabeitia, 21, of Torreon in Mexico’s Coahuila
province, an accounting major at the Instituto
Technologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey.
“This semester opened my eyes a little bit. I always
thought, ‘Okay, I have to finish college and after that
try to find a job in my place (in Mexico).’ Now I’m
Another student who found St. Norbert on his own is
Volodymyr “Vova” Vasyuta, 19, a junior transfer and
business administration major from Lviv, Ukraine, who
spent a year in Muskegon, Michigan, as a high school
exchange student in 2000. While there, he made contact with relatives in Green Bay whose ancestors had
emigrated to the United States a century ago. They
asked if he’d like to continue his college studies at St.
Norbert with their help. He leapt at the opportunity.
“I’m studying here much more than in the Ukraine. I
devote myself much more to studying,” said Vasyuta,
who shares an apartment on campus with seven U.S.
students. “At first it was kind of intimidating; I didn’t
know what to expect. They all know each other over
the years, and they were a group,” he said. “Later I
realized that all of them are really nice people. I’ve
done many things with them and got to know many
other people.”
Quan Hoang, who is majoring in communications,
wrote in an article for the student newspaper, The
SNC Times, that the biggest impediment to making
friends with U.S. students was learning “how to cross
the line of timidity and embarrassment.” Initially, he
hung out more with students from Japan, until his
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English improved to the point where he could understand U.S. students’ rapid-fire conversation and
jokes. Hoang, the son of a Vietnamese diplomat,
aspires to join the Vietnam-U.S.A. Society and “work
to erase misunderstandings between Americans
and Vietnamese.”
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In a paradoxical way, St. Norbert’s isolation may have
helped it internationalize, King believes. “Some
administrators and faculty members recognized that
our students needed this more than if we were in a
large metropolitan area,” she said.
Lessons Drawn from a Small Campus
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St. Norbert is a feeder school for both the Peace
Corps—92 alumni have served as volunteers—and
the U.S. military. Ten of its ROTC graduates went on
to earn general’s stars. Now it is hoping that courses
such as Gratzia Villaroel’s UN course and those offered
by the peace and justice minor will groom future leaders for UN programs and international humanitarian
organizations.
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Political scientist Elizabeth King was instrumental in
securing Title VI grants that helped St. Norbert launch
its international studies major in the 1970s and the
IBLAS major in the 1980s. “When I got here (in 1973)
and asked folks, ‘Have you traveled?’, they’d say,
‘Yeah—Milwaukee, Chicago,’” she said. Still, King,
who went on to serve as a department chair and dean,
said, “There were always like-minded faculty. It was
just pulling us together—some in history, some in
anthropology, some in business, and the language people, of course. The science faculty always was very environmentally conscious. To deal with the environment
today, you have to take an international or global
approach. Once we came up with a proposal for an
international studies major, there wasn’t any opposition.”
Tullbane believes the college has been helped by taking
an entrepreneurial approach to internationalization.
That spirit is evident in the Discoveries International
program for IBLAS majors, but also in the work of the
ESL Institute, and in paying the language majors to
tutor school children around De Pere. After Mattias
Glatting turned up in the freshman class, Sarah
Griffiths got in touch with high school guidance
counselors across Wisconsin to see if they had more
exchange students eager to stretch their educational
stay in the United States.
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Internationalization
What lessons can other colleges draw from the
example of St. Norbert College?
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His compatriot, Trang Nguyen, aspires to become an
international business lawyer. Vietnam, she said, “will
need someone who knows both cultures, speaks both
languages, knows both sides of the coin.”
THE
NORBERTINES:
SCHOLASTIC
ROOTS IN
MEDIEVAL
EUROPE
Who are the Norbertines? They are the followers of a monastic tradition begun in Prémontré, France, in 1120 by Norbert, a Germanborn preacher, bishop, and church reformer. The Canons Regular of
Prémontré once boasted 400 abbeys across medieval Europe. They
weathered the Reformation (although the bones of Norbert—canonized in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII—had to be relocated from
Protestant Magdenburg to Catholic Prague) and then struggled to
survive the anti-clerical excesses of the French Revolution. Today
there are 1,700 Norbertines—priests, brothers, sisters, and deacons—at work in two dozen countries, but St. Norbert College
remains the only Norbertine institution of higher education in
the world. ■
St. Norbert
(1080-1134),
founder of the
Canons Regular
of Prémontré
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When Tullbane had spacious offices in the Bemis
Center to offer faculty, he recruited not those heavily
involved in international research and sending students
abroad, but those who were not. His reasoning? These
new faculty “might get fired up by seeing all that was
going on in the International Center. Everyone goes
back more of a believer than when they came.”
“We offer a lot of choices,” said Tullbane. “IBLAS is
offered, but we also offer global business. You can take
a business administration degree, not do the language,
but still get an international business degree. You still
must study abroad, but you go to an English-speaking
country. Political science also has a strong international
specialty. It’s better to have everyone doing something
international than to have a tiny group doing it and
no one else.”
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Tullbane, who majored in architecture at Rice
University before embarking on a military career, said
one of his most vivid classroom memories was a course
on Napoleonic history taught by a visiting professor
from Oxford. “I want to give that opportunity to our
students, too. Just because they are in De Pere,
Wisconsin, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have that
opportunity,” the associate dean said.
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“The idea is to offer things for everyone at every level.
We used to have an international economics major.
We eliminated that. Some people might think of it as
dropping back. But actually we simply admitted to
ourselves that economics is an international field. We
refurbished the entire economics major so that it
became international,” Tullbane said.
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garage outside the
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UNIVERSITY OF
NORTH
CAROLINA AT
CHAPEL HILL
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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
(UNC) became the first U.S. college campus with its
own planetarium when a gift from alumnus John
Motley Morehead III, discoverer of acetylene gas,
enabled it to build majestic Morehead Planetarium a
few years after World War II. The planetarium was heir
and repository to a Tar Heel tradition that stretched
back to the 1820s when Joseph Caldwell, the first president, brought a telescope and astronomical clock back
from Europe and, at a cost of $400, built the first
astronomical observatory at a U.S. university.
Astronomy lost the fixed place it had in college curricula
in the nineteenth century, but the study of space still
excites great minds and stirs the public imagination.
Today, astrophysicists and their students are no longer
restricted to viewing the canopy above their own campus.
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Global Across
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Across the World
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In the months and years ahead, Chapel Hill’s celestial
explorers will gaze at the clear night sky through a 13foot telescope perched on an 8,775-foot mountaintop
in the Chilean Andes. The Southern Astrophysical
Research (SOAR) telescope will not be the largest telescope in the world, but it will be among the fastest,
with “quick change” instruments allowing scientists
and students in a control room in Chapel Hill to
adjust in minutes the optical and infrared views of the
Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds. SOAR is a joint
undertaking by the University of North Carolina and
Michigan State University with the governments of
Brazil and Chile and the U.S. National Optical
Astronomy Observatory. While leaders gathered on the
peak in Cerro Pachon, Chile, to dedicate the $32 million telescope in April 2004, UNC officials gathered
inside Morehead Planetarium for their own celebration. “This is a great day in the life of Carolina,” said
Chancellor James Moeser, whose physicists and
astronomers conceived the project and spent 18 years
making it a reality. For its financial contributions and
pains—including enlisting Michigan State after two
other academic partners dropped out—UNC will
control the telescope for 124 half-nights a year.
The South
Building on the
UNC Campus
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Internationalization is Writ Large at
America’s Oldest Public University
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should be one of six top priorities for the university.
They did so from the strong conviction that the best
way to secure a prosperous future for North Carolina
is to prepare students to meet the challenges of a
global economy.
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The late Michael Hooker, Moeser’s predecessor, once
stressed the importance of UNC’s asking itself, “Is
what we do in Chapel Hill helping the factory worker
in Kannapolis?” The big textile mill in Kannapolis
closed last year, a victim of economic forces beyond
the state’s or the university’s control. Textiles and furniture both have been hit hard by global economic
forces while tobacco, the third pillar of the North
Carolina economy, has been staggered by health concerns. The response from Chapel Hill has been to
broaden its view of how it can best serve as a resource
for North Carolina, students and citizens alike. The
UNC Board of Trustees in 2003 declared that extending “Carolina’s global presence, research and teaching”
“Ultimately what we want is for Carolina to be a
world center of knowledge, where great students and
scholars come and where great research and scholarship emanates and affects the world,” said Moeser, a
concert organist who was the University of Nebraska
chancellor before answering UNC’s call in 2000. “It’s a
phenomenon of the shrunken globe. We realize that
both our economy and our ecology are truly global
and national borders don’t mean much any more. We
can’t exist in national silos any longer.”
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In an era of tight budgets at most public campuses,
UNC is in the middle of a building boom.
Construction cranes loom on every horizon and concrete trucks rumble from dawn to dusk past Franklin
Street. A half billion dollars in projects are underway,
largely thanks to a $3 billion bond issue that North
Carolinians approved in 2000 for the state’s entire
public system of higher education. The flagship university is also two-thirds of the way toward a goal of
raising $1.8 billion in private funds in a separate
“Carolina First” fund-raising drive. Even the venerable
Morehead Planetarium is down for a $10-million
facelift and conversion into a full-fledged science center. The live feeds from the SOAR telescope will be
visible on massive television screens in a new, $205
million Science Complex. Ground recently was broken
on a $26.5 million Global Education Center that will
bring under one roof a galaxy of international services,
studies and research programs.
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Old Well
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C. Moeser at the
©
Chancellor James
SOAR is an apt metaphor for what is happening across
many fronts at the nation’s oldest public university
(chartered in 1789, with the first classes in 1795). This
university, a center of scholarship on the South and a
bastion of Latin American and European studies, is
today deeply involved in research and service in Africa
and Asia as well. Its physicians are seeking better treatments for malaria and HIV in Malawi while its social
scientists gather vital health statistics across Russia and
China. Internationalization is writ large at UNC.
Preparing Students for the
Global Workforce
North Carolina lost 142,000 manufacturing jobs in
the last three years. “North Carolina has been hit harder by NAFTA and by the flight of low-wage manufacturing more than almost any state in the country,” said
businessman Alston Gardner, UNC alumnus of the
class of 1977, who chairs the Advisory Board for
International and Area Studies. Gardner, who built
and sold a global professional services firm, has donated $10 million to fuel the university’s international
education efforts. His gifts pay to send 25 undergraduates to study in Singapore each summer, and they pay
to bring 25 international undergraduates to the
Kenan-Flagler Business School to create an “international experience” for those students who do not go
overseas. He also underwrote a lecture series that
recently brought Egyptian human rights activist and
dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim to Chapel Hill.
The new dean of the Kenan-Flagler Business School is
W. S. (Steve) Jones, a native North Carolinian who
attended UNC on a Morehead scholarship and went
on to become a leading banker in Australia and New
Zealand, returned to his alma mater last year as dean
of. The former CEO of Suncorp Metway Ltd. was an
economics major and Morehead Scholar—UNC’s top
scholarship for undergraduates—in the class of 1974.
“My interest as dean is simple. It’s vital for the country
and the state’s competitiveness and long-term economic health that the business people living here are aware,
knowledgeable and skillful at taking advantage of
international opportunities as well as aware of challenges that are posed from international competitors,”
said Jones. “It has to be a core part of what they learn.
My belief, having lived overseas for 15 years, is that
the world doesn’t look as most Americans think it
does. America is arguably the most isolated significant
country in the world.”
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said Coclanis. “Beneath the surface at UNC, a wonderful array of international activities, initiatives, and
programs has been operating for years. We have many
internationally prominent researchers and scholars,
with real infrastructural assets all over the world in
such places as Thailand and Malawi.”
Putting the new post in the provost’s office and
providing a significant programming budget helped
answer any doubters. “It built confidence in the faculty that this would be something that would serve its
interests,” said Coclanis. “I don’t have to create, much
less mandate, international interest and programs. I
need to make them more visible and bundle and leverage them when appropriate.”
The Chicago-born Coclanis’s own academic interests
have extended from the U.S. South—he wrote a prizewinning history of South Carolina’s Low Country and
rice plantations from colonial times to the early twentieth century—to South America and Southeast Asia. An
authority on how markets globalize, he spent a year in
Southeast Asia as a Fulbright scholar, and has collaborated with scholars in Germany, Singapore, China and
Saudi Arabia. He also directed in 2003 the first
Singapore Summer Immersion Program—a seven-week
study abroad program for 25 rising UNC sophomores.
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He suggested that North Carolina could learn a lesson
from the way Italy has remained a global leader in
fashion and industrial design, even after the actual
manufacture of goods moved elsewhere. Noting that
High Point, North Carolina, still holds the largest furniture mart in the world, Jones said, “What you want
to try to do is transition from manufacturing center to
the design, the marketing, the strategic center for these
industries.” He also stressed the importance of North
Carolina students’ studying abroad.
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“We have to demystify this experience and have them
think of this as the world that they are going to operate in for the next 30 years of their careers,” Jones said.
Internationalization: Catching the ‘Virus’
UNC last fall tapped Peter A. Coclanis, the respected
chair of its history department, to fill the new post of
associate provost for international affairs. “It took a
while to get buy in from the various deans and directors. There was some controversy over whether we
needed this office, because many of the individual
schools were doing so well” on the international front,
Coclanis is an old Singapore hand, but it was an eyeopening experience for the students, who received full
scholarships for the trip, courtesy of Alston Gardner.
“We were there right after the SARS epidemic. They
checked our temperatures twice a day,” recalled sophomore Stephanie Poole, 19, of Efland, North Carolina.
She also remembered
the shock of walking
into a classroom and
for the first time “seeing Asia at the center
of the map.”
“Small things like
that remind you how
big the world is,” said
Poole, who signed up
for Mandarin
Chinese upon her
Egyptian human rights
activist Professor Saad
Eddin Ibrahim lecturing in
Chapel Hill
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With almost 16,000 undergraduate and 10,000 graduate and professional school students, UNC sent 1,426
students to study abroad in 2002–03, including 1,233
undergraduates. This fall almost 1,400 international
students are enrolled at Chapel Hill. Fewer than 200
are undergraduates. University of North Carolina
Board of Governors policy requires that 82 percent of
the spaces in each entering freshman class be reserved
for North Carolina residents. The remaining 18 percent come from the 49 other states as well as other
countries. The University of Virginia, a rival 150 miles
up the road, admits more than a third of its students
from out of state. (On the other hand, Chapel Hill
gets 24 percent of its operating budget from the state,
three times as much as the University of Virginia.)
A controversy erupted two summers ago when UNC
assigned entering freshmen to read Approaching the
Qur’an: The Early Revelations, an introduction to Islam
by Michael A. Sells. The North Carolina House voted
to bar the use of state funds to teach students about a
single religion. The federal courts rejected a lawsuit
against the reading program, which Moeser vigorously
defended in an appearance at the National Press Club
in Washington, DC. Looking back, he calls it “one of
our proudest chapters.” The funding threat dissipated.
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UNC hired Robert Miles, a sociologist from the
University of Glasgow who was a pioneer in Erasmus,
the European academic exchange program, to run its
Office of Study Abroad, with a mandate not only to
increase participation but to knit the study abroad
programs more tightly into the intellectual life of the
campus. Richard Soloway, who served as senior associ-
04
Study Abroad
ate dean and then interim dean of the College
of Arts and Sciences during a period of enormous
expansion in study
abroad opportunities,
said, “We were less concerned with being in the travel business and more in
the development of integrated curriculum.” While
most UNC students choose destinations in Europe,
and Florence, Italy, remains the biggest draw, the university now offers more than 276 programs in 68
countries. Chancellor Moeser believes the enthusiasm
for study abroad comes first from the faculty and then
from students’ talking with classmates “who have had
these tremendously enriching experiences. It’s a virus
that catches on.” UNC ranks first among major public
research universities in the percentage of undergraduates participating in study abroad (32 percent).
return. “I knew I wanted to go abroad and study
somewhere, but I wouldn’t have thought of Asia
because it seemed too far away, too unheard of to me.
I’m from a very small town in the middle of the state.”
This year she won another scholarship that allowed her
to spend the summer studying in Beijing courtesy of
the UNC Honors Asian Studies program.
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Robert Miles, Director,
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52
MEMORIES OF
BAHNHOF
FRIEDRICHSTRASSE
AND THE
BERLIN WALL
For millions, the lasting memories of the Berlin Wall are those joyous days in November 1989 when Berliners clambered atop the
graffitied barrier and toppled it with pick axes, hammers and
ropes. UNC Chancellor James Moeser has grimmer memories dating to 1961, when East German authorities sealed the border and
constructed the hated wall. Moeser arrived in Berlin on a Fulbright
scholarship a few weeks later. “Here I was, 21 years old, never
been north of Amarillo, Texas. This was the flashpoint of the Cold
War and I was there for a whole year, literally studying and living
on the precipice between the East and the West,” recalled
Moeser. A room became available at the Technische Universität
Berlin “because a third of the students they expected were locked
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Panoply of Scholarship, Grant and
Fellowship Opportunities
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Accra, Ghana; and other places. Rye Barcott ’01, a former Burch fellow and now an officer in the U.S.
Marine Corps, worked with youths in Nairobi, Kenya,
and wound up incorporating a charity, Carolina for
Kibera Inc., that sends students each summer to help
youth in Kibera, the largest slum in east Africa.
Another former Burch fellow, Baker Henson, started
the non-profit World Camp for Kids in Africa, which
provides AIDS education to villagers.
