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Internationalization Collaborative

Liberal Arts Institutions

Dickinson College

Dickinson College, founded in 1783, the first college chartered in the newly recognized United States, was named in honor of John Dickinson, one of the leaders of the American Revolution and a signer of the Constitution. Dickinson is located in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a pre-Revolutionary town of 20,000 people in the state’s Cumberland Valley.

Dickinson is a Baccalaureate I liberal arts college with a four-year program of study in the liberal arts. The college grants Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science degrees. Dickinson employs 183 faculty, plus 27 academic professionals; of the permanent faculty, 96 percent have earned the Ph.D. or other highest degree. The student to faculty ratio is 11:1 and the average class size is 15 students per class.

Dickinson enrolls 2,067 full-time students from 41 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, various military addresses abroad, and 18 foreign countries. Campus housing is available for students with special interests such as foreign languages, multicultural affairs, and the arts, and for social interest groups.

Overview of Internationalization Efforts

Dickinson College was one of eight institutions selected for the ACE Promising Practices Project: Spotlighting Excellence in Comprehensive Internationalization.

I. Vision and Goals for Internationalization

Dickinson’s strategic plan articulates its vision for internationalization, declaring that the college aspires to create "an educational program of the highest quality and challenge that turns the campus from a single site into the hub of a truly global network. The Dickinson global education model should be characterized by sustained, in-depth study; an imaginative variety of opportunities that reach across disciplines; and close integration of study elsewhere with the program on the home campus."

The following objectives, and related goals, are mentioned in the college’s strategic plan:

• Enhance exchange abroad and elsewhere in the United States based on Dickinson's distinctive principle of close integration of the on- and off-campus experiences.
  1. Move to an expanded "partnership" model for study abroad that links academic departments at Dickinson with corresponding departments at foreign institutions.
  2. Develop overseas experiences beyond the traditional junior year or semester.
  3. Build a comprehensive network of international internship opportunities, focusing on - but extending beyond - the Dickinson and partner sites. Explore the possibility of course offerings at home and abroad that look at "work" and "vocation" (including the arts, scientific endeavors, and public service, in addition to business) in cross-cultural perspective.
  4. Integrate orientation and reentry more fully into the curricular and residential experience.
  5. Become a center for research and policy related to study abroad. Include research activity (e.g., pre- and post-language testing) as part of international program oversight and quality control.
     
     
• Internationalize the campus beyond study abroad.
  1. Adopt technology that will allow virtual home and abroad programming.
  2. Develop summer certification programs for high school language teachers and other professional groups using Dickinson’s Carlisle campus and the college’s centers abroad.
  3. Increase international student enrollment to 10 percent of total enrollment.
     
     
• Create international degree opportunities focusing on Dickinson's overseas partner institutions and affiliates.
  1. Create joint international baccalaureate degrees with partner institutions.
  2. Develop international masterâs degree linkages.
     
     
• Enhance the college’s innovative connection of global education with U.S. diversity programming.
  1. Develop a "Global Mosaic" and connect it with the college’s American Mosaic program. Enhance the work of the Community Studies Center in support of both.
  2. Provide ongoing support for the Diaspora & Community Studies initiative.
  3. Explore linkages with historically black colleges and universities, perhaps offering participation in abroad programs (including faculty immersions) as a dimension of such collaboration.
     
     
• Evaluate all proposals for new international partnerships in terms of cost and immediate programmatic benefits, acknowledging that no actions should be taken which add to the college’s expenses.
  1. Give the highest priority to new programs that are self-funded, that will replace programs of a similar cost, or that have immediate revenue potential.
  2. Perform financial assessments on all new program proposals prior to approval and evaluate budget and program effectiveness on an annual basis.

