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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Studies in Cuba as Well

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

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

Iranian Community Helps Build Bridges

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

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

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

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

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

---

University of California, Davis

Read more about University of California, Davis

Students in Jason Scorza’s introductory philosophy classes at Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU) learn how to grapple with life’s questions not only from their professor and textbooks, but from a retired Scotland Yard homicide detective and a veteran United Nations peacekeeper. The detective shows them how the theories of rationalism and empiricism play out in police work, and the U.N. manager explicates the difficulty of translating democratic theory into practice in war zones. 

They make these contributions to philosophy class discussions not in person, but online. They participate through FDU’s Global Virtual Faculty Program as part of a cadre of more than 70 professors and professionals who lend their expertise and field student questions via e-mail and over the university’s Blackboard® system. Scorza, associate provost for global learning and professor of philosophy and political science, said, “The ability to engage in an in-depth conversation online surpasses what you’re able to do in a classroom in an hour-long period.” 

Billy Futter, a pharmacy professor at Rhodes University in South Africa, has contributed to FDU’s interdisciplinary Global Challenge course—a requirement in the core curriculum—as well as health classes over five years and “enjoyed every minute.” By e-mail from Port Alfred, he wrote, “Keeping the discussion going is 90 percent of the success of (any) course.” Futter said he has sought to disabuse the American students of the notions “that all foreigners want to live in the U.S.A. and envy everything your citizens have,” and that Africans live “in a jungle surrounded by lions.” He’s also provided a South African perspective on thorny questions about AIDS, unwanted pregnancies, and human rights. When one student asked out of the blue if he’d ever surfed Cape Town’s famous beaches, Futter promptly sent back a link to a spectacular picture in USA Today showing his son riding a giant wave at Dungeons Reef off Cape Town’s Hout Bay.

The Global Virtual Faculty “enhance our core courses, our general education, and global topic courses, but they also partner with our faculty in courses within disciplines,” said Diana Cvitan, director of the Office of Global Learning.

An Internationally Minded Founder

Fairleigh Dickinson has had an international bent from its founding in 1942 by Peter Sammartino, who proclaimed the institution would be “of and for the world.” It grew to become New Jersey’s largest private university, with a majority of the 12,000 students enrolled on the Metropolitan campus in Teaneck, New Jersey and 3,500 at the College at Florham in Madison, New Jersey. In 1963 it acquired Wroxton College from Trinity College, Oxford University, a restored abbey where FDU students study abroad and the university holds faculty and staff retreats. In 2007 FDU opened a branch campus in Vancouver, British Columbia, in hopes of drawing international students from Pacific Rim countries.

Most at Florham are traditional college-age students attending full time and residing on campus; half those enrolled at the Metropolitan Campus are commuters taking classes part-time. FDU enrolls almost 1,000 international students, but sends just a few hundred domestic students to study abroad each year. Education abroad, said Scorza, “is next to impossible for the great majority of them, mostly for the reasons of affordability and the demographics of students we enroll.” That is all the more reason why FDU places such an emphasis on technology.

Fairleigh Dickinson requires every undergraduate to take at least one course a year online. Some are “blended” courses that combine online work with sporadic in-person sessions; others are entirely online. FDU uses interactive television (ITV) to link classrooms on its campuses in New Jersey and Canada, and for guest lectures from China, Germany, and elsewhere. “We’re the only university in New Jersey that has both Internet access and an overhead data projector in every classroom,” said Catherine Kelley, assistant provost in the Center for Teaching and Learning with Technology. “The five ITV classrooms are booked solid. The people in those classrooms can see and talk to each other on the television screens and interact as if they are in the same room.”

Pathway to the United Nations

FDU also uses high tech tools to share with schools and colleges events in its United Nations Pathways program, which brings ambassadors and foreign leaders to campus for lectures and interaction with faculty and students. The Metropolitan campus sits 15 miles from the headquarters of the United Nations overlooking the East River in Manhattan. It is a path that has been “well worn indeed to the benefit of both of us,” United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in September 2008 in accepting an honorary doctoral degree. He called the honor—his first from a U.S. university—“a sign of the very close relationship between the United Nations and Fairleigh Dickinson University, and the vision for global thinking of the university and its students.”

“Fairleigh Dickinson requires every undergraduate to take at least one course a year online. Some are “blended” courses that combine online work with sporadic in-person sessions; others are entirely online.”

FDU is accredited as a nongovernmental organization by the U.N. Department of Public Information and recently received consultative status from the United Nations Economic and Social Council in Geneva. Since 2002, when the United Nations Pathways program began, 70 ambassadors and heads of state have lectured at FDU. “No other university has so recognized and acknowledged its U.N. alignment as FDU,” says President J. Michael Adams, who is presidentelect of the International Association of University Presidents, an organization that his predecessor, Sammartino, helped found in the 1960s. FDU’s first president “embraced the idea and ideals of a world body, and he knew that having the U.N. headquarters nearby represented a rare opportunity to help students better understand the world,” said Adams.

Adams, interviewed by e-mail on a trip to London, said technology plays “an important role in our mission to prepare world citizens. Since the development of our online learning requirement and the creation of Global Virtual Faculty, our goal has been to use technology to introduce students to new perspectives and help them connect to other countries and cultures.” Technology, he added, helps “bring the world to our students…. The result is a more diverse and globally reflective campus community that well prepares students for the interconnected global village they soon will inherit.”

“Incorporating new technologies into the educational process is expensive. And certainly in challenging economic times, this can be even more difficult to accomplish,” Adams said. But “it is essential to prepare students to be facile with the tools of the modern age.”

Adams and the university’s communications director, Angelo Carfagna, coauthored a book in 2006 titled Coming of Age in a Globalized World: The Next Generation. Adams became president of Fairleigh Dickinson in 1999 after 15 years as dean of the Nesbitt College of Design Arts at Drexel University. “It was really his vision to put technology and global learning on the table at the same time. These two initiatives fused together and helped propel one another forward,” Scorza said.

At first some faculty were skeptical about the push. “Half said, ‘Why should we do this?’ The other half said, ‘We do this already. We have courses on international relations and world literature, so what really is the point of an internationalization initiative?’” recalled Scorza. But faculty support and enthusiasm grew quickly, especially as FDU garnered recognition as a pacesetter in harnessing technology to advance global education.

---

Fairleigh Dickinson University

Read more about Fairleigh Dickinson University

Berklee College of Music is teeming with aspiring rock, jazz, R&B, and hip-hop musicians as well as songwriters, sound engineers, and others determined to make careers in contemporary music. They come not only from across the country, but around the world: almost a quarter of Berklee’s 4,000 students are international. Berklee sends faculty out to hold auditions on six continents. Working in pairs, they hit 45 cities in 21 countries on Berklee’s “World Scholarship Tour.”

