Leadership

Brent Swails, a cub news producer at CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta, happened to be in the back of the room one day when executives were discussing the launch of a new program by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the neurosurgeon and the TV network’s chief medical correspondent. CNN would be dispatching crews from Atlanta to cover global health stories for Gupta’s weekly series. Swails spoke up and mentioned that he had minored in global health studies at Northwestern University. He got the assignment and soon flew to Brazil for his first “Vital Signs” story. 

When a news producer’s job in CNN’s Johannesburg bureau opened up, he landed that, too. The four months he’d spent as a Northwestern sophomore studying and researching HIV/AIDS in South Africa helped with that advancement, too. Now at age 28, he’s a CNN veteran who has spent four of the six years since college posted overseas including a stint in Hong Kong and a second tour in South Africa, covering much of the sub-Saharan continent. He had dreamed of such a career, “but thought it would take a long time to go the international route. I was lucky.”

However, as Louis Pasteur said, chance favors the prepared mind. Not many journalism students concentrate on global health studies. Swails, in fact, was the only one in his class at the prestigious Medill School of Journalism. But the private university on the banks of Lake Michigan in the Chicago suburb of Evanston sends scores of other students around the world each year to study public health problems in China, Chile, Cuba, France, and South Africa and, where possible, to do something about them.

Sparking Interdisciplinary Collaborations

Half the global health minors are pre-med students, but the program attracts students from across disciplines, including engineering, education, journalism, and even music. Faculty collaborate across disciplines to teach the core courses and offer electives on infectious diseases, disabilities, mental health, refugees, and other global health issues. President Morton Schapiro said the program “embodies the interdisciplinary spirit of the most successful programs at Northwestern” and stands as a model for other efforts “on campus and around the world.” The university has declared global health one of its “areas of greatest strength” alongside nanoscience, energy, and sustainability, all the foci of a major fundraising campaign.

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Fast Start with Federal Help

Global health studies was launched in 2000 with help from a $500,000 National Security Education Program grant won by the fledgling Office of International Program Development (IPD). “In a very short time we were able to do a lot of things: develop curriculum, create programs abroad, organize conferences, (and) provide support for students’ going abroad and for faculty,” said IPD Director Dévora Grynspan. “Very quickly we had a critical mass of courses and programs abroad.”

Global health studies became a minor in 2004, with students required to take three core courses and four electives and to participate in a “substantial” public health experience abroad. That means “they cannot just go volunteer in some hospital,” said Grynspan. “They have to formally learn about public health conditions abroad.” The minor attracts close to 300 students at the 16,000-student university and graduates five dozen or more each year.

Delivering Care in Rural Liberia

Most get that experience primarily by enrolling in classes at partner schools in Paris; Beijing; Santiago, Chile; Cape Town and Stellenbosch, South Africa; Havana, Cuba, and starting in 2014, Tel Aviv, Israel. But some choose to work independently, as did anthropology major Peter Luckow ‘10.

Luckow came to college with an interest in biology and public service, and more than one high school teacher urged him to consider a career in international medicine. He spent two summers interning for Partners in Health, the Boston nonprofit that works in some of the poorest places in the world. At the suggestion of its celebrated cofounder, Dr. Paul Farmer, Luckow went to Liberia in summer 2009 to help a small charity trying to build a community health network in a country still struggling to recover from civil war. The World Health Organization estimated there were only 30 physicians left in the country of 3 million people when the conflict ended in 2003.

Luckow had taken a year off at Northwestern to expand a student-run charity that he helped found called GlobeMed, which raises funds and medical supplies and does hands-on humanitarian work in poor countries. GlobeMed now has chapters on more than 50 campuses. Dr. Rajesh Panjabi, a Harvard Medical School physician who had founded a non-profit called Last Mile Health to provide care in rural Liberia, asked Luckow to return after graduation to help grow the organization, which is known in Liberia as Tiyatien Health. It had a budget of $50,000 and a dozen community health workers then. Today it is a $1.7 million operation with a staff of 120, and Luckow was featured in Forbes magazine recently as one of “30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs.”

“Save the World” Types Eager to Help

William Leonard, chair of anthropology and co-director of global health studies, said Northwestern students were hungry for something like this. When he offered his Introduction to International Public Health course in 2001 for the first time, “the student response was amazing. The course with 45 slots was overenrolled after the first 30 minutes of preregistration.”

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The program has had the ancillary benefit of strengthening a bond between the main campus in Evanston and the medical school in downtown Chicago. Medical students were already doing volunteer work or study overseas, “but the medical school was looking for a way in which experiences abroad could be more structured,” said Grynspan. Now there are regular pathways to conduct research at partner institutions, including Stellenbosch University in South Africa, Makerere University in Uganda, Peking University in China, and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago. 

Northwestern won a grant from the National Institutes of Health in 2008 to strengthen global health programs campus-wide and establish a Center for Global Health within the School of Medicine, which now has its own adviser helping students find places and people in need of support.

Grynspan, working with a staff of six, sends close to 200 undergraduates each year on the global health and on some other education abroad programs, or about a quarter of all Northwestern students who study overseas. The IPD office also handles international agreements, hosts visitors, and arranges student exchanges. It shifted the Mexico program to Chile on short notice in 2009 due to the swine flu scare.

Undergraduates who choose global health “are all save-the-world-type people. They just love the idea of going to poor countries, helping out, and doing research,” said Grynspan, a political scientist by training. “This is an organized way to do it.” Not incidentally for the pre-meds, “it looks very good on their transcript and c.v. They are going straight into the best medical schools and public health programs in the country.”

Turning Passion Into Action

Students are learning something not taught in labs or found in most textbooks.

“What we try to teach them is more a way of looking at the world: What are the right questions to ask? How is (health care) different in different countries? We just want them to have that type of sensitivity because there’s no time to learn it when they go to grad school. It’s just too intense,” said Grynspan, who was born in Israel and raised in Costa Rica.

Luckow is applying to medical schools now, but intends to stay connected with both Last Mile Health and GlobeMed (he is on the board). He remains grateful for the opportunities the global health studies program gave him to turn what had been “a very extracurricular passion for global health” into real action. “I know it changed my life and, given the success of the program, it’s changing hundreds of other students’ lives,” he said.

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Northwestern University

Read more about Northwestern University

When the University of South Florida reorganized its international programs, it squeezed into two words the name of the wide-ranging operation: USF World. Karen Holbrook, senior vice president for global affairs and international research, describes USF World as “a mindset, a culture, a strategy, and a reality” as well as the particular branches of its international operations nestled in the Patel Center for Global Solutions. Holbrook, a biologist and former president of Ohio State University, answered a call from USF President Judy Genshaft to come to Tampa in 2008 for a short period to watch over its burgeoning research enterprise. Five years later she’s still there, arriving in her sports car at the Patel Center at dawn and staying late. “It’s really fun, probably more fun than anything I’ve ever done,” said Holbrook. “I’ve really, really enjoyed being at USF World.” Her idea of fun includes spending hours on a cruise designing an intricate schemata for USF’s quest to become a global research university, with circles within circles and boxes crammed with goals, metrics, and strategies. A vision plan she drafted is 380 pages and a PowerPoint presentation to the Faculty Senate contained 120 slides. “I go through them fast,” she said. 

USF is going fast. Built on a World War II practice bombing range and opened in 1960, what was largely a commuter college now is a system institution with 48,000 students and $411 million in research grants and contracts. All freshmen must live on the green campus lined with graceful live oak trees. It has weathered $125 million in state budget cuts. The out-of-state tuition of $16,260 (Floridians pay $6,330) is a draw for the 2,368 international students, and more are coming through a new partnership with INTO University Partnerships, the British recruiting enterprise that places students from China and elsewhere into intensive English and academic pathway programs at allied universities (Colorado State University, another Simon Award winner, is another INTO school). On a campus where Floridians once comprised 96 percent of students, USF aims to double international enrollments to 10 percent by 2018. “We’re doing it to enhance the quality and moreover the relevance of the educational experience,” said Provost Ralph Wilcox. “We believe we’ve got something to offer international students, but they also have an incredible amount to bring to us.”

Serving the Needs of a Global Community

Genshaft, president since 2000, is carrying out her third strategic plan, each more globally focused than the preceding one. That is only natural for Tampa Bay, she said, home to 480 multinational corporations as well as Florida’s busiest port and MacDill U.S. Air Force Base, headquarters for U.S. Central Command (CentCom) and Strategic Operations Command. Genshaft said one business leader told her pointblank that his company cannot alone teach employees “tolerance, cultural knowledge, and the value of international activities. You’ve got to do it and then they’re better employees for us.” The military, too, relies on USF’s help to bring academic perspectives to grappling with the world’s trouble spots and resolving problems peacefully instead of using “kinetics,” as retired three-star Marine Lt. General Martin Steele, associate vice president for veterans research and executive director of USF Military Partnerships, delicately put it. 

Learning Mandarin in Tampa Bay and Qingdao

USF secured a Confucius Institute in 2008 by promising to recruit its first tenure-track professor of Mandarin. Eric Shepherd got the job. “It was unfathomable to me that at that time we had 40,000 students and basically no Chinese language program beyond an introductory class taught mostly in English,” he said. Now the Department of World Languages offers a Chinese minor, and 200 students attend classes taught by three professors and three instructors. “We came along a little later, but we’re quick learners,” said Genshaft.

Shepherd, a master of the Chinese storytelling performance art called Shandung “fast tales,” sends students to Qingdao University and Ocean University of China for up to 18 months of classes and internships. “They learn how to work at a professional level,” he said. “If they’re an international business major, they learn to do international business in Chinese. If they’re a chemistry major, they’re learning how to do chemistry in Chinese.”

As an undergraduate Victor Florez, 23, now working for the Confucius Institute, finished fourth in a monthlong, nationally televised “Chinese Bridge” language contest for international students. Florez, a Miami native of Colombian ancestry, came to college with a strong desire “to learn a language that was completely alien to me.” Mandarin fit the bill. “My first year I studied three hours a day,” said Florez. “If you put in the work, it’s inevitable that you’ll come out speaking fluent Chinese.”

