Only nine community colleges across the United States enroll more international students than the 1,500 at Green River Community College, and those others are all much larger and in bigger places than Auburn, Washington, a suburb 20 miles south of Seattle. Green River enrolls 8,000 students on a wooded, hilltop campus and two branch campuses. This happened neither by accident nor overnight.

The story of how all these international students got there is a tale that starts a quarter century ago when the board of trustees approved then-President Rich Rutkowski’s plan to create an international programs division under the guiding hand of then-dean of students Mike McIntyre. “World peace through education was always part of my philosophy,” said McIntyre, now retired as executive vice president for instruction and student affairs. Rutkowski, a pragmatic former business manager, saw early on how internationalizing and “looking outward’ could redound to the benefit of the college and a community with a surging immigrant population and where many owe their livelihoods to exports. 

Their first big step was striking a deal to open a small campus in Kanuma, Japan, in 1990 bankrolled by a Japanese politician and magnate who had earlier built a branch for Edmonds Community College campus in Kobe. The arrangement with Green River fell apart in less than a year—Edmonds would close shop seven years later amid a financial scandal—but “it was a launch pad” for Green River’s international activities, said Rutkowski, who retired in 2010 after 27 years.

“The freedom in the early days was unbelievable. Anything was possible,” said McIntyre, who still keeps a hand in cultivating Green River’s international partnerships. Despite the branch’s brief existence, Green River’s name now was known in Japan— classes had been heavily advertised in the Tokyo Metro—and students began journeying to Green River for intensive English classes. When former ESL head and then-executive director of international programs Ross Jennings asked for $10,000 for an exploratory, three-month solo trip to China, McIntyre and Rutkowski said yes. Jennings, now vice president, made fast inroads, convincing dubious U.S. consular officers it wasn’t risky to issue visas for Chinese students to enroll in community colleges. McIntyre said, “We more or less opened China up for community colleges.”

A Running Start

Fast forward 15 years and today 559 of Green River’s 1,500 international students are from China, including teens as young as 16 finishing high school and working on an associate degree at the same time. They enter through a Washington State-authorized program that allows 11th and 12th graders—local or international—to earn both a high school diploma and a college degree. This has not been without controversy. Some faculty are at odds with President 

Eileen Ely over the youngest international students’ maturity, English skills, and readiness for college work. But college officials say the young students who advance out of ESL are earning the same stellar grades—3.5 GPA on average—as older international students. The top sending countries after China are Vietnam, South Korea, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan.

A track record of success in student transfers to universities and extensive support services are the principal reasons Green River draws international students in droves, college leaders said. Arrayed on pegs around the wall of Jennings’ office in the McIntyre International Village (four gray, one-story buildings including ESL classrooms) are colorful baseball hats from dozens of those schools, including Indiana University, University of Washington, University of California-Berkeley, Cornell, and Ohio State.

Home Stays and On-Campus Housing

The college issued bonds in 2003 and partnered with a private developer to build its first student apartments, something most community colleges lack. It is a strong selling point for parents nervous about sending their teens to a distant country. Some 340 local and international students dwell in the 87-unit Campus Corner Apartments, which has a lounge and other amenities but no cafeteria. Many others live with 400-plus host families, while some rent and share apartments and houses on their own.

For $650 a month, the host families provide meals and a room of the student’s own and drive them to campus if there is no bus route. Cyndi Rapier, director of international housing, tells townspeople that “if you’re doing it for the money, don’t do it. You have to value the international experience and value opening your home to these students.” The vast majority do. Deb Casey, vice president of student services, said the students she has hosted from France, Denmark, Egypt, and Afghanistan “have been amazing. It’s been a great experience for my daughter.” Rapier said some students she hosted came back to attend her sons’ weddings.

A Program Within a Program

A staff of more than 50 (including 30 full-time) works with international students. “We’ve become a destination point because of the way we treat our students,” said Ely. “We don’t have the sunshineall-the-time that California has, but we can almost guarantee that a student can get into a four-year institution.” Ely, a Seattle area native who previously headed a Nebraska college, added, “We get accused of handholding the student too much, but I don’t think you can handhold enough.”

Green River, like all 1,600 U.S. community colleges, is an open access institution that offers career and technical courses as well as academic classes. About half its students are on the college transfer track to which most international students aspire, and half of all first-time, full-time freshmen graduate or transfer within three years. Jennings said international students transfer at much higher rates. “What we’ve been able to do is create a program within a program. Our job is to put them on a transfer track and make sure we monitor that every step of the way.” He said 10 percent of students wash out during intensive English, but most transfer.

“I felt like something was missing. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone.”

“We’re not unmindful of the fact that they don’t really come to Green River to come to us. They come to get into USC, Washington, Indiana” and other universities, he added. 

Strong Returns on International Education

The main campus is literally in the woods a few miles from restaurants and shops in downtown Auburn, which can be a shock for students from metropolises with millions of people. Green River is considering adding student housing to a branch it has opened in nearby Kent in the middle of an “urban village” teeming with shops and restaurants and on a commuter rail stop. It already offers ESL classes there.

Green River’s investment in Kent has been made possible by the large returns the college has generated from its investments in educating international students. Vice President for Business Affairs Rick Brumfield said that since 1988 the Office of International Programs has generated more than $109 million in gross revenues that netted the college more than $53 million.

That money “has allowed Green River to maintain and expand classes, programming, services, and capital projects that support all students who study at Green River,” he said. “This has been particularly critical during difficult economic times and with the decline in state funding of public higher education.”

