Barely one in eight undergraduates participates in study abroad, and, when they do, it is most often in Western Europe or Australia, and even then in an American enclave or among English-language speakers. Integration in a foreign country is rare. A semester abroad certainly can create a memorable experience and maturation, but does a few months in one country truly generate an appreciation of the wider world?

Americans are largely monolingual—and now expect the educated worldwide to speak English. In fact, linguistic atrophy is more characteristic of student life than foreign language competency. Only 8% feel their abilities in a second language improved in college.

The curriculum likewise doesn’t present much reassurance. Harvard’s former president, Derek Bok, noted that: “Only a small minority of students appear to take any coursework that would prepare them as citizens to understand America’s role in the world and the global problems that confront it.”

We give lip service to the importance of global consciousness, but do little to promote it. I offer a few suggestions and observations to redress this:

• Avoid tokenism. Don’t create a singular curricular hurdle or opportunity and declare victory. Instead, generate a limitless menu of possibilities for students and faculty.

• Avoid cultural relativism in the classroom. Too often foreign students are treated differently because of alleged cultural differences. They don’t speak up in classes in their home countries, so perhaps we should expect less contribution to class discussion. Academic dishonesty is more rampant abroad, goes the myth, so we shouldn’t hold foreign students to the same standards or repercussions. By submitting to cultural biases, even under the guise of sensitivity, we compromise the quality of the academic experience for all students.

• Take advantage of immersion opportunities, even in our own backyard. We host so many immigrant communities, which might expose a more representative view of the world than the elite stratum able to afford American tuition pricing. Be on the lookout for teachable moments and experiences locally through community service or participant-observation. We are often surrounded by unfolding case studies in our own environs and through them connected to world events.

• Take advantage of communication technology to create ongoing academic interchange. The logistics of being in the same place at the same time are daunting for faculty to teach abroad or students to enroll abroad. Blended or distance learning can allow faculty and students to co-mingle without co-locating. We now have the capability to create virtual academic community for those who can’t commit to moving.

• Don’t limit the cultivation of global citizenship only to those below age 22. To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw: like youth, global opportunities are often wasted on the young. We shouldn’t try to forcefeed or cram too much into the undergraduate years. Graduate and professional education—and programs for older students, often studying part-time—extends the opportunities to integrate international efforts. Create graduate study abroad—short, intensive destination courses for student cohorts.

• Seek out study-abroad-in-reverse, and build institutional alliances that create a dynamic two-way flow of students studying abroad for a single semester or year. Establish dual-degree agreements that promote this bilateral exchange. Create distance learning exchanges so that online courses might become melting pots for students from various institutions and cultures.

• Be cautious of major overseas commitments, but bullish on partnerships. Beware of the urge to create bricks-and-mortar, standalone branch campuses: These are often beyond the core mission of the institution, limited in any deeper benefits to the main campus and fraught with risks and the poorly anticipated.  Alliances, however, provide the ease of starting and exiting, the benefit of in-country expertise and existing overhead, often a truer opportunity for global interchange, and perhaps even a baby step toward more extensive involvement.

• Embrace the conversation as much as the outcome. So often, I have heard from faculty and administrators that simply the opportunity to explore new overseas opportunities brought colleagues together on a project, which became a valuable learning experience in itself.

• Balance the intensive with the extensive. The core dilemma for developing global awareness and commitment is whether to focus concertedly on one place or more broadly across many continents. Too focused becomes binational rather than global, but too broad becomes both superficial and unrealistic. Rotate the focus of attention.

Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once offered the helpful concept of the diachronic and synchronic—that is, a comparative perspective across both time and space. This, for me, encapsulates the mind-opening purpose of the university: to take someone out of the comfort of one’s own place and era, with the means to understand other cultures and, as a consequence, to gain perspective on being a contemporary American. At their best America’s higher educators provide a foundation for global awareness that produces lifelong curiosity and sensitivity—and, if possible, a deeper understanding of the connections between the local and the global, the past and our future.

Jay A. Halfond is dean of Metropolitan College and Extended Education at Boston University.

