Steven Belluscio, associate professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC), came back from a Salzburg Global Seminar in summer 2005 fired up about spreading the message to other faculty about the importance of infusing international content into the curriculum. It was a natural fit for the sole community college in the borough of Manhattan and one of the larger components of the City University of New York (CUNY). The college, anchored in a four-block-long waterfront building shaped like a ship on 4-1/4 acres in lower Manhattan, enrolls more than 1,500 international students, placing it seventh among community colleges in the 2009 Open Doors report. Eighty-five percent of its 21,000 students are minorities, and it is one of the nation’s leading producers of African American, Hispanic, and Asian Americans with associate degrees.

Located blocks from the World Trade Center— debris from the collapse of 7 World Trade Center in the September 11, 2001, attacks caused irreparable damage to a large commercial building that had been donated to BMCC for a major expansion—the college sits near the canyons of Wall Street and is surrounded by the pricey condominiums and chic shops of Tribeca. Most BMCC students live elsewhere and commute on the 14 subway lines and buses, ferries, PATH rail, and other transit that converge in lower Manhattan. While 62 percent of students are enrolled full-time, many are holding down jobs and raising families in a city often called the capital of the world. They have seen how events on the other side of the globe can dramatically affect their city and their lives. The college’s 2008 strategic plan, “A Bridge to the Future,” stated the challenge:

The new millennium has ushered in a new world characterized by globalization and increasing cultural interaction. It is therefore imperative that the college develop students who are intellectually prepared to engage other cultures and understand the differing perspectives they offer. Our society is a global one, and our students must be able to work and interact effectively with people from diverse cultures Belluscio was among nearly 50 BMCC faculty and administrators the college sent to the Salzburg Global Seminar between 2004 and 2009. It sent more than 70 students as well to Austria to learn more about globalization and discover how other U.S. institutions were helping their students prepare for this shared future. Five other community colleges participated in the seminar that Belluscio, nine fellow faculty, and an administrator attended. “It was an intensive week,” said the English professor, who has taught literature and writing courses at BMCC since 2004. “It made us think realistically about what we should try to accomplish at BMCC with what we learned at the Salzburg Seminar. The one thing that kept coming up is the idea of best practices: How do we take all this lofty theory about internationalizing the curriculum and practically apply it to what we do at BMCC?”

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Global Pedagogy Handbook

A college committee on which Belluscio served set out to determine to what extent students were already being exposed to international issues in existing BMCC courses and to find ways to enrich that content. “We decided to put together a collection of potential lesson plans that we’d make available to all faculty in a handbook,” said Belluscio. They dispatched liaisons to attend faculty meetings in each department and solicit two-page lesson plans. The committee sifted through numerous contributions and settled on 35 lesson plans from a dozen of the 19 BMCC departments, then compiled them into a Global Pedagogy Handbook that was distributed electronically to the entire faculty in 2007.

The lesson plans covered courses from business management to mathematics to nursing to speech, communications, and theater. A math professor taught trigonometry students the evolution of the square root symbol from ancient Egypt to fifteenth century Germany and France, where it took the form used today. A nursing professor assigned advanced students the task of formulating a global strategy to combat tuberculosis. An English as a Second language instructor assigned essays on sub-Saharan Africa in an intensive writing class.

In a preface, the faculty committee said its purpose was “to demonstrate that bringing a global perspective to the courses we teach need not thoroughly disrupt the structure, content, and methods we currently employ but, on the contrary, can be as simple as following the directions” in the handbook’s lesson plans.

BMCC administrators do not know for certain what impact the handbook has had on course content and pedagogical approaches. Belluscio said he knows it has resonated with colleagues in the English Department.

Bringing Salzburg to BMCC

But Dean for Academic Programs and Instruction Erwin J. Wong believes the push is rippling through the faculty, especially among those who participated in the Salzburg Global Seminar. One such veteran, assistant professor of history Alex D’Erizans, introduced a global history course in fall 2010. “It’s primarily a grassroots effort. Those initially touched by Salzburg have become the major spokespeople,” Wong said. BMCC, for financial reasons, was unable to send faculty to the Salzburg seminar in 2010.

In its stead Wong is looking at how to incorporate global themes in the faculty development programs that BMCC faculty attend in New York. “If you can’t go to Salzburg, maybe you can bring the idea of Salzburg to the college,” he said.