Teaching Service and Activism

The international students who come to Green River get not only grades on their transcripts but notations of how much community service they performed. Martha Koch, manager of international student activities, said there is never any shortage of volunteers for projects her office organizes. “They’re at the food bank, they’re planting trees, they might be removing invasive blackberries or helping at the Seattle marathon,” said Koch, jokingly adding, “We could be breaking rocks and they’re like, ‘Yeah! Let’s do it.’” She encourages students to keep a portfolio and show their service certificates to universities when they apply for admission and scholarships.

Yu Sato arrived from Tokyo in 2010 at age 18 for intensive English classes. At first she stuck to her studies and hung out with friends, but “I felt like something was missing. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone.” She threw herself into activities and wound up as vice president of student government. The diminutive Sato, who wants to become a research veterinarian, also got a Chihuahua that she carried everywhere, à la Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde. Now the 4.0 student is carting it around her new school, the University of California, Berkeley.

Koen Valks, 19, of Amsterdam, Netherlands, arrived at age 17 to do a gap year on a Fulbright-arranged program before starting at a Dutch university, but stayed for a second year and now has transferred to American University as an international relations major. He was one of Green River’s five “international student ambassadors.”

The son of a former diplomat, Valks aspires to follow in his father’s footsteps. He expressed gratitude to Green River for teaching him how to work with people from many different countries and cultures, a skill “I’m going to use the rest of my life.”

An aspiring electrical engineer, Ugo Nwachuku, 19, of Lagos, Nigeria, also came to Green River at 17. “I don’t think I would have had the right attitude and mental state to carry on and be a good student if I’d gone straight to university,” said Nwachuku, who won a scholarship to Drexel University. This “prepares you for a whole lot of situations in life.”

Studying in Japan and Australia

Education abroad is a tough sell at Green River, as it is at most community colleges due principally to financial reasons, but programs to Japan, Australia, and New Zealand are popular. Sixty-four students studied abroad in 2011–2012. Gary Oliveira, who teaches photography, led Green River’s own 10-week study program in Japan four times. “Many do it on financial aid and loans. A lot don’t get help from their parents,” said Oliveira. “I’ve had students who brought a lunch on every field trip and did whatever they could to cut costs.” 

Among the most popular and longest running is the 10-week education abroad program that history Professor Bruce Haulman, now emeritus, has led to Australia and New Zealand each winter since 2001. It draws 30 students, including some from other Washington community colleges. Haulman had to turn students away from a popular London program in the 1990s. He applauded the support he got from college leaders. “It’s an entrepreneurial model. If you want to do something and it’s not going to have a negative financial impact, why not try?” Haulman said.

Development Works Open a New Chapter

As vice president of international programs and extended learning, Edith Bannister, newly retired, cultivated partnerships with schools in Denmark, France, Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan, China, Finland, and Iceland.

Her spouse, Barry Bannister, director of international development, has opened a new international chapter for Green River by undertaking projects for the U.S. State Department. The Australian educator and management consultant has worked on international education projects across Asia and the Middle East for the World Bank and other clients.

Since 2007 Green River has won $1.5 million in U.S. State Department grants to host students from developing countries each summer. Green River is the only community college among four institutions offering the Study of the United States Institutes for Student Leaders (SUSI) program on women’s leadership. Female students from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan took classes in summer July 2013, and in the past students have come from the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India to study communications, human rights, the U.S. Constitution, and gender. Edith Bannister, who directs the project, said, “It’s helped internationalize the faculty.” 

“World history professor Michelle Marshman called it “an absolute gift” to have these students in her classes.”

World history professor Michelle Marshman called it “an absolute gift” to have these students in her classes. Barry Bannister, Marshman and sociology instructor Louise Hull led a workshop in Delhi, India, in December 2012 for 40 past SUSI participants. Marshman stays in touch with them by e-mail and Facebook and got firsthand accounts on the Arab Spring from students in Egypt. “Learning is a twoway street,” she said.

Green River, located in a valley that is a hub of the aviation industry, has provided classroom training for future pilots and air traffic controllers in partnership with institutions in China and Japan.

Soon after veterinary pathologist Tony Frank became vice president for research at Colorado State University in 2000, he was asked by the then-president to accompany him to South  Korea. “I wasn’t horribly enthused,” recalled Frank. “I’d been very focused on my own lab and had almost no connections to international activity. I really didn’t see what value I was going to add or how it was going to have a big impact.” But Frank returned from Seoul “an absolute convert,” won over to the idea that forging strategic partnerships with universities overseas could expand Colorado State’s reach and pay large dividends for its scholars, researchers, and students. “To be honest, I spent a lot of time kicking myself after that for having missed as many opportunities as I had over the years,” said Frank, who went on to become provost and, in 2008, president. He now has logged 12 international trips. 

The land-grant institution, established in 1870 when Colorado was still a territory, is working hard not to miss opportunities these days. It has close partnerships with 17 universities in 11 countries including a new Joint Research Institute with East China Normal University (ECNU) in Shanghai and a robust dual-degree program with the Foreign Trade University in Hanoi, Vietnam. It has stepped up recruitment of international students to the picturesque Fort Collins campus in the foothills of the Rockies. In 2008–2009 there were fewer than 900 international students. Today there are more than 1,650, including a recent influx of more than 400 in its new intensive English and academic preparatory program called INTO Colorado State University. 

CSU is following a script laid out in a 2007 internationalization strategy. Leaders speak of “building the brand” and improving lives “throughout Colorado and the world.” Tom Milligan, vice president for external relations, who spearheads the branding push, said, “Being a global institution is part of how we want to think and talk about ourselves and position ourselves. We’re different from other medium-to-large-size public institutions. The things that we’re good at, like water, biomedicine, and veterinary medicine, we’re as good as anybody in the world.”

