Globalby Harvey Charles, Ph.D.
Since beginning as Vice Provost for International Affairs at the University of Minnesota one year ago, I have come to appreciate even more the length, breadth, and depth of its engagement with internationalization.
One of the reasons I was keen to assume this position was because I have known of the “U’s” reputation as a leader in international education as early as my time in graduate school more than 30 years ago. In addition to being the first U.S. institution to offer a doctorate in international education, for example, UMN has a national reputation for curriculum integration and other cutting-edge approaches to internationalization. This year we celebrate 150 years of hosting international students. We were one of the first institutions to enter China after its opening to the world in 1979 and welcomed our first Chinese students in 1914.
There are many other anecdotes about UMN’s impressive profile in international education that I can share with you, but it is also clear that there isn’t a consensus about what internationalization is all about on this campus—a state of affairs that is more the rule than the exception throughout postsecondary education in the United States. Way too often, internationalization is narrowly seen as the presence of international students on the campus or the number of students participating in study abroad, or in effect, student mobility concerns.
In this, the inaugural issue of Global Currents, I therefore felt it necessary to offer readers a sense of the broad spectrum of work covered by international education at the University of Minnesota. It is our view that internationalization is the academy’s response to globalization and provides the University with the capacity and tools to exploit the opportunities presented by globalization while minimizing the challenges that come with it. Internationalization helps prepare our students to be globally competent, support faculty as they work within global scholarly networks to push the boundaries of knowledge, and navigate and support the ways in which the global intersects with the local community inhabited by the University.
The objective of Global Currents is to foreground the work of UMN faculty in internationalizing teaching, research, and service; therefore, the magazine features articles written by faculty and administrators on a range of topics from Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) to the Global MBA offered by the Carlson School of Management, from the Sustainable Development Goals initiative to how design can support the decolonization agenda, from an academic conference on swine production convened in China and led by our faculty to the Fulbright experience of UMN faculty, and many more. All of these subjects are intended to demonstrate the substantive ways in which UMN faculty are globally engaged and work diligently to ensure that global learning is deeply integrated into the academic experiences of our students, as they lead innovation and discovery which almost always happens in a global context, and as they snatch the many opportunities that constantly emerge from our globalized world to further enrich and enhance the mission of the University of Minnesota.
It is impossible to be a world-class research university in the 21st century without a deep commitment to and engagement with global work in all aspects of our operations. I am pleased that the University of Minnesota has modeled this kind of engagement for many decades and will keep doing so as we continue to assert ourselves as a leading global center for teaching, research, and service.
Harvey Charles is Vice Provost for International Affairs for the University of Minnesota system