People Development

As the world’s oldest university specializing in aerospace and aviation, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU) traces its roots back to a pilot-training school founded in 1926. Today, the institution has residential campuses in Daytona Beach, Florida, and Prescott, Arizona, and an overseas campus headquartered in Singapore. A robust international student population, industry and academic partnerships around the world, and a strategic commitment to global engagement help Embry-Riddle achieve its mission to be a world leader in aviation and aerospace higher education.

When Kaloki Nabutola, PhD, was attending high school in his native Kenya, he would tell people that he wanted to study aeronautical engineering. A family member asked if he was planning to attend Embry-Riddle. He had never heard of the institution, but his interest was piqued when a friend asked the same thing. “I looked it up and found it had the number one aerospace engineering program,” Nabutola says.

Twelve years later, Nabutola has earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from Embry-Riddle. In April 2020, he defended his dissertation in mechanical engineering—via Zoom due to COVID-19—with a focus on ground vehicle aerodynamics. “I’ve spent my entire adult life at Embry-Riddle,” he says.

Not only has Nabutola been a student at Embry-Riddle, he has also been at the front of the classroom as a graduate student instructor. He has been able to use examples from his own international experience when working with his students. “Being an international student has definitely diversified the way I think about engineering problems because I have seen them used in so many different ways,” he says.

Nabutola is one of more than 1,000 international undergraduate and graduate students who currently study on Embry-Riddle’s main campus in Daytona Beach.

Deepening an Early History of Global Engagement

Embry-Riddle’s history of global engagement began during World War II, when British pilots learned to fly alongside their U.S. counterparts. During the same period, the school also trained cadets from Latin America in aircraft maintenance at its site in Florida and established an aviation technical school in São Paulo, Brazil, in partnership with the Brazilian Air Ministry.

Now, the institution prepares its graduates for global careers in fields such as aerospace, applied sciences, business, cybersecurity, engineering, security, and space. “We’re an institution that has its history, soul, and mission all driven by aviation- and aerospace-related activities—not just airplanes, but anything that goes with the movement of people around the world,” President P. Barry Butler, PhD, says.

When Butler became president in 2017, it was clear to him that global engagement should be one of the institution’s five strategic priorities. He appointed a global strategy team focused on promoting global competencies among students, staff, and faculty; expanding Embry-Riddle’s global reach to new locations; and diversifying the university’s international student population. “A lot of our programs are built around knowing that every one of our students is going to be working in a truly global environment, whether that’s the airline industry, manufacturing, government, or being an astronaut,” Butler says.

Butler joined Embry-Riddle at a time when the institution was already in the process of consolidating its international initiatives under the International Programs division, which was established in 2016. “Until about 4 years ago, everything was decentralized from an international program perspective,” says Assistant Provost and Dean of International Programs Aaron Clevenger, EdD, who became Embry-Riddle’s first senior international officer in 2017.

International Programs currently manages international student and scholar services, international enrollment, international student programming, the Embry-Riddle Language Institute (ERLI), study abroad, and global engagement. International Programs also helps coordinate across the university’s two campuses in the United States, its campus in Asia, and more than 100 teaching sites on military bases through its worldwide campus.

The division has just finished its own strategic plan that integrates the objectives of the five pillars of the university’s strategic plan. “That was the critical piece….And tailoring what we are doing to the mission and vision of the institution meant that we’re all moving toward the advancement of the institution,” says Caroline Day, associate director of international experience and communication.

Creating the International Student Experience

In the past 10 years, Embry-Riddle has experienced a 57 percent growth in international students, who make up almost 17 percent of its student population and represent 110 countries. There are currently more than 1,000 international students at its main campus in Daytona Beach, and more than 200 at the Prescott campus. Daytona Beach also hosts students who come for flight training from the Singapore campus, which was established in 2011.

As the number of international students has grown, the university has focused efforts on helping members of this community integrate into campus life. Day coordinates international student orientation and cultural programming. She says her job is to make sure that international students are “safe, happy, and healthy and have what they need to be successful.”

In March 2020, Embry-Riddle moved all of its classes online in response to COVID-19. While some international students decided to return to their home country, many chose to remain on campus. The university kept a residence hall open for students who elected to stay, and International Programs staff reached out to all students who remained in the United States to make sure they were safe and had access to the services and support they needed. The office remained open and available to students, both virtually and with a physical presence throughout the pandemic; hosted monthly live info sessions about topics ranging from immigration to housing, COVID-19 safety precautions, and enrollment advisement; and designed a virtual engagement program.

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Championing Aviation English

ERLI offers an intensive English language program for students who eventually want to matriculate at the university. The program has four levels, each with a special topics course that introduces students to relevant vocabulary and concepts for careers in aviation and aerospace.

The institution has also developed an innovative test, the English for Flight Training Assessment, as a requirement for all students studying aeronautical science. The assessment measures the aviation vocabulary and usage of students who want to become commercial pilots, ensuring that they meet the standards required by the Federal Aviation Administration to communicate with air traffic controllers and other aircrafts.

To support those who need extra assistance with their English, ERLI runs an aviation English language course in collaboration with the College of Aviation to help prepare international students who are going to become pilots. “As you can imagine, being able to communicate in the air is a little bit different from academic English and being able to talk about your paper with your professor,” says Hannaliisa Savolainen, MA, ERLI’s director.

Assessing and Expanding Global Learning Outcomes

In addition to exposing all of its students to new cultures through a diverse international student population, Embry-Riddle has worked closely with its Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence (CTLE) to internationalize its curriculum. One initiative is the development of seven student learning outcomes focused on global competencies that will be used to assess academic international education offerings, including education abroad, research abroad, and international internships. The learning outcomes were launched as part of an International Programs assessment for the 2020–21 academic year.

The learning outcomes have initially been integrated into education abroad offerings, but they can be applied to any course. “They have also been incorporated into the campus annual assessment process, meaning that they can be adopted by any department or course that would like to assess their impact on internationalizing the campus or providing global competency skills to students,” Clevenger says.

The next focus is to assess courses that are approved as part of a new global competence certificate that Embry-Riddle will launch in 2021. The curriculum is currently being mapped to the global competencies to determine the courses that will be included in the certificate, which is undergoing review by the faculty senate.

International Programs has also worked with the CTLE as it developed an inclusive teaching certification that introduces faculty to tools for successfully working with international students and helps prepare all students for global careers. More than 137 faculty have participated since the certification launched in 2019. Participants take part in workshops on topics such as universal design, how to manage difficult dialogues in the classroom, and how to teach in globally diverse classrooms. The certificate, which is recognized in the promotion and tenure process, is advertised by both International Programs and the CTLE.

