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Internationalization Collaborative
Comprehensive Universities
University of Richmond
The University of Richmond is an independent, privately
endowed, primarily undergraduate institution of higher education in
Virginia that provides a comprehensive academic program. Since its
founding in 1830, the university has broadened the scope of the
educational experience and now includes the Richmond School of Law
(1870); the Graduate School (1921); the Robins School of Business
(1949); and the School of Continuing Studies (1962). The Jepson School
of Leadership Studies opened in the fall of 1992, and is the first
school of leadership studies in the nation.
The University of Richmond occupies a distinctive place in American
higher education. Traditionally, many institutions aspire to excel
either as a large research university or as a small liberal arts
college. At Richmond, students, faculty, and staff are working to
establish a third prototype: one that combines the high level of
faculty-student interaction students receive at a small liberal arts
college with the array of choices available at a much larger university.
Few small colleges offer such a range of academic specialties, while few
large institutions offer undergraduates such small classes and extensive
opportunities for students to interact with faculty. The
university’s 350-acre campus, located in the state’s capital
city and close to the nation’s capital, provides students with
abundant learning opportunities.
At Richmond, the student is at the center of the learning experience.
Consider a sampling of the activities and opportunities one might
witness:
- A team of students from marketing, management, finance, and
accounting developing a plan for a local business.
- A law student searching an online database.
- A group of mathematics and computer science majors engaging in
faculty-directed research. leadership students and faculty preparing for
an Ethics Bowl during which they will engage ethical theory and critical
thinking skills with contemporary issues.
- An English major reviewing the latest draft of her senior thesis
with a faculty member.
- A first-year core class comparing the Gospel According to Matthew
with Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals.
- A psychology major conducting a lab experiment with faculty and
staff on memory and aging.
- A Spanish major leading vocabulary drills with a small group of
students.
- A senior fellow in the Writing Center assisting a first-year student
with a paper on the ancient philosophy of Lao Tzu.
- A staff person instructing faculty in the use of teaching software
in the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology.
- A chemistry class viewing animated experiments on computer software
designed by faculty and staff.
- Bonner Scholars meeting in the chaplain’s office to discuss
service experiences.
- Students in the Women Involved in Living and Learning (WILL) Program
gathering to hear a guest lecture on gender roles in the new
millennium.
- A student reviewing a videotape of himself with a professor in the
speech lab.
- A scholar-athlete with plans to attend medical school scoring a goal
against William and Mary in a women’s field hockey game.
- A group of students preparing for A Streetcar Named Desire under the
direction of a theatre professor in the Modlin Center for the Arts.
- A faculty member sharing with his core course students an exhibition
of the photographs of Lewis Hine and discussing social changes between
the world wars.
The University of Richmond has an undergraduate enrollment of
approximately 3,000 students, equally divided between women and men.
There are approximately 1,000 full- and part-time graduate students in
law, business, and arts and sciences, plus an additional 1,000 full- and
part-time undergraduate students in the School of Continuing Studies.
Degrees are offered in 45 undergraduate fields and
professional/interdisciplinary programs. The student/faculty ratio is
10:1 in the undergraduate divisions. There are 303 full-time faculty at
all ranks; 226 are full time at the assistant level or above, and 98
percent of these hold a Ph.D. or equivalent advanced degree.
Eighty-four percent of the university’s undergraduates come
from outside the state of Virginia; they represent 49 states, the
District of Columbia, and nearly 60 foreign countries. In fall 2001, 801
of 5,622 applicants enrolled as first-year students. Approximately 80
percent of students entered from schools that award class rank are in
the top fifth of their high school classes. The middle 50 percent of
entering students achieved composite SAT scores between 1240 and 1350.
Overview of Internationalization Efforts
I. Vision and Goals for
Internationalization
Internationalization at the University of Richmond
is comprehensive and integrated into all aspects of institutional life.
Efforts include a focus on recruiting students interested in an
institution with an international profile; curriculum development;
faculty development; student life and co-curricular activities; study
abroad; international students and scholars; and community outreach. The
university also focuses on the integration of international students,
faculty, and staff into the academic and co-curricular life on campus,
as well as the integration of study abroad students into cultures and
education systems abroad.
