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MY TITLE, “International Studies: Internal Administration Issues,” may be a little misleading, but not a lot. “Internal administration” actually refers to academic curriculum and program administration. This is the core of what the faculty does in an academic governance system that links departments, colleges, and central administration. Nothing that I discuss here can be accomplished without the active leadership of the faculty, although there is little doubt that the direct involvement of department heads, deans, and even vice presidents is necessary for coordinating efforts and setting general directions.
The phrase “internationalization of the curriculum” appears with greater frequency these days, and my hunch is that this is true as much because we are internationalizing the curriculum as because we need to internationalize it. Nonetheless, we do have some important issues to confront on what I call the “corporate” level—that is, a level that transcends the immediate day-to-day interests of the individual faculty member. Here I address the corporate responsibility in five steps. The first provides the context in which I view internationalization of the curriculum. The next three concern, successively, individual course change, curricular revision, and study abroad. The fifth step offers some suggestions for an institutional strategy, a strategy that I confess is difficult in the best of circumstances.
I begin with some contextual observations. While we may talk about the internationalization of the curriculum, or of international studies, we should recognize at the outset that there has been an international aspect to our respective curricula for as long as we have had colleges and universities.
First of all, for large segments of the curriculum national boundaries have never made any sense, because the intellectual substance and the methods for addressing it are not geographically oriented. Consider just a few fields: mathematics, chemistry, physics, and biology. Apart from an occasional bizarre and short-term exception (Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union being one), the idea of nationalism, and therefore of internationalizing, makes no sense. The variables that operate in one nation operate similarly in another. These disciplines are global.
While many other fields—the literatures and social sciences, for example—are less so, a perusal of their curricula clearly reveals considerable international content. If large segments of the curriculum have little to do with national boundaries and if large segments are sensitive to national differences, then what's the fuss about “internationalizing” our studies? The answer is obvious for most people, but let me underscore it: a primary, though by no means the only, symptom appears in selected professional curricula—law, business, agriculture, social work, and engineering. The drive to internationalize these curricula is evident, and that effort reflects the real need for change.
Our task is not so much to internationalize the curriculum as to create a global curriculum. Our task is less to provide a liberal education within the context of Western civilization—William Bennett notwithstanding—than it is to liberalize our educational programs so that the values of our society are seen within a complicated, and delicate, global fabric of values. Today's educated citizen is globally, not simply internationally, oriented. It is conventional wisdom that rapid travel, instant communication, and both the positive and negative effects of technology are responsible for redefining the world and the kind of education needed in it. The consequence, however, is globalization, not internationalization. The three major issues that dominate the international agenda are security, commerce, and the quality of the environment. None respects international boundaries. We may make bilateral agreements, but they are within a global context. This distinction between global and international is in my view important, and it does have some implications for language courses and curricula, a point to which I return.
I turn now to course change. Most individual course changes have little effect on fiscal concerns. Course internationalization or globalization will occur in the usual way, though the campus context may serve a catalytic role. In any event, course changes reflecting a global orientation are taking place with or without more general planning. Students will demand a worldwide approach, new faculty members will have been educated in that context, internal pressures for changes in a major will expedite it, and general campus interest in a global orientation will influence it.
In brief, individual course change is upon us as it always has been: the curriculum of today is substantially different from what it was twenty or thirty years ago. It is doubtful that this change will be sufficient throughout a college or university curriculum. As I have already indicated, internal pressures for changes in a major and other course offerings will shape individual courses. What we can expect to find, in addition, is that the pressures on many departments, including the language departments, will have implications not only for how courses are shaped but for the kind of people invited to join the faculty. These pressures will be, and have been, felt through the international, or global, orientation now influencing highly popular professional curricula. We need an all-campus-based method designed to determine the extent to which our courses are as globally oriented as they should be.