Lon Moeller, JD, senior vice president for academic affairs and provost, says that one of the driving factors behind Embry-Riddle’s commitment to comprehensive internationalization and global learning outcomes is its deep engagement with employers and industry around the world. “We’re a really niche school in terms of aviation and aerospace, and these are industries that require internationalization,” he says. “We hear from our employers that they want Embry-Riddle students for their technical expertise, but they also really need to have that kind of broad worldview to be successful in the workplace.”

Embry-Riddle’s long history in aviation studies has positioned it to become a leader in aerospace, with degree programs in areas such as aerospace engineering, aerospace safety, space physics, and spaceflight operations. Space, the next international frontier, requires immense transnational understanding and willingness to work together, says Karen Gaines, PhD, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Embry-Riddle faculty and students across the university have even partnered with the International Space Station (ISS) and NASA to send payloads to the ISS.

Gaining Real-World Experience Through Study Abroad

Approximately 250 Embry-Riddle students study abroad each year, the majority through faculty-led programs. That number has drastically increased since 2011–12, when around 20 students per year participated in exchanges with international partners. Embry-Riddle was planning to offer 16 programs abroad during summer 2020 before they were canceled amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many of Embry-Riddle’s education abroad programs focus on the professional application of skills and knowledge. Since 2012, William Coyne, EdD, a professor of air traffic management, has led a summer study abroad program to Europe focused on aircraft management. The group visits several air traffic control and related organizations, such as the regional International Civil Aviation Organization headquarters in Paris, the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation (EUROCONTROL) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Brussels, and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency in Cologne. “We want to introduce students to the aircraft management world and how globally harmonized we are with our partners [around the world],” Coyne says.

Another popular faculty-led option is the annual business program to the United Kingdom, led by professors John Ledgerwood, MSA, and Tamilla Curtis, DBA. Each summer, participants visit British Airways headquarters at Heathrow Airport, where they are able to meet with representatives of different departments. They also visit various airports around the country to learn about aviation and airport regulations.

Clevenger says that one of the distinguishing factors of Embry-Riddle’s faculty-led programs is the opportunity to complete real-world projects that tie back to students’ majors. Examples include a program in Kosovo where students photograph cultural heritage sites using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, and a unique partnership that allows students to spend a week at Aegean Airlines headquarters in Greece. “The programs incorporate those aspects of study abroad that we know really drive home for students the importance of this global future that they are going to have,” he says.

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Documenting Cultural Heritage in Kosovo

Embry-Riddle aeronautical science professors Kevin Adkins, PhD, and Dan Macchiarella, PhD, have taken students to the Balkans for a five-week summer program since 2016. Before this year’s program was canceled due to COVID-19, they had planned to take almost 30 students. At the start of this program, group members spend 1 week taking an upper-division social science class on Balkan history with a local professor while they tour Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. Then, they spend 4 weeks in Kosovo, using the American University of Kosovo in Pristina as a base. They collaborate with Cultural Heritage Without Borders, a nongovernmental organization with a mission to help countries preserve important cultural heritage sites. Using UAVs, the group helps document cultural heritage sites in Kosovo, which was part of the former Yugoslavia.

After the breakup of the USSR, conflict between ethnic Albanians and Serbians led to a protracted war throughout the 1990s that resulted in NATO’s intervention in 1999. “The history of war since 1990 really affected the region. So we have a huge role in helping them reestablish themselves under a national identity,” says Macchiarella.

Unmanned aircraft systems are ideal to document sites because of the aerial perspective for the photography. Macchiarella says they are also particularly conducive to undergraduate research because they need a team to fly them. As students become more advanced, they can pilot the aircraft.

“It is work that is easy to scaffold,” Adkins says. “It doesn’t really take much training for a student to help clear an area or visually observe the airspace.”

The drones take thousands of pictures that can be processed and stitched together to make giant, highly detailed maps and 3D objects that can be manipulated. At the end of the program, the students give a project presentation that is attended by local officials, representatives from the Kosovo government, and U.S. embassy officials.

Ron White, who is majoring in unmanned aircraft system sciences, participated in the program in summer 2019. He says that being able to fly drone missions on weekends in several small towns was one of the highlights of the program. “This was an amazing opportunity to help local communities in the sense of documenting historic buildings, sites, and encroachment to these sites,” he says.

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Architect Sali Shoshi, Cultural Heritage Without Borders’s executive director, adds that collaborating with Embry-Riddle has allowed the organization to both speed up a process that used to be very time-consuming and expand its reach. Three-dimensional models of cultural heritage sites can even be uploaded to games and online applications so that children and adults can explore them on their phones.

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Collaborating With Aegean Airlines

Since 2016, Charles Westbrooks, MEd, associate professor of aeronautical science, and Mitch Geraci, MS, associate professor of aviation maintenance science, have taken students to Greece for a four-week summer program in collaboration with Aegean Airlines. They are also joined by faculty members in humanities and business.

A local travel agency, Get Lost, connected Embry-Riddle with executives at the airline who were interested in partnering with a U.S. institution. Get Lost Founder and CEO Angeliki Vaxevanaki designed a customized study abroad itinerary in which students sail in the Cycladic archipelago for 2 weeks, travel around mainland Greece for 1 week, and settle for 1 week in Athens, where they visit Aegean Airlines.

“Students get the chance to visit Greece, get to know the country on a deeper level, and understand its core values,” Vaxevanaki says. “Consequently, when meeting with Aegean executives, they are not only participating in workshops and providing solutions to issues supplied by Aegean, but [they get to] understand the company, its love for Greece, and its people.”

During the week spent in Athens, students receive briefings from key Aegean Airlines employees in charge of various parts of the company. Tours also include visits to Athens International Airport and a chance to fly on the flight deck of an Aegean A-320.

The students also work on projects developed through collaboration between the Aegean Airlines practitioners and ERAU faculty, Westbrooks says. Students have helped with projects such as developing a marketing plan targeted at Gen Z and designing the layout of a maintenance workshop.

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David Morgan, who graduated from Embry-Riddle in December 2019 with a degree in aeronautical science, says that the hands-on experience of working with one of the top European regional airlines was “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” He is currently a flight instructor, teaching U.S. Navy personnel how to fly in a general aviation aircraft.

While he was in Athens, Morgan gave a presentation to Aegean employees about how to divert an aircraft to another airport if an issue arose with the flight. “Interacting with the CEO of Aegean Airlines, watching Aegean’s flight operation control center, and seeing maintenance personnel fixing aircrafts in real time tied together everything I learned about airlines at Embry-Riddle,” Morgan says.

Elon University has  gone on an extra-ordinary journey in the past 15 years, transforming itself from a regional college into a comprehensive university with a national presence that receives far more applicants than it can accept from across the country. The beautiful 575-acre campus near Burlington, North Carolina, with dogwoods, magnolias, cherries, redbuds, and oaks—Elon means oak in Hebrew—is designated a botanical garden, and Elon has mastered the knack of building in a Georgian style that makes new dorms and classroom edifices look like they have been nestled in those trees for eons.

