Relationship Cultivation

It was no accident that the nineteenth century founders of Pittsburg, Kansas, chose a name that called to mind the much bigger and grander Pittsburgh (with an ‘h’) in Pennsylvania’s coal mining precincts. Little Pittsburg in the sunflower state’s southeast corner was awash in coal that drew miners from Italy and the Balkans. The railroads came, too, to ferry the ore to zinc smelters in nearby Joplin, Missouri . The Kansas legislature established the Auxiliary Manual Training Normal School in Pittsburg in 1903 to prepare industrial arts teachers . Soon that mission broadened . It became Kansas State Teachers College in 1923 and Pittsburg State University in 1977 . Its graduates include Debra Dene Barnes, the 1968 Miss America, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Tate, and H . Lee Scott, president and CEO of Wal-Mart . Its football team, nicknamed the Gorillas, has won three national championships and amassed the most wins in NCAA Division II history.

More importantly, today Pittsburg State University boasts more than 7,000 students and a reputation as a strong regional university with deep and growing international ties from Paraguay to Korea to Kazakhstan. The student body includes 490 international students, many on exchanges from partner universities around the world. Pitt State sends teams of business majors to Russia to teach high school and university students about ethics in free enterprise, and automotive technology students to Korea to compete—and win—in a “mini-Baja” dune buggy competition. Education majors hone their teaching skills in classrooms in Paraguay and Russia, and enterprising faculty have won several federal Title VI grants for a host of international business and education projects. “This didn’t happen overnight. This has been a long history of this institution,” said President Tom W. Bryant, still jet lagged from a spring journey to visit partner universities and forge new relationships in Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Bryant said the region’s rich ethnic heritage “may be one of the things that made all this possible. This little community reaches out its hands to the international students, and maybe it’s because they remember their grandparents coming over on the ships.”

Faculty Behind the Wheel

At a ceremony celebrating the 2008 Senator Paul Simon Award for Campus Internationalization, Steven Scott, provost and vice president for Academic Affairs said, “We owe this to the faculty—the faculty who serve on the International Council, the faculty who’ve had a commitment and a passion for international travel, international engagement, internationalizing the curriculum.”

One such faculty member, John Tsan-Hsiang Chen, joined the Department of Engineering Technology in 1981 and soon bore the title of assistant to the president for Chinese Affairs. Over the past 25 years, Chen has recruited and mentored hundreds of students from his native Taiwan, and from China as well, and helped cement ties with two dozen universities. Now honored with a scholarship for international students that bears his name, Chen remembers with a smile that on one of his first trips on the university’s behalf back to Taiwan, his department chairman docked him vacation time. In fall 2007, 80 of Pitt State’s international students came on exchanges, half from partner universities in Taiwan and China.

“We have the diversity most schools would pray and dream about. We’re on the
right path…”

“Life has become much easier” for the international faculty who followed Chen, said Anil Lal, an associate professor of economics who leads education abroad trips to his native India and recruits for the Kansas campus. Pitt State enrolled a record 53 students from India this past spring, and a half-dozen others took classes in its Intensive English Program. Lal said some of the growth is driven by “the internet phenomenon,” with students themselves spreading the word on the Indian equivalent of Facebook. “The students here say good things about this place and then others come,” said Lal. Director of International Affairs Chuck Olcese agreed that word-of-mouth “is the greatest recruiter of international students. Now you add this whole social networking on the internet and we don’t even know where our name is going out anymore.”

Lal was a civil servant in India and consultant for the World Bank before completing a doctorate in economics at Washington State University and joining Pitt State in 1995. He draws large audiences on Indian campuses by lecturing on development economics and offering general advice about studying in the United States. Only indirectly does he try to sell students on Pitt State. “If they feel I’m genuine and honest, they might come” or convince someone else to, he said. Lal’s personal connections have opened doors in India, and he hopes to develop those ties to the point that he can pass the recruiting duties on to someone else. “That’s my strategy,” he said. “One thing I learned in government is no one is indispensable.”

When University Professor of Finance Michael Muoghalu, the Nigerian-born director of the M.B.A. program at the Kelce College of Business, joined the faculty two decades ago, Pitt State enrolled more than 100 students from his home country. They came at government expense for degrees in Pitt State’s highly ranked technology program. Today only six Nigerian students attend Pitt State, but the M.B.A. program that Muoghalu runs draws students from around the world. “For some reason, I just fell in love with this place,” said the finance professor. “If you compare Pitt State to other schools this size, you can’t find one that is more international. It’s way ahead of the curve.” Half of the 140 students in Muoghalu’s M.B.A. program are international; they hail from 20 countries. “We have the diversity most schools would pray and dream about. We’re on the right path,” he said.

Professor of Management Choong Lee is a faculty dynamo who has helped forge deep ties with universities in his native Korea and, more recently, in central Asia. Having taught in Brazil, “Korea was not big enough for Choong,” said an admiring Peggy Snyder, dean of Continuing and Graduate Studies. Lee joined the faculty in 1989 after earning a B.S. in nuclear engineering at the prestigious Seoul National University in Korea, and completing two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. at the University of Iowa. Lee has won three consecutive Title VIb Business and International Education grants from the U.S. Department of Education—grants aimed at helping U.S. businesses become more globally competitive with university assistance—and is going for a fourth. He consults extensively in Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan and hopes to establish a Center for Central Asian Business and Research at Pitt State. “We developed the first sister-school relationship with the National University of Uzbekistan and also Kazakhstan,” said Lee, who said Pittsburg State is as well known as Harvard in parts of the region. Lee’s interest in central Asia was whetted by hearing U.S. officials emphasize the region’s strategic importance to world peace. 

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Multiple International Partnerships

Pitt State’s automotive technology program is ranked near the top nationally and its engineering technology graduates are prized by employers in the auto and aviation industries. The College of Technology, in a showcase, $28 million, 278,000-square foot Kansas Technology Center, is also one of the biggest draws for international students. Lee initiated a flourishing exchange of students and faculty with Gyeongsang National University (GNU) in Jinju, South Korea. In 2006 Pitt State sent three students for five months to GNU, where they tutored GNU students in English, then competed against teams from 80 Korean universities in a grueling “Mini-Baja” in a dune buggy-like vehicle they designed and built. Pitt State sent another team in 2007 for a month—returning with the championship trophy from the rugged race.

Cody Emmert, 22, of Seneca, Kansas, captained both teams. “If you told me when I was a freshman that I would be going to Korea for six months or be involved in an engineering competition internationally, I wouldn’t have believed it,” said Emmert. Students such as Emmert can command $60,000 starting salaries, said University Professor and Chairman of Technology Studies John Iley. Emmert is a car lover who expects his knowledge of Korea to be a major plus as he pursues a career in the increasingly international automotive industry.

Pittsburg State also has a rich relationship with Paraguay under a partnership inspired by President John F. Kennedy and his Alliance for Progress with Latin America. Kansas and Paraguay have collaborated on citizen exchanges since 1968, and the Kansas legislature allows Paraguayan students to pay in-state tuition. In 2007, Paraguayans comprised approximately 10 percent of the international students. “It’s a very good deal,” said Cecilia Crosa, 21, a junior from Asunción. Jazmin Ramirez, 24, a junior political science and international studies major, interrupted her six-year program in law at the National University in Asunción to obtain a Pittsburg State degree in political science and international studies. Ramirez, who interned for the United Nations office in her capital this past summer, believes the American education and degree will help her fulfill her goal of becoming an envoy for Paraguay.

Pitt State professors travel to that land-locked country to teach a series of four-week general education evening classes in English. In a year, students can earn 24 credits, transferable to Pitt State or other U.S. universities. University Professor of Social Science and Director of International Studies Paul Zagorski was one of several professors who traveled to South America in 1998 to see about expanding opportunities for study and research abroad. They got their warmest reception in Asunción, and that is where Pitt State planted its flag. The push in Paraguay was helped by the Title VI federal grants that Pittsburg State received to internationalize its faculty and curriculum. Alice Sagehorn, a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, was intrigued by the possibilities. She approached the dean of Arts and Sciences and said, “This is wonderful, but I noticed two things: there’s no one from the College of Education and no women on the committee.”

“He said, ‘You’re on the committee,’ and that’s how it started,” recalled the busy Sagehorn, who earned her master’s degree at Pitt State. After returning to join the faculty in 1992, it took the former elementary school teacher just seven semesters to complete a Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction at the University of Arkansas. Quickly Sagehorn became adept at securing large federal grants to expand the work of the College of Education, including one to train more Kansas teachers to teach English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) and another to bring teachers from China to teach Mandarin to children and teens in the Pittsburg public schools. She coordinated Pitt State’s education abroad activities for a year and became the founding director of the Pittsburg State University in Paraguay program in 2004. She has made 14 trips to Paraguay in the past eight years, including taking education majors every other summer to practice teach in an international school in Asunción. Sagehorn conceived the Pittsburg State in Paraguay program on a long flight home after overhearing a Paraguayan mother tell her college-age daughter that leaving home to study in the United States before turning 21 was out of the question. “I got to thinking: If we can’t bring the students to Pittsburg, how can we bring Pitt State to Paraguay?” Sagehorn said. The program attracts upwards of two dozen students each year, some of whom complete their undergraduate studies in Pittsburg like Cecilia Crosa and Jazmin Ramirez.

There is “very much a private college feel” to Pittsburg State, said Bruce Dallman, dean of the College of Technology. “The student-faculty interaction here is out of the ordinary, especially for a public institution.” Students, domestic and international, savor the attention. Ankit Jain, 22, a senior automotive engineering major from New Delhi, India, said it came as no surprise that Pitt State won the Senator Paul Simon Award. “They made a good choice. This is the second best in the whole U.S. for automotive engineering, and our university is improving day by day,” said Jain, president of the Indian Student Association.

Why Pitt State?

Semonti Sinharoy, 21, a senior from Calcutta, India, who double majored in plastics engineering and chemistry, said, “I came here for the plastics program. Basically, there are only three or four schools in the U.S. with a plastics program like this.” Coming from a city with 4.5 million people, Pittsburg (with 20,000) took some getting used to, Sinharoy said. But the town and the “continuous exchange of culture between the Americans and international students” grew on her. Sinharoy, headed next to Columbia University in New York for a master’s in engineering management, recently won an undergraduate research award from the Society of Plastics Engineers for helping recycle foams and plastics made from soybean oil.

Pittsburg State takes great pride in the Intensive English Program (IEP), staffed by seven full-time faculty…”

Sung Hwan Kim, 24, a junior accounting major from Seoul, Korea, first came to Pittsburg State on an exchange. “Now I’m paying tuition,” said Kim, who believes that finishing his degree in Kansas will provide a faster route into the accounting profession than if he had returned to a university back home. “I’m a little bit older than these [other students]. I served in the army for two years before coming here,” Kim said.

Xiao Wu, 22, who was born in Shanghai, China, but raised in Nagoya, Japan, first came to Pitt State for the noncredit Intensive English Program. He returned to enroll in electronics engineering technology, which involves extensive coursework in math and physics. Wu, the director of activities for the Chinese Student Association, said with a laugh that when he mentions his major, “people kind of want me to fix their computers. I can’t do that.” He expects to wind up in electronics, like his parents back in Nagoya.

A Variety of Program Opportunities

Pittsburg State takes great pride in the Intensive English Program (IEP), staffed by seven full-time faculty and directed by Christine Mekkaoui, a Peace Corps veteran fluent in Arabic, French, and Spanish. “Pitt State has been very supportive in keeping full-time faculty in the Intensive English Program. We don’t have graduate teaching assistants; we don’t have faculty wives. Everybody has a master’s degree in teaching English and is well qualified, and that makes a huge difference,” said Mekkaoui. The IEP had 77 students in fall 2007 and 68 for the spring semester. Traditionally most students have come from Asia, but Saudi Arabia has begun sending large contingents of late. Most stay at Pittsburg to pursue degrees, others use their English skills to win admission to other U.S. universities. “We’re able to take a personal interest in our students and help them with everything. We help them find places to live and, if they have a car accident, we’re dealing with the insurance company. We’re really here for them,” said Mekkaoui.

IEP occupies spacious offices in Whitesitt Hall, down the corridor from the flag-filled Office of International Programs & Services, where domestic students come to learn about study/ education abroad opportunities and international students come for academic advice as well as help with visas. Under Olcese, director of International Affairs since 1999, the office has been transformed into the hub for much of the international activities on campus. “Chuck has taken it to a different level,” said Mekkaoui. “He is more the international face, trying to involve the upper administration and the whole campus in making things international.” He heads a staff of six that includes a full-time study abroad coordinator—a position created in 2006 and held by Julia Helminiak. President Bryant observed, “We’ve got good leadership and staff over there.” He believes the next challenge for Pitt State is to convince more students to go abroad. More than 100 Pitt State students studied abroad in 2006-07—triple the number from seven years earlier—and others went overseas on service trips. Every student who studies abroad receives a university scholarship ranging from $200 to $1,000 to defray costs. In the past two years, 17 faculty have led students on 18 education abroad trips to 13 countries, including Korea, China, India, Paraguay and Brazil. 