Students’ Stake in Education Abroad

BMCC offers students several education abroad opportunities, including faculty-led summer courses in Ghana, Italy, Spain, France, Costa Rica, and China. Only a few dozen students sign up and go abroad, and courses in some of these countries are only offered in alternate years. BMCC students can participate in a CUNY exchange with the University of Paris.

But every student at BMCC has a stake in education abroad. Back in the early 1980s, students, by referendum, approved earmarking a portion of their student activity fee to subsidize education abroad. Each year a small portion of the $43.85-per-semester student activity fee generates $93,000 in revenues for education abroad scholarships. Those scholarships defray roughly 60 percent of the cost of the BMCC education abroad programs; everyone who goes benefits from this. The students’ remaining costs are reduced further if they qualify for Study-Travel Opportunities for CUNY Students (STOCS) grants. Those scholarships range from $1,000 to $1,650 and are awarded by need and by the program’s benefit to students’ studies and career plans.

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Michael Giammarella, a professor in the Student Life Department who coordinates education abroad and leads students to Italy each summer, said five of the dozen students who studied in Italy in summer 2010 received a STOCS grant. Giammarella said the education abroad program at BMCC accomplishes a great deal with limited resources. The lure of the summer offerings is that these courses run from two to four weeks, Most students take classes full-time; the median age is 22. a length of time that “is manageable” even for students’ working full-time jobs, he added.

Dean Wong believes that if BMCC somehow could subsidize the full costs of education abroad, “my guess would be that you’d have thousands of students’ applying.”

Many Expanding Horizons

BMCC’s horizons are growing as are enrollments at all six of CUNY’s community colleges, which now account for 85,000 of the system’s quarter-million students. CUNY plans to open a seventh community college in 2012. BMCC has been squeezed for space almost since it opened in 1964 on two floors of a commercial building in midtown; temporary trailers that line the old West Side Drive attest to the cramped conditions inside the main Chambers Street building.

But that will change dramatically in 2012 when the BMCC opens the new, 14-story Fiterman Hall after a $325 million remodeling and reconstruction. It will give the college 50 percent more space and room to enroll more students, both New Yorkers and international students. Wong and faculty leaders are determined that international education will be a growing part of the college’s future, too.

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Borough of Manhattan Community College

Read more about Borough of Manhattan Community College

Few campuses provide a view more dramatic than the panorama of the Pacific Ocean, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the San Francisco skyline afforded by the hilltop, upper campus of the University of San Francisco. Students who come to this Jesuit university can expect to be pushed hard to venture into far less privileged precincts, as near as the streets downtown where San Francisco’s homeless dwell or as far as remote hamlets in Malawi and Guatemala. Sitting in his office atop the Lone Mountain campus, President Stephen Privett, S.J., said, “For us…the global perspective is the realization that about 70 percent of the world lives in dire poverty. I always tell the kids that one person in 100 has a college education, so they’re 1 percent of the world. The ethical question for higher education, whether Catholic, private, public, for profit, not for profit, is: What are you doing for the 99 percent?”

USF became San Francisco’s first college in 1855, when Italian Jesuits opened St. Ignatius Academy after the gold rush. They were following the example of Saint Ignatius Loyola, the sixteenth century founder of the Society of Jesus. In San Francisco the Jesuits educated generations of sons and, later, daughters of immigrants. That heritage endures although today the roster of names is more diverse: not only O’Briens and Giordanos, but Nguyens, Aquinos, and Yangs. After USF’s buildings were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire, classes were held in a drab building dubbed the Shirt Factory, but in 1927 it relocated to the verdant site near Golden Gate Park and expanded in 1978 by acquiring Lone Mountain College, a Catholic women’s school with Spanish Gothic architecture and those priceless views. Today USF enrolls 5,700 undergraduate and 3,500 graduate students in arts and sciences, business, law, nursing, and education. Nearly 10 percent are international students. Located in the city where the United Nations was born, USF set out a decade ago to become “internationally recognized as a premier Jesuit Catholic, urban university with a global perspective that educates leaders who will fashion a more humane and just world.”

USF, once a basketball power (the Dons won back-to-back NCAA basketball championships with Bill Russell and K.C. Jones in the 1950s), now wins recognition for its community service requirement. The 200,000-plus volunteer hours logged by 3,000 students each year has won laurels from the Corporation for National and Community Service.