Adding to the curbside appeal is Elon’s reputation as an institution where students become deeply engaged in community service, and where a large majority studies abroad. So deeply is study abroad engrained in the culture at Elon that even the custodial and administrative staff has the opportunity to see London in January, when the flats reserved for Elon students in the fall and spring would otherwise be empty.

Elon provides each student—and, if they so request,  prospective employers and graduate schools—not only course grades, but a second, formal transcript on their participation in five “Elon Experiences,” namely: leadership, service, internships, study abroad, and undergraduate research.

Elon cemented its reputation for civic engagement by perennially emerging among the high scorers on the National Survey of Student Engagement. Elon also was one of the 10 original campuses that em-braced Project Pericles, a national effort to promote good citizenship under the aegis of philanthropist Eugene Lang and his foundation. Not only did 71 percent of the Class of 2007 study abroad, but 80 percent completed an internship and 91 percent engaged in volunteer service.

Elon engineered its rise with strong administrative and faculty leadership, a passion for strategic planning, and a knack for stretching limited dollars. (These gains have not gone unnoticed: a 2004 book authored by George Keller from Johns Hopkins University Press, Transforming a College: The Story of a Little-Known College’s Strategic Climb to National Distinction, examines Elon’s rise to a top regional university.) Elon is a place that prides itself on congeniality, down to the “College Coffee” on Tuesday mornings when classes and work stop for 40 minutes while students, faculty, and staff gather outside the main campus building for coffee, donuts, and conversation. Faculty have embraced study abroadwith gusto. Each year, more than 50 faculty memberslead study abroad programs, most on short-term courses offeredin the winter and summer. A Study Abroad Committee, a standing committee of faculty that includes two student members, passes judgment on each program, and faculty say their participation in study abroad, including not only course development and teaching but scholarship as well, is valued as a critical part of their professional development.

Clearly, international studies and global awareness have played a large role in the creation of this new Elon. “Two or three decades ago Elon served first-generation college students,” says President Leo M. Lambert. Today, 80 percent of the parents are college graduates and more than a third boast graduate degrees as well. “These parents are aware how small the world is getting and how important it is for their student to experience that world more broadly through their Elon education,” adds Lambert.

Lambert’s predecessor, J. Fred Young, president from 1973 through 1998, set the institution on this course and nurtured the study abroad programs. Young, a former school superintendent, created an organization that continues to place teachers from other countries in North Carolina public schools. He personally recruited one of those exchange teachers, Sylvia Muñoz of San Jose, Costa Rica, to come to Elon to open El Centro de Español—the Spanish Center—to provide Spanish language and cultural lessons in an informal setting to students, faculty, and staff alike. Now ensconced in remodeled Carlton Building next to the Isabella Cannon Centre for International Studies, El Centro bustles with activities day and night.

Isabella Cannon Shows the Way

At his 1999 installation, Lambert announced a landmark $1 million gift from Isabella Cannon, a 1924 Elon alumna, that gave international studies a showcase home at the heart of campus, overlooking Scott Plaza and Fonville Fountain. Cannon, born in Scotland in 1904, was a librarian, civic activist, and globe-trotter who in 1977, at age 73, campaigned as “a little old lady in tennis shoes” to unseat the mayor of Raleigh. A diplomat’s wife, she had lived in China, Iraq, and Liberia before concentrating her energy on opening parks and improving life in North Carolina’s capital. As commencement speaker in 2000, the diminutive Cannon reminded Elon graduates that collectively they had “a grand total of more than 50,000 years to make this a better world.” She made another major gift that allowed Elon to build the Isabella Cannon International Studies Pavilion, which houses 11 international and 11 U.S. students and is one of several living-learning communities in the university’s  Academic Village, modeled after Thomas Jefferson’s design for the University of Virginia. Cannon died in 2002 at age 97, six months before the dedication of the new Isabella Cannon Centre for International Studies, with Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan, as principal speaker.

Elon changed its name from Elon College to Elon University in 2001—the town that had grown up around the college had to change its name, too, from Elon College, North Carolina to plain Elon—and, underscoring that status, opened the Elon University School of Law in nearby Greensboro in August 2006. Elon already offered graduate degrees in business, education, and physical therapy. On Lambert’s watch, the full-time faculty has grown from 192 in 1999 to 291 in 2006.

Elon charges lower tuition than many of the universities with which it competes for students, but it does not discount that “sticker price” to woo students. Its endowment stands at $70 million, but Elon’s leaders hope to boost it by $100 million in a five-year campaign now underway.

Elon’s growth over the past decade was fueled by admitting more students, from 3,500 in 1995 to more than 5,200 today. “We’ve benefited tremendously from our location and being in this great mecca of higher education in North Carolina,” says Lambert, a former education professor and associate dean at Syracuse University who founded an innovative program there to hone the teaching skills of future professors. “Growth has fueled quality at Elon; there’s absolutely no doubt about it,” Lambert says. “But we can’t continue to growand still be the intimate kind of community Elon is right now.”

Studying Abroad in January

Elon has built its study abroad reputation largely around month-long winter-term courses offered in the middle of its 4-1-4 calendar. It began with a single January course in London in 1969. Elon now offers approximately 30 such winter-term study abroad courses. In 1985 Elon began sending students and a professor to London for a full semester; in 2006 the university added a faculty-led semester in San Jose, Costa Rica, that combines Spanish classes with courses taught in English in marketing, the politics of Central America, and environmental issues.

Elon also offers students opportunities to enroll in 32 affiliate and exchange programs as well as seven Elon summer study abroad courses. Increasingly, Elon also is placing students in international internships, co-ops and other educational experiences, and Laurence Basirico, dean of international programs, is scouting possibilities for new semester-long Elon programs in Europe and Asia. “We want to have one on each of the continents,” says Steven House, dean of Elon College, the College of Arts and Sciences.

These extensive off-campus programs are a costly undertaking for an institution on a tight budget. That they have grown so large is testament to the importance the university places in international education. “When you have 60 students studying abroad for a semester in Italy, Elon sends all of their tuition funds to the Italian school and loses use of these funds for the main campus. It’s a big expense,” says Provost Gerald Francis, who joined the faculty in 1974 after earning his Ph.D. in mathematics at Virginia Tech. Francis’s 24-year tenure as academic dean and provost spans the Young and Lambert eras. His role in Elon’s metamorphosis was pivotal.

From Custodians to Faculty, Everyone Gets a Chance to Go Abroad

Francis also has been a champion of finding creative ways to help faculty and staff experience travel abroad. Gerald Whittington, Elon’s vice president for business, finance, and technology, personally has led 300-plus Elon faculty and staff—from full professors to custodians—on more than a dozen London trips. Whittington sees a practical payoff to taking the staff to see the sights of London for themselves. “Our students are getting messages from above, below, and sideways that this is an important value of the institution and one that they ought to participate in. That’s why we do it,” says Whittington, who grew up in the great cities of Europe.

