Inclusion and Equity

They were just brief remarks in the wee hours of the chill October 1960 night on the stone steps of the Michigan Union from a tired John F. Kennedy who had flown in after debating rival Richard Nixon in New York. But the future president threw out a challenge to the thousands of students who had waited in the drizzle to greet him. Speaking off the cuff, he asked, “How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the foreign service and spend your lives traveling around the world?”

The idea of an international volunteer corps of young Americans already had been percolating in Congress, but the Michigan students got the ball rolling, gathering hundreds of signatures on a petition expressing a willingness to serve in poor countries. Kennedy formally proposed a Peace Corps in a San Francisco speech a few days before winning one of the closest elections in U.S. history. On March 1, 1961, JFK signed an executive order creating the agency, which Congress later wrote into law. Among the first volunteers were Alan and Judy Guskin, the Michigan graduate students who organized the petition drive. Half a century later, no tour of the Michigan campus is complete without a stop to read the inscription on the marker on the Union steps: “Conception of Peace Corps First Mentioned on This Spot October 14, 1960.”

The Peace Corps connection is an indelible part of the identity of the University of Michigan, which enrolls nearly 6,000 international students and offers instruction in 65 languages, from Bamana and Bosnian to Tamil and Twi to Urdu and Uzbek. Founded almost two centuries ago, U-M (it prefers the hyphen and never tires of seeing its block letter M logo stamped on sweatshirts and signs) boasts the seventh largest endowment of any U.S. university ($7.8 billion), according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers, and conducts more research ($1 billion-plus) than any campus other than Johns Hopkins, according to the National Science Foundation. Constitutionally autonomous, it has weathered large cuts in state funding and still managed to hire dozens of new, tenure-track faculty, all while squeezing over a decade nearly a quarter-billion dollars in recurring costs from its $1.6 billion operating budget. “We have navigated this period well. We’ve remained on our upward trajectory and been able to do a lot of things we wanted to do, like increase the number of students who are studying abroad,” said Provost Philip Hanlon.

Ramping Up International Activities

From a campus with 27,000 undergraduates and 14,000 graduate students, the education abroad numbers have doubled since 2004–05 to nearly 2,000 in 2010–11, with 1,300 others heading abroad for service, internships, and other noncredit opportunities. President Mary Sue Coleman has made it her mission to, as she put it, “ramp up our international efforts,” in part by leading deans and faculty on carefully planned trips to Africa, China, and Brazil that have produced expanded research partnerships and other initiatives.

The 2008 trip to Ghana—on which she brought the Michigan Gospel Chorale—and to South Africa led to creation of an African Presidential Scholars Program that brings ten promising young scholars to Ann Arbor each year for residencies, as well as establishment of a new African Studies Center within the International Institute. Coleman has expanded a partnership with Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) in Shanghai, where a Michigan faculty member is dean of the UM-SJTU Joint Institute that confers dual degrees in engineering. The U-M Medical School has a $14 million research partnership with Peking University. At the same time, a top-level U-M task force ruled out opening a branch campus in China, as some universities have done. 

International Opportunities for Undergraduates

President Coleman also created in 2009 the Challenge for the Student Global Experience that has raised tens of millions of dollars for education abroad scholarships. She found internal funds to match $1 for every $2 of large donations, made the first gift herself, and later donated her 2011 salary increase as well. 

More than half of Michigan students (53 percent) now study outside Europe, compared with 38 percent eight years ago. The Center for Global and Intercultural Study within the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, operates the largest education abroad office on the decentralized campus. U-M faculty serve as resident directors of 40 of its 90 study abroad programs. The center also runs a service program called Global Intercultural Experience for Undergraduates (GIEU) that sends 200 students in small groups, each with a professor, to 15 to 20 places in need around the globe each summer. 

Senior Natalie Bisaro, a communications and comparative literature major, spent a month in Grenada working with young children. “Before going, I was kind of terrified of studying abroad, to be honest,” said Bisaro. “This was all pretty much life changing.” She later spent a semester in Switzerland and took a sports management class in Ann Arbor that included two weeks in London looking at preparations for the Summer Olympics. The latter was one of a dozen “Global Course Connections” classes with travel embedded. 

Lester Monts, senior vice provost for academic affairs, pushed for the creation in 2002 of the GIEU program. Monts, an ethnomusicologist and trumpeter who led the U-M Symphonic Band on a tour of China and helped bring to Ann Arbor the only Confucius Institute devoted solely to the arts, said, “One of the things that I’ve tried to do here is not let these big, grand, university initiatives go without some kind of undergraduate involvement,” he said.

Close Ties With Ghana

Fittingly, some of Michigan’s strongest international ties are to Ghana, the country that Kennedy singled out in his remarks on the Union steps. Through a partnership with the Ghanaian Ministry of Health, the University of Ghana, and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, dating to the 1980s, the U-M Medical School has trained most of the country’s obstetrician-gynecologists and helped reverse a “brain drain” of young physicians who used to leave the country for training. Other schools, including Engineering, Public Health, and Social Science, also send faculty to teach and conduct research in Ghana and bring Ghanaian faculty and students to Ann Arbor. 

For a class project, biomedical engineering major Jack Hessburg and classmates spent weeks in Ghana accompanying obstetricians on their rounds in teaching hospitals, and back in Ann Arbor then designed a 17-inch plastic device to place a fabric sleeve around the baby’s head to aid midwives in deliveries. The device awaits approval by health authorities, but “the obstetricians and midwives we were working with were excited and cautiously optimistic,” said Hessburg. 

Sending Engineers and Artists Abroad

The College of Engineering has made a big push to encourage students to study and undertake projects abroad. “We’re broad minded. We talk about study abroad, research abroad, volunteer experiences abroad, engineering projects abroad,” including solar car competitions, said Associate Dean James Paul Holloway. “The goal is not study 
abroad. The goal is for students to get outside their comfort zone.”

The engineers are as much interested “in a challenging experience as they are in academic credit,” said Amy Conger, who directs the college’s international programs. “They want an experience that is engaging, professionally relevant, and that’s going to teach them something new. They want to tackle a problem.”

Bryan Rogers, retiring dean of the School of Art and Design, took an art class while completing a PhD in chemical engineering at University of California Berkeley and wound up reengineering himself into a sculptor and installation artist. The School of Art and Design is the smallest school at Michigan, and Rogers spent a couple of years selling the idea of education abroad to his faculty before convincing them to make international travel and study a requirement for the major. Rogers, who did postgraduate work at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, said, “Being somewhere else helped me better understand who I was. That’s what I want for our students and faculty…. The idea is not to go somewhere and get culture dust sprinkled on you, but to get away from the things that you’re familiar with and have an experience that helps you see where you came from.”

Global Scholars for Life

The university keeps expanding its international ambit in ways small and large. Three years ago it created a living-learning community it calls the Global Scholars Program in which U.S. and international students dwell together on the top two floors of a 10-story dorm and work on social justice projects. “When we advertise, we say we want students who are interested in making the world a better place,” said Jennifer Yim, the director. It quickly filled up with 35 students the first year, 70 the second, and the capacity of 130 the third year. “My students say ‘GSP for life,’” Yim said.

Xiaoxiao Liu, a senior from Beijing, served as a GSP resident adviser. He was also president of the student government’s international student affairs committee. Liu won math competitions as a schoolboy in China, but came to the United States for college because he wanted to learn more than the math and sciences emphasized in China’s universities. “Here you can speak whatever you want to say. People tend to have more diverse views of what’s going on. That’s something I really wanted to explore,” said Liu, who pulled off a rare triple major in actuarial math, statistics, and economics.

John Greisberger, director of the International Center, is heartened by the growing number of international undergraduates serving as resident advisers. “Four years ago, fewer than five of the 150 to 160 resident advisers were international students. Now it’s close to 40,” said Greisberger. “It’s a great job on campus. They get free housing and a meal plan. It really does build a multicultural environment within the residence halls.”

An Area Studies Powerhouse

Michigan is an area studies bastion, with six national resource centers among the International Institute’s 18 centers, plus a federally funded international business center. But that distinctive strength also means the Michigan centers were hard hit in 2011 when Congress cut Title VI funding for the national resource centers by 47 percent. Mark Tessler, vice provost for international affairs, said, “We’re better prepared than most. Some of these centers actually have endowments. I think the university will support us for a while.” But “the biggest unanswered question” is what happens in the long run to the dozens of less commonly taught languages, Tessler said. “If universities like us don’t offer them, then the U.S. just won’t have this capacity.” 

“We think it’s very important for a place like Michigan to keep the breadth and depth as much as possible because we know that many other institutions cannot.”

Kenneth Kollman, director of the International Institute, is looking to foundations to help fill in the $1.5 million, two-year funding gap. Although foreign language and area studies fellowships were not cut, Kollman said Michigan has had to cut back on summer language workshops and training for Michigan high school teachers. The university once calculated that it takes 29 students to pay for each section of a language course, but some of the centers’ languages— including Persian, Serbo-Croatian, Tamil, and Quechua—have as few as five students, he said.

Geography Lesson

The university in 2010 launched a “Global Michigan” Web site, globalportal.umich.edu, that pulls together resources and encourages students and faculty to conduct study and research abroad. “The world is today’s college campus. Never before have we had so much to learn from other nations and cultures,” Coleman says in a videotaped message that ends, “Go Blue—abroad!”

Coleman is unwilling to cede any of Michigan’s 65 languages as expendable.

“We think it’s very important for a place like Michigan to keep the breadth and depth as much as possible because we know that many other institutions cannot,” the president said. Cutting programs “is our last resort.”

“We had an experience back in the 1980s when we had one of these budget crunches and made the decision to close a couple of academic departments,” including geography, Coleman said. “Everybody thought there wasn’t any future in geography and then GPS [Global Positioning System] came along with all sorts of new things. Now it’s a very robust discipline. Anybody looking back now would think that decision was silly. So we are very careful; reducing languages for us would be a very serious decision.” 

It’s no surprise that San Francisco State University (SF State) is a magnet for international students. The green campus sits in a tranquil corner of one of the world’s most enticing  cities, with Muni trolleys running up to its door and the Pacific Ocean beckoning a mile away. It has ranked in the top five in international enrollments among master’s level institutions since 1996 and occupied first place three times according to the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors report. More surprising, this urban campus is second in the country in another category: participation in year-long study abroad. Most of these students, like the large majority of all 25,000 undergraduates, are racial or ethnic minorities. “We have this huge mix racially and ethnically, and that’s who we send,” said Provost Sue Rosser.

A significant number are from disadvantaged backgrounds. They win dozens of Gilman Scholarships each year—176 in the past five years— and three-quarters of the nearly 450 SF State study abroad students receive aid in some form. Yenbo Wu, associate vice president of international education, said, “We have proven that you can study abroad even if you’re not super rich.” David Wick, coordinator of study abroad services, said, “We’re doing some pretty unique things to make study abroad possible for very diverse, very low income, transfer, and older student populations.” The drive for diversity is a widely shared passion at SF State (both Wick and Marilyn Jackson, assistant director of international programs, wrote doctoral dissertations addressing education abroad issues for students of color). The campus is home to the nation’s first and only College of Ethnic Studies, created after a prolonged student strike during the antiwar and civil rights ferment of the late 1960s. The distinctive-looking student center, topped by tilted pyramids, is named for Cesar Chavez, the farm workers’ leader, and it faces Malcolm X Plaza. “We’ve gone beyond diversity. We are a campus for social justice and equity,” said Dean of Students Joseph Greenwell.

Senior Albert (A.J.) Burleson, who grew up in impoverished, historically black Hunter’s Point, started college years ago and even earned a track scholarship at Cal State University, Fresno, but left far short of a degree. He found much greater success at SF State where he completed a bachelor’s degree in sociology and international relations after spending a year at the University of Amsterdam on a Gilman Award. Burleson’s resume includes work on filmmaker Kevin Epps documentary Straight Outta Hunter’s Point. He became a peer mentor in the international programs office after returning from the Netherlands. “I received so much aid and support, and me coming from the inner city, I see it only fitting that I return the favor by helping others access study abroad,” said the 35-year-old. Another peer mentor, senior Jordan Brown, 26, a broadcasting and electronic media major who grew up in Sacramento, used his Gilman to study at the University of Tübingen and the Hochschule der Medien in Stuttgart, Germany, and headed to Ghana after graduation to complete a documentary. Brown successfully navigated art and media classes taught in German after one course in San Francisco and six weeks of language classes in Germany. “That was intense, but good,” said Brown, who is weighing a possible return to Germany for graduate school.

Thriving Despite Economic Challenges

SF State has moved forward with its internationalization efforts during a period of prolonged austerity and budget crises for California’s public institutions. When Yenbo Wu arrived in 2000 to take charge of the Office of International Programs, it had a 10-person staff. By 2007, when President Robert Corrigan, a stalwart supporter of internationalization, elevated Wu to the new position of associate vice president for international education, the staff had grown to 20. A hiring freeze subsequently cost the office two of those positions. A new international student adviser hired in spring 2012 was the first addition to the staff in two years. Corrigan, who retired in July 2012 at age 77 after 24 years, said he felt an obligation to ensure that the international students who enroll in such large numbers have a good experience during their years on the urban campus, including academic advice, mentoring, and opportunities to interact with faculty outside the classroom. Corrigan’s successor is Leslie Wong, former president of Northern Michigan University.