Ambassadors for Education Abroad and a Gateway in the Student Center

Some 2.5 percent of USF students graduate with an international experience. Some 844 earned credit abroad in 2011–2012. Holbrook wants to grow that number exponentially. Genshaft and her husband donated more than $1 million to endow Passport Scholarships of $2,500 to $5,000. USF World recruits returning undergraduates to serve as “GloBull Ambassadors” for education abroad (the Bull is the university mascot), and the professional staff has grown from 5 to 11. Since the Patel Center sits at a distance from the heart of campus, USF World opened a satellite study abroad office in Marshall Student Center. “We needed to be more central to be able to catch and serve the students. We call it the Gateway Office,” said Amanda Maurer, director of education abroad. Maurer underscored the importance of the GloBull Ambassadors in convincing fellow students to pursue education abroad. “We can say it ourselves five or six times, but if a student goes up there and says, ‘You’ve really got to do this; it changed my life,’ they listen,” she said.

A new Global Citizenship program rewards up to 200 freshmen and sophomores who study global issues with $2,000 scholarships for education abroad. Anthropologist Karla Davis-Salazar, who has excavated Mayan ruins in Honduras, led the first cohort to Panama in 2013. Despite tight budgets, the provost found $400,000 to fund the Global Citizenship initiative. “Part of my goal for the future is (finding out) why more students aren’t interested. What do we need to do to open their minds?” said DavisSalazar, now an associate dean.

The international services staff also has expanded from six to nine. The INTO partnership will bring more Asian students to Tampa. USF also draws students from Latin America, including 60 undergraduates from Venezuela. Among them are engineering students Ana and Juan Lopez Marcano, siblings who said the courses and workload are harder back home but the research opportunities much greater at USF. Ana, 19, who was president of her high school class, hopes to design biomedical devices. “I really like it here,” said her 20-year-old brother, aspires to land a job at a tech giant such as Microsoft and learn “the cool stuff.” 

Establishing the USF Brand in Far Places

Roger Brindley, associate vice president for global academic programs, sees his job as “brand profile development writ large.” He works on expanding international partnerships. “For the life of me I can’t understand why people in India have heard of Harvard, but not South Florida,” quipped Brindley, a British-born expert on early childhood education. USF World now has two people in Delhi who work on recruiting students as well as finding new research opportunities and promoting economic development. USF has more than 40 faculty members of Indian heritage and 240 students from India.

“For the life of me I can’t understand why people in India have heard of Harvard, but not South Florida.”

The university provides grants up to $12,000 to faculty to generate research, scholarship, and “creative activity” with counterparts at five partner universities in Ghana, China, and the United Kingdom. Its Ghana Scholars Program, which brings faculty from the University of Ghana and the University of Cape Coast to USF to complete dissertation work, recently received an honorable mention Andrew Heiskell award from the Institute of International Education.

These partnerships are vital to USF’s achieving its goal of becoming globally engaged, said Brindley. No one “thinks becoming globalized is switching on a light. A generation from now the only relevant universities, in our opinion, will be globally engaged. We have a responsibility to do that work and be one of the universities that succeeds.”

Faculty Interests Drive Internationalization

Michael Churton has witnessed the changes as a longtime professor of special education with a deep international bent. An authority on distance learning, he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Malaysia in the 1970s. To honor the memory of a friend killed in Vietnam, he flew to wartime Saigon and applied for a teaching job just before the government fell. He has made Southeast Asia a focus of his career, studying disabilities among indigenous people in Borneo as a Fulbright Scholar, coordinating a USF partnership with the University of Malaysia-Sarawak, and working with Vietnam’s education ministry on e-learning courses for medical students. He is an honorary professor at Hanoi Medical University and has travelled to Vietnam a dozen times and to Malaysia 20 times.

When he joined the USF faculty in 1994, “there was no support from any place” for such work overseas, he said. “It was faculty members on their own. Slowly, as a new administration and new people came in, the evolution began and now we’re much farther along.”

“USF World has greatly enriched the possibilities for faculty and students. I can’t tell you how much they have helped us to stretch ourselves,” said education psychologist Darlene DeMarie, who established a model child care center at the University of Limpopo on a Fulbright in South Africa.

More than 120 Peace Corps volunteers have earned master’s degrees under the tutelage of James Mihelcic, a civil and environmental engineering professor, first at Michigan Tech and since 2008 at USF. Mihelcic, a prolific researcher, was recruited to be a 21st Century World Class Scholar, a distinction created by the Florida legislature. He finds low-tech solutions to water and sanitation problems in developing countries and heads a multi-university consortium that recently won a $3.9 million National Science Foundation grant to recover energy, water, and nutrients from wastewater.

Mihelcic said the Peace Corps volunteers in his master’s program are equipped to tackle complex sanitation problems. “It’s a scarce skill set,” said Mihelcic. “The Peace Corps has had trouble attracting and retaining engineers overseas.” Cohorts of 20 students spend two semesters at USF studying not just environmental engineering, but anthropology and global health. “Part of our job is to get students to understand you can do a lot of behavioral change besides the technological solutions,” he said.

Still Building “Who We Are”

In separate conversations, administrators and faculty alike describe USF in terms that suggest a large canvas still being painted. As Davis-Salazar, the anthropologist, put it, “We are still building who we are.” It is a collegial undertaking. At the helm of USF World, Holbrook has displayed a prodigious capacity for organizing and putting forward her own ideas, but she said they are “only the starting point. What’s exciting is other people’s ideas.” More than 100 faculty are involved in workgroups fleshing out USF’s international vision plan and coming up with metrics to gauge the university’s progress. “We want people to know about it and be excited about it,” Holbrook said. “When you do it by yourself, it’s just out there for everybody to attack, and that’s what I hope everybody will do.”

“There’s no doubt that the needs of international students are on the minds of most people at the university.”

The words have been backed up with dollars and actions. Wilcox, the provost, said, “We have invested and created a budget for USF World in difficult times.” Even with a 25 percent, $104 million cut in state appropriations over the past four years, “we had the focus, the discipline, and the strategic appetite to say the world is important and USF World is important.”

“This is a high-energy university,” said Wilcox. “This is an incredibly ambitious set of goals….We all realize that being a 50-something-year-old institution if we aspire to the level of achievement we do, we’re going to have work harder than other, older institutions because they want to improve and get better, too. We’re not going to sit still. There’s so much more to do.”

The ties that bind both the international and the multicultural student services offices at St. Cloud State University (SCSU) are particularly strong, reflecting the conviction of campus leaders that it is incumbent upon them to prepare students for a world far more diverse than the central Minnesota communities where the overwhelming number of undergraduates grew up. The multicultural student services office is deeply involved in the arrangements for education abroad programs in South Africa, Laos, and Thailand that are aimed especially at students of color who trace their ethnicities to these parts of the globe.

President Earl Potter III said his institution is the leader among the 31 institutions in the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system—which is separate from the flagship University of Minnesota—“in developing curricular and co-curricular learning opportunities in support of multiculturalism and internationalism. We approach these two aspects of awareness as part of the same continuum, with distinctive characteristics but connected through the imperative of educating our students for life.” 

A partnership with Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU) in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, dates back to 1995, when Professor of Ethnic Studies Robert Johnson, History and African Studies Professor Peter Nayenga and Director of Multicultural Student Services Shahzad Ahmad began a semester-long program on comparative race relations. “It is a transformative personal experience,” said Johnson. Ahmad, a Pakistani-born SCSU alumnus, said, “It engages a very different set of students who typically have not participated in study abroad.” 

Now SCSU sends students to South Africa for two to three weeks over spring break as well. Junior Tashiana Osborne, 21, went as a freshman. Osborne, a leader in the National Society of Black Engineers, said it “was like a flashback” to the segregation era in the United States “even though I never witnessed that.”

SCSU also sends faculty and staff to South Africa for professional development, and nursing students for clinical practice. Nearly 600 students, faculty, and staff have made the journey since the partnership began. SCSU spends $500,000 a year making such international study and research opportunities possible.

In-State Tuition for International Students

Under the leadership of Potter, a no-nonsense former Coast Guard captain, Provost Devinder Malhotra, an Indian-born economist, and Associate Vice Provost for International Affairs Ann Bos Radwan, who directed the Fulbright Commission in Cairo for more than 20 years, SCSU is now seeking to make international study, research, and experiences an integral part of life for all 17,600 students and 900 faculty. This is taking place on the heels of wrenching budget cuts and a reorganization that eliminated 26 of 200 academic programs.

SCSU ranked 13th among master’s level institutions in Open Doors 2012, with 1,250 international students. The largest contingents come from Saudi Arabia (180) and China (170), but the campus also draws 131 students from Nepal and an equal number from African nations. One lure is that international students effectively pay in-state tuition simply by volunteering twice each semester at cultural events on campus or in the community. That shaves $6,000 off annual tuition and “makes us very competitive,” said Radwan, who calls it “a champagne education at beer prices.” 

Malhotra said that when he came to St. Cloud in 2009, he found “an institution in quest of an identity. Regional comprehensives are in an awkward position within the hierarchy of higher education. We are not RI (research) nor are we community colleges, but nobody tells us what we are,” he said. Still, that meant it was well poised to define a new identity.

Frank Diagnosis of Strengths and Weaknesses

Potter said there had been some strategic planning and talk about becoming “a global university” before his arrival in 2007, but it was merely “a stake in the ground with nothing underneath.” What was really needed, he decided, was “action planning.” Potter commissioned an International Vision Task Force composed of a dozen faculty, deans, administrators, and staff. The report they produced in 2011 contained some unsparing language: the past approach to internationalization had been “unsystematic”; education abroad programs were weak, with too many students going on island programs taught in English; domestic and international students stayed to themselves within “mono-cultural” groups; international activities were largely “decorative”; and partnerships with universities overseas were “idiosyncratic,” not strategic. The task force laid out a vision and strategy for SCSU “to be recognized as the most innovative comprehensive university for international education,” with faculty winning grants for international research and businesses vying to hire graduates because of their international understanding and experience. 

The university also pared a prolix mission statement to 13 words: “We prepare our students for life, work, and citizenship in the twenty-first century.” Potter said, “It was important to be clear and direct, and to anchor our future work.” Imparting global and cultural understanding is one of four pillars of what SCSU calls its learning commitments to students (the others are active and applied learning, community engagement, and sustainability).

“We have to ask ourselves how do we create a curricular design and delivery (system) that recognizes the rapidly increasing globalized nature of our society and economy…and gives our graduates a sense of awareness and ability to operate in such a world.”

Malhotra said it isn’t just a question of sending more students abroad or boosting international enrollments. “We have to ask ourselves how do we create a curricular design and delivery (system) that recognizes the rapidly increasing globalized nature of our society and economy…and gives our graduates a sense of awareness and ability to operate in such a world.”

