40Th Anniversary Retrospective: Overseas Study at Indiana University

© 2014 by Kathleen Sideli and Walter Nugent. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   05/16/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4918-5856-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-7299-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014902018

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter:

1.     The Early Years: Merle E. Simmons

2.     1967-1976: Walter Nugent

3.     1976-1979: Peter J. Sehlinger

4.     1979-1985: Louis F. Helbig

5.     1985-1988: Rodney B. Sangster

6.     1988-1989: E. Philip Morgan

7.     1989-2003: Richard E. Stryker

8.     1979-present: Kathleen Sideli

Appendix:

A.    IU Enrollment and IU Study Abroad Enrollment (1972-2012)

B.     World Regions and Program Duration of IU Students Abroad (2011-12)

List of Contributors

For additional materials related to the history of Overseas Study at Indiana University, see http://overseas.iu.edu/about/history/retrospective.shtml

Endorsement

The lives of thousands of Indiana University students have been transformed by opportunities to live and study in different parts of the world. IU undergraduates began to travel abroad as early as the 19th century. Over the past 40 years, the university formalized structures, increased the number of overseas sites, added new university partners and providers, expanded advising, and adapted the duration of programs to meet the different needs of students. But the essence of study abroad at Indiana University is unchanged. The goals are still to offer students experiences that will enhance their understanding of other cultures and enable them to navigate different environments and engage in active dialogue with people in other parts of the world.

This remarkable book documents imaginative and strategic developments at Indiana University over the past 40 years. It is a vivid account of the Office of Overseas Study. But it is much more than this. Directors and staff have always been in the forefront of initiating new directions, and in attracting students who might never have considered going overseas. The challenges and possibilities of study abroad at Indiana University have relevance to other colleges and universities. Many of the experiences, programs and initiatives that are discussed and documented in this book will be valuable to institutions that are eager to enhance their own programs. The editors and contributors of 40th Anniversary Retrospective: Overseas Study at Indiana University have portrayed how a university in the Midwest of the United States has opened the world for its students and they point to a future in which increasing numbers of undergraduates will want to be part of an inter-dependent world.

Patrick O’Meara, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Vice President Emeritus of International Affairs and Special Adviser to the President of Indiana University.

Preface

By Walter Nugent

Overseas study has, in one form or another, been part of Indiana University for a very long time. A pre-modern version took place in the 1880s, when the famous ichthyologist and soon-to-be president of the university (and in 1891, first president of Stanford), David Starr Jordan, led some students to Europe for summer tramps. IU then had fewer than 200 students, all of them in Bloomington (regional campuses were far in the future), and the student-credit-hour system had not yet been invented. A handful of summer programs sporadically surfaced later, from 1929 through the 1950s.

The first academic-year study abroad program, and with it the modern, durable, continuing programs, began in 1959, when the Department of Spanish and Portuguese created a year-long one in Lima, Peru. The U.S. Department of State supported it morally and financially (as described in Merle Simmons’s chapter to follow). The Lima program continued annually for over thirty years. European academic-year programs followed in the mid-1960s in Madrid, Strasbourg, and Hamburg, jointly with Purdue University, and in Bologna, initially a solely IU operation.

From that day, overseas study at IU would never again be ad-hoc and ad-interim, but a permanent and ongoing fixture—albeit with remarkable evolutions in extent and focus, as the following chapters demonstrate. I will let them speak for themselves; together they reveal an expansion, in retrospect a natural growth, entirely unsuspected in the 1960s. What exists today could not have been imagined at that time, any more than anyone could have imagined laptops, e-mail, and twitter.

This book is not an orthodox or monographic history. It is a compilation of the recollections of the past and present directors of IU’s overseas study operation. At times autobiographical, at times anecdotal, but chiefly descriptive of the ups and downs of the directors’ administrative terms, the chapters taken together present an implicit narrative of the beginning, development, and changes in overseas study at IU. All of the directors have held doctoral degrees; all but the present director have been tenured professors (in Latin American folklore, history, comparative literature, Slavics, public administration, and political science). The present director, Kathleen Sideli, is a prominent member of the overseas-study profession that has emerged in American higher education during the past twenty years.

The directors—and chapter-writers—are the following.

Merle Simmons, author of the early years to 1967, was a noted scholar of Latin American folklore and was a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He wrote his recollections in 1992. About ten years later, Kathy Sideli asked me to do a similar piece on my nine years (1967-1976) as director, and it has become Chapter 2. I was a faculty member in the Department of History from 1963 to 1984, when I moved to the University of Notre Dame. My successor was Peter Sehlinger, a professor of history on the IUPUI campus; he is a Latin American historian and was director from 1976 to 1979; Chapter 3 is his. Following him, 1979-1985, was Louis F. Helbig, professor of German and comparative literature and author of Chapter 4. Rodney Sangster (Chapter 5) from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures came next, from 1985 to 1988, until he joined the Education Abroad Programs at the University of California. An interim director, E. Philip Morgan, served for the academic year 1988-1989; Chapter 6 is a brief recollection of and by him. In 1989, Richard Stryker of the Bloomington Department of Political Science began the longest (up to now) time in the directorship, serving until 2003, as he describes in Chapter 7. Kathleen Sideli took over in 2003 and continues in the position. She has written Chapter 8.