Cuts in state aid have led to greater class sizes at SF State, especially in departments depleted by the loss of 100 faculty jobs to attrition. A university planning advisory council that Corrigan appointed to address the budget challenges expressed strong support for “the university’s commitment to internationalization and the benefits that international programs bring to our students.” It also applauded efforts by the Office of International Programs (OIP) “to maximize flexibility and efficiency” and took note of “the financial advantages associated with strategically recruiting international students.” International students bring their global perspective and the numbers needed to develop new programs. In the economics department, which had lost five of 14 faculty members, Sudip Chattopadhyay, the chair, spearheaded the creation of a dual-degree master’s program with Xiamen University that brings to campus a cohort of 30 Chinese students, fully funded by their government, and sends SF State faculty to teach at Xiamen in the summer. “We have to be very innovative as to how we offer the same curriculum with reduced resources,” Chattopadhyay said. 

A Stellar Faculty, a Welcoming Community

Since fewer than 400 domestic students come from outside California, the international contingent makes an outsize contribution to campus diversity. “We’re not Stanford or Berkeley, but this is a university that’s right for most students, not just in the United States but the world,” said Wu, a native of Beijing. The location and SF State’s mission also help attract a stellar faculty. Rosser, a zoologist and women’s studies scholar who previously was Georgia Tech’s first female dean, said, “We’re really quite fortunate in the caliber of faculty we’re able to attract.” 

“We’re not Stanford or Berkeley, but this is a university that’s right for most students, not just in the United States but the world.”

San Francisco, the city that gave birth to the United Nations, is home to a polyglot population. “We don’t have to do much of a marketing job for San Francisco,” said Jay Ward, the OIP associate director who has directed international student services since 1994, when there were 1,000 international students. Counting those on Optional Practical Training, SF State now has more than 2,400. With a third adviser now on board, Ward hopes to extend office hours and expand programming “to the way it was before.”

Koichiro Aoshima, the Japanese-born coordinator for international student services and outreach, recalled that on the day he first set foot on campus in 1998, “a guy came up to me and asked for directions. He thought I was from here. You just blend in.” 

Aoshima and Mei-Ling Wang, coordinator of international student advising, advise hundreds of international undergraduate and exchange students. When speaking with new arrivals, Wang always keeps in mind how she felt as an 18-yearold freshman at Drexel University in Philadelphia, fresh from Taiwan. “It isn’t easy. You struggle with the language. I was even afraid to go to grocery shop. I didn’t know how to order a sandwich. ‘Why do they have so many choices?’” she recalled. “You really have to be patient with these students.”

Incubating Student Leaders

There are 26 international clubs at SF State. The largest by far is the 1,800-member International Education Exchange Council (IEEC). It includes the hundreds of exchange students who come to SF State each year, droves of U.S. students preparing for or newly returned from study abroad, and other students drawn by dozens of weekly events including sports events, film nights, and language exchange partnerships. The council affords ample opportunities for leadership training with nearly 100 officer positions, including co-U.S. and international presidents.

Eric Ostlund, 24, a graduate student from Uppsala University, Sweden, studying law, economics, and criminal justice, said, “The IEEC is very different from anything you’re likely to find anywhere else, just in terms of sheer size and magnitude and all the different things we do. We’re one of the few environments where if you have an idea and you want to do it, you actually can.”

Ostlund was co-president with Linda Carter Nguyen of Alameda, California, whose Vietnamese immigrant parents named her after the actress who played Wonder Woman, from a television show they watched to learn English. Nguyen joined the IEEC to meet French students on campus before her semester in Paris. “I kind of corralled all the French people on campus and said, ‘Be my friend, take care of me.’ So when I went to Paris, that’s what they did. They picked me up in the airport. They introduced me to their friends,” she said. Flying back home, the liberal studies major resolved “to be more involved in the IEEC to keep this international dream alive.” 

IEEC students are a familiar sight on campus—staffing a study abroad table on the quad, distributing flyers, and organizing events and activities. They also raise funds for scholarships. Noah Kuchins, the IEEC adviser, works to connect all incoming students with buddies “before they set foot on campus.” He finds prospects when they inquire at the OIP about education abroad. His pitch: “You’re interested in studying in Japan and we’ve got 30 Japanese students coming next semester. Would you want to welcome one of them?”

Exchange Brings Opportunities

Students can choose among 115 study abroad programs in 28 countries. SF State has 55 bilateral exchanges of its own and offers 51 more through the California State University international programs office. Exchanges bring international opportunities to every department, including SF State’s undergraduate cinema major. Since 2010 Weimin Zhang, an associate professor and awardwinning documentary filmmaker, has led the International Documentary Workshop in Shanghai, China, each summer in partnership with Xiejin Film and Television College at Shanghai Normal University. She brought the first dozen SF State students to Shanghai in June 2010 to collaborate with a dozen Shanghai Normal students over three weeks to conceive, write, and film four 10-minute documentaries on unusual aspects of life in China, including the local hip hop scene, housing shortages, and migrant workers’ struggles. The students overcome language barriers. Zhang, a graduate of the Beijing Film Academy, said, “Even I was surprised they can make a film in a language they don’t even know.” President Corrigan, who visited the first workshop, marveled that students shared “a common language of film.” The Shanghai film school also sends several students to San Francisco for a semester each term. 

General Education Includes Global Perspectives

All undergraduates must fulfill a cultural, ethnic, or social diversity requirement. Some 300 courses already contain significant international content. Paul Sherwin, dean of the College of Liberal and Creative Arts and formerly dean of humanities, believes a forthcoming general education change will quadruple student enrollment to 4,000 in courses offering comparative study of global issues and regions. “The curriculum already has changed drastically in almost all majors,” even in his own field of English literature, said Sherwin, pointing to a recent hire who teaches a course on Shakespeare’s influence on India’s Bollywood.

“We’re creating global citizens,” said history professor Trevor Getz, an Africa specialist whose popular courses serve as a feeder to education abroad programs in Ghana and South Africa. “It’s not just important that we send our elite abroad. This country does a pretty good job of that. It’s equally important that the kinds of students that we have here are able to have that experience.” 

Political scientist Emil Nagengast was hired by Juniata College in 1996 to teach international politics, with Europe and the former East Germany—he’d studied at Karl Marx University in Leipzig shortly before the Berlin Wall fell—his special province. But in 2004, with a conscience pricked by complaints from two former, African-born students about the Eurocentricity of his course, he spent a sabbatical in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, examining the workings of the fledgling African Union. The next year, with guidance and help from a Washington & Jefferson College professor who had already begun taking students to The Gambia, Nagengast led four Juniata students to Senegal and The Gambia for three weeks. In 2008 Juniata and other colleges in Pennsylvania formed a Keystone Study Away Consortium to offer a full semester at the University of  The Gambia. Nagengast, or Nags as students call him, now has led eight summer trips to The Gambia and launched a winter class as well. He calculates that 135 Juniata students to date have studied in The Gambia over summer and 31 in spring semester. His Introduction to International Politics course now devotes as much time to the African Union as it does to the European Union (one week). Of his midcareer switch in interests, Nagengast recalls that when he broached the idea of education abroad in West Africa, administrators “just said, ‘Interesting. Go do it.’ They trusted me.” 

He is not alone in finding ready support for internationalizing courses and the entire experience at Juniata, a liberal arts college with 1,600 students tucked in the Appalachian mountains in the central Pennsylvania town of Huntingdon. Juniata was founded in 1876 as the first of a half dozen colleges associated with the pacifist Church of the Brethren. It is independent but still part of a network of Brethren colleges. Most past presidents were church ministers and a fraction of current faculty and students are members. The Brethren heritage is manifest most strongly in its peace and conflict studies program and in the meditative “Peace Chapel,” a circular ring of stones set on a nearby hilltop designed by architect Maya Lin. Traditionally its student body was drawn from within the borders of the Quaker State. But that is changing.

A Long International Journey

Juniata set out almost two decades ago to make itself a more globally minded campus. A 1993 strategic plan identified internationalization as a top priority and urged the recruitment of more international students. The next year it opened an Intensive English Program to help attract them to Huntingdon. Juniata in 2004 joined the American Council on Education (ACE) Internationalization Collaborative, and its 2008 strategic plan embraced a goal of raising international enrollments from 6 to 10 percent. It reached that mark swiftly, with 166 students on visas on campus in 2011–12, including 50 from China. President Thomas Kepple said he would gladly see that percentage double to 20 percent so long as Juniata’s overall enrollment keeps growing as it has on his watch, from 1,200 in 1998 to the current 1,600. Juniata’s out-of-state enrollment has doubled to 40 percent.

“It’s becoming a better place. It’s hard work in admissions, basically,” said Kepple, who will retire in May 2013. Students are drawn in part by Juniata’s generous financial aid for both domestic and international applicants. Dean of Admissions Michelle Bartol said, “We’re never coasting. Right now with China recruitment, everyone else is kind of catching up. We’ve got to stay one step ahead.” 

The college, which boasts an alumnus with a Nobel Prize in physics (William Phillips ’70), is particularly strong in the sciences and sends dozens of graduates to medical and graduate schools. For international parents, “the sales pitch is they already know people who’ve sent their children here and they’ve done well,” said Kepple. “Ninety percent of our Chinese students graduate. That’s larger than our U.S. student number.”

Language Houses and a Global Village

Dean of International Education Jenifer Cushman and Rosalie Rodriguez, the college’s chief diversity officer, returned from an ACE Bridging the Gap Symposium in 2008 determined to find new ways to change the face of the college and encourage more students to encounter and reflect upon cultural differences. They came up with a Global Engagement Initiative that included the creation of a residential Global Village that features an intercultural floor for a mix of international and domestic students within a larger dorm. 

“This is a really good community. People are really nice and welcoming, the professors remember your name and their office is always open.”

Clarissa Diniz, a pre-med student from Recife, Brazil, said it was “really cool” living there as a freshman. She stayed on as a resident adviser for sophomore year. Diniz, daughter of two math professors, has a brother who graduated from UCLA, but was happy with her small town choice. “This is a really good community. People are really nice and welcoming, the professors remember your name and their office is always open.”

Also as part of the Global Village, several small houses on campuses are being turned into Spanish, French, and German houses where students live together to improve their language skills. Sophomore Rebekah Sheeler from Boyertown, Pennsylvania, was programming coordinator for the newly opened Spanish House in 2011–12. “The other students call me the Mom,” laughed Sheeler, who was drawn to Juniata to play field hockey but dropped the sport after a year in part to pursue international education interests. She combined classes and an internship in Orizaba, Mexico, in summer 2011, spent fall 2011 at a university in Quito, Ecuador, and will intern at a wildlife reserve in Peru in spring 2013.

A Thirst for Languages Without a Requirement

Juniata has no language requirement beyond two years in high school for admission. The college jettisoned a stronger requirement in the 1970s, and an effort in 1996 to reinstate it fell a few votes short. But Professor of Spanish Henry Thurston-Griswold said, “When I came in 1992, we averaged 50 students per semester taking Spanish. Now we have more than triple that number.” Juniata is home to the much-honored Language in Motion program, which deploys international students and study abroad returnees to local K–12 classrooms where they present language lessons and cultural activities. Language in Motion, led by Deborah Roney, has taken root at 13 other colleges and universities. 

Juniata offers French, German, and Russian as well as Spanish and two years of Chinese. “The difficulty with languages other than Spanish is we’re basically one-person programs,” said Michael Henderson, chair of world languages and associate professor of French. “Obviously offering an upper division course in French critical theory is not a good idea…. My main motivation is to get students in my classes to study abroad.”

In the 1980s Juniata exchanged as many as 20 science majors each year with the Catholic University of Lille in France and the University of Marburg in Germany. Chemistry Professor Ruth Reed, a former Fulbright scholar in Germany, championed the exchanges, which later dropped off. She saw one downside to sending so many Juniata students to Lille and Marburg. “If you send too many, then you defeat the purpose. You have this little clique that doesn’t integrate. We can be too successful,” said the retiring chemistry professor.

While Reed’s passion came early, Gerald Kruse, a professor of math and computer science, was farther along in his career when he had a serendipitous meeting with Thomas Weik, a computer science professor at Juniata partner Muenster University of Applied Sciences in Germany. They wound up swapping homes and classes for fall 2006. “It was just a fantastic experience. I went over as a passive supporter (of education abroad) and came back as a very active promoter,” said Kruse, who now serves on Juniata’s International Education Committee. 

An Engaged Faculty and Two Advisers

Almost half the class of 2011 studied abroad, many on the 20 education abroad courses led by Juniata professors. Juniata has exchange partners in 19 countries. “Our success at this didn’t start at the top,” said Provost James Lasko. “Faculty who had international contacts were largely responsible for this exchange model. Sometimes administrators just have to know when to get out of the way and give your people a little latitude to run with a good idea.” Cushman, the dean of international education and associate professor of German, said, “Faculty involvement and engagement really are the heart of our international programs. Faculty members go above and beyond. Every time my office takes a step, it’s in conjunction with faculty.” 

Juniata has 102 full-time and 48 part-time faculty, and each student has two academic advisers, one for their Program of Emphasis (POE)—Juniata’s interdisciplinary alternative to majors—and another from a second discipline to offer a different perspective. The advice includes strong encouragement to study abroad.

Most students choose straightforward business, science, and humanities concentrations, but three in 10 chart new pathways to their bachelor’s degrees. 

Brianne Rowan, 22, from Port Townsend, Washington, fashioned her POE around global health issues. She spent three summers doing volunteer work in Thailand with a humanitarian group from her hometown, spent junior year abroad in Lille, France, and twice went on two-week service trips with Juniata’s Habitat for Humanity chapter to build homes for the poor in Yerevan, Armenia, and in El Salvador. 

Megan Russell, 22, a senior from Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania, and a Habitat for Humanity leader, learned on Nagengast’s 2011 trip to The Gambia that “things do not always go as planned. Sometimes a pipe breaks in your room or scorpions are chasing you around, but it’s all part of the experience.” The aspiring physical therapist came back from Gambia and organized a fundraiser to buy solar panels for a rural hospital.