“Don’t think there is not self-interest in this. They are all part of the sales force,” agrees Francis. The provost even encourages Basirico to send a university staff member, when possible, with the faculty who lead the regular study abroad courses in January. If an Elon art historian takes students on a fast-paced program to Italy, “it really helps if you have somebody to help keep up with the busses and hotels,” reasons Francis. “Librarians, purchasing agents, the registrar, or people in student life can (do that) to help the program run smoothly. And that makes them part of the international campus here.”

Courses with Few Prerequisites

Last January, Elon faculty led students to Australia, Barbados, Brazil, China, Costa Rica, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Peru, the Philippines, and beyond.

While students typically pay from $2,800 to $5,500 for travel, lodging, and other expenses for the winter study abroad courses, they are charged no extra tuition; that is bundled into the fall semester tuition. Courses also are offered back on campus for students who cannot participate in the study abroad. Traditionally, most of the winter-term study abroad programs are 200-level courses with few prerequisites. That was done intentionally so students wouldn’t be precluded from signing up, says Basirico. Thomas K. Tiemann, an economics professor who holds an endowed chair, says, “There’s a big range of study abroad opportunities here, depending on the students’ experiences, attitudes and how brave they are.”

Increasingly, these courses are gaining rigor. Some were challenging from the start, such as “Field Biology in Belize,” in which students learn about rainforest ecology and explore a coastal reef. The course is open to non science majors, but since it counts as a lab elective for the many biology majors who sign up, “I want it to be challenging,” says biology professor Nancy E. Harris.  “They may have had botany, zoology, and maybe even ecology, but when they get there, they are blown away. It’s truly an eye-opening experience.” Students start each day at a wildlife preserve in Belize’s Rio Bravo bird-watching at 6:30 a.m., followed by lectures and field observations. Students keep cultural and scientific journals, take exams and lab practicals. It’s a real science class but with a huge dose of cultural and biological reality. “The itinerary reflects the rigor. There’s very little free time,” says Harris, who also is associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, which is called Elon College. “There are howler monkeys overhead, jaguar in the forests, poisonous snakes under the decks, (and) bats in the bathroom. It’s cool.” At night students go out with flashlights, poke sticks in holes, and “play the game of who will let the tarantula walk over their head,” says Harris. During the marine biology half of the class, the students go snorkeling along the coral reefs in the azure Caribbean off Ambergris Caye, but even there they have lectures, tests, and field reports to complete. A USA Today reporter who accompanied the class in January 2004 noted, “One of their final exams, a ‘fish and coral practical,’ is conducted under water, using waterproof paper.”

“Study abroad has tentacles…”

Faculty new to Elon often are surprised at how quickly the opportunity arises to teach in another country. Vic Costello, associate professor of communications, says, “It seems like the whole institution buys into it. I’m living proof. Two years after I came in, I was leading a class to Europe.” Demand was strong for Costello’s course, Gutenberg, Reformation and Revolution: Media’s Impact on Western Society, which took students to Mainz, Germany, the birthplace of the printing press, and ended in Geneva, Switzerland, where the Internet was born at the CERN Institute. “Study abroad has tentacles that go throughout the campus. It is fully integrated with the culture of the school,” says Costello, who chairs the Study Abroad Committee.

Vice President G. Smith Jackson, the longtime dean of students and coordinator of the Elon Experiences, says, “Students come to Elon because of our active, engaged approach to learning, and study abroad is at the top of that.” Jackson describes the dynamic as a “collision of powerful factors: students and parents who want this type of education, an administration that supports it, and faculty who understand the power of that pedagogy.”

Elon awards $50,000 in scholarships for study abroad each year. Honors students and Elon Fellows automatically receive a $750 travel grant as part of their awards. “When we spend a dollar around here we like to say we are getting two or three things done,” says Lambert. “An example is the way we top off certain scholarships to emphasize the importance of internationalization and global citizenship.”

Good Timing for an International Plan

A decade ago, when winter study abroad started taking off, the international program was still operating out of a crowded ground-floor office in the Alamance Building. Bill Rich, then the dean, put together an ambitious blueprint for expanding the size, staff, and reach of the international programs office. A year later, when Isabella Cannon presented her $1 million gift, it became a reality. Rich, an emeritus professor of religious studies, retired in 2004, but still leads a winter-term trip to Athens and Thessalonica to study the art, architecture, mythology, and religion of ancient Greece. Some of these winter courses are so popular that students are left with a second or third choice. It’s a far cry from the early days when “we would stand in the cafeteria lines to recruit students for study abroad,” Rich says.

Education Internships in Costa Rica

Basirico, who is also a sociology professor, returned from a 2004 trip to Costa Rica and asked F. Gerald Dillashaw, dean of the School of Education, if he’d be interested in sending education majors to San Jose for a semester to intern in Costa Rican classrooms. The School of Education already was sending upward of 20 sophomores to assist in London schools each spring. In Costa Rica, of course, there would be the added complexity of working in Spanish. Immediately, “everyone on our advisory committee was in favor of the idea,” says Janice L. Richardson, an associate professor of mathematics who directs the North Carolina Teaching Fellows Program at Elon. The Teaching Fellows Program is a scholarship program jointly funded by the state and the university that provides $13,000-a-year scholarships for 25 students from North Carolina who agree to spend four years teaching in North Carolina schools. Both Dillashaw and Richardson traveled to Costa Rica to lay the groundwork, and seven education majors spent this past spring as teacher aides in San Jose, living with local families and also taking classes of their own. On a recent visit, one Elon sophomore told Richardson, “Now I know what it’s like to be a Spanish-speaking student walking into an English classroom and not understanding the language.”

Elon has another steady connection with Costa Rica. As a reward for faculty and staff who participate in the conversational Spanish classes and cultural activities at El Centro de Español, Sylvia Muñoz escorts a dozen or more faculty and staff to her homeland each May. Participants are charged just $400. And El Centro offers a travel perk for students, too, who show up faithfully for its conversations, cooking classes, rumba lessons, movie nights, and festivals like Día de los Muertos: Once they log 140 hours, “they get a free plane ticket to any Spanish-speaking country. A lot use it to study abroad,” says Muñoz. The ticket is funded through the provost’s office.

