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

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

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

Strategic Partnerships: The International Fulcrum

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

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

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

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

Reaching Across the Curriculum

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

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

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

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

Impact Overseas and in Indianapolis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making Service a Centerpiece of International Education

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

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

Backing International Ambitions With Resources

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

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

Challenge of Internationalizing a Commuter Campus

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

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

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

Like a championship basketball team from the past, the first dozen Beloit College students who flew off to Europe in 1960 are still remembered and celebrated at the Wisconsin campus as “the Brussels Sprouts” who set the pace for study abroad. Beloit’s international roots extend to the nineteenth century when the first international students enrolled and alumni founded universities in Japan and Turkey. Campus museums display the artifacts that archeology and anthropology professors brought back from Africa and Asia. Between the two world wars, Dean George Collie made headlines with a proposal to turn Beloit into a “world college” for students from around the globe dedicated to pursuing peace and racial harmony.

Today this liberal arts campus by the scenic Rock River is renowned for its success in integrating education abroad into the curriculum. Working with colleagues from Kalamazoo College, International Education Director Elizabeth Brewer coedited and other Beloit faculty contributed to an entire book on the topic, Integrating Study Abroad Into the Curriculum: Theory and Practice Across the Disciplines, which lays out a blueprint for maximizing the benefits of education abroad. “We established a mission statement for international education and then invented learning goals for study abroad,” said Brewer. “We’ve focused on multiple things—communication skills, understanding oneself, learning from the host country, and not just about the host country but making discoveries about the subjects the students study here.” Beloit also is a sponsor of the journal, Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad. A signature Beloit approach is its Cities in Transition courses that use foreign cities as classrooms and send students off on explorations after teaching them how to map new places, conduct ethnographic studies, and interview strangers about their everyday lives. Brewer, an adjunct professor in German, has helped Beloit secure steady support from foundations for these efforts. Brewer, director of the international education office since 2002, is a former study abroad director who took three years off in mid-career to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Slovakia.

Integrating Student Insights From Abroad

The 45 percent of Beloit students who take part in education abroad may spend a semester at one of the college’s 11 bilateral exchange partners or sign up for classes offered by other affiliated universities and study abroad organizations. Almost half study in Asia, Latin America, or Africa and only a small number go to any one place. “Our students become extremely self-sufficient, self-reliant, and independent. They learn to problem solve because they are on their own,” said Beth Dougherty, chair of the international relations department. They must write a series of short essays before they go overseas about how the particular program will enhance their education and demonstrate forethought about the country and people they will encounter. The Committee on International Education, composed of six faculty and two students, reviews each application and sometimes orders rewrites. “We pay a lot of attention to their preparation before they go, and we celebrate the experiences in substantial ways when they return,” said President Scott Bierman. The college calls off classes on a Wednesday in mid-November for an International Symposium where dozens of students make presentations on what they learned overseas. Among topics explored in the 47 talks in November 2010 were human rights activism in China, persecution of albinos in Uganda, Muscovites’ remembrance of their war dead, and Mexicans’ use of the folk healing method curanderismo.

The Cities in Transition experiential learning courses have been offered since 2005 in such places as Moscow; Kaifeng and Jinan, China; and, with Mellon Foundation support, in Quito, Ecuador. The students attend other classes taught by local faculty, but a Beloit professor back in Wisconsin directs their research projects and joins them once or twice over the course of the semester. Beloit students have studied the life-size statues and funerary art in a famous Moscow cemetery, interviewed peddlers who erect a “night market” on the streets of Kaifeng each evening, and explored the hardships of life as a migrant worker in Senegal’s capital. Their professors use the Internet to guide and monitor the students’ site-based learning. Some students have won Fulbright grants to continue these explorations after graduation. In a comparative Cities in Transition course taught mainly on the home campus, students examine issues of health and poverty in Beloit and Managua, Nicaragua, where they spend a week mid-semester. 

The Cities in Transition pedagogy “helps students get out and look at a city in ways they wouldn’t otherwise,” said Donna Oliver, a professor of Russian who dispatches the students to Moscow’s Novoderichy cemetery to begin their research on remembrance. Daniel Youd, chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, said a fascination with contemporary China draws many students into study of Mandarin. At first some questioned why they were going to provincial cities instead of Beijing, “but as the word has gotten out that these are great programs, students are more than excited to go to Kaifeng and Jinan,” Youd said.

Unparalleled Preparation for World Citizenship

Beloit adopted a mission statement in 2005 that reads, “Our emphasis on international and interdisciplinary perspectives, the integration of knowledge with experience, and close collaboration among peers, professors, and staff equips our students to approach the complex problems of the world ethically and thoughtfully.” Its 2008 Strategic Plan for the 21st Century committed the college to expanding the Cities in Transition offerings and providing “unparalleled preparation for world citizenship to all students.” 

“Our emphasis on international and interdisciplinary perspectives, the integration of knowledge with experience, and close collaboration among peers, professors, and staff equips our students to approach the complex problems of the world ethically and thoughtfully.”

Natalie Gummer, an associate professor of religious studies and expert on Buddhism who has twice taught Cities in Transition courses in China, uses the same mapping and exploration techniques in a freshman seminar she directs that dispatches new students out into Beloit, a city of 36,000 residents dealing with aging industry and one of the highest unemployment rates in Wisconsin. While Beloit may not seem as exotic and unfamiliar as Kaifeng or Quito, the exercise gets the college students thinking from the start “about their role in the community and how to engage thoughtfully with the city and its people,” said Gummer.

Although Beloit has no foreign language requirement, 70 percent of students sign up for at least one language class. Half reach the intermediate level and a quarter complete four semesters of Spanish, French, German, Russian, Mandarin, or Japanese. The college provides resources for students to study Arabic on their own, and offers intensive summer classes in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. All students must take at least two courses on global relations and on another language or culture. Beloit opened a Center for the Study of World Affairs, now part of the international education office, back in 1960, the same year those education abroad pioneers flew off to Brussels.

Grants from the Freeman, Mellon, and Luce foundations have enabled Beloit to add faculty in international relations, Chinese, and Japanese, as well as art history. A third of the 105-member faculty contributed to an Asian studies push that led to a flowering of new courses, including one called The Physics of Asian Music. Twenty-nine faculty traveled to Asia with Freeman Foundation support. 

Support for International Students

Beloit enrolled 109 international students in 2009– 10, or 8 percent of the student body. It provides more financial aid to international undergraduates than most U.S. colleges its size or larger. “It’s an enormous commitment on the part of the college, but it’s part of our mission, part of our history,” said Bierman.

The beneficiaries include sophomore Teng (Ted) Liu, 20, of Chengdu, China, the son of a local official and a policeman. It took just one class at Beloit for Liu to decide to major not only in economics but also anthropology. The college gave him a grant to spend a month in New York City’s Chinatown after his freshman year researching how Buddhism helps Chinese immigrants adjust to U.S. life. “Anthropologists and economists need to learn from each other,” said Liu, who believes cultural sensitivity will stand him in good stead for an international business career.

“Anthropologists and economists need to learn from each other, said Liu, who believes cultural sensitivity will stand him in good stead for an international business career.”

Kristof Huszar, 20, an exchange student from Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary, savored his one semester on the Wisconsin campus. “I learned new things from different perspectives,” said the budding mathematician, son of a history professor and English teacher. “I have many American friends. The whole atmosphere here is very international. It’s just a global thinking. Quite often students from five continents sit at the same table and have lunch together. This was such a great experience for me.”

Weissberg Chair Draws International Leaders

Each spring the college brings in a prominent international figure for a weeklong series of classes and lectures first made possible by a gift from Marvin Weissberg, a real estate developer and Beloit parent. Daughter Nina Weissberg, class of 1984, now a trustee, is involved as well. Former Iraqi defense, finance, and trade minister Ali Allawi held the visiting Weissberg Chair in International Studies in 2011. Among his predecessors dating back to 1999 have been Palestinian leader Hanan Ashrawi, South African Justice Richard Goldstone, and Jan Egeland, former head of humanitarian affairs for the United Nations.

Allawi, an exile during the long regime of Saddam Hussein and his Ba’ath Party, survived two attempts on his life in Baghdad. The historian now sees “a glimmer of light at the end of a dark tunnel” for Iraq and the Middle East. He drew hope from how France and Germany resolved their historic enmity, and from South Korea’s reconciliation with Japan despite years of mistreatment. “The Koreans transcended that. They had to. It’s a question not only of survival but the well being of their people. You can’t just be looking at rectifying historical injustices all the time,” said Allawi. “There has to be something better at the end of the day.”

Short-Term ‘Advertisements’ for Semester Study Abroad

It might be expected that at a liberal arts college with such emphasis on international education, an even higher percentage of students would study abroad. The emphasis on semester programs and the academic calendar at Beloit—there is no January term—“works against us in terms of the metrics,” said Bierman. For first- and second-year students he favors adding new, short-term education abroad offerings “carefully crafted so that they are not seen as substitutes for the semester-length experiences, but rather as advertisements for a subsequent longer period abroad.”

Bierman sees a double advantage to having faculty lead short-term education abroad courses: it would enrich their own international experience and expertise. “We expect faculty to introduce international elements into nearly every class that they teach at Beloit, but that would be leveraged if faculty also had greater opportunities to teach abroad,” the president said.

Up to three-quarters of international relations majors write senior theses on topics they began researching abroad. Pablo Toral, associate professor of political science, said one student who studied disruptions caused by two big dams in Thailand knew so much about the project that students at the Thai university took to calling her “Mrs. Dam.”

Cultivating ‘Intentionality’ About Study Abroad

The Spanish-born Toral advises students who head abroad without a thesis topic in mind “to relax. If you don’t find your thesis, the thesis topic will find you.” The key is to steer them to the right courses beforehand, help them ask the right questions while abroad, “and when they come back, you can’t let the dream die. You have to keep feeding them, pushing them,” said Toral. International education “is a never ending project.”

