For the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, the route to campus internationalization has been less like a highway and more like a series of small, winding paths.
“It takes a thousand little things,” says Kathleen Enz Finken, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the 10,000-student state university. “There’s no one solution to becoming more international.”
As demands to produce globally minded graduates grow, more and more colleges are seeking to foster truly global campuses, where international perspectives inform teaching and learning, faculty research and student life. Nearly 125 colleges, including La Crosse, are part of the Internationalization Collaborative, organized by the American Council on Education, where members exchange best practices and strategies for developing and advancing their international agendas. Ten years ago, just 30 institutions were part of the group.
As La Crosse’s experience shows, becoming more international isn’t necessarily the result of a single, and expensive, mega-initiative. Rather, over more than a decade, the university has embraced a series of finite but ultimately far-reaching steps, involving people across the campus: offering professors and staff members modest grants for international travel, forming multifaceted overseas partnerships that can further both faculty research and student exchanges, and pairing foreign students and study-abroad returnees in a support network.
The university has even taken advantage of its hometown’s sister-city program to build relationships abroad.
The numbers suggest the work is paying off. In 1995, just 85 La Crosse students studied overseas; last year, 455 did. International enrollments have more than tripled. Some 70 foreign scholars annually visit La Crosse’s campus, along northern bluffs of the Mississippi River, and since 1999 the university has sent 385 faculty members abroad to teach, conduct research, or scout out sites for study-abroad trips.
“They’ve really sought to connect all parts of the university, up and down, in this work,” says Christa Olson, ACE’s associate director of international initiatives. “They create synergies, and I think they feed on them.”
Small Steps, Bigger Results
To see La Crosse’s strategy at work, Mark Gibson is Exhibit A.
A 26-year veteran of the university, Mr. Gibson was hardly internationally minded. His overseas experience was limited to a high-school trip to Spain, and his department, exercise and sport science, discouraged students from studying abroad, because doing so meant getting out of step in its highly structured degree program. When a student, a double major in German and exercise science, came to him for help in finding an athletic-training internship that would also provide German-language immersion, Mr. Gibson turned to Jay Lokken, La Crosse’s director of international education.
Mr. Lokken probably could have found Mr. Gibson’s student an internship himself, but instead he encouraged the exercise-science professor to apply for an international-development grant to go to Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, in Germany, where La Crosse already had a broader institutional partnership. At a maximum of $3,300, the awards cover little more than basic travel expenses, but “by putting a little bit of money on the table, we’re saying this is something the university values,” Ms. Enz Finken says.
Within five minutes of meeting his counterpart in Frankfurt, Mr. Gibson says, they had found a job for his student. So the pair began to discuss their work, quickly becoming excited about the possibilities for collaboration.
In the five years since, Mr. Gibson has twice traveled to Germany to teach courses, as have several of his exercise-science colleagues. German faculty members have spent weeks at a time in Wisconsin, to observe and possibly adapt its athletic-training program. (European universities offer physical therapy but don’t teach athletic training, which focuses on both injury prevention and rehabilitation.)
Last year the institutions won a four-year, $386,000 grant through the joint U.S.-European Union Atlantis program to develop international curricula and student exchanges. Through it, three La Crosse students are spending this semester at a third partner, the University of Granada, in Spain, where they are taking classes and interning at local rehabilitation clinics.
“Studying abroad was always an aspiration of mine, but it never seemed like it could work, because I want to graduate in four years,” says one of the three, Jen Werner, a 21-year-old junior from Middleton, Wis. Studying and working in Spanish has been daunting, she says, but the opportunity to “live another culture” is worth it.
Mr. Gibson says there is already a waiting list of freshmen and sophomores who want to go abroad. He is also drafting a syllabus for an international sports-medicine minor as part of the grant. And, as a board member of the discipline’s national association, he has urged his exercise-science colleagues on other campuses to think more globally.
“It’s good for my teaching, it’s good for my research,” he says. “It’s reinvigorated an old professor.”