Breaking Out of the Minnesota Bubble

Eighty-eight percent of undergraduates are Minnesotans. About 400 students a year study overseas. By graduation, 13 percent have had an international experience. An added challenge in meeting the global citizenship goal is that many students are transfers who spend just two years at SCSU. Mikhail Blinnikov, a Moscow-born geography professor and director of the Global Studies program, said, “Our job is to catch them early.”

Seventy percent of Minnesotans trace their ancestry to the Scandinavian countries and Germany. But Minnesota is also a state with a welcome mat out for new immigrants and refugees, including Hmong who fled Laos after the Vietnam War and more recent arrivals from Somalia. “My classroom looked a whole lot more Scandinavian when I came in 1980,” said Professor of Communications Studies Roseanna Ross.

Still, Minnesotans “have a very strong affinity for their state,” said Professor of Geography Gareth John, who has known tourism majors to turn down great jobs that would have required them to relocate. 

“The presence of international students “really enriches the community in St. Cloud,” she said. Too many Minnesota students “stay in their safe little bubble. I think they are missing out.”

Graduate student Amy Lindquist came from small-town Spicer, Minnesota (population 1,167), and seized every opportunity at SCSU to internationalize her education. Lindquist taught intensive English classes filled with students from China and the Arab world, and won a Fulbright assistantship to teach English to high schoolers in Bulgaria. She spent another year studying at Universidad de Concepción in Chile and now is eyeing a career in international education. The presence of international students “really enriches the community in St. Cloud,” she said. Too many Minnesota students “stay in their safe little bubble. I think they are missing out.”

Strategy and Serendipity

Radwan, an economic historian, has drawn on her extensive experience in the Middle East to deepen the university’s existing international partnerships, forge new ones, and look for more opportunities overseas. “We’ve sorted the world into the areas that the State Department uses—Europe and Eurasia, South and Central Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific—because that’s where the funding usually is. We’re looking at each and asking, ‘What do we do in this area?’”

Potter stressed the need to think strategically about partnerships, but allowed there is “a bit of serendipity” in all of them. “Nepal for years has been one of the largest sources of international students on this campus. I can’t tell you how we got started, but the numbers become their own justification for relationships.” Potter has been a commencement speaker at Pokhara University in Nepal. In May 2013 SCSU sent five students and a professor to study social and environmental issues in Nepal’s mountain regions. “We’re beginning to do things in Nepal that we would not have chosen to do without this long-term pipeline of students,” the president said. 

Supporting China’s “Angel” on Mission to Improve Special Education

SCSU has had relationships of long standing in China, but Professor of Special Education Professor Kathryn Johnson opened a new chapter by enlisting the university’s support for Chunli “Angel” Zhao, who has overcome enormous odds to become a champion for disabled children in her homeland. She was born with brittle bone disease and dwarfism and raised in Yangshuo, a scenic fishing village that then-President Bill Clinton visited in 1998. Angel’s parents were told by local officials to keep the teenager out of sight. Later an American ex-pat, Chris Barkley, took Angel under his wing, taught her English, and hired her as receptionist for an eco-friendly mountain lodge he built in Yangshuo.

Johnson, once a UNICEF consultant in Beijing, met Angel there in 2011, brought her to St. Cloud as an intern in the Educational Leadership program, and made it her mission to arrange for Angel to meet Clinton at last. The costs of attending a Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York almost proved prohibitive, but Potter told Johnson he would pay for it. “We got there and it was magical,” said Johnson. The former president not only greeted Angel, but brought her up on stage and promised support for her efforts to build a model school and teacher training center in Yangshuo. Angel “could have been a victim of circumstance, but now she is the leading advocate for people with disabilities in China,” Clinton said.

Finding Roots and Relatives in Laos

SCSU has sent more than 250 students, most of them children of Hmong refugees, to Laos and Thailand over winter breaks. That program is led by Political Science Professor Shoua Yang, a refugee himself. Many Hmong youth in Minneapolis and elsewhere still struggle with adjusting to U.S. life. The high achievers who make it to college “don’t understand their heritage, culture, and how their parents just struggled in the past. It’s the missing piece of information in their past,” said Yang.

The winter 2012 class filled in that piece for Allen Yang, 21, a junior majoring in information systems, and his freshman brother who met their grandmother and uncle for the first time. “It was a really emotional experience,” said Yang, president of the Hmong Student Association. “It’s really about finding your identity, which is what every college student does.” Now Yang encourages as many Hmong-Americans as possible to visit Laos, including his parents, who are planning a homecoming 40 years after fleeing as newlyweds.

A Lesson From Nepal

Chemistry Department Chair Lakshmaiah (Ram) Sreerama taught biotechnology at Tribhuvan University in Kirtipur, Nepal, as a Fulbright Scholar in 2010–2011. He said only half-jokingly that he gets more respect from his students since winning the Fulbright. Sreerama grew up in Bangalore, India, and still recalls the impact on his life by a U.S. professor on a Fulbright who gave a science lecture at his high school. “He gave me all kinds of ideas. That was always lingering in the back of my mind,” said the biochemist.

Sreerama marveled at how much Tribhuvan’s graduate students achieve in rudimentary laboratories. That has allowed him to raise the bar for chemistry majors. “I tell them, ‘Look at all the resources and the technologies you have. How come we can’t accomplish that?’ I use that all the time—and they like it, they absolutely like it.”

An Internationalization Push Still in Infancy

SCSU also won a 2013 Andrew Heiskell Award for a wide-ranging partnership and student exchange program with Universidad de Concepción in Chile that was launched in 2001 by Robert Lavenda, professor of anthropology.

Notwithstanding all the laurels, administrators and faculty alike concede there is much to be done. Some but not all the dozens of recommendations in the visionary plan laid out in 2011 are being implemented, including adding more language study to education abroad programs and offering both homegrown and third-party opportunities. 

Business Dean Diana Lawson, a member of the International Vision Task Force, said the university now has “a manageable framework” for international activities, and once a governance structure is “cemented in the institution, it will be easier to expand the scope and scale of what we do.” Likewise, Radwan said, “Now that we have the basics down, we need to deepen them.” Dan Gregory, associate provost for research and dean of graduate education, said, “Our international agenda is in its infancy. We’re just starting. We’re going to be in a very different place in five years.” 

Amid dizzying growth in communities ringed around north Houston, the newest expansion of the 78,000-student Lone Star College System will add just 300 to 350 students—in Jakarta, Indonesia. It is a modest enterprise by Texas standards but is in keeping with other Lone Star efforts to internationalize the education it delivers at its six colleges to all students—2,000 of whom are international. 

The architect of this expansion is Chancellor Richard Carpenter, who as a foster child in Louisiana foresaw a future painting houses before a music scholarship to a community college altered his personal trajectory. He became at 29 the country’s youngest college president in a Kentucky community college and ran systems in Nevada and Wisconsin before becoming Lone Star’s chancellor in 2007. He is a veteran of several economic development missions abroad led by governors and has seen how much interest there is among foreign leaders in building U.S.-style community colleges of their own to expand opportunity. “They look at it like they discovered gold,” said Carpenter, who sits on the board of Community Colleges for International Development, Inc. “We are American ambassadors. We take the American dream and plant it around the world.”

Magnet for International Students

Lone Star, founded in 1972, was North Harris Montgomery Community College District before adopting its current name in 2007. Lone Star’s enrollment stood at 49,000 in 2007. Its growth surge was fueled by the recession that sent unemployed workers to community colleges to improve their job prospects. Local voters approved a $420 million bond issue for expansion in 2008, and in 2012 Lone Star opened a sixth campus, University Park, in office space that once was the headquarters of Compaq computers. But a half-billion dollar bond issue was rejected in May 2013, which may apply the brakes to future growth.

Houston, a global center for the oil and gas industry, remains a powerful magnet for international students. Houston Community College enrolls 5,800, more than any other two-year college. Lone Star was fourth in 2011–12 with 2,000 and has had as many as 2,500. They pay $5,000 a year in tuition, a quarter of what University of Houston charges. “What a gift to get a solid education here and transfer that to a four-year university,” said Nithyanantha J. Sevanthinathan, Lone Star’s chief international officer who heads strategic global partnerships, and “Nithy” to everyone. 

Internationalizing the Faculty

Lone Star committed itself to an international course when it established an International Programs and Services (IPS) office in 2004. Nithy, the first director, formulated the framework and implementation. In 2008 IPS began awarding $4,000 Faculty International Exploration (FIE) awards to encourage faculty to internationalize the content of their courses and create education abroad programs. Fifty-five faculty have shared $270,000 in awards. The first went to then-band director James Stubbs, who visited jazz festivals in Europe and returned the next summer with students who performed at the famed Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland and in Italy. “We felt like celebrities,” said Stubbs, now dean of arts and humanities at Lone Star-Kingwood.

Only 41 students studied abroad in 2011–2012, even with the college offering 15 scholarships up to $2,000. “Program cancellations due to low enrollments have been the biggest challenge,” said Malaysian-born Nithy. Six of ten courses offered for summer 2013 were cancelled. Lone Star-North Harris Art Professor Eric Sims has tried unsuccessfully to run an art appreciation program to Spain, but said, “I haven’t given up. Many of these students have never been out of Houston. This is a life-changing experience.”

Stirring Imaginations

Still, Lone Star faculty have taken students to Italy, China, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Tanzania, and the FIE awards are a powerful stimulant for faculty imaginations. Lone Star-CyFair Psychology Professor Lori Richter and Adjunct Professor Davida Rogers took 16 students in June 2013 to Tanzania, where they studied orphans and children at risk, performed service, and took a safari in the Serengeti. Richter, a former Peace Corps volunteer in The Gambia who also lived in Kenya, said, “I just want our students to experience my experience. I want them to feel like the whole world is open to them.”

Christopher Garcia, 19, a business student and the sole male in the Tanzania group, saved money from several jobs to go. “I’ve been looking at study abroad since I got to Lone Star,” said Garcia, who helped organize a community service project last spring in Houston that drew more than 300 volunteers. Garcia aspires to become an international businessman and when he does, “I want to be culturally sensitive.

Like Richter, Lone Star-Montgomery Spanish Professor Norseman Hernandez, who grew up in poverty in Honduras, embodies a passion for education abroad. “I was one of the kids selling food to people on buses. It’s been a long way for me to be here,” said Hernandez, who’s led students to Mexico twice and Chile once.