This observation brings me to curricular revision, by which I mean changes in the patterns of course offerings, including the content of individual courses. At the risk of oversimplifying, I can classify courses as having three general program orientations: skill acquisition, the major, and general education. These are evident in the various modern language departments. Foreign language instruction, composition, and writing are skill-acquisition courses. They are courses for which the goals can be clearly specified, assessment is relatively easy, and computer-assisted-instruction technology may be particularly appropriate. They do not typically form part of a major, and they are not generally considered part of a liberal education program. Rather, they are considered necessary foundation work.
The remaining courses can be partitioned into two overlapping categories: those designed to reproduce one's own kind—that is, courses designed to produce specialists—and those intended to serve the general student as part of a general- or liberal-education program.
The questions we face here are several. First, how do the courses we offer fit coherently into a major—that is, just what is the major? Second, in what ways do courses explicitly serve nonmajor purposes? Third, how do we modify and develop majors, emphases, or course sequences that are sensitive to the principal curricular changes—internationalization, specifically—taking place elsewhere on campus? Fourth, to what values are skill-acquisition courses oriented? If a language sequence is structured to enable students to read foreign language literature, can it effectively and efficiently serve the international-program needs of students in wholly different disciplines? If not, how can this deficiency be addressed? Should we put even greater emphasis on majors in which language and literature offerings are a part, but only a part? Should globalization of the curriculum produce majors more like a multidepartment program in Japanese culture or like an international-business degree that replaces some classical business-course requirements with a strong language-and-culture component?
Answers to these questions may not involve the acquisition of new resources but will probably require some reallocation of internal funding—for example, increasing the support dollars and faculty in some areas while decreasing them in others. As serious as these money questions are, by far the most formidable issue is how we develop the kind of academic governance that permits the curricular questions to be addressed in a corporate manner. Because faculty members identify strongly with their own departments and disciplines, it is exceedingly difficult to create a forum in which they can ask the more corporate curricular questions. We may need to globalize, or internationalize, our curriculum, but that won't be possible until faculty members can become more ecumenical in their curricular outlook. Stated differently, until they can function with a college-wide perspective that places curricular goals ahead of their immediate departmental interests, we will not have sufficient constructive curricular change. As some institutions have discovered, this goal may require an all-campus methodology for implementing well-stated goals and missions within our varied programs.
Apart from individual course changes and general program development, a potentially important component of a globalized curriculum is study abroad. Anyone familiar with a good study-abroad program knows that it can be the source of a long-term broadening intellectual transformation. I refer not to the look-and-see travel programs or the American-enclave programs but to programs that by their nature immerse a student in the language and culture of the host nation. While this point may be evident, I'm inclined to doubt that the way we develop and use study-abroad options reflects that shared understanding.
One common model for study abroad is a program that grows out of a department of foreign languages. Characteristic elements include a foreign language background, typically a minimum of a year and a half or two years of college courses; an orientation toward language and literature, with attention paid to history and culture; and a modicum of flexibility depending on the student's ingenuity. It is not uncommon for such programs to operate on a shoestring, to worry from year to year about whether enrollments will be sufficient, to encounter difficulties in transferring credits, and every so often to face the prospect of not being able to identify the next director. A related problem is whether the course work is taught at a foreign university or especially developed for American students. Problems notwithstanding, reasonably well organized programs provide students with an experience that will shape the rest of their lives—and it is this fact that prompts two further questions geared to globalization, or internationalization, of the campus.
First, if this prototypical study-abroad program does play a powerful role in bringing about cultural understanding and language fluency, why isn't it an integral component of a literature or cultural major? We cannot require a student to study abroad, but why doesn't the department take steps to ensure that, if at all possible, most students do study abroad for at least six months? The task of implementing such a change would be formidable because it would require an infusion of support beyond what is usually available, an extensive study of credit transfers so that students are not caught in a bureaucratic maelstrom, the overseas involvement of more senior faculty, and the willingness of the institution to understand that the cost of overseas facilities has to be treated as an ongoing operational expense paralleling that of the campus buildings and utilities. It would require another change as well: within selected departments some important upper-division course work might have to be offered overseas and not on campus—a shift that faculty members understandably might be reluctant to make even if the pedagogical rationale is sound.