Links Around the World

Vice Provost for International Affairs James Cooney said, “The heart of our internationalization strategy from the beginning has been to link specifically to institutions around the world, get our faculty involved with those institutions, and develop joint research.” The hiring of Cooney in 2007 to a new position with elevated stature was also part of that strategy. The political scientist was lured to Fort Collins from Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

One aspect of Colorado State’s story is familiar to public universities almost everywhere: steep state budget cuts, amounting to $36 million or 28 percent over three years before a $6 million bump up this year. Only federal stimulus funds spared Colorado’s universities steeper cuts. The National Science Foundation ranked Colorado last among research universities in state funding per student. Colorado State relies on state money for less than 10 percent of its $911 million budget. It conducted $376 million in research in 2012. 

"President Tony Frank came late to international work but now pursues it with a convert’s passion."

The $220,000 that Cooney’s office had been given to expand education abroad, strategic partnerships, and other activities was shaved by $40,000. But its budget and staff kept growing thanks to $330,000 in added revenues from the spurt in international enrollments and new partnerships in China and elsewhere. “We feel we have one of the best models for working with China,” said the vice provost. China pays for up to 30 faculty to travel to China for research collaborations and steers talented students from a dozen high schools to CSU. Colorado State, for its part, gives each an $8,000 scholarship. It opened a five-person recruiting office at East China Normal University and recently cut the ribbon on a Confucius Institute specializing in water issues. 

A New Pathway “Into” the University

Colorado State is one of four U.S. universities partnering with INTO, a for-profit British company that forms partnerships with universities in the United States, United Kingdom, and China to recruit students and place them in intensive English and “academic pathways” classes with extensive support that lead to regular undergraduate and graduate studies. Provost Rick Miranda said, “We’d like to have more students come from South America, from Europe, from Malaysia and Indonesia. We don’t want to skew things too much toward China.” INTO has moved into renovated Spruce Hall, CSU’s oldest building. Many students live with domestic students interested in world affairs on a floor of a dorm designated the Global Village.

Haotian “Stewart” Wu, a senior business administration major from Hefei, China, is a live-in mentor there. He transferred to CSU as a junior from Anhui Agricultural University on a 2+2 program. He spent summer 2012 as a paid INTO “ambassador” traveling around China marketing CSU at education abroad fairs. The outgoing Wu has friends on the football team and attends games. Football “is pretty boring, but actually I learn a lot” about U.S. culture, said Wu.

The Office of International Programs teams with the athletics and alumni offices to offer a “Football 101” class where international students learn the rules, try on helmets and shoulder pads, tailgate, and attend a game. “They get a real kick out of it,” said Mark Hallett, senior director of International Student and Scholar Services. As many as 200 turn out and “scream with excitement” at kickoff. 

Grooming Gilman and Fulbright Scholars

Colorado State has also stepped up its education abroad offerings and, by raising funds from colleges, departments, donors, and providers, tripled scholarships to $150,000. Director of Education Abroad Laura Thornes said more than 800 students took classes for credit, and 500 took part in noncredit experiences in 2012–2013. Most went to Western Europe, but 115 studied or worked in China and Japan, 25 went to Kenya, and 17 to South Africa. One in six students has studied abroad by graduation. “If we could get to 25 percent, that would be our ideal,” said Thornes.

A push to encourage Colorado State students to apply for Benjamin Gilman International Scholarships paid immediate dividends. Two dozen won Gilmans in 2012 and 2013, more than the previous four years combined. The awards of up to $5,000 go to students who receive need-based Pell Grants. “We worked with all the diversity offices on campus to make them more aware of the Gilman,” said Thornes. Faculty and staff volunteers read and critiqued students’ essays. Accounting major Sabiha Dubose said her Gilman to study in Antibes, France, was “truly a blessing.”

“We worked with all the diversity offices on campus to make them more aware of the Gilman.”

A similar push is underway for Fulbrights. Karen Gardenier, the Office of International Programs’ assistant director for academic programs, works with representatives from each of CSU’s eight colleges. Fewer than a dozen students applied in past years and only a handful won. “We’re hoping to get those numbers up and create more of a culture on campus for Fulbright,” said Gardenier. That effort includes small stipends for faculty to handpick and groom prospects. CSU also increased incoming Fulbrighters in the past five years from five to 35 annually.

International and Arabic studies major Brooke Lake is spending six months in Morocco and Jordan improving her Arabic before graduation. Lake, who volunteers as a cultural mentor to international students, did charity work in Egypt over an earlier summer, which “kick started my passion for the Middle East.” This all took her family by surprise. “They had no idea who their daughter was. My mom was like, ‘Who are you?’” recalled Lake, but now “she loves it.”

Making Music Together

There is a musical quality to CSU’s partnership with East China Normal University. After President Frank heard a concert in Shanghai, he set in motion a collaboration between the two universities’ musicians. East China’s opera director Cao Jin and Todd Queen, chair of music, theater, and dance, quickly “hit it off,” said Queen, a tenor who sang and taught master classes at the Shanghai institution. Twenty-five ECNU students and faculty came to Fort Collins in 2010 and with CSU’s orchestra and choir they performed Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, with its “Ode to Joy,” a universal anthem for freedom. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” said Queen.

Mezzo-soprano Carol Perry sang in Shanghai in 2011. The experience was invaluable, she told a college publication. “In the performance world, we have to adapt to other cultures quickly. Not every production or rehearsal will be in your language. You need to be present in the culture you’re in,” she said. Most recently, Chinese and Colorado State students performed The Yellow River Cantata in CSU’s concert hall.