Growing Pains and Essays on the Radio

There have been growing pains with the rapid climb in international enrollments, especially the spurt in the number of students from China. History professor David Sowell, a former international education director, said, “Our big challenge now is how do we integrate them? We have the Global Village; we have lots and lots of student groups. How do we use programming and those groups to draw students into that intercultural exchange?”

Doug Stiffler, an associate professor of history and East Asia specialist, sees that already happening. When Stiffler and spouse Jingxia Yang, now the Chinese language instructor, came to Juniata in 2002, “there was one student from mainland China and a handful of ethnic Chinese students. It was a pretty homogenous place, albeit with a great commitment to international education,” said Stiffler. “Over five or six years, we saw that number change to 50 Chinese students. For us, it’s a wonderful thing.”

The influx has boosted enrollments in Juniata’s Intensive English Program. Instructor Gretchen Ketner, a National Public Radio fan, found an unusual way to help students hone writing skills and adjust to U.S. college life. She assigned them to write “This I Believe” essays for the Penn State public radio station, WPSU. Nearly a dozen have gotten on the air.

Separately, Stiffler did an on-air interview for that station’s “StoryCorps” broadcast with a freshman from Chengdu, China, who wrote in Ketner’s class about his admiration for Lin Zhao, a student leader in Beijing during the Hundred Flowers Movement in 1956 when Mao Zedong briefly encouraged citizens to speak freely. She was imprisoned in 1960, but wrote about freedom and democracy in her letters and diary—some in her own blood—until her execution in 1968. “She’s a real hero,” the business student told Stiffler. “Our government and our school never talk about this…. I want to learn something about America. I want to teach people what is liberty, what is freedom, what we can do in this special time.” 

Kati Csoman, assistant dean of international education, said that in addition to the regular orientation, all new international students can join the U.S. freshman in “Inbound” retreats built around such activities as backpacking, hiking, cooking, the arts and exploring spirituality, pop culture, and other topics. The students choose from more than 30 tracks. Two peer leaders assisted by faculty or staff shepherd the new students in groups of 10 through the three-day experience. “The idea is to bring together students across their interests, but then also help them make friendships and learn about the college,” said Csoman.

It took some families in a barrio of Managua, Nicaragua, by surprise when U.S. and  Nicaraguan college students showed up at their door asking what they knew about HIV/AIDS prevention. But soon the students were familiar faces. The nursing students from Fairfield University in Connecticut and the social work and Teaching English as a Second Language students from Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) were part of a project called Cuidemos Nuestra Salud (Take Care of Our Health). The project began in 2009 and now continues every year to improve the health of preschool children and their families in the impoverished Barrio Ayapal. 

Vilma Alvarez, UCA professor of social work, had connected with community leaders the year before when she sent her students to the barrio to perform service. At the time, UCA and Fairfield, both Jesuit institutions, were no strangers to one another. Fairfield faculty had research ties there that stretched back to the 1990s, and the university began sending Latin American and Caribbean studies students on short trips in 2000. In 2004 the universities signed a collaborative agreement that established a semester-long study abroad program at UCA and also provided a full scholarship for a UCA student to attend the sister school in Connecticut each semester.

In for the Long Haul

Lydia and Philip Greiner, nursing professors and spouses, decided the sister school partnership presented a perfect opportunity to enrich the learning experience for undergraduates in her public health class, students who usually do prevention work in low-income neighborhoods in Bridgeport, a few miles from the Fairfield campus. Now some would spend spring break in 2009 learning about and addressing the challenges and needs in Ayapal. 

The Greiners had laid the groundwork in an earlier visit where they met Alvarez and Marisol Morales Vega, the community leader and director of a preschool, Amigos por Siempre, for the barrio’s three-to-five-year-old children. Morales “was really clear. She said, ‘You’re not just coming once. That’s been done before. People have come, they promise, and they leave. I’m not interested in that.’ We made a commitment that we were in for the long haul,” Lydia said.

Listening First

They also committed to listening to the community first before deciding what to do. A dozen Fairfield nursing students were paired with UCA social work students and a student who could translate, and they went door-to-door asking families about their most pressing health concerns. Later Morales called a meeting with parents active in the preschool to discuss the results. The answer was clear: HIV/AIDS education was what people wanted most.

“They felt people were very stigmatized and there was a lot of misinformation. They asked us to produce a homegrown DVD that people could watch in the privacy of their homes because Marisol said they would not come to an event about HIV/AIDS,” said Greiner. The Fairfield contingent returned home but continued to collaborate with the UCA students by e-mail and Facebook. They also enlisted help from other Fairfield students with video-making skills. They produced a four-minute video with images from Nicaragua and a draft script that was translated into Spanish and vetted by Morales and some of her school parents. A UCA student at Fairfield narrated the final version.

Lydia Greiner returned in 2010 with a dozen more students and, with the same UCA students, distributed 400 copies of the DVD to families throughout the barrio. Subsequently Fairfield has sent students and faculty to Nicaragua twice a year, fulfilling their public health nursing requirements while working on priorities such as cardiovascular health problems and promoting hygiene in a barrio that floods easily and does not always have running tap water.

Finding the Link Between the Barrio and Bridgeport

Greiner and other faculty take both traditional college-age nursing students and older adult students who are switching careers. Greiner said she has seen some students who had a passing interest in public health nursing “become passionate about it,” including Colleen Grady, now an emergency room nurse in Boulder, Colorado, who went on that first trip in 2009.

“My Spanish skills were terrible. It was such a blessing to have the UCA students there to help translate,” said Grady. “One thing that I will always remember is when one of the UCA students told me how sad she was to see how people in the barrio were living. She lived nearby, but was unaware of the hardships in the barrio. It made me think about how easily we can become disconnected to people in our own cities and neighborhoods.”

“After this trip I knew that I wanted to volunteer as a nurse internationally, but I also felt the importance of taking care of people in my own community,” said the 31-year-old Grady, who has subsequently volunteered with a nonprofit called Blanca’s House in El Salvador and Liberia.

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Professor Jessica Planas, who has made three of the trips, said she impresses upon her students the similarity of challenges facing the poor whether in Managua or Bridgeport. “Many of the families that we work with in Ayapal deal with the same issues that my patients back home deal with,” including lack of money to buy medicine and low literacy levels, she said. “And these 
issues will be encountered by all my students, regardless where they choose to practice nursing.”

Internationalizing the UCA Students’ Education

Speaking through an interpreter, Professor Alvarez said, “What we have in common is the community work.” While the Fairfield contingent comes for just a week, the work “is continuous,” with her students and the community leaders continuing to promote preventive health measures year-round. The added value for her students “is the intercultural experience and the interdisciplinary approach.”

UCA psychology student Maria Christina Aguirre, who spent the fall 2012 semester at Fairfield, said working in Ayapal “was a beautiful experience. The people were very thankful.” 

UCA has 8,000 students, most on government-funded scholarships to the Catholic institution. Laurie Cordua, UCA’s director of academic cooperation and internationalization, said, “Having this relationship with Fairfield is very important for us. Our students don’t have the means to have a study abroad experience. This gives them the opportunity of having an intercultural experience, of sharing, of working in teams with students from the United States that otherwise they wouldn’t have. It’s really an internationalization experience at home, locally.”

Mirroring the University Mission

Sixty percent of Fairfield’s 5,000 students study abroad for a semester, year, or shorter periods, or perform service in five countries. The university’s strategic plan speaks about producing young men and women “committed to diversity and the promotion of justice” and “prepared to engage with the world around them as competent and informed global citizens.”

President Jeffrey von Arx, S.J., said, “It is no longer sufficient to measure globalization by the numbers of students getting on a plane.” The partnership with UCA and Ayapal crosses “language and cultural divides to effect real and lasting change,” he said, and stands as “an exemplar of how the university lives out its mission.”

Fairfield, which enrolls students from other U.S. universities in its semester-long program at UCA, has also invited nursing faculty and students from other schools to join the work in Ayapal, and it is planning to send its own nurse practitioner graduate students to work in a rural health clinic in January 2014 in Santa Maura, Nicaragua, a mountain region where coffee is grown. January is the harvesting season when the clinic nurse has her hands full treating an influx of 3,000 migrant workers. 

So the partnership is growing despite challenges that include the paucity of bilingual nursing students and faculty at Fairfield’s end as well as the time constraints of academic requirements in both institutions. Despite those impediments, both sides regard their collaboration as a model for communitybased work. Neither has the complete answer, but by working together they are making a difference in people’s health in barrio Ayapal.

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Fairfield University

Read more about Fairfield University

The Ohio State University (OSU) is imposing by any dimension. Its 64,000 students make it the third largest higher education institution in the United States. The research budget is closing in on $1 billion. Recently it generated nearly a half-billion dollars for its endowment by leasing to an Australian firm the concession to operate the campus parking garages for 50 years. When it piloted an undergraduate mentorship program that came with a $2,000 carrot that could be used for education abroad, it started with 1,000 students. “We don’t do anything small in Ohio State,” said Dolan Evanovich, vice president for strategic enrollment planning.

But five years ago its president, provost, and faculty decided that Ohio State was not sufficiently international. They set out to remedy that in a hurry. Today Ohio State has what it calls Global Gateway offices in Shanghai, China, Mumbai, India, and São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, and it’s eyeing which continent will be next. International enrollments have rocketed from 4,000 to 6,000, mostly due to a large influx of Chinese undergraduates, who now comprise two-thirds of all 3,600 students the world’s largest country sends off to Columbus. Education abroad enrollments have spiked from 1,716 to 2,255, thanks to a switch from quarters to semesters and the introduction of May session courses. Deans of the 14 colleges have embraced the strategy, recognizing internationalization is vital to their mission, not to mention their job evaluation.

Even colleges deeply engaged for years in overseas research and partnerships now see new doors opening. Bruce McPheron, dean of the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences, said, “This gateway strategy provides an opportunity not only to build lasting partnerships with other scholars, but with the private and public sectors, just like we do here as a land-grant university.”

What’s taking place, said Vice Provost for Global Strategies and International Affairs William Brustein, is that internationalization has become rooted in “the campus community’s DNA.”

Sherri Geldin, director of Ohio State’s showcase Wexner Center for the Arts, which just mounted an exhibition on the work of contemporary Brazilian artists and filmmakers, observed, “It’s nothing we even have to think about very consciously. It just happens.”

New Leadership and Status for International Affairs

Ohio State wooed Brustein from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009 by elevating the position of senior international officer to the rank of vice provost and including him in the Council of Deans. Brustein also was promised “that he would have the attention of not only the provost, but also the president. Symbolically that’s critical,” said Joseph Alutto, provost at the time and later interim president after E. Gordon Gee stepped down in 2013 (it was the globally minded Gee who set a goal of making Ohio State “the landgrant university to the world).”

“This university was punching under its weight when it came to comprehensive internationalization,” said Brustein, who also was given an office in Bricker Hall on the Oval amidst the rest of the university’s leadership. “A lot was going on in the colleges, but in terms of having signature university programs and an institutional strategy, those didn’t exist.” Kelechi Kalu, a professor of African American and African Studies, was tapped in 2012 for associate provost, overseeing day-to-day operations of the Office of International Affairs (OIA) in century-old Oxley Hall.

A President’s and Provost’s Council on Strategic Internationalization prepared a detailed blueprint for engaging more faculty and students in global learning, teaching, and research. Undergirding the strategy were what the council called its six “pillars”: recruiting more international faculty and students, promoting scholarship on global issues, creating dual-degree programs, developing an international physical presence, increasing international experiences for students, and collaborating with alumni and Ohio business ventures.

Ohio State has embarked on a 10-year, $400 million initiative to hire 500 new, interdisciplinary faculty to pursue breakthroughs on the “grand challenges of the twenty-first century” in three realms: energy and environment, food production and safety, and health and wellness. These Discovery Themes, as Ohio State calls them, all have deep international dimensions.

Understanding the Worth of Global Gateways

Ohio State leaders originally thought the gateway offices could largely cover their $250,000-a-year costs by generating revenues from executive training, which would subsidize recruiting and academic activities. Professors would fly in from Columbus to provide executive training in short bursts. But “the price points for delivering executive-type education in China and India are not what they are here in the U.S.,” said Christopher Carey, a West Point graduate who is Global Gateways director.

The original business model, Brustein said, “was overly ambitious” and undervalued the academic benefits accruing from these overseas outposts.

“We said, ‘Let’s look at what the gateways are doing in terms of assisting the quantity and quality of the students who are coming here, particularly from China, and let’s monetize that. Let’s look at (how) they’re facilitating faculty teaching and research collaborations. Let’s look at the monetary value of the new internships and study abroad programs that we’ve created,’” he recalled. That reasoning carried the day.

New dual-degree programs have sprouted with Shanghai Jiao Tong University and other institutions. The gateways energized local Buckeye alumni, one of whom donated prime office space in Mumbai. With a half-million living alumni, Buckeyes are everywhere. “We just started our own alumni club in Shanghai,” boasted David Williams, dean of the College of Engineering. “We’re building the same kind of network for engineers we have here in this country.” The gateway also gives Ohio State an edge in recruiting “fabulous” Shanghai Jiao Tong students for graduate school, he added.

“None of this is cheap, but if you’re going to do it, you have to do it well,” said Alutto, the former longtime dean of the Fisher College of Business, who returned to the faculty after Ohio State’s new president, Michael Drake, took office this summer.

Ramping Up Student Services and Friendship

As recently as a quarter century ago, Ohio State had open admissions and nearly nine in 10 students were from Ohio. As it raised standards, it attracted more out-of-staters and international students, who together now make up nearly a third of the student body. Engineering and business are the biggest draws for the 6,000 international students.