This strong focus on cultivating “student intentionality” about education abroad and then encouraging undergraduates to take full advantage of international events on campus are “helping us improve the learning outcomes from study abroad,” said Brewer. Students “are bound to learn something if you send them overseas, but the outcomes are so much stronger if you help them think about what they’re trying to achieve before they go.”

When Tori Haring-Smith was in seventh grade, her imagination was captured by a book the journalist and war correspondent John Sack wrote about his travels to the 13 smallest countries on the planet. Nine years later, with Swarthmore College diploma in hand, she set out to retrace his steps to Sark, Swat, Sikkim, and other off-the-beaten-track places. Her 12-month journey came courtesy of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, bestowed on a select group of liberal arts college students for a year of independent travel and study around the world. Watson fellows don’t have to take classes or do academic research. They just have to use their imaginations to explore the world, as 2,500 have done since 1969 with generous grants from the late IBM chairman’s foundation. 

Haring-Smith, like many Watson fellows, gravitated toward academe, teaching theater and writing at Brown University, serving as executive director of the Watson Fellowship, becoming a dean and vice president at Willamette University, and then in 2005 being named the twelfth president of Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania. Washington & Jefferson (W&J) now has its own version of the Watson: the Magellan Project, which helps students pursue global intellectual adventures during college summers. The college provides both extensive mentoring, including workshops on how to write compelling project proposals, and financial support to make the projects happen. Since 2008 it has green-lighted and funded 100 Magellan Projects, including some that did not require a passport but all of which “involve purposeful travel and exploration in new and unfamiliar surroundings.” The grants average $2,000.

The college has a one-stop referral location to help students through the application process. The projects are self-directed, but the Magellan Scholars painstakingly map their plans in advance with a faculty mentor. They also must convince a committee composed of an associate dean, the head of career services, and three professors that the project is feasible. Every scholar attends a writing workshop in February and commits to telling others (including prospective W&J students) about their journeys upon their return. It is all aimed at assisting students “in crafting and in telling compelling stories of curiosity and achievement that will be useful throughout their college years” and beyond, as explained on the Magellan Project Web site.

From Diagnosticians to Problem Solvers

The Magellan Project has quickly become a signature feature of the college. It has its own $1 million endowment and its laurels include a 2010 Andrew Heiskell Award for Innovation in International Education. Moreover, said Haring-Smith, it has effected a change in how students view poverty and other social inequities. “It’s taken them from a stance that essentially said, ‘There’s a problem; someone should solve it,’ to ‘There’s a problem and I am going to help solve it.’” 

The college, which traces its roots to three “log cabin colleges” established in the 1780s by Presbyterian ministers that merged in 1865, enrolls 1,450 students on a 60-acre campus in the town of Washington, 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. 

The college sends about 190 students on traditional education abroad programs each year, many on faculty-led three-week classes in January. But Haring–Smith was intent on finding new ways to thrust them into situations “where they would be on their own, independently solving problems… without anybody to fall back on.” The Magellan Project, she said, was in keeping with the college’s mission statement, which speaks of graduating men and women “prepared to contribute substantially to the world in which they live,” and with a 2007 strategic plan that set a goal of bringing “the world into W&J and W&J into the world.” 

A Layperson’s Guide for Cancer Patients

The projects can revolve around independent research, service, or internships, but formal classroom study is out of bounds. Projects have included studying Holocaust sites in Europe, examining the healthcare system in Cyprus, volunteering at medical clinics in the Dominican Republic and South Africa, and preparing a patients’ guide to granulosa cell tumor (GCT) research.

Sophomore Haley Roberts wrote that guide after interning for GCT researchers at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Roberts, a student athlete and economics major, survived the cancer at age 16. “When I was diagnosed in 2009, I was frustrated that I didn’t fully understand GCT or treatment options or how cancer worked. Patients wanted to know about the science behind their disease to make better medical decisions and talk to their doctors intelligently,” she said, but the typical scientific medical article was indecipherable. As a result, she published The Genetics of Granulosa Cell Tumour, An Unofficial Guide for the Scientifically Illiterate, which has been downloaded hundreds of times from the Granulosa Cell Tumour Research Foundation’s Web site. Roberts, who remains in remission, now aspires to a career in public health.

Deciphering the Tax Code of Opportunities

Washington & Jefferson College had a panoply of student research and internship awards and opportunities before the Magellan, but “it was extremely confusing. It was like the tax code," said Haring-Smith. “We said, ‘Let’s call these all Magellans.’” 

Nick Tyger, a molecular biology major, is among a handful of students who snagged three Magellans over successive summers. The grants supported his work volunteering and recruiting other students to volunteer to set up health clinics in poor, mountain villages in the Dominican Republic near Haiti. He also travelled to Cusco, Peru, to scout other locations for clinics.

That didn’t pan out, but the club Tyger established, Presidents Without Borders (a nod to the college nickname), attracted 40 members and sent volunteers to Nicaragua in summer 2012. Tyger, who is headed to chiropractic college, said, “I have a new outlook on the global community. I thought before I left that these types of problems—hunger and poverty—were so much farther away than they actually are. Just a short plane ride and you’re in the midst of it.”

Not a Good Magellan Without Tears

Tiffani Gottschall, an economics professor who is the Magellan adviser for sophomores, said students typically have “a lot of nerves” as they embark on their projects. “They touch down in the airport in Turkey or Egypt and find themselves alone. Now what do they do?” she asked. James Sloat, associate dean for assessment and new initiatives, said, “In some sense, it’s not a good Magellan unless there are tears along the journey.” 

A third of W&J students are the first in their family to attend college and 20 percent qualify for need-based Pell Grants. They do not “have a sense of entitlement or superiority….They feel, ‘I’m just an average person,’” Haring-Smith said. It’s an enormous boost to their self-confidence when they extricate themselves from situations “where the last bus has gone up the mountain to the village where they are staying, and they have no money and no place to stay and no phone and no place to call even if they had a phone.”

Magellan Scholars are given ample opportunities to speak about their experiences, including recruiting pitches to freshmen before the new students sign a pledge at a matriculation ceremony to work toward becoming global citizens.

Educating Parents

Freshman, sophomores, and juniors with at least a 2.5 GPA can apply. The college awards about 25 Magellans each year. Haring-Smith would like to see many more. Increasing the number “actually has more to do with educating parents than educating students,” said the president, who has had to allay concerns of parents worried about sending their daughters or sons off to distant lands alone. She tells them: “You’ve raised a child who can do this.”

Carol Barno of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, was one of those anxious parents in 2010 when freshman daughter Erin set off to study architecture in Europe. The mathematics and art major has since done two more Magellan projects. “They’ve given her such confidence. She’s not that little 18-yearold girl I sent to W&J saying, ‘Oh, God, please take care of her,’” said Barno. Erin, a star field hockey player, concurs: “Traveling abroad on my own has made me fearless.”

Washington & Jefferson College

Read more about Washington & Jefferson College

Educators and political leaders alike have worried for years that too few college students were taking the courses that would prepare them for becoming the nation’s future scientists and engineers, and there has been special concern about the numbers of women and minorities entering these fields. Back in the mid-1990s the Graduate College at the  University of Arizona (UA) launched a program that brings dozens of promising, underrepresented undergraduates to the Tucson campus each summer to work alongside mentors in research labs and help prepare them for graduate school. The National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the university itself provide support for these summer opportunities, which draw students not just from UA but other U.S. colleges and universities. 

The University of Arizona conducts more than $60 million a year in research—it was 30th in the National Science Foundation rankings for fiscal 2010—and awards more than 200 PhDs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields annually. Professors welcome these bright undergraduates to their labs and often can make room on the bench for an additional intern. When Maria Teresa Velez, associate dean of the Graduate College and director of the summer program, sat down with Sergio Arias, director of international relations at the Universidad de Guanajuato in Mexico, to discuss ways to deepen existing institutional ties, they saw how an expanded summer research program could benefit both universities and, indeed, both countries. The result was the Verano de Investigación or Summer of Research program, which gives students hands-on lab experience and grooms them for graduate school. Originally limited to students from Mexican universities, the program now is open to promising students from across Latin America.

The track record speaks for itself: more than a third of the 73 undergraduates from the program’s first six summers already are attending graduate schools in the United States, Latin America, and Europe.

All but one student (a Colombian) were Mexican but the program now is open to college students throughout Latin America. It is “a win-win situation” for both UA and its Latin American partners, said Francisco Marmolejo, UA assistant vice president for Western Hemispheric programs and executive director of the Consortium for North American Higher Education Collaboration (CONAHEC). 

Learning the Arc of the Research Process

Andrew Comrie, dean of the UA Graduate College and associate vice president for research, said apprenticeships like this are the best way to show students “how fascinating science is” so that “the bug bites.” It deepens their learning and boosts their motivation to tackle “all this tough stuff,” he said.

“It’s a classic model,” Comrie said. “You build the trajectory of the lab experience around framing a research question that intrigues the student, conducting experiments for 10 weeks to answer this question, while giving them all this other preparation and professional training. They learn the whole arc of the research process.” They present their findings on posters at a Graduate College symposium that wraps up the summer.

The program operates in tandem with the ongoing Summer Research Institute for 90 underrepresented U.S. students. The students live together on campus on dorms and, in addition to their lab work, take a 40-hour class to prepare for the Graduate Record Examination and to zero in on graduate programs that best match their research and career interests as well as skills. For the Latin American students, there is additional tutoring on English skills and seminars from current graduate students regarding the adjustment issues they are likely to face if they pursue degrees in the United States.

Support From Sponsoring States

The participating universities in Mexico and elsewhere customarily pay the students’ travel and living expenses with funds allocated by their federal or state governments. Families contribute as well. UA absorbs other costs, including the $3,500 it would normally charge for six credits of tuition. 