Related Posts: Trends & Indicators: International Enrollment; Forum on Internationalization (pdf)

Or so we often hear.

I believe we don’t give ourselves enough credit for innovation and creative thinking within higher education. The soap operas of entrenched faculty, factions divided over trivia, professors protecting their sub-disciplines, lengthy and convoluted approval processes, and ongoing acrimony and melodrama all overshadow progress made without fanfare. The longer view of the history of the American college and university clearly demonstrates the responsiveness to changing societal needs and opportunities—with faculty often at the forefront of that change.

If a growing creative class, to use Richard Florida’s term, is the catalyst for our dynamic society, then the university is its temple. Cruise control is anathema to the academic temperament. Academics’ very psyche draws them to tinker rather than stagnate. Faculty are innately restless. Even when they devote their entire adult life to one institution, faculty often reinvent themselves several times over the course of their careers. This is one of the undervalued appeals of the academic life and the malleability of the academic enterprise. Professional lives can change even when titles do not. Faculty can move in and out of various roles. Universities, consequently, have been remarkably adaptable and even protean institutions over the centuries—and very capable of reinvention and delivering new knowledge and value to their expanding constituents. While the list of top corporations changed dramatically over the course of the past century, America’s leading universities have not: far more because of their resilience than their resistance to change.

David Riesman, sympathetic to the impediments that leaders face in higher education, coined the term “faculty veto group” to characterize the negative force faculty play in moving their institutions forward. Faculty block but rarely facilitate; micromanage and second-guess, rather than support their institution’s leadership. Though there is no denying the inherent intransigence in this stereotype, just as often faculty quietly innovate. We look for evidence of blockbuster changes when modest, incremental change is far more common, less detectable, and perhaps much more desirable. By focusing on the challenge of introducing major transformations or innovations, it is easy to overlook the march forward from ideas far more discreet, minute and local, though cumulatively perhaps even more impactful.

I would distinguish between micro- and macro-innovation—one a baby step and the other a major leap, one whispers and the other screams, the first overlooked and the latter overrated. Micro doesn’t mean mini; introducing innovations in the classroom, reinventing course content, developing interesting scholarly projects each pave the way for even larger breakthrough events. We tend to elevate and romanticize vision and self-proclaimed paradigm shifts, as if these are frequent and planned. “If you are having visions,” former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt once said, “you should see a doctor.” Beware the prophet, but study the plodder. What is micro today can lead to macro tomorrow—with the foundation, reassurance and wisdom that help to ensure success. Lasting innovation benefits as much by slow cooking as stir-frying. So, let’s give a cheer or two to the academics we too often berate for their inertia.

Forecasting the future of various possible actions—or inactions—has inherent false negatives (thinking something looks safe, and it isn’t) and false positives (fearing something bad will occur, and it doesn’t). Potential risk should never paralyze an organization, but there are ways to mitigate that risk: seize concrete opportunities, take trial-and-error steps that minimize large investments or lingering commitments, select options that permit a variety of alternative paths, and avoid dependency on any set outcome. Academic innovators find ways for their institutions to be nimble rather than calcified, and avoid public megafailures. There are few institutions as unforgiving and intolerant of failure as academe.

In my experience, the most successful innovations occurred through steps that wouldn’t have been catastrophic if aborted, and worked out in ways, frankly, no one even predicted or planned. I would modify the popular business cliché “disruptive technology” to suggest that academe benefits most by its disruptive pedagogy. Trying new things causes old habits and assumptions to be revisited. While I am coining new jargon, I would also introduce the phrase “planned serendipity.” Strong academic leaders place themselves in the path of potentially good ideas and capitalize on them.

Chocolatier Willie Wonka morphed Thomas Edison’s famous edict (invention is 99% percent perspiration and 1% inspiration) into a slightly different, more mathematically-challenged formula: “Invention, my dear friends, is ninety-three percent perspiration, six percent electricity, four percent evaporation, and two percent butterscotch ripple.”

Effective academic leaders cleverly bring the butterscotch to the party.

Jay A. Halfond is dean of Metropolitan College and Extended Education at Boston University.