The emphasis now is not on driving that number higher, but diversifying the pool and improving the experience when they reach Columbus. “We’re concentrating on making sure that our students are well taken care of, feel welcome, and integrate well into the fabric of Ohio State,” said Gifty Ako-Adounvo, international student and scholar services director.

Improved services come at a price. Ohio State in 2012 added a $500 per-term fee to tuition for new international undergraduates to expand academic support and extracurricular programs, provide more English proficiency instruction, and offer more housing options. It also underwrote the $175,000 cost of flying a 10-person team from admissions, international affairs, and student life to China to hold full-blown preorientation sessions for hundreds of incoming students and their parents.

The raft of extracurricular programming includes weekly “Global Engagement Nights” that bring dozens of U.S. and international students together. Xin Ni Au, 21, a nutrition major from Johor, Malaysia, attended nearly every one, became a volunteer Global Ambassador, and exuberantly greeted new arrivals at an OIA booth at the Columbus airport.

Au, a junior, transferred to Ohio State just nine months earlier, but with help from two Malaysian students she found on Facebook, she threw herself into campus life. She’s still surprised “how friendly people are. People smile and say, ‘Hi. How are you?’ and everything. Frankly, you don’t get that in Malaysia.”

Tianxia “Mark” Gu, 22, a senior from Shanghai, also became a Global Ambassador. The gregarious Gu said he was “pretty shy” before coming to Columbus, but now counts more than 50 students as close friends. A self-described “super sports fan,” he “learned the Buckeye pride before I came here.” He credits his American accent to watching reruns of the sitcom Friends back in Shanghai and considers Monica, the perfectionist, a role model. The finance and math major wants to return to China and develop job search software to help people “build their dream.”

Tackling Rabies and Cervical Cancer in Ethiopia

Wide-ranging partnerships in Ethiopia with universities, government agencies, and NGOs testify to the breadth of resources Ohio State can summon to address endemic health problems. Its “One Health” initiative musters administrators, faculty, and students from all seven OSU health science colleges, as well as the business college and others. Already the collaboration has laid the groundwork for a mass campaign to vaccinate dogs against rabies and introduce cervical cancer screening in places where that has never been done.

Spearheading the One Health work in Ethiopia is Wondwossen Gebreyes, a veterinary molecular epidemiologist. “We’ve been teaching courses there every summer since 2009,” said Gebreyes. “For the past two years we’ve adopted the One Health model and expanded the disciplines.” For him, One Health is a way to pay back the poor farmers whose cattle Gebreyes once treated after earning a veterinary degree at Addis Ababa University (he also has a PhD from North Carolina State). “I got all my education in Ethiopia for free on their shoulders,” he said.

Usha Menon, vice dean of the College of Nursing, has journeyed to Addis Ababa four times to teach and prepare a pilot cervical cancer screening program in the Amhara region. A half-dozen nursing students accompanied her on the last trip. Nearly 90 percent of cervical cancer occurs in the developing world, where four of five women have never been screened, said Menon, who came to Ohio State in 2012. “I’ve never seen this level of collaboration at other schools among the health sciences.” Menon encountered fewer bureaucratic hurdles for her screening since Gebreyes already had secured permission from the Ethiopian government for the larger One Health project. “That’s the joy of Ohio State for me. Cross-collaboration makes these things much easier to do. I don’t have to start from scratch,” she said.

“I’ve never seen this level of collaboration at other schools among the health sciences....That’s the joy of Ohio State for me.”

Tom Gregoire, dean of the College of Social Work, made his first visit to Ethiopia with the One Health team and will return to teach a graduate course. Did the College of Social Work need a kick to internationalize? No, Gregoire said, but the strategic plan “sent a signal from the top and created more enthusiasm around it. It’s more sanctioned. There’s a zillion things one can do around here and a good plan helps you choose.”

Teaching Critical Languages

Ohio State has six Title VI national resource centers, including the National East Asian Languages Resource Center. The Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures offers more than 160 language courses and in 2012 received a threeyear, nearly $10 million grant to administer the U.S. State Department’s Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program to establish intensive summer language institutes at partner universities in China, Japan, and Korea.

Professor Galal Walker underscored the difficulty the United States faces in producing enough graduates fluent in these languages. “There are 200,000 Chinese studying in the United States and about 15,000 Americans studying in China, most in very low-level, short-term classes, sometimes with no language at all,” he said. While Mandarin course enrollments have grown to 60,000 at U.S. campuses, 50,000 are at beginner levels, said Walker.

Walker is doing his part. He runs a two-year master’s program that prepares Americans to work in China-related careers. They do internships in China and spend the second year taking regular classes at a Chinese university. “The idea is to provide our students a basis for having sophisticated interactions with Chinese counterparts, the kind of educated people you meet in large companies and corporations,” said Walker.

Briun Greene, one of those graduate students, first learned Mandarin as a linguist for the Army. Recently he was tapped to serve as the interpreter for a visiting Chinese business delegation at a big trade show in Las Vegas. (The company flew in several of Walker’s students as its guests.)

“You have to be really fast on your feet to do that. He did a great job,” said the professor. The problem is that “very few get up to Briun’s level, which takes 2,500 hours of instruction—more than it takes to earn a law degree.” Greene sees his future as an entrepreneur in China. “I love living in Asia. I felt the most alive there,” he said.

Preparing Stem Faculty for India

When the U.S. Department of State announced in June 2013 that Ohio State had won a prestigious Obama-Singh 21st Century Knowledge Initiative award to expand India’s pipeline for producing science and engineering faculty, astrophysicist Anil Pradhan received accolades as the driving force behind the effort. Two OSU colleagues and a professor at partner Aligarh Muslim University are codirectors.

But Pradhan said “20 to 30 busy people” at OSU and an equal number at the Uttar Pradesh, India, university helped prepare the complex proposal. Ohio State also matched his $150,000 grant and will provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in fellowships to allow future Indian faculty to conduct PhD research, receive mentoring, and earn a master’s degree in teaching in Columbus.

“The idea is to train STEM faculty at the worldclass level,” said Pradhan. “Thousands upon thousands of universities and colleges have opened up in India with practically no (such) faculty.” He hopes to speed up the 10 years of training customarily required.

“Other universities in India are watching this project. It has huge potential,” said Pradhan, who taught radiation physics in India last spring as a Fulbright scholar, one of 14 Ohio State faculty so honored in 2013–2014. Pradhan, who emigrated from India as a teen, had never before ventured outside his laboratory on a project like this, but felt emboldened by OSU’s internationalization efforts. The big U.S. land-grant universities “have the most experience in providing higher education to masses of people,” said Pradhan, and Ohio State can “lead the pack.”

Pradhan is not alone in that belief. “There’s a certain hunger for helping this university realize its goal of global eminence. It’s become everybody’s narrative,” said Kalu.

Four words encapsulated the theme of Randy Woodson’s installation in 2010 as the fourteenth chancellor of North Carolina State University: “Locally responsive. Globally engaged.” The message was woven throughout the “Pathway to the Future” strategic plan that was quickly produced on Woodson’s watch. More than a catchphrase, it has become a compass for colleges, deans, and faculty at the 127-year-old, land-grant institution.

It remains a source of pride that the university has extension offices in each of North Carolina’s 100 counties, but now it also touts strategic partnerships with 20 universities on four continents, culled from a roster of hundreds of memoranda of understanding (MOU). International enrollments have surged to more than 3,400, including hundreds of undergraduates, once few and far between. The Office of International Affairs (OIA) is growing, too, and working more closely with student life, housing, and other units to better serve the newcomers. In part by trimming administrative bloat and consolidating programs, Woodson and Provost Warwick Arden husbanded the resources for an $18 million Faculty Excellence Program to hire 48 interdisciplinary faculty to work in clusters to address “the global grand challenges of society.”

“There was a lot of pent up energy when I got here,” said Woodson, a former Purdue University provost who began his career as a horticulturist studying how Israel grew fruits and vegetables in the desert. NC State, like Purdue, is an engineering bastion. On a campus with 34,000 students, nearly 9,000 are pursuing engineering degrees, including half the international students. One thing that surprised the chancellor upon arrival in Raleigh was that only 10 percent of the student body was from outside North Carolina, far below the 18 percent cap enshrined in state law. “Why aren’t we at 18 percent?” Woodson immediately asked. The response was that the university did not get to keep any extra tuition revenue from enrolling more outsiders. “I said, ‘I don’t care. It’s important for the reputation of the university, it’s important for the experience of students from North Carolina to study side by side with kids from Korea, China, India, and Indiana.”

Shrey Satpathy, 19, a sophomore nuclear engineering major from New Delhi, India, quickly made his presence felt on campus, winning selection at the end of freshman year as a Caldwell Fellow, a leadership program, and also capturing a $50,000 prize in a statewide technology competition. He and a classmate proposed a way for new public school teachers in North Carolina to share and evaluate lesson plans online; the prize money is to make that a reality.

Satpathy sees nothing unusual in an international undergraduate’s immersing himself in the problems of U.S. public schools. “I don’t consider myself an outsider. I consider myself more of a global citizen,” he said, and besides, “when you start something, it has a ripple” effect that could help teachers far beyond North Carolina’s borders.

Bringing International Programs to the Fore

Bailian Li, vice provost for international affairs, said the new strategic plan and the buy-in from all 12 colleges has truly made his office “the center for global engagement. We play the leadership role.” When Li arrived in 2006, the Office of International Affairs had a 16-member staff. Now it numbers 40. Political scientist Heidi Hobbs, who directs a popular master of international studies program, said, “International used to be, ‘Oh yeah, that’s them over there and they’re doing something international.’ Now it’s moved from the periphery to the central mission of the university.”

Funding is one reason the Office of International Affairs cuts a larger figure. It has $120,000 to spend each year to fund joint faculty research and education initiatives with those 20 strategic partners. The sum includes $35,000 in seed grants to faculty to promote collaborations. Li said his office has funded more than 40 international projects since 2011 and more than half these faculty have gone on to win additional support for their work.

Veterinary professor Siddhartha “Sid” Thakur used his $5,000 seed grant for a pilot project to monitor food-borne pathogens in meat sold in two states in India, a country with no such monitoring system. He enlisted hospitals and veterinary colleges for the effort in his native land. “That seed grant gave me money to go to India, talk to these people, and then write a bigger grant,” he said, which came in the amount of $100,000 from the World Health Organization. Thakur, a former Food and Drug Administration scientist, said, “I cannot solve drug resistance issues in North Carolina alone. How quickly these pathogens move around the globe is amazing.” Two Indian agricultural ministry officials have visited NC State, and Chancellor Woodson paid a return visit last year.

Tourism professor Duarte Morais, another seed grant recipient, has conducted research and worked with villagers in Tanzania, the Philippines, and Indonesia as well as with Native Americans on an extension project in North Carolina to help poor communities reap benefits from tourism. Morais, who is from Portugal, said, “When I applied to come here, I made a pledge to become an engaged scholar doing research and work here in North Carolina as a laboratory for other places in the world, and to teach classes that were engaged locally, but global in nature. That’s the walk I’m walking.”

Textile engineering professor Marian McCord was tapped to direct a new Global Health Initiative. McCord works on bringing affordable sanitary products to women in developing countries. “When your leadership puts global engagement at the forefront, you’re empowered and enabled to work on nonconventional types of research,” she said.

Among the 20 strategic partners are University of Surrey in the United Kingdom and Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil, which have a three-way relationship with NC State that they call the University Global Partnership Network. David Dixon, the international programs coordinator, said each institution committed $60,000 to promote joint research, exchange faculty and students, develop new academic programs, and fuel innovation, entrepreneurship, and technology transfer. In three years they’ve convened six conferences and a dozen workshops and funded 17 research collaborations.

Promoting Study Abroad with Scholarships and a Bus “Wrap”

Twenty percent of undergraduates study abroad, most on short-term, faculty-led programs, and Li and Ingrid Schmidt, associate vice provost and director of study abroad, are shooting for 30 percent. Not long ago only one student in eight studied abroad. “We know that study abroad is what we call a high-impact experience,” said Provost Warwick Arden. “It feeds directly into the success of our students. We’re trying to produce a student who’s prepared for a successful career in a global knowledge economy.”

NC State has made a concentrated push to encourage more low-income and minority students to sign up for overseas study. It mounted a “People Like Me” marketing campaign that featured scores of posters and even a campus bus wrapped with photos of smiling faces of education abroad veterans. The campaign was the handiwork of Schmidt and Joanne Woodard, vice provost for institutional equity and diversity, as part of NC State’s participation in the American Council on Education’s “At Home in the World” initiative. Wrapping the bus—something more commonly done to advertise Wolfpack athletic teams—cost $7,000 but “we got a lot of mileage out of that,” said Schmidt. Woodard said they discovered “a natural synergy” between the international and diversity offices. Schmidt agreed, saying, “We can greatly enrich each other.” Advertisements alone don’t do the job. Schmidt’s office dispensed $225,000 in study abroad scholarships in 2012–2013.

The Study Abroad Office began offering Global Perspectives Certificates in 2009 to students who complete a mix of study, service, research, or internships abroad, engage in international activities on campus, and make a final presentation on their experiences. Ninety have earned the certificate and 375 more are pursuing one. Those requirements were no problem for Janet Nguyen, a senior international studies major who studied in China and founded NC State’s first Asian-interest sorority. Nguyen, who envisions a career working on behalf of children, said new courses such as “Global Perspectives on Sustainable Development” provided her “with a very diverse and unique learning experience.”