Other La Crosse faculty members have deepened their international ties through a short-term summer language-study program, offered at some of the institution’s partner universities in France, Germany, Mexico, Russia, and soon, Mr. Lokken hopes, China. As part of the program, which lasts two to four weeks, participating professors have a few free hours each day to network with local faculty members. Many language-program alumni have gone on to establish overseas research collaborations, one of which led to a joint program in international business with the University of Applied Sciences, also in Frankfurt.
While such awards have allowed veteran professors to acquire a global perspective, they have also helped La Crosse gain a reputation as an institution that supports international work, aiding the university in attracting new faculty members who are already globally engaged, including Ms. Enz Finken and David A. Anderson, an assistant professor of archaeology. Since arriving at La Crosse three years ago, Mr. Anderson has led undergraduate research in Egypt, begun designing a new Middle East-studies minor, and been named to lead a faculty international committee.
“I’ve not just been supported to work and take students overseas,” he says. “I’ve been highly encouraged.”
Empowering the Choir
Getting as many people as possible on the campus engaged in international efforts is a key part of La Crosse’s strategy. “My office can’t do this alone,” Mr. Lokken, the international director, says. “You need a choir.”
The university’s dining service, for example, has taken the lead on rethinking the menu to cater more to the dietary preferences of the growing international-student body, such as providing special meals for Muslim students during Ramadan.
La Crosse’s director of residence life used international-travel funds, which are also available to staff members, to visit Australia to see how universities there, which enroll large numbers of international students, manage housing and student services. This fall the university will also open its first “global village” residence hall to house a mix of international students, foreign-language majors, and those interested in global cultures.
Meanwhile, a faculty committee led by Mr. Anderson sets the guidelines for travel grants and reviews proposals for faculty-led study-abroad programs.
Many faculty members have become forceful advocates for international study. Some, like Mr. Gibson, even evaluate overseas course offerings so that students in tightly sequenced majors are able to earn academic credit abroad. La Crosse has also looked for partners with similar academic strengths, like business and premedicine, to make student exchanges or direct enrollment easier. For public-university students, those options can often be less expensive than going abroad on a third-party program.
As a result, faculty and administrators say many students who wouldn’t have previously considered study abroad are now going overseas. One student who went with Mr. Anderson to Egypt had never left Wisconsin. After going overseas, he told the professor, “I want to experience the world.”
Students who’ve studied abroad can embolden their friends and classmates to go overseas, says Francine Klein, a professor of French. The university encourages them to talk about their experiences—Mr. Anderson’s students gave presentations not just on their research but on what it was like to live in an Islamic country—and has begun urging them to act as ambassadors to international students as well. Study-abroad and international students have formed a new group, La Crosse International Friendship Exchange, or LIFE, to better connect.
Students also provide bottom-line support for La Crosse’s internationalization. The student body eight years ago voted to levy a $60-per-semester fee on themselves to support, among other programs, study-abroad scholarships, financial aid to foreign students, and international undergraduate research grants.
In addition, the university imposes a small charge, of about $100 a semester, on international students and on students studying overseas to underwrite the faculty international fund.
Still, La Crosse officials acknowledge there is more work to do to further internationalize the campus. Although about 28 percent of each undergraduate class now studies abroad, college officials want even more students to go overseas.
The university’s international enrollments have surged, but sustaining that momentum will be hard to do with Mr. Lokken’s small staff. And faculty members say it can be tough to balance international work with their course load at this teaching institution.
A permanent internationalization committee is weighing new strategies. Ms. Enz Finken, the provost, says one idea she hopes soon to put in place is a small grant program to encourage professors to revise courses to make them more internationally focused.
“It’s a small thing,” she says, “but we know that small things can have a great impact.”
Correction (5/31, 12:05 p.m.): The surname of a University of Wisconsin at La Crosse student pictured in the photographs with this article was misspelled in the captions. She is Christiane Berdan, not Bernard. The article has been updated to correct the error.
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