The program drew seven students in 2007, the first summer, 17 students the next, then dropped to 10 and 12 in 2009 and 2010 as the Arizona legislature was considering and enacting stricter immigration laws, but the number rebounded to 26 in both 2011 and in 2012. The Graduate College, at the behest and expense of Chile’s government, is planning to host Chilean undergraduates in research labs for 10 weeks in an Invierno de Investigación, or Winter Research Program. One Mexican student co-authored with his mentor an article in the Applied Thermal Engineering journal. Several UA professors have started collaborations with Mexican colleagues as a direct result of mentoring the visiting students.

A Faster Route to the PhD

Yissel Contreras, 23, of Mexico City, spent the summer of 2011 working with Anthony Muscat, a professor of chemical and environmental engineering, on new techniques for modifying silicon surfaces. Contreras was on the eve of graduating from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) with a bachelor’s degree in technology and was considering other research opportunities in Germany and the Netherlands when a classmate told her about the Arizona program.

“It’s definitely one of the best I’ve ever seen,” she said. “It really prepares students for graduate school. I have to admit my English really improved.” She had studied the language for years in school, “but it’s totally different from being in a place where you were using it all the time.” It also opened up for Contreras a possibility she did not know existed: going straight into a PhD program without first getting a master’s degree. She is now back in Tucson as one of her mentor’s doctoral students.

Ambitions to Be the “Northernmost” Latin American University

More than a tenth of the University of Arizona’s 2,700 international students are from Latin America, including 162 from Mexico, 24 from Brazil, 22 from Chile, and 14 from Colombia (total UA enrollment is 39,000). The border and the city of Nogales, Mexico, are just 68 miles south of UA’s palm tree-lined campus in the middle of downtown Tucson, ringed by mountains and the Sonoran Desert.

Marmolejo said the summer program dovetails with UA’s ambition to win recognition “as the northernmost Latin American university in the world,” a phrase borrowed from Michael Proctor, UA vice president for global initiatives. 

The program “internationalizes the university in such a way that underrepresented (American) students influence the Latin Americans, and the Latin American students influence the underrepresented students. The meshing … is very important,” said Velez, a clinical psychologist.

The students must have a GPA of 3.0 and a passing score of at least 500 on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). “We like for them to come for the summer between junior and senior year. By then they have the coursework to enable them to really engage in laboratory research. They’re more mature and know English better; that’s the ideal time also to consider if graduate school is for them,” said Velez. The students are asked beforehand which three to five professors they would like to work with and they are matched with one of them if possible. 

Swift Dividends

University partnerships across borders are commonplace, but “many times these initiatives become just ceremonial things,” said Marmolejo. “The Latin American Summer Research Institute engages faculty and students” and maximizes intercultural learning.

The payoff has been swift. Of those 73 undergraduates from the first six summers, 28 are now in graduate school, including 13 at Mexican universities, 11 at UA, and four in Europe. “This has been a great tool to move our connections with our partner universities in Latin America to the next level,” said Marmolejo.

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When Sonia Penso enrolled at Providence College, it was the dream of her autoworker parents—Portuguese immigrants whose education stopped in grade school—that she become a doctor or lawyer. Sonia herself envisioned law school as a strong possibility. But majoring in global studies, studying abroad in Nicaragua and Argentina, and working with troubled U.S. and Latino youth led her down a different path. She is now a caseworker with Homeboy Industries, a renowned gang intervention program in Los Angeles. “When everything shifted, I was really surprised that both my parents were incredibly supportive,” said the 23-year-old, who graduated in 2011. 

Global studies seems to have the effect of altering career trajectories. Michelle DePlante ‘08, who was among the first to sign up when Providence created the interdisciplinary major in 2005, does immigrant and refugee work in the Rhode Island capital. Victoria Neff ‘09 is at the University of Denver doing graduate work in international studies after two years in the Peace Corps in China. Alexandra BetGeorge ‘11 is a Fulbright Scholar teaching English to high school students in Bulgaria.

These are the career paths that leaders at the Catholic college envisioned when it created the interdisciplinary major and imbued it with extensive community service requirements across all four years. They must become fluent in a second language (two advanced level courses) and, naturally, participate in education abroad. The global studies program now has nearly 100 majors and graduates 25 students each year.

An Ethos of Service and New Emphasis on Education Abroad

The ethos of service runs strong at Providence, the only U.S. college founded and run by the white-robed Dominican Friars, but a push to internationalize students’ experiences picked up steam with the creation of a Center for International Studies in 2007 to facilitate education abroad. The college’s 2011 strategic plan seeks to boost the education abroad participation rate from 15 to 35 percent. An overhaul of the core curriculum addressed the need to develop more engaged students who undertake “research, scholarship, service, internships, and other immersion experiences locally, regionally, and abroad.”

Since making financial aid fully portable for the first time—a step with an annual cost of $3 million—Providence has seen the number of education abroad students rocket from 163 in 2010–11 to 230 in 2011–12, with even larger numbers projected for the 2012–13 academic year, said Dean of International Studies Adrian Beaulieu, who recently hired a fourth staff person for the Center for International Studies. The percentage studying abroad for a full semester has risen to 25 percent. Beaulieu said the first mandate he was given when hired as dean in 2007 was “to get serious about study abroad.”

Nicholas Longo, now the director of global studies, taught the first introductory course on global studies to 20 students back in 2005 as a part-time lecturer. Longo is a summa cum laude graduate from the class of 1996 who majored in political science, minored in a then-new department, public and community service studies, and became a civic engagement activist and scholar. He returned to his alma mater in 2008.

An Interdisciplinary Faculty and Community Advisers

Global studies has no faculty of its own but draws from other departments. Longo, an associate professor in the Department of Public and Community Service, said, “There’s a core group of six faculty from social work, from philosophy, from the business school, from foreign language, from sociology, and from public service.” 

Some courses are co-taught by community advisers such as DePlante, outreach coordinator for International Institute Rhode Island (IIRI), a nonprofit that provides educational, legal, and social services to immigrants and refugees throughout the state and southeast New England. She had done volunteer work for the institute as a college student and joined it full-time upon graduation. Now some of the students she teaches fulfill their service requirement by volunteering at IIRI.

Seeing the Real World Implications of Globalization

Service learning is built into most of the major’s required courses. Students often work in teams on projects that in Longo’s words “examine globalization and global citizenship through the lens of local community engagement.”

Using local activists as co-teachers “really brings a community voice into the classroom,” said Longo, who once was a national student coordinator for the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Campus Compact and later directed Miami University’s civic leadership institute.
“Students are not just studying globalization in that first course. They are doing service learning and civic engagement projects and seeing what the real world implications of globalization are in Providence,” said Longo. 

Like Sonia Penso, DePlante, the daughter of a Cuban immigrant, had to explain her choice of the major “more than once” to her parents and other relatives skeptical of whether it would lead to a job. “But I knew I was learning critical skills that would be the foundation for any direction I wanted to go,” said DePlante, who minored in business and Spanish as well. “The major provides the leadership and thinking skills that employers and grad schools are looking for.” She studied and did a business internship in Seville, Spain, then wrote her thesis on the assimilation of Hispanic immigrants in Providence.

A Capstone Globally Engaged Thesis

Most of Providence’s 3,900 undergraduates do not have to write theses, but the capstone of global studies is a requirement to produce a “globally engaged” thesis. The seniors participate in a year-long seminar synthesizing what they have learned in the classroom and in their community involvement at home and abroad, then write a paper that is supposed to have real world implications, like the comparative study that Penso did on troubled urban youth in Nicaragua, Argentina, and Rhode Island.
Throughout the four years, the majors must develop an individualized learning plan and keep an “e-portfolio” tracking their progress in learning a second language, choosing an education abroad program, engaging in civic and service activities, and demonstrating awareness of global issues.

Longo said it has taken time to convince some faculty colleagues that global studies was “a rigorous and legitimate academic discipline,” but the projects students have taken on and their success after graduation have made that task easier. Neff, who came to Providence on a soccer scholarship, wrote her thesis on the role of community organizations in combating HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. BetGeorge studied abroad in Tunisia, which positioned her well to write a thesis on the role of Facebook in sparking the first Arab Spring revolution.

Reaching Students Outside the Major

While global studies has had a strong influence on its own students, until this fall there was scant room in its courses for non-majors. But with a newly hired adjunct, the college now offers four sections of Introduction to Global Studies instead of two. “Part of the reason we haven’t grown as much as we probably could have is that if you didn’t come in as a global studies major, it was hard to get into the course,” said Longo. Now he hopes to “introduce the themes and the concepts from our course to many more students.”

“People aren’t looking at us any more like we were totally crazy for majoring in global studies,” Penso said with a laugh. “For me, it was the best choice I made. I’m so thankful that so many of the experiences that I had”—she worked with gang kids in Managua and undocumented youth in Buenos Aires—“were so far out of my comfort zone. It made me feel I can accomplish so much and do so many other things. It prepared us for the real world.”

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They were just brief remarks in the wee hours of the chill October 1960 night on the stone steps of the Michigan Union from a tired John F. Kennedy who had flown in after debating rival Richard Nixon in New York. But the future president threw out a challenge to the thousands of students who had waited in the drizzle to greet him. Speaking off the cuff, he asked, “How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the foreign service and spend your lives traveling around the world?”

The idea of an international volunteer corps of young Americans already had been percolating in Congress, but the Michigan students got the ball rolling, gathering hundreds of signatures on a petition expressing a willingness to serve in poor countries. Kennedy formally proposed a Peace Corps in a San Francisco speech a few days before winning one of the closest elections in U.S. history. On March 1, 1961, JFK signed an executive order creating the agency, which Congress later wrote into law. Among the first volunteers were Alan and Judy Guskin, the Michigan graduate students who organized the petition drive. Half a century later, no tour of the Michigan campus is complete without a stop to read the inscription on the marker on the Union steps: “Conception of Peace Corps First Mentioned on This Spot October 14, 1960.”