Turkish-born Meltem Tugut entered Pitt State as a freshman in 2000, became president of the International Student Association, graduated summa cum laude, and later served as coordinator of international programs while completing the second of two master’s degrees in business. Tugut, who this fall started studying for a business doctorate at St. Louis University, said one of her favorite memories is International Recognition Night in October, when international students are honored by being called out onto the court during halftime of a women’s volleyball contest.

A service learning program called Students In Free Enterprise (SIFE) also turns Pitt State students into world travelers. SIFE, supported by a phalanx of U.S. and multinational corporations, sponsors competitions worldwide in which teams of students vie to demonstrate mastery of business skills and ethics. The 50-member SIFE chapter at Pitt State has traveled to Russia and Kazakhstan on several occasions. Rebecca Casey, interim chairperson of the Department of Accounting, has led three of those trips, including one in which her students brought along a video they made in Russian with Pitt State students’ role-playing a scenario about bribery in the workplace. The video ended with tax agents’ arresting the buyer and the business falling apart. “It really made them stop and think,” said Casey, an alumna. “I think we convinced a lot of them.” 

Both Bryant and Scott, the provost, are former deans of education who began their careers as high school teachers. Although their background was not in international education, “we value those experiences,” Scott said. Both have avidly supported the institution’s international undertakings and looked to create more opportunities for students, faculty, and administrators “to travel and learn about international issues,” said Scott. One of his first moves as provost was finding the resources that allowed the Office of International Programs to hire Helminiak as the campus’s first full-time study abroad coordinator. Scott recalled a meeting at the outset of the academic year where senior administrators and faculty discussed their international travel plans and agenda. “We didn’t have a globe, but it’s almost like you’ve got the whole world laid out in front of you,” said Scott. “We talked about India, China, Taiwan, Korea, Kazakhstan, Russia, and certainly about Paraguay, figuring out where we were going and who’s going to do this work. To think about a small community in southeast Kansas where that’s the perspective is pretty remarkable.”

The provost, an alumnus, believes one reason that Pitt State has carved out such a significant international profile is that the faculty aren’t territorial. “You’ve got these early adopters, these pioneers, that now have offspring taking their own trips. Somebody took Alice Sagehorn to Paraguay to begin with,” he said. “Part of our culture is this helping, helping, helping. It’s not about smugness or ‘I know more than you.’ It’s about, ‘If I know something and you’d like to know it or understand it, I’ll help you,’” said Scott. 

Pitt State also encourages the international interests of professors in a wide range of fields. Education Professor Dan Ferguson, whose field is recreational therapy, has led students to Romania to work in orphanages in the former communist country. Professor of Nursing Barbara McClaskey leads two trips over winter break to give nursing students an opportunity to volunteer in hospitals in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, across the Rio Grande River from El Paso, Texas. “It opens your eyes to see what they go through down there,” said senior Sarah Manthei, 22, of Shawnee, Kansas, who had a job waiting after graduation in the organ transplant unit at Saint Luke’s Hospital of Kansas City.

Raising Funds for More International Activities

The international office reports to Dean William Ivy, who oversees Enrollment Management and Student Success. Ivy came to Pitt State in 2007 from Oklahoma State University. “I kind of jumped on a moving train here,” Ivy said of Pitt State’s large international profile. He noted that at the annual international banquet, “six deans and three vice presidents show up for the dinner as well as the president. It’s quite impressive. The international students don’t have any questions that they’re important here and that people appreciate their being here.”

The lanky Bryant, a onetime college basketball player, will be retiring at the end of the 2008-09 after a decade as president. He completed one major fund-raising drive soon after becoming president and is nearing the finish line on a second that is seeking $120 million, including $2.5 million for international initiatives. That money would fund scholarships and incentives for faculty to internationalize their courses.

Five percent of undergraduates and 10 percent of graduate students are international. Bryant would gladly see that number increase. “We love the diversity. We need to do that for our students from here in the Midwest,” he said. Students from Crawford County and small towns “need to be able to compete in this global economy and be as marketable and as successful in that economy as we can make them. Why shouldn’t our kids have that opportunity?” 

The boxer rebellion against foreign influence ended a century ago with Russian, Japanese, and western forces occupying beijing and forcing China’s imperial government to pay reparations. The United States was due a minor share for its supporting role in quashing the rebellion.

Edmund J . James, president of the University of Illinois, saw an opportunity to draw something positive for China out of the  bitter potion of defeat . He led the way in convincing President Theodore Roosevelt to use the compensation for an altruistic purpose: bringing Chinese students to the United States to pursue higher education .

Hundreds of those young scholars ultimately earned degrees on the Urbana-Champaign campus, and Britain also used its reparations for scholarships . The same funds were used to build a preparatory school in Beijing called Tsinghua College—forerunner to Tsinghua University, now one of the world’s greatest institutions of higher education with a campus modeled after Illinois’s famous Quad . Tsinghua weathered hard times during World War II and the Cultural Revolution, but when China reopened to the world, “we engaged quickly to rebuild that relationship,” said Jesse G . Delia, executive director of Illinois’s International Research Relations . Today, nearly 1,000 of the 5,685 international students on the Illinois campus hail from the People’s Republic of China . 

International roots run deep at Illinois’s flagship campus, which began operations in 1867—five years after the Morrill Act—as Illinois Industrial University. Its first president, John Milton Gregory, described it as “West Point for the working world.” By 1908 it became an early member of the Association of American Universities. Today it keeps an international profile that few institutions can match, with eight federally funded Title VI National Resource Centers: African Studies; European Union Studies; East Asian and Pacific Studies; South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies; Latin American and Caribbean Studies; Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies; Global Studies; and a CIBER (international business center) in the business school. Only the University of Washington and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have more. It ranks fourth among U.S. universities in international student enrollment (the only ones with more—the University of Southern California, Columbia University, and New York University—are private), and fifth in the number of students who study abroad—more than 2,000 each year. Chancellor Richard Herman hopes to double that number by 2012 as part of his dream of making the University of Illinois “the world’s preeminent institution in international education, research, and service.”

In some respects that ambition means going back to the future, for Illinois professors were deeply engaged in international education projects spanning the globe in the 1950s and 1960s when, with the help of the Marshall Plan and later with U.S. Agency for International Development grants, they helped design and build agricultural colleges and institutes of technology across Asia, Africa, and South America. Their credits include India’s first Institute of Technology in Kharagpur and the G.B. Pant Institute of Agriculture and Technology in Uttar Pradesh, as well as the College of Agricultural Engineering, Jabalpur, in Madhya Pradesh. Illinois faculty helped Pakistan open its first agricultural school at the University of Peshawar (now the autonomous Agricultural University, Peshawar), and were there at the creation of Egerton Agricultural College (now Egerton University) in Kenya.

“We weren’t alone, but that was all led by this institution,” said Herman, a mathematician who sits on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. “We have a rich international history and an enormous base on which to build.” On a 2007 visit to Brazil, Chancellor Herman was pleased to learn that a celebrated Illinois dean of agriculture, Eugene Davenport, played a role in establishing the Escola Superior de Agricultura or Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture (ESALQ) in Piracicaba in the 1890s. 

The Work of Many Colleges

The tapestry of international programs and activities at Illinois reflects the work of many faculty and colleges. Associate Provost for International Affairs William I. Brustein noted, “As with many U.S. universities, a centralized office for international programs and studies emerged relatively late. Consequently, much of the international activity was carried out by the colleges and schools within the university,” such as the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Science (ACES) and the College of Engineering. Many University of Illinois colleges operate their own study/education abroad offices in addition to the campus-wide office.

Brustein, a sociologist and authority on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, assumed the leadership of the office of International Programs and Studies (IPS) in 2007 after heading international studies at the University of Pittsburgh. The three-story International Studies Building, a short walk from the much-photographed Quad, houses most of Illinois’s area studies centers, as well as the IPS director’s office, the study abroad office, and services handling international visitors and institutional collaborations. Brustein, immediate past president of the Association of International Education Administrators (AIEA), observed, “The challenges for a central office in a decentralized environment are to reinforce the positive initiatives taking place within the colleges and schools, establish bridges or synergies among the colleges, internationalize those less engaged colleges, eliminate redundancies in the system, ensure compliance with campus and governmental policies, and bring to the campus new international education opportunities.” One of his first steps was to create a campus-wide International Advisory Council composed of the senior administrators from each college with responsibility for international programs. Brustein chairs the council, which advises him on college-level initiatives and serves as a sounding board for new ideas.

Illinois’s international reputation was bolstered over the years by breakthroughs in computer science and the natural sciences, as well by advances in the social sciences, such as anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s pioneering studies of poverty in Mexico.  Still, the agriculture faculty were among the most peripatetic. Forty-seven agriculture faculty spent extended periods living in India during those college-building days from 1954 to 1973. Hundreds of international students came to Urbana-Champaign for advanced agricultural degrees, and Illinois faculty were still winning multi-million-dollar contracts in the 1980s to build or expand institutions in Pakistan, Kenya, and Zambia before U.S. AID funding ended. “At the end of the Cold War, we went through kind of a drought in our international programs,” recalled Robert A. Easter, dean of ACES since 2001. The college’s office of International Agriculture was disbanded in a 1996 reorganization, although faculty such as Easter still made heavy use of their passports. Easter has lectured and consulted on swine nutrition in 27 countries, from Costa Rica to China. For a while it seemed that the institutional commitment to international activities was lagging.

That did not sit well with faculty there in the glory years of institution building. Finally a faculty committee put together a concept for what they called ACES Global Connect, a new office to coordinate and encourage agriculture faculty research and projects overseas. Since it started in 2002, “we’ve been gradually rebuilding our international engagement,” said Easter. Now, instead of leaving professors to their own devices when they head off to consult in Brazil or China, “we’re trying to be more systematic and strategic about forming alliances with other universities in different parts of the world.”

Global Connect, a small office with a modest budget (approximately $100,000 last year) provided largely by the college, is intent on helping a new generation of faculty pursue federal grants, partnerships, and other international opportunities. “We were fish out of water for a little period there. ACES Global Connect was our attempt to reinvigorate international programs in our college. We’re resource poor, but rich in passion,” said director Mary Ann Lila, a biology professor and vice president of the Global Institute for BioExploration (GIBEX).

“Even on a shoestring budget…Global Connect has become a role model for international engagement on campus...”

Global Connect launched in 2006 an Academy for Global Engagement that selects eight faculty fellows from different disciplines “for a year-long immersion in the international realm,” said Lila. They rub shoulders and exchange ideas in monthly seminars and hit the road to visit the headquarters of multinational corporations in Chicago and make the rounds of international health and development agencies in Washington. The capstone is an international trip at the end of the year where the faculty fellows collaborate on short-term research and education projects. The first group went to Mexico to explore the antidiabetic properties of certain plants. “The social scientist in the group was working on how to get Mexicans to stop drinking sodas and have more family meals together; the crop scientist was working on how to harvest these plants; and the horticulturist was making sure they don’t become invasive species,” said Lila. The fellows include someone from the University of Illinois Extension program, which now sends crop experts around the world in addition to working with farmers around the state. Illinois has 76,000 farms and is the country’s second biggest agricultural exporter. Even on a shoestring budget, Lila said, Global Connect has become a role model for international engagement on campus, and other state universities have expressed keen interest in replicating the Academy for Global Engagement fellows program. “Student and faculty exchanges, joint workshops, sabbatical leaves, and research visits as well as joint grantsmanship have sprung forth out of the (Global Connect) Academy connections,” said Lila, whose own research has taken her to Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan in search of plants that might lower cholesterol or confer other health benefits.

Growing New Interest

The international emphasis at the University of Illinois and the encouragement for education abroad produces students such as sophomore Lindsey Bruntjen, 20, of Illiopolis, Illinois, who studied in Istanbul, Turkey, on her first winter break and in Parana State in Brazil on her second. This past May, the ACES major was among 25 students in the International Business Immersion Program who went on a faculty-led class trip to see farms and factories in Belgium, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, France, and Germany. “I hadn’t expected to do all this. I didn’t realize how many doors would be open once I got to the university. There are so many opportunities and you just can’t say no,” said Bruntjen, whose parents grow corn and soybeans in central Illinois.

Senior Paul Kirbach, 23, of Jerseyville, Illinois, a double major in animal and crop sciences, spent a semester at Sweden’s 500-year-old Uppsala University. In a global crop production class with classmates from Eritrea, Germany, Czech Republic, and Sweden, “we were each other’s textbooks. We got into a few arguments—but we learned,” he said. Kirbach, as an editor of an  international journal for agriculture  students, also got to attend a conference in Athens, Greece.

