Inclusion and Equity

It is the stuff of dreams of college presidents and international educators everywhere: A wealthy and generous benefactor comes along, opens a checkbook and says, “You can enroll some of the brightest, most able and accomplished international students in the world. Send us the full bill.” 

This actually happened five years ago to Colby College and a handful of other top U.S. colleges and universities, and none moved with more alacrity to make the most of the opportunity than Colby. The standing offer from financier-philanthropist Shelby M.C. Davis and family has enabled the Maine college to attract scores of students from the network of United World Colleges (UWC). UWC is a federation of 10 boarding schools on five continents that provides two years of International Baccalaureate classes, service opportunities, and leadership training to high achievers from dozens of countries in hopes that they will make the world a better place.

Without question the Davis UWC scholars have made Colby a better place. The faculty cannot stop talking about them—about how they raise the level of intellectual discourse in classes from advanced calculus to international relations to religion. Dasan M. Thamattoor, an associate professor of chemistry, marveled, “They go beyond what we teach them. In my line of work we’re doing organic chemistry, but they talk about politics and art and music. The conversation with students has been just phenomenal.” Referring to Stanislav Presolski ’05 from Pleven, Bulgaria, he said, “I can talk with Stan about anything from Italian cooking to the opera. Stan actually spent some time in Italy.”

At United World College of the Adriatic outside of Trieste, Italy, to be specific. As he readied to receive his diploma summa cum laude and move on to graduate work in biochemistry at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California, the engaging Presolski said Colby needs “to improve on their propaganda—I use the word in the good sense” to recruit even more international students to central Maine. “Maine sounds pretty cold by definition, and Waterville sounds like—well, where is it. Many international students don’t realize the excellent opportunities they are given at Colby,” said Presolski, who spent his junior year at Oxford.

Presolski, 22, the son of a gynecologist and a surgeon, once described to Colby magazine an epiphany he had in a freshman English composition class, writing about the treatment of gypsies in Bulgaria. “Back home, when I was reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I would say, ‘Wow, see how Americans are so cruel in their treatment of black people.’ But I had never questioned myself or considered that I had the same kind of bad opinion of the gypsies,” the magazine quoted him in a Fall 2002 article.

Director of Admissions Steve Thomas and  colleagues regularly make recruiting visits to the UWC colleges located in Hong Kong, India, Italy, Norway, Singapore, and Wales as well as Lester B. Pearson UWC of the Pacific in Victoria, British Columbia, and Armand Hammer UWC of the American West in Montezuma, New Mexico (There are also UWCs in Swaziland and Venezuela). Thomas said no one at Colby fully appreciated the impact these students would have on their U.S. classmates. “They’re seeing these kids doing this in a third or fourth language and they end up striving for more as a result,” said Thomas. “To really appreciate what these kids are doing, you have to ask yourself, ‘Could I do this in Romanian or Czech?’”

Thomas said the ability to admit UWC graduates without regard to need “has been absolutely amazing. If we had unlimited funding for the non–UWC kids, and you admitted the top kids, we’d admit at least 200, 300 more kids out of the international pool.” 

Financial Aid Helps Campus Internationalize

With 1,800 students and a faculty that combines a passion for scholarship with a love of teaching, Colby long has drawn students from almost every state and scores of countries. Only one student in nine calls Maine home (although many Maine students, like the UWC students, can be found clustered near the top of class rankings). But with tuition and room and board topping $41,000, Colby would be out of reach of a lot of students, U.S. and international, without extensive financial aid. Although not need blind, Colby provides aid to two-thirds of students, and those packages average more than $26,000.

The Davis scholarships are even more generous, covering the full need of UWC graduates up to $40,000. Until recently, the scholarships were limited to students who were admitted and chose to attend Colby, Princeton, Middlebury, Wellesley, or the College of the Atlantic. Recently the Davis family has made up to 50 more top U.S. campuses eligible for scholarships for UWC graduates. But Colby still attracted 27 for the Class of 2009. (The Davis UWC Scholars program is now run out of Middlebury College.) 

“They absolutely raise the intellectual level and make our American kids think in terms they’d never thought of,” said Sandy Maisel, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government and co-director of Colby’s new Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement.

“They are superb students,” agreed President William “Bro” Adams. “They are a little older, and at this time of life, a year can mean a lot. They have also had this IB [international baccalaureate] experience at UWC campuses. It’s a rigorous, tough, traditional curriculum. The third thing is they are hungry—emotionally, intellectually hungry. They get into the middle of this kind of education we provide—close quarters involvement with faculty—and they just take off.”

UWC Students Serve as Catalysts

The valedictorian and marshal of the Class of 2005 was Mark Chapman, a citizen of Zimbabwe who spent his junior year in Beijing and did a senior honors project on the reintegration of Muslims in China’s southwest corner into the Islamic world. The curly-haired Chapman, 22, double-majored in international studies and religious studies, with a minor in Chinese. He was returning to China after graduation for more language study and aspires to get a Ph.D. and “work on facilitating Chinese-African relations.” These are still turbulent times in Zimbabwe. His educator parents recently relocated to Aberdeen, Scotland. Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia and once a British colony, has been independent since 1980. Seizure of white-owned farms by the government has led to an exodus of whites and left the country’s economy in disrepair.

Chapman, a devout Anglican who was active in Christian fellowship activities, said, “It’s a difficult time for all Zimbabweans. White Zimbabweans find it difficult to imagine going back home.” His closest friends in Zimbabwe—including a goddaughter—are black. When he first enrolled in the UWC College of the Pacific in Victoria, British Columbia, “I found it strange to be around so many white people.”

“I definitely have a very strong attachment to Africa. I would like to live there in the long run. But I’m much more an Africanist than a nationalist,” he said. Asked if he felt the UWC alumni were both educators and students at Colby, Chapman said, “To a degree. I certainly don’t represent all of Zimbabwe or Africa. But one thing that a lot of international students bring is a confidence in the classroom. You’re more comfortable sharing your own  experiences.” That in turn makes the Americans more willing to talk about their experiences, he said. “In that sense we can serve as a catalyst for discussion. That’s beneficial. It’s not so much knowledge that we bring, but rather a different perspective.”

Perspectives on Issues Unlike Those From Inside the United States

Kenneth A. Rodman, the William R. Cotter Distinguished Teaching Professor of Government and director of Colby’s Oak Institute for the Study of International Human Rights, said the perspectives from students from outside the United States “create debates that American conservatives and American liberals wouldn’t have with each other. That enriches what goes on in the classroom.”

He offered two examples. “I had a Brazilian student in a class on business and American foreign policy. We were talking about oil disputes in Latin America, controversies over governments expropriating or changing contracts for multinationals. This Brazilian student was very pro-business, but when one U.S. student referred to it as ‘our oil,’ the Brazilian student said, ‘Our oil?’ He made the class confront questions of nationalism,” said Rodman. “On the other side of the spectrum, a student from the United States gave a presentation in one of my classes on female genital mutilation. Her viewpoint was very idealistic and feminist. A student from Angola, a feminist herself, asked, ‘Well, what are you going to do? Are you going to go into these villages to just liberate people? Do you understand the culture?’

“In those two cases, the American students expressed a point of view and were challenged by foreign students who may agree with much of their basic orientation, but confronted them with arguments they wouldn’t hear from other American students,” said Rodman. “It’s a way of challenging your ethnocentrism. It’s eye-opening. It forces us to get out of the Crossfire or Fox News mentality where you’re basically grafting onto other parts of the world our own idiocies.”

Rodman was the first director of Colby’s 15-year-old international studies program and is the founding director of the Oak Institute for the Study of International Human Rights. Every year since 1999 Colby has invited a human rights activist to spend a semester as an Oak Fellow on the Maine campus, lecturing, conducting research, and often resting up for further battles ahead back home. The arrival of the first fellow, Zafaryab Ahmed of Pakistan, was delayed for six months when the Pakistani government refused to let him leave the country.

Colby also provides Oak scholarships to international students whose families or homelands have been victims of torture and others rights abuses.

All of these activities, said Rodman, help make Colby students smarter, more culturally aware and less likely to view the rest of the world “as an extension of the United States.”

“Whether you’re an American business person in Latin America, or a human rights activist in Africa, you have to be at least cognizant of the cultures that create those situations and have a degree of humility in pushing forward a human rights agenda,” he said. 

Cotter Initiates the Move Toward Internationalization

Rodman’s colleagues in Colby’s government department include Cal Mackenzie, a leading scholar on the presidency and the executive branch, and Maisel, an authority on political parties and elections. Maisel joined the faculty in 1971 after getting degrees at Harvard and Columbia. “I came for the good weather,” quipped the native of Buffalo, New York. In those days Colby “wasn’t international at all and it wasn’t very national; it was very New England–oriented.” Former President William R. Cotter (1979–2000) was an internationalist who had served as the Ford Foundation’s representative for Colombia and Venezuela and worked as an assistant attorney general in northern Nigeria. It was on his watch that two-thirds of Colby students began studying abroad for at least one semester. In the 2004 Open Doors, Colby ranked seventh among liberal arts colleges in study abr/oad, with an 82 percent participation rate by its 2003 graduates (including summer and January-term experiences). Cotter, who was president of the African-American Institute before taking the Colby post, became president of the Oak Foundation after he left Mayflower Hill. Oak is an international philanthropy that works to protect human rights, curb abuse, and safeguard the environment.

“Bill Cotter had never worked on a campus before, but he had a vision of internationalizing both the student body and the curriculum. That made a huge difference,” said Maisel. The students who study abroad “come back to a campus where international issues are really quite prominent in both the curriculum and extracurricular activities.” Colby was among the first U.S. campuses to institute a January term. To deal with enrollment imbalances, it also allows some incoming freshman to begin their careers studying at Colby programs in France and Spain, then matriculate on the Waterville campus in the winter.

William Adams, a social philosopher who had been a senior administrator at Wesleyan University and president at Bucknell University, engaged the entire college community in a year-long exercise to develop a strategic plan for Colby soon after his inauguration as Colby’s president in 2000, and the college now is preparing a major fundraising drive to carry out those ambitious plans.

The Goldfarb Center

The creation of the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement was one of the first and most visible fruits of the new blueprint for Colby’s future. Maisel and his colleague, James W. Meehan Jr., the Herbert E. Wadsworth Professor of Economics, both made the case that the college needed a highly visible public affairs center to galvanize a host of interdisciplinary efforts on issues of national and international importance. The college found a sympathetic ear in investor, trustee, and benefactor William Goldfarb ’68. The Goldfarb Center has hosted lectures and conferences in its first two years on topics ranging from terrorism and civil liberties to AIDS and public health issues in Russia. In 2006-07 it will move into the new Diamond Building at the foot of Mayflower Hill where many of Colby’s social science departments and interdisciplinary programs will reside.

“Students are involved in everything we do,” said Maisel. “They chose the films for our conference on fighting terrorism and are putting on a play. And when Philip Heymann visits [noted Harvard Law School authority on terrorism and liberty], 20 of the 35 people invited to have dinner with him will be students.”

The internationalization of the curriculum has been “a very real change on the Colby campus,” added the government professor. “I’m an Americanist and it is really easy for me to Americanize any program. But I have set as a goal of mine to internationalize the Goldfarb Center program as much as we can.” He envisions the Goldfarb Center’s enlisting help from alumni to land international internships for students—from London to Capetown to Singapore. It is already helping pay for students to conduct research overseas. After a fall 2004 seminar on corporate social responsibility, five seniors received help from the Goldfarb Center to spend January 2005 in Chile working for Vincular, a nonprofit organization whose goal is encouraging businesses across Latin America to be good employers and good citizens.

The five students—Melissa Landau of Pound Ridge, New York, Jonah Waxman of Piedmont, California, Alan Ashbaugh of Needham, Massachusetts, Shannon Emerson of  West Friendship, Maryland, and Caitlin McCusker of Lakewood, Colorado—all were fluent Spanish speakers. Some had previously studied in Latin America. They visited Chilean fruit exporters as well as a Spanish-owned electrical company trying to convince customers of the need for higher rates to improve the safety and reliability of service.

Ashbaugh said it also became obvious to the students that “we became good publicity” for the companies to show off their corporate social responsibility programs. There were stories in the local media about the student interns, and the utility, Chilectrica, “actually put us on a poster.”

Channeling Enthusiasm in Education Abroad

Colby runs a small number of its own study abroad programs, but it is careful about which programs students can go on for credit. “Our job is not to talk them into it, but to channel the enthusiasm into the appropriate venues, make sure they’ve thought about what they want to do and why, and how it relates to what they’ve done at Colby and what they want to do afterwards,” said Martha Denney, associate dean of faculty and director of Off-Campus Study.

Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin are dissolving a consortium that sent students and faculty to Quito, Ecuador, Capetown, South Africa, and London. “It was much more difficult and financially challenging than anyone had anticipated,” she said, and harder to convince students from the three colleges that this was where they should study abroad.

Colby still runs its own programs in Salamanca, Spain, Dijon, France, and Cork, Ireland, as well as one in St. Petersburg for  Russian majors.

International Studies Benefits from Addition of More International Students

Associate Dean of Students Sue McDougal advises international students; her office is practically their clubhouse. She is in charge of their orientation, and she takes newcomers on shopping trips for winter coats and boots at the L.L. Bean outlet store in Freeport. One January she went to Bulgaria and visited the families of the large Bulgarian contingent on the Waterville campus.

“We had a big gathering at a tea house in Sofia. I was so excited to get back here to tell each of the students that I’d met their moms or dads and brothers and sisters and what we talked about,” she said. “But by the time I got back, it was old news. Every single one of them had e-mailed home and all the kids knew all the conversations. I felt like I had nothing to share."

Associate Professor of Government and International Studies Jennifer Yoder, a specialist on the transition from communism in eastern Germany and other former Soviet bloc states, says the rise of international studies at Colby and elsewhere has tracked the move toward globalization, increased international openness, growth in study abroad, and “more awareness that what happens in the United States is affected by what’s going on internationally.”

International studies majors “tend to be much more adventurous than a typical American traveler, more interested in visiting developing countries, going to places where they can use their language skills and not fall back on English,” said Yoder.

The arrival of UWC graduates in large numbers has “changed the classroom—my classroom, my colleagues’ classrooms. The level of intellectual discourse has been raised,” Yoder said.

“It happens all the time. Last semester, in a course on political ideologies of Europe, I was talking about communist ideology. Most of the American students have this conventional idea about communism being so deeply flawed and the cause of so much death and destruction in the world. There was a Hungarian student who said, ‘OK, I understand that, but let me tell you what attracted my grandparents to communism,’” she related.

