The nation’s historically black colleges have a legacy of international engagement.
They educated generations of political, business, and scientific leaders, from Africa as well as from countries such as India, whose graduates were not always welcome at other American institutions.
Many black colleges developed close ties with foreign universities. Some, with roots as agricultural colleges, played an important role in development work overseas.
Today, however, black colleges often lag behind their predominantly white peers in international efforts. They enroll few foreign students and send even fewer overseas—a 2011 survey by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities found that fewer than 1 percent of students at its historically black member institutions studied abroad, and just 2 percent of their student bodies came from another country.
Their international offices may be poorly staffed, or even nonexistent, and financial constraints can limit overseas travel. And some on campus may even see becoming more international as a threat to the institutions’ very mission, that of educating African-American students.
But with a growing consensus that graduates need global experience and skills to succeed in an ever-more-interdependent world, there is concern that historically black colleges and universities, which award 22 percent of the bachelor’s degrees earned by black students in the United States, are being left behind. That prospect reflects a broader issue, of whether the internationalization of American higher education tends to benefit only an elite group of students and institutions.
“Are we really serious about global learning for all?” asks Patti McGill Peterson, presidential adviser for global initiatives at the American Council on Education. “It’s an equity question.”
The council, with support from the U.S. Department of Education, spent more than a year examining the challenges for historically black institutions in internationalization, working with seven colleges to assess their current efforts and to develop strategies to globalize their curricula and campuses. A report on the findings will be released later this spring.
Special Obstacles
Some of the headwinds black colleges face will be familiar to other institutions—lack of money, for instance, or of institutional leadership. But these obstacles are often felt more acutely at black colleges, says Gailda Davis, one of the project’s leaders.
During the study’s 18 months, she notes, almost all of the participating institutions had major turnover among their top administrators. The council’s previous work has identified support from presidents and provosts as a critical factor in successful international efforts.
At North Carolina A&T State University, budgetary problems have sometimes threatened to undercut the progress the institution has made. The university, which took part in the project, did approve a special fee to support scholarships for study abroad. But during the recent recession, it also eliminated its foreign-languages department to save money and now offers only entry-level language courses, says Minnie Battle Mayes, director of the college’s office of international programs. Students who hope to learn a language well enough to study at a foreign university must go off-campus for needed courses.
Ms. Mayes makes do with a staff of just three to handle all of the university’s international work. “We have strong, viable partnerships abroad,” she says, “but these all require someone to look after them.”
With limited administrative support, international work at black colleges can happen on an ad hoc basis, without formal agreements. If a faculty member who started an overseas research project or student exchange retires or leaves the institution, that connection can be lost, Ms. Davis says.
While many of these difficulties are common, to a degree, to other types of institutions, others are specific to black colleges. For one, possible partner universities abroad may not be familiar with the concept of a historically black institution. And potential students, particularly in Asia, the source of the majority of international students coming to the United States today, may be even less aware.
“When you go abroad, you have to spend a great deal of time answering the question, ‘Who are you?’” says Kimya Dawson-Smith, who was formerly director of the office of international students and study-abroad programs at Dillard University and is now an independent education consultant. “It’s a barrier not shared by other universities.”
Some programs seek to help institutions overcome these hurdles. The HBCU-Brazil Alliance, started in 2008, brings Brazilian students to study at black colleges in the United States.
But students and faculty members at HBCUs may be wary of admitting larger numbers of foreign students or of a new emphasis on making the campus more internationally focused, concerned that these efforts could detract from black colleges’ longstanding mission. Among the fears, Ms. Davis says: “What will this mean for our culture, our history? Do we just become like every other institution?”
“They worry,” she says, “about the loss of HBCU-ness if the campus internationalizes.”
Persuading students to travel overseas can also be difficult, says Maxine Sample, director of international education at Virginia State University. Black students in general—not just those at black colleges—study abroad at low rates. Fewer than 4 percent of American students who go abroad are black, according to the Institute of International Education, far less than their share of the overall college population.
A large number of Ms. Sample’s students are the first in their families to go to college, and they—and their parents—don’t always see how international study fits with their degree or career. “For many of them, going away to college is quite a journey,” she says. “To talk about leaving the country might be a stretch.”
Connections to Africa
At the same time, black colleges may have some strengths that could help them in their global work, Ms. Davis and her colleagues at the council found. For instance, faculty members at these institutions often play a strong mentoring role and influence students’ choice of courses, majors, even careers. If professors are convinced of the value of study abroad, they could be valuable advocates.
In some cases, the interest may be there but untapped by colleges. At Dillard, a third of the faculty was born abroad, Ms. Dawson-Smith says.
Likewise, when Ms. Sample reviewed Virginia State’s courses as part of the project, she found that fully half had some sort of global content.
“That’s a strength we can build on” in internationalizing the curriculum, she says.
Black colleges may also have connections in parts of the world where American universities have not typically had strong ties. Tuskegee University, in Alabama, has worked in Africa for more than a century. Back in 1901, Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee’s founder, sent four of his students to Togo. And Tuskegee was the model for Liberia’s Booker Washington Institute, the start of a long relationship between the two institutions.
Tuskegee, says Thierno Thiam, special assistant to the president for global initiatives, is drawing on its expertise in the region in some of its current international efforts, such as a federally sponsored project to improve water and environmental sciences at three African universities.
Given its legacy abroad, Mr. Thiam says, “Tuskegee has absolutely no option but to globally engage.”