“Farm students today appreciate the importance of the international more than some of the urban students. If their dads are listening to the daily market forecast, there’s usually a report on what’s going on with soybeans in Brazil,” said Dean Easter. Agribusinesses “tell us that they don’t want to hire somebody without international experience. If you go to work for a multinational grain trading company, you may be six months in Decatur, two years in Fargo, and then the next year in Montevideo (Uruguay) running an elevator. So you might as well just expect your career path is going to take you north and south.”

A Half-Century of Study Abroad

Agriculture isn’t the only college pushing education abroad. Eighty percent of the courses at Illinois with international content reside in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS), which enrolls almost half of Illinois’s 31,000 undergraduates, said Assistant Dean Barbara HancinBhatt, the LAS director of International Programs. “We have study abroad programs that are almost 50 years old.” The college’s Global Studies Initiative infuses global topics into general education courses for 1,200 to 1,500 freshmen. They are encouraged to take three-week Global Studies courses abroad on winter break (as Bruntjen did to Turkey and Brazil). Subsidies for LAS majors bring the cost of a trip to China or Singapore as low as $1,850. Other undergraduates can study in Paris, Rome, Barcelona, or Cape Town for $2,750 (LAS majors pay $400 less). Hancin-Bhatt and husband Rakesh Bhatt, an associate professor of linguistics, lead a “Discovery Course” to Singapore for freshmen over winter break. It examines how the city-state maintains a national identity while still bolstering the Chinese, Malay, and Indian strands of its culture and neighborhoods. “A tremendous amount of learning happens on these trips. The relationships built between students and faculty are extraordinary. We have students who come up at the end of the trip and give us hugs,” said Hancin-Bhatt, who is also a linguist. LAS majors comprise half of the 2,000plus students that Illinois sends overseas each year. Doubling those numbers will take “serious curricular integration of study abroad” and more resources, she said. Study abroad must “no longer be seen as enrichment but part of the core education we do.”

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Multiple Function Partnerships

Illinois enjoys a thriving partnership with the National University of Singapore (NUS). The two universities already grant dual degrees in chemical engineering, and now they are offering joint Ph.D. programs as well. In the 18-month master’s program, Singapore and Illinois students spend a semester on each other’s campuses, then do three-month internships in both places with major corporate sponsors. The dual-degree program has spin-off benefits for the rest of the campus, including opening the door for Illinois freshmen to stay in NUS dorms on that Discovery Course to Singapore each January.           

Delia, executive director of International Research Relations and former dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has made 14 trips to Singapore to further this relationship with NUS and with A*STAR, the government agency that funds research in Singapore. A*STAR already has built a biomedical research complex called the Biopolis and is completing the first phase of a Fusionopolis to house physical science institutes. Illinois will send engineering and computer science faculty and postdoctoral students there for extended periods to work on advanced digital technologies. It will be “as seamless a projection of activities on this campus as we can make it,” Delia said.

“For us, it presents an opportunity to globalize our brand and project our commitment to being an international research university, in a way that reinforces and adds to the strengths at home,” he said. Advances at Fusionopolis could push the frontiers of work at Illinois’s own research park south of campus, and that in turn could spur economic development in Illinois and elsewhere in the United States. “We think it’s a win-win possibility,” he said. The partnership will also prepare the next generation of Illinois scientists and business executives “for the world in which they’re going to live out their lives: one in which they will have to lead their companies and conduct their research in collaboration, negotiation, involvement with international partners.”

Relationships with China are “much more complicated,” Delia said. “The barriers to involvement and joint work are obviously higher,” including the barrier of language. Illinois has enjoyed a 20-year partnership with Tsinghua University, and recently launched a new program in which Tsinghua engineering students will come to Illinois for their fourth and fifth year of studies and graduate with both a bachelor of science and a master’s degree. Corporate partners are helping sponsor that program, too, in the belief that the graduates they hire will “support the competitiveness of our international and multinational corporations,” said Delia. The program pays the fees and provides stipends for students in exchange for a work commitment. “The next goal would be to build an American student counterpart to this,” said Delia. Illinois also provides executive leadership training for 300 to 500 Chinese business and government executives who come to Urbana-Champaign each year for short-term programs. Support from the Freeman Foundation brings up to a dozen Chinese academics and social scientists to pursue research on the Illinois campus for a year; and Illinois, home to one of the largest university libraries in the United States, runs a summer training program for Chinese librarians. All of these are “real spires of visible excellence,” said Delia.

Managing Enrollments

Eighty-seven percent of the university’s nearly 31,000 undergraduates hail from Illinois. Administrators sometimes find themselves answering questions from politicians about why the campus enrolls so many international students—5,378 in 2007, including 1,731 undergraduates. Chancellor Herman is proud that the undergraduate student body has become more international on his watch, going from 2.2 percent to 5.6 percent in 2007. “I certainly worked very hard to increase the numbers at the undergraduate level,” he said, adding that this has not come at the expense of Illinois students. Instead, the international share has grown largely by cutting back on the number of out-of-state domestic students. Keith A. Marshall, associate provost for Enrollment Management, said, “We do virtually no recruiting of international graduate students—our reputation, rankings, and excellent academic offerings do the work for us. At the undergraduate level our recruiting is modest compared with many, but has been growing each year in recent years.” Illinois gets 23,000 applications for the 7,000 places in its freshman class. Some 15,000 are offered admission and the rest turned away. Still, “we are the only state university in the Midwest still growing,” Marshall pointed out.

“Illinois students recently voted to tack $5 onto their fees each semester to raise $300,000 a year for education abroad scholarships.”

Illinois students recently voted to tack $5 onto their fees each semester to raise $300,000 a year for education abroad scholarships. Members of the Study Abroad Student Advisory Committee, with some support from the study abroad office, championed the referendum. First they went classroom by classroom, talking up the idea and soliciting signatures to put it on a referendum ballot. They also convinced the Student Senate to lower the number of signatures needed from 3,000 to 2,000.

Rory Polera, 22, a senior from Williamsburg, Virginia, said one student senator accused them of playing Robin Hood. “He told us, ‘You’re just these wealthy Chicago kids who want to go abroad and party it up. Why should everyone pay for you to go and have fun?’” he said. But the pro-fee students carried the day and the referendum passed overwhelmingly (6,347 to 2,992). The fee will sunset in three years unless students vote then to extend it. Those who object to it can get the $5 fee refunded. Much of the $900,000 generated in the meantime will go toward need-based scholarships and aid to encourage minorities to study abroad. “Students should be saluted for their generosity,” said Brustein. 

Any weakness of the U.S. dollar will only make the education abroad challenge harder for administrators such as ACES Assistant Dean Andrea B. Bohn. Rising tuition is already pressuring family budgets, and even with study abroad scholarships students still need money for airfare and other expenses, she said. “This isn’t unique to the University of Illinois, but it’s a huge challenge that we face. I’m working very closely with our Office of Advancement to get more donor support.” Bohn, who once arranged education abroad for students at the University of Hohenheim in her native Germany, tries to convince ACES students to consider semester programs, which often cost about the same as a semester in UrbanaChampaign. “It may cost $2,000 more, but we can help with a $1,000 scholarship on that,” she said. If students chose an education abroad experience instead over winter break, “it’s going to be $2,400 that you didn’t have to spend.”

Deans From Nigeria, Australia

Many on Illinois’s faculty and several senior administrators are international. The dean of the College of Engineering, Ilesanmi Adesida, still feels a debt of gratitude to the Peace Corps teachers who taught math and science in his Nigerian high school. From Lagos he went to the University of California at Berkeley for three degrees in electrical engineering. Before becoming dean in 2006, he directed Illinois’s Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory and its Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, and made important discoveries on how to speed up semiconductors and microelectronics and circuits. Adesida, who became a U.S. citizen in 2002, said, “I always tell people to have an open mind, to welcome different types of people, and be open to any culture. People with open minds are magnanimous people—and you never know where you’ll end up.” It is essential for Illinois to maintain its international collaborations, he firmly believes. “There’s no way you can bottle up your knowledge,” said Adesida. “Our primary products are our students.” The path to continued U.S. prosperity is to train those “young minds to be adventurous and curious.”

Dean of Education Mary Kalantzis wasn’t looking to leave Australia when a recruiter came to Melbourne to woo her in 2006. Kalantzis, an expert on multi cultural education and literacy, said friends and colleagues told her, “You can’t go. With No Child Left Behind and all that stuff, why would you want to be an educator in America at this moment?” But a visit to UrbanaChampaign won her over. Illinois was a pacesetter in special education, including awarding the first Ph.D. in the field and the place where PLATO—one of the first computer-assisted teaching tools—was built. It also developed innovative techni ques for teaching reading and math. “It really is an extraordinary place,” said Kalantzis, who was born in Greece.

“My goal is to make sure that every single person who trains to be a teacher has some international experience,” preferably in a non-English-speaking country, she said. The experience of trying to catch a bus in an unfamiliar place or negotiating with someone who doesn’t speak English “will make them more sensitive to the differences they will face in the classroom.” She added, “The stereotypes of the narrowness and inwardness of Americans—and there are some stereotypes—have certainly been dispelled for me here living among people in this community and in this university,” she said.

Tolstoy, Gandhi Kin Connect in Urbana

For Chancellor Herman, it is imperative for Illinois to keep moving down this international road. Doubling the education abroad numbers will have the ancillary benefit of allowing Illinois to admit as many as 1,000 more transfer students, he said. “What we’re trying to do is use this globalization of our students to also serve the people in the state better.”

Recently a great, great grandson of Leo Tolstoy journeyed from Russia to speak at a campus event promoting a community-wide reading of Tolstoy’s novel, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. At the end of Vladimir Tolstoy’s talk, an Illinois professor came up to shake his hand and ask him to autograph one of his ancestor’s books. The professor was Rajmohan Gandhi—grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian pacifist and freedom crusader—who is a research professor in International Programs and Studies and directs the Global Crossroads Living-Learning Community. Herman loves the symmetry of that moment. “Imagine, the grandson of Gandhi meeting the great, great grandson of Tolstoy. Where else but at Illinois could this happen?” he asked.

The paltry number of Iranian students studying in the United States deeply troubled University of California, Davis Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef. He remembered the era when Iran sent more students to study in the United States than any other country. But that was before relations between the two countries ruptured in 1979 after Islamic revolutionaries overthrew the Shah, seized the U.S. Embassy, and held 52 Americans hostage for a year. 

Those government-to-government relations are still frosty, but Vanderhoef saw no reason for academic ties to remain sundered. Almost a decade ago he set out to begin repairing the rift by inviting the president of the University of Tehran to speak at UC Davis. The Iranian educator accepted and twice journeyed to Dubai to obtain a visa only to be turned down by the U.S. embassy there. 

“He left office and a new president came in and decided to invite us to Tehran,” said William Lacy, the vice provost for University Outreach and International Programs. The Iranian government granted visas, and in 2004 a six-person UC Davis delegation including Vanderhoef, Lacy, and the deans of engineering and of agricultural and environmental sciences became the first from a U.S. university to visit Iran in a quarter-century. That their visit came off “was a minor miracle,” said the chancellor. “A week after we got back, a person from our campus got all the way to the airport at Tehran and was turned around.”

But Vanderhoef and his colleagues were welcomed warmly at four universities across Iran, and a leading member of the Iranian parliament and brother of then-President Mohammad Khatami hosted the visitors for a dinner. UC Davis counts several senior Iranian officials among its alumni, and dozens of scientists, academics and other proud alumni turned out for two events the university sponsored. “It wasn’t political. It was university to university, and university to our alumni,” said Lacy.

Vanderhoef, a biologist, kept a riveting journal, which the university later posted online. Near the end of the one-week trip, he wrote: “As we walk the city streets, unaccompanied by our hosts, we are treated warmly and graciously by adults and with curiosity and respect by children… teenagers are fun and engaging but sometimes very solemnly forthright. I will never forget, to the day I die, a young girl asking me, ‘Do you think we are all terrorists?’”

The university produced an award-winning video about its Iran initiative called UC Davis: Building Bridges in the Middle East. In 2005 it brought Shirin Ebadi, the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner for her work on behalf of women’s rights in Iran, to campus for a speech. A crowd of 1,600 packed the auditorium, including hundreds from California’s large Iranian-American community. Hearing her speak in Farsi “was an incredible experience” and a lesson in  multi-culturalism, recalled Lacy. Half the audience responded immediately and enthusiastically to her remarks, while most of the Americans had to wait for the translation before they responded. 