Emilia Tjernstrom ’06, a native of Stockholm, Sweden, and graduate of the Red Cross Nordic UWC in Norway, worked with street children during the semester she studied in Morocco. An economics and math major, she is an activist in the Movement for Social Justice, a member of the Woodsmen’s Team, and manager of the annual springtime International Extravaganza. She spent the summer doing field research in Mongolia.

Tjernstrom, sporting ribbons opposing violence against women and supporting gay rights and wearing a keffiyeh scarf for Palestinian statehood around her neck, said she has learned much from her U.S. classmates. “Colby focuses a lot on the visible diversity, the things we can notice. There’s a lot of diversity within the Americans also, a lot I can learn from them. I’m from a socialist country. I take so many things for granted, being from Sweden. I just assume people are willing to give up [some] of their own consumption to make sure that the rest of society can have medical care. Here people have a very different perspective.”

French Department Expands Focus

Colby’s French Department has made the transition from focusing exclusively on the literature and culture of France to that of the wider French-speaking world. Professor Suellen Diaconoff, on the verge of retirement, switched her research interest from eighteenth century France to the writings of the modern Scheherazades of Morocco. “We call ourselves French studies right now. We have a very strong Francophone identity, which means that it’s all the countries where French is spoken. We run Jan [January] Plans to Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, where they speak French like in Paris but also Creole,” she said. “I also ran a Jan Plan to Morocco in 2001. We went out to Rabat, Casablanca, Fez to study women’s NGOs.”

The ranks of French majors have swelled to 50.

A Diversity of Experience on a Small Campus

Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, the Crawford Family Professor of Religion, teaches the religions of Asia including her own, Sikhism. Dressed in a bright silk sari, she said with a laugh, “In America I became more Indian. I had never worn a sari in my life” before leaving a convent school in India to attend Stuart Hall in Virginia and later Wellesley College. Her father was a Sikh writer and scholar.

Last year Singh was surprised and moved to come across a troupe of students dancing to Punjabi folk melodies she remembered from girlhood. The performance—mixing the classical Indian dance Bharat Natyam with modern dance—was choreographed by Julia Hutchinson ’07 after she returned from studying in India. 

Paul Josephson, associate professor of history and director of the Science, Technology and Society Program, is a Sovietologist and Russian expert who did his Ph.D. at MIT on the history of Soviet physics. The lanky Josephson, a marathon runner who trains 50 miles a week in sun, rain, or snow, is a zealot about the need for students to master the languages of the regions they study.

“I’m trying to learn Bulgarian myself. I’ve given up on Hungarian, but I can read Ukrainian, and I’m also teaching myself to read Polish,” said Josephson, who is fluent in Russian and German. “I explain to my students the importance of learning foreign languages as a ticket abroad, as a gateway to other cultures.”

Erica Hill ’05 from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, was an international studies and economics major who took every opportunity to internationalize her Colby education. Hill, who headed off to Peru a month after graduation for Peace Corps training, spent a semester in Thailand studying at Chiang Mai University and spent January 2005 in Guatemala researching her honors thesis on village banking systems. She also did an internship one summer in Japan.

“Colby has given me so many opportunities to do international things. I kind of think that’s how every college is now with globalization, but I realize it’s not,” said Hill.

Classmate Rodney Yeoh ’05, a UWC scholar from Itoh, Malaysia, was a finalist for Malaysia’s lone Rhodes Scholarship. He had to fly home to Kuala Lumpur over Thanksgiving 2004 for the interview.

Yeoh, whose father runs a hardware business, came to Colby with plans for medical school, but got captivated instead by religious studies. He studied Aboriginal religions in Australia for a semester as a junior, and now is pursuing a doctoral degree at Harvard Divinity School. His ambition? To become a documentary filmmaker exploring the connections between religions and violence.

President Adams said Colby is still figuring out how to draw its increasingly diverse student body—both the international students and U.S. minority students—fully into campus life and activities. 

That happens naturally in the classroom, “but in the broader zone of campus life we’re still trying to find out how you maximize the impact and the educational efficacy of having these interesting students with you. The melting pot doesn’t melt perfectly spontaneously.”
 

How international is Michigan State University? Many U.S. campuses have close ties with a myriad of academic institutions in other lands.  Michigan State  University (MSU) actually helped build universities in Brazil, Colombia, Japan, Nigeria, and Pakistan. Almost every U.S. college and university today sends students to study abroad. No public university sends greater numbers than Michigan State—2,385 in 2004-2005. MSU students can choose from more than 200 programs in 60 countries and on every continent, including Antarctica. By graduation, 28 percent of the students have studied abroad.  Today, it is not uncommon to find a dean or vice provost for international programs at major research universities. Michigan State created an Office of International Programs and appointed the first dean in 1956.

The nation’s land-grant pioneer—founded in 1855 as the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan, it was the model for the Morrill Act of 1862—now aspires to become what President Lou Anna Kimsey Simon calls the first “world grant” research university serving not only residents of Michigan’s 83 counties but people around the globe.

Internationalization As A Tool For Local Success

Michigan State’s passion for the international is all the more noteworthy considering the economic struggles that Michigan has endured with the decline of the U.S. auto industry. The percentage of the university’s revenues coming from taxpayers dropped from 52 percent in 1997 to 37 percent in 2006. With nearly 45,000 students and a deep commitment to affordability and accessibility, Michigan State has kept a tighter lid on tuition than any Big Ten campus.  It absorbed $66 million in cuts in the past five years, although it is close to the finish line of a $1.2 billion fundraising drive that boosted endowment and created five dozen new faculty positions.  Its tenure stream faculty remains below a peak in the 1980’s, but MSU’s leaders stress that the numbers now are growing once again. 

Michigan State’s stature is inextricably bound to its international activities, beginning with development work across Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s. Under legendary President John A. Hannah (1941–1969), it embraced a global mission even as its size and reputation burgeoned. It was the Michigan State College of Agriculture and Applied Sciences when Hannah succeeded his father-in-law as president; the red brick chimney of a furnace next to Spartan Stadium still bears the letters MSC. But it achieved university status in 1955 and became Michigan State University in 1964. Hannah led Michigan State into both the Big Ten and the Association of American Universities, the alliance of top research campuses. Later he ran the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). On the watch of Peter McPherson, Michigan State president from 1993 to 2004 and a former USAID administrator himself, the number of students studying abroad nearly tripled.  McPherson, a banker and one-time Peace Corps volunteer who chaired the Commission on the Abraham Lincoln Study Abroad Fellowship Program and is currently president of the National Association of State Universities and LandGrant Colleges, aspired for 40 percent to study abroad.

Simon said that as she travels people often ask, “Aren’t you running into a lot of resistance in your state?”

“Quite the contrary,” she tells them. Surveys show that “the people of Michigan do understand the value of study abroad. They understand that we have to compete in a global economy, and Michigan State University must play an important role in that.” Michigan State has a special obligation as a public institution to translate advances in knowledge into improvements in people’s lives so they see the globalized economy not as “an instrument of despair,” Simon said, but as a path toward a brighter future. 

At a sesquicentennial celebration on Sept. 8, 2005, Simon unveiled a strategic plan called “Boldness by Design” that set the goal of winning recognition as the world’s leading landgrant research university for the 21st  century by 2012, the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Act.  The university installed a 7-foot statue of Hannah outside the Administration Building that already bore his name, and a model of the Hannah statue is kept in the president’s conference room. 

Simon designated Michigan State’s internationalization as the special focus of a self-study the university did for the 2005 reaccreditation review by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. A faculty team produced a 268-page report analyzing the university’s international strengths and weaknesses. “In the 20th century, MSU built its international reputation, in part, through its involvement in the creation of new universities and colleges around the globe and its development work, and most recently on our expansive study abroad programs,” the self study said. “MSU’s international engagement in the 21st century will be based on equal, transparent, and reciprocal partnerships with host-country institutions.”

The bottom line, said Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs Kim A. Wilcox, is that “we have to be more purposeful about this.” Too often, added Wilcox, a  developmental speech acoustics scientist, Michigan State’s international ties rested on “the whim of the faculty. If somebody resigns or retires or leaves, the research program goes away because it was just them and their buddy in Rwanda. That’s not a sustainable presence.”

MSU’s leaders say they won’t squelch faculty curiosity or entrepreneurship, but want to concentrate energy and resources on such institutional strengths as food, health and security, and environmental studies. “I understand how this fits and how to do it,” said Simon, whose Ph.D. is in higher education administration.

She wants to forge a closer bond between Michigan State’s area studies centers and international institutes that concentrate on thematic issues, from business and development to education, health, and agriculture. The university recently opened an office in Beijing to coordinate projects and activities and to serve as its eyes and ears in that part of the world, much as it has an office in Washington, DC.

Development Partner in Africa, Asia, and Latin America

Michigan State is no longer in the bricks-andmortar business of building universities overseas as it did with the University of the Ryukus in Okinawa, Japan, in 1951 or the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 1960. But it is still deeply involved in development work across Africa, Asia, and Latin America through such programs as the Partnership for Food Industry Development (PFID) and the Partnership to Enhance Agriculture in Rwanda through Linkages (PEARL).

Following in the footsteps of botanist William J. Beal, who in the 1870s created the first hybrid corn, MSU scientists are helping small farmers from Nicaragua to Mozambique learn modern techniques to bring fresh fruits and vegetables to big city markets. PEARL has helped Rwandan farmers turn their finest Arabica coffee beans into a brew sold in Starbucks and other upscale java shops. In China, MSU runs a joint degree program in turfgrass management—and hopes that Beijing will install Michigan State turfgrass in its Olympic stadium as Athens did for the 2004 Games. “With our turfgrass,” said College of Agriculture and Natural Resources Dean Jeffrey D. Armstrong, “the opening ceremony activities can go on above and below ground level, and 36 hours later you can have a real sod playing field in place.”

The Rwandan project—also nurtured by USAID dollars— “started with just one coffee washing station. Now there are nearly 50,” said Dan Clay, the director of the Institute of International Agriculture. “We can’t even come close to the demand.” Agronomist Tim Schilling of Texas A&M University is the incountry director of the work in Rwanda, and Michigan State and Texas A&M both have trained faculty from the Université Nationale du Rwanda and the Institut des Sciences Agronomiques du Rwanda. Clay was in Rwanda directing an earlier MSU food security project when the civil war erupted in 1994. He and his family were safely evacuated, but 800,000 Rwandans—mostly Tutsis and moderate Hutus—were slain by Hutu militias during the four-month bloodbath.

The staff of the Institute of International Agriculture has doubled in size to 40 and its external funding has quadrupled to $10 million a year since Clay became director in 2000. “At MSU, the definition of what a university does is broad enough to include the Rwanda PEARL coffee,” he said.

Putting knowledge to practical use is what land-grant colleges do best. Scores of faculty in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources conduct research overseas, and 21 percent of  its students study overseas.

Jeffrey M. Riedinger, acting dean of International Studies and Programs and director of the Center for Advanced Study of International Development, said, “Michigan farmers say, ‘Hey, the Chinese are wiping out our apple juice market. Why are you over there helping them?’ And what we’ve done is take groups of Michigan farmers and the Farm Bureau to China or Chile and other countries and show them, no, we’re learning as much from them about advanced techniques and technologies and varieties as any information we’re communicating to them. Some of this is going to come back to the state in more resistant tree stock, new varieties, or improved practices.”

The creation of biofuels is one area where individuals from the United States can learn from other countries, said Riedinger, who has worked with peasants in the Philippines and China on land rights issues. “Our faculty coming back from Brazil and India and China say colleagues there are way ahead of us in some key areas in biofuels. Our foreign colleagues think it’s madness that we would grow corn—a food crop—to produce fuels.”  

Sherman Garnett, dean of James Madison College, Michigan State’s school for public policy majors, led the reaccreditation self-study on internationalization. He said, “Like any good place, we do a lot with little.” Garnett agrees that Michigan State must “be more strategic.” 

In African studies, for instance, Michigan State faculty are involved in dozens of important projects across the continent. That is appropriate for individual faculty, said Garnett, but as an institution “we can’t have dozens of windows in a region and give them equal emphasis, time, and support.”

The African Studies Center, founded in 1960, offers instruction in up to 30 African languages, several rarely taught anywhere else in the United States. With 165 Africanists on the faculty, Michigan State produces more Ph.D.s on Africa than any other institution. No other university offers more study abroad opportunities in Africa (18).  Michigan State, under then-President Clifton Wharton, in 1978 became the first U.S. university to divest holdings in companies with investments in South Africa in protest of apartheid. “We’re known as a pro-African place,” said David Wiley, director of the African Studies Center since 1977. 

At Michigan State it is possible to “go to no less than 14 different departments across this campus and get briefed on food safety,” said Mary Anne Walker, managing director of the Office of International Development, an office created in 2000 to secure more funding for global research and service projects.

Michigan State not only has microbiologists and toxicologists working on food safety, but sociologists and behavioral specialists as well seeking better ways to communicate about risks. Walker, who previously managed USAID civil society projects in Croatia, said Michigan State has 112 collaborative projects in 55 developing countries, with offices in 11 countries.

It was this practical, applied side of knowledge that attracted Yong Zhao to the faculty. Zhao, born in a farm village in China’s Sichuan Province, is a University Distinguished Professor of Educational Psychology and founding director of the Center of Teaching & Technology and the U.S.-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence. Training to become an English teacher, he devoured psychology textbooks left behind at his college by American professors. He came to the United States for graduate work, mastered Web technology and online education, and sped through a Ph.D. program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in two years. He has won several multi  million grants from federal agencies for research on technology in the classroom, as well as pilot experiments trying to bridge the best of Western and Eastern approaches to education. He helped set up computer club houses in middle schools across Michigan, and is overseeing bilingual classrooms in China and Michigan. “I believe in the idea of connecting to the needs of the people in education. A good scientist should be in the service of the community of the people,” said Zhao, who thinks the U.S. school reform movement worries too much about math and science scores and doesn’t appreciate how well U.S. schools foster creativity. 

Zhao, who recently became an U.S. citizen, said, “The whole state of Michigan needs to open up. Globalization and internationalization are here to stay. …We have to change. Kids from Michigan are in competition with kids from India and China as much as they are with kids from New York or the state next door.”

Leading in Study Abroad Among Public Universities

Michigan State has made it possible for students in almost any major to study abroad. But Garnett, who spearheaded the MSU selfstudy on internationalization, said, “If you look at the map of where our students go and you look at the map of where our research and development work is, they don’t overlap as much as we’d like. We want to bring those closer together.”