International Studies the Second Largest Major

The university created an Office of International Student and Scholar Services seven years ago and later opened a Center for Global Education to encourage students to study abroad and pursue professional and service internships overseas. The international studies major launched four years ago quickly became the second largest field of study in the liberal arts. “Students are going crazy for this,” said Jennifer Turpin, the new provost and former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. The major combines courses from the humanities, social sciences, arts and sciences; education abroad is strongly encouraged but not required. With new hires, USF has added programs in African studies, Middle East studies, and Asian studies. Turpin, a sociologist who studied the role of Russian media in the disintegration of the Soviet Union, said, “Year after year, as I’ve introduced the new faculty, people say it looks like the United Nations is walking in.”

Seniors Emily Saeger and Erica Ernst are two of those drawn to international studies. Saeger, from Washington, D.C., spent a summer teaching in Nicaragua and a semester interning for a nonprofit in Quito, Ecuador, on protecting the Amazon rainforest. Saeger, who double majored in Latin American studies, concentrated in environmental development and is considering a career in that arena. When Saeger enrolled she “didn’t realize how strong the whole social justice mission was at this school and I definitely didn’t imagine myself taking so much out of that. I’m not Catholic or very religious at all. But the thing I like the most about being in a Jesuit university is that commitment to social justice…. It’s felt and seen throughout the classes.”

Ernst went on a two-week USF service trip to Uganda, and then spent a semester studying and working with schoolchildren in the Francophone West African nation of Burkina Faso. She and other students studied digital photography, and then used their skills to make books in French for children about how to use the village library.

“The international studies major launched four years ago quickly became the second largest field of study in the liberal arts. Students are going crazy for this.”

The trip had its trepidations. “After three and one-half months in Burkina Faso, most of us got parasites, and two got malaria. That’s just the reality of going somewhere like that,” said Ernst. Her mother, a nurse back home in Bellevue, Washington, told her, “Just take the medicine. You’ll be fine.” Ernst was homesick at first and overwhelmed by classes taught only in French, but when she went to work in a village it was “almost living in a dream. It was just so beautiful, in the middle of nowhere with the sky and the green grass going on forever.”

Lois Lorentzen, a professor of social ethics in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies and codirector of the Center for Latino Studies in the Americas, has led students on service trips to Cambodia and South Africa. “We don’t send students to super dangerous places; we do semi-dangerous ones,” she said. Recently the university canceled a trip to Tijuana, Mexico, because of drug violence along the border.

A Scholarship for Study in Developing Countries

Education abroad is growing at USF, but remains at modest levels. Some 432 students studied abroad for credit in 2008–09. Sharon Li, director of the three-person Center for Global Education, said students can choose from more than 50 USFsponsored programs that allow them to apply their financial aid toward the expenses. Still, for students who may be working two jobs to pay tuition, education abroad remains a reach. “We’re struggling with that,” said Turpin.

USF awards Pedro Claver Scholarships (named for a seventeenth century Jesuit saint who ministered to slaves in Cartagena, Colombia) covering half the cost of tuition for those who study in countries such as Zambia and Nicaragua where they will be engaged with the poor. “You can’t take it to Paris or Madrid or Rome or London,” said Privett.

Privett has joined students on service journeys to South Africa, India, and Uganda. He did refugee work in El Salvador and knew the six Jesuits at Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) murdered with their cook and her teenage daughter by the Salvadoran army during the 1989 civil war. He later headed a social justice institute at Santa Clara University, where he was provost before becoming USF president in 2000.

Exposing Deans and Students to Poverty

Privett has taken deans and trustees on retreats to El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Judith Karshmer, dean of the School of Nursing, said, “I’ve been on countless university presidential retreats and the topics have always been capital campaign, more students, how to integrate core curriculum. This presidential retreat was ‘Let’s go to the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere so we can understand our jobs at San Francisco from a global perspective.” They met with subsistence farmers and children living in a dump.

Professor of Nursing Linda Walsh takes students to Guatemala to deliver prenatal care in Mayan villages alongside “comadronas”—traditional midwives who are also priestess-like figures. The students visit homes to conduct prenatal exams and provide vitamins and antibiotics. They encourage the comadronas to change gloves and wash hands frequently, but also say they learn much from these unschooled midwives. “They put their hands on the woman’s belly and they can just feel if the head is up or down and where the baby’s back is,” said senior Juliet Huntington.