Vanderhoef, who stepped down this summer after 25 years as provost and chancellor, said academics can find common ground and communicate at times when governments cannot. “If one bases everything one knows upon the headlines, it looks like things are absolutely awful,” the chancellor said. But he felt that “all the acrimony really was much more at higher government levels than it was on the ground.” The trip bore out that impression.

Five years later, UC Davis has participated in a few other exchanges, but not without difficulties. The overall picture for Iranians’ enrolling in U.S. universities has brightened somewhat. The number, which peaked at 51,310 in 1979-80 and plummeted to 1,660 in 1998-99, inched back to 3,060 by 2007-08, according to Open Doors. A private donor gave UC Davis’ Graduate School of Management $113,000 to host six Iranian graduate students from Sharif University of Technology for a quarter. Former Dean Nicole Woolsey Biggart said it took a year to secure permission from the U.S. Commerce, Treasury, and State Departments and one had her visa denied.

UC Davis and Indiana UniversityPurdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) are the only two American universities allowed by the Departments of State and Treasury to engage in formal relationships with Iranian universities. This requires a license from Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control, which enforces trade sanctions against targeted foreign countries such as Iran and Cuba (UC Davis also has such a license for an education abroad program in Cuba). IUPUI enrolled 33 engineering students from the University of Tehran in 2007.

Studies in Cuba as Well

UC Davis has sent faculty and students to Cuba, another country under U.S. embargo and one of the world’s last remaining communist countries, annually since 2005. The students take classes taught by faculty from UC Davis’s humanities programs. UC Davis is among a handful of universities with permission from the U.S. government to take students there. “We felt it was important for us to offer that educational experience,” said Lacy.

The State Department licensure rules stipulate that universities can take only their own students and they must participate “in a structured educational program lasting at least 10 weeks in Cuba as part of a course offered at a U.S. undergraduate or graduate institution.” While the Bush administration tightened the rules on travel to Cuba in 2004, the Obama administration has loosened them for relatives, and Lacy said it is possible that the limits on educational travel may be eased as well.

Iranian Community Helps Build Bridges

Mohammad Mohanna, a prominent IranianAmerican real estate developer in Sacramento, California, and UC Davis supporter, was part of that 2004 delegation. When they returned, Mohanna paid for the production and distribution of the Building Bridges video. Interviewed before the disputed election that led to mass protests and a crackdown on dissidents in Iran, Mohanna said, “It’s very important—more than ever before—that we build relationships and ties with our allies in Iran. We are new Americans. We are blessed to be in this position, to act as ambassadors of the U.S. to Iran. We don’t have a formal relationship, but each and every one of us is a beacon of hope.”

“It’s very important­­­—more than ever before—that we build ­relationships and ties with our allies in Iran. We are new Americans.”

Lacy, the vice provost, said UC Davis’s efforts in Iran are “part of a larger picture of rebuilding relationships and collaborations in education, research, and outreach in the Middle East. We’re working in some very difficult places. Iran’s one; Iraq’s another. Afghanistan is a third. In fact, there aren’t many easy places to work in the Middle East right now. But we felt it was important for us to continue working there.”

The outreach to Iran drew criticism from some in California’s Iranian-American community who vehemently oppose the regime in Tehran, but none came from local politicians or from Washington. Vanderhoef did field some questions, however, from federal agencies. “We have the State Department and even the FBI and the CIA interested in what we are doing. I must say they have not, so far as I can tell, interfered with what we are doing, but they are very interested,” said the chancellor, who returned to Iran in 2008 with an Association of American Universities delegation.

Now, as he returns to the biology faculty, Vanderhoef plans to keep doing his part to “explore new ways in which we can interact with Iran.” Recalling work he did early in his career in Taiwan, as it was still in the early stages of developing its economy, Vanderhoef said, “I saw how slowly it went. You gain patience. I think we have to be patient with Iran.”

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University of California, Davis

Read more about University of California, Davis

Pacific Lutheran University’s mission statement fits this liberal arts institution as snugly as a glove: educating students “for lives of thoughtful inquiry, service, leadership, and care—for other persons, for their communities, and for the earth.” Fidelity to that call has led faculty and students on journeys far outside the wooded 146-acre campus in Tacoma, Washington, near the Puget Sound and Mount Rainier. Almost half its 3,350 undergraduates study abroad, many on three- and four-week courses during January. Twice Pacific Lutheran has pulled off the feat of holding classes simultaneously on all seven continents. 

That is thanks to one of the most popular “study away” courses—Pacific Lutheran’s preferred terminology—a sea voyage from Patagonia to Antarctica, tutored by Charles Bergman, an English professor with a passion for combining literary and environmental studies. He relishes being able to teach Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner while crossing “the Drake Passage as real albatrosses with 13-foot wingspans circle the boat.” For someone who has never seen an albatross, it may be hard to understand what’s at stake with killing one, Bergman said. “But when students are standing on deck in a storm, feeling awkward and ungainly and having to grab on because the waves are big and then an albatross for whom a hurricane is home cruises by gracefully and easily, their world gets realigned in a certain way.”

The course, called “Journey to the End of the Earth,” will be audited in January 2010 by President Loren Anderson, who will join two dozen students for part of the voyage. The course always maxes out on enrollment, despite the price tag of $9,600, double what most J-term courses cost. Other Lutes (what students call themselves) will be studying in Australia, China, Ecuador, England, Ireland, France, Germany, Greece, Martinique, Namibia, New Zealand, Norway, Tobago, Uganda, and the United Arab Emirates. Typically 400 students enroll in these J-term courses. In all, 43 percent of PLU students study abroad before graduating.

Many faculty have personal and professional ties to other lands. Almost two-thirds have lived, taught, or conducted research overseas, speak another language, or were born outside the United States. Provost Patricia O’Connell Killen says, “The opportunity to be involved in international education is a real recruitment tool. It’s part of what faculty like about coming to PLU.” 

Transformation From the Ground Up

Anderson, president since 1992, said, “PLU is a classic case of institutional transformation from the ground up,” starting with the creation of a Global Studies program in 1977. A $4 million gift from alumnus Peter Wang and Grace Wang allowed the university to open the Wang Center for International Programs, and a 2003 long-range plan called “PLU 2010” made international education a central focus.

Pacific Lutheran’s founders had roots in Norway. The institution is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Anderson believes his school’s religious message and mission resonate with the current generation of students. This year’s freshmen were “in fifth grade when 9/11 happened,” he said. “They’ve grown up and been shaped in a time when there’s an incredible sensitivity to the globe and to the fact that traditional borders and boundaries don’t mean much. They’re fearless about the world and ready to take it on.”

Gateway Sites

PLU operates semester-long education abroad programs at its “gateway” sites in China, Mexico, Norway, Trinidad & Tobago and an internship program in Namibia. Neal Sobania, executive director of the Wang Center, explained that a gateway “swings both ways. Our sense is that it’s not enough to send our students somewhere else. We want to have real interactions with people from these places and bring people from there back to our campus.” 

“... Our sense is that it’s not enough to send our students somewhere else. We want to have real interactions with people from these places and bring people from there back to our campus.”

It has done that most notably with Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, where it sends students each fall and has an on-site manager, Pang Lirong, who holds a master’s degree from PLU. Some 60 Sichuan faculty and staff have paid exchange visits to Tacoma over the past quarter century, and PLU has reciprocated by sending its faculty and students, including composers from its music department. After commencement last May, music Professor Greg Youtz led 64 students on a two-week concert tour that included performances at conservatories in Beijing, Xian, Shanghai, and Sichuan. A $700,000 grant from the Freeman Foundation to help bring Chinese language and studies into local schools helped PLU build this musical bridge to China. Youtz also has led study-tours to China for dozens of public school teachers. He and other faculty composers have had their music performed by orchestras in Sichuan, and PLU musicians have returned the favor by performing in Tacoma works by composers from Sichuan. “When I turned in my last passport, it had something like 19 Chinese visas,” said Youtz. His head “is constantly full of China.”

Ties with Trinidad & Tobago are such that Carnival, the pre-Lenten festival that is an important part of life across the Caribbean, is now a social and cultural highlight on the PLU campus. English Professor Barbara Temple-Thurston took the first students there in January 1993 and soon established a semester-long program with the University of the West Indies. Like PLU’s program in Chengdu, China, it draws students from other universities as well. Temple-Thurston, a native of South Africa, felt it was misleading for students to experience Trinidad only in the month of January when preparations for Carnival were at a fever pitch. “The students got this sense of this exotic place. They were leaving with a very skewed impression of the culture,” she said. A faculty committee already was looking for places to start a semester study away program, and  Temple-Thurston convinced them Trinidad &  Tobago was a perfect choice. She wanted students to “be there when things calm down to see what the culture is really like.” Several Trinidadian students now join the PLU students in their college classes, and the Ministry of Community Development, Culture, and Gender Affairs of Trinidad & Tobago and PLU split the costs of a full, four-year scholarship to bring a Trinidadian student to the Tacoma campus.

The first scholarship winner, Candice Hughes, set about launching PLU’s Carnival, majored in geosciences, spent a semester studying in Botswana, and wound up as class speaker at graduation in 2008. She now helps run PLU’s program in Trinidad until she begins graduate school. She told Scene, the university magazine, “I came in as a girl from Trinidad, and I’m leaving as a world citizen.” Kareen Ottley, a student following in her footsteps, said, “Traveling from Trinidad, this was such a far place to come. But I felt really comfortable here. People are very friendly, very welcoming. What I really liked is that at PLU the focus is beyond education. They want to create a well-rounded student interested in serving your community.”

Academic Ties to Namibia and Norway

Pacific Lutheran’s connections with Namibia run through Norway and their mutual interests in peace studies and work on democracy and development. Half of Namibia’s population is Lutheran, and Norway has long been a player on the world stage in peace and reconciliation efforts. Steinar Bryn, who helps promote interethnic dialogue in the Balkans, has taught at PLU and arranged for PLU students to intern in the Department of Dialogue and Peacebuilding at Nansenskolen (the Nansen Academy) in Lillehammer, Norway. 

Norway’s Hedmark University College, the University of Namibia, and Pacific Lutheran also exchange students and faculty and cooperate on peace and development projects. Pacific Lutheran, which enrolled 48 Norwegian students in 2008–09, sends students each fall to Hedmark for a semester, and places others in internships in Windhoek, Namibia, where they help patients with HIV/AIDS and tackle other projects. Sobania calls this “faith in action. The emphasis is on serving others and making a difference in the world.”

Weighing the Impact of Education Abroad

Pacific Lutheran has begun assessing the impact of its gateway programs by measuring changes in students’ knowledge of global issues, intercultural skills, cultural diversity, and commitment to citizenship. Sobania said the changes were significant among those who went on these programs. He next plans to study the impact of J-term courses on students’ attitudes and skills.

“I’m truly impressed by what you’re doing here. It is moving your ­students and our country in the direction we simply must go.”

There are other, less scientific ways to note these changes. Patricia Bieber, a program specialist at the Wang Center, said, “You see fewer white Tshirts with big writing on the front. They’ll come in wearing a new scarf or jacket, or something from an African nation or India. You watch them evolve.” Charry Bentson, assistant director of the Wang Center, recalling a student who was wary of leaving for a course in India, said, “We didn’t think we could get him on the plane.” He returned eager to undertake service work in India after graduation.

Returner Reflections Weave Strands Together

Pacific Lutheran alternates yearly between holding an international symposium on a major global topic and an event called World Conversations where faculty and students reflect on their experiences abroad. Former Vice President Walter Mondale, speaking at the first World Conversations in February 2007, said, “I’m truly impressed by what you’re doing here. It is moving your students and our country in the direction we simply must go.” The university also engages students in weekly discussion groups called Returner Reflections. Liz Pfaff, a junior majoring in Spanish and mathematics, who spent a J-term in Honduras and a semester in Oaxaca, Mexico, said the most important part of education abroad is “what you do when you get back.” Senior Troy Moore, a Spanish major who spent one semester in Granada, Spain, and a second in Chengdu, China, said, “I wouldn’t feel as much of a global citizen as I do now had I not come to this school” He signed up for AmeriCorps after graduation. Senior Zach Alger, a political science and Spanish major who did a J-term in South Africa and a semester in Granada, said, “You have to take the initiative to make it a valuable experience, to integrate it back into your life and make sure it wasn’t a fivemonth vacation.”

Krista Rajanen, who went to South Africa on a J-term and to Oaxaca for a full semester, signed on as a Sojourner Advocate after her return. That is one of four paid positions counseling peers about education abroad. Rajanen said, “I always tell students that the J-term experience can be equally as impactful as a semester. For me it certainly was, seeing the huge disparity and distance in South Africa between rich and poor.” Austin Goble, an economic major from Greeley, Colorado, who spent a semester in Ankara, Turkey, won a university grant to return there after graduation to research organic farming’s impact on rural village life. “When I came to PLU, global education wasn’t on my mind,” said Goble. “It was after my friends came back from studying abroad and I saw how they could tie things together with their class work that I really got an itch to go.”