It is not the arts alone bringing CSU and ECNU together. They created a Joint Research Institute for New Energy and the Environment in 2011, with each committing to spend $300,000 annually for three years on the search for clean alternatives to fossil fuels. Wei Gao, a professor of ecosystem science and sustainability who directs the CSU China Programs office and Confucius Institute, also leads this research institute, which works on land, water, air quality, and climate issues.

Playing Pachelbel and Parsing P&G Financials

Since 2008, 32 economics and business faculty have taught compressed, four-week courses at Foreign Trade University (FTU) in Hanoi, Vietnam, which is “trying to reform its curriculum to mimic ours,” said economics professor Robert Kling. “It has really contributed to the internationalization of our faculty and had the unanticipated effect of giving our department more of a sense of community.” Vietnam’s education ministry pays CSU $23,000 for each course taught.

Thirty Vietnamese students spend their senior year at CSU and earn dual degrees. One is Phong Nguyen, who could be found one afternoon in a theater lobby of Lory Student Center playing Pachelbel’s Canon in D on a grand piano. The dual-degree program “is considered the best in our university,” Nguyen said. Classes at CSU were “more practical and down to earth,” added Nguyen, who liked working in teams to analyze a Dell bond issue and a Procter & Gamble financial report. “We’re learning from each other and from doing the projects.”

FTU is a CSU strategic partner. Many of those partnerships have been forged in rapid succession since 2008. Chad Hoseth, director of international initiatives, said CSU is now assessing all 17 and considering changes. “This is a list that evolves to meet the needs of our faculty and students,” he said.

Protecting Tigers and People

Protecting natural resources is a passion at Colorado State and much of that work is conducted on an international scale. Nearly 90 Indian Forestry Service officers have trained at CSU. Social psychologist Michael Manfredo heads the Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources, which deals with finding ways for people to enjoy nature without trampling on it. Managing wildlife and natural resources “is 10 percent biology and 90 percent managing people,” said Manfredo, just back from working on an effort to reduce tiger-human conflicts in Dehadrun, India.

The department also offers a Conservation Leadership Through Learning master’s degree that involves a year of classes in Fort Collins and a second year of field work in Mexico. Seven of the first 21 students were international, and the program is expanding to Peru, New Zealand, and Kenya. In the field, Manfredo said, “everybody is a learner. The professors are learning new ways of thinking (just) as the students are.”

Manfredo said the elevated stature of the Office of International Programs helped get that program off the ground. “It sure makes it easier when you’ve got someone appreciative and supportive of what you’re doing,” he said.

Prairie Populism Writ Large

Robin Reid, director of the Center for Collaborative Conservation in the Warner College of Natural Resources, spent 20 years in East Africa conducting livestock research. Support from the top at CSU, she said, “is sparking connections all over the place. It’s causing this cross-campus set of energy and activities that is good for (everybody).” Research ecologist Paul Evangelista, who has worked in Ethiopia for 14 years, said CSU has long fostered his interdisciplinary work. 

Hoseth, the international initiatives director, said, “Our genetics are collaborative.” Case in point: when the College of Business hired its own study abroad coordinator, they placed her in Laurel Hall with the rest of the international program staff.

Hallett, the ISSS director, said, “There’s a bit of the prairie populist about this campus. It’s a land grant, outward-focused (institution) with a lot of idealism,” and now it’s doing extension work writ large on the international stage. 

The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) runs the country’s second largest study abroad operation, sending 2,800 students a year off to earn credits in other countries. It has found that those who study abroad are more likely to graduate. But it bumps up against the same barrier that confronts other institutions, large and small: students are more likely to study abroad if their families have the means to help them afford it. Eighteen percent of all UT Austin undergraduates study abroad, but only 8 percent of those are the first generation in their family to attend college.

To close that gap, the study abroad office launched a First Abroad Initiative in 2010 that has since changed its whole approach to convincing newcomers to college to include overseas study in their plans and helping them afford it. It began by creating a $4,000 study abroad scholarship that is promised to a select group of stellar first-generation students while they are still weighing admission offers to UT Austin. The prospective students are told the Hutchison International Scholarship will be there for them to use any time over the next four years.

The initiative provides more than money. Working with academic support programs, academic advisers, and colleges across the 52,000-student campus, the study abroad program also arranges close mentoring of the Hutchison students that starts even before they matriculate. Some 65 high school seniors are offered the $4,000 scholarships each year; about half accept the admissions offer and become eligible to use the money.

That was only phase one. The next step came in 2011 when UT Austin Study Abroad began awarding $3,000 First Abroad scholarships to another group of first-generation freshmen and sophomores interested in education abroad. Those awards, too, come with mentoring and other support, and the students are given two years to put them to use. Students cannot receive both a Hutchison and First Abroad award, but they are eligible for other scholarships, including $2,000 from the Coca Cola Foundation if they study in China.

Overall, as of January 2014, 248 students had received Hutchison or First Abroad awards and 48 had already used them, but many still have time. Two-thirds of the first cohort of Hutchison scholars and 80 percent of the initial group of First Abroad winners wound up studying abroad. And there’s evidence these first-generation students are persisting in college at higher than average rates.

Convincing Students Before They Can Say No

The scholarships and the mentoring are intended to get these first-generation students thinking early about education abroad and help them choose courses and chart an academic path that will allow them to graduate on time. The early planning also allows students to marshal additional resources and, in some cases, convince skeptical families that education abroad is affordable and makes sense for their daughter or son. The students receive “the most in-depth support we have ever given,” said Margaret Storm McCullers, the coordinator of curriculum integration and special projects.

Putting money on the table was paramount to opening first-generation students’ minds to study abroad. “We had this idea that if money was the thing stopping students from talking with us, then the scholarship was a way to get them to talk before they could say no,” said Heather Barclay Hamir, former director of study abroad. “It really has been a complete overhaul in our thinking.”