“We’re helping them bring some Western teaching strategies and international standards for nursing practice without harming the Eastern approach to healthcare, which combines mind, body, and spirit.”

“Back home in San Francisco you push a button on a machine and get a result, whereas in Guatemala you have to use your hands, your eyes, your senses, and your knowledge to get results,” said Molly Zeldner. “That’s the root of what nursing is; it’s not about machines.”

The School of Nursing also has forged a partnership with two nursing schools in Hanoi, Vietnam, and is hoping to launch a master’s degree program there. Vietnamese nurses are taught under the USF curriculum for five semesters in Hanoi, then finish the degree with a sixth semester in San Francisco.

“We’re helping them bring some Western teaching strategies and international standards for nursing practice without harming the Eastern approach to healthcare, which combines mind, body, and spirit,” said Greg Crow, a USF alumnus and adjunct professor who spearheads the Vietnam Nurse Project. Associate Professor Gregory A. DeBourgh has made numerous trips to Vietnam with Crow to advance the partnership.

International Experiences for Law, Architecture Students

The School of Law, which has a Center for Law and Global Justice, has been in the vanguard of USF internationalization efforts. Students do human rights work with professors such as Dolores Donovan in Cambodia, Haiti, and elsewhere.

Dean Jeffrey Brand is Jewish, but twice has given talks from the pulpit in St. Ignatius Church at graduation masses. “My mother would have been shocked,” he said, but the Jesuit values and mission “speak to things that I believe in and that legal education should be about: academic rigor and excellence…and service to the poor and marginalized.” Donovan, who is Catholic, said, “The school does act on the values that I was taught as a child…. It melds nicely with my own commitment to international social justice.”

Seth Wachtel, director of the Architecture and Community Design Program, teaches a senior design studio course that gives students opportunities to design and construct projects for impoverished communities locally and far afield. His students have built a library in Zambia and constructed a community center in Nicaragua. “All the projects have either a social justice foundation element to them, or environmental justice, or historical preservation” or all three, he said.

Looking Toward Asia

Mike Duffy, dean of the School of Business and Professional Studies, has positioned his school as a source of expertise for Chinese companies with U.S. operations. He’s considering creating a special bilingual MBA program that would combine instruction in English and Mandarin, taught by such faculty as Associate Professor Xiaohua Yang, a Shanghai native. The business school, which enrolls nearly a third of USF students, in 2009 launched a joint master’s degree program in Global Entrepreneurship Management with Jesuit universities in Barcelona and Taipei. The first multinational cohort of 32 students spent four months in classes in Spain, four months in Taiwan, and four months in California.

International enrollments at USF began climbing after the university opened a recruiting office in Bangkok, Thailand, in 2003. That office now is relocating to Beijing. “China has become our No. 1 sending country,” said Lisa Kosiewicz, director of the Office of International Student and Scholar Services. In 2006 there were 60 students from China. In 2009 there were 273.

Recipe for Jesuit Education

Another challenge for Jesuit universities is how to maintain their religious character as the number of Jesuits on the faculty dwindles. Privett says 15 Jesuits now work at USF, down from as many as 40 three decades ago. (Another dozen Jesuits live in the university’s Jesuit community, but work elsewhere). Privett is confident USF will lose neither its mission nor identity.

“There’ll be fewer Jesuits, but you do not need to be a Jesuit to deliver a Jesuit education. You do need the vision, the value, and the core insights,” he said. “I tell kids it’s like Mexican food. If you have the recipe and the right ingredients, you get the product.”

“It’s an exciting time and the future is even more exciting as we look at different possibilities to making USF a truly international institution,” said Vice Provost Gerardo Marin. “We want to educate students to change the world.”

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.

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

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

Coupling Study Abroad and Service

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

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

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

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

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

Roadblocks to Volunteering Overseas

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

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

Seeking More International Students

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

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

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

Learning Diversity in the Classroom

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

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

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

Teaching in Thailand

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

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

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

Success of Global Studies Major

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

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

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

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

Bursting the Loyola ‘Bubble’

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

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

Looking After the President in Bangkok

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

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

The Importance of Asia

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

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

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.”