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The University Center for International Studies
(UCIS) was created in 1993 by a sociologist, Craig
Calhoun, who witnessed the crushing of the protests
in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and wrote a prize-winning book, Neither Gods Nor Emperors: Students and
the Struggle for Democracy in China. UCIS helped
secure federal funds to establish Title VI international
area studies and foreign language resource centers. It
now has seven centers, including three shared with
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Of more recent vintage is the Robertson Scholars program, which selects a cadre of 15 to 20 top students at
both UNC and Duke University, pays their full freight
and frees them to undertake ambitious service and
study projects during the summers. The Robertson
Scholars take classes on both campuses; indeed, the
program, endowed with a $24-million gift from Julian
and Josie Robertson, even pays for a free blue bus that
shuttles students and faculty between the campuses all
day long. “All the Robertson kids seem very much
involved in changing the world types of things,” said
Coclanis, the associate provost. Another program, the
Burch Fellows, provides up to $6,000 each for UNC
students to pursue dream projects around the world
before returning to Chapel Hill. The Burch program
also sponsors field research seminars for undergraduate
students to Beijing, China; Cape Town, South Africa;
RS
In Chapel Hill, the Morehead scholarships—endowed
by the same chemist who donated the planetarium—
are thought of as a junior version of the Rhodes
Scholarship. About 40 incoming freshmen each year
receive these full, four-year awards for leadership and
achievements in and outside the classroom. They are
closely mentored and given numerous opportunities
to study and travel abroad. This past summer, 134
Morehead scholars studied and performed service
work in 56 countries.
20
up by the wall. My roommate was a guy who had come across on
out years later. He went to prison first, but then was released in a
buyout by the West German government,” Moeser said. The young
Westerners could travel between the sectors and Moeser ven-
American’s Fulbright education included hearing performances of
tured weekly into East Berlin, to visit that friend, an architecture
the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan in that era
student. Once he toyed with the idea of lending him his passport,
when the famed orchestra became a symbol of West Berlin’s
because the East German guards had never checked his docu-
freedom and resilience. ■
©
August 11; his best friend had stayed behind and didn’t get out.”
ments on the train trip back to West Berlin. But on the day they
planned to try this ploy, Moeser noticed the guards’ checking
documents on both sides of the platform at the Bahnhof
Friedrichstrasse. “We aborted the plan. I probably would have
been sent to an East German prison if I’d been caught trying to
facilitate an escape. The friend I had over there actually did get
International Center
Director Robert J.
Locke and Assistant
Director Diana Levy
flank Ph.D. candidates Carlos Mena
(Ecuador/geography)
and Akitsugu
Kawamoto (Japan/
rock music)
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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 4
the international activities and connections that exist
at Chapel Hill. They are compiling a searchable database, crafting templates for international agreements
and exchanges and preparing surveys of students and
faculty. “People seem ready for this. The moment is so
right,” said Crowell, a UNC alumna and former fundraiser for the university. When some of UNC’s highest
profile professors were asked to sit on an advisory
panel, Coclanis and Crowell were hoping to get the
group together three times a year. Instead, the professors decided to meet every month.
Associate Provost
for International
Affairs Peter
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Assistant Provost
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Coclanis harbors this vision: “UNC has for many years
been known as a force for progressive social change in
the South. I think now what we would like to do is to
broaden our mandate to be a force for progressive
social change internationally.”
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Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Robert
Shelton, a physicist who came to Chapel Hill from the
University of California system three years ago, said a
remarkable bond exists between the university and the
state’s citizenry. In one marketing survey, five out of six
people “said that this university here at Chapel Hill is
the single most important institution in the history
and for the future of the state,” Shelton said, That
kind of support, coupled with strong funding from the
legislature, makes it imperative “that this university be
very involved in helping the state connect economically
to future opportunities, and those all have international
implications, whether it’s the loss of tobacco as more is
grown overseas or the loss of high-tech call centers that
are going to India.”
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Duke. Calhoun’s successor as UCIS director, anthropologist James Peacock, kept up the push to raise the
visibility of the campus’s diffuse international efforts.
The center, during its 11-year history, has attracted
$16 million in grants for research, training and other
activities. The U.S. Agency for International
Development chose UCIS to help rebuild a national
university in famine- and war-ravaged Eritrea. The
National Science Foundation awarded UCIS a fiveyear graduate traineeship grant to support students
doing interdisciplinary research on democracy and
democratization. In conjunction with Duke
University, the UNC center is now home to the
Rotary Center for International Studies in Peace
and Conflict Resolution, one of seven in the world
training scholars and negotiators in peace and
conflict resolution skills.
Being Internationally Wise
Coclanis now has authority over UCIS and both the
organizational stature and budgetary clout to bring
academic fiefdoms together. One of the first tasks that
Coclanis and Margie Crowell, the assistant provost for
international affairs, undertook was inventorying all
“We need to be internationally wise. We need students
with international savvy and enthusiasm, who want to
embrace an international economy so they can work
here in North Carolina and serve the state,” said
Shelton, who got to lead the UNC delegation to the
SOAR dedication on the Chilean mountaintop.
“Students are looking for those experiences, whether
it’s study abroad, internships, working on the SOAR
telescope, you name it.”
Four years ago UNC sent 30 students a year to Asia;
now it sends 130. Jeff Wood, 20, a junior, from Cary,
North Carolina, has gone twice, first on a summer
program to China and a year later for a full semester at
the University of Hong Kong. Wood, a double major
in business administration and Chinese, is taking the
highest level of Chinese offered—tenth semester.
“I randomly decided to take Chinese in my freshman
year, and I loved it,” he said. “I knew I wanted to be a
business major and figured Chinese would be the best
language to have when I graduated.”
Christopher Liang, 22, of Winston Salem, North
Carolina, had learned some Cantonese from his parents, but found that didn’t help when he began learning Mandarin at the University of Hong Kong. Liang,
a senior majoring in information sciences, said, “I
spent two months afraid to go out by myself. I always
grabbed Jeff or someone else to translate. People
always thought I was joking with them when I had
Jeff translate.”
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Erica Keppler, 20, a junior from North Gates, North
Carolina, majoring in journalism, was UNC’s first
exchange student with Mahidol University
International College in Salaya, Thailand, for seven
months last year. On her first day back in Chapel Hill,
she aced a quiz given by a journalism professor that
required students to fill in country names on a
blank map of the world. “The average score
was six countries,” she said. “I could name so
many just living in Thailand for so long and
traveling within Southeast Asia and
being interested. As soon as you travel,
it’s like getting a bug. You want to
travel everywhere. You end up reading more. You become more of a
global citizen.”
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Wood thinks he may spend his business career working in China. Claude “Trey” Mack, 20, an astronomy
major who went to Singapore last summer and was
headed to Vietnam this summer, thinks he’ll be
working in the United States. “Even if you don’t have
a career in the Foreign Service or constantly going to
different parts of the world to close business deals,
you want to be able to talk about how you and
your country fit in on the global scale. In America
we definitely need a lot more knowledge of what’s
out there,” Mack said.
Growth and Diversity in Education Abroad
The university also is striving to increase the diversity
of the students it sends abroad. African-American and
Hispanic students are under represented. “We need to
develop ways to make sure students from lowerincome backgrounds and minority students are aware
that it is possible,” said Bernadette Gray-Little, the
new dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. GrayLittle, who grew up in rural Washington, North
Carolina, said minority students “may be like I was
when I went to college. They don’t have this already
in mind and don’t know this is a possibility for
them.” Gray-Little went to Marywood College in
Scranton, Pennsylvania, got her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at St. Louis University and spent a year in
Denmark on a Fulbright scholarship before joining
the UNC faculty in 1971.
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Logan Davis, 21, a junior from Pittsboro, North
Carolina, majoring in psychology, said he’d been
contemplating taking a year off from college when he
went to Kyoto last summer. “It gave me more of a
focus in all of my other studies. It reinvigorated me
for everything,” he said.
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Undergraduates
who studied
abroad including
(alphabetically)
Logan Davis, Erica
Keppler, Leah
Latella,
Christopher Liang,
Trey Mack,
Stephanie Poole,
Justin Sosne and
Jeffrey Wood
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The business school also runs intensive 10-day to twoweek immersion trips for MBA students during breaks
and between semesters for a first-hand look at industries in other countries “We are quick, but we are not
shallow. It’s very intensive,” said Mabel Miguel, the
director of international programs. Professors led the
Global Immersion Electives on trips in March to:
Berlin, Prague and Athens; Buenos Aires, São Paulo
and Rio de Janeiro; and Beijing, Shanghai and Hong
Kong. After classes let out in May, there were trips to:
Hong Kong, China and Japan; Mumbai, Goa,
Bangalore, Delhi and Agra, India; and Thailand,
Vietnam, Singapore and Malaysia.
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International Students Throughout the Institution
More than half of UNC’s international students come
from Asia. Business administration is far and away the
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At the business school, the Kenan Institute of Private
Enterprise has played a leading role in internationalization, including establishment of the Kenan Institute
Asia in Bangkok, Thailand, endowed in 1996 by the
Thai government, the U.S. Agency for International
Development, and the William R. Kenan, Jr.
Charitable Trust. USAID selected the Kenan Institute
Asia to help Thailand after deciding the Asian tiger no
longer qualified for development assistance. Over the
years, the institute has helped incubate businesses that
tackled serious Thai health and environmental problems. Jack Kasarda, director of the Kenan Institute,
said one of its biggest success stories was linking a
ON
Business School Internationalizes
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director, Frank
Hawkins Kenan
Thai entrepreneur with a U.S. technology company
that developed a faster and cheaper test kit for HIV
and sold 1.5 million kits in its second year. With support from the Kaufman
Foundation, the business
school and Kenan
Institute Asia now place
undergraduates as summer interns in Southeast
Asian businesses run by
ethnic Chinese families
who, Kasarda noted, are
inveterate entrepreneurs.
The university hopes to keep pushing up the study
abroad numbers—they’ve been climbing by 10 percent
a year. “In five years, I would like to see us in the
region of 50 to 60 percent participation,” said study
abroad director Robert Miles. But he quickly added,
“We do not want to sacrifice. We are always going to
be cautious about not only the academic integrity of
the program that the student participates in, but the
fit between that program and the curriculum here. It’s
not just a matter of putting a student on a plane and
saying, ‘Go to Buenos Aires, come back with your
credits, don’t get into trouble and have a nice time.’
It only makes sense if the academic program they are
taking is sound and relates to the objectives that they
have here as a Carolina student.”
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Jack Kasarda,
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THINGS ‘JUST
CLICKED’ FOR UNC’S
GARDNER,
SALESMAN-TURNEDPHILANTHROPIST
At age 48, with open-neck shirts and tousled hair, Alston Gardner
looks like the part of a relaxed entrepreneur and outdoorsman
whom you might expect to find conducting business on the back
nine of the local country club.
Gardner is indeed a successful businessman and sportsman,
but you won’t catch him playing golf (“What a waste of time”). His
idea of fun is getting on a bike and spinning 70 miles alongside
Tyler Hamilton and Greg LeMond on a charity ride, or pedaling
1,200 miles in 16 days from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City with disabled
Vietnam veterans. He has journeyed around the world on behalf of
World T.E.A.M. Sports, a charity that stages daunting athletic challenges with disabled athletes
Gardner is a venture capitalist who founded OnTarget Inc.,
an international training company, and sold it to Siebel Systems in
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top field of study, followed by computer science, economics and engineering. But international students
can be found in almost every department. Aki
Kawamoto, 34, a music teacher and rock guitar player
from Tokyo, came to Chapel Hill to study under
music professor and rock musician John Covach.
“Professor Covach is a well-known scholar in this field.
He was the sole reason I chose this institution,” said
Kawamoto, who dreams of making a living playing
rock—and if that doesn’t pan out, to land a job himself as a rock music professor. He’s writing a thesis on
Emerson, Lake and Palmer, the 1970s band known for
mixing classical music with rock.
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agencies as the National Institutes of Health, the
National Science Foundation, the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Agency
for International Development and its 55 faculty
fellows come from five UNC schools and 16 departments. Barry Popkin, an economist who is the director
of the Division of Nutrition Epidemiology in the
Department of Nutrition in the School of Public
Health, directs major longitudinal surveys in Russia
and China that are a principal source of information
about health, poverty, life expectancy and nutrition in
those countries. Popkin is also involved in similar
studies in South Africa and the Philippines.
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Carlos Mena, 29, of Quito, Ecuador, found his way to
Chapel Hill to pursue a Ph.D. in geography after
working as a guide in the Amazon for a conservation
group that was funded by the Carolina Population
Center. Mena received a fellowship from the Fogarty
Foundation and intends to return to Ecuador afterward to start a graduate school of his own or work
with a nongovernmental organization on population
and environmental issues.
Julia Kruse,
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assistant director
for Western
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Public Health is Global Health
Europe, Office of
The Carolina Population Center is the leading center
in the United States and, indeed, the world for
population research. It studies demographic, health,
nutrition and other quality-of-life issues in 50 countries and across the United States as well. Most of its
60-plus research projects are funded by such federal
Study Abroad, and
Richard Soloway,
SO
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senior associate
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dean for social
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1999 for more than $400 million. He is a major benefactor to both
to go to Germany or Hong Kong and do the same thing for them
there.” OnTarget wound up with offices in 14 countries and did
his alma mater, the University of North Carolina.
business in 40.
©
Duke, where his father was once an engineering professor, and
The 1977 graduate has given UNC $10 million for internation-
“It just clicked for me that there was this big world out
al activities, including dozens of scholarships to send students
there,” said Gardner, who before his 30th birthday had barely trav-
and faculty to study in Singapore and Beijing. Gardner chairs the
eled outside the United States. He made the most of the travel
UNC Advisory Board for International and Area Studies and has
opportunities that business brought him. After a training session in
taught in the business school.
South Africa, he’d head off to an African game preserve; in
Gardner was an indifferent student who “worked and partied
all through school,” but afterwards made his mark as a sales
executive in technology. “I developed some models to help my
own people be more productive, and that morphed into a training
Thailand, he went biking on the Burma border. “You’d have the
richest experiences of your life,” he said.
But most of OnTarget’s overseas business was in Europe.
Why the emphasis on Asia in the UNC scholarship programs?
company,” he said. “We got dragged all over the world. You’d
“I had no interest in sending kids to Paris or Florence or
work for an IBM or Xerox or HP in North America, and get invited
continued
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and works closely with the school’s Office of Global
Health to promote the University’s goals of internationalization.
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UNC’s School of Medicine and three other health professional schools are deeply involved in research and
partnerships around the globe. “We’re not missionaries. That’s not our goal,” said Myron S. Cohen, chief
of the infectious disease division in the school’s
Department of Medicine. “But if you’re interested in
malaria, you can’t be a malaria researcher sitting in
your office in Chapel Hill. You have to work in countries where malaria is a devastating problem.”
ED
Executive Vice
Chancellor and
Cohen, who joined the UNC faculty in 1980, said the
problems encountered in infectious disease are closely
related to other social and health ailments. “If you
have bad nutrition, infections result. We have a very
strong environmental science department. Water and
sanitation all impact on whether people are going to
die of infections or survive,” he said. “Financial disparities are critical. In infectious diseases, we’re looking at
the end point of a lot of other things that haven’t gone
right in health.”
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Provost Robert N.
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By Cohen’s count, there are 37 microbiologists, 30
physicians, 17 epidemiologists, nine dentists, eight
pharmacologists and three health behaviorists working
in various UNC schools on infectious diseases. “We do
this both domestically and globally,” he said. “We’ve
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“We really believe that public health is global health,”
said Margaret E. Bentley, associate dean for global
health and professor of nutrition in the School of
Public Health. At UNC, global health is integrated
across departments, programs, and centers and emphasizes the linkages between problems and solutions in
developing countries and in industrialized, Western
settings. The Student Global Health Committee is
active in educational, research, and service activities
“We need to drive the global focus down into the untenured
richness of culture and history in Asia. It’s important that we take
professor, the tenured professor, the staff person, the individual
them out of their comfort zone,” he said. He also believes that
student, so that it’s not something you think about, you just do it.
China is on its way to playing a vital role in global security as well
You don’t have to think, ‘How do I globalize or internationalize the
as an economic power.
syllabus?’ it is just accepted as a routine part of your job. Twenty
©
20
Spain for the summer. Most students know nothing about the great
Gardner supported the creation of the associate provost’s
years ago, institutions were struggling with how to encourage
position and welcomes the building of the Global Education
computer use, and they came up with having these centers around
Center. But the businessman said, “I would actually hope that ten
campus to let students come use computers.
years from now there wouldn’t need to be a ‘primary location’ on
“Those centers have almost become irrelevant because all
campus for international programs, that there wouldn’t need to be
the students have laptops and everybody’s connected with a wire-
one person in charge of international programs at the university.
less network. Computers are pervasive,” said Gardner. “When
We will truly be successful when every program is by definition
we’re at that point on internationalization, then we will have
international, when every person at UNC begins to define his or
succeeded. We have a long way to go, but we’re on our way.” ■
her job in international terms,” said Gardner.
got a clinic in Durham [North Carolina] where we see
a hundred patients a day with STDs [sexually transmitted diseases] and no HIV and we’ve got a clinic in
Malawi were we see a hundred patients a day with
STDs and 50 percent are also infected with HIV.”
UNC researchers who want to know more about the
interplay of STDs and HIV inevitably are going to
look to Malawi for answers.