June Pierce Youatt, senior associate provost for undergraduate education and dean of undergraduate studies, said, “We work hard to integrate study abroad into our academic programs so that there’s a convenient way to do it. It doesn’t impede their progress toward a degree; it doesn’t make them stay a semester longer to graduate.” The bulk of Michigan State students study abroad during the summer on short-term programs, many led by MSU faculty and most taught in English. While the university recommends that entering freshman have taken at least two years of another language, Michigan State has no university-wide language requirement for graduation. The College of Arts and Letters and some programs, including a new Global and Area Studies major, do require language study.

Kathleen Fairfax, director of the Office of Study Abroad, said that at professional meetings, she sometimes senses a chill in the air when talking with counterparts from other universities. “They complain to me, ‘We don’t want to do study abroad the way you’re doing it. We don’t believe in short-term programs,’” Fairfax said. 

“They consider (summer programs) a lower level of study abroad.”

But then she encounters colleagues from other campuses “that want to be like us” and climb the Open Doors rankings, Fairfax added. Only New York University ranked ahead of Michigan State in the 2005 report produced by the Institute of International Education.

“We really feel the land-grant mission here at MSU. It permeates everything, including study abroad,” said Fairfax. “We want to make study abroad as accessible and affordable and open to as many students as possible, and we think everybody qualified to go should go.” 

Fairfax said the growth of study abroad at MSU reflects “a real partnership” between her office and staff of 23 and the colleges and academic departments that sponsor the programs. “Basically we have two levels of marketing going on. My office does the university-wide marketing—we publish the catalog, place ads in the student newspaper, put on study abroad fairs, and provide information at freshman orientation. But the colleges do the actual recruiting for specific programs,” Fairfax said. “Sometimes we hit them first, and then they hear it in class from their college. Eventually they hear it from somebody—and they go.”

In 2003, Fairfax’s office inaugurated Freshman Seminars Abroad, a two-week program open to all new students. They take place over two weeks in late July and early August, and take students in groups with MSU professors to such destinations as Québec City, Canada; Cork and Dublin, Ireland; Cape Town, South Africa; and Hikone, Japan. There was also a spring break seminar to Mérida, Mexico, in March 2006. The students receive two credits. The costs ranged from $1,000 for the Mexico and Québec trips to $2,900 for South Africa.

Rebecca Kapler of South Lyon, Michigan, who went on the Ireland seminar, said, “It was an experience to do it before you got on campus. I wasn’t even 18.” She is certain that she’ll study abroad again during her years at MSU.

Half the students in MSU’s Honors College study abroad, lured in part by $70,000 worth of scholarships that the college awards in $500 and $1,000 increments. Ronald C. Fisher, dean of the Honors College  and a professor of economics, said, “You can’t overestimate how important that experience is, even to honors students. We still have a lot of first-generation college students whose international experience (before coming to Michigan State) is often limited to Canada.”

Brian Forest, 21, a senior from Clinton Township, Michigan, double majoring in political science and Asian studies, used his nearly fluent Japanese as a guide at the 2005 World Exposition in Aichi, Japan, on an internship arranged through the Japan Center for Michigan Universities.

Forest, who switched to Japanese in high school after “running out of French classes,” said, “They do a really good job here of making it almost impossible not to study abroad. It’s hard to escape even if you wanted to. I got e-mails all the time from both the colleges I’m in promoting study abroad.” 

Michigan State’s Office for International Students and Scholars (OISS) attends to the welfare of 3,300 international students, more than half from Korea, China, India, Taiwan, and Japan, and 1,200 visiting scholars. The 2,200 international graduate students comprise 40 percent of MSU’s graduate population, while the 1,000 international undergraduates are 3.3 percent of undergraduate enrollment. The Colleges of Business (638), Natural Science (574), Engineering (519), and Arts and Letters (418) enrolled the largest number of international students in fall 2005. 

The OISS was an early adopter of new technology to speed the processing of student visas and forms for the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS).

Peter Briggs, director of OISS, called his office “a poster child for change. The technology allowed us to become so efficient we’ve been able to collapse a position and refocus on our connection to the community and our educational mission.”

Michigan State saw an overall decrease of 22 international students—0.7 percent—in fall 2005. Some had feared a much larger drop when the number of applications fell. Karen Klomparens, associate provost for graduate education and dean of the Graduate School, said, “I told my colleagues, ‘You need to look at who’s dropping off the application pool. It’s the bottom 25 percent, not the top.’”

The speed with which Briggs’ shop handled the paperwork for visas also helped, said Klomparens, a botanist and product of MSU. “We have the reputation of getting our paperwork out the door very quickly. We FedEx lots of stuff all over the globe to make sure it gets to international students. We’ve had students tell us that sometimes they decided to go to the first place that got them the forms they needed to apply for their visa because it showed that (the university) cared,” said Klomparens.

MSU CIBER’s global EDGE

Tomas M. Hult, director of Michigan State’s Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER), deploys half of his staff of 30 on a single, monumental task: updating the thousands of links on Michigan State’s encyclopedic international business portal to the Web called globalEDGE™ at http://globaledge.msu.edu/ibrd. “If you type in ‘international business’ on any search engine, we will come up No. 1,” boasted Hult. The site gets 3.7 million page hits a month and offers resources from the complete CIA World Factbook to 45 online course modules about export regulations and licensing rules to up-to-the-minute news from around the world. “We’re one-stop shopping for everything you want to know about international business,” said Hult, a native of Sweden who earned his Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Memphis.

His office also hosts the Web hub for all 30 of the nation’s Title VI B-funded CIBERs. Hult and Irem Kiyak, associate director, even trot out a roulette wheel with flags from dozens of countries for prizes at study abroad fairs. The MSU CIBER was founded in 1990 by S. Tamer Cavusgil, a global international marketing scholar from Turkey who holds an endowed chair at the MSU Eli Broad School of Business and retains the title of executive director of the CIBER.

Learning Fluid Dynamics in Volgograd

The MSU College of Engineering sends 70 students for five weeks each summer to study in Volgograd, Russia; it is MSU’s largest study abroad program. The college also sends students on exchanges and other programs to England, France, Italy, Germany, and Australia. The classes in the non–English-speaking countries are taught by MSU faculty or local professors of engineering who speak English. “We wouldn’t have a market for courses not taught in English for our students. There’s just not enough language strength,” said Thomas F. Wolff, associate dean for undergraduate studies. “Inside the classroom, once you close the door, dynamics is dynamics. It’s the same all over the world,” he added.

Spartan engineers learn early how international their future profession has become. “Engineering probably has the most international faculty in the university. We have large numbers of professors from all over the world—India, China, Korea, and Eastern and Western Europe,” said Wolff, a civil engineer. “They are collaborating every day with colleagues all over the world.” With the United States producing 65,000 engineers a year and countries in Asia on a path to produce 1 million, the students understand that they will be operating in a world with intense competition.

“Routine, well-defined engineering work, such as doing stress analysis on a valve with three-D computer models, can easily be done by good engineers for a third of the price on the other side of the world and be back the next day,” said Wolff. “What the U.S. has been good at is integration and innovation. If you’re going to outsource a large part of your work, there have to be bright people at the top figuring out what to outsource, what to do with the results, and how you’re going to put all that together.”

Area Studies Centers

In addition to African Studies, Michigan State has area studies centers that concentrate on Asia, Canada, Latin America, Europe, and Russia.  It operates several thematic institutes that work across regions and focus on agriculture, business, education, health, international development, and development issues that affect women. Even before the reaccreditation review, the university was seeking better coordination of their activities. 

Michael Lewis, director of the Asian Studies Center, said MSU teaches a full range of Asian languages, including three years of Korean and two years of Hindi and Vietnamese. It offered instruction in Khmer, the language of Cambodia, in fall 2006 for the first time. “We’re growing like crazy in language and other center initiatives,” said Lewis, an East Asian historian. 

Michigan State’s national resource centers secured a federal grant and funding from thenProvost Simon in 2002 to launch the “e-LCTL Initiative” under which Title VI centers in 120 universities work together to coordinate which less commonly taught languages they teach. 

“It’s a boom period for the Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL),” said David K. Prestel, chair of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages. Margo Glew, coordinator of the LCTL Program, said, “We’ve nearly doubled the number of languages available for instruction at MSU.” 

Still, champions of international education at Michigan State want to see the university do more on this front. Jenny Bond, acting assistant dean of international studies and programs and an emerita professor of human nutrition, said the next frontier for MSU“is more foreign language” and finding ways to further internationalize the education of students who do not study abroad. It is a task made easier by an unusual spirit of collaboration on the East Lansing campus, said Bond. “That’s the real secret (to MSU’s internationalization). There are just no boundaries.”

Dawn Pysarchik, associate dean of international studies and programs, said the provost had provided $100,000 to revitalize a program called Internationalizing Student Life. The program dates back to 1990, but had flagged in recent years because “it was not connected to the academic side of the institution,” said Pysarchik, a professor in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences.  “It was food, fun, and festivals. We discovered it couldn’t be just that. It has to have roots in the academic part of students’ careers as well as their cocurricular lives.”

MSU’s emphasis on international activities is strongly supported by the eight-member, elected Board of Trustees. Board chairman David Porteous said that in President Hannah’s day, “I’m sure many people felt he was pushing the envelope too far, but he turned a small, regional school into a great research university, and the international dimension was a critical component of that.”

Porteous, an attorney from Reed City, Michigan, credits McPherson and Simon with building on Hannah’s legacy. “I’m very proud that with all the challenges we have economically here in the state of Michigan—some of the toughest in the history of the state—our university is not turning inward and putting walls up; we’re doing just the opposite,” said Porteous, who sang in the Russian choir during his college days. 

Michigan State elevated John K. Hudzik, dean of international studies and programs from 1995 to 2004, to vice president for global engagement and strategic projects. Provost Wilcox described Hudzik’s job as “masterminding intellectual capital on thinking about the world in the same way we thought about” plant science and veterinary medicine in the past.

Hudzik, a political scientist, said, “We need collaborators and partners. We can’t afford to do everything on our own.” Hudzik and Wilcox led an MSU delegation to leading Thai universities last January. “Our partners abroad are world-class institutions. There was a time when some did not think of them in that way, but they certainly are now,” said Hudzik.Wilcox said that in meeting with Thai academics, he was struck by the similarity of the challenges they face, including improving higher education, meeting environmental challenges, and responding to the threat of avian influenza.

“Thailand does not need from us people who’ve studied Thailand their whole lives. They’ve got lots of people who understand Thailand already,” said Wilcox, who is also a product of MSU’s Honors College. Likewise, “our Chinese partners aren’t looking for Chinese culture experts from us. They want engineers, they want physicians, they want plant scientists and water scientists.”

In a February 2005 speech marking Michigan State’s sesquicentennial, President Simon asked rhetorically, “Who would have imagined 150 years ago that an experiment that began with a tiny class in a rough-hewn building carved out of a forest … would become the global prototype of a genuinely American brand of higher education—one that is an engine of the economy, a force for the democratization of public learning, the model for engagement with the world beyond the campus, and a catalyst for improving the quality of life in Michigan and around the world?”

Simon added, “Just as the establishment of the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan gave impetus to the work of Justin Morrill to create the land-grant system to prepare for the 20th century, let us work together to create … the next bold experiment: the land-grant university for the world.”

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Michigan State University

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Many liberal arts colleges and universities founded in colonial times and the century after U.S. independence jettisoned their founders’ religiosity, but not Earlham College. Earlham is the proud bearer of a Quaker heritage in Indiana that began after farmers who could no longer abide slavery migrated from North Carolina to the Northwest Territory in the early 1800s. Soon the Quaker population of Richmond, Indiana, rivaled Philadelphia’s. The Indiana Friends in 1847 established a boarding school that a dozen years later became Earlham College—named for the home of a prominent Quaker minister in England and pronounced with a silent h (like Durham).

Earlham is still imbued with Quakerism. The 100-member faculty makes decisions not by vote but by seeking consensus on issues small and large. Their biweekly meetings in unadorned Stout Meetinghouse are led not by the president or deans, but by a clerk of the faculty chosen by his or her peers. President Doug Bennett also presides over a Quaker seminary, the Earlham School of Religion. Upwards of a quarter of the faculty and 15 percent of the students are Quakers, although those are only estimates. Len Clark, provost and academic dean, once tried to count the Quakers on the faculty for the board of trustees. “But when you say, ‘Now, are you actually a Quaker?’ Quakers tend to answer not ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ but ‘Why would you want to know that?’” Clark said. “It’s sort of like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: The numbers change if you try to count them. I gave up.” 

A former president, Tom Jones, once described Earlham as “a cross between a Friends meeting and a scientific laboratory.” It sends graduates in large numbers on to Ph.D.s in biology, the life sciences, and sociology, as well as other fields. The number of languages it teaches is not extensive, but large numbers of students achieve proficiency in Spanish, French, German, or Japanese. It recently added classes in Arabic, and offers Latin and ancient Greek as well. Every student must demonstrate command of a second language as a prerequisite for graduation.

The newest major is Comparative Languages and Linguistics, requiring advanced study in at least two languages and study abroad. It is an institution engaged in what Bennett calls “a full court press on internationalization,” from the emphasis on study abroad to international material threaded throughout the curriculum. “It’s not just in the French department and the history department, it’s everywhere,” said Bennett.

Earlham boasts a daring array of semesterlong study abroad opportunities that entice most of the 1,200 undergraduates to other parts of the world. To this experience some students add a May term. Earlham offered a semester-long program in Jerusalem from 1982 to 2000, when strife in the Middle East and a State Department travel advisory forced it into hiatus; the college hopes to restart the program in Amman, Jordan. Civil unrest also forced Earlham to relocate a signature program from Kenya to Tanzania in 20032004. Other off-the-beaten-path study abroad choices include:

• Northern Ireland. An exploration of the long religious and social conflict in Northern Ireland. Students stay with families in Belfast and Derry and learn the history of “the Troubles” as well as the politics and culture of the six Ulster counties that remained under British rule when the Republic of Ireland gained independence in 1921.

• U.S.-Mexico Border. Students electing this program, located in the neighboring cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, are immersed in learning how such critical issues as immigration, free trade, human rights, and the environment play out in the border region. 

• South Asia. Launched in 2005, this ambitious program takes students to Chennai, India, and Kandy, Sri Lanka, to study economics, culture, and conflicts on the subcontinent. 

• Japan. Studies in Cross-Cultural Education (SICE) program sends students each fall to study Japanese at Iwate University in Morioka and assist in local middle and high school English classrooms. Upon graduation, many SICE students return to northern Japan as assistant English teachers. Earlham’s program served as a model for the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program. 

More than 70 percent of Earlham students study abroad. All must fulfill requirements in domestic and international diversity, and Earlham’s 45 majors and minors include more than a dozen interdisciplinary programs, from Peace and Global Studies to Latin American Studies to minors in Jewish Studies and in Quaker Studies.