These new scholarships were funded largely by a spurt of revenue from an endowment. The College of Liberal Arts and McCombs School of Business added scholarships of their own for first-generation students. The initiative made an extra $220,000 a year available on top of other scholarships for study abroad. All told, UT Austin awarded nearly $1 million for education abroad in 2012–2013.

The infusion of extra scholarship money from endowment funds will be spent by 2017. After that, the International Office expects to have at least $130,000 a year and it is raising funds to supplement that. The goal is to keep awarding 50 to 65 Hutchison and First Abroad scholarships a year.

Lessons Outside the Classroom

Ngan Nguyen, 22, a senior from Houston, “always thought it would be too expensive to study abroad.” But when the nutritional sciences major got an e-mail about the First Abroad scholarship, she changed her mind and signed up for a semester at Seoul National University in South Korea. Nguyen, whose family emigrated from Vietnam when she was a toddler, had been a fan of Korean television dramas since high school and studied the language in college.

In Seoul Nguyen took classes taught in English with Korean and other international students. Apart from the course content, the aspiring pharmacist said she learned a valuable lesson in “how to balance my schedule with working hard in school and then also going out and exploring the country,” including skiing and singing karaoke. “I came back thinking I should keep that (balance) up and this semester I got my first ever 4.0.”

Senior Lorena Watson, 22, became a study abroad peer adviser after returning from a faculty-led program in Santander, Spain. She remembers in high school pitching all the study abroad brochures colleges sent with recruitment letters. “I really didn’t know what study abroad was” before the offer of a Hutchison scholarship came in the mail. “My thing was, ‘Well, if I’m going to this school, why would I want to leave and go somewhere else?’ I didn’t grasp the value of it until I was awarded the scholarship.”

Watson, an education major from Dallas, learned to “be completely myself … and to slow down” while living with a host family that summer in Santander. “My host mother said, ‘You’re so young and pretty and intelligent, you should just enjoy life.’ It’s not the thing we hear in America. What we hear is … to use those attributes until you make it to the top.”

Convergence of Diversity and International Interests

The First Abroad Initiative fostered or deepened partnerships between study abroad and other academic and support offices on campus, especially the Longhorn Center for Academic Excellence, part of the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement. One of the fruits of that partnership was a four-week course in May 2013 in Beijing on social entrepreneurship led by Longhorn’s Leonard Moore and Ge Chen. Three-quarters of the 38 students who went were African American, Asian American, or Hispanic and nearly threefifths were first generation.

“Our interests converged,” said Moore, an associate vice president and history professor who teaches a popular course on the Black Power movement. “While we were thinking of ways to help black and Latino kids become competitive globally, the study abroad office was working on these access programs to diversify their programs.” More than half the class received Coca-Cola Foundation scholarships. “We had remarkable support,” said Moore.

This spring, without the lure of extra scholarship money from Coca-Cola Foundation, Moore and Longhorn Center colleague Darren Kelly took 43 students to Cape Town to learn about urban economic development in South Africa and work with children in poor townships. Moore said Beijing and Cape Town were chosen over more traditional destinations to give first-generation students “a truly transformative experience” and “a competitive advantage over their peers.” He’ll take another class to Beijing in May 2015.

Joshua Rosales, a sophomore accounting major from San Antonio, blogged, “I always thought that I had it rough while struggling with school and finding a way to afford it,” but after this experience I realized “how privileged I am compared to the rest of the world.”

“We’ve learned a lot about working with very high-need students,” said Barclay Hamir, who recently became Boston University’s executive director of study abroad. “If money is their biggest worry, this gives us enough time to figure out how they can stay on track academically, do something that captures their interest, and make it work financially.”

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University of Texas at Austin

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

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

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

Diving Deeper Into Partnerships

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

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

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

Continuing the Dialogue on Social Media

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

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

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

A Work in Progress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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George Mason University

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Hundreds of U.S. cities have sister places around the world, with their interchanges usually centering on trade, tourism, and education. The custom took hold after U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower convened a White House conference in 1956 to promote citizen diplomacy. The partnership between Albion, Michigan, a small town in the middle of Michigan, and Noisy-le-Roi, a similar sized community not far from Versailles, France, fit that mold. It began in the late 1990s and was built on the personal connection between an Albion businesswoman who had once lived in the Paris suburb and a Frenchman who’d been a high school exchange student in Michigan. The partnership, called a jumelage in French, flourished, with the customary visits by civic delegations, youths, and senior citizens, with home stays, concerts, and sports competitions. The mayor of Noisy-le-Roi became a regular at Albion’s annual Festival of the Forks, a community celebration alongside the Kalamazoo River. Faculty and staff from Albion College took part on their own, and French professor Dianne Guenin-Lelle began taking freshmen to the suburb on class trips to Paris.

When the college got new leadership in 2008, it set about turning the bilateral relationship into a tripartite one. Today Albion College has a joint program in sustainability studies with the Université de Versailles at Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ) and its students work with counterparts from two French business schools on projects that include reciprocal visits. Several UVSQ students attend classes and serve as teaching assistants at Albion, and Albion education majors practice teach in the middle school in Noisy-le-Roi.

Provost Susan Conner, whose field is eighteenth and nineteenth century French history, believes this is a model for internationalization that other small colleges might want to follow. “A lot of our success has been through personal relationships that came through the sister city partnership,” she said. That’s something that happens all the time “in a small community at a small college where people see each other, talk with each other, and build programs together.”