In the early years there were few models for overseas study programs.¹ For Simmons and then myself, there was a good deal of seat-of-the-pants flying with regard to the practicalities of student travel and housing, transfers and equivalencies of credits earned, safety and discipline, and everything else. Simmons’s title and position, insofar as he had an official one, was chair of the Foreign Study Committee, a small group of faculty members, nearly all from the language-and-literature departments in Ballantine Hall on the Bloomington campus. The creation of the four European academic-year programs in the mid-1960s, and the sudden expansion of cash flow that they entailed, made it imperative that the operation come under oversight of the office of the dean of the College of Arts & Sciences. When I was appointed associate dean in the fall of 1967, overseas (then, foreign) study was part of my duties. Over time, it became an established unit within the administrative structure of the university (as I explain in my chapter), at first in the College in Bloomington (1967-1972), and then within the university’s central administration from 1972 onward.

Under the first four directors—Simmons, myself, Sehlinger, and Helbig—our emphasis and attention went mostly to the academic-year programs, all of which followed the immersion model. Students in such programs took regular university classes at their host university and lived with local students or families as far as feasible under local conditions. We also operated some summer and short-term programs and sent students to semester-long programs run by the Council on International Educational Exchange (the CIEE). But language proficiency and cultural immersion remained our main goals, reflecting the programs’ origins in the Bloomington language departments.

That emphasis began to change under Rodney Sangster’s leadership, even though he was a Slavic linguist himself. The explosive addition of programs (usually semester or short-term) suitable for students from the Schools of Business, Public and Environmental Affairs, and others, without requiring extensive language proficiency and seldom permitting real immersion, took place later, when Stryker, and then Sideli, were the directors. This shift explains the almost exponential rise in numbers of students on overseas study programs, more rapid than the growth of the university’s student population as a whole, great though that has been. In retrospect this opening-up was very timely. The numbers of students going on the academic-year immersion programs have remained basically stable over the years, reflecting the flat numbers of majors in language-and-literature departments not only locally but nationally. Conversely, the national trend (and IU’s) has been toward increases in majors in business and other pre-professional undergraduate programs. Stryker and Sideli responded vigorously to accommodate this trend.

In more general ways, the development of Overseas Study at IU has been a microcosm of change in American higher education during the past several decades. It is a much larger and more complex operation than the one I directed forty-some years ago. I have mentioned already the steep rise in the numbers of students participating, with concomitant expansion in the number and diversity of programs—all the while keeping close watch on academic quality through the university-wide Overseas Study Advisory Committee with its continuing faculty oversight.

Beyond the sheer numbers, there have been other changes. Most obvious, perhaps, is the integration of new technologies into the operation. In my day, there were no office computers, no internet, and no e-mail. Record-keeping was done by hand. Today, by contrast, student records are kept track of in integrated databases; it would be impossible to maintain manual records on the numbers of students now participating. Technology has thus facilitated democratization—making programs available to more numerous and diverse kinds of students. Technology also has made possible the continuing evolution of the Overseas Study Programs office as a bureaucracy in the good sense, i.e. an agency replete with smoothly-running procedures to accommodate student needs and to facilitate their international experiences. With all that has come professionalization, both in the IU office and nationally. Sideli has been a pioneer in that process, a leader in the creation of the Forum on Education Abroad, now considered a principal professional organization in the field, with over 650 affiliated institutions.

The early directors—most of all myself—were amateurs in overseas study, serving as directors for a few years while we remained rooted in our professional specialties. Technology, democratization, bureaucratization, and globalization—of the essence of overseas study, of course—and finally, professionalization—have been hallmarks of the IU Overseas Study operation, and of American higher education generally.

The changes since the early days have been immense. But as these chapters will show, they have been organic, evolutionary, and, I believe, for the great benefit of the university and above all for its students.

I owe great thanks to my co-editor, Kathy Sideli, who was the sparkplug behind this project and has, with me, closely edited every chapter. As has always been the case at IU, overseas study is the work of many willing hands.

Walter Nugent

October 2013

Chapter One

Merle E. Simmons, The Early Years

Mexico

The first overseas study venture organized by Indiana University that I am aware of was a program that the School of Education created in 1939 or 1940 under the direction of Professor Merrill T. Eaton.