The second question concerns the expansion of study abroad as one element in globalizing the campus curriculum. Technological advances make it possible to bring much of the world to the campus through satellite communications in a way that can radically transform undergraduate and graduate instruction in many disciplines. On the other hand, these developments cannot, at least in the near future, replace “being there.” Pressures are growing for more study abroad, most obviously from professional schools but throughout the arts and sciences as well. There has been an increase in the number of specialized study-abroad programs, programs oriented to majors in business, engineering, and the like. While these will serve defined purposes, they may not produce much in the way of credit. To the extent that they do, and to the extent that language and culture instruction is involved, they will clearly entail administrative issues. For example, who provides the language and culture instruction, who pays for it, where does responsibility rest (that is, is this an all-campus program, or is it run by one department or college with an expectation of support services from another), and how are agreements reached not only within the university but with foreign host institutions?
These developments pose yet another question for which there is no pat answer: what kind of language instruction is it going to be? If instruction is principally oriented to preparing students to read literary texts in upper-division courses, is the pedagogical method suitable to the objectives of, for example, a college or department of business administration? If a course uses different pedagogical methods—for example, those that emphasize communication skills for overseas travel—does it carry credit? and which departments accept the credits? The more general question is this: as we internationalize, or globalize, the curriculum, won't the language-instruction needs differ from those associated with a traditional language and literature curriculum? If so, what is the appropriate way to introduce distinctive kinds of language instruction that provide credit and serve new constituencies?
I'm confident that there are ways of dealing constructively with these issues, but I'm equally confident that colleges and universities are not currently tuned to curriculum and course development in which the pedagogy is shaped to serve the needs of professional programs. How can we expand the international components of the curriculum and pay more attention to global issues in educating students to become world citizens?
If there is an institutional objective to globalize, or internationalize, the curriculum, then it is reasonable to expect a coordinated institutional effort to reach that objective. There are lots of alternative approaches, but I choose to offer one for consideration. It's a coordinated all-university process, one that can be implemented in close sequence at departmental, college, and campus levels. It requires organization of committees at each level, but the tasks differ as a function of level. The approach is not entirely new it has been tried to some extent, particularly on smaller campuses.
At the departmental level, a number of questions can be asked, but they will not apply in the same way to all departments or to all courses and programs within the same department. One possible set is this:
Here is a representative set of related questions for the college level:
At the campus level, still another representative set of questions can be asked:
Although many of these questions are asked, not often are they raised in a systematic all-college or all-university manner. To ask them as part of a single over-all effort is in itself an important incentive for change and development. Since an all-campus effort would be a significant exercise in internal academic administration, there is little doubt that the consequence would have implications not only for course and curricular change but for the very structure of the institution. Key to the process would have to be the understanding that the inquiry is designed to enhance the globalization of the institutional focus and that individual departments are part of a systematic decision-making process rather than the victims of arbitrary decisions made elsewhere.
I close with a general observation. One of the most difficult, and interesting, internal administrative tasks we have is to design our review and inquiry processes to draw the faculty into corporate decision making. That is, to provide the framework within which faculty members see themselves as involved in a decision-making process that can influence events and programs outside their respective departments and work toward a well-defined institutional objective. University senates or councils function in this way to some extent, but to incorporate the body politic into planning ways to achieve a specific institutional mission is more difficult. In my view, it is an inherently more cohesive process that, in turn, can produce more easily implemented and more readily accepted planning strategies. Done appropriately, it can provide the administration with a set of guidelines and proposed actions that will influence the allocation of resources, space planning, and organization. A corollary is that internationalization, or globalization, of the curriculum would then not be a responsibility arbitrarily assigned to language and literature departments but a campus undertaking in which the contributions of these departments would be but a single component, albeit an important one.
The author is Professor of Psychology and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Georgia. A version of this paper was presented at a meeting of the SAMLA Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (SAADFL), 9–November 1989, in Atlanta, at a session organized by RaymondGay-Crosier.
© 1990 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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