Offering an ‘Engaged’ Experience

Many of Pacific Lutheran’s international students come to Tacoma on exchanges. Karl Stumo, vice president for admission and enrollment services, hopes to attract more for all four years. Half the international students in fall 2008 came from China and Norway. “We’d love to see that diversity increase,” said Stumo.

It is the combination of liberal arts and professional programs that draws both domestic and international students, said Stumo. “It’s a very engaged experience. We ask students to ask big questions: Who am I? What am I built to do? What are my God-given talents, and how can I apply them in the world?” The university launched an International Honors Program in 2007 that requires study of global issues from ancient to modern times on topics from war and peace to poverty to environmental sustainability.

President Anderson summed it up. “My feeling is that we’re embarked on a global journey here that cannot be detoured…. When I hear the rhetoric about tightening up on world trade and (not) shipping jobs overseas, that just isn’t going to happen. We’ve crossed the border into a new global era from which we cannot step back.” 

Boston University (BU) is impossible to miss, perched alongside the Charles River in the city that dubs itself the Athens of America. Dorms and lecture halls stand sentry on Commonwealth, and the Boston T trolley doubles as the campus shuttle. Kenmore Square, the iridescent CITGO sign, and Fenway Park sit in BU’s backyard; the Prudential Tower looms in the distance. In this vibrant cityscape, this one-time Methodist seminary has blossomed into the fourth largest U.S. private university, with 30,000 students and a phalanx of graduate and professional programs. It enrolled more than 5,000 international students from 135 countries in 2008–09, and it operates one of the premiere education abroad programs, sending 1,500 BU undergraduates and 700 from other U.S. campuses to destinations around the globe for work and study.

BU has embarked on a 10-year, $1.8 billion drive to move higher in the academic rankings, and its 2007 strategic plan, Choosing to Be Great (www.bu.edu/president/strategicplan/choosing.shtml), makes building on BU’s international strengths a cornerstone of that strategy. While pledging to continue “our long and proud tradition of service-based and professional learning,” it emphasized that “the landscape for our students and programs is more than Boston; it is the world.” Already the percentage of international students in the freshman class has jumped from 7 to 11 percent, and President Robert Brown is aiming for 14 percent, which he says would give BU “basically a global student body.” 

Strategic Growth in Languages

Another impact can be seen in BU’s language programs, already the beneficiary of several of the 100 new faculty positions planned. Eighteen languages from Arabic to Korean are regularly taught, and BU’s African Studies Center, a Title VI national resource center and one of the nation’s oldest, provides instruction in half a dozen more. 

“Deans nowadays are running languages together into huge departments with all kinds of crazy combinations; BU is walking in the other direction.”

James McCann, an environmental historian who studies the nexus between maize and malaria, said its broad reach allows students to write dissertations in fields “all the way from geography to anthropology in different parts of Africa.”

Not every BU student must learn another language, although the large College of Arts and Sciences requires proficiency. Even without a blanket requirement, 9,000 students are studying languages. Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Virginia Sapiro said, “I’ve been working to expand the number of lesser taught strategic languages.” Already she’s hired new, tenure-track faculty for Turkish and Arabic, and Persian is next.

BU bifurcated an omnibus language unit into separate Departments of Romance Studies (French, Italian, and Spanish) and Modern Languages and Comparative Literatures (German, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese). Christopher Maurer, chair of the Department of Romance Studies, said, “Deans nowadays are running languages together into huge departments with all kinds of crazy combinations; BU is walking in the other direction.” William Waters, chair of modern languages, said, “They don’t have armies of students studying those (strategic) languages… but what you see in Dean Sapiro’s moves there is strategic thinking” about bolstering BU’s intellectual capacity in such areas as Muslim studies. A professor of French, Elizabeth Goldsmith, was tapped in 2008 to become full-time director of academic affairs for all BU education abroad programs, and BU also has created a new position of director of language programs. 

Full Semesters and Internships Overseas

Most BU students who study abroad go for a full semester. Open Doors 2008 ranked BU fourth among doctoral institutions in that category. More than 40 percent of undergraduates study abroad and Brown is aiming for 50 percent at an institution that once was primarily a commuter college. Internships are a signature of BU education abroad. With 4,000 active internship sources worldwide, the Division of International Programs boasts that it can personalize placements in fields ranging from the arts and journalism to business and psychology. Faculty love this. “If the students know there is a study abroad program, that draws them in like a vacuum cleaner,” said James Iffland, a professor of Spanish. He credits Urbain “Ben” De Winter, associate provost and head of the Division of International Programs, with being “an absolute dynamo” in developing opportunities for study and internships abroad. Eugenio Menegon, a professor of Chinese history, said, “If you find the right opportunity and provide just a little bit of faculty support, it’s amazing what the students can do. They take off.” 

Stepping Into ‘This Engaging World’

One signpost of BU’s passion for global education is that international relations is the largest major in the College of Arts and Sciences, drawing 1,100 of the 16,000 undergraduates. The international relations faculty includes former ambassadors, Foreign Service and military officers, as well as scholar Husain Haqqani, now on leave as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States. Erik Goldstein, the department chair, said the curriculum “offers a special blend of the academic and the practical applications of international affairs,” with more courses on intelligence and security issues than any university outside the war colleges, as well as dozens on the environment and development. 

“It is a department that really values teaching and understands we have a strong obligation to our students,” said William Grimes, associate chair of international relations and director of a new Center for the Study of Asia. The Asia center “gives us a seat at the table when it comes to talking about how to expand our faculty and curriculum.”

The popularity of international relations is no surprise, said Brown. BU students chose a university “that is big and complicated and right in the middle of a city. The world looks interesting to them. They’ve already taken one step into this engaging world.”

Educating Engineers and Pre-Meds Abroad

A decade-long push to encourage engineering students to pursue part of their education in other countries has resulted in almost 20 percent of engineers spending a semester studying overseas. Most head to Technische Universität Dresden, where they can take engineering courses taught in English while also enrolling in German language and cultural classes. The Dresden model proved such a good fit that BU now sends engineers to universities in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Guadalajara, Mexico, as well. In all, 55 engineers studied abroad last year, said Associate Dean for Undergraduate Engineering Solomon Eisenberg. 

Science majors also study at the Dresden technical institute, taking organic chemistry in a class of 25 instead of 200 back in Boston. The Dresden science program recently branched out to Grenoble, France, where BU premeds can immerse themselves in French culture (although again, the science courses are taught in English). “The sophomore year is ideal for this. The later you wait, the harder it is,” said Mort Hoffman, an emeritus professor of chemistry who helped establish the partnership with the Dresden university. 

A Foothold in the Middle East

BU began offering postgraduate degrees for dentists in Dubai in July 2008, and the School of Medicine has explored opening a branch in the Middle East. Brown called the Dubai dental offerings part of “a grand experiment” to see which BU degrees can be offered at great distances. But he rules out trying to replicate its undergraduate program overseas. “BU is known as a very fine liberal arts general education with a diversity of majors at the undergraduate level overlaid with a really rich set of graduate programs. The question is, if you don’t replicate the graduate professional programs (and) the diversity of undergraduate programs, then is it BU?” asked Brown, former provost and engineering dean at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The School of Public Health is spearheading a Global Health Initiative that engages faculty from many fields in efforts to reduce health disparities between wealthier and financially strapped countries. Even Robert Pinsky, former U.S. poet laureate, has participated in its symposia. Associate Dean Gerald Keusch, former director of the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health, said, “If you believe as we do that global health touches on everything, then you need to connect across the whole of the university. Students have this great urge to do something meaningful. We’re playing into that.”

Jay Halfond, dean of Metropolitan College and Extended Education, who chairs the President’s Council for a Global University, said, “We’ve become very principled about how we choose to be involved internationally,” he said. BU looks for “true academic relationships and engagements that will enhance the reputation of the university,” not just business opportunities. Metropolitan College offers continuing education classes online and on military bases, as well as at a graduate center in Brussels, Belgium.

BU already has exchanges with Chinese universities in Shanghai and Beijing, and the provost and faculty members have paid exploratory visits to Indian institutions. Management professor Sushil Vachani said, “We’d like to be better known in those countries. The world’s center of gravity has shifted towards Asia.”

Weaving Education Abroad Into BU’s Fabric

Ben De Winter, associate provost for International Programs, has orchestrated the expansion of BU’s international activities since 1997. “My sense was that the greatest challenge here was to integrate study abroad into the fabric of the university, into the curriculum, to make it part and parcel of a BU education, not simply an experience that was somehow set apart,” said De Winter. He made the rounds of Boston University’s 17 schools and colleges, discussing with deans and faculty where their disciplines fit into an international context. Soon the College of Fine Arts was sending theater majors to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts for a semester, while music students went to the Royal College of Music, and art students headed to Venice. The Dresden program for engineers was inaugurated in 2001. “I’ve never really felt that there were serious obstacles to what we wanted to do. The difference today is that there is so much more explicit support for  everything that is international,” said the Antwerp, Belgium-born professor.

De Winter and his International Programs staff recently moved out of a cramped townhouse into spacious quarters in a new building on the west end of campus. The busy International Students and Scholars Office (ISSO), which had been blocks apart, now is under the same roof, next door to the busy Center for English Language and Orientation Programs, where 1,600 students take intensive English instruction each year. Befitting a university with so many international students and scholars, the ISSO has doubled in size since 1998, in part to meet the additional reporting required after the September 11 attacks. “We have undergone enormous change and institutionalized reporting to such a degree that I’m not sure the students realize how complicated our systems really are,” said Director Jeanne Kelley. De Winter said of the post-9/11 period, “We got everybody involved. The ISSO was spearheading it, but the information technology group was essential, the registrar helped, the admissions office helped, the provost’s office was there.” 

Brown, who in 2005 became BU’s 10th president, is a Texas-born chemical engineer who was deeply involved in MIT’s global education efforts during a long career at that campus on the other bank of the Charles River. Brown was instrumental in forging the Singapore-MIT Alliance and still chairs a scientific advisory board for the island nation, which made him an honorary citizen in 2006. 

Now, expanding BU’s international reach is “a major part of what we’re doing,” said Brown. “Long before I arrived Boston University had a great connectivity to the world through international programs and as a destination for international students. What our strategic planning exercise did was roll that up and get the community to declare that this is one of the core competencies of the university.” 

Difficult economic times pose fresh challenges, but that will not deter BU from pursuing this international course, said Brown. “If you really have a set of priorities, you can’t let economics hold you back. Now, does it slow you down a bit? Yes, but it does not hold you back.
 

Two dozen young scholars visiting the United States on Fulbright exchanges were in the middle of an afternoon of workshops at Northeastern University in Boston when President Joseph Aoun dropped by to offer greetings and a short lesson on U.S. higher education. The linguistics scholar called it “the only truly open system in the world.” When there is a faculty opening, no one checks where the applicants’ passports are from, he said. Instead, “we seek the best brains wherever they are.” Public and private universities compete fiercely for faculty, students, and research grants; promotion is based on merit; and professors share in profits from their inventions. The government provides support but does not dictate what or how colleges and universities teach. “We don’t believe in onesize-fits-all,” Aoun said. India and other countries in Asia and Latin America are looking to adapt this model and open up their systems of higher education, Aoun said. “It’s going to happen. Competition is going to intensify at the worldwide level,” he predicted, then added with a smile, “That’s why you’re here. You’re making our life more difficult.”

The Fulbrighters laughed and applauded, appreciating that their host was a personification of how the U.S. system works. Born in Beirut, Labanon, Aoun was educated there, in Paris, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a PhD in linguistics and philosophy. He was a professor and dean at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles before returning to Boston in 2006 to become the seventh president of Northeastern University.

Northeastern, a private research university in the heart of Boston, is a recognized leader in experiential or cooperative education. The tradition started in 1909, a decade after the university’s founding, when four engineering students rode trolleys after class to part-time jobs around the city. Today, thousands of Northeastern students alternate semesters in the classroom with sixmonth stints in the working world. Those jobs, once confined to Boston, now take them from coast to coast and, increasingly, to London, Paris, Singapore, and beyond. Aoun created a Presidential Global Scholars initiative with a $1 million annual budget that awards students grants up to $6,000 to cover the added expense and, in some cases, lost income when they do co-ops abroad. Northeastern students typically earn $15,000 on co-ops in the United States—a far cry from the 10 cents an hour those four engineering students made a century ago. Many do two or three co-ops before graduation.

“Aoun wants to double the number of students’ choosing international co-ops and ‘give every student the opportunity to have an international experience.’”