Earlier this year, William
L. Roper, moved from
the deanship of the
School of Public Health
to become dean of the
medical school, as well as
CEO of the UNC
Health Care System and
vice chancellor for medical affairs. Early in his
medical career, Roper
was a public health officer in Alabama. He went on to
become a White House health adviser and director of
the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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U C C E S S
roots in other parts of the world. So for a whole host
of reasons, across our university, we’re putting a real
emphasis on a global university.”
Carolina’s School of Public Health is widely regarded
as one of the nation’s best, ranked second only behind
Johns Hopkins. The medical school makes top 20
lists, but Roper wants to see it up at the top, like
public health.
“We aren’t missing any essential elements,” Roper said.
“What we need to do is just take what we have, rev up
the speed and do it more intentionally. That’s the word
I keep using: intentionally…That’s what strategic planning is all about and that’s what we have to do right
now, on global health and on things generally.”
William L. Roper,
dean, School of
Medicine
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Roper, too, stressed that the work of UNC’s medical
researchers is vitally important to North Carolina as
well as Malawi.
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“We do this not just because we have a heart for helping the poor and unfortunate, but also because the
health problems in other parts of the world will be
our health problems the day after tomorrow,” said
Roper. “Infectious diseases currently in central Africa
can be transported by a person on an airplane here
next week. North Carolina is a place where we have
a rapidly growing Hispanic population and folks
coming either as visitors or to stay who have their
Corinthian columns
grace the facade of
this UNC building
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Education Abroad
Pioneer Finds Winter
the Perfect Time for
Faculty, Students
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University leaders believe the popularity of these study
abroad programs is part of the reason freshman
applications are up 50 percent in the past five years.
At college admissions fairs, the traffic is always heaviest
around the education abroad table, officials say.
Expanding Education Abroad with
Short-term Programs
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The University of Delaware is an exemplar of education abroad among major state universities—a fitting
legacy for the institution that pioneered and popularized the junior year abroad for language majors in the
1920s. That tradition lapsed after World War II, but
Delaware now sends more students to study abroad
each year than all but a handful of U.S. universities.
Instead of going for a full semester or year, most nowadays go on faculty-led study tours during an extended
winter break in January. Last year Delaware sent
almost 1,300 students abroad to study in 35 countries,
from a shipboard photojournalism trip to Antarctica to
classes in Peru for business and anthropology majors.
More than a third of graduating seniors have studied
abroad, some twice.
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UNIVERSITY
OF DELAWARE
Seventy-five percent of Delaware’s education abroad
students get their passports stamped during the winter
term, led by faculty who compress two full courses
into the abbreviated term. There are also faculty-led
education abroad programs in the summer; they customarily attract about 200 students. Fewer than 10
Bob McFadden, owner
of the Acheron Station,
and Neil Gow, faculty
member from Lincoln
University in
Canterbury New
Zealand, lecturing to
Lesa Griffith’s animal
husbandry students on
a tour of New Zealand.
McFadden tends 6,000
sheep on the farm that
extends for miles.
Photo courtesy of Lesa Griffiths,
University of Delaware
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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 4
ing the looks on their faces the first time they see the
world in a different way.”
She saw that look the first time flying over the mountains and into Christchurch, New Zealand, and again
traveling across New Zealand’s enormous sheep stations, some as large as 37,000 acres. The Delaware students were struck by how often a New Zealand farmer
would quiz them on what the value of the U.S. dollar
was that day and how much beef they ate. That in
itself was a lesson “for Ag students who are a little
insular,” she said.
Associate Director
Lisa Chieffo
and Director
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Lesa Griffiths of
the Center for
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International
Studies, outside
Hullihen Hall
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“For me, New Zealand is like visiting an uninhabited
island. To stop at a beach where all you can see for 10
miles in either direction is the lifeguard, or to drive for
six hours and not come to a stoplight is just amazing,”
said Griffiths. “You’re talking about a little tiny country on the other side of the world that ranks as the
most efficient producer of beef in the world. It’s an
agricultural system completely different from anything
we know in the United States.”
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percent of Blue Hens—Delaware’s nickname—
go abroad to study for a full semester or year.
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The university added a three-week winter term in
1971, and then expanded it to five weeks in 1975.
More recently generous faculty incentives have led to a
spurt in the number and variety of education abroad
courses led by Delaware professors during these miniterms. The university also elevated the status of the
Center for International Studies in 2001.
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The winter education abroad program “is very, very
popular among the students,” said Lesa Griffiths,
director of the Center for International Studies and
professor of animal nutrition. Her introduction to
international education came in January 1999 when
Griffiths led 36 agriculture majors—33 of them
women—to New Zealand to study that small country’s sheep and cattle farms. She has repeated the trip
every other year and in January 2005 will lead her
fourth trip down under. Griffiths, a New York suburbanite who studied hog nutrition at Cornell and
Purdue universities, said, “I’m primarily a teacher.
That’s what I really love to do. To some people the
thought of going abroad and spending 24-7 with a
large group of students is frightening. For me, I always
thought that would be incredibly exciting. I love see-
Griffiths happily agreed two years later when the
provost’s office asked her to serve as the international
center’s director.
Lisa Chieffo, the associate director of student
programs and an adjunct professor of German, said,
“We don’t go through providers. If it’s a UD program,
it’s a UD program, and we run it with our faculty.”
The university relies on adjuncts to teach some
courses, with resident directors coordinating the
semester-long programs.
Faculty Creativity
Griffiths said the success of Delaware’s offerings “starts
with the faculty and their creative (program) designs.
We have no set model. Some faculty take students to
other institutions where they stay for the five weeks.
Some go to multiple institutions, and move two or
three times. Some move the entire time, staying only
three or four days in any location.”
“Every program is unique,” she added. “Some are
teaching in very nice academic classrooms at a host
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Delaware students pay regular tuition and a program
fee to cover the costs of the travel, food, lodging, and
ground expenses. Program fees typically run between
$2,500 and $4,500. The university funnels tuition revenues directly to the Center for International Studies,
which each year awards $200,000 to $250,000 in
merit- and need-based scholarships for study abroad.
Still, Griffiths said the office can meet only one-fifth
of the requests for support.
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All this “has made the program popular among faculty.
The opportunities just steamrolled,” said Griffiths.
“We see about 12 new programs each year, reaching
new majors and providing new routes into the world.”
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While they generally leave it to the faculty to come up
with the course ideas —Antarctica was an exception;
that program was hatched at the center—Chieffo said,
“We encourage faculty to choose courses that are going
to fit into students’ majors or help them fulfill general
education requirements.”
Building Data on Short-term
Education Abroad
As a scientist, Griffiths came to this field eager to see
data on what education abroad meant for students’
academic careers. Although short-term education
abroad programs are growing in popularity on many
campuses—Open Doors statistics indicate they account
for half of all education abroad—Griffiths said she got
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the sense that short-term programs weren’t generally
accepted as fully legitimate.
“But based on my experience in New Zealand, I knew
that it was [legitimate],” she said. “I knew that students were transformed by their study abroad experience.” With help from Delaware’s Office of
Institutional Research, she and Chieffo surveyed more
than 2,000 students who had spent the 2003 and
2004 winter terms studying overseas or back on the
Newark campus.
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The faculty are paid for teaching the courses, plus a
per diem and expenses. “It’s really quite generous,”
said Griffiths. The 10-person office also assigns each
faculty leader a program coordinator and provides
extensive help drawing up budgets, arranging tickets,
and disbursing travel advances. Griffiths and Chieffo
make a point of sending thank-you notes to faculty on
their return, and copying in department chairs.
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institution; some are teaching around the campfire in
Tanzania; others are teaching in hotel rooms. It’s whatever the program demands. We ask that they cover the
same number of student contact hours that they
would if they were teaching on campus, but otherwise
we are very flexible.”
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The education abroad students had higher GPAs to
start with on average. Adjusting for that, Griffiths and
Chieffo found that those who went overseas were more
aware of global issues, better able to articulate U.S.
foreign policy, and were more understanding of why
the views of people in other countries differed from
their own.
University of
Delaware students
try their hand at
fly fishing on the
Hurunui River
after a visit to the
Griffiths and Chieffo have published two articles
about their research—the first of which appeared in
International Educator magazine (Vol. XII, No. 4)—
and a third is in the pipeline. They were most struck
by the students’ responses to the survey’s last, openended question, which asked them to write down the
most important thing they learned in that month, in
or out of the classroom.
“We got twice as many responses from the students
who studied abroad,” said Chieffo. Those who stayed
in Newark usually wrote about something they learned
in class. “The ones who went abroad didn’t write
Acheron Station in
New Zealand
Photo courtesy of Lesa Griffiths,
University of Delaware
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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 4
about their courses, even when the content was similar,” said Griffiths. “They wrote about the intangibles
of the experience and what it meant for them—the
things that are very hard for students to describe.”
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Photo by Rich Dunoff, Office of Public Relations, University of Delaware
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Their research has provided ammunition for all who
believe that education abroad—even for an intensive
few weeks—can have a powerful impact on today’s
college students.
04
Delware
20
University of
A student who had gone to Argentina wrote, “To be
honest, I’ve realized how fortunate I am to have had
the opportunities in life that have been presented to
me. Also, when you get down to it, people are all the
same everywhere.” One just back from Italy wrote that
she had learned “the importance of thinking more
globally and…not being caught up in American ignorance.” A third said that in Martinique she had
“learned to be open-minded and not judgmental.
There are millions of people in this world and…lots
who are just like me. The world is not confined to my
backyard.”
©
Gore Hall,
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U C C E S S
Delaware Pioneered Education Abroad in 1923
When eight young men from the University of Delaware
trade, industry, commerce, and the Government can
boarded the ocean liner Rochambeau in New York on July 7,
draw...for work abroad or...work that involves knowledge of
1923, for the transatlantic crossing to Le Havre, France, The
the languages and customs of other countries.
The experiment was judged a success. Delaware put
coverage to the event. The college students were embarking
seven rising juniors — four men and three women — in
on what the broadsheets described as a remarkable innova-
Kirkbride’s charge the next summer. Smith College emulated
tion in U.S. higher education: the junior year abroad.
Delaware’s model, starting its own program at the Sorbonne
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New York Times and other major newspapers gave prominent
in 1925. Delaware sent 14 more students in 1925, including
of Delaware President Walter Hullihen, a Wilsonian who
five from Rutgers and the Universities of California and
was convinced that the Delaware Foreign Study Plan — the
Florida. The next year even more U.S. universities signed on
term junior year abroad came later — would deliver large
and Delaware enrolled 43 students in its junior year abroad
dividends for the participants, for their university and for
program. With a $1,000 grant from Pierre du Pont and the
their country.
encouragement of the American Council on Education,
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Widely quoted in all these accounts was University
Kirkbride went on a speaking tour of U.S. campuses to pro-
Continent, but never in such numbers nor with such singular
mote the concept. In the summer of 1928 some 68 students
purpose. The Delaware students were led by an engaging
booked passage to France. The experiment, according to
young professor, Raymond Watson Kirkbride, who had
Munroe’s history, was not without trying moments, mainly
served in an ambulance corps in France in World War I and
due to Kirkbride’s sloppy bookkeeping and dilatory habits in
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after the Armistice perfected his French at the University of
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Other U.S. students before them had studied on the
reporting on students’ progress. President Hullihen repeatedly chastised him. “Further threats on my part would, I am
guage department in 1921, Kirkbride soon sold the idea of the
sure, be useless. I can only warn you that the end seems
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Grenoble. Hired by the University of Delaware’s modern lan-
near,” he wrote in December 1926. Six months later came
enlisting the backing of industrialist Pierre Du Pont and
this rocket from Newark: “You incur a deficit with as much
other business barons. Hullihen even went to Washington,
nonchalance as though you had the Bank of England behind
D.C. to pitch the idea to then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert
you and had carte blanche to draw upon it.”
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junior year abroad to Hullihen, who became its Barnum,
The Delaware Junior Year Abroad program expanded
and Europe as an engineer, liked it immediately, seeing its
to Germany for a time in the early 1930s and later to
potential to turn out graduates equipped to expand U.S. mar-
Switzerland. It was interrupted by World War II, briefly
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Hoover. The future president, who had spent years in China
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According to John Munroe’s The University of
restarted and then terminated in 1948 by President William
Carlson, who was more concerned with finding space in
classrooms in Newark for returning war veterans than with
sending language majors off to Switzerland. Hullihen, who
04
Delaware: A History, Kirkbride’s eight pupils first polished
their language skills at the University of Nancy while board-
20
ing with local families, then enrolled at the Sorbonne in
Paris, taking a survey course in French civilization geared
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was among the leading academic figures of his day, died in
office in 1944. In 1933 the CBS radio network broadcast to the
for international students that combined literature, art, histo-
nation an address by the Greek and Latin scholar on the
ry, philosophy, and economics. Some also took classes at the
importance of study abroad:
Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques in economics, political
Life in another country tends to broaden and liberalize
science, and international relations. Hullihen explained the
[the student’s] outlook, through contact with a civilization
purpose to The Christian Science Monitor:
Our plan aims to reach the type of man who is going
into business; the type that embraces two-thirds of our
college graduates of today. We wish to see eventually a
great reservoir of college trained men from which business,
other than his own, with its literature and art, with its modes
of thought, with its attitudes toward life and living.
It makes him realize how much of goodness and kindness
and culture there is beyond the borders of our favored land.
It brings him into touch with the long history of the peo-
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 4
ples of Europe from whom our nation sprang, and gives him
36 and had never completed a doctoral degree. However, two
a new conception, a new realization, of our kinship with
students from that first class of eight did earn Ph.D.s in
them and of the solidarity of human interests throughout
French, including one who was blind. A third became the
the world.
head of Du Pont’s operations in Argentina and later Canada.
If undergraduate study abroad could be made a suc-
The library in the Paris building where the Delaware program was based before the war was named in Kirkbride’s
honor, and alumni who called themselves “Delforians”
peoples which is the necessary condition of international
raised funds to donate ambulances to France before it was
good will about which we talk so much and do so little.
overrun by Germany in World War II. Today, the main admin-
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cess, it might well prove to be a real contribution by
American colleges to promotion of an understanding of other
istration building on the University of Delaware’s Newark
campus is Walter Hullihen Hall, and a block away a busy
He returned to the United States in failing health in 1928 and
lecture hall honors the memory of Raymond Watson
succumbed, possibly to tuberculosis, in early 1929. He was
Kirkbride—the fathers of education abroad.
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Kirkbride’s academic adventures came to a premature end.
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The University of
Delaware Foreign
Study Plan was
the first of its kind
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Florida Puts Its
Internationalization on the
Accreditation Spot
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Century Tower
Carillon, a landmark
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In a 2002 strategic plan for the University of Florida,
then-President Charles E. Young described the 149year-old institution as standing “on the brink of true
greatness.” Over three decades it had doubled in size
and joined the ranks of the nation’s major research
institutions. When the 1970s began, fewer than
20,000 students were enrolled on the leafy
Gainesville campus ringed with loblolly pines and
live oaks; its faculty, physicians and scientists conducted barely $27 million in research. Now enrollment stands at 48,000 and its researchers received
$458 million in grants in 2002-2003. Florida’s oldest
public university is now the fourth largest in the
United States in enrollment and twenty-fourth in
research and development expenditures.
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UNIVERSITY OF
FLORIDA
on the Gainesville
campus that was
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commemorate the
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centennial of UF’s
parent institution
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and to honor alumni
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killed in WWII
All photos courtesy of the
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Focusing Accreditation Review on
Internationalization
Photo by Ray M. Carson
©
It was a measure of both the university’s growth and
ambitions that four years ago, while beginning preparations for a 2003 accreditation review, the University
of Florida asked the Southern Association of Colleges
and Schools (SACS) for permission to focus its
accreditation self-study on its internationalization
efforts. “Education is the one essential commodity in
the new global community,” the university said in its
proposal. “And our education program ought to
ensure that University of Florida students can make
the transition to any part of the world comfortably
and successfully.”
Even when the outcome is not in doubt, accreditation
reviews are a daunting, labor-intensive process. To
invite extra scrutiny of its international education
efforts required a certain daring. Other institutions
had suggested a special focus to their reviews, said
David A. Carter, associate executive director of the
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The strategy that Young and Colburn pushed included
upgrading the status of the university’s International
Center and hiring Dennis C. Jett as its first dean in
2000. Jett had completed a doctorate in international
relations even while serving as U.S. ambassador to
Mozambique and Peru during a diplomatic career that
spanned more than a quarter century. While posted to
the Carter Center in Atlanta, he turned that dissertation into a book, Why Peacekeeping Fails, exploring
why international peacekeeping worked in
Mozambique while failing in another former
Portuguese colony, Angola.
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In moving to Gainesville, he found a major land grant
university with a rich tradition of Latin American
studies that dates back to the 1890s and significant
international representation among students and faculty. The University of Florida enrolls nearly 2,800
international students, hailing from more than 100
countries. The Gainesville campus is also home to
1,300 international faculty scholars and postdoctoral
fellows. Florida sends 1,400 students abroad to study
each year. Part of the International Center’s job is “the
day-to-day care and feeding of those three constituencies,” said Jett. The university, both in elevating the
status of the International Center and in making the
Global UF efforts the focus of its accreditation selfstudy, was trying to infuse the commitment to global
education more deeply across the sprawling campus.
“There’s a recognition that to remain a leading
research institution, we must have a global presence
and global impact,” said Jett.
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(Spring 2004)
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Olympia, Greece
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Florida students at
the Temple of Zeus in
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Olympics were held
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on the Athens track
where the first modern
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(right) Student lineup
The university devised a
logo and web site for its
global ambitions and
strategy called Global UF
(www.global.ufl.edu).