Why go to such lengths? “We think there is great talent out in the world and it’s our job to find them, not wait for them to find us,” said Berklee President Roger Brown. And when they bring their musical traditions and materials into Berklee’s classrooms, all benefit. “If I’m in class with a young man from Ghana and someone from Indonesia and someone from Finland, I’m learning a lot more than if I were just with people who had the same background that I had,” said Brown.

In just the past two years Michael Shaver, assistant director of admissions, has been to “every continent except for Antarctica. I’ve been to Australia, Malaysia, Japan, Italy, Thailand, Finland, Ghana, South Africa, France, Brazil, Ecuador, and Canada.” Berklee conducted 1,250 live auditions overseas in 2008–09. Half the 6,400 auditions were held in Boston, and the rest in locations across the United States.

Alto saxophonist Jim Ogdren, academic assistant to the dean of the performing division, gave clinics and conducted auditions in Panama City during the Panama Jazz Festival, the brainchild of Panamanian jazz pianist and Berklee alumnus Danilo Perez. “We try to get them to play the style and music they know best,” said Ogdren. “They often try to play what they think (we) want to hear and stop being themselves. They think we want to hear jazz. We’ll see a great shredder guitarist or a drummer come in and they’re trying to play swing.”

A Strong Draw From Asia

Almost half of Berklee’s 1,000 international students come from Japan, South Korea, and other countries in Asia. Sung Ho Cho, 29, from Seoul already holds a bachelor’s degree in physics but is retooling himself as a jazz guitarist. How did he hear about Berklee?

“Actually in Korea, Berklee is famous among the music students,” he said. “When they think about going abroad and studying, the first choice is Berklee. Lots of students want to come here.” His idols include Pat Metheny and Berklee’s own Mick Goodrick, a faculty member the students admiringly call Mr. Goodchord.

Classmate Seung Hun Lee, 28, also from Seoul, earned a classical music degree back home, playing saxophone in a symphony orchestra. Now he hopes to chart a new path as an alto saxophonist. “I never played jazz before. I really wanted to learn,” said Lee, whose favorite player, Walter Beasley, graduated from Berklee.

Berklee was founded as a jazz school called Schillinger House of Music in 1945. Founder Lawrence Berk later combined his name and his son’s first name to come up with Berklee. It has had an international cast for decades. The first international student was Toshiko Akiyoshi, who arrived from Tokyo in 1956 after Berk sent her a plane ticket and offered a full scholarship. “She went on to become one of Japan’s most preeminent big band leaders and really helped create the tradition of jazz in Japan,” said Brown. “The school has a long and great tradition of finding talent all over the world and giving those young people opportunities they wouldn’t have had otherwise.” 

Arif Mardin, the legendary music producer from Turkey who produced hits for Aretha Franklin, the Bee Gees, and Norah Jones, attended Berklee on a scholarship paid for by Quincy Jones, who spent a year at Berklee before heading off to make his name in the music world. Canadian jazz great Diana Krall won a scholarship at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival that paid her way to Berklee.

Teaching Master Classes Around the World

The institution’s own international musical journey began in earnest in 1985 when faculty members traveled to Japan to give clinics. Now faculty musicians regularly head out to perform and give master classes at 14 schools in the Berklee International Network in Nancy, France; São Paulo, Brazil; Barcelona, Spain; Quito, Ecuador; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Freiburg, Germany; Tokyo and Kobe, Japan; Helsinki, Finland; Dublin, Ireland; Athens, Greece; Ramat HaSharon, Israel; and Seoul, South Korea. The college also mounts jazz festivals in Perugia, Italy, and San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Berklee’s tuition and fees top $15,000 per semester. Four of the nine full-ride scholarships the college offers are reserved for international students, including ones reserved for African and Canadian musicians. In 2008 Berklee launched an Africa Scholars Program with auditions in Accra, Ghana, and Durban, South Africa, where it offered $1.4 million in scholarships to 25 musicians. Brown, the president, once taught school in Kenya before getting an M.B.A. and founding a successful child-care company, Bright Horizons.

“The school has a long and great tradition of finding talent all over the world and giving those young people opportunities they wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

“Obviously, we could give a thousand of those scholarships to gifted African musicians, so it will not make a dent in allowing the talent of Africa to come to Berklee. But it will certainly deepen our connection to the continent,” the president said. “We also find that a lot of students who come to the auditions and get to know the college find a way here through other scholarships they are able to get.”

An ‘Outlier’ Among Music Schools and Conservatories

Jay Kennedy, associate vice president for academic affairs, said that among U.S. music schools and conservatories, “Berklee is essentially an outlier. There are aspects (of the curriculum) that are similar in other schools, but not in the concentration that we have them…. We are the most progressive in terms of how we align with what the music business and industry is doing today.”

A decade ago, many international students would come for just two to four semesters, said Jason Camelio, director of international education operations. Now “more are wanting to stay and complete that degree because they see value to it.” Berklee offers diplomas and certificates as well as bachelor degrees. 

Berklee will raise its international profile even higher in 2011 when it opens a satellite campus in Valencia, Spain. Berklee Valencia will be a joint venture with Spain’s Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE) in a new arts complex called ARTeria Valencia. The Spanish campus will accommodate 1,000 students, including 200 that Berklee hopes to send from Boston each year, said Sharon Glennon, former director of international programs and now planning director for the Valencia branch. And that means Berklee students will be getting even broader exposure to the wide world of music. 

---

Berklee College of Music

Read more about Berklee College of Music

With state support shrinking, the University of Minnesota did something that President Robert Bruininks concedes was counterintuitive: it slashed tuition for international students and other nonresidents. Instead of paying $6,000 more than Minnesotans pay each semester, they now pay just $2,000 more. The public university was able to do so without asking for the legislature’s permission because “we’re one of the few academic institutions in the country that has constitutional autonomy from the state,” said Robert Jones, senior vice president for academic administration. But university leaders are convinced the move will pay off for an institution that aspires to become one of the top three public research universities in the world in a decade. 

Minnesota already holds a position that most universities would envy: 28th in the world rankings by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and 9th among U.S. public institutions. With 51,000 students on the Twin Cities campus alone, including 3,700 from other countries, it is also one of the largest, and only three research universities send more students to study abroad. The Office of International Programs (OIP) has extended its reach and seen its budget burgeon since 2002 from $13 million to almost $23 million.

Another reason for the cut in out-of-state tuition is that Minnesota is girding for a projected drop in the number of students’ graduating from its high schools. “The University of Minnesota is a unique strength and comparative advantage for our state in a global economy. It’s a talent magnet,” said Bruininks. Pursuing “the international agenda of the university is not only the right thing to do to advance research and education… (but also) to advance the Minnesota economy as well.”

Transforming the U

The University of Minnesota already had a broad global footprint when the Board of Regents in 2005 endorsed a strategic blueprint that made further internationalization a top priority. Since launching this “Transforming the U” initiative, it has consolidated colleges, expanded the faculty, and made rapid progress on improving graduation and retention rates. It also has moved quickly and adroitly to attract more international undergraduates. International students now comprise 3 percent of undergraduate enrollment, up from 1 percent, and the goal of 5 percent is in sight, thanks in part to intense recruitment efforts, tuition changes, and a push by International Student & Scholar Services (ISSS) to streamline admissions paperwork and make the university more inviting. 