II. Progress

Internationalization at Dickinson begins in the classroom. Dickinson’s global education curriculum is best envisioned as a series of concentric circles. At the core is foreign language training. The college offers instruction in 12 foreign languages: Chinese, French, German, modern and ancient Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. All students must reach at least the intermediate level of accomplishment in one foreign language; all are encouraged to continue well beyond. Enrollments demonstrate Dickinson’s success in building a campus in which language mastery is commonplace, rather than an exception. In 1999–2000, 28 percent of all enrollments were in foreign language courses. Fully 21 percent of all graduating seniors were foreign language majors, the highest percentage among American colleges and universities. Factoring in area studies graduates brings the total of those who did advanced language work higher still, to 31 percent.

Cultures are complex entities; their study requires application of insights from a variety of fields and theoretical approaches. Consequently, strong interdisciplinary programs constitute the second circle of the college’s global curriculum. Dickinson offers interdisciplinary majors in East Asian, Italian, and Russian Area Studies (as well as a certificate in Latin American Studies), International Studies, and International Business & Management. Each of these programs is staffed by 10 to 13 contributing faculty; each has its own dedicated budget. By their nature, the interdisciplinary programs parallel the breadth of vision and synthesis of insights in global education. International Studies and International Business & Management particularly focus on placing individual cultures within a context of theory by requiring students to combine a shared methodological core with specialization on a single nation or region. These concerns typify the college’s language departments as well. While aiming at the acquisition of proficiency, all ground instruction in interdisciplinary and theoretically informed study of the culture(s) for which language is a vehicle of expression.

Foreign language and area studies form the critical mass from which global education radiates across the entire curriculum. Many other majors, such as environmental studies and policy studies, offer global "tracks"; Dickinson’s education certification program includes foreign language methods coursework. All majors in humanities and social sciences require internationally focused courses. Additionally, all students encounter cross-cultural analysis through a comparative civilizations ("non-Western") requirement. In sum, more than 40 percent of all the college’s enrollments each year are in international dimensions of the curriculum.

A global curriculum on campus, no matter how strong, will be ineffective if it is not joined with direct encounter with foreign cultures. More than any other activity, Dickinson’s particular approach to study abroad has created an ethos of global awareness and a sense of participation in international endeavor across the entire campus.

Until 1985, Dickinson operated only one yearlong overseas program (Bologna, Italy), but students typically went abroad through programs or consortia run by others. As part of its NEH-supported internationalization project, the college built a network of abroad programs, operated by Dickinson in direct partnership with foreign universities. The goals of this policy change were, and remain, to insure high quality in the abroad experience, to build a close and smooth articulation between study at home and abroad, and to develop collaborative relationships at overseas sites with partner universities and others that multiply Dickinson’s global resources.

Dickinson now sponsors 32 programs on six continents in 20 countries. At the heart of this network are semester- and year-long programs in Cameroon (Yaoundé), China (Beijing), England (Norwich, separate programs in science and humanities), France (Toulouse), Germany (Bremen), India (Madurai), Italy (Bologna), Japan (Nagoya), Mexico (Querétaro), Russia (Moscow), and Spain (Málaga). The college operates all of these programs in partnership with a foreign university. Dickinson also has affiliation agreements with institutions in Australia (Queensland), Costa Rica (field studies), England (Durham), Israel (Jerusalem), and Korea (Seoul). In India, Dickinson participates in the South Indian Term Abroad (SITA) consortium. When enrollments allow, a Dickinson faculty director is in residence; elsewhere the college relies on colleagues from partner universities who have taught courses in residence on the Dickinson home campus. Most programs offer a combined, specially designed curriculum of courses and extensive coursework at Dickinson’s partner institutions. Almost all have homestays.

Dickinson also operates a series of summer sessions, often using its foreign centers as a base. Most tightly integrated with the centers are month-long summer "immersions" offered regularly in French (Toulouse and Francophone Cameroon), German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. The immersions target students who have just completed their foreign language requirement, giving them an opportunity to employ what they have learned and progress further.