David R. Colburn, the
provost and senior vice
president for academic
affairs, told the faculty in
November 2002,
“Fundamentally, it’s
about the education of our students and how we
expose them to the world of which we want them to
be a part.” Colburn, a historian and co-author of the
book Florida Megatrends examining how the Sunshine
State became one of the most ethnically diverse and
international corners of America, said, “As Americans,
we have done a fairly poor job of being engaged in the
world. We have a notion of what the world ought to
look like, and it’s in our own image.”
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accrediting agency, but “UF was the only one to focus
on international education.” It was not entirely out of
the blue. The National Association of State
Universities and Land-Grant Colleges recently had
articulated a new strategic vision that called “global
competence, confidence and comfort … [the] preconditions for both survival and success in the twenty-first
century.” SACS gave UF its blessings.
Its location is a drawback. With 95,000 residents,
Gainesville isn’t even among Florida’s 10 largest cities.
Until recently the only nonstop flights out of the
Gainesville airport were to Atlanta and Charlotte; now
there are flights to Miami and Memphis as well. “We
are located in a nice, small college town in north central Florida. That’s a real handicap when you are trying
to promote an international perspective,” said Jett.
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Leadership and Buy-in
Internationalization was one of seven central commitments in the strategic plan that Young left for his successor, J. Bernard Machen, whom Florida lured from
the presidency of the University of Utah. Machen, a
dental surgeon by training, is also former provost at
the University of Michigan.
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A Flexible Plan
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Each of UF’s 17 colleges was asked to do its own
inventory of international activities on the three main
academic fronts of teaching, research and service and
then to set five-year goals to step up its international
activities. The emphasis was on looking ahead, not
backwards. “We decided early on we didn’t want it to
be a historical exercise,” said Jett. “We didn’t see much
value to collecting information on what happened five
years ago or ten years ago or even last year. The much
more relevant question was: Where are we now and
where do we want to be in five years?”
Dennis Jett,
dean of the
International Center,
and colleagues
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It was left to each dean “to look at his or her own colleagues and decide what internationalization means
and how it’s best pursued” within that discipline, Jett
said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean precisely in the engineering college what it might imply in education or
liberal arts or chemistry.”
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Jill W. Varnes, a professor of health science education and UF’s director
of accreditation and new
degree programs, chaired
a 22-member steering
committee for the
2½-year accreditation
self-study. Four dozen
faculty members, administrators and graduate
students served on various committees, including ones
that looked at the international sides of UF’s teaching,
research, centers and institutes, and service and
outreach. The Global UF web site served as a communications tool to keep everyone, especially the 4,000
UF faculty members, apprised of what these panels
were up to.
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“Anything that happens in an institution this big
requires leadership at the top, buy-in at the middle and
participation at the bottom,” said Jett. With Colburn,
Young and now Machen, the leadership from the top
was there. “The buy-in from the middle is to get the
faculty involved. You don’t do anything in an institution of higher education until you convince the faculty
that it’s important and in their interest,” Jett added.
The International Center put together a common
questionnaire, but left each college to conduct its own
evaluation. “We tried to focus questions in a way that
elicited comparable responses,” but that was not paramount, said Jett. “The value of the exercise isn’t so
much to compare one college versus another, or even
necessarily to aggregate data across the university, as it
is to get each college to evaluate where it is and to
articulate where it wants to be in five years.”
The former diplomat had this to say about how things
are done in academe versus Washington. “I tell my former colleagues that unlike the federal government, in
academia they occasionally treat you like an adult. A
lot more responsibility and authority is given to individual deans and department chairs. It’s also easier to
measure results,” said Jett. On the other hand, “it’s
often less clear who can make things happen in academic settings. The way you address that is through a
lot of dialogue and consensus building.”
Jill W. Varnes,
interim dean of the
College of Health and
Human Performance,
who chaired the
University of Florida’s
accreditation steering
committee
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Getting Results
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As an example of the centers’ reach, the report
noted that more than 1,035 public utility regulators
from 108 countries had trained at UF’s Public
Utilities Research Center under a contract with the
World Bank.
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Some colleges and departments were notably more
international than others. A high percentage of faculty and graduate students in engineering, it noted,
was international, meaning that “most of the commitment to internationalizing education comes from
the ground up in this college.” In the College of
Medicine and the College of Dentistry, on the other
hand, state law limits enrollment to U.S. students.
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The report noted, however, that fully a third of the
graduate students in biomedical sciences were international, “and this ensures an international presence
in the classrooms and labs of the department.”
What knowledge did this academic exercise produce?
Varnes and her colleagues found that:
Almost 600 faculty—one in seven—were engaged
in international service and outreach.
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The College of Business Administration had set a
goal of sending at least ten percent of faculty abroad
each year on overseas assignments. More than half
the business faculty had participated in the program.
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The College of Health Professions was mapping
plans to create a school for public health, the only
piece missing from an array of health programs that
train physicians, dentists, veterinarians, nurses and
pharmacologists.
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The 172 academic centers and institutes,
by definition interdisciplinary, were
magnets for international work on
campus. Many “serve as the
point of contact between
the university and a broad
range of community, scholarly, and business groups,”
a committee said. “The
ability to provide a bridge
between the intellectual
capital on campus and
interested groups across the
world contributes significantly to UF’s national and
international visibility.”
of Florida Mace
—an alligator
atop a globe
Photo by Ray M. Carson
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The University
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Sixteen percent of the faculty collaborated with universities or research institutes in other countries, and
almost 30 percent regularly gave presentations and
published scholarly work in international venues.
Four hundred served on editorial boards of international, peer-reviewed journals.
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Nearly 450 faculty members held contracts or grants
in 2001 with an international component. These
activities brought in $37 million in external funds.
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Undergraduates had a choice of more than 300
undergraduate courses with significant international
content.
Campus activities often rippled through the wider
community. One result of the year that Jelon Veira
spent as Latin American Artist in Residence at the
College of Fine Arts, for example, was the establishment of Gainesville’s first school teaching the
Brazilian martial art of capoeira.
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With more than 4,000 members, Volunteers for
International Student Affairs (VISA) was the largest
student organization on campus,
uniting U.S. and international
students at a host of cultural events.
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Even the significant number of
Gator Dining Service chefs born
outside the United States helps
“create a unique dining experience on campus.”
The self-study steering committee adopted a raft of recommendations on ways that the university could deepen its commitment to internationalize the educational life and atmosphere in
Gainesville. It suggested raising
from six credits to nine the general
education requirement for coursework
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The panel called for raising the number and proportion of international students, encouraging overseas
sabbaticals and internships, and stepping up international exchanges, including finding suitable housing
for global scholars and guests. The committee called
study abroad “a fundamental means for internationalizing education. No amount of study in the classroom
at the university can match the learning experience a
student acquires by studying abroad.”
Setting Goals and Priorities
The consultants found few comprehensive mechanisms in place to define priorities for the university’s
internationalization. The university needed such a
mechanism to establish priorities and allocate funding for such competing goals as overseas sabbaticals,
more research in other countries, and attendance at
international conferences and workshops.
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Promotion and tenure
Each academic unit must decide whether to count
international teaching and research equally with
work done in the United States. The consultants
frowned on the practice of counting such work
merely as “service.”
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Opportunities for international education
They suggested that leaders of the UF professional
schools work with arts and science faculty to design
more courses on globalization, and that the international studies major be more general and less
focused on the particular needs of the engineering
or business school or other colleges.
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International students
UF should concentrate on recruiting international
students into areas where their presence would
contribute significantly to the internationalization
of the student body and the curriculum.
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Annual evaluation
The outside advisers urged the UF centers and
institutes to identify ways to measure annually their
degree of internationalization.
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That pursuit paid off handsomely in 2003 when, in
addition to securing renewed funding for Latin
American and African studies center and UF’s Center
for International Business Education and Research,
Florida became the only institution in the country to
win funding from the U.S. Department of Education
Title VI program for two new national resource centers: the Center for European Studies housed within
the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a
Transnational and Global Studies Center, housed at
the International Center and directed by Jett. The
Latin American and transnational grants are shared
with Florida International University.
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It said international service should be recognized along
with teaching and research in tenure and promotion
decisions, the International Center should expand its
speakers program, and the University of Florida
Foundation should try to bring in $5 million-plus
from international donors each year. It also applauded
the university’s pursuit of more Title VI federal funding for language and area study centers.
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with an international focus. It also urged incentives to
encourage students to study a language, even if they
achieved proficiency in another language in high
school. Brochures for the Student Health Care Center
should be printed in Spanish, French, Chinese, Arabic
and German as well as English.
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What was the upshot of UF’s effort to take a hard look
at its internationalization?
Five members of the 17-member SACS visitation team
concentrated on looking at UF’s international programs. The accreditation agency’s consultants echoed
many of the points made by the faculty panels. They
offered this critique and these suggestions:
Sustaining the Effort
The University of Florida won full, 10-year renewal of
its accreditation. Jett said that, “Part of the challenge
of an exercise like this is: What do you do after it’s
over?” Often the site visitors send back a list of technical things that an institution can attend to immediately, “but how do you have the sustainability and continue to examine what needs to be done, particularly with
something like internationalization? That’s the real
challenge,” said Jett.
The International Center has begun bestowing dozens
of $3,000 grants on faculty members who create new
courses or add international content and components
to existing courses. It also established an International
Educator of the Year award.
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low—undergraduate tuition for state residents is still
under $3,000 a year—handicapped their efforts to
move up in national academic rankings. Many
Floridians receive “Bright Futures” scholarships from
state lottery revenues to help pay their tuition, but
Machen has said those scholarships don’t cover what it
costs to educate each student.
Encouraging more students to participate in education
abroad is critical to Florida’s globalization, said Jett.
Even with 1,400 heading out each year to earn credit
outside the United States, “that’s only a small percentage of our students,” he said. “Even if we were wildly
successful at vastly increasing that number, we probably would not see more 10 percent of our students
study abroad. So for 90 percent of them, if they are to
have an international component to their education, it
has to be through international elements in their classes and also through their interaction with the international students who come here.”
“You need to know a bit about the world beyond your
county or state. Students recognize that and appreciate
it,” the former ambassador said. “No university education worthy of the name can ignore the international
perspective that our students will need to be compete
in an ever more globalized economy and to be good
citizens in an increasingly interconnected world.”
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The University of Florida earned a place in the
Association of American Universities, which represents
62 of the top, research campuses in North America,
back in 1985. Only 17 public, land grant universities
belong to the AAU.
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But it is aiming higher. This summer Machen
launched a $150 million fund-raising drive to raise
faculty salaries, which he called the key to helping
Florida move into “the ranks of the best of the best.”
Through discovery and research, the new president
pledged in his September 10, 2004 inaugural address,
the University of Florida will “take its rightful place of
prominence as a global leader in higher education.”
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the Florida Legislature’s insistence on keeping tuition
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A College Sets
Language in Motion
in Heart of the
Keystone State
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Juniata, founded as an independent college in 1876 by
members of the Church of the Brethren to prepare
men and women “for the useful occupations of life,”
also is known for two other programs that share a
stately old home on campus: the Baker Institute for
Peace and Conflict Studies and the Center for
International Programs, both of which bring a global
focus not only to the campus but to Huntingdon and
surrounding towns in this distressed rural region.
More than 800 people—town and gown alike—
turned out last fall when former Irish president and
former United Nations high commissioner for refugees,
Mary Robinson came to speak.
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Tucked in the rugged mountains of central
Pennsylvania, Juniata College is a regular on lists of
the country’s top liberal arts colleges, best buys, and
places to go where students can “not only study” but
“collaborate with” their professors. It awards two bachelor of science degrees for every bachelor of arts diploma, and its formidable science program has produced
one Nobel Prize winner (William Phillips ’70, who
shared the 1997 physics award for discovering how
lasers can slow atoms) and science Ph.D.s in large
numbers. It was a Juniata professor who conceived the
idea of putting sophisticated lab equipment in vans
and dispatching them with a skilled instructor to
remote high schools to give teens opportunities to run
experiments leagues beyond the ordinary fare. The
program was called Science in Motion, and it has since
been replicated at campuses across the Commonwealth
and in 10 other states.
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JUNIATA
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On this campus that prides itself on its accomplishments in the sciences, perhaps it should come as no
surprise that there are a couple of science twists to its
internationalization.
Once intended
as the college
president’s residence,
Language in Motion
JoAnn deArmas Wallace was walking across campus
not long after her arrival as dean of the Center for
International Education five years ago when her gaze
fell on one of those formidable Science in Motion
trucks. That program has separate vans for biology and
chemistry classes, each loaded to the gills with exotic
gear not commonly found in high school labs. A
thought occurred to Wallace: Why couldn’t the center
dispatch Juniata students with firsthand knowledge of
other languages and cultures into the local schools as
this red-brick home
now houses the
Oller Center for Peace
and International
Programs
All photos courtesy of
Juniata College
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well? They wouldn’t need to lug any spectrometers or
chromatographs around, just themselves and their
expertise on life in another land.
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Language in
The Language in Motion outreach program, in only
its second year, won an Andrew Heiskell Award for
curricular innovation from the Institute of
International Education. Juniata President Thomas R.
Kepple observed at the time that the program “helps
us to reach out to the local community and potential
students to awaken them to the empowering richness
of world languages and cultures.”
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Deborah W. Roney,
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and several surrounding counties to Japanese,
Korean, Chinese, Urdu, Farsi, Arabic, Pashto, and
other languages. The program doubled in size the
second year and then nearly doubled again. In
2003–04, Roney enlisted 43 students who made
more than 240 presentations at 12 schools. Some of
the presentations were shared by videoconference
with classes in schools even farther away. Faculty
from Juniata’s World Languages and Cultures
Department also made visits to the schools.
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The native speakers and U.S. students fluent in the
languages commonly taught in the area—Spanish,
French, German, and Russian—were an immediate
hit. Both Juniata instructors and the teachers in these
rural schools discovered the college students had a
special flair for connecting with youths just three or
four years their juniors.
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Wallace, dean
of the Center for
The program expanded rapidly beyond the four core
languages after Deborah W. Roney, the director, made
a pitch at the orientation for international students in
2001 to recruit speakers of Spanish, French, German,
or Russian. “Some of the students from Brazil, Japan,
Egypt, and other countries said, ‘Well, couldn’t we participate?’ And I said, ‘Sure. I’ll find a place for you,’” she
said. “Now we take students from a variety of languages
into any classroom that will have us.”
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Baker Center;
JoAnn deArmas
20
director of the
With a $5,300 NAFSA Cooperative Grants Program
grant, funded by the U.S. Department of State,
Juniata’s Language in Motion program was born in
2000–01. Recruiting participants from among
Juniata’s 70 to 80 international students as well as the
100 or more students who return from studying
abroad each year, the center sent 11 students into five
schools giving 50 presentations that first year.
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Andrew Murray,
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Juniata’s ambassadors now fan out not only to language classes but social studies classrooms. The guest
lecturers have exposed students across Huntingdon
Some Juniata students do this strictly as volunteers,
while others participate as part of a one-credit service
learning class; the latter must make seven class presentations. “We had one student who adopted a class and
went in eight or 10 times over the course of a semester,” said Roney. Another spoke to 18 classes, sometimes several in a day.
For the U.S. tutors, the experience offers a welcome
opportunity to share their education abroad experiences with an audience more receptive than they may
find back in the dorms. “When they come back from
studying abroad, they can’t get enough of talking
about their experience and what they’ve learned. Their
own friends, after they’ve heard about five or six stories, are saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, right. That’s interesting;
let’s go play Frisbee,’” said Roney, who holds a Ph.D.
in Slavic linguistics.
“The fact that they can go stand in front of a bunch of
rapt high school kids—kids who are just like they
were four or five years before—and speak fluently in
another language, is an amazing experience. It’s really
very affirming of what they’ve done,” said Roney. As
for the international students, “being in the schools is
a real eye opener. Most are really interested in seeing
more of American culture than just the college campus.”
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Language in Motion hasn’t attracted that kind of funding yet, but it has won support from foundations,
including a two-year, $146,041 grant in 2004 from
the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations to provide more
help for public school teachers and to teach other
colleges how to get their own Language in Motion
programs going.
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faculty and departments to start sending their students
abroad. At first Russey did this missionary work while
teaching a full load of chemistry courses, but eventually the college named him director of international education. “As it became more visible and interesting, they
gave him some course release time, and eventually half
time,” said Wallace, who is Juniata’s first full-time dean
for international education.
Andrew Murray, the founding director of the Baker
Institute, former chaplain and faculty member since
1971, said, “I don’t think there ever was a formal decision or a time when someone said, ‘let’s internationalize the campus.’ For a rural small liberal arts college,
the campus always had a strong international flavor.
That’s one reason why peace and conflict studies
found fertile soil here.”
Integrating Peace Studies with
Internationalization
“During the 1980s we became much more intentional
about it,” said Murray, an ordained minister of the
Church of the Brethren. The Baker Institute was an
outgrowth of a program in peace and conflict studies
that Juniata started in 1971 with support from
Elizabeth Evans Baker, an actress, poet, and peace
activist, and husband John Calhoun Baker, a Juniata
alumnus (class of 1917), long-time chair of the Board
of Trustees, former associate dean of Harvard Business
School, and retired president of Ohio University. The
Bakers endowed peace programs at Juniata, Ohio
University, and Bethany Theological Seminary and
expanded one at Dartmouth College.