Seeking Allies to Serve International Students

Ten years ago, NC State enrolled fewer than 1,600 international students who constituted 5 percent of the student body. Now there are twice as many. While the OIA staff has grown, it is still a challenge to meet all the needs of the growing number of international students and scholars.

When Elizabeth James came on board as director of the Office of International Services (OIS) in 2012, “we were woefully outnumbered in terms of our student-to-adviser ratio. We were about 1,000-to-one … and most of our peers are running around 650 to 700,” she said.

Making a virtue of necessity, her office now works much more closely with academic advisers in NC State’s 10 colleges. It also improved its technological capability, making it easier for students to find answers on the OIS website, and it makes ample use of social media. “We had a bit of a paradigm shift. We were under no illusions that we were going to double or triple our size, so we strategically started working with a lot of the college advisers and our natural partners in the counseling center,” said Thomas Greene, the associate director. James said they recognized that “we can’t be everywhere. By collaborating, we don’t have to be a mini–student affairs division just for international students.”

To attract more international students, NC State launched an intensive English program in 2011. “The first semester we had eight students and two teachers,” recalled Jeong Powell, the admissions officer who started the program. By 2012, there were 161 students and 14 instructors, and to date nearly 120 students have matriculated into degree programs. The Korean-born Powell subsequently became the first full-time director of international admissions and established a pipeline from four top high schools in China and three in South Korea. Associate Vice Provost and Director of Admissions Tommy Griffin twice has flown in high school guidance counselors from Asia to see for themselves what NC State has to offer. “Our campus was ready” for this push, said Griffin. “We really have a lot of advocates in our colleges and all the other offices on campus. They all see a benefit.”

Branch Campus for a French Business School

SKEMA Business School opened a branch on the NC State campus in 2011. The French school brings 300 students a year in cohorts to Raleigh, where it rents a facility amidst not only the engineering school and other colleges, but dozens of high-tech businesses and nonprofits that have set up research shops on the new Centennial Campus. SKEMA, which has three campuses in France and another in Suzhou, China (all classes are in English), boasts that it is one of the few foreign schools with its own U.S. facility and the sole one vested with the authority to process U.S. visas. Most SKEMA graduate students stay for three months and return to France, but some study for a full year. Dean Jacques Verville envisions attracting North American undergraduates who could start in Raleigh “and then move to our campuses in Europe and China. When you have that flow, that’s SKEMA.”

NC State enrolls 220 international business students in its own Poole College of Management, something Dean Ira Weiss calls “phenomenal. They give our students an extra push for their money. They bring a hunger and energy to the table that energizes everybody around them.” Poole and SKEMA already offer dual master’s degrees in Global Luxury Management and more are planned.

The SKEMA students also benefit from an International Cultural Leadership Project (ICLP) that brings hundreds of international students together with NC State undergraduates for workshops, seminars, community service, and social gatherings, from volunteering at food banks to ball games and bowling nights. Volunteers logged more than 900 hours of service in 2013–2014.

The project is run through the Office of International Affairs’ Global Training Initiative, which provides fee-based programs and services for international universities, businesses, and other clients. “The vast majority of our programs are short term and we do a mix, half for professionals and half for students,” said Ilin Misaras, the assistant director. A four-week summer program gives Chinese undergraduates “a taste of graduate school,” Misaras said, and another partnership brings in students from Brazil. It also places international students in internships throughout the technology-rich Research Triangle area. It has given Chinese pharmaceutical executives a short course on FDA drug regulations.

“The challenge for us is to grow beyond just these short-term training programs,” said Misaras, a former broadcast journalist. “Part of our mandate is to help the North Carolina business community. We have connections in China. How can we help North Carolina businesses get there? I think that’s the next step.”

Expanding a Foothold in Prague

NC State explored accepting an invitation from the government of South Korea to open a branch at the new Songdo Global University alongside SUNY, George Mason University, and other foreign universities, but it ultimately declined. “The economy hit us,” said Chancellor Woodson.

Provost Arden said, “We prefer to develop strong relationships with partner institutions as opposed to planting the flag and setting up our own. We  feel that that gives us much more bang for the buck.”

But NC State is considering ways to expand the foothold its College of Design has in Prague, Czech Republic. It has been sending architecture majors to study in Prague during the summer for years and in 2005 that summer program evolved into the Prague Institute, with classes year-round in a thirteenth-century building in the middle of the history-rich city. It was the first overseas branch of any North Carolina university and “we actually had to get the signature of the governor of North Carolina to permit us to rent our own facility,” recalled Dean Marvin Malecha. Woodson calls the Prague Institute “one of our real success stories.” It now offers courses for a broad array of students, and the university is looking at ways to make it a center for faculty scholarship, not just short teaching stints.

For a regional public university in western Georgia that sends barely 200 students a year to study abroad, Columbus State University (CSU) has something that few other U.S. institutions can match: its own house in Oxford, England, and ties with the University of Oxford that allow fortunate Columbus State students and faculty to take classes and workshops there. Five hundred have done so since a retired banker named Kyle Spencer purchased a stately Edwardian home in 2002 and turned the deed over to his hometown university. Spencer House is “pivotal to our planting the flag globally,” said President Timothy Mescon.

Planting that flag is a principal way Columbus State is hoping to keep raising its standards and standing among colleges in the Georgia system. The strategic plan the university adopted in 2013 seeks to foster “a vibrant, globally connected campus culture” that empowers people “to contribute to the advancement of our local and global communities.” Columbus, the third largest city in Georgia after Atlanta and Augusta, is an old textile mill town on the banks of the Chattahoochee River. It lacked a college until civic leaders finally convinced the state to open a two-year institution in 1958; bachelor and master degrees were soon to follow.

Today it is the tenth largest of Georgia’s 31 public colleges and universities. Half the 7,000 undergraduates and 1,400 graduate students come from Muscogee County and other neighboring places along the Alabama border, but more than a third are drawn from elsewhere in Georgia and 1,600 hail from other states. It also enrolls 130 international students. In public higher education, “geography does matter. We are, at the end of the day, in a retail business,” said Mescon, former business dean at Kennesaw State University. He has stepped up recruiting in the metro Atlanta area, 100 miles away, because “that’s where the market is,” and recently added an international recruiter.

The biggest challenge Columbus State faces is not just finding students, but keeping them until they graduate. Only one in eight full-time freshmen who entered in 2007 graduated in four years and 30 percent in six years. A third of students attend college part-time and many are older than traditional age. Nearly half are ethnic or racial minorities. The international push at Columbus State is one of the principal ways the university is seeking to expand students’ horizons. CSU has strong business, computer science, and performing arts programs, the latter housed on a hip, new downtown campus alongside the Chattahoochee, which, thanks to the demolition of two old dams, features the world’s largest urban whitewater course. Some of the rafts bearing tourists and thrill-seekers over the rapids advertise the university logo.

A Strategic Plan and Student Fee Build Momentum for Internationalization

As Neal McCrillis heard the story, when a wealthy local benefactor offered in 1998 to endow a professorship to teach European history, she was told, “We’re not that big. We can’t have one person who just teaches British or French history. We need something broader.” So McCrillis, a British historian, was hired for the endowed professorship both to teach and create a Center for International Education (CIE). “I had a mandate to develop study abroad programs, but beyond that the administration was not really quite sure what the center should be,” he recalled. For years the center occupied a nondescript room in Howard Hall, a classroom building. Today it is in a small building of its own, the International House, in a central location, and while still teaching a few courses, McCrillis is kept busy as CIE’s full-time director.

The scope of international programs grew gradually, then picked up steam when the provost asked the faculty International Education Committee in 2011 to come up with the first comprehensive strategy for campus internationalization. They produced a detailed blueprint for ratcheting up study abroad offerings, curricular integration, faculty development, international student services, service learning, and other international activities.

The timing was right because another panel was already at work on a new strategic plan for the entire university, and several international goals were embraced and articulated in that broader document, including expanding study abroad enrollment by nearly half, tripling international enrollments, offering students the opportunity to earn an interdisciplinary International Studies Certificate, and widening the circle of students and faculty engaged in on-campus activities.

Equally crucial was a decision approved by students in 2011 to add a $14 per semester international education fee. “That gave Neal this recurring revenue source to fund scholarships for study abroad and underwrite faculty exploration in other countries. It’s a critical annuity in support of this globalization that benefits a huge number of students,” said Mescon, who became president in 2008.

CIE now awards upwards of $300,000 a year in grants and scholarships. Honors College students are guaranteed a $3,200 scholarship for study abroad in their junior or senior year. CIE offers “first-come, first-served” study abroad grants of $650 to $1,050 to all comers who commit to signing up for a program. “Our experience over the years is that the grants which cover a quarter or more of the cost make the programs accessible to many more students,” said McCrillis.

Drumming Up Enthusiasm for Study Abroad

Some 200 Cougars study abroad each year, twice as many as a decade ago. “You can’t just sit in the office and wait for students to show up, because that’s not going to happen,” McCrillis said.

“It’s hard work to drum up the number of students you need for a program,” said geography professor Amanda Rees, who has taught courses in Oxford and Belize. Kimberly Lawrence, the study abroad coordinator, deploys student ambassadors to make 200 presentations in classrooms each year, and Rees herself makes the rounds of colleagues’ classes to pitch her overseas courses. “You’re trying to get in front of 300 to 400 students to drum up a handful,” said the British-born professor.

Patrick McHenry, associate dean of the College of Letters and Sciences, said students need to be convinced that education abroad will pay off when they enter the job market. “The more we get that message out to them, the better. Our students are very practical minded,” said McHenry, a Milton and Renaissance scholar who has taught literature classes in Oxford and in Florence and Montepulciano in Italy. “We have to cajole them no matter what.”

Fast Track to an International Studies Certificate

The International Studies Certificate that the faculty envisioned became a reality in fall 2013. Theater professor Becky Becker was put in charge and given an office and assigned half-time to the Center for International Education. The requirements include study abroad or an international internship or service, at least 18 hours of coursework, and a capstone course or research project. Two students completed the requirements and received the certificate on their diplomas in May 2014, including Jason Todd Raley, Jr.

“I had unknowingly already taken all but one of the classes I needed for the certificate,” said the marketing major, who studied earlier in South Korea and Spain and right after graduation went to Costa Rica on a third, short-term CSU study program.

“I just took these courses because I really love internationally themed classes and activities. Being a marketing major, they could help me get in the door to have international ties to my career. I’ll have an edge on some people who may want the same thing, but have nothing else to back them up,” said Raley, the son of a state trooper and forensic accountant.

As a global ambassador for CIE, Raley also used his marketing skills to convince other Cougars to study abroad. “I love getting people to buy into things they normally wouldn’t buy into,” he said. “Every day, when somebody came in here and said, ‘I can’t afford it’ or ‘I’m afraid to fly,’ I’d look at them and say, ‘There are scholarships. You can pay for three-fourths of it with nothing out of your pocket if you do some research and do it right. And flying’s safer than driving.’”

Twenty-seven students so far have taken the required introductory course that Becker teaches; McCrillis credited her with making inroads with faculty in departments across the campus. “That’s really important,” McCrillis said, “so that when a biology student says, ‘I’d like to have the international certificate,’ they get a positive response from their adviser.” (The other certificate recipient was a theater major who researched Nigeria’s spirit culture.)

On top of study abroad and programming on campus, the certificate “provides an important missing piece. It ties all those things into the students’ majors,” said McCrillis, who chairs the USG System Council for International Education.

The Speed Dating Approach to International Conversations

A signature element of Columbus State’s global education efforts is the International Learning Community (ILC), which brings faculty together with students in large numbers to delve into an important issue over the course of a year through lectures, discussion groups, films, field trips, and other activities inside and outside the classroom. Faculty choose a theme each year—migrations in 2013–2014, revolutions and technology in 2012–2013, and “strangers in a strange land” in 2011–2012—and commit specific classes to be part of the ILC, which are marked in the course catalog as “I” classes. Many are classes freshman must take as part of their First Year Community experience, but some are upper division courses and they span a dozen or more disciplines, from art and business to environmental studies and theater. At least 700 students each year take part.

Sixteen evenings a year students come to the International House for snacks and “Global Dialogues,” which are small-group, student-tostudent conversations that Rees, who chairs the International Learning Community, likens to a form of “speed dating.” International students performing service in exchange for their in-state tuition waivers lead the 90-minute dialogues. Students sit at a half dozen tables and change tables every 15 minutes to hear even more viewpoints. “They share a lot and hear a lot. It’s really very intense and, when you read their writing afterwards, it gets very personal,” said Rees, who requires students in her “I” courses to attend three dialogues a semester. Other faculty use them as an opportunity for extra credit.

McCrillis said the dialogues give some students “their first chance to hear viewpoints and attitudes other than those expressed by their Georgia-born and -raised neighbors.”

“Students are genuinely interested. That makes me very happy,” said Vanessa Jackson, a Jamaican graduate assistant at the CIE who earned her bachelor’s degree in biology at CSU. “Columbus State has become much more internationalized since I came in 2009.”

Omovueme Emasealu, 26, a senior computer science major from Nigeria, seconds that. “I think (Columbus State) is becoming more international on a weekly basis,” said Emasealu. He chuckles about classmates’ misconceptions and stereotypes about Africa, but also appreciates how “very open and friendly” Americans are. He still remembers his surprise on his first plane ride to Atlanta when “a lady began telling me her life story. I was thinking, ‘Really? You can do that?’”

Alice Roxana Barno, 28, a pianist from Romania earning a second bachelor’s degree, relishes the mentoring from faculty. “Back home, if you wanted to talk to a professor, you’d better make an appointment three weeks before and do not look him in the eyes,” she said.