The Peace Corps connection is an indelible part of the identity of the University of Michigan, which enrolls nearly 6,000 international students and offers instruction in 65 languages, from Bamana and Bosnian to Tamil and Twi to Urdu and Uzbek. Founded almost two centuries ago, U-M (it prefers the hyphen and never tires of seeing its block letter M logo stamped on sweatshirts and signs) boasts the seventh largest endowment of any U.S. university ($7.8 billion), according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers, and conducts more research ($1 billion-plus) than any campus other than Johns Hopkins, according to the National Science Foundation. Constitutionally autonomous, it has weathered large cuts in state funding and still managed to hire dozens of new, tenure-track faculty, all while squeezing over a decade nearly a quarter-billion dollars in recurring costs from its $1.6 billion operating budget. “We have navigated this period well. We’ve remained on our upward trajectory and been able to do a lot of things we wanted to do, like increase the number of students who are studying abroad,” said Provost Philip Hanlon.

Ramping Up International Activities

From a campus with 27,000 undergraduates and 14,000 graduate students, the education abroad numbers have doubled since 2004–05 to nearly 2,000 in 2010–11, with 1,300 others heading abroad for service, internships, and other noncredit opportunities. President Mary Sue Coleman has made it her mission to, as she put it, “ramp up our international efforts,” in part by leading deans and faculty on carefully planned trips to Africa, China, and Brazil that have produced expanded research partnerships and other initiatives.

The 2008 trip to Ghana—on which she brought the Michigan Gospel Chorale—and to South Africa led to creation of an African Presidential Scholars Program that brings ten promising young scholars to Ann Arbor each year for residencies, as well as establishment of a new African Studies Center within the International Institute. Coleman has expanded a partnership with Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) in Shanghai, where a Michigan faculty member is dean of the UM-SJTU Joint Institute that confers dual degrees in engineering. The U-M Medical School has a $14 million research partnership with Peking University. At the same time, a top-level U-M task force ruled out opening a branch campus in China, as some universities have done. 

International Opportunities for Undergraduates

President Coleman also created in 2009 the Challenge for the Student Global Experience that has raised tens of millions of dollars for education abroad scholarships. She found internal funds to match $1 for every $2 of large donations, made the first gift herself, and later donated her 2011 salary increase as well. 

More than half of Michigan students (53 percent) now study outside Europe, compared with 38 percent eight years ago. The Center for Global and Intercultural Study within the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, operates the largest education abroad office on the decentralized campus. U-M faculty serve as resident directors of 40 of its 90 study abroad programs. The center also runs a service program called Global Intercultural Experience for Undergraduates (GIEU) that sends 200 students in small groups, each with a professor, to 15 to 20 places in need around the globe each summer. 

Senior Natalie Bisaro, a communications and comparative literature major, spent a month in Grenada working with young children. “Before going, I was kind of terrified of studying abroad, to be honest,” said Bisaro. “This was all pretty much life changing.” She later spent a semester in Switzerland and took a sports management class in Ann Arbor that included two weeks in London looking at preparations for the Summer Olympics. The latter was one of a dozen “Global Course Connections” classes with travel embedded. 

Lester Monts, senior vice provost for academic affairs, pushed for the creation in 2002 of the GIEU program. Monts, an ethnomusicologist and trumpeter who led the U-M Symphonic Band on a tour of China and helped bring to Ann Arbor the only Confucius Institute devoted solely to the arts, said, “One of the things that I’ve tried to do here is not let these big, grand, university initiatives go without some kind of undergraduate involvement,” he said.

Close Ties With Ghana

Fittingly, some of Michigan’s strongest international ties are to Ghana, the country that Kennedy singled out in his remarks on the Union steps. Through a partnership with the Ghanaian Ministry of Health, the University of Ghana, and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, dating to the 1980s, the U-M Medical School has trained most of the country’s obstetrician-gynecologists and helped reverse a “brain drain” of young physicians who used to leave the country for training. Other schools, including Engineering, Public Health, and Social Science, also send faculty to teach and conduct research in Ghana and bring Ghanaian faculty and students to Ann Arbor. 

For a class project, biomedical engineering major Jack Hessburg and classmates spent weeks in Ghana accompanying obstetricians on their rounds in teaching hospitals, and back in Ann Arbor then designed a 17-inch plastic device to place a fabric sleeve around the baby’s head to aid midwives in deliveries. The device awaits approval by health authorities, but “the obstetricians and midwives we were working with were excited and cautiously optimistic,” said Hessburg. 

Sending Engineers and Artists Abroad

The College of Engineering has made a big push to encourage students to study and undertake projects abroad. “We’re broad minded. We talk about study abroad, research abroad, volunteer experiences abroad, engineering projects abroad,” including solar car competitions, said Associate Dean James Paul Holloway. “The goal is not study 
abroad. The goal is for students to get outside their comfort zone.”

The engineers are as much interested “in a challenging experience as they are in academic credit,” said Amy Conger, who directs the college’s international programs. “They want an experience that is engaging, professionally relevant, and that’s going to teach them something new. They want to tackle a problem.”

Bryan Rogers, retiring dean of the School of Art and Design, took an art class while completing a PhD in chemical engineering at University of California Berkeley and wound up reengineering himself into a sculptor and installation artist. The School of Art and Design is the smallest school at Michigan, and Rogers spent a couple of years selling the idea of education abroad to his faculty before convincing them to make international travel and study a requirement for the major. Rogers, who did postgraduate work at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, said, “Being somewhere else helped me better understand who I was. That’s what I want for our students and faculty…. The idea is not to go somewhere and get culture dust sprinkled on you, but to get away from the things that you’re familiar with and have an experience that helps you see where you came from.”

Global Scholars for Life

The university keeps expanding its international ambit in ways small and large. Three years ago it created a living-learning community it calls the Global Scholars Program in which U.S. and international students dwell together on the top two floors of a 10-story dorm and work on social justice projects. “When we advertise, we say we want students who are interested in making the world a better place,” said Jennifer Yim, the director. It quickly filled up with 35 students the first year, 70 the second, and the capacity of 130 the third year. “My students say ‘GSP for life,’” Yim said.

Xiaoxiao Liu, a senior from Beijing, served as a GSP resident adviser. He was also president of the student government’s international student affairs committee. Liu won math competitions as a schoolboy in China, but came to the United States for college because he wanted to learn more than the math and sciences emphasized in China’s universities. “Here you can speak whatever you want to say. People tend to have more diverse views of what’s going on. That’s something I really wanted to explore,” said Liu, who pulled off a rare triple major in actuarial math, statistics, and economics.

John Greisberger, director of the International Center, is heartened by the growing number of international undergraduates serving as resident advisers. “Four years ago, fewer than five of the 150 to 160 resident advisers were international students. Now it’s close to 40,” said Greisberger. “It’s a great job on campus. They get free housing and a meal plan. It really does build a multicultural environment within the residence halls.”

An Area Studies Powerhouse

Michigan is an area studies bastion, with six national resource centers among the International Institute’s 18 centers, plus a federally funded international business center. But that distinctive strength also means the Michigan centers were hard hit in 2011 when Congress cut Title VI funding for the national resource centers by 47 percent. Mark Tessler, vice provost for international affairs, said, “We’re better prepared than most. Some of these centers actually have endowments. I think the university will support us for a while.” But “the biggest unanswered question” is what happens in the long run to the dozens of less commonly taught languages, Tessler said. “If universities like us don’t offer them, then the U.S. just won’t have this capacity.” 

“We think it’s very important for a place like Michigan to keep the breadth and depth as much as possible because we know that many other institutions cannot.”

Kenneth Kollman, director of the International Institute, is looking to foundations to help fill in the $1.5 million, two-year funding gap. Although foreign language and area studies fellowships were not cut, Kollman said Michigan has had to cut back on summer language workshops and training for Michigan high school teachers. The university once calculated that it takes 29 students to pay for each section of a language course, but some of the centers’ languages— including Persian, Serbo-Croatian, Tamil, and Quechua—have as few as five students, he said.

Geography Lesson

The university in 2010 launched a “Global Michigan” Web site, globalportal.umich.edu, that pulls together resources and encourages students and faculty to conduct study and research abroad. “The world is today’s college campus. Never before have we had so much to learn from other nations and cultures,” Coleman says in a videotaped message that ends, “Go Blue—abroad!”

Coleman is unwilling to cede any of Michigan’s 65 languages as expendable.

“We think it’s very important for a place like Michigan to keep the breadth and depth as much as possible because we know that many other institutions cannot,” the president said. Cutting programs “is our last resort.”

“We had an experience back in the 1980s when we had one of these budget crunches and made the decision to close a couple of academic departments,” including geography, Coleman said. “Everybody thought there wasn’t any future in geography and then GPS [Global Positioning System] came along with all sorts of new things. Now it’s a very robust discipline. Anybody looking back now would think that decision was silly. So we are very careful; reducing languages for us would be a very serious decision.” 

It’s no surprise that San Francisco State University (SF State) is a magnet for international students. The green campus sits in a tranquil corner of one of the world’s most enticing  cities, with Muni trolleys running up to its door and the Pacific Ocean beckoning a mile away. It has ranked in the top five in international enrollments among master’s level institutions since 1996 and occupied first place three times according to the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors report. More surprising, this urban campus is second in the country in another category: participation in year-long study abroad. Most of these students, like the large majority of all 25,000 undergraduates, are racial or ethnic minorities. “We have this huge mix racially and ethnically, and that’s who we send,” said Provost Sue Rosser.