“My classes aren’t just about uno, dos, tres, and Ola! Como está? They’re about the world,” said Norseman, who as a boy dreamed of being a pilot. He uses Google Earth in his classes and assigns students to make presentations on different parts of the world. “I also learn. It’s like I’m traveling and I’m there, too,” he said. “I’m not in a cockpit, but I get to go wherever I want now.” 

“I’ve been looking at study abroad since I got to Lone Star,” says Garcia, an aspiring businessman. “I want to be culturally sensitive.”

International Education Conferences

The pride of Lone Star’s international programming is the International Education Conference it has held each spring since 2004 where prominent speakers address global issues and Lone Star’s own professors give workshops on their international  explorations. The conference sprang from a Title VI international studies grant that the North Harris campus won in 2002. “Everything international comes from that grant,” said Anne Albarelli, dean of academic affairs at North Harris. She and Theresa McGinley, dean of instruction in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Business and Economics Division, spearheaded that effort and today serve on the conference planning committee and the IPS Council. 

Lone Star has spent $60,000 on the conferences over the years. The keynote speaker at the 10th conference in April 2013 was Middle East expert Mark Kimmitt, a retired brigadier general and U.S. State Department official. Lone Star has also piggybacked with the World Affairs Council of Houston to host such figures as Lech Walesa, the former Polish president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. McGinley, whose parents survived World War II in Poland, said she always brought international perspectives to her U.S. history courses. Today more than 70 Lone Star courses carry an international studies designation.

Nithy is the impresario of the conferences. He was an international student once who came to Minnesota to pursue opportunities largely unavailable to Malaysia’s Hindu minority. With Fulbright support, he earned a peace studies degree and two MAs while organizing bicycle treks across the United States, South America, and Africa that schoolchildren followed online. “My dream was to journey the whole world on a bicycle,” said Nithy, whose father was a shipyard laborer.

Saving Vietnamese Parents Money and Visiting Wall Street

The largest number of international students come from Mexico, Columbia, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Nepal. Some live with relatives in Houston and commute to Lone Star. The six campuses are more suburban than urban. “They look like (international students’) image of what an American college looks like,” said Melvin Anthony of Lone Star-CyFair, one of 14 international student advisers.

That is the route second year student Chi Cao, 20, followed, journeying from Danang, Vietnam, four years ago to live with an uncle in Houston while she completed high school and enrolled at Lone Star. “I decided to go to Lone Star to save my parents money,” she said. They are going to be saving a lot more. In April 2013 she won a $30,000-a-year scholarship that the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation awards to top community college students. Cao is headed to Texas A&M University and looking forward to buying textbooks for the first time instead of reading reference desk copies in Lone Star’s library.

Cao, a finance major who hopes to help Vietnam develop its financial system, revived a moribund international club at Lone Star, won class office, and was on a Model United Nations team that convened in New York. “As an international student, if you only have grades, it’s not going to help you get into a good school. You have to be involved in school and get this on your resume,” she said. Cao got to visit Wall Street on the New York trip. “It inspired me,” she said.

Naziat Khan, 24, was also on that Model UN team, which represented Bhutan, a Hindu country in the Himalayas. Born in Bangladesh and raised in Texas, Khan, who is Muslim and wears a hijab, said it was hard at first “to think like a Bhutanese.” Now she’s convinced that the best way to resolve problems is to “step into somebody else’s shoes.”

Expanding Overseas Without Taxpayer Dollars

Lone Star will offer dual degrees in Jakarta in a partnership with the Putera Sampoerna Foundation. Classes will be taught in English by Lone Star and local faculty. The venture came about after Nithy met a representative of the Foundation at a State Department-sponsored conference. Putera Sampoerna is an Indonesian industrialist whose foundation was looking for a four-year U.S. college to partner with its new Universitas Siswa Bangsa Internasional. Nithy convinced the foundation executive that Lone Star was worth a look. Sampoerna himself visited and liked what he saw.

Carpenter traveled to Jakarta three times and Nithy four times in advance of the opening. “We sat with the people in Jakarta and said, “We have a lot of expertise. We have the curriculum you need, we have instructional designers, we have technology and IT infrastructure, but we don’t take taxpayer money outside of our neighborhood,” said Carpenter. The foundation agreed to cover Lone Star’s costs up front, including salaries and expenses for two faculty and an administrator, with the expectation that Lone Star will repay that after the college starts generating profits.

Getting Used to Accents

Shah Ardalan is president of Lone Star’s sixth and newest campus, University Park. An electrical engineer who was born in Kurdistan, Ardalan was formerly the system vice chancellor and chief information officer. He has a patent pending on a digital career planning system that has won plaudits from the U.S. Department of Education. Ardalan wants to make University Park, which offers upper division classes in partnership with five Texas universities, “a model as the innovative college for the twentyfirst century.” 

Ardalan believes Lone Star should cast an even wider net for international students. “I want to be a reflection of what the real world is. It’s good for (international students) and good for my American students, too,” he said. When a Texas student complained about a professor’s accent, Ardalan told him to get used to it “because you’re going to hear more and more accents. When you pick up the phone, you cannot expect everybody to talk with the ‘nice’ accent you were raised with.” No one else had trouble understanding the professor, Ardalan noted. 

Dreaming in English

Ita Jervis spoke almost no English when she moved to Houston from Ecuador in 2001. She enrolled immediately in ESL classes, graduated summa cum laude from Lone Star and the University of Houston, and today advises international and ESL students at Lone Star-Kingwood. “What I love about Lone Star,” Jervis said, “is that we act. It’s not just words, it’s actions. We’re not waiting for tomorrow. Everyone works together as a team to do the best for our students.”

She often tells students what she told a classmate who addressed her in Spanish when both were ESL beginners: “Right now our mission is to speak English, so let’s practice speaking English within ourselves, because the faster we learn the language, the better we can achieve our goals.”

Her husband, who worked for an oil company and spoke English, told her that she’d know she was speaking the language, not just translating words, when she dreamed in English. The night that happened, she woke up and “just started jumping, I was so happy,” recalled Jervis.

“What I love about Lone Star,” Jervis said, “is that we act. It’s not just words, it’s actions. We’re not waiting for tomorrow. Everyone works together as a team to do the best for our students.”

She also counsels students to believe in themselves. “The first thing that happens when you come to a different country is that you lose your self-confidence, whether you are educated or not, poor, middle class, or rich. You feel stupid,” she said. One day, she assures them, they’ll be dreaming in English. 

When 23-year-old Alfred Murerwa Kimathi returned to Nairobi from a two-week workshop at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, on global water issues, he enlisted fellow Kenyatta University students to prod their university to construct a wetland to mitigate discharges from its own sewage treatment plant. Raw sewage is a dire problem throughout the Kenyan capital, where an aging sewer system serves fewer than half the population of 3 million and many live in squalor without toilets. The effort undertaken by Kimathi and other environmental planning students was a small step in the right direction.

“The workshop had a big positive impact on me,” said Kimathi, who was one of seven Sustainability Fellows selected from research universities in Brazil, Russia, India, China, Turkey, South Korea, and Kenya and flown to Virginia for the July 2013 workshop. They joined George Mason students in an intensive course taught by Dann Sklarew on “Water Management for Environmental Sustainability.” In addition to classroom work, the fellows took field trips to explore the Potomac River watershed, visited the Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation in Front Royal, Virginia, and met with experts from international agencies, the World Wildlife Fund, and Water.org (formerly WaterPartners International).

That workshop was an outgrowth of a 2012 agreement by the eight universities to form a Global Problem Solving Consortium to work on big dilemmas that cross national boundaries, from clean water to food security to climate change. George Mason has been the driving force behind the consortium, with then-Provost Peter Stearns leading the charge. “We have in our strategic plan a deep commitment to global education. This is right at the heart of what we want to be doing,” said Stearns, a social historian who recently retired.

Diving Deeper Into Partnerships

George Mason first invited to its Fairfax campus a senior administrator and faculty member from each partner—University of Brasília in Brazil, University of Delhi in India, Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Istanbul S‚ehir University in Turkey, Kenyatta University, Tsinghua University in China, and Yonsei University in Korea. It already had ties with all of these institutions, but hoped to magnify the impact of earlier collaborations and move in new directions, including joint degrees and team-taught courses.

Anastasia Likhacheva, an economist at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and expert on disputed waterways that cross national boundaries, gave a lecture to Sklarew’s workshop via an online hookup from Shanghai. “It was perfectly organized,” she said. “It was really amazing to discuss Russian water strategies (with students) from the U.S., Europe, Africa, and Latin America. It was as international an experience as possible.” Likhacheva also lectured at a food security workshop, as did Sklarew by videoconference.

Sklarew is a professor of applied ecology and sustainability who once led a learning network for a United Nations project addressing transborder issues among countries sharing watersheds along the Nile and Mekong rivers, the Black Sea, and other bodies of water. He asked the international fellows to research beforehand a water problem in their own countries, then had them work in small teams with Mason students to examine solutions and make presentations. Mason had its own fellow in the group. A dozen other Mason students taking Sklarew’s class for credit also took part. “They were all saying, ‘Wow! This is a lot more than I thought I’d get out of summer school,” he said. George Mason now selects eight to 10 of its own students each year as Global Problem Solving Fellows, who pursue research, participate in international events on campus, and receive $500 study abroad scholarships.

Continuing the Dialogue on Social Media

Mayank Jain, a University of Delhi math and IT major, has stayed in touch with Sklarew and several fellows by e-mail and social media. “It was a lifetime experience and the learning will surely help me in the future,” said Jain, who is designing software to help small towns and villages design and secure funding for clean water projects.

Nélio Machado, a Brazilian high school teacher who was completing a master’s degree, said the workshop “was just fantastic.” Machado, who has published papers on sustainable development and aspires to get a PhD, noted that the workshop addressed not only environmental problems, but also the question of human rights and the conflicts waged over disputed waters.

George Mason’s own workshop fellow, Lindsey Denny, said, “I had no idea that issues of water insecurity throughout the globe are predominantly a woman’s burden.” She, too, is using social media to communicate with “my network of water-savvy friends all over the world.”  

