Leadership

As a campus situated in a community where almost one in four residents are immigrants, the University of Maryland-College Park (UMD) dedicated the 2018–19 academic year to exploring immigration, global migration, and the refugee experience. The Year of Immigration initiative led to more than 75 campus events, nearly 60 academic courses related to immigration, and extensive community engagement with local nonprofits, high schools, and community service groups. The initiative was jointly implemented by the Office of International Affairs (OIA) and the College of Arts & Humanities.

Against a backdrop of rising nationalism and a wave of anti-immigrant policies, international educators at UMD wanted to raise awareness of the issues affecting immigrants and refugees. In 2017, more than 300 international students and scholars at UMD were affected by travel bans implemented by the Trump administration. “That elevated my consciousness,” says Ross Lewin, PhD, associate vice president for international affairs. “I thought we needed to be more cognizant in recognizing that our international community is an extraordinary asset to the well-being of the university community.”

Image

Creating A More Inclusive Campus

With a focus on issues such as immigration, forced migration, and the experiences of refugees, the Year of Immigration was created with a goal of expanding the notion of internationalization to cultivate a more welcoming and inclusive community. “Not only do we have 6,000 international students at the University of Maryland, and more than 1,300 international faculty members, we have countless numbers of international staff members who are working on our campuses every single day,” Lewin says.

After initially partnering with the School of Music in the College of Arts & Humanities, the OIA reached out to academic departments, other university-wide units, and undergraduate and graduate student governments. “The advantage of working with OIA was that because it is a central, campuswide unit, it could really give [the initiative] broad publicity and invite other colleges to participate in different ways,” says Bonnie Thornton Dill, PhD, dean of the College of Arts & Humanities.

The Year of Immigration boasted educational, cultural, and community engagement events and activities. For example, all first-year students read The Refugees by Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnamese American novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen. Nguyen was invited to campus to speak as part of the College of Arts & Humanities Dean’s Lecture Series and also visited with students in individual Department of English classes. The School of Music also sponsored a yearlong festival featuring music and performances from around the world, such as the work of German American composer Kurt Weill. On-campus dining facilities also developed menus that included international cuisine.

Image

Graduate student Anne Marie Shimko Corwith, who recently defended her PhD dissertation in international education, coordinated a three-hour Human Rights Day event in November 2018, with speakers who discussed efforts to support refugees abroad, barriers for refugees integrating into the United States, and the experiences of undocumented students at UMD. Corwith says that she personally has been able to continue working with several of the organizations that were involved in the event.

Professor Shibley Telhami, PhD, organized several events during the year that built on his own expertise as the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development. He organized a panel in March 2019, “The Global Response to the Refugee Crisis,” featuring Nancy Lindborg, MA, president and CEO of the United States Institute of Peace; Eric Schwartz, JD, president of Refugees International; and Her Excellency Dina Kawar, MA, the Jordanian ambassador to the United States. In addition, Telhami moderated a panel, “Immigrant Stories,” sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation, during which several immigrants shared their stories of coming to the United States. The panel included former UMD President Wallace Loh, PhD, who was born in China and then sought political asylum with his family in Lima, Peru, before coming to the United States to attend college.

Image

Engaging the Local Community

The Office of Community Engagement focuses on connecting the university to the surrounding community. The office organized events for the Year of Immigration initiative, such as “Be Seen, Be Counted.” This event brought together nearly 60 nonprofit leaders, elected officials, government entities, business owners, designers, and members of the UMD community to learn how to apply a design thinking process to address hard-to-reach and undercounted populations in Prince George’s County and surrounding neighborhoods in advance of the 2020 U.S. census. The goal was to help stakeholders brainstorm ways in which they might better solicit participation from underrepresented populations in the census so that the resulting data would better reflect the county’s needs for public resources.

Image

The Office of Community Engagement also launched Terps Translate, a project that recruited multilingual student volunteers to provide free interpretation and translation services of nonlegal materials at campus and community events. “The Year of Immigration gave us this outlet to highlight the importance of who our neighbors are,” says Gloria Aparicio Blackwell, MS, director of community engagement. “We don’t have to travel abroad just to learn about other cultures—we have [that opportunity] across the street.”

Dill says the Year of Immigration brought new focus to much of the work that was already being done in the College of Arts & Humanities. It also gave new impetus to the college’s global engagement requirement. All majors in the college must meet the requirement through language study, semester study abroad, or an individually designed experience that achieves the learning outcomes of the global engagement requirement. A number of courses from UMD’s Global Classrooms Initiative—virtual, project-based courses offered through OIA in collaboration with partner universities abroad—were also developed around themes related to the initiative. “The impact of the Year of Immigration on the college was to amplify the work we do, encourage its expansion, and build community connections and make them part of our ongoing curriculum,” Dill says.

Image

Internationalizing With the Sustainable Development Goals

Since the Year of Immigration, there has been a renewed focus on expanding internationalization on the UMD campus. The OIA is currently developing a new international strategic plan that will be framed around the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In 2021–22, OIA is planning a themed year centered on SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities. This next themed year dovetails with the intended focus on inclusivity at UMD, emphasized by President Darryll J. Pines, PhD.

Reflecting back and looking ahead, Lewin says, “The Year of Immigration put wind at our backs and really distilled our own vision of how we want to advance internationalization at the University of Maryland moving forward.”

University of Maryland-College Park

Read more about University of Maryland-College Park