A significant number are from disadvantaged backgrounds. They win dozens of Gilman Scholarships each year—176 in the past five years— and three-quarters of the nearly 450 SF State study abroad students receive aid in some form. Yenbo Wu, associate vice president of international education, said, “We have proven that you can study abroad even if you’re not super rich.” David Wick, coordinator of study abroad services, said, “We’re doing some pretty unique things to make study abroad possible for very diverse, very low income, transfer, and older student populations.” The drive for diversity is a widely shared passion at SF State (both Wick and Marilyn Jackson, assistant director of international programs, wrote doctoral dissertations addressing education abroad issues for students of color). The campus is home to the nation’s first and only College of Ethnic Studies, created after a prolonged student strike during the antiwar and civil rights ferment of the late 1960s. The distinctive-looking student center, topped by tilted pyramids, is named for Cesar Chavez, the farm workers’ leader, and it faces Malcolm X Plaza. “We’ve gone beyond diversity. We are a campus for social justice and equity,” said Dean of Students Joseph Greenwell.

Senior Albert (A.J.) Burleson, who grew up in impoverished, historically black Hunter’s Point, started college years ago and even earned a track scholarship at Cal State University, Fresno, but left far short of a degree. He found much greater success at SF State where he completed a bachelor’s degree in sociology and international relations after spending a year at the University of Amsterdam on a Gilman Award. Burleson’s resume includes work on filmmaker Kevin Epps documentary Straight Outta Hunter’s Point. He became a peer mentor in the international programs office after returning from the Netherlands. “I received so much aid and support, and me coming from the inner city, I see it only fitting that I return the favor by helping others access study abroad,” said the 35-year-old. Another peer mentor, senior Jordan Brown, 26, a broadcasting and electronic media major who grew up in Sacramento, used his Gilman to study at the University of Tübingen and the Hochschule der Medien in Stuttgart, Germany, and headed to Ghana after graduation to complete a documentary. Brown successfully navigated art and media classes taught in German after one course in San Francisco and six weeks of language classes in Germany. “That was intense, but good,” said Brown, who is weighing a possible return to Germany for graduate school.

Thriving Despite Economic Challenges

SF State has moved forward with its internationalization efforts during a period of prolonged austerity and budget crises for California’s public institutions. When Yenbo Wu arrived in 2000 to take charge of the Office of International Programs, it had a 10-person staff. By 2007, when President Robert Corrigan, a stalwart supporter of internationalization, elevated Wu to the new position of associate vice president for international education, the staff had grown to 20. A hiring freeze subsequently cost the office two of those positions. A new international student adviser hired in spring 2012 was the first addition to the staff in two years. Corrigan, who retired in July 2012 at age 77 after 24 years, said he felt an obligation to ensure that the international students who enroll in such large numbers have a good experience during their years on the urban campus, including academic advice, mentoring, and opportunities to interact with faculty outside the classroom. Corrigan’s successor is Leslie Wong, former president of Northern Michigan University.

Cuts in state aid have led to greater class sizes at SF State, especially in departments depleted by the loss of 100 faculty jobs to attrition. A university planning advisory council that Corrigan appointed to address the budget challenges expressed strong support for “the university’s commitment to internationalization and the benefits that international programs bring to our students.” It also applauded efforts by the Office of International Programs (OIP) “to maximize flexibility and efficiency” and took note of “the financial advantages associated with strategically recruiting international students.” International students bring their global perspective and the numbers needed to develop new programs. In the economics department, which had lost five of 14 faculty members, Sudip Chattopadhyay, the chair, spearheaded the creation of a dual-degree master’s program with Xiamen University that brings to campus a cohort of 30 Chinese students, fully funded by their government, and sends SF State faculty to teach at Xiamen in the summer. “We have to be very innovative as to how we offer the same curriculum with reduced resources,” Chattopadhyay said. 

A Stellar Faculty, a Welcoming Community

Since fewer than 400 domestic students come from outside California, the international contingent makes an outsize contribution to campus diversity. “We’re not Stanford or Berkeley, but this is a university that’s right for most students, not just in the United States but the world,” said Wu, a native of Beijing. The location and SF State’s mission also help attract a stellar faculty. Rosser, a zoologist and women’s studies scholar who previously was Georgia Tech’s first female dean, said, “We’re really quite fortunate in the caliber of faculty we’re able to attract.” 

“We’re not Stanford or Berkeley, but this is a university that’s right for most students, not just in the United States but the world.”

San Francisco, the city that gave birth to the United Nations, is home to a polyglot population. “We don’t have to do much of a marketing job for San Francisco,” said Jay Ward, the OIP associate director who has directed international student services since 1994, when there were 1,000 international students. Counting those on Optional Practical Training, SF State now has more than 2,400. With a third adviser now on board, Ward hopes to extend office hours and expand programming “to the way it was before.”

Koichiro Aoshima, the Japanese-born coordinator for international student services and outreach, recalled that on the day he first set foot on campus in 1998, “a guy came up to me and asked for directions. He thought I was from here. You just blend in.” 

Aoshima and Mei-Ling Wang, coordinator of international student advising, advise hundreds of international undergraduate and exchange students. When speaking with new arrivals, Wang always keeps in mind how she felt as an 18-yearold freshman at Drexel University in Philadelphia, fresh from Taiwan. “It isn’t easy. You struggle with the language. I was even afraid to go to grocery shop. I didn’t know how to order a sandwich. ‘Why do they have so many choices?’” she recalled. “You really have to be patient with these students.”

Incubating Student Leaders

There are 26 international clubs at SF State. The largest by far is the 1,800-member International Education Exchange Council (IEEC). It includes the hundreds of exchange students who come to SF State each year, droves of U.S. students preparing for or newly returned from study abroad, and other students drawn by dozens of weekly events including sports events, film nights, and language exchange partnerships. The council affords ample opportunities for leadership training with nearly 100 officer positions, including co-U.S. and international presidents.

Eric Ostlund, 24, a graduate student from Uppsala University, Sweden, studying law, economics, and criminal justice, said, “The IEEC is very different from anything you’re likely to find anywhere else, just in terms of sheer size and magnitude and all the different things we do. We’re one of the few environments where if you have an idea and you want to do it, you actually can.”

Ostlund was co-president with Linda Carter Nguyen of Alameda, California, whose Vietnamese immigrant parents named her after the actress who played Wonder Woman, from a television show they watched to learn English. Nguyen joined the IEEC to meet French students on campus before her semester in Paris. “I kind of corralled all the French people on campus and said, ‘Be my friend, take care of me.’ So when I went to Paris, that’s what they did. They picked me up in the airport. They introduced me to their friends,” she said. Flying back home, the liberal studies major resolved “to be more involved in the IEEC to keep this international dream alive.” 

IEEC students are a familiar sight on campus—staffing a study abroad table on the quad, distributing flyers, and organizing events and activities. They also raise funds for scholarships. Noah Kuchins, the IEEC adviser, works to connect all incoming students with buddies “before they set foot on campus.” He finds prospects when they inquire at the OIP about education abroad. His pitch: “You’re interested in studying in Japan and we’ve got 30 Japanese students coming next semester. Would you want to welcome one of them?”

Exchange Brings Opportunities

Students can choose among 115 study abroad programs in 28 countries. SF State has 55 bilateral exchanges of its own and offers 51 more through the California State University international programs office. Exchanges bring international opportunities to every department, including SF State’s undergraduate cinema major. Since 2010 Weimin Zhang, an associate professor and awardwinning documentary filmmaker, has led the International Documentary Workshop in Shanghai, China, each summer in partnership with Xiejin Film and Television College at Shanghai Normal University. She brought the first dozen SF State students to Shanghai in June 2010 to collaborate with a dozen Shanghai Normal students over three weeks to conceive, write, and film four 10-minute documentaries on unusual aspects of life in China, including the local hip hop scene, housing shortages, and migrant workers’ struggles. The students overcome language barriers. Zhang, a graduate of the Beijing Film Academy, said, “Even I was surprised they can make a film in a language they don’t even know.” President Corrigan, who visited the first workshop, marveled that students shared “a common language of film.” The Shanghai film school also sends several students to San Francisco for a semester each term. 

General Education Includes Global Perspectives

All undergraduates must fulfill a cultural, ethnic, or social diversity requirement. Some 300 courses already contain significant international content. Paul Sherwin, dean of the College of Liberal and Creative Arts and formerly dean of humanities, believes a forthcoming general education change will quadruple student enrollment to 4,000 in courses offering comparative study of global issues and regions. “The curriculum already has changed drastically in almost all majors,” even in his own field of English literature, said Sherwin, pointing to a recent hire who teaches a course on Shakespeare’s influence on India’s Bollywood.

“We’re creating global citizens,” said history professor Trevor Getz, an Africa specialist whose popular courses serve as a feeder to education abroad programs in Ghana and South Africa. “It’s not just important that we send our elite abroad. This country does a pretty good job of that. It’s equally important that the kinds of students that we have here are able to have that experience.” 

The strides that Northern Arizona University (NAU) is making on all fronts in international education—doubling international enrollments, tripling participation in education abroad, marshaling enthusiastic faculty support for a Global Learning Initiative that will infuse more global content into the curriculum discipline by discipline—shows what a committed institution can do even under exacting budgetary circumstances. NAU has raised its international profile and activities even while dealing with the loss of a third of its state aid ($60 million) over four years. Part of its success stems from finding a novel way to finance the Global Learning Initiative, coupled with strong leadership and resolute support from the top.  