Many immersion students opt to continue on to advanced language study and return to the relevant center for a semester or year, making the immersions key "feeders" in generating the college’s exceptionally high number of language majors. Departments outside the languages also are encouraged to take advantage of the center resources for summer study. For example, the Fine Arts Department holds a painting workshop at Toulouse, the Anthropology Department operates a field school in Cameroon, and the Physics Department offers a summer program in Bremen.

The flow of students abroad is encouraged in a variety of ways, ranging from major policies to "small touches." Chief among the former are pricing and portable financial aid. Dickinson budgets all abroad programs (travel included) at no more than the cost of study at home, with financial aid fully applied. The "small touches" include flying the flags of all nations with Dickinson centers, mounting clocks in the campus library and student union that give the time of day at Dickinson’s foreign centers, and even (to the consternation of some Carlisle residents) installing street signs in foreign languages.

These efforts have garnered broad and deep participation. Dickinson’s study-abroad rate for 1999–2000 was 81 percent, with 80 percent of this at its centers. In some majors, the entire junior class goes abroad. The college is particularly proud of its record for duration of study. In contrast to the national trend of ever-shorter sojourns, one-third of Dickinson students spend an academic year (or longer) abroad. Equally rewarding has been the college’s success at extending study abroad to all majors. Even in the sciences, as a result of special efforts to build a science program at Norwich and to provide further options through Dickinson’s Australian partner university, participation rates are unusually high.

Study abroad at high rates and, in most cases, through the college’s own programs, has many benefits. Take, for example, the related tasks of preparation and reentry. Dickinson operates a series of familiar activities to meet these ends, such as pre-sojourn orientations, an international house for returning students, and opportunities to tutor and make presentations in local schools. Yet beyond this, close knowledge of the work students will do at centers and partner universities abroad allows departments to mold sophomore courses to intensify preparation and senior programming to provide maximum chance for remembrance, reflection, and mentoring.

Additionally, the following activities and programs are integral to the college’s international programming:

• An active program of residencies by international scholars on the home campus. Since 1984 Dickinson has hosted 80 such scholars through IEF and outside grants (e.g., Fulbright). Residencies last from a week to an academic year. Some are one-off events, others are regular occurrences, such as yearlong stays by faculty from Chinese and Russian universities in support of instruction in those languages.
• Enhanced library resources, especially in foreign languages, in which the dual goal of proficiency and broad cultural sweep mandates active acquisition. Foreign language holdings range from 1,000 volumes in Japanese to 9,000 in Spanish, bolstered by 775 subscriptions to internationally related periodicals, including newspapers and journals. The college’s library holdings in Chinese and Japanese were recently enhanced through the cataloguing of a 20,000-volume collection of works on Asia (20 percent of them not available elsewhere in the United States), given to Dickinson by a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois.
• Faculty summer immersions in foreign languages. Each summer, up to 10 faculty from outside the language departments spend a month at one of the campus centers improving their skills. Each "qualifies" by taking an intermediate-level language course before the session. The immersions include intensive language study, homestays, and "pairing" with a specialist in their field from a foreign partner university. Upon return to Dickinson, participants offer Foreign Language Intensive courses (FLIC), regular offerings in which students may opt to work in the foreign language. IEF funds French-, German-, Italian-, Russian-, and Spanish-language immersions and also cultural immersions in China, Greece, and Italy.

These practices, matched in the college’s other offices, have resulted in a global program of exceptional staying power, operated with great expertise. So, in a striking recent illustration, when Yongyi Song, Dickinson’s librarian-bibliographer of the Cultural Revolution, was arrested in Beijing last year on charges of spying, the college organized a successful international campaign for his release, while continuing to operate Dickinson’s abroad program and scholarly exchange with Peking University.

III. Successful Strategies

There are many more facets to global education at Dickinson that deserve attention, from the Career Center’s active international placement program to the Kade Center for German Writers. To better understand what Dickinson has achieved, the following characteristics emphasize three aspects of internationalization of which the college is particularly proud.

