America's stay-at-home college professors
While everyone talks about the importance of maintaining an international perspective, too many institutions of higher education and their faculty members shun overseas studies.
By Patti McGill Peterson
Aug. 6, 2001
WASHINGTON -- Every college and university in the United States routinely extols the value of an international education, and with good reason. Graduates will increasingly live in a world where nations and cultures are closely interconnected. Their careers and lives will depend on how well they have been prepared to exercise global citizenship.
But just offering study-abroad programs or enrolling foreign students doesn't make for a worldly campus. Too often, such programs provide little more than a list of disconnected activities offered by an institution.
Too often, what's is missing is someone at these educational institutions who can unite these diverse international elements through a constant global vision. Too often, what's missing is the faculty.
There are numerous signs that the faculties at U.S. educational institutions are more parochial than their colleagues overseas. A Carnegie Foundation study in 1996 found that, compared to 14 other nations, U.S. faculty-members ranked last or next to last in thinking that connections with scholars in other nations were important to their work.
U.S. professors are less likely to believe that they need to read books and journals published abroad. And they are less likely to think that the curriculum at their institutions should be more international in focus. They were also the least well-traveled faculty in the comparison group. Only about 20 percent had collaborated with foreign colleagues on projects over the last 10 years and only 14 percent had taught abroad in the last decade. And most of those were faculty members at large research universities.
The Chronicle of Higher Education a couple of years ago documented a troubling rise in stay-at-home sabbaticals for faculty. Sabbaticals traditionally have been a way to get away and breathe the air of fresh ideas, different perspectives and new cultures, not a reason to sit at home in the den.
Most U.S. colleges and universities should be concerned about their stay-at-home faculty but too often, just the opposite is the case. Administrators, and even some faculty, sometimes disparage international exchanges as mere academic tourism. Tenure and promotion decisions often do not reward faculty that have studied abroad. It's no accident that those awarded grants for overseas lectureships are mostly tenured faculty well along in their academic careers.
American academic institutions and international academic exchange programs, such as the Fulbright program that we administer, need to work together to make it easier and more attractive for U.S. scholars to go abroad. Flexibility in the length of time and types of grants would be a good start. Incentives from the campus are also important. At the very least, study abroad shouldn't count against promotion and tenure. Institutions also could establish faculty development funds for international travel related to research or teaching.
Colleges and universities can foster exchanges of both students and faculty by creating links with campuses abroad. These partnerships can have a profound effect on campus life, classroom teaching, course development and faculty research.
Given the growing importance of an international perspective in education, it iss vital that more U.S. professors go abroad to study, teach and do research. Otherwise, today's faculty runs the risk of being less worldly than their students.
Patti McGill Peterson is executive director of the Council
for International Exchange of Scholars. (Copyright 2001, Global
Beat Syndicate, 418 Lafayette St., Suite 554, New York, NY 10003
http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/syndicate).