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

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

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

“Like a Queen Walking on Air”

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

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

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

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

Absent From the Negotiating Table and From History

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

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

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

No Shortage of Candidates

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

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

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

Combination of Art and Science

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

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

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

A Need to Do More

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

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

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

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University of San Diego

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Kafka scholar John Grandin could see the writing on the wall midway through his four decade career as a professor of German at the University of Rhode Island (URI): enrollments in language classes were shrinking and so were positions on the faculty.  Their emphasis on literature assumed that most majors envisioned themselves becoming teachers to share their love of the language with the next generation. But “interest in German and some other languages was waning because of this one-sided assumption,” said Grandin. “We had to reach out to other disciplines to make language learning more relevant to a broader spectrum of students.”

Grandin looked across the Kingston campus to the College of Engineering where a new dean named Hermann Viets had arrived in 1987. “I thought, `Hermann with two n’s—he must have a German background,’” recalled Grandin. Indeed Viets did and soon the pair mustered support from the faculty and a grant from the federal Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) to launch the International Engineering Program (IEP), which would allow students to earn dual degrees in engineering and German in five years. An entire year would be spent studying and working in Germany. “Students went for it right away,” recalled Grandin, now director emeritus after 23 years as IEP director and four decades on the faculty.

Today a quarter of URI’s 1,100 engineers graduate with a bachelor of science in engineering and a bachelor of arts in German, Spanish, French or, starting this fall, Mandarin. 

In-State Tuition During Education Abroad

German is still the biggest draw. At least 80 eighty percent of URI’s 125 German majors are engineers. Grandin and Viets enhanced the program’s appeal by allowing all, even out-of-state students, to pay in-state tuition during the semester at a German university followed by  a six-month paid internship at a company in Germany. Some URI students may have begun language classes in high school, but others start from scratch as freshmen in Kingston. Regardless, by year four they are learning engineering and other difficult courses in German, Spanish, French, or Chinese. It works because the language faculty “understand that the students sitting in front of them in these classes are largely engineering or business students,” said Dean of Engineering Raymond Wright. “It never would have worked if you had three or four engineers sitting in a class filled with German, French, or Spanish majors there for the linguistic side of things.” URI offers such courses as German for Engineers, Spanish for Business, and Advanced Technical Chinese.

“It’s been a terrific partnership,” said Dean of Arts and Sciences Winifred Brownell. With twin degrees, “they are among the most marketable of the graduates we send out into the world.” Brownell said colleagues have jokingly called her and Wright “the odd couple” at national conferences where they have spread the gospel about URI’s marriage of humanities and engineering.

A Model for Other Universities

The IEP program continues to garner strong corporate, government, and foundation support. The National Science Foundation funds a partnership between URI and Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany that includes research, student exchanges, and dual master and doctoral degrees. Seventy-five URI and exchange students from several countries live in two former fraternities converted into language houses. 

Several universities, including Valparaiso University, University of Connecticut, Northern Arizona State University, and others, have built programs modeled in whole or in part after the IEP. But Grandin, who is writing a book examining how fluency in a second language has furthered the careers of IEP graduates, expressed disappointment that the IEP model has not spread farther among U.S. engineering schools. “Our doing it in Rhode Island is not enough,” he said. “I was invited many times to visit other campuses. Generally people will say, ‘This is a wonderful idea; we’ve got to do it, too.’ But then they don’t follow through.” He suspects the reasons for that are lingering resistance among language faculty and an attitude among “a whole lot of engineers who think the whole world speaks English.”

Hot Ticket in the Job Market

IEP graduates are a hot commodity in the job market, said Sigrid Berka, who succeeded Grandin as director in 2010. A survey of German IEP alumni found two-thirds working for companies that operate in the international arena. One in six is employed overseas. The roster of German companies that hire URI students includes BMW, Bayer, Siemens, Volkswagen, and ZF Friedrichshafen.. The fifth-year students regularly get offers from such U.S. giants as Boeing, Johnson & Johnson, General Electric, General Dynamics, and Sensata Technologies (formerly Texas Instruments).

The Chinese major was added partly in response to a growing demand from New England companies, such as Hasbro, Pratt & Whitney, and Sensata, that are eager to hire Mandarin-speaking engineers for their manufacturing sites in China who can navigate two cultures and engineering cultures, Berka said.