Former Associate Vice President for International Programs Gene Allen laid the groundwork for expanding Minnesota’s activities in China and elsewhere, including its signature “Minnesota Model” for integrating education abroad into the curriculum. The international profile has grown even further under his successor,  Meredith McQuaid, who was given a seat at the table with other deans when decisions are made about the university’s research and spending priorities. McQuaid, an attorney who formerly led international programs in the law school, is a Minnesota alumna who studied Mandarin in China as an undergraduate, taught English in Japan and once took a motorcycle trip around the world. She recently found spacious, new quarters for the Office of International Programs on the East Bank campus, closer to the Mall and main administration buildings. The University International Center also is home to a new Confucius Institute, the 30-year-old China Center, and the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition, Title VI national resource center. More strategically, McQuaid’s creation of an International Programs Council has led to renewed investment in internationalization efforts across the university system. 

“Transforming the U” initiative, the university awarded faculty ­$1 million in grants in 2007 and 2008 . . .”

The OIP was established in 1963 in an era when the university had an Office of International Agricultural Programs as well, coordinating dozens of faculty projects across the world, many under contract with the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID). Some 130 Moroccans—including students of Jones and Allen—earned doctorates and returned home to make the Institute Agronomique et Veterinaire Hassan II in Rabat one of Africa’s top agricultural universities. Exchanges were forged with universities in India, Nigeria, Uruguay, Norway, Hungary, Malaysia, Tanzania, and Tunisia. 

Faculty Grants for Global Scholarship

As part of the “Transforming the U” initiative, the university awarded faculty $1 million in grants in 2007 and 2008 “to promote a global network of scholarship and engagement and encourage interdisciplinary and transnational partnerships.” While the faculty grants were modest—in the $15,000 to $20,000 range—civil engineering Professor Efi Foufoula-Georgiou said they went a long way. “It’s unbelievable how much mileage I got for this grant,” said Foufoula-Georgiou, who directs the National Center for Earth Surface Dynamics at St. Anthony Falls Laboratory. The grant allowed graduate students to travel to conferences in Italy, and that in turn led to collaborations at the University of Genoa and University of Padua. Art Professor Tom Rose received a small grant for exchanges with the Beijing Film Academy, which led to the creation of a course on contemporary Chinese art. Now a department that “never really had much of an international presence is now becoming much more interested and engaged,” Rose said. 

OIP’s new Global Spotlight Initiative is focusing on Africa and global water issues. Carol Klee, chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, was named assistant vice president for international scholarship. Senior Vice President Jones and McQuaid visited Africa twice in 2008 to explore partnerships with sub-Saharan universities. Biologist Craig Packer, who has spent three decades studying lions in Tanzania, now is working with Minnesota colleagues on a broader “Whole Village Project” to address overpopulation and poverty, starting with an examination of how international aid impacts rural villages. 

No Longer Operating in a Vacuum

Following up on an academic task force’s blueprint for forging an international university, McQuaid appointed an International Working Group in 2007 to produce a five-year action plan. Its “Where in the World Are We Going?” report pinpointed gaps in the university’s efforts, including opportunities missed because faculty and schools had traditionally operated on their own in the international arena “The university lacks oversight of international efforts and knowledge of where in the world we are and what we are doing there,” the report said. The “plethora of MOUs [memoranda of understanding] signed with institutions around the globe is redundant, inefficient, and ineffective; the complete lack of oversight—legal and otherwise—is surely exposing the university to heightened risk.” Even within OIP, the staff of the Learning Abroad Center and that of ISSS worked apart. “That struck me as absurd,” said McQuaid. Changes to the structure and interaction of OIP units are being made under her leadership.

More than 2,000 students study abroad each year, and the University’s goal is to double that number, which would mean 50 percent would have an education abroad experience by the time they graduate. OIP combined separate education abroad offices and opened the Learning Abroad Center under the same roof with ISSS. The name “Learning Abroad” was chosen, Director Martha Johnson said, because “learning is a verb.” The 38-person staff arranges education abroad for 400 non-University of Minnesota students each year along with their own 2,000.

The so-called Minnesota Model of Curriculum Integration has won acclaim and foundation grants to knit education abroad into the curriculum. More than 800 faculty, administrators, and staff have attended OIP workshops on curricular education, and 90 recently returned for a refresher course led by director Gayle Woodruff. 

A Hospitable Place for Refugees

The university sits in what Brian Atwood, dean of the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, calls “an international city”—home to 19 Fortune 500 companies with global operations—in a state with a reputation for hospitality toward immigrants and refugees. The world headquarters of the American Refugee Committee and the Center for Victims of Torture are in Minneapolis. 

When Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf— the first democratically elected female head of state in Africa—came in April 2009 to receive an honorary degree, nearly 2,000 of the 4,800 people who filled Northrop Auditorium were her compatriots, part of the diaspora from Liberia’s brutal civil war. Large populations of Hmong from Cambodia, Somalis, and others who fled strife have started new lives in Minneapolis and St. Paul. 

“Some of our population,” quipped Atwood, former U.S. AID administrator, “is a result of failed U.S. foreign policy.” The university recently appointed its first postdoctoral and graduate fellows in Hmong Studies. Minnesota has had “an open, accommodating, accepting culture for a long, long time,” observed Bruininks, who has spent four decades at the U as education professor, dean, provost, and president. 

Researching the Impact of Education Abroad

Minnesota is also home to the federally funded Study Abroad for Global Engagement (SAGE) project, which examines how education abroad affected the attitudes of nearly 6,400 participants from 22 institutions dating back to 1960. One significant finding: the duration of education abroad had negligible impact on how involved they were in civic activities, volunteering, and other forms of “global engagement” in later life.

Minnesota’s Office of Institutional Research has conducted important research of its own on education abroad. It found that among freshmen who entered in 2000 and did not study abroad, the graduation rates were 30 percent within four years, 51 percent within five years, and 56 percent within six years. But the rates were sharply higher among those who did study abroad: 51 percent within four years, 84 percent within five years, and 91 percent within six years. The gap is even greater among the freshmen who entered in 2004: 40 percent within four years for those who did not study abroad versus 65 percent for those who did. This casts doubt on what the Learning Abroad Center’s Johnson calls “the misperception” that education abroad makes it harder for students to graduate on time.

ISSS Director Kay Thomas, an educational psychologist, stressed the importance of getting data like this “to back up what we’ve been saying” about the importance of international education. Her office has also been doing research on the critical experiences of international undergraduate students about to graduate, as well as studying the impact of administrative staff exchanges. Thomas is a past president of NAFSA, as were the two directors she worked for earlier in her 40 year career at the university, Forrest Moore and Josef Mestenhauser.

