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Internationalization Collaborative

Comprehensive Institutions

Manhattanville College

Manhattanville College is a liberal arts college of 1,600 undergraduate and 1,000 graduate students located in Purchase, New York, 25 miles from downtown Manhattan. Founded in 1841 by the Religious of the Sacred Heart as a school for women, Manhattanville is now a coeducational, secular institution dedicated to guiding men and women to understand the impact of a multifaceted liberal arts education. Under the leadership of our current president, Richard Berman, Manhattanville adopted a new mission statement in 1995 that posits the student we desire to graduate:

Our mission: To educate students to become ethically and socially responsible leaders for the global community.

We are committed to doing this in three ways:

Global learning is an integral component of our mission. Our commitment to global awareness is found throughout our general education initiatives and throughout the upper divisions of the curriculum. However, we seek to establish greater coherence and better assess what we are doing while infusing an interdisciplinary approach into many components.

Being a part of the ACE Internationalization Collaborative will help Manhattanville College more thoroughly embrace its mission, thus solidifying for our students those connections between the academic world and the global community, as we further confront the complexities of the 21st century.

Overview of Internationalization Efforts

I. Vision and Goals for Internationalization

To achieve our internationalization outcomes, Manhattanville College hopes that being a member of the ACE network will assist us in shaping, implementing, and assessing a unified global learning curriculum that will encourage our students to become more globally conscious problem solvers as they face the unique challenges of the 21st century. We believe the following goals can be achieved through our participation with ACE:

• Clearly define global learning outcomes and delineate strategies that coincide with our college mission and pedagogical objectives.
• Solidify global learning outcomes as a central portion of our undergraduate general education curriculum.
• Expand the primary global awareness components in our Preceptorial course (see Successful Strategies, below).
• Develop a cyclical assessment plan to evaluate the student portfolio, allowing us to revise processes as they relate to our global learning outcomes and the general education curriculum.
• Assess our general education curriculum to ensure a coherent model is in place, in which connections among courses of study are both intentional and evident to students.
• Design pedagogical workshops and in-service training for faculty interested in designing new interdisciplinary courses that reflect attention to global learning.
• Redesign existing disciplinary courses, as appropriate, to reflect similar trends.
• Hire new faculty members who can make a contribution to globalized general education.
• Create a visiting scholars program to assist us in designing and instructing globalized courses.
• Offer summer stipends and assist with grant opportunities (such as Fulbrights) for faculty to promote scholarship in global issues.
• Build on our existing Semester in New York City program, adding an innovative aspect that emphasizes global learning outcomes.
• Strengthen our relations with the United Nations through a regular Ambassadors’ Lecture Series for all members of the college community, and enhance integration of U.N. opportunities within the curriculum.
• Develop a plan for integrating world languages into the general education curriculum.
• Infuse cross-cultural education into such areas as political science, history and anthropology, and the sciences.
• Measure and assess new and existing programs for achieving and maintaining global awareness.

II. Progress

In theory, our efforts to produce a “continuing intellectual and organizational project” complement those objectives outlined in Strong Foundations (Association of American Colleges, 1994). Manhattanville educates its students to recognize that “common responsibility” is necessary to confront the multiple problems of the modern world in such a way that students complete our programs prepared not only in their disciplines and professions but also in their abilities to imagine and construct better—more humane, just, and equitable—futures for themselves and others. Our faculty offer strong support for global learning opportunities by offering a wide range of course offerings across the disciplines.

Added support from the administration underscores Manhattanville’s commitment toward creating a global academic community, including our recently acquired status as an NGO associated with the Department of Public Information at the United Nations, which brings a steady flow of students and ambassadors between U.N. headquarters in New York and our campus.

While the mission and spirit of the college values global learning, the practice is assuredly ad hoc and the outcomes not always consistent. We have a unique and dynamic foundation, including the strong support of the president, provost, and faculty. Building upon this foundation, our team seeks ACE’s guidance as we commit ourselves to making global and cultural awareness an organic component of our overall curriculum, rather than a collection of distinct pieces grafted onto the curriculum.

We recognize our need to embark on this major outcomes assessment initiative to ensure that our mission and global learning ideals are truly part of each student’s experience. We want to ensure that existing global components remain viable and worthy components of the curriculum and co-curriculum, and that we work to create exciting new opportunities that enhance the learning outcomes for our students.

III. Successful Strategies

Manhattanville College is eager to share its three successful ventures for infusing global awareness into its curriculum with other Collaborative members. These components are part of our general education program and have proven a successful basis for our efforts to help students recognize their place in the global community.

The Preceptorial

The Preceptorial is a yearlong, seminar-style course required of all first-year Manhattanville students. It is intended to foster the intellectual development of students and provide a foundation for college-level academic work through an introduction to the liberal arts tradition of world civilization.

Beginning in the fall with the theme “Search for the Good Life,” students read and discuss classic texts by such intellects as Plato and Adam Smith, or sacred scriptures from both the East and the West. Preceptorial classes are purposefully kept small in order to facilitate careful consideration of the ideas contained in these texts, ideas that have influenced people, institutions, and whole societies for hundreds or sometimes thousands of years. In the spring, the Preceptorial moves on to “Search for a Good World,” focusing on more contemporary, global texts reflecting the increased interaction of different peoples, cultures, and civilizations to create the modern world, with its new issues, concerns, and opportunities.