Matthew Zimmerman, a 2001 graduate in ocean engineering, French, and German, spent a semester at the Université d’Orléans in France, then worked for the software company SAP in Karlsruhe, Germany, for six months. He is cofounder and vice president of FarSounder, Inc., a Warwick, Rhode Island, company that makes 3-D sonar systems for ships. “We have customers worldwide so I use my intercultural communications skills daily,” Zimmerman said. “Shipyards and boat captains really appreciate being able to communicate with you in their native language.”

While studying in Braunschweig, Alex Reeb, a doctoral student in civil engineering at Virginia Tech, got to see the world’s longest rail tunnel being built under the Alps in the Gotthard Pass in Switzerland. He then worked for Züblin AG in Stuttgart, Germany, for six months and still managed to graduate six months early upon return to Rhode Island. “Even now at industry conferences, potential employers have been excited to hear about my time in Germany,” he said.

Sara Manteiga was raised speaking English and Spanish—her parents teach Spanish at URI—and decided to take French in high school and pursue dual degrees in chemical engineering and French. She studied at Université de Technologie de Compiègne in France, then researched the effect of carbon dioxide on ecosystems during an internship with the oil company TOTAL in the town of Pau in the Pyrenees. “My year abroad was hands down the best experience of my undergraduate career,” said Manteiga, a summa cum laude graduate now studying chemical and biomedical engineering at Tufts University. 

Sonia Gaitan, the daughter of parents from Colombia, combined chemical engineering and Spanish at URI and learned Portuguese as well. She studied in Spain for a semester, then did an internship in Sao Paulo, Brazil, with Johnson & Johnson, which hired her after graduation. Now a senior quality assurance engineer, Gaitan credits the IEP experience with helping her work effectively with people “from all parts of the world and all walks of life.” 

Grandin will be honored at the Modern Language Association’s 2012 meeting for his contributions to international education. “To me,” he said, “the IEP is still kind of a miracle.” Engineers are required to take only one course in foreign language and cross cultural competence (other URI undergraduates must take two semesters). Nevertheless, with only that modest requirement, “we’ve got 25 percent of (engineering) students not only taking language, but getting a degree in it.”

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University of Rhode Island

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Living space is at a premium in the middle of New York City, even in the dorms at Barnard College. But every spring there were empty beds in those residences when Barnard students headed abroad for a semester. Wouldn’t it be nice, administrators thought, if international students could be brought to campus for four months to fill those spaces? Traditional exchanges wouldn’t work. There was no shortage of universities with students eager to study in Manhattan, but there was no guarantee that the Barnard women would want to spend a semester at those particular universities. There was also the disparity in tuition—$20,000 a semester at Barnard and nothing for students in Europe and some other countries. 

Then longtime Provost Elizabeth S. Boylan and Hillary Link, associate provost and dean for international programs, thought of something: Why not invite partners in Women’s Education Worldwide, an international network of women’s colleges, to send a small number of students who could take all the courses they wanted but not have to pay full tuition since they would not receive credit from Barnard? They called this the Visiting International Student Program (VISP) and started small in spring 2008 with five students from the University of Copenhagen and the Collegio Nuovo of the University of Pavia in Italy. It worked so well that they took in 41 students the next year from those and other universities in China and South Korea. This year 59 young women from seven countries—Italy, Denmark, China, South Korea, Australia, Ghana, and South Africa—spent the spring on Morningside Heights. The Gilder Foundation paid the way for the students from Ghana and South Africa.

“It’s a program born in part out of relative poverty,” said Barnard President Debora L. Spar, whose institution’s $186 million endowment is the smallest (three to seven times smaller) of the elite women’s colleges once known as the Seven Sisters. “This program works beautifully because it enables us to internationalize the campus in a way that’s not particularly expensive for us or the students.” There are 150 other international students at Barnard enrolled for four-year degrees; they pay full tuition.

Spar is a political scientist who came to Barnard from Harvard Business School. In her 2008 inaugural address, she expressed a determination to expose Barnard students “to the complex realities of the global economy” and do their part to solve the educational inequality that women face in much of the world.