Arizona’s third-largest university, perched beneath the scenic San Francisco Peaks in Flagstaff, already was deeply involved in study and research across the American Southwest—the 27,000-square mile Navajo Nation is next door. The global engagement push has it looking even farther. The university made global engagement a strategic priority and hired Harvey Charles as vice provost for international affairs and director of the Center for International Education. Charles earlier directed international education offices at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, Georgia Tech, and San Francisco State University. President John Haeger and Provost Liz Grobsmith convened the Task Force for Global Education in 2008 and charged it with crafting a blueprint for transforming NAU into a global campus and ensuring that graduates were ready to compete in a global economy. While 18 faculty and administrators formed the nucleus of the task force, 30 other faculty and the then-mayor of Flagstaff, Joe Donaldson, served on five subcommittees (the mayor was on the community engagement panel). They came up with numerous ways to embed global learning throughout academic majors, general education courses, and cocurricular activities. “It is our hope that students will have multiple and substantive encounters (as opposed to merely a one-course requirement) with these perspectives,” said the panel. The faculty Senate gave its blessings to the panel’s raft of recommendations in 2010.

Fast Forwarding Course Development

Anthropologist Miguel Vasquez recalled a meeting to winnow four dozen faculty proposals in the running for $4,000 seed grants to develop new courses. “Harvey walked in and said, ‘Let’s make this easy. I want to award every one of these grants because this is what we’re trying to do on this campus. We’ve got the money, so let’s do it,’” said Vasquez. “It pushed the whole thing fast forward.” The university-wide belt-tightening brought on by the reductions in state appropriations actually whetted faculty appetites for the global initiative, said Blase Scarnati, director of the Global Learning Initiative. “Things started moving around the table, and that kind of kinetic energy made a lot of innovative things possible.”

“Instead of generic global learning outcomes, we’re talking about global learning outcomes in the language of physics, dental hygiene, electronic media and film, engineering.”

Each department was charged with defining global learning outcomes for its own discipline. “Instead of having a university-wide committee telling everybody how to do global learning, we’ve given the responsibility to the faculty themselves,” explained Charles. “Instead of generic global learning outcomes, we’re talking about global learning outcomes in the language of physics, dental hygiene, electronic media and film, engineering.”

Looking at the World Through Sustainability, Diversity Lenses

The faculty also were pressed to realign the curriculum in ways that buttressed three bedrock NAU values: sustainability, diversity, and global engagement. Charles launched a twice-a-year, 20-page magazine, NAU Global, that explained the changes ahead and shone a beacon on the extensive study and research that faculty and students were undertaking overseas.

Scarnati, a musicologist, said even minor course adjustments “can have quite a dramatic impact” on internationalizing the curriculum. Assigning civil engineering students to design a bridge for Kenya instead of Arizona requires the same complex math calculations, but also forces students to weigh “all sorts of cultural issues in terms of materials and workforce management,” Scarnati said. When professors and students looked closely, global issues hit closer to home than some realized. In Scarnati’s own department, awareness grew about the threats that development poses to the African blackwood trees that provide the wood to make oboes and other woodwinds. 

It will take time to see some changes bear fruit. Starting in fall 2012, a five-year Global Science and Engineer Program (GSEP) offers science and engineering majors the opportunity to spend a full year studying and interning abroad and to earn a second bachelor’s degree in French, German, or Spanish (or a minor in Chinese and Japanese). It is modeled after the University of Rhode Island’s groundbreaking dual-degree program. Eck Doerry, an associate professor of computer science who used to take rising sophomores on “icebreaker” summer trips to Germany, said, “Engineers are going to have to change how they behave.”

Global Engagement Outside the Classroom

Paul Trotta, professor of civil and environmental engineering and adviser to the Engineers Without Borders (EWB) chapter, led students on service trips to a village in Ghana to build a solar-powered water station and perform other work, including building quarters for a village nurse. They undertook the latter after village leaders identified their most pressing need not as more solar power, but as lodging, to convince the government to send them a nurse. When an engineering student came down with malaria, an anthropology student stepped up to manage construction. It wasn’t applied anthropology, but “what a wonderful experience she had,” said Trotta. EWB also has undertaken wastewater projects on the island of Roatán, 30 miles off the coast of Honduras. “We need projects closer to home,” said Trotta, who noted it costs as much to fly one student to Ghana as it does to build a well.

Leslie Schulz, executive dean of the College of Health and Human Services, led a December 2011 service trip to a Tibetan refugee camp in Mainpat, India. Schulz, a nutritionist and diabetes researcher, brought a dozen faculty and students—dental hygienists, engineers, and sustainable community experts—on the journey that began with two days of flying and an arduous 17-hour bus ride. They dwelled for eight days in a Buddhist monastery and, with other Flagstaff volunteers, fanned out to seven refugee camps providing care, mapping needs, and trying to improve the spotty electricity supply. Schulz brought the leader of the Mainpat community to Flagstaff in May 2012 to help convince other NAU colleges to pitch in on future trips. Her only criterion for who goes is that each must be able “to contribute something to the community, not just study people.”

Surge in International Enrollment

NAU’s international enrollments have nearly doubled since 2008, paced by a surge in students from China and Saudi Arabia. Its  intensive English program “had a huge bump in enrollment,” from 90 students in spring 2009 to 220 in fall 2010, said William Crawford, director and associate professor of linguistics. The program recently expanded into a former elementary school building; the playground, still equipped with slides, is now a designated smoking area.

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Mandy Hansen, director of international admissions and associate director of the Center for International Education, said NAU’s size and locale is a draw. Sunny Flagstaff has a population of 60,000 and, at 6,900 feet elevation, stays cooler in summer than Phoenix. “In a smaller town like Flagstaff and a midsize school, they can find their place. Parents feel really comfortable sending their students here,” said Hansen. Catherine Ribic, director of international students and scholars, said some “are unhappy when they get here, but then they’re unhappy to leave.” 

NAU was an original participant in an American Association of State Colleges and Universities initiative to promote dual degrees with Chinese universities, and it now has agreements with four dozen universities for a variety of 2+2, 1+2+1, and 1+3 programs. Four of the 35 staff members of the Center for International Education work on the China initiatives. Among them is graduate student Bruce Feng Wang, who originally came to NAU on a 2+2 exchange from Beijing International Studies University. As a junior business major, Wang was part of a student delegation that met Warren Buffett in Omaha, Nebraska. He even got to question the legendary investor about his decision to invest in a Chinese electric car company—an investment that subsequently turned sour. “NAU has really valued international education,” said Wang. “I have friends who went to bigger universities, but they don’t provide the resources for international students that NAU does.”

Grabbing Every Opportunity

The Chinese government pays for faculty to attend what NAU calls its Scholar Academy where they learn about U.S. higher education and pedagogical approaches. Dozens of NAU faculty have lectured in China. Grobsmith allowed Charles to retain some revenues from the Scholar Academy to help fund other global activities, including the engineering dual degrees and a symposium highlighting student research. “We found a mechanism that enables him to invest in all these initiatives that have put us on the map,” said Grobsmith, who retired in June 2012 as provost and became special assistant to the president for strategic and international initiatives (The new provost is Laura Huenneke, biologist and former NAU vice president for research). NAU now is looking to create dual-degree programs with universities in Indonesia, India, and elsewhere. “Every opportunity that comes along, we try to grab it,” said Grobsmith. “There’s just unending opportunity. There’s a tremendous value placed on American-style education, and people are hungry to get their students here.”

Michelle Harris, associate professor of sociology, helped establish a dual master’s degree program with the University of Botswana. Two NAU graduate students spent 2011–12 in Botswana, while Thembelihle Ndebele spent the year earning a master’s degree in Flagstaff. Harris said the soft-spoken Ndebele helped give Arizona students “a taste of the world” in every class she took. Ndebele spent part of her year in Flagstaff interning with Catholic Charities. “I’ve learnt a lot from this experience. It will help me go back and try to boost our child safety systems,” she said.

Go Scholarships and Frequent Sales Pitches

Student participation in faculty-led education abroad courses tripled in three years. So-called GO Scholarships ranging from $250 to $1,000 are helping fuel growth. Half the $100,000 awarded comes from a small fee collected by the student government from all 17,000 undergraduates. There were 20 faculty-led study trips in 2012, mostly in summer. “We presented to 3,400 students in person in spring 2012 through class visits, information sessions, and fairs on campus,” said Eric Deschamps, director of education abroad. NAU focuses mainly on exchanges, which puts education abroad “within reach of a lot of our students,” he added. Still, even with growth in education abroad offerings, only 355 NAU students studied abroad in 2010–11.

NAU serves many first-generation college students and others with little familiarity with other countries and cultures, even though Mexico is just across the border. On a class for graduate students that Charles led to view student affairs operations at European universities in May 2010, more than half the participants were traditionally underrepresented students. Among them was Marvin Jim, a Navajo graduate student who works at NAU’s Native American Cultural Center. He called the trip “a defining moment in my life. We went to Europe with lots of questions and came back with even more. We got out of our comfort zones.” 

Senior Ruth Naegele gave up a career in supply management to start college in midlife and spent a semester at the University of South Australia on a Gilman Scholarship. It “could not have been a better experience,” said Naegele.

Early Stage of the Journey

NAU is still at an early stage of this journey but is well positioned to keep accelerating its progress. Vasquez, the anthropologist, noted the Southwest “is the only place in the world where the so-called first and third worlds share a border.” Both international and minority enrollments are growing. A decade ago 77 percent of students were white; now they comprise 66 percent. Latino enrollment jumped almost 8 percent from 2010 to 2011, while 5 percent more international students enrolled. “This place is a wonderful laboratory for diversity,” said Vasquez. The Global Learning Initiative gives NAU faculty and students new opportunities to learn about the world—and themselves.

