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Collegial Conversations, May 2007
Through these conversations NAFSA hopes to target the best practices and experiences of some of international education's preeminent leaders. Every month the International Education Leader Development 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.
Joseph Brockington
Joseph L. Brockington is Associate Provost for International Programs and Professor of German language and literature at Kalamazoo College. He holds BA, MA, and Ph.D. degrees from Michigan State University. A former Chair of the Section on US Students Abroad (SECUSSA) of NAFSA, Dr. Brockington has served as a member of the founding board of the Forum on Education Abroad, the Association of International Education Administrators (AIEA) executive committee and serves on the national team of the International Education Leadership Knowledge Community of NAFSA. He has published and presented numerous papers at international, national, and regional, and consortial conferences on topics in study abroad orientation and re-entry, international programs administration; campus internationalization, and modern German literature. He is one of the co-editors of the 3rd edition of NAFSA's Guide to Education Abroad for Advisers and Administrator.
Ten years ago, I was finishing my first year as interim director of the CIP, following four years as associate director, and twelve years as a tenured faculty member in the German department. We had just appointed a new provost and the plan was to do a national search in the fall. Well somehow that fell through and here I still am. What I wish I had known then that I know now:
Joseph Brockington
Joseph Brockington
What do you wish you had known ten years ago that you know now?
Let me begin by telling you a bit about the Center for International Programs (CIP) at Kalamazoo College. We are a full-service international center with responsibility for study abroad, international students and scholars, foreign university partners and exchanges, and budget management for grants with an international focus. With a study abroad participation rate in excess of 80%, much of our work revolves around study abroad. While we don't have direct responsibility for international and area studies in the curriculum, we do maintain close ties to the academic departments. Located in academic affairs and reporting to the provost, we see supporting and, when appropriate, providing leadership for the comprehensive internationalization of the College as another of our main tasks.Ten years ago, I was finishing my first year as interim director of the CIP, following four years as associate director, and twelve years as a tenured faculty member in the German department. We had just appointed a new provost and the plan was to do a national search in the fall. Well somehow that fell through and here I still am. What I wish I had known then that I know now:
- My late father was an accountant and corporate treasurer. When I was an undergraduate he constantly suggested that I take some business courses, maybe a little accounting. Who knows it might come in handy. I assured him that I was just fine with literature and philosophy. That first year and in the ten ensuing it seems like all I do is numbers; individual program and general department budget projections, quarterly and year-end reports, enrollment projections, participation statistics, grant expense reports, financial aid impact, etc. Yes, I have someone on staff who does the heavy lifting with the day to day budget and financial tracking, but if I'm going to sign off on a report, I need to understand what it means and how we got there. As a profession, we offer new leaders very little in the way of professional development in the area of budgets and finance. This is something we should give some thought to.
- There is a big difference between "managing" faculty as a sometime department chair and managing the staff of the international center. Faculty learn to work well alongside one another in their academic responsibilities and occasionally to work with one another on committees etc. Staff have to work with each other everyday. Work flows from one person to the other and back and must do so seamlessly, if the center is to get the job done. Those first couple of years I read any number of management books, looking for models and insights that would help me help my staff colleagues do their jobs. In the end there was no magic answer. We've settled on a rather flat organizational structure, with each staff member having the appropriate responsibility and most importantly the authority to manage the work in her area. This model requires a great deal of communication among the staff and between individuals. My job is to facilitate frequent communication and triage the work when necessary. And of course, I'm always the one who is ultimately responsible and thus, will shoulder the blame. Any praise belongs to the staff.
- Don't put off your vacation because you're too busy. This has taken me several years to learn and even now I'm not particularly good at it. But one might as well face up to the fact that a) you're not indispensable, the staff know how to handle things if there is an emergency (and they know how to find you, anyway) and b) you are no good to the center, the institution, or yourself if you are tired and burned out. Schedule vacation time and take it!
What are current concerns and trends that you see as critical from your view of the international education field?
I'm going to limit myself to two here.- The Lincoln program's goal of one million U.S. students abroad has been mentioned in these conversations before. A recent SECUSS-L exchange discussed whether there would be enough places abroad to accommodate these students. The issue I see before the profession with regard to these numbers is not the capacity abroad, but rather the capacity at home to prepare them for their sojourns and to receive them when they return. Are there enough places in foreign language courses and in appropriate languages, pre and post study abroad. Likewise with area studies courses? My students return from their programs overseas and want to take more language, more history, art, philosophy, literature from the regions they were in. What thought have institutions given to these issues? And finally, there is the whole reentry process. As Milton Bennett has remarked, "being in the vicinity of experience is not learning." Returnee students need an opportunity to reflect on and process their experiences abroad in meaningful ways. Bringing them home and then throwing them back into the fray as though they had never been gone, is not the answer.
We need to give some serious consideration to how we introduce our institutions to the next generation of international education leaders. In several presentations, I've heard Jack van de Water describe what he calls a dual path to senior international education leadership - one through the faculty (Ph.D. in an academic discipline, teaching, tenure, etc., an international version of the so-called 'golden road'); and one through administration (Masters, often in Education or International Program Management, maybe a Ph.D. or Ed.D. in Education or Intercultural Communication, years of experience in the international office). Colleges and universities recognize the former as the right stuff for a senior director or dean of international education, without question. Jack notes, that the latter often hit the'glass ceiling' at the associate director level. I've had some interesting conversation during several recent consultancies about this topic, what are the qualifications you seek for the senior position? Without fail, faculty and administrators I've spoken with choose academic preparation and familiarity with the institution over professional competency and experience in the field.
Clearly, international education is long past the time when it was 'amateur sports' and anyone could play. There are professional competencies in the field that one must either possess or be able to quickly master, for the institution's sake if for no other reason. But as a profession, we owe it to our mid-career colleagues, many of whom have chosen the administrative path (sometimes at our urging), to help our colleges and universities understand that it is a skill set that matters, not just the initials after one's name. The IEL Delphi project has gone a long way toward identifying that skill set. However, unless we as current senior leaders use resources like the Delphi survey to educate our presidents and provosts as to what the next generation of international education leaders should be, I fear that we may lose a very talented generation of international education professionals.