Liberal Arts Classes and a Cultural Immersion

The VISP students arrive in January, go through orientation, and dive right into their academic and cultural immersion in the Big Apple, including trips to Broadway shows and the Metropolitan Opera and tours of the United Nations and the Cloisters. They live in the dorms on Barnard’s compact four-acre campus, across Broadway from Columbia University (Columbia, once all-male, is coed. Barnard and Columbia students attend classes interchangeably). The activities outside the classroom play an important role in helping the visiting students fit into campus life. “Our students struggle with the same things when they go abroad. Inevitably they say the hardest thing is to make friends with the local students,” said Link. 

Alberta Spreafico, among the five original VISP students, had no trouble finding her place at Barnard. Born in Milan and raised in England and Italy, Spreafico was so taken with Barnard and Columbia that she returned the next year to complete work on a master’s degree from the University of Pavia. She interned at the United Nations and is now working at Henry Ford Health Systems in Detroit on a telemedicine project to improve health care in poor countries. Barnard was “wonderful,” said Spreafico. “I was just thrilled by the liberal arts education and the broadness of the opportunities presented.”

Sunny Nam, 20, an English and political science major from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea, who studied at Barnard in spring 2011, said, “The semester in New York City was like a dream for me.” She learned “to set priorities that fit me, not by other people’s standards or the society’s standards. This has changed a lot of my education goals, and more broadly, my identity.” Barnard, Ewha, and the Collegio Nuovo all belong to the Women’s Education Worldwide, an organization that brings together presidents and deans from women’s colleges around the world to advocate for the education of women.

Professor of Economics Rajiv Sethi advised five VISP students and went to see Phantom of the  Opera with a dozen of them. Asked if one semester was sufficient for the visiting students to make their presence felt, Sethi replied, “In some respects the one-semester model is even better…. We get a much larger number of students’ cycling through the program than we would if they came for four years each. This results in contact with many more individuals, and a more rapid spread of information about us globally.”

Global Symposia on Women’s Issues

Indeed, raising Barnard’s international profile and attracting more applicants from other countries is an expressed goal. Spar is pursuing those ends on another front with an annual Global Symposium on women’s issues that she launched in Beijing, China, in 2009 and subsequently has staged in Dubai and Johannesburg, South Africa. The fourth will take place in Mumbai, India, in March 2012.

The first symposium came about fortuitously. Spar had been invited to participate on a panel at the opening of Columbia’s global center in Beijing. By coincidence, several Chinese-American applicants had mentioned in their essays Barnard’s first Asian student, Kang Tongbi of the Class of 1909, who returned to China and worked for women’s suffrage and against the practice of foot binding. Spar and Link put together the “Kang Tongbi Commemorative Symposium: Women Changing China” featuring a novelist, television host, filmmaker, and women’s rights advocate. It drew a full house of 175 alumnae, educators, and business leaders. “We launched that symposium on a prayer and a shoestring. Something just clicked. We realized that whereas in the United States you can go to dozens of conferences every day on (women’s issues)… they are much fewer and farther in between” in developing countries, Spar said. “In creating these forums we’ve carved out a space that’s kind of empty right now.”

The “Women in the Arab World Global Symposium” in Dubai in 2010 drew 300 people, and the 2011 symposium on “Women Changing Africa” drew nearly 400 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Spar took a half-dozen Barnard students and two faculty with her. The students held a workshop for girls at the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg on leadership and self-esteem. Spar hopes to bring even more students and faculty to India in March 2012. 

A Spurt in International Applications

One bonus of VISP and the symposia is that Barnard is seeing more applications from these countries, as well as more interest on the part of Barnard students in studying at the universities where they now have friends.

Spar, addressing the “Women Changing Africa” symposium, said her career switch from the predominantly male Harvard Business School to a college “totally dominated by women” has given her a new perspective on gender differences.

It is “not that women are better or that women necessarily make better leaders, but I think women lead differently than men,” Spar said. Barnard now is trying to “take what we were learning about women’s leadership and education and push it outside the gates of New York City and embrace the rest of the world.”

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Barnard College

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

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

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

Seeking an Edge in Global Talent Competition

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

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

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

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

An Ethos of Education Abroad

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

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

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

Wanted: More International Undergraduates

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turning Students Into ‘Inspired’ Jazz Musicians in Europe

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

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

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

What China Wants From Washington Square

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

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

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