A Hands-On Faculty Committee Guides International Activities

With a three-person staff, McCrillis leans heavily on the Faculty Senate’s International Education and Exchange Committee to superintend the international enterprise. Twenty-two people serve on the committee and eight subcommittees that review study abroad programs, deal with scholarships, approve visiting scholars, and tend to other international matters.

John Finley, who teaches international business, said, “It sounds corny, but there’s a real esprit de corps with the international committee,” with people always willing to stay when meetings run long. English professor Dan Ross, the panel’s chair, agreed, saying, “More than any committee I’ve ever been on, that one works.” He credits McCrillis with making the advisory panel as effective as it is. Ross, a 25-year faculty veteran who has taken classes to Japan and England, said, “We just had nobody doing these things until Neal came along.”

One successful study abroad program begets another. Julie Ballenger, chair of the biology department, has been a role model for colleagues. The plant geneticist led her first tropical ecology class to the Bahamas in 1999. Since then she’s taught environmental classes in Africa (Botswana and Tanzania), Ecuador, Belize, Costa Rica, and Australia as well.

“After camping in the Kalahari Desert for two weeks with lions walking through our campsite, it was like every door opened. Nothing  was impossible. From that point on, it’s been the students pushing and driving all these new programs,” said Ballenger, who also did a stint as assistant director of CIE when study abroad offerings were just getting off the ground. “Many of our students haven’t left the state of Georgia or the Southeast. When you see them after they come back, they have a new confidence. They carry themselves differently.”

Kevin Burgess, a biology colleague, also takes students far afield, from Australia to Ecuador. Burgess had six job offers after a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto and “probably wouldn’t have come here if it wasn’t for the study abroad program. That’s what pushed me.”

A Philanthropist Pays His Oxford Experience Forward

Five hundred Columbus State students and faculty have studied at Oxford while living in the threestory, century-old home on Woodstock Road that Kyle Spencer purchased for CSU for $2 million in 2002. The retired 88-year-old banker never spent a night there himself because his late wife Sara “preferred the hotel,” he recalled with a smile. But the Spencers did stay in Oxford’s Gothic dorms in the 1980s while attending continuing education classes through the Oxford Berkeley Program.

“Every time we went, they had a mixture of undergraduates, graduate students, and outsiders like us. We had a very impressive, very warm tutor who was a born educator. The thing that impressed us was that they wanted us foreigners and rebels to learn,” he said. The Spencers returned three times and then began paying for their children’s teachers and later faculty from Presbyterian College and Columbus State to attend the summer sessions.

Now, CSU faculty teach three, two-week courses there each summer and McCrillis takes faculty there for a workshop each autumn. In addition, Columbus State sends up to five students a year to spend a semester at an Oxford college and take tutorials with a don. Some Oxford undergraduates live in Spencer House with them. Spencer, the benefactor, donates an additional $150,000 a year to cover all the students’ costs above CSU’s regular tuition.

As a senior, Mark Sciuchetti spent a semester at Regents Park College. Now a history graduate student and aspiring professor, Sciuchetti said curious Oxford students sometimes asked if he was a Rhodes Scholar. “I just said, ‘No, I’m a Spencer scholar.’ But they were surprised a state university provides so much funding.”

The existence of Spencer House “made it impossible for us to drop the ball” on internationalization, said English professor Susan Hrach, who was recently honored by the Georgia Board of Regents for innovative teaching approaches, including enhancing global awareness and reducing culture shock in classes taught in England and Italy.

Mescon hopes one day to convert a carriage house on the Spencer property into classrooms and additional apartments. “We’d like to build a much bigger facility, whatever Oxford will allow,” the president said.

When Mary Lyon opened the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in western Massachusetts in 1837, the United States had 120 colleges for men and none for women. FDR’s path-breaking labor secretary Frances Perkins, obstetrical anesthesiologist Virginia Apgar, and playwright Wendy Wasserstein passed through its Gothic halls and strolled the campus landscaped by the son of Frederick Law Olmsted. Even 16-year-old Emily Dickinson, the poet and “Belle” of nearby Amherst, attended classes for a year.

Following in their footsteps today are more than 600 international students, over a quarter of the student body. “You walk through a mini-U.N. on campus,” said Eva Paus, director of the McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives. President Lynn Pasquerella calls it “a microcosm of the world.” It is the second largest concentration of international students at any four-year college. International and domestic students alike are drawn to the country’s oldest college for women with a longstanding commitment to admit young women of talent with little regard to their ability to pay.

Mount Holyoke is not a newcomer to internationalization. The first international student, a Canadian, arrived two years after Lyon opened the doors to a college offering advanced instruction in “science, literature, and refinement” for the good of “our country and for the world.” Mary Woolley, a storied successor and the only female U.S. delegate to a League of Nations disarmament conference in 1932, wrote, “Internationalism has been woven into the very warp and woof of this institution from the beginning.” Today’s mission statement speaks of providing “an intellectually adventurous education in the liberal arts and sciences” to prepare students “for lives of thoughtful, effective, and purposeful engagement in the world.”

Steering a Distinctly International Course

But it is in this century that Mount Holyoke has steered its distinctly international course. A 2003 strategic plan laid the groundwork for the McCulloch Center. By 2007 admiring accreditors were saying that “with little fanfare” Mount Holyoke had created “a veritable world college” in the Connecticut River Valley. While faculty and administrators across the campus share that responsibility, Paus and her five-person staff make it happen. The McCulloch Center has a $12 million endowment of its own and, all told, the college has raised $30 million in endowed funds supporting international studies, teaching, research, and other activities, with more than half generating scholarships for international students.

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The McCulloch Center runs study abroad, develops curated international internships, and provides international student services. It also serves as the fulcrum for activities such as bringing a global scholar to campus each fall (former Norwegian President Gro Harlem Brundtland and Liberia’s Leymah Gbowee, the 2011 Nobel Peace Laureate and parent of a Mount Holyoke student, among them) and organizing biennial Global Challenges Conferences. Paus, a development economist, said the center’s overriding purpose is “to bring greater cohesion and visibility to global learning and to deepen it through new cross-disciplinary initiatives.”

Prizing the Contributions of International Students

Faculty, a quarter of them foreign-born, relish the diversity in their classrooms. When Jon Western, a professor of international relations, needed assistants for a foundation-funded project tracking civilian deaths in Syria, three of the eight students he hired spoke Arabic. “If I talk in my human rights class about Islam, I’ll have Sunni and Shia students who can elaborate on distinctions,” he said.

Politics professor and alumna Kavita Khory, originally from Karachi, Pakistan, said international students often “are much more politically engaged and aware” than U.S. classmates, but the latter “love that we present ourselves as an international college in so many ways.”

“Mount Holyoke is a fantastic place to teach the history of global inequality,” said Holly Hanson, a Uganda expert who as a teen volunteered in Africa for a year on her mother’s advice to “do something useful for the human race” before starting college. “I had this very profound African experience. The classes that I’m teaching 40 years later are answering the question (about inequality) that was formulated for me as a teenager.”

Mount Holyoke relies on tuition for over half its budget. Nearly 80 percent of students receive aid, but the college also looks for students whose families can pay. “We have expensive values… but we have to bring in a class that we can afford,” said Sonya Stephens, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty.

Nearly two-thirds of international students come from China, India, Vietnam, Pakistan, and South Korea. Pasquerella said the college decided last year to recruit and admit more students from the Middle East, Africa, and South America because “if you want to be truly multicultural and international, it can’t be all Asian students.”

Paying for Internships at Home or Abroad

Although it might be assumed that a college with a $700 million endowment was well insulated from the financial pressures felt by other private liberal arts colleges, it is not. That made all the bolder the college’s decision in 2014 to fund with its own dollars summer internships for sophomores or juniors. They are guaranteed $3,000 if they land an unpaid U.S. internship or $3,600 to work internationally. 

A third of the 400 students who took the college up on the offer in 2014 landed international placements in 52 countries. Their contributions ranged from participating in community outreach for an archaeological project on Easter Island to advising Fulbright applicants in Brussels to teaching poor farmers in India to become beekeepers.

Alumnae abroad help the students find openings and often directly super vise and mentor them. “Mentorship is really important because we see the internship not just as a preprofessional experience, but a cocurricular experience,” said Kirk Lange, director of international experiential learning. Students must show how the internships fit their learning goals “and both the host organization and the student’s faculty adviser must sign off on them.” 

Maggie Jacobi, a senior majoring in economics, worked as an AIDS educator in Gulu, Uganda, and said she “only had to pay $10 out of pocket for the entire summer. This is a good environment to have really big dreams.”

Schuyler Cowan, an Italian and politics major from Lake Placid, New York, spent her internship in Venice translating documents for the website of Ca’ Foscari University. She believes it helped her win a Fulbright, as four other seniors did this year. Cowan will teach English in Germany.

When Jenny Watermill was hired by the Career Development Center in 2008 to coordinate internships, two others did similar work. Now there are four full-time staff and a dozen others who also spend time on internships.

“The wonderful thing is students are no longer evaluated for internship (grants); if you’re a student, you get it. What we evaluate are the quality of the internships,” said Eleanor Townsley, associate dean of the faculty. 

The guaranteed funding for an internship is part of the college’s Lynk Initiative to connect academic work with practical applications of the liberal arts. The college emphasizes course work and skill-building in preparation for the summer intern ships and research. Back on campus afterwards, many make presentations at a student showcase on their experiences.

Supplementing, Not Supplanting, Study Abroad

The internships are intended to supplement, not supplant, study abroad. “The most important thing for us, actually, is the blend of international internships and study abroad opportunities,” said Stephens. Students who enroll in classes abroad pay the tuition and fees charged by the program or host university.

Students who are on financial aid receive Laurel Fellowships to help pay for Mount Holyoke’s own study abroad programs in Montpellier, France; Shanghai, China; and Monteverde, Costa Rica, or other preferred programs and exchanges. When Sinafik Gebru, a biology major from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, told her father she had won a Laurel Fellowship to study environmental challenges in Costa Rica, he asked, “Aren’t you already studying abroad?” International students cannot use Laurel Fellowships to study in their home country.

Students’ past preference for spring study abroad “created difficulties on campus. We had overcrowding in the fall and empty beds in the spring,” said Joanne Picard, dean of international studies. It righted the imbalance by waiving a $900 administrative fee for studying abroad in the fall.

Bringing International Experts to Class Remotely

Most faculty research grants in recent years have supported work done in other countries or with global partners. Many collaborations cross disciplines. International relations professor Western and Spanish professor Rogelio Miñana team-teach a course that combines human rights law and new media in Latin America. The students’ main assignment is to build a bilingual website for a mock human rights organization and to mount a media campaign aimed at local Latino communities. “Students love the connection between the foreign and local aspects,” said Miñana, an authority on Cervantes’ Don Quixote and the seventeenth century character’s enduring cultural impacts.  

With guidance from a nine-member Faculty Advisory Board, the McCulloch Center keeps a hand in numerous projects aimed at internationalizing the curriculum. In 2011, working with Library, Information and Technology Services, it induced faculty to bring expert voices from around the world into their classes. 

A dozen faculty took a seminar on the pedagogy, techniques, and logistics of videoconferencing, from simply using Skype and Adobe Connect to relying on high-end equipment in designated classrooms. More than 50 faculty have participated and the project, dubbed VP-50, won an award in 2014 from the American Council on Education and the SUNY Center for Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL).

The McCulloch Center offered a carrot to encourage faculty and their international guests to participate in the hook-ups. Faculty members get $150 the first time they arrange an international speaker, and the guest receives a $100 stipend. “It’s just a little gesture, but videoconferencing is a wonderful, economical way of bringing in international perspectives,” said Paus.

Language professors connected classes with universities in France, Italy, and Russia, and an Asian studies class on Chinese opera heard from a renowned performer of traditional Yue opera in Beijing.

Making the Case for Women’s Colleges

Senior Jelena Jezdimirovic from Uzice, Serbia, researched the history of international students at Mount Holyoke while working in the college’s Archives and Special Collections. The economics and critical social thought major catalogued 5,000 alumnae from other countries, including the first from the Balkans nine decades ago. “I couldn’t believe it. People still wonder how I found Mount Holyoke. How did someone in 1924 find out about it?” she asked.

Graduates include the first female editor of the Bombay edition of the Times of India, a spokeswoman for the government of Ethiopia, novelists, and diplomats. “It’s important for students to see that there’s a legacy. Tradition is very important to Mount Holyoke. We’ve always done some things that other schools haven’t done,”  Jezdimirovic said

Half a century ago there were 200 U.S. colleges for women. Today there are barely 40. “In the landscape of higher education, being a women’s college is not the norm. That’s OK with us. Mount Holyoke was an anomaly in 1837, and we have remained a women’s college by choice,” the Mount Holyoke website says. “We know that women thrive in an environment where all the resources are designed for and dedicated to them.”

Professors attest to that. Western, who also teaches international relations at the other members of the Five College Consortium— Amherst, Smith, Hampshire, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (students have reciprocal rights to take classes at the other campuses)— calls the classroom atmosphere at Mount Holyoke “profoundly different.” Paus said that in coed settings, male students often speak out “whether or not they have something to say while women wait to have the perfect answer.”

“The cooperativeness of the way the students interact in classes is really striking,” said Darby Dyar, an astronomy professor who conducts lunar and solar system research for NASA and the National Science Foundation. Dyar is an alumna of Wellesley College, another of the Seven Sister schools.

At a time of great financial pressure on private colleges, staying single-sex comes at the price of cutting off half the potential pool of applicants. “It’s a question that we’ve asked ourselves,” Pasquerella said. “We looked in our most recent strategic plan at coeducation and reaffirmed our commitment to women’s education, believing that it is more important than ever before. It’s a tough sell, but we have so much to offer.” Referring to the attempted assassination of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenage advocate for girls’ education, Pasquerella said, “If women are still dying around the world to get an education, then Mary Lyon’s historic mission hasn’t been fulfilled.”

