In many ways, colleges’ international offices and diversity offices have similar missions: Both serve students whose backgrounds often differ from the rest of the student body. Each seeks to expose all students to cultures or belief systems unlike their own.
Yet, too often, despite their commonalities, those offices don’t play together.
A two-day meeting here aims to bridge that divide. Organized by the American Council on Education, the gathering, which attracted dozens of institutions, is the capstone of a three-year project to explore the potential for collaboration between multicultural education and internationalization efforts on campuses.
“These two entities have grown up independently,” said Patti McGill Peterson, presidential adviser for global initiatives at the council. The challenge, she said, is to find “that sweet spot” where they can work together.
One stumbling block is that while the two offices share goals, they frequently have different ideas about how to attain them. For instance, international educators, like their counterparts in multicultural education, talk about how important it is for today’s college graduates to be interculturally competent—that is, to be able to understand and appreciate different cultures and to work with people from diverse backgrounds.
But, said Darla K. Deardorff, executive director of the Association of International Education Administrators, those in international education have tended to see study abroad as the primary way to improve cross-cultural skills.
As a result, they may be overlooking opportunities to expose students to broader perspectives on their home campuses, said Ms. Deardorff, who is to speak during Friday’s sessions.
Collaborators or Competitors
Organizational silos, though prosaic, may also be behind the lack of cooperation. On many campuses, international offices, with their roots in study abroad and global research, are housed on the academic side, reporting up through the provost. Diversity offices, by contrast, may be located within student affairs.
North Carolina State University is one of eight institutions that participated in the ACE project, which received financial support from the Henry Luce Foundation. Before signing on, Joanne G. Woodard, N.C. State’s vice provost for institutional equity and diversity, simply had little occasion to interact with her colleagues in international education, outside of her own personal interests as a faculty member.
“We’ve never been in competition for resources,” Ms. Woodard said during a panel discussion. “But we’ve never deliberately been in collaboration with each other either.”
Another project participant, the Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District, outside San Diego, had multiple committees responsible for different facets of multicultural and international education. Although they had overlapping missions, those working groups were often unaware of what one another were doing, leading to a duplication of effort, said Nancy Jennings, a professor of communication at Cuyamaca College.
As a result of its work with ACE, the district has disbanded many of the smaller committees and formed a single Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council to tackle global and multicultural issues, Ms. Jennings said.
Such organizational distinctions typically matter little to the students being served, said Carolyn Newton, provost of the College of Wooster, in Ohio. “When a student is coming to the table to ask what’s for dinner,” she said, “it doesn’t make a difference whether dinner comes from student life or academic affairs.”
But Ms. Newton acknowledged that matters of territory may be of greater significance to faculty and staff members. When Wooster sought to integrate its international and multicultural efforts into a single Center for Diversity and Global Engagement, it became clear that some of those involved saw themselves “as competitors, not collaborators,” she said.
It also didn’t help that this arranged marriage happened just as the financial crisis hit, exacerbating tensions over scarce resources.
Four years later, Ms. Newton believes that bringing the different offices together under a single roof—literal and figurative—has had benefits.
Bumping elbows has helped build trust, she said, and led to programming—such as new “I-Seminars” featuring student research on global and multicultural themes—that highlights the college’s commitment to cross-cultural understanding and diversity, in all its forms.
