Collegial Conversations, January 2007

Through these conversations NAFSA hopes to target the best practices and experiences of some of international education's preeminent leaders. Every month the Chief International Education Leaders Network will ask one of its subscribers to answer the following three questions. Over the coming year we hope to see many unique and thought-provoking answers.

William I. Brustein

Dr. William I. Brustein is associate provost for international affairs and professor of sociology, political science, and history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before coming to Illinois, he was director of the University Center for International Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Brustein has published widely in the areas of political extremism and ethnic/religious/racial prejudice. He is president of the Association of International Education Administrators (AIEA) and serves on the Board of Directors of the Association for Studies in International Education, the editorial advisory boards of the Journal of Studies in International Education, and the International Education Report. He also serves on the executive committee of the Commission on International Programs of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC).

During January, William answered questions and shared his insight. View the Archived Discussion!

What is at the top of your strategic planning list?

At the top of my strategic planning list is to position the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a leading global campus. This will involve a focus on several key challenges and opportunities. They are:

• Global Partnerships: To assess the costs and benefits associated with establishing branch campuses abroad, global institutional partnerships/relationships including dual or joint degrees, and international internship opportunities.
• Rethinking the Relationship with Academic Units: To develop effective models for working with deans, department chairs, and faculty to achieve the goal of internationalizing our campuses. We need to think in terms of how our international initiatives respond directly to the self-interests of deans, department chairs, and faculty.
• Foreign Languages in the Global University: We are obliged to explore new ways to ensure that all students regardless of their discipline have access to foreign language learning relevant to their educational and career goals. This might require rethinking the role that language and literature departments perform in teaching language instruction to students who are not language and literature majors.
• Study Abroad: Meeting the Lincoln Commission's Challenge: The Lincoln Commission report has called for a goal of 1 million college students studying abroad annually by 2016. Will reaching this goal require that our institutions abandon the model of assessing study abroad user fees for a system in which the costs of operating a study abroad office and providing study abroad fellowships are funded directly from tuition and state revenues or general student fees? How should we respond to the policies of some colleges and universities to restrict the numbers of students participating in programs operated by third-party providers, especially when it involves the use of institutional fellowship/scholarship funds for programs not directly operated by that institution?
• Global Competence and Assessment: To achieve the widely accepted goal of producing globally competent graduates, the curricula of our institutions of higher learning must be redesigned. How do we design and assess curricula that will lead to global competence with the understanding that "no one size fits all"?

What are the most difficult challenges you face today to carry out your international mandate?

The key challenge that I face is how to carry out our international mandate in light of the fact that as a SIO (Senior International Officer) I "lead from the edge." In other words, because we (SIOs) typically do not oversee our own faculty or degree programs, we have to be exceptionally skillful and creative in developing partnerships with other academic units. To succeed at a comprehensive internationalization of the campus necessitates that we are effective facilitators. To be an effective facilitator of an institution's internationalization, one must be able to work with the various constituent units in ways that these units perceive internationalization as relevant to their own goals and creating added value. We can only get so far with our international agenda if we rely solely on the altruistic motivations of deans, department chairs, and faculty.

A second challenge is to become more entrepreneurial in terms of fundraising for international programs. Not having our own alumni, we have to find ways to partner with other units as well as to convince the institution's senior leadership to prioritize fundraising for international programs and studies. I am a firm believer that new opportunities await us in the area of fundraising for international activities, especially in cultivating international alumni, friends, foundations, and corporations.

Reflecting on your past experience, what advice, resources, favorite Web site, etc., would you most like to share with your colleagues, or those aspiring to become an chief international education officer?

Unlike the positions of a faculty, chair, dean, provost or chancellor, there is no direct path or ladder to become a SIO. Thus, the issue of how to become an international education officer requires special attention. The best advice that I can give someone aspiring to become a SIO is to take advantage of the professional development and network opportunities provided by AIEA and NAFSA. The AIEA and NAFSA annual conferences have provided me such valuable information, particularly sessions dealing with "best practices." I would frequently take back what I learned at these conferences and think of ways to adapt the lessons to my own campus.