Khory, the politics professor, said faculty share a conviction that Mount Holyoke is doing the right thing in making internationalization its calling card. “That’s really what we see as our past, present, and future.”

In May 2018, a delegation of senior administrators led by Lawrence Schovanec, president of Texas Tech University (TTU), arrived in Costa Rica with scissors in hand. They were there for the ribbon cutting ceremony at TTU’s first international degree-granting campus, Texas Tech University at Costa Rica (TTU-CR). The new campus, a public-private partnership between TTU and Costa Rican financial group Promerica Group, is one of the most visible examples of the ways in which TTU has expanded its portfolio beyond its main campus in Lubbock, Texas.

In the last 2 decades, TTU has transformed from a regional institution in west Texas to a top research institution with a global reach spanning from Costa Rica to Spain. TTU’s robust research portfolio and its international partnerships have helped propel the university’s recent Carnegie designation as one of 115 top tier research institutions—of which 81 are public institutions—in the United States. TTU’s research strengths include areas such as climate change; the interconnections of water, land, food, and fiber; computational and theoretical sciences; and energy. 

In addition to its physical presence around the world, the university currently serves 37,000 students—more than 3,000 of whom come from abroad—on its main campus. Internationalization has gone hand in hand with TTU’s quest to become, in the words of its first president Paul Whitfield Horn, an institution that thinks in “worldwide terms.”

“We’ve created a culture at Tech that covers the full gamut of international activities and initiatives,” Schovanec says. “It’s not just a matter of raising international student enrollment; it’s creating a community here on campus that’s supportive and appreciative of comprehensive internationalization of our education enterprise. It relates to research funding opportunities that have an international focus and opportunities for students to be involved in study abroad.”

Advancing TTU’s Global Vision With Strategy

The Office of International Affairs (OIA) is at the helm of TTU’s internationalization efforts. Under the leadership of Vice Provost for International Affairs Sukant Misra, OIA’s mission is to advance “the global vision of Texas Tech University by promoting international leadership, awareness, education, scholarship, and outreach for the university and the broader community.”

The unit oversees international recruitment, international undergraduate admissions, international student and scholar services, and study abroad. OIA is also responsible for international partnerships, research collaborations, and grants administration. The K–12 Global Education Outreach (K–12 GEO) initiative, which is part of OIA, won a NAFSA Senator Paul Simon Spotlight Award for its outreach efforts in 2016. K–12 GEO works with local schools and classrooms to foster global awareness in the wider Lubbock community. OIA continues to find new ways to move the university’s internationalization strategy forward on and off campus.  After 25 years at TTU, in various positions, Misra became vice provost and senior international officer in January 2018. Prior to this role, he served for 4 years as associate vice provost of international programs under Tibor Nagy, a former ambassador to Ethiopia and Guinea who retired from TTU at the end of 2017 after a 14-year tenure. 

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As associate vice provost, Misra spearheaded the development of the 2015–2020 OIA Strategic Plan and preparation of annual strategic plan assessments, which fed into the university’s new strategic plan, “A Pathway to 2025.” The strategic planning process led to several university-wide goals, such as integrating global perspectives into the curriculum and furthering intercultural understanding in the community at large.  

TTU also launched a new quality enhancement plan (QEP) as part of its 2015 reaccreditation with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). The QEP, “Communicating in a Global Society,” focuses university-wide efforts on global communication and awareness. Led by the Office of the Provost, the QEP has provided additional funding to enhance undergraduate education in global communications through programing, educational activities, and scholarships.

Building a Globally Engaged Student Community

An area of strategic aim for TTU has been creating a globally engaged student community by recruiting, admitting, retaining, and graduating more international students. One of the first things Misra did as associate vice provost was to help transition international undergraduate admissions from the Graduate School to OIA, which has led to a more streamlined admissions process. 

TTU has always had a large international graduate student population, so many of the university’s recruitment efforts in the last few years have been centered on international undergraduates. The efforts have been fruitful; in the last 5 years, the number of international undergraduate students on the TTU campus has grown by more than 80 percent. According to President Schovanec, the number of international undergraduate students on campus exceeded the number of international graduate students for the first time in fall 2017. 

“We set out on the path to increase our [international] undergraduate enrollment very intentionally,” says Provost Michael Galyean. “We provided the appropriate staffing and defined what kinds of services we needed to offer. We made a commitment to serve those students once they got on campus.”

At the same time, the international graduate population grew by 18 percent. Now, more than one-quarter of all graduate students on campus are international.  

International students are primarily served by the International Student Life unit within OIA. This unit organizes orientation, welcome week events, and cultural programs, among other activities. Beth Mora, international student life coordinator, manages TTU’s international student orientation and other events throughout the academic year. “We help connect them to the Lubbock community, help connect them to the university, and help connect them to each other,” she says.

To help ease incoming international students’ transition to campus life, OIA partners with off-campus student apartments to provide incoming international students with a place to stay if they arrive in Lubbock before the campus residence halls open. Students are able to pay $5 per day for a “three-day stay.” “Many of our international students take advantage of both airport pickup and the three-day stay,” says Mora. 

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Dhanraj Apte, a graduate student from India studying industrial engineering, says he did not realize how much effort TTU puts into helping international students transition to life in Lubbock until he started working as a graduate assistant for OIA. “They have recognized the need to offer help and create[d] different resources for international students to make sure that we’re not having difficulties adjusting to U.S. culture,” he says. 

Promoting International Research to Advance Internationalization

Misra has also helped provide a renewed emphasis on international research and partnerships with the establishment of the International Research and Development (IRD) division of OIA in 2014. The unit, with support from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Office of Research Services, assists faculty from across campus to engage in international research and development activities. In addition to sending a monthly email that provides information about internal and external funding opportunities, IRD assists faculty with putting together grant proposals. 

“We have really ramped up our support for international research,” says Provost Galyean. “In the last 4 years, we’ve had a significant increase in not only the amount of funding we received, but also the number of proposals related to international research going out the door.” 

Biology professor Gad Perry, who also serves as senior director for international research and development, says his job is to help make international research collaboration as easy as possible for faculty by helping them identify funding opportunities and potential collaborators abroad. “We provide resources, information, and connections,” he says. “In doing so, hopefully we enhance the chance that they’ll do international research.”

Reagan Ribordy, director of international programs, says the IRD unit oversees a budget of $25,000 for international research seed grants. Approximately 10 faculty receive $2,000 grants per year to cover travel or other start-up costs, with the goal of eventually gaining external funding. Recent projects have included an investigation of young people’s communication via social media in Thailand and a pilot study on the antidiabetic properties of a medicinal plant found in Belize. 

According to Ribordy, TTU faculty have submitted more than $50 million worth of proposals since the IRD unit was established in 2014. Since then, the university has received approximately $4.8 million in external funding for international initiatives. These funds include a grant from the U.S. Department of State, which selected TTU to host 25 young African leaders through the Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders in summer 2017. 

TTU is also developing strong relationships with partner institutions in countries such as Ethiopia and Brazil. For instance, Stephen Ekwaro-Osire, former associate dean of research and graduate programs in the Whitacre College of Engineering, is the principal investigator for a $1.1 million grant that supports the design and development of curriculum for four graduate programs in civil engineering and construction technology at Jimma University in southeastern Ethiopia. Additionally, the TTU Department of Human Development and Family Studies has collaborated with Jigjiga University in eastern Ethiopia to develop programs in nutrition and early childhood education. 

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In Brazil, TTU has partnered with the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) since 2014 to fund joint research projects. TTU and FAPESP have successfully cosponsored three rounds of research proposals, with teams winning support for the exchange of faculty and postdoctoral researchers in each cycle. For example, two TTU faculty members, along with a researcher from the Federal University of São Paulo, received funding to examine the effects of toxic stress on children’s brain development using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology. 

Another TTU initiative that promotes international undergraduate research is Research Study Abroad, a new program piloted by professor David Weindorf, a research faculty fellow in the Office of the Vice President for Research. Weindorf used funding from his endowed chair, the BL Allen Endowed Chair of Pedology, in the Department of Plant and Soil Science to fund student travel to countries in Africa, Asia, and Europe. He is hoping to encourage other faculty to replicate the program.

Engaging in Community Outreach to Foster Individual Understanding

TTU views community outreach through its K–12 GEO program as a central pillar to its campus internationalization strategy, with a mission to “build a globally engaged community of learners through outreach opportunities that foster intercultural understanding and exchange while enriching the quality of life for both the universities and local communities across west Texas.”

Founded in 1997, K–12 GEO creates opportunities for more than 20,000 local students, teachers, and community members to learn about the world each year. By visiting local classrooms and inviting local students to the TTU campus, TTU faculty and staff help boost students’ awareness of other countries and cultures within a community where many young people do not have the opportunity to travel. K–12 GEO programs include an Ellis Island experience, workshops on holidays such as Chinese Lunar New Year and Mexico’s Day of the Dead, and activities celebrating the history of Ireland’s music and dance culture.  

In addition to the programming provided to local K–12 students, OIA hosts eight to 10 events featuring internationally recognized speakers and culturally diverse educational programs that are open to the larger Lubbock community. Particularly noteworthy is the annual Texas Tech Ambassadors Forum, which features a panel discussion by diplomatic and foreign policy experts. Other events include an annual German Christmas celebration called Weihnachten and Culture Fest 2017. In 2017, OIA worked with 17 international student groups to put on an outdoor festival that showcased cultural performers from the Texas Commission on the Arts.

“Today’s complex world requires international cooperation on multiple levels. TTU is committed to graduating a diverse and globally competent group of students who are prepared to face these challenges. Community outreach continues to play an integral part of this mission,” says Kelley Coleman, director of international enrollment development and outreach.

Growing Study Abroad and Extending Opportunities to Underrepresented Students

As part of the university’s internationalization strategy, TTU has recently focused on expanding the number of students who study abroad. In 2016–17, approximately 1,300 TTU students participated in credit-bearing programs abroad. The College of Architecture highly encourages, and the College of Engineering requires, an international experience for graduation, with other departments considering adding this requirement as well. The College of Arts and Sciences has a foursemester foreign language requirement, which many students fulfill abroad. The TTU Spanish program is especially popular. 

 With more than 27 percent of enrolled students identifying as Hispanic, TTU was recently awarded the designation of a Hispanic-serving institution by the U.S. Department of Education. In response, study abroad staff are currently reviewing their programs and approaches to determine how to ensure that the demographics of the study abroad population reflect the larger student body. OIA often works with other offices on campus that serve underrepresented students, first-generation students, and students with disabilities to promote study abroad opportunities. One of OIA’s most frequent collaborators is the First Generation Transition & Mentoring Programs office. 

“Specifically in collaboration with the first-generation office, we copresent with the financial aid office at the beginning of each academic year,” says Whitney Longnecker, director of study abroad. “The presentation [to students] discusses the basics of study abroad but also covers the specifics of how to apply financial aid and scholarships to a study abroad experience.”

The presentation helps make sure first-generation and other underrepresented students are aware of the funding opportunities available for education abroad. Funded by a $4 education abroad fee that every enrolled student pays each semester, OIA administers a scholarship program that offers more than $350,000 each year to support study abroad. 

OIA makes an effort to reach out to underrepresented students throughout the year. “We also hold remote advising hours in the first generation programs office, which is a good way to meet with first-generation students in a space in which they are already comfortable,” Longnecker says. OIA continues to offer students similar levels of outreach and support once they go abroad.

Cesar Rocha, a senior studying mechanical engineering, spent fall 2017 at TTU’s study abroad center in Seville, Spain. He was able to take engineering courses as well as an upper-level Spanish class. As a first-generation student, he says he had never considered studying abroad before enrolling at TTU. “I was just trying to get to college and finish,” he says. 

Rocha adds that the program in Seville not only allowed him to keep up with his engineering curriculum, it also offered him a lot of first-time experiences. Although he is fluent in Spanish, it was the first time he had ever taken a formal Spanish class. Traveling to Spain was also the first time he had flown on an airplane. “It totally pushed me out of my comfort zone,” Rocha says. 

Rocha is one of many TTU students who have spent time at TTU’s study abroad center in Spain. Since 2000, the center has served more than 4,600 TTU students from all academic disciplines in both summer and semester-long programs—representing more than 40 percent of all TTU students who study abroad. The center also provides an opportunity for many TTU faculty and graduate teaching assistants to spend a semester abroad. 

Additionally, each semester, the TTU center in Seville hosts six to eight interns from the University of Seville who assist center staff with administrative tasks as well as interact with TTU students to improve their Spanish language skills. This relationship has served as an indirect recruitment pipeline to TTU’s graduate programs. 

Myriam Rubio, who earned her bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Seville, began working at the center as a linguistic assistant. She learned about TTU’s master’s program in Spanish through her interactions with the TTU faculty and graduate teaching assistants who came to Seville to teach. Rubio is thriving in her graduate program at TTU. “I’m loving every minute of my stay on the campus in Lubbock. My experience as a master’s student is not only improving my performance as a [Spanish] instructor, but it is also allowing me to grow both professionally and personally,” she says.

Offering a U.S. Education in Costa Rica

Building on its experience managing a physical presence overseas in Spain, TTU’s most recent international venture is the new campus in San José, Costa Rica. Promerica Group approached TTU in 2014 with the idea of offering a U.S. education in Costa Rica. According to Jack Bimrose, former director of EDULINK, a subsidiary of Promerica Group, U.S. higher education is cost prohibitive for large segments of the Central American population. The concept is to make academic programs related to strategic areas of development in the region more accessible to local students. 