Designed to afford Indiana primary and secondary teachers an opportunity to know Mexico and its culture, the program provided for summer travel to Mexico City and elsewhere in Mexico with Professor Eaton as tour-director. After writing a report at the end of their travels, students received academic credit applicable to degrees in the School of Education. The program continued for two or three summers until, as I surmise, the dislocations of World War II and war-time restrictions on travel apparently caused its demise.

Not until 1952 was there any renewed effort in this area by the University. To Professor Harvey L. Johnson, named Chairman of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in 1949, goes credit for initiating the next attempt to provide IU students an opportunity to study outside the U.S. I had been going to Mexico almost every summer from 1941 on my own, and since my wife and I and our nine-months-old baby daughter were planning to spend the summer of 1952 in Mexico City in any case, Professor Johnson asked me to help a few Spanish majors find housing in the city, take some courses at the summer school of the University of Mexico, and travel around a bit under my direction. I was offered no remuneration since there was no money in the Spanish Department budget for such luxuries as foreign study. Professor Johnson hoped, however, that from these informal beginnings the groundwork might be laid for a more formal program in the future. As it turned out the first group of students for whom my wife and I worked in loco parentis consisted of a grand total of three enrollees. Neither the Department nor I had any responsibility for getting them to Mexico and back, but while they were down there my job was to assist them in the areas mentioned above and in such other important activities as suggesting remedies for Montezuma’s revenge.

I think I speak for all participants in the program when I say we had a most pleasant and fruitful summer. The parents of one of the students drove down to Mexico in August and they, their son Kelly Carr, and I drove our two cars from Mexico City to Oaxaca where we spent about a week hobnobbing with picturesque Indians, examining archaeological sites, and trying to find gasoline for our cars. For reasons which I do not recall there was a severe gasoline shortage in southern Mexico in August of 1952. Kelly Carr went on to take a degree in dentistry at IU and is today an outstanding dentist in Lafayette, Indiana. Another interesting human sidelight of this summer trip is the fact that on the trip south in my 1941 Ford I was accompanied by two elderly aunts of my wife who had been born in Oaxaca and lived there until their family moved to Mexico City at about the time of the Revolution of 1910. They had not returned to their birthplace until they went with me in 1952 as unenrolled participants in the newly created Indiana University Program for Summer Study in Mexico. A student from Illinois also joined the IU Program very informally during the course of the summer. Marie Wellington and her husband of only a few months had come down to Mexico on their own with only pennies in their pocket, but somehow (probably from contact with one of my students from IU) the Wellingtons sought out Concha and me for counsel and advice about how to live in Mexico with very limited resources. Neither of the Wellingtons was actually taking any courses. Free counseling to these engaging travelers we provided to the best of our abilities. As a matter of fact we probably gave the Wellingtons more personal attention than any of the IU students required. Our effort, however, bore fruit. Marie Wellington went on to become a well-known professor of Spanish and publishing scholar on the faculty of Lake Forest College in Illinois.

Such was the founding of what was, I think, the first IU program for study abroad in the post-war era. I do not know for sure why Professor Johnson did not send a group to Mexico in 1953. I think it was because he was trying unsuccessfully to obtain money to pay the director some kind of modest stipend. In any case there was a lapse of one year when no students went to Mexico under Spanish Department auspices. In 1954, however, Professor Johnson finally obtained funds to finance the start of a formal program.

The Director that year was Dr. Glen D. Willbern, who had been a professor of Spanish at IU since 1929. Being originally a native of south Texas, Dr. Willbern knew Mexico very well indeed. As I recall, about a dozen Spanish majors signed up in the new program. This group of students travelled to Mexico by bus and train and Dr. Willbern, as their Director, was responsible for arranging their housing in approved Mexican homes and for planning each individual’s program of courses at the summer school of the University of Mexico. He also arranged group travel to many places of interest. Under Dr. Willbern’s expert guidance the new program was thus established on a firm foundation.

I do not recall who directed the Mexican program in the summers of 1955, 1956, and 1957, though I am almost sure that Dr. Willbern served again as Director in one of those years. Nor do I remember at exactly what point the program moved from the University of Mexico to Mexico City College. I know only that by the summer of 1958, when I was named Director of the full-fledged program for the first time, we were sending our students to Mexico City College, an institution of good academic quality that had been founded a decade or two earlier along the lines of colleges in the United States. In the mid-fifties it had moved from a downtown location to a beautiful new campus at Kilometre 16 on the highway to Toluca. Mexico City College was much better organized than the summer school of the University of Mexico and was better equipped to deal with foreign students and such problems as the transfer of credits to U.S. institutions. It also had developed a good housing office that was able to guarantee high-quality housing for IU students in Mexican homes.