A Work in Progress

Stearns gave a workshop session on the universal right to clean water. Several lectures were videotaped and made available for students and faculty at the consortium universities to watch, along with a dozen lectures by four George Mason professors. A full-fledged online course “is still being worked on,” said Stearns. “It’s a work in progress.” Madelyn Ross, director of GMU’s global consortium and China initiatives, said, “We want to find a way to turn the workshops into digital events as well. We hope to make them more than one-off events.” A second consortium workshop for students was held at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow in July 2014 on food security, and a third is scheduled for summer 2015 at Istanbul S‚ehir University on conflict resolution.

George Mason is accustomed to getting places in a hurry. Founded in 1972 in a Washington, D.C., suburb, it grew rapidly and has become Virginia’s largest public university. Five percent of the 33,000 students are international, and the university sends more than 1,300 students abroad each year. Its strategic plan captures the spirit behind the Global Problem Solving Consortium: “We will prepare our students to thrive in a global context by infusing global awareness, citizenship values, and learning opportunities across all fields, and we will partner with other organizations in solving global problems where our impact will be highest.”

A Modest Beginning, but ‘How Else Would You Start?’

George Mason recently got a $50,000 donation from Cisco Systems to strengthen the consortium’s ability to share information and develop more globally networked learning opportunities. The embryonic consortium has been operating on a shoestring with some outside and some internal funding. But “how else would you start?” asked President Angel Cabrera. “What we have here is the beginning of what could be a global learning platform” to allow more people to work together in quest of interdisciplinary solutions to “wicked” problems.

Mason professor Thomas Lovejoy, a globe-trotting ecologist who has worked in the Amazon since 1965 and coined the term “biological diversity,” helped bring the University of Brasília aboard and taught at the first workshop.

“What’s quite unusual about (the consortium) is the drawing together of a network of student representatives from universities in national capitals, which by their very nature are public service– oriented. This allows a lot of boundaries to be crossed,” said Lovejoy. Those personal ties could “lead to very important things down the line.”

“A lot of good things start without a lot of money,” said Lovejoy, a former environmental adviser for the United Nations Foundation and World Bank. “As long as there’s somebody with vision and drive behind it like Peter Stearns, it should do fine."

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George Mason University

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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.

The recent move by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, to the Big Ten Athletic Conference might seem far afield from its ambitions to expand its international connections and stature. But even before playing Penn State and Michigan on the gridiron, Rutgers became a full-fledged member of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), the vehicle that brings presidents from the Big Ten and the University of Chicago together on academic pursuits. As President Robert Barchi told a Star-Ledger reporter after his 2012 installation, “We’re playing with the big boys now.” Two years in advance of the 250th anniversary of its founding as the eighth college in colonial America, Rutgers is undergoing a metamorphosis with the purpose of living up to the slogan emblazoned on its ubiquitous red bus fleet, “Jersey Roots, Global Reach.”

Rutgers looms large in what Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs Richard Edwards called “the thoroughly globalized landscape that is New Jersey,” with 65,000 students on three major campuses in New Brunswick and Piscataway, Newark, and Camden. With the 2013 merger of New Jersey’s two medical colleges and six other health schools, its budget skyrocketed in a single year from $2.2 billion to $3.6 billion and the university is undergoing a building boom. Rutgers University-Newark, with more than 12,000 students, bears the distinction of being the nation’s most ethnically diverse university, according to U.S. News and World Report, and the main campus along the Raritan River is not far behind. Rutgers serves a densely populated state with the dubious distinction of having less capacity at public universities and exporting more students than any other. Only 8 percent of Rutgers undergraduates come from out of state, and until recently the university actually was faced with the loss of state aid if it enrolled more outsiders.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and the state legislature scrapped that penalty. Rutgers today enrolls nearly 5,900 international students; their ranks swelled by 1,000 with the medical and health school merger. A big push to attract undergraduates from China and elsewhere boosted their numbers by 60 percent in two years. Now, like other campuses that have gone this route, Rutgers is figuring out how best to ensure their success at this widely dispersed, decentralized institution.

“We’re constantly thinking about how to bring different groups together and think in different ways. That’s where the most exciting moments happen. That’s where the knowledge is. That’s what internationalization is all about.”

Internationalization Not a Stand-Alone Goal

Barchi, a neuroscientist, moved swiftly after his 2012 installation as Rutgers’ twentieth president to produce a new strategic plan, the university’s first in nearly two decades. Adopted in February 2014 after 18 months of brainstorming and soul-searching, the strategic plan offered a blunt assessment of Rutgers’ weaknesses in comparison with the nation’s top public research universities and laid out four priorities for “achieving greatness”: envisioning the university of tomorrow, including wider use of technology in teaching; building a world-class faculty; transforming the student experience; and enhancing Rutgers’ public prominence. While there are international ramifications to all these themes and priorities, internationalization was not singled out and that was intentional, Barchi said.

“The way we’re looking at it going forward is that globalization is something we’re doing in all of our programs. It’s not a mission or a goal in and of itself that we are going to emphasize at the expense of other academic priorities,” said Barchi, former president of Thomas Jefferson University and provost of the University of Pennsylvania. One of his first moves was to scuttle his predecessor’s plans to open a 5,000-student satellite campus in Hainan, China, with South China University of Technology.

Nonetheless, the trajectory of international programs is upward, especially since the 2011 creation of the Centers for Global Advancement and International Affairs (GAIA), which unified activities across Rutgers’ schools and campuses. The vision came from Joanna Regulska, vice president for international and global affairs and a professor of women’s and gender studies and geography who has been honored by her native Poland for contributions to democracy and civil society there. She started with a staff of 20. Three years later more than twice that many are at work in GAIA’s three frame buildings on the College Avenue campus and outposts in Newark and Camden. Fueling the growth was GAIA’s 2 percentage point share of a new, 4.5 percent first-year tuition fee.

Regulska previously had directed international programs for the School of Arts and Sciences alone. “I pushed for GAIA for a very long time. Things were moving even before I had an official portfolio,” she recalled. GAIA selects a biennial theme and sponsors scores of international events each year, including nearly 100 on global health in 2013–2014 alone. “I’m the bridge builder,” said Regulska. “We’re constantly thinking about how to bring different groups together and think in different ways. That’s where the most exciting moments happen. That’s where the knowledge is. That’s what internationalization is all about.”

Seeding Public Health Degrees and Service Learning in Brazil

GAIA also had more than $240,000 at its disposal in 2012–2013 for seed grants to faculty to spur international collaborations and internationalize curricula. In an institution that expends more than $700 million in research, a few thousand dollars from GAIA isn’t much, but faculty are using the grants to reel in larger support.

Stephan Schwander, a professor in the School of Public Health who studies how pollution weakens resistance to tuberculosis, secured $10,000 from GAIA and $5,000 from his department to launch a global health concentration within the public health master’s program. “It’s a start and a recognition from Rutgers that this educational activity is needed,” said Schwander, who leads an interdisciplinary global health working group. Studying TB in the lab “has shown me very clearly that biomedical work alone is not the solution,” said Schwander. “Tuberculosis is a disease of poverty” and working across disciplines will “come closest to understanding what’s going on.” Rutgers recently got its first Fulbright Visiting Scholar in Global Health. Susan Norris, a professor of nursing who conducts research in favelas and twice has taken students to Brazil for service learning, also got help from GAIA. “An $8,000 grant can get me to Brazil several times,” said a grateful Norris.

Instilling a Study Abroad Culture

Fewer than 1,000 students a year study abroad, including 275 from Camden and Newark. “Given the size of the university, we still have a long way to go,” said Giorgio DiMauro, director of the Center for Global Education. “Cost is a big factor. We’re addressing that by offering programs of different lengths and types, and exploring ways to lower the cost of study abroad.” Changing the academic culture also “is an important piece. Study abroad has not been as well integrated as it could be into the academic majors,” he added.

Eugene Murphy, GAIA’s assistant vice president, concurred. “We need to rationalize the way international education opportunities are structured here. Right now, they cost too much,” said Murphy, an anthropologist and former NYU administrator who took GAIA’s number two job in 2013. “It’s a stretch for a lot of students.”

Jorge Schement, vice president for institutional diversity and inclusion, called Regulska a pioneer who “stepped forward with a vision and promoted that vision at a time when nobody cared, and then people began to see the wisdom of what she was doing. She began opening doors that brought the diversity identity together with the international identity.” The diversity identity is strong in a melting pot state where one person in five is foreign born. “Diversity is us,” said Schement.

The Care, Feeding, and Recruiting of International Students

New Brunswick is 30 miles from New York City and 50 miles from Philadelphia, which helps draw international students. But there were no formal international recruiters until three years ago when Vice President of Enrollment Management Courtney McAnuff conceived the 4.5 percent first-year tuition fee. It allowed him not only to hire a recruiter but also to add a counselor or other support person for every 150 additional international students.

An e-mail from two incoming Kenyan students asking McAnuff how they would recognize him upon their late night arrival at Kennedy International Airport made McAnuff (who drove in to get them) realize Rutgers needed to arrange vans as an alternative to $200 cab rides. Rutgers opened a 24-hour diner to give international students a place to eat over holiday breaks when the main dining halls were closed.

The Center for Global Services’ share of the fee allowed Urmi Otiv, the director, to hire new staff. That still leaves each staff member responsible for more than 800 students, but “we’re in a much better place than we were and looking to get better,” said Otiv. She counsels students, “‘Yes, Rutgers is huge and overwhelming, but the trick is to create your own small Rutgers’” by making friends and networking.

Lobbying Congress as Part of an American Education

Making friends was not a problem for Jianyu Yeyang, 21, a sophomore from Kunming, China. “I’m quite Americanized,” said the political science and finance major, who goes by the nickname Cobra and attended U.S. high schools for two years. He took part in a Rutgers study abroad program in Beijing, studying with international students as well as locals who mistook him for an American and were surprised he spoke Mandarin.

As a volunteer Global Ambassador for the Center for Global Education, he was part of a Rutgers contingent who traveled to Washington, D.C., on NAFSA’s Advocacy Day to lobby Congress for the Dream Act and other immigration changes. (Yeyang made a pitch to staff of New Jersey’s senators for making it less difficult for international students to obtain visas). Yeyang, wearing a varsity letter jacket, worries countrymen stick too much to themselves at Rutgers. “They’re still living a lifestyle like they’re in China,” he said.

Michael Marcondes de Freitas, 29, of Brasília, Brazil, had to make new friends when he began PhD studies in a rarefied mathematics field because there were few students with whom he could converse in Portuguese. “Math is so lonely, it drove me to pursue getting involved on campus,” he said.