Patricia Lamson, director of the International Programs Office, credits faculty curiosity with helping grow Earlham’s garden of international offerings. “They like to create and do with students, because we are a teaching college. Teaching is our priority,” said Lamson. A change in the academic calendar seven years ago left room for a mini-term in May. Faculty quickly realized they could take these classes overseas “and—boom!—just like that, it exploded,” she said. “They range from studying Papiamento in Curacao to weaving and arts in Turkey.” Her husband, Howard Lamson, a professor of Spanish, inaugurated Earlham’s semester-long study abroad program to Mexico back in 1972. Now the faculty couple take students each May to Cuautla, Mexico, for immersion classes at an Earlham-owned facility called Casa Sol. They also work with students who spend a semester there or in the border program.

Music professor Dan Graves was a junior faculty member when he showed up in Lamson’s office in 1987 and volunteered to lead the spring semester in London. “Patty laughed and said, ‘The waiting list is six years. But have a seat and tell me: If you could go anywhere in the world and lead a program, where would it be?’” recalled Graves. “I had never been out of the United States, but I’m a musician so I said, ‘I’d like to go to Vienna.’”

He led the first choral group to the Austrian capital in 1988 and has since taken Earlham’s sopranos, altos, and baritones half a dozen times to study German and sing in the city’s great cathedrals. “Why anybody would trust somebody who had spent the last 13 years teaching in a small high school in Connecticut to get something going in Vienna is beyond me. But there’s that kind of trust,” said Graves.

Earlham’s Kenya program was begun in 1978 by a couple in the biology department. Another faculty couple, Brent Smith—professor of biology—and Nancy Taylor—an assistant professor of art and reference librarian—inherited the mantle and have taken students to Kenya five times and to Tanzania once for full semesters. Smith also has led students to the Galapagos and Ecuador, and Taylor has taken a May class to Turkey to study weaving. Their two sons grew up accustomed to spending every third autumn in Africa. When the boys reached high school age, “I remember asking them, ‘Do you guys want to go back?’” Taylor said. “The answer was, ‘Oh, yeah. That’s what makes our family cool.’”

Sara Penhale, science librarian and associate professor of biology, is also a seasoned Africa hand, having led Earlham students to Kenya and Tanzania four times and organized multiple safaris for alumni and others. Her husband, Allan M. Winkler, a Distinguished Professor of History at Miami University in Ohio, chronicled in the March-April 2005 International Educator the experience of helping 11 Earlham students scale 19,340foot Mount Kilimanjaro in 2003. Penhale says that before embarking on her first Kenya trip, “I felt I could do it because Patty Lamson said, ‘Of  course you can do it.’… I love the way that office runs and their attitude. They are supportive and nonbureaucratic.”

Rajaram Krishnan, an associate professor of economics who specializes in development and the environment, signed up for a faculty development trip to Japan in 2001 funded by the Freeman Foundation. He recalls going to Chuck Yates (director of the Institute for Education on Japan) and expressing doubts that he would “do anything meaningful related to Japan in my professional life.’ And Chuck said, ‘Freeman has given us this grant to open people’s minds, so come along.’” Two years later, Krishnan put the experience to use in a new course on the political economy of South and Southeast Asia, and in 2005 inaugurated Earlham’s first study abroad semester to his native India.

Krishnan also directed the Kenya program in 2002. His interest in the environment made it a good fit, but the economist also felt like he was “following a template, because the Kenya program had been around for 25 years. There were things I would have done differently.” He once had counseled his wife Subha, a special education teacher, to stop talking about things she would do differently and become a principal herself. She did so with great success. “So the advice I gave my wife, I finally gave myself: If you think you’re all that bright, why don’t you put together a program of your own? It seemed to me the natural place to do that was South Asia,” the economist said.

Krishnan wanted his program open to all students. He also realized that to operate yearly, it could not depend on the availability or specialty of a single professor. “I wanted to make sure it was an Earlham program, and not a Rajaram program,” he said. He went through the course catalog and found 40 courses that could be taught at the women’s college in Chennai that serves as the program’s base, and he “roped in three colleagues willing to come along for the ride” and lead the program in subsequent years.

Bennett, a political philosopher, said the roots of Earlham’s internationalism stretch back more than a century, when Earlham graduates ventured out as teachers and missionaries to the Middle East and Japan. “We have been receiving students from the Friends School in Ramallah since the 19th century,” said Bennett. The college also has long ties to the Friends School in Tokyo. At the end of World War II, Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, who spent two years at Earlham before transferring to West Point, was serving as senior aide to General Douglas MacArthur. The story is told by Landrum Bolling, president emeritus of Earlham, that it was a conversation with the U.S. wife of the headmaster of the Friends School that convinced Fellers—and through him, MacArthur—that the United States should treat Emperor Hirohito with respect, not as a war criminal.

Earlham was one of several Midwest colleges that enrolled Japanese-American students during World War II who otherwise would have been interned with their families in camps in the Western United States. After the war, Earlham’s Quaker leaders “looked at one another and said, ‘Somebody has to start the work of reconciliation with Japan. Why shouldn’t it be Earlham?’” said Bennett. Its Japanese Studies program was built by the late Jackson H. Bailey, an alumnus and protégé of the famed Harvard scholar Edwin O. Reischauer. Reischauer journeyed monthly to Richmond to give a faculty seminar while Earlham set up its Asian studies program in the 1950s with support from the Ford Foundation. Earlham developed an exchange that still flourishes with Waseda University, a prestigious private institution in Tokyo.

Bolling, president from 1957 to 1973, remembers a conversation with Reischauer about whether Earlham could offer Japanese studies without teaching the language. “He said, ‘If you’re serious about this program, you have to teach the language. Just do it.’” Reischauer, who later served as ambassador to Japan during the Kennedy administration, confessed an ulterior motive: his Harvard program was losing half its graduate students because they could not master Japanese. It would be better for Harvard—and for East Asian scholarship—if Earlham helped promising students get a head start on the language. Earlham today offers nearly two dozen courses in its Japanese Studies major, and 15 more in its Japanese Language and Linguistics minor. It also runs student exchanges between Waseda and the 26 campuses belonging to the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) and the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM).

Bolling, the 93-year-old president emeritus and director at large for Mercy Corps, the international humanitarian agency, has been deeply involved in the search for peace in the Middle East for decades. During the Carter administration, he served as a back channel of communications with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Yasser Arafat years before the United States recognized the PLO.

The Organic Growth of Earlham’s International Side

“A lot of things have grown here not by plan, but by kind of organic logic,” said Bennett, a Quaker.  “The same spirit of exploration and commitment that led us into Japan has led us into lots of other places; not everywhere. But the organic quality of the growth of our international commitment means it’s deeper and sturdier than it might have been if it had been top down in response to some grand plan.” As an example of Earlham’s “organic” growth, consider how its international enrollments grew from 3 percent in 1997 to 10 percent by 2004. It did not happen by chance, but it did not happen by decree, either. 

Under the leadership of Jeff Rickey, the dean of admissions and financial aid, the admissions office began actively recruiting more international students. Senior Associate Dean Musa Khalidi was given a budget to travel around the world and entrusted to award as many halftuition scholarships as he saw fit to deserving international students, in addition to two full scholarships. 

“Ninety-eight percent of the international students receive financial aid,” said Khalidi, who graduated from Bethlehem University in the West Bank before earning a master’s degree from the University of Notre Dame. He laughed when asked if applicants are surprised to find a Palestinian Muslim in a senior admissions post at a Quaker college in Indiana.

“It really does not come as a shock to many people. With the way Quakers approach their day-to-day life and education, it’s a very, very normal and natural thing,” he said. “Students and families sometimes find it exciting to hear a different accent and find a different cultural and religious background in Richmond, Indiana.”

Khalidi met his future wife, Kelley LawsonKhalidi, the associate director of Earlham’s international programs office, when the Earlham alumna was leading the Jerusalem program in 1991 and he was teaching her students. She speaks Arabic, French, and Spanish, advises international students, and works closely with international faculty.

Both believe that personal attention is one reason international students are drawn to Earlham in growing numbers. “Some schools think it’s a matter of creating a financial aid policy, and when you implement that, you are going to find (more) international students coming to your institution. It’s really not that easy,” said Khalidi. “Kelley and I are on the phone on a daily basis talking about international students. International families appreciate knowing that there is a person they can call and say, ‘Can you tell me what’s happening with my daughter? I can tell she is homesick; she’s not happy.’

“And when they hear that Kelley has already met with their daughter, they really love that,” he said. “It pays off because if a family is happy, they are going to spread the word. …When they send their son or daughter to a place like Earlham, they don’t have many worries.”

Khalidi, director of international student admissions, makes a half-dozen recruiting trips a year. When he made a presentation on international students at a faculty retreat in August 2005, he received an ovation. “The clapping and the joy and the happiness would energize anybody” to recruit even harder, he said.

Khalidi has recruited several students from the global network of United World Colleges (UWC). They receive $10,000 scholarships from philanthropist Shelby Davis to attend Earlham. The 10 UWC campuses—two-year residential schools offering the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum—annually attract hundreds of outstanding students with demonstrated leadership skills from dozens of countries. One of the most impressive of the Davis Scholars is Jawad Sepehri Joya, who overcame polio, poverty, and the repressive Taliban regime to make a new life for himself in his native Kabul, Afghanistan.

Joya, 21, a sociology and anthropology major, was taken under wing by an Italian physician when Joya’s family brought him to a Red Cross rehabilitation facility in Kabul seeking a replacement for a broken wheelchair. The doctor recognized a spark in the boy and arranged for tutoring. Joya mastered not only languages but computer skills, and the Red Cross soon hired the 13-year-old to help with interpretation and to keep its computers running. He wound up at the United World College in Trieste, Italy, before choosing Earlham over several scholarship offers. 

The charismatic Joya these days bounds around campus in a motorized wheelchair. He has represented Earlham at the annual Japan-America Student Conference. Two U.S. senators offered him internships last summer, although his first trip home to Afghanistan in nearly four years forced Joya to postpone taking up that opportunity. Joya does see a stint in Washington, DC, in his future and proudly calls himself “the model of a global citizen.”

Earlham attracts more than the usual share of students determined to save the world. Many wind up pursuing service-oriented careers. John Howell, a Harvard-educated professor of physics, said, “I remember going to my 25th reunion [at Harvard] and hearing former classmates talk about the money they made in their law firm and how successful they were in whatever. Two weeks later there was an Earlham reunion and I was hearing students talk about the work they’d done in improving agriculture in Mali and Teach for America. It was such a different orientation of what constitutes success.”

‘The Ethos of Quakerism’

Loren Pope, author of Colleges That Change Lives: Forty Schools You Should Know About, once wrote about Earlham: “If every college and university sharpened young minds and consciences as effectively as Earlham does, this country would approach Utopia.”

Robert Johnstone, a professor of political science, said Earlham’s Quakerism differs from other colleges’ religious affiliations. “This is not a Baptist school in the sense that Baylor University is, it’s not an Ohio Wesleyan. But the ethos of Quakerism pervades the place, the emphasis on social justice, on conflict resolution, on simplicity. In so many ways, the spirit of Quakerism abides here and always has” even though most of the faculty are not Quakers, said Johnstone.

Earlham offers a major in Peace and Global Studies and a minor in Quaker studies. The chair of Peace and Global Studies, Caroline Higgins, recently found herself on conservative academic gadfly David Horowitz’s list of “the 101 most dangerous academics in America,” along with Noam Chomsky, Derrick Bell, Angela Davis, Bernardine Dohrn, and others. Horowitz told the Palladium-Item, Richmond’s newspaper, that Earlham needs a professor of military science to balance what students are taught in Higgins’ classes.

The Quaker school has no professor of military science, of course. Higgins is a diminutive 66year-old who led students to Argentina in May 2006 to visit factories occupied and run by workers and to spend three weeks in Rosario, described in a class flyer as “a city characterized by radical participatory democracy and civic education.” InsideHigherEd.com, an online daily, featured Higgins in a story about Horowitz’s book. She told Scott Jaschik, the editor, that there were only a small number of campuses where pacifist views like hers are tolerated. “If I’m dangerous, it’s because education is dangerous,” she added.

In an interview in her office, dominated by a flaming orange-and-red mural of mythological scenes painted by a Mexican artist during a year at Earlham as a Fulbright scholar, Higgins said that in her classes, “We talk not only about conflict but solutions. We look for places where things are going well, and we try to hold up examples of where peace works and violence doesn’t.”

One of her colleagues, Plowshare Professor of Peace Saoud El Mawla, got stuck in his homeland of Lebanon when war erupted in July 2006 between Hezbollah militants and Israel. El Mawla, who encountered prolonged difficulties securing a U.S. visa when Earlham hired him three years ago, had gone home to Beirut to visit family and renew his visa.

The Islamic civilization scholar told InsideHigherEd’s Jaschik in an interview by email, “This is my first war as a peace studies professor, but not as an activist and militant for peace and justice. … The war brings us to real life and puts us before the human sufferings, hopes and tears. We have to stay firm in our convictions, to spread hope, to build networks of solidarity and action trying to stop the war and to make peace. It is very, very hard but we cannot do anything else.”

Aletha Stahl, associate professor of French and Francophone Studies, helped establish a semester-long program in Martinique andhas led students to Haiti several times on May terms. She led 18 students to France in fall 2005 on a program that starts with language classes in Nantes, the port city in Brittany, then moves to the Pyrenees where students spend two weeks living and working with artisans before finishing the semester in Paris. Stahl said Earlham typically graduates three to five French majors a year.

A growing number of students are majoring in Comparative Languages and Linguistics. “We’re all finding that it’s harder even to remember who are ‘our’ majors,” said Kathleen Taylor, professor of Spanish and Hispanic Studies. “With all kinds of students interested (in languages) across majors, we don’t necessarily call them ours anymore.”

Taylor has led students to Curaçao twice, taught Papiamento during the regular term, and is preparing an online textbook of the language. When she started learning Papiamento herself, “I had no idea I would have any use for it.  It’s turned out to have a lot more than I expected. The first time I taught it I had 16 in the class, and nine went with me to Curaçao on the May term. Last year I had 26 in the class and 13 went on the May term.”

“One of the things that keeps us alive intellectually is that we keep opening new doors and exploring new things,” said Taylor, who has led Earlham’s semester program to central Mexico five times. “We are expert learners and that’s a good model for our students.” Welling Hall, professor of politics and international studies, said international students are drawn in large numbers to her international studies classes. Earlham offers scholarships to students from Seeds of Peace, a camp in Maine for teens from conflicted regions of the world, including the Middle East, the Balkans and Cyprus, and Earlham students often work there as counselors.

