Internationalization Task Force Final Report

Preface

The Internationalization Task Force (ITF) was established in Fall 2004. It consisted of 35 members of faculty, administration, staff, and students who volunteered to represent a broad constituency of programs and departments from across the university. The Task Force developed goals, a mission statement, a campus questionnaire, and held a campuswide forum on internationalization. The Task Force also worked through nine subcommittees examining areas in detail that pertained to internationalization and reported back to the whole committee. This report is the result of the deliberations of the committee of a whole whose work was enriched by the sub-committees. It is the endproduct of a campus-wide, collaborative deliberative effort that began in October 2004 and continued through April 2005.

According to the NAFSA, the US Association of International Educators, there are six components to campus internationalization. These involve 1) the development of leadership and the administration of leadership across the campus; 2) the internationalization of the curriculum; 3) the recruitment and support of faculty with international training, teaching and research experience; 4) the promotion of opportunities to study and do research abroad including faculty-led Concentrated Learning Experiences Abroad (CLEAs); 5) the recruitment and integration of international students and international visiting teacher-scholars and performers into campus life; and 6) the internationalization of student affairs, including the promotion of internationally-focused extra-curricular activities and service.

Goals to be achieved by 2009-2010.

1. Northern Michigan University will have an administration that provides the broadest possible support for the institution’s international mission. NMU will have an Office of Global Programs comprising of 1) academic activities and programs and 2) an operations function housing a set of operations designed to facilitate study abroad and process international students.
2. Northern Michigan University students, graduate and undergraduate, will enjoy the benefits of a set curricular options, and requirements that have been critically reviewed to assure they integrate globalized content suitable for the 21st century.
3. Northern Michigan University will have a faculty who consider international scholarship to be an essential component of a career in the professoriate. The faculty at Northern Michigan University will include more individuals whose academic interests encompass the global dimensions of their fields.
4. Northern Michigan University will provide increased opportunities for students, graduate and undergraduate, to study abroad through both traditional programs and through faculty-led initiatives.
5. Northern Michigan University will welcome a diverse constituency of teachers and learners to campus. It will host on a regular basis international teacher-scholars and performers. It will educate an increased number of non-US students, roughly equivalent to 5% of the student body.
6. Northern Michigan University’s Division of Student Affairs will play several key partnership roles with faculty designed to nurture global citizenship through education of Northern Michigan University students.
7. Northern Michigan University will use both “High Tech” and “High Touch” approaches to internationalize the campus community. It will support the use of innovative technologies for classroom interaction with educators and students in other countries while at the same time using these technologies to disseminate the University’s name and its global mission to the world community. In so doing, it will seek partnerships with the local and regional community in order to retain Northern’s distinctiveness as a university in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Synergy

It is assumed that actions taken from the implementation plan for a given set of goals will have beneficial synergistic effects across a range of related initiatives. For example, the creation of regular study abroad sites for NMU students at given locations will help to develop a regional expertise among faculty in those areas. It will also generate an increase in applications for study at NMU by students in the countries where our sites are located. And the increased initial support for experimental international service learning will lead to the growth in demand for such activities by students. Developing a program for visiting international faculty and performers will lead to an enlarged interest in global education and a broader exploration by students of opportunities to study outside the country. It is hoped that the myriad of suggestions provided below will begin to generate an academic discourse at NMU that increasingly will have an international focused.

The strategies outlined herein are aimed at helping Northern Michigan University to position itself as an institution whose graduates will acquire while studying at NMU not only a set of professional or pre-professional skills, but also a knowledge base that encompasses a global perspective and a strong sense of global community.

Definitions

Because there is considerable confusion regarding terminology that is used, this report provides definitions supplied from the literature by the American Council on Education and the Center for Institutional and International Initiatives.

Globalization is the closer integration of the countries and the peoples of the world which has been brought about by the enormous reduction in the cost of transportation and communication, and by the dismantling of political and economic barriers to the flow of goods, services, capital, knowledge, and to a lesser extent, people across borders (Steglitz, 2003).

It is the belief of the ITF that the forces of globalization will pick up pace in the 21st century and that the impact of these trends on students’ futures will be profound. A large proportion of today’s students, for example, can expect to spend some part of their career outside the United States, and a greater number of our current students must be prepared to operate in a workplace comprised of both US and non-US citizens. Given these trends, the committee supports a campus-wide initiative to globalize NMU curricula and programs. The committee further believes that an acknowledgment of the play of global forces and processes must perforce be accompanied by improved understandings of the cultures and peoples of other nations and reifies the importance of international studies. Responding to these twin exigencies will lead to the Internationalization of the NMU campus. The American Council on Education (ACE) and the Center for Institutional and International Initiatives (CIII) provides the following definition of “internationalization.”

Internationalization is a complex process whose combined effect, whether planned or not is to enhance the international dimension of the experience of higher education in universities and similar institutions (Knight, 1994). This committee fully recognizes that the processes inherent in globalization have important implications for multiculturalism. The ACE/CIII provides the following definition of “multiculturalism.”

Multiculturalism refers to a feeling of shared fate, to the need for changing identities, transforming our sense of self and of what it means to be an American, and of seeing what the United States looks like through the eyes of different groups, and sometimes refers to an attempt to increase social and economic justice (Eddy, 1996). This being said, the committee felt its primary task was to focus on internationalization and to defer issues of multiculturalism for a later date. (See below, Curriculum II). This report will proceed to provide recommendations arranged in categories recommend by NAFSA, the Association of International Educators.