Freshman Seminar on ‘Global Experience’

The curriculum at Elon sends an early signal to freshmen about the importance the university places on internationalization. “Right off the bat we expose students to the idea that theirs is not the only world and that there are other places and people worth studying,” says Janet Warman, an English professor who directs the General Studies program. Freshmen must take a seminar on The Global Experience taught by faculty from every department that explores such issues as human rights abuses and environmental responsibility. With a limit of 25 students per section, the seminar dates back to a 1994 revision of the core curriculum. Warman, who received Elon’s top teaching award in 2004, says, “Early on, there was a lot of resistance. Students didn’t seem to understand why we were studying the things we were studying. Now they are much more receptive.” Two years ago, when former Sudanese slave Francis Bok lectured about his autobiography, Escape From Slavery, “the students flocked around him to hear more of his story and ask how they could take action,” Warman says. The General Studies program does not end with freshman year. As juniors or seniors, students must take advanced interdisciplinary seminars. Elon reinstated a language requirement three years ago, and already the language faculty want to raise it. “A two-semester requirement is really quite minimal,” says Ernest Lunsford, a professor of Spanish. “We also would like to have more study abroad that incorporates serious language study.” Elon offers majors in Spanish and French and minors in Italian and German studies. Classes are also taught in Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic.

The only major other than languages that requires study abroad is international studies, which has surged in popularity. Laura Roselle, a political science professor, says, “In 1997 we had 12 majors. Right now we have 173. Each time we raised the requirements, we thought, ‘Uh-oh. Enrollments might suffer.’ But it has not slowed at all.” International studies, she says, appeals to the service-oriented students drawn to Elon. “They are looking for a place where service opportunities and volunteer activities are valued, and they find that here,” says Roselle. “The to-do list for Elon is to deepen the connections between the academics and those experiences.”

Project Pericles and AIDS in Namibia

Project Pericles, a national civic engagement initiative that Elon signed onto in 2002, also has had a decidedly international cast to its character. The first 29 Periclean Scholars in the Class of 2006 focused on the problem of HIV/AIDS in Namibia. Over three years, under the direction of sociology professor Tom Arcaro, the group produced a four-part documentary series that aired on public television in the region. The project brought to campus speakers from Namibia, including Anita Isaacs, an activist for those living with HIV. Arcaro, who was North Carolina’s Professor of the Year in 2006, also led several students and a campus video producer to Namibia to meet with AIDS activists and tape footage for the documentary series. Students packed 70-pound suitcases with textbooks, toys, school supplies, and clothing that they distributed to Namibian school children. Lambert called Arcaro’s stewardship of the program “the single most powerful, sustained, and globally influential act of teaching and mentoring I have (ever) witnessed.” As seniors, 11 Elon students journeyed to southern Africa to join Namibian university students at a Future Leaders Summit on HIV/AIDS. The Periclean Scholars in the Class of 2007 tackled the problem of pediatric malnutrition in Honduras, and subsequent classes also have chosen an international focus for their work.

If there is any anomaly to this pervasive international culture, it is that fewer than 2 percent of Elon students are international. International enrollments have grown over the past decade from 40 to 89, and the university is eager to attract more. To date, its efforts to do so have been constrained by the limited availability of financial aid.

John Keegan, director of international admissions and associate director of admissions, travels the world recruiting students, and exchanges dozens of e-mails on a daily basis with prospects and their parents. “We would love to enroll 100 more international students,” says Keegan, a 1996 Elon alumnus. “Every day the international students on campus ask me, ‘Who else is coming from my country? Who else is coming from Panama? Who else is coming from Singapore?’ They are just as into it as we are.”

A Personal Touch

The personable Keegan is a persuasive salesman. Chae Kim, 20, a sophomore accounting major from Seoul, South Korea, and her parents got the full treatment when they pulled into Elon on a spring break trip after she spent a year in Jackson, Mississippi, as a high school exchange student. “He was very welcoming. He basically told my parents he would look after me while I was here,” said Kim. She found herself one of only two Korean students on campus that first semester, but that did not bother her. “I just feel obligated to step out more and represent who I am more because numbers-wise, there aren’t many of us,” said Kim, who interned for PricewaterhouseCoopers in Seoul this past summer.

Susan C. Klopman, vice president of admissions and financial planning, says stories like Chae Kim’s are “what has made Elon admissions and enrollment successful. We have been fortunate enough to really make connections with so many of our students. It’s getting harder with the proliferation of applications, but a personal relationship is critical for international students. To whom are they entrusting this child? What’s the nature of this school and this place? When they meet John, the trust level just goes sky high. He represents the Elon community so well.”

Another international student, Kira Tippenhauer, 21, a sophomore originally from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, says Elon’s size was just right. “I did not want to go to a huge school where I would be just a number,” says Tippenhauer, who heard of Elon through a family friend in Michigan who knew John Keegan’s sister. “I love it here,” says Tippenhauer. “There are not that many international students, but still there are students from 45 different countries. That means 45 countries in the world know about Elon and have parents who decided to send their kids to Elon.”

Munoz, the El Centro director, says, “What’s nice about the numbers we have now is that we stand out. People notice us. They really take us as part of their families. My supervisor, Lela Faye Rich (associate dean for academic advising) is like a mother for all international faculty. If you want to be recognized or known, it’s very easy.”

They also don’t have to worry about getting to or from the airport, 45 minutes away. “We pick them up, we drop them off at the airport. That’s any time that they ask for it,” says François Masuka, director of International Student and Faculty Scholar Services. “We do things I don’t think many schools do. The environment is a friendly, brotherly, sisterly type of environment. We cultivate that. You’ve got to hold more hands here.” Masuka, who hails from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and earned a master’s degree at the School for International Studies in Vermont, worked at the University of Virginia and Texas Tech University previously.

Stepping Up Exchanges

Elon hopes to bring more international students to campus by stepping up exchanges. Monica Pagano, assistant dean of international programs, says, “When I got here (in 2003), there were two exchanges. Now we have 14. It’s exciting.” The Argentinian-born Pagano is an authority on service learning. She returned in spring 2007 from the Dominican Republic, where she’d gone to expand opportunities for students to volunteer over spring break. So pleased were the parents of one 2006 Elon graduate with the service-learning projects that took their daughter to Guatemala and Tibet, that they gave the university $250,000 to fund international service-learning scholarships.

Many students who come for short stays are placed in the Isabella Cannon International Studies Pavilion with the domestic and international students living there for the full year. “It’s great to constantly have that flow of culture coming through,” says Ayesha Delpish, an assistant professor of mathematics who is the resident faculty member. Elon is hosting 20 exchange students in fall 2007, more than ever before. Nancy Midgette, associate provost, observes, “Now it’s our job to encourage our (domestic) students to be the other half of these exchanges. They work best when you have people going in both directions.”

Both Lambert and Basirico believe that the university will need more staff and resources to move its international education programs to the next level. With so many faculty leading study abroad courses, Basirico says, “The next step for us is to become a leader in terms of quality of programs and a leader in research on the pedagogy of study abroad.”

Lambert says, “There are times when you can’t just keep moving along the same trajectory. You’ve got to make a leap in terms of the resources you commit to a particular program.” Elon’s infrastructure for managing international programs was “built like everything else at Elon––by bootstrapping it and making it incrementally better and better. But after a period of years, you need to regroup, reorganize, and make new investments to take the program to the next level.”