Blogging About Life in ‘Minne-snow-ta’

Thomas’s office enlisted nine international students in 2008 to blog about life on campus from the classroom to the cafeteria and to field questions from prospective students. Theerachai Chanyaswad of Thailand told of being stumped by his new classmates’ rapid-fire, idiomatic American English. His suggestion: “Calm down and try to fit in. You will succeed.” 

“The so-called Minnesota Model of Curriculum Integration has won acclaim and foundation grants to knit education abroad into the curriculum.”

Asa Widiastomo of Indonesia offered practical advice about what clothing to bring to “MinneSNOW-ta.” Asa, who is Muslim and wears a hijab, said in an interview, “it was really hard in the beginning. People just saw me for my appearance.” But the outgoing Widiastomo joined the University Women’s Chorus, became a leader of the Indonesian Student Association, and got involved in multicultural groups. 

A Rebirth of ESL

Following a post-September 11 slump in enrollment in intensive English classes, the College of Liberal Arts shut down in 2004 an ESL program that had existed for decades. One student pointedly asked, “How can we be a world-class university if we don’t invite the world?” With encouragement by OIP, the university reopened the intensive English program (IEP) a year later within the College of Continuing Education. Enrollment is growing and Michael Anderson, director of the Minnesota English Language Program, said, “The closing and rebirth of the IEP has helped internationalize the university and also bring attention to the functions that it serves on campus.”

In harsh economic times, budgets remain tight. Bruininks and Jones both expressed a determination not to stint on the U’s expanded international thrust. “If anything, those areas will be strongly protected,” said the president. Jones was even more emphatic. Cuts “will be the last thing I do because I think we’re on the cusp of creating something here that’s going to position the university for the next 50 years.”

The motto of Portland State University in Oregon is emblazoned on a sky bridge that spans Broadway, Portland’s main thoroughfare: Let Knowledge Serve The City. “We’d like to change it now to Let Knowledge Serve the Globe,” quips Kevin Kecskes, associate vice provost for engagement. Portland State, already known for deep community partnerships, today works on a broader canvass seeking sustainable solutions to economic, environmental, and social challenges that confront cities everywhere. 

This urban university practices what it preaches. In a city crisscrossed by light rail and streetcars, most students, faculty, and staff walk, ride bicycles, or take public transportation to the compact, 49-acre campus. The new president, Wim Wiewel, an expert on urban affairs, rode a bicycle to work on his first day in August 2008. Most of the 26,000 students commute; the dorms abutting Broadway house only 2,000 of them, although plans are on the drawing boards for several thousand more.

The city itself is a powerful draw for the 1,700 international students. “Typically international students want to come to an urban environment. The living environment is more supportive culturally and more diverse than in a university town like Corvallis or to an extent Eugene,” said Gil Latz, vice provost for international affairs and a professor of geography. Portland’s lures also make faculty recruiting easier. “A lot of people want to live in the Pacific Northwest,” said Ronald Tammen, director of the Mark Hatfield School of Government. Wiewel, who came from Chicago, said his new hometown “is such an easy city to sell. It’s a great brand.”

Wiewel is building on momentum created over a decade at Portland State. His predecessor, Daniel Bernstine, doubled enrollment and won the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges’ (now the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, A·P·L·U) Michael Malone International Leadership Award in 2005 for his efforts to internationalize Portland State. 

Broadening the Experience of ‘New Majority’ Students

The new president, a native of Amsterdam, views attracting more international and out-of-state students as a strategic way of broadening the educational experience for Oregon students. The student body typifies what some call “the new majority” in American higher education: older and often part-time. Most of these collegians “can’t park their family and their job for six months to go study in Berlin,” said Duncan Carter, associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Fretting over that reality would be pointless, said Provost Roy Koch, so instead Portland State has concentrated on offering short, faculty-led education abroad opportunities, often over spring break as part of longer courses. The number who study abroad is still modest (541 in 2007–08) but it has been climbing. Ron Witczak, assistant vice provost and director of education abroad, said, “We started in 2001 with three or four faculty-led programs and roughly 30 students. Now we’re up to 27 with close to 250 students.” Last year a full-time coordinator was hired. “There’s no place-bound student who can’t figure out a way to go abroad for two weeks if they want to,” said Wiewel. Both the length and cost—typically $2,500 to $3,500—make the short-term programs attractive, and partial scholarships are available for those in need.

“There’s no place-bound student who can’t figure out a way to go abroad for two weeks if they want to.”

Jill Scantlan, who quit school, earned a GED at age 16, and became a licensed massage therapist, spent nine months studying in Hyderabad, India. The 25-year-old international studies major aims to earn a master’s degree and return to India to do public health work. Helen Johnson returned to college for a master’s in teaching English as a second language after two decades as a homemaker. The two summers she spent practice teaching in South Korea were “the experience of a lifetime,” said Johnson, 47, a native of Greece who aspires to teach English to immigrants. “Now I’m back to what I really want to do.”

Emphases on Sustainability and Community Learning

Sustainability was the watchword at Portland State, even before it received a 10-year, $25 million matching grant in 2008 from the Miller Foundation—the largest gift in the institution’s history—to make the university an exemplar of sustainability, from the curriculum to campus life to community partnerships. Wiewel said, “You can’t be known across the world for everything unless you are Princeton or Harvard or some place like that. We’ve got to pick our strengths, and sustainability is one of those. It’s not just green wash; it’s real. People are doing it.” Portland State is working with Hokkaido University in Japan and Tongji University in China on ways to foster sustainability, and the issue drives the curriculum for the Hatfield School’s executive leadership and training programs for hundreds of government managers and business executives from Vietnam, Japan, and South Korea. 

Portland State’s long-standing relationship with Waseda University in Tokyo also focuses in part on sustainability. The campus houses the Waseda Oregon Office, which brings dozens of Waseda students to Portland each year and sends 60 students from across the United States to Tokyo each summer for intensive Japanese classes. Latz, who studied at Waseda as an Occidental College undergraduate, is looking for a third partner elsewhere in Asia for a three-way exchange around the global sustainability theme. “We have to move away from thinking only in terms of two dimensions to a problem,” the geographer said. “If this third country were Korea, for example, the students would learn that the Korean approach to sustainability would be very different from the Japanese approach and the Portland approach.”

Community-based learning is also a key to the curriculum at Portland State, where all undergraduates are obliged to perform service. Eight thousand students work in teams to identify and address community problems each year, and “we are incorporating this service element into our study abroad programs,” said Latz.

Kecskes, who directs the community partnerships, eschews the “service learning” term. “Community-based learning is a much larger umbrella. ‘Service’ can connote a one-way street,” he said. One course that Kecskes helped design takes students to Tucson, Arizona, and Nogales, Mexico, to study immigration policy and pollution from global factories south of the border. Instructor Celine Fitzmaurice’s students spend a night in a migrant shelter and live with families who work in those factories. Often, she said, there is at least one student whose parents entered the U.S. without documentation. Kecskes designed another course in which students meet with leaders of Portland’s Oaxacan immigrant community before heading to Oaxaca, Mexico, to see conditions there for themselves.