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Wallace, who previously ran education abroad programs at Antioch College and Wright State and
DePauw Universities, said “I was looking for a place
that was really committed to internationalization and I
found it in Juniata, both in the center and in the
Baker Institute.”
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Three-quarters of Juniata’s 1,400 students are from
Pennsylvania. Two dozen in last year’s freshman class
were from Huntingdon County. Indeed, Donald
Mitchell, the now retired professor who started
Science in Motion in the 1980s, had an ulterior
motive for working with the local schools: he wanted
to entice more Huntingdon students to come to
Juniata and major in chemistry. Science in Motion
started with a $570,000 National Science Foundation
grant in 1987 and later secured a $1.8-million followup grant. It is now a state-funded program, with 11
colleges and universities dispatching science vans to
schools across Pennsylvania.
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“The way Juniata internationalized is very unusual.
It started with faculty in the science department, not
the humanities,” said Wallace. Chemistry professor
William Russey had been a Fulbright fellow at the
University of Bonn in the early 1960s after graduating
from Kalamazoo College and before earning his doctorate at Harvard University. He made fast friends in
graduate school with a French chemist who wound up
at the Université Catholique de Lille. “They decided
in their conversations that, well, why couldn’t they just
exchange students, and they just did it, without either
university’s having any kind of mechanism for it,” said
Wallace. The agreement was later formalized, and
Wallace and others journeyed to Lille in May 2004 to
mark the exchange’s twenty-fifth anniversary.
Russey found two German universities interested in
exchanging students and began pushing other Juniata
The Baker Institute, with two professors, two part-time
senior fellows, a $3-million endowment, and a budget
of $220,000, helps develop curriculum not just for
Juniata but also for the more than 100 other U.S. colleges and universities with full-fledged peace programs.
“We apply the resources of the academic community to
war as a human problem. We are an interdisciplinary,
applied program. In much the way that education people work against ignorance, and health people work
with disease, we work with problems of large scale,
international conflict,” said Murray, who once swam
the 20-mile length of Raystown Lake in a day to raise
funds for peace studies (the feat took almost 15 hours).
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Juniata students
at Festiva Latina
held in a
Huntingdon,
Pennsylvania,
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The Baker Institute also works on problems much
closer to home. Celia Cook-Huffman, associate director of the Baker Institute and an associate professor of
peace and conflict studies, in 2001 collaborated with
four Penn State professors—the sprawling state university is a 45-minute drive away—on a guidebook on
how communities can address disputes involving
intensive livestock operations. Last semester she took a
group of Juniata students to Ireland for a week to
study the Northern Ireland peace process.
Expanding Dreams in the Local
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The Baker Institute also has placed students as interns
with the European Parliament and with the Vienna
agency that monitors compliance with the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. It provides one four-year
scholarship to Juniata to a single student from a wartorn region of the world. Since 1992, students from
Macedonia, Bosnia, Cameroon, and now Afghanistan
have attended Juniata on that scholarship.
The Bakers also commissioned the meditative, openair Peace Chapel on a hilltop just east of the campus
that was constructed in 1989 and designed by Maya
Lin, the architect who designed the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial in Washington, D.C. Granite steps lead to a
clearing in a field where people go to sit on 53 granite
blocks arranged in a circle. The site has become a local
landmark, used for outdoor worship services by the
campus and local community, as well as Earth Day
celebrations and the occasional wedding. During
2000, the millennium year, with support from local
churches, there were prayers for peace at sunrise for
the entire 366 days.
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Juniata was also among the campuses chosen by the
U.S. Department of State to host students from the
Middle East and North Africa in the new Partnerships
for Learning Undergraduate Studies Program (PLUS).
Some 75 students will receive U.S.-funded scholarship
for two years of undergraduate education in liberal
arts, the humanities, and social sciences—but not
business, computers, engineering, or the sciences.
“We’ll have students from Jordan, Syria, Morocco, and
Iraq to add to Deb’s numbers to go out into the
schools through Language in Motion,” said Wallace.
Juniata’s offerings bring a welcome touch of diversity to
a homogenous region. Jean Kozak, a high school counselor for the Juniata Valley School District, wrote Roney
last fall, “In this small, rural school district, cultural
diversity is almost nonexistent. Our students do not
have the opportunity to meet people of color or those
from other countries, let alone from different parts of
the state or country.” Language in Motion “opens doors
of understanding, tolerance, and globalization. It
enhances the thirst for knowledge of other cultures and
increases the awareness of one’s own culture.”
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school in 2001
Attached to her thank you letter were students’ praises
for Juniata’s young ambassadors. One called the visiting collegians “awesome” and another asked, “Why
can’t they come once a week?”
Ninety-six percent of Huntingdon’s 9,000 residents are
white, and unemployment runs well above the state
and national averages. The Juniata River, which flows
east to the Susquehanna, brought the area commerce
in the mid-nineteenth century. An article in Harper’s
New Monthly in March 1856 described the Juniata as
“one of the chief thoroughfares by which the myriads
of European immigrants reach their new homes in the
Western wilderness.” Huntingdon is still a railroad
town, but barely. Amtrak service is down to two
trains a day.
Some folks in the hollows still eke out a living as
fishers or hunters or in flea markets. “We want to
expand the children’s horizons and make them think
they could actually do a second language and go to
college,” said Wallace.
Added Roney: “It makes it possible for some of those
kids to dream of things they would not have thought
of before.”
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Striving Toward Internationalization
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Lynn University itself is distinctly international, with
25 percent of students coming from 90 nations. In a
welcome message, Ross, now one of the longest serving university presidents in the United States, says,
“We view the world as a global community, and we
embrace and explore its diversity as a fundamental
component of Lynn education.” Indeed, Lynn lists the
global community as one of the core principles on
which its mission is built. Its vision statement says that
Lynn aims “to be a global university for the twentyfirst century whose graduates apply ethical values in a
diverse, complex, and interconnected society. The
governing Board of Trustees is committed to developing academic programs that reflect the importance of
global transformation, multicultural awareness, and
international exchange. This triad forms both the
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In its first incarnation, Lynn University was a two-year
Catholic women’s college called Marymount College
that the sisters of the Sacred Heart of Mary opened in
Boca Raton, Florida, in 1962. The 123-acre campus
was situated three miles from the Atlantic beaches in a
prosperous Gold Coast community 40 miles north of
Miami. Despite an ideal location and perhaps because
it had to compete with Miami-Dade Community
College, one of the nation’s largest and best two-year
institutions, the career-oriented private college
foundered until it was rescued in 1971 by an entrepreneurial educator named Donald E. Ross, placed under
the control of a lay board and made coeducational.
Rejuvenated and renamed the College of Boca Raton
in 1974, the college grew steadily, expanding its offerings to include bachelor’s degrees in 1981 and master’s
degrees in 1985. President Ross and the trustees
changed the name to Lynn University in 1991 to
honor the institution’s benefactors, Boca Raton philanthropists Eugene M. and Christine E. Lynn. In 1998
the university enrolled the first candidates
for Ph.D.s. in global leadership. Its
enrollment has grown to 2,500 students in fields that range from the
liberal arts to business to hospitality,
international communications and
aviation management. Ross is also
president of a sister college in the
Republic of Ireland, the American
College Dublin.
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Every Freshman
Needs a Passport at
This Florida Campus
A Lynn University
professor leads
an impromptu
discussion with
international
students
All photos courtesy of
Lynn University
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dozens of faculty and staff and sails off on a five-day
Caribbean “Academic Adventure.”
premise and direction to further develop and extend its
academic programs, support services, administrative
operations, and resources internationally.”
The first excursion took the 640 members of the
Class of 2006 to Key West and Belize for five days of
exploring Mayan ruins, rainforests, and coral reefs in
January 2003. Last January the Class of 2007 went to
Grand Cayman and Jamaica, and this year’s freshmen
will make the same voyage between the fall and
spring terms.
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Two years ago, Lynn launched an international education experiment that may be unique in U.S. higher
education. Each January it packs the entire freshman
class—600 strong—aboard a cruise ship along with
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The Academic Adventure program is integrated with a
year-long core course, FYE 101-102 First Year
Experience, which includes a pre-trip orientation to
assist students in preparing for the cross-cultural
nature of the January program. This course is part of a
broader effort to provide mentoring to freshmen and
to encourage them to form close bonds with classmates inside and outside the classroom. Students are
divided into cohorts to work with their mentors from
the start of the year, “and they retain that structure as
they go into the Academic Adventure. Therefore when
they come back, they are still talking about it with
their mentors and classmates from the First Year
Experience program,” said Kathleen Cheek-Milby,
Ph.D., vice president for academic affairs. That helps
them reintegrate those learning experiences into the
rest of their education, she added.
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“We don’t just talk about being international.
We truly are international from our student body
to our faculty and staff to our taking students to
see the world. That’s what we are proud of,” said
Karla Winecoff Stein, Ph.D., senior vice president
for international relations.
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While dozens of universities enroll international students in numbers far greater than the 446 who
enrolled at Lynn last fall, Lynn’s international students
represent a higher percentage of the student body than
is commonly found on American campuses. The countries that sent the greatest numbers last year were:
Taiwan, Venezuela, Colombia, Haiti, England, Brazil,
Turkey, Canada, Argentina, Jamaica, Germany, France,
Peru, Trinidad & Tobago, Dominican Republic,
Panama, The Netherlands, and Romania. Lynn is also
a NCAA Division II athletic power, fielding stellar
squads in soccer, tennis, golf and other sports, and
some of its best athletes have come from the ranks of
international students. The Fighting Knights men’s
soccer team is the reigning Division II champion.
The students receive one course credit for the trip, the
costs of which are bundled into Lynn’s undergraduate
tuition. They read Peter Mason’s Jamaica: A Guide to
the People, Politics and Culture before embarking,
take an online exam and participate in shipboard
activities and academic excursions. Students are only
eligible to receive an A if they write an optional 750word essay or prepare a video or photo essay on the
experience. Those who skip the essays but complete
the rest of the work can achieve Bs.
Kathleen Cheek-Milby,
vice president for
academic affairs and
Karla Winecoff Stein,
senior vice president
for international
relations
Cheek-Milby, who spent 15 years as a professor and
administrator at the University of Hong Kong and
Temple University Japan before becoming Lynn’s top
academic officer seven years ago, said that Lynn hit
upon the Academic Adventure as a means of ensuring
that every student, regardless of major, had an international experience.
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“There’s a tremendous amount of planning. We don’t
just get on board. The faculty prepares great syllabi.
The students have reading assignments and then
reflection papers as well. They often end up saying,
‘For one credit, we’re doing more work than we do for
three,’” said Cheek-Milby.
Ralph Norcio,
dean of the College
of Business
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The Academic Adventure may look “kind of of frivolous” to some people, said professor Ralph Norcio,
Ph.D., dean of the College of Business Management,
but it is just one of many ways in which Lynn has
become more international in its composition, activities and zeitgeist.
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“We have classes and special activities for the students
on board and special educational excursions once we’re
on land,” she added. During the Academic Adventure
the student cohorts compete in a College Bowl-type
format on their knowledge of the countries and
cultures they visit.
came out of this trip feeling much closer to my classmates
and with a new understanding of the school’s goals.”
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The Lynn contingent typically comprises one-third of
the passengers on the ship. “It’s a mini university
aboard the ship. We have two decks and a command
center that are ours,” said Stein. “We take our own
security guards, our own nurses. The vice presidents
and many of the faculty and staff go.”
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Lynn has faculty-led education abroad programs that
have grown in numbers in recent years. Each group of
15 to 20 students is led by two faculty members on
weeklong trips over spring break and longer journeys
over the summer. The number of those trips has
mushroomed from three in 2001–2002 to 13 this past
year. “We feel strongly that our mission is very much
international and that to really embody the mission,
it’s one thing to read all the right books, but it’s much
more important to actually be going abroad and having a multicultural experience,” said Cheek-Milby.
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On Grand Cayman, first visited by Christopher
Columbus in 1503, the students’ tours include the
famous Cayman Turtle Farm and the Conch Shell
House and a snorkeling trip which together provide a
perspective on some of the indigenous wildlife and the
natural environment. Trips to the Governor’s
Residence, the Tortuga Rum Factory, local estates and
museums help the students develop a sense of the government, industry and culture of the island nation.
Growing Short-Term Education Abroad
Opportunities
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Merissa Bernstein, now a sophomore, wrote in her
essay that it was a unique, hands-on way to learn
about another culture. “The concept of taking each
freshman class on a cruise to give them the opportunity to learn about diverse types of food, dance, art,
architecture and life styles is truly an amazing
opportunity,” she said.
“Was this a successful learning experience?” wrote Craig
Walters, also in the Class of 2007. “I believe it was. … I
Norcio first led a group of business students to Ireland
in June 2000, using the American College Dublin,
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Classmate Megan Hopkins called the experience
“unforgettable. I accomplished things which I never
thought I would be able to do and I learned things
which I never would have learned otherwise. The setting was perfect for learning. There was a lot to do and
a lot of ‘firsts.’”
Norcio has been a driving force in the expansion of
faculty-led study tours, having led five since 2000.
Norcio, who joined the Lynn faculty in 1990, returned
from a semester teaching as a Fulbright scholar in
Bucharest, Romania, determined to share with business majors the experience of education abroad. “That
was my first international experience. It really opened
my eyes,” he said. It became clear that for students to
succeed as business managers, they “would really need
to understand and appreciate what people do in other
countries,” he said.
“What the university tries to do is give student different opportunities,” said Norcio. “I never try to talk a
student out of going abroad to study for a semester at
another college; that’s a more valuable experience. But
the great majority is not looking to do the full semester. So we thought we could really give them somewhat of an appreciation of what was going on in other
countries with these two-week study tours.”
Stein indicated that all of the education abroad programs include an intensive pre-departure orientation
to help student get ready for their time immersed in a
new cultural milieu. In addition, students are required
to keep journals on their reflections while abroad and
must participate in a standardized evaluation process
upon their return.
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European nations
“Our main study abroad program is our sister school,
American College Dublin, founded in 1993,” said
Monaco. “It’s a small school, like Lynn, with a lot of
personal attention and small classes. It’s different
enough to be a great study abroad experience, but it
also offers a lot of the same or similar courses, so it
automatically works in with their degree here.”
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Some students go on multiple study tours during their
years at Lynn, and some use the brief exposure to new
cultures as a springboard to study abroad for a full
semester, said Nicolette Monaco, the university’s study
abroad coordinator.
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Pickering has lead
Lynn’s sister school, as a
base for exploration. In
subsequent summers, he
and history professor
John Pickering, Ph.D.,
have squired students on
two-week study trips to
Belgium, Germany,
Switzerland, and France;
to the Czech Republic,
Poland, Hungary, and
Austria; to northern and southern Italy; and to
Monaco, France, and Switzerland.
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With Pickering, his humanities colleague, Norcio tries
to give Lynn students a historical and cultural perspective as well as a business perspective on each country
they visit.
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The 22 students who traveled to Europe with Norcio
and Pickering in June 2001 met a commissioner of the
European Union in Brussels, as well as a speech-writer
for the NATO secretary general. They met with senior
IBM executives in Paris, visited a Mercedes engine
plant in Stuttgart, and received career advice in
Geneva from a young Lynn alumnus who is a private
banker with Credit Suisse.
The Turkish-born banker “is one of my favorite students of all time,” said Norcio. “When the students see
him, they really get the idea that maybe they can operate in the international arena, too.”
Lynn students visit
Malahide Castle
near Dublin, Ireland
Pickering said two weeks is not a lot of time, especially
when visiting several countries, as they have on some
of the study tours. But “the vast majority say it really
enlarged their perspective not only of themselves but
the world,” he said. “Many have not been abroad
before, so that in itself is worth the trip.”
With the large and growing presence of international
students on the home campus, the current undergraduates increasingly are exposed to international issues in
classroom discussions in Boca Raton as well.
Stein noted that the more than four-fold increase over
the last three years in the number of faculty-led education abroad tours offered by Lynn is partly a result of
the interest in visiting other cultures that the
Academic Adventure has spurred among the students.
Norcio notes, “The president always had a vision in
terms of the importance of globalization in education.
Sometimes a leader has difficulty getting the troops to
buy into it. But I think as a university we definitely
buy into it, very much so.”
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More than once in its colorful history, Joplin, Missouri,
has been the right place at the right time. After the
Civil War and into the twentieth century, it was the
lead- and zinc-mining capital of the world. When
Route 66 was built in the 1920s, the famous highway
from Chicago to Los Angeles ran right through town.
Today the traffic courses east and west on Interstate 44,
but Joplin, down in the southwest corner of Missouri
that bumps against Kansas and Oklahoma, remains a
trucking capital of the United States.
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Bringing the World
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When Joplin built a new high school in 1937, the
local citizenry convinced the public school district to
offer college classes as well in the facility. Joplin Junior
College prospered downtown, and enrollment stood at
2,400 when it graduated to four-year status and
moved to its own campus in 1967. Missouri Southern
College joined the state system a decade later and, by
legislative decree, became Missouri Southern State
University in 2003. It remains primarily a baccalaureate institution, although it partners with other
Missouri universities to offer master’s level classes in
several fields. Missouri Southern has schools of Arts
and Sciences, Technology, Education and Psychology,
and Business Administration, and a Division of
Lifelong Learning. It charges the lowest tuition of any
of Missouri’s 13 public colleges and universities: $127
a credit or $1,905 for a full semester’s load for state
residents, and twice that for those from out of state.