Hall advises the Model United Nations Club, which hosts a major competition each spring for high school students from across Indiana. Hall was skeptical when two international students approached her a few years back with the idea of having the high schoolers deal with a scenario in which a meteor had wiped out much of North America, with survivors’ forced to seek refuge in the southern hemisphere. They recruited an Earlham physics professor to lecture on meteor strikes, and the science fiction scenario for a futuristic U.N. was a big success.

Applications to Earlham have climbed, but increased selectivity carries a price. Clark, the provost, said, “Increasingly we’re having to turn away students that we are pretty sure would succeed and flourish there. We are still thinking through how to adjust to that.” 

Bennett notes with pride that one-fifth of Earlham students qualify for federal Pell Grants (the average family income for those need-based awards is $15,000). “We’re a higher-need student body than most of our competitors. We love that. The value added we do for the world is huge,” said Bennett.

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Earlham College

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When U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings delivered the commencement speech at Miami Dade College in May 2008, she hailed the famous community college as “the largest and most diverse college in the nation—and probably in the world.” Miami Dade enrolled more than 58,000 students in fall 2007 and 32,000 other noncredit students. It awards more associate degrees than any other U .S . college and claims the largest enrollment of Hispanics and black students. It changed its name from Miami Dade Community College to Miami Dade College in 2003 when it began offering bachelor of education degrees.

Despite the switch, it remains primarily a community college. In 2007 it awarded 45 of those bachelor’s degrees—and 6,500 associate degrees. Spellings, who also received an honorary degree (as both President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush had before her), said in her address, “Everywhere I go, across our nation, and around the world, I meet people who are trying to achieve what this college has done and is doing. Last summer, your president Eduardo Padrón joined me on a delegation of university presidents to Latin America. We held up Miami Dade College as a model of how to help more people access a college education.” Padrón is a Miami Dade alumnus who emigrated from Cuba at the age of 15 in 1961, the year after Dade County Junior College opened on a World War II U.S. Naval air station north of Miami in quarters so modest that it earned the nickname “Chicken Coop College.” It was Florida’s first integrated community college and quickly grew to become the largest institution of higher education in the state.

Globally Themed Arts and Literature

Miami Dade says its mission “is to provide accessible, affordable, high quality education by keeping the learner’s needs at the center of decision-making and working in partnership with its dynamic, multicultural community.” It backs up those words with an array of activities that have both internationalized the curriculum and enriched the cultural life of perhaps the most international city in the United States. Padrón has personally played a large part in helping the institution fulfill this mission. He has been Miami Dade’s president since 1995 and before that led the downtown Wolfson campus for 15 years. At Wolfson, he played a pivotal role in the birth of the Miami Book Fair International, which brings hundreds of authors and attracts several hundred thousand visitors during its eight-day run each November, culminating with a colorful street fair on the Wolfson campus. More recently, Miami Dade became the principal sponsor of the Miami International Film Festival—11 days of film premieres, lectures, and red-carpet events that attract film directors and stars from Hollywood and around the world, with a special emphasis on the filmmakers of Spain and Latin America. It is the only major film festival affiliated with an institute of higher education.

Vivian Donnell Rodriguez, a veteran Miami arts administrator who became Miami Dade’s vice provost for Cultural Affairs in 2007, said, “It is second nature to all of us to create programs that are diverse, because that’s what our community is. They reflect the people that live here. These are our audiences. It’s a very natural result. You see it when you walk through the halls of our campuses and see the interchanges and hear the languages. This isn’t something that we have to go out of our way to do. It has to happen this way.”

Both the book fair and the film festival complement what the college calls its “living arts curriculum” of globally themed arts and literature programs, including master classes taught by visiting artists and opportunities for Miami Dade students to dance, sing, and perform on tours that in the last year alone took them to the Dominican Republic, Italy, Taiwan, and other distant stages. “We are very proud of our students, for they have demonstrated that higher education can be a model for international cooperation and understanding. Our academic excellence is rooted in our respect for the diverse origins and traditions of our students and faculty,” Padrón says. 

The Miami Book Fair International, which began as a two-day street fair in 1984 called “Books by the Bay,” has grown into the largest book fair in the country. Local booksellers and librarians conceived the fair as a way to convince publishers to send more authors on book tours to Miami. They approached Padrón and asked for his help. He liked the idea, having seen firsthand how book fairs had become “signature cultural events” in Barcelona, Spain, and Buenos Aires, Argentina. 

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Miami had nothing like it at the time. He agreed to put up $75,000 and host the book fair on the Wolfson campus. “It immediately touched a nerve in our community. Miami draws all kinds of events and conventions geared towards tourists, but this event was ‘for us, by us.’ The book fair is open to everyone and draws people from all walks of life, all united by the written word. People had been waiting for something like this,” said the president, an economist by training.

Today the book fair’s annual budget tops $1 million, with local governments, foundations, businesses, and other sponsors absorbing most costs, and 1,500 volunteers—mostly Miami Dade faculty, administrators, staff, and students—pitching in. Alina Interián, executive director of the college’s Florida Center for the Literary Arts and longtime book fair impresario, said, “We pride ourselves in having created a very successful formula that has been emulated by a number of communities around the United States.” Miami Dade runs ads for the event in Publisher’s Weekly and The New York Times Book Review. The literary lions who have read and lectured at Miami Dade during the fair include 11 Nobel Laureates (from Saul Bellow to Toni Morrison to Octavio Paz to Derek Walcott) and more than 50 Pulitzer Prize winners (from John Updike to Rita Dove to Miami’s own humorist, Dave Barry). While there is a modest admission charge ($5) to the colorful, three-day street fair at the end of the week-long celebration, all the author lectures are free. A parallel program in Spanish draws Ibero-American authors and poets from Latin America and Spain as well as Brazil, Portugal, and the Caribbean. “But the fair is hardly limited to these countries. Authors have traveled to the fair from Israel, Russia, Ireland, England, Italy, Canada, Nigeria, Congo, and more,” said Padrón. 

“Authors have traveled to the fair from Israel, Russia, Ireland, England, Italy, Canada, Nigeria, Congo, and more.”

Miami Dade stepped in to sponsor the glittering Miami International Film Festival (MIFF) in 2004 when Florida International University bowed out. The budget for the Miami International Film Festival tops $2 million, but the college has a gold-plated list of partners, American Airlines, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Miami Herald among them. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation also has put up three $25,000 prizes for the best films. Originally, the film festival was confined to the former Olympia Theater, a silent movie palace and vaudeville theater built in 1926 to look like a Moorish castle. Maurice Gusman, a business magnate and philanthropist, saved the theater from demolition and donated it to the city in 1975. It was restored and placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984 and has undergone further restorations in recent years as the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts. But MIFF has outgrown the Gusman. With 166 films from 54 countries, including 10 world premieres, movies were screened at seven venues around greater Miami and Miami Beach at the 10-day festival in March 2008. More than 75,000 people attended the screenings, talks, and related events in 2008. The film festival reflects the college’s commitment “to arts, to culture, and to the community,” said Vivian Donnell Rodriguez, the college’s vice provost for Cultural Affairs. “Obviously our mission is one of education, but we do that in a variety of ways, not only through classes and continuing education, but through all these cultural programs as well.”

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Extending Beyond the Campus

Miami Dade also imbues international arts into the curriculum through two complementary initiatives: the Cultura del Lobo Performance Series and the Center for Cultural Collaborations International. Cultura del Lobo, meaning Culture of the Wolf, was a play on the name of the downtown campus, Wolfson. It began in 1990 with the aim of bringing to campus “the newest, most-challenging performing art being created today with a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean and work that is reflective of our multi-ethnic community,” according to the college’s Cultural Affairs Department. The Center for Cultural Collaborations International was launched six years later to commission new works and support international artists who come to Miami for residencies during which they would create, perform, and teach master classes about their work, said Jennylin Duany, the center’s residency and education coordinator. An early grant from the Ford Foundation provided seed money for the center’s international initiatives. 

Each year more than 12,000 students and other Miami residents attend the more than 100 performances and master classes put on by the dancers, actors, and others artists that the college brings in. Latin and Caribbean arts and culture are richly represented, but so are other cultures and regions. Last season, among the featured artists were the Spanish Harlem Orchestra, the Urban Bush Women (from Brooklyn, New York) performing with Senegal’s all-male Compagnie Jant-Bi, and a dance troupe from Belgium, Compagnie Thor, making its American debut with a show called “D’Orient” choreographed by Thierry Smits that paid homage to the world of the Middle East. In all, 40 artists performed at venues across Dade County and held 150 master classes, taught both at Miami Dade College, its New World School of the Arts, and in local public schools. While the general public pays up to $52 for a seat at some of these concerts and performances, Miami Dade College students and staff pay only $5. Teatro Prometeo, founded in the early 1970s to preserve and promote Hispanic culture through theater, in 2006 became part of the Florida Center for the Literary Arts. It sent students to perform at Casa Teatro in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in December 2006. Miami Dade College students regularly perform on other international stages as well. In summer 2007 the Hard Bob Jazz Ensemble played at the Umbria Jazz Festival in Italy, while dancers from the New World School of the Arts performed in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

In recent years the college has been sending representatives of the Miami International Film Festival each summer to mount a four-day, abbreviated version of the festival in Latin America, drawing local filmmakers, professors, and students to the screenings and events. This year “MIFF Abroad,” as it is called, went to Mexico, and past programs have been held in Chile and Colombia.

Book Fair-Cum-Literary Festival

The 25th Miami Book Fair International, scheduled for the second week of November 2008, will be held on the Wolfson campus just in advance of International Education Week. Padrón sees the book fair as “an invaluable opportunity for our students. Many of the authors arrive prior to their presentation and stay afterward to attend classes and interact with students in an intimate setting. The book fair provides the authors’ books to the particular classes in advance, and the students prepare for their close encounter. The authors hold book signings, but you can also find them wandering around, enjoying the festival themselves. The whole campus and even the city becomes a classroom that week.”

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The president added, “Most of our students are the working poor, and they may not be aware of the reputations of many of the authors coming to the fair. But when an author visits their class, or when they attend a reading, their motivation skyrockets. Many students get involved as volunteers. Then there is the street fair, which is free for students, where they can bring their families and enjoy a relaxing day around the college. They get the sense that education is truly a lifelong process.”

Does Padrón see the literary festival as integral to Miami Dade’s educational mission or more as part of its civic duties? “Separating our civic and educational missions is a little difficult,” he replied. “We often talk about extending the classroom beyond the campus. We believe in the open door approach to education, and the book fair is an open invitation to everyone in the community to appreciate reading and writing. The book fair fits perfectly with our motto that ‘opportunity changes everything.’ We open the door to this opportunity.”

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Miami Dade College

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The old saw that no good deed goes unpunished tells in part the story of La Roche College and its Pacem in Terris Institute, which has provided several hundred scholarships for students escaping conflicts in countries torn by war from the Balkans to Burundi. The institute and its work brought renown to the small Catholic college in Pittsburgh. The queen of Jordan and first lady of Uganda served on the board of Pacem in Terris, founded in 1993 by the late Monsignor William Kerr soon after he became the college president.

The commitment to provide full tuition, room, and board to every Pacem in Terris student eventually put the college’s resources under heavy strain, especially as enrollment declined after 2002. The La Roche trustees finally decreed that no more Pacem in Terris students could be admitted unless the funds were in hand to pay for their four years of education. In June 2009 Inside Higher Education ran what amounted to an obituary for Pacem in Terris, reporting that the program was on hiatus after graduating its last four scholarship recipients. The college had invested $7 million of its own funds, $4 million in grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development, and $4 million in gifts from other donors in the program over the years, but never built an endowment or rainy day fund for Pacem. (The college’s own endowment is only $4 million).

A Rebirth

The hiatus, however, was brief. By fall 2009 Pacem in Terris enrolled two new scholarship recipients from Uganda and Burundi and now there are two more Pacem students from Rwanda and Equatorial Guinea. “We’ve had a bit of a resurgence,” said Kenneth Service, the outgoing vice president for institutional relations and executive director of Pacem in Terris. Some $120,000 has been raised for new scholarships, and the college is talking with donors about creating opportunities for students from Sri Lanka and Lebanon.

Moreover, the scholarship initiative has had a lasting effect on the college, which the Sisters of Divine Providence founded in 1963 to prepare young women entering their order; that was the same year that Pope John XXIII issued the celebrated Pacem in Terris encyclical on human rights. Later La Roche opened its doors wider, first to women and then to both sexes. Kerr, president from 1992 to 2004, was a friend to the powerful as well as the poor. Vice President Joseph Biden and Rwandan President Paul Kagame were among those paying tribute after the priest died of a stroke while celebrating Mass at the cathedral in Tallahassee, Florida, in 2009. Sister Candace Introcaso, the college president, also saluted Kerr, telling the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “Under his leadership, La Roche College was transformed from a regional coeducational, liberal arts college into a global community of learners with a burgeoning international presence.”

The Pacem in Terris story began with Kerr’s journey to a Croatian refugee camp in 1993 during the civil war in the Balkans. A Croatian-American businesswoman had offered to help provide scholarships. “Typically, he went over there to find 20 students and came back with 30,” said Service. Kerr had a larger purpose than just making a difference in the lives of a few individuals. He wanted to strike a blow against hatred and hostility among Muslims, Christians, and Jews. “Taught by the lessons of the Holocaust and now of ‘ethnic cleansing,’ young people from wartorn areas must be educated to break the cycles of resentment and revenge which have fueled the major conflicts of the twentieth century,” Kerr wrote.

Later, when Rwanda was convulsed by genocide, Kerr secured support from AID to bring scores of refugees to Pittsburgh for a college education. La Roche built a successful English as a Second Language program to accommodate the French-speaking newcomers. By 2009, when it looked like Pacem in Terris might fade into the past, the program had produced 451 graduates from trouble spots in the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East.

Fostering Global Citizenship

The college sold some underused property to bolster its finances, and the 2009–10 enrollment of 1,230 undergraduate and 126 graduate students included 139 international students, plus 46 more in the ESL program. Most of these international students are paying their own way. La Roche’s enrollment is down from a peak of almost 2,000 in 2002, but it rose in fall 2010. The college’s mission statement proudly states that La Roche “fosters global citizenship and creates a community of scholars from the region, the nation, and around the world” and seeks to “promote justice and peace in a constantly changing global society.”

Thomas Schaefer, who joined the college in 2002 as director of external relations for Pacem in Terris and now is associate vice president for academic affairs, said that this commitment to globalization is a direct legacy of Pacem in Terris. “It grew out of that sense that this is central to our mission. We’re now taking what Pacem initiated and making sure that every student has a global awareness.”