First, Dickinson’s international program is exceptionally comprehensive, as evidenced by course enrollments, study-abroad rates, and funding. Yet the best testimony is the extent of faculty involvement. An educational program is only as good as those who teach it, and Dickinson has made a sustained effort to internationalize its faculty. International experience is a criterion in all hiring. Personnel practices of evaluation and promotion are crafted to encourage its enhancement. For example, the college’s Academic Handbook includes provisions for "stopping the tenure clock" for junior faculty who direct abroad programs (on their request). Such activity weighs significantly in considerations of merit pay, promotion, and tenure.

The college’s research and development committee actively funds faculty research abroad. During the last two years, more than 70 professors received grants for scholarly activity overseas. Special effort is made to provide international experience to faculty who want to add this dimension to their careers, or expand on existing international competencies. For example, faculty from all departments have participated in the summer language immersions. They return not only ready to offer FLIC courses, but also are motivated to increase the international content of all their offerings and, in some cases, to initiate new research with their counterparts at foreign universities.

Overall faculty participation in global education is, predictably, very high. Some 57 percent of Dickinson faculty are specialists in international fields. More than one-third (54) have directed abroad programs. International expertise clusters in humanities and social sciences, but is not limited there. Dickinson’s four geologists, for example, have worked respectively in Antarctica (where a mountain was named for a faculty member), the Bahamas, Ireland, and Kamchatka. Anecdotal but telling evidence of the degree to which a global ethos permeates the faculty and the entire campus is the present composition of the college’s personnel committee: a French professor who has directed Dickinson’s Toulouse program, a China specialist and an anthropologist who have both led programs in Beijing, a studio artist who recently returned from a sabbatical in ceramics in Amsterdam, and an environmental scientist recently back from work sponsored by a Fulbright grant in Germany. The committee reports to Dickinson’s dean, a Russian historian who served as project director for the college’s NEH grants in international education, and to the president, a specialist in German culture who, while a Dickinson student, studied on a Fulbright grant at the University of Basel.

Equally distinctive, are Dickinson’s partnerships with universities at sites abroad. Centers abroad can become "islands" separating students from full encounter with the surrounding culture. Given the close relationships with partner universities (and other practices including homestays and a preference for sites less popular among tourists), Dickinson’s centers serve instead as portals for the movement of people and ideas. Rather than separate, they connect Dickinson internationally by making the home campus the hub of a truly global network of exchange.

In one direction, international visitors flow from the college’s sites abroad to Carlisle. In the case of faculty, the large majority of scholars in residence funded by IEF come from partner institutions. In 1999–2000 alone, faculty from seven partner universities—Bremen, East Anglia, Málaga, Nanzan, Peking, Russian Humanities, and Yaoundé—did teaching residencies at Dickinson, with the visitors from Beijing, Cameroon, Moscow, and Norwich here the entire year. Partner relationships allow the college to bring international students to campus in a particularly effective way as well. Each year, as many as three students from most partner institutions enroll at Dickinson as overseas student assistants. These students receive full scholarships and in return work to assist language departments with tutoring and language tables and houses.

Moving in the opposite direction, Dickinson students and faculty flow out through campus centers into partner universities. In those universities, the ever-increasing cohort of faculty, administrators, and students who have been at Dickinson to teach or serve as overseas student assistants help make the links between study at home and abroad exceptionally strong. In some cases, integration (and shared faculty experience) between Dickinson and the partner university is so thorough that grades as well as academic credits transfer back to student records. Dickinson and Bremen are pushing integration to its limit through plans for a joint bachelor’s degree. The college has established linkages with graduate programs at several partner institutions, as well.