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The Dutch immigrants who settled in western Michigan in the mid-nineteenth century brought not only their culture and Reformed Protestant faith, but a strong interest in establishing schools to impart their principles and religion to the next generation. “Onze school for onze kinderen (our school for our children) was the operating description of both the college and the Christian day schools that they established,” according to a history of Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Calvin, one of the largest and most academically rigorous Christian colleges, remains firmly in the Christian Reformed fold. But Calvin is no longer onze school for onze kinderen. Fewer than half Calvin’s 4,200 undergraduates belong to the Christian Reformed Church. Ten percent are minorities, and there are more than 320 international students from five dozen countries. The majority of international students receive more than $10,000 a year in financial aid.

As recently as the 1970s, 90 percent of the students came from Christian Reformed high schools in the Grand Rapids area and sister schools in midwestern suburbs, southern California, Canada, and other places where Christian Reformed families clustered. When Ellen B. Monsma came to Calvin to teach French in 1971, “if you looked around the fine arts auditorium, all you’d see was blonde heads.” But, says Monsma, director of Calvin’s Off-Campus Programs, “it’s very different now.”

Ninth in International Students, Fourth in Study Abroad

According to Open Doors 2006 data, compiled by the Institute of International Education, Calvin ranked ninth among baccalaureate institutions in attracting international students, and fourth in sending students to study abroad. Rather than catering to onze kinderen, Calvin has internationalized its faculty and curricula and aggressively expanded ties with scholars, theologians, and institutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In 2006 Calvin launched the Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity under former provost Joel A. Carpenter to better understand the growth of Christianity in the developing world. While buildings across campus attest to the college’s Dutch roots—with such names as the Spoelhof College Center, Hekman Library, and Noordewier-VanderWerp Residence Hall—and a chair recently was endowed in Dutch Language and Culture, students from Asia and Africa far outnumber those from the Netherlands and rest of Europe. Fully 74 students had citizenship or roots in South Korea, a country with a large number of Reformed or Presbyterian churches and a vigorous missionary tradition. Home for those Korean students means 17 different countries, from Fiji to India to Germany to the United States to Brazil. Calvin also has become a favored destination for “MKs” or missionary kids—U.S. citizens, Canadians, Filipinos, Koreans, and others raised overseas. Many MKs are supported by scholarships provided by Calvin alumnus Stanley van Reken and wife Harriet through their Christian Missionary Scholarship Foundation. It all adds to the international flavor of the 390-acre campus straddling the East Beltline on the outskirts of Grand Rapids.

Open Admissions but Lots of Merit Scholars

Calvin produces more future Ph.D.s than all but a few dozen liberal arts colleges, according to tallies kept by the National Science Foundation. Calvin enrolled 80 National Merit Scholars in 2006–07, including 29 in the freshman class. But it also admits virtually every applicant. “It’s a very unusual student body,” says President Gaylen J. Byker. Open admissions are “part of who we are.”

Calvin, borrowing language from the Book of Revelation, embarked in 1985 to attract those “from every tribe and language and people and nation.” At the time it had a single off-campus study program in a small town outside Valencia, Spain. Today it runs semester-long, off-campus study programs in Tegucigalpa, Honduras; Beijing, China; Budapest, Hungary; Accra, Ghana; York, England, and Grenoble, France, as well as Valencia. It has added majors in international development, international relations, and Asian studies as well as a minor in African and African diaspora studies. In a 2001 overhaul of the core curriculum, it specified that students must study a non-Western or pre-Renaissance subject to fulfill a global and historical studies requirement. “We call it ‘the long ago or far away requirement,’” Provost Claudia Beversluis says with a smile.

Leaders with Global Resumes

Two alumni with broad international backgrounds were brought in to lead the institution in the mid-1990s: current president Gaylen Byker and Joel Carpenter, provost from 1996-2006. President Byker is a former international lawyer and investment banker with a Ph.D. in international relations who dropped out of Calvin as a freshman in 1966, enlisted in the Army and served as an artillery officer in Vietnam. Byker, son of a Michigan state senator, returned home, wed, started a family and captained the wrestling team at Calvin while carving out an interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree. He earned both a law degree and master’s in world politics from the University of Michigan, clerked for a federal judge, and worked for a Philadelphia law firm before resuming graduate studies.

A mentor at the University of Pennsylvania coaxed him to head to Beirut to help rebuild Lebanon after its civil war. Byker landed on the faculty of the American University of Beirut while his wife Susan taught at an international school, which their 11- and 5-year-old daughters attended. But what was thought in 1982 to be the end of violence in Beirut was just a lull; from five miles away, the Bykers felt the force of the truck bomb that blew up the Marine barracks on Oct. 23, 1983, and killed 241 American and 60 French soldiers. Two months later, Byker was returning to the Middle East from co-teaching a January interim course at Calvin when he learned that Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut, had been assassinated. The Bykers were among the Americans evacuated by U.S. Marine helicopter crews from the Beirut beaches in February 1984. The family returned to Beirut in the spring, but Byker later had to be smuggled out of the country after militants began kidnapping male Westerners, including their friend, the Rev. Benjamin Weir, a Presbyterian missionary. Susan Byker, not wanting to disrupt further her Lebanese students’ education, waited until the end of the school year to depart with her daughters.

During those chaotic years in Beirut, Byker managed to complete a survey on the attitudes of Lebanese citizens toward their wildly fluctuating currency. It would be 1993 before Byker completed writing his dissertation. He spent those interim years jetting around the world as an investment banker for Chase Manhattan and Banque Paribas, helping governments and corporations hedge commodity price transactions. Then in 1995 he answered the call to serve as Calvin’s president.

“Part of the challenge here is to keep the very distinctively Christian and Calvinistic or Reformed characteristic of the college, while really opening it up to this global perspective,” says Byker. A tradition of respect for intellectual inquiry made this task easier, notwithstanding strict religious restrictions on who can belong to the faculty, he says. “We expose our students to everything. We bring everybody here to lecture,” says Byker. Rosemary MasonEtter, the international admissions director, puts it, “Calvin seeks to have conversations, not prevent conversations.” The college also hosts a celebrated January Series of lectures that it bills as “15 days of free liberal arts education,” that fills the Fine Arts Center Auditorium at lunchtime for 15 consecutive weekdays. Speakers have included Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life manager of Hotel Rwanda; Dr. Paul Farmer, the founder of Partners in Health; Egyptian scholar and dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim, and Scott Ritter, former U.N. weapons inspector.

Far From Fundamentalism

Calvin is far from fundamentalist. Kwabena Bediako, 20, a senior chemistry major from Mampong-Akuapem, Ghana, observes, “For the most part the college is not afraid of tackling or confronting issues that are seen as controversial in other Christian colleges. Nothing is too awkward or too controversial to be investigated or be discussed, especially in the sciences.” Bediako’s older brother is a 2004 graduate working on a Ph.D. in immunology and a master’s in public health at Northwestern University. Bediako, a chemistry major, says, “I’m going to have to confront some of these issues at some point in my career. We might as well start to think about them critically now rather than be caught off guard later in life.”