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Political scientist Emil Nagengast was hired by Juniata College in 1996 to teach international politics, with Europe and the former East Germany—he’d studied at Karl Marx University in Leipzig shortly before the Berlin Wall fell—his special province. But in 2004, with a conscience pricked by complaints from two former, African-born students about the Eurocentricity of his course, he spent a sabbatical in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, examining the workings of the fledgling African Union. The next year, with guidance and help from a Washington & Jefferson College professor who had already begun taking students to The Gambia, Nagengast led four Juniata students to Senegal and The Gambia for three weeks. In 2008 Juniata and other colleges in Pennsylvania formed a Keystone Study Away Consortium to offer a full semester at the University of  The Gambia. Nagengast, or Nags as students call him, now has led eight summer trips to The Gambia and launched a winter class as well. He calculates that 135 Juniata students to date have studied in The Gambia over summer and 31 in spring semester. His Introduction to International Politics course now devotes as much time to the African Union as it does to the European Union (one week). Of his midcareer switch in interests, Nagengast recalls that when he broached the idea of education abroad in West Africa, administrators “just said, ‘Interesting. Go do it.’ They trusted me.” 

He is not alone in finding ready support for internationalizing courses and the entire experience at Juniata, a liberal arts college with 1,600 students tucked in the Appalachian mountains in the central Pennsylvania town of Huntingdon. Juniata was founded in 1876 as the first of a half dozen colleges associated with the pacifist Church of the Brethren. It is independent but still part of a network of Brethren colleges. Most past presidents were church ministers and a fraction of current faculty and students are members. The Brethren heritage is manifest most strongly in its peace and conflict studies program and in the meditative “Peace Chapel,” a circular ring of stones set on a nearby hilltop designed by architect Maya Lin. Traditionally its student body was drawn from within the borders of the Quaker State. But that is changing.

A Long International Journey

Juniata set out almost two decades ago to make itself a more globally minded campus. A 1993 strategic plan identified internationalization as a top priority and urged the recruitment of more international students. The next year it opened an Intensive English Program to help attract them to Huntingdon. Juniata in 2004 joined the American Council on Education (ACE) Internationalization Collaborative, and its 2008 strategic plan embraced a goal of raising international enrollments from 6 to 10 percent. It reached that mark swiftly, with 166 students on visas on campus in 2011–12, including 50 from China. President Thomas Kepple said he would gladly see that percentage double to 20 percent so long as Juniata’s overall enrollment keeps growing as it has on his watch, from 1,200 in 1998 to the current 1,600. Juniata’s out-of-state enrollment has doubled to 40 percent.

“It’s becoming a better place. It’s hard work in admissions, basically,” said Kepple, who will retire in May 2013. Students are drawn in part by Juniata’s generous financial aid for both domestic and international applicants. Dean of Admissions Michelle Bartol said, “We’re never coasting. Right now with China recruitment, everyone else is kind of catching up. We’ve got to stay one step ahead.” 

The college, which boasts an alumnus with a Nobel Prize in physics (William Phillips ’70), is particularly strong in the sciences and sends dozens of graduates to medical and graduate schools. For international parents, “the sales pitch is they already know people who’ve sent their children here and they’ve done well,” said Kepple. “Ninety percent of our Chinese students graduate. That’s larger than our U.S. student number.”

Language Houses and a Global Village

Dean of International Education Jenifer Cushman and Rosalie Rodriguez, the college’s chief diversity officer, returned from an ACE Bridging the Gap Symposium in 2008 determined to find new ways to change the face of the college and encourage more students to encounter and reflect upon cultural differences. They came up with a Global Engagement Initiative that included the creation of a residential Global Village that features an intercultural floor for a mix of international and domestic students within a larger dorm. 

“This is a really good community. People are really nice and welcoming, the professors remember your name and their office is always open.”

Clarissa Diniz, a pre-med student from Recife, Brazil, said it was “really cool” living there as a freshman. She stayed on as a resident adviser for sophomore year. Diniz, daughter of two math professors, has a brother who graduated from UCLA, but was happy with her small town choice. “This is a really good community. People are really nice and welcoming, the professors remember your name and their office is always open.”

Also as part of the Global Village, several small houses on campuses are being turned into Spanish, French, and German houses where students live together to improve their language skills. Sophomore Rebekah Sheeler from Boyertown, Pennsylvania, was programming coordinator for the newly opened Spanish House in 2011–12. “The other students call me the Mom,” laughed Sheeler, who was drawn to Juniata to play field hockey but dropped the sport after a year in part to pursue international education interests. She combined classes and an internship in Orizaba, Mexico, in summer 2011, spent fall 2011 at a university in Quito, Ecuador, and will intern at a wildlife reserve in Peru in spring 2013.

A Thirst for Languages Without a Requirement

Juniata has no language requirement beyond two years in high school for admission. The college jettisoned a stronger requirement in the 1970s, and an effort in 1996 to reinstate it fell a few votes short. But Professor of Spanish Henry Thurston-Griswold said, “When I came in 1992, we averaged 50 students per semester taking Spanish. Now we have more than triple that number.” Juniata is home to the much-honored Language in Motion program, which deploys international students and study abroad returnees to local K–12 classrooms where they present language lessons and cultural activities. Language in Motion, led by Deborah Roney, has taken root at 13 other colleges and universities. 

Juniata offers French, German, and Russian as well as Spanish and two years of Chinese. “The difficulty with languages other than Spanish is we’re basically one-person programs,” said Michael Henderson, chair of world languages and associate professor of French. “Obviously offering an upper division course in French critical theory is not a good idea…. My main motivation is to get students in my classes to study abroad.”

In the 1980s Juniata exchanged as many as 20 science majors each year with the Catholic University of Lille in France and the University of Marburg in Germany. Chemistry Professor Ruth Reed, a former Fulbright scholar in Germany, championed the exchanges, which later dropped off. She saw one downside to sending so many Juniata students to Lille and Marburg. “If you send too many, then you defeat the purpose. You have this little clique that doesn’t integrate. We can be too successful,” said the retiring chemistry professor.

While Reed’s passion came early, Gerald Kruse, a professor of math and computer science, was farther along in his career when he had a serendipitous meeting with Thomas Weik, a computer science professor at Juniata partner Muenster University of Applied Sciences in Germany. They wound up swapping homes and classes for fall 2006. “It was just a fantastic experience. I went over as a passive supporter (of education abroad) and came back as a very active promoter,” said Kruse, who now serves on Juniata’s International Education Committee. 

An Engaged Faculty and Two Advisers

Almost half the class of 2011 studied abroad, many on the 20 education abroad courses led by Juniata professors. Juniata has exchange partners in 19 countries. “Our success at this didn’t start at the top,” said Provost James Lasko. “Faculty who had international contacts were largely responsible for this exchange model. Sometimes administrators just have to know when to get out of the way and give your people a little latitude to run with a good idea.” Cushman, the dean of international education and associate professor of German, said, “Faculty involvement and engagement really are the heart of our international programs. Faculty members go above and beyond. Every time my office takes a step, it’s in conjunction with faculty.” 

Juniata has 102 full-time and 48 part-time faculty, and each student has two academic advisers, one for their Program of Emphasis (POE)—Juniata’s interdisciplinary alternative to majors—and another from a second discipline to offer a different perspective. The advice includes strong encouragement to study abroad.

Most students choose straightforward business, science, and humanities concentrations, but three in 10 chart new pathways to their bachelor’s degrees. 

Brianne Rowan, 22, from Port Townsend, Washington, fashioned her POE around global health issues. She spent three summers doing volunteer work in Thailand with a humanitarian group from her hometown, spent junior year abroad in Lille, France, and twice went on two-week service trips with Juniata’s Habitat for Humanity chapter to build homes for the poor in Yerevan, Armenia, and in El Salvador. 

Megan Russell, 22, a senior from Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania, and a Habitat for Humanity leader, learned on Nagengast’s 2011 trip to The Gambia that “things do not always go as planned. Sometimes a pipe breaks in your room or scorpions are chasing you around, but it’s all part of the experience.” The aspiring physical therapist came back from Gambia and organized a fundraiser to buy solar panels for a rural hospital.

Growing Pains and Essays on the Radio

There have been growing pains with the rapid climb in international enrollments, especially the spurt in the number of students from China. History professor David Sowell, a former international education director, said, “Our big challenge now is how do we integrate them? We have the Global Village; we have lots and lots of student groups. How do we use programming and those groups to draw students into that intercultural exchange?”

Doug Stiffler, an associate professor of history and East Asia specialist, sees that already happening. When Stiffler and spouse Jingxia Yang, now the Chinese language instructor, came to Juniata in 2002, “there was one student from mainland China and a handful of ethnic Chinese students. It was a pretty homogenous place, albeit with a great commitment to international education,” said Stiffler. “Over five or six years, we saw that number change to 50 Chinese students. For us, it’s a wonderful thing.”

The influx has boosted enrollments in Juniata’s Intensive English Program. Instructor Gretchen Ketner, a National Public Radio fan, found an unusual way to help students hone writing skills and adjust to U.S. college life. She assigned them to write “This I Believe” essays for the Penn State public radio station, WPSU. Nearly a dozen have gotten on the air.

Separately, Stiffler did an on-air interview for that station’s “StoryCorps” broadcast with a freshman from Chengdu, China, who wrote in Ketner’s class about his admiration for Lin Zhao, a student leader in Beijing during the Hundred Flowers Movement in 1956 when Mao Zedong briefly encouraged citizens to speak freely. She was imprisoned in 1960, but wrote about freedom and democracy in her letters and diary—some in her own blood—until her execution in 1968. “She’s a real hero,” the business student told Stiffler. “Our government and our school never talk about this…. I want to learn something about America. I want to teach people what is liberty, what is freedom, what we can do in this special time.” 

Kati Csoman, assistant dean of international education, said that in addition to the regular orientation, all new international students can join the U.S. freshman in “Inbound” retreats built around such activities as backpacking, hiking, cooking, the arts and exploring spirituality, pop culture, and other topics. The students choose from more than 30 tracks. Two peer leaders assisted by faculty or staff shepherd the new students in groups of 10 through the three-day experience. “The idea is to bring together students across their interests, but then also help them make friendships and learn about the college,” said Csoman.