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The first group of students began their studies at TTU-CR in August 2018 in five academic programs: electrical engineering, industrial engineering, computer science, mathematics, and restaurant and hotel management.

The campus, which has been accredited by SACS, will offer the same curriculum in English as the main campus in Lubbock. TTU faculty will teach on the Costa Rica campus, which has been built to the specifications of the departments at TTU. The hope is that TTU-CR will eventually host U.S. students who are studying abroad. 

“This is a unique model of engagement with industrial partners who want to provide the quality of a U.S. college education to Costa Rican students,” President Schovanec says. “We want the Costa Rica campus to become a nexus for postsecondary education in Central America.” 

At first glance, St. Lawrence University might give the impression that it is an institution far removed from the rest of the world. Founded in 1856 in Canton—a town of 10,000 in upstate New York— St. Lawrence is a private liberal arts institution with a student body of 2,500. Ottawa, Ontario, is the closest major city, located 80 miles away across the Canadian border. But it is the university’s remote location that fuels a need to give its students an international perspective.

“St. Lawrence is indeed very isolated. Because of that, there has been very strong faculty leadership to implement more global engagement,” says Marina Llorente, a professor of modern languages and literature who became associate dean of international and intercultural studies and senior international officer in 2016.  

St. Lawrence’s commitment to global engagement dates back to the 1920s, when students established the first International Relations Club on campus. Beginning in the 1930s, the institution hosted a series of cross-border conferences on U.S.-Canadian relations in collaboration with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. In 1949, St. Lawrence hosted the world’s first Model United Nations. The institution was also one of the first U.S. universities to actively engage in East Africa in the early 1970s. 

“The drive to explore and understand the world beyond our rural upstate New York campus has been part of St. Lawrence University’s institutional DNA for over 90 years,” said President William L. Fox. “St. Lawrence has continuously focused on building international components into curricular and cocurricular programming. You can say that internationalization is central to what we do and who we are.”

Nine percent of St. Lawrence’s total student population comes from abroad, but the institution also serves highly qualified, often high-need students from the surrounding region in upstate New York. More than 20 percent of the domestic undergraduates are eligible for Pell grants. 

“For those students, the sort of international perspective we have is amplified even more,” says Karl Schonberg, vice president of the university and dean of academic affairs. “There is a really interesting relationship between the local and the global here because of that mix of students in our population.” 

Prior to Llorente, Schonberg served as the associate dean of international and intercultural studies, leading the Patti McGill Peterson Center for International and Intercultural Studies (CIIS). CIIS oversees all international programming on campus, manages off-campus study programs, and coordinates a number of area studies programs. The associate dean position is filled by a tenured senior faculty member who serves for 4 years, with a possible two-year extension. 

Opportunities for Internationalization Through Off-Campus Programs

Since 1987, CIIS has coordinated the international and domestic off-campus programs, which previously operated through individual departments. CIIS currently manages 30 off-campus study programs in more than 25 countries. These programs provide significant professional development opportunities for faculty members. Forty-six percent of full-time faculty have led off-campus study programs of various lengths.

English professor Natalia Singer says that she never would have imagined that joining the faculty at St. Lawrence would take her as far afield as France and India. “There are so many projects and endeavors that have helped internationalize our curriculum that I’ve been able to take part in. I’ve been able to not only broaden my own curricular specialities, but also to direct and teach abroad,” she says. 

Students similarly benefit from a myriad of options available for experiential learning. Almost 70 percent of students participate in an off-campus study experience prior to graduating. The Institute of International Education’s (IIE) Open Doors report ranked St. Lawrence 15th among the top 40 baccalaureate institutions for the number of undergraduates participating in study abroad programs in 2015–16.  

St. Lawrence offers five signature semester- or yearlong study abroad programs in France, Kenya, Spain, and the United Kingdom, and its First-Year program in London, England. In addition, it runs signature domestic off-campus programs in the Adirondack Mountains and New York City. The university has seen significant growth in its off-campus summer programs over the last several years. In summer 2018, for example, St. Lawrence offered 12 courses in Denmark, France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Nicaragua, Rwanda, and the United Kingdom, and two in the United States.

Madeleine Wong, associate professor and chair of global studies, recently spent a semester teaching in St. Lawrence’s First-Year program in London. As an alternative to the institution’s on-campus First-Year program in Canton, students live together in central London and take liberal arts courses that focus on developing their writing, speaking, and research skills. “I wanted to make sure that our program did not reinforce or perpetuate some of the tourist expectations that students have about study abroad,” Wong says. 

A particular area of focus has been the creation of education abroad programs for students majoring in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). A growing number of students in these disciplines have been able to engage in off-campus programs due to concerted faculty efforts; in 2016–17, approximately 29 percent of students in off-campus programs were STEM majors.

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Ten years ago, Ed Harcourt, professor of computer science and mathematics, worked with CIIS to develop the first education abroad program for engineers. The result was a semester-long program hosted by the University of Otago in New Zealand. “Over the years, I’ve been hunting around for places for our science, math, and engineering students to study abroad. The biggest constraint is being able to take these classes, science and math classes, in English,” Harcourt says. 

St. Lawrence STEM majors also have study abroad options at James Cook University in Australia, the University of the West Indies at St. Augustine in Trinidad and Tobago, and Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in China. 

Funding Opportunities for Undergraduate Research Abroad

In addition to its credit-bearing off-campus programs, CIIS offers a variety of opportunities for students to conduct research or pursue personal projects abroad. CIIS receives support from various donors, many of whom are alumni of off-campus programs, to fund travel enrichment grants that allow students to pursue an academic or personal interest while studying abroad. Travel research grants are also available to students who want to pursue more extensive study or research through independent travel or during an extension of an off-campus study program. 

Music major Emma Greenough received a CIIS travel research grant to attend the Russell Memorial Weekend festival in Doolin, a small coastal village in Ireland, during her semester abroad in Cork City. “My goal of this brief, yet informative and meaningful trip was to show how Irish music and its culture, including its natural beauty, are intermingled throughout the country,” she says. “My study abroad experiences, especially my time in Doolin, nurtured my love of Irish music and provided me reason to return [to Ireland] in the future.”

The CIIS Fellows program is another funding opportunity that supports faculty-student collaboration throughout the world and has funded 33 projects since 2001. The Fellows program is noncredit bearing but may lay the foundation for future academic work such as a senior capstone project. 

Wong took four students abroad to conduct independent research through the CIIS Fellows program. In July 2018, she accompanied global studies major Shanice Arlow to Namibia to examine how notions of race impact different populations in post-apartheid Namibia. Wong and Arlow received $7,500 from CIIS to conduct interviews with people across multiple generations and do archival research at the National Library of Namibia. 

Wong says the students’ projects are often tangential to her own research interests: “My role is to foster a sense of intellectual curiosity and experiential learning of the world in my students. Each of the students have their own interests, and my job is to help them develop critical thinking skills and [learn] how to do research in a foreign place to enhance their understandings of diverse global issues. I’m there to supervise them and teach them to ask interesting questions.” 

Encouraging Self-Awareness Through Global Studies

St. Lawrence’s off-campus study programs provide a way for students enrolled in interdisciplinary area studies programs to gain international experiences and still complete their degree requirements. The university offers degree programs in African, Asian, Canadian, Caribbean/Latin American, and European studies, as well as programs in Native American and African American studies. Drawing on the strengths of its area studies programs, the institution received a $1 million external grant from the Endeavor Foundation to support five faculty positions and establish the Global Studies Department in 2000.

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Professor of global studies Eve Stoddard was the first chair of the new department. She says that the global studies major was born from the fact that many themes in international studies cut across countries and disciplines. In addition to learning a second language, global studies majors take five core courses that introduce them to key concepts and debates related to global processes, political economies, and cultural studies. Students also design a concentration, which might be an intense area study or a cross-cutting theme such as gender studies.

The global studies curriculum is designed to encourage students to examine their own identities and place in the world through a global studies lens. “A lot of our students have developed that critical self-awareness of who they are, …their roles in society, [and] their responsibilities to the world, to their local communities, and to the world,” Wong says. 

Britni Stupin knew she wanted to major in global studies when she was accepted to St. Lawrence. As she started to take her global studies courses, she began to gravitate toward topics related to Africa and public health. 

Stupin was able to further pursue these interests through the Semester in Kenya program, which is run through St. Lawrence’s campus in Nairobi. While she was there, she focused on a community approach to health care. Stupin had the opportunity to work as a health programs intern at a nongovernmental organization in Kigali, Rwanda. “In essence, global studies has allowed me to find and pursue my academic interests and passions and has given me the tools necessary to think critically about the world around me,” she says.  

Establishing a Long-standing Footprint in Kenya

Stupin is one of more than 2,000 students who have studied in Kenya since St. Lawrence launched its first semester-long program there in 1974. In 2014, the institution celebrated 40 years of engagement in East Africa, based out of its five-acre Nairobi campus, which currently employs 17 Kenyans. “The program is very much about not encountering East Africa, but engaging and embedding yourself in the local community,” says Matthew Carotenuto, a professor of history who also coordinates the African Studies program, which launched in the 1980s. 

During the first week of the Semester in Kenya program, students live in accommodations on the Nairobi campus and participate in a weeklong orientation that prepares them to live independently in Kenya, with an emphasis on safety and security. Students spend 8 weeks on the campus where they take a series of courses, including Swahili and “Culture, Environment and Development in East Africa.” The group participates in rural and urban homestays as well as three extended field experiences in northern Tanzania and in various locations in Kenya. After the first 3 months in Kenya, students do a monthlong independent study, often with a placement at a host organization that works with an issue that interests them. 

In addition to Kenya, students are placed all over East Africa, including Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. For instance, students have interned with a member of the Kenyan parliament who is a St. Lawrence alumnus, and other students who are interested in public health have been placed at a hospital in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.  

St. Lawrence strives for a mutually beneficial relationship in its overall approach to engagement in Kenya. Since 1984, the university has offered annual scholarship opportunities to Kenyan students to study in Canton, New York. Many Kenyan alumni who have studied at St. Lawrence have gone on to distinguished careers across Kenya, including four who were elected to the Kenyan parliament.

Emmanuel Ngenoh, a computer science and economics major who graduated in 2015, says his scholarship to St. Lawrence changed his life. While he initially struggled to adjust to life in Canton, he received support from the close-knit campus community and his host family. “I went from wanting to go back home the first few months at St. Lawrence, to not wanting to leave at all my senior year,” Ngenoh says.

He has subsequently returned to East Africa, where he has worked as a software developer and cloud solutions specialist. Ngenoh is currently planning on enrolling in a master’s program in information systems management at Carnegie Mellon University, which includes 1 year of study in Australia and 1 year of study in Pennsylvania. “There is no question as to how my experience at St. Lawrence University has influenced my adaptability in the world and expanded my abilities,” Ngenoh says. 

In 1992, the university created a standing two-year position for a visiting Swahili scholar who can either conduct research toward a PhD from a Kenyan university or earn a master’s degree from St. Lawrence. The current visiting scholar, Khalid Omar Kitito, previously worked as an education officer at the National Museums of Kenya and interacted with St. Lawrence students who visited the museums in Mombasa as part of the Semester in Kenya program.  

As the visiting scholar, Kitito taught Swahili and two semesters of “Swahili Culture and Identity,” which were intended to help students understand cultures other than their own. Moreover, Kitito taught a course titled “Hakuna Matata” for Canton area high school students to share Kenyan cultures and cultural practices. While at St. Lawrence, Kitito earned a master’s degree in human development and school counseling. He says his stipend has also helped fund his PhD program in Kenya.

Creating an International Community on Campus

In addition to welcoming international scholars on campus, St. Lawrence has made international student recruitment a strategic priority. The university has doubled its overall international undergraduate student population from 4 percent in 1995 to 8.5 percent in 2016. The campus hosted a total of 217 international undergraduate students from more than 60 different countries in 2016.

A large number of St. Lawrence University’s international students come from United World Colleges (UWC), a network of 17 high schools around the world, with support from the Shelby Davis Foundation, which offers up to $20,000 in financial aid per student. “They’re among the very best students on this campus and they’re involved in everything you can mention,” says President Fox. 

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With the growing international student population, St. Lawrence has increased the number of staff supporting the students’ academic and social adjustment. In addition to organizing intercultural activities, CIIS staff have focused on integrating domestic and international students. One way they have done this is through the creation of a living learning community called InterCultural House (I-House). I-House was established in 1984 as a coed facility accommodating around 80 domestic and international students. The internationally themed community offers diverse events, trips and community building activities, and a weekly tea time that encourages domestic and international students to come together and interact. 

Another major initiative is the Global Gateways program, which is funded by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The program seeks to foster intercultural exchanges while strengthening the bond between domestic and international students. In summer 2017, the program brought together 19 international students and six domestic students for a twoweek program prior to the start of the fall semester. 

“Global Gateways seemed like the perfect opportunity to learn about the different people that live around the world who go to St. Lawrence,” says undergraduate Connor Glitz. “In 17 short days, the program transformed us from an international group who didn’t know each other into a family of St. Lawrence students.”

Svetlana Kononenko, an international student from Russia, wanted to join the program after struggling to connect with international peers in high school. “Paintballing, swimming, campus kitchens, biking, presentations, classes, and games late at night made Global Gateways into a memorable and valuable experience,” she says. 

The program represents a microcosm of St. Lawrence’s overall strategy for bridging the local and global. “I strongly believed that this...program would help me to develop leadership skills and find my niche in a truly global university community by providing a forum for both international students and domestic students to blur the line of difference, thereby building an inclusive community,” Kononenko says. “And that’s what I found.”