The IU program at Mexico City College prospered for several years and it was my privilege to serve as resident director in Mexico once more in 1965, this time with a group of eighteen students. During all these early years we always used surface transportation to get our students to Mexico and back. All the various directors brought back dramatic, poignant or hilariously funny accounts of things that happened on their watch, but naturally the ones that stick in my own memory were those that happened to me personally or to my wife Concha. Let the summer of 1965 serve as an example.

As already stated above, in 1965 all travel was still done by train and bus; air travel was too expensive. So I well recall our long bus trip from Indianapolis to Laredo, Texas, with a break for one night’s sleep in San Antonio. Then came a train ride of some 26 hours from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, to Mexico City. There the efficient housing office of Mexico City College had arranged for our Mexican landladies personally to welcome their students late at night at the railroad station and then to whisk them away immediately by one’s and two’s into the darkness of the great city. Talk about the need for a quick adaptation to a new environment! In those days students quickly became experts in adapting to culture shock.

The evening after our arrival, however, all the IU students managed to find their way to a local restaurant where we had asked them to reassemble in order to compare notes about their experiences of the previous 24 hours, to consult with the Director about housing or other problems, to receive instructions on catching the bus to Mexico City College the following morning, and finally to have a really good meal in celebration of their arrival in Mexico City. Fortunately, it turned out that there were very few problems to report at that first meeting.

As a matter of fact the whole summer went fairly smoothly, proof that our selection process in Bloomington had been quite efficient. There were, to be sure, many minor problems. Perhaps the most notable high (and also low) point of the summer came in Acapulco when a group of U.S. sailors in that port invited some of our girls to a shipboard dance. As Director I did not exactly welcome this invitation, but when the Navy Captain of the ship personally guaranteed to my wife that his sailors would behave themselves properly, with some trepidation we allowed six or seven of our girls to accept the invitation. They all reported that they had a very enjoyable and very proper dance on the ship anchored a few yards off shore. However, even before the girls got to the dance, disaster struck. While our girls were being taken out to the ship in a small boat, it capsized, and our girls with all their belongings were unceremoniously dumped into Acapulco Bay. There was no real danger and the sailor hosts immediately helped our party-goers back into the capsized boat. They arrived at the dance in a very wet condition, but after drying off as best they could, the dance went on as planned. However, everyone assumed that the girls had surely seen the last of their money, tourist cards, and any other valuables that they were carrying. But the next morning, as soon as the sun came up, the doughty American sailors set to work diving into the relatively shallow water where the accident had occurred. All valuables were rescued from the bottom of the ocean except for the tourist card of one unfortunate student. When we got back to Mexico City I took her to the governmental office that was in the business of replacing lost tourist cards. So it was that, except for our girls’ having received a good soaking, the shipboard dance was a great success.

Around 1967 some important changes occurred in the summer program in Mexico. These came about in part because of another completely new venture in Mexico that was organized by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), a consortium made up of all the universities of the Big Ten plus the University of Chicago.

In 1967 the Director of the CIC, whose office was in Chicago, asked me to chair a newly formed committee charged with looking into the establishment of a special program for honors students only from all of the eleven cooperating institutions. As chairman of that committee I was sent to Mexico along with Professor E. Robert Mulvihill of the University of Wisconsin in order to explore possibilities for such a venture. Following visits to five Mexican universities, we recommended that the CIC establish its program at the University of the Americas in Mexico City. This was a Jesuit institution that had been established some two decades earlier on a fine campus on the south side of the city. Professor Mulvihill and I found most impressive the physical facilities of the school, its location in a quiet suburb of the capital, and its excellent library, but we were even more impressed by Father Ramón Rivera, Director of the summer School, who immediately understood what the CIC was looking for (he had himself studied many years in the United States and in Germany). Acting on the advice of Professor Mulvihill and myself, the CIC started operations at the University of the Americas in the summer of 1967.

IU honors students were, of course, eligible to participate in the CIC program, so in effect we had at IU not one but two summer programs in Mexico. However, the two programs did not overlap very much since the CIC program enrolled only students of extremely high caliber with junior or senior standing. The long-established IU program at Mexico City College, on the other hand, while trying always to maintain high standards, was designed primarily for good but not necessarily honors-quality students on the sophomore or junior level.

In the meantime, however, a crisis of sorts was in the making at Mexico City College where our own program was flourishing. It had become widely known in Mexico that this school was planning to move in the near future to a beautiful new campus on the outskirts of Puebla some ninety miles from the capital. We at IU were not disposed to send our students that far from the big city with all its cultural advantages, but more importantly we were greatly impressed by the very high quality of the classes that Father Rivera provided for the CIC students. So only one year after the CIC established itself at the University of the Americas, IU decided to move its own older program to that institution. For many years both the IU and the CIC programs operated there quite successfully. The move from Mexico City College also proved to be wise because, as anticipated, that school soon transferred its operations to Puebla.

All these important innovations in IU’s program in Mexico were accompanied by other lesser changes in day-to-day operations. The services of the housing