From the City of Lights to the American Heartland

Noisy-le-Roi (literally “the King’s Walnut Grove”) and neighboring Bailly (a later addition to the jumelage) are 15 miles from the Eiffel Tower and one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. Albion, out in the Michigan woods 95 miles from Detroit, holds its own attraction for the visitors from France. “For them this is very exotic. This is part of l’Amerique profonde, the heartland of America. It is absolutely a place of wonder, the green space, the natural beauty, the way people are very friendly,” said Guenin-Lelle.

Albion, after a sharp enrollment drop during the economic downturn, enrolls 1,300 students and sends 50 to 60 on education abroad programs each year. It has relationships with more than a dozen universities overseas, some through the Great Lakes College Association, but nothing before like the ambitious partnership with UVSQ, a two-decade-old public university with 19,000 students. It was Noisy Mayor Michel Colin, a retired international businessman, who opened that door.

“He and his wife were staying with us and we were talking in the kitchen about all sorts of things. He knew about our sustainability studies program and said, ‘When you come I’ll introduce you to the president of the University of Versailles because they have a sustainability program, too,’” recalled Conner.

Meeting on the Common Ground of Sustainability

Despite huge differences in size and mission, the two institutions found a congruity between Albion’s Center for Sustainability and the Environment and UVSQ’s master’s degree program and research on développement durable. The joint program includes team-taught international courses, video or online guest lectures, co-op and field research, and study abroad opportunities. Albion elevated sustainability studies in 2013 to a stand-alone major. Albion students now can receive a UVSQ certificate along with their college degree and, if they wish, cross the ocean to earn a UVSQ master’s degree in half the time.

Sara Sample was among the first two sustainability majors. She was a natural fit to study at USVQ since she is also double majoring in French. “I was kind of the guinea pig for the program,” said the 21-year-old junior from Sterling Heights, Michigan, who spent fall 2013 at UVSQ’s Rambouillet campus. Sample, who manages the Albion student farm, took a week of classes at the Bergerie Nationale, a historic sheepfold created in 1784 by King Louis XVI and now the university’s experimental farm. “It was really cool,” said Sample, who wants to return to France after college to teach or pursue research.

While the USVQ sustainability classes are supposed to be taught in English, some professors reverted to French since they knew how well Sample could handle the language. The only culture shock she experienced was when she returned home. “It was a bit difficult not to be able to say, ‘Oh, I can go to Paris right now. It will only take a half-hour by train,’” she allowed.

A Dearth of French Speakers

While Albion welcomes up to five exchange students from UVSQ each year, only two so far have spent a semester at UVSQ and Debra Peterson, director of the Center for International Education, said, “It will be challenging to find students who have the level of French to make it there.” The students from Albion’s Gerstacker Institute for Business and Management do their projects with students from the École Supérieure de Vente (SdV) in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in English. Caitlin McClorey, 21, a junior and captain of the volleyball team, skipped games against two rivals to make the trip to SdV for a week last fall. Her coach was understanding and McClorey called it “one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.” Seven SdV students paid a return visit in April and got to make a presentation on their project, marketing and designing a fitness device, at Albion’s annual undergraduate research symposium.

Albion sent students to practice teach in Costa Rica for the first time in 2013, and Conner said it was the success of students doing their practicum in Noisy that led to the start of that initiative. “We are seeing comparable aspects of a sister city relationship develop (in Costa Rica) as well,” said Conner, who recently retired.

Seeking More Structure, Less Serendipity

Conner’s hope for the future is that the college will become an even greater participant in the sister city partnership. “We’re the latecomer into this relationship. I’d like to see it become part of the fabric so that people plan things a year in advance, that things are absolutely on the college calendar, and that relationships have been so cemented that we don’t need to rely on serendipity to make things happen,” the retiring provost said.

Noisy and Bailly have taxpayer dollars to spend on the jumelage. “We have no budget,” said Guenin-Lelle, although it is not hard to convince Michiganders to go to Paris. All told, 600 people have journeyed across the Atlantic since the sister city partnership began.

“So many activities have grown out of this relationship” that pay dividends for Albion students even if they never “set foot off campus,” said Peterson. But the partnership “requires a lot of tending and a lot of involvement from all sides. It’s been very organic and grassroots, not top down. You never know quite where it’s going except that it’s developing and doing wonderful things for people on both sides.”

Guenin-Lelle, who has taught at Albion for 27 years, said, “This should not be happening by some measures. You look at the different places and ask, ‘What is going on? How can this be?’” What has made it work was that the college “simply said yes to opportunities and understood it’s really people-to-people, not place to place.”

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Albion College

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

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

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

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

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

New Leadership and Status for International Affairs

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

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

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

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

Understanding the Worth of Global Gateways

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

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

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

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

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

Ramping Up Student Services and Friendship

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tackling Rabies and Cervical Cancer in Ethiopia

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

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

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

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

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

Teaching Critical Languages

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

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

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

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

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

Preparing Stem Faculty for India

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bringing International Programs to the Fore

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

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

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

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

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

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

Promoting Study Abroad with Scholarships and a Bus “Wrap”

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

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

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

Seeking Allies to Serve International Students

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

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

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

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

Branch Campus for a French Business School

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

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

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

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

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

Expanding a Foothold in Prague

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Strategic Plan and Student Fee Build Momentum for Internationalization

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

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

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

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

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

Drumming Up Enthusiasm for Study Abroad

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

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

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

Fast Track to an International Studies Certificate

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Speed Dating Approach to International Conversations

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Hands-On Faculty Committee Guides International Activities

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

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

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

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

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

A Philanthropist Pays His Oxford Experience Forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

After Wake Forest University made preparing students to become global citizens the centerpiece of a 2006 Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) for reaccreditation, leaders decided a good place to start would be to work on improving instruction in 40 classes taught by its own faculty in other parts of the world each year. J. Kline Harrison, the associate provost for global affairs, canvassed faculty for ideas on how to improve study abroad programs and heard back that if “we’d had more intentional training to prepare for the experience, we’d have been even more effective.” The faculty wanted their own schooling or, to use the formal term, professional development. Nearly two-thirds of students study abroad, a participation rate topped in the 2014 Open Doors report only by the University of Denver and the University of San Diego (another 2015 Simon Award winner).