The university’s goals include:
- To offer every Richmond student an education that prepares her/him
for living and working productively in a world where cross-cultural
contacts are inevitable and potentially, but not inevitably,
enriching.
- To create an international campus on which people from different
cultures and linguistic backgrounds live and study together, learning
with and from one another.
- To involve every student in at least one substantive study abroad or
cross-cultural experience.
II. Progress
The University of Richmond has employed the following strategies in
an effort to accomplish these goals:
Curriculum development
In addition to internal funding for curriculum development, two
successful proposals to the Department of Education Title VIA program
for International Studies and Foreign Languages have supported
development of new and revisions of existing courses on Asia, Africa,
and Latin America, as well as the addition of instruction in Mandarin
and the creation of self-instructional programs in Swahili and Brazilian
Portuguese.
International visiting scholars
Internally and externally funded visiting scholars, artists, and
performers are an ongoing part of the integrated approach to
internationalization at Richmond. Here, too, the choice of visitors is
predicated on curricular concerns and "the state of the world." It is
carried out collaboratively by various departments and the dean of
International Education, who is in charge of the program and its
budget.
Study abroad
In 1988, when the Office
of International Education was created, study abroad at Richmond was
minimal and accidental. It consisted, essentially, of a few summer
programs directed by three or four Richmond faculty members in France,
Spain, and Austria. Since that time the University of Richmond has
developed a portfolio of more than 50 programs, with new ones being
added each semester. Its approach is grounded in some basic principles:
that study abroad is an integral part of a Richmond degree; that all
students are encouraged to participate; and that all students therefore
should have equal access to this important element of an undergraduate
education. In order to accomplish these goals, the university must
involve faculty in creating and assessing programs.
At Richmond, the quality of a study-abroad program is judged on the
basis of the rigor of academic instruction as well as the level of
immersion, including immersion in a different education system as well
as daily life and culture. For these reasons the university has favored,
whenever possible, direct relationships with universities abroad. When
they include student and faculty exchanges, such relationships have the
advantage of transforming the home campus. After all, most students
spend seven semesters on the home campus and only one semester abroad.
Having students from partner institutions on campus not only helps with
recruitment and preparation for study abroad, but it also facilitates
the rethinking and integration of knowledge and experience gained while
in classrooms abroad and in residence halls here. Such exchanges should
include faculty and should lead to collaborative teaching and research
involving faculty and students from partner institutions.
The university adds approximately three to four new exchange
relationships each academic year. More than 90 percent of students
participate in Richmond programs, for which they receive full
institutional financial aid and travel stipends, in addition to academic
and general advising before, during, and after study-abroad
experiences.
International students
The number of international students at Richmond has grown
significantly during the last five to six years, to the point where it
now approximates 5 percent of the total population. This figure includes
degree-seeking, exchange, and sponsored students. The university’s
goal is for international students to account for 10 percent of the
population within the next five years. Significant financial aid is
available, but the task has been complicated by two factors: the
aftermath of September 11, the effect of which cannot yet be adequately
measured, and the inclusion of international students in the need-blind
admission of some of the most elite institutions, a policy that has the
potential to make the university’s merit aid much less effective
recruitment tool.
Collaboration with sponsoring agencies
Collaboration with sponsoring agencies such as the Soros
Foundation’s Open Society Institute, the Study Abroad Foundation
and ACTR/ACCELS Freedom Support Act has brought increasing numbers of
visiting international students to Richmond. Nine students from the NIS
reside on campus this academic year. It is difficult to overstate the
potential that their presence affords for introducing to students
cultures and countries nearly unknown and yet clearly important.
Community outreach
As is true of most universities, especially those located in
population centers , all of our lectures, exhibits, and events are open
to the public and are attended by large numbers of community members.
Particularly successful, though, has been the university’s
12-year-old International Film Series, which presents eight films each
semester and draws a devoted audience for the three weekly shows.
Approximately 300 people view each film. This number is significant in a
landscape of severely diminished commercial distribution of foreign
films in the United States in general.