He volunteered at international student orientations, once held in a modest-sized ballroom in the Student Center but now big enough to fill a gym, and was a leader of the Rutgers chapter of a charity, Giving What We Can, that raised funds to fight malaria. “These have been the best six years of my life,” said Marcondes de Freitas, who is off to Denmark on a postdoctoral fellowship.

Finding and Cultivating Fulbright Talent

Rutgers has dramatically increased its production of Fulbright Scholars and it’s not by happenstance. Arthur Casciato, director of the Office of Distinguished Fellowships, doesn’t wait for students to wander into his warren in historic, nineteenthcentury Bishop House; he goes out and finds them. In 2007 when the office was created, there were eight applicants and no awardees. By 2012, nearly a hundred students applied and 19 won, including Lillyan Ling and Michelle Tong.

Ling, 23, a Phi Beta Kappa English major now working for Oxford University Press, taught high school in Dobrich, Bulgaria, on the Black Sea coast. She applied at the last minute at a professor’s urging, and Casciato waived an internal Rutgers deadline that had passed. “I never say no to anyone,” he said.

Why Bulgaria? “I wasn’t interested in picking a glamorous place. At this age, I need to expose myself to as much as possible,” said Ling, the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Her choice meshed with Casciato’s advice to apply to countries with favorable selection odds. “Winning Fulbrights has a lot to do with strategy,” he said.

Tong, also Chinese-American, got an e-mail out of the blue from Casciato. “I had no idea that this sort of office really existed,” said Tong, a K-pop fan who taught in Cheongju, South Korea, and worked as a United Nations intern. “He heard about me from my French professor who was a Fulbrighter in her day.”

Building Upon Old Ties and Fostering New Connections

Rutgers is focusing on five countries to build or expand partnerships, joint research, and exchanges: China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Liberia. After former President Richard McCormick visited China in 2011, Rutgers established dual-degree programs with South China University of Technology, Tianjin University, and others. It also created a Rutgers China Office on the New Brunswick campus to expand ties and exchanges.

The office generates revenues for its activities by running professional development and training programs for Chinese university leaders, administrators, and others. Political scientist Jeff Wang, the director, sees a bigger purpose. “The China-U.S. relationship will be the most important in this century. There are a lot of misunderstandings between the two, so this people-to-people exchange is really the best tool to educate both sides,” said the Xian native.

A partnership with the Indian Council for Cultural Relations gained Rutgers a visiting professorship in Indian Studies. An Obama-Singh 21st Century Knowledge Initiative grant allowed it to stage a higher education leadership academy in Mumbai. U.S. Agency for International Development grants underwrite large projects in Indonesia and Liberia. Rutgers’ ties with the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil date back 40 years.

Owing Students an Internationalized Education

Rutgers revised its tenure and promotion process in 2012 to explicitly recognize faculty members’ international activities, which Regulska said made it one of only a handful of institutions in the country to do so. She borrowed the idea from universities in Florida and Michigan. Faculty can present their accomplishments in the areas of international research, teaching, curriculum development, advising international students, grant writing, and service. Regulska said this was not only an institutional recognition of the value of international engagement, but also a recognition that it takes more time and effort to sustain such a commitment.

The tenure form now asks junior faculty to list the international courses they taught on campus or abroad and to specify the number of international students they advise. “We know it takes more time and energy to be a good adviser for international students because the student has a second language and it’s a different culture for them,” Regulska said.

Increasingly Garden State students such as Kunal Papaiya understand their own stake in Rutgers’ internationalization. The political science major believes Rutgers needs to “increase its global presence” and recruit more international students like Yeyang. “We’re not just competing with domestic students. We’re competing with international students like Cobra. We need to get more students like him in here,” said Papaiya, a senior who is eyeing a career in law and politics.

Jean-Marc Coicaud, professor of law and global affairs at Rutgers-Newark and a former United Nations official, said Rutgers must keep up not just with the Big Ten schools and other top public institutions, but elite private ones as well.

“Private universities have been in this (internationalization) business in a very, very aggressive fashion for years, giving an additional edge to students who are already very privileged,” said Coicaud. “If Rutgers misses the train, we’re allowing private universities to even deepen their advantage.”

When Brazil launched its Ciência sem Fronteiras (Science Without Borders) initiative to send 100,000 students and researchers around the world, many prestigious institutions stepped forward to snap them up. Rice University went a step further, repurposing the resulting $100,000 from tuition paid by the Brazilian government to send Rice faculty to Brazil to jump start collaborations. It also arranged extra support for the small influx of Brazilians on the Houston campus as part of a broader initiative to build lasting links between Rice and Brazilian universities.

The Brasil@Rice initiative, directed by Adria Baker, associate vice provost for international education, reflects the determination to deepen Rice’s ties to Latin America, as the university has already done on a much wider scale with China. The initiative started in 2012 just as the university began offering a Latin American studies major that requires study abroad and competency in Spanish or Portuguese. 

Brazil had launched its science mobility program a year earlier. Then-Provost George McLendon made the decision to redirect the tuition revenues and championed Brasil@Rice. Houston, often called the energy capital of the world, is by itself Brazil’s sixth largest trading partner, and cultural, intellectual, and economic ties between Houston and Brazil “made this a natural for us,” said McLendon. “It’s also true that Texas is probably the Brazil of the U.S., a very friendly bunch of people with a can-do spirit.”

Spelling Brasil the Brazilian Way

The Brasil@Rice initiative—spelled with an ‘s’ as the Brazilians do—has created “a new way of looking at international on our campus,” said Baker. It also provides an extra level of attention for Brazilian students and scholars during their stay in Houston. The initiative is managed by Mayra Onuchic, who is, in McClendon’s words, “the mother figure for all the Brazilian students.” She and husband José Onuchic—both Brazilian by birth—are masters of one of Rice’s 11 residential colleges. He is a prominent physicist, member of the National Academy of Sciences, and codirector of Rice’s Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, which seeks to advance cancer research with breakthroughs in physics. Doctoral students and postdocs from Brazil regularly work in his National Science Foundation–funded lab. He is also a linchpin in a partnership with the University of São Paulo in which the two universities jointly administer and share use of an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. “We both use the supercomputer remotely,” said Onuchic. “For me it’s 10 miles, for them 4,000, but for the guys doing the job, that doesn’t make any difference. The research is synergized by our working together. I’d like to see this become the bedrock that connects our two universities.”

There are other components to the bedrock. Robert Vajtai, a nanotechnology researcher, is working with graduate students and Universidade Estadual de Campinas (University of Campinas or UNICAMP) in the state of São Paulo on novel ways to nanoengineer graphene, a two-dimensional form of carbon, to store energy. One advantage of working with the Brazilian researchers, he said, “is that they have much more freedom to select interesting projects. Here you need to submit proposals and follow whatever your grant contract says.” Vajtai had just received word from a sister journal of Nature that it was publishing the teams’ latest findings. “These guys are motivated, knowledgeable, and very diligent,” said Vajtai, who added that his department is open to the possibility of dual doctoral degrees.

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History Leads the Way

Most notably, the history departments at Rice and UNICAMP created a dual doctoral degree program in 2012. Brazilian graduate student Ludmila de Souza Maia was the first to avail herself of that opportunity, spending 2012–2013 at Rice and now, back in Brazil, finishing a dissertation that will earn her two doctorates in spring 2016. “I felt very special at Rice. I was very spoiled. I got a lot of attention and had the whole department helping me,” said Maia. Rice provided a travel grant for her research in Paris archives on nineteenthcentury Brazilian and French women writers, and sent her to Latin America studies conferences in Illinois and New Mexico. The first Rice doctoral student is now studying at UNICAMP, and each institution has approved second candidates.

The chair of Rice’s history department, Alida Metcalf, collaborated with UNICAM history professor Silvia Hunold Lara to create that dual degree, which Rice’s Faculty Senate approved in November 2012. They had strong support from the top. The presidents of the two universities had each visited the other’s campus and signed partnership agreements. Metcalf and Lara shared a common interest in the history of the Atlantic slave trade, a strength of both departments. Nonetheless, “it took a year and a half working with our lawyers and bureaucratic staff to put our ideas on paper. It’s not easy,” said Lara.

Doctoral candidates complete coursework at their home campus—including advanced study of Portuguese for the U.S. students—then spend a year at the other school before returning home to write a dissertation in their native language and a lengthy abstract in the other tongue, with Metcalf and Lara as coadvisers. “It’s complicated having two advisers on a dissertation,” said Metcalf, who spent part of her childhood in Latin America, but going down this path “exposes them at a much more sophisticated level to the way in which history is written in two different countries.” And the preparation will give newly minted historians distinct advantages in applying for professorships “in the global academic environment that we are living nowadays,” said Lara, who has been a visiting scholar at U.S. and French universities.

Rice’s enrollment is 6,500 while UNICAMP’s is 34,000. Nearly a quarter of Rice students are international. Brazilians comprise only a small percentage (22 graduate students and 15 visiting students in fall 2014), but their presence is readily felt, especially in events arranged by the Brasil@ Rice initiative.

“To really get a lot out of one year in another country, you have to be ready to hit the ground running,” said Metcalf, the history chair. Brasil@Rice “has been able to provide that for the Brazilian students to maximize their time here.” McClendon, who has returned to the faculty, said the Brazilians have contributed greatly to the cultural mix on campus. “It’s actually not that hard to get Brazilians to feel acculturated because they gravitate naturally to social events,” he added.

Connections Beyond the Campus

Brasil@Rice has ventured beyond the campus into the wider Brazilian business, consular, and cultural communities in Houston. A university representative serves on the board of the Brazilian-Texas Chamber of Commerce, and Rice hosted a delegation of government officials on a visit to Houston last fall. Onuchic was among the first winners of a Diaspora Prize that Brazil created in 2013 to honor the achievements of Brazilians abroad in science, technology, and innovation.

Baker said Brasil@Rice has “generated tremendous enthusiasm. We’ve got people from different fields across campus, from high-level professors to beginning faculty, talking with each other. We even have staff thinking Brazil.” While more Brazilian students are coming to Rice, the language barrier and costs have made it difficult to convince more Rice students to study in   Brazil, Baker said. The university this past summer sent its first students to a language immersion program in São Paolo and subsidized two internships in Brazil. Baker believes the success of Brasil@Rice provides “a template for internationalization” that Rice now can follow with other countries. 