So far only a small fraction—about 300—of the 6,000 co-ops that Northeastern students go on each year are international. The difficulty of securing visas and work permits means that some placements are unpaid internships or volunteer positions with charities.

Aoun wants to double the number of students’ choosing international co-ops and “give every student the opportunity to have an international experience.” Aoun expressed delight that at Northeastern he found a university with “a predisposition to embrace the world.” He quickly set in motion the drafting of a new strategic plan for “building a global university” and preparing students to become “engaged citizens of the world.”

Dialogue of Civilizations Propel Education Abroad

Northeastern’s education abroad programs are burgeoning. Nearly 1,700 students studied abroad for credit in 2009–10, a 240 percent increase from barely 700 in 2006–07, and the Office of International Study Programs under new Director William Hyndman III has expanded its staff.

Much of this growth is due to the rapid proliferation in recent years of Dialogue of Civilizations courses in which faculty lead cohorts of students to other countries for intensive courses over several weeks in the summer. The Dialogue courses were pioneered by Denis Sullivan, who directs the International Affairs Program as well as Northeastern’s Middle East Center for Peace, Culture, and Development. He first offered a Middle East studies course in Cairo more than a decade ago, borrowing the “Dialogue of Civilization” name from a term popularized by then-Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, who suggested it as a riposte to the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington’s prediction of a “Clash of Civilizations.”

“Then the United Nations started using the term (Dialogue of Civilization). I thought, ‘That’s what I’m doing. I’m bringing students to Egypt to have a dialogue.’ I started calling my program the Dialogue of Civilizations,” recalled Sullivan. A handful of colleagues followed his example, teaching summer courses in China, Greece, and Mexico. In 2006 then-provost Ahmed Abdelal decided to allow students to apply tuition dollars to cover most of the costs. By summer 2010 some 960 undergraduates took 50 Dialogue programs taught in 37 countries by nearly five dozen faculty. Hyndman, the study abroad director, said for some it is less expensive to study overseas than to stay in Boston and take classes there. “They pay for their eight credits and maybe an additional fee of a few hundred dollars, but that’s it. It’s quite a good deal,” said Hyndman.

In five years at Northeastern, Denise Horn, an assistant professor of international affairs, has led students twice to both South Africa and Thailand and once to Brazil, Dominican Republic, India, and Indonesia either for Dialogue courses or for an international service-learning experience called the NU Global Corps. She teamed with Lori Gardinier, a lecturer and director of the human services program, on a course that took students to India for fall 2009 to work with the Deshpande Foundation on helping poor farmers improve their lives and livelihoods (the human services program is an interdisciplinary major that imparts the skills needed for political advocacy, community development, and social service, at home and abroad). In India, the Northeastern students purchased seeds and encouraged farmers to plant home gardens to feed their families. They also created a sewing workshop for women and taught English to preschoolers. “I had one goal and that was to get out in the world and see what I could find,” said junior Rosie Pagerey. “I consider myself a global citizen now."

“We have a lot of flexibility, a lot of resources, and a culture that’s academic but also business-minded, all of which enables us to move a little faster than other people.”

A New Home and New Interest in Languages

Northeastern moved most of its language classes in 2007 out of the Department of Modern Languages into a World Languages Center housed in the College of Professional Studies. That entrepreneurial college, which once catered primarily to evening and continuing education students, hired 25 new instructors to meet the increased demand from undergraduates. “This has been phenomenal for us,” said Dennis Cokely, chair of modern languages. “Five years ago, we had 800 students per semester studying seven languages. Today we have 13 languages and nearly 1,700 students.” The popularity of international business and international affairs majors also whets students’ appetites for languages. The center teaches 13 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, and Swahili.

Christopher Hopey, the outgoing vice president and dean of the College of Professional Studies, said, “We have a lot of flexibility, a lot of resources, and a culture that’s academic but also business-minded, all of which enables us to move a little faster than other people.” Hopey, recently named president of Merrimack College, retooled the College of Professional Studies in other ways, offering more courses online and off-site at partner institutions in Turkey and Australia. He started the successful NUIn program, which allows Northeastern to admit 200 additional freshmen each year who are sent to London or Thessalonica, Greece, for their first semester of classes. Northeastern forged a partnership with the education company Kaplan Inc. to bring hundreds of students from China and a dozen other countries to Boston and groom them for college-level work. Four hundred such students were enrolled in the Global Pathways program in 2009–10 plus 300 others in English as a Second Language courses.

Online MBAs

The College of Business Administration launched an online MBA in 2006 that now enrolls 1,000 overseas students each year. Typically these online students perform as well or better than those in regular MBA classes in Boston, said Dean Tom Moore, who created the program in response to a request from IBM, which sought to retain promising managers in India by offering them a route to the professional degree.

Many of the business school’s top undergraduates gravitate toward an international business major that requires six months of classes abroad followed by a six-month co-op in the same country. “They are quite cosmopolitan by the time they return,” the dean said. Northeastern also receives 100 exchange students from partner business programs in Europe and Mexico, which “helps internationalize our campus here,” he said.

Drawing International Students With Co-Ops and Carnevale

International enrollments at Northeastern surged in recent years to 3,313 in fall 2009, with students from China and India accounting for almost half. Scott Quint, then-associate dean for International Student and Scholar Services and Intercultural Programs, said many are drawn to business and computer science and to the School of Allied Health Professions. The city of Boston is a big draw; so are the opportunities to do coops, said Quint. The 12-member International Student and Scholar Institute (ISSI) includes a full-time specialist who works to arrange co-ops for international students.

Quint, who stepped down last April after more than a quarter century working with the university’s international students, was also the impresario of Northeastern’s Carnevale, a twomonth-long international festival of music, art, dance, poetry, lectures, food, song, and fashion. It started in 1996 with one event: an ice-carving contest. International students are still carving Shinto shrines and icons such as the Sydney Opera House from ice with chainsaws each winter, but that is only one of the host of attractions. There were 48 events over eight weeks last February and March.

Twin Cities on a Global Scale

Northeastern’s expanding international profile also can be glimpsed in the creation of a World Class Cities Partnership by the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, which is building ties among municipal, business, and cultural leaders from 10 cities that girdle the globe from Boston to Barcelona to Haifa to Hangzhou to Kyoto to Vancouver. None of these cities is their country’s largest or the capital, but many are on the cutting edge of technology and culture, said Dean Barry Bluestone.

Bluestone sees this global partnership as emblematic of the “incredible trajectory” that Northeastern has been on since weathering a financial crisis that forced it to downsize in the early 1990s. “It’s cutting its own wake, really figuring out new ways of engaging with the community and developing extraordinary new international programs,” he said. “There’s a sense of academic entrepreneurship here: ‘Let’s try something new. Let’s see if it works. Let’s put some real effort into it and see what we can build.’”

Next Steps on the International Journey

Robert Lowndes, vice provost for International Affairs, said the pace of Northeastern’s internationalization has accelerated since the adoption of the new academic plan in 2007. “We’re getting more people out into the world,” said Lowndes, a physicist. Just as Northeastern built an infrastructure that includes more than 60 cooperative counselors and coordinators that makes it possible for 90 percent of undergraduates to gain that work experience, the university now is building the capacity to deliver on the 2007 academic plan’s goal of seeing that all students gain international experience. This will become Northeastern’s “second signature experiential effort,” Lowndes predicted.

The next step, said Aoun, is “to get more students to take advantage of the global opportunities” and to start thinking of Northeastern as an institution not confined to the physical campus in Boston. The president envisions some students’ spending two years in Singapore or Australia before coming to Boston, or starting on some other yet-to-be-built satellite campus. “What we are seeking to do is have students completely at ease with the world—and not only one part of the world,” said Aoun.

Dozens of Hobart and William Smith Colleges (HWS) students occupied every seat and nearly every square inch of floor. Others crowded the doorway and spilled into the hall. It was late on a sunny spring afternoon—no time to be indoors—but the colleges’ annual Global Visions celebration of student photography and research projects exerted a powerful attraction. The promise of sushi afterward helped, as did the door prize: a $500 digital camera for the best photograph of the year (you had to be present to win). Still, the turnout testified to how well the colleges’ Center for Global Education does what many colleges aspire to: weaving education abroad into campus life and crafting thoughtful ways for students to relive and rethink experiences upon return home.

Hobart and William Smith Colleges offer photography and journal writing workshops and give small grants to encourage students to delve into the life of the communities where they live and study. On return, their stories and photographs may be published in The Aleph: A Journal of Global Perspectives, a full-color publication produced with Union College, or Abroad View magazine, which several colleges sponsor. Photography serves as a “gateway into the culture” of the countries where HWS students study, said Doug Reilly, programming coordinator for the Center for Global Education. The Center for Global Education also stages an open mic night called “the Away Café” in the campus pub for students to share stories from overseas.

Founded as separate colleges for men (Hobart) and women (William Smith) in 1822 and 1908 respectively, Hobart and William Smith are now closely coordinated with the same classes, faculty, and president but retain separate traditions, diplomas, deans, and athletic nicknames (Statesmen and Herons). From its 195-acre campus overlooking Seneca Lake in Geneva, N.Y., HWS send hundreds of students annually on more than 40 semester-long programs in 32 countries, nearly two-thirds outside Western Europe. 

“We made a commitment that no matter what happened to the economy, we were going to hold steady the percentage of our students who studied abroad.”

Finding a Leader at the Peace Corps

The selection of then-Peace Corps Director Mark Gearan as president in 1999 underscored the emphasis at HWS on internationalization. Gearan directed the Peace Corps during President Bill Clinton’s second term after serving as a senior White House official during the first. Gearan, an attorney and high school principal’s son, sent the first Peace Corps volunteers to South Africa, Jordan, Bangladesh, and Mozambique and created the Crisis Corps, which deploys returned volunteers for short stints to places dealing with disasters.

Gearan, a graduate of Harvard College and Georgetown Law School, said he was drawn by the colleges’ approach to global education. “When you have so many faculty members who have lived and led programs around the world, it really internationalizes the campus.”

The percentage of students’ studying abroad has risen to roughly 60 percent. That is “a great statistic and point of pride,” said Gearan, but he is also concerned about internationalizing the education of those who “are parked here in zip code 14456.”

Gearan has concerns, too, that education abroad not be just “a one-off” experience for the students who do go overseas.

Safeguarding Education Abroad

Gearan and Provost Teresa Amott protected the education abroad program from budget cuts that most academic departments had to absorb last spring. “We made a commitment that no matter what happened to the economy, we were going to hold steady the percentage of our students who studied abroad,” said Amott.

Education abroad, said Gearan, “is mission central, in our judgment, if you really want to prepare well-educated, twenty-first century citizens.” Gearan does not denigrate study in London, Paris, Rome, and the other capitals of Europe, but he emphasizes the added value of sending students to Vietnam, Senegal, South Africa, Peru, China, Brazil, and other “very twenty-first century places.”

A strategic plan drafted upon Gearan’s arrival led to the creation of a Center for Global schools’ progreEducation. The ss down this path was accelerated by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that underwrote a formal Partnership for Global Education with Union College in Schenectady, New York. Both institutions ramped up predeparture and reentry programming. Political scientist Thomas D’Agostino has led the partnership and directed the HWS Center for Global Education since it opened. He is now associate dean for global education.

Unfinished Business: Attracting International Students

An unfinished objective at HWS is attracting more international students, Gearan said. HWS enrolled 77 international students in 2009–10, or 4 percent. A first step has been to resuscitate exchange agreements that had gathered dust. Amy Teel, the Center for Global Education’s program manager, said, “We went from no exchange students in 2005 to about 35 a year coming in now.”

Felix Spira, 22, a German exchange student from Maastricht University in the Netherlands, came for the spring 2010 semester. “My home university has seven different partner universities in the United States. I chose Hobart and William Smith because it’s a small college where you have a high chance to get closer interactions with your teachers. I’m on a first-name basis with two of my professors,” said Spira.

Languages Encouraged but Not Required

HWS offer majors in Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese, and the classics; German is offered only as a minor. Eric Klaus, the sole tenure-track faculty member in German, recently scouted locations in Leipzig and Berlin for the Center for Global Education where science majors could study in English and “get a taste of German culture.” With such a small program, Klaus said, “you have to make yourself indispensable and recognizable on campus.”

There is no language requirement at HWS. “The culture of this institution is anti-requirement; we’re not an institution that requires students to do things. But we have goals,” said Amott, the provost. Students must demonstrate “a critical knowledge of the multiplicity of world cultures.” They can do this in a myriad of ways, including courses in language, history, literature, religion, economics, and the arts. Still, Amott, an economist born in Bolivia to a U.S. Foreign Service officer and Brazilian mother, added, “I wish we had more students’ achieving competency in a second language.” The Self-Instructional Language Program allows students to study Arabic, Vietnamese, and Hindi independently, with biweekly tutorials from a native speaker. Sometimes Polish, Korean, and Portuguese are supported in this way as well.