It also is making it possible for more students to experience education abroad. It launched a Study Abroad, Study USA program beginning with freshmen who entered in 2009 that includes in their regular tuition the cost of taking an education abroad course lasting one to three weeks or spending the same amount of time immersed in a domestic, multicultural experience, such as studying blues music in Harlem or volunteering on the recovery effort in New Orleans.

Service agreed that Pacem in Terris “encouraged the college to become much more international and to reach out and do more student recruitment internationally.” That emphasis also is seen in an annual conference on “Global Problems, Global Solutions” that La Roche inaugurated in 2004 and now holds jointly with Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Duquesne University. Even with Hurricane Ivan bearing down, 100 students and faculty turned out that first year to discuss the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. The joint conferences typically draw as many as 500 students, faculty, and townspeople for two days of lectures and workshops.

Paul Le Blanc, a history professor who studies working class politics and revolutionary movements, said Pacem in Terris “was transformative for all of us. In some ways we bit off more than we could chew, but then in dealing with the various issues and realities that came up, we evolved in ways that have been wonderful.”

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Think Big

What lessons should other colleges draw from the Pacem in Terris experience at La Roche? “You have to decide whether you’re on the ‘God will provide’ or the ‘God helps those who help themselves’ side of the ledger,” said Service. Raising scholarship funds became harder after September 11, 2001, Service said, and some promises of help never came through. But Service sees another message from the story of La Roche and Pacem in Terris.

“Don’t be afraid to think big; don’t be afraid to take some risks,” he said. “While the financial side of this was a problem, the other benefits that La Roche has received from this program are almost incalculable.” La Roche now provides students “a much higher quality education that prepares them to go out into a global society. While that wasn’t the initial intent, some of those ancillary benefits have more than paid for themselves. "

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La Roche College

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When a greater than expected number of students signed up to study abroad in 2009, Loyola University Maryland faced a dilemma. Tuition dollars follow the students and in a troubled economy, the redirection of resources was “more than we had budgeted for,” said Loyola President Brian Linnane, S.J. The university considered telling some students to forego the opportunity, “but in the end, we thought, ‘How could we do this? International education and the opportunity to study abroad is what we sell. It would have had a chilling effect.’” Loyola found other ways to economize.

Loyola University Maryland had a mission to uphold, namely to “inspire students to learn, lead, and serve in a diverse and changing world.” Loyola—one of four Jesuit universities in the U.S. that bear the name—encourages students to go beyond the leafy campus confines, whether that be to grittier parts of Baltimore or to Bangkok, Thailand. More than two-thirds of Loyola’s 3,700 undergraduates study abroad, do internships, or perform service overseas. They choose from 34 semester- or year-long education abroad opportunities in 26 countries.

Coupling Study Abroad and Service

Increasingly Loyola students are encouraged to perform community service while living and learning in another country. “This is a big part of the identity of Loyola,” said André Colombat, dean of International Programs and professor of French, whose staff collaborates with the campus’ large Center for Community Service and Justice (CCSJ) on twinning academics and volunteering overseas. That center, which has a staff of 14, also runs international immersion trips to El Salvador and Mexico in which students perform volunteer work but don’t receive academic credit for it.

Several other service-learning programs carry credit, including a summer course taught in Guadeloupe, the French archipelago in the Caribbean, and semester programs in El Salvador and Chile, where Loyola has an exchange agreement with Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago.

French Professor Catherine Savell-Hebb takes students each summer to Marie-Galante in Guadeloupe, where they study French literature, hike through tropical forests to a volcano, and live with families in the beachfront town of Capesterre. They helped clean up after Hurricane Dean and, during more placid summers, taught computer skills to local children. The host stays are of particular importance to the professor who wants students to “be sensitive to what it means for the local families to host an American. They think nothing they have is good enough for us,” said Savell-Hebb.

“Often, later in life, little time bombs will go off, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, now I understand….Now it makes sense.’”

Andrea Goicochea, the CCSJ’s assistant director for International Immersion Programs and Justice Education, said, “I don’t know if their parents are thrilled with us because they may decide to go from studying law to (signing up) with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. Their lives in some ways have been turned upside down.” Goicochea, a former Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic who spent 15 years as a lay missioner for the Maryknoll Fathers, said the impact of seeing poverty first hand sometimes hits long after their return. “Often, later in life, little time bombs will go off, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, now I understand….Now it makes sense,’” she said.

Roadblocks to Volunteering Overseas

Arranging service learning outside the United States poses extra challenges. The Center for Community Service and Justice’s Robin Crews and Christina Harrison both have encountered roadblocks. In Spain, where Loyola sends students for a semester at the University of Alcalá, the Spanish organizations wanted a six-month commitment from prospective volunteers, said Harrison, associate director of Immersion Programs and Education, but “our students are only there for four months.”

In Newcastle, England, the obstacle was a criminal background check required before student volunteers can work with children. British students at the University of Newcastle “usually wait at least a semester” before they start, said Crews. “That eliminates any possibility of volunteering if your student is there for just one semester.” They are trying to work out such wrinkles. “It’s definitely a learning curve,” said Harrison.

Seeking More International Students

The university is seeking to attract more international students. Only 1 percent of undergraduates and 3 percent of all students are international. Most of the 170 international students take classes not on the Evergreen campus but in graduate programs 10 to 15 miles away that offer advanced degrees in pastoral counseling, Montessori education, computer science, and other fields. Forty percent of Loyola’s 6,000 students are enrolled in graduate programs.

Martha Wharton, assistant vice president for Academic Affairs and Diversity, said that Loyola is looking to bring more international students in on exchanges, especially while Loyola juniors study abroad. The first exchange students from a technological university in Singapore arrived this fall. Loyola also offers two-year scholarships and a joint Loyola degree to qualified graduates of St. John’s College, a junior college in Belize.

While the international enrollment is sparse, Loyola draws 85 percent of its students from outside Maryland. Many come from the nearby states of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania and from New England.

Learning Diversity in the Classroom

Conscious of the need to expose students to people and viewpoints outside their comfort zones, Loyola requires all undergraduates to complete a diversity course before graduation. Faculty and administrators spent two years discussing and shaping the requirement before the Academic Senate approved it in March 2004 after vigorous debate. It took effect with the class that entered in 2006. Students can meet this requirement by taking a course with “a substantial focus”—more than 50 percent—on one of three issues: global diversity, domestic diversity, or social justice.

Several of history Professor Elizabeth Schmidt’s courses fulfill the requirement. Schmidt specializes in African history. “I have many courses with few history majors, but lots of business and global studies majors,” said Schmidt. One of her courses has a service-learning component. Her students not only learn in the classroom about strife in Africa, but also tutor African refugee children in downtown Baltimore. “I can’t tell you how many business majors I’ve had who (do this) a bit grudgingly, and then they get into it and keep tutoring after they leave my class,” she said.

Senior Meg Young shared the professor’s passion for African studies. Young, a global studies and French major from Greensboro, North Carolina, signed up with the Peace Corps after graduation to work in a small village in South Africa. Young spent one semester studying in Ghana and a second in Montpellier, France. Young, a star swimmer in high school, even got to help coach the Ghanaian national swim team while in Accra. “Everyone was so welcoming in Ghana,” said Young. “People ask me, ‘What did you learn? What was the biggest difference?’ I say what I learned was that there weren’t that many differences.”

Teaching in Thailand

Two other global studies majors, Chelsea Catsam of Pomfret, Connecticut, and Paulina Stachnik of Carmel, New York, packed their bags after graduation to spend a year in Thailand teaching English to children in Catholic schools. They are part of a corps of 30 graduates that Loyola selects and sends to Bangkok each year. Catsam, who aspires to become an international lawyer, spent her junior year in France and traveled across much of Europe, but was intent on broadening her horizons after college. “Asia is just so exciting for me,” she said.

“People ask me, ‘What did you learn? What was the biggest difference?’ I say what I learned was that there weren’t that many differences.”

Stachnik is a native of Krakow, Poland, whose family emigrated to the United States when she was 6. She spent a semester in Bangkok, took a Loyola study tour to India, and spent a summer studying in Prague, Czech Republic. “I came to Loyola largely because their study abroad programs were so highly emphasized,” said Stachnik. “I’m in good company here. The best thing about Jesuit education is that it opens the world up to you and once you open that, it’s hard to close.”

Success of Global Studies Major

Global studies is a recent creation at Loyola, launched in 2006 as an interdisciplinary amalgam of history, economics, political science, and sociology courses. Students have voted for the major with their feet: the first eight majors graduated in 2009, 18 in 2010, and 40 are on tap to graduate in 2011.

Sociologist Michael Burton, the first chair of global studies, said there had been discussions among the faculty for years about offering an international studies major. It finally took hold despite worries that it might siphon off majors from the four contributing departments. Those faculty concerns have been mitigated by the fact that many students have double majors.

Economics professor Marianne Ward, current chair of global studies, said the program’s name was deliberately chosen over the more common “international studies” because “we felt that ‘international studies’ had an implicit focus on the notion of the nation state…. Many issues in the current world environment transcend national boundaries. We wanted to capture that notion.”

Students must take macro and microeconomics, along with a modern Western civilization course that focuses on arts and culture. Comparative politics and statistics courses also are required, along with a senior seminar. The language requirement is the same as that for all undergraduates: two years. The global studies majors must either study abroad or do an internship with a company or NGO doing international work, domestically or overseas.

Bursting the Loyola ‘Bubble’

Senior Lauren Brown of Wellesley, Massachusetts, who spent her junior year in Beijing and Buenos Aires, said, “There’s a definite Loyola ‘bubble.’ We might just be a small group who is very internationally aware. (But) I think we’re moving in the right direction of breaking this bubble.” President Linnane and Vice President for Academic Affairs Timothy Law Snyder both are intent on bursting those bubbles, for students and faculty alike. “Even some that study abroad retain that bubble about themselves because they seek not to venture out and take risks,” said Snyder. He stressed the importance of increasing the diversity across the institution. “We are saying that the more diverse our student body, our faculty, our curriculum, our administration, our leadership, and our approaches can be, the healthier we will be,” said Snyder, a mathematician.

Snyder noted that when Loyola produced the first draft of a new strategic plan in 2008, students came forward and pressed the case for expanding the global studies program. Loyola is doing just that, with plans to hire six additional faculty in the field.

Looking After the President in Bangkok

Linnane and Snyder visited Loyola’s semester program at Assumption University in Bangkok in 2007; each blogged about the experience. More recently Linnane visited a Jesuit center for scholarship in Beijing. His snapshot of the Great Wall of China wound up on the back cover of the April 2010 Loyola magazine.

In Bangkok, students led Linnane and another Jesuit visitor to an “enormous open air market” for lunch one Sunday. Afterward, when the priests decided to make their own way back to the hotel, the students tried to talk them out of it. The two Jesuits did make the trip back unescorted, but what Linnane took away was that these Loyola students felt “they had come to own Bangkok—and they did.”

The Importance of Asia

Linnane believes it is especially important for Loyola to expose students to Asia and other cultures outside “the rich intellectual tradition of the Christian West where our roots are as a Jesuit, Catholic institution.” Karyl Leggio, dean of Loyola’s Sellinger School of Business and Management, is also looking to the East for internships and study tours for her students. “We’re good with European experiences; we do okay with South America. We’re not doing nearly enough with Asia,” said Leggio, a professor of finance who is an authority on China’s largely unregulated stock markets. “If you’re coming out of business school and not thinking of studying in Asia, you’re making a mistake.”

Leggio, who came to Loyola from the University of Missouri at Kansas City, wondered beforehand about the relevance of religious-based education for MBA students. “Once I got here I realized it was absolutely the wrong concern,” said Leggio. “The Jesuits are about social justice and giving back to the poor and helping in the community. That is precisely the way you do business education if you want to do it well, I believe.

When the University of San Diego opened its Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice, its leaders wanted to not just teach about human rights but to make a genuine contribution to solving conflicts in strife-torn countries. They came up with the idea of offering a respite on the San Diego campus where often unsung peace activists could recharge their batteries, inspire students, and at the same time get professional help to craft a narrative of their struggles against violence back home. The Women PeaceMakers Program was born. 

Since 2003 some 32 women have spent eight weeks on the Catholic university’s campus overlooking Mission Bay, speaking to classes and community groups, learning about U.S. programs that help victims recover from trauma, and working with writers on their personal narratives. They visit social justice organizations working to alleviate poverty in this city near the Mexican border—and they go on excursions to the famous San Diego Zoo and to Disneyland in Anaheim.

Their travel to the United States is covered by the program, and the peacemakers, who share apartments on campus and cook together, receive a stipend of $4,000 for living expenses. The entire program is underwritten by the Fred J. Hansen Foundation, named for a benefactor who made a fortune in real estate and avocado farming. The foundation, led by trustee Tony Dimitroff, also supports the Hansen Institute for World Peace at San Diego State University, which has done extensive work in the Middle East.

“Like a Queen Walking on Air”

Christiana Thorpe, a former nun, school principal, and deputy minister of education in Sierra Leone, went home in 2004 and became Sierra Leone’s Chief Electoral Commissioner, presiding over the free and fair 2007 elections and now preparing for the 2012 balloting.

Thorpe, who founded an NGO to educate girls displaced by civil war, said in an interview via Skype from Freetown about the Women PeaceMakers Program, “When I came back after that experience, I was ready to take on anything or anybody else in the world. I was really empowered.” 

“Back home it was a very lonely experience, a very lonely journey, dealing with women and girls who are traumatized and trying to get them reconciled either with their communities or their family members,” she said. “Eventually, you yourself are almost traumatized. You don’t look for thanks in this kind of work, but when you get the odd thanks, it makes you feel like a queen walking on air.” 

Working with a professional writer to put her story on paper also “was a big eye-opener for me. I didn’t realize I had so much to offer. If it were not for the Women PeaceMakers Program, I would not have realized the extent of work I had been doing toward peacebuilding within my country,” said Thorpe.

Absent From the Negotiating Table and From History

Dee Aker, the Kroc Institute’s deputy director, helped design and still directs the program. Aker, a psychological anthropologist by training, is a former journalist who has worked on four continents in education and on helping people make the transition from conflicts. “We realized that no one was recognizing what we were seeing on the ground, how women were…making powerful decisions and having a major impact on averting or ending conflicts,” Aker said. “Women never got invited to the negotiation table. They are just behind the scenes.”

The Kroc Institute has special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. The Women PeaceMakers Program hosts biennial conferences in support of efforts to improve the status of women and girls. The 2010 conference produced a report on the 10th anniversary of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, a landmark that stressed the importance of women’s “equal participation and full involvement in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security.” Among the speakers were Monica McWilliams, who helped end Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence, and Luz Méndez, one of only two women who participated in the negotiations that ended Guatemala’s civil war in 1996.