A Distinctive Theme and Mission
The ambitious commuter college with 5,300 students
boasts another distinction: it is nationally recognized
for how well it has woven international education into
its academic programs and ambiance. The university’s
regents (now Board of Governors) in 1990 approved
President Julio S. León’s proposal to add this international emphasis, and in 1995 then-Governor Mel
Carnahan signed legislation instructing Missouri
Southern to “develop such academic support programs
The centerpiece of
Missouri Southern’s
themed semesters is the
Gockel International
Symposium, where
prominent scholars
address issues
pertaining to the
country of focus
All photos courtesy of Missouri
Southern State University
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The Institute of International Studies spends $35,000
of its $1 million-plus budget bringing in speakers and
making arrangements for the themed semesters.
Stebbins, a professor of journalism, and colleagues on
the planning committee also use ingenuity and academic e-mail lists (such as Listserv) to find resources
locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. The
lineup for the fall 2004 Russia semester, for instance,
began with an exhibit of cutting-edge, post-Soviet
paintings collected by Oklahoma businessman
Christian Keesee and featured a reading by poet
Yevgeny Yevtushenko and lectures by visiting Soviet
scholars, including Nina L. Khrushcheva, granddaughter of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Also on tap:
a Russian film festival, a Russian sock hop with an
expatriate former student spinning contemporary
Russian rap and rock, and a hands-on demonstration
by the director of the Joplin Public Library of how to
make pysanky, the geometrically designed Ukrainian
Easter eggs. Interspersed among the lectures are ample
opportunities to slurp borscht and nibble on pelmeni,
and for a finale the university is offering tickets to see
the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra perform in
Kansas City in mid-November. Many of the 60 special
events during the three months are scheduled during
prime morning class hours so professors could bring
whole classes to hear the lectures or watch a ballet.
The evening events draw from the wider Joplin community, especially immigrants or those whose ancestors
came from that part of the world. Residents often contribute cultural artifacts or expertise. The India festival
attracted Indian-born physicians from Joplin’s major
medical centers and their families. “Some had never
been on our campus before,” said Stebbins.
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Japan Semester
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Internationally Themed Semesters
Two years later Missouri Southern launched the program that has become the trademark of its internationalization: the themed semester. For three months in
the fall of 1997 the emphasis was on China, with faculty, students, and townspeople offered special courses
and dozens of lectures and cultural events on the history, civilization and future of the emerging Asian
power. From the classroom to the cafeteria, Missouri
Southern sought to make China a part of the education of every student, even those taking a straight load
of accounting, education, computer information or
criminal justice classes.
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master, demonstrated
the 400-year-old ritual
Every academic year since then has opened with a
themed semester. After China, the emphases were on
Africa (1998), Latin America (1999), the U.S. role in
the new millennium (2000), Japan (2001), India
(2002), and Cuba (2003). The fall 2004 theme is
Russia, with Mexico to follow in 2005 and France in
2006. “We’ve done a good job of bringing color and
excitement to the semesters,” said English professor
William Kumbier.
and public service activities it deems necessary and
appropriate to establish international or global education as a distinctive theme of its mission.” Some lawmakers and members of the state coordinating board
for higher education were skeptical that Joplin was the
place to do this. Chad Stebbins, director of the
Institute of International Studies, said, “I think the
common phrase was, ‘Why should it happen, and why
should it be located in Joplin? Why not in Kansas City
or St. Louis or Columbia?’” Missouri Southern pointed to a formidable list of companies in southwest
Missouri with international business ties and made the
argument “that our students deserve the same opportunities that a student in Kansas City or St. Louis
would enjoy,” Stebbins said.
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Dale Slusser, a
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A third of Missouri Southern’s students attend part
time, and all but 800 commute. Women outnumber
men, three to two, and a quarter of the 3,600 full-time
undergraduates are older than 30. Ninety percent of
students are white, reflecting the demographics of the
nine southwest Missouri counties from which the university draws most of its enrollment. Joplin has 45,000
residents, but the region’s population is 300,000.
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On the subject of international education, León speaks
from experience. He was a national champion distance
runner as a student in his native Chile. He came to the
United States on a track scholarship in 1965, met wife
Vivian (a native of Hong Kong) while both were students at Oklahoma Baptist University, and went on to
earn a master’s in business administration from the
University of North Texas and a doctorate from the
University of Arkansas. He moved north to Joplin to
join the business faculty in 1969, became dean of the
business school in 1976, and moved into the president’s
office in 1982. León, a past chairman of the board of
the American Association of State Colleges and
Universities, has helped chart Missouri Southern’s course
for more than half the institution’s 67-year history.
Planning Semesters on India and Cuba
A closer look at the planning and execution of the
India semester explains how the themed semester concept took root, and how its impact in Joplin has been
greater than even the best planned lecture or concert
series. In the summer of 2000, two years in advance of
the India semester, the Institute of International
Studies sent six faculty members to study at the
University of Hyderabad. A South Asian specialist on
the history faculty, Karl J. Schmidt, had been proselytizing colleagues to teach more about India in their
classes, and he led a group of a dozen students to
study in Hyderabad that same summer in advance of
the faculty trip. “He was really fired up about India
and trying to convince others of us to go,” said
Kumbier, one of two English professors who made the
trip. They were also influenced by philosopher Martha
Nussbaum, who in her book Cultivating Humanity
extolled the idea of colleges’ sending faculty to study
in developing countries.
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Missouri Southern’s president conceived the international mission back in the 1980s as a way of ensuring
that students were prepared for an increasingly globalized economy and world, even if Joplin’s own population did not fully mirror that diversity. In words of
welcome to new students, León emphasizes that
Missouri Southern’s “curriculum combines a liberal
arts foundation with a professional orientation and a
strong commitment to the international aspects of
education in order to prepare you for lifelong learning
and a successful career in a rapidly changing and competitive world.” Missouri Southern sends more than
200 students to study abroad each year, helped in part
with a budget of $286,000 to promote overseas study
and make the trips more affordable (The Institute of
International Studies also has a $60,000 budget for
faculty overseas research and travel). Missouri
Southern’s array of education abroad offerings include
biology courses taught in Costa Rica each summer and
field trips led by criminal justice professors to study
other countries’ prisons, courts and criminal justice
systems. The art department has a long tradition of
taking its dozen or more majors to Sweden for classes
each summer and touring the great museums of
Europe before heading back to Missouri. The education department regularly sends seniors to studentteach in England. Still, only 5 percent of Missouri
Southern students avail themselves of these opportunities. But 75 to 80 percent of graduating seniors report
in surveys each spring that they participated in at least
one international class or event during the themed
semesters. León reasoned by the time students graduated, they would have been exposed to at least four or
five cultures outside the U.S. mainstream.
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Broadening a Regional Outlook
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“Most of my students don’t have a clue when they come
into my world literature survey what they are going to
be reading,” said Kumbier. Students must take a survey
course in literature as part of the core curriculum, and
they can choose among English, U.S., and world literature. Sixty or more students typically sign up for the
two classes that Kumbier teaches each semester.
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The experience of the Missouri Southern faculty at the
University of Hyderabad was considered such a success
by both sides that it became the prototype for a
Council on International Educational Exchange
(CIEE) summer program in Hyderabad. Wells had
previously taken a CIEE trip to São Paulo, Brazil, and
had used that experience to help plan for Hyderabad,
so that first exchange enriched the second, and the second has the potential to enrich more.
“My training was almost entirely in European literatures, and I became interested in enhancing the nonEuropean parts of my course with traditional Indian
and postcolonial literature,” said Kumbier. “I always
teach the Indian epic poem, The Ramayana. I was able
to meet with professors in India who were not only very
aware of The Ramayana, but aware of how it plays out
in everyday life and also in contemporary literature.”
Stebbins said the six faculty who journeyed to India
became valuable resources during the themed semester
two years later. They spoke to classes around campus
and took part in a workshop on how faculty could
incorporate the lectures, events and content from the
India semester into other courses.
For sociologist N. Ree Wells, the trip led to her introducing a new comparative element in a course she
teaches on social inequality: the Indian caste system
versus the U.S. class system. She also volunteered to
develop and teach a one-time course on contemporary
India during the 2002 themed semester. She has been
back to India twice since.
Stebbins said the university is applying for FulbrightHays funds to send faculty to Mexico in advance of
that themed semester. The university sent four communications students with four professors to Cuba in
Summer 2003 in advance of the Cuba theme semester.
The students filled a glossy, 54-page magazine with
their stories and photos from the trip, including close-
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Kumbier and fellow world literature professor Joy
Dworkin organized a study group with counterparts
from the University of Hyderabad. That “added a very
rich dimension that we couldn’t have had from anywhere but India. We were able to use a lot of what we
were exposed to in our classes almost as soon as we got
back,” said Kumbier.
Dr. Chad Stebbins,
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passed out mangos
Cuba Semester
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up views of everyday life on the Caribbean island.
Three other students and a professor went to Russia
this summer on a similar assignment.
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All of Missouri’s public colleges and universities had to
tighten their belts during a state budget crisis in recent
years. Tuition at Missouri Southern jumped 37 percent
in 2002, although it remains relatively low. But the
university has kept its commitment to the themed
semesters and to encourage student and faculty travel
abroad. Kumbier said the enthusiasm among faculty
has grown as they have seen internationalization pay
dividends in their own classrooms and professional
development.
Kumbier, who also teaches a film course, got to attend
a film festival in Cuba last December thanks to a connection he made with Tamara Falicov, a University of
Kansas professor (Lawrence is just a couple of hours
away, and Missouri Southern also called on several
experts from the University of Kansas’s Asian Studies
Center during the Japan semester in 2001). Not long
after delivering a talk on Cuban film at Missouri
Southern, Falicov invited Kumbier to join her students
on the trip to Havana. Stebbins’s institute picked up
most of the cost.
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The keynote speakers at the Gockel International
Symposium on Cuba last fall were Albert R. Coll, a
Cuban-born scholar from the Pell Center for
International Relations and Public Policy in Newport,
R.I., and Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado, a political science professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha
and expert on Cuba’s nuclear power program. Senior
Allison Rosewicz said the two “were probably some of
the most intelligent and well-spoken speakers Missouri
Southern has ever hosted.” Rosewicz, who graduated
in May and is joining the Peace Corps, said, “As
Americans, we get so caught up in our dominating
‘culture’ … that we forget there are other ways of
thinking out there. And the only way to realize this is
to diversify ourselves. I’m glad Missouri Southern is
helping people make the first step in doing this by
providing intercultural experiences like the international semesters.”
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Kumbier said a core group of faculty from several disciplines is deeply committed to the internationalization mission and never miss an event or opportunity
to bring students to lectures and events. A small segment of the faculty remains to be convinced. Some
professors “just don’t see how it’s relevant and don’t see
how they can change their syllabi to add new things,”
he said.
“Now I’ve got an interest in Cuban film and can use
that in my film study courses. It’s already led to some
writing and other connections with people interested
in Cuba,” said Kumbier. “One thing leads to another.
As the program develops, more and more of these
ramifications are happening. We’re in a situation now
where really any one faculty member or student can
make it grow.”
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Wells, who came to Missouri Southern from Louisiana
State University in 1993, said, “Junior faculty seem
especially enthusiastic about the international mission
and willing to internationalize their courses.”
Missouri Southern, which has seen its language enrollments steadily climbing, is still building this international component of its mission. Several of the Russia
semester events were tailored to draw faculty and students from the science and math departments.
Wells, a native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, said, “The
international mission is the reason I’ve decided to stay
at Missouri Southern. Some of us feel this really makes
the difference in our work environment and our
careers. It’s providing opportunities for me to continue
my lifelong learning and always have a rich source of
new materials to integrate into existing courses and the
potential to teach new one. It keeps my job interesting. It keeps me happy.”
For professors like these, Joplin is proving once again
to be the right place at the right time.
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A New Tradition
Leads Many Far Afield
from South Bend
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Outside of the mythic Russian village of Anatevka, few
places in the world are so steeped in tradition as the
South Bend, Indiana, campus of the University of
Notre Dame, from the famous Golden Dome atop the
administration building to the perfervid rallies for the
Fighting Irish footballers to the 27 residence halls
more organized than some municipalities. With a $3billion endowment, Notre Dame stands among the
nation’s top universities and is without question the
most celebrated Roman Catholic university in the
world. Not all of that reputation has been earned on
the gridiron or silver screen. The work of Rev.
Theodore M. Hesburgh, president from 1952 to 1987,
on behalf of civil rights, immigration reform, and justice at home and abroad repeatedly thrust him onto
the national stage. The faculty includes leading scholars in political science, history, and the law as well as
ethics and nuclear physics. Such entities as the Kellogg
Institute for International Studies (which focuses on
Latin America), the Keough Institute for Irish Studies,
the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, the Kroc
Institute for International Peace Studies, and the
Center for Civil and Human Rights extend Notre
Dame’s reach on issues of global concern. The Center
for Social Concerns sends dozens of students each
summer on eight-week service projects to work with
the poor in such places as Honduras, Cambodia, and
India. The university’s own roots are international. Its
founder, Father Edward Sorin, a French priest of the
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UNIVERSITY OF
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Congregation of Holy Cross, built the college in a
former missionary outpost in the northern Indiana
woods, 40 miles east of Lake Michigan.
Building Education Abroad Over 40 Years
One of Notre Dame’s newer traditions began four
decades ago when 64 German majors set off for a
month of intensive language instruction in Salzburg,
Austria, followed by a full year of classes at the
University of Innsbruck in the Alpine city that had
just hosted its first Winter Olympics. Notre Dame
soon was sending juniors to spend a year in Angers,
Staff from
Notre Dame’s
international
studies program
All photos courtesy of the
University of Notre Dame
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In a colorful
brochure on
“The University
of Notre Dame:
An International
Tradition/A
Global Vision,”
the Rev.
Timothy R. Scully, then vice president, spoke of the
challenge before the university:
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Aran Islands off
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ND students leave
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The Rev. Edward A. Malloy, president of Notre Dame
since 1987, has said that the university’s very name
“perhaps best suggests the elements at the core of our
identity—a universal faith, an international inheritance, a legacy of the intellectual tradition that underpins all of Western culture.” In a strategic plan
endorsed last year by the university’s predominantly
lay board of trustees, Malloy said, “It is Notre Dame’s
providential mission to be a great Catholic university.
To achieve this vision of creating a premier Catholic
institution that will also assume a leadership role
among the great universities of the world requires our
most determined and collaborative efforts.”
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In building a world-class Catholic university, Notre Dame
must continue to respond boldly to its global vocation,
present from the beginning of the university’s missionary
foundation. After all, to be Catholic means to be universal, and so the very essence of the university’s identity will
lead Notre Dame to become more and more international
in reach. Christianity transcends national borders, as does
scholarship and learning. Indeed, the notion of a
“Catholic university” is not an oxymoron, as George
Bernard Shaw suggested; it is a redundancy, and it argues
powerfully for an education that is boldly international.
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The Domers, as they sometimes call themselves,
embraced these opportunities with enthusiasm. Today
it takes 19 pages in Notre Dame’s outsized Bulletin of
Information to list the education abroad programs and
courses offered on five continents, including Angers
and Paris, France; Athens, Greece; Cairo, Egypt; Perth
and Fremantle, Australia; Dublin, Ireland; Innsbruck,
Austria; Jerusalem, Israel; Monterrey and Puebla,
Mexico; Nagoya and Tokyo, Japan; Moscow, St.
Petersburg, and Vladimir, Russia; Rio de Janeiro and
São Paulo, Brazil Rome and Bologna, Italy; Santiago,
Chile; Shanghai and Beijing, China; Toledo, Spain;
and London and Oxford, England. That’s not to mention the overseas programs offered by St. Mary’s
College, a sister school across the street in South Bend.
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France, and Nagoya, Japan, as well, and in 1968 the
Notre Dame Law School began offering courses in
London. The following year the School of Architecture
sent all majors to Rome for their third year, a practice
followed to this day.
Notre Dame is one of a handful of research universities that sends as many as half its students to study
abroad during their undergraduate careers. In Open
Doors 2003, it ranked third in that category with an
estimated participation rate of 51 percent for the class
of 2002, trailing only Yeshiva University (75 percent)
and Georgetown University (52 percent). Almost a
thousand Notre Dame undergraduates plus 172 graduate students pursued studies abroad that year.
Summer programs are gaining popularity — especially
for athletes and activity leaders who cannot tear themselves away from campus — but Director of
International Programs Tom Bogenschild said,
“we have very high demand for our semester and
academic-year programs.” Eighty-five to 90 percent
of the Notre Dame students who study abroad do
so for at least a semester.
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High Demand for Education Abroad
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For any faculty holdouts, the leaders of the international studies team are relentless proselytizers on the
importance of getting students out of South Bend for
part of their college education.
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The number studying abroad has nearly doubled since
1996, said Associate Director of International
Programs Claudia Kselman, who once co-directed the
Angers program. The growing demand is driven not
only by artful marketing but word of mouth. “The
more students you send, the more who come back and
extol the virtues of study abroad,” said Bogenschild.
“We could send another 300 to 400 students if we had
the cash to do it and if it didn’t impact the rest of
the community.”
office, the development office, the student affairs
office. Virtually everybody across campus is impacted
by the expansion of international programs.”
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“Tradition is a big thing here at Notre Dame,” said
Bogenschild. “We’re getting legacy students who are
the offspring of parents who met in our first programs
in Innsbruck or in Angers, and they want their daughter or son to experience that as well.” Almost one student in four is a Notre Dame legacy. Space is less a
problem in the non-English language programs than
in those taught in English-speaking nations such as
Great Britain, Ireland, and Australia.