Patrick McGuire, a professor of economics who has led semester programs in London, Galway, Ireland, and Central Europe (where the students visit Germany, Romania, and Hungary), agreed that learning another language is important, but argued that it should not be a deterrent to students’ gaining rich experiences in courses taught overseas in English.

Fellow Professor of Economics Scott McKinney regularly leads students to Ecuador and Peru to study development economics and pre-Columbian history and culture. McKinney was born and raised in Lima, Peru, to American parents who worked in the airline and shipping business. McKinney speaks Spanish fluently—he even does home-stays himself with Ecuadorian families when he takes students to Quito—but he, too, believes there should be no language bar to education abroad. For HWS students who may pursue careers in banking or finance, it is paramount to see poverty firsthand, he said. “What we’ve really emphasized here is that everybody should go. You shouldn’t have to study three years of Spanish to go abroad to a Spanishspeaking country.”

Returns to India and Turkey

Lisa Philippone, 20, a junior anthropology major, spent a semester in India and returned there in summer 2010 to live on an organic farm in the desert state of Rajastan, teach, and work on an honors project examining how Hindus reconcile their beliefs in the purifying aspects of water in places where water is scarce or polluted. She won one of three $15,000 summer travel awards supported by alumnus Charles Salisbury, who also helped underwrite the renovation of historic Trinity Hall, where the Center for Global Education is housed.

Philippone said that her choosing to study in India was “a big deal” to neighbors and friends back home in Rochester, New York. “People just talked about it. They see India as a Third World country and wanted to know why I’d go there, why I’m studying India’s culture, and where that’s going to take me,” said the budding anthropologist. It reaffirmed her judgment that HWS was the right place for her. “It may sound corny, but it allows me to study what I love. I’m going to leave here with a sense of clarity on what I want for my future.”

Alexandra Hallowell, 22, a senior international relations and French major from Duxbury, Massachusetts, was studying at Maastricht University in the Netherlands when she won two HWS grants totaling $1,000 to spend a fortnight in Istanbul, Turkey, interviewing Islamic women about politics, religion, and culture. She self-published a small magazine about the project that helped her win a Fulbright scholarship to return to Turkey as an English teaching assistant and to interview more women about how they balance religious and cultural norms in a secular society.

“It may sound corny, but it allows me to study what I love. I’m going to leave here with a sense of clarity on what I want for my future.”

Emphasizing Global Citizenship for Town and Gown

HWS help to internationalize the community of Geneva as well. Last winter the colleges mounted a community-wide campaign to get the 13,000 residents of Geneva as well as faculty and students to read Three Cups of Tea, the best-selling account of mountain climber Greg Mortenson’s ongoing crusade to build schools for girls across Pakistan and Afghanistan.

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Posters went up around town showing high school coaches, Gearan, and other civic leaders engrossed in Three Cups of Tea, and school children raised thousands of dollars for Mortenson’s “Pennies for Peace” campaign to build more schools. Students, faculty, and townspeople filled the local opera house when Mortenson’s coauthor, journalist David Oliver Relin, came to speak. The Center for Global Education’s Amy Teel and Doug Reilly also use Three Cups of Tea in a workshop they teach on the global aspects of leadership.

The Vietnam Connection

HWS’ education abroad program in Hanoi, Vietnam, started 15 years ago when Marie-France Etienne, a professor of French who was born in colonial Vietnam, led students there. The program gained a champion in Professor of Sociology Jack Dash Harris, who was first exposed to Vietnam while teaching in the Semester-at-Sea program. He is now an authority on changing roles of men and women in Vietnamese society. HWS and Union College began sending students to Hanoi for a full semester in fall 2000.

Harris chairs the faculty Committee on Global Education, which provides strong oversight for the education abroad programs. He and D’Agostino co-directed a federally funded project that produced study guides to help prepare students for their immersion in Vietnam. The In Focus: Vietnam project enlisted the expertise of HWS and Union faculty and students as well as outside experts to make short films on Vietnamese history, culture, economy, and contemporary life, each accompanied by a list of suggested readings.

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Science faculty, too, weave global education into their curricula. Paleontologist Nan Crystal Arens, a Harvard-educated associate professor of geoscience, is spending the fall 2010 semester with HWS students in Queensland, Australia. It is the third time she has led that program. “We can talk about tectonic plates until we’re blue in the face, but it’s really a different experience to go and stand in the fault zone or in the volcano,” she said. “It brings the material alive in ways that we can’t do in a classroom, no matter how good we are as teachers.”

When Jared Cohon received the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Academic Leadership Award in 2005, there was no shortage of worthy academic pursuits on which the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) president could spend the accompanying $500,000 prize. He chose to direct a large sum to a Global Awareness Across the Curriculum initiative, in which faculty from the institution’s six undergraduate colleges vied for grants to create new courses exploring international topics and themes. It achieved the desired results. An engineering professor won a national award for a project management course in which students in Pittsburgh collaborate with counterparts in Brazil, Israel, and Turkey. Information technology students teamed up with classmates in Qatar and students in Singapore to design Web sites for NGOs. In classes held synchronously and linked by video in Pittsburgh and Qatar, an architecture professor explored the challenges posed by the construction boom in cities in the Middle East. 

A n international bent comes naturally to Carnegie Mellon, a private university founded in 1900 by the Scots-born steelmaker and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie to teach “practical arts and sciences.” CMU is a bastion for computer science and for engineering and technology, but is also home to a celebrated fine arts program. It boasts not only of Nobel Laureates (16), but also of winners of Academy Awards (56) and numerous Tonys and Emmys. Both mathematician John Nash of A Beautiful Mind and artist Andy Warhol are alumni. Its labs have done pioneering work in artificial intelligence, robotics, and biometrics. Those breakthroughs occurred on the home campus in Pittsburgh, three miles from where the Allegheny and Monongahela meet to form the Ohio River. But today CMU has a wider footprint, with graduate programs in more than a dozen countries and a full-fledged undergraduate branch in Qatar.

One of Six U.S. Universities in Qatar

Carnegie Mellon Qatar is one of the six U.S. universities—the others are Weill Cornell Medical Center, Texas A&M, Northwestern, Virginia Commonwealth, and the Georgetown School of Foreign Service—offering degrees in the oilrich emirate’s Education City in Doha. Carnegie Mellon Qatar occupies a striking new building with golden interior walls on which are etched the words of Andrew Carnegie that serve as the university’s motto: “My heart is in the work.” A bagpiper in full Scots regalia played at the February 2009 ceremony where Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al Missned, wife of the Emir and chair of the Qatar Foundation, and Cohon shared ribboncutting duties. The student body, half Qatari and half international students, is small (300) but growing, with roughly 35 graduates each year. It offers bachelor of science degrees in business administration, computer science, and information systems.

“If you spent enough time here in Pittsburgh to get the essence of Carnegie Mellon and then went to observe our ­program in Doha, you would say, ‘Gee, this really is Carnegie Mellon.’”

Carnegie Mellon, with unstinting support from the Qatar Foundation, has striven to replicate in Doha the educational offerings and the cocurricular experience afforded in Pittsburgh. Some faculty are hired from the region, but others such as Kelly Hutzell and Rami el Samahy from the School of Architecture alternate semesters’ teaching in Pittsburgh and Doha. Hutzell calls it “a joy” to be teaching her “Mapping Urbanism” course in a city undergoing dizzying changes. Carnegie Mellon deans and department heads visit Doha regularly and there is a brisk, two-way traffic of students on breaks, over summer and for full semester stays. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Gates have spoken at events hosted by Carnegie Mellon Qatar.

“If you spent enough time here in Pittsburgh to get the essence of Carnegie Mellon and then went to observe our program in Doha, you would say, ‘Gee, this really is Carnegie Mellon,’” said Cohon, a civil engineer who has piloted Carnegie Mellon since 1997.

Surging International Enrollment

The number of international students has doubled over the past decade, from 1,747 in fall 1999 to 3,518 in fall 2009. They constitute almost half the graduate student population and are strongly represented in engineering, management and information systems, computer sciences, and business.

Carnegie Mellon prepares undergraduates for careers in engineering, arts, humanities, and sciences. Many of these professionally oriented majors have requirements that can make it difficult for students to fit education abroad into their schedules. Some 400 now take some of their coursework overseas, and that number has been rising. “Study abroad in the usual semester abroad sense is sometimes a hard sell,” said Linda Gentile, director of the Office of International Education. This reality has strengthened the determination of faculty and administrators such as Vice Provost for Education Indira Nair to find other ways for students to, in Nair’s words, “become aware, socially responsible global citizens.” This includes innovative uses of technology to expand the classroom well beyond the confines of Pittsburgh and arranging unusual summer internships in faraway places for CMU’s technologically adept students.

A Memorable Lesson in Concrete

Lucio Soibelman, professor of civil engineering, codesigned the award-winning construction project management class taught synchronously with engineering schools in Brazil, Israel, and Turkey. His share of the president’s Carnegie award paid for digital equipment that allows students in all four countries to see everything that Soibelman writes on a whiteboard in Porter Hall in Pittsburgh. Soibelman isn’t teaching basic engineering skills—these advanced students are well beyond that—but he is equipping them to overcome the cultural barriers that working engineers confront daily on international projects. “The main readings and discussions are related to globalization. They read books on working across cultures and on negotiation,” said Soibelman, a native of Brazil.

His students once got into a friendly quarrel with their Turkish counterparts over how quickly concrete could be poured. “The Turkish students kept saying they could build one floor per week. The American students kept pushing back, saying, ‘No, you can’t,’” recalled Soibelman. One floor a month is the U.S. norm. But when the Americans flew to Turkey on spring break, the Turkish students immediately brought them to a construction site where concrete was being poured. A week later, before the return flight, they returned to see the next floor going up. “When I asked my students how the trip was and what sights they had seen, they just looked at me and said, ‘They can do it,’” recalled the professor, who explained that lower labor costs, greater use of concrete, and major investment in concrete forms allow the Turks to build more rapidly.

“We want every student to have a global perspective and be able to use their expertise to solve real world problems (across) disciplinary boundaries and national boundaries.”

Globe-Trotting Student Consultants

Joseph S. Mertz, Jr., who teaches in both the School of Computer Science and the graduate H. John Heinz School of Public Policy and Management, places students each summer on internships as technology consultants in Micronesia, the Cook Islands, Palau, India, and elsewhere. “I teach geeks the soft skills they need to put their technical skills to use in the service of humanity,” said Mertz. CMU undergraduates helped the Republic of Nauru issue national identification numbers to its 10,000 inhabitants. Two students helped the tiny island of Niue, the smallest selfgoverning country in the world (pop. 1,400), connect laptops to the internet for its 500 schoolchildren. At a Bangalore, India, orphanage for blind children, students wired a computer to a traditional Braille machine, sounding out the letters and words children wrote with a stylus and correcting their spelling.

In the Global Project Management course taught by Randy Weinberg, director of the Information Systems (IS) program, students in Pittsburgh and Doha collaborate with students at Singapore Management University. “They do video, they Skype, they e-mail. We have the same readings, assignments, and assessments,” said Weinberg. It is a taste of the life they will lead when they graduate “because unless you’re a small, boutique IS shop, your clients and partners are going to be in distant locations.”

The culture at Carnegie Mellon is highly interdisciplinary. Partnerships are encouraged with colleagues across campus and around the world. “We want every student to have a global perspective and be able to use their expertise to solve real world problems (across) disciplinary boundaries and national boundaries,” said Amy Burkert, an assistant science dean who designed and taught one of the global courses and recently succeeded the retiring Nair as vice provost for Education.

Branding Carnegie Mellon Overseas

Doing what Carnegie Mellon is doing in Qatar is daunting, but there has been widespread agreement that “getting the Carnegie Mellon brand out into the world was an adventure worth pursuing,” said Provost Mark Kamlet.

Students from Pittsburgh are encouraged to spend a semester in Doha, and 10 are sent over spring break on a trip paid for by the division of student affairs in Pittsburgh and Qatar Foundation. Fifty students vie for those slots, and those chosen are expected on their return to share the experience with peers.

Megan Larcom, 21, a senior from Middletown, Rhode Island, majoring in international relations and business administration, interned in the Doha student affairs office the summer after freshman year, then returned to Qatar for a full semester as both a student and teaching assistant in accounting classes. A varsity rower with a 4.0 GPA, she also played on a newly formed women’s basketball team in Doha. She twice won federal scholarships to spend summers studying Arabic in Tunisia and Morocco, then landed a Fulbright scholarship to Egypt, where she is teaching English and pursuing research at Suez Canal University.