Méndez, vice president of the National Union of Guatemalan Women and a 2004 Woman PeaceMaker, spoke of organizing “courts of conscience” where women could speak out for the first time about the sexual violence inflicted on them in Guatemala’s decades-long civil war. “It was so liberating for them,” she said, and also secured their place in the historical record. In Guatemala “as in many countries,” she said, women often “are (left) out of history.”

No Shortage of Candidates

“We’ve had lawyers, government officials, a chief of police for a tribal area, a woman who took on the blasphemy law in Pakistan” and other activists as Women PeaceMakers, said Aker. The institute worried at first about getting word out about the program, but with the UN connection that has not been a problem, and it receives hundreds of applications each year.

The peacemakers have come from two dozen countries in the midst or not-long-removed from conflicts. On a couple of occasions, things were so unsettled that the prospective woman peacemaker could not leave and the institute had to choose someone else, said program officer Jen Freeman, formerly one of the “peacewriters.”

Aker and Freeman have journeyed to Nepal and the Philippines to hold regional conferences for alumnae and others involved in conflict resolution.

Combination of Art and Science

Merlie “Milet” Mendoza, a humanitarian worker in the Philippines, came to San Diego in fall 2010 two years after she was kidnapped and held for two months by militants in the Sulu archipelago, where she had been helping poor Muslim communities. Mendoza is a former official in the Corazon Aquino administration who moved from government to grassroots organizing in 1989 and led a peace coalition in troubled Mindanao.

In her PeaceMaker narrative, Mendoza said, “Peacemaking and conflict management go beyond the rational. They touch on the sacred and the divine. It is a combination of art and a science. It is about goodness.”

Another 2010 PeaceMakers Program participant was the Liberian peace activist and social worker Vaiba Kebeh Flomo, who helped organize the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace that brought pressure on the government of Charles Taylor and rebel forces to sign an accord in 2003. She later mobilized women to register and vote in the 2005 elections that made Ellen JohnsonSirleaf Africa’s first elected female president. 

A Need to Do More

Flomo helped unite Christian and Muslim women’s groups, who at one point, like the Greek women seeking to stop the Peloponnesian War in Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, withheld sex to pressure men to end the violence. Flomo was among the Liberian women featured in the 2008 documentary, Pray the Devil Back to Hell. 

In reaching out to Muslim women, Flomo, who worked for the Lutheran Church of Liberia’s Trauma Healing and Reconciliation Program, repeated one message: “In time of war, women and children suffer most. The bullet cannot pick and choose. Once it is in the air it is not looking for a Christian, it is not looking for a Muslim. It comes to anyone.”

Flomo, now back at work in Monrovia, said via Skype that her stay in San Diego “helped my self-esteem. After I told my story and I saw myself—‘Oh, this is where I came from and this is where I am’—it brought me to another level in my work. It made me think that if I came this far, I need to do more.”

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University of San Diego

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New York University’s prodigious number of international students (7,200) and participation in education abroad (4,300) have long solidified its place among the most international U.S. universities. Now it has laid claim to the title of the world’s first “global network university,” with a new liberal arts college open in Abu Dhabi, a second in the works for Shanghai, and nearly a dozen other sites around the world where NYU students go to study. Most of its 43,000 students still throng the buildings with their signature violet flags that surround Washington Square. Amending the 1831 pronouncement by Albert Gallatin and other founders that they were creating a university “in and of the city,” President John Sexton describes today’s NYU as “in and of the world.” 

Sexton, seated in his office atop red sandstone Bobst Library with a red-tailed hawk nesting outside his window, said the concept of the global network university is still evolving, but like a Polaroid picture becoming clearer over time. It is not, he emphasized, merely a hub-and-spoke arrangement or set of affiliated branches. “We see the university as an organism, a circulatory system” for faculty and students to move between continents for learning and research, Sexton said. He recalled a conversation over breakfast at Chequers with then Chancellor of the Exchequer of Britain Gordon Brown, who remarked that NYU’s ambitious conception brought to mind the Italian Renaissance “and the way the talent class moved among Milan and Venice and Florence and Rome.” That captures in a nutshell “the world view in which we see ourselves operating,” said Sexton.

The peripatetic Sexton had just returned from a 12day journey to Abu Dhabi, Singapore, South Korea, and Abu Dhabi again. A Brooklyn native, Sexton was schooled by the Jesuits at Fordham University to be a professor of religion, then retooled at Harvard Law School as a legal scholar. He has played a multitude of parts—champion high school debate coach, clerk to the Chief Justice of the United States, law school dean, and chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He is wont to quote Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Buber, Diogenes (“I am a citizen of the world”), and Charley Winans, his mentor and faculty legend at Brooklyn Prep.

Seeking an Edge in Global Talent Competition

Sexton believes NYU has gained an edge in a global competition for talent, such as the prominent economist it landed by offering to let him teach every fourth year in Abu Dhabi, closer to his wife’s family in Pakistan. He can envision the future Shanghai campus luring a world-class mathematician with aging parents in China. Already Sexton and Alfred Bloom, vice chancellor for NYU Abu Dhabi, boast of creating “the world’s honors college” in the Middle East emirate. NYU and its Abu Dhabi patron flew several hundred high school seniors to the emirate for weekend visits before admitting the first class of 149, one-third American. The median SAT verbal and math scores were 1470. NYU Abu Dhabi in May awarded $16 million over five years for four joint-faculty research projects that will be based in Abu Dhabi and deal with climate modeling, computer security and privacy, cloud computing, and computational physics. Sexton has promised that all of NYU’s overseas operations will be self-sustaining and won’t siphon resources from Washington Square.

Vice Provost for Globalization and Multicultural Affairs Ulrich Baer presides over NYU’s 10 global academic centers for education abroad in Accra, Ghana; Berlin, Germany; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Florence, Italy; London, England; Madrid, Spain; Paris, France; Prague, Czech Republic; Shanghai, China, and Tel Aviv, Israel. Two sites are planned for Sydney, Australia, and Washington, D.C., and Sexton expects to open two more in South America and South Asia. With Abu Dhabi—Washington Square students will be able to spend a semester there—NYU’s global network will feature at least 16 sites by 2014.

Baer, who rowed crew at Harvard as an international student from Germany and did his PhD in comparative literature at Yale, has authored books on photography and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and edited a literary anthology about the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. Apart from providing academic and intellectual leadership for NYU’s global network, Baer’s duties now include negotiating long-term leases for more housing in London and Paris as well as explaining to NYU students why they can party in dorms in some parts of the world but not others. “The university is just starting to grasp what it means to operate globally like most corporations do,” he said. “You move people around. When you’re in Shanghai, do we pay for your dental insurance or not?” 

“I felt like I had died and gone to international education heaven.”

An Ethos of Education Abroad

Given the size of NYU’s education abroad program, it might be expected that this enterprise operates from a high visibility office with heavy foot traffic. That is not the case. Although NYU aspires to soon unify international operations in a single location, Baer and the Office of Global Programs currently occupy a suite on the eleventh floor of Bobst Library, while most education abroad staff work out of the lower level of a high-rise residence ten blocks away. They make education abroad pitches at innumerable orientation sessions but leave it to academic advisers within NYU’s 16 schools to close the sales. “Each college has a point person. By the time they get to us, they typically have decided,” said Associate Director Jaci Czarnecki. “We might meet with them to talk about which location makes the most sense and what they need to do to apply and be admitted and get there.” Education abroad is so ingrained in the NYU experience that most students don’t need a lot of convincing, she added. 

Some undergraduates are admitted to spend their first year at NYU centers in Florence, London, Paris, or Shanghai. Sophomore Mercedes Moya, U.S. born but raised in Paris, started at La Pietra, the Florence estate where students live and attend classes. “For me, New York is abroad,” said Moya, a politics and Italian major. “It was the city that drew me here. New York is definitely the capital of the world.”

Nearly 1,000 business majors study abroad each year, according to Susan Greenbaum, associate dean of the Stern School of Business. Over spring break last March, Stern flew 650 juniors in its international economics course to Budapest, Buenos Aires, or Singapore to visit businesses. An alumni benefactor supports the program. Stern also now offers a business and political economy degree in which students spend two semesters in London and a third in Shanghai. “We hope that we’ve lit them on fire” for work in the international arena, Greenbaum said.

Wanted: More International Undergraduates

The Office for International Students and Scholars (OISS) already occupies prime real estate a block from Washington Square. NYU enrolls more than 6,700 international students—one-third are undergraduates. The countries that send the most students to NYU are South Korea (1,400), China (almost 1,200), and India (more than 1,000). Most pursue master’s degrees or PhDs, but the 2,035 international undergraduates are double the number of five years ago. (Some 1,000 graduates are on Optional Practical Training.) OISS director David Austell said that when he arrived at NYU in 2007, “I felt like I had died and gone to international education heaven.”

Sexton aims to boost the number of international undergraduates from 9.1 to 20 percent. Freshman Hyun Seok Oh, a permanent resident of Hong Kong, chose NYU because he wanted to study in a metropolis like his hometown. Oh, an economics major, said, “A campus would have been nice and everything, but the advantages here outweigh the disadvantages. It’s a great place.” 

“I felt kind of lost, but then I got used to it and made a bunch of friends,” she said. Studio arts “is a small program within a huge school…(and) the advisee system is very good.”

While business is the biggest draw for international students, more than 800 are enrolled in NYU’s vibrant visual and performing arts programs. Young Eun “Grace” Lee, from Seoul, South Korea, is a studio arts major. At first NYU seemed bigger than she bargained for and “I felt kind of lost, but then I got used to it and made a bunch of friends,” she said. Studio arts “is a small program within a huge school…(and) the advisee system is very good.”

While international undergraduates live in NYU’s high rise residences, graduate students are dispersed. With sky-high rents in Greenwich Village and much of Manhattan, some find apartments across the East River in Brooklyn or across the Hudson River in Jersey City, Hoboken, and other areas linked to the city by rapid transit.

The plan is to eventually enroll 2,000 students at NYU Abu Dhabi and as many as 3,000 in Shanghai, which will start in 2013. Sexton enlisted May Lee, an NYU-trained lawyer and banker, to negotiate terms with the Chinese Ministry of Education, Shanghai’s municipal government, the government of the special Pudong district, and East China Normal University. Lee, associate vice chancellor for Asia and daughter of Chinese immigrants, said the idea of bringing American-style education to China and helping the Chinese build a bridge to Westerners “really struck a chord with me.”

Turning Students Into ‘Inspired’ Jazz Musicians in Europe

Faculty in this large, decentralized university continue to find ways to entice U.S. students to venture into the world. David Schroeder, director of jazz studies, has turned Florence and Prague into favored destinations for music majors. “Nobody wants to leave New York as a jazz musician,” said Schroeder, but while his students are treated as greenhorns in Manhattan, “in Europe they’re considered those young, inspired jazz musicians from New York City.”

Junior Zach Feldman, 20, a music business major, was a deejay at the Hard Rock Cafe Prague and arranged parties that drew hundreds to other clubs in fall 2010. “It was really cool, dealing with club owners who didn’t speak any English,” he said. “Literally half the sophomore class (of music business majors) is going to Prague next semester (fall 2011).”

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Some 4,349 undergraduates studied abroad in 2009–10. Among the three-quarters who had declared a major, only 52 were language majors. Some global centers require language study, but most courses are taught in English. Associate Professor of Sociology Tom Ertman began the Berlin program in 2005 with non-German speakers in mind. “You could (never) run a program out of here targeting German students because there weren’t enough of them,” said Ertman. But lots of students were intrigued by the German capital’s image as “a cool, young, happening place.” Some 140 students study there each year, including large numbers from NYU’s Steinhardt art programs.

What China Wants From Washington Square

Xudong Zhang, a comparative literature professor and chair of East Asian studies, said Chinese language enrollments have grown “at an explosive rate” and now top 1,000. Zhang helped launch the Shanghai education abroad center in 2006 and directs China House, one of the NYU language and culture centers. China House soon will move into a new home alongside La Maison Française and Deutsches Haus on charming Washington Mews, a gated block of converted nineteenth century stables.

Zhang grew up in Shanghai, the son of naval research engineers. East Asian studies, he said, will be “no more special than other departments” in the partnership with East China Normal University. “What leading Chinese universities want from us is not ethnic Chinese faculty like me; they want our best researchers in science, social sciences, and the arts.”

President Sexton knows what his partners want and what NYU wants, which is to become one of the two or three dozen premiere research universities in the world. Many rivals have greater space and more resources, Sexton averred, but they cannot match NYU’s “locational endowment”—New York City—and “attitudinal endowment”—its aggressive entrepreneurship.

Kennesaw State University’s transformation from junior college to Georgia’s third largest university took only a few decades. It is still growing, adding its first doctoral degrees and building dorms so more than just 4,000 of its 22,000 students can live on the metropolitan Atlanta campus. With help from legendary University of Georgia coach Vince Dooley, it is preparing to field its first football team in 2014. But its academic ambitions are even grander and—as suggested by the 22-foot-high sculpture by Eino, Spaceship Earth, in the heart of campus—more global. “That’s Kennesaw State straddling the globe,” Ikechkwu Ukeje, a Nigerian-born professor and chair of elementary and early childhood education, said in jest.

But that artwork and a nearby colorful, 2.7-ton slab from the Berlin Wall both remind students and faculty every day of Kennesaw State’s international ambitions and achievements. One feather in its cap recently came in the form of a midterm report from its accreditor, the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges (SASC), which requires member institutions to single out an area for self-improvement when they seek reaccreditation. KSU intrepidly asked in 2007 to be held accountable for how much and how well it bolstered its international education programs.

SASC sent Susan Buck Sutton, then associate vice chancellor of Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (she is now at Bryn Mawr College), to take a look. “KSU is emerging as a national leader in international education,” Sutton wrote in evaluating the institution’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP). “It would be difficult to find another university where such a broad range of global learning initiatives, across all dimensions of the institution, is occurring.”

“We’ve made the Quality Enhancement Plan part of our DNA,” said Barry J. Morris, vice provost for global engagement and strategic initiatives and executive director of the Institute for Global Initiatives, who deflects credit to the faculty. Morris said KSU’s international thrust benefited from strong leadership from President Daniel Papp and his cabinet, but received legitimacy “because it was chosen from the bottom up. The faculty themselves raised the flag.” 