III. Successful Strategies
Faculty development
To create an international university, one must begin with the faculty, which forms the core of all that happens at
an institution. One can strive to hire faculty members whose backgrounds
and educations are international, and administrators at the University
of Richmond have done so successfully—especially if one considers
that 15 years ago, the university had few non-native English speakers
and non-Southerners. The university now has speakers of various
languages, people born and educated on all continents, and a number of
Americans who have lived, studied, and worked around the world. More
important, the university’s well-known Faculty Seminar Abroad
recently earned "Honorable Mention" in the Institute for International
Education Heiskell Award Program.
The University of Richmond has fully supported the Faculty Seminar
Abroad program, with internal institutional funds, for the past 13
years. Each year, an interdisciplinary, interschool group of eight to 12
faculty members studies a selected country/region during the spring
semester and then spends three weeks on site, meeting with academic
counterparts (often at universities with which the university has
exchange agreements), with business and political leaders, and with
journalists and local residents. They study and experience the economic,
political, religious, and aesthetic culture of the region. Countries are
selected based on the current world situation, as well as institutional
curricular needs. The outcomes include new and revised courses, new
directions and contacts for research and teaching, the strengthening of
existing and the creation of new cooperative agreements with
universities abroad, faculty involvement in students’ study
abroad, and the creation of an interdisciplinary intellectual culture on
campus. To date, 36 percent of all faculty members have participated in
the seminar, which is explicitly intended as an opportunity for
nonspecialists to acquire new knowledge and experience resulting in new
teaching and research.
The seminar has taken place 11 times since its inception in 1989. The
specific goals of the seminar are:
- To internationalize the curriculum by creating based on its current
significance to the world at large and to Richmond’s curricular
needs.
- To involve faculty members from all schools and all departments in
interdisciplinary dialogue by providing a shared focus (the studied and
experienced country or region).
- To encourage the development of new international linkages for
research and teaching.
- To strengthen the first-year core course "Exploring Human
Experience" by offering all faculty members first-hand experience of
cultures which produced the course texts.
- To enable faculty members to advise students on study abroad.
- To promote faculty exchanges.
Interdisciplinary and interschool (Arts and Sciences, Business, Law,
Leadership Studies, Continuing Studies) groups of faculty members,
working during the spring semester, create a reading list, study texts,
make presentations from their own disciplinary perspectives, hear from
internal and external specialists on the target country/region, and then
spend three weeks on location. The group visits universities and
important cultural sites. Upon their return, participants write
extensive reports and create syllabuses. Outcomes have included new
courses, some team-taught by faculty from different disciplines; new
directions of research; exhibits of contemporary art from a visited
country; and an exhibit of a participant’s sculpture and poetry
inspired by the seminar. The seminar has gone to Yugoslavia, Poland, and
Russia (1989); East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia ('90); China
('91); Ghana and Senegal ('92); Jordan, Yemen, Syria, and Israel ('93);
Argentina, Brazil, and Bolivia ('94); Mexico and Ecuador ('96); twice to
India ('98, '99); South Africa ('00); and Australia and New Zealand
('01). All schools and nearly all departments, including the sciences,
have been represented.
Two factors are essential to the project's success: extensive
preparation as a group and the monitoring of outcomes. The seminar thus
develops an intellectual community of people who know one another better
and in different ways than is conceivable without such an intensive
shared experience. In required follow-up reports, this is one of the
most often-cited outcomes.
"Probably all who participated in the seminar would agree that among
its greatest benefits was the enhanced appreciation we developed for
each other, both as professional colleagues and as friends. Life in the
university community will be more comfortable as a result, and because
of the friendships that were forged, there will be more exchange both
personal and intellectual. How else would I have entered into discussion
about racial politics with a black member of the law faculty, talked
about abortion, capital punishment, and gender issues with a self-styled
leftist from the political science department, or had a fruitful
exchange about Formalism in art and literature with a painter (not to
mention discussing Mormonism with a Quaker provost and a director of
international studies)?"