Close bonds with the partner universities facilitate all manner of special projects. For example, Dickinson faculty have organized scholarly conferences with their counterparts at Toulouse and Peking. For the college’s two U.S.-France sessions, Dickinson French majors, themselves veterans of study in Toulouse, translated the conference sessions and papers subsequently published. Partner relationships also engender faculty exchange, including opportunities for Dickinson professors without significant previous international experience. In 1999–2000, for instance, a specialist on Native Americans from East Anglia and the director of Dickinson’s women’s studies program exchanged positions to teach and conduct research.

Another distinctive dimension of Dickinson’s international program is the imaginative linkage of internationalization and study of U.S. diversity. This strategic plan reaffirms the college’s charter mission of educating citizens for the new nation. Yet the college does so fully aware that the concept of "citizen" is much more fluid than it would have appeared to the country’s founders in 1783. Looking outward, Dickinson students must reflect on the relationship between their responsibilities as citizens of a single nation and of an increasingly global world. Looking inward, they must ask, within the context of an ever more diverse society, "What is an American?" These questions, two sides of the single coin of identity, are best examined together. Nothing provides a more powerful vehicle for reflection on one’s self than the creative encounter and engagement with others, provided by internationalization (or vice versa).

The spark for the linkage on campus came from the "domestic" side. In 1996, Dickinson faculty created the American Mosaic, an interdisciplinary program in which students spent a semester doing fieldwork on issues of ethnicity, race, class, and gender in nearby Steelton, Pennsylvania. The program, which received the Oral History Association’s 1996–98 award for distinguished achievement in higher education, was repeated in 1998 in a community of Mexican migrant workers in Adams County and served as a catalyst for two major curricular developments. Dickinson established a Community Studies Center to enhance student-faculty research and fieldwork in the social sciences. And, supported through a series of grants, the college began to interweave study of the global and the domestic much more explicitly under the rubric "crossing borders."

The projects at the heart of the "crossing borders" initiative include:

• A Hewlett Foundation grant to create freshman seminars that examine issues of diversity and unity domestically and globally. These seminars include a residential dimension as well; sophomore courses on cross-cultural analysis that form a curricular foundation for subsequent study abroad; and a senior culminating experience built around study of citizenship and identity.
• A Luce Foundation grant in Diaspora & Community Studies that will bring visiting experts to campus, fund faculty workshops and a scholarly conference, and support the addition to the American Mosaic of a Global Mosaic.
• A FIPSE grant in which students from Dickinson, Spelman, and Xavier universities have joined together to do community-oriented research on issues of ethnicity, race, and gender, first at Dickinson’s center in Cameroon and then, in alternating semesters, at each of the home campuses.

IV. Future Plans

Dickinson has chosen a distinctive path in global education. At times, as in the college’s FIPSE project with two historically black universities or in the SITA program, Dickinson has entered into alliances with other institutions. Yet overall, Dickinson has opted not to play the admittedly important role of "provider" of overseas opportunities for others, nor to spread resources to mount extensive summer outreach or graduate programs. Instead, Dickinson’s focus has been on its own undergraduates during their four years on campus.

This singularity of purpose is not rooted in insularity. Dickinson’s service to others has been to turn its college into a laboratory—or, given the multiplicity of curricula, locales, support mechanisms, and perspectives, a complex of laboratories—for experimentation with models that may be widely adopted elsewhere. Consequently, the college has amassed a rich inventory of practice and policy. That inventory includes complex international curricula in nearly all departments, dozens of models for abroad programs and international partnerships, many proven programs for faculty development, rich experiences in exchanging scholars and students, and a catalogue of administrative and personnel practices to support internationalization.

The process of building an inventory of internationalization has always been open-ended. In the future, the college will continue to grapple with certain critically important questions. In a world of globalization and diaspora, what does it mean to be a citizen? How can the college contribute to deepening students’ skills of cross-cultural analysis and the quality of their experiences abroad? What policies best allow the college to employ its resources, human, financial, and technological, in support of internationalization? How can Dickinson better make a global perspective permeate its campuses? And what are the most effective means of assessing the college’s efforts?

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This page last updated on: 6/16/2006