The Preceptorial’s overall mission is to provide a setting in which students may increase their awareness of the world, both ancient and modern; strengthen academic skills such as reading, speaking, and analyzing as a foundation for further study; help students become acquainted with a diverse group of their fellow students while engaging in a common intellectual endeavor; and ensure that they develop, through regular contact, a constructive relationship with their academic adviser that will serve them well as they proceed beyond their first year at Manhattanville. The Preceptor serves a dual capacity as teacher and as the student’s academic adviser until the student declares a major and selects an adviser in his or her major field. In addition to guiding students to plan appropriate courses for both semesters, the Preceptor introduces them to the Portfolio System and establishes a mentoring relationship that facilitates a successful adjustment to college.

The Portfolio System

At the heart of Manhattanville’s distinctive approach to undergraduate education is the portfolio system. Ultimately, the portfolio reflects a student’s entire college career because it is both a system of planning and assessment and a repository for the student’s best work. Among the primary materials included in the portfolio are a first-year essay; a study plan outlining all coursework to be counted toward the degree; a program evaluation essay that gives a rationale for the student’s choice of courses, as well as a personal evaluation of his or her progress; a global awareness requirement, in which the student must indicate how he or she used his or her education to develop a broader or deeper awareness of other cultures; a résumé developed in consultation with the Office of Career Services; and specific examples of work in writing and research. Submission and approval of the portfolio is a requirement for graduation.

The portfolio is formally reviewed twice during the student’s academic career. The first formal review takes place during the second semester of the sophomore year. After the student submits the written portfolio, she or he has the opportunity to meet with a faculty panel that includes a representative of the Board on Academic Standards. Besides checking to make sure the student’s plan fulfills basic degree requirements, the review also serves an advisory function, considering whether the student has set and formulated appropriately challenging academic goals and, if necessary, asking him or her to revise these goals.

As mentioned, the portfolio includes a global awareness requirement. A plan for fulfilling this competency must be submitted at the first portfolio review and carried through by the final portfolio review. Generally, the competency is satisfied by a well-reasoned essay based on a minimum of two courses (minimum six credits) beyond the Preceptorial. The essay should demonstrate that students gained a broader global perspective or a deeper awareness of a culture other than their own. In addition to traditional college courses, students also may base their essay on studying or living abroad, independent work, or relevant internships. Courses taken to satisfy this requirement may overlap with major, minor, and distribution courses. We believe that our rather unique Preceptorial and portfolio system will contribute to the consortium’s mission of institutions assisting one another in designing, implementing, and assessing the programs that make up their general education curricula. We endeavor to learn from others as to how they direct, implement, and assess their programs in global learning as well.

Study Abroad

Manhattanville College encourages students to consider enriching their undergraduate academic experience through study off campus or abroad. The director of Study Abroad works out of the Academic Dean’s office and assists students in researching study abroad possibilities. There are many options for study abroad through reputable American institutions in countries around the world, including 10 cooperative programs directly connected to the college.

Participation in Manhattanville’s cooperative programs for study abroad means that students pay Manhattanville tuition and are able to use most of their Manhattanville institutional aid, as well as federal financial aid. Course titles from Manhattanville cooperative programs appear on the Manhattanville College transcript and grades are calculated into the grade point average. The cooperative programs are competitive and students applying to them must demonstrate maturity and academic excellence (a cumulative GPA of 3.2 or better) and present a convincing rationale. They must submit their application by the published deadline and have had their portfolios approved by the Board on Academic Standards.

For all programs outside the United States and England, the college requires that students must have completed at least one year of appropriate foreign language study. Ordinarily, students request to spend a junior semester abroad; in rare instances, second-semester sophomores or first-semester seniors can be approved. Students are not allowed to spend their final semester of study off campus.

The following is a list of cooperative study abroad opportunities for Manhattanville College students:

IV. Future Plans

Our Global Learning Task Force began meeting in October 2005, and we have conducted an institutional assessment of what Manhattanville College currently offers in the way of internationalized efforts. However, we know that we have a long way to go in coordinating these offerings.

Schmitz (1992) delineates what has become the core of Manhattanville College’s effort to infuse global learning through our general education curriculum. We would like to see our unified vision of planned reform reflect these sentiments:

Negotiating one’s affinities and commitments to diverse communities within U.S. society is a challenge for all citizens—and a special challenge for liberal education. Crossing borders and boundaries, working cross-culturally, negotiating difference, sustaining multiple and perhaps competing commitments, developing one’s value scheme while honoring that of others, making consequential choices while recognizing significant disagreement, sustaining a sense of relation to the entire polity: These are some of the societal requirements confronting curricula engaging cultural pluralism in America.

In recognizing the need for global learning as a component of our general education program, we embrace the need to teach the boundaries, guiding our students to question existing structures, engage with multiple perspectives, and creatively solve problems that arise from differences of any nature.

Please direct questions about this page to:
beth_burris@ace.nche.edu
This page last updated on 6/21/06