ISP 29 and 30 Overview

The strand of the Salzburg Global Seminar which currently employs me is called the International Study Program, hereafter referred to as ISP. The 29th constellation of this program convened this January 6-13th, and was comprised of faculty and administrators from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) and members of the Appalachian College Association (ACA). A year prior, they had been charged with the project of transforming their campuses into sites of global citizenship; this meeting signified the second time that they had assembled their teams at the Seminar in order to forward their talks. For the next twelve months, those teams, which are supported by grants from the Mellon Fellow Community Initiative, will do the work that I imagine as the necessary evil related to many tasks at university: the often sluggish process of paring down plans, garnering assets and stakeholders, and most importantly, securing the approval of their trustees and planning boards, such that these global citizenship programs are irreversible.  

In order to guide them a bit at this stage of their conceptualization, we offered six plenary sessions of various persuasions. The details of those sessions, along with some commentary of them, will be the subject of many of my impending blogs.

The institutions included in that first cohort are:

Bennett College for Women (HBCU)

Brevard College (ACA)

Clark Atlanta University (HBCU)

Dillard University (HBCU)

Ferrum College (ACA)

Fisk University (HBCU)

King College (ACA)

Lees-McRae College (ACA)

Mars Hill College (ACA)

Morehouse College (HBCU)

Spelman College (HBCU)

University of Charleston (ACA)

Warren Wilson College (ACA)

West Virginia Wesleyan College (ACA) 

Xavier University of Louisiana (HBCU)

This week--indeed, the process that is unfolding around me at the present, while I update you here--is called ISP 30. The focus of this congregation is identical, but serves to broaden the reach and underscore the mission established by the institutions invited for ISP 29. In this iteration of the ISP, 12 entirely new schools from the HBCU and ACA systems have sent faculty who are now just beginning to learn about the theory and strategy behind conceptualizing a university program related to globalization or international studies. All told, ISPs 29 and 30 will have hosted nearly 100 faculty, staff, and administrators from 27 different schools; each institution has a unique goal and plan, but several of them appear to be interested in acting as a confederate in order to make maximum use of financial and institutional resources during this time of pecuniary instability. 

The second cohort:

Alderson-Broaddus College (ACA)

Bethune-Cookman College (HBCU)

Bluefield College (HBCU)

Carson-Newman College (ACA)

David & Elkins College (ACA)

Emory & Henry College (ACA)

Howard University (HBCU)

North Carolina Central University (HBCU)

Shaw University (HBCU, will attend in 2010)

Tusculum College (ACA)

University of the District of Columbia (HBCU)

Wheeling Jesuit University (ACA)

As a student, I am very pleased to hear that professors and presidents care so much about addressing a much maligned area of many university curriculums, and I am encouraged by the progress that has been made toward that end. When I was pursuing my undergraduate degree, I was sometimes overwhelmed by the feeling that there was no one outside of the student body itself who truly cared about the wishes and interests that were so dear to the students who attended the university. My impression was often that faculty were so busy with research or with tenure-track pursuits, that they often snubbed efforts that I made to get to know them, to travel to other local universities and to take advantage of their resources, or to otherwise broaden the scope of possibilities afforded to us as fervent members of the academy. These ISP sessions give me the acute impression that there is a simmering intent to establish this sort of connection with students, and what is more, that it has an orientation: I heard many times that faculty wanted to create something that was both fresh and enduring, because they had the distinct notion that their versions of this sort of program had the power to change students' lives. Such was the investment in their voices that I was frequently moved during their presentations; but more lingering still is the feeling of hope that I have, that in a decade or more, the plans which have been developed here will be steadfast monoliths on each campus, which will allow for inter-institutional and inter-national collaboration on scale which, as it blooms, grows ever more vital.

If you are interested in learning a bit more about the distribution of these schools, we have created a Google map with each of the 27 institutions represented. To the left of this map, the schools are listed again, each with a hyperlink to its own webpage. The orange points are participants from ISP 29, while the blue points represent those invited for ISP 30.

D. Travis Campbell