Portland State is also the new home of the International Partnership for Service Learning & Leadership, a not-for-profit that runs programs for undergraduates’ combining study abroad with volunteer service. It will offer a master’s degree in international development and service that includes six months of courses at Portland State and six months’ service in Kingston, Jamaica, or Guadalajara, Mexico. 

Surprises in Studying Impact of Education Abroad

Portland State participated in the Global Learning for All project of the American Council on Education (ACE), which looked at how institutions with large numbers of nontraditional undergraduates—adults, minorities, and parttime students—incorporated international content and activities into their curricula and campus life. Portland State also shared a Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education grant with five other institutions to measure the impact of international learning on students’ attitudes.

“It was as though the (Russian) language had disappeared,” said Freels, but now enrollments have rebounded partly with the help of a $1 million National Security Education Program grant.”

Carter, associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Latz, and Patricia Thornton, an associate professor of international studies, helped pilot a test that examined what students took away from their education abroad experiences. “We got some surprises,” said Carter. “Students who had traveled frequently abroad or indicated several short trips abroad outside of an academic context actually scored lower on the attitude section than students who’d never left the country.” He added, “We call this the Club Med experience and hypothesize that this may actually do more harm than good.” 

The faculty senate, after lively debates over the wisdom of expanding the list of core objectives for a Portland State education, recently adopted an international learning outcome as part of a broader revamping of curricular requirements. The new goal reads: “Students will understand the richness and challenge of world culture, the effects of globalization, and develop the skills and attitudes to function as ‘global citizens.’” Provost Koch said, “It was implied before, but now it’s very explicit.” The challenge is figuring out how to accomplish it for engineers as well as history and international studies majors. “We don’t want to just create another course or set of courses. We want to make it an integral part of students’ existing coursework,” he said. 

Luring Students to Russian Language Classes

Four thousand Portland State students took foreign language courses in fall 2008. “We are the largest unit in the university,” said Sandra G. Freels, chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and professor of Russian, one of 20 languages taught. When the Soviet Union collapsed, “it was as though the (Russian) language had disappeared,” said Freels, but now enrollments have rebounded partly with the help of a $1 million National Security Education Program grant. 

That grant allowed Portland State to offer 22 Russian-speaking freshmen and sophomores the opportunity last fall to add an extra, two-credit class taught in Russian to the standard, six-credit Inquiry course, one of the university’s requirements. These students were encouraged to live on the Russian immersion floor of a dorm and later might spend a full year at St. Petersburg State University. The purpose, said professor Patricia Wetzel, “is not aimed at producing Russian majors. It’s producing chemistry, business, and history majors who can use their language professionally.” The students, many of them heritage speakers of Russian, often “had no idea what their language skills are worth,” said Freels.

Raising the Research and Global Profile

In bringing Wiewel to Portland, the State Board of Higher Education chose a president whose most recent book was Global Universities and Urban Development. Wiewel first came to the United States from Holland on an American Field Service high school exchange. After earning a doctorate in sociology at Northwestern University, he directed the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and was provost of the University of Baltimore in Maryland. His goal is to double the externally funded research budget to $80 million in five or so years. Research “by definition nowadays is global…. The more you raise the research profile, the more it allows you to go beyond your local focus,” Wiewel said.

The Hatfield School of Government has taken an entrepreneurial approach to growing its international profile. “We have tentacles that stretch throughout the local community, the state, the nation, and the world,” said Tammen, the director. “We grow not on public money, but on money that we generate ourselves by training government officials in the United States and abroad and by doing contract work for a lot of different folks.” 

Marcus Ingle, director of the school’s International Public Service & Fellows program, regularly takes Portland State students to Vietnam and recently won two grants from the Ford Foundation to establish a program on state leadership for sustainable development at the Ho Chi Minh Political Academy in Hanoi. He also had a hand in arranging a $2 million Intel Corp. initiative that has brought 28 Vietnamese engineering students to Portland for two years to finish their studies and earn a Portland State degree.

“We grow not on public money, but on money that we generate ourselves by training government officials in the United States and abroad and by doing contract work for a lot of different folks. ”

Political scientist Birol Yesilada, chair of contemporary Turkish studies, and Harry Anastasiou, a professor of conflict resolution, take students to Cyprus for two weeks each year to study life on both sides of the Green Line that divides the Greek and Turkish communities. Yesilada said Portland State is still “a young campus. It does not have entrenched rules. It doesn’t have the financial means of a Harvard, but if you have a good idea, you’ll get support to do it. They are not going to stand in your way.”

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

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

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

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

Transformation From the Ground Up

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

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

Gateway Sites

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

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

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

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

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

Academic Ties to Namibia and Norway

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

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

Weighing the Impact of Education Abroad

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

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

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

Returner Reflections Weave Strands Together

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

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

Offering an ‘Engaged’ Experience

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

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

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

From its classic, New England campus with the postcard view of New London’s steeples and Long Island Sound, Connecticut College has taken an interdisciplinary approach to ensuring that its 1,900 students learn to become “international citizens,” as President Leo I. Higdon Jr. puts it.

Some of the most worldly and widely traveled are the 30 admitted as sophomores each year into the Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts (CISLA), a certificate program with its own $7 million endowment that provides airfare and a $3,000 stipend for CISLA’s Global Scholars to do internships anywhere in the world. They must complete a research project as seniors upon their return./p>

David Urbaneja-Furelos, an international relations and East Asian Studies major from Burgos, Spain, interned for the United Nations Industrial and Development Organization in Beijing and Taiyuan, China. “I’ve always wanted to work for the United Nations, but the UN only offers unpaid internships that usually are reserved for master’s students. CISLA helped me to afford something that otherwise would never have happened.” Chinese language major George Fernandez interned for NBC during the Olympics and for a developer in Beijing.

Gili Ben-Yosef, a sociology major, interned in Argentina for a Jewish relief agency and wrote her senior paper on what it means to be Jewish in twenty-first century Buenos Aires. Nonprofits needn’t worry about whether they can afford an intern. “We basically have the whole world open to us and can choose the ideal internship,” she said. “It empowers us to go international after graduation.”

Experiencing a New Culture Alone

Jessamyn Cox found it lonely at times being on her own in Reutlingen, Germany, while interning at an art museum. “You’re outside your comfort zone and don’t have the support system of family and friends,” she said. But experiences like hers make the CISLA internships all the more formative. Mary Devins, associate director of CISLA, said, “This living by yourself without a friend down the hall is an enormous learning experience.” Added Robert Gay, CISLA director, “We push them.” Gay, a British-born ethnographer who studies crime and poverty in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, said the CISLA certification on a diploma means “that you went abroad and worked in a professional situation where you may be the only English speaker in an office. It’s a tremendous asset for your resume.” Robert Proctor, professor of Italian and a founder of the program, said, “Whatever we do here in the classroom, it’s nothing compared with the growth we see in these kids upon their return.”