A steering committee led by Steven Duke, then director of international studies, was given the task of figuring out how to buttress preparation. Instead of sending professors elsewhere for training, the committee settled on an in-house solution and in 2009 put on the first Workshop on Intercultural Skills Enhancement (WISE). It invited not only Wake Forest faculty and study abroad professionals, but also counterparts from nearby colleges so they could share ideas and learn from each other.

One of the speakers was Penelope Pynes, associate provost for international programs at nearby UNC-Greensboro, who laid out her approach to providing “culture shock treatment” to faculty before departure. 

One Plan Leads to Another

The workshop’s popularity grew each year, drawing attendees from surrounding states and then farther afield. It expanded into a full-blown conference in 2013 for 135 people. Nearly twice that number came in 2015, including several dozen from the United Kingdom. “Our thinking was that if Wake faculty needed this, then people in other universities did, too,” said Duke. “We were learning as we were going the first few years, but by the fourth year felt we had something really potent for a lot of people.”

“There really wasn’t another conference exactly like this” to help faculty design courses in ways that facilitate mastery of intercultural competency, said Pynes, who became a fixture at WISE conferences and is one of two outside experts on its steering committee. “We started out very heavily as a workshop for faculty but then, of course, realized we needed staff, too, to make intercultural competency a critical part of study abroad programs as opposed to something added after the fact.” She sends 10 or more UNC-Greensboro colleagues to the conference each year and said WISE proved useful “in garnering support for our own internationalization plan. Over the years we’ve built a cadre of faculty who understand intercultural communication and when we got around to doing our own QEP in 2013, we got a lot of support” for making global engagement the focus of the exercise required as part of reaccreditation.

Instilling Confidence and Sharpening Eyes

For Terry Baker, an accounting professor who had just taught his first summer class in Europe, that inaugural 2009 workshop “gave me a lot of confidence and the network and resources to make my program better and meet the intercultural development goals set for my students.” Since then he’s taught managerial accounting abroad five more times, taking students inside the  factories of Land Rover, Cadbury Chocolates, Mercedes Benz, and other manufacturers. “If you do it right, it makes what we do on campus look dull and shallow,” said Baker. “The real payoff is developing the students’ intercultural awareness and global mindedness.” The decision to launch WISE “turned out to be a brilliant guess or a shrewd assessment of a niche market that wasn’t being served,” the accounting professor said.

Anthropology professor Steve Folmar had been taking Wake Forest students since 2001 to  Nepal, where he studies issues of identity and social justice for the Himalayan country’s Dalits or “untouchable” castes. He collaborated with Duke on writing the curriculum for a pre–study abroad course. Even Folmar, an anthropologist well versed in working in other cultures, found much to learn himself from the WISE conferences. “Getting involved in these ongoing conversations and hearing other people’s approaches makes you put a much more discriminating eye on what you’re doing yourself.” 

Learning the Basics or Novel Techniques

The seventh WISE conference featured 28 sessions and two keynote presentations on cross-cultural engagement, including several aimed at preparing Chinese and other international students for their sudden immersion in U.S. campus life, as well as helping domestic students break out of the American “bubble” during their studies overseas. With preconference workshops, it stretched over three days. 

What was once a small pamphlet has been replaced by a 40-page program, with four pages of recommended readings on study abroad, intercultural competence and learning, and cross-cultural crisis management. There were sessions on how to measure students’ intercultural competence, panels that offered inside looks at model programs for inbound and outbound students, and tips on how to use digital devices and social media to document intercultural learning. Faculty new to study abroad could hear the basics, but there was also grist for veterans such as Folmar. 

He picked up the idea of sending students on scavenger hunts for photographs and artifacts in the royal city of Bhaktapur, Nepal, giving them “specific tasks related to what I want them to learn, whereas before I would either let them encounter these things on their own or cover them in the classroom.”

In addition to Pynes, Michael Vande Berg, former vice president for academic affairs at the Council for International Education Exchange, serves on the WISE steering committee alongside Wake Forest faculty from numerous disciplines. 

Intercultural Learning “Takes a Campus”

Registration fees make the WISE conference selfsupporting. Fifty of the 260 attendees from the 2015 conference were Wake Forest participants whose fees were covered by the institution. “We’ve had folks from the Office of Multicultural Affairs, the Women’s Center, the LGBTQ Center, housing, student life, diversity and inclusion, as well as the academic advising dean and a variety of faculty,” Duke said. “Intercultural learning does depend on people in housing. It depends on effective people in academic advising and the bursar’s office and the registrar’s office. To do it well, it takes a campus.”

Duke, who recently left to become assistant vice president for global strategy and international initiatives at the University of Nebraska, believes the vast majority of the estimated 10,000 to 20,000 U.S. faculty who go abroad with students each year “received no training in their PhD programs on how to do intercultural learning effectively.” WISE started with a small idea, he said, and grew by focusing on the academic benefits that accrue for students when faculty and staff acquire these twenty-first-century skills for themselves. The dates for the 2016 WISE conference are set— February 3–5—with a veteran international educator, Leigh Hatchett Stanfield, director of global campus programs, now in charge.