From Junior College to Comprehensive University

KSU opened in 1966 as Kennesaw Junior College, constructed on what once was farmland in Cobb County 20 miles northwest of Atlanta. It did not start offering bachelor’s and master’s degrees until the 1980s. Now it is preparing its first doctoral students. Today it has 20,000 undergraduates (average age 25) and 2,000 graduate students. Some 1,600 are international and nearly 900 students study abroad each year. Eighty-five percent live off campus or commute and half are nontraditional. KSU proudly describes itself as “a metropolitan university.” Former President Betty L. Siegel was a vigorous proponent of KSU’s international efforts during her quarter century at the helm, and KSU took part in the American Council on Education’s Global Learning for All project aimed at helping institutions expose adult, minority, and part-time students to international education. Daniel Papp, a Sovietologist and founder of the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech, picked up the international torch when he became president in 2006. 

The “Year Of” Program

A signature international activity is KSU’s “Year of Program” that spotlights a particular country, region, or international theme through a host of courses, lectures, exhibits, music, theater, and other activities that extend throughout an academic year. It started with Japan in 1984–85 and now has examined nearly two dozen countries as well as the Olympic movement and slave trade across the Atlantic. The Year of Romania was marked in 2010–11 with 33 lectures, a film festival, and other events that examined the treatment of the Roma (Gypsy) minority, persecution of Jews, post-communist religion and politics, and medieval painted monasteries. Some KSU students studied in Romania, and five faculty with Romanian roots made contributions as well. The Year of Program “is a lot of fun and a lot of work,” said Daniel Paracka, director of education abroad and manager of the Year of Program.

The 2006–07 Year of Kenya resonated with Atlanta’s sizeable Kenyan immigrant community. When the Kenyan ambassador spoke, he brought consular staff to process visas for Kenyan Americans to visit their homeland, and KSU has held follow-up conferences with support from Atlanta companies that do business in Africa. “We are still reaping the positive benefits. People now call us ‘Kenya-saw,’” said Vice Provost Morris, a Russian-speaking political scientist and former international banker.

[The Global Learning Coordination Council is] “the group that more than any other drives our internationalization efforts. This is the engine that ties the entire university together.”

Kennesaw State’s Coles College of Business recently became the new home of the India China America Institute, an economic think tank on economic and geopolitical issues involving the United States and the world’s largest emerging economies. The institute will help the business school and the university to “further engage in these countries while solidifying our position as a leader in global education,” said Ken Harmon, the business dean who is serving as interim provost and vice president for academic affairs. 

A New Institute for Global Initiatives

The Institute for Global Initiatives (IGI) was created under the provost’s office in 2003 to provide what history professor Akanmu G. Adebayo, the first executive director, describes as a “one stop shop” for faculty and student research and study. It replaced a smaller Office of International Programs housed in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Today a Global Learning Coordination Council (GLCC) of faculty, staff, and students oversees and coordinates KSU’s international activities (Professor Ukeje is a council member). The biweekly council developed a Global Engagement Certificate that students now can earn with their diplomas. Morris calls the council “the group that more than any other drives our internationalization efforts. This is the engine that ties the entire university together.”

Ed Rugg, retired vice president for academic affairs and former chief academic officer, said the transformation from junior college to university in the 1980s left “open fields for us to run in. The undergraduate curriculum hadn’t been fleshed out…. If we had better ideas for doing something, people were willing to entertain them. Nobody was saying no.” KSU was the first public institution in the state to offer an international affairs major, and its faculty have led internationalization initiatives for the entire University System of Georgia. “Our visibility and perception as an international campus was not just mythic, but real,” said Adebayo, who is editor-in-chief of KSU’s peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary Journal of Global Initiatives.

Financing Study Abroad With Student Fees

Kennesaw State provides $1 million a year in funding for the IGI and $940,000 more for other global learning activities, said Assistant Vice President for Financial Services Ashok Roy, who is also an associate professor of Asian studies. Students voted to impose an additional $14-per-semester fee on themselves to provide Global Learning Scholarships of at least $500 for everyone who studies abroad or takes part in university-sponsored service trips overseas. Students receive as much as $2,000 if they perform service and study abroad for longer periods. The fee generates $750,000 annually, said Dawyn Dumas, director of Global Engagement Programs.

“Our philosophy is that leadership is a lifestyle. Once they’ve gone on their first trip, they are hungry to go all around the world.”

KSU has dramatically increased education abroad opportunities for math and science majors. Professor of Mathematics Jun Ji, the College of Science and Mathematics representative on the GLCC, said, “Four years ago we had one (education abroad) program with 10 students. Now we have eight programs in science and math, and we got 98 students last year.” A large poster outside Ji’s office shouts in bold letters, “YOU CAN GO TO CHINA FOR $2,100.” This includes a $750 Global Learning Scholarship plus an additional $400 per student from KSU’s Confucius Institute, one of the 68 such centers in the United States and 300 worldwide that receive support from China to encourage study of Chinese language and culture. 

KSU sends students on 40 different education abroad programs, mostly for two to three weeks in the summer. With Georgia Southern and Georgia State, it offers full-semester Italian culture courses in the Tuscan town of Montepulciano. KSU ranked tenth in the 2010 Open Doors report among master’s level institutions in education abroad. The School of Nursing sends students on two-week service-learning trips to Oaxaca, Mexico. Sociologist Ardith Peters leads students to Uganda in summer to work with an NGO on adaptive sports for blind children. 

‘Emerging Global Scholars’

KSU has added a President’s Emerging Global Scholars program to the mix of opportunities offered through its Center for Student Leadership (CSL). Fifty high achievers took 10-day service trips to Brazil or Mexico as freshmen and went to South Africa at the end of their sophomore year for further civic engagement activities. “Our philosophy is that leadership is a lifestyle,” said CSL Director Brian Wooten. “Once they’ve gone on their first trip, they are hungry to go all around the world.”

“Next year we’re going to India,” said sophomore Gina Perleoni. Classmate Zoe HoChoy, who grew up in Kennesaw, said never “in my wildest dreams” did she expect to have multiple education abroad experiences in college. Graduate student Punit Patel, born in Mumbai, India, but raised in the United States, said that “momentum is building year after year” on KSU’s international front. Patel, former student body president, and 21 classmates took part in the Asian International Model United Nations conference in Beijing, China, over spring break. All received Global Learning Scholarships to attend.

“One great thing about KSU is that international students are encouraged to become campus leaders,” said Dhanashree Thorat, 22, an English major from India. The university helped pay her way to give a paper at Oxford in England.

Moby-Dick in Morocco, Children’s Books in Benin

During the Year of Kenya, Karen Robinson, associate professor of theatre and performance studies, and lecturer Margaret Baldwin collected oral histories from Atlanta’s Kenyan community and mounted a play around them. Robinson, who visited Kenya with other faculty, later brought the Shangilia Youth Choir, a troupe of children rescued from the streets of Nairobi, to perform at KSU. Ten theater majors staged Melville’s Moby Dick at a collegiate festival in Casablanca, Morocco, in 2009, speaking their lines in English with selective narration in French and Arabic by students fluent in those languages.

While a graduate student, Assistant Professor of French Lucie Viakinnou-Brinson created a nonprofit called Seeds of Knowledge to provide textbooks for schools in her native Benin. Now she has students in her French classes, from beginners to advanced, write children’s books in French to donate to schools in Benin, and hopes to take students on her next trip there.

Recognition for Faculty, Student Global Engagement

Dawyn Dumas, the IGI’s director of Global Engagement Programs, spearheaded efforts to create a registry of KSU faculty and staff with international expertise. Scores of faculty have stepped forward to present credentials entitling them to be designated international education “specialists” or “contributors.” Dumas is also the point person for students seeking to earn the Global Engagement Certificate. They must have spent at least four weeks on education abroad, completed 12 credits in upper division global learning courses, and submitted a portfolio documenting service or activism on such issues as hunger or human rights. More than 100 students have earned the certificate since 2008.

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Donald L. Amoroso, executive director of the new International Center for Innovation in Technologies and former chair of the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, takes students with him twice a year to study and conduct research in Japan. “My heart is in it,” said Amoroso, an expert on advanced cell phone technology. The university spent more than $1 million converting a warehouse into high-tech classrooms and computer labs for Amoroso’s innovation center.

Though on the rise, an immediate goal for the university is to lift the graduation rate, which is still under 40 percent. Papp, Morris, and faculty leaders all believe KSU’s international thrust will help the institution keep more students on that path to a diploma. 

When Tori Haring-Smith was in seventh grade, her imagination was captured by a book the journalist and war correspondent John Sack wrote about his travels to the 13 smallest countries on the planet. Nine years later, with Swarthmore College diploma in hand, she set out to retrace his steps to Sark, Swat, Sikkim, and other off-the-beaten-track places. Her 12-month journey came courtesy of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, bestowed on a select group of liberal arts college students for a year of independent travel and study around the world. Watson fellows don’t have to take classes or do academic research. They just have to use their imaginations to explore the world, as 2,500 have done since 1969 with generous grants from the late IBM chairman’s foundation. 

Haring-Smith, like many Watson fellows, gravitated toward academe, teaching theater and writing at Brown University, serving as executive director of the Watson Fellowship, becoming a dean and vice president at Willamette University, and then in 2005 being named the twelfth president of Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania. Washington & Jefferson (W&J) now has its own version of the Watson: the Magellan Project, which helps students pursue global intellectual adventures during college summers. The college provides both extensive mentoring, including workshops on how to write compelling project proposals, and financial support to make the projects happen. Since 2008 it has green-lighted and funded 100 Magellan Projects, including some that did not require a passport but all of which “involve purposeful travel and exploration in new and unfamiliar surroundings.” The grants average $2,000.

The college has a one-stop referral location to help students through the application process. The projects are self-directed, but the Magellan Scholars painstakingly map their plans in advance with a faculty mentor. They also must convince a committee composed of an associate dean, the head of career services, and three professors that the project is feasible. Every scholar attends a writing workshop in February and commits to telling others (including prospective W&J students) about their journeys upon their return. It is all aimed at assisting students “in crafting and in telling compelling stories of curiosity and achievement that will be useful throughout their college years” and beyond, as explained on the Magellan Project Web site.

From Diagnosticians to Problem Solvers

The Magellan Project has quickly become a signature feature of the college. It has its own $1 million endowment and its laurels include a 2010 Andrew Heiskell Award for Innovation in International Education. Moreover, said Haring-Smith, it has effected a change in how students view poverty and other social inequities. “It’s taken them from a stance that essentially said, ‘There’s a problem; someone should solve it,’ to ‘There’s a problem and I am going to help solve it.’” 

The college, which traces its roots to three “log cabin colleges” established in the 1780s by Presbyterian ministers that merged in 1865, enrolls 1,450 students on a 60-acre campus in the town of Washington, 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. 

The college sends about 190 students on traditional education abroad programs each year, many on faculty-led three-week classes in January. But Haring–Smith was intent on finding new ways to thrust them into situations “where they would be on their own, independently solving problems… without anybody to fall back on.” The Magellan Project, she said, was in keeping with the college’s mission statement, which speaks of graduating men and women “prepared to contribute substantially to the world in which they live,” and with a 2007 strategic plan that set a goal of bringing “the world into W&J and W&J into the world.” 

A Layperson’s Guide for Cancer Patients

The projects can revolve around independent research, service, or internships, but formal classroom study is out of bounds. Projects have included studying Holocaust sites in Europe, examining the healthcare system in Cyprus, volunteering at medical clinics in the Dominican Republic and South Africa, and preparing a patients’ guide to granulosa cell tumor (GCT) research.

Sophomore Haley Roberts wrote that guide after interning for GCT researchers at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Roberts, a student athlete and economics major, survived the cancer at age 16. “When I was diagnosed in 2009, I was frustrated that I didn’t fully understand GCT or treatment options or how cancer worked. Patients wanted to know about the science behind their disease to make better medical decisions and talk to their doctors intelligently,” she said, but the typical scientific medical article was indecipherable. As a result, she published The Genetics of Granulosa Cell Tumour, An Unofficial Guide for the Scientifically Illiterate, which has been downloaded hundreds of times from the Granulosa Cell Tumour Research Foundation’s Web site. Roberts, who remains in remission, now aspires to a career in public health.

Deciphering the Tax Code of Opportunities

Washington & Jefferson College had a panoply of student research and internship awards and opportunities before the Magellan, but “it was extremely confusing. It was like the tax code," said Haring-Smith. “We said, ‘Let’s call these all Magellans.’” 

Nick Tyger, a molecular biology major, is among a handful of students who snagged three Magellans over successive summers. The grants supported his work volunteering and recruiting other students to volunteer to set up health clinics in poor, mountain villages in the Dominican Republic near Haiti. He also travelled to Cusco, Peru, to scout other locations for clinics.

That didn’t pan out, but the club Tyger established, Presidents Without Borders (a nod to the college nickname), attracted 40 members and sent volunteers to Nicaragua in summer 2012. Tyger, who is headed to chiropractic college, said, “I have a new outlook on the global community. I thought before I left that these types of problems—hunger and poverty—were so much farther away than they actually are. Just a short plane ride and you’re in the midst of it.”

Not a Good Magellan Without Tears

Tiffani Gottschall, an economics professor who is the Magellan adviser for sophomores, said students typically have “a lot of nerves” as they embark on their projects. “They touch down in the airport in Turkey or Egypt and find themselves alone. Now what do they do?” she asked. James Sloat, associate dean for assessment and new initiatives, said, “In some sense, it’s not a good Magellan unless there are tears along the journey.” 

A third of W&J students are the first in their family to attend college and 20 percent qualify for need-based Pell Grants. They do not “have a sense of entitlement or superiority….They feel, ‘I’m just an average person,’” Haring-Smith said. It’s an enormous boost to their self-confidence when they extricate themselves from situations “where the last bus has gone up the mountain to the village where they are staying, and they have no money and no place to stay and no phone and no place to call even if they had a phone.”

Magellan Scholars are given ample opportunities to speak about their experiences, including recruiting pitches to freshmen before the new students sign a pledge at a matriculation ceremony to work toward becoming global citizens.

Educating Parents

Freshman, sophomores, and juniors with at least a 2.5 GPA can apply. The college awards about 25 Magellans each year. Haring-Smith would like to see many more. Increasing the number “actually has more to do with educating parents than educating students,” said the president, who has had to allay concerns of parents worried about sending their daughters or sons off to distant lands alone. She tells them: “You’ve raised a child who can do this.”

Carol Barno of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, was one of those anxious parents in 2010 when freshman daughter Erin set off to study architecture in Europe. The mathematics and art major has since done two more Magellan projects. “They’ve given her such confidence. She’s not that little 18-yearold girl I sent to W&J saying, ‘Oh, God, please take care of her,’” said Barno. Erin, a star field hockey player, concurs: “Traveling abroad on my own has made me fearless.”

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