Bediako’s parents, Kwame and Gillian, founders of the Akrofi-Christaller Institute for Theology, Mission and Culture in Ghana, are working with Calvin’s Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity. The Nagel Institute recently received a $2 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to fund a three-year program of scholarship and lectures for Chinese scholars on the intersection of science, philosophy, and belief. The executive director for the project is Kelly J. Clark, a Calvin philosophy professor whose friendship with a Chinese professor he met on sabbatical in Scotland led him to become a student of Chinese philosophy. After an exchange of visits, Clark says he decided that “there were things we had to learn from them, so I devoted myself to the study of Chinese thought.”

Religion professor Diane B. Obenchain, a Harvard-trained expert on Confucianism, came to Calvin to teach world religions in 2005 after long stints at Kenyon College and visiting professorships at Peking University and other Asian institutions. Daniel H. Bays, an authority on the history of Christianity in China, came to Grand Rapids in 2002 after a long career at the University of Kansas, where he chaired the history department and directed the Center for East Asian Studies. Bays secured a $500,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that Calvin agreed to match 3-to-1 to create a $2 million endowment for Asian Studies. Political science professor Amy S. Patterson, a Peace Corps veteran who wrote her dissertation on grassroots democracy in Senegal, was attracted to Calvin both by its religiosity and the strong interest in international issues. She is the author of The Politics of AIDS in Africa and editor of a second compendium on the AIDS crisis.

President Byker likes to tell visitors that, “There were three Calvin colleges before Calvin College in this country. One was called Harvard, one was called Yale, and the other was called Princeton. They were all founded by Calvinists very much in the exact intellectual tradition within which we exist today.” Of the more than 200 Protestant Christian colleges founded before the Civil War, “zero are Christian today,” he adds. All jettisoned their religious identity and became secular, he states. Calvin began as a Christian Reformed seminary in 1876, opened a junior college in 1906, and became a baccalaureate college in 1921. It remains the principal educational institution of the Christian Reformed Church, which claims a quarter-million members in the United States and Canada.

Looking toward the Global South and East

Carpenter, a historian and authority on evangelical movements, directed the religion program of The Pew Charitable Trusts before he was hired as provost in 1996. Upon returning to his alma mater, Carpenter pushed the college to pay more attention to issues of “the global South and East.” Beversluis, the current provost, says, “he kept telling us, ‘Look, the church isn’t headquartered in Europe and the U.S. anymore. The growth areas, the edge, is in the global South and East, so Calvin College better know where it’s happening. We’d better be on top of things and not graduate students who think that west Michigan is somehow the center of the universe.’” Carpenter says he found a Calvin ready “to break out of its protective ethnic shell.”

Sociologist and Dean for Multicultural Affairs Michelle R. Loyd-Paige has both lived and helped drive change at Calvin, which was far more homogenous when she arrived on campus as a freshman 30 years ago. “We see ourselves as having this unique position of being a credible, Christian, and scholarly voice on these issues. We believe we have something to say to—and to hear from—a wider audience,” says Loyd-Paige, an ordained minister in her African-American church in Muskegon, Michigan.

Nana Yaa Dodi, 23, of Asamankese, Ghana, a business and international relations major, can attest to the attention she received when applying to the college. “I felt like the admissions counselors actually cared about my being able to make it here to Calvin. They were willing to work with me and my parents on finances. At various times, especially when I was receiving so much correspondence and replies to my e-mails, I wondered, ‘Am I the only student applying? These people get back to me really fast.’”

More than 700 Calvin students study abroad each year, 500 on three-week classes during the interim term and upwards of 200 on full-semester programs. Under the leadership of Frank Roberts, a former academic dean and director of Off-Campus Programs, and Monsma, the current director, “we really bootstrapped the semester programs abroad,” Carpenter says. Now the college is scrambling to keep up with the demand. The International Development Studies major requires students to study in a developing country, which explains why Monsma is exploring an arrangement with an institute in Thailand to supplement an existing development program in Honduras (Calvin also runs a language study program in Honduras).

Students can take their full financial aid to study at the Calvin-run programs in Britain, China, France, Ghana, Honduras, Hungary, and Spain, and also at five other Calvin-endorsed programs in Austria, Germany, Greece, Japan, and the Netherlands. They are eligible for half their financial aid if they choose from 16 other Calvin-approved semester programs.

Growing By Finding the International ‘Pioneers’

While Calvin has parlayed its religious interests and connections into a deeper involvement in study and research abroad, Carpenter believes there are lessons to be learned here for any institution seeking to internationalize.

“This sort of thing can bubble up. I’d be amazed to find a campus in the nation where the interest in internationalization is not there,” says the Nagel Institute director. “I’ve seen a lot of post-tenure faculty saying, ‘I’m getting a little bored with the thing that really excited me in graduate school; I’ve ridden this horse long enough. There are some new worlds to discover.’”

“In some ways that is how change happens in a lot of fields. You go with the pioneers first and see if their commitment and enthusiasm can excite the interest of others,” says Carpenter.

One of Calvin’s preeminent international “pioneers” is Roland Hoksbergen, professor of economics and business and the driving force behind the International Development Studies major, which in two years has attracted 85 students. Had such a major existed when Hoksbergen entered Calvin in1971, he might have completed his bachelor’s degree in four years instead of eight. But he dropped out, bought a van, and drove to Alaska. He wasn’t sure what he would do there, but he was intrigued to learn about far-away peoples and cultures. A few years later he wound up doing earthquake relief work in Guatemala and in the process met his wife and found his vocation. “I poked my head out and said, ‘Man, people are poor here. I wonder what’s going on and what can be done about it?’” That led him back to Calvin for a bachelor’s degree and a desire “to understand the economic part of life.” Calvin hired him even before he completed his Ph.D. in economic development at the University of Notre Dame. He took leave to spend three years in Costa Rica as director of the Latin American Studies Program for the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities and two years in Nicaragua running the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee’s efforts. He also led Calvin study abroad programs in Ghana in 2002 and in Honduras in 2005.

Another pioneer is Beryl Hugen, director of Calvin’s social work program, who has led several January interims to Russia and Mexico and spends a third of his time teaching at the Russian-American Christian University (RACU) in Moscow, a small liberal arts college affiliated with Calvin and other religious colleges. “It’s easy to get caught up in off-campus study,” says Hugen, a 1971 Calvin graduate. “It’s almost a rite of passage for our students now.”