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In recent years, even while hovering near the top of
the Open Doors rankings, Notre Dame actually has
turned down hundreds of students who wanted to
study abroad, but for whom there was no space in a
Notre Dame-run or -approved program.
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The university charges students the equivalent of full
tuition, room, and board to participate in any of the
dozens of education abroad programs, but that covers
roundtrip airfare. The international studies office
receives a fixed allocation from the “Ad Building”—the
gold-domed administration building—that effectively
caps how many students can be sent abroad. That
creates extra difficulties when the value of the dollar
is falling, as it was this past year.
Enthusiastic faculty support explains why study abroad
has become such a large part of the Notre Dame experience. “The culture is very enthusiastic for study
abroad,” said Assistant Provost for International
Studies Julia V. Douthwaite, a Romance language professor who heads the 20-person international studies
office. Added Bogenschild, “A lot of faculty support
what we’re doing. We’ve been working very closely
with departments, with deans, with the registrar’s
Broadening Student Experience
“We’re out here in the corn fields of Indiana,” said
Bogenschild. “We have a growing international student
presence, but we don’t have the international exposure
on a day-to-day basis in [this] community that many
universities on the coasts have.” South Bend, 10 miles
south of the Michigan border, has a population of
107,000, and Chicago is a two-hour drive.
For many of the 8,200 undergraduates—a select
group with average SAT scores of 1,370—their world
is the 1,250-acre campus and the panoply of organizations and extracurricular activities that occupy most of
their waking hours outside the classroom and library.
Eighty percent live in the dorms; three percent are
international. One-fifth of the 3,100 graduate students
also occupy housing on campus. While one in six
undergraduates is not Catholic, all must take two theology and two philosophy courses.
“It’s a real island kind of campus. Even South Bend
hardly exists in the students’ lives,” said Douthwaite,
who has taught here since 1991. “Maybe that’s why
ND students
enjoy a sunset
near Fremantle,
Australia
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Students Stay on Track to Graduate
our students are so excited about going abroad. They
are eager to get out in the world and have experiences
and adventure and to struggle with things.”
While it doesn’t promise the football games will be on
television, Douthwaite’s office goes to lengths to
ensure not only that students have reasonable creature
comforts but also that they lose no time in pursuit of a
Notre Dame diploma. “They get to go live in these
fabulously exciting places—and they get Notre Dame
credit. There’s no interruption at all in their academic
careers,” said the assistant provost.
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Notre Dame’s premeds—South Bend is full of them—
have a choice of fall programs in Australia, Mexico, and
England that allow them to take the physics course
they need in the fall of junior year to prepare for the
Medical College Admissions Test in the spring.
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traditional healing
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student receives a
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A Notre Dame
When a student studying abroad asks, “Couldn’t you
pay to have the football games brought to us on TV?”
Douthwaite’s immediate answer is, “No, we will not.
Go watch soccer. That’s what you’re there doing. It’s
not America.” (On the other hand, Bogenschild, an
anthropologist, has managed to catch the grand finals
of the Australian Football League on a seven-inch television for two years’ running while on a student field
trip in the Outback.)
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“We’re sending 17 students, including 12 premeds, in
the fall to the University of the Americas in Puebla,
Mexico” said Kselman. They take physics in English
but everything else in Spanish. “These students are all
quite proficient in Spanish, but they improve it while
they are there,” said Kselman. They also get opportunities to work alongside Mexican doctors not usually
available to U.S. undergraduates. “That’s an asset for
them in their future medical practices,” she said.
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Notre Dame could not have achieved the large participation rates it has recorded in recent years without
making education abroad attractive for the university’s
many premeds and future engineers. Despite the pull
of being one of the 80,000 souls packed into Notre
Dame Stadium on autumn Saturdays to watch the 11time consensus national college football champions,
the International Studies office has no problem finding
takers for education abroad in that semester.
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Douthwaite served as resident director of the Angers
program from 2001 to 2003. After a decade on the
faculty, she was surprised how much better she got to
know students during those two years. “We’d sit
around and ask, ‘Well, why didn’t we ever know each
other back on campus?’ They would say they were so
busy all the time doing all these sports and clubs and
activities,” she said.
“The engineering curriculum is impossibly tight, but
we’ve identified courses at the University of Western
Australia in Perth that meet exactly the requirements
that they would otherwise be taking here at Notre
Dame as juniors,” said Bogenschild. “During the
extended fall break we place the engineers as interns in
gold mining operations and other unusual placements.” With the lure of those exotic internships, 15
to 20 engineers apply for that program each year. For
the premeds as well as business and liberal arts majors,
Notre Dame has a program at the University of Notre
Dame Australia, a young university on the shores of
the Indian Ocean 20 minutes from Perth, the capital
of Western Australia. The menu of courses there is
capped by a field trip to the rugged Pilbara region on
the northwest coast to study how mining and offshore
gas operations are impacting Aboriginal culture.
Notre Dame owns a building off Trafalgar Square in
London that offers dozens of courses in arts and letters, business, engineering and the sciences. Last year,
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A Missionary Zeal for Internationalizing
Notre Dame
Bardi Dancers, an
Aboriginal people
from northwestern
Australia
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Malloy’s strategic plan, Notre Dame 2010: Fulfilling the
Promise, called for consolidating “centers of research
excellence in international studies” and building up
Asian and African studies. “We must be present in
China and India as well as in Africa. Present international tensions also suggest the need for opportunities
in predominantly Islamic countries,” the plan said.
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For its part, the international studies staff continues to
do missionary work on campus, reaching out to deans
and chairs and looking for ways to facilitate study
abroad by more science and engineering majors.
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Some full-year Notre Dame education abroad offerings
have been “semesterized,” as Bogenschild put it. The
Innsbruck program is still a full year, but the university is considering making it one semester and enrolling
students from other U.S. schools. The extensive
London program started in 1981 as a semester program for juniors from the College of Arts and Letters,
but was opened up in 1997 to students from Notre
Dame’s three other colleges, business, engineering, and
science. Many engineers head off to London in the
summer for courses.
students with the
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in addition to the resident five-person staff, the Notre
Dame London Centre had four visiting faculty from
South Bend as well as adjunct British professors. In
Dublin, Ireland, students take some courses at Notre
Dame’s Keough Center in Newman House, a
Georgian home on St. Stephen’s Green, and enroll
directly in nearby University College Dublin or Trinity
College Dublin for the rest.
Notre Dame
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Malloy has often said that he first felt the call to
priesthood as a Notre Dame undergraduate after
climbing Mexico’s El Cerro del Cubilete (Top Hat
Mountain) to visit the shrine to Cristo Rey (Christ
the King) on a summer volunteer trip to work among
the poor. Malloy will pass the university reins at the
end of 2004–05 to the Rev. John I. Jenkins ’76, a
philosophy professor who is currently vice president
and associate provost.
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Notre Dame has a program for language majors in
Nagoya, Japan, but it relies on the Council on
International Educational Exchange programs for
other students it sends to Japan and China. The
university trustees last year embraced an ambitious
strategic plan drafted by Malloy that includes opening
up more opportunities to study in Africa and Asia.
Malloy, who is stepping down at the end of the
2004–05 year, also set a goal of working toward
achieving a bilingual student body—although Notre
Dame still has no language requirement outside the
College of Arts and Letters and the College of Science.
The famous
Golden Dome atop
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Jerusalem, while enrolling in courses simultaneously at
Bethlehem University and Hebrew University.
Notre Dame students
in Monterrossa, Italy
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makes friends with
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“There are constituencies within those colleges that
find study abroad very difficult,” said Bogenschild.
“For example, within engineering, we can satisfy civil
and geoscience aspects, but aerospace engineers can
only go to London. The computer engineers don’t
have any particular place to go to. We’re not all things
to all people, unfortunately. We’re trying to develop
new options for them.”
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an Australian native
Administration
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mural in the
“We’re going to be creating more custom-designed
summer programs for faculty to run and bring their
own students. This will be particularly desirable for
faculty in engineering and science,” said Douthwaite.
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The international studies office also hopes to revive a
program that allowed Notre Dame students to study at
Tantur, the university’s Ecumenical Institute in
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by Luigi Gregori
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Dame was painted
Both Bogenschild and Douthwaite studied abroad as
undergraduates a generation ago. An anthropology
major at Occidental College, Bogenschild drove a
Volkswagen bus from Los Angeles to Guatemala for
his five months of independent study. Douthwaite, a
French major at the University of Washington in her
native Seattle,
said, “I was the
old-fashioned
study abroad student who didn’t
have a lot of
money. I went to
Avignon, France,
for one quarter
because that’s all I could afford.” But once there she
could not bear to leave, so she quit school, found a job
as an au pair and stayed for nine more months before
returning to finish her education in the United States.
For many Notre Dame undergraduates who grew up
in affluent suburbs, studying abroad is “the first time
they’ve ever lived in a city. It’s very exciting and very
destabilizing,” said Douthwaite. “They learn to take
everything in stride. They get this Zen attitude. They
say, ‘I can do anything. Nothing is that scary, really.’”
“They lose your baggage? So, you borrow some
clothes. You don’t know where you’re going to live? So,
you just put up in a cheap hotel for a few nights. You
don’t understand what’s going on? So, you just sit back
and listen for a while and don’t say anything until you
do figure out what’s going on,” she said. “You can
cope—and you will learn the language and be able to
thrive in this environment, if you just give it time.”
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Innovative Scholarship
Program Brings Oregon
Some of Its Best
Students
U.S. Department of State, flourished from the start in
Eugene. During the years it has helped more than 400
students from scores of nations afford a University of
Oregon education. It offers tuition remission of
$6,000 or more a year based on financial need. Each
year the Office of International Programs sends 35 of
these talented young people into the communities of
Eugene, Springfield, and beyond, not only to schools
but community centers, libraries, church halls, and
retirement homes. Students from distant parts of the
globe occasionally serve as translators at hospitals,
helping send patients with instructions written in their
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A generation ago Oregon legislators were contemplating ways to expand the horizons of children and
teenagers in schools across the heavily forested state.
Oregon holds a special place in U.S. imagination—
endpoint of the journey for Meriwether Lewis and
William Clark and birthplace of Nike Inc. (“Just do
it”) as well as 1960s novelist Ken Kesey and the
indomitable distance runner Steve Prefontaine—
it epitomizes the outdoors and the free spirited.
Diversity, however, is not its strong suit. While 75 percent of the U.S. population enumerated in the 2000
Census gave their race as white only, among Oregon’s
3.6 million residents the figure neared 87 percent.
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Developing Cultural Ambassadors
The International Cultural Service Program (ICSP),
launched in 1983 with the help of a $5,000 NAFSA
Cooperative Grants Program grant, funded by the
Photo by Michael McDermott, University of Oregon
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The legislators came up with the idea of providing
scholarship assistance at public universities to international students who agreed to serve as cultural ambassadors in local schools and community organizations.
Several campuses jumped at the opportunity, most
notably the University of Oregon, the flagship institution of higher education in the Willamette Valley.
Cooperation and fun
are hallmarks of the
International Cultural
Service Program, as
seen among these
students representing
19 nations
All photos courtesy of the
University of Oregon
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The Lane Education Service District produces an enticing picture catalogue for ICSP each year that includes
capsule descriptions of the talents each international
student can bring to the community and classroom.
ICSP scholarships are renewable for the length of a student’s studies in Eugene, which means that the Office
of International Programs can only choose 15 of the
approximately 100 students who apply each year. Each
makes a commitment to perform 80 hours of cultural
service during the school year.
own language. The program has become a fixture in
the schools of sprawling Lane County, which stretches
110 miles from the Cascades to the Pacific—Eugene
is in the middle—and by itself is nearly the size of
Connecticut.
Graduate student
and Ginny Stark,
then-director of
International Student
and Scholar Services,
Most participants “are not your average student,” said
Ginny Stark, the outgoing director of International
Student and Scholar Services. Often these students
stood out as leaders at schools back home and many
are “stars in the student community in general” in
Eugene, she added.
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Armen, Albania,
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Brikena Haxhiraj from
The international students must have financial need to
qualify for the scholarships. Stark and her colleagues
also look to ensure that those selected reflect as many
countries and cultures as possible.
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This program is not for the shy. The students often
wear traditional costumes and intersperse stories with
music and dance from their homeland. Schools and
organizations were invited to selected speakers from
Benin Republic, Ghana, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Kenya,
Myanmar, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Japan,
Singapore, Thailand,
Vietnam, China,
Albania, Armenia,
Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Bulgaria, Norway,
Romania, Ukraine,
Serbia/Montenegro,
Turkey, Bolivia, Mexico,
Brazil, and Ecuador.
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(below) University of
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In 2003–04, the program’s twentieth anniversary year,
the Office of International Programs sent 35 students
from 27 countries to share the language, arts, tradition, culture, and, often, the food of their homelands
with students from elementary grades through high
school and some older groups as well. Women outnumbered men almost two to one and all but nine of
the 35 students were undergraduates.
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Service Program 20th
anniversary celebration
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The catalogue descriptions are enticing: Meet Tsitsi Magaya from Harare,
Zimbabwe, “a tremendously talented musician and
daughter of a very famous Mbira player” as well as
granddaughter of a traditional Shona healer; Lei
“Florence” Zhang, an expert on the folk arts of China;
or Balinese dancer Ria Muljadi from Jakarta,
Indonesia; Navara “Pin” Boon-Long of Chiang Mai,
Thailand, who promises to play traditional Thai music
on the violin and demonstrate Thai cooking; or,
perhaps for classes with higher levels of testosterone,
Miloje Cekerevac of Belgrade, who can hold forth on
water hockey and other favorite Serbian sports.
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Ole-Ronkei was also instrumental in bringing the first
young woman from his village to the United States for
college. He also helped arrange a full scholarship for
Kakenya Ntaiya to Randolph-Macon Woman’s College
in Roanoke, Virginia. Ole-Ronkei called on an old
friend, Kathleen Gill Bowman, president of the college
and former vice provost in Eugene, to swing that one.
Ntaiya’s successful pursuit of that degree was the subject
of a four-part series in The Washington Post in 2003.
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Ole-Ronkei is a member of the Massai tribe, the
nomadic cattle herders of Kenya. He first came to
Eugene from the village of Enoosaen with the help of
the cultural scholarship in 1985 and stayed to earn a
bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1988, a master’s in
interdisciplinary study in 1988, and a Ph.D. in journalism and communication in 1995. He also did a
stint as coordinator of ICSP. In recent years, while
heading the African operations of Compassion
International, a child sponsorship charity, he has
served as mentor to and a one-person placement
agency for promising young Kenyan students, including several from his village in western Kenya 20 miles
from the Masai Mara Game Reserve.
In the Daily Emerald’s October 2, 2002 article on
UO’s “Kenyan Connection,” Konchellah said, “In
Kenya, I am considered a blessed person to be at the
University of Oregon. I have to achieve everything
that is expected of me.” Ole-Ronkei was quoted in the
same article—written by Ayisha Yahya, a Kenyan
graduate student who is also an ICSP speaker —as saying, “I am a professional beggar on behalf of others.”
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A five-day university celebration of ICSP’s twentieth
anniversary drew dozens of program alumni from several continents back to Eugene last November. The
keynote speaker was Morompi Ole-Ronkei, whom
Tom Mills, the associate vice president for international programs, described to the Oregon Daily Emerald,
the student newspaper, as “our role model for the type
of student who gives back to the university more than
he received.”
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Alumni Establish Deep Roots
Another of Ole-Ronkei’s success stories is Vincent
Konchellah, a former secondary school teacher from
Enoosaen and Kilgoris, Kenya, who is in the ICSP and
aspires to earn a doctoral degree in business.
Konchellah’s speaking résumé notes that in polygamous Kenya he has “two ‘real’ brothers, two ‘real’
sisters, and 21 siblings.”
One protégé, Kimeli Ole-Naiyomah, who started at
the University of Oregon and is now a medical student
at Stanford University, was in New York City on
September 11, 2001. Later, when he journeyed home
to Enoosaen, he helped convince Maasai tribal leaders
to donate 15 cows to the United States. The expression of sympathy for the victims of the terror attacks
drew worldwide news coverage.
Ole-Ronkei, who was recently promoted to head of
training at Compassion International’s headquarters in
Colorado Springs, Colorado, said by e-mail that however much impact the cultural service program had on
the students and teachers of Eugene and Lane County,
its biggest effect was on the international students.
“Their lives are never the same again. For once, they
get to establish very close relationships and long after
they have left the university, they are still able to
remain in touch with each other around the globe,” he
said. “Today, I have friends in virtually every continent
as a result of the ICSP.”
The cultural service program “is an excellent recipe
for establishing those deep roots that will not be
uprooted by distance or duration of separation,”
said Ole-Ronkei.
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President Dave
Frohnmayer with
Oregon alumni in
Hong Kong
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returned to Schiphol Airport. All airports in the
United States had shut down in the wake of the
attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Subasic wound up stuck at the Amsterdam airport
for four nights, without his wheelchair, which was
locked up on the plane. He spent those nights sleeping in a paramedic storage room.
A Life Transformed
While the Oregon program long has served as a model
for other U.S. universities, its administrators have not
rested on their laurels. In recent years they have selected speakers with disabilities, including Slobodan
“Boda” Subasic, a disability rights activist from
Belgrade. Subasic, the son of an engineer and a
teacher, lost the use of his legs when struck by muscular dystrophy at age 13 in 1991. He spoke out across
Europe on the needs and rights of the disabled, and
first visited Eugene in 1998 on an exchange program
arranged by Mobility International USA and later did
an internship with that organization.