Participants also mention the effect on teaching:
I returned from the trip with heightened enthusiasm about the new
first-year [core] course, which will include a number of African books
this year for the first time, and which I will be teaching, also for the
first time.
The new experience and knowledge profoundly effect not only new, but
also long-taught, courses. For example, a literature scholar spoke of
how his 18th century English novel course will be transformed by his
experience in Central Europe, and a Spanish literature professor who
went to Latin America for the first time wrote:
My two weeks in Mexico and Ecuador made me experience
‘my’ language less as a personal property and more as an
organism with a life of its own. In a way, this gave me a perspective
more than actual knowledge, so that I could see in real terms the way I
speak Spanish, and see ‘castellanismo" as one of my constant
demons to dispel . . . .I would not have expected my language to be so
out of context in Latin America.
The effect on future research is equally interesting. Variations
abound, from a specialist in U.S. international relations who became
involved in research on a Vietnamese war general, to a historian who
wrote:
Despite my concern with superficiality and my recognition that I may
simply have acquired the little knowledge that makes one dangerous, I
found this trip wonderful. It has provided me with new ideas, problems,
and standards of comparison for looking at my own region of Africa. And
as I work to formulate my next major project, some of what I observed in
the region will be in my mind, guiding my questions about what has been
normal, or obvious, in social policy, the development of nationalism,
and concepts of development. It has also encouraged me to reexamine
notions of what constitutes realism, or practicality, in a given social
context.
A specialist in Milton added Australian poetry as a new area of
teaching and research, and a Medievalist began teaching and researching
contemporary Anglo-Indian literature. It should be stressed that by
being inclusive and in many ways open-ended, this faculty seminar allows
for a great diversity of reactions, reflections, and outcomes, from a
biologist who said in his report that he "saw and identified 85 species
of birds (a taxonomic list appended)" to the sculptor/poet who
wrote:
The more I thought about what I was going to write about this
experience, the more I realized that it was beyond any kind of simple,
non-poetic description or explanation. The thought formed itself that
the only way to get at any kind of meaningful statement was to write a
long, episodic poem, one that took the ripest bits of memory and plumbed
them for meaning and connected them into some kind of narrative.
Participants often point out the lasting effect and continuing
process of outcomes, as in this comment:
The full extent of the benefits of the African seminar will probably
not be completely evident for some time. Each day it seems that I see
something with greater clarity and understanding when I am reminded of
some forgotten or unremarked experience in Africa that adds new
dimensions to whatever I am experiencing, whether it be a news item, a
speech rhythm, or a passage in a book."
Institutional funding of the seminar has helped in grant proposals to
foundations and federal programs such as the U.S. Department Of
Education Title VI: International Studies and Foreign Languages.
IV. Future Plans
Global Living and Learning Center
We all know that processes of globalization are as complex and
problematic as they are inexorable. Higher education can and should make
a contribution toward understanding them and, as important, toward
formulating a moral and pragmatic set of approaches and solutions not
only to the opportunities, but also to the economic, social, and
cultural dislocations arising as a consequence of globalization in
countries rich and poor. The University of Richmond plans to build a
center dedicated to addressing these issues. The ground level of this
building will host the Office of International Education; classrooms;
lounges for meetings (formal and informal); and office space for
international visiting scholars/writers/artists. Upper levels would
house international and U.S. students, in equal numbers. The center
should become the focus of most, if not all, international activities on
campus.
Graduation requirement
We plan to propose to the faculty a new graduation requirement: a
substantive cross-cultural experience of living, studying, and working
in a setting radically different from the student’s culture of
origin. Most students will fulfill this requirement through study
abroad, but others will be able to opt for a rural experience, for
example on an Indian reservation; for an urban experience; or even for
the quintessential suburban experience.
Collaborative international teaching and research
Even with much of the infrastructure and resources in place, the
university is still experiencing limited, if growing, faculty
involvement in international collaborative projects. Faculty and staff
intend to make a concerted effort to promote such involvement in the
future.
*Please contact the institution directly if you have
questions about their institutional programs.
Please direct questions about this page to:
beth_burris@ace.nche.edu |
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This page last updated on:
6/16/2006
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