The popularity of CISLA spawned three other interdisciplinary centers that offer certificates in conservation biology and environmental studies, arts and technology, community action and public policy. One in six undergraduates now works to the higher standards demanded by these centers.

Pipeline to Vietnam

CISLA was created two decades ago under former President Claire Gaudiani, who also had a hand in designing the college’s Study Away/Teach Away (SATA) program, in which one or two faculty and 10 to 20 students spend a semester in another land. Originally, said government Professor Alex Roberto Hybel, the intention was to study only in developing countries. But some of those destinations were a difficult fit for faculty whose research interests lay elsewhere, and eventually professors began leading students on SATAs to Rome and Prague as well as to China, India, Vietnam, and Peru. “Initially there was some reluctance, but as faculty members realized how much they could benefit,” more stepped up to lead SATAs, said the Argentine-born Hybel, who doubled as dean of international programs in the mid-1990s.

In 2008 there were SATAs to Mysore, India, to Hanoi, Vietnam, and to Rome, Italy. That was the eighth time for the program in Hanoi, where the Connecticut College contingent lives in a residence for international students and takes courses taught by their own professors and the faculty of Vietnam National University (VNU). To date 150 students and 14 faculty have gone to Hanoi, and 19 VNU faculty have paid reciprocal visits to New London. William Frasure, a professor of government instrumental in arranging these exchanges, in 2008 became the second American ever awarded an honorary doctorate by the Vietnamese university. 

“Several new courses that directly draw upon our Vietnam experience have been introduced into the college’s curriculum, and numerous ­existing courses have been enriched by it.”

Frasure said, “Several new courses that directly draw upon our Vietnam experience have been introduced into the college’s curriculum, and numerous existing courses have been enriched by it.” In addition to expanding students’ academic horizons, “the Vietnam project has really meant a whole new career direction” for some faculty, he added.

Spring Break in St. Petersburg, Russia

Connecticut College, a women’s college until 1969, also sends students abroad for shorter stretches on its Traveling Research and Immersion Program (TRIP). TRIPs take place between semesters, over spring break, and at the end of the academic year. Andrea Lanoux, chair of Slavic studies, took her beginning Russian students to Russia over spring break in 2008 and 2009. “I had 17 people last year sign up for Russian. I went from 6 to 17 overnight,” said Lanoux. Each student also received a loaner iPod filled with Russian pop music, folk songs, poetry, videos, cartoons, talk shows, nursery rhymes, and language exercises. A foundation grant paid for the iPods.

“When you hand these out in class and students who don’t know Russian turn them on and it’s all in Cyrillic, their eyes just light up. It’s a wonderful thing. I would never teach a class again without iPods. It’s the perfect tool for language learning,” said Lanoux. “Japanese and German [programs] are also doing it.”

In 1991, Judaic studies scholar Roger Brooks, now dean of the faculty, was one of the first professors to lead a TRIP. Showing students a slide of Robinson’s Arch, the remains of a once grand archway to the ancient Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, he instructed students to look for these remains “if you ever go to Jerusalem.” One student raised her hand and said, ‘Spring break is coming up. Why don’t we all go and you can show it to us.’ Four and a-half-weeks later, all 23 students were with me in Jerusalem,” he recalled. 

Preparing Students for Global Lives

Connecticut College’s revised mission statement wastes no time in emphasizing the international. The first sentence reads, “Connecticut College educates students to put the liberal arts into action as citizens in a global society.” The college emphasized a need to further internationalize when it launched a $200 million fund-raising drive in 2008: “We must ensure that all our students are prepared to thrive in this global society. We will bring international content to every course of study, and we will expand foreign language proficiency. We will create new ways for students to study abroad and new international experiences on campus.”

Students must take one semester of an intermediate language course or one year of a new language. Frances L. Hoffmann, a professor of sociology and women’s studies, said the college has tried “to shift the nature of foreign language instruction to encourage students to become verbally excellent as well as able to read.” For example, Paola Sica, associate professor of Italian, said, “Many students are interested in art history. We try to find the link between our upper level Italian courses and the courses they’re offering in the art history department. We’re trying to find new directions not enclosed in a little box.”

The college started offering Arabic in 2007, and an interdisciplinary program in Islamic World Civilizations is on the drawing boards. “We need more languages. We need more people. We need to broaden the scope of what we do. But it’s all just a matter of money we don’t have,” said Edward Brodkin, an Asian history specialist.

“Connecticut College educates students to put the liberal arts into ­action as citizens in a global society.”

Hoffmann, former dean of the faculty, led a drive to expand Knowlton, the international residence hall, to accommodate an “International Cultural Commons” that would be filled with satellite televisions’ broadcasting international news, sports, and cultural events. “I had this notion that when the World Cup was on, we’d show the games, have a dinner and music, and you’d have to speak the language of the teams that were playing, trying to marry the cocurricular life and academic life.” But the grand plans—which would have cost at least $11 million—ran into structural and financial roadblocks.

“We came together and made an adjustment around the balance between physical facilities and programs,” said President Higdon. “What we want to try to do is support curricular and faculty development around our international global immersion and objectives.” An anonymous $1 million gift is helping with what is now called the International Commons initiative.

Mixing Food and Languages

Last fall the college appointed its first Foreign Language Fellows, student peer counselors who are paid $1,200 a year to mount social and cultural events promoting nine languages. “It’s a challenge to actually make (other) students participate,” said Cinthia Isla Marin, a sophomore from Iquitos, Peru, who is the Spanish Foreign Language Fellow. “The United States is full of Spanish speakers. The students are like, ‘What’s the point of going to an activity? I can turn around and see a Spanish speaker if I want.’ For them, the activities have to be much sexier.” One of her hits was a Spanish karaoke night. She also found pen pals for her classmates among her former United World Colleges classmates. United World Colleges (UWC), a global educational NGO, selects students from across the globe regardless of their ability to pay for higher education opportunities. UWC has 13 colleges across five continents that aim to foster international understanding and peace.

Katherine Shabb, born in Texas but raised in Lebanon, was the Arabic Fellow. With the help of kitchen workers of Lebanese descent, the freshman redecorated the Knowlton dining room with Lebanese flags, served Middle Eastern food, and brought in a Middle Eastern singer for entertainment. “It was a much smoother transition for me coming from Lebanon, finding that there’s such a strong international commitment in the school,” said Shabb. 

Faculty Engagement in International Programs

Chemistry Professor Marc Zimmer three times has taken students to his native South Africa. He was named Connecticut’s Professor of the Year in 2007, in part for his success in mentoring minority students. His research on green fluorescent protein (which can tag cancer cells) is funded by both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. He came to Connecticut College in 1990 from a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University and “one reason I stayed was because I wanted to do more SATAs. It’s a great opportunity for me and my family.”

Brodkin, a historian of Asia, has led a half dozen semester programs in India. Brodkin, retiring at the end of 2009 after four decades on the faculty, remembers a time when half the required courses for history majors dealt with European history and a quarter were about the United States. “The implication was that Europe was twice as important as America and the rest of the world didn’t really matter at all,” he said. “That changed very quickly when we got people from the rest of the world. We now have an Africa historian and a Latin America historian.”