It isn’t certain how long Brazil will continue its Scientific Mobility Program, but the Brasil@Rice office hopes to award $90,000 for further faculty travel and collaborations, including two-way visits. A decision is pending approval by a new provost.

Nonetheless, even with no guarantee of future revenues from the mobility program, “my guess is the strength of the ties we build will endure one way or another after that program no longer exists,” said McLendon.

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Rice University

Read more about Rice University

Thomas Jefferson was the prototype of what every university today professes students need to become: a global citizen. The polyglot president, diplomat, scientist, inventor, and educator was friend to the Marquis de Lafayette and Simon Bolivar. He voiced hope that the university he founded in the foothills of the Blue Ridge  Mountains in 1819 would stand as “the future bulwark of the human mind in this hemisphere.” He recruited five of eight original faculty from Great Britain. Most of the first 65 students journeyed to his “Academical Village” from outside Virginia.

But in modern times, it took until the end of the twentieth century for the University of Virginia (U.Va.) to take what Vice Provost for Global Affairs Jeffrey Legro called “a self-conscious turn to the world.” Building on its success as a top public research university, U.Va. made internationalization a central thrust of its two most recent strategic plans. Under former President John Casteen, it brought international students in far greater numbers to Charlottesville and appointed a vice provost for international affairs. On President Teresa Sullivan’s watch, it reorganized and expanded international programs, pushing students and faculty to venture far beyond the Blue Ridge and finding new ways to embed a culture of global awareness on the Grounds, as the 1,682-acre campus is called.

A Center for Global Health and an International Residential College, where 300 students (60 percent domestic, 40 percent international) live, were created after the 1999 strategic plan. But a faculty task force that looked across the Grounds in 2008 delivered the blunt assessment that while “the University of Virginia is by no means inactive internationally… neither is it a leader."

A Central Strategy and Shared Costs

Since then U.Va. has raised the international banner higher even while weathering diminished state support (but a swelling endowment, now $7 billion). In an institution with 11 independent schools—even separate business schools for undergraduate and graduate students—the president and provost found ways to pull academic  fiefdoms together on internationalization. “The best part is that this is not just in the expected places. Everybody has embraced it,” said Sullivan, a sociologist who became president in 2010. 

The opening of an office in Shanghai—U.Va.’s first overseas—in 2013 marked a milestone in the journey. Justin O’Jack, former China director for the Council on International Educational Exchange, was hired to run the China office with a mission of supporting research partnerships, academic programs, internships, admissions, alumni engagement, and career placement. The university sent a 20-person delegation, including a half-dozen senior leaders, to a two-day conference and ceremonial opening last March. More importantly, boasted former Executive Vice President and Provost John Simon, “I got all of the deans to contribute to the costs of the China office, so everyone has a stake.” Start-up costs were $150,000 and it costs $300,000 a year to operate.

Simon, departing after four years for the presidency of Lehigh University, said schools were accustomed to acting like “independent operators…that could do everything they want whenever they want.” Some had stellar overseas connections “but to me, the issues around global are a centralized strategy. I’m not saying the schools can’t do other things, but that’s not an institutional strategy.” He predicts U.Va. will plant its flag in half a dozen other locations within five years.

Location, Location, Location

Legro, a politics professor and vice provost for global affairs since 2012, chairs a Global Affairs Committee with representatives from all schools and major administrative units. A separate Global on Grounds Committee comprised of faculty, staff, and students is charged with developing new ways to integrate global content into the university experience.

A modest Center for International Studies made way for a more ambitious and deeper-pocketed Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation, which has been given prime space in a historic building in the shadow of Jefferson’s iconic Rotunda.

“It’s location, location, location,” said the center’s director, Brian Owensby, a Latin American historian. It shares space with a new Global Internship Program and a popular global studies major and can dispense $450,000 for research projects small and large. Two teams of environmental scientists split $100,000 awards last year. “Things are going gangbusters,” said Owensby.

The global internship director, Majida Bargach, placed 39 students in jobs in 2014 and 70 this summer. Bargach, a French lecturer who also leads a study abroad class to her native Morocco, said the interns gain the benefit of “a total immersion by themselves in the workplace.”

Student Demand for a Global Studies Major

The evolution of the global studies major attests to the strong voice and tradition of self-governance that students enjoy at U.Va., where they run the vaunted Honor System (exams are unproctored) and a galaxy of hundreds of organizations, many with an international focus.

Students on their own initiative began stumping in 2007 for a global development studies major, arguing in an 8,000-word white paper that U.Va. prepared too few students for careers fighting poverty. Richard Handler, a cultural anthropologist, stepped forward to direct the major in 2009. It’s now bundled into a larger global studies major with tracks on health, the environment, and security/justice.

“Universities these days are full of students who want to go around the world and do good work,” said Handler, who raised $1 million to hire a “professor of practice” to connect students with global development organizations.

Francesca Fiorani, a Renaissance art historian and associate dean, said the attraction of the major is not only for students but also for faculty. “We’re rethinking the traditional disciplines. It’s driving curriculum reform across the university.” Core courses range from economics to anthropology to sociology, all presented from a global perspective. “That’s what students want,” said Fiorani. ”They want to know how to operate with people from all over the world.”

The Center for Global Health has doubled to 55 the number of $5,000 awards to students to work in interdisciplinary teams on projects in developing countries. “In the past, people thought ‘global health’ was only for doctors and nurses, but it’s for the economists, educators, and engineers as well,” said Rebecca Dillingham, MD, the director.

Vanquishing the Fear of Missing Out

Two thousand students studied abroad in 2013– 2014. More might go but for a much-discussed malady known as FOMO, or the fear of missing out. U.Va. is a school rich with traditions, from secret societies to fall football to a spring steeplechase race. “We’re challenged to get more students to go abroad for a semester or year. That’s where a lot of our energy is going,” said Dudley Doane, director of the International Studies Office.

“They don’t want to miss any of their eight great semesters here. But it’s a bit of an urban myth. Nine of 10 who go abroad will tell you it was their most meaningful semester,” said Legro. McKenna Hughes, 22, an English and linguistics major and peer adviser in the International Studies Office, said, “The thing about traditions is they happen every year. We push them to realize they’ve got three other chances.”

Meg Gould, 22, spent a summer in Morocco and a full semester in Paris and was selected by peers for one of the coveted rooms for seniors behind the colonnade on the Lawn. She also represented students on the Board of Visitors. “U.Va. definitely opened the doors for me,” said the global studies and French major. “Amazing experiences can occur outside of Grounds.”

The International Studies Office partners with the Department of Anthropology to offer CORE (Cultural Orientation, Reflection, and Engagement) seminars to prepare students for crossing cultures and demystify the experience. “It’s a wrap-around curriculum,” said coordinator Catarina Krizancic, an anthropologist. “It isn’t enough to put people in a different language or culture. You have to mentor and teach them through it.”

This academic year is the last in which U.Va. is sponsoring the Semester at Sea program. It has provided a dean and sent other faculty and staff on the voyages since 2006. 

Making Room for International Students

By law 70 percent of U.Va.’s 15,000 undergraduates must be Virginians. Nine hundred—5.5 percent—are international. It is twice as hard for out-of-staters to win admission, and even harder for international students. “The burgeoning of our reputation internationally” keeps driving up the number and quality of applications, said Richard Tanson, senior international student and scholar adviser.

International students can fall under the thrall of Charlottesville, too. “I cherish this U.Va. experience,” said “Grong” Yexiao Wang, a senior from Chengdu, China, majoring in math and political philosophy. Few friends at other campuses are “so fond of their schools.” Wang banded together with classmates to start a U.Va. China Fund that last February honored economics professor  Kenneth Elzinga for his steadfast support— including driving a visiting Chinese scholar and his wife to the hospital one icy night in time to deliver their baby. The award is named for U.Va.’s first graduate from China, educator and diplomat Weiching  Williams Yen, Class of 1900.

Sophomore Lexi Schubert, an economics and cognitive science major from Munich, Germany, leads a new organization called Global Greeters that helps students settle into college life. That was not a problem for Schubert, who speaks five languages and is learning Indonesian and Hungarian. “Studying in the U.S. was always a dream of mine.”

Rafat Khan, a senior from Dhaka, Bangladesh, cut a distinctive figure on campus with an upswept coif he calls “a faux-hawk.” He threw himself into a host of activities, including the Global on Grounds Committee, and worked to overcome the self-segregation of international students. “The ideal university environment is one where there’s a flowing, cross-cultural dialogue and people have friends from all over the world,” said the commerce major and philosophy minor. “U.Va. has done a good job, but there’s always room to grow.”

Humanities and Business in the Global Context

Befitting an institution whose founder once said that liberal education would help “guard the sacred deposit of [citizens’] rights and liberties,” U.Va. has partnered with other universities to uphold the place of the humanities in a globalized, business-minded world. The Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures works with Delhi University, Nanjing Univer sity,  Oxford University, and London’s School of Oriental and African Studies on a mission of connecting scholars “across conceptual, imaginative, and continental divides.” Two Mellon Foundation grants since 2011 topping $6 million are allowing the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to hire 20 new interdisciplinary faculty and providing research funds for dozens of faculty and graduate students. The latest $3.5 million grant focuses on the Global South, including new courses and research on the histories and cultures of Africa, Latin America, and South and East Asia.

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Fiorani, the associate dean, said U.Va. views itself as both an importer and exporter of humanities faculty. “All sorts of places across the globe have a strong interest in developing the liberal arts education for which the U.S. is uniquely famous.”

The bifurcated business schools, the Darden School of Business and McIntire School of Commerce, have stood in the vanguard of curriculum internationalization. Darden Dean Robert Bruner led a national task force that produced an encyclopedic report on The Globalization of  Management Education. It found business schools innovating rapidly to globalize but also forecast a high failure rate for their experiments, which Bruner said “is actually indispensable because only by that will we identify a sustainable path or paths forward.”

McIntire Dean Carl Zeithaml, a global management strategy expert, was taken aback by a “lack of international orientation” when he came to Charlottesville in 1997. “I really felt that most people thought that the boundaries of the world were consistent with the boundaries of Albemarle County.” After a visit to Asia with other deans, he proposed opening an office there. “I guess I wasn’t very good at it because it took another 17 years,” he said wryly. 

Back to the Future

Jefferson’s Rotunda was sheathed in scaffolding during the spring of 2015, undergoing renovations to make the old new again. The global offices in the Academical Village were also undergoing renovations to fit everything under one roof. 