Amid the woods, lakes, and prairies of Central Minnesota, the College of Saint Benedict (CSB) for women and Saint John’s University (SJU) for men provide a liberal arts education suffused with international experiences and coursework. Saint Benedict and Saint John’s ranked first among baccalaureate institutions in semester-long education abroad and 13th in international student enrollment in the 2011 Open Doors report. The biggest department—management—recently overhauled its curriculum and changed its name to the Department of Global Business Leadership. CSB and SJU have one of the most unusual coeducational arrangements in U.S. higher education: two campuses, four miles apart with two presidents but a single faculty and school buses that ferry students back and forth during half-hour breaks between 70-minute classes.

The separate campuses are bound by shared Benedictine values—monks founded Saint John’s in 1856 and nuns opened Saint Benedict in 1913. Saint John’s recently named its first lay president,  Michael Hemesath, an alumnus and Carlton College professor of economics, and shifted to lay control, as the sisters did half a century ago. Father Bob Koopmann, the last Benedictine president of Saint John’s, said the values won’t change. He expressed pride that the two schools have been able to partner since 1965 without one engulfing the other. “It hasn’t been easy over the years because Saint Ben’s was smaller—now they’re bigger—and within the Catholic Church men dominated and still do. But the fact that we could work it out is just wonderful,” said Koopmann, a concert pianist, music professor, and alumnus.

A More Seamless Approach to Internationalization

Sixty percent of the 2,000 “Bennies,” as the female students are known, and 45 percent of the 1,900 “Johnnies” study abroad, most on one of the colleges’ 17 semester-long programs on a half-dozen continents. Sixteen of these programs are led by faculty. In addition, the schools offer up to a dozen summer courses overseas and arrange service and internship opportunities from Belize to Bosnia to Hong Kong. 

It’s expensive to dispatch so many faculty around the world. “It has some challenging attributes,” said College of Saint Benedict President MaryAnn Baenninger, but this approach makes it easy for students to study abroad “with little detrimental challenge to their curriculum.” It is also “the only model that lets you change the international experience of your faculty in a wholesale way after they arrive.”

Nonetheless, the Saint Benedict president sees “a very big danger in equating internationalization with study abroad.” Especially since making internationalization one of three cornerstones of a 2010 strategic plan, the colleges have shifted emphasis from student mobility to a more comprehensive approach. “We’re developing more of a seamlessness on what it means to be global, but we’re not there yet,” said Baenninger, a psychologist. “We have to constantly poke ourselves and remind ourselves that just counting study abroad numbers isn’t what it’s all about. It’s what other activities students voluntarily choose to engage in and how they interpret difference and the ‘other.’” It is tempting for the 80 percent of students from Minnesota “to think that they and their culture are the norm,” she said. “You have to come at that in every which way.”

A Part for Everyone

Joseph Rogers, director of the Center for Global Education, echoed those sentiments. Internationalization “has to be embedded in all aspects of the college. It can’t reside just in study abroad or international student programming. Everyone has to feel they have a part to play in internationalization, from faculty who teach mathematics and the natural sciences to student development professionals in the residence halls,” he said. 

Rogers, an attorney and East Asia expert, led a semester program in China in 2006 for his alma mater, stayed on as director of education abroad, and was tapped to run the new Center for Global Education in 2010. Peggy Retka, his successor as director of education abroad, said, “We stick with our own programs because that allows us to build the academic offerings around our common curriculum, and so, almost every student can fit a semester abroad into their four-year plan. That’s good for our faculty and good for our students’ participation rate.” Each student on the faculty-led semester programs takes a four-credit study abroad seminar to fulfill an intercultural and experiential learning study requirement.

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In the years leading up to creation of the Center for Global Education, top administrators already were pushing to professionalize study abroad operations and make them less dependent on the proclivities of individual faculty. “Some faculty thought they were losing ownership of the programs,” said Vice Provost Joseph DesJardins. “There were some tough times but those conversations really matured the community.” DesJardins credited Rogers and Retka with allaying those concerns “by making decisions in a real collaborative way.” A 12-person advisory council composed of faculty and administrators now provides the vehicle for that collaboration. 

Growing Interest in China, Japan, and India

Rogers has moved to expand partnerships with institutions around the world and cement ties that began with those individual faculty contacts. One of the oldest and deepest partnerships is with Southwest University in Beibei, China, which stretches back to 1986. A faculty development trip to East Asia a decade later whetted chemistry professor Henry Jakubowski’s interest in Chinese medicine. He went on to lead the China semester program twice and teach an honors senior seminar, “Medicine: East Meets West.” He also had a hand in creating a summer exchange that allows 16 students from both countries to conduct research for six weeks in China and then six weeks in Minnesota. “It’s a fantastic way to build relationships,” said Jakubowski, who listens to Mandarin tapes through a speaker mounted on his bicycle as he pedals to work.

The colleges launched an Asian studies major in 2009 and expanded Chinese and Japanese language instruction with the help of a $140,000 U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant. A semester study program in Kolkata, India, was launched in 2011, thanks to the efforts of English department chair Madhu Mitra and other faculty with roots in that area. Mitra led the first group of students to Kolkata and even landed novelist Amitav Ghosh as a guest lecturer. It took three years and three faculty development trips to India to make that new program happen. “We did our homework,” said Provost Rita Knuesel. “I wanted to make sure I could look at two presidents and say, ‘We are ready to go.’” An economics professor, Sucharita Sinha Mukherjee, led the program in 2012, and Mitra will take the class to Kolkata again next spring. But Mitra said, “We’re really hoping that the next time (2014), a non-Indian faculty member will lead this course. It will be completely unsustainable if it’s just people from India.”

Junior Kia Marie Lor, 20, of St. Paul, the daughter of Hmong immigrants and recipient of a Gates Millennium Scholarship, jumped at the opportunity to study in Kolkata, but first had some convincing to do at home. “My mom was really upset. She was like, ‘Are you dropping out of college?’” the communication major related. “I told her, ‘No, I am just studying abroad.’ To a Hmong mother that is completely bizarre. In the Hmong language there is no word for study abroad.” But she won her mother over and later spent a second semester in China.

Since 1989 more than 1,200 Japanese high school students have attended a summer ESL program at CSB and SJU, which grew out of an enrichment program for U.S. high schoolers that history professor David Bennetts had organized. “That was the start of my venture into things international,” said Bennetts, who taught January courses in Japan seven times, started a semester exchange with Bunkyo Gakuin University in Tokyo, and created a U.S. history course for international students.

A Semester-Long Orientation Course

The colleges enrolled 252 international students in 2010–11, or six percent of enrollment. They are drawn by the availability of financial aid and scholarships that range from $4,000 to $19,000 a year. Vice Provost DesJardins said, “They are not visitors. It’s not ‘them.’ They’re us. If a kid is coming from Japan, they are going to be treated the same way for financial aid purposes as the kids coming from Chicago.” 

International students take a 12-week cultural academic orientation course in their first semester in addition to the standard three-day orientation that all new students attend.  Lisa Scott, the academic adviser who co-teaches the classes, said, “One of my very first lectures is about explaining the liberal arts and understanding why you’re here and what the liberal arts means to you.” For students interested only in business, “that’s a hard one to swallow at first so we come back to it again and again,” Scott said. “That ongoing orientation class is a real gift,” said Alex Schleper, director of the International Student Program Office and a onetime Saint John’s quarterback who shares the instructional duties.

“They are not visitors. It’s not ‘them.’ They’re us. If a kid is coming from Japan, they are going to be treated the same way for financial aid purposes as the kids coming from Chicago.”

The colleges tapped the brakes on recruitment in China after an outsized entering class—50 instead of the usual 25—encountered difficulties in 2009–10. “They weren’t as successful in their first year as we had hoped they would be,” said Baenninger. The number reverted to normal for 2010. The lesson, said Roger Young, the international admission director, was that “we need to diversify. We can’t rely on China and the Bahamas and Trinidad and not on other areas of the world.” The colleges traditionally have had a pipeline to Caribbean countries where the Benedictines have monasteries.

There are far more success stories than disappointments. Huaweilang (Clement) Dai, 23, of Shanghai, China, graduated with a Phi Beta Kappa key and landed an internship with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and its Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. Dai, who interned previously with the American Council on Renewable Energy, dreams of helping his homeland make greater use of clean energy even while it builds more coal plants. “We can’t abandon fossil fuel energy overnight,” said Dai, three of whose roommates studied or traveled in China.

Documenting Humanitarian Issues

The colleges offer students opportunities to volunteer in Tanzania, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. (Forty young people from Bosnia-Herzegovina attended the colleges on scholarships paid for by a trustee). Senior Trang Pham, 23, went to Bosnia for 20 days as part of a student group called Extending the Link that each year travels the world to produce a documentary on humanitarian issues. Hers was on recovery from the Balkan war. Earlier documentaries addressed the plight of orphans in Uganda and human trafficking in Nepal.

It was the fifth time the Vietnam-born Pham used her passport for college-sponsored study and service, after earlier stops in Japan (May 2009), Egypt and Israel (May 2010), Vietnam (summer 2010), and China and Hong Kong (winter 2010). She was one of the E-Scholars—“E” for entrepreneur—who are groomed to create socially conscious business ventures. 

Students can earn credit following El Camino de Santiago de Compostela (or Way of Saint James), the pilgrims’ route in Spain. The late Jose Antonio Fabres, a professor of Hispanic Studies, said that class provides “a very humbling” experience for college students: being on the receiving end of help. “In a lot of programs students do things for others. In this program others do things for them. They get help from strangers when their blisters become unbearable,” explained the Chilean-born Fabres in an interview weeks before his death from cancer.

Baenninger has launched a program that has taken dozens of Saint Benedict students to the Women as Global Leaders Conference in the United Arab Emirates, where the president serves on the board of trustees of American University of Sharjah.