Resources the Only Impediment

Armando Ignacio Bengochea, dean of the College Community, said, “The only thing that 
stops Connecticut College from realizing any of its largest ambitions is simply resources. We have incredible ambitions and they’re only held in check by resources. We would certainly have many more international students if we could afford them.” Budget pressures led the college to cut back slightly on admission offers this year to international students who needed significant aid, and Martha Merrill, dean of admission and financial aid, is hoping to find more international students who can pay all or much of the comprehensive fee. “Those are the challenges for us as a small college without the name recognition (of) some other institutions,” she said.

Almost five percent of Connecticut College’s 1,900 students are international. Roughly the same percentage hold dual citizenship, and several dozen more are permanent residents or U.S. citizens who grew up overseas.

Finding the resources to meet Connecticut College’s ambitions rests principally on the shoulders of Higdon, who became president in 2006 after leading the College of Charleston and Babson College and serving as dean of the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. Higdon, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi, spent two decades as an investment banker on Wall Street before switching to academe.

“Our overarching vision is to be one of the very best liberal arts colleges in the land. We think we’re moving toward that goal” by emphasizing globalization and cross-cultural fluency for students and faculty, said Higdon. However the economic winds blow, Connecticut College is holding steady on that course.

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

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

Strategic Growth in Languages

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

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

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

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

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

Full Semesters and Internships Overseas

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

Stepping Into ‘This Engaging World’

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

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

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

Educating Engineers and Pre-Meds Abroad

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

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

A Foothold in the Middle East

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

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

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

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

Weaving Education Abroad Into BU’s Fabric

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

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

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

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

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

The old saw that no good deed goes unpunished tells in part the story of La Roche College and its Pacem in Terris Institute, which has provided several hundred scholarships for students escaping conflicts in countries torn by war from the Balkans to Burundi. The institute and its work brought renown to the small Catholic college in Pittsburgh. The queen of Jordan and first lady of Uganda served on the board of Pacem in Terris, founded in 1993 by the late Monsignor William Kerr soon after he became the college president.

The commitment to provide full tuition, room, and board to every Pacem in Terris student eventually put the college’s resources under heavy strain, especially as enrollment declined after 2002. The La Roche trustees finally decreed that no more Pacem in Terris students could be admitted unless the funds were in hand to pay for their four years of education. In June 2009 Inside Higher Education ran what amounted to an obituary for Pacem in Terris, reporting that the program was on hiatus after graduating its last four scholarship recipients. The college had invested $7 million of its own funds, $4 million in grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development, and $4 million in gifts from other donors in the program over the years, but never built an endowment or rainy day fund for Pacem. (The college’s own endowment is only $4 million).

A Rebirth

The hiatus, however, was brief. By fall 2009 Pacem in Terris enrolled two new scholarship recipients from Uganda and Burundi and now there are two more Pacem students from Rwanda and Equatorial Guinea. “We’ve had a bit of a resurgence,” said Kenneth Service, the outgoing vice president for institutional relations and executive director of Pacem in Terris. Some $120,000 has been raised for new scholarships, and the college is talking with donors about creating opportunities for students from Sri Lanka and Lebanon.

Moreover, the scholarship initiative has had a lasting effect on the college, which the Sisters of Divine Providence founded in 1963 to prepare young women entering their order; that was the same year that Pope John XXIII issued the celebrated Pacem in Terris encyclical on human rights. Later La Roche opened its doors wider, first to women and then to both sexes. Kerr, president from 1992 to 2004, was a friend to the powerful as well as the poor. Vice President Joseph Biden and Rwandan President Paul Kagame were among those paying tribute after the priest died of a stroke while celebrating Mass at the cathedral in Tallahassee, Florida, in 2009. Sister Candace Introcaso, the college president, also saluted Kerr, telling the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “Under his leadership, La Roche College was transformed from a regional coeducational, liberal arts college into a global community of learners with a burgeoning international presence.”

The Pacem in Terris story began with Kerr’s journey to a Croatian refugee camp in 1993 during the civil war in the Balkans. A Croatian-American businesswoman had offered to help provide scholarships. “Typically, he went over there to find 20 students and came back with 30,” said Service. Kerr had a larger purpose than just making a difference in the lives of a few individuals. He wanted to strike a blow against hatred and hostility among Muslims, Christians, and Jews. “Taught by the lessons of the Holocaust and now of ‘ethnic cleansing,’ young people from wartorn areas must be educated to break the cycles of resentment and revenge which have fueled the major conflicts of the twentieth century,” Kerr wrote.

Later, when Rwanda was convulsed by genocide, Kerr secured support from AID to bring scores of refugees to Pittsburgh for a college education. La Roche built a successful English as a Second Language program to accommodate the French-speaking newcomers. By 2009, when it looked like Pacem in Terris might fade into the past, the program had produced 451 graduates from trouble spots in the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East.

Fostering Global Citizenship

The college sold some underused property to bolster its finances, and the 2009–10 enrollment of 1,230 undergraduate and 126 graduate students included 139 international students, plus 46 more in the ESL program. Most of these international students are paying their own way. La Roche’s enrollment is down from a peak of almost 2,000 in 2002, but it rose in fall 2010. The college’s mission statement proudly states that La Roche “fosters global citizenship and creates a community of scholars from the region, the nation, and around the world” and seeks to “promote justice and peace in a constantly changing global society.”

Thomas Schaefer, who joined the college in 2002 as director of external relations for Pacem in Terris and now is associate vice president for academic affairs, said that this commitment to globalization is a direct legacy of Pacem in Terris. “It grew out of that sense that this is central to our mission. We’re now taking what Pacem initiated and making sure that every student has a global awareness.”

It also is making it possible for more students to experience education abroad. It launched a Study Abroad, Study USA program beginning with freshmen who entered in 2009 that includes in their regular tuition the cost of taking an education abroad course lasting one to three weeks or spending the same amount of time immersed in a domestic, multicultural experience, such as studying blues music in Harlem or volunteering on the recovery effort in New Orleans.

Service agreed that Pacem in Terris “encouraged the college to become much more international and to reach out and do more student recruitment internationally.” That emphasis also is seen in an annual conference on “Global Problems, Global Solutions” that La Roche inaugurated in 2004 and now holds jointly with Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Duquesne University. Even with Hurricane Ivan bearing down, 100 students and faculty turned out that first year to discuss the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. The joint conferences typically draw as many as 500 students, faculty, and townspeople for two days of lectures and workshops.

Paul Le Blanc, a history professor who studies working class politics and revolutionary movements, said Pacem in Terris “was transformative for all of us. In some ways we bit off more than we could chew, but then in dealing with the various issues and realities that came up, we evolved in ways that have been wonderful.”