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On two occasions Subasic made presentations to the
University of Oregon trustees. Now, with a business
degree in hand, Subasic is looking to pursue a career in
international marketing while still speaking out as an
advocate for the disabled.
alumnus Morompi
Ole-Ronei,
President Dave
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Mills, Oregon
The young man returned to wheelchair-friendly
Eugene to enroll at the university in fall 2001, but
endured one hitch on the way. He was on a jumbo
jet from Amsterdam to Seattle on September 11,
2001, which turned around, dumped fuel, and
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Walugembe
He told the Oregon Outlook that his view had changed
about the illness that transformed his life at 13. Once,
if someone had asked, “‘What if there’s some magic
that you could just switch the time back and this had
never happened? Would you do it?’” his immediate
reply would have been “‘Are you crazy? Of course, I
would!’ But now, if someone asked me, I’m not sure I
would say yes,” he said. “I would probably never have
traveled. Maybe I would have been drafted and died
in the war. I’m not sure I would be this person that
I am now.”
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Subasic was living in Belgrade in 2000 when NATO
bombed the city to bring the Milosevic regime to heel.
With electricity and elevators out, his family gave up
trying to evacuate him from their apartment to a shelter. They rode out the attacks.
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Proud of Its International Roots,
But Strapped for Money
For the university, pulling out of that spiral has meant
sity has become. It was recognized last year by the American
intensifying fundraising, at home and abroad. It has launched
Council on Education as a leader among research universi-
a $600-million drive to boost faculty salaries and provide
ties in advancing internationalization. Last fall 1,273 interna-
more scholarships, including $10 million a year for interna-
tional students from 86 countries were pursuing degrees in
tional student scholarships and $10 million for education
Eugene, representing 6.4 percent of the total enrollment of
abroad scholarships.
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Oregon takes pride in how international its flagship univer-
The University of Oregon is considered a paragon
from Japan, continuing a relationship that began in 1876, the
among U.S. universities in the way it maintains close rela-
year of the university’s founding, when a Japanese student
tions with nearly 12,000 international alumni. An internation-
was enrolled in the first class. An Irish-born geology profes-
al education administrator had the foresight more than three
sor, Thomas Condon, had that student’s tuition charged
decades ago to start tracking their names and addresses.
against his salary. In 1930 President Arnold Bennett Hall,
Tom Mills, associated vice president for international pro-
a pioneering fundraiser, spoke of the importance of interna-
grams, said, “My predecessor felt we ought to keep in con-
tional education to Oregon’s future: “The progress of civiliza-
tact and ask donations for scholarships for our current inter-
tion is no longer confined to a state or nation alone; the
national students. No list was kept at the time, so he hired a
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linked with the rest of the world.” Oregon Governor Ted
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people of every country are inevitably and increasingly
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20,000 students. More than 20 percent of these students came
couple of work-study students, sent them to the registrar’s
office and to the alumni office, and started building one. That
gave us a really good database. He was very far-sighted.” It
viable and healthy postsecondary education system is criti-
gave Oregon a head start in this arena, long before the age of
cal to grow the economy, create jobs, and allow Oregon to
e-mail and before such tracking became routine. The UO
become a competitive player in the global marketplace.”
Alumni Association took over the list-keeping 10 years ago,
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Kulongoski sounded a similar note last fall when he said, “A
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The University of Oregon’s successes on the interna-
but the Office of International Programs still has full access
to the names. Oregon has alumni chapters in 13 countries,
resources have been strained by slipping state support and
including three in Japan alone, where the loyal Oregon
rising enrollments. President Dave Frohnmayer has lamented
Ducks gather quarterly and publish an electronic monthly
that his faculty are paid just 80 percent of what peers else-
newsletter. Mills has traveled with Frohnmayer across Asia
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tional education front have come during an era when its
and South America. His office and the Alumni Association
are real—underfunding; increasing enrollment; an economy
publish an annual newsletter just for international alumni,
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where earn at research universities. “Our challenges here
and last year the university hired its first, full-time coordina-
century; the challenge, in the midst of this, not to relax stan-
tor of international alumni programs. Cynthia Stenger, a
dards, but to raise them to the world-class standards befit-
Peace Corps alumna (the Czech Republic) with master’s
ting our advertisements,” the former Rhodes Scholar said in
degrees in German and linguistics, took on those duties.
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not conducive to educating for the needs of the twenty-first
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his 2002 convocation speech. Last spring Governor
Stenger is looking into arranging more events to
Kulongoski, in a State-of-the-State address, acknowledged
bring the estimated 8,500 international alumni overseas
that, “In recent years the higher education tank in Oregon
back to Eugene (some 3,500 international alumni live in the
has been running close to empty. Programs have been cut.
United States) for special occasions like the annual
Faculty has been lost. Tuition has skyrocketed. We need to
Oregon Bach Festival. Sports-minded Duck alumni from
get higher education off this downward spiral.”
Australia and Japan arrange trips to Eugene to coincide
with football weekends.
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tonier quarters at the foot of Beacon Hill. In the
middle of the Depression, Suffolk became a university
with the opening of its College of Liberal Arts (1934)
and Sawyer School of Management (1937), which
started out as well with evening classes. For years the
college was the only place in Massachusetts where a
student could earn a bachelor’s degree solely by taking
evening classes.
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Almost a century ago a young lawyer named Gleason
L. Archer bucked the Boston establishment by opening a night school for “ambitious young men who are
obliged to work for a living while studying law.”
Archer, who traced his own roots to the Massachusetts
Bay colony, found it repugnant that the doors to
Boston’s top law schools were closed to the city’s
immigrants, mostly Irish, Italian, and Jewish. In 1906,
the same year he passed the Massachusetts bar, Archer
began teaching students in his one-room Roxbury
apartment, then moved his fledgling Suffolk School of
Law into offices on bustling Scollay Square, the heart
of Boston’s tenderloin but also strategically close to
both the courts and the first U.S. subway, the “T.”
Bostonians flocked to the night classes and Archer
soon was operating one of the country’s largest law
schools. The prolific dean won the battle for accreditation in 1914, wrote a shelf full of textbooks that
other law schools adopted, and relocated Suffolk to
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SUFFOLK
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Suffolk’s Campus
Stretches from
Boston’s Beacon Hill
to Madrid and Dakar
Branches Around the Globe
Suffolk’s growth curve accelerated in the 1990s. It
acquired more property across Beacon Hill, built its
first dorm, and began attracting significant numbers of
out-of-state and international students. It also acquired
a new dimension consistent with its heritage as an
institution created to open opportunities for those
who otherwise might be denied a college diploma or
law degree. In 1995 it opened a branch campus in
Madrid, Spain, and in 1999 it began offering classes in
Dakar, Senegal. These two distant campuses draw students from across Europe and Africa, respectively.
Classes are taught in English, even in francophone
Senegal, a former French colony. They also draw U.S.
students from the home campus and other U.S. universities who go to Madrid or Dakar to study abroad.
Both serve as a feeder source for international enrollments in Boston, where students head to complete
their bachelor’s degrees after two years of classes in the
Spanish or Senegalese capitals.
Suffolk University
Dakar students
between classes
All photos courtesy of
Suffolk University
(left to right)
Walter F. Caffey,
dean of enrollment;
Marguerite J. Dennis,
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Marguerite J. Dennis, vice president of enrollment and
international programs, said the government of
Senegal invited Suffolk University to open the branch
in Dakar and gave it a 99-year lease on a campus complete with academic facilities on the grounds of the
École Nationale d’Économie Appliquée. The business
courses are taught by faculty from Boston who fly in
to teach intensive two-week courses with four hours
of instruction each day.
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programs; and
John W. Hamel,
director of
undergraduate
“I don’t know of another institution set up the way we
are. It’s a totally seamless, transparent operation—the
same accreditation, same faculty, same curriculum,
same transcript. The only thing that is different is that
the costs are less. In Africa they are about 50 percent
less than in Boston,” said Dennis.
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admission
The president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, received
an honorary doctor of laws degree from Suffolk in
June, presented at the same commencement ceremony
in Dakar where 18 sophomores received certificates for
completing the two-year business program. Ten were
transferring to Suffolk University and six transferring
to other universities this fall. Senegal’s minister of education, Moutapha Sourang, as well as Alpha Oumar
Konare, the president of the African Union and former
president of Mali, attended the event, along with U.S.
Ambassador Richard Allan Roth and business leaders.
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The classes in Madrid are taught by four resident
Suffolk University professors and two dozen adjuncts.
Since the Madrid campus began, more than 100 students have transferred to Suffolk Boston. In recent
years, more than a score of applicants for whom no
space was available in Suffolk’s dorms has elected to
start college studies in Madrid, then transfer to Boston.
An Emphasis on Access for Students
of All Backgrounds
Suffolk University once marketed itself with the
slogan, “CHEERS Isn’t The Only Place on Beacon
Hill Where Everyone Knows Your Name.” It was a
big success, although Dennis said they dropped it
eventually because 18-year-olds no longer understood
the reference to the long-running television sitcom
about a pub in Boston.
Today the university owns or leases almost 1 million
square feet of space in 15 buildings across Beacon Hill,
including several at the foot of the State House. It can
house more than 800 students. There are no quads or
rolling lawns, but Dennis said, “Boston is our campus.” In what is widely regarded as America’s biggest
and best college town, Dennis said, “We are the only
school smack dab in the middle of everything, adjacent to the State House, which makes it fabulous for
the political science and history majors, and adjacent
to the financial section, which is fabulous for the
finance, accounting, and business majors. People who
choose us are coming for those reasons, not for ivycovered buildings.”
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enrollment and
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vice president of
The offices of President David J. Sargent and other
senior administrators are on the 25th floor of a Beacon
Street skyscraper. Sargent is the former dean of the law
school, which now occupies a high tech, $70-million
building that bears Sargent’s name.
Most undergraduate and law students attend class full
time; most graduate students are enrolled part time.
The university opened two dorms in recent years,
allowing it to recruit far more widely than just from the
public and parochial high schools of greater Boston.
Less than a decade ago, 95 percent of Suffolk students
came from Massachusetts. Today, a quarter come from
other U.S. states and 4 percent are international.
A panel from the New England Association of Schools
and Colleges, in renewing the university’s accreditation
last year, commended the university for maintaining
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“We were well entrenched in Madrid. We decided to
open up our campus and make it an international campus, not just for Spanish students but for students from
all over the world, as well as a study abroad site (for
U.S. students). And that’s what we did,” said Dennis.
“its commitment to its distinctive mission while undergoing extensive growth and also making the transition
to a more residential campus; its emphasis on access to
students of all backgrounds continues to be central to
its values and its activities….As it approaches its centennial celebration, Suffolk University should view its
evolution with considerable pride.”
Suffolk in recent years has increased greatly the number of students it sends abroad. It sent 63 students to
Madrid and 16 to Dakar last year. It has formal
arrangements and partnerships with universities in
more than a dozen countries, including China, Russia,
France, England, and the Czech Republic.
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Expanding Programs at Home and Abroad
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A decade ago, after the first Gulf war, Suffolk set up a
program to train mental health counselors for Kuwait.
“We were one of the first schools in Kuwait after the
war,” said Dennis. “We started with 19 students and
graduated 15 with graduate degrees in mental health
counseling. It was all taught by our faculty, with
simultaneous translation in every class. It was a wonderful program. We really accomplished something
significant.” She also believes it was one of the reasons
that Senegal invited the university to open a campus
in Dakar.
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Suffolk managed to raise international enrollments
sharply even before the first dorm opened. Dennis,
who had previously worked at Georgetown University,
recalled, “People said, ‘Oh, you’ll never get international students to come because you have no dormitories.’ But many international students don’t want to be
in a dormitory. They don’t eat at six o’clock. We have
this wonderful area around Beacon Hill. I knew we’d
attract a good international population.” Suffolk’s
international numbers grew fivefold in the 1990s.
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The program in Madrid had a more conventional
start. Suffolk had had an arrangement with a private,
two-year Spanish college to send graduates to Boston
to complete bachelor’s degrees. When the Spanish college elected to close its end of the operation, Suffolk
opted to go it alone.
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Dennis said Suffolk now is looking for new ways to
encourage students to go abroad. “The junior year
abroad is a myth. It doesn’t exist. Kids are going for
shorter and shorter periods: one semester, summer
school, and what’s becoming even more popular, the
winter ‘inter’ term, between when final exams end in
December and the spring semester begins the third
week of January,” she said.
Photo by Patrick O’Hanlon, Suffolk University Media Services
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Student Perspectives
Madrid, too, is an easy sell for U.S. students looking
to study abroad, with friendly people and lower costs
than most European capitals. The Suffolk Madrid
campus is also a popular destination for students from
other countries in Europe eager to polish their English
before studying in the United States. Students who
spent a semester or longer at the campus spoke highly
of their experiences in diaries and comments posted on
the Suffolk Madrid Web site (www.suffolk.es).
Students outside
at Suffolk’s
Madrid Campus
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Transitions: Taking the Long-Term View
The transition from Dakar to Boston has also been a
good one for many of those students, who come from
20 countries in Africa. Some accounting majors who
attended Dakar have won laurels in intercollegiate
competitions for business majors. “They are outstanding
students, so focused and so bright,” said Dennis.
Professor Walter
Johnson, chair of the
Physics Department,
Suffolk has transformed itself from an evening college
for part time students to a full-fledged university with
deep academic commitments and responsibilities on
three continents. “Whenever you do this kind of an
enterprise, you have to take the long view of it.
Otherwise, expectations and goals will never materialize,”
said Dennis.
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teaches at Suffolk
University’s Boston,
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Madrid and Dakar
campuses both in
person and through
One young woman from the United States wrote:
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The Brooklyn, N.Y.-born educator, an alumna of St.
John’s University, added, “This school in 15 years has
come from being a small commuter institution to having a strong international program…There’s been so
much cross-fertilization, not only of students, but of
faculty, that has helped internationalize everything we
do here on the home campus.”
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I sit here at 1 in the morning, the night before I leave
Spain to go back to the states, writing about why I really
do not want to leave. If there is anything I can say right
now as advice, the most important would be to encourage that if it is any way possible, any way at all, work a
few more hours, ask for one more loan, get in touch with
that old relative that might remember who you are and
be willing to lend you the money…Stay for the
year…The rhythm of this city is incomparable to any
other in the world.
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technologies
A young man from Norway wrote:
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My stay at Suffolk University in Madrid was a great
experience. I improved my Spanish and English…and got
a great insight in the Spanish culture and daily life…The
advantage of Suffolk University is its intimate size, very
friendly faculty, and a service-minded administration…
You can find everything for your taste (in Madrid): bull
fighting, famous museums, Flamenco shows, the world’s
best soccer teams, concerts, amusement parks, and Europe’s
best night life.
Strolling in
Madrid
I have had the experience of a lifetime here, and love
Spain more than even I thought I would. Learning about
everything that makes Spain “Spanish” was enriching,
whether it was the history, the festivals, the culture, or the
cinema and literature…My mom is going to be upset to
hear it, but after college, she might need to take a plane
flight to visit me in my new home.
Photo by Patrick O’Hanlon, Suffolk University Media Services
A young man from California wrote:
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Project Partners
NAFSA: Association of International Educators has championed the cause of international education and exchange for
more than 50 years, supporting the belief that students with international experience and a global perspective are crucial
to the survival of the modern world. Committed to building the skills, knowledge, and professional competencies of its
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members, NAFSA strengthens international education's biggest asset—the professionals who make educational
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exchange possible. Today, NAFSA has more than 9,000 members from all 50 states and 80 countries. Our members share a
United States Department of State
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Educational and Cultural Affairs Bureau
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enhances constructive leadership in a global community.
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belief that international education advances learning and scholarship, builds respect among different peoples, and
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Educational Information and Resources Branch
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The Educational Information and Resources Branch (ECA/A/S/A) of the Department of State’s Educational and Cultural Affairs
Bureau promotes the international exchange of students and scholars through a network of overseas educational information
centers located in nearly every country of the world. More than five million prospective students contact these centers each
year. The Branch estimates that a majority of the international students now studying in the U.S. contacted a Department of
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State-affiliated center for information on U.S. study. These students contribute an estimated $12 billion annually to the U.S.
economy. The Educational Information and Resources Branch also works with partner organizations to support international
AS
students and scholars on U.S. campuses; fund professional development and training for international student advisers, admissions personnel, and others at U.S. institutions; and supports activities that build mutual understanding through the exchange
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of people and ideas. Programs assist international activities of the U.S. academic community, including student and faculty
ment of foreign students. ECA/A/S/A funds research on international education, including Open Doors, the annual census of
the international academic community in the United States that tracks statistics about international students and scholars in
the U.S. and U.S. students who study abroad.
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exchanges, study abroad, coordination with foreign governments, evaluation of foreign institution’s credentials, and recruit-
Educational Testing Service is the world’s largest private educational testing and measurement organization and a leader in
educational research. The company is dedicated to serving the needs of individuals, educational institutions, and government
bodies in almost 200 countries. ETS develops and administers more than 12 million tests worldwide. Traditionally, ETS’s primary
purpose has been the development of tests and other assessment tools to provide information (including test scores and interpretative data) to test takers, educational institutions, and others who require this information. ETS is now poised to broaden
its scope beyond the U.S. measurement space into the worldwide education and training space.
Eighth Floor
Washington, D.C. 20005-4701
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www.nafsa.org
INTERNATIONALIZING THE CAMPUS 2004
1307 New York Avenue, N.W.