The university’s reinvigorated internationalization is a type of reconstruction, too, as U.Va. seeks to reclaim the legacy of America’s earliest global thinker. “That is our goal, and though there are challenges, we are well on our way to realizing it,” Legro said.

With the University of San Diego’s (USD) Spanish Renaissance–style architecture, sunny climate, gardens in flower year round, and postcard view of Mission Bay, it might seem hopeless to convince students to tear themselves away to study abroad. But nearly three-quarters of the undergraduates do so and, befitting USD’s religious identity, many jump at opportunities to perform service in South Africa, Jamaica, Haiti, and elsewhere. “One of our distinguishing marks is that we take seriously the need to become global citizens,” said former President Mary Lyons. “As a Catholic university that belongs to a worldwide network that has global outreach, global presence, and pays attention to global concerns, it comes naturally to us.”

Today’s USD is the product of a 1972 union between colleges for women and men built after World War II on a hilltop called Alcalá Park that sits 22 miles from the border with Mexico. The founding Sacred Heart nuns modeled the women’s college after the University of Alcalá in Spain, professing a belief that those attracted by its beauty would also find truth and goodness. The college has been under lay control since the merger and only half the student body is Catholic. Undergraduates must take philosophy and two religious studies classes. Kuwaiti student Khaled Alaskar, a mechanical engineering major, initially regarded the requirement as a burden, “but I learned a lot about different religions. USD does a good job at addressing how religion is important in people’s lives without enforcing it.” 

Expanding the Global Footprint

Lyons, a former captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve and president of the College of Saint Benedict (a 2012 Simon Award winner) and the California Maritime Academy, has just retired. She drove two, multiyear strategic planning efforts during the past 12 years that both placed greater emphasis on international study and research. An International Center headed by an associate provost was created in 2007, bringing three separate study abroad offices under one roof. A 2011 strategic plan set a goal of “expanding USD’s global presence” and developing a “footprint” in major cities abroad to promote international partnerships, exchanges, and collaborations.

In August 2014 it opened a 10,000-square-foot USD Madrid Center with classrooms, meeting and study spaces, and facilities equipped with videoconferencing and high-speed connections to the home campus. The university spent $400,000 to open the center near Retiro Park and the Prado museum. Lyons said it represented the culmination of a decade of efforts “to graduate men and women who are truly global citizens.”

USD had already been sending 90 students to learn Spanish, live with host families, and take other courses each fall in the Spanish capital. The center now has two administrators and a large roster of local faculty teaching classes that run the gamut from art history to business to political science. It is also home to summer programs for the business and education graduate schools.

Denise Dimon, associate provost for international affairs, said the goal is to enroll 200 students each year at the USD Madrid Center—115 went in 2014–2015—and attract students from other U.S. colleges as well. While students studied in Madrid before, “the difference is we are now a recognized educational institution in Spain,” Dimon said.

Paula Cordeiro, former longtime dean of the School of Leadership and Education Sciences (SOLES), is considering designing a graduate course that would bring future school principals to Spain. To do that, she said, “I need to make connections with schools and professional organizations there. It will be much easier to do that if I have a base— our Madrid Campus—to work out of.”

Seeking to Make Peace and Social Innovation

Thanks to a $25 million gift and $50 million bequest from Joan Kroc, widow of the McDonald’s founder, USD is home to the Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice and the Kroc School of Peace Studies. The institute won a Simon Spotlight Award in 2011 for its Women PeaceMakers program, which provides several months’ respite for community activists from war-torn countries.

Mrs. Kroc gave instructions that the institute was to not just “talk about peace, but make peace.” Perhaps no school could adequately fulfill that lofty ambition, but USD’s leaders admit that Kroc has had, in Lyons’s words, “fits and starts.” Built in 2000, it began offering master’s degrees two years later, followed by a minor for undergraduates. The Kroc School, opened in 2007, has six faculty members and 33 graduate students. But a conference it organized in November 2014 on “Defying Extremism” drew 125 international policymakers, religious leaders, and peacebuilders from 30 countries. The institute followed that up with a February 2015 regional conference on extremism that drew participants from eight Asian countries to Manila and the conflicted island of Mindanao in the Philippines. Provost Andrew Allen said Kroc has the potential to become the hub for peacebuilding studies and actions that span the university.

It has already begun strengthening ties with USD’s other schools. Patricia Marquez, Kroc’s dean since 2014, came from the School of Business Administration, where she taught entrepreneurship for social change. While still at the business school, she spearheaded creation of a joint Center for Peace and Commerce with Kroc and launched a Social Innovation Challenge that has grown beyond the campus. Last spring the Challenge awarded $75,000 to eight teams of students from universities across San Diego for such ventures as building portable toilet seats for landmine victims in Uganda and opening a school in Ghana.

Marquez is a Venezuelan-born and University of California-Berkeley–educated anthropologist—her research was on street children in Caracas—who takes an iconoclastic approach to how Kroc should pursue its mission. “I’m not interested in the same old categories. If business is going to come up with solutions to social problems, we need to bring into the conversation people very different from us in their thinking,” said Marquez. “We do focus on peace, but we’re not training philosophers of peace. We’re training people who understand philosophy, sociology, anthropology, economics, and all these things to solve some of the most intractable problems in the twenty-first century.”

Her successor at the joint center, economics professor Stephen Conroy, said it occupies “a rare space that folks on either side quite frankly might be somewhat uncomfortable with. But for me, being a force for good and trying to improve standards of living is what business should be all about.” USD is also an Ashoka Foundation Changemaker Campus, part of a network of 30 universities seeking to incubate innovative approaches to solving global challenges. 

Priming the Pump for Study Abroad

Half the undergraduates who study abroad do so for a full semester. Students receive $170,000 in need-based aid and get a 30 percent tuition discount on credits earned in short-term programs. As many as 100 faculty teach short-term courses overseas during January intersession and summer terms.

“We have centralized support from the international center. Graduate schools do their own programming as well,” said Dimon. “We offer a variety of study abroad programs, research missions, and service-learning activities, packaging them in different ways for students’ different needs.”

The study abroad staff is lean—Director Kira Espiritu and Associate Director Jessica Calhoun work with four advisers and an operations manager, handling all logistical arrangements and student service support—which means schools and faculty must shoulder some marketing and administrative burdens. Chemistry professor James Bolender said there are fewer such burdens than when he pioneered a field study class for science majors on Mexico’s Baja Peninsula in 2001. He remembers “flying by the seat of my pants” back then. Bolender has led students back to Baja ever since and worked alongside them on a humanitarian water quality project in Mbarara, Uganda.

A Taste of International Education for Sophomores

USD’s lofty study abroad participation rate has also been helped by the Second Year Experience Abroad, part of a wider effort by the student affairs office to encourage freshmen to return for their second year. Students take a global studies seminar and travel in cohorts in January of their sophomore year to Florence, Italy, or Antigua, Guatemala. Courses offered run the gamut from language and art to chemistry and statistics. More than 10 percent of freshmen—150 students—sign up each year.

“I consider this a big retention strategy,” said Carmen Vazquez, vice president for student affairs. It’s also delivered striking results for the International Center. Espiritu said 85 percent of those sophomores wind up studying abroad again.

Piper Bloom transferred from a community college, so she missed that sophomore opportunity, but “immediately decided that I wanted to have some of that experience, even though I’m a little older than everyone else.” She chose a popular summer Shakespeare course in London. “You hear from friends who went and it just inspires you to go,” said the English major, who was headed to Japan after graduation to teach English.

Building International Experiences Into Graduate Curricula

International experiences are par for the course for many of USD’s graduate and professional schools. Dimon has a direct hand in that as she remains director of the Ahlers Center for International Business as well as associate provost. Ahlers has sent 150 MBA students to 13 countries to do international practicums, consulting directly for foreign companies or tackling projects in teams alongside MBA students from the local university. Notwithstanding that most are working professionals who are pursuing MBAs part time, a majority graduate with an international experience on their résumés, Dimon said.

Ahlers has forged close ties with EGADE Graduate Business School of the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico, whose retired dean, Jaime Alonso Gomez, is now a USD distinguished professor of strategy and international business. He teaches business students and executives that in additional to the proverbial three Ps—people, products, and profits—they need to treat peace and prosperity as equally important considerations for their bottom lines. “That is the true meaning of education: bringing not only material wealth, but building better communities, better neighbors, better everything,” Gomez said.

SOLES, the leadership and education graduate school, since 2008 has required every student to participate in an international experience. “We didn’t do it on a whim. We take it very seriously,” said Linda Dews, assistant dean of the School of Leadership and Education Sciences. “We’re seeing that it’s making a difference for the way students approach their professional career.”

Most students spend only brief periods abroad, but that does not tell the full picture, said Assefa Tessema, a doctoral student from Ethiopia who directs the school’s Global Center. “When people hear it’s a one-week or 10-day program, they may assume it’s superficial work. But it’s very intensive engagement for students and for faculty, who start planning a year in advance.”

An Emphasis on Service as Well as Learning

Many study abroad programs encourage students to perform service. Political science professor Mike Williams weaves that into the summer course he teaches in South Africa. “I’m a cheerleader and also an organizer,” he said, “trying to get more people to think about how we advance our social justice mission and how to do this in their classes.”

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A conversation with Williams convinced Jennifer Bradshaw to switch majors from business to international relations and to follow Williams to the village of Makuleke, where the group slept in huts, worked alongside community leaders, and mentored youth. “They were some of the most genuine, welcoming people I’ve ever met. That experience made me rethink my own life here in the U.S. I think about it every day,” said Bradshaw.

The Mulvaney Center for Community, Awareness and Social Action arranges service immersion trips to Jamaica, Guatemala, and other countries, but also guides students to assist immigrants, the homeless, and poor in San Diego’s Linda Vista section, Tijuana, and other border towns.

In a Jamaica program led by John Loggins, director of community-based learning, students learn the history of the Atlantic slave trade, tutor kids, and participate in activities from cooking classes to jam sessions in the town of Duncan near Montego Bay. “There’s all kinds of different ways they can learn,” said Loggins, an alumnus and former Peace Corps volunteer in Jamaica. “It’s really transformed the dynamic in that community.”

“We’re doing this international work because it’s good education,” said Chris Nayve, an assistant provost and the center’s director who has three USD degrees (BA, JD, and MBA). “It’s not just the content of the class. It’s about who are you becoming.”