A Last Minute Switch to Kenya

Calvin offers instruction in Chinese and Japanese as well as Spanish, French, German, and Dutch. Recently, with a $140,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to launch its minor in Africa and African Diaspora Studies, it began offering Kiswahili classes, and plans are in the works to teach Korean. Geography professor Johnathan Bascom helped start the African and African Diaspora Studies minor. He is writing a book about Eritrea and had planned to take an interim class there in January 2007 to study its geography. Eight weeks before departure, unrest made that impossible. Bascom quickly regrouped and took the same seven students to Kenya to work in a rural village with a German charity fighting trachoma, a blinding, bacterial eye disease spread by flies. The Calvin students also got to visit a game park and snorkel in the Indian Ocean, but only after spending several days and nights in a remote village of the Sumburu, an ethnic group related to the Maasai. Using handheld Global Position System devices, they mapped the village to help determine the best sites for digging new wells and latrines. Bascom, who has twice taught in Eritrea on Fulbright grants, said the trip was “a deep cultural dive” for his class. Says Sarah Holland, 21, a senior geography major from Grand Rapids, “It was dusty and dirty and fantastic.”

“The GPS work got us beyond merely providing a meaningful cross-cultural experience, which is what the interim is supposed to accomplish. I think we got to the edge of providing an actual contribution,” says Bascom. Pointing to the college’s 52-page blueprint for diversity, racial justice, reconciliation, and cross-cultural engagement, he adds, “I think that the African studies and diaspora minor is part and parcel of this college responding to our own self-subscribed mandate, From Every Nation.”

An Egyptian Student’s Legacy: Rangeela

One of the traditions at Calvin is an annual variety show called Rangeela—the word means “many colors” in Hindi—put on by international students. It was started by a young student from Egypt named Anne Zaki in her freshman year, 1995–96. Zaki, a pastor’s daughter from Cairo, Egypt, came from an international, all-scholarship boarding school for student leaders in Vancouver, Canada. Initially she found the Calvin campus too tame and homogenous for her liking. Her resident adviser and the college chaplain offered words of wisdom.

“They challenged me and said, ‘Look, if you don’t like it, change it. Don’t just up and go. Isn’t that what you learned in your school back (in Vancouver)? You’re supposed to be a leader,” Zaki relates. The 18-year-old conceived the idea for Rangeela, which was a big hit from the start. After graduation, Zaki returned to Cairo for a master’s degree and married a minister who was a graduate of Calvin Theological Seminary. The couple moved back to Grand Rapids, where the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship hired Zaki to give the institute a more global focus. Now she works part-time for the institute and is on the path toward a divinity degree at Calvin Theological Seminary. She takes pride in the growth of Rangeela, which has become such a hot ticket that seats are even sold to dress rehearsals. “I nudged Calvin in a good direction,” says Zaki. “International students are becoming more aware of their own culture. Korean students go back home over Christmas break, visit grandma in the village and ask, ‘Can you teach us a folk dance?’”

Reviewing the 2007 Rangeela, a reporter for the student newspaper, Chimes, griped that an emcee’s accent was “too thick to be understood.” The performers were stung, but perhaps no one was more upset than Linda Bosch, the international student adviser who works closely with students on the production and is revered by them. “She’s like a mother when we arrive,” says senior Jane Cha, 22, a psychology major born in Philadelphia and raised in Beijing by Korean missionary parents.

Bosch says aspects of the variety show were fair game for criticism—including its 2¼-hour length—but not the accent of the host, who hailed from an English-speaking country, Singapore. “Everyone should talk like we do here in Michigan—yeah, right,” she says acidly. But Bosch counseled restraint on those upset by the Chimes review. The following week the newspaper ran several tempered letters of complaint and a 1,300-word Q&A with Bosch—twice as long as the offending review—in which the adviser explained the anguish caused by the review, but also stressed the importance of more communication across cultures, not less. Her advice to future Chimes reviewers? Be more welcoming and hospitable to guests in our country—but don’t patronize them by limiting criticism.

Students at many campuses joke and sometimes fret about living in a “bubble,” and Calvin students are no exception. “I’m always struck by the activist inclination of the students,” says Bruce Berglund, a cultural historian and assistant professor of history. “I’ve had a number of students really eager to go out and save the world.” One of his students—now in graduate school in architecture—designed a community center for a small town in northern India on an internship, and another worked with AIDS orphans in Africa.

Before spending the fall semester in classes in Calvin’s program at Capital Normal University in Beijing, Christi Bylsma, 20, a junior from Holland, Michigan, spent the summer working in a private foster home in a Chinese village. Bylsma, an Asian Studies major, says, “You have to understand the world before you can address its issues. The best thing we can do to make the world a better place is to get out there and get educated. That’s what Calvin is trying to provide for us.”

Following a Study Abroad Class on the Web

When Matthew Kuperus Heun, an associate professor of engineering, and wife Tracy Kuperus, an international development instructor, led students on an interim to South Africa in January 2005, they also pioneered a “web log” that allowed parents, professors, and students back home to follow their progress on their journey across a country that has moved from apartheid to democracy. Heun, a 1989 Calvin alumnus, says, “If I was a parent sending these students halfway around the world, I’d want to know what was going on. The people in Calvin’s IT department thought that would be an interesting experiment, so we did it. We assigned one student for each day we were away to write an entry and upload their pictures. By the time we got home, we had 60 to 70 pages of student-generated content, both written and visual.”

In Calvin’s engineering program, professors such as J. Aubrey Sykes and Edward G. (Ned) Nielsen encourage students to engage with the world through projects and internships. In Sykes’ senior design class, one team of students designed a kit that could pop 50 pounds of amaranth an hour so that African villagers consume more of the puffed, nutritious grain instead of just grinding it into flour. Other teams worked on projects to make a low-cost water purification system, use a Stirling engine to convert solar energy to electricity, and cannibalize the motor and transmission from an old Toyota Tercel to build a rudimentary utility vehicle.

Breaking Taboos

Economics professor Adel S. Abadeer came to Calvin in 1999 after teaching at Tufts and Boston University. Abadeer, once a shot putter on the Egyptian national track team, says, “I’d never even heard of Grand Rapids or Calvin College. Calvin Klein came to mind before Calvin College or John Calvin.” But it has been a happy match for the economist. He welcomes Americans’ growing interest in other cultures. “Many taboos are being broken,” says Abadeer, who grew up in poverty. “We see the Chinese now differently from 50 years ago, not as very poor but as mathematicians. We see the Indians or Russians as chemists or software engineers. As we get to know more about them, we associate better attributes to foreigners.”

Abadeer tells students that people in Egypt and other African countries are no different from people in the United States. “We think, we hope, we fear, we love, we aspire the same as you, but our resource set and our cultural set is different,” he says. People in less developed countries want “your understanding before your second-hand clothes,” he tells them.

“Students are more interested now because there is some compatibility, some rivalry, and even some fear,” he says. “There’s fear of competition, but also hope and hunger to learn more. We used to have problems attracting students to go to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Now we have problems accommodating students who want to go to those parts of the world.”

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