Student Affairs in Qatar

That student affairs office in Doha has a staff of ten, larger than any of the other U.S. universities in Education City, said Renee Camerlengo, assistant dean of student affairs and director of special projects in Pittsburgh. “From the very beginning we really believed in a very strong out-of-classroom experience” for the Doha students, most of whom commute to classes, said Camerlengo.

While Qatar is regarded as a progressive and tolerant place, Camerlengo asks the American students to dress conservatively and not drink alcohol while living in the Muslim country “as guests of the Emir and the Sheikha.” On their return, students are expected to share what they saw and learned. “We’ll never be able to send all 5800 (undergraduates) to Doha on this kind of trip, so the students fortunate enough to go have to bring a part of that experience back to their contemporaries,” Camerlengo said.

Opportunities and Pins on a Map

President Cohon said the expansion of Carnegie Mellon’s global footprint has not been “as strategic as we would like. If we took a map of the world and put pins on the countries we would like for Carnegie Mellon to be present in…. It would be China and India first, and then maybe other places after.”

But CMU planted its flag in the Middle East when the Qatar Foundation pledged to furnish the facility and cover most other costs. “Where we are is very much a product of our taking advantage of opportunities that have arisen and respecting the constraint we have self imposed, which is that we will not subsidize any international program from Pittsburgh. They have to pay for themselves,” said Cohon. “We are not a rich university.”

Cohon wants Carnegie Mellon to be recognized “as an important institution and indispensable institution in those new centers of wealth and power.” And he wants the university community to look back in 2050 and say, “Gee, it really was a great thing that we decided to become a global university 50 years ago.”

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

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

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

Seeking an Edge in Global Talent Competition

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

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

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

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

An Ethos of Education Abroad

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

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

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

Wanted: More International Undergraduates

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turning Students Into ‘Inspired’ Jazz Musicians in Europe

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

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

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

What China Wants From Washington Square

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

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

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

The unwieldy name of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) recalls its 1969 birth as an institution combining the Indiana University School of Medicine and allied schools with the extension branch of the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology and sister components. There are twin faculties under a common dean, separate course numbering systems, and separate IU or Purdue diplomas depending on which school a student attends. Notwithstanding the vestiges of split identity, IUPUI has grown into an urban research university with 30,000 students and a distinctive emphasis on international education.

“Comprehensive programs of internationalization come neither easily nor naturally to institutions like IUPUI,” said former Associate Vice Chancellor for International Affairs Susan Buck Sutton. Its internationalization has “defied the odds not by replicating the historical modes of international education found elsewhere but by thinking through what new forms of internationalization might fit the new kind of institution.” For IUPUI, said William Plater, retired executive vice chancellor and dean, internationalization became “a way to unite the campus.”

After Sutton became the international affairs office first full-time director in 2003, she winnowed a bulging, cobwebbed pile of Memoranda of Understanding (MOU) that she inherited. “We had signed around 200 over the years, and with most, nothing (ever) happened,” said Sutton. “It seemed like a friendly thing to do but, after a nice dinner in Bangkok or in Paris or wherever, no one ever thought about what would be needed to sustain the MOU.” 

Strategic Partnerships: The International Fulcrum

IUPUI concentrated on developing close relationships with a limited number of universities. “Internationalization through institutional partnerships has become our defining feature,” said Sutton, an anthropologist who retired this past spring but is spending a year doing international work for Bryn Mawr College. “You collaborate not just in sending students back and forth but in curriculum development, teaching in each others’ classes, and joint research projects.” Such strategic partnerships draw in “faculty and students who previously would never have done anything international,” she added.

“Internationalization through institutional partnerships has become our defining feature....You collaborate not just in sending students back and forth but in curriculum development, teaching in each others’ classes, and joint research projects.”

After campus-wide discussions involving hundreds of faculty and administrators, IUPUI settled on Moi University in Eldoret, Kenya; Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China; and the Autonomous University of the State of Hidalgo (AUEH) in Pachuca, Mexico, as its three closest partners. IUPUI already had a strong base upon which to build its Kenyan ties: the Indiana University School of Medicine helped Moi build its school of medicine in the late 1980s and ever since has been sending a faculty physician for a full year and residents and students on rotations.

The IU-Kenya partnership took an extraordinary turn after Professor Joe Mamlin discovered in 2000 that a Moi medical student was among the AIDS patients dying with only palliative care in Moi’s hospital. Mamlin secured antiretroviral drugs for Daniel Ochieng, who recovered, and set about creating a community-based program called the Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare (AMPATH), which today provides AIDS medicines and primary health care to 120,000 Kenyans in dozens of clinics across western Kenya. Seven other U.S. medical schools have joined the effort, which has grown thanks to $60 million in funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development. Fran Quigley, associate director of AMPATH and a clinical professor at the IUPUI School of Law, told the AMPATH story in a 2009 book, Walking Together, Walking Far.

Reaching Across the Curriculum

The IUPUI partnership with Moi now extends well beyond this celebrated medical collaboration. Chancellor Charles Bantz and Moi Chancellor Bethwel A. Ogot in 2006 signed an agreement forging a strategic alliance that has led to joint projects in education, social work, informatics, engineering, business, and other fields.

A campus-wide faculty committee spent two years developing a dozen international learning goals that apply equally to the professional schools as well as the liberal arts. “It’s relatively easy for liberal arts folks, but what is international learning for students in the school of engineering? What about the school of nursing? What about tourism management?” asked Sutton. Understanding societies and cultures became a main objective for student learning.

IUPUI’s Department of Tourism, Conventions, and Event Management twice has sent faculty and students to a town in the Rift Valley where Lornah Kiplagat, a four-time world champion runner, operates the High Altitude Training Centre. They helped the center revamp its Web site and improve marketing aimed at sports teams and tourists from Europe. Kiplagat aspires to open a boarding school for girls at the facility, which is 8,000 feet above sea level. The IUPUI visitors gave advice to women in nearby villages about how to draw more tourists with arts and crafts. They also shared information on health and fitness because obesity is a growing problem, even in a land famed for its fleet runners, according to Assistant Professor of Physical Education Brian Culp.

Ian McIntosh, director of international partnerships, helped organize two reconciliation conferences in Kenya following postelection violence. He also brought Rwandans from both sides of that country’s 1990s civil war and genocide together for a reconciliation conference in Indianapolis. “If you can find ways for students, staff, or faculty to be meaningfully engaged and doing something important in their life, they’ll jump at it,” said McIntosh, an Australian and veteran of work with indigenous peoples.

Impact Overseas and in Indianapolis

The close relationships with Sun Yat-Sen and AUEH have rippled through IUPUI’s hometown. The partnership with Sun Yat-Sen helped IUPUI land a Confucius Institute, not unusual by itself—there are 68 Confucius Institutes across the United States and more than 300 worldwide that promote study of Chinese language and culture—but this was the third institute for Indiana. Only five states have three or more.

It is also the only one headed by a cell biologist. The “day” job for professor-physician-scientist Zao C. “Joe” Xu is running a National Institutes of Health-funded research lab that studies strokes. Xu was skeptical when Guangmei Yan, vice president of Sun Yat-Sen and a former colleague in China, asked him to add leadership of the Confucius Institute to his duties. “I’m not a Chinese studies expert or a language expert. What do you want me for?” he asked.

Yan replied that having attained such professional stature at IUPUI, Xu should make time to contribute to strengthening “the most important bilateral relationship in the world.” Chancellor Bantz and civic leaders play active roles on the institute’s advisory board. It helped mount the first Indianapolis Chinese Festival, subsidizes study abroad in Guangzhou, and runs a language-and-culture day camp for youngsters. “Of course we teach Chinese, but we do more than that,” said Xu. “People are turning to China now. Business is one thing, but the cultural ties…and people-to-people (relationships) will last forever.”

IUPUI and Sun Yat-Sen soon will offer 2+2 bachelor degrees in a half dozen fields, where students earn degrees from both universities after spending two years at each. IUPUI had a 2+2 program for undergraduate engineers with the University of Tehran in Iran until 2009 when they were unable to win U.S. Treasury Department approval for joint master’s degrees.

The partnership with AUEH “is an organic outgrowth of the increasing migratory ties between this heartland area of Mexico and the heartland state of Indiana,” Sutton said. One fruit is a $1 million research collaboration called the Binational Cross-Cultural Health Enhancement Center (BiCCHEC) that engages faculty from many disciplines to work on solutions to problems with oral health, nutrition, and diabetes in distant Mexican towns and immigrant communities in Indiana. Hospitals at IUPUI and AUEH exchange pediatric resident doctors, and medical, nursing and dental students perform service in Jalisco and other Mexican towns.

“IUPUI has doubled its international student numbers to nearly 1,400 over a decade, and Bantz, the chancellor, is eager for more. ‘Great international students are going to raise everybody’s performance.’”

Associate Professor of Dentistry Angeles Martinez-Mier, an expert on fluoride and decay prevention, leads BiCCHEC, which was designated one of IUPUI’s first Signature Centers of Excellence in 2006. Martinez-Mier, herself from Mexico, said they brought IUPUI anthropologists, historians, engineers, educators, and other faculty into the mix because “we soon realized you cannot deal with these health issues if you don’t tackle the social determinants of health.” The learning goes both ways. IU’s James Whitcomb Riley Hospital for Children made adjustments to its bereavement program after a faculty member witnessed how in Hidalgo a hospital for children with serious disabilities helped the parents to grieve.

Michael Snodgrass, associate professor of Latin American history, has studied how immigrants from western Mexico have revitalized run-down Indianapolis neighborhoods. Snodgrass now chairs the fast-growing international studies program.

Making Service a Centerpiece of International Education

IUPUI’s robust Center for Service and Learning has a 12-person staff headed by Bob Bringle, a psychology professor who consults with universities around the world on service learning. Bringle has hosted national workshops and coedited a book on international service learning. He argues that even short-term participation heightens students’ knowledge, ethical sensitivity, and interest in global issues. “A third of our study abroad courses have a service-learning component,” said Bringle, who once helped Sutton add a service component to the summer course on modern Greece she taught on the island of Paros. IUPUI Informatics students still perform service on Paros, such as producing videos at the mayor’s request to promote the island’s cultural heritage, said Stephanie Leslie, director of study abroad.

David Jan Cowan, director of the architectural technology program with the School of Engineering and Technology, has led IUPUI students to Thailand and Indonesia under the aegis of his Global Design Studio, a volunteer project that helps communities recovering from disasters or blight. Cowan, now an associate professor, said international activities “launched my career” at IUPUI. 

Backing International Ambitions With Resources

IUPUI’s global emphasis received a shot in the arm in 2005 when it joined the American Council on Education’s Internationalization Collaborative. The international affairs office, which Plater remembers as having a budget of $500 when it started in 1987, has matured into a $1.7 million operation with a staff of 30 and prime space in a heavily trafficked building in the heart of campus. 

IUPUI has doubled its international student numbers to nearly 1,400 over a decade, and Bantz, the chancellor, is eager for more. “Great international students are going to raise everybody’s performance,” he said. Among those students is Wenting Jiang, 24, a junior marketing major from Hangzhou, China. “We can say the entire downtown is our campus,” said Jiang. “Although we cannot work off campus, I personally get lots of chances to visit companies and do some networking.”
The emphasis at IUPUI on global health drew junior Pich Seekaew, 19, a premed biology major from Chang Rai, Thailand, who founded a chapter of the Timmy Foundation, which sends medical volunteers overseas. “We’re trying to increase the engagement between these amazing (health) schools on campus.”

Challenge of Internationalizing a Commuter Campus

Study abroad numbers at the predominantly commuter school are also up more than twofold to 410. More than 6,000 of the 22,000 undergraduates attend classes part-time. IUPUI was open admissions until a decade ago. The six-year graduation rate for freshmen who enrolled in fall 2004 was just 34 percent (This is an Indiana-wide problem; the manufacturing-heavy state ranks 42nd in percentage of adults with bachelor’s degrees). 

The freshman retention rate has jumped from 64 to 73 percent over the past five years and Executive Vice Chancellor Uday Sukhatme is seeking to further enrich the student experience with his RISE to the IUPUI Challenge initiative, which encourages all undergraduates to engage in Research, International, Service, and Experiential learning or RISE (the name Uday means rise in Hindi). Students who complete at least two of these activities get a special notation on their transcripts. The first to do all four was senior Cora Daniel, 22, a nursing major from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who worked in a Kenyan orphanage, studied in Strasbourg, France, and was headed after graduation to Benin as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Recognizing that not everyone can fit education abroad into their schedule, global dialogue courses allow students to talk over videoconference links with counterparts in classrooms in Mexico, Russia, and elsewhere. “We’ve had nursing classes, education classes, and others,” said Dawn Whitehead, director of curriculum internationalization. Freshmen are targeted because “we want them to have this international perspective as early as possible.”