Image

Think Big

What lessons should other colleges draw from the Pacem in Terris experience at La Roche? “You have to decide whether you’re on the ‘God will provide’ or the ‘God helps those who help themselves’ side of the ledger,” said Service. Raising scholarship funds became harder after September 11, 2001, Service said, and some promises of help never came through. But Service sees another message from the story of La Roche and Pacem in Terris.

“Don’t be afraid to think big; don’t be afraid to take some risks,” he said. “While the financial side of this was a problem, the other benefits that La Roche has received from this program are almost incalculable.” La Roche now provides students “a much higher quality education that prepares them to go out into a global society. While that wasn’t the initial intent, some of those ancillary benefits have more than paid for themselves. "

---

La Roche College

Read more about La Roche College

Henry Ford used to say that customers could buy his Model Ts in any color they wanted “so long as it is black.” The College of the Atlantic (COA), a small, alternative liberal arts school on the rugged coast of Maine, has similarly narrowed the choice of majors for its 355 students to one: human ecology, the study of humans’ relationships with each other and with the natural environment. The adventurous, environmentally conscious students drawn to this 35-acre campus on Mount Desert Island in Bar Harbor actually face far more choices than Ford’s customers of a century ago, for each is expected to customize this interdisciplinary major. “No two graduates will leave here with exactly the same course work and practical experiences,” said President David Hales.

But all share a passion for protecting the environment and mitigating the problems caused by the internal combustion engine and other sources of pollution. That explains why College of the Atlantic students and their professors can be found at the United Nations’ climate change meetings in such distant places as Montreal, Nairobi, Bali, Poznan, or Copenhagen. They have participated in other UN meetings in Bangalore, Johannesburg, Dubai, and Curitiba, Brazil, as well on topics from desertification to biodiversity to sustainable development. “The origins of this, like many things at the college, came as much from the students as it did from the faculty,” said Kenneth Cline, associate dean for faculty and professor of public policy and environmental law.

Preparing for International Talks

Cline, a lawyer by training who recently was named to hold a new David Rockefeller Family Chair in Ecosystem Management and Protection, leads an International Environmental Diplomacy Program that steels students for meaningful participation in these treaty talks. How is that possible or even plausible for a group of 18-to-22-year olds?

The College of the Atlantic, founded in 1969 by Bar Harbor residents and peace activists who wanted to bring a year-round enterprise to the tourist town that sits between Acadia National Park and Frenchman Bay (they originally thought of calling it Acadia Peace College), is well positioned for these international undertakings. It is one of the five campuses (along with Colby, Princeton, Middlebury, and Wellesley) chosen in 2000 to enroll United World College graduates on scholarships funded by philanthropist Shelby M.C. Davis. The United World Colleges are a global network of a dozen boarding schools offering the International Baccalaureate to top students from scores of countries identified as potential leaders. The Davis UWC Scholars program now helps UWC graduates at 91 U.S. colleges and universities. Starting with freshmen who entered in fall 2010, the program provides up to $20,000 per student each year for campuses with 40 or more UWC graduates, and $10,000 per student for the rest.

Thanks in part to these scholarships, one in six students at the College of the Atlantic is international. Among the 13 COA students at the climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December 2010 was junior Neil Oculi, who was part of the official seven-person delegation from his home country, St. Lucia. A capsule biography on the COA Web site said of Oculi: “In his spare time, he enjoys hanging out with his friends, cooking, and planning how to become the next prime minister of St. Lucia.” ‘

'You Should Be Ashamed’

Another COA student and UWC alumnus, Juan Carlos Soriano of Lima, Peru, became the sole representative of the 1,500 youth attending the Copenhagen conference permitted to address the final plenary session. It was a bittersweet two minutes. Clad in a neon orange T-shirt emblazoned with the words, “How Old Will You Be in 2050?” Soriano upbraided the delegates for failing to reach a binding agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions. “You should be ashamed,” said Soriano, who has seen the glaciers melting in the highlands of Peru.

Soriano and a third COA student, Lauren Nutter, are leaders of SustainUS, a nonprofit organization of young people that works for sustainable development and youth empowerment. Nutter has attended the last three climate change conferences (Bali, Poznan, and Copenhagen) as well as a preparatory meeting in Bangkok. “The college has been really good in supporting those of us who want to go,” said Nutter, 21, of Uxbridge, Massachusetts. “Usually I’ve had at least my plane ticket paid for and most if not all of the accommodations, which is usually a hostel. I always end up spending some money on food.”

The COA participants received accreditation but like many activists found themselves on the outside looking in at times at the overcrowded Copenhagen meeting. Cline and Doreen Stabinsky, a geneticist and environmental activist who teaches half-time at COA, also attended the conference. Cline estimated that it cost $26,000 to attend the meeting, with the college contributing $14000 and the rest “we raised ourselves.”

Going Beyond Observer Status

“In the past we had some small forays into the international realm,” said Cline, but now the International Environmental Diplomacy Program and other classes offer students ways to participate in these high-level policy meetings that go beyond mere observation. Gray Cox, who teaches social theory, political economics, and history, said, “they aren’t international relations majors’ practicing their political science skills. They are human ecologists” who are integrating theory and practice. Forty-five percent of the class of 2010 studied abroad. Some performed service in Mexico, Tobago, and other places.

“Our students have multiple experiences abroad,” said Cox, who has been involved with the college since it opened in 1972 and once was admissions director. The coursework, the internships, service projects and community organizing, and the international networking “are all feeding into one another…in a way that’s very distinctive of the COA experience.” The International Environmental Diplomacy Program, he added, “is the crown jewel.”

Nutter believes youth are making progress in voicing their concerns, even if their pleas for stronger action on climate change were ignored by elders at Copenhagen. At Bali, she recalled, representatives of the 200 youth in attendance got to speak “just by asking the chair nicely.” In Copenhagen, the 1,500 youth had official status and a right to the microphone, at least briefly.

Exposure to ‘World’s Best Thinkers’

Copenhagen drew 100 heads of state and their entourages. Such international gatherings are always “a three-ring circus,” said Cline. Outside the plenaries and closed-door negotiating sessions, “some of the preeminent experts of the world are there giving lectures and workshops. It’s a way for me to take students and expose them to some of the best thinkers in the world at the same time that they are actively involved in this process.”

“It’s a tremendous learning opportunity,” said Cline. “I would encourage any school that has an international program and any range of disciplines to think about this as a way of turning theory into practice.”

Nutter, who graduated in June, is spending 12 months traveling the world on a $25,000 Watson Fellowship. The Thomas J. Watson Foundation makes 40 such awards for independent study and travel outside the United States each year; graduates of 40 liberal arts colleges are eligible. Nutter is traveling to Turkey, India, Belgium, Netherlands, Peru, and Argentina, looking at how youth can be empowered in the environmental decisionmaking process.

Nutter was already an environmentalist before coming to the seaside campus in Maine to study human ecology. As she and other COA students have found, it is a place that encourages thinking globally.

Image

---

College of the Atlantic

Read more about College of the Atlantic