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Wake Forest University

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Virginia Commonwealth University freshman Alex Eliades was moving out of a residence hall and scouting a new place to live when he made a final check of his mailbox and found a flyer offering rising sophomores an opportunity to pioneer a living-learning program called VCU Globe. They would move into apartments in a new dorm, take a series of one-credit classes on global issues, participate in extensive cocurricular activities, and serve as mentors and “culture brokers” for the university’s large and growing international student population. In short, they would get a fast introduction to becoming global citizens without leaving Richmond, Virginia. 

It was just the ticket for Eliades, a political science and history major whose family emigrated from Greece three generations back. He sees his future lying in the international realm, possibly as a diplomat. “I’ve been using every opportunity I can to find ways to interact with the international community at VCU and in the greater Richmond area,” said Eliades, now a 21-year-old junior. “It’s such a thrill. I wanted to make sure they met someone who could show them cool parts of Richmond and the different things they can do here, and, of course, learn about their countries and what to do if I ever end up in their end of the court.”

Nearly nine in 10 VCU Globe residents are U.S. students. Fifty signed up for VCU Globe the first year, 90 in 2014, and 100 in 2015. The program has given Globe students opportunities to travel to Mexico, Qatar (where VCU has a campus), and Japan. Eliades studied Spanish and tutored children in Zapotec villages in Oaxaca in 2014. Another group journeyed to Doha last March and to Japan this summer.

Parmida Enayati, 22, a junior from Canada, had just transferred to VCU when she was recruited for Globe. “When I was originally approached, I didn’t really understand what they were talking about and didn’t think I’d be interested, but I’m so happy I changed my mind.”

“It was an amazing place to live,” said Enayati, who was born in Tehran and raised in Vancouver, where her father owns an English language school and her mother is an immigration consultant. “I never imagined in a million years my best friends would be from Korea and other parts of the world.” She added that it made VCU, which enrolls 32,000 students, “so much smaller.” For three-quarters of those on the Qatar trip, the experience was their first time studying abroad. 

Quest for Distinction

VCU, located in the heart of Virginia’s capital, enrolls many first-generation college students and Pell Grant recipients, said McKenna Brown, executive director of the Global Education Office. 

Six hundred studied abroad in 2013–2014. Even with scholarships, the costs can be daunting for students who may need to “work 60 hours a week in the summer to save (for tuition) or take a course to stay on time to graduate,” Brown said.

The university made increasing global engagement of students, faculty, and staff a priority in a 2011 “Quest for Distinction” strategic plan. It built community engagement and service on and off campus into the VCU Globe’s requirements. Students tallied 1,750 hours of service on campus in 2014–2015 and nearly 1,300 hours more providing help in the community, such as volunteering in clinics, schools, and literacy centers in Richmond’s immigrant neighborhoods. Students must perform at least 10 hours of service each semester. Globe residents also hold workshops on American life and customs for VCU’s 1,500 international students, serve as conversation partners, and assist with orientation and adjustment to university life. 

“I could have used this when I did my graduate research at the Vatican library,” quipped Globe Director Jill Blondin, an art historian who previously ran a living-learning program at the University of Texas-Tyler. What makes VCU Globe different, Blondin said, is the strong curricular component. “It’s a six-semester commitment that goes way beyond taking a single credit class here or there.” Students must take a one-credit orientation class, five sequenced, one-credit global seminars, and a three-credit, upper-level elective. A global thrust also is added to their section of a research writing course that is mandatory for all undergraduates.

VCU Globe has attracted students from 30 majors, Blondin said, with biology the most popular (11 percent), followed by international studies (9 percent) and political science (8.5 percent).

New Residences Furnish New Opportunities

The Globe is the second living-learning  arrangement spawned by the Quest for  Distinction—Aspire, the first, stresses community engagement—and more are on the way. The university has opened two new residence halls and is building two more. Nearly 6,000 students now live on campus. In addition to the Globe students, there are 80 additional beds constantly occupied by students in short-term programs from other countries. Two groups of 40 students from the University of Guadalajara each stayed for a month, experiencing U.S. university life and exposing American students to their culture.

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“It’s a welcoming environment for international students,” said Brown. “It’s a markedly different experience for them. They’re having meaningful, sustained interaction with American students versus what too often happens—maybe a 15-minute awkward conversation at a happy hour without much follow-up.”

Rewarding a Passion

Each semester, Globe names several faculty fellows from an array of fields who emphasize global ramifications of their specialties. Joann Richardson, a kinesiology and health sciences professor, created a service-learning course on community health promotion in global environments.

“It’s been fantastic,” said Richardson. “Often you might get five or six students in a new course. We cross-listed it with my home department, set a 30-student maximum, and got 30 students right away.” Students worked with Vietnamese, Latino, and Filipino immigrants in ethnic enclaves around Virginia and some took a service trip to Jamaica that Richardson led over spring break. In two decades of teaching, it was the first such class she has taught overseas.

The fellows’ departments receive a $5,000 stipend they can use to support a course release or for professional development. Apart from that, Richardson said, “it’s a career reward to bring my discipline into the Globe and to have it take on that more international perspective. To be able to link what’s a passion for me professionally—promoting community health—to an (international) initiative here at the university was very satisfying.”

International Seminars and Research Grants

There are other inducements to get more faculty to think global. In summer 2013, borrowing an idea from its neighbor, the University of  Richmond, VCU held a faculty development seminar in Spain and Morocco to explore migration issues. It took a second group to South Africa in 2014 to examine public health issues; Richardson was among the participants. The Global Education Office’s Brown led a third group to China in June 2015. Faculty are also invited to apply for Quest Global Impact Awards of up to $20,000 for international projects.

Brown said VCU Globe, the seminars, and other international initiatives share a common purpose articulated in the Quest for Distinction: to further global engagement of students, faculty, and staff “to transform lives